by Sarah Bird
Joe’s expression darkens enough at the last word that I figure it is a serious insult.
“Whole fahcacting country eating grass and bugs and bark. Killing each other for a bag of rice. Then we came. Biggest meeting of cultures since Rome took Carthage. We were gods. We got the best pussy in the country. You couldn’t shove the cunts at us fast enough back then, could you? Now … now …” Bobby contemplates the gray haze, the relentless traffic, a little old lady in a dark kimono buying oxygen at a corner. “Now this. This. You, you Japanese, no giri, no shame. No gratitude. No obligation.”
The gray sky darkens and jewel-colored neon lights blink on, one after another, until we are driving through a neon aurora borealis of kanji characters, club names, and tipping martini glasses.
Enchiladas
The next morning, I wake up at six and spend several hours peering out my window at a thin slice of the Imperial Palace. Swans glide around the moat. Even at six, there is a crowd that grows each hour. I call Bobby’s room at nine and am informed that his calls are being held. I dial room service and a chirpy voice answers, “Mornie. Rooeen sorbee.”
When I tell her I’d like to order breakfast, she asks how I’d like my aches, suggesting, “Scrampoe?” I agree to scrambled eggs. She inquires whether I’d like toes or ningrish mopping we bother with my aches. I choose the English muffin with butter and she repeats my odor of scrampoe aches and ningrish mopping we bother. After adding orch jews to drink, she concludes with a “Tangjewberrymah.” I tell her she’s welcome and wait for my breakfast.
For the rest of the day, I wander around, staring into a multitude of windows, turning down one street after another that seems identical to the one before it. At five that evening, Bobby calls and tells me to meet him in the lobby in an hour. “Vacation’s over, kid. We’re going to work.”
Bobby is pacing the lobby when I arrive half an hour early, at five-thirty. When he sees me, he whacks his forehead. “Why are you wearing your costume? You carry your costume.” He holds out the garment bag he has looped over his forefinger to illustrate. “You carry your costume.”
Though it only takes me a few minutes to change and race back down to the lobby with the sew girl’s go-go dress packed away, Bobby is apoplectic by the time I return. “At last.” He turns to Joe. “Cancel the hearse. She’s alive.” This time he notices my feet. “Where are your go-go boots?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Oh, for the love of—” Bobby walks away, muttering curses and throwing his arms up in supplication. “You don’t have go-go boots.”
“They didn’t have any on Okinawa. We looked everywhere.”
“Every titty bar on Okinawa’s got broads shaking their asses in white go-go boots.”
“The biggest any of the shops had were sixes. None of them had any in my size, size ten.”
“Size ten? Christ almighty, lemme look at those gunboats.”
I hold a foot up.
“Whadda you do, get your shoes out of a clown catalog? Those dogs are special order. Be a coupla weeks before any store in Tokyo could get in something that gargantuan.”
“They’re not that big.”
“No, no, they’re very petite and delicate. For God’s sake, Zelda, you could snowshoe with those things. Okay, what do you propose doing the act in?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing. Nothing as in barefoot? Where do you think you are, Dogpatch?”
“I usually dance barefoot. I danced barefoot at the tryout.”
“Tryout! Tryout is over. This is the real thing. You are going onstage as part of the Bobby Moses Revue. You are a go-go dancer. How can you not have go-go boots?”
Shame overwhelms me. “I didn’t think it would be that big a deal.”
“That’s good. That’s perfect. And when I go onstage with my dick hanging out, will that not be that big a deal? Where does it stop with you kids?” Bobby presses both his palms flat against his temples as if he were trying to keep his head from exploding.
On the drive to Tachikawa Air Base, Bobby doesn’t say a word, though every time he glances in my direction, he does emit an eloquent calliope concert of hisses, wheezes, sighs, grunts, and gasps.
Outside Tachikawa there is the usual assortment of bars, pawnshops, and strip clubs. Bobby orders Joe to pull over at the Good Sex Club.
Joe and I wait in the car for half an hour before Bobby returns carrying a pair of white go-go boots. He tosses them in the open window onto my lap. The boots are easily three, four sizes too small for me.
