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.