Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (10 page)

“Yes sir,” he spits. “It’s just gonna take a few days for the money transfer to go through.” Then he turns and plods off to the bathroom.

I look at Mamta and Ewan, utterly speechless.

“Look!” Mamta says, pointing to the television in the corner of the room. “He didn’t break the TV!” Bless her, she’s grasping.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s beginning to look like I’ve traveled all the way around the world to the safest country on earth only to be drawn and quartered by an unhinged Phil-adelphian. Monday night seems so very far away.

“Listen,” Mamta whispers, “why don’t you and Ewan just bring some of your important stuff down to my place. You know, just to be safe.”

We agree this is probably a good idea, since there’s no telling when the Beast will decide to start throwing things over the balcony railing again. So I pick up my laptop and a stack of CDs. Ewan collects all his books.

We go downstairs and drop off our stuff. Ewan stays with Mamta, and I go up to Julia’s to see if I can stay the night if things become life-threatening. As I’m filling her in on the recent developments in the saga, the doorbell rings. Julia answers and it’s Mike, who lives in the apartment between Julia’s and mine.

“Hey, do you know what’s going on in Tim’s flat?” I hear him ask.

I run out of the apartment and look towards mine. The door is wide open, the police alarm from the kitchen is sounding, and Ron is inside screaming. I go down to Mamta’s and get Ewan. We decide to go up and get everything of importance out of the place, in case Ron has started a fire or something. I grab the rest of my CDs, and some work clothes and shoes. Ewan gets more books. Mamta offers to help, and Ewan quickly makes use of her, handing over his encyclopedia of arthropods and his giant collection of historical maps of the world.

But our mass exodus is halted when we can’t get the front door open. The handle won’t turn. Ron is on the other side, blocking us in. We can hear him outside shouting at Mamta’s roommates, who had come to make sure we were alright.

“Oh my God, we’re trapped!” I say, clearly kind of starting to enjoy the drama. I look at Mamta and Ewan with their arms full of useless books, and we all laugh. Then we look worriedly toward the door, because we really are trapped.

I could force the door open, but I am really afraid to do anything that will result in Ron being thrown off balance, for there’s a second balcony and he’s standing directly between it and the door. So we put everything down, go into my room, open the window, and watch as Ron wields a fire extinguisher to keep at bay the group of MOBA teachers from nearby apartments who have gathered around him, some people looking scared, others covering their laughing mouths.

We wait at the window until he finally moves away from the door. We quickly gather up everything and make a run for it. As we bust through the door, Ron is busy threatening the others congregated outside—the entire floor of tenants at this point, including a few mystified Japanese people who have never seen a real American crazy before.

“What’s your name?” he demands of Mike.

“I’m not telling you,” Mike says.

“What’s your name?” He points to Julia.

“Thaddeus,” she says.

“What’s your name?” Holly, Mamta’s roommate, this time.

“I don’t have a name.”

“Well,” Ron growls, “I’m going to remember your names and I’m going to find you and you’re going to be sorry!” Then he burps and kind of sneezes.

We sneak behind him and spirit our stuff down to Mamta’s. From above someone yells down that two police officers have arrived, yay!

I run up the stairs ready to tongue-kiss both of them at the same time and, with a wink and a lick of my lips, invite them over to Julia’s later. Turns out the two officers are the same ones who had brought Ron home earlier, after the bridge incident.

The party has moved back inside my apartment, so I open the door and see the two cops standing over Ron, who’s sitting in a chair in the middle of the darkened hallway, his arms folded, his expression defiant, his face beet-red and shiny.

Erica, one of Mamta’s friends who’s half Japanese, serves as interpreter.

“I own this place! This whole place!”

Erica translates directly with a wink wink, nudge nudge.

The officers look at each other, confused. After a long, winding conversation that takes in all of Ron’s hijinks as well as Erica’s attempt at explaining that not all English teachers behave like this, the officers tell us they can’t do anything because it isn’t illegal to be publicly drunk in Japan, and anyway, he hasn’t hurt anyone. (But what about what he’s done to my
feelings
?!) They take down our details as a formality, and after accepting my heartfelt apologies on behalf of my entire country, they leave.

The door closes behind them, and we all silently turn our heads to look at our tormenter.

The good thing about a drunk like Ron is that, though he can ingest award-winning amounts of booze, he will reach his stopping point, and suddenly. Leaning back further in his chair and struggling to keep his eyelids raised, he reaches that stopping point. Down, down, down he goes, backwards toward the floor, the chair giving way under his greasy girth. He roars and spits all the way down to the floor, a trip that happens in slow motion. Then thud. Binge over. Yay, gravity.

