Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation

by Dave Hill

  In reality, however, we were scheduled to do a four-city tour starting in Osaka.2 We arrived after a sixteen-hour flight, instantly finding ourselves delirious with jetlag because apparently the time difference between America and Japan is like six-to-eight weeks or something. By the time we actually got on stage, we were just plain hallucinating.

  “Hello, Osaka,” I said, testing the microphone. “We are Valley Lodge from New York City and we have come to rock you!”

  Most of the people in the audience just stood there in silence after I said that, presumably because they didn’t understand a word of it, but maybe also because we looked like we were about to die. My bandmates and I were a little confused, too, because even though the club in Osaka was a lot like the ones we’d played in New York, there were actually people at this one. Lots of them. In fact, the place was packed.

  “Are these people here to get their asses handed to them by our gravity-defying hot rock action?” I wondered. “Or are they just here to watch a bunch of old dudes muddle their way through a couple songs before they start pelting us with beer bottles, ashtrays, and whatever else they can send sailing at our heads?”

  There was only one way to find out. So I gave my bandmates one of those hot rock nods that signifies the start of a hot rock show and we launched into our first hot rock jam. And that’s when something crazy happened, the people in the audience actually knew the song. They even sang along.

  “That’s weird,” I thought.

  In my fragile state, a part of me worried we had just become the victim of some elaborate prank where some wily bastard convinced a bunch of Japanese people to show up to the club and pretend to like our band. But then I realized that would take too much planning3 and instead decided we should probably just play another song and see if it happened again.

  And it did.

  As we powered our way through our second number, I looked out into the crowd of people packed in there like, um, whatever those little salty fish that come in a can are called, and saw them once again bobbing their heads along with the music. Pretty Japanese girls were mouthing along with every word I sang and leather-clad Japanese rocker dudes were pumping their fists in approval. It was electrifying to finally play for a crowd of people who were there not because they were afraid we might blow off their wedding if they failed to show, but because they actually thought we were good at rock, maybe even kind of awesome at rock.

  “Do you think you can handle some more, Osaka?” I screamed, basking in the adulation.

  Adding to the relative insanity of it all was that it was all taking place in Japan, the most mind-blowing place I’d ever seen in my whole life. None of us had ever been there before and we found everything we encountered to be completely fascinating.

  “Look, a vending machine that dispenses beer right in the middle of the street!” I said to my friend Carl, whom we brought along to give the appearance of an entourage, before insisting he take a picture of me pounding a can of Asahi right next to a police officer’s head.

  “The soap dispenser in this men’s room is remarkably well-designed and efficient,” my friend and Valley Lodge guitar player John would tell me.

  “Not to mention completely adorable!” I’d respond.

  “I know, right?”

  “Heeheeheeheehee!”

  As awesome as everything was, though, it didn’t take long for us to realize that the reason Japanese tourists took so many pictures when they come to America isn’t because they were culture shocked like us. They just think Americans are total morons. We couldn’t disagree, either. We felt like pantsless cavemen compared to these people.

  From Osaka we continued on to Kyoto4 for not only the second show of the tour, but what would also mark the very first time we’d just played a show and then actually had another show to play right afterward. Prior to then, we’d always played every show like it was our last—not because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but because—between the jobs, babies, and other stuff I mentioned earlier—we truly didn’t know if all four of us would even wind up in the same room together again. To actually have another show lined up made us feel like a real band.

  “How was the club last night compared to the venues you play in America?” Ryo, a translator assigned to help us survive the tour, asked me in the van.

  “It was much, much smaller than what we’re used to,” I lied. “But we really enjoy playing intimate shows like that. Really gets us back to our roots, you know?”

  Embrace the fantasy, I figured.

  Our show in Kyoto was another stunner, simply because it once again resembled a show in which a real rock band gets on stage and there are a lot of people there to not only see them, but actually to enjoy them, and—who knows?—maybe even secretly fantasize about passing each band member around like a goddamn rag doll as they take turns licking him from head-to-toe.

  “We did it again!” I said to my bandmates as I leaned up against our van and guzzled one of those beers you can drink right there on the street and no one can say a damn thing about it.

  And that’s when our expectations were once again exceeded.

  As my bandmates and I stood there patting ourselves on the back for what we were certain was another successful rock assault, five uniformed college girls stumbled out of the club we’d just decimated. Four of them were hammered and one of them was really, really hammered, so much in fact that she couldn’t help but collapse on the ground and immediately start hosing down the streets of Kyoto with what appeared to be roughly five gallons of beer, nine pounds of noodles, and an unquantifiable mass of unidentifiable pink stuff.

  “Maybe we’re not so different after all,” I thought.

  But then something just plain insane happened. Two of the hammered girls peeled the really, really hammered girl off the sidewalk and carried her off into the blurry (at least to her anyway) night. Then the other two hammered girls got down on their hands and knees and began cleaning up all the puke. As my bandmates and I watched this all go down, our heads practically exploded. Needless to say, we got some pretty great pictures of that, too.