“Put ’em on.”
I make an attempt just to show Bobby that it is physically impossible to shove my clodhoppers into the doll boots. But the tiny boots have a stretch insert running their length that gives enough to actually allow me to jam my foot in. My foot bulges over the sides, and the top of the boot, meant to reach almost to the knee, stops at the middle of my calf, where it squeezes the muscle and all surrounding flesh up into a mushroom cloud that blobs over the top. Triumphant, I turn to Bobby. I don’t need to say a word. The boot’s awfulness speaks for itself.
“Perfect,” Bobby proclaims. “Now you look like a go-go dancer.”
“I’m not wearing these.”
“Why? You have to be the first woman in the history of the world wears her real shoe size?”
“I don’t care. I’m not wearing them.”
Bobby blinks several times and studies the roof of the car as if someone were up there talking to him. He nods at his invisible interlocutor, dips his head, holds his hands up, presses them down.
“Bobby?”
Bobby suddenly seems to remember that I’m sitting beside him. “You don’t want to wear the boots? You want to go on as part of my act barefoot? Good. Fine. Then I hope you have five hundred dollars to reimburse me for your ticket over here and another five to get your barefoot carcass back to Okinawa. Do you? Do you have a thousand dollars?”
“No.”
“May we consider this case closed?”
This time I answer with my own calliope assortment of sighs.
At Tachikawa’s front gate, Bobby gives his name and the guard raises the black-and-white striped arm across the road, then gives the car a salute that makes me miss my father. Bobby returns the guard’s crisp salute with a joke version of his own that includes crossed eyes and his tongue stuck out.
The road widens. It runs through a parade ground that stretches out in either direction with nothing on it but grass and an American flag. Our headlights pick out the borders of white-painted rocks that surround every building, flag, and statue and line every path, parade route, and street. Tachikawa’s broad avenues, open parade grounds, and white-painted rocks make me deeply homesick. In the darkness, the rocks that have always before seemed the height of stupid wasted effort now shine like strands of pearl, trails laid out with the best of intentions to guide us past danger.
As Joe pulls up in front of the Tachikawa O Club, Bobby stares at me, then whirls his hand around his head to indicate my hair. “What are you going to do with your—”
“My hair? You already bleached it, isn’t that enough?” Bobby doesn’t comment, and I feel I must take a stand. “I have no plans for my hair.”
Bobby leans forward, talks to Joe. “No plans. She’s got no plans for the hair. With the Dogpatch bare feet, the hair hanging down, the makeup by Ma Kettle.” He turns to me. “This—this is how you intend to go onstage? You know they call this ‘show’ business, don’t you? Not hide business?”
I step out of the car and discover that my feet, bound in the tiny white boots, have gone completely numb. Tottering behind Bobby, I am as hobbled as a geisha on wooden getas. He waits at a side door. I pray he will notice and let me take the boots off.
“Can you shake your tush there, Zelda?”
“I’ll never be able to dance in these.”
“Look, Zelda, you wanna get hookworm, do it on your own time. You’re on my dime now.”
Half a dozen
Japanese musicians in matching maroon tuxes and string ties are waiting inside the door. The younger ones have long hair that they wear in greasy pompadours. They all smoke like they’ve been studying James Dean. The older guys don’t seem as sullen as the younger ones. Their leader, Mr. Watanabe, springs forward.
“Bobby, you rate. You bust my bars.”
“Ah, Knobby, your balls are bust anyway.”
“You want you-shoo-roe?”
“Yeah, the usual. Just hit me a rim shot when I need one.”
Knobby translates into Japanese and the musicians stand, pick up their instruments, and start to leave.
“Oh, Knob, I got a dancer. Work out what she wants.”
The bandleader turns to me expectantly. “Give me you charts.”
“Charts?”
“You know,” Bobby intervenes. “Give the man your music.”
“What music?”
“What music? Whatever music you were planning on dancing to—unless you were going to accompany yourself on the accordion, in which case I’ll just shoot myself now and get it over with. Give him your music.”
“You mean sheet music? I don’t have sheet music.”
