Free The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan Page A

spotlight were on her to the table. She took a copy of his book out of her
purse and waited for the people that were in front of her to disappear off the
earth. Then it was her turn.
    I can imagine the sound of her heart as she
stood there waiting. The writer took the book and signed it without looking up.
That was all. She turned very slowly and walked away. She never looked back,
going out the door.
    She was wearing a white dress.

Montana Traffic Spell
    We all have moments in life when we
don’t know what to do next. Here is one of them; A friend and I were driving
down the Mainstreet of a small town in Montana. It was a cloudy autumn late-afternoon
and we came to a green light. It was the only traffic light in town: the shepherd
of a sleepy intersection.
    My friend wanted to turn right on the light
but he hesitated for no apparent reason except that suddenly he didn’t know
what to do next.
    My friend is an experienced driver, so it
had nothing to do with his driving ability. He just didn’t know what to do next
and I sat there watching him with a great deal of interest, wondering how it
was all going to turn out.
    We weren’t moving on the green light and
suddenly there was a line of cars building up behind us. I don’t know where
they had come from in such a small town but they were now behind us. For some
strange reason nobody was making a fuss, not even honking a horn, over us completely
stopping the traffic.
    We were just a long line of cars stopping
for no reason at a green light. Perhaps, they didn’t know what to do next either.
    We were all in a cloudy Montana approaching-twilight
spell, just sitting there in our cars, some of us patiently listening to the
radio, others anxious to get home to family and loved ones or just to go
someplace by yourself and do something that was your own business, but nothing
was happening. We were at a complete standstill.
    I don’t know how long this went on.
    It could have been thirty seconds or a year
might have passed taking us in a full circle right back to where we had started
from.
    There was no way of knowing.
    We were all helpless.
    We didn’t know what to do next.
    Then a man in the ear right behind us
solved the problem. lt was so easy that I don’t know why it wasn’t done before.
It changed everything and we made the right turn and all the other cars drove
on past us committed now to finish their destinations.
    Nobody knew what to do next until the man
behind us rolled his car window down and yelled at the top of his lungs; “ MOVE,
YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH !”
    That took care of it.

Hangover as Folk Art
    For Jim Harrison
    Yesterday I had a hangover here in
Tokyo that was so painful and exhausting that I could only think of it as grotesque
folk art. It was being sold by vendors that you don’t want to know about.
    Normally, a real bad hangover bites the
dust when the sun goes down. It dies like a snake. This hangover didn’t die at
all. It changed into folk art made from my central nervous system, my stomach
and the little stretches of imagination I call my brain.
    The folk art took the shapes of badly
carved, smelly little dolls, undesirable tainted trinkets constructed from
rusty beer cans and coal, paintings of alligator shit on swamp bark, and of
course, last but not least, colorful native shirts woven out of the underwear
removed from corpses by albino grave robbers who can only rob graves on full
moon nights. They work at the most twelve nights a year and the rest of the
time it’s unemployment for them. They stay around the house and watch a lot of
television. During the commercials they beat their wives.
    In other words: I simply don’t want a day
like yesterday again in my life. When the hangover finally ended, the folk art
vendors had vanished, taking their strange and dubious wares with them. They
also took every feeling in my body with them except for an abstract chalky
awareness that I was still breathing.
    Right, Jim?

Marching in the
Opposite