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.
# of times I’ve visited Takashimaya department store just to use their fancy, high-tech “Washlet” toilet: 3
# of train suicides that have made me late for work: 2
5
In which we learn that our hero’s rock star wet dreams can indeed come true-if he just stays asleep long enough.
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.