79. The Itch

Saturday evening, July 8th

I take the cell phone from Azami. “Moshi-moshi.”

“This is Yūri,” says the voice on the other end. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“I’m so sorry, Yūri. I lost my phone the other day and I . . .”

I’m getting tired of having to lie to everyone. If I had my druthers, I would be up front with my friend and tell her the truth that in less than twelve hours I will have to go in for questioning. I would also tell her what I fear most: that the cops might arrest me the moment I set foot in their office. But this is Japan. You don’t wear your heart on your sleeve here; you put it in a lacquered box, wrap it up in a furoshiki, and shove it into a dark corner of your closet out of sight with the rest of your troubles.

We agree to meet at Small Spaces in an hour. In the meantime, Yūri will contact the others and tell them where to go, and I will hurry back to my apartment and try to call Naila again.

It should be around seven-thirty in the morning in D.C. If I don’t get through now, there won’t be another chance until Sunday morning. And that is cutting it far too close comfort.

I dial my cousin’s number. The phone starts to ring. Fourteen rings later, there’s still no answer.

“Goddammit!” I shout into the receiver. Trying the number again, I get nothing. 

“She’s not home?” Azami asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t know whether she’s out or whether she’s just not answering her phone. What I do know is that I’m going to be up shit creek if I don’t get in touch with her before tomorrow morning.”

Smoking yabatill the wee hours of the night with dé Dale and Nori on Ko Samui would have made a fitting epilogue for my experience with stimulant drugs, one that had until then been rather positive in many respects. Regrettably, it would prove to have only been The Prologue.

Not long after returning to Fukuoka, dé Dale was made an offer the businessman in him couldn’t easily refuse: several hundred grams of crystal meth at a price that tickled his animal spirits. As soon as the deal had gone through, dé Dale parceled the speed out to anyone he could contact, unloading as much of the drug as possible, save a hefty personal stash for himself and his girlfriend Nori, who was now smoking like a champion.

I, too, was persuaded into buying a large portion of it.

“Shinji will be in town,” dé Dale murmured cryptically over the phone. “If you want to meet up, it’ll have to be at ‘twenty o’clock’.”

Twenty g’s! Good God!

Twenty grams was more than enough to keep me twisted around Shinji’s little finger for the remaining seven months of 2001. I didn’t know if I could trust myself around that much speed.

“Twenty? I’m kind of busy. Can’t we meet earlier? At, say, five?” I offered. Five grams would have been more manageable.

“No. It’s twenty or never. And so you know, our friend won’t be as generous with his time next time.”

“Twenty, huh?”

If only I had said “No thanks” to dé Dale, the next few years might have turned out differently. I probably wouldn’t be facing jail time today. But, I couldn’t. Something within me just wasn’t capable of saying “No” to dé Dale.

“Deal me in.”

 I managed at first to keep the habit at a minimum, smoking only on weekends, but it didn’t take long for those weekends to start including Thursday nights and then Wednesday nights, and the occasional Tuesday night, as well. By the time Sunday night would zip around my body would be screaming for sleep. Four or five days speeding, with the pedal to the metal, and only occasional catnaps on my sofa, would finally catch up with me and utter exhaustion would drag my listless body into a groggy tomb.

By Monday morning, I would be feeling much better than I had the right to be. My appetite would have returned, too, so I would make a breakfast of misosoup, asazuképickles and rice. I’d drink several glasses of vegetable juice for the health in it.

“Today I’m gonna eat healthy,” I’d declare, “and rejuvenate. Yes, rejuvenate! Lots of fruits and vegetables for Rémy’s poor body. And vitamins, yes, vitamins! Ha-ha!”

I would put the lighter and rolled up 1000-yennote away in my sock drawer and tell myself I wouldn’t be needing the paraphernalia today, that I’d be able to get through the day just fine without it, thank you very much.

My confidence would be unshakable: I would get through the day without lighting up, end of story.

The itch, after all, is gone, I’d tell myself. I’m rested and the furthest thing from my mind is smoking.

I would have to remind myself, of course, that this was the case, that I was okay, that I was above it, that smoking even a little . . . Nah, I didn’t need it. I just didn’t need it . . . Besides, there were so many other things to fill my mind: my dissertation, the errands I had to run, the calls I had to make, the dinner I wanted to prepare, and the date I wanted to arrange.

But, Shinji would be back in no time pestering me, peeking over my shoulder to see what I was up to.

I’d tell him to shoo.

I would busy myself, instead, with work and even make some progress on my dissertation. I would have a nice lunch, more vegetables, and be feeling pretty damn good considering all the abuse I had put my body through recently. And yet, I wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling that wherever I went, whatever I did, Shinji was shadowing me. 

“Just go a-way, will ya!”

As the day progressed, my thoughts would turn increasingly to Shinji, and I would have to convince myself that I neither needed, nor wanted, to smoke.

“Why, I could smoke whenever I wanted to,” I’d say to myself, “especially when you consider how much meth I have tucked away in the old sock drawer. There’s no reason to smoke up on today of all days, when the weekend, well not quite the weekend, but Thursday night was only three short days away, and I’d be able to smoke myself silly then. Just think how goodit will feel to smoke again after having not smoked for a few days.”

This argument would gain traction, convincing my head of the benefits of waiting. My body, though, was never fully convinced. So, I would go out to run errands, if only to put some physical distance between the drug and myself, and that would do the trick for the next few hours.

By the time I would come home, though, there would be an itch I would give my eyeteeth to scratch. And so, straight to the sock drawer I would go and remove the rolled up 1000-yen note, sticky with white soot, and one of the many small Ziploc bags of meth stashed there. I would sprinkle the crystalline shards onto a fresh sheet of foil, light up and inhale deeply.

---

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

77. Yaba Daba Doo!

Saturday morning, July 8th

I wake up early with Azami at my side, sound asleep but grinding her teeth so fiercely I worry she might crack a tooth. With a gentle nudge, she rolls over onto her side, the gnashing stops.

I go to the kitchen to make myself a café au lait. As the milk is being heated in a saucepan, the kettle comes to a boil. I place three scoops of coffee grounds into the filter, and once the milk is warm enough add two lumps of La Perruchesugar to the milk, then slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, pour water over the coffee grounds and let it drip, drip, drip into the milk.

Bowl of café au laitin hand, I go and sit outside on the balcony. My rabbit rubs up against my ankle.

“Morning, Pyon,” I say and scratch him where he likes it, on the top of his head right between the ears. “You got any regrets, Pyon?”

The rabbit stands on his hind legs and gives me a noncommittal look.

“No? Not even one? Well, I’ve got plenty for both of us.”

 After locking and chaining the door and shutting the curtains in the hotel room, I cut open the hard plastic containing the pink pills, and let them spill out onto the glass coffee table. Examining one, I found “WY” imprinted on one side of each tablet.

The latest edition of The Economist featured a short article about recent seizures of methamphetamines in Thailand. According to the article, anti-drug operations had netted some six million pills that very week; another seven million pills had been nabbed the week before.

“I guess this is why the shit was so hard to find,” I said, tossing dé Dale the magazine. A good month for the narcs, perhaps, but it was evidence, too, of the booming trade in methamphetamines in Southeast Asia. The article also stated that the pills, imprinted with a “WY” logo, were mainly produced by the United Wa State Army, the largest drug trafficking organization in Myanmar. Thailand was the primary market for yaba.

“Check this out,” I said to dé Dale, holding one of the pills up. “WY. Wonder what that means. Wa’s Yaba?”

Dé Dale replied with a grunt. He couldn’t be bothered to look up, focused as he was on separating the paper lining from the foil of the Nestlé Crunchwrapper. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a junkie, I always say. Brushing the flame of his lighter quickly under the wrapper, dé Dale picked at the paper with some tweezers and pulled it neatly away.

“Ha hah!” he said proudly and handed me the foil.

Borrowing dé Dale’s Swiss Army pocketknife—the guy was never without it—I cut the foil in half, and, crushing one of the pills up, placed an amount of the pink powder onto one of the tin squares. With a straw clenched between my teeth, I flicked the lighter and, passing a weak flame below the foil, waited for the smoke to rise.

Nothing. 

I tried again and waited, but the shit would not burn. Instead of giving off smoke, the pink powder melted and formed a dirty liquid.

“What the hell is this?” I said, putting the foil down on the coffee table.

Dé Dale grumbled that I wasn’t doing it right and gave it a shot himself. But, still no luck.

“Maybe the bastard sold us X,” he said.

I popped half a pill into my mouth, chewed on it a bit, and then washed it down with gin. Dé Dale did the same, and returned to the task of trying to make the pink powder to burn.

“It’s awfully sweet for ecstasy. Almost chocolaty,” I said, chewing on another half.

“It’s probably been cut with something,” dé Dale replied, the irritation in his voice rising.

Dé Dale had been simmering since we left Khaosan when our first attempts to score yabahad been frustrated. And now that we had got it only to be disappointed, dé Dale was ready to boil over. After several tries, we gave up trying to coax a plume of smoke from the pink powder, and popped one more pill each.

Slouching back into my chair, I turned on the TV. MTV was playing the same irritating video by a band I’d never heard of before called Crazy Town. Since arriving in Bangkok, I had seen it more than a dozen times. The song was also being blasted from speakers at street side vendors all over town.

Come muh lady . . . Come, come muh lady . . . you’re my butterfly, Sugar baby . . .

“Ugh. At least the chick in the video’s hot,” I said, pressing the “mute” button. 

When another thirty minutes had ticked by, and still nothing, dé Dale banged his fist on the table and jumped to his feet. “Fucking bastard sold us children’s aspirin!”

He paced the room like a caged tiger, fuming. I might have been able to comprehend my friend’s anger if it had been histhree thousand baht that had been flushed down the toilet. I was more philosophical about it: there were worse ways to learn a lesson, I thought, than being made a fool of by a drug dealer in Patpong. At least it was only three thousand baht. Could have been worse.

Just as I was about to concede to dé Dale that we had been duped, though, I began to feel a mellow, yet distinct, tingling throughout my body.

Dé Dale admitted he was starting to feel it, as well.

“I don’t know what this is,” I said, “but I’m starting to feel pretty damn good.” 

“Me, too,” dé Dale said, brightening. A smile spread across his face, the furrow in his brow softened.

Half an hour later, dé Dale declared that he was “high like the kite”, so we left the suite and hit the clubs.

Saturdays are another full day for me. I have two lessons in the morning at a “culture center” across town, teaching the unteachable: pensioners. At noon, I have to hurry back home where I have three more group lessons, back to back.

After teaching all week and having the same dull conversations over and over again, I am usually beat by the time Saturday mornings roll around. If I’ve also squeezed translation and freelance jobs in between the lessons—and more often than not I do—then I am a zombie by the end of the week, on the fast track for karōshi, or death from overwork.