Folks gathered outside begin to scatter now that the show’s main performer appears to have passed out in epic fashion. “Goodbye, y’all,” I say. “Thanks for coming. Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow. G’night. Be safe.”

I step over Ron and walk to the kitchen, where Ewan sits looking tired, confused, and desperate to take up smoking. “It’s over, Ewan,” I say, patting him on the shoulder. “Let’s go to bed.”

The next day, I receive a call from the MOBA head office at work. He is out. They’ve moved him somewhere else; I don’t ask where. I get home that evening and find that all of his stuff is gone. I walk back to the kitchen and see a final parting gift from Ron on the tile floor: a big brown turd. I turn around and walk to his room. It is completely empty, except for one item on the floor: a small paperback book that had presumably fallen from his bag on the way out. The title:
Networking in Japan: Making Those Important Contacts
.

Also, my
Entertainment Weekly
is missing.

A few days later, gossip swirls that Ron has gone missing from his new digs and still hasn’t shown up for work. All of us gasp at the idea that Ron is freely walking the streets of Fujisawa carrying all of his belongings and throwing empty beer cans at old grandmas on the street. What if he decides to pay us tenants at the AF Building a visit? He is our landlord, after all.

Finally, after two weeks have passed, Ron calls the MOBA head office and says, no doubt slurring every syllable, “I’m ready for work!” But at this point MOBA has written him off and decided to do something unprecedented in their history: pay for a teacher’s flight back home before he’s even started work. It’s the right decision—for the security of the nation.

That night, Mamta sees a particularly interesting item on CNN. A flight from Japan’s Narita Airport bound for New York’s JFK had to make an emergency landing in the Midwest because an unruly American guy had attacked a stewardess.

I’d bet my very soul that this guy had been drinking Jack Daniels. And reading my
Entertainment Weekly
.

Since the Ron fiasco, I’ve been seriously questioning my future not only in my apartment but also with MOBA. Sometimes it seems like getting a job teaching at this school is about as difficult as finding work as a homeless person on the streets of New York. It takes no credentials whatsoever and anyone can do it, which means that in day-to-day life you run the risk of clashing with drug-addled assholes who don’t know when to shut up and go to sleep.

Or just normal everyday idiots, like Paul from Canada who recently dedicated an entire class to teaching his students the nicknames English speakers have for Japanese people, most of them extremely unflattering (“slanty-eyed midgets,” for one). When I asked him why he felt compelled to do such a thing, he said simply, “I just thought they should know.”

Then there’s Australian Mark, who recently had the brilliant idea to teach a lesson in impenetrable, slangy Crocodile Dundee–inflected speech, because “they’re gonna have to deal with it if they ever come to Australia.” I watched from my classroom as his three mid-level students had three separate mid-level nervous breakdowns.

Not that I’m any kind of Einstein. I’ve made my share of idiotic remarks in class. Sometimes it’s unavoidable when your job is to talk all day and try to maintain enthusiasm. Recently I was teaching two men, both engineers and advanced-level students, and we were talking about Japanese electronics, architecture, and design. At one point I proclaimed in a commanding tone, as if I were saying something really quite unprecedented and insightful, “Japanese engineering is just, like, totally amazing, and, you know, the architecture and, like, electronics, I mean, you know,
my God
…” I wanted to die even as I rambled on, and from the look on my students’ faces, they wanted the same thing.

I decide to use the whole Ron thing as an excuse to finally make the big move to Tokyo. It’s time to move on, to head north, onwards to the city to take a large, sloppy bite out of the Big Rice Ball.

I find a room in Minato Ward, South Tokyo, in what is called a guesthouse. There are two showers, two toilets, two sinks, and one tiny hot plate in one tiny kitchen.

I’ve made the unlikely and not altogether fabulous transition from living with two gaijin to living with five. There’s Talvin from England, a MOBA teacher in Tokyo; Amelia from Australia, who hates her job at a gimmicky “English Through Drama” language school for kids; Hans, a banker from Germany; Chain-Smoking Jerry, a freelance English teacher (yes, I said a freelance English teacher) from Canada who, though he’s got to be nearly sixty, hasn’t let it keep him from snagging a beautiful young Japanese woman (in this case, the lovely Keiko) and getting her to cook for him. They’re all pretty nice.

But my new best friend is Rachel from California. She’s the girl next door. Not in that bobby sox–wearing, let’s-go-to-thehop kind of way; she lives in the room next to me. I loved her immediately because, since she’s from California, she has a disposition at least as sunny as mine. She is an ex-MOBA teacher who now works at Lane, a school with four branches in Tokyo.

