Read Soldiers in Hiding Online

Authors: Richard Wiley

Soldiers in Hiding (3 page)

BOOK: Soldiers in Hiding
7.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
But enough. I am a figure of waning prominence, it is true, but my name is permanently lodged in the memories of nearly all my countrymen. Teddy Maki. Teddy Maki. The name has a certain ring to it, don't you agree? The way those final vowels lift it so nicely into Japaneseness.
 
WHEN I WAS A CHILD LIFE WAS WONDERFUL. IN THE CITY there was a small grocery store full of vegetables, fruit, and soft fresh fish. In the valley there was a farm, Maki's farm. My uncle and father served each other well, for all of the children of both men worked the farm in late spring and summer and then spent the other seasons living above the grocery and going to school. For a while we had tried attending school in the valley near our home, but the long stares of the other children quickly sent my brothers and me toward the city and the tolerance of numbers. In the part of Los Angeles where my uncle kept his store it was possible to see kimonoed men and women and to hear only Japanese for days.
It is interesting to remember, to try to recall, the first realization one has of being different. During my early years the color of people, the curve of an eye, the texture of hair, the height and prominence of a cheekbone were all invisible to me. But as I grew older they came into focus.
We
stayed together in our small and studious way while
they
fanned out across the world. I remember a time, before my father had saved enough money to buy his farm, when he made his living as a gardener, trimming and pruning the bushes of our neighbors. He would often take me with him on his jobs, letting me ride high atop the clippings in the back of his truck, and he would laugh at the half-understood insults that sometimes came his way. On Saturdays, during those years, our family practice was to go to town together and to shop and walk
along the boarded streets as if they were our own. My mother's dress, the way it hung so oddly long, made her legs look like cucumbers, and my father's hat was always tight across his eyes. Why, I remember thinking, did they need to be so strange? The parents of other children were all belt buckles and boots, all muscular and tall, yet my father, even from the low vantage point of his son's eyes, was clearly the smallest of men. What boy, under such circumstances, wouldn't long for Los Angeles? To have an uncle such as mine seemed like a gift from the gods, and the longer I stayed with him, the farther I grew from my father, the more impossible it became to go back.
 
