Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (8 page)

People have all sorts of reasons for leaving their home country to live in a completely foreign land where they stick out like sore thumbs. Some are good reasons (personal fulfillment, sobering up, wanderlust, cultural curiosity), and some are questionable (avoiding the law, drug smuggling, sex tourism). MOBA, one of the most popular language schools in Japan, doesn’t care what the reason is, as long as you can pretend to know how to speak English.

I’ve had my doubts about MOBA’s hiring practices from the very beginning, and not just due to the fact that my roommate Sean only has a high school education, has never met a double negative he didn’t like, and had no problem getting a job as an instructor. I’ve also noticed a tenuous command of the English language on the part of a few of my coworkers who can barely string a sentence together correctly without breaking into a cold sweat. Like Stanley from New Zealand, who brings a briefcase the size of a tuba case to work and says things like, “Yeah, but he didn’t play like do that right down the middle without your mum crickety bum licker.” Or Pete from Pennsylvania, whom I recently overheard in a class explaining what the word
broke
means like this:

“You know if you have something, like a dish or a glass, and you drop it on the floor?
Broke
is what it becomes. For example, ‘My watch is not working. I think it is broke.’”

As an English teacher, and a kind of anal retentive one, when overhearing such egregious misteachings of the language in an adjacent classroom (we can hear everything through the thin walls), I often wish I could leave my class, jump into a phone booth on the street below, squeeze into my spandex, grab my magic Declension Dildo, and quickly emerge as some sort of costumed English language superhero (Conan the Grammarian?) whose mission it is to save people across Japan from the dangerous consequences (i.e., sounding stupid) that can result from mixing up the past and the present perfect forms of verbs.

“Here I come to save the day!” I would sing as I flew into master villain Pete from Pennsylvania’s room, slapped the hapless teacher silly with the Declension Dildo, and corrected the students before the mistake could be permanently etched into their brains. “Brok
en
! His watch is brok
en
!”

“How can we ever thank you very much?” the grateful students would say.

“Just use ‘broken’ in a sentence correctly,” I’d reply with a wink before sheathing my weapon, flying out of the room, and quickly returning to my class in normal clothes. My own students, having taken the opportunity of my being out of the room to have a quick conversation in Japanese, would be none the wiser.

But my doubts about MOBA’s commitment to excellence in English instruction have been confirmed beyond repair ever since the arrival of my new roommate, who took Sean’s place when his MOBA contract had ended. Sean is on his way back to Melbourne and his job as a customs agent at the airport.

“I’ve done what I set out to do,” he told me with a wink and a nudge over a farewell drink at our local bar.

Even without the wink and the nudge, I’d pretty much known he wasn’t talking about fulfilling his lifetime goal of scaling Mount Fuji or learning the traditional Japanese process of making washi paper. He was talking about making it with Japanese girls.

Sean is one of those guys who come to Japan for no other reason than the possibility of having sex with Asian hotties. It’s common knowledge around these parts that Western guys, especially those with limited sex appeal in their own countries, can experience the ultimate image makeover by just stepping off a plane at Narita Airport. All of a sudden, they’re exotic and hot. They’re like that tuneless, unwashed, and insufferable local band in your town that nobody goes to see but somehow develop a huge following in Japan thanks to some obscure seven-inch they managed to get released there because of their cute mugs and the voracious appetite of young Japanese girls for white boys playing guitars. In Australia, Sean was a pale, stocky, simian type, perpetually squinting like he is always staring directly into the sun. In Japan, he’s a sexual dynamo, in spite of the fact that, when he speaks Japanese to his lady friends, he sounds like Crocodile Dundee ordering a kangaroo burger at a sushi bar.

But what had Sean’s plan been in specific terms, I wanted to know.

“Six in six,” he says proudly, taking a swig of Asahi Super Dry beer.

I’ve never been too good with numbers. Was I meant to divide, multiply, add? Surely not subtract. I’m confused by it.

“Six ladies in six months,” he clarifies, looking at me.

Oh, I see. A girl a month. A cross-cultural experience of a lifetime easily reduced down to simple mathematics and sex. Cheap and calculating, yes, but I must say it’s always encouraging to hear about someone reaching his goals with little to no effort. But such little ambition! Surely he could have shot for nine or ten.

