Reading means borrowing.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
ePub
A4Chapter 2
1
0It was an extremely hot night. Hot enough to softboil an egg. I pushed open the heavy door to J’s Bar with the back side of my body, as I always did,
and the air conditioner had filled the place with pleasantly cool air.
The inside of the place smelled like cigarettes and whiskey and French fries and armpits and sewage, the smells stagnating on top of each other
just like a layer cake.
As always, I sat at the seat on the end of the bar, scanning the place with my back to the wall. Wearing unfamiliar uniforms, there were three French
sailors with two girls they’d brought, and a couple who must’ve just turned twenty, and that was it. And no Rat.
After ordering a beer and a corned beef sandwich, I pulled out a book and decided to take my time waiting for the Rat.
Just ten minutes later, a thirty year-old woman with breasts like grapefruits and a flashy dress entered the bar and sat a seat away from me,
scanning the surroundings just like I’d done and ordering a gimlet. After taking just one sip of her drink, she got up and made a painfully long phone
call, then came back and grabbed her purse before going to the bathroom. In forty minutes, she ended up doing this three times. Sip of gimlet, long
phone call, purse, toilet.
J came over to me, looking bored, and asked if my ass wasn’t getting tired. He was Chinese, but his Japanese was better than mine.
Returning from her third trip to the toilet, she looked around for someone and then slid into the seat next to me, talking to me in a low whisper.
“Hey, you wouldn’t be able to lend me some change would you?”
I nodded and dug the change out of my pocket, then set it all on the counter. There were thirteen ten-yen coins in all.
“Thanks a lot. If I ask the bartender to make change for me again he’ll be sore at me.”
“No problem. Thanks to you my pockets are lighter.”
She smiled and nodded, nimbly scraping up the change and disappearing in the direction of the pay phone.
Getting tired of reading my book, I had J bring the portable television over to my place at the bar and began watching a baseball game while
drinking my beer. It was a big game. In just the top of the forth, the pitcher gave up two homeruns and six hits, an outfielder collapsed from anemia,
and while they switched pitchers there were six commercials. Commercials for beer and life insurance and vitamins and airline companies and
potato chips and sanitary napkins.
After seeming to have struck out with the girls, with his beer glass in hand, one of the French sailors came up behind me and asked me, in French,
what Iwas watching.
“Baseball,” I answered in English.
“Base-ball?”
I gave him a simple overview of the rules. This guy throws the ball, this other guy hits it with a stick, running one lap around is one point. The sailor
stared fixedly at the screen for five entire minutes, but when the commercials started he asked me why the jukebox didn’t have any Johnny Hallyday.
“’Cause he’s not popular,” I said.
“What French singers are popular here?”
“Adamo.”
“He’s Belgian.”
“Michel Polnareff.”
“Merde!”
Saying this, the French sailor went back to his table.
At the top of the fifth, the woman finally came back.
“Thanks again. Let me buy you a drink.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I feel like I have to return favors—it’s a character trait of mine, for better or worse.”
I tried to smile, but it came out all wrong, so I just nodded and said nothing. She called J over with her finger and said a beer for this guy, a gimlet for
me. J
nodded exactly three times and disappeared from the other side of the bar.
“The person Iwas waiting for never came. You?”
“Same story.”
“Waiting for a girl?”
“A guy.”
“Same as me. We’ve got something in common, then.”
There was nothing I could do but nod.
“Hey, how old do you think I am?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Liar!”
“Twenty-six.”
She laughed.
“But I don’t mind. Do I look single? Do I look like a girl with a husband?”
“Do I get a prize if I guess right?”
“We might be able to work something out.”
“You’re married.”
“Yeah…you’re half-right. I got divorced last month. Have you ever talked to divorced woman like this?”
“Never. Though I did once meet a cow with neuralgia.”
“Where?”
“In college, in a laboratory. We could only fit five people in there at one time.”
She laughed like she was having a good time.
“You’re a college student?”
“Yeah.”
“Iwas a college student too, once, back in the day. Maybe around ’60. Those were the good old days.”
“How so?”
She didn’t say anything, she just giggled and took a sip of her gimlet, checking her watch as if suddenly remembering something.
“Gotta make another phone call,” she said, grabbing her purse and standing.
With her gone and my question still unanswered, the dust whirled around in the air for a moment. I drank half my beer and then called J over and
paid my check.
“Running away?” J asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re not into older women?”
