up in flames... 

Day 107 "Sex Me Up"

Tanya and I have been sleeping together for a couple days now, but we still don't hold hands in public. I met her at a pub in November and we started humping the first week of December. I say humping because it is only so-so and humping has always sounded that way to me, like something rubbery, half flaccid, but still moderately sweaty.

I don't mean to sound so apathetic because Tanya is hot in her own I'm pushing forty but still trying to look twenty five sort of way. Maybe it's the way we hooked up in the first place; she found out I was from Spokane, just two hours south and one mild mannered border crossing away from her old stomping grounds in Nelson, B.C. She bought me a drink and cuddled right up to me and since I too was starting to feel a little sick for some company in this writhing city of thirty three million faceless people, I didn't resist.

To me, Nelson was a sort of renaissance little town full of potheads, snow bunnies and other outdoorsy types, semi-employed lumbermen, and a bunch of middle aged American expatriate draft dodgers. To her, Spokane was apparently a semi-exotic metropolis in a foreign country. Maybe I am making that part up a little, to suit my image of her, but it sure seems that way because if she new what Spokane was really like, she wouldn't be so excited about the fact that I came from there.

So a few weeks later, here we are Christmas shopping in the alleys and miniature streets of suburban Tokyo. We stumble from stall to stall and the occasional storefront for about an hour and then look up at the exact same moment. "Little American" in flowing cursive neon hangs in the air above our heads and slightly to the right. A little English will always attract attention in Tokyo, and we are no exception to this rule.

Inside Little American, which I think is such an ironic place to be for both Canadian Tanya and myself, all five foot four of my little, American self, there are nothing but Japanese. Though the walls are lined with American snack foods and soft drinks, Kraft products, a few 1980's movies on VHS tape, forks, spoons, and plastic dinner plates of many colors, and other various items of kitsch, I feel this is a not so American place. Tanya does not seem to be so pessimistic. Perhaps her American self, and I mean that in the all-inclusive North American sense, is in need of a little slice of home.

Not me though, home can stay exactly where I left it. I am starting to feel a little more interested in the cute twenty something girl checking out the boxes of instant oatmeal. She is about my size, wearing those midriff revealing low cut denim pants that everyone seems to be wearing lately. The kind of pants that back home would be bulging a little to contain the extra American flesh of the something-teen buttocks wearing them. Here in Tokyo, the buttocks have a little less flesh on them and so the tightness of the pants is a little more suggestive of the true shape that lies beneath.

Tanya hasn't appeared from behind the floor to ceiling display of mac and cheese so I decide to bump into midriff girl. I provide the obligatory sumimasen – excuse me – and then search for her eyes with mine. When her eyes do meet mine, for a second I think I'm in, she's going to talk to me and perhaps flirt a little, but she quickly turns away. Damn.

I look around this Little American store because I wonder if anyone is staring at me. No one's even looking my way. I check the back of my hands; dense tufts of dark hair protrude from the cuffs of my jacket. I see my face in the silvery skin of a few miniature waste bins. Another tuft of hair protrudes from my collar. I forget how much like a bear I am, especially here. It must be my formidable amount of body hair that repulses the Japanese, at least the cute one's I'd really like to get acquainted with. Maybe I need to start wearing turtlenecks. Maybe I should cultivate my bear-ness, play up the bestial side. Maybe I should learn more Japanese.

Tanya has emerged from behind the mac and cheese, looking like she is ready to say something really important, and I am definitely going to shave.

Day 73 "The birth"

In Tokyo it costs more to see a movie than the total price of nineteen McDonald’s cheeseburgers, back home. That’s a lot of cheeseburgers. One could feed a small village of people with that kind of beef product. But here, in this fifteen by eighteen foot ninety-nine yen grocery store on the second floor basement of a discount generic everything is gray department store, nothing costs that much. It’s eighty-seven cents for four eggs and one dollar and seventy-four cents for ten slices of bacon, thick slices of bacon, and so I am thinking this is pretty cheap for a place like Tokyo.

I’m also thinking it’s time to leave; this grocery is getting more and more cramped by the minute. Three old women with what look like lawn chairs on wheels push their way into the store. This causes a small boy and his friend to literally pop right out of the store and shuffle over to the singlewide escalator. This is kind of funny because the boys have rectangular yellow-leather backpacks emblazoned with the words “Let’s Friendly Endeavor” in the shape of two people leaping.

I try turning around to shuffle toward the register, but I can’t. A pretty young housewife has cuddled up to the pyramid of eighty-seven cent sausages to my right. She is pinching and cooing at them as if they were her own baby’s fingers, her own baby that is at this moment regurgitating a piece of what I think is a banana on the shoulder of her mother’s expensive cashmere sweater.

Since I can’t turn around, I try sliding to my left, down the aisle of vegetables, which have all been neatly cloven and individually sealed inside perfectly wrinkle free cellophane. No luck. An older gentleman in a brown sweater, a shade of brown I have never before witnessed, a color more brown than anything should ever be, has fallen to the floor, undoubtedly pushed there by seven or eight barely pubescent girls huddling around the trinket rack. I stopped through this part of the store on my way in so I know they are fussing over the colorful fruit scented erasers and miniature postcards of Japanese pop icons like Glamour Friends and Beastie Foot. They don’t seem to notice that they butted this man to the floor. I reach down without bending over to try and help him up, but he refuses my hand. He apologizes several times, quickly, and then pushes past me toward the sausages. The girls do not move as I approach.

Excuse me I say in Japanese, one of the first words I learned upon arriving here. The girls ignore me. I say it again, only louder, and one girl turns to look at me. She stares, apparently in awe and backs into her mass of friends. They all squirm and grunt a little at first, but then two more of them turn to look at me and suddenly they all fall together into the trinket rack and the whole thing collapses. One girl screams and begins to cry. The other girls roll around a bit, trying to get up. I slide past and step up to the register. The attendant looks at me, astonished.

All I have to pay for is a pear and what I think are shortbread cookies. But the attendant won’t take my coins. He shoes me away, mumbles something under his breath, and steps over to the trinket rack to stand it up again. Being unfamiliar with the customary gesture in a situation like this, I smile, bow, pocket my fruit and probable cookies, and step onto the escalator. I think everyone is watching me. I think everyone suspects I am not actually human. I think I need to avoid small, cramped stores like this in the future.

At the top of the escalator, the two boys with the yellow, “Lets Friendly Endeavor” backpacks are waiting. They too are staring straight at me, mouths open, arms akimbo; two little endeavors with their feet planted firmly on the ground.

-tinhart