"Okay, first we're going to hit 811, then we're going to hit Motown, then we gonna hit GASPanic!"
Tucker is hunched over the steering wheel, finding holes in swift traffic. These are the very lowest of the low, the dens of the absolute bottom-feeders, places worth only a half-hour or bemused hour or two in other lifetimes, but one has to start somewhere, of course.
"Okay Tucker. Let me explain this place to you. This is still early, so that's why people aren't here, but that line of military hair-cut guys will be sitting on their 600 yen beers all night. They want to score. Next month they might be in Timbuktu, so there's no next week, and there's no three months from now. Over there, we have an old Asia hand--girl looks kinda young, probably from Thailand or Cambodia; he's just here to show off, have some fun watching the whole show. Over there we got a mix of less dramatic players-- maybe they'll score, maybe they won't, maybe you'll see real sophistication pop out, but we'll need to go to Eden to see..."
Already, however, with the launch of music, Tucker is out ("Eden?! That place is for snobs!"), and his target of choice is a PVC-boot-wearing 40-year old Japanese divorcee, a used-up, fat disgusting excuse for a human being whose very proximity makes me retch a little in my throat. It takes me half an hour to recover.
"Tucker! Tucker! What are you doing? That woman is absolutely wretched!"
"Hey mate! Old girls need love too!"
And that is it. That is exactly it. He is completely irrepressible. He doesn't care at all that onlookers are wearing expressions of shock and contempt. He doesn't care that if he looks in the mirror, he'll see a twenty-six year old who just needs to get his act together; he might actually be able to make something of his life. What he has, instead, is zest: pure, unadulterated love of the game, dancing and prancing, jumping and jittering, hands flying to and fro, unself-conscious, singing along to the music when he knows the words with wild abandon. However degenerate his form of the game, his is an indomitable will to get the score tonight. We are perfect because we go after different things. Here, this place, now: this is the only reality, this is the only freedom, and ephemeral nineteen year olds who walk in are forever lost to his grasp. Freedom--freedom--freedom: American great essential quality communicating in a straight-line pure and unbroken like a bolt of lightning through his family line. And I surrender to this will, you see; I ignore the oddness that his car keys are “lost” when I want to go get my jacket (he knows this is a ploy to leave; he wants me here, a friend assists him), I ignore the weirdness of our being unable to leave the club at two, three in the morning as the music blasts on and streams of after-after-afterparty goers replenish the ranks. Eye-contact, dance move, smile or frown; signal interest, signal decline. The throb of music is the only underscore to continuing and increasing drunkenness, the outer senses failing, the refinement passing away, reduction to the absolute lowest denominator. Tiredness gives way to weariness and weariness gives way to total fatigue. But after total fatigue, there is even another level, an exhaustion so complete, so moral, that one reverts to a more primitive personality, a complete surrender to the music.
“Dude! Dude! Dude! You are freakin' awesome! Where did you learn to dance. Those Russian hostesses are in freakin' awe!”
Eden is now so far away. My hands lay down unknown archeologies of rhythm; they uncover civilizations that have risen and fallen in millenia of inborn memory, and on these, I build a superstructure that is at once ancient yet new. Around me swirl an entire archipelago of Russian hostesses who have streamed in for their hour to party. Tatiana. Olga. Natasha. Ekaterina. Girls from forgotten Siberian factory cities making 3000 yen an hour base pouring drinks to Japanese businessmen. The club is a dark womb, a black cave of flashing lights and laser lines, and I am a god of dance, creator and destroyer of worlds. Such beauty; such raw intense drunken communion, whiff of a joint, 600 beats per minute, blonde hair, blue eyes. Half-friends and semi-acquaintances stream in; in the outside street alley a few words and hard-to-find goods are exchanged. But then it's back inside the club; warm and dry.
"So who are you going for?"
"I don't know maybe that one."
"Don't let the American whale snag you."