  From Kyoto we soldiered on to Nagoya5, high-fiving, whipping off our shirts and twirling them over our heads every inch of the way. The Nagoya show was yet another scorcher, a super blast even. And I should probably tell you all about it someday. But the fact is, we’ve got more important things to discuss here: Tokyo, the main event, the final stop of the tour, and the culmination of our fantastic rock ’n’ roll journey.

  This is me roaming the streets of Tokyo in my spare time. I’m pretty sure that is a doctor’s office of some sort behind me. (photo credit: Dale May)

  I had expected Tokyo to be the Japanese equivalent of New York City. In fact, as we approached the city limits, I almost felt like we were coming home. But I soon realized that comparing Tokyo to New York is a total insult. To Tokyo, that is. In fact, if Tokyo and New York were in prison together, New York would be Tokyo’s bitch, with Tokyo buying New York for a carton of cigarettes and having intercourse with its face for weeks on end just to show it who’s boss. I mean that, of course, in the nicest of ways. It’s just that Tokyo has so much to offer.6 It’s like New York times ten but still crammed into the same amount of space and then popped into the microwave at full heat for ten minutes. You must go.

  As we pulled up to the hotel in Tokyo, my bandmates had a little surprise for me.

  “The guys and I have been talking,” John said. “And we’ve decided that you really ought to have your own hotel room for a change.”

  “That’s so sweet,” I thought.

  Naturally, I assumed the guys wanted to reward me for all the hot rocking I’d been doing, but it turned out that they just didn’t want to put up with my snoring anymore. I was a little hurt, but I couldn’t blame them. I do snore a lot, like a bear even.7 And while I might have felt a bit shunned, I was actually kind of psyched, too, because my Tokyo hotel room had a very special feature.

  Over the co
urse of the tour, I’d become increasingly fascinated with Japanese toilets, you might even say obsessed. I’d use them wherever and whenever possible and then document them in blushing. sometimes even excruciating detail on my blog—what they looked like, their most exhilarating features and, perhaps most importantly, how they made me feel both “down there” and deep down inside my heart of hearts. And my hotel room in Tokyo just happened to have what I consider to be the Holy Grail of Japanese toilets. Sure, I’d seen it before, but up until then I never thought I had the level of privacy or intimacy required to really go to town, to really become one with it.

  To the naked eye, the Holy Grail looks pretty much like a regular toilet. But then on the side there’s this command center, like it might instantly transform into a jet fighter at any moment. And I had seen a bidet—those European ass-blasting machines—before, but I had never bothered to use one because I figured if I wanted my ass to be all wet and drippy like that, I never would have gone to the bathroom in the first place.

  Upping the ante on things, the Japanese have managed to combine the toilet and the bidet into one futuristic machine that’s probably illegal in most countries. So, with our final show of the tour, the climax of our rock ’n’ roll odyssey, just a couple of hours away, I decided to shift my priorities and take the Holy Grail for a little test drive.

  I walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Sure, I was alone, but I wanted to make sure I was really, really alone. Then I sat down on the toilet and used it to the best of my gastrointestinal abilities, which—considering the fact that I’d spent the past week ingesting nothing but beer, sushi, and whatever else I could possibly lather in wasabi and chili oil—was pretty impressive.8

  The initial transaction concluded, I began to inspect the command center. There, I saw a button emblazoned with what looked like the letter “m” being sprinkled with water droplets.

  “Ladies and gentleman, I give you the butt button,” I thought.

  In front of the butt button was a volume knob of sorts, so I just cranked it up as high as it would go because I figured “Fuck it, I’m on vacation.”

  Then I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed the butt button. Suddenly, a jet stream came out. And I don’t know if there was an electronic eye on this thing or what, but when I hit the butt button, somehow it just … found me right where I needed to be found. And up until that point in my life, I had never given much thought to if I got blasted in the anus with water at what temperature and water pressure I would want it to be. But it didn’t matter because the Japanese had figured that out for me, too. As it turns out, it’s exactly 72 degrees and sort of like being gently tapped in the anus over and over again. It’s beautiful. So I began repeatedly hitting the butt button as fast as the futuristic apparatus would let me.

  After about forty-five minutes of this, I was drenched in sweat and slowly fading in and out of consciousness. Then I looked down at the command center again. This time I saw another button, which had a silhoutte of a woman on it.

  “The lady-parts button,” I presumed.

  It felt like forbidden territory. I know I’m not a lady and I wasn’t even sure how the electronic eye would assess the situation. And I certainly didn’t want to confuse the technology. But then I just thought “When am I going to start living my life?”

  Then I closed my eyes again, took another deep breath, threw in the sign of the cross for good measure, and pressed the lady-parts button. This time another jet stream came out, only this time it hit me in what some people, including me, like to call the taint.9 Like most people, I had spent my whole life trying to avoid letting exactly this sort of thing ever happen to me. But once it did, I couldn’t imagine how I managed to go all those years without being blasted in the taint with water every single day of life. It was intoxicating. So then I started hitting the taint button as fast as it would let me. Then I went back to the butt button. Then I went back to the taint button. Then I went back to the butt button. And then I went back to the taint button again. And again.

