tim (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} pyramid108) wrote,@ 2003-08-22 06:07:00 |
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i remember where i got my love ／ 愛をもらった場所覚えてるよ
This is the last entry in this journal. The journal will not be deleted. It will remain here. I'll be deleting a few entries from it in due time -- the stupid, short ones -- and keep only the posts that are significant to the, uh, "story."
For now, enjoy the final entry, if you can. It's long. That's about all I can say.
I just finished taking a cold shower. It was the first time I tried to do that in a time. It was a nice thing to do, on top of many not-so-nice things to do.
I've been thinking for a while, about transcription, mistranslation, and misinterpretation. That all human communication is, indeed, a string of lies, and that one human can't even trust himself to trust another human properly.
I'm also in the market for some porn. Everyone who looks up porn has some tips. I'm on DSL right now; I figure, that's what people do with DSL -- download porn. Someone tell me about where to find some porn. Own up -- wherever it is you get your porn, give away the secret.
I'll give away mine, too -- I don't even use it anymore.
I thought a little bit in the shower about love. So I figure I'm going to write about love. Someone read this. I know I have people all over the world reading what I write, and some of you are Japanese, so I'm going to put in passages I like about love, in Japanese, and then translate them. Mistranslations and/or embellishments will appear in brackets.
**
How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?
How can I give love when I just don't know how to give?
How can I give love when love is something I ain't never had?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
You know, life can be long
And you've got to be so strong
And the world she is so tough
Sometimes I feel I've had enough
--John Lennon, "How?"
**
You know, I feel like this is one of the few songs on earth, in English, that I might have written. This and "Norwegian Wood." Mostly because of the lack of negative particles.
"How?" is something I would have written in high school. "Norwegian Wood" is something I would have written in college.
This is something I'd write now, about a child:
***
子供の言葉：
私は、私の愛は信じるものと言ます。私の愛は私に下ったものです。生まれたとき下って、大
***
A child's words:
Love is something I believe in. My love is something that was given to me. It was given to me when I was born, and I will hold [onto] it until [long after] I become an adult. I can't say "I'll hold [onto] it until I die." Because I do not [yet] know death, I cannot say this. There are many things I do not yet understand. Like love.
*****
The Oprah you see in your non-Chicago cities is the Oprah that airs in Chicago at eleven-thirty in the evening. It was airing just after Big Joe went to bed. I was sitting on the makeshift futon on the floor, looking at my piles of black socks, fingering the perfect Shelby knot still in place around my neck. My god, I became an expert in tying a tie, today. Tonight, I watched Oprah. The topic was the rise of masturbation in young teens. A woman was shocked to find, in her daughter's room, a vibrator. Her daughter was fourteen years old. The daughter also appears on the show. She has braces, making her mouth metal like an old black Chicago beggar's, except she's young, and pretty, like a apricot-skinned flower.
In the shower, I honestly tried to masturbate. I couldn't. It's not that I don't have the power within me; I just couldn't do it. Not with all the bad things that happened today, climaxing with me watching "Will and Grace" in a giant sofa in a giant Chicago office building's corporate break room. I ate a burrito Big Joe had racked up on his company expense account. It was alright. I could hardly taste it. I turned on "Will and Grace" after the first fifteen minutes of Robert DeNiro's directorial debut-ish piece A Bronx Tale struck me as too voice-overed.
I went to check my email on Big Joe's office computer, only to find that I'd left my Outlook Express open at his house, and therefore wouldn't be receiving any email.
I sat in front of the TV, alone, and wondered.
To my right was a wall of windows. Looking out, twenty-something floors down, Chicago sparkled like a translucent city beneath a front-lit reflection.
Haruki Murakami says in an interview that one night, a "joyous" thing occurred: he heard a "little voice" -- a "whisper" -- telling him to start writing a novel. He was 29. He wrote a novel. It wasn't great. He wrote another, and another.
I don't have voices telling me to do anything.
I have voices now, and they're my own, and they're telling me to say, yes, I've masturbated in other people's showers before. I can't say I'm sorry. I can't say I'm not sorry, either. The act is what it is. It's something that comes up.
I can't very well say I'm ashamed of urinating in other people's toilets, can I? I can't say I'm ashamed of defecating in their toilets, either.
It's something that comes up.
If I've masturbated in your shower, and you have some proof: well, sorry. It is, as I have said, simply something that happens. You're welcome to do it in mine, whenever you want. Just don't announce it beforehand, and we'll be okay.
*******
8/19/2003:
今クランベリージュース飲んでる。苦味だ。あの苦味好きじゃないけど飲む。クランベリ
俺が書いたことより信じやすい、あのビンに書いてあることも。
*******
8/19/2003:
"Right now, I'm drinking cranberry juice. It has a bitter taste. I don't like that bitter taste, yet, I drink it, because cranberry juice is good for the health of the urinary tract. It says so on the damned bottle. In becoming an "adult," I've come to believe things that are written on bottles. It's a shame. It's a little bored, that "adult" habit of believing things that are written on bottles.
"Things written on bottles are so much easier to believe than even the things I write."
*******
Actually, I was almost kind of ashamed of urinating in someone's toilet, today. It was Big Joe's toilet. I tried to urinate, and it wouldn't come out.
See, for a few days, I've been drinking cranberry juice. Three times, someone mentioned something about the cranberry juice, when I told them about it.
"You got a kidney stone, or something?"
Big Joe asked me, on the phone yesterday, when I told him I was coming up to Chicago, and that his mom had indeed dropped off his green card like she'd said she would, "What, you passing a kidney stone?"
This was all fun and funny -- until around nine this morning, when my Brita-blest clear urine turned violently, painfully, numbfully red for a split second, then yellow as popcorn salt.
Something pinged against the toilet porcelain.
I . . . don't feel any pain in my groin anymore.
For the moment.
At the moment, what with the site of bloody urine disturbing me violently, I took this to be a bad omen. It turns out now that it might not be so bad.
Maybe not. It's still a little too early to tell. It still kind of hurts. And I can't seem to urinate in a single stream too efficiently. I'll work on it, I imagine. At some long, long, far off time, when it's probably gone and healed itself.
} { } {
It was about a hundred and three in Chicago today, and a hundred and ninety in a suit. I managed. It kind of cool in here, now, at 2:04AM. I'm providing sideways advice and halfhearted graphic designs to the efforts to launch the insert credit's first finest hour. The goal of my halfhearted graphic designs is to spur those who would rather use no graphics at all to think of something better. They didn't exactly think of something too remarkably better. They thought of "abstract" -- solid colors. Oh, well, they're good people, at least. You can't take that away from them -- or can you?
What, really, can you take away from a person, in the nitrogen-cycle-sense?
*************
少年の言葉：
僕は、僕の愛は欲望の真っ暗な真ん中に本当に生きてるものだと言ってるんだ。僕の愛が
*************
A young man's words:
I say my love is something that exists in the pitch-dark dead center of my [lust]. My love is an angered-ish feeling. My love is not something I received from my parents[;] it has been living deep within the very dark center of me since a time I cannot remember. When I die, this dark love of mine dies with me.
*****************
Among the last lines of The Death of Ivan Ilyich:
"Death is finished. There is no more death."
I like the way it sounds in Japanese. I once flipped through to the end of a Japanese translation:
「死が終わってしまった。これから死が無いだ。」
("Shi ga owatteshimatta. Korekara shiga nainda.")
トルストイの「イヴァンイリイッチの死」より
I like the way it sounds when you substitute "Ai" ("Love") for "Shi" ("Death").
「愛が終わってしまった。これから愛が無いんだ。」
"Love is finished. There is no more love."
{}][{}
Does it have to die with me, though?
I'm not sure.
If my love is something that exists deep, deep in the dead center of my lust, of the reactor that generates my goal-orientation, whether those goals are fame, fortune, or a fuck, they're my goals, and as long as someone remembers someone who remembers them, whether they're accomplished or not, my love is somewhere encoded within them.
Deep, deep, deep inside me, and the words I say, it's there. Anyone who hasn't seen it until now -- anyone who doesn't see it now -- they don't see it because they don't need to see it.
These are hardly words you'll tell your grandchildren.
These are words you'll tell yourself you told yourself.