It is that weekend; or it is another one, that I find myself following a text message through Saturday afternoon to Tucker's car, parked conveniently just north of the Roppongi crossing, to stumble bleary eyed into the passenger seat and doze away a somewhat sunlit afternoon. Intimations of a faint communion with eternity had existed before; like the city as a girl peeking at you from behind a fan from some long-ago forgotten initial day to streetscenes, frozen, in which the sunlight passes through the spray of water to prism beautifully into a kaleidoscope of colors. Now, finally, however, I understand. Time has finally frozen. Grabbing a pocket Nikon, I snap a picture of a perfect afternoon's subdued light, this moment never to exist again, this moment never to be recovered.
"Where is this going? Where is this going?"
Tucker has no answer. But I can see, as clearly as if from a tall vista, how inevitable everything that is to come, how inevitable it was everything that led up to this moment, as trapped as Tucker is in his fate, as trapped as I am in the prison that I have made of my own making, the prison that I have now come to reject as worthless and ragged, as pointless as torn and used clothing. Already from here: the keeping score; Tucker to offer additional rides in his car, the drive up to Moka, a walking away in winter-time, feet stepping on snow making the most awful of possible sounds. He knows he is in decline. He knows that our friendship is based on absolute tenuousness. We will throw rocks from tetrapod breakwaters into the uncaring Japanese sea, we will break beer bottles in midnight streets, and this is just the same as Sunday afternoons but everything is just a facsimile of the things we used to do.
"I am curious, Tucker, how many girls have you slept with? How many girls have you bedded?"
Suddenly on the defensive, he leans back and tries to pretend he hasn't heard.
"Come on, mate. Be a pal. I'm just curious."
Tucker lights a cigarette. A tiny voice. "A bit over two hundred. I've lost count."
"Wow. Holy cow. That is an amazing number. Any virgins?"
"Well... well..."
"Well..."
"Well of course a lot of girls are going to tell you they're virgins."
"No, Tucker. I think some of them were. Can't you tell? If they bleed..."
"Aw, every girl is going to pretend she's a virgin."
"Number, Tucker. Number. And how old was the youngest?"
"Maybe almost ten. And the youngest girl was when I was a teenager, we were both nineteen so there."
I sit there, in that parked car, on that Saturday afternoon that we are both merely waiting to pass so that we can resume night-time adventures, and I feel the very non-linearity of time, how its granier and quantamized rather than a smooth flowing stream. The entire future, open to me like a stage with its curtains already open, shocks me into a clear and perfect realization. Tucker and I are good friends. We have become each other's 'person of main contact,' the fundamental baseline company of choice even as we continue to associate—of course—with a variety of people. As winter sets in—the long, cold, deep winter that will bring the purity of snow—we will slowly become aware—inevitably--of the economy of our friendship. He will impose on me, using my apartment as his crashpad of choice; I will force him to let me drive because of his constant state of one or another intoxication; I will pass through rain-damp Tokyo streets, gazing with wonder upon the aesthetics of construction sites, and we will slowly—slowly--ease to a breaking of relations. This, without question, is inevitable. But as doomed as this friendship is; as impossible to stop that moment of final accounting, when a certain carefully negotiated sum of money will change hands across an bar table, nevertheless we will enjoy our moment in the sun.
“Hey Ritchie, I was thinking we should do something different tonight.”
Laidback and looking at his cell p
hone, Tucker talks to me off-handedly.
“What's that?”
“Well looks like some buddies of mine are going to be at some art gallery. We can probably check it out, maybe meet some chicks.”
“Ritchie, I am curious, though. What's brought you to Japan? Why are you here?”
I breathe out.
“Well. Long story.”
“No rush.”
“I first came here when I was nineteen. I saved up pocket money from my part-time job, and as soon as I could, I went out west by rail-pass. Then, as I was bouncing around Los Angeles, this email arrived in my inbox—it was for a flight special to Kyoto, only $350 round-trip. I checked my bank balance; I realized I could do it, so I hopped on the flight.”