When I move in, I have to pay a deposit and a month’s rent in advance, but thankfully no “key money,” which is a customary monetary gift of at least three months’ rent that new tenants in Japan offer their new landlord just for being such a great guy. I avoid this odious practice by going through an agency that specializes in finding housing for poor, helpless gaijin. Unfortunately, I am also paying for my Fujisawa apartment, so right now, I’m paying two rents. And eating lots of Cup Noodle.

Because of my lack of cash flow, I had to move all of my stuff myself using only my hands and the train. A sane and more financially solvent person would have loaded all of their stuff into a cab and put any of the overflow into boxes and had them sent through his local convenience store delivery service (because there is absolutely nothing you can’t do at a freaking convenience store here). But all of this costs money, and I have zero disposable income. I’m borrowing money from teachers at the school just to eat, and if I could have gotten away with it, I would have walked around Fujisawa Station with a cane, a pair of Speedos, some dark glasses, and a coffee cup made of tin begging people for spare yen for a few hours a day. Unfortunately, if you’re a white man in Japan—even one with a limp and a vision impairment—you are (correctly) assumed to be making the big bucks, because more likely than not you are an English teacher. So that shit wouldn’t fly here. I simply had to bite the bullet and move everything myself. And though I could’ve done without having to wheel my TV/DVD player behind me on a little trolley down a five-lane city street from Shinagawa Station to my new place, I got through everything all right, and the TV only fell over twice.

Soon after I move in, I’m hanging out with Rachel on the couch in the tiny sitting room/kitchen while Chain-Smoking Jerry gives Keiko a lecture about the first Thanksgiving and what it means to Americans and Canadians alike. As he exhales a huge plume of smoke in our direction while relating the history of maize cultivation in North America, Rachel tells me that her language school is looking to hire a few new teachers.

“I’m such a dork, I totally forgot to tell you about it,” she apologizes.

“Oh my God, get me a job! Get me a job
immediately
!” I demand.

“Totally, yeah, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

And with that brief exchange I am on my way to a new teaching position at two of Lane’s schools in Shinjuku and Ginza. I send in my résumé, and a few days later they call me in for an interview.

This interview is a little different. While Drew, the head teacher, does ask me about my interests and hobbies, the Lane folks seem a little more preoccupied than MOBA with their teachers having a decent command of the English language. To that end, there is an hour-long, ten-page exercise that tests my knowledge of English grammar, from comma splices to misplaced modifiers to restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. Although it’s a bit of a harrowing experience struggling to recall how
affected
and
effected
are different, and although I seriously doubt the need for the general Japanese population to know what distinguishes a simile from a metaphor, it is comforting to know that the school is interested in hiring me for my thorough knowledge of the language and not just my American passport, valid working visa, and jazz hands. Still, I’m more than a little worried about how I’d performed on the test.

I get a call the next day from Craig, the other head teacher, offering me a job with the school.

“Really?! Did you not look at the grammar test?” I say.

He says no, they did, and that I made a pretty good showing, actually. In fact, I received the highest score they’ve ever seen. Those Latin classes served a purpose after all.

I am ecstatic. Not only because I will be working in central Tokyo, but because I will be making more money, have more vacation time, have all national holidays off (at MOBA, national holidays have been our busiest days), and, most importantly, I will never ever have to see or hear Jill again, ever, as long as I live, ever.

“You bitch! You’re leaving me alone with that cow?!” Donna says after I sing her the good news to the tune of “America” from
West Side Story
during one of our after-hours drinking binges. We’ve grown very close in our time at MOBA together. We’d initially bonded out of our mutual loathing of Jill, only later discovering we also had a mutual love for text messaging, sukiyaki, and men in uniform.

But she wishes me well, and we promise each other that our life together is not over. Sitting at our favorite Kamiooka izakaya bar getting sloppy on foamy mugs of beer, we make a solemn vow that we will, as Donna put it, “go somewhere fucking fabulous on holiday together and be complete pigs.” We toast to it, clinking our glasses together and spilling beer onto our tiny plates of complimentary pickled relish.

All settled in Tokyo now, I decide it’s high time I hatch the next part of my big “I’m Waking Up to Myself” party: yes, it’s time to go out in public with my viola. I place an ad in the English-language
Metropolis
magazine looking for people to play music with. It would be nice, I figure, to have a regular quartet, marching band, or heavy metal orchestra to meet with, and it’s been a while since I last played music with other people, considering I typically play by myself in my apartment when nobody else is home with the shades drawn and a rolled-up towel pushed up against the bottom of the door. But even though I’ve played for years, I’m still a little lacking in confidence, and this insecurity may have seeped into the wording of my ad:

AMATEUR VIOLA PLAYER, AMERICAN

SEEKS OTHER AMATEUR MUSICIANS TO PLAY MUSIC JUST FOR FUN.