A few weeks after Sean’s departure, Ewan and I both receive faxes at work informing us that we’re getting a new roommate on Friday. His name is Ron Faust and he’s from the U.S., and that’s all the information they give us. Though we are both a little nervous at the idea of our home life being altered, it’s in the back of our minds that this Ron Faust could be a really cool guy who might breathe new life into the AF Building.

“Maybe he’ll be a good cook,” Ewan says.

“Maybe he’ll be a flutist,” I offer.

“Maybe he’ll be a necromancer!” says Ruth.

“Maybe he’ll be a fugitive,” says our neighbor Julia, who used to work at a prison in England. We all giggle in blithe amusement for the last time that week.

By the time Friday rolls around, we’ve prepared ourselves as much as we can. Ewan cleaned up the kitchen and common area and even bought some wine and crackers that he arranged on the kitchen table as a welcoming gesture. I put new batteries in the TV remote.

I wait around with Ewan for a while watching the Discovery Channel, but I eventually get sick of waiting for Ron to show up and leave to visit Julia two doors down. We get drunk and continue the “maybe he’ll be a…” game until things get really stupid.

“Maybe he’ll be,” Julia stammers, her head bobbing on her hand, “Madonna!!”

“Yes!! Or,” I begin, holding my index finger in the air to emphasize the seriousness of my point, “it’s also possible that he’s Cher.”

When I come back at midnight, the mythical Ron Faust still hasn’t arrived, and I see that Ewan has opened the wine, downed a few glasses, and even started in on the cheese and crackers.

Ron, it turns out, doesn’t arrive on Friday. Nor does he arrive the next day. After a few more days, Ewan calls the Tokyo head office of MOBA to find out what’s happened to him. All they know is that, apparently, he hadn’t shown up at the airport for his flight.

Three days later he still hasn’t arrived, and Ewan and I are happily getting used to the idea of not having a new roommate and maybe turning the unused bedroom into a fitness/meditation room. Then, two weeks after the day that he was meant to arrive, who should ring our bell at ten p.m. on a Friday but Mr. Faust himself. He is drunk and from Philadelphia. And he looks like a pirate. He has a scraggly, unkempt beard, glassy eyes, and when he says, “Hello, I’m Ron,” it sounds as if he’s just released a small collection of rocks from his lungs.

Stunned, I say hello and welcome him in. He limps inside, dragging his left foot along the floor as he walks, and I help him with his stuff. After we deposit his things—a bookbag, a rucksack with what looks like a rolled-up one-person tent attached at the top, and four plastic grocery bags—on the floor of his room, he stumbles back to the door and spends a good ten minutes making sure he’s able to use the key properly, repeatedly sticking it in, turning it round until the lock clicks out, turning it back until the lock clicks in, and pulling it out again until he feels he’s mastered the drill.

“Just wanna make sure,” he grumbles, sounding not unlike car wheels on a gravel road.

Afterwards, he comes into the kitchen where Ewan and I are sitting and takes a load off. Ewan and I sit looking at him and each other nervously, unsure what to say to break the ice. (I’m thinking, “Wow, you’re totally fucking wasted!” would be appropriate.) Ron sits slumped in his chair, breathing heavily like he’d just killed a person with his bare hands. He pulls a tall can of beer out of his jacket pocket and cracks it open, sucking up the rising fizz and foam. I guess he stopped by the 7-Eleven first?

Now, God knows I hate to judge, but this man does not appear to be in any shape to instruct Japanese people in the finer points of English idioms or irregular past verb forms (especially not irregular past verb forms). He looks like he’d been scraped off the streets of Philadelphia and shipped to Japan while still viciously intoxicated—without being told why. My guess: a Philadelphia MOBA headhunter had been desperate to meet his quota, went out onto the street, found Ron drinking from a brown bag and talking to his imaginary friend Crabcake, and thought, “Now there’s a MOBA English teacher!”

Visibly freaked out, Ewan soon retires to his room with a book he’d just bought about the history of furniture.

“Good night, guys,” he says in his affable way. “Nice to see you, Ron.”

“Yeah, ghghsshgrighsfheigls,” Ron replies, one eye looking toward Ewan, the other at the floor.

