69 (14 page)

Adama, Iwase, and I were drinking café au lait at the coffee shop Boulevard, waiting for the two girls to appear.

“What the hell? This is just coffee-flavored milk.”

Adama couldn’t understand café au lait. I told him that this was what
Rimbaud
had drunk when he was writing
A Season in Hell
and that anyone who didn’t appreciate the taste wasn’t qualified to discuss art.

“Rimbaud? Bullshit. Rimbaud drank absinthe when he wrote poetry.”

“Who told you that?”

“It was in a book I read.”

Adama was reading more and more all the time. Being a grind by nature, once he got interested in something he really delved into it. Not long before, it would have been easy to snow him on something like this, but it was getting a lot harder. He’d given me an earful, just the other day, about Bataille’s
The Guilty Party, The Plague
by Camus, and Huysmans’
Against the Grain
, all of which he’d just finished. I’d acted surprised that it had taken him so long to get around to them, but privately I was a bit put out. It wasn’t that I didn’t read a lot myself, of course.
The Complete Sartre;
Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past;
Joyce’s
Ulysses
; the
World Classics
and
Masterpieces of Oriental Literature
series published by Chuko Books; Kawade’s
The World’s Great Thinkers
and
Sacred Texts of the World
; the
Kama Sutra
;
Das Kapital
;
War and Peace
;
The Divine Comedy
;
The Sickness unto Death
;
The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes
;
The Complete Lukacs
;
The Complete Tanizaki
... I knew the titles of all these books by heart. But the works I really loved and actually read and underlined in red ink were the great comic-book serials “Joe Tomorrow,” “The Way of the Dragon,” “Muyonosuke the Ronin,” and
“The Genius Bakabon.”

Anyway, I was in no mood to let Adama’s intellectual progress get me down. Today, after discussing our film and play with the angel and Ann-Margret, we were going to meet Mie Nagayama of Junwa at a jazz place to negotiate her appearance in the opening event. Nothing, and nobody, could wipe the smile off my face on a day like this.

“Ken, where we gonna hold the festival?”

Why did Adama always have to get so realistic about things? Didn’t he have any imagination, any dreams? I felt sorry for him. No doubt it had to do with the environment he’d grown up in. I grew up surrounded by sunlit orange groves, cool mountain streams glinting with silvery fish, and ballrooms where American officers and their families waltzed the night away. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration; the neighborhood had four scraggly
mikan
trees, a muddy pond with goldfish in it, and a house full of whores who held marathon screaming matches with GIs, but at least there weren’t any slag heaps. Slag heaps didn’t have a speck of romance in them; they were symbols of the mad rush to rebuild the economy after the war. Slag heaps didn’t inspire dreams.

“We need a hall of some sort,” I said.

“No shit. What are you grinning about? You think you can make a festival happen by drinking coffee-flavored milk and grinning? What’re we gonna do, rent the gym at Northern High?”

“They probably wouldn’t let us.”

“Of course not, you idiot.”

“Hm. I guess we got a problem.”

“You need permission if you want to use the Community Center and the Citizens Hall and all those places. You have to write a long description of what type of program you’re going to put on, and the producer has to stamp it with his personal seal. You got a personal seal, Ken?”

“Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And what’re you gonna do about the tickets?”

“Hand ’em out. Sell ’em.”

“No, I mean where you gonna have ’em printed? If we go to some printer in town, they’ll report it to the school.”

He had a point. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but his slag heap realism had succeeded in wiping the smile off my face.

“You wanna print ’em by hand?”

“A thousand tickets?”

“Forget it. Can’t have hand-printed tickets anyway.”

To do it by hand or have them mimeographed was out of the question. We weren’t talking about invitations to a birthday party or talent night at an old folks’ home.

“So do we call off the festival?” Adama said. He seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. It was all he could do to keep a straight face.