*****************
I remember where I got my love. I remember it very clearly. It was a day I'd eaten graham crackers in kindergarten. I wasn't particularly hungry for them. I wanted to go home. Kindergarten was loud. Outside my house for the first time in my only five-years-progressed life, my ears were now fully realizing how horribly sensitive they are.
I talk about them all the time. Always, you hear about my "Hell Ears" like it's some kind of gimmick. Well, in a way -- it is. In another, darker way, it's not.
My Hell Ears are not enjoyable. I can hear cars from five street blocks away. I can hear Big Joe's air-conditioner and his breathing over my 100-decibel music, and someone's walking a dog -- at four in the morning?
Kindergarten made me sit in the corner, and cry. I didn't like being in kindergarten. Everyone was so noisy. I didn't know yet that they weren't as noisy at I'd thought they were.
At that time, I loved my mother like a young child does. She said she loved me, and I don't doubt that she did. I stopped loving her that way quickly, and slowly, at the same time. That doesn't mean I stopped loving her altogether. In the mass of my love, there's a piece that remembers her like it's supposed to. It's just smaller, and a different color, so I can still remember it.
I lost the nature of that love when I made my own.
I made my own while sitting at a low table in a kindergarten class near Newark, Delaware. It was a low place, and bright in illumination, and full of white people who looked like me.
There was a Chinese girl who sat far on the other side of class. Her name was "Chung." That's all I knew. I never talked to her. I ended up moving two weeks after I saw her.
When people ask where my fascination with Asia began, I always tell some lie or another. Or I say I don't remember. Here's a tip: when you're dealing with the me who calls himself "Tim Rogers," realize that when I say "I don't remember," it means don't want to talk about it, or I just don't want to talk to you, personally.
The truth is, I liked Asia because of this girl. I came to want to know more about her. I said before that I never had a "girls are icky" phase. Well, whatever "girls are icky" phase might have at some point spawned in me was miscarried that day I saw that Chinese girl for the first time.
She was so quiet. She was sitting in the corner, crying quietly, alone.
The teacher kept trying to talk to her, real soothing-like. The teacher, a black-haired white woman named Mrs. Newman, kept bending down and touching Chung's back. The Chinese girl kept crying, the beginning of my woman in the window, hands on her face, something I still see today and weep when I can't remember anything else, when I think of precisely how much of nothing one person -- myself all-included -- can ever become.
Where is she, today? Something tells me she's dead. She most likely has to be.
When I saw her, it struck me like that: this girl won't be alive when I'm old enough to wonder where she is. She's my love, love in a five-year-old girl. She's my death, both the beginning and the ending of it. From a long time ago, before I was able to question it, to now after her death, she's been weeping at the dead center of my lust. She is the reason I can never have children, and I can't remove her except with my own death. It's a cold notion. I don't entirely like it. I can't get rid of it, however.
That's where my lust came from. My love is inside my lust, and my lust is inside my love. It can't end even with my own death.
*
Here's where it becomes more concrete. Here's where, if this were fiction, you'd accuse me of "overkill." It's not fiction, however. It's me talking honestly. I'm not afraid to do that, anymore, not about this.
(Oh, shit -- I just touched my right glasses lens. I now have a . . . smudge. Forgive me for typing with my right eye closed.)
The girl never stopped crying, that day. It was fourteen days before my family moved to Kansas. I wouldn't see the girl too much after that. Though I'd remember her name even until now, I wouldn't use it in my mind, anymore, after that day. Her name was filed somewhere outside her body and her soul and her little lavender dress and her butterfly barrette.
Her mother came to the class. The teacher didn't know what to do with the girl who was crying without making a sound, at snack time. She might or might not have had some issue with the graham crackers. They were golden. I myself couldn't really stomach them, back then. I ate, anyway, and drank my apple juice, which I still drink now.
Her food and drink was untouched. It was a little after ten in the morning. That's when snack time was.
**
I'm . . . shaking as I type this.
**
Her mother showed up, to escort the girl out of class. Whenever the girl next came back to class, always in a pastel little dress with some ornament in her straight black hair, she was silent. She never spoke, for the thirteen days I was in her presence from across a classroom.
When her mother came into the room, the girl was quiet.
My god, her mother was beautiful. It was the first time I'd ever seen something so beautiful. She was in overalls, and was wearing a man's gold watch. Her hair was pulled back in a long braided ponytail. Where she'd come from to pick up her daughter, I don't know.
Her mother couldn't have been any older than my mother. She might have been twenty-seven, or twenty-eight. The mother nodded at the teacher, while the girl watched them, her lips closed. When at last the mother and the teacher were done talking, the mother took the girl by the hand, and she began to cry again. Some few feet before the girl and her mother reached the classroom door, the mother let go of the girl's hand.
I don't imagine I could understand what I was seeing. Or maybe I could, in the same way we all understand anything that can be understood.
Looking at her filled me with a feeling like I had to go to the bathroom, except I didn't have to go to the bathroom.
I think that's when my kidney stone began to form.
(Or . . . not.)
The best way I can describe this to someone close to me is to say that I wanted that woman as my mother, and I wanted her to make me cry.
Or you could take the blunt route, and say that I, at five years old, wanted to have violent, submissive sex with that woman.
Long, long ago, and far, far away, this happened. And it still gets me now. A woman some six times my age had aroused me while I was eating graham crackers.
And today I passed a kidney stone that might not have been a kidney stone. It hurt like nothing has ever hurt me before. I lived through it.
****()****
私はきっと悲しみの
真ん中あたりで泣いている
私はきっと喜びの
真っただ中で笑うんだ
あー この旅は
気楽な帰り道
のたれ死んだ所で
本当のふるさと
あー そうなのか
そういう事なのか
ぴりーぴりー
ナビゲーターは魂だ
--ブルーハーツの「ナビゲーター」より
****()****
Watashi wa kitto kanashimino
Mannaka Atari de naiteiru
Watashi wa kitto yorokobino
Mattada nakade waraunda
Aa-aa, kono tabi wa
Kirakuna kaerimichi
Notarejinda tokorode
Hontouno furusato
aa-aa, sounanoka?
Souiukotonanoka?
--The Blue Hearts, "Navigator"
[Clearly, in the dead center of my sadness, I am crying. Clearly, at the height of my happiness, I'll laugh.
[I'm truly at ease on this journey. I'm at ease because I'm always on my way home. My home: is any place I can die along the side of the road. That's my true home. That's how it is. Isn't that how it is?
[I'm adrift upon the sea, always on my way home; my navigator is my soul.]
"If I die at the side of the road, that's my true home."
"Life is a journey home."
"My navigator is my soul."
"If I die in the middle of the road, that's my true home."
"Life is about going home."
"At the end of the journey lies home."
"Home is at the end of the road."
"Home is out, adrift, across the sea."
"When in the middle of a sad time, you're crying. When happiness is at its height, you will laugh."
"When in the middle of a sad time, you're crying. When happiness is at its height, you will laugh."
"You're coming home."
"You're dying."
So am I.
"My home is wherever I can comfortably die."
"I will die weary."
"You will die weary, too."
"Everyone dies weary, at the side of the road."
*
There are things in there no one said.
<>><<>><<>><
I did, a few times, sleep with older women. It's the thing I always wanted to do. A few times with a 32-year-old Japanese woman. Just once, it was with a Chinese woman in her late thirties. Once or twice, it was with a 43-year-old Japanese woman. The last time, it was with a woman whose age and nationality I could not discern -- I think she might have been Thai -- who I met at a bookstore. She was most likely in her mid to late forties. "Forty-seven" seems like a good number -- a prime, and a magic one, at that -- so we'll go with it. Just once, with a forty-seven-year-old woman. Well, it was actually a few times, if you catch my meaning. More than a few times, actually.
No, I'm not bragging, honest. I'm just reminding myself of the things I've done, as a person ought to be allowed to do.
My ex-girlfriend, when I finally told her about this -- not the forty-seven-year-old; the other two -- got angry. It was after we'd broken up. We were in Chicago for something or other related to a job interview. I was wearing a suit, like I was today. It was the day after my birthday -- that is to say, my younger brother's birthday.
We were eating pizza at Gino's East in Chicago. It was good pizza. How we got on the topic of sex with older women, I don't remember.
(Or do I?)