“And you liked it?”
“I think it changed my whole outlook on things. Kinda poetic in a way, too, that it was Kyoto first; all red lanterns and wet paving stones, temples and Gion. I did manage to get out to Tokyo, and there I even got a little culture-sick, just hemmed in by too many dyed-hair Yankee types, but even that was incredible you know.”
“And now you've decided to move here?”
“This country is just beautiful, you know. It's like they do everything in the most beautiful way possible; not the best or most efficient way, but the way that's going to surround themselves with aesthetic things.”
“Mmm, I don't know about that.”
VI.
“Ritchie, show up at Shibuya crossing at eight p.m. Saturday. I want money back.”
If he wasn't involved in enough drama, Shan had somehow also in the mix of things managed to get himself hit by a Japan Self-Defense Force truck. There are a lot of ironies, here, of course. But the long and the short of it is he is going to be paid a yen thirty million settlement, or almost 300,000 US for his two month stay in hospital and the reconstructive surgery on his legs. Or so he had me believe. Actually the final recompense is only 16,000 US, and much of that is already earmarked for the hospital and administrative fees. Be not quick to scoff at my naivety. I do not know or like Shan enough to investigate what he is doing, and three hundred thousand doesn't sound unreasonable considering the factors involved, especially the sensitivity of military vehicles hitting foreigners so widely reported in East Asian news. But Shan is able to use a sworn promise, hand in the air, pledge to the blood commitment, of providing 10% of settlement to me in return for my support of him in order to encourage my group's support of him during his period of trial. He even buys a few tailor-made shirts and spends some money on expensive drinks to show substance to his stories. The truth does come out eventually, in a curious way, but in the meantime, he's in jail, he's out; I'm visiting; I'm being caught up in events and unable to get funds to him; everything is to and fro.
“Ritchie I want full accounting of money entrusted to you and a refund of anything you haven't spent.”
The sound of his voice on that unexpected phone call does send a chill down my back. But stupidly, he doesn't even show up to his promised appointment; and it is only weeks later that he finally manages to hunt me down, at which point I bare my teeth to him and show no sympathy whatsoever as he explains where's he been for the last few months.
“There was an administrative error. They arrested me, but somebody broke into the records office and set fire to the building. So the police had no record of why I was being held, and they thought I was an illegal alien. They kept me on Sado-shima for four months until they figured out what had happened.”
“Sado-shima? Isn't that the old place where they exiled people?”
“Mmm.”
And Shan is actually being honest, for once; there was indeed a fire set by a deranged criminal that resulted in his extended incarceration; LeFauve for all his influence is almost certainly not behind this.
“Well what did you do? How was it?”
“They kept me out in fields doing carpentry work. It's been goddamn cold.”
“Well, I sympathize.”
“As for the money...”
As for the money, a fifth, which isn't unreasonable at all, disappeared in the handover from Eric to me, and more than a half we had to pay out to keep his stuff from being evicted from his apartment. After all, he just disappears all of a sudden after telling us that we need to look after his stuff for just a month, so one month drags to two, and two drags to three before we realize we have to cut the rate of spending and move everything to self-storage or we'll drain his bank account in two months. That is also a big waste of time and effort, not to forget all the intangibles of incurring U.S. Embassy wrath for assisting public enemy #1—who can put a price tag on that.
“As for the money, I'm wondering why you need it back at all? You promised 10% of the settlement, do you remember? So that would be three million yen.”
“10%? 10%? Do you have paper record of that?”
He looks at me with a look of scorn, but what Shan doesn't realize is that I have one more card than he does.
“No, but as you're smiling, I think you remember exactly well. So why do you need four hundred thousand yen back when you're the one who's supposed to be forking over three million?”
“It's a matter of principle, dog. Hand over full fifteen hundred thousand, and I'll give you what I promised.”
