The Tokyo-Montana Express (30 page)

I’m forty-four years old.

Now: it’s my turn.

I am watching a Japanese love affair from
very close up. Actually, I am in bed with the lovers watching them fuck. I am a
part of their movement, but these are different lovers.

One of them is a film director and the
other lover is film itself.

If you saw me right now, you’d just see
somebody sitting quietly in a theater very carefully watching a movie, but I am
not watching a movie, I am watching a passionate love affair in which each
frame is a kiss, a caress, and each scene a lightning storm fuck.

Sometimes compared to the passion of art,
human love affairs are studies in ice, like the skeleton of a refrigerator lying
on its side near the North Pole.

For John Fryer

There are not too many fables about
man’s misuse of sunflower seeds. Once upon a time there was an evil dance
master who got the idea of using sunflower seeds to harness the energy of
nature in a manner that would have met with Dr. Frankenstein’s wholehearted
approval.

The dance master was truly a very bad man
because everybody knows that chickadees love sunflower seeds in the winter when
heavy snows cover the ground.

Using sunflower seeds was a sure and
diabolical way to enslave the hearts and minds of chickadees, and that’s exactly
what he did, buying twenty large birdfeeders and filling them up with sunflower
seeds.

Soon hundreds of chickadees gathered at his
place out in the country and away from the prying eyes of men who possessed
conscience or a desire to be President of the United States and use the issue of
chickadee abuse beginning step to the Presidency.

The chickadees gorged themselves on
sunflower seeds which he bought by the hundred-pound sack and soon the chickadees
were totally in his power. They would do anything for those seeds.

…
anything
.

From that point on, it was only a short
distance to teaching them to tap dance. Within a few months, he had a hundred
tap dancing chickadees under his wing, so to speak.

He made little top hats for them and little
canes to carry and he had them tap dancing on a huge ornate mirror lying on the
kitchen table surrounded by dirty dishes and empty bottles.

He would put some good tap dancing music,
Beethoven or Dixieland, on the phonograph and soon the birds would be tap
dancing their little hearts out for more sunflower seeds.

Like a John Audubon Busby Berkeley, he taught
them complicated precision routines that they would perform on that cursed
mirror while he, their only audience, drank cheap gin out of a ten-year stale
piece of hollowed out wedding cake.

Moral: Don’t become too fond of sunflower
seeds. Even if you’re not a chickadee, you never know
.

The pleasures of the swamp just keep
happening to me, oozing down through my waking hours, alligatoring my perceptions
of reality and teaching me that stagnant water has its own intelligence and can
be as brilliant as a Nobel Prize winner if you deal with it on its own terms
and don’t try to make it into a Himalayan skyline.

Dangerous snakes?

I use them for silverware. They can turn a
dull meal into an exciting experience. A hamburger steak can become a matter of
life and death.

Mosquitoes?

They’re just bloodthirsty flying air
conditioners. After you lose your blood egotism, they are no problem.

Quicksand?

I think of quicksand as a telephone call to
a lover. We have a nice conversation about secret weather and agree to meet
next week at a coffee shop that resembles the pleasures of the swamp.

The Japanese girl doesn’t know it but
this is the greatest day of her life, the Mount Everest of her existence. She
is maybe eighteen. I’II have to make a guess because I never saw her face. I
don’t know what will happen after today, but it will never get any better for
her.

Getting off the Yamanote Line train at
Harajuku Station, she is walking along in front of me with a young man beside
her who possesses the clarity of a boyfriend.

She is wearing a pair of very light blue
pants that cling to her body like the sky fits the earth. The pants are not an accident.
She has a magnificent body and walks like a Twentieth Century shrine in the
pleasure of its own worship. She is totally aware of every movement and shadow her
body casts. She can feel the power of her body’s religion by watching prayers
in the eyes of men.

At one point in the station, she reaches
back and gives her own ass a cute little caress and it makes her happy. She
knows a great thing and it’s all hers. Lovingly touching it, she is very happy.

lf she lives to be a hundred, life will
never be the same again.

Southeast of Helena

In Kyoto, there is a Buddhist shrine called the Moss Garden
where moss grows in a thousand colors and textures and each variation of the
moss is a form of music, so pure in detail that it shines like a green light
for the soul to go.

The Moss Garden is over six centuries old,
so that’s a lot of music and prayers rising like mist off the moss.

Here in Montana there is a small canyon
that narrows to a rocky gorge filled with a grove of cottonwood trees. In the
autumn, they look like a yellow waterfall seeming to come and go from nowhere.

It’s a very old story that takes place
in every culture on this planet Earth: A kid with some drumsticks pounding on everything
in sight. He cannot take his drums with him, so he changes everything around
him into drums.

For weeks now I have watched a Japanese
teenage boy and his
drumsticks
. I have seen him drum on
trees, the backs of chairs, walls, tables, and parked bicycle seats.

A few moments ago the world within
listening distance was filled with the sound of a hard drumming song pounding
out of a pair of speakers in a cafe.

I turned and saw the boy drumming in
perfect rhythm on the air and it was as if the sound of the drums was coming
from his sticks.

A reasonable facsimile of a crime
against nature attended a cocktail party in his mind. The facsimile was an interesting
guest and provided entertainment for the other guests who when photographed
together in a group portrait were his intelligence.

The facsimile of a crime against nature
told some amusing anecdotes and then started to dance. The other guests watched
with fascination. Then the telephone rang and it was for the facsimile who
answered the phone and had to leave immediately because it had forgotten a
previous engagement that was being held out in the country many miles away.