That kind of dawn began to occur halfway through his second year of nothing happening.
By the time the third year was barely in progress he realized fully that nothing was happening. Then he started to think about it.
He didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
That took another eleven months which brought him to the end of the third year of nothing happening. By that time he wondered if he really missed things happening or was he suffering from a simple case of nostalgia, another victim of the past.
He decided to wait one more year to see how he felt.
No reason to jump into anything, he thought. You don’t want to get into water over your head.
My Tokyo Friend
Groucho:
Harpo and Chico said that after they died they’d send out a message if they could.
George Jessel:
Have you heard anything from them?
Groucho:
Not a goddamn word.
My friend here in Tokyo has been Groucho Marx in his eighties. I brought with me from America a 586-page book about Groucho as an old man and I’ve been reading it whenever I want to have some company.
The book is called Hello, I Must Be Going written by Charlotte Chandler who was a friend of his. She approaches Groucho from every angle. There are personal recollections of him plus conversations between him and people that he knew and liked; Woody Allen, George Jessel, Bill Cosby, Jack Nicholson, etc. There are also interviews with his living brothers Gummo and Zeppo.
Harpo and Chico are of course… not a goddamn word.
For six weeks I have had an old Groucho Marx for a friend. I am sorry that it has had to be a one-way friendship. I’ve read hundreds of anecdotes about him and laughed and been amazed by his wit and imagination.
When not spending time with him mirrored by the book high above Tokyo in my little hotel room, I think about him wherever I go. I’ll be on a train staring out the window and instead of seeing Tokyo, I’ll be looking at a photograph of Groucho Marx in his eighties.
It looks like Tokyo to everybody else but it’s Groucho to me.
Halfway through dinner by myself Groucho will sit down beside me and say something funny and I will smile.
Or I’ll be talking with some very serious Japanese intellectuals and Groucho will sneak up behind us as only Groucho can sneak up. And he will say something like, “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.” I’II laugh and the Japanese people will wonder why I am laughing. They will look quizzically at me and I will apologize by saying, “Excuse me, I just thought about something funny.” They will try to understand this American of uneven strangeness but they really won’t be able to.
Having made me laugh Groucho silently leaves, disappears into the shadows of the room, the shadows that go on forever, taking you away into death.
Sayonara, Groucho.
Chicken Fable
I almost think of them as people. Yesterday it was windy here in Montana and they were Italians because I fed them some spaghetti. They did a comedy imitation of a banquet in Rome, celebrating some kind of obscure fraternal organization anniversary. The 51st anniversary of the death of the mother of the founding father of The Sons of Italian Eyeglass, Train and Bicycle Lovers.
As the chickens ate spaghetti for the very first time, their brown feathery bodies were wind-driven like grass and a part of the early morning sun patterns.
The chickens were all talking about the spaghetti.
Maybe that is why I think of them as sort of people, because they never stop talking. They always have something to say.
While seventeen chickens were dining in Rome, the eighteenth chicken was in the chicken house laying an egg. She had her head turned sideways toward the spaghetti benefactor. The wind glistened off one bright eye, staring at me.
Today the chickens were Orientals because I fed them some leftover rice. They very carefully very carefully examined first bites of rice, using their beaks as chopsticks and soon were enjoying a good time in China.
Moral: It is difficult to go any place in this world without being close to the grave of a chicken.
The Fence
It is just another block-sized vacant lot filled with the oblivion of urban memories. There used to be houses there filled with people in disappeared-ago ages. The houses are gone and the people are gone. They all, more or less, wore out at the same time. Now the vacant lot waits for new houses and new people to fill them.
In another hundred years or so, it will be a vacant lot again.
The lot is guarded by a Cyclone fence as if anyone wanted to steal the emptiness held prisoner inside. The dry yellow grass of summer passing covers the lot which has rolling contours to it like small hills. I think a series of partially filled in basements have created the illusion of hills. It is the miniature of a larger landscape.
An old man with a cane stares intently or maybe it’s only abstractly through the fence at the vacant lot. I wonder what he sees in there that demands so much of his remaining attention. Perhaps, he lived there when houses still bloomed. Somehow, for no reason at all, I doubt that, but often I’m wrong these days. I’ve been so wrong recently that because I don’t think the old man lived there ensures the fact that he did.
Staring at the vacant lot causes him to almost miss his bus. I sit down next to him. I look at the back of his hands that hold the cane between the isolation of his thin, worn-out legs. His hands are covered with death freckles that are so thick they almost look like an aerial photograph of some Mayan ruins abandoned in the jungle.
The old man opens his mouth to yawn. He still has his own teeth. God, they’re old. They look as if a slice of fresh white bread would be an almost insurmountable challenge.
Then I smile to myself.
They put a six-foot-high fence around a vacant lot to keep this old man out. What did they think he was going to do? Climb over that fence and rebuild the past, put all the houses and the people back just the way they were?