“It’s got nothing to do with her age. Anyway, if the Rat shows up, tell him I said hey.”
I left the bar just as she finished her phone call and stepped into the bathroom for the fourth time. On my way home, I whistled the whole way. It was
a song I’d heard somewhere before, but the name of it somehow managed to escape me. A really old song. I stopped my car along the beach,
staring at the dark, nighttime ocean while trying my best to remember the name of it.
It was the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. I think these were the lyrics:
“Come along and sing a song and join the jamboree, M-I-C-K-E-YM-O-U-S-E!”
They probably really were the ‘good old days’. 11
ON
Good evening everybody, how’re you doing out there? I’m feelin’ really excited tonight! Almost good enough to give everybody half of what I’m
feeling!
It’s time for NEB’s world-famous Pop Music Requests! From now until 9pm we’ve got a
wonderful two hours lined up for you on this Saturday night, blasting the coolest hot tunes your way! Old favorites, songs that bring back memories,
fun songs, songs that make you wanna get up and dance, boring songs, songs that make you wanna puke, anything goes, so hit those phone lines!
You know the number. Yeah, make sure you get that number right! You run up your phone bill and upset your neighbors if you misdial, you know. By
the way, since we opened up our phone lines at six, all ten lines to our station have been ringing off the hook. Hey, can we get a mic on those
ringing phones for a second? Isn’t it amazing? It’s great, just great! Dial
‘til your fingers break! Last week, you guys called us so much our lines blew a fuse, but that won’t happen this week.
Yesterday we had specially-made phone lines installed. Fat as an elephant’s legs. Elephant legs, not giraffe legs, much bigger than those, maybe
even a little too big. So don’t worry, just dial like crazy!
Even if our station staff goes crazy, there’s no way you guys can blow that fuse! Isn’t it great? Great! Today was too hot to do anything, but we can
still have a good time rockin’! Yeah? That’s what good rock music is made for! Same as pretty girls. Okay, here’s our first song: Brook Benton with
Rainy Night inGeorgia.
OFF
…man…what’s with this heat? Phew…
…hey, can you turn up the air conditioner?
…hot as hell in here…hey you, cut that out, I’m sweatin’, sweatin’ bullets…
…yeah, that’s how I get…
…hey, I’m thirsty, can someone bring me a Coke? …yeah, good. No, I don’t have to piss! My bladder is like, super-strong…yeah, my bladder…
…thanks, Mi, this is great…yeah, frosty cold…
…hey, there’s no bottle opener…
…don’t be stupid, I can’t use my teeth! …hey, the record’s ending. I got no time, quit screwing around…hey, the bottle opener!
…shit…
ON
This is great, isn’t it? Now this is music. Brook Benton’s Rainy Night in Georgia. Didn’t it make you a little lonely? Anyway, do you know what
today’s high temperature was? Thirty-seven degrees Celsius, thirty-seven degrees. Too hot, even for summer. Like an oven out there. At that
temperature, it’s lonelier snuggling with your girl than hanging out all alone. Can you believe it? Okay, let’s cut out all the talking and start playin’
some records. Here’s Creedence Clearwater Revival with Who’ll Stop the Rain. Here we go, baby.
OFF
…hey, no, that’s okay, I got it open with the edge of the mic stand…
…man, that’s good…
…nah, I’m good. Just feel like I’ve gotta hiccup. You worry too much, yeah, you too…
…hey, what’s happening with the baseball game? …are they broadcasting it on another station?...
…hey, wait just a second! You’re telling me that in this whole radio station we don’t have a single radio?
That should be a crime…
…nah, I heard it. We should drink a beer to that sometime soon. Ice-cold…
…ah, shit, I can feel one coming on…
…*hiccup*…
12
At 7:15 the phone rang.
It happened while Iwas lying on a wicker chair in the living room, in the midst of gobbling down cheese crackers.
“Hey, good evening! This is Radio NEB’s Pop Music Requests. Are you listening to the radio?”
Inside my mouth, the confusion of the moment sent the beer and the remnants of a cheese cracker down my throat.
“The radio?”
“Yeah, the radio. The machine representing the cumulative efforts of…*ahem*… civilization as we know it. More advanced than the electric vacuum
cleaner, smaller than a refrigerator, cheaper than a television. What were you doing?”
“Reading a book.”
“Tsk tsk, that’s no good. You’ve gotta listen to the radio. Reading books just makes you lonely, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.”
