Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (26 page)

This is me roaming the streets of Tokyo in my spare time. I’m pretty sure that is a doctor’s office of some sort behind me.
(photo credit: Dale May)

I had expected Tokyo to be the Japanese equivalent of New York City. In fact, as we approached the city limits, I almost felt like we were coming home. But I soon realized that comparing Tokyo to New York is a total insult. To Tokyo, that is. In fact, if Tokyo and New York were in prison together, New York would be Tokyo’s bitch, with Tokyo buying New York for a carton of cigarettes and having intercourse with its face for weeks on end just to show it who’s boss. I mean that, of course, in the nicest of ways. It’s just that Tokyo has so much to offer.
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It’s like New York times ten but still crammed into the same amount of space and then popped into the microwave at full heat for ten minutes. You must go.

As we pulled up to the hotel in Tokyo, my bandmates had a little surprise for me.

“The guys and I have been talking,” John said. “And we’ve decided that you really ought to have your own hotel room for a change.”

“That’s so sweet,” I thought.

Naturally, I assumed the guys wanted to reward me for all the hot rocking I’d been doing, but it turned out that they just didn’t want to put up with my snoring anymore. I was a little hurt, but I couldn’t blame them. I do snore a lot, like a bear even.
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And while I might have felt a bit shunned, I was actually kind of psyched, too, because my Tokyo hotel room had a very special feature.

Over the course of the tour, I’d become increasingly fascinated with Japanese toilets, you might even say obsessed. I’d use them wherever and whenever possible and then document them in blushing. sometimes even excruciating detail on my blog—what they looked like, their most exhilarating features and, perhaps most importantly, how they made me feel both “down there” and deep down inside my heart of hearts. And my hotel room in Tokyo just happened to have what I consider to be the Holy Grail of Japanese toilets. Sure, I’d seen it before, but up until then I never thought I had the level of privacy or intimacy required to really go to town, to really become one with it.

To the naked eye, the Holy Grail looks pretty much like a regular toilet. But then on the side there’s this command center, like it might instantly transform into a jet fighter at any moment. And I had seen a bidet—those European ass-blasting machines—before, but I had never bothered to use one because I figured if I wanted my ass to be all wet and drippy like that, I never would have gone to the bathroom in the first place.

Upping the ante on things, the Japanese have managed to combine the toilet and the bidet into one futuristic machine that’s probably illegal in most countries. So, with our final show of the tour, the climax of our rock ’n’ roll odyssey, just a couple of hours away, I decided to shift my priorities and take the Holy Grail for a little test drive.

I walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Sure, I was alone, but I wanted to make sure I was really, really alone. Then I sat down on the toilet and used it to the best of my gastrointestinal abilities, which—considering the fact that I’d spent the past week ingesting nothing but beer, sushi, and whatever else I could possibly lather in wasabi and chili oil—was pretty impressive.
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The initial transaction concluded, I began to inspect the command center. There, I saw a button emblazoned with what looked like the letter “m” being sprinkled with water droplets.

“Ladies and gentleman, I give you the butt button,” I thought.

In front of the butt button was a volume knob of sorts, so I just cranked it up as high as it would go because I figured “Fuck it, I’m on vacation.”

Then I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed the butt button. Suddenly, a jet stream came out. And I don’t know if there was an electronic eye on this thing or what, but when I hit the butt button, somehow it just … found me right where I needed to be found. And up until that point in my life, I had never given much thought to if I got blasted in the anus with water at what temperature and water pressure I would want it to be. But it didn’t matter because the Japanese had figured that out for me, too. As it turns out, it’s exactly 72 degrees and sort of like being gently tapped in the anus over and over again. It’s beautiful. So I began repeatedly hitting the butt button as fast as the futuristic apparatus would let me.

After about forty-five minutes of this, I was drenched in sweat and slowly fading in and out of consciousness. Then I looked down at the command center again. This time I saw another button, which had a silhoutte of a woman on it.

“The lady-parts button,” I presumed.

It felt like forbidden territory. I know I’m not a lady and I wasn’t even sure how the electronic eye would assess the situation. And I certainly didn’t want to confuse the technology. But then I just thought “When am I going to start living my life?”

Then I closed my eyes again, took another deep breath, threw in the sign of the cross for good measure, and pressed the lady-parts button. This time another jet stream came out, only this time it hit me in what some people, including me, like to call the taint.
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Like most people, I had spent my whole life trying to avoid letting exactly this sort of thing ever happen to me. But once it did, I couldn’t imagine how I managed to go all those years without being blasted in the taint with water every single day of life. It was intoxicating. So then I started hitting the taint button as fast as it would let me. Then I went back to the butt button. Then I went back to the taint button. Then I went back to the butt button. And then I went back to the taint button again. And again.

After about two hours of this, I felt as if I were floating over my own body as I looked down on it. I’m also pretty sure I saw that bright light that people who’ve had near-death experiences always talk about. And I was about to go back for more when John burst into my room screaming “Come on, we gotta go rock the fuck out of Tokyo!”

Ripped from another dimension, I pulled up my pants, marched out of there with my head held high, and rocked the fuck out of Tokyo with a cleaner ass and taint area
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than anyone who’s ever rocked the fuck out of Tokyo before.

Our show in Tokyo that night was the stuff of legend (well, to me anyway). Not only was the club four times the size of all the clubs we’d played in Japan thus far, but there was also four times as many people there and they seemed even more into it than all those other people I already told you about. We got a second encore and everything. I was so pumped I even got the courage to finally test out some of the Japanese I’d been practicing in the van on a gorgeous girl who’d spent the entire show standing right in front me, singing along with every word and seemingly getting lost in my bloodshot eyes.

“
Odori ga sugoku umai des ne
,” I told her. “
Koko o so wa te
.”