I am now left alone with our new tenant. I sit and try not to stare at him as he finishes the tall beer he’d opened only a few minutes before. He lifts the can above his gaping mouth and shakes the last precious drops in, his lips slurping against the mouth of the can, his tongue reaching out and over to catch any stray dribbles. He smacks his lips, puts the can down on the table, and proceeds to inhale and exhale so loudly he sounds like he’s got a mic on him. Satisfied that there is absolutely nothing else in that can, he hightails it to his room, rifles through one of his bags, grumbling to himself all the while, and once again emerges, limping into the kitchen with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

When he sits back down, he does something I totally don’t see coming: he takes off his left leg. Or rather, he takes off the prosthetic lower leg part and drops it on the floor. So that’s why he was limping. I decide not to ask him about it; he might not be finished taking off body parts yet, and I don’t want things to get awkward. Plus, he’s busy biting off the cap of the JD bottle.

I kind of want to throw up.

After taking his first swig, he makes a brief and barely understandable reference to being a Vietnam War veteran. It speaks volumes. Then he tries to engage me in a conversation about his girlfriend Debbie, whose husband is a real prick and he really wants to do the right thing by her so he is going to support the baby if it’s his and he told this to the husband himself, yeah he did, but he’s a prick and he wouldn’t listen and he just tried to pick a fight, so what can he do and the husband’s the one with the money so it wouldn’t be any good for her to leave him because where would they get the money for that cruise they were planning?

“Exactly,” I say, wondering if I have enough money to hire a security guard to stand outside my bedroom door while I’m sleeping.

For some reason, I am very hesitant to ask Ron any questions. Maybe it’s because I don’t see him offering any answer that can be understood by someone who hasn’t been drinking highballs for the past two and a half weeks.

My curiosity gets the better of me, though, and almost without realizing it, I ask him, “So why are you here?”

“To get away from Mom,” he replies without hesitation.

He’s joking, right? This is a joke. I’m being punk’d. OK, guys, I get it, where’s the camera? Come on, OK, you got me, ha ha, very funny, didn’t see it coming. Ashton, get your ass out here, you nut! You are awful, but I
love
you! Ashton? Guys? Guys??

“And her retarded fucking husband.”

I decide then and there that this Ron gentleman is the most fucked-up person I have ever met. Sure, I had some problems before coming here. I was a pothead. I was directionless. I was bored and uninspired. I was a part-time waiter. But this guy? He is like an amalgam of horror movie villains. Does his mother live in his attic? What’s wrong with her husband? Where does Debbie fit into this melodrama? A feeling of helpless dread takes me over. It’s fight-or-flight time, and since I’m a little fairy at heart, I decide to flee, back over to Julia’s, to unload my worries about being beaten to death with a prosthetic leg in my sleep—and to take solace in her well-stocked cabinets of English biscuits.

“It turns out,” I tell her as I make myself a cup of tea and arrange some McVities Digestives on a small plate, “that you were not far off with that fugitive comment. And it’s also possible, Ruth, that he’s a necromancer.”

Julia doesn’t blink. “Did you happen to see if he has any tattoos, like maybe a series of numbers or a gang symbol?”

I tell her that no, I hadn’t seen any tattoos, but that was probably because I’d been preoccupied with the prosthetic leg on the floor, the containers of booze that kept appearing from nowhere, and the fact that he only has one earlobe.

By the time I return a few hours later, Ron is well into his fourth or fifth tall beer and has downed about half of his bottle of Jack. He has somehow managed to pry Ewan away from the cocoon of his bedroom and is talking to him about his girlfriend and his mother and the prick and the baby, and Ewan looks as if he is questioning his very concept of reality. I retire to my room to read and try to get some sleep.

I fall asleep enumerating the various ways one might lose an earlobe. I wake up about an hour later to the sound of Mr. Faust banging around the apartment, cursing, throwing things around, and generally grumbling like Grendel. I get up and peek out my bedroom door. All I can see is his shadow moving along the hallway floor and the shadows of the things he is throwing (the TV remote, a magazine, some Tupperware).

I fall back asleep and awake later to an eerie silence. I get up and clamber out the door and down the hall to the kitchen. It’s strewn with beer cans, dirty dishes, cigarette butts, crumpled-up pieces of paper, and small puddles of Jack Daniels.