Harajuku Sunday (15 page)

Tucker—a paranoid conspiracy theorist with a strong streak of resentment against his father, father's father, and grandfather's father, all Marine officers.
 
They were imperialists--but what he resented was not that they had whined about the "white man's burden" while breeding a string of half-castes in the slums, but that they were unable to keep it up--that he had been left, so to speak, holding the bag, crushed with the weight of historical guilt without any of the rewards of empire.
 
And so he drank--to an incredible degree--he got older; he was only twenty-six but his skin had the beat up appearance of a thirty-five year old and he chased after the very lowest quality of woman; he played for the very lowest stakes.
 
And this--of course--made our friendship easy.
 
"C'mon mate, c'mon mate, c'mon mate!"
 
With dismayed faces the courtiers (whose reactions are now completely predictable, whose jokes are obvious, whose responses in any given situation are preordained to the fourth or fifth degree) watch as the prince is taken out out of the court by an ill-mannered rogue, so disheveled, unattractive, and poorly-dressed as to be beneath contempt, and the prince is happy!
 
The prince is actually genuinely cheerful!
 
Few have seen such expressions of genuine unadulterated joy, ear-to-ear smiling!
 
Passing parked Jaguars and Range Rovers, we get into--of all things--an illegally parked beat up old white cube car, and tear off through night traffic
Tokyo
streets in some parody of a previous white car, a previous night racing through the nameless beat of the city.

"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 phone, 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.”