Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (9 page)

Among all the crap on the table I find a small letter that he’s scribbled to an unfortunate soul by the name of Debbie. It is written in the penmanship of a three-year-old, but I am able to make out its contents. He talks about his new roommates, saying about us that we’re “good guys, but I won’t be surprised if one of them has to kiss the sidewalk soon.” Cue maniacal laughter.

Hmm. Evil’s afoot. What is Ron Faust’s plan? Is he concocting a plot to get rid of us? Perhaps he’s considering making our rooms into fitness/meditation rooms. Ewan’s would work better for that, I think.

Since I’m now wide awake, I decide to sit down, have a piece of damn toast, and read the
Entertainment Weekly
a friend has sent me from home. I’m settling nicely into an article about Michael Jackson, who always makes me feel better about my life, when Ron comes back in and sits down with several more beers and a fifth of vodka. He asks what I’m reading, and I show him. When I stand up to put my dish in the sink, he picks up the magazine, scoffs, and says, “Do you really get off on this stuff?”

“Um…,” I mumble, not sure how to answer, “I just read it; I don’t touch myself or anything.”

He doesn’t really appreciate the joke.

“Well, I always read the articles in
Playboy
. They’re really good. Course, I look at the pictures, too.”

Gross.

Then he starts talking about this woman who’d bought his car a few weeks before he’d made the big move to Japan.

“She had a great stack, though not much of a face, I’ll tell you. It wouldn’t stop a clock, let’s put it that way.”

It’s very interesting to hear a man who is about as sexually appealing as a toilet seat talk about someone else’s lack of physical attractiveness. Kind of like hearing Tony Danza say that he’d broken up with a girl because she sounds stupid.

Ron starts warming up to me once he gets his tenth or eleventh drink in him. He asks if I want to share a Valium with him. He says we’re kindred spirits. I beg to differ and decline the offer, though I am
ve-heh-ry
tempted. Instead, I say my good nights and go back to bed.

In bed I wonder what Ron’s mother looks like. I wonder if their relationship has ever crossed any moral boundaries, and as I’m drifting off to sleep with the word “Debbie” dancing in my head, I jump awake, having had an epiphany that won’t be silenced. His mother and Debbie are the same person! And the husband is his stepfather! And he’d left the country because something terrible had happened that he’d needed to escape from! He got his mom pregnant! I have it! It all makes sense now!
Gross!

Having had such a monumental breakthrough, I have trouble falling back asleep. I toss and turn for several hours, listening to Ron curse and burp and piss and yell throughout the apartment. The sun rises and I hear him cursing to himself at the front door right outside my room. He opens the door, and I can hear him throwing things out and over the balcony into the garden below.

It is then that the screw turns, and, the sleep deprivation allowing my polite Southern façade to crack, I bolt out of bed, throw open the door, and shriek, “What the fuck are you doing?!!”

I look down at the area where our shoes had once lain just inside the door. They’re all gone, except for one of my sneakers that he still has in his hand, poised to toss. Taken off guard, he turns to me and starts fumbling for an explanation, but since in the past five hours he has ingested innumerable beers, a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, a Valium, and an ocean of vodka, an answer isn’t forthcoming.

I storm out the door onto the balcony and look over the railing. There, four stories down, is a wonderland of footwear tossed away like so much rubbish.

I turn back and look at Ron, my nostrils flaring, my eyes surely bulging. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking stuff, do you understand me? Don’t you fucking ever fucking touch my fucking stuff!”

I run down the stairs, stumble into the garden, and start picking up all the shoes and carrying them up to the apartment. It takes me two trips, which gives me a good chunk of time to get even angrier. When I’ve retrieved all the shoes and brought them back up, I stand at the threshold of the front door and glare at Ron, leaning against the wall in the hallway looking confused. I am ready to use the “F” word some more.

“You fucking drunk insane fucking idiot, what’s your fucking problem?!!”

Meanwhile, Ewan has finally come out of his room and started being my yes-man, punctuating my railings (“You need to fucking dry out! Fucking shit fuck!”) with the occasional sober “exactly” or “that’s absolutely right.”