But Charis had already played one last card. It's almost bizarre that is the Christian girl, the girl of absolute morals, who suggested we wade through all his legal paperwork when he transferred his goods from his apartment to self-storage. But feminine deviousity trumps absolutism. “LE-SAMA, HERE IS RECEIPT FOR FINAL PAYMENT OF 1.5 MILLION YEN FOR THE INCIDENT TAKING PLACE IN TAKABASHI INVOLVING MINISTRY...” And we looked at each other in the musty storage building; this told us what we need to know.
Shan does eventually get not quite US $5,000 back, which is more than fair; I only later remember the cell phone bill, the other incidentals involved that mean he has taken a very convoluted process to get back a difference of several hundred dollars, an amount he surely would have paid in filing fees considering all the legal rigamarole it takes him to do what he does, not to forget he still owed me the 10% even of $15,000 if not $300,000. Yet I suppose he gets some satisfaction out of finally making bureaucracy work for him, and I suppose in a sense he is pleased to finally have a high-hand on me, to watch me squirm and cough up cash in process that leaves him with a sense of power. More details spill out—Dominique’s drug-trafficking conviction (drugs hidden in a convenient pocket), Dominique's psychotic breakdown at the country club leaving one very frightened Chinese (!) male hiding in a bathroom (rumors?), Dominique's apparent charge at one point that it was I, actually, who pulled a knife on her. But finally, all things said, the real thing that needs to be recorded is something that nobody with a name points out.
“And did you see nothing suspicious with the timing of it all? That he gets accused so strangely coincidental with some other expressed incident?”
“No. Not until years, years later, and only after fiascoes of my own.”
But the quiet nagging voices are easily silenced and the convicted criminal Shan is sent on his way.
This has been an account in neat and organized form of things that were all happening simultaneously and far more messy, emotionally-trying, and indeed victimizing than as can be expressed in linear form. I am sorry, of course, Tucker, for leaving you holding the bag like that, and yes yes yes Julian is that famous auteur who later went on to produce so-and-so movie but is currently curating $6 shows in Bowery. But then, all that being said, there is still that other major occupation of our lives, or simply our occupation, and this is of course at least two thirds of our energies, almost half our waking hours—it is really rather far too charming and amusing to pretend that one jets off to Japan, spends all of one's waking hours going to one or another amusing party or bar or club; that this is all of our lives or even just the meaningful part. I loved Japan, of course. What I didn't tell Tucker was that even the dyed-hair swarms of Roppongi that made me
physically ill so many years ago also managed to inflict something psychological onto my view of the world. Of course I had known that the Japanese were odd; of course I had known that their cheap bleach-job youth were the trash of Asia. But it had never occurred to me so personally, hit so close to home, that there were aesthetic answers to things; that all of the contradictions of life could be answered in so insouciant a fashion.
Confession: in America I am nothing. A graduate of a medium-ranked Pennsylvania university, I can hope to work in a cloth-covered cubicle as a junior programmer at some semi-known company. The girls ignore me; my days are banal; and everything is just absolutely predictable to the nth degree, I have failed even in the timing of my birth, having missed the dot-com bubble that made people just two years older millionaires doing exactly the same major. Japan. I walk down the street, and girls giggle. My very presence in a subway car makes girls toy with their hair, and if I say something in English, I am instantly 'cool' and 'international.' But, even beyond this, even beyond the foreigner cool and all the assorted fringe benefits, detectable even in the most simplistic products or classical works of art, is a faint, tremulous, almost undetectable pathos of things, an indistinct undertone that only the most refined senses can pick up. Like a siren song, the country calls me, and when a salary offer from a company in Tokyo arrives, without a glance backwards I pack my bags and leave. My new company is a clean, bright, happy place overlooking the Dentsu plaza in Shimbashi, and I have the prestigious corner seat; I am the conquering American hero brought in to take our team to the very top of the rankings. And this I do, for a year, a golden year, operating in an archaic and stripped-down version of software that is totally obsolete in the U.S.
Harajuku Sunday Page 10