  After about two hours of this, I felt as if I were floating over my own body as I looked down on it. I’m also pretty sure I saw that bright light that people who’ve had near-death experiences always talk about. And I was about to go back for more when John burst into my room screaming “Come on, we gotta go rock the fuck out of Tokyo!”

  Ripped from another dimension, I pulled up my pants, marched out of there with my head held high, and rocked the fuck out of Tokyo with a cleaner ass and taint area10 than anyone who’s ever rocked the fuck out of Tokyo before.

  Our show in Tokyo that night was the stuff of legend (well, to me anyway). Not only was the club four times the size of all the clubs we’d played in Japan thus far, but there was also four times as many people there and they seemed even more into it than all those other people I already told you about. We got a second encore and everything. I was so pumped I even got the courage to finally test out some of the Japanese I’d been practicing in the van on a gorgeous girl who’d spent the entire show standing right in front me, singing along with every word and seemingly getting lost in my bloodshot eyes.

  “Odori ga sugoku umai des ne,” I told her. “Koko o so wa te.”

  She ran away pretty quickly after that. But I guess if a total stranger told me I was a fantastic dancer, and then followed up by instructing me to “touch him here,” I probably would have done the same. Oh, well, they seemed like the perfect words at the time.

  Still coming down from what felt like the greatest rock show of all-time, I woke up the following morning confronted by the sobering actuality that it was time to go home—back to America, back to reality, back to waiting two weeks to hear whether or not one of my bandmates was able to play a gig or it turned out his wife was really counting on him to go to that engagement party with her after all.

  Before I came crashing down to earth just like the mighty Icarus, however, there was still a matter of unfinished business to attend to. Because of my Z-list celebrity, the Gibson guitar company had loaned us a few guitars to use on the tour. And also because of my Z-list celebrity, we had to return the guitars to their office in Tokyo before we left the country. The original plan was to slow down to about ten miles per hour and just toss them out the side of the van to whomever was standing out front so that we might be able to squeeze in a bit more sightseeing before heading to the airport. But when we got there, a Gibson employee was outside waiting for us and—because he is Japanese—11 insisted that we come inside, meet the whole staff, tour the entire facility, and drink some tea with everybody.

  “Let’s make it quick,” I muttered to my bandmates as we reluctantly followed behind.

  Once we got inside, however, I immediately changed my tune. There, standing to greet us, was Tomoko, a preternaturally beautiful Japanese woman who appeared to have subtle track lighting around her entire impossibly bewitching frame. The fact that she also happened to work at my favorite guitar company only added to her allure. And the fact that I absolutely didn’t want to leave Japan at all had me officially thinking crazy.

  “Maybe I don’t need get on that plane with the guys,” I thought. “Maybe I could just stay here in Japan and keep being a huge rock star. And maybe Tomoko and I could move in someplace together, settle down, start filling the place up with half-Japanese babies, and maybe even get three or four of those life-affirming toilets.”

  The more I thought about it, the less it sounded crazy and the more it sounded like a fucking plan. That all changed, however, when the head of Gibson Japan walked into the room, shook my hand, and said, “So, Dave, we understand you really enjoy the toilets here in Japan.”

  “Really?” I asked, trying to act like I had no idea what he was talking about. “What would ever make you think that?”

  “We read your blog,” he said. “We all read your blog.”

  “You what?” I thought, my skin turning even paler than usual.

  As I looked around, I n
oticed that every Gibson employee in the room had their hands politely pressed to their lips as they quietly snickered to themselves. Except for one, however—Tomoko. Instead, she just stood there giving me one of those looks that people tend to give you when they know you’ve traveled all the way to other side of the earth and the only thing you really seem to care about is the fact that the toilets there are designed so you could probably go without changing your underwear the entire trip next time.

  It was in that moment that I realized maybe it was time to go back home after all, back to my old life, the one where I wasn’t a huge rock star, I was just some old guy with a guitar who, if he wanted to get his taint cleaned, had to do it the old-fashioned way.12

  “Thanks, everybody,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” they replied.

  “And thank you, Tomoko,” I said.

  She just kind of nodded and got back to her paperwork after that. Hey, I tried.

  As sad as I was to get on the plane home, it gave me a lot of time to reflect about things—Japan, the tour, Tomoko, rock ’n’ roll, and just life in general. And somewhere over Siberia it finally hit me.

  “It doesn’t matter that I’m not some huge rock star,” I thought. “And it also doesn’t matter if I never make it back to Japan again.”

  The only thing that mattered was that simple act of rocking out, of finding that one thing you love doing more than anything else in the world and doing it to the point where people worry you have some kind of medical condition. And rocking out doesn’t have to mean playing guitar in a band, either. It can be whatever you want it to be, whether it be stamp collecting, gardening, mechanical bull riding, accounting, or maybe even knitting to the point where people can’t stop themselves from gathering around you to bear witness to your unstoppable wefting and warping ways.13