“Listen,” he said after a pregnant pause, “my brother’s at Hiroshima University. I’ll get him to have the tickets done at the campus print shop. They use real photosetting, not just typing or whatever, and since the print shop belongs to the university, it’ll be about half price. As for the hall—you know the Workers Hall near the entrance to the base? They use that place for union meetings and stuff, so there’s no real regulations or anything—all you need is a guarantor to put his seal on a form, and it doesn’t matter who he is. The seats are removable, too, so if we have everybody sit on the floor, I figure we can get about eight hundred people in there. A thousand, no, but, hell, there isn’t a hall in Sasebo that’ll hold a thousand people. Even the Citizens Hall won’t hold more than six hundred, and that’s counting the balcony.”

Adama was consulting his notebook as he reeled this off.

“The stage is about five meters deep—that’s more than enough space for the drums and amps and everything, right? You got six lights on either side of the stage, and a projection room, too. I guess you don’t need a projection room for an eight-millimeter film, but you need to make the place dark or you won’t be able to see anything, right? Well, this place already has black curtains for all the windows. You can make it dark in about three minutes. Pitch dark, the way you want it. Oh, yeah, and the guarantor—I know this guy from the basketball team who graduated last year. He’s pretty spaced out, and I already asked him to help. All we have to do is buy a ready-made seal and use his name and address, okay? Well? What do you think?”

“
You’re a genius!
Café au lait is coffee-flavored milk! Slag heaps are the pride and glory of Japan!”

I pressed my palms together and bowed to him. He calmly told me to can the crap and to decide on the design for the tickets and get it to him by the following day.

“Yumi-chan and I were talking it over, and... Well, there are only two people in the play, right?”

The angelic Lady Jane said this between quiet sips of English tea, the drink of aristocrats. She was sitting next to me. Ann-Margret was next to Adama. She’d practically pushed Iwase off the sofa to claim that position, and Iwase had had to move to the next table. Now and again, the angel’s thigh brushed against mine. Each time that happened, the sofa we were sitting on was transformed into an electric chair: a powerful current shot to the top of my skull, my hair stood on end, it was hard to breathe, my crotch tingled, my throat went dry, my palms grew sweaty, and the lonely expression on Iwase’s face faded from my field of vision.

“Right. Just two people—a boy and his older sister.”

Adama smiled knowingly. It was a smile that said my ulterior motive—to get tight with our leading lady by rehearsing alone with her—was transparently obvious.

“Well, see, I was thinking that Yumi-chan would be better for the job...”

I nearly dropped my glass.

“But I don’t have half your talent,” Ann-Margret told her. “I still think you should do it.”

“We already decided this on the way over, didn’t we? Yazaki-san, you know about the Performing Arts Festival last year, don’t you? She won the judges’ award for her Portia. And she was only a second-year student.”

Ann-Margret covered her mouth and squirmed in her seat, saying, “Stop it, I’m getting embarrassed.” She was leaning against Adama, her massive breasts jiggling beneath her blouse.

“Oh, yeah, I read about that!” Iwase said. “I think it was in the PTA newsletter. Ken, didn’t we plan to do an article on Sato-san?”

I felt the sofa being transformed from an ecstasy chair into something more like a wet toilet seat. The words
Shut the fuck up, Iwase!
were on the tip of my tongue, but I figured they wouldn’t win me any points, so I held them back and chewed on the rim of my glass. Adama had his head bowed and was laughing to himself.

“We can’t use the drama clubroom, but I was thinking we could rehearse in the church I go to,” Portia the busty Christian said cheerfully, and I forced a smile, desperately trying to think of a way to insert a sexy bathtub scene into the script and to add another character—a girl the boy loved from the bottom of his heart. I quickly realized it was out of the question, though, and slumped down in my seat. It was out of the question because only five minutes earlier I’d been holding forth about how subtle, how revolutionary, and how pure and innocent the play was because it involved only two characters, and they were related by blood. “Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind my doing it,” Ann-Margret said, and I assured her in a feeble voice that nothing would please me more.