The odd thing, though, is I don’t feel the slightest bit tired this morning. I should be an emotional and physical basket case considering what is going on, but I’m not. Just like yesterday, I was full of energy when I woke, my mind racing a mile a minute, high on the adrenaline coursing through my arteries.

Floating on my back in the Baiyoke’s 20th floor swimming pool, I started peaking again. Every time felt like the first, an orgasm rippling through my virgin flesh. I closed my eyes and let my body sink to the bottom of the pool. 

“I could stay here all day,” I said to myself, air gurgling out of my mouth and bubbles drifting like lazy dirigibles to the surface.

If only I’d had a long hallow reed to suck air through, bliss would have been mine. I would have become a merry little sea cucumber, not a worry in the deep blue sea.

It must have been around midnight when dé Dale and I had left our suite at the Baiyoke. We wandered around Pratunam for a while where I cashed a traveler’s cheque and, now flush with cash and goodwill, splurged on a Planet of the Apes gorilla mask for my friend.

Let me tell you, a kid never got so much pleasure out of a toy as dé Dale got out of that mask. Dé Dale donned the mask and started hamming it up, climbing on to dumpsters, spinning around telephone poles. Later as we were barreling through the streets of Bangkok on a tuk-tukheading back to Patpong, dé Dale leaned all the way out, howling and beating his chest. 

After clubhopping most of the night we ended up at a hole in the wall where the Mama of the bar challenged my friend to a game of The Captain’s Mistress. “You win, you drink for free,” Mama said.

It sounded like a fair bet to my friend. What was a game of glorified tick-tac-toe, after all, to a Frenchman who was often bemoaning the dearth of suitable chess opponents back in Fukuoka? He took up the gauntlet with the blind alacrity of a bull copulating in a queue at the slaughterhouse.

“Dé Dale, I wouldn’t put that piece there if I were you? She’s going to . . .”

“Rémy, tais-toi!”

Dé Dale blamed the first loss on my interruption.

“Shall we make the game more interesting?” dé Dale suggested, anteing up the gorilla mask.

“Hey! I paid good money for that!” I protested.

“Trust me,” dé Dale said. “I now understand how the bitch’s mind works.”

It was a rout: dé Dale did not manage to win a single game. Instead of drinking for free, we ended up having to pay double, the mask sacrificed on the altar of dé Dale’s pride.

After settling the bill, dé Dale told Mama that he wanted three whores to take back with us.

Three! Boys be ambitious, indeed.

As I was wondering how dé Dale intended to divvy up the poontang—two for him, one for me; two for me, one for him; one and a half for each of us; three for him, none for me—the saddest looking specimens of womanhood you could imagine started slinking in. It was as if we had arrived late at a farmers’ market and all that was left were greasy black bananas and stinky durians.

“You gotta be kidding,” dé Dale said. “Never mind.”

Passing on the orgy, we hailed a taxi and headed back to the hotel, where to our surprise the pool was still open.

“I was almost about to dive in after you,” dé Dale told me when I finally surfaced, gasping for air. “You know how long you were down there?”

“Sea cucumbers can’t be bothered with things as bourgeois as time.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” I said, jerking my head to knock the water out of my ears.

“You were down there for almost two minutes.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, impressed not so much by my pneumatic capacity as I was with the morning sky. It was lit up like Christmas, the sun rising above the city like a golden ornament against a crimson curtain. “Did you get a load of the sky?”

“Yeah, I’ve been staring it all this time.”

“What time is it?” I said.

“Eight.”

“Eight! Let me tell you, if this is children’s aspirin, I’m buying stock in Bayer!”

Getting up from his chaise lounge, dé Dale yelled, “Yaba-daba-doo!” at the top of his lungs and did a canon ball into the pool.

---

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

76. Let's Make a Deal

Dé Dale and I were brought to a dive far off the main strip. It was chockablock with young prostitutes sitting in booths, singing along with a karaokemachine. Aside from the bartender and a doorman, there were no men in the place, not a single customer.

My first thought was that we had been tricked into coming to a hostess bar where we would be forced to buy the girls drinks. Dé Dale was ready to bail right then and there, but the dealer persuaded us to wait until he came back.

“Fifteen, maybe twen’y minute,” he said, leaving us in the care of the bartender.

We sat down at an empty booth in the back that faced the entrance, and ordered gin and tonics. 

Before long, some of the bar girls started slinking over like cats about to pounce on mice and asked where we were from.

Dé Dale replied that we were from Luxembourg.

More questions followed: How long have you been here? What are you doing in Thailand? And so on.

Dé Dale fed them a load of baloney about being orchid buyers for a flower-importing consortium. Why bother with the truth?

When one of the girls tried her best to curry favor with dé Dale, I told her: “You’re very charming, but, I’m afraid it won’t work. My friend here likes men. Little men. Hairy little men.”

Without missing a beat, the girls turned their attention to me. One of them sat down right next to me and grabbed my wimpy bicep.

“You very tall. Me like,” she said. “Do you have girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I have four.”

“Butterfly boy!!!” They cackled with laughter. 

The girl put her arms around my neck and begged for me to let her be my fifth girlfriend. 

“I’ll think about it.”

“You don’ like me?”

“Oh, I likeyou all right.”

Not that she wasn’t pretty, she was, captivatingly so with her friendly eyes and natural, unaffected smile, but the thought of spending the next six months worrying that I might have contracted HIV or some other nasty STD was enough to make the water in me run cold.

Ten minutes came and went and dé Dale started tapping his lighter against the tabletop. “If the guy doesn’t show up in another 10 minutes,” dé Dale said, “We’re outta here.”

I had to agree with my friend. The longer we were forced to wait the more I worried we were becoming sitting ducks.

The bartender, noticing that the two of us were getting restless, came by and assured us the guy would probably be back in another ten minutes.

Dé Dale was ready to bolt. The Frenchman had the patience of a firecracker. When I suggested he have one more cigarette before leaving, he lit up and sat back in the settee, arms crossed, glaring in the direction of the entrance.

Before dé Dale could finish his cigarette, the dealer returned, short of breath. It had been nearly forty minutes.

So much for yaba being readily available.

As dé Dale was settling the bar tab, I followed the dealer to the restrooms in the back of the bar where, locking the door behind us, he pulled out a roll of ten pink pills, tightly wrapped in clear plastic. 

“I only wanted a few,” I protested. “This is way, way, waytoo much for the two of us.”

“But I bought these for you,” he said. “Ten for five thousand. ($110)”

“Five thousand?” I was taken aback. 

So much for the drug being cheap! Christ!

“I haven’t got that much on me.” I didn’t actually know how much cash I had on me and I wasn’t about to start counting the contents of my wallet before him. “I’ll take five for two thousand. It’s all I can afford.”

The dealer told me that was out of the question. He wanted to unload the whole lot as quickly as possible. It was far too risky for him to carry it around.

“Look, I only wanted five at the most and I’ve only got twenty-five hundred baht.”

“All for three thousand ($66),” he said finally.

“Deal!”

I passed a wad of bills to him, took the roll of pills from his hands, and left the restroom. 

Dé Dale was all ready to go, and, without so much as an adieubade to the girls, we beat-feet out of the bar. Once outside, we hopped into the fourth taxi we found and drove off to the Pratunam area where the Baiyoke Sky Hotelwas located. 

Getting out of the taxi a good ten-minutes’ walk from our hotel, we dropped in at a convenience store to pick up some tin foil. Not finding any, we bought a chocolate bar, chewing gum, cigarettes—anything we could find that came wrapped in foil. We also picked up a fresh lighter, some tonic water, and, once fully accoutered, made our way back to our hotel, snickering like kids leaving a candy store.

75. The Pied Piper of Patpong

As soon as dé Dale and I arrived in Patpong, we made a beeline for the Japanese street, a lane with bar upon bar catering to the “special needs” of Japanese businessmen. There was no comparable street exclusively for Germans or Aussies or Frenchmen, as far as I knew, but the Japanese managed to have a street all for themselves, employing some of the best-looking girls you’d hope to find in the trade. And what made these girls all the more attractive was that they were dressed in evening gowns rather than the raunchy outfits of the go-go girls that left little to the imagination.

They called out to the salarymenin simple Japanese, “Hey uncle, you’re welcome here!”

Dé Dale said it would be fun to pop into one of the clubs and freak everyone out by speaking Japanese, but before we could, my friend got distracted by a cigarette vendor.

“Got any Gauloises bleues?” he asked.

“No, sir. Sorry.”

“Just give me a pack of Marlboros, then.”

The vendor handed dé Dale the pack and said, “One hundred baht.”

“One hundred baht! ($2.20) Are you out of your mind? Forget it!”

“Okay, okay. Eighty baht ($1.77). Special price for you, sir.”

“Special price for you maybe,” dé Dale grumbled as he removed some bills from his wallet. “Rémy, remind me to get some cash tomorrow.”

“Dé Dale, get some cash tomorrow.”

“Would you like me to punch you now, or later when we get back to the hotel?”

I laughed, but took a step back just to be on the safe side.

As the vendor was giving dé Dale his change, something clicked in my friend’s mind: “Um, perhaps you can help us . . .”

“Yes, sir?”

“We’re looking for something a little, shall we say, stronger than tobacco to smoke.”

A small, dim light flickered on inside the vendor’s head. He smiled, nodded his head, and said, “Oh, okay . . . Kapoh . . . Okay. I got it.” Then, motioning for us to stay put, he added, “Let me get friend.”

Before long “the friend” showed up, a guy roughly our age in faded jeans and a tatty, blue polo shirt.

“You want grass,” he asked right off the bat.

“No,” dé Dale said. “We want yaba.”

“W-w-what?” The guy said, stepping back, eyes bulging. “It’s n-n-not easy t-to get.”

“Tell us about it,” dé Dale replied flatly.

“How about some grass? Real good quality.”

“No.”

“Hashish?”

Dé Dale gave the man an emphatic No. “We want yaba. Yaba or nothing.” He made like he was about to start walking away.

“Okay, okay. Wait. Wait.”

The guy’s eyes darted about, taking a survey of the people in the area. He gave us a good looking over, too. And, why shouldn’t he? For all he knew, the two of us, as odd a couple as Laurel and Hardy, might have been out to cheat or, worse, entrap him. 

Taking a few steps away from us, he made a call on his cell phone. 

“Okay,” he said to us after hanging up. “It take time. Twen’y minute, maybe thir’y. Not easy. Very, very hard to get now.”

Dé Dale’s eyes met mine as if to ask: you okay with this?

What are bridges for, if not for crossing? 

I nodded to the dealer. “Let’s do it!”

“Okay, follow me.”