It turns out that Ron, in his profound delirium, thought Ewan and I were playing a cruel joke on him. He couldn’t find his leg on the floor and naturally jumped to the conclusion that we’d thrown it over the balcony.

I ask him why the fuck he fucking thought that fucked-up shit, and he says, “Because of the argument.”

“What fucking argument?” I ask with petulant exasperation. “What are you fucking talking fucking about?!”

He must have interpreted our conversation in the kitchen earlier—the one in which he’d offered me a Valium and I’d politely declined—as an epic struggle between opposing forces that had ended in a vengeful prank. I should have just taken the damn pill. (It’s not like me to dismiss offers like that out of hand.)

I take advantage of the fact that he’s sorry and prostrate, and I send him to his room with no more vodka.

“Go to fucking bed!” I command him. Still confused and very, very drunk, he sheepishly obeys and limps to his room.

I’m awake for good now. Ewan and I have a cup of tea in the kitchen after cleaning up the remnants of the past eight or so hours and try to think of what to do. Meanwhile, Ron is in his room snoring like a hacksaw. Then, of course, he starts talking—screaming, really—in his sleep. At one point I hear him shout, “Hey, fatty!” but since neither Ewan nor I can generally be described as such, I figure he’s safely asleep and dreaming of Debbie/his mother.

Ewan and I can’t figure out how he had gotten hired by MOBA. Yes, they hire some idiots, but how had Ron stayed sober long enough to get through the interview? Had he not made a bad impression when he’d creamed his coffee with whiskey and then wet his pants?

I spend the whole day at work telling everyone about what happened and worrying about what I will find when I return home. Will he be selling all my CDs for a hundred yen by the side of the road? Will he have turned the refrigerator into a medicine cabinet for his many pharmaceuticals? (Actually, that might be nice.) Will he have killed, crushed into powder, and then snorted poor Ewan?

How could this have happened? Is MOBA so desperate for teachers that they’ve resorted to raiding American rehab clinics, luring the conscripts out with the promise of limitless Absolut and tonics? It’s true, the English conversation school industry in Japan is one of the most fiercely competitive in the country. On trains, magazines, television, newspapers, and billboards everywhere, advertisements for language schools abound. Even celebrities, always up for making a quick buck in the lucrative Japanese market, get in on the fun, allowing their images to be used to convince the Japanese public to say screw it, get a second mortgage, and sign up for some English lessons. Which means you have the baffling phenomenon of Celine Dion’s face on an Aeon English School poster beckoning people to come to Aeon and learn to speak English like an overwrought French Canadian.

I understand the need for teachers to meet the demand of an English-starved public. In Japanese grade schools, kids learn English reading and grammar starting in junior high. But since most English teachers don’t speak English, they are ill-equipped to prepare their students for any real-world English-speaking scenario. So a handsome student named Tatsuya can graduate from a Japanese high school, walk right up to a native English speaker named Cheryl in a dimly lit bar, say something as basic as “I can buy you any drink?” in order to woo her, and because Tatsuya’s pronunciation is so horrendous, Cheryl will promptly hold up her hand and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.” Their relationship will end at roughly the same time it started. Very sad.

The tragedy of Cheryl and Tatsuya is why native English speakers are a hot commodity here, and all of the competing language schools understandably need a constant influx of teachers from America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in order to meet the demand. But I’m old-fashioned, I guess. I think prospective teachers should be able to do more than present a valid passport and pass the height requirement. They should at least have to pass a breathalyzer.

I call the accommodations department at the head office and talk to Kevin, the man in charge, who thankfully has already spoken to Ewan, so I don’t have to start from the beginning. He apologizes and says that there must have been a mistake.

“We’ll try to get him out of the apartment as soon as possible, but since it’s the weekend, you know, it’s a little difficult to arrange these things.”

“Oh,
please
,” I say. “Please please
please
get him out of there.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He calls me later and says that they won’t be able to move him until Monday night—three days hence!—but that they will definitely be moving him then. He offers me a pearl of advice.