She ran away pretty quickly after that. But I guess if a total stranger told me I was a fantastic dancer, and then followed up by instructing me to “touch him here,” I probably would have done the same. Oh, well, they seemed like the perfect words at the time.

Still coming down from what felt like the greatest rock show of all-time, I woke up the following morning confronted by the sobering actuality that it was time to go home—back to America, back to reality, back to waiting two weeks to hear whether or not one of my bandmates was able to play a gig or it turned out his wife was really counting on him to go to that engagement party with her after all.

Before I came crashing down to earth just like the mighty Icarus, however, there was still a matter of unfinished business to attend to. Because of my Z-list celebrity, the Gibson guitar company had loaned us a few guitars to use on the tour. And also because of my Z-list celebrity, we had to return the guitars to their office in Tokyo before we left the country. The original plan was to slow down to about ten miles per hour and just toss them out the side of the van to whomever was standing out front so that we might be able to squeeze in a bit more sightseeing before heading to the airport. But when we got there, a Gibson employee was outside waiting for us and—because he is Japanese—
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insisted that we come inside, meet the whole staff, tour the entire facility, and drink some tea with everybody.

“Let’s make it quick,” I muttered to my bandmates as we reluctantly followed behind.

Once we got inside, however, I immediately changed my tune. There, standing to greet us, was Tomoko, a preternaturally beautiful Japanese woman who appeared to have subtle track lighting around her entire impossibly bewitching frame. The fact that she also happened to work at my favorite guitar company only added to her allure. And the fact that I absolutely didn’t want to leave Japan at all had me officially thinking crazy.

“Maybe I don’t need get on that plane with the guys,” I thought. “Maybe I could just stay here in Japan and keep being a huge rock star. And maybe Tomoko and I could move in someplace together, settle down, start filling the place up with half-Japanese babies, and maybe even get three or four of those life-affirming toilets.”

The more I thought about it, the less it sounded crazy and the more it sounded like a fucking plan. That all changed, however, when the head of Gibson Japan walked into the room, shook my hand, and said, “So, Dave, we understand you really enjoy the toilets here in Japan.”

“Really?” I asked, trying to act like I had no idea what he was talking about. “What would ever make you think that?”

“We read your blog,” he said. “We
all
read your blog.”

“You what?” I thought, my skin turning even paler than usual.

As I looked around, I noticed that every Gibson employee in the room had their hands politely pressed to their lips as they quietly snickered to themselves. Except for one, however—Tomoko. Instead, she just stood there giving me one of those looks that people tend to give you when they know you’ve traveled all the way to other side of the earth and the only thing you really seem to care about is the fact that the toilets there are designed so you could probably go without changing your underwear the entire trip next time.

It was in that moment that I realized maybe it was time to go back home after all, back to my old life, the one where I wasn’t a huge rock star, I was just some old guy with a guitar who, if he wanted to get his taint cleaned, had to do it the old-fashioned way.
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“Thanks, everybody,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” they replied.

“And thank you, Tomoko,” I said.

She just kind of nodded and got back to her paperwork after that. Hey, I tried.

As sad as I was to get on the plane home, it gave me a lot of time to reflect about things—Japan, the tour, Tomoko, rock ’n’ roll, and just life in general. And somewhere over Siberia it finally hit me.

“It doesn’t matter that I’m not some huge rock star,” I thought. “And it also doesn’t matter if I never make it back to Japan again.”

The only thing that mattered was that simple act of rocking out, of finding that one thing you love doing more than anything else in the world and doing it to the point where people worry you have some kind of medical condition. And rocking out doesn’t have to mean playing guitar in a band, either. It can be whatever you want it to be, whether it be stamp collecting, gardening, mechanical bull riding, accounting, or maybe even knitting to the point where people can’t stop themselves from gathering around you to bear witness to your unstoppable wefting and warping ways.
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As it turns, however, rocking out for me means actually strapping on a guitar, plugging it into a huge amplifier, and then strangling that thing like it was a goddamn wild animal hellbent on killing me, which, as it turns out, is actually a lot cooler than any of that other stuff I just mentioned.

Unless, of course, to you rocking out means parking yourself on a Japanese toilet, holding on for dear life, and claiming your destiny at long last.

In that case, we’re pretty much neck and neck.

The Time I Went to Prison

The joint, the hoosegow, the gray bar hotel. Call it what you want, but I’ve always held a fascination for correctional facilities and the incarcerated in general. Otis,
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for example, was my favorite character on
The Andy Griffith Show
. He was a man with a story to tell.

This is my story.

I was drinking with my friends Carl and Clark one night at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen when suddenly, from out of nowhere, I got an idea.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if I did a comedy show in prison?” I slurred.

“That would be hilarious!” Clark said, choking on his beer. “You’d die!”

“Yeah, they’d totally kill you!” Carl agreed with a smile. “It would be so great!”

“I know, right?” I agreed back for some reason.

We spent the next few minutes busting our guts over how my comedy routine might go over in prison, the various ways in which the inmates would torture, then kill me, all the nonconsensual intercourse I would be subjected to both before and after my death, and who would have to call my parents to tell them where to pick up the body. We were having a really nice time.

When I woke up the next afternoon, though I struggled to remember exactly why I’d brought up the topic of prison in the first place, I thought, “You know what would be
really
funny? If I went ahead and called an actual prison to set up a show.”

As I sat on the edge of my bed giggling uncontrollably to myself in my underwear, I was pretty sure it was one of the best ideas I’d had in a really long time. I decided to hop on the Internet and research what prisons were convenient to my apartment. And, as it turned out, there was a place called Sing Sing about thirty miles north of New York City in Ossining, New York, just a train ride away. It is a very popular, very prisony prison. I decided I should probably give them a call right away.