Once, when I was in the tenth grade and had been staying with my uncle for three or four years, a girl, her very existence couched in blonds and blues, fell in love with me and chose several paths by which I might walk her home from school. The girl's name was Trudy, Germanic and pure, and her hair had ringlets which would bounce when she walked so tall beside me. I can remember waiting in the alley behind her house, knee-deep in the grass and hidden by the dusk. When she could sneak away Trudy would run to me. In the alley behind her house she would remove her jacket and pull my willing head in between her giant breasts, in among the white walls of flesh that moved past my ears. She talked to me in a low voice, asking me if I liked it and what I wanted to do, but when she pulled my head back all I could do was gasp, panting for air, until she laughed and plugged my mouth with one of her huge nipples, making me dizzy and helpless once again.
After the war came and when I wondered at the ironies in my life I often thought of Trudy. She would have given herself to the war effort, I knew, but would she have considered the Japanese dangerous? Remembering my thin body in her arms she would probably have thought us weak and said that it was the Germans who were the real worry, for the blood in their veins was in hers. Still, whenever I search my memory for signs of Los Angeles I find Trudy first, for she is that part of which, at the time,
I was most proud. As I grew older I wanted less and less to spend my summers picking fruit and vegetables on my father's farm. My uncle, with the city behind him, grew toward America so much faster than Father. His English was better and his humor was ruled, like my own, by what he heard on the radio, by what was new. Progressively each year, when school was out, the features of the farm became less appealing, my father's form more foreign. When he, in his tired old truck, would stop at the store, and when we heard him talking to my uncle below, my cousins and I would look at each other or out the window at Los Angeles and yearn for the summer we'd miss, for the time when the parks and nearby beaches would be full, when young Japanese girls, as well as many others, would be waiting. Nevertheless, it took me until the summer after graduation to insist that I would no longer go, that I was educated now and would find my future in music, that I'd stay in Los Angeles and live above my uncle's store like a real American boy.
My cousins and brothers, all younger than myself, were packed into the pickup and gone, and suddenly the upper floor of my uncle's store, with its outside staircase leading to the open city, was mine alone. Where was Trudy, I remember wondering, when I needed her most? Now that I was a graduate she was two years gone and had moved across the city to Hollywood. She'd called a time or two, late at night, but she couldn't get past my uncle's English, and the telephone was forever in his domain. So with the place to myself I really did turn my attention to my talent. A guitar sat across my lap hours each day and, true to the Japanese stereotype, I could copy anything. I listened to recordings of the Ellington band and in a while could play rhythm or do wild solos, note for note, with whoever was on the record. My uncle used to come quietly up and sit on the edge of one of the six beds in the room and listen…. “Teddy, Teddy,” he would sometimes say, smiling.
In my high school class there were others who played, and on the Fourth of July we did a dance, our first job. It was a block party held at a hall near my uncle's store, and we were beside ourselves with the success of it. My uncle marveled at the way we sounded so professional, and my cousins, home from the farm for the holiday, stood in stupid silence at the side of the room. They all said, “Is that Teddy up there? Is that our Teddy?”
The leader of the band was a boy my age whose name was Jimmy Yamamoto. Jimmy was dark of mood and walked around the neighborhood with his hands deep in his pockets, a soulful look on his face. He was from a broken home, something nearly unheard-of among Japanese immigrants of that day, and it had been rumored throughout the high school that for a time Jimmy was in trouble with the law. He was a thin man, unmuscular and smooth, yet there was an aura about him which made the rest of us feel something akin to fear. He spoke so little, had no need of friends, seemed to know so much.
Nevertheless, it was Jimmy Yamamoto's ability at booking that meant everything to the band. When he spoke to people he kept his voice low, but there was something about his manner that made them listen. By the end of the summer, when my cousins came back, Jimmy had acquired the habit of standing around the store, silently peeling himself a peach, and staring at the steady customers. My uncle and I felt a little proud that he had adopted us, though we had no idea why.
“He's done more for the band than you have,” my uncle said one night, nodding toward Jimmy at the back of the store. “Why don't you ask him to name it?”
“It has a name already,” said Jimmy, not coming forward but somehow getting his voice all the way up front to us.
“What do you think, Jimmy?” asked my uncle. “Some nice catchy name. Something that will bring pride to the neighborhood.”
Jimmy stopped leaning on the long meat counter and walked slowly up to where my smiling uncle stood.
“We're going to call the band ‘Jimmy Yamamoto and the American Japs,'” he said.
My uncle didn't move. A smile lingered at the edges of his mouth. “What?” he said.
“That's what I want to call the band.”
My uncle and I looked at each other. I knew Jimmy wasn't joking though I'd never heard the name before, but my uncle wasn't sure. “You want to call the band, ‘American Japs'?” he asked, his voice still uncommitted.
Jimmy nodded, smiling slightly, but my uncle's smile was gone. “You can't do it,” he said.
“It's a good name,” said Jimmy. “I've given it a lot of thought and it is a name with distinction, one that will be difficult to forget.”
“It is a bad name,” said my uncle. “It calls attention to prejudice rather than pride. It will make the community ashamed rather than knit it together.”
“It's a good name,” said Jimmy.
“A bad one,” said my uncle.
The argument over the name of the band went on like this for days, my uncle furiously thinking up better names when Jimmy was gone, then hitting him with them when he came in sometime after dark.
“Anything else,” he said, finally. “The community wants this band to work but not with that name. Anything else, Jimmy, and you can take the town by storm and with our blessing. What do you say? Choose another name?”
Jimmy had his trumpet tucked under his arm. He carried in his hand a list of j obs stretching to Christmas. “Look at the bookings,” he told us. He left the list with my uncle and then walked away.
“He's a good boy,” my uncle told me. “What did I tell you? I knew it all the time.” He swung the booking list in my direction. “Trumpet players are always the leaders,” he said, remembering for a moment whose uncle he was. “He's calling the band ‘Jimmy
and the Ayjays'; what do you think? A reasonable compromise, don't you agree?”
The essence of Jimmy Yamamoto, so far as I could tell, was contained in the name that he first chose for our band. Jimmy Yamamoto and the American Japs. Irreverence. He was a man I was awed by and I could never understand why he wanted me for a friend. I was simple and standard for my age, while Jimmy was smart and cool. The only time I was his equal was when we played. His trumpet and my guitar were friends of the first order, and though the other members of the band came and went, it was always Jimmy and I who were steadfast.
For six months we played jobs every weekend. During the week I would go back to my uncle's store to hang about with my younger cousins, listening to talk of the high school, of what it had been like on the farm that summer. My father believed my uncle when he told him what a good musician I was, and even my mother, silent as always, came to wonder about her eldest son. Was it such a fine idea to give up a chance for college? She asked my uncle and he answered by saying, “Why don't you go hear them?” He took her by the shoulders as he said it. “Why not?” he asked. “Why not go listen to the band play?”
But though we gave them several opportunities, my parents never came to hear the band. My mother took my uncle's word, believing blindly that I had talent, and my poor father laughed when he heard what Jimmy'd wanted to call the band.
They were from Japan, those parents of mine, and they'd rebuilt that world in east Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. I knew my parents could never be American, no more than I could ever be Japanese. “Why don't you call the band ‘American Japanese'?” my father suggested, and we all laughed. My uncle put his hands upon my father's head, roughing him up gently, as an elder brother would. My father was a farmer, not a merchant; we all knew that. He was interested in the old things like
shamisen
and Noh. It had been a long time since I, or any of the
others in the family, had taken him seriously or listened to the things he said.
 