“You and Ron should just attempt to stay out of each other’s way until then, if at all possible.”

Well, that sure ruins my dinner plans. Thankfully, Kevin has spoken to Ron and assures me that he is very sorry and has agreed not to come near us.

When work is over, I prepare myself to return home, with anxiety in my heart and, thanks to my friend and colleague Donna who has a boyfriend at Yokosuka base, a mild sedative in my belly.

Mamta, a teacher from Australia who lives directly below me, says she’ll go home with me.

“I know you don’t want to be alone with the one-legged man,” she says.

When we arrive, Ewan is there, alive and well, but Ron isn’t. We all sit down and have some tea and watch a Discovery Channel program called
Travelers
that sends young, wide-eyed Americans to exotic places so they can say things like, “I just love shopping in another culture!” We all agree that Ron is a better roommate than any of the retards on the show would be.

To prove our point, a skinny white girl from Ohio named Kim tries on an African head wrap at a street market and says, “Oh, this is
totally
me!” I start desperately wishing Ron would come back and put us all out of our misery. Right on cue, Mamta looks down the hall at the door and says, “Um, Tim? Yeah, the police are here.”

I stand up and walk to the edge of the hallway leading to the door. Just outside it stand two policemen, leaning in and saying to me, “Your friend? Your friend?” while pointing to—you guessed it—Ron. Not surprisingly, he is drunk as a wombat. I speak to the policemen in my rough Japanese, and they explain, with the help of hand signals and mimicry, that they’d found him on the bridge down the road stumbling and generally looking like a scary foreigner. I thank the officers and apologize, going against my gut instinct to fall to my knees and offer them money if they will just stay the night. They leave Ron propped up against the wall just inside the door, and I go back to the kitchen.

Ron stands in the hallway for some time, leaning against the wall so as to remain more or less vertical. I slump down into a chair at the table and exchange unsure looks with Mamta and Ewan.

“I suppose it’s good he didn’t accidentally fall into the river,” Mamta offers, and we all nod in agreement before changing our minds and sheepishly shaking our heads in embarrassed disappointment.

A growling sound comes from the hallway, followed by the words “Can’t we talk about this?”

I hear him take a few steps toward the kitchen and say, in a more menacing tone, “Where’s that guy who thinks he’s better than everyone else?”

“Who’s
that
?” I wonder aloud before realizing he’s talking about me. I think this evaluation of my character is completely unfair. Sure, I am most definitely better than certain people, like most of the people I went to middle school with, all the gorgeous guys who have ever ignored me, and anyone who has ever told me I look like Bert from
Sesame Street
. But I don’t argue. Nor do I raise my hand and say, “Over here!”

I stand and walk over to the kitchen drawers. “There you are,” he says. Meanwhile, I start pulling all the cutlery out of the drawers to hide in my room.

Finally he makes it to the kitchen, launching into a litany of good deeds that he’s performed today.

“I did all the dishes.” I look at the drying rack. He’s washed two soupspoons and a rice bowl.

“See how I washed all the dishtowels and hung ’em up?” he adds, pointing to the balcony. I go out to the balcony and find hanging two formerly white towels covered with big brown blotches and smelling like Ron’s breath had the night before. He must have wiped up the Jack Daniels puddles with them, I figure.

“And I took out that big trash bag.”

“Where did you take it?” I ask him.

He looks uncomfortable and says nothing.

On a hunch I look down to the street and see the bag slumped against some shrubbery, a milk carton sticking out and leaking droplets onto the greenery.

“Great,” I say, coming back inside and taking a seat at the table. “Thanks.”

He twitches and tilts his head, detecting a lack of authentic appreciation. Then he looks at me the way a person looks when he’s about to snap another person’s neck, gets in my face, and says, doing a spot-on imitation of Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
, “You wanna live here? I just bought this building. And I ain’t leaving.”

He steps back and lifts his arms and shoulders into a shrug.

“Guess
you’ll
have to.”

“You, um, bought the AF Building, Ron?” I ask.