I said, and then to really put the greeting across, I added, “Meow.”
The cat that was hurrying across the street slowed down at the sound of my greeting and then continued slowing down, coming to just standing there looking at me.
I said, “Meow,” again with the cat looking at me.
I passed out of the cat’s sight as I walked around the corner and started up the hill toward the house where the woman had hanged herself about a year ago.
After she hanged herself, her husband left everything just the way it was the day she committed suicide, and still very little of it had been changed. 1980s Christmas cards were still on the mantel, but the thing that really got me was the kitchen and I will go into it in detail later on. The dead woman’s kitchen demands its own time and attention and this is not that time.
As I walked up the hill toward the house, I was thinking about the cat that I had said hello “meow” to and cats in general and my intelligence soon found a single focus.
Cats don’t know that people are writing books about them that are splashed all over the best-seller lists and that millions of people are laughing at books filled with cat cartoons.
If you were to show a book full of cat cartoons to a cat: Frankly, it wouldn’t give a damn.
February 1, 1982 Finished.
I tossed the bottle of tequila across the street in Ketchikan and the young Alaskan state legislator caught it without hesitation, effortlessly, maybe because he liked to drink tequila.
It was a wonderful drunken night in Alaska.
Before I launched the bottle toward him, I said, “Here, catch, wild legislator.” That’s what I had taken to calling him, though we had just met that evening.
A group of us funnying and laughing wandered through the streets of Ketchikan, one of the most beautiful towns I have ever visited.
Ketchikan flows like a dream of wooden houses and buildings around the base of Deer Mountain, whose heavily wooded slopes come right down to the town, beautifully nudging it with spruce trees.
The population of Ketchikan, 7,000, and the integrity of the town is virtually unspoiled by a form of style and architecture that could be described as “Los Angeles.”
There is no endless street of franchise restaurants and automobile-oriented business. There are no shopping malls to flagrantly disrupt the simplicity of commerce. When people want to buy something, they can just walk down to the store.
So much of America, even what were once unspoilable beautiful towns, look as if “Los Angeles” had overflowed on them like a toilet bowl whose defecated contents all have something to do with the lifestyle of the automobile.
I think the worst case of “Los Angeles” automobile cultural damage I’ve ever seen is Honolulu. For all practical purposes of survival you might as well drop dead if you don’t have a car in Honolulu.
I’m not talking about being a tourist at Waikiki and lying around like a suntan lotion postage stamp on the beach, mounted right next to thousands of other postage stamps in a stamp collector’s album owned and operated by the sun.
I’m referring to living in Honolulu.
I think I saw more cars there than I ever saw people.
Often whenever I saw somebody just walking down the street with their feet actually touching the ground and not accompanied by four wheels and a metal eggshell around them, I was startled.
I almost felt like stopping the car I was driving in and offering the person sympathy for the circumstances of misfortune that had led them to walking.
A folksinger has written a song about Honolulu in which she mentions tearing down paradise and putting up a parking lot.
I saw a downtown restaurant that had a sidewalk café as a part of the restaurant. It was a rainy day and nobody was sitting there. “That must be an interesting place to sit and watch people when the weather’s good,” I said to the woman I was, of course, driving with, because it really doesn’t make any sense to try and walk around Honolulu. It’s a problem of you can’t get there from here that would have baffled Einstein. E = MC2 was duck soup compared to Honolulu traffic.
“You used the wrong word,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Cars. You watch cars, not people.”
We drove on to the next place where we had to drive because if we didn’t drive there, we wouldn’t be able to find a parking space, and that’s very important in Honolulu. I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them.
When I arrived in Honolulu from Alaska, I saw a bird flying around in the Honolulu International Airport. I had never seen a bird inside an airport before. It flew casually around people boarding airplanes, and people just getting off them.
The bird did not act frightened as if it had accidentally been trapped in the airport. The bird was quite comfortable. I think the airport was its home and this was a poetic life, not touched by fear of flying. Also, the bird was perhaps an omen, a portent of the chicken photograph.
When I stepped outside the airport, a Japanese woman was waiting for me, and I got into her car, not knowing what I was really getting into, which became a way of life when Los Angeles visited Hawaii on vacation but decided not to go home.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention there’s been a change in the calendar map. I moved out of Berkeley yesterday and came back across to stay in San Francisco for two weeks before I go to Chicago.
What led me to leave the house where the woman hanged herself needs a few days sorting through details before I perhaps attempt to describe my leaving or I may not put it down at all. I probably should because in a remote way it has something to do with the woman hanging herself.
But, also, we must not forget that this is the route of a calendar map following one man’s existence during a few months’ period in time, and I think that it would probably be unfair to ask for perfection if there is such a thing. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space.
If there’s nothing there, how can anything go wrong?
February 1, 1982 Finished.
Speaking of things going not according to plan, the morning that I moved over from the strange house in Berkeley back to San Francisco, the bus taking me here to the Japanese section of town, where I am at a hotel, was rerouted because a building was burning down.
Then the driver stopped and asked us all to get off the bus and change to another bus, so obligingly we all got off, but then somebody came running up to the bus, carrying himself in an official manner and uniform, yelling at the driver, trying to get his attention.
I paid no other attention to what was going on with the bus because I was too busy watching the building burn down. It was a huge fire with smoke rising like a vaporous tower from a disorganized fairy tale that I had failed to finish reading when I was a child or so the smoke seemed.
I