MUST BE AMATEUR. FOR FUN.

I think my ad also suffered from bad placement, since it was positioned right under an ad reading:

HI! FEMALE SINGER/DRUMMER HERE!
AUSTRALIAN, BLOND, EARLY 20’S

SEEKS PATIENT, UNDERSTANDING GUITAR TEACHER FOR PRIVATE INSTRUCTION.

I CAN TEACH YOU ENGLISH!!

I’d guess 99 percent of the people looking for musicians to work with that week answered her ad. But I do get a few responses:

Hmm. Not too promising. I’d sooner peel off my own face than play Genesis songs on the viola. Then I get an e-mail from a piano player named Toru in Yokohama.

Wow. He writes English better than I do. I write him back, and we strike up an e-mail friendship. A few weeks later we meet in Shibuya for coffee to get to know each other and discuss what music we should play. I learn that he’s been teaching himself English for about twelve years, starting when he was thirteen, and he’d improved by practicing on his foreign friends. He suggests we try the Brahms sonatas for viola and piano. Blissful in my ignorance, I quickly agree, and we are off to the Yamaha store to buy some sheet music. Toru already has the piano music, so we just need the sheets for viola, which he quickly finds among the thousands and thousands of papers on the shelf and hands to me with a smile.

I hesitate to look at the music as an old demon creeps into my consciousness: Though I’d started playing violin when I was seven, switching to viola in my twenties, I don’t sight-read music very well. When I took up the violin, I learned via the Suzuki method, which emphasizes ear training at the expense of music reading. Though I later learned to sight-read, it was always a struggle for me, and my natural tendency was always to ignore whatever sheet music my teacher had assigned for the week and just pick things out that I wanted to play (“Edelweiss,” “You’re the One that I Want,” the themes from
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
,
The Golden Girls
, or
L.A. Law
). Once I knew what a piece was supposed to sound like—either by listening to my teacher play it or by obtaining a recording of it—I could rattle it off with relative ease. But given the same piece of music and no assistance whatsoever, I’m doomed. Doomed.

Long story short, I am a string player deathly afraid of sheet music.

This phobia would’ve been my undoing had I been playing in the era of Mozart, when rehearsal time was extremely limited and most people sat down and just sight-read their way to riches, glory, and designer pantaloons. Had I had the gall to ask Wolfgang before a performance to just hum a few bars of what I was meant to play, I would’ve been laughed off the stage, my fluffy white wig a web of tomatoes, eggs, and spittle, my legs beneath my secondhand pantaloons lashed repeatedly by violin bows, my fluffy blouse ripped to shreds and set on fire, my head nearly split open with an almond cheese log.

Thankfully, I’m living in more liberated and patient times. I have a look at the first movement, and it seems pretty manageable. Then I turn to the second movement and nearly faint. The notes are crowded together on the page like, well, like Tokyoites of all shapes and sizes standing, sitting, swaying, knocking about, picking fights with each other, and looking up each other’s skirts on a rush-hour train. I stare at the two pages comprising the movement and panic, feeling like a complete phony, desperate for Toru to just agree to play sitcom theme songs and familiar show tunes and let me off the hook.

But then I think, “Hey, I never shy away from a challenge.” But then I think, “Actually, Tim, you ALWAYS shy away from a challenge. I’ve never seen you NOT shy away from a challenge.”

“This looks fun,” I say to Toru, trying to wipe the fear off my face, and we make a date for me to come to his house in Yokohama’s Higashi Totsuka area and give Brahms a whirl.

Meanwhile, I get this intriguing reply to my ad:

Hi, My name is Nabe, I saw your ad in Metropolis. I am interested in your viola to join the project that I and my freinds are doing. The project is a kind of a musical community. We have not given name for. But, the main idea or theme of this project is making music with others who have totally different background each other, but nobody force nobody. In the other words, it could be expressed as “Encounter with others through music or sound.” Well, all you need is enthusiasm and free mind about sound. So, if you are interested in our project, give me a e-mail. Of course, you can ask me any question about the project, I also got a lot of things to tell you about it. Maybe, to begin with, we should meet for each other and share the idea. In addition, I play the guitar (both electric and accoustic), didgereedoo, harmonica, termin, etc. I am looking forward your response!?