WHEN I FINISH AT THE STUDIO IT IS OFTEN TOO EARLY for anything but the long trip home or for a visit to my son in his terraced mansion all surrounded by his wealth. Today, however, it seems to have taken me longer than usual to reduce the “Amateur Hour” to its lowest common denominator, to the farters and contortionists who keep it toward the tops of the charts. From the studio it is a slow walk, for a man my age, to Roppongi, which is always my evening destination. My mistress, a woman I have kept for three years now, has a small business, which I set up for her on one of the narrow Roppongi streets that slip back off the main one. My mistress's name is Sachiko, and the bar that she manages is called the Kado. She is in her late thirties so she remembers the war, but with the wide warp of her child's memory, that is all. She is from Hiroshima and has dull scars, the shadows of bomb burns, on her arms and thighs and belly. Sachiko's spirit is light, her laugh easy. Yet it seems to me that she is connected as I am, fused by the very blanching of her skin, to the life and technology of North America. It is for this reason that I want her. It is in her hurt that I find safe harbor, though I have a wife at home who would gladly give the same.
In Tokyo the low winter clouds push down upon shops and restaurants, making me hurry. In Roppongi daylight leaves early and as I walk, unobserved, I pass through parts of the city that are pleasing to me. I walk for a while among cement girders, heavy highways held up by them, and the roar of traffic cast down upon the road beside me. This cement coating is what lets the country wear so well, the cloth that keeps it clean. Soon there is a side street I can enter, which takes me out of all the traffic and gives me old Japan. Here there are geisha houses behind high mauve walls, their privacy protected. Sachiko's bar is not among these, yet it is here that she first thought to rise. The geisha, all white-faced
and riding down the cobblestones in her jinrikisha, is still a mighty myth among failed bar girls.
On a corner, at the nearest edge of main Roppongi, I can see the Kado's neon sign, dull but brightening in the gray dark. Behind it many other such signs are coming into their own, for we are not far from a wide street where westerners go to drink, not far from plastic-looking British-style pubs where red-rouged Japanese girls go to try to find husbands, or if that's too harsh, simply to live a little. “Hello,” I say to someone. “
Konbanwa
….” It is barely eight o'clock, but the banter and business of running the bars is started.
BOOK: Soldiers in Hiding
7.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The House of Shadows by Paul Doherty
For Your Paws Only by Heather Vogel Frederick
Death Trick by Roderic Jeffries
Unknown by Unknown
Driver, T. C. by The Great Ark
The Price of Pleasure by Connie Mason
Eternal Prey by Nina Bangs