We were led away from the Japanese street to a wide thoroughfare lined with noisy beer gardens and overrun with sloppy drunks.

“Wait here. I come right back. Five minute.”

As we waited, dé Dale whispered to me in French, “Any sign of the cops, I want you to hightail it to that street with all the shops there. Go all the way through until you get to the main street on the other side. Tu le comprends, ça?”

“Oui.”

“Get a taxi, but do not, and, man, I shouldn’t have to tell you this is, Rémy, do not go straight back to the hotel. You do not want to lead the cops right back to where we are staying.”

“D’accord.”

“Take two taxis if possible, or better yet, a tuk-tuk. They’re faster. Walk the last kilo.”

A few minutes later, the guy in the faded blue polo shirt came back and said he could get the yaba, but once again emphasized that it would take time.

“Yaba is heavy shit,” he said as he led us away. 

Where did this guy learn his English?

“The police are . . . Police are . . .”

“Clamping down?” I suggested.

That seemed to be the word he was searching for. He nodded.

“Yeah, the police are clamping down. Heavy shit. Heavy, heavy shit. When you get it, hide it there,” he said pointing to his sock.

It didn’t sound like the shrewdest piece of advice to me. Were I a cop, that’s one of the first places I would look. No, it’s better to keep it tucked in you hand so you can toss it into a river, or down a drainpipe, or into a garbage bin the first sign of trouble, and run for your life into the nearest, most crowded place you can find.

“I understand,” I said.

“Ten year,” the guy said over and over. “Pot, hash, no problem, but yaba? Ten year.”

He made a gesture with his hands to show us the handcuffs that would surely be slapped on us if we were caught. 

It started to occur to me that this yabamight not be worth all the hassle and risks. Ten years in a Thai jail was no day at the beach. Just the same, I followed behind the guy like a child on the heels of the Pied Piper.

---

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

73. Yaba

Friday evening, July 7th

As soon as I’m finished with work, I go to a Balinese restaurant in Imaizumi and wait for Azami. More shots of Ron Zacapa Centenarioand a pint of beer. Despite all I have consumed since the afternoon, circumstances are keeping me as sober as a judge.

Azami arrives an hour later with a hastily scribbled message from dé Dale: “Warrant?”

“Of course, they had a warrant,” I say. “A warrant to search my apartment, another one to search my body, and, one to make me piss into a cup. Warrants are the least of my worries. What about dé Dale? Is he okay?”

Azami says that he is. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened since dé Dale and I last met on Sunday. 

It is a huge relief, but it makes me shudder to imagine what might have happened to dé Dale and me if the cops had raided my place, then. The thought of it sends a fresh chill up my spine.

Azami asks me if I am okay.

“Yeah, I’m fantastic. Having the time of my life,” I say, downing the last of my Zacapa. “C’mon, let’s go get something to eat.”

We leave the Balinese restaurant and walk to a Thai restaurant called Gamlangdi, where a Thai man and his wife, both bubblier than cheap spumante, run the kitchen. Whenever Azami and I are feeling low or are quarrelling, all we need to do is pop into the restaurant, sit down at the counter, and chat with Mr. Chang. Listening to him talk in his animated mix of broken Japanese, pidgin English, and Thai, it’s never long before we forget what we have been upset about. We always leave Gamlangdiwith our bellies full, our hearts warmed.

“Sawadi kah,” Mr. Chang beams as we descend the steps into the restaurant. “Long time, no see! O-hisashi buri!”

We take our customary place in the middle of the counter, before Mr. Chang’s work area.

“Mo kekkon shita?” he asks Azami.

My girlfriend shakes her head. No, we haven’t gotten married yet. She looks towards me and rolls her eyes.

“Sir, why you wait?” Mr. Chang says to me.

I shrug.

“You should hurry up marry, have chil’ren. C’mon! C’mon! No spring chicken! Ha-ha!”

“I know. I know,” I say, pretending to wipe sweat from my brow with an o-shiborihand towel.

“Ha-ha-ha. Sir, you want Singha?”

“Yes, please.”

His plump wife, Yoopping, waddles over to a beer cooler and brings me an ice-cold Singhabeer. Mr. Chang serves Azami a pot of hot jasmine tea. We then proceed to order. “Pork satay, baikapao. . .”

Baikapaois a fiery hot dish made with stir-fried ground chicken and chopped vegetables, flavored with chili and basil and served on a bed of jasmine rice. It’s out of this world and it just so happens to be what I ate on my first night in Bangkok back in the spring of 2001. I was dining at a street stall—admittedly, not the most halalof places to eat, but damn good, nonetheless.

With dé Dale still in China on business, I went to Thailand two days earlier than him and checked into a suite at the Baiyoke Sky Tower.

A few months before our trip, Timemagazine happened to do an exposé on amphetamine abuse in Asia. Authorities in Thailand, in particular, were having a devil of a time trying to eradicate a potent form of speed, known locally asyaba, or “mad medicine”. 

The article, which was written by author Karl Greenfeld,[1]depicted the local drug in the most unflattering terms. As a former abuser himself, Greenfeld knew what he was writing about. But, rather than persuade me of the dangers of yaba, the article had the perverse effect of wetting my appetite for this new, exotic high. And so, while I might have written “sightseeing” on the Immigration card, the true purpose of my visit was to dig my teeth into the meat of another forbidden fruit.

After dinner, I took out the treasure map dé Dale had e-mailed me from Guangdong and hailed a tuk-tuk.

“Sawadi krap,” the jockey said.

“I want to go to . . .” I checked dé Dale’s map. “Khaosan Road. Take me to Khaosan Road, please.”

“Khaosan, ka poh,” the jockey replied. “Okay, okay.”

As soon as I hopped on the three-wheeled taxi, the driver revved the small engine, kicking up a black cloud of exhaust, and took me on a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride through town.

Khaosan was a broad street, about a block long, lined with restaurants that teamed with drunk Brits and Krauts, dirt-cheap guesthouses, dubious bars, and street vendors selling the same kind of overpriced crap that could be found anywhere tourists congregated. The street was crawling with Europeans—hippies wigged out on who-knows-what, boisterous students, and the occasional disoriented family.

Map in hand, I managed to find the dark alley that dé Dale had described, and walking down it, located the run-down guesthouse where “X” marked the spot. Sitting down tentatively at a table, I ordered a Singha.

An elderly Thai couple lounged behind a makeshift front desk, and, in an open-air lobby of sorts with several cheap plastic tables, sat three tough-looking Thai women.

As I sipped my beer, one of the women called me over and asked what I wanted. 

I answered her question with a question: “What do you have?” 

“What you want here,” she repeated testily. 

It was a reasonable question to ask considering I was the only foreigner around.

“I’m looking for yaba.”

“Why you know here?”

“A friend . . .”

“We don’t have anything today,” she said. “Come back tomorrow at five.”

I paid for my Singhaand returned to the Baiyoke.

On my second day in Bangkok, I went around the city pricing furniture, antiques, and other Asian knickknacks; the kinds of things I had been decorating my apartment with over the years. Running all over town all day in the sweltering Thai heat, by the time evening rolled around I no longer had the energy to make the trip back to Khaosan Road to try to score some yaba. Besides, I doubted the battleax at the guesthouse would actually come up with the goods. 

And so, when dé Dale arrived at the Baiyokethe following day, he found me empty-handed.

“What?” He was exasperated. “I was hoping you’d have the stuff already. Man, what kind of friend are you anyway?”

Soon enough, he would learn for himself how difficult it was to score yaba, despite reports to the contrary. But that’s the media for you. Timemagazine had reported that the drug could be found on just about any corner and sold for only a few bucks a hit. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Dé Dale and I hopped into a taxi and returned to Khaosan. 

When dé Dale had sent me the “treasure map”, he instructed me to “act cool and observe what the others there were doing.” It was for that very reason that I had sat down and ordered a Singhawhen I went to the guesthouse two nights earlier. 

But what does dé Dale go and do when we arrive? Mr. “Iam the Party” walks straight up to that shabby front desk of the guesthouse and, with a nod and a wink to the old man slouched in a worn Lazyboy, says, “I’m . . . looking for . . . something.”

I couldn’t help but smile. So, is this how it’s done, Master?

The old man didn’t budge, didn’t blink, didn’t raise a pinky.

“I’m looking for . . . something,” dé Dale said again, raising an eyebrow.

My stomach started convulsing. I had to cover my mouth with my hand and bite down on my tongue to keep from cracking up.

Dé Dale repeated the same pregnant question one more time to which the old man motioned lazily towards a woman in her late thirties. She hadn’t been there the night before.

With ever more purposefulness in his voice, dé Dale said, “I want. . . what you have.” 

It was all I could do to not burst out laughing. 

The woman answered with a definitive shake of her head, at which dé Dale finally gave up and started for the alley.

“Fuck!”

---

[1]Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of the highly recommended Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation, Harper Collins Publishers, 1994.

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

72. Lightning Strikes Twice

True to his word, dé Dale did indeed take the Amazon home with him the night of the salsa event. I don’t know how the little bastard broke the ice—I had been in a toilet stall topping off when he made his move. By the time I returned to the hall, the two of them were standing close to each other, enganged in an animated repartee. Dé Dale said something that made the tall, gorgeous woman laugh—a laugh that always reminded me of shattering glass. She gave her long, straight hair a playful flick, touched his meaty shoulder.

And there you have it, boys: make a girl laugh and in no time you’ll be halfway up her leg.

When the event was coming to an end, dé Dale invited Nori, that was the Amazon’s name, and the nag she had ridden in on to join us for drinks later. With a wink and a nod, a battlefield commission was handed down to me: wingman. My mission: keep “Rocinante”[1] happily engaged for the rest of the evening as my friend made his move. It was a thankless task but I performed above and beyond the call to duty. That’s what friends are for, right? By and by, dé Dale would cajole Nori back to his place where they would go at it all night long like a bulldog giving an Afghan hound the bone.

Around the same time that dé Dale had met Nori, I too was struck by a lightning bolt.

Things had been going pretty damn well at the time. Business in particular was booming no thanks to that buffoon Mori who was bumblind along as Prime Minister in those days. Because I advertised regularly, it was not uncommon for prospective students to call me to arrange a time to observe a lesson. It was, however, unusual to get three inquiries in one day like I did the day Azami called.

And yet her call stood out. Where most people who called left me with the impression that they didn’t have the slightest clue of why they were calling, her voice was clear and businesslike. Instead of hemming and hawing over the phone, this Azami was eager to come by and start up—today.

I told her I appreciated her enthusiasm, but suggested she observe a lesson first and decide later. Shortly before the six-thirty lesson was about to start, she arrived.