Anyway, my ex-girlfriend -- Korean, two years my junior -- pounded her fist on the table, rattling silverware and cast-iron pans, rattling the very checked tablecloth and the very smell of pesto in the air. A lot of customers quieted down with the rattle, and thanks to their quieting down, they all heard what she had to say. I had tried to stress the Chinese woman; her being not Japanese spared me half an argument and another description of how Japanese soldiers had raped Korean women during World War II.
"You know? You know what that is? You know what they call . . . this?"
She was stuttering. Her speech had been horrified into an internet shorthand/Konglish hybrid.
"Wh-what?" I asked her, half-ashamed that she'd try to stab me.
"They call this a MOTHERFUCKER!!"
With two exclamation points, she said it. My Hell Ears detected dozens of jaws dropping.
I tried to defend myself, and she wouldn't hear it. A white guy fucking a Chinese woman -- Chinese women are filthy, you know -- is one thing. A white guy fucking a Chinese woman more than twice his age? What the fuck is wrong with that?
I had to explain: nothing is wrong with it. It's what I wanted to do. It happened for a true reason. I willed it to happen. I wanted it. It was the most I could want.
)()()()(
Yet, at the same time, deeper down, there is indeed something wrong with me. Something deep, and dark.
I've described it before. I can't help it. I describe it to some people in short bursts.
I can't control my mind. Sometimes I don't know when beginnings are closer than endings, or endings are closer to beginnings.
I have to tell this to someone:
I hear things. Lots, and lots, and lots of things. I hear things all day long. I hear telephones ringing. I hear dogs barking. I hear scorpions scuttling on wooden floors. I hear fire engines when they're not really there. I don't know when things are there and when things aren't.
Most of the time, I can't sleep because of the things I hear.
I can't control my ears.
Surely, somewhere, right now, a scorpion is scraping its pointed little feet against a dry wooden floor. If I think I'm hearing it, well -- it must be happening somewhere, right? Yet, I'm not hearing it for real.
I've managed to live a fairly decent life this way. I've managed to not die. Last night, in Dunkin Donuts, I managed to get a blonde woman high on both life and marijuana to pay for my dozen of mixed donuts.
I ate two, and then got diarrhea. Now, I think I'm constipated. I've never been constipated before, so how the hell would I know?
I'm used to excessive excretion, what with my inguinal hernia. That's not the point I'm trying to make, however.
It's sounds, most pointedly sounds that aren't there.
I talk to people constantly, when they're not there. I talk without moving my lips. It's like I'm rehearsing conversations that may or may not ever happen.
I think a lot of people do this.
I used to do it constantly. It was always with one particular person that I talked. Lately, I haven't been talking to anyone.
---
This isn't about separating real from unreal. Leave that to science-fiction.
---
This is about my being selfish or not selfish, and how I ended up not selfish. It has to do with my love -- the dark one, the one that's deep inside.
I was at a bookstore one day, when I met that Thai woman. I went to her house and had sex with her many, many times. Me, a person who has never taken drugs or smoked a cigarette or drunk alcohol, sometimes loses memories for a short span of time. I guess it's like a computer slowing down when too much shit is stored on its hard drive.
I lost the memory of that Thai woman for a long time. I still don't know where it went. I remember where it was when it came back, however.
Here's the story of how I lost my selfishness.
First, a preface.
I was in Las Vegas one night. Big Joe was in a club. He'd paid fifty dollars to enter. I sat at a bar in the Bellagio, striking matches, blowing them out, drinking iced water, and looking around. I was dressed up pretty nice, in a cowboy jacket and jeans and a shirt the color of a Dr. Pepper can. And a black tie.
I saw a woman sitting before a row of slot machines. She was Japanese. She was wearing a long tan trench coat that must have had forty buckles down it. She had big black sunglasses on her face, and she was smoking a cigarette and playing the slot machine.
I managed to talk to her after kind of staring for an hour. She told me she came to Vegas once every two weeks, on "business." She only stayed two days at a time. Sometimes the weekend, sometimes not. She played the slot machines all night, because she didn't want to bother to adjust to the time zone difference. She had tempered herself into the equilibrium. She was allowed by time to exist in two places at once. She was two people at once.
She was a miracle of people-physics; like a cylindrical truck with a hole a person-length wide was speeding at just the right speed as she fell at exactly the right speed to land on her feet without collision.
She bought me a Sprite.
Second, a foreword.
A woman at the airport in San Jose bought me a Dr. Pepper because I was wearing Japanese sandals, and was able to say I'd just gotten back from Japan, and meant it.
Third, and introduction.
I really, honestly do like some things just because they're different from me. I think everyone does this, in some regard.
The story -- or, "i remember where i got my love".
I'd gone nine days without food or sleep in Tokyo. My head was caving in. I walked from Saitama to Ikebukuro, and then ended up somehow in Sugamo, staring at a guy who was reciting Buddhist sutras at a temple. I burned some incense, and cried at the smoke. I stared at bowls of plastic tempura in a window.
Nine days. People tell me this is impossible. It's not. I know it's not, because I lived it.
For nine days, I drank cheap coffee at internet cafes. I'd pay the 100 yen first-hour fee, and drank six or seven cups of coffee standing up.
It was a dark time. I don't remember more than most of it, and that's the truth for once.
I ended up in Sugamo Station a little before ten in the morning on a Tuesday.
I was wearing a pair of jeans. I didn't know where I'd gotten them. I was crying at a display of bread rolls in a bakery window.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, very gently, like a cool breeze, like a John Lennon song.
"Can you swim?" a girl who tried to be many things, and was still a girl, had asked me, in an email, two weeks earlier. She followed this question by saying that she was listening to John Lennon's "How?" while getting ready to lay down and die. She was getting sleepy.
"I'd like to swim with you. So can you swim? Let me know in your reply."
I never answered her question. She didn't have the right to ask it.
Standing behind me as I stood before the bakery window was a Japanese woman. She was in her mid-forties. She looked Thai. She had a tight, youthful face, and her long coat and sweatpants concealed what I later learned was a marathon runner's body.
"Are you crying?"
She was speaking English.
"No."
It was the truth. Or was it?
She made excuses for speaking English so presumptuously.
"It's alright."
"My English is so bad."
"No, it's not." It was the truth. I'm honest when nine days hungry. It's almost like a high, that kind of food-lacking.
"I worked at a bank in Tokyo. An international bank."
(Aside: Haruki Murakami says he hated running his own jazz club in Tokyo, because he had to deal with people. His parents hated him for refusing to take a company job. Now, he has an office in Tokyo, where he goes to be alone, and write. That's nice. He's . . . normal, though. He doesn't have any problems. It's a bit inspirational to know when in the middle of telling a story like this.)
"Oh. Your English is really, really good." I wasn't exaggerating.
"Why are you sad?" she asked me.
"I'm hungry," I said, in the mood for honesty.
In fifteen minutes' time, we were walking down the road into deep Sugamo, stopping at stores. She bought me a pair of 100-yen wool gloves at a 100-yen shop. She bought me a pair of house slippers -- if I wore them instead of regular socks, my feet wouldn't get so cold. She bought me a hot can of tea. It hurt to drink it. I told her I'd lost my home and my friend and my everything. We passed by a Tendon Tenya tempura shop, and she asked if I wanted to eat there. I imagined the smoky taste of the sticky donburi sauce on the top of the roof of my mouth, and I gagged, almost. I said, no. My stomach felt weak. She suggested udon, and I didn't refuse.
Rather than take me to an udon shop, she took me to a supermarket. She bought a large package of noodles. She bought a lot of things. She bought me a tall bottle of Aquarius sports drink, which, high in electrolytes, would be good in a food-deprived stomach and a nutrient-deprived body. I was spotting out. My eyes were hazy. Footsteps felt like far-away electricity ticking beneath the rocky feet of crows on a power line in a desert somewhere. She bought a box of cookies. She bought a thick package of tofu.
Then she took me to her home. She didn't have furniture in her home. It was a half-sized, tiny Japanese apartment. It was smaller than the ones I'd seen some foreigners living in. The floor was brown, and wood.
Rather than a bed, she had an air-mattress. I was hazy, and immobile, when I sat on it. She used an electric pump to pump it up. On the walls were pictures of Bob Marley and Jim Morrison. There was an ashy smell like peanut butter in the air. She told me she'd been living there since she quit her job. She's been so bored up here, alone, lately.
