The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  “What is wrong with me?” I asked the therapist.

  She talked for a while, and then she told me to copy down an address.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  I set my alarm for six thirty to make sure I had enough time. I left my apartment and smelled the San Francisco spring air. It reminded me of summer camp.

  My sixth letter to the inventor of instant ramen ended with me scribbling down an address, so I’ll fill in what happened after that. The address was on Dolores Street in the Mission District, and when I got there I was standing in front of a church. Except for its green spire, the church blended in neatly with the Victorian-style houses around it.

  I parked my car and walked up three cement steps to a big white door. I turned around to see if anyone was watching. I felt self-conscious standing near a church, and by a weird coincidence this church was diagonally across the street from a bar in which Hadman was an investor. Amanda sometimes worked there as a guest bartender. It was early in the morning and therefore unlikely that anyone was in the bar, but I imagined that Amanda and Hadman were spying on me from inside it, laughing.

  A sign to the left of the big white door said RING BELL over an arrow pointing to a button. I pressed the button, and a chime rang inside. I waited for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably five seconds. When the door opened, a woman’s face peeked out. She was around fifty-five years old, with short white hair and rosy cheeks.

  “Come on in,” she said.

  “Is this . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  One of the things I’ve thought about more than anything is whether I should say the name of the group that met at the church. I’ve thought about it for months, maybe years. I’ve thought about it so much because I want to be truthful. But I’ve decided that it might be best if I don’t say the name, and I hope I can be forgiven for that. What I’ll say is that there were twelve people sitting on sofas and chairs in what looked like the church’s social room (a floor below the chapel), and that I sat on one of the sofas and listened. Some of the people spoke about an obsessive quality to their romantic lives. Some spoke about the guilt of cheating on their husbands, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends, yet how they were powerless to stop. All of them spoke about the horror not only of betraying people they cared about, but of having lost a sense of who they were.

  They spoke for nearly an hour about things I had thought were unspeakable.

  When it was over, the woman who greeted me at the door said, “That’s all the time we have. Is anyone available to mentor newcomers?”

  A man who looked in his early forties raised his hand.

  “My name is Matt. If you’re looking for a mentor, come talk to me.”

  People began rearranging the sofas into a neat square and stacking bridge chairs in the back of the room. I approached Matt, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “You looking for a mentor?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “OK,” Matt said. “I’ll tell you what. Put away some chairs.”

  Close up, Matt looked like a hardened version of Sean Penn, but his demeanor reminded me of Mr. Miyagi, the karate master played by Noriyuki “Pat” Morita in The Karate Kid. Put away chairs. Wax on, wax off. I put away some chairs and went back to Matt.

  “What time do you have to be at work?” he asked.

  It was Thursday, which meant I had to get to the magazine for Josh’s weekly story meeting.

  “I have about half an hour.”

  “Let’s grab coffee.”

  I slung my laptop bag over my shoulder, and we left the church. Matt walked so quickly along Dolores Street that I had a hard time keeping up. There was a tightness about his face; his jaw muscles seemed perpetually engaged, even when he wasn’t talking. He was under six feet, like me, and he wore a gray sweatshirt, dark jeans, and off-brand sneakers. He led me across the street to a café, where we each ordered a coffee drink. We sat down on a worn-out brown sofa by the front window. Next to us, a girl with tattooed shoulders was typing on a laptop. Matt must have sensed I was afraid she would overhear us.

  “Don’t worry about her,” he said. “She’s probably absorbed in her own problems.”

  “OK.” I was still uncomfortable.

  “So tell me why you’re here.”

  I tried to summarize everything about Amanda and Kim and Maureen and Harue and how I felt so alone, but I didn’t think I was making much sense.

  “I can relate to that,” Matt said.

  “You can?”

  “Listen, I was alone for most of my life. And I hurt a lot of people. I’m not proud of that.”

  “How did you change?”

  “We’re talking about you today. I’ll be your mentor. But you’ll have to do some things that I ask.”

  A few nights earlier, I had watched a movie called Samurai Trilogy I: Musashi Miyamoto. I had never watched a samurai movie in my life, and the only reason I watched this one was that it had popped up in the “Movies You’ll ♥” list on my video rental store’s Web site. The main character is a young man named Takezo, played by Toshiro Mifune. He’s a fearsome but unruly warrior with little connection to those around him. His fellow villagers become convinced he’s a menace, so they hunt him in the forest, rounding up his relatives so he’ll turn himself in. But before the villagers find Takezo, a Buddhist priest builds a fire in the woods and cooks a hearty stew, luring Takezo with the aroma of a hot meal.

  Priest: How’s the food?

  Takezo: (devouring the stew) Why did you come?

  Priest: To capture you, of course. How about it? If you give yourself up to a priest, they’ll probably treat you like a human being.

  Takezo: No way!

  Priest: Son, do you think you can win like this?

  Takezo: Of course!

  Priest: (chuckling) You’re going to defeat everyone, even yourself. Is that it?