Azami was fairly tall, not model tall like dé Dale’s Nori, but taller than average. She also had shoulder-length black hair. Blackhair. Of the fifty or sixty young women visiting me each week for lessons, only one other had black hair: a real beauty by the name of Eiko. The remainder in some crazy attempt to project their individual personalities all had their hair colored brown or dark blond. It was enough to make the Eikos and Azamis of Japan seem exotic.

And, boy, was this Azami ever exotic! With her large brown eyes, strong masculine features, and a complexion that was naturally darker than most women’s, what the Japanese call jiguro, it was as if the girl had just stepped right out of a Gauguin canvas. And so, when Azami told me that she wanted to have private lessons, I was only happy to oblige the beauty, twelve years my junior.

Private lessons to English teachers can sometimes be what lap dances are to strippers and so it was with Azami and me from the get-go. A typical conversation went something like this:

“Men don’t find me attractive,” Azami said.

“What would you make you think a thing like that?”

“I’ve never met a chikan,” she answered.

By chikan, of course, she meant that uniquely Japanese variety of pervert who got his rocks off by groping women on crowded trains.

“You’ve never been molested?” I asked.

“No, never.”

“And you’d like to be molested?”

“Yes! I want to be molested,” she cried out. “I want to be molested. I want to be molested. I want to be molested!”

“Perhaps I can arrange something for you.”

It wasn’t long after that that we became lovers.

---

[1]Rocinante was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

71. Contacting De Dale

As soon as the two Customs officials leave, I hurry out the door myself, taking the fire escape, a rusting spiral of steel that creaks and moans with each step. Through a dark passage overcrowded with discarded bicycles, I come out on to the main street. With a quick glance left and right, I step out onto the street and make my way towards a 7-11 a few blocks away where I call Azami from a public phone.

When she answers, I apologize for having lost my temper earlier and ask her to meet me at a caféhalf a block away from my apartment. 

Hanging up the phone, I then take a roundabout route to get to the café, which I am relieved to discover is empty except for two young women having coffee and cake.

I take a seat in the back that is partially hidden behind a pillar but from which I can see the entrance. After a few minutes, a waitress comes to my table to take my order: a shot of Zacapa and a beer chaser. It is only five in the afternoon, but I need to calm my nerves and go over the things I need my girlfriend to do. 

After all I’ve put the poor girl through, I wonder if she’ll be up for it.

About half an hour later, Azami arrives. She lays into me as soon as she sits down, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Um . . . You remember that package Naila was sending me?”

“Y-yes?”

“Well, apparently, her medicine was it.”

“What medicine?”

“Adderall.”

“Addo . . .?”

“Adderall. She was taking it for her attention deficit disorder. It’s a kind of ampheta . . .” 

“Why did you . . .?”

“Hold on, Azami! Ididn’t know she was sending me a package until she e-mailed me. Even then, I didn’t know what was in it . . .”

“But you said . . .”

“Never mind what I said. The fact of the matter is I didn’t ask her to send anythingto me.”

“Oh, Rémy, I just knew something like this would eventually happen.”

“Look, we can have that conversation later,” I say, taking my girlfriend’s hands. “Right now, I need you to do something for me.”

She recoils, yanking her hands away from mine. “W-w-what?”

“I need you to contact dé Dale.”

“Why?”

The two of them would never be confused for kindred spirits.

“One, I need to know the extent of the investigation. And, two, if the shoe were on the other foot—and it was dé Dale, rather than me, who was being investigated—I would want to know. He needs to be very careful. Just do this one favor for me, and then you can do whatever you like. Okay?”

I wouldn’t blame Azami if she were to tell me “Sayōnara”, but she gives a slow, hesitant nod. I know what she must be thinking, though: Rémy’s chickens have come home to roost.

“Call dé Dale from a public phone. You have his number, right?”

She nods again.

“And it’s probably not a good idea to go directly to his place. The cops might be keeping their eyes on him.” I look around the café. A couple in their early thirties, who came in after Azami, is studying the menu. “They could still be watching me right now. If possible, try to meet dé Dale at, say, a café in his neighborhood. Café Tecois just around the corner from his place. It should still be open. Tell him what I’ve told you. Tell him, that I’m going in for questioning on Sunday. I have no idea what the police know or how long they’ve been watching me. Ask him if he’s noticed anything odd going on around him. Got that? And, again, tell him he’s got to be careful. He’ll understand. Okay?”

Azami exhales through her nose and nods a third time. What little color there was in her face is now gone. Standing up and straightening her dress, she leaves without another word.

After finishing my beer, I pay the bill and head back home for the final lesson of the day.

---

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

70. Wafer Thin

Dé Dale called to say he was heading out the door “right now”. The salsa event, according to the flier he had given me a week earlier, was supposed to start at eight, and at nine-thirty, my friend could no longer be considered fashionablylate.

“No problem,” I said. 

“I’ll call when I’m in your neighborhood.”

“Gotcha.” 

Hanging up the phone, I settled back down at the dining room table where I prepared a fresh foil, sprinkled some crystals on it, and lit up. Odds were my friend was, like me, still in his apartment, “topping off”, if you will. 

Getting high on meth is never as hard as stayinghigh: it’s like trying to stay afloat on a leaky inner tube that needs a puff of air here, a puff of air there.

“Good thing the wife’s out with friends,” I said to myself after blowing a thick cloud of white smoke out the window. I would have been sitting on the toilet or a step in the stairwell, otherwise, sneaking one more hit in before I left, just one more for the road, one more the bump in the road, just one more for . . .

Before long my cell phone was ringing again. Dé Dale was now a block away from my place.

So, he really was heading out the door.

I took one final hit, a gluttonously long one, and held it, held it, held it until my lungs felt as if they were going burst, then exhaled out the window. 

Folding the foil up nice and neat, I slipped it, and two others just in case, into a simple black wallet between an assortment of business cards and “point cards”, none of which could be tied to me. This was yet another precaution dé Dale had once chastised me into taking:

“Man, what are you thinking?” he had said at the time. “One of the first places the cops look is in your wallet.” Tossing me a cheap wallet, he said: “Here, use this one for your gear. If a cop ever questions you, asks to see your ID, you’ll be able to take your own wallet out and not have anything to worry about. This is disposable, as well. Cops on your tail? Then toss this in a river.”

I returned the bag of meth with the rest of my stash, balled up in a pair of socks in my sock drawer, and then, went back to the dining room and double checked that I hadn’t left any clues to my illicit habit for my wife to pick up on. Yūko and I had enough troubles as is. No need letting her in on my nascent drug addiction, too. 

“How are you doing?” dé Dale asked when I hopped into his car.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

Not bad indeed! If I had topped off again, that inner tube I was now soaring on might have very well popped.

Dé Dale handed me a small vial of honey oil, explaining that he had a shipment of bongs coming in from Amsterdam and didn’t want to leave anything in his apartment in case the cops decided to snoop around.

“Why thank you, kind sir.”

Honey oil is nature’s answer to Valium: the perfect thing to ease you to bed after you’ve been awake for several days. Dip a needle into the oil and add a little dollop of it on the side of a cigarette then smoke it like you would your Marlboros. Only with honey oil, Marlboro Country comes to you.

“Let’s hope you can repay the kindness,” dé Dale said. “You carrying?”

“I am, indeed.”

“Yosh!” Dé Dale was in a good mood now. “I’m already out, if you can believe it. That Chinese bitch can’t get enough of the shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were still at my place smoking tinfoil.”

It was “the Chinese bitch” who had introduced dé Dale to shabu, who had taught him how to smoke it, and who was now supplying his and indirectly my own habit in a kind of perverse trickle-down effect.

“You left her there?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. If I don’t find anything to fuck at the party, I can always screw her again.”

“R-i-g-h-t.”

Only in the World According to Gabriel dé Dale could something like that be pulled off. In my own world, if you ran after two hares, as the saying goes, you caught neither.

“So, you doing anything for Golden Week?” dé Dale asked, as we were approaching the Dome. The party was being held at a “live house” just next to it.

“No.”

Golden Week,a weeklong string of holidays, began on the 29thof April. What with final exams bearing down on me, I hadn’t given it much thought.

“Let’s go somewhere!”

“Like Okinawa or something?”

“Okinawa? No, I can’t stand that miserable place! I mean a proper trip . . . somewhere abroad. There are some great parties on Cyprus. Or we can go to Goa.”

I rather liked Okinawa, the laid-back mood of the island, the music, the coral beaches, even the local cuisine. It wasn’t miserable at all, far from it. Still, I could understand dé Dale’s desire to get away.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I haven’t made my schedule yet, but I’m sure I can take off about two weeks around then. I’ll need a vacation after the exams and all.”

The best part of all was that my wife, due to leave for Canada in early April, would be out of the country by then. I would be free to go wherever I liked, whenever and with whomever. I was practically a single man again.

“Well, let’s not just talk about it,” dé Dale said, thumping the steering wheel. “Let’s do it!”

“All right, then!”

I was certain it was the speed talking: when you’re high you are inundated with “great” ideas. What’s more, you have the conviction, the perseverance, and the boundless energy to carry them out, allof them, and not just someday, but today! Right now! Let’s do it!

Every time I smoked, I could barely keep up as I filled page after page with story ideas, witty dialogues, and so on. I made lists of projects I just had do straightaway, and found new ways to tweak my business to squeeze out a few more drops of blood from the turnip.

Every time I got high on meth, it was as if I were lowering a bucket into a wellspring of creative genius. That was the attraction of the drug, and looking back it’s easy to understand why I developed such a powerful taste for it.

Meth-inspired babble or not, it still came as a surprise that dé Dale would suggest our taking a vacation together. The man seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in finding fault in me. You name it: the way I sentimentalized about the romances in my life, the stupid futility of my marriage, even the clothes I wore—he was in one of his two-thousand-dollar, custom-made Skinnleather pants, his “pussy-magnets” as he called them; I was in something with a considerably smaller price tag—he would find something snide to say. Be that is it may, no one, save my wife, was spending as much time in my company than dé Dale was. And as the year passed we would spend even more time together.

I still can’t get my head around that today.

Did it mean that, in spite of all his playful vitriol, dé Dale sensed substance in my wafer-thin existence, or did he merely need someone to get high with? Like that aversion I once had to drinking alone. After four years of conjugal acrimony, I had developed a rather thick skin. My pride wasn’t so easily bruised that I cared; nor did I want to devote much time brooding over the riddle of dé Dale and my friendship. It was just one more pedestrian curiosity as I walked through life.

At the salsa event, we clawed our way through the crowd to get to the bar where crap drinks were being sold for outrageous prices. It was then that a woman caught dé Dale’s eye. 

“Did you see that?” he asked. “She looked right at me and smiled.”

“Who did?”

“The tall one.”

“Long brown hair over there,” I said pointing to a tall, slender woman in black leather pants.