Later, I thought it was the Thai woman from years before who'd had an air-mattress. It wasn't. She didn't have an air-mattress. It was silly. The Thai woman, I realized today, while walking well out of my way to guide a white woman who took up the wrong line of work to a train station in a city that is not hers -- nor mine -- lived in a high-ceilinged house with a big, puffy bed that made no sounds.
It was with this Japanese woman, whose name I never learned, that I sat on this air-mattress, which kept deflating, and watched Bob Sapp on television. She smoked a cigarette and saw that I kept down a cup of tea. Then she went to make udon.
She put out her cigarette in a jar like you'd use to keep pennies. She made my udon noodles like she was putting on a sweater. She was already wearing a sweater -- big, and purple, and thready. Her hair was up in a ponytail. Her hair was kinky and curly. She wasn't unattractive at all. With the back of my head touching the inch-thick wall behind the air-mattress, I studied this woman's sweatpants. I could see the curve of her ass. She wasn't wearing underwear, or else she was wearing a thong. She made the udon boredly, putting sweater after sweater of steam into the air. She didn't turn on the vent. The wet smell made me hot. I sighed, and fell asleep with my back against the wall, as The Pink Panther -- the movie -- came on television.
The woman had brought a tray to me, in time. She put a big flat spoon and a pair of wooden chopsticks into the udon. She made me another cup of tea. She saw that I drank it. I said I wanted something cold. She gave me some of the sports drink. I ate one noodle, with chopsticks. It was good -- she'd made it vegetarian, for me, and it tasted boiled in soy sauce -- and the hard tofu was better. I took three bites of a tofu cake. Then a fourth. My hand was shaking. My body had grown so warm inside that I was freezing cold.
All this, from what? I was thinking. What the hell is this? I did this to myself. I'm not in a war. I'm not fighting for any cause. I'm just me, down on my luck, hot and cold, and I feel like I'm going to die.
I'd been wandering shopping arcades and department stores for so long I didn't know the interior of an apartment when I saw one. I was hearing corporate jingles on a three-second loop. I was alone.
The Japanese woman was spoon-feeding me udon.
"You're a mess," she kept saying, in Japanese. "You need some rest. You need to eat this."
The first feeling I'd felt in a long time came over me. I tipped and swerved to my feet, and found the bathroom. I vomited chunks of tofu and ramen into her toilet. I was reverse hungry when I collapsed on the air-mattress again.
The Pink Panther was still on as she was feeding me azuki red-bean-paste ice cream with a tea spoon. At one point, she went outside, and came back with more ice cream. The first carton had been freezer-burned, and probably wasn't too good for my health.
By four in the afternoon, I ate three of the now-cold udon noodles, and then vomited again. Her bathroom smelled like cherry air-freshener and dirty orange juice by the time I was done.
I sat on the mattress again, now fully recharged. Vomiting can make you feel better sometimes; in the case of having not eaten for nine days -- longer than I hope to not eat again -- it takes two vomits, I wager.
By the second vomit, the little wooden apartment was dark. Some blue light cut in through the balcony curtains. The television set made everything glow.
She turned down the television volume, and smoked another cigarette, and talked to me. I talked to her, and drank some hot tea. I was warming up.
At one point, she put her head on my shoulder. I didn't move. I froze. At another point, when her cigarettes were put away, she laid her hand gently on my crotch.
"Maybe you'd feel better if we had sex?" she said, in English. "I'll be on top. You don't have to do anything. I'll be slow."
I'd be lying if I said that didn't do something for me.
I'd be lying if I said it didn't do two things for me.
I immediately burst out into tears, and fell over onto my side, away from her, on the mattress. She sat there and looked at me, with shame.
I remember the way she said it: "I'll be slow." Like reciting a nursery rhyme.
"I'm sorry," she said, again and again. Eventually, I gave up, and let her take me to a bar, where we sat for three hours, talking.
She ordered a pizza, and talked about her dead husband. She had given me some old gloves of his. She'd given me two pairs of gloves in one day. Today, I still have neither of them.
The cheese on the pizza didn't sit well with me.
Then she ordered mushrooms. My least favorite food on earth -- a whole plate of them. She ate one, and then picked up a mushroom with her chopsticks and brought it to my mouth. I ate it, and then I ate the rest of them, with my own chopsticks. It was like flesh ripped straight off the side of someone's heart.
She gave me a piece of paper with her email address on it, and five thousand yen, at the station. The station smelled like a vegetable market and cigarettes and cinnamon. The woman's lips were chapped white at this time. It was after seven in the evening.
I took her money and her email address.
She'd said, at the bar, in Japanese, "I'm going to give you my email address. When you get better, when you find out what's wrong with you, and fix it, maybe we can meet again?"
I knew I could never see her again. Under those circumstances, no one can meet her ever again.
"I'm so lonely," she said, at the bar. "No one will touch me. No one will let me touch them. I'm so old. I'm going to die, old and alone.
"I want someone to fuck me. I want someone to fuck me from behind. I want someone to fuck me in the ass. I want someone to eat my pussy. I don't care who. I want to suck someone's dick again. I don't care whose. Like I was a girl again. I need it. I've always needed it. I think I've never had it."
"Can I . . . kiss you?" she asked me, at the train station.
I couldn't be selfish. Someone who pulls in air and pure air, air and living air, from all around, waiting for a prize, stood before me. I made her less tired with my gestures, with my life, with a piece of my love.
I shook my head. Like a grateful gentleman, I kissed the back of her hand, and I got on the train, and I never saw her again. I spent some of her money on a meal of tempura the next morning, and then put the rest toward the first month's rent at the coffin I lived in for two months.
I wasn't selfish when I took that money. I was a promise she'd bought, that some day, someone might fix what's wrong with them, and come back to her, and love her deeply, and darkly, and until she was dead by the side of the road, in her true home.
Which is to say, if I have love for her, it's dark, and it's somewhere no one can touch. I can't ever see that woman who made me udon, ever again, and I'm not sad.
The dark young man inside my heart is saying: I should have fucked her, like she wanted.
The child behind me is asking, "Did the girl speak to anyone after you left?"
The adult before me is shaking his head. "Either she went on not talking forever, or she died."
My God, I couldn't go on if she lived to have friends. I couldn't live with myself, or with anyone else, if she ever made any friends and ever approached a normal life.
My love won't and can't grant her love of her own, and if she were still alive, she'd be grateful.
**
I'm saying these things, here, in public, because I'm done. I'm done trying to fit in. I won't do it anymore. If I accept a job at a Japanese 7-Eleven, though I may wear a uniform, I'm doing it on my own whim, and the manager, hopefully, will not be able to read this, much less find it.
Don't call me immature. I know maturity. I choose to be blind to it. This is who I am.
Today, I finished growing up.
I have decided to continue as what I am.
I am broken. I can never be fixed. I am broken for you. I can never be fixed for you. I am broken by myself. I can never be fixed by you.
I have remembered where I found my love.
It's right here:
***********
大人の言葉：
俺の愛は俺のものだ、と俺が言ってる。相手のものではない。俺の愛は俺だけのものだ。愛
***********
An adult's words:
I say, my love is mine. It does not belong to anyone else. My love is only mine. If the loved choose to love, that's okay; if they don't love back, that's okay. My love can not only not be stolen from me, it can also never be lost. My love is all mine, until the day I die.
*****************
My love is mine.
And I am yours.
(
Today was the second-worst day of my life, and yet, I've come up with an excellent T-shirt idea: a black shirt with white text that reads
I LOVE.
Period included. Maybe even a Japanese version?
"俺は愛する。"
Maybe black, with white design? Ripped-off sleeves? Someone make a shirt like this for me, someone with access to a shirt-machine. I'll wear it wherever I go. In winter, I'll wear it over something heavy.
)
I removed an article from insert credit last week. Rather, I had it removed. It was an article I'd written in November of 2002. I wanted it to be posted when it was at least three months old. This was done; the article was posted in April of 2003, upon my return from Japan. The article is now gone.
I let it stay on the website for four months. In those four months, other articles were written that referenced that article. When the article disappeared, it left holes.
I like holes in the internet as much as I like the idea that, if all the computers in the world are turned off, the internet will still, technically, "exist."
I like being inside a website with white text on black, and then clicking on a link, and suddenly seeing a black-text-on-white 404 error page. Where did the page go?