Subscribers to the Sun
It’s morning and soon the Teletype will start and this hotel in Tokyo will he connected like a bridge directly with the events of the world as they happen.
Now the teletype is still asleep, getting its last winks in before it’s awakened to bring us what historians centuries from now will remember as July 17, 1978.
As the machine sleeps soundly here in the lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel, history waits just a few moments away to be recorded by the machine which will be awakened by an alarm clock that instead of ringing, it will wake the machine up by printing the word TESTING followed by six apostrophes ’’’’’’ and then the letters:
M
MN
MNN
That is a different way to be awakened, followed by more letters and then the almost religious chant of the wire service machine:
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.
The first test pattern ends with:
END HOW RCVD?’’’’’’
The alarm continues to wake up the machine by typing out the first message five times for a total of ten wake-up foxes jumping over ten wake-up lazy dogs and five END HOW RCVD?’’’’’’
Then the machine is totally awake, ready for the day and its first message comes out, connecting it with the third planet from the sun, Earth:
:ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS:
GOOD MORNING
Table of Contents
The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska
All the People That I Didn’t Meet and the Places That I Didn’t Go
The Japanese Squid Fishermen Are Asleep Now
The Smallest Snowstorm on Record
A San Francisco Snake Story
Football
Ice Age Cab Company
Shrine of Carp
Meat
Umbrellas
A Death
in Canada
Autumn Trout Gathering
Harmonica High
Winter Vacation
The Purpose
The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You
No Hunting Without Permission
OPEN
Spiders Are in the House
Very Good Dead Friends
What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?
The Pacific Ocean
Another Texas Ghost Story
There Is No Dignity, Only the Windswept Plains of Ankona
The Tomb of the Unknown Friend
Cooking Spaghetti Dinner in japan
The Beacon
Blue Sky
An Eye for Good Produce
Gone Before We Open Our Eyes
Harem
Montana Love
Cat Cantaloupe
Al’s Rose Harbor
Farewell to the First Grade and Hello to the National Enquirer
The Wolf Is Dead
The Closest I Have Been to the Sea Since Evolution
Homage to Groucho Marx
A Feeling of Helplessness
One Arm Burning in Tokyo
Rubber Bands
Werewolf Raspberries
Toothbrush Ghost Story
Skylab at the Graves of Abbott and Costello
The Bed Salesman
Tire Chain Bridge
White
Montana Traffic Spell
Hangover as Folk Art
Marching in the Opposite Direction of a Pizza
Dogs on the Roof
California Mailman
The Cobweb Toy
Her Last Known Boyfriend a Canadian Airman
The Butcher
To the Yotsuya Station
A Safe journey Like This River
Parking Place Lost
Studio 54
Crows Eating a Truck Tire in the Dead of Winter
Something Cooking
Cold Kingdom Enterprise
The Beautiful Oranges of Osaka
Drowned Japanese Boy
The Great Golden Telescope
The Man Who Shot Jesse James
Dancing Feet
Seventeen Dead Cats
Light on at the Tastee-Freez
The Eyes of Japan
The Magic of Peaches
Times Square in Montana
Wind in the Ground
Tokyo Snow Story
The Last of My Armstrong Spring Creek Mosquito Bites
Clouds over Egypt
Fantasy Ownership
The Mill Creek Penguins
A Reason for Living
1953 Chevrolet
My Fair Tokyo Lady
The Menu / 1965
The Convention
In Pursuit of the Impossible Dream
The Old Testament Book of the Telephone Company
Breakfast in Beirut
Another Montana School Gone to the Milky Way
Four People in Their Eighties
Florida
Ghosts
A Study in Thyme and Funeral Parlors
Rabbits
A Different Way of Looking at President Kennedy’s Assassination
Portrait of a Marriage
Self-Portrait as an Old Man
Beer Story
Homage to Rudi Gernreich / 1965
Turkey and Dry Breakfast Cereal Sonata
Old Man Working the Rain
The Remarkable Dining Cars of the Northern Pacific Railroad
Railroading in Tokyo
Two Montana Humidifiers
Contents for Good Luck
Tod
Five Ice-Cream Cones Running in Tokyo
The Good Work of Chickens
Castle of the Snow Bride
The Instant Ghost Town
The Mouse
House of Carpets
The 1977 Television Season
The Window
Painstaking Popcorn Label
Imaginary Beginning to Japan
Leaves
Waking Up Again
Poetry Will Come To Montana on March 24th
Sunday
Japanese Love Affair
Tap Dancing Chickadee Slaves
Pleasures of the Swamp
Sky Blue Pants
Kyoto, Montana
A Different or the Same Drummer
When 3 Made Sense for the First Time
A One-Frame Movie about a Man Living in the 1970s
My Tokyo Friend
Chicken Fable
The Fence
Subscribers to the Sun