“You and your goddamn finger! You’ve always got to point!”

I pointed again, only more deliberately.

“Ugh! You are so uncool, man,” dé Dale blustered. “Do that one more time, and you walkhome.”

The woman was gorgeous, an Amazon, easily a hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall. With the stiletto heels she was wearing, she towered above all the other women in the room, and a good many of the men. 

And boy was she ever flirtatious! Every now and again, she’d turn around, give dé Dale the eye, and then laugh playfully.

“I’m going to take her home tonight,” dé Dale said with such confidence that I assumed they had already met. I asked him if they had.

“Nah, first time to see her,” he said, staring directly at her and smiling in that devilish way of his.

Dé Dale is one of those unique characters you run across in life who seem to get exactly what they want. Compromise just doesn’t figure. He used to say it was because he didn’t give up, that he was disciplined, that he acted on his ideas.

“Anyone can have dreams, Rémy,” he once told me. “Anyone can tell you that they want to do this or that, but only a few people will actually do it.”

I had dreams; had always had them, but the overwhelming force of the current rushing against me was keeping me downstream, by no means defeated, yet struggling desperately. At thirty-five, however, I was beginning to fear that I would be washed away forever by that current, washed away and forgotten. And it was this fear of never coming to anything, of failing, that I no longer even bothered to tell others what it was that I wanted to do with my life, not my friends in Japan, not even my wife Yūko. Only my girlfriend, Azami, knew.

With bottles of mineral water in our hands, the two of us entered the main hall into which the object of dé Dale’s desire had disappeared. The darkened hall was even more crowded than the reception area. On stage a band was playing some Latin tune. The music did little for me, but all the women gyrating their hips to the beat was enough to make me pretend I was a fan.

“And you didn’t want to come,” said dé Dale. “Think about all the pussy you would have been missing!”

He was right. He was always right. And I was finding it easier and easier to just go with the flow, to follow the master’s lead out of the labrynith than try to search blindly for the exit myself.

68. Paranoia

Friday afternoon, July 7th

Later when I’ve gotten back from Kokura, two officials from the Customs Office—Nakata, the pudgy one with the wimpy little mustache and Windbreaker—pay me a visit. Nakata told me yesterday that my cell phone would be returned today, but thanks to Azami’s incessant calling, the battery died before the data could be transferred. And now the two of them are entreating me, practically cap in hand, for the adaptor. They don’t have the authority to confiscate it out right, Nakata explaines with a tinge of embarrassment; my permission is required.

Were there anything remotely incriminating on my cell phone, I might not be so cooperative. Fortunately, I have for many years been in the habit of erasing all out-going texts, and keeping the in-box tidy, purposely free of anything that could implicate me, or my friends, in any crime or “extracurricular” love activity. I have dé Dale to thank for that.

Those first two grams of crystal meth didn’t last nearly as long as I had hoped. Imagine that! Before I knew it, I was buying a gram here, another there, but always for some express reason or another, of course. If it weren’t finals I had to cram for, then it was Giles Peterson DJ-ing at O/Dor a date with a hot nurse that required me to be sharperthan usual. Within six months of that first enlightening hit, I was buying five-gram bags of the drug for the bargain-basement price of seven thousand yen ($67) a gram.

Dé Dale meanwhile was buying the shit in bulk–twenty, thirty grams at a time–and, as a precaution, keeping most of his stash in a safe place an hour’s drive outside the city. Whenever he couldn’t be bothered, or was just too damn “baked” to make the trip, he would ring me up from a pay phone and ask to “borrow” a gram of “Shinji”, no different from, say, a neighbor knocking on your door to borrow a cup of sugar.

I’ll never forget that first neighborly visit.

Dé Dale wasted little time getting down to business. The Frenchman could be as methodical as a surgeon. After, giving the coffee table in my living room a good wipe down with tissue, he took the small packet of crystal meth I had given him and snipped a corner off with his Swiss Army knife. Placing the bit of plastic that he had just cut off in the center of the tissue, he twisted the tissue up.

Next, dé Dale set about preparing the foil. I handed him a strip, which he folded in half to form a perfect square. With another narrow fold along the open end he created a cuff sealing the foil. He then wiped the foil down with a fresh piece of tissue making it nice and flat, free of any wrinkles or creases where the meth might catch and burn. Finally, he manipulated the foil with his fingertips to form a shallow trough into which he then sprinkled some of the crystals.

Before lighting up, dé Dale dug a small, but powerful penlight out of his pocket and, illuminating the surface of the table, scoured every inch of the table and the surrounding floor.

“Aha,” dé Dale said, pointing to a speck on the table. “You see that?”

He dabbed at a splinter with the tip of his index finger and added it to the rest of the crystal on the foil. After placing the first tissue into the second and twisting the two of them up, he gestured for me to follow him to the toilet. There, he set the tissue alight, allowing it burn slowly and thoroughly.

“You may think I’m being paranoid,” dé Dale said, “but, my friend, paranoia has nothing to do with it. I’m merely being careful. And, I want you to be very careful, too. You have to realize what the risks are. Do you want to go to jail?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You think I’m stupid?”

“Well then, if you are so smart, I need not tell you that little piece of plastic in there could get you arrested. It’s not much, but it’s enough for the cops to take your freedom away, to put you behind bars until you talk, and believe me, you willtalk. If talking gets you out and back to your life, you will sing like le canari, just as everyone does.”

Dé Dale turned the tissue to keep the flame alive, and once satisfied he had destroyed any evidence, dumped it into the toilet and flushed it.

“Mon ami, ici, ce n’est pas l’Amerique. La France non plus,” he said. This is not America, my friend. It’s not France, either. “The police won’t break down your door here. They’re much more subtle. The first thing they do is go through your garbage when you’re not around, then they go in and check all the surfaces in your apartment, wipe them all down, vacuum the floors. Then, they take it all to their labs to be tested. And if they find traces of our friend “Shinji”here, how are you gonna explain how he got here? A little bird flew it in?”

Dé Dale stared intently at me, looking past my eyes into that thick head of mine to listen to the thoughts.

“No, my friend, you will not say anything,” dé Dale continued. “Why? Because they won’t find anything here that incriminates you. And you know why? I will tell you why. Because, so long as you want to meet Shinji, you will be as careful as I am. You understand?”

I nodded.

“Tres bien.”

We returned to the coffee table and lit up.

---

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

67. Exceeding the Speed Limit

Shortly after hanging up the phone with Azami, the sleek white bullet train pulls into the station and unloads its cargo of “salarymen” and “office ladies”, schoolgirls and boys. I get on board, and settle into a window seat. The train departs and in no time is rocketing through the city along elevated tracks at a speed exceeding one hundred fifty miles per hour. The forty-plus mile trip to Kokura will take about fifteen minutes.

“That’s some speed,” I murmur to myself, the city becoming a gray blur outside the window.

Having partied with dé Dale for nearly a year, I was used to my friend digging his hands into his pockets and producing Ziploc bags of coke, vials of honey oil, lumps of hashish, or the occasional tin of ecstasy pills. “Felix and his Magic Bag of Tricks” I got to calling him. So, I didn’t have to think twice before following him out onto the darkened stairwell of a building where he would offer me my first hit of “shabu”.

It had been a damn good twelve months. Despite being in one altered state or another, I managed to accomplish quite a lot. I finished most of the course work for my Masters degree, and even managed to pass the highest level of the Japanese Proficiency Test without breaking a sweat. Business was booming, too.

And if that weren’t enough to have me floating on cloud nine, I pulled off a major coup d’état persuading my wife to study abroad for a year. If she wouldn’t agree to a divorce, the next best thing I could hope for was a long vacation from the marriage.

On the stairwell, dé Dale pulled a pen out of his pocket, unscrewed the tip and removed the ink.

“Hold this,” he said, handing me the shell of the pen.

From his wallet, dé Dale removed a square piece of tinfoil, folded neatly in half. Carefully opening the foil, he showed me the contents, what looked like shards of clear glass.

Crystal meth!

“Put the pen in your mouth and wait for my signal,” dé Dale instructed.

I put one end of the hollow pen in my mouth, and hunched over such that the other end was poised above the foil.

With a lighter, dé Dale heated the foil. The shards melted instantly, forming a clear liquid, and a moment later a milky white vapor rose from the foil. When he nodded, I inhaled deeply. It was flavorless, odorless, but upon exhaling a long stream of white smoke billowed out of my mouth.

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened . . . Genesis, 3:5-7

Dé Dale took a small packet out of his pocket and asked if I wanted it.

Did I want it? After only a single hit I felt as if the curtains had been drawn and the windows flung open. Everything was so goddamn clear to me now. Yes, I did want it.

I handed my friend thirty thousand yen ($285) for two one-gram packs.

“That’s some powerful speed you’ve got there,” dé Dale warned. “Go easy on it.”

---

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.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

64. Pulling Up Stakes

For better or worse, dé Dale and my lives have become as intertwined as a ball of string over the years. Pull on what looks like a loose thread you only end up tightening the knot binding us together.

As I nursed my third double margarita, I entertained thoughts of leaving Japan myself.

I’d have to wait until the investigation is over, of course. And, Lord knows how long that will take. A day or two, I guess, if all goes well . . . It’d be nice to save a bit more money, but, hell, once you head down that road, there’s no end. You never can save enough . . . No, I’ve got enough, enough to make a fresh start somewhere completely different. Brazil. Yeah, Brazil. Carnaval, Bossa Nova, mulattoes in skimpy bikinis with their tan bulbous fannies bouncing as they stroll down the beach . . . Or perhaps the Canaries, like dé Dale has talked about so often.

Hell, I could even pretend to be serious for once in my life, return to the States and attend graduate school, get my PhD . . . 

Or, I could move to Beirut and settle down once and for all. How many times have I thought about doing precisely that? I wouldn’t need much money . . . 

I’d have to finish up the current year at the universities, I suppose, out of consideration for the kids in my classes. The people I work with are goddamn bores, but the kids . . . the kids are all right. I owe it to them to finish up the school year.

And then, I’ll be free. Another six months and I’ll be free to do whatever I like.

By the time I had finished that third double margarita it no longer made sense for me to hang on any longer than I really needed to. Dé Dale’s suggestion in May that I join him had the effect of loosening stakes that had once been driven deep into the soil of Japan. The police raiding my apartment, however, dislodged them. Now all I had to do was pull up the remaining stakes and move on.

I paid the bill and headed back to my apartment.

---

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.

63. I'm gonna leave Japan

Friday morning. July 7th

I’m up at five, an hour earlier than usual, so I can take care of some things before I have to leave for work. Considering how much I drank last night—three double margaritas straight up at the aptly named Mexican restaurant, El Borracho (The Drunk)—I am feeling pretty good.