  Takezo: I’m not afraid to die! As long as I take some of them with me.

  Priest: What about your relatives? They’re suffering because of you.

  Takezo: Let them die!

  Priest: What about the beautiful women?

  Takezo: I don’t care!

  Priest: And their little children?

  Takezo: Shut up! I don’t care! Let them die . . . (bawls)

  Priest: (whipping Takezo) You idiot! I beat you with the hand of your ancestors!

  The priest ties up Takezo with some rope. Then he walks Takezo back to his temple and throws the rope over a high tree branch, hoisting Takezo in the air so that he’s dangling, bound around his chest, from the tree. Takezo hangs there, alive, for several days.

  I asked Matt, “What kinds of things?”

  “First,” he said, “you’ll have to stop dating for a while.”

  I wondered what he meant by “a while.”

  “No dates and no sex for ninety days.”

  I thought about Matt’s request. In my adult life, barely a day had gone by in which I wasn’t in—or in pursuit of—a romantic relationship. Three months seemed like an eternity. I could not imagine it.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You can probably find another mentor who won’t demand this of you,” Matt said.

  A beautiful woman named Otsu takes pity on Takezo, releasing him from the tree. She helps him escape, so the villagers capture her as bait. Thinking she’s being held in a castle, Takezo scales the castle wall searching for her. The priest, spotting Takezo on the wall, offers to lead him to Otsu. But instead, the priest guides Takezo to a small room filled with books; as soon as Takezo enters, the priest slams and locks the door, making Takezo his prisoner.

  Priest: (speaking from behind the door) Takezo, in this room, you will become a new man.

  Takezo: No! Get me out of here!

  Priest: Otsu will wait for as many years as it takes. In this room, there are many things for you to learn. When you have mastered them, we shall speak again. I leave you, wild fool!
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  Three years later, Takezo emerges from the castle as a noble samurai warrior named Musashi Miyamoto.

  “OK, I’ll do it,” I said.

  Matt gave me his phone number.

  “Call me at least once every day. Just check in, tell me how you’re doing. Also, I’m going to give you a writing assignment.”

  “What kind of writing assignment?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  As a kid I sometimes went to synagogue for holiday services. I had even gone to Hebrew school and had a Bar Mitzvah. But I didn’t really believe in God. The only time I ever prayed was during the baseball play-offs, when the New York Yankees were losing and I asked Him to help them. Sometimes I would propose deals with God. My standard offer was a promise never to masturbate again, in exchange for a Yankee comeback. I would look at the Yankees in the batter’s box, and if their helmets looked a little shinier, then that was God’s signal that the deal was on. The Yankees pulled off miraculous victories, but I never held up my end of the bargain.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Listen, God for our purposes doesn’t have to be the old man in the sky. He or She or It can be anyone. Or anything. Just as long as you can believe that this person or thing has your best interests at heart. Is there anyone who can be God for you?”

  Just thinking about Matt’s question embarrassed me. I glanced over at the girl typing on her laptop to make sure she wasn’t listening.

  “Come on,” Matt urged. “Anyone.”

  “Momofuku Ando.”

  I just blurted it out, but somehow it seemed right.

  Matt accepted the name without hesitation, even though he couldn’t pronounce it. “Momojuku Condo. OK!”

  “Momofuku,” I corrected him. “Ando.”

  “Momofuku Ando. Right. So, you’ll write letters to Momofuku Ando this week.”

  “Letters?”

  “Write to him about your past relationships. Anything you think is relevant. Be sure to include everything you can remember, and write a letter every day.”

  The whole thing sounded ridiculous.

  “I’m supposed to write letters to Momofuku Ando about my past relationships? And then what?”

  “We’ll meet on Saturday afternoon in Dolores Park, and you’ll read me what you wrote.”

  “That’s it? Just write letters and read them to you and I’m going to change?”

  “No. The letters are just so you can see the scope of your behavior, so you can get it all down on paper. After that, we’ll work on changing. OK?”

  I didn’t know what else to do.

  “OK.”

  Matt got up to leave, but then he stopped.

  “By the way, who is Momofuku Ando?”

  “I read about him in a Japanese magazine. He invented instant ramen.”

  “You mean like Top Ramen?”

  “Yes, that’s one of his brands. He also invented the cup. You know, Cup Noodles.”

  Matt laughed all the way out of the coffee shop.

  PART II

  MOMOFUKU AND ME

  A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 1 : HALLEY’S COMET

  To understand how the inventor of instant ramen helped me change, it would be useful to know something about his life. No better place to start than Halley’s Comet.

  You see, the baby who would grow up to invent instant ramen was born on March 5, 1910. That year, Halley’s Comet made one of its near-Earth flybys. To most people, this was nothing more than a coincidence.

  Nissin Food Products, however, has always made a big deal about the connection. For example, on the page devoted to Ando’s birth in the catalog to the Instant Ramen Invention Museum, an illustration shows an icy white ball zooming past Earth. The entire planet is covered in clouds except for a small clearing, through which sparkling dust from the comet’s tail gently settles over Japan.