“Books, those’re things you read with one hand to kill time while you’re spaghetti’s boiling. You got that?”
“Yeah.”
“Great…*hiccup*…now that that’s straightened out, we can talk. You ever talked to a radio announcer who can’t stop hiccupping?”
“Nope.”
“Well, we’re breaking new ground. It’s a first for our listeners at home as well. Anyway, do you have any idea why I called you during a live
broadcast?”
“Nope.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, there’s this girl…*hiccup*…who requested a song for you. Do you know who that could be?”
“Nope.”
“She requested the Beach Boys song California Girls, we remember that one, don’t we? Got a guess who she might be?”
I thought it over for a moment, then told him I had no idea.
“Yeah…well, that’s a problem, then. If you can guess who she is, you’ll get a special-edition T-shirt sent to you, so think hard!”
I thought it over once more. I had an idea, but I felt as if there were something stuck, blocking me from getting to the nook in my brain where the
memory was stored.
“California Girls…Beach Boys…does that ring a bell?”
“When you put it that way, there was this girl in my class five years ago who let me borrow that record.”
“Tell us more.”
“Well, we were on a field trip and this girl’s contact lens fell out and I helped her look for it, so as a reward she let me borrow that record.”
“A contact lens, huh? Hmm. Anyway, you gave the record back to her, right?”
“Nope, I lost it.”
“That’s no good. Even if you had to buy a new one, you should’ve returned it. A girl lends you something…*hiccup*…you return it, understand?”
“Yes.”
“Great! So the girl from five years ago who lost her contact lens on a field trip, she’s definitely listening, yeah? So…uh…what’s her name?”
I told him the name I’d finally remembered.
“Well, it looks like he’s going to be buying a copy of that record and returning it to you. Great! …anyway, how old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“That’s a good age. You a student?”
“Yes.”
“…*hiccup*…”
“Hm?”
“What’s your major?”
“Biology.”
“Mm…you like animals?”
“What do you like about them?”
“That they don’t laugh.”
“Hm? Animals don’t laugh?”
“Horses and dogs laugh a little.”
“Wow, when?”
“When they’re having a good time.”
For the first time in years, I felt myself getting angry.
“Well…*hiccup*…maybe we’ll start seeing more canine comedians.”
“You mean you’re not one of those?”
“Hahahaha!”
13
California Girls
Well East Coast girls are hip
Ireally dig those styles they wear
And the southern girls with the way they talk They knock me out when I’m down there
The mid-west farmers’ daughters really make you feel
alright
And the northern girls with the way they kiss They keep their boyfriends warm at night
Iwish they all could be California
Iwish they all could be California girls
14
The T-shirt came in the mail three days later, in the morning.
It looked like this:
(ebook editor’s note: image not available) 15
The next morning, I put on that brand-new, scratchy shirt and wandered around the harbor for a while, when my eyes fell upon a tiny record shop with
the door open. There weren’t any customers to speak of, just a girl sitting at the counter looking bored as she went over the receipts while drinking
a soda. I stared at the record shelves for a while before I came to a realization about the girl behind the counter: she was the girl from the week
before, the one with the missing finger who was passed out in the bathroom. I said hey. She looked a little surprised when she saw me, looked at
my T-shirt, then drank the rest of her soda.
“How’d you find out Iwork here?” she said, sounding irritated.
“Just a coincidence. I came to buy a record.”
“Which one?”
“A Beach Boys album with California Girls on it.”
Looking deeply suspicious of me, she got up and took long strides over to the record shelf, then brought it over to me like a well-trained dog.
“How about this one?”
I nodded, looking around the store with my hands in my pockets.
“I also want Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3.”
She was silent this time, coming back holding two records.
“We’ve got GlennGould and Backhaus, which one do you want?”
“GlennGould.”
She set one record on the counter, then took the other one back to the shelf.
“What else?”
“A Miles Davis album withGirl in Calico.”
She took a little longer this time, but finally returned with the record.
“And?”
“That’s it. Thanks.”
She lined up the three records on the counter.
“You’re gonna to listen to all of these?”
“Nah, they’re presents.”
“You’re a generous guy.”
“Seems that way.”
She shrugged her shoulders uneasily, five thousand five hundred and fifty yen, she said. I paid her and took the records.
“Well, anyway, thanks to you, Iwas able to sell three records before lunch.”
“That’s great.”
She sighed and sat in the seat behind the counter, starting to look through her pile of receipts.
“Are you always working in this store all by yourself?”