“Maybe I’m still drunk,” I say, sitting up in my futon.

It probably wasn’t the wisest thing to go drinking the very night my home was raided by a small army Narcotics and Customs agents, but those three margaritas were the shortest distance separating me from restless anxiety and being curled up in the arms of Morpheus.

Out of habit, I walk over to where my Mac ought to be.

“Oh, yeah,” I say, remembering that the computer has been confiscated.

I make an about-face and go to living room where a stereo component system has been gathering dust, pop in a random CD, push play, and Mr. Hermano’s “Free as the Morning Sun” brings the long unused speakers dancing back to life.

“To hell with the neighbors,” I say, turning the volume up and filling my apartment with the song’s uplifting melody.

In the kitchen I make myself a bowl of café au lait, and carry it out to the balcony where I sit in a lounge chair and savor it. 

The sun, rising in the southeast, reflects off the windows of the hotel across the street, bathing my balcony in faint yellow light. Sparrows chirp at the feeder and my rabbit Pyon-kichi scratches at my foot, trying to get in a little humpy-humpy. It is, all things considered, a perfect morning.

Last night at the Mexican restaurant, after knocking back my second double margarita, I reflected upon a conversation dé Dale and I had in May.

We were at a reggae party on Noko Island, the first of a string of music events and parties held on the island and elsewhere in town during the summer. Dé Dale said he didn’t want to miss a single one of them this year.

Sitting on the beach away from the crowds, we passed a flask of Ron Zacapa Centenario back and forth.

“I’m gonna do it,” dé Dale said. “I’m gonna leave Japan.”

“When?”

“By December.” 

It was something he had been ruminating over for the past year. Now, his mind was made up. There’d be no going back.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“That’s the beauty of it,” he replied, taking the flask of rum from me. “I haven’t got a clue.”

Dé Dale stood up and invited me to follow him down the beach.

“I’ve been so dumb,” he said as we made our way over some large boulders. “I should have done this yearsago rather than suffer the way I have.”

“If I stay in Japan,” he continued, “I’ll only be repeating things I’ve already done. Where’s the fun in that?”

With a mischievous smile, he added, “Rémy, you’re not to tell anyone about this. No one. Not even that stupid girlfriend of yours . . . I’m going to be bad. Very, very bad.”

Dé Dale wouldn’t go into details, saying: “The less you know, the better.” 

One thing was clear, though: he was going to burn his bridges behind him as he left. And, once gone, he wouldn’t be returning. Not for several years, if ever at all.

---

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.

62. Don't waste your time with anything else

Dé Dale sent me a message shortly after he had returned from the trade show in Tōkyō:

“Santa made a list, checked it twice, and I am happy to inform you, my friend, that you have been a very, very good boy . . . Expect a nice rock for your stocking, and it won’t be coal! Busy?”

I was, but I could make the time. I always could for dé Dale.

How many times had a fellow gaijin come to me and bragged that he had scored some “killer bud”? More times than I could remember, and I had never once been impressed. They thought of themselves as players, but compared to dé Dale, they were hopeless dilettantes. Weed was more common than perverts on commuter trains, but cocaine? Now that was a different story.

“I don’t know if I should even give this to you,” dé Dale said when I hopped into his car a few hours later. “It’s too damn good.” 

He pulled two plastic Ziploc bags out of the thigh pocket of his cargo pants and handed me one.

He wasn’t kidding: it contained a rock, tightly compressed and pearly white. My mouth watered, my heart sprinted out of the blocks.

The two of us looked at each other, grinned broadly, and broke out in maniacal laughter.

“Let’s head back to my place,” dé Dale said, hanging a right at the traffic light. “You have time?”

“For this? I can make the time.”

Turning up the car stereo, dé Dale asked if I’d heard of U.F.O.

“Unidentified Flying Objects?”

“No, man! The DJs. United Future Organization.”

“Ah, right. Yeah, I have heard of them, but never heard them.”

“Well you have now,” he said, extending an open palm towards the stereo.

Dé Dale in his untiring capacity as mentor and teacher would explain that U.F.O. was a trio of DJs, two Japanese and one Frenchman, originally based in Fukuoka that was on the forefront of the acid jazz/nu-jazz movement ripping through the hippest clubs in Japan.

“U.F.O.’s in town playing at O/D tonight.”

“O/D?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of O/D!” he said, banging his hand against the steering wheel. “Man, I shudder to imagine what kind of life were you living before you met me.”

I confessed it hadn’t been one to brag about.

Dé Dale pulls his car up to an über-modern apartment building, exposed concrete with odd flourishes of steel painted in primary colors on the outside. Bauhaus founder Gropius meets Le Corbusier at a cocktail party and bumps into Terence Conran who sells him a garden shovel for two hundred bucks. To be honest, it was a little over the top for my taste, but impressive all the same.

“If the car hasn’t got their pussies wet,” dé Dale said, turning the motor off, “by the time they’re in my apartment, they’re tearing their panties off.”

“I bet.”

Once in the apartment—I kept my boxers on, hiked up to my nipples like a pensioner, thank you—dé Dale locked and chained the door, then showed me to his dining room. Not the largest dining room, but what it lacked in spaciousness, it more than compensated with good sense. In the center was a vintage white Arne Jacobsen table, surrounded by six Eames shell chairs, originals from the 70s, covered in lemon yellow vinyl leather. 

“And I thought I had a nice place,” I said, sincerely impressed.

“You like?”

“And how! Need a roommate?”

Dé Dale laughed. “C’mon, take a load off.”

I sat down, the shell chair fitting the contours of my body perfectly.

“Now thisis a chair,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“A friend of mine owns an antique furniture shop,” he replied, closing the window blinds. “I’ll introduce you to him, if you like.”

“I would. Thanks.”

When the blinds were closed, I took the Ziploc bag out of my pocket, opened it, and dabbed my finger into the powdery bit. Tasting it, my whole mouth became instantly numb. 

How long had it been since I’d had good blow? How long since I’d had blow period? Too, too long.

“C’mon, you gonna be cheap or you gonna make some lines for me, too?”

Without answering my friend, I sprinkled some of the cocaine onto his dining room table. Then, I dug into my back pocket for my wallet and fished out a one-thousand-yen note and a credit card. Chopping up a small lump of the coke, I divided the powder into separate piles, splitting one up into four generous lines, each an inch long. 

“What the hell are you doing?” dé Dale protested. “You’re just asking for it.”

He took the credit card from me, cut the lines up into thirds then, with his own ten-thousand yen note rolled tightly, meticulously, almost beautifully, inhaled the first of his smaller lines, then a second, before moving out of the way. 

“You’d better enjoy this, my friend, because we won’t be getting anything like this for a long, long time.”

Bending over the table, and placing my best nostril forward, I took in the whole of my line. 

“You’re a junky, man!” 

I smiled back at my friend before going after the second line. And then it hit me. “Wow.”

“My Colombian friends told me it was from their own stash. They don’t waste their time with anything else.”

---

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.

60. Buddies

As a stranger in a land as strange as Japan where enduring and satisfying human relationships can sometimes be difficult to come by, necessity often forces you into tenuous friendships with people you might not associate with otherwise. More often than not, the only thing bringing a group of gaijin together is the aversion to drinking alone.

It was no different with me. 

I had an odd collection of drinking buddies, like a drawer full of mismatched socks, I had picked up over the years. We would meet, get shit-faced on cheap beers at gaijin watering holes or, better yet, pig out at inexpensive izakaya with all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink deals, and score the occasional skank.

I have to admit it had been fun in a sophomoric sort of way for a while, but it could never be a fraction as fulfilling as the time I was now spending with dé Dale, drinking Zacapa and meeting, beautiful women, yes, but also getting to know men who were going places and doing things with their talents and connections. Shōhei and his partner, for instance, would open an upscale restaurant in a years’ time that would be the launching pad for a chain of fine dining establishments located throughout the Kantō and Kansai region,[1] making the two of them millionaires many times over and celebrities in their own right before their mid thirties.

And talking about bending reality, in those first few months alone since dé Dale and I had become friends, my mind had already been twisted into a pretzel. No one had, or ever would, come nearly as close to influencing how I lived or thought as the Frenchman did over the next several years. He would lead me out of the labyrinth of frustration my life had become.

“By the way, I have to go to Tōkyō next week for a show,” dé Dale said, leaning in close, his voice becoming a whisper. “I’m going to be meeting some mates from Colombia.”

“Colombia?”

“If you’ve been a good boy, Santa may pay you an early visit this year.”

If my face had been lit up like a pachinko machine before with that first sip of Zacapa, I wonder what it must have looked like when I learned that it was going to snow this spring: Jackpot!

“Won’t be cheap,” dé Dale said, taking a sip of his rum, “but I assure you it will be well worth it. Interested?”

Interested? Like a kid eager for Christmas morning, I was. I nodded my head, yes.

---

[1]The Kantō region includes the Tōkyō metropolis and six neighboring prefectures—Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa. The Kansai region lies in the southern-central part of Japan’s main island Honshū and includes the prefectures of Mie, Nara, Wakayama, Kyōto, Ōsaka, Hyōgo, and Shiga.

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.

59. Zacapa

Having finished off the last bubble of the Moët & Chandon, dé Dale ordered a glass of rum and invited me to try it.

I declined, saying, “I’ve never been a big rum drinker.”

“This is no ordinary rum, my friend,” dé Dale said. “This is Ron Zacapa Centenario. From Guatemala.”

“Guatemala? Huh.”

I had never heard of Zacapa, nor had I known that rum was produced in that small Central American country. I was willing to trust dé Dale’s judgment all the same; he hadn’t been wrong about much yet.

The liquor was much darker than other rums, and had a surprisingly pleasant nose. Giving the rum a tentative sip, I was overwhelmed by its rich, full-bodied flavor as the liquor washed over my tongue. 

My eyes must have lit up like a pachinkomachine because dé Dale turned to Shōhei and said, “Now that my friend here has slobbered all over my glass, how about a fresh one for myself.”

Shōhei laughed and took another glass off of the glass shelf. Placing a tumbler of stylishly etched crystal on the counter, he switched on a light that illuminated the glass from underneath.

“Bacarat,” dé Dale informed. “They know how to do things right here.”

Shōhei then pulled out a block of ice from behind the counter and started chipping away at it with an ice pick. He rotated the ice in his left hand, chipped at the rough edges, flipped it around and gave it a few dexterous jabs with the pick, until it was a perfect sphere of ice, which he set into the tumbler.

Shōhei then took the bottle of Zacapa Centenario which was covered in petate, a hand-woven mat made from palm leaves, uncorked the bottle and poured a generous amount into the glass. With a flourish, he gave the ice a spin and slid the drink over to dé Dale.