More than anything else, I like getting emails from readers who begin by complimenting me on my latest article, continue by referencing an article (not by me) which references the deleted article, and then asking where the deleted article went.
This shows me that these people read my new article, read another article, and then saw a link to an article of mine that they know they've read. I like my hypothesis:
They would not click on the link if they hadn't read and enjoyed the article which has been deleted.
I like when they ask where the article's gone, and I pretend, "I don't know."
I like the hole. I like the adventure of it.
Most other people don't. They immediately fill the hole, or else keep digging around it, to make their whole world a hole, and I say to those people:
My love was never yours. It wasn't anyone's, except mine. If you wanted love, you needed to make your own.
You can't share love, and no matter how early, it's too late to try. It's always too late to try. Life isn't about trying, or even thinking about trying. It's not about doing, either. It's about being.
Love is. Mine is, anyway.
Only now, from you who I always saw and heard clearly, I die, as the sun rises over Chicago.
This is the end.
Thank you for reading.
--tim rogersの最後の冒険が始まってる
This is the last entry in this journal. The journal will not be deleted. It will remain here. I'll be deleting a few entries from it in due time -- the stupid, short ones -- and keep only the posts that are significant to the, uh, "story."
For now, enjoy the final entry, if you can. It's long. That's about all I can say.
I just finished taking a cold shower. It was the first time I tried to do that in a time. It was a nice thing to do, on top of many not-so-nice things to do.
I've been thinking for a while, about transcription, mistranslation, and misinterpretation. That all human communication is, indeed, a string of lies, and that one human can't even trust himself to trust another human properly.
I'm also in the market for some porn. Everyone who looks up porn has some tips. I'm on DSL right now; I figure, that's what people do with DSL -- download porn. Someone tell me about where to find some porn. Own up -- wherever it is you get your porn, give away the secret.
I'll give away mine, too -- I don't even use it anymore.
I thought a little bit in the shower about love. So I figure I'm going to write about love. Someone read this. I know I have people all over the world reading what I write, and some of you are Japanese, so I'm going to put in passages I like about love, in Japanese, and then translate them. Mistranslations and/or embellishments will appear in brackets.
**
How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?
How can I give love when I just don't know how to give?
How can I give love when love is something I ain't never had?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
You know, life can be long
And you've got to be so strong
And the world she is so tough
Sometimes I feel I've had enough
--John Lennon, "How?"
**
You know, I feel like this is one of the few songs on earth, in English, that I might have written. This and "Norwegian Wood." Mostly because of the lack of negative particles.
"How?" is something I would have written in high school. "Norwegian Wood" is something I would have written in college.
This is something I'd write now, about a child:
***
子供の言葉：
私は、私の愛は信じるものと言ます。私の愛は私に下ったものです。生まれたとき下って、大
***
A child's words:
Love is something I believe in. My love is something that was given to me. It was given to me when I was born, and I will hold [onto] it until [long after] I become an adult. I can't say "I'll hold [onto] it until I die." Because I do not [yet] know death, I cannot say this. There are many things I do not yet understand. Like love.
*****
The Oprah you see in your non-Chicago cities is the Oprah that airs in Chicago at eleven-thirty in the evening. It was airing just after Big Joe went to bed. I was sitting on the makeshift futon on the floor, looking at my piles of black socks, fingering the perfect Shelby knot still in place around my neck. My god, I became an expert in tying a tie, today. Tonight, I watched Oprah. The topic was the rise of masturbation in young teens. A woman was shocked to find, in her daughter's room, a vibrator. Her daughter was fourteen years old. The daughter also appears on the show. She has braces, making her mouth metal like an old black Chicago beggar's, except she's young, and pretty, like a apricot-skinned flower.
In the shower, I honestly tried to masturbate. I couldn't. It's not that I don't have the power within me; I just couldn't do it. Not with all the bad things that happened today, climaxing with me watching "Will and Grace" in a giant sofa in a giant Chicago office building's corporate break room. I ate a burrito Big Joe had racked up on his company expense account. It was alright. I could hardly taste it. I turned on "Will and Grace" after the first fifteen minutes of Robert DeNiro's directorial debut-ish piece A Bronx Tale struck me as too voice-overed.
I went to check my email on Big Joe's office computer, only to find that I'd left my Outlook Express open at his house, and therefore wouldn't be receiving any email.
I sat in front of the TV, alone, and wondered.
To my right was a wall of windows. Looking out, twenty-something floors down, Chicago sparkled like a translucent city beneath a front-lit reflection.
Haruki Murakami says in an interview that one night, a "joyous" thing occurred: he heard a "little voice" -- a "whisper" -- telling him to start writing a novel. He was 29. He wrote a novel. It wasn't great. He wrote another, and another.
I don't have voices telling me to do anything.
I have voices now, and they're my own, and they're telling me to say, yes, I've masturbated in other people's showers before. I can't say I'm sorry. I can't say I'm not sorry, either. The act is what it is. It's something that comes up.
I can't very well say I'm ashamed of urinating in other people's toilets, can I? I can't say I'm ashamed of defecating in their toilets, either.
It's something that comes up.
If I've masturbated in your shower, and you have some proof: well, sorry. It is, as I have said, simply something that happens. You're welcome to do it in mine, whenever you want. Just don't announce it beforehand, and we'll be okay.
*******
8/19/2003:
今クランベリージュース飲んでる。苦味だ。あの苦味好きじゃないけど飲む。クランベリ
俺が書いたことより信じやすい、あのビンに書いてあることも。
*******
8/19/2003:
"Right now, I'm drinking cranberry juice. It has a bitter taste. I don't like that bitter taste, yet, I drink it, because cranberry juice is good for the health of the urinary tract. It says so on the damned bottle. In becoming an "adult," I've come to believe things that are written on bottles. It's a shame. It's a little bored, that "adult" habit of believing things that are written on bottles.
"Things written on bottles are so much easier to believe than even the things I write."
*******
Actually, I was almost kind of ashamed of urinating in someone's toilet, today. It was Big Joe's toilet. I tried to urinate, and it wouldn't come out.
See, for a few days, I've been drinking cranberry juice. Three times, someone mentioned something about the cranberry juice, when I told them about it.
"You got a kidney stone, or something?"
Big Joe asked me, on the phone yesterday, when I told him I was coming up to Chicago, and that his mom had indeed dropped off his green card like she'd said she would, "What, you passing a kidney stone?"
This was all fun and funny -- until around nine this morning, when my Brita-blest clear urine turned violently, painfully, numbfully red for a split second, then yellow as popcorn salt.
Something pinged against the toilet porcelain.
I . . . don't feel any pain in my groin anymore.
For the moment.
At the moment, what with the site of bloody urine disturbing me violently, I took this to be a bad omen. It turns out now that it might not be so bad.
Maybe not. It's still a little too early to tell. It still kind of hurts. And I can't seem to urinate in a single stream too efficiently. I'll work on it, I imagine. At some long, long, far off time, when it's probably gone and healed itself.
} { } {
It was about a hundred and three in Chicago today, and a hundred and ninety in a suit. I managed. It kind of cool in here, now, at 2:04AM. I'm providing sideways advice and halfhearted graphic designs to the efforts to launch the insert credit's first finest hour. The goal of my halfhearted graphic designs is to spur those who would rather use no graphics at all to think of something better. They didn't exactly think of something too remarkably better. They thought of "abstract" -- solid colors. Oh, well, they're good people, at least. You can't take that away from them -- or can you?
What, really, can you take away from a person, in the nitrogen-cycle-sense?
*************
少年の言葉：
僕は、僕の愛は欲望の真っ暗な真ん中に本当に生きてるものだと言ってるんだ。僕の愛が
*************
A young man's words:
I say my love is something that exists in the pitch-dark dead center of my [lust]. My love is an angered-ish feeling. My love is not something I received from my parents[;] it has been living deep within the very dark center of me since a time I cannot remember. When I die, this dark love of mine dies with me.
*****************
Among the last lines of The Death of Ivan Ilyich:
"Death is finished. There is no more death."
I like the way it sounds in Japanese. I once flipped through to the end of a Japanese translation:
「死が終わってしまった。これから死が無いだ。」
("Shi ga owatteshimatta. Korekara shiga nainda.")
