On my way home, I pedal past dé Dale’s flagship shop, The Zoo. A block and a half away from my apartment, the shop specializes in drug paraphernalia: rolling papers and bongs, turbo lighters and glass pipes for smoking meth and crack. The Zoo also sells beach cruisers and New York hats and original silver accessories and anime figurines, but those bicycles and hats, as popular as my friend claims them to be, isn’t what brings people into his shop at three o’clock in the morning.

Dé Dale always opened up possibilities for me: where other foreigners spoke of the limitations of being a gaijinin Japan, of all the things they couldn’t do, my friend was steaming ahead, doing the unimaginable: running several headshops in town and selling drugs, albeit it nominally legal ones. What balls! What stupidity!

“If you really want to make money,” dé Dale once lectured me, “you must tread a very fine line between what is accepted and what is not, what is allowed and what is not, what is legal . . . and what is not. That is where the money is, Rémy! That is where the others are too goose to tread.”

“Chicken.”

“Chicken?”

“Yeah, it’s ‘chicken’, not ‘goose’.” 

“Ah, chicken. Yes. I am a learning machine,” he said, and he was. 

I try not to be too obvious as I ride by The Zoo. Beach cruisers are lined up smartly on the sidewalk, lava lamps gurgle in the display window, and the dreadlocked manager is slouched at the entrance having a smoke. Seeing me, he gives me a friendly nod. 

Business as usual. Thank God.

The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.