Dé Dale and I clinked our glasses and savored the moment.

“Are you a rum drinker now?” dé Dale asked after a while.

“I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to drink anything else,” I replied. “The scales have fallen from my eyes.”

“Better late than never.”

---

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.

58. Bending Reality

Dé Dale took me to an shamelessly hip bar in Imaizumi where everyone seemed to know him. The moment he walked in the door, arms were thrown wide open, customers and bartenders alike calling out his name: “Dé Dale! Where have you been hiding yourself?”

“In Nepal, buying hemp,” he shouted back, and pointing towards one of the bartenders who had the tan and long hair of a surfer, added, “Sorry, Shōhei, none for you.” The whole bar erupted in laughter.

We mounted barstools, minimalist things I had seen recently in the Conran Shop. Dé Dale introduced me to the bartenders, who pulled out their meishi(business cards) from a pocket in their crisp black aprons, and did a smart job introducing themselves to me.

I took the business cards and placed them before me on the steel counter top.

“Aren’t you going to . . . Oh, Rémy, don’t tell me you haven’t got your meishi,” dé Dale said, shooting me a look that made me shrink.

“No, not on me. I-I didn’t expect to be meeting . . .”

“Rémy, when you’re with me, you should assume it.”

“Trust me, I’ll have them on me next time,” I replied, embarrassed.

Dé Dale ordered a bottle of champagne straight off, and, as Shōhei was fetching it, told me that the two bartenders were worth getting to know.

“They’re well connected in the city, and this Shōhei, why, I’ve seen him fill a ballroom at the Solaria Hotel with five hundred women, all immaculately dressed.”

Shōhei placed champagne glasses and a bucket of ice before us and proceeded to ceremoniously uncork the bottle.

Dé Dale poured four glasses of champagne, two for the bartenders and two for us.

“It’s been a very good month,” he said, raising his glass. “Thanks to trippers like you.”

The others in the bar raised their own glasses, and, when dé Dale said, “Kampai!” they all clinked their glasses together.[1]

It was fascinating to watch the Frenchman interact with the others. Dé Dale’s Japanese was far from perfect, a fact he freely admitted. He couldn’t read or write a proper sentence if his life depended upon it, and yet it didn’t stop him from conducting business, signing contracts, taking out loans, and so on.

“People who moan about language preventing them from doing business,” he would say, “are lazy. The only reason those losers are aliveis because the sun shines and the air is free.”

As bad as he claimed his Japanese was dé Dale was able to make the most of what he knew to become a far more engaging and entertaining conversationalist than I could ever hope to be after all my years trying to master the language. 

It was no different with his English. Yes, it could have done with some fine-tuning, but it was still far more intelligent, nuanced, and substantive than the facile blather of your average American.

Three glasses of champagne later I admitted to dé Dale that it hadn’t been a bad month for me, either.

“My friend, I don’t mean any disrespect, but I doubt in your best month you earn nowhere near what The Zoo alone pulled in this month.”

“True, but I haven’t got all the overhead and hassles that I’m sure you have. And, everything I earn is tax free.”

“Well, my friend, if you want to live like a Bohemian, then I suggest you move to Bohemia,” dé Dale replied with a sardonic smile. “Paying taxes is a very small price to pay.”

“For what?”

“By paying taxes, you establish an income, a record of achievement that you can then use to get loans . . .”

“Loans? Who wants loans?” Now it was my turn to be skeptical. I was perfectly happy operating on a cash basis, knowing exactly how much money I had, never having to worry about bourgeois nonsense such as mortgages.

“Permit me to enlighten you, Rémy. Loans are the fuel for growth. Your business cannot grow without them.”

“Why would I want to get any bigger than I am? Okay, a little bigger would be nice, but I’m already making two to three times what any of my friends are making at the moment, maybe not you, but much better than average. I’m not rich, but I am comfortable.”

“It’s the purpose of any business to grow. It is their raisons d’être. Businesses either grow, or they die.”

“Well, this isn’t really what I want to be doing. I mean it’s just something that pays the bills and . . .”

“What is it then you’re wanting to do?”

“Write, travel, take photos . . .”

“You write? I did not know this,” he said, taking a sip of his champagne. “Why do you write?”

“Why?”

Why didI write? Most people seemed to want a tidy answer, something you could put in the center of a truffle and pop into their mouths. My reasons, however, were as cluttered and confused as that table in Adachi’s law office. The desire to write, I had long felt, was an affliction, an obsessive-compulsive drive to arrange letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, to cover a perfectly good sheet of clean white paper with black ink.

“You know why?” dé Dale said. “Ego.”

“Ego?”

“Yes, ego.”

“I’d like to think it’s more than that.”

“What is it then?” 

I rambled on about romantic ideas I had about living the life of a writer.

“Rémy, Rémy. If I wanted to punch you here,” he said, patting me in the soft part between my left breast and shoulder. “I don’t aim for there, I aim for here.” He put his fist a good foot behind my shoulder.

I had the feeling that I’d heard this witticism before, too, perhaps in the movie, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Not that I was going to tell my friend that.

“I consider myself lucky if I’m able to accomplish halfof my goals,” dé Dale continued. “You know why I run the business I do?”

“To get laid?” I offered, half-jokingly.

“Well, yes, there is that. Chicks are definitely attracted to guys with cool jobs, but that’s but an infinitesimal part of what I’m trying to achieve. More important than all the pussy and money you can throw my way, I want to bendreality. Some kid comes into my shop and buys . . .”

“Shrooms?”

“No, it doesn’t even have to be shrooms. It could be those ugly canvas shoes I sold fifteen thousand pair of, or the hemp bags I was just in Nepal ordering. I designed them, had them made, imported them, and now some kid is slinging it over his shoulder and putting his wallet and things in it. I’ve changed his daily life. I’ve bent his reality.”

---

[1] Kampai (乾杯, lit. “dry cup”) is the Japanese equivalent of “Cheers!” Meaning to drink up all the saké in one’s cup, it can be more accurately translated as “Bottoms up!” It can also mean to “propose a toast”, as in “Kare-no kenkō-o iwaishite kampai-shiyō!” (彼の健康を祝して乾杯しよう, Lit. “Let’s toast his health!”)

---

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.

55. Not bad

“Mark my word,” dé Dale assured me, as he was getting out of his car. “Imaizumi is the next Daimyō.”

Everything—the coolest bars, trendiest restaurants, the most fashionable boutiques—was moving south to the neighborhood which was at the time still an unfrequented corner of the city with narrow, convoluted roads, a collection of seedy love hotels, and shabby apartment buildings.

“I watch these things very carefully,” dé Dale told me as he pressed the lock button on the car key. The Mercedes chirped.

“Tell me, how much are you paying for parking alone every month?”

“Rémy, I never ask how much something costs. I ask myself, how can I affordit.”

That witty little remark sounded awfully familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

“So, when are you going to open up a boutique in Imaizumi, yourself?” I asked.

“I’m going one better,” he answered proudly. “I’m going to move my head office to Yakuin once I find a property I like.”

Yakuin was further south still, and one train station away from Tenjin, the commercial heart of the city.

“Why Yakuin?”

“The new subway line.”

It was under construction at the time, due to be completed in about five years’ time. 

“Besides,” he said, “I’ve already got a shop in the ZEEX building over there.”

“You do?” The man amazed me. “How many places you got now?”

“Ten.”

“Ten!”

“Not bad for a Jew who started out selling trinkets from a box on the street, is it?”

51. Bayside Toke

A few days after the opening of The Zoo, dé Dale rang me up.

“Hey, man, want to party?”

It was well past eleven and I was already half a bottle of wine away from hitting the sack.

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’ll come by your place and pick you up, then.”

“Pick me up?”

There weren’t many gaijinin town who had their own cars. The few who did usually drove rusting jalopies that had been fobbed off by friends who didn’t want to shell out several thousand dollars for the shaken (車検). [1] It came as quite a surprise to me then when dé Dale pulled up in front of my building in a brand-new Mercedes wagon.

“Hop in,” he said. I did and off we went, aggressively powering down narrow streets like a bat out of Hell.

“Where’s the party,” I asked.

“Iam the party,” dé Dale replied. “But, first, I have to stop in at my warehouse. If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Dé Dale’s warehouse was located in industrial area of the city, only a few blocks from where the old Customs House and Immigration used to be. Inside, narrow corridors separated rows and rows of metal shelves stuffed floor to ceiling with the same merchandise I had seen at The Zoo. Two tattooed and pierced employees busied themselves under the sickly glow of fluorescent lights unloading boxes that had just come in from Holland and Thailand. Dozens of plastic bongs, silver accessories packed in bubble wrap, knit caps, shoulder bags made from hemp, canvas shoes, wool scarves, skeleton figures, and pillow-case sized bags filled with dried psilocybin mushrooms. I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy shop.

“Give me a sec, will you?”

“Sure, take your time.”

Dé Dale sat down at a desk and placed a call to Switzerland. The guy was amazing. One moment he was ordering his staff around in Japanese, the next he was on the phone speaking German having funds moved from his Swiss bank account to one of his suppliers in Thailand. I had a couple of years of university German under my belt—enough to order bierand würstat a kneipein Heidelburg—but this dé Dale, he blew just me away.

When dé Dale was finished with his call, I asked him if it were smart to be doing what he did so close to Customs.

“Oh, the cops are watching me, everystep of the way,” he said. “Make no mistake about it.”

As soon as his work was done, we took off for Bayside Place, a woebegone shopping mall the city had built ten years earlier at the port from which hydrofoils and ferries departed for islands in the Genkai Sea and beyond to South Korea. Dé Dale had a small boutique in the mall, as well, one of several he operated all over the northern part of Kyūshū island. He told me he needed to check up on something at the shop, so I tagged along. 

The boutique was much smaller than The Zoo and lacked its subversive edge. It was also dead quiet like most of the shops in the mall.

“There’s no future in retail,” dé Dale told me as we entered the shop. “From now on I’m going to focus more on wholesale.”

I picked up a pair of cheap canvas slip-ons selling for 3,900 yen ($37) and made a face.

“Those canvas shoes you were just snickering over . . .”

“Snicker? Me?”

“I saw you. They’re as ugly as shoes get, yes, but I sold over fifteen thousand pairs of those canvas shoes last year. Imagine that: fifteen thousand Japanese kids wearing myshoes. All I need is three or four hit items a year like those ugly shoes and . . .”

15,000 times 3,900 yen . . . Christ, that almost 60 million yen ($560,000).

It was a staggering amount of money for someone who was busting his balls ten hours a day and making less than a fifth of what dé Dale earned with those ugly shoes. I had long suspected that I was in the wrong business; now, I was certain of it. 

“And, how much do you buy them for?” I asked.