トルストイの「イヴァンイリイッチの死」より
I like the way it sounds when you substitute "Ai" ("Love") for "Shi" ("Death").
「愛が終わってしまった。これから愛が無いんだ。」
"Love is finished. There is no more love."
{}][{}
Does it have to die with me, though?
I'm not sure.
If my love is something that exists deep, deep in the dead center of my lust, of the reactor that generates my goal-orientation, whether those goals are fame, fortune, or a fuck, they're my goals, and as long as someone remembers someone who remembers them, whether they're accomplished or not, my love is somewhere encoded within them.
Deep, deep, deep inside me, and the words I say, it's there. Anyone who hasn't seen it until now -- anyone who doesn't see it now -- they don't see it because they don't need to see it.
These are hardly words you'll tell your grandchildren.
These are words you'll tell yourself you told yourself.
*****************
I remember where I got my love. I remember it very clearly. It was a day I'd eaten graham crackers in kindergarten. I wasn't particularly hungry for them. I wanted to go home. Kindergarten was loud. Outside my house for the first time in my only five-years-progressed life, my ears were now fully realizing how horribly sensitive they are.
I talk about them all the time. Always, you hear about my "Hell Ears" like it's some kind of gimmick. Well, in a way -- it is. In another, darker way, it's not.
My Hell Ears are not enjoyable. I can hear cars from five street blocks away. I can hear Big Joe's air-conditioner and his breathing over my 100-decibel music, and someone's walking a dog -- at four in the morning?
Kindergarten made me sit in the corner, and cry. I didn't like being in kindergarten. Everyone was so noisy. I didn't know yet that they weren't as noisy at I'd thought they were.
At that time, I loved my mother like a young child does. She said she loved me, and I don't doubt that she did. I stopped loving her that way quickly, and slowly, at the same time. That doesn't mean I stopped loving her altogether. In the mass of my love, there's a piece that remembers her like it's supposed to. It's just smaller, and a different color, so I can still remember it.
I lost the nature of that love when I made my own.
I made my own while sitting at a low table in a kindergarten class near Newark, Delaware. It was a low place, and bright in illumination, and full of white people who looked like me.
There was a Chinese girl who sat far on the other side of class. Her name was "Chung." That's all I knew. I never talked to her. I ended up moving two weeks after I saw her.
When people ask where my fascination with Asia began, I always tell some lie or another. Or I say I don't remember. Here's a tip: when you're dealing with the me who calls himself "Tim Rogers," realize that when I say "I don't remember," it means don't want to talk about it, or I just don't want to talk to you, personally.
The truth is, I liked Asia because of this girl. I came to want to know more about her. I said before that I never had a "girls are icky" phase. Well, whatever "girls are icky" phase might have at some point spawned in me was miscarried that day I saw that Chinese girl for the first time.
She was so quiet. She was sitting in the corner, crying quietly, alone.
The teacher kept trying to talk to her, real soothing-like. The teacher, a black-haired white woman named Mrs. Newman, kept bending down and touching Chung's back. The Chinese girl kept crying, the beginning of my woman in the window, hands on her face, something I still see today and weep when I can't remember anything else, when I think of precisely how much of nothing one person -- myself all-included -- can ever become.
Where is she, today? Something tells me she's dead. She most likely has to be.
When I saw her, it struck me like that: this girl won't be alive when I'm old enough to wonder where she is. She's my love, love in a five-year-old girl. She's my death, both the beginning and the ending of it. From a long time ago, before I was able to question it, to now after her death, she's been weeping at the dead center of my lust. She is the reason I can never have children, and I can't remove her except with my own death. It's a cold notion. I don't entirely like it. I can't get rid of it, however.
That's where my lust came from. My love is inside my lust, and my lust is inside my love. It can't end even with my own death.
*
Here's where it becomes more concrete. Here's where, if this were fiction, you'd accuse me of "overkill." It's not fiction, however. It's me talking honestly. I'm not afraid to do that, anymore, not about this.
(Oh, shit -- I just touched my right glasses lens. I now have a . . . smudge. Forgive me for typing with my right eye closed.)
The girl never stopped crying, that day. It was fourteen days before my family moved to Kansas. I wouldn't see the girl too much after that. Though I'd remember her name even until now, I wouldn't use it in my mind, anymore, after that day. Her name was filed somewhere outside her body and her soul and her little lavender dress and her butterfly barrette.
Her mother came to the class. The teacher didn't know what to do with the girl who was crying without making a sound, at snack time. She might or might not have had some issue with the graham crackers. They were golden. I myself couldn't really stomach them, back then. I ate, anyway, and drank my apple juice, which I still drink now.
Her food and drink was untouched. It was a little after ten in the morning. That's when snack time was.
**
I'm . . . shaking as I type this.
**
Her mother showed up, to escort the girl out of class. Whenever the girl next came back to class, always in a pastel little dress with some ornament in her straight black hair, she was silent. She never spoke, for the thirteen days I was in her presence from across a classroom.
When her mother came into the room, the girl was quiet.
My god, her mother was beautiful. It was the first time I'd ever seen something so beautiful. She was in overalls, and was wearing a man's gold watch. Her hair was pulled back in a long braided ponytail. Where she'd come from to pick up her daughter, I don't know.
Her mother couldn't have been any older than my mother. She might have been twenty-seven, or twenty-eight. The mother nodded at the teacher, while the girl watched them, her lips closed. When at last the mother and the teacher were done talking, the mother took the girl by the hand, and she began to cry again. Some few feet before the girl and her mother reached the classroom door, the mother let go of the girl's hand.
I don't imagine I could understand what I was seeing. Or maybe I could, in the same way we all understand anything that can be understood.
Looking at her filled me with a feeling like I had to go to the bathroom, except I didn't have to go to the bathroom.
I think that's when my kidney stone began to form.
(Or . . . not.)
The best way I can describe this to someone close to me is to say that I wanted that woman as my mother, and I wanted her to make me cry.
Or you could take the blunt route, and say that I, at five years old, wanted to have violent, submissive sex with that woman.
Long, long ago, and far, far away, this happened. And it still gets me now. A woman some six times my age had aroused me while I was eating graham crackers.
And today I passed a kidney stone that might not have been a kidney stone. It hurt like nothing has ever hurt me before. I lived through it.
****()****
私はきっと悲しみの
真ん中あたりで泣いている
私はきっと喜びの
真っただ中で笑うんだ
あー この旅は
気楽な帰り道
のたれ死んだ所で
本当のふるさと
あー そうなのか
そういう事なのか
ぴりーぴりー
ナビゲーターは魂だ
--ブルーハーツの「ナビゲーター」より
****()****
Watashi wa kitto kanashimino
Mannaka Atari de naiteiru
Watashi wa kitto yorokobino
Mattada nakade waraunda
Aa-aa, kono tabi wa
Kirakuna kaerimichi
Notarejinda tokorode
Hontouno furusato
aa-aa, sounanoka?
Souiukotonanoka?
--The Blue Hearts, "Navigator"
[Clearly, in the dead center of my sadness, I am crying. Clearly, at the height of my happiness, I'll laugh.
[I'm truly at ease on this journey. I'm at ease because I'm always on my way home. My home: is any place I can die along the side of the road. That's my true home. That's how it is. Isn't that how it is?
[I'm adrift upon the sea, always on my way home; my navigator is my soul.]
"If I die at the side of the road, that's my true home."
"Life is a journey home."
"My navigator is my soul."
"If I die in the middle of the road, that's my true home."
"Life is about going home."
"At the end of the journey lies home."
"Home is at the end of the road."
"Home is out, adrift, across the sea."
"When in the middle of a sad time, you're crying. When happiness is at its height, you will laugh."
"When in the middle of a sad time, you're crying. When happiness is at its height, you will laugh."
"You're coming home."
"You're dying."
So am I.
"My home is wherever I can comfortably die."
"I will die weary."
"You will die weary, too."
"Everyone dies weary, at the side of the road."
*
There are things in there no one said.
<>><<>><<>><
I did, a few times, sleep with older women. It's the thing I always wanted to do. A few times with a 32-year-old Japanese woman. Just once, it was with a Chinese woman in her late thirties. Once or twice, it was with a 43-year-old Japanese woman. The last time, it was with a woman whose age and nationality I could not discern -- I think she might have been Thai -- who I met at a bookstore. She was most likely in her mid to late forties. "Forty-seven" seems like a good number -- a prime, and a magic one, at that -- so we'll go with it. Just once, with a forty-seven-year-old woman. Well, it was actually a few times, if you catch my meaning. More than a few times, actually.