Bobby twirls his bulk on his heel and walks away from me, muttering in Yiddish, asking God if he needs this aggravation. If he needed to pay for the privilege of having his act completely fucked up. Once he’s calmed himself, he turns back to me and with a great show of theatrical patience asks, “Let’s say you’re working with a band that—oh, my goodness—doesn’t know your arrangements.” Bobby affects a piping falsetto to emphasize how stupid he thinks I am. “How do you communicate what you want them to play?”
“I don’t. I mean, I don’t communicate with bands. They play something and I dance.”
“And if they play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’? What then, Zelda?”
“They don’t. They wouldn’t.”
Bobby throws his arms up and walks away. “Get a gun. You’re murdering me here. Just get a gun and shoot me now, you’re killing me anyway.”
Knobby steps up. “What song you rike?”
“To dance to? I don’t know. ‘Midnight Hour’? ‘sweet Soul Music’? ‘Knock on Wood’?” The bandleader has never heard of any of them.
“Give me you tempo.”
“Tempo?”
“The beat,” Bobby translates. “What tempo do you want. Waltz, march—”
“I don’t know. Just regular rock ’n’ roll.”
“Ah, hai! Roku roru!” One of the younger band members gives me a thumbs-up. “Ichi-ban!” He confers with the bandleader, who nods rapidly, then turns to me.
“Okay. We get with program now. Roku roru. No probrem. Can do, chief.”
The band leaves.
“Well, you got your wish, Zelda. The band’s gonna play something and you’re gonna dance. Now, if only I could get my wish and be struck dead on the spot. Go.” He points to the ladies’ room. “Change.”
He walks away to the men’s room muttering, “Gai gezunterhayt.” The backward slap of his hand tells me he means this as some kind of Yiddish brush-off.
Behind his back, I flip him off to raise my spirits a little, but it doesn’t help much.
I get dressed, then go backstage to wait for Bobby. Flats painted to look like a pyramid and emblazoned with the legend TACHIKAWA ON THE NILE OFFICERS’ WIVES CLUB SPRING PAGEANT, 1962 lean against the walls. I remember the Yokota Officers’ Wives Club pageants. I remember the year LaRue Wingo, the squadron commander’s wife, was Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, with a headdress that had a cobra sticking off the front. Moe was one of the slaves who carried her in on a palanquin. The year before that, LaRue was Joan of Arc in paper-clip chain mail and Moe was one of the devoted peasants.
Though Moe would have looked far better in paper-clip chain mail and a cobra headdress than LaRue Wingo ever would, it never occurred to me to ask why she didn’t try out for these lead roles. It was understood that the rank of the squadron commander devolved onto his wife, and if she chose to pick the prize plum year after year, no wife who cared about her husband’s career would offer any opposition.
As I wait amid the dusty scenery, a feeling of colossal doom washes over me. As a twitchy introvert who was forced to move far more than was conducive to good mental health, I find this feeling of dread is familiar. I would get it every time I walked into a new school, or stepped onto a school bus that didn’t contain one person I knew, or searched for a seat in a cafeteria full of strangers while I held a tray of food that always seemed to be enchiladas smelling like body odor.
I’d learned after we left Yokota, though, that no matter how hideous each new experience was it would be over soon. We would move from temporary quarters to base housing and change schools. Or my father would be reassigned or the base would close and we would move. Whatever the reason, the moves came with much greater frequency after we left Japan. I learned that wherever we landed we were just passing through. That no one knew me and I knew no one and that, when we moved, once again no one would know me, so it never mattered. If I could just hold my breath for as long as it took to pass through, it would soon be as if I’d never been there.
A young airman with the tag CLUB STEWARD above his name, DINKINS, bustles up to me and asks where Bobby is. “The base commander’s out there and he’s tired of dancing with his wife.”
“What can I do?”
The steward’s face is raw from shaving over blemishes. “The guy who had this duty before warned me about this.”
“About what?”