“It’s not as simple as that,” he replied. “C’mon, this place is depressing me.”

We left Bayside Placeand walked to the end of the deserted pier where, I suppose, lovers were meant to gaze upon the romantic skyline of the city before heading off to one of the nearby “love hotels” to screw each other’s brains out. Only, there wasn’t much of a view to speak of. Across the harbor were general cargo sheds, silos, and a tugboat. Beyond that was the stadium for the boat races and further still was the city’s elevated expressway. An uninspiring skyline of fifteen-storey high buildings and neon billboards could just barely be seen in the distance.

Dé Dale asked me if I smoked.

I pulled a pack of Gauloisesout of my jacket breast pocket.

“Ooh, les Gauloises bleues. I haven’t had one of these in years.”

He took a cigarette from the box and put it between his lips. Digging into the hip pocket of his cargo pants for what I thought was going to be a lighter, he took out a small Ziploc bag with a black ball of clay in it. 

“Smell this,” he said. 

I did. It was hashish.

“I hope you appreciate this. It’s from your Beqaa Valley.”

He passed the hashish over a flame to soften it, then tore off a small amount and returned the rest to the Ziploc bag.

“Consider it a gift,” he said, handing me the bag. 

“Thanks!”

“Hold this a sec,” he said, giving me the small lump he’d torn off. 

He then pulled the filter off the cigarette, tossed it into the water, and started to remove the tobacco. Gesturing for the hashish, I placed it in his palm and he started to rub his hands together in a circular motion, blending the tobacco with hashish. From another pocket, he took out some Zigzag papers and rolled up a spliff. It had taken him less than a minute.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had smoked. Lighting up and taking that first toke, I let out an embarrassing rail of coughs.

“Man, you want to cops to find us,” dé Dale said, looking around nervously.

“No—cough, cough, cough—it’s just that—cough, cough—it’s been—cough, cough, cough—it’s been fucking ages—cough.”

I passed the spliff back to dé Dale and then the rush hit me.

“Woa!” I had to lean against the concrete breakwater to keep from swooning.

With the spliff held between his index and ring fingers, dé Dale took a long hit from his cupped hand, then, without exhaling, made the following observation: “An Arab and a Jew sharing a spliff. Imagine that!”

“You shouldn’t call someone from Lebanon an Arab,” I said taking the spliff back. “They may consider it dis—cough, cough, cough—disparaging. I understand what you’re getting at, though. What the world needs is more pot, and fewer bombs—cough, cough.”

---

[1] Shaken (車検), a contraction of Jidōsha Kensa Tōrokuseido (自動車検査登録制度) is Japan’s vehicle inspection system which can cost up to ¥200,000, plus the cost of repairs and parts if necessary. It is one reason why you seldom see older cars on Japanese roads.

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.

50. But she's sleeping

It is well past one a.m. in D.C. where my cousin lives. If my neck weren’t on the chopping block, I might wait until a more civilized hour to call. 

I try the number as Dita gave it to me with the extra digit and, not surprisingly, don’t get through. “One of the numbers has to go.” I drop the last digit, and, presto, the phone starts ringing.

“Hello?” It’s my aunt. She sounds wide-awake. Must be the jetlag.

“Hello. Ammteh Michelin, this is Rémy.”

“Rémy! It’s so good to hear your voice. What are you doing?”

“Ammteh, I haven’t got much time. Is Naila there?”

“Yes, but she’s sleeping.”

“Listen: I need to talk to her right now. It’s extremely important.”

“Shall I wake her?”

“Yes, yes! Yal’luh, wake her up!”

“Khalass, Rémy. I’ll get her.”

Naila is still half asleep when she comes to the phone. It always takes my cousin a good half an hour to sweep the cobwebs out of her head and start talking coherently, but I don’t have the time for pleasantries.

“Naila, you sent me a package a few weeks ago.”

There is a muffled grunt on the other side of the phone. Hardly the kind of unequivocal affirmation the situation demands.

“Naila, you’ve got to wake up and listen! You sent me a package, right?”

“Yeah,” she says, blowing her nose into the receiver.

“What did you send me?”

She mumbles something about dryer sheets, charcoal for my narghilè. These are the same things she mentioned in her mail.

“What else did you send?”

“Um, I don’t remember.”

“Naila, you’ve gotto remember! What was in the package?”

After a pause, she says, “Vitamins?”

“Vitamins? What the hell do you mean by vitamins?” My aunt must be eavesdropping. “Listen, Naila, my place was raided by the police this morning.”

“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry, Rémy!” Now my cousin is awake. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so . . .”

“Naila, what did you send?”

Adderall is the muted answer.

“Adderall . . .”

In a way, it is a relief to hear that a fairly common prescription drug might be what all the fuss is about. Things could be much, much worse and I admit so to my cousin.

“I want to say it’s all right, Naila, like, hey, no problem, but I can’t. I’m in a shitload of trouble . . . not nearly as much trouble as I could have been if the police had, say, raided my place last week . . . if you catch my drift.”

She does. After living with me for ten months last year, there isn’t much my cousin doesn’t know about me.

“The thing is, Naila,” I continue “and forgive my vulgarity, but I feel as if the cops are pointing their fingers at me and accusing me of farting when, in reality, I’ve shit my pants.”

Halfway around the world, my cousin laughs nervously.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Not a fucking clue. I don’t know what my options are, for one. I don’t even know if I’m legally obliged to talk to the cops. And, I don’t know how contained this is.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Party,” I answer.

“Oh, right.” 

The Party is the nickname Naila and I gave my friend dé Dale, who has a habit of replying, “I am the party,” whenever someone asks him if there are any parties going on.

My cousin begs me to leave Japan. “You told me you were thinking of leaving,” she says. “Now’s your chance.”

“I can’t, Naila. Bastards took my passport away.”

“Oh, haraam, Rémy, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I haven’t got much time left on this phone card. Listen. I’m not angry with you, Naila. So, let’s save the apologies for later . . . I have to go in Sunday morning for questioning. I’ll try to call again before then, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Just in case, God forbid, I don’t get through to you again, if you are ever asked, tell them . . . well, tell them the truth: I did not ask for the Adderall to be sent. I did not want it. Did not need it. I did not even know it was coming. Okay? I didn’t ask, didn’t want, didn’t know. You got that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll call again. Bye.”

“Be careful, Rémy. I’m so sorry.”

“Remember: I didn’t ask, didn’t want, didn’t know . . . Didn’t ask, didn’t . . .”

And then the line goes dead.

---

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.

48. Show Time!

It wasn’t until The Zoo opened down the street from my apartment in late 1999 that dé Dale and I finally got to know each other. Although he had been living in Fukuoka for nearly as long as I had, the two of us seemed to be running around in concentric circles. All I knew about the man was a few salacious rumors.

In the dark, too, about dé Dale’s nationality, I resorted to greeting him in English, a “Hey, man” here, a “Whassup?” there, whenever our paths happened to cross. And so, it was in English that we spoke for the first time, curiosity having compelled me to pop over to The Zoo on its opening night.

A row of massive bouquets stood on tripods before the shop bearing congratulatory messages from companies that conducted business with dé Dale. Inside, the shop was crowded with businessmen, friends, staff, and not a few customers who, like me, had been attracted by the commotion.

Dé Dale walked straight over to me, hand out and grinning broadly. “Thanks for coming!”

“Quite a store you’ve got here,” I said.

The Zoo was deep and narrow. At the front of the shop, fashion accessories were displayed: racks upon racks of rings, bracelets, bags and hats. The deeper you ventured into the shop, however, the more degenerate the merchandise became. Outrageous graffiti covering the walls and ceiling pulled you further into the store, where body modification equipment was on display. Everything you could possibly want and more to pierce, cut, implant, stretch or tattoo your body. And in the very rear, in The Zoo’s Holy of Holies, dissipation reigned: every kind of paraphernalia imaginable vied for space on the crowded shelves: pipes, bongs, rolling paper, scales, turbo lighters, and so on. And there in the glass case next to the cash register was a smorgasbord of psychedelics, many I had never before heard of.

“You’re so conveniently located,” I said to dé Dale, giddy as a boy in a toyshop, “I don’t know whether to be thrilled or concerned.”

“Man, you cannot believe what I have been through in the last three days to make The Zoo a possibility,” dé Dale said excitedly. He was standing before a row of dildos, one of which wobbled and churned on the shelf. “Four days ago my realtor found this property, the next day I got the loan and signed the contract. Yesterday, we painted the place and then moved all this stuff in last night. I have not slept a minute in four days.”

“Sounds like a rough week.”

“No! Sounds like a goodweek! A great week for business! There was a chance, I took it, and—boom—three days later, here I am and here you are and here is everyone else and now it’s show time. You saw the sign?”

“The sign? The one out front? Yes, I . . .”

“There’s a reason for that,” dé Dale said, giving his temple a self-congratulatory tap.

Rather than hanging a shingle out front that gave the business hours like practically every other shop in the world, there was a board that said: 

Show Time: 11am to ?

“The Zoo is not just a store,” dé Dale crowed.

“You can say that again.”

“This is going to be my showcase. This store! This is but merely the beginning, my friend! Merely the beginning.”

There was no way I could have known it at the time, but dé Dale was full on, pumped up with enough methamphetamine to give an elephant a heart attack. I was under the naive assumption that the man rocking on the balls of his feet before me had the stamina of Napoleon who famously functioned on as little as three hours’ sleep a night. And, like le Petit Caporal, dé Dale was also short in stature, even in a country like Japan. What he lacked in height, though, he more than compensated in his physical presence: he had the broad shoulders and powerful arms of an ape.

“Pardon me, but I don’t believe I know your name,” dé Dale said, presenting me with a business card: G. dé Dale, President.

“G?”

“Gabriel, Gabriel dé Dale. Everyone calls me dé Dale. And you are?”

“Rémy,” I said.

“Rémy?” he said. His piercing blue eyes studied me. “You’re American, no? Or am I confusing you with some one else?”

“I am American, American by birth, but I’m half French. My old man’s from Avignon.”

“Avignon. Interesting. And the other half?”

“Lebanese.”

“Ah, Lebanese!” His eyes widened as if his suspicions had been proven correct. “You are only the second Lebanese I have ever met, and you both party. That must be some country.”

“It is. You should visit it some day.”

“I would very much like to do that, but I am . . . Jewish.” Dé Dale’s hair was strawberry blond, cropped militarily short. On his chin he sported a narrow beard, tinged with orange. He looked like the Devil himself. “Now that we’re neighbors, we ought to get together and party.”

“Sure, anytime,” I replied, pulling my own business card out of my wallet. “I usually finish work late . . .”

In a broad gesture taking in the whole of his store, he said, “And you take me for some nine-to-five stiff?”

---

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.