No, I'm not bragging, honest. I'm just reminding myself of the things I've done, as a person ought to be allowed to do.
My ex-girlfriend, when I finally told her about this -- not the forty-seven-year-old; the other two -- got angry. It was after we'd broken up. We were in Chicago for something or other related to a job interview. I was wearing a suit, like I was today. It was the day after my birthday -- that is to say, my younger brother's birthday.
We were eating pizza at Gino's East in Chicago. It was good pizza. How we got on the topic of sex with older women, I don't remember.
(Or do I?)
Anyway, my ex-girlfriend -- Korean, two years my junior -- pounded her fist on the table, rattling silverware and cast-iron pans, rattling the very checked tablecloth and the very smell of pesto in the air. A lot of customers quieted down with the rattle, and thanks to their quieting down, they all heard what she had to say. I had tried to stress the Chinese woman; her being not Japanese spared me half an argument and another description of how Japanese soldiers had raped Korean women during World War II.
"You know? You know what that is? You know what they call . . . this?"
She was stuttering. Her speech had been horrified into an internet shorthand/Konglish hybrid.
"Wh-what?" I asked her, half-ashamed that she'd try to stab me.
"They call this a MOTHERFUCKER!!"
With two exclamation points, she said it. My Hell Ears detected dozens of jaws dropping.
I tried to defend myself, and she wouldn't hear it. A white guy fucking a Chinese woman -- Chinese women are filthy, you know -- is one thing. A white guy fucking a Chinese woman more than twice his age? What the fuck is wrong with that?
I had to explain: nothing is wrong with it. It's what I wanted to do. It happened for a true reason. I willed it to happen. I wanted it. It was the most I could want.
)()()()(
Yet, at the same time, deeper down, there is indeed something wrong with me. Something deep, and dark.
I've described it before. I can't help it. I describe it to some people in short bursts.
I can't control my mind. Sometimes I don't know when beginnings are closer than endings, or endings are closer to beginnings.
I have to tell this to someone:
I hear things. Lots, and lots, and lots of things. I hear things all day long. I hear telephones ringing. I hear dogs barking. I hear scorpions scuttling on wooden floors. I hear fire engines when they're not really there. I don't know when things are there and when things aren't.
Most of the time, I can't sleep because of the things I hear.
I can't control my ears.
Surely, somewhere, right now, a scorpion is scraping its pointed little feet against a dry wooden floor. If I think I'm hearing it, well -- it must be happening somewhere, right? Yet, I'm not hearing it for real.
I've managed to live a fairly decent life this way. I've managed to not die. Last night, in Dunkin Donuts, I managed to get a blonde woman high on both life and marijuana to pay for my dozen of mixed donuts.
I ate two, and then got diarrhea. Now, I think I'm constipated. I've never been constipated before, so how the hell would I know?
I'm used to excessive excretion, what with my inguinal hernia. That's not the point I'm trying to make, however.
It's sounds, most pointedly sounds that aren't there.
I talk to people constantly, when they're not there. I talk without moving my lips. It's like I'm rehearsing conversations that may or may not ever happen.
I think a lot of people do this.
I used to do it constantly. It was always with one particular person that I talked. Lately, I haven't been talking to anyone.
---
This isn't about separating real from unreal. Leave that to science-fiction.
---
This is about my being selfish or not selfish, and how I ended up not selfish. It has to do with my love -- the dark one, the one that's deep inside.
I was at a bookstore one day, when I met that Thai woman. I went to her house and had sex with her many, many times. Me, a person who has never taken drugs or smoked a cigarette or drunk alcohol, sometimes loses memories for a short span of time. I guess it's like a computer slowing down when too much shit is stored on its hard drive.
I lost the memory of that Thai woman for a long time. I still don't know where it went. I remember where it was when it came back, however.
Here's the story of how I lost my selfishness.
First, a preface.
I was in Las Vegas one night. Big Joe was in a club. He'd paid fifty dollars to enter. I sat at a bar in the Bellagio, striking matches, blowing them out, drinking iced water, and looking around. I was dressed up pretty nice, in a cowboy jacket and jeans and a shirt the color of a Dr. Pepper can. And a black tie.
I saw a woman sitting before a row of slot machines. She was Japanese. She was wearing a long tan trench coat that must have had forty buckles down it. She had big black sunglasses on her face, and she was smoking a cigarette and playing the slot machine.
I managed to talk to her after kind of staring for an hour. She told me she came to Vegas once every two weeks, on "business." She only stayed two days at a time. Sometimes the weekend, sometimes not. She played the slot machines all night, because she didn't want to bother to adjust to the time zone difference. She had tempered herself into the equilibrium. She was allowed by time to exist in two places at once. She was two people at once.
She was a miracle of people-physics; like a cylindrical truck with a hole a person-length wide was speeding at just the right speed as she fell at exactly the right speed to land on her feet without collision.
She bought me a Sprite.
Second, a foreword.
A woman at the airport in San Jose bought me a Dr. Pepper because I was wearing Japanese sandals, and was able to say I'd just gotten back from Japan, and meant it.
Third, and introduction.
I really, honestly do like some things just because they're different from me. I think everyone does this, in some regard.
The story -- or, "i remember where i got my love".
I'd gone nine days without food or sleep in Tokyo. My head was caving in. I walked from Saitama to Ikebukuro, and then ended up somehow in Sugamo, staring at a guy who was reciting Buddhist sutras at a temple. I burned some incense, and cried at the smoke. I stared at bowls of plastic tempura in a window.
Nine days. People tell me this is impossible. It's not. I know it's not, because I lived it.
For nine days, I drank cheap coffee at internet cafes. I'd pay the 100 yen first-hour fee, and drank six or seven cups of coffee standing up.
It was a dark time. I don't remember more than most of it, and that's the truth for once.
I ended up in Sugamo Station a little before ten in the morning on a Tuesday.
I was wearing a pair of jeans. I didn't know where I'd gotten them. I was crying at a display of bread rolls in a bakery window.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, very gently, like a cool breeze, like a John Lennon song.
"Can you swim?" a girl who tried to be many things, and was still a girl, had asked me, in an email, two weeks earlier. She followed this question by saying that she was listening to John Lennon's "How?" while getting ready to lay down and die. She was getting sleepy.
"I'd like to swim with you. So can you swim? Let me know in your reply."
I never answered her question. She didn't have the right to ask it.
Standing behind me as I stood before the bakery window was a Japanese woman. She was in her mid-forties. She looked Thai. She had a tight, youthful face, and her long coat and sweatpants concealed what I later learned was a marathon runner's body.
"Are you crying?"
She was speaking English.
"No."
It was the truth. Or was it?
She made excuses for speaking English so presumptuously.
"It's alright."
"My English is so bad."
"No, it's not." It was the truth. I'm honest when nine days hungry. It's almost like a high, that kind of food-lacking.
"I worked at a bank in Tokyo. An international bank."
(Aside: Haruki Murakami says he hated running his own jazz club in Tokyo, because he had to deal with people. His parents hated him for refusing to take a company job. Now, he has an office in Tokyo, where he goes to be alone, and write. That's nice. He's . . . normal, though. He doesn't have any problems. It's a bit inspirational to know when in the middle of telling a story like this.)
"Oh. Your English is really, really good." I wasn't exaggerating.
"Why are you sad?" she asked me.
"I'm hungry," I said, in the mood for honesty.
In fifteen minutes' time, we were walking down the road into deep Sugamo, stopping at stores. She bought me a pair of 100-yen wool gloves at a 100-yen shop. She bought me a pair of house slippers -- if I wore them instead of regular socks, my feet wouldn't get so cold. She bought me a hot can of tea. It hurt to drink it. I told her I'd lost my home and my friend and my everything. We passed by a Tendon Tenya tempura shop, and she asked if I wanted to eat there. I imagined the smoky taste of the sticky donburi sauce on the top of the roof of my mouth, and I gagged, almost. I said, no. My stomach felt weak. She suggested udon, and I didn't refuse.