“There’s another girl. She’s out to lunch right now.”
“And you?”
“When she comes back, we switch off.”
I took a cigarette from the pack in my pocket and lit it, watching her work.
“Say, if it’s okay, how about we go out to lunch together?”
She shook her head without looking away from her receipts.
“I like to eat lunch alone.”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
She deprioritized her receipts, looking annoyed, and lowered the needle onto a new record from Harper’s Bizarre.
“So…why’d you invite me, then?”
“Just wanna shake things up once in a while.”
“Shake ‘em up by yourself.”
She went back to working on the receipts at hand.
“Forget about me, already.”
I nodded.
“I think I said it once already, but I think you’re a complete sleazeball,” having said that, with her lips still pursed, she flipped the receipts through her
four fingers.
16
When I entered J’s Bar, the Rat had his shoulders on the bar and his face grimaced while reading a telephone book-sized, incredibly long Henry
James novel.
“Is that a good read?”
The Rat looked up from his book and shook his head from side to side. “Still, I’ve been reading it very carefully, ever since our talk the other day. ‘I
love splendid deception more than the drab reality,’ you know it?”
“Nope.”
“Roger Vadim. A French Director. And this one, too: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the
same time, and still retain the ability to function.’”
“Who said that one?”
“I forget. You think it’s true?”
“It’s a lie.”
“Why?”
“You wake up at 3am, you’re hungry. You open the fridge and it’s empty. What do you do?”
The Rat thought it over, then laughed in a loud voice. I called J over and ordered beer and French fries, then pulled out a wrapped record and
handed it to the Rat.
“What’s all this?”
“It’s a birthday present.”
“But my birthday’s not ‘til next month.”
“Iwon’t be here next month, so I’m giving it to you now.”
With the record in his hand, he was still thinking.
“Yeah, well, I’ll be lonely once you’re gone,” he said as he opened the paper, pulled out the record and looked it over.
“Beethoven, Piano Concerto Number 3, GlennGould, Leonard Bernstein. Hmm…I’ve never heard this. Have you?”
“Never.”
“Anyway, thank you. I’ll just come right out and say it, I’m really happy.”
17
For three days, I kept trying to find the girl’s phone number. The girl who lent me the Beach Boys record, that is.
I went to the office at our high school and looked up the register for our graduating class, and I found it. However, when I tried calling it I got a
recorded message telling me the number was no longer in service. When I called Information and gave them the girl’s name, the operator searched
for me, and at the end of five minutes, she told me there was no number listed in their directory under that name. That was the good thing about the
girl’s name, it was unique. I thanked the operator and hung up. The next day, I called up a bunch of our former classmates and asked if they knew
anything about her,
but nobody knew anything about her, and most of them only vaguely recalled her existence from our school days. The last person I asked, for some
reason I didn’t understand, said, ‘I don’t have a damn thing to say to you,’ and hung up on me.
On the third day, Iwent back to the high school and got the name of the college she’d gone on to attend. It was the English department of a second
rate girl’s school. I called their office and told them I was a quality control manager from McCormick’s Salad Dressing and had to ask her
something from a survey she’d filled out and that I needed her current address and phone number. I apologized and told them it was very important
that I speak to her. They asked if Iwouldn’t call back in fifteen minutes after they’d had time to look it up. After drinking a bottle of beer, I called them
back and the person in the office told me that she’d dropped out of school in March. The reason she’d quit was to recover from an illness, but they
didn’t have the slightest idea why a girl who was well enough to eat salad wasn’t back enrolled in classes again.
When I asked if they had a contact address for her, telling them even an old one would be okay, he checked for me. It was a lodging house near the
school. When I called there, a matronly-sounding lady said she didn’t know where the girl went after moving out, then hung up on me, as if to say,
‘you don’t want to know anyway.’
That was the end of the last line thread connecting us.
Iwent home and drank beer by myself, listening to California Girls all the while.
18
The phone rang.
Iwas lying atop a wicker chair, half-asleep while gazing at a book I’d left open. The sudden evening rainstorm was comprised of big drops of water
that wet the leaves of the trees in the yard before it passed. After the rainstorm was gone, the sea-smelling southerly wind began to blow, shaking
the leaves of the potted plants on the veranda just a little, then went on to shake the curtains.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was dark and controlled; she spoke as if her words were settling on a thin glass table. “You remember me?”
I pretended to think about it for a minute.
“How’s the record business?”