“About Mr. Moses. The way he gets before the first show of a tour. He’s fine after that. But the first one can be a real bitch. Pardon my French, ma’am. It’s just part of his—well, the last guy called it Mr. Moses’s windup. A lot of the performers are like that, even the big names. You wouldn’t believe what they had to do to get Soupy Sales onstage. Would you at least come with me?”
He leads the way into the men’s room. Bobby, fully dressed in a tuxedo, sits, glowering, on the closed lid of the commode in the last stall. “I hope you’ve liked your free trip so far, Zelda, because as of this minute it’s over.”
“Uh, Mr. Moses, sir, I’m Spec Sergeant Dinkins. I’m the club steward here at Tachikawa Officers’ Club. You were scheduled to go on at twenty hundred hours. It is now twenty-one hundred hours, and the base commander is wondering why the show hasn’t started yet.”
“Tell your fucking commander that my watch only goes up to twelve.”
“That comment would not be advisable, sir.”
“Then tell your fucking commander that I’m taking a crap and I can either do it in here or I can come out there and do it on his head.”
The club steward grows pale beneath his abraded pimples. “Could you …?” He moves close to me. His breath is sour from nervousness. “I really need to keep this assignment. They’ll send me to Nam.”
“Bobby, come on. It’s one show. Just do what I plan to do, pretend you’re not here.”
The gaze Bobby turns on me is equal parts distilled contempt and disgust. “You’re not here. The name and the face on the poster is Bobby Moses. I was Far East Funnyman three years in a row. I played the Mikado, the Pagoda, the Latin Quarter. I had the Bitchi Bashi girls dancing for me. Now I’m supposed to go out and make those turds in khaki and their fat-assed wives laugh? Laugh? Those numbnuts wouldn’t know a joke if it bit them on the ass. I can’t cover my dry cleaning for what I’ll take home here. I don’t know why I ever agreed to play this retard factory to begin with. Zelda, your people suck.”
He slaps the cheap metal partition of the stall.
“Look at this crap they give you people. They got better johns in Sing-Sing. You Air Force heroes are so important, why don’t they spring for a decent can?”
For the first time, I notice how crummy everything is. Bobby is right, it’s a whole world created for and by people like me who are just passing through, whose only lasting monuments to quality, to beauty, sit ou
t on runways.
“I’m not going on. I’m leaving.”
Bobby glares and folds his arms like a stubborn toddler. The steward looks at me. They both wait for me to do what I’m supposed to do, talk our reluctant star out of his trailer and onto the set.
“You know what, Bobby? I’ll bet if you’ll get up right now and come with me”—the steward looks at me with a gleam of grateful hope in his rabbity eyes.
I turn my back on him. “I’ll bet Joe can get us back to the Imperial Hotel before the dining room closes. They’ve got a travel agency right in the hotel. They’ll probably be closed by the time we get back, but we can get there first thing tomorrow morning and book a flight out. We can be back in Okinawa by tomorrow afternoon.” I become more exhilarated as I talk. The notion of simply leaving is a revelation to me. I think Bobby is a genius as I reiterate the simple brilliance of his plan. “Let’s just leave.”
Bobby stands. His shoes, polished to a mirror gloss, wink in the light as he walks out of the stall. I am enveloped in a comforting cloud of Brut as he stands next to me, hikes his foot up onto the sink, and smooths the razor-sharp crease on his pants. He straightens his cummerbund, bow tie. Adjusts his French cuffs and cuff links to the perfect angle, then faces me and asks, “Have you lost your tiny little mind? Bobby Moses has never—I repeat, never—disappointed an audience. Wherever two or more fans gather in his name, Bobby Moses goes on, you got that? Now get backstage and wait for your cue and—” He stops dead to study my hair, my lack of makeup, my costume, and the sort of expression used to sell Rolaids comes over his face. He starts to speak, realizes the job is too monumental, and dismisses me with a mournful shake of his head.
Backstage, Bobby paces, grumbling to himself and throwing punches. The steward watches, pointing occasionally to the audience on the other side of the curtain but not daring to penetrate the nimbus of rage whirling around that night’s headliner. Abruptly, Bobby stops and glares at Sergeant Dinkins. “Who’s doing my intro?”