  There’s no doubt about it. Nissin means to suggest that Ando—and maybe instant ramen itself—was sent from above.

  Around the time I started to shave, I would stare at myself in the bathroom mirror and wonder what I was going to look like in the twenty-first century. In those days, my favorite TV show was a science fiction series about a permanent manned station on the moon. Everyone on the show carried laser weapons shaped like staple guns, and one of the characters was an alien woman who could morph into whatever animal she wanted. The show was called Space: 1999, which made the twenty-first century seem very far away.

  In the version of my future I would see while staring in the mirror, I was always posing for a family portrait. My future wife was standing next to me, and in front of us our two children. My wife was of average height, thin, with dark hair, but I couldn’t make out any features of her face. I couldn’t see the children’s faces very clearly either, but I could tell that one was male, one female. My future self ’s hair was shorter than mine in the mirror, and he wore glasses. He seemed dependable, honest, strong. Normal. The head of a family. Which is to say, when I imagined myself as an adult, I saw a man who was very much like my father. Of course, as it turned out, I was not much better than the writers of Space: 1999 at predicting the future. Because in the early years of the twenty-first century, humans had not yet stepped foot again on the moon, and I was single, reading letters addressed to the inventor of instant ramen aloud in Dolores Park.

  We sat near the top of the big sloping green. Matt listened from a few feet away, chewing on a blade of grass. He bobbed forward and back, as if to release energy that might build up and explode if he sat still. While I read the letters, he stared out over the Mission District rooftops toward the downtown skyscrapers. On a clearer day, he could have seen all the way across the bay to the loading docks in Oakland. Every once in a while, a white bulldog ran by, its jowls dripping, in pursuit of a just-launched tennis ball. Couples—some gay, some straight—lay on blankets around us. Like Dolores Street (at the bottom of the hill), Dolores Park was dotted with palm trees, the result of a post-1906-earthquake attempt to dress up the neighborhood. When I first moved to the city, I hated the palm trees because they seemed out of place. But now their out-of-placeness was exactly what made them beautiful.

  “Read that part again,” Matt said.

  It was the part about cheating on Harue with women I had met through the America Online member directory. Matt closed his eyes, bowing his head while I reread the section. When I reached the end a second time, he opened his eyes.

  “Put a star next to that passage,” he said.

  I drew an asterisk in the margin of my notebook. It felt good to have Matt not only listen but also give me this kind of mysterious instruction.

  While reading the last letter, the one about Amanda, I began thinking about the differences between Matt and me. In particular, I felt ashamed that I was rich enough to afford a weekend at a Lake Tahoe ski house yet all I could do was complain about it. Was he thinking of me as a spoiled brat who made too much of my problems? Our daily phone calls were usually about me, but Matt had begun sharing glimpses of his life. He had been homeless for part of his adulthood, and he had battled an addiction to alcohol. He had gotten sober a few years before we met, and he was working as a counselor at a rehabilitation clinic. He rented an apartment, but it was above an all-night S&M club, so he rarely got much sleep. I had never interacted with anyone like him, let alone shared with such a person the intimate details of my life.

  When I got to the part about the ski house, Matt asked me to put a star next to that section, too, and to reread it.

  “I once met a guy like Hadman,” he said when I was done. “Down in the Tenderloin.” The Tenderloin is a San Francisco neighborhood with a tough reputation. “And this guy was about twice as big as me, and he said some nasty stuff. So I felt the way you felt, but in my case I used to carry a gun.”

  I was afraid to ask, but I asked.

  “Did you shoot him?”

  Matt pulled up another blade of grass, sticking it in his mouth with the first
one.

  “You don’t want to know about that. I did a lot of bad things.”

  It struck me that the letters to Ando were not only the story of how things had gone very wrong in my romantic life, but also the story of how two seemingly very different men wound up sitting next to each other in Dolores Park.

  After I read the last letter, we sat silently on the grass. The wind picked up, rustling the papers of my notebook.

  Matt was the first to speak.

  “How was that for you?”

  I thought back over the previous week. Every night, after I came home from work, I had gone straight to a coffee shop and written a letter to Ando. When writing articles for the business magazine, I would agonize for days over the wording of single paragraphs. But these letters, once I got going, practically poured out of me.

  How was it for me? If you had asked me before writing the letters if I was an honest man, I would have said yes. If you had asked me how I treated people—especially those I was close to—I would have said that I treated them very well. If you had asked me if I was living a full life, I would have said yes, and as evidence I would have proffered my career, my funny adventures at Japanese restaurants, and my MBA. If you had asked me why I was still single, I would have said that I simply hadn’t met the right person, and that as soon as I did, I would be so overwhelmed with desire that I would have no trouble remaining faithful to her.

  Now I had to admit that the truth was very different. I had lied frequently to people I cared about, and had regularly betrayed them. I had promised myself over and over to stop, but I couldn’t stop. My activities and career decisions—nearly every decision in my adult life—had been motivated primarily by the need to meet new women.