“Not so good…it’s like there’s a recession or something. Nobody’s listening to records.”
“Uh huh.”
She tap-taped her nail on the receiver.
“It was really hard work getting your phone number.”
“Yeah?”
“I asked around at J’s Bar. I had the bartender ask your friend for me. A real tall, weird guy. He was reading Moliere.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
Silence.
“Everyone looked sad. You didn’t show up there for a week, so they were saying you must be sick or something.”
“I never knew Iwas so popular.”
“Are you….mad at me?”
“For what?”
“For saying all those terrible things to you. Iwanted to apologize for that.”
“Hey, you don’t have to worry about me. You care about me, you might as well be feeding beans to pigeons.”
She sighed, and I could hear the flicker from her cigarette lighter coming through the receiver. After that, I could hear Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline.
She must’ve been calling from the record store.
“I’m not really worried about your feelings. I just feel like I shouldn’t have talked to you like that,” she said quickly.
“You’re pretty hard on yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m always thinking about the kind of person I’m trying to be.”
She was silent for a moment.
“You wanna meet up tonight?”
“Sure.”
“How about 8 o’ clock at J’s Bar. That okay?”
“Got it.”
“…um, I’ve been having a rough time lately.”
“I understand.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up.
19
It’s a long story, it happened when Iwas twentyone. Still a lot of youth left, but not as young as I once was. If Iwasn’t happy with that, the only choice I
had was to jump off the roof of the Empire State Building on a Sunday morning.
I heard this joke in an old movie about the Great Depression:
‘You know why I always have my umbrella open when Iwalk by the Empire State Building? ‘Cause people are always falling like raindrops!’
When Iwas twenty-one, at least at this point Iwasn’t planning to die. At that point I’d slept with three girls.
The first girl was my high school classmate, and when we were seventeen we got to believing that we loved each other. Bathed in the lush twilight,
she took off her slip-on shoes, her cotton socks, her thin seersucker dress, her weird underwear she obviously knew didn’t fit her, and then after
getting a little flustered, took off her wristwatch. After that, we embraced each other atop the Sunday edition of the Asahi Shimbun.
Just a few months after we graduated from high school, we suddenly broke up for some forgettable reason. After that, I never saw her again. I think
of her every now and then, during those nights when I can’t sleep. That’s it.
The second girl I slept with, Imet her at the Shinjuku station on the subway. She was sixteen, flat broke, and had nowhere to sleep, and as an added
bonus she was almost nothing but a pair of breasts, but she had smart, pretty eyes. One night, when there were violent demonstrations sweeping
over Shinjuku, the trains, the busses, everything shut down completely.
“You hang around here and you’ll get hauled off,” I told her. She was crouched in the middle of the shutdown ticket-taker, reading a sports section
she’d taken from the garbage.
“But the police’ll feed me.”
“That’s a terrible way to live.”
“I’m used to it.”
I lit a cigarette and gave one to her. Thanks to the tear gas, my eyes were prickling.
“Have you eaten?”
“Not since this morning.”
“Hey, let me get you something to eat. Anyway, we should get out of here.”
“Why do you want to get me something to eat?”
“Who knows?” I don’t know why, but I pulled her out of the ticket-taker and we walked the empty streets all the way to Mejiro.
That incredibly quiet girl’s stay at my apartment lasted for all of one week. Every day, she’d wake up after noon, eat something, smoke, absentmindedly read books, watch television, and occasionally have uninterested sex with me. Her only possession was a white canvas bag which held
inside it: a thin windbreaker, two T-shirts, one pair of blue jeans, three pairs of dirty underwear, and one box of tampons; that’s all she had.
“Where’re you from?”
Sometimes I asked her this.
“Someplace you don’t know.”
Saying that, the refused to elaborate. One day, when I came back from the supermarket clutching a grocery bag, she was gone. Her white bag was
gone as well. A number of other things were gone as well. Some loose change I’d scattered atop the desk, a carton of cigarettes, and my carefully
washed T-shirt. On the desk there was a torn piece of paper like a note, bearing the simple message: ‘rat bastard’. It’s quite possible that was a
reference to me.
My third partner was a girl I’d met at our university’s library, she was a French Lit major, but in the spring of the following year she was found in a
small forest past the edge of the tennis courts, hanged. Her corpse hung there unnoticed until past the beginning of spring semester, for an entire
two weeks it dangled there, blown around by the wind. Even now, nobody goes in those woods after the sun goes down.