Sasebo Bridge had been the scene of the main battle in the campaign against the
Enterprise.
Spread out beyond it was the American navy base. The jazz club Four Beat, a favorite hangout of Iwase’s and mine since our first year of high school, stood on a wide road lined with plane trees leading to the bridge. The club’s interior had a particular smell we associated with black people. We called it the smell of the blues. It was in the counter, the sofa, the tables, the ashtrays. There had been nights when a sailor who was a dead ringer for Chet Baker and had a mermaid tattoo on his left shoulder played the trumpet, nights when black MPs took time out during their rounds to harmonize on “St. James Infirmary,” and nights when hostesses from bars that catered to foreigners, their hair bleached brown or yellow or red, got into fights, filling the air with the smell of cheap perfume as they swung and clawed and kicked at each other. The owner, a man named Adachi, never gave us any flak even when we sat for hours over a single glass of Coke. Adachi was always stoned on booze or pills or dope, and whenever he got really loaded he’d start to cry. “Shit,” he’d whimper through his tears, “why wasn’t I born black?”

I thought it was the perfect place to meet Mie Nagayama. We’d told the angel and Ann-Margret that the next bit of business only concerned the production team. There wasn’t exactly any need to lie to them, and the fact that I only did so to spare Jane’s feelings is probably better left unsaid, because it’s just another lie. Actually, it had been Adama’s idea. He figured that if I were confronted with three beautiful women at the same time I’d lose it entirely and scare them all off by saying something utterly insane.

“Here to meet somebody?” Adachi said from behind the counter. “Judging by how jumpy Ken is, it must be a woman.”

Adama nodded.

“She’s the number one star in Junwa High,” I explained. Adachi gave a scornful little laugh and turned his eyes—permanently yellow and cloudy from all the stuff he took—to the poster of Charlie Mingus on the far wall. Adachi didn’t have much interest in women. He once told me he’d done so much booze and pills and dope that he couldn’t even get it up anymore.

“Seriously, though, she’s a real knockout,” I said. “Which reminds me, what do you recommend for background music? Something light, you think, like Stan Getz or Herbie Mann?”

Adachi nodded. “I know just the thing. We got a new Wes Montgomery record in—got strings on it. Mood music, man.”

“Great!” I said. “That’s perfect.” But I should have known better than to trust some weirdo who went around weeping and wailing about not being black. When Mie Nagayama appeared, decked out in a red satin blouse, tight black jeans, silver sandals, eighteen-karat gold earrings, and pink nail polish, Adachi grinned to himself and put on Coltrane’s
Ascension.
John Tchicai and Marion Brown were making their alto saxes squeal like stuck pigs, and Mie Nagayama grimaced at the noise, her almond eyes reduced to dark inverted commas.

We all went back to Boulevard. Even as I sat there pitching the festival to Mie Nagayama, I was painting a little picture in my mind of that evil bastard Adachi going into withdrawal, falling down in the street with convulsions, and being run over by a truck.

“Whaddaya mean, a festival?” she said, holding a Hi-Lite between pink fingernails and puckering orange-painted lips to expel a stream of smoke. At that moment, for the first time in my life, I realized that a woman’s lips could have something that not even Rimbaud’s poetry or Hendrix’s guitar or Godard’s editing techniques came near.
If only I could make lips like that mine to do with as I pleased,
I thought. A guy would eat coal if that’s what it took to win such a prize. I explained festivals to Mie Nagayama with all the passion of a man willing to devour an entire slag heap.

“I can’t act,” she said, crushing the ice from her drink between her teeth.

“You don’t need to know how to act,” I told her. “You see, you’ve been chosen as a figurehead.”

“A figurehead?”

“Right. It’s like I said earlier. We’re talking about a festival where a thousand of the most progressive high school students in Sasebo come together, without any help from their teachers or anyone else. We’re doing it on our own. They have festivals in Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto—all the big cities—but they’re not organized only by people like us. I bet this has never been done even in New York or Paris. That’s how amazing it is.”

“Paris?”

“That’s right. Not even high school kids in Paris can pull off something like this.”