Shoe Dog Read Online Free Page A

and turned to Carter. “I think maybe the time has come to leave Shangri-La,” I said.
    I didn’t make a hard pitch. I didn’t think I had to. It was clearly time to get back to The Plan. But Carter frowned and stroked his chin. “Gee, Buck, I don’t know.”
    He’d met a girl. A beautiful Hawaiian teenager with long brown legs and jet-black eyes, the kind of girl who’d greeted our airplane, the kind I dreamed of having and never would. He wanted to stick around, and how could I argue?
    I told him I understood. But I was cast low. I left the bar and went for a long walk on the beach. Game over, I told myself.
    The last thing I wanted was to pack up and return to Oregon. But I couldn’t see traveling around the world alone, either. Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person.
    Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop.
    The next day I gave my two weeks’ notice at the boiler room. “Too bad, Buck,” one of the bosses said, “you had a real future as a salesman.” “God forbid,” I muttered.
    That afternoon, at a travel agency down the block, I purchased an open plane ticket, good for one year on any airline going anywhere. A sort of Eurail Pass in the sky. On Thanksgiving Day, 1962, I hoisted my backpack and shook Carter’s hand. “Buck,” he said, “don’t take any wooden nickels.”
    THE CAPTAIN ADDRESSED the passengers in rapid-fire Japanese, and I started to sweat. I looked out the window at the blazing redcircle on the wing. Mom Hatfield was right, I thought. We were just at war with these people. Corregidor, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking—and now I was going there on some sort of business venture?
    Crazy Idea? Maybe I was, in fact , crazy.
    If so, it was too late to seek professional help. The plane was screeching down the runway, roaring above Hawaii’s cornstarch beaches. I looked down at the massive volcanoes growing smaller and smaller. No turning back.
    Since it was Thanksgiving, the in-flight meal was turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Since we were bound for Japan, there was also raw tuna, miso soup, and hot sake. I ate it all, while reading the paperbacks I’d stuffed into my backpack. The Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch . I identified with Holden Caulfield, the teenage introvert seeking his place in the world, but Burroughs went right over my head. The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.
    Too rich for my blood. I passed out. When I woke we were in a steep, rapid descent. Below us lay a startlingly bright Tokyo. The Ginza in particular was like a Christmas tree.
    Driving to my hotel, however, I saw only darkness. Vast sections of the city were total liquid black. “War,” the cabdriver said. “Many building still bomb.”
    American B-29s. Superfortresses. Over a span of several nights in the summer of 1944, waves of them dropped 750,000 pounds of bombs, most filled with gasoline and flammable jelly. One of the world’s oldest cities, Tokyo was made largely of wood, so the bombs set off a hurricane of fire. Some three hundred thousand people were burned alive, instantly, four times the number who died in Hiroshima. More than a million were gruesomely injured. And nearly 80 percent of the buildings were vaporized. For long, solemn stretches the cabdriver and I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
    Finally the driver stopped at the address written in my notebook. A dingy hostel. Beyond dingy. I’d made the reservation through American Express, sight unseen, a mistake, I now realized. I crossed the pitted sidewalk and entered a building that seemed about to implode.
    An old Japanese woman behind the front desk bowed to me. I realized she wasn’t bowing, she was bent by age, like a tree that’s weathered many