Rather than take me to an udon shop, she took me to a supermarket. She bought a large package of noodles. She bought a lot of things. She bought me a tall bottle of Aquarius sports drink, which, high in electrolytes, would be good in a food-deprived stomach and a nutrient-deprived body. I was spotting out. My eyes were hazy. Footsteps felt like far-away electricity ticking beneath the rocky feet of crows on a power line in a desert somewhere. She bought a box of cookies. She bought a thick package of tofu.
Then she took me to her home. She didn't have furniture in her home. It was a half-sized, tiny Japanese apartment. It was smaller than the ones I'd seen some foreigners living in. The floor was brown, and wood.
Rather than a bed, she had an air-mattress. I was hazy, and immobile, when I sat on it. She used an electric pump to pump it up. On the walls were pictures of Bob Marley and Jim Morrison. There was an ashy smell like peanut butter in the air. She told me she'd been living there since she quit her job. She's been so bored up here, alone, lately.
Later, I thought it was the Thai woman from years before who'd had an air-mattress. It wasn't. She didn't have an air-mattress. It was silly. The Thai woman, I realized today, while walking well out of my way to guide a white woman who took up the wrong line of work to a train station in a city that is not hers -- nor mine -- lived in a high-ceilinged house with a big, puffy bed that made no sounds.
It was with this Japanese woman, whose name I never learned, that I sat on this air-mattress, which kept deflating, and watched Bob Sapp on television. She smoked a cigarette and saw that I kept down a cup of tea. Then she went to make udon.
She put out her cigarette in a jar like you'd use to keep pennies. She made my udon noodles like she was putting on a sweater. She was already wearing a sweater -- big, and purple, and thready. Her hair was up in a ponytail. Her hair was kinky and curly. She wasn't unattractive at all. With the back of my head touching the inch-thick wall behind the air-mattress, I studied this woman's sweatpants. I could see the curve of her ass. She wasn't wearing underwear, or else she was wearing a thong. She made the udon boredly, putting sweater after sweater of steam into the air. She didn't turn on the vent. The wet smell made me hot. I sighed, and fell asleep with my back against the wall, as The Pink Panther -- the movie -- came on television.
The woman had brought a tray to me, in time. She put a big flat spoon and a pair of wooden chopsticks into the udon. She made me another cup of tea. She saw that I drank it. I said I wanted something cold. She gave me some of the sports drink. I ate one noodle, with chopsticks. It was good -- she'd made it vegetarian, for me, and it tasted boiled in soy sauce -- and the hard tofu was better. I took three bites of a tofu cake. Then a fourth. My hand was shaking. My body had grown so warm inside that I was freezing cold.
All this, from what? I was thinking. What the hell is this? I did this to myself. I'm not in a war. I'm not fighting for any cause. I'm just me, down on my luck, hot and cold, and I feel like I'm going to die.
I'd been wandering shopping arcades and department stores for so long I didn't know the interior of an apartment when I saw one. I was hearing corporate jingles on a three-second loop. I was alone.
The Japanese woman was spoon-feeding me udon.
"You're a mess," she kept saying, in Japanese. "You need some rest. You need to eat this."
The first feeling I'd felt in a long time came over me. I tipped and swerved to my feet, and found the bathroom. I vomited chunks of tofu and ramen into her toilet. I was reverse hungry when I collapsed on the air-mattress again.
The Pink Panther was still on as she was feeding me azuki red-bean-paste ice cream with a tea spoon. At one point, she went outside, and came back with more ice cream. The first carton had been freezer-burned, and probably wasn't too good for my health.
By four in the afternoon, I ate three of the now-cold udon noodles, and then vomited again. Her bathroom smelled like cherry air-freshener and dirty orange juice by the time I was done.
I sat on the mattress again, now fully recharged. Vomiting can make you feel better sometimes; in the case of having not eaten for nine days -- longer than I hope to not eat again -- it takes two vomits, I wager.
By the second vomit, the little wooden apartment was dark. Some blue light cut in through the balcony curtains. The television set made everything glow.
She turned down the television volume, and smoked another cigarette, and talked to me. I talked to her, and drank some hot tea. I was warming up.
At one point, she put her head on my shoulder. I didn't move. I froze. At another point, when her cigarettes were put away, she laid her hand gently on my crotch.
"Maybe you'd feel better if we had sex?" she said, in English. "I'll be on top. You don't have to do anything. I'll be slow."
I'd be lying if I said that didn't do something for me.
I'd be lying if I said it didn't do two things for me.
I immediately burst out into tears, and fell over onto my side, away from her, on the mattress. She sat there and looked at me, with shame.
I remember the way she said it: "I'll be slow." Like reciting a nursery rhyme.
"I'm sorry," she said, again and again. Eventually, I gave up, and let her take me to a bar, where we sat for three hours, talking.
She ordered a pizza, and talked about her dead husband. She had given me some old gloves of his. She'd given me two pairs of gloves in one day. Today, I still have neither of them.
The cheese on the pizza didn't sit well with me.
Then she ordered mushrooms. My least favorite food on earth -- a whole plate of them. She ate one, and then picked up a mushroom with her chopsticks and brought it to my mouth. I ate it, and then I ate the rest of them, with my own chopsticks. It was like flesh ripped straight off the side of someone's heart.
She gave me a piece of paper with her email address on it, and five thousand yen, at the station. The station smelled like a vegetable market and cigarettes and cinnamon. The woman's lips were chapped white at this time. It was after seven in the evening.
I took her money and her email address.
She'd said, at the bar, in Japanese, "I'm going to give you my email address. When you get better, when you find out what's wrong with you, and fix it, maybe we can meet again?"
I knew I could never see her again. Under those circumstances, no one can meet her ever again.
"I'm so lonely," she said, at the bar. "No one will touch me. No one will let me touch them. I'm so old. I'm going to die, old and alone.
"I want someone to fuck me. I want someone to fuck me from behind. I want someone to fuck me in the ass. I want someone to eat my pussy. I don't care who. I want to suck someone's dick again. I don't care whose. Like I was a girl again. I need it. I've always needed it. I think I've never had it."
"Can I . . . kiss you?" she asked me, at the train station.
I couldn't be selfish. Someone who pulls in air and pure air, air and living air, from all around, waiting for a prize, stood before me. I made her less tired with my gestures, with my life, with a piece of my love.
I shook my head. Like a grateful gentleman, I kissed the back of her hand, and I got on the train, and I never saw her again. I spent some of her money on a meal of tempura the next morning, and then put the rest toward the first month's rent at the coffin I lived in for two months.
I wasn't selfish when I took that money. I was a promise she'd bought, that some day, someone might fix what's wrong with them, and come back to her, and love her deeply, and darkly, and until she was dead by the side of the road, in her true home.
Which is to say, if I have love for her, it's dark, and it's somewhere no one can touch. I can't ever see that woman who made me udon, ever again, and I'm not sad.
The dark young man inside my heart is saying: I should have fucked her, like she wanted.
The child behind me is asking, "Did the girl speak to anyone after you left?"
The adult before me is shaking his head. "Either she went on not talking forever, or she died."
My God, I couldn't go on if she lived to have friends. I couldn't live with myself, or with anyone else, if she ever made any friends and ever approached a normal life.
My love won't and can't grant her love of her own, and if she were still alive, she'd be grateful.
**
I'm saying these things, here, in public, because I'm done. I'm done trying to fit in. I won't do it anymore. If I accept a job at a Japanese 7-Eleven, though I may wear a uniform, I'm doing it on my own whim, and the manager, hopefully, will not be able to read this, much less find it.
Don't call me immature. I know maturity. I choose to be blind to it. This is who I am.
Today, I finished growing up.
I have decided to continue as what I am.
I am broken. I can never be fixed. I am broken for you. I can never be fixed for you. I am broken by myself. I can never be fixed by you.
I have remembered where I found my love.
It's right here:
***********
大人の言葉：
俺の愛は俺のものだ、と俺が言ってる。相手のものではない。俺の愛は俺だけのものだ。愛
***********
An adult's words:
I say, my love is mine. It does not belong to anyone else. My love is only mine. If the loved choose to love, that's okay; if they don't love back, that's okay. My love can not only not be stolen from me, it can also never be lost. My love is all mine, until the day I die.
*****************
My love is mine.
And I am yours.
(
Today was the second-worst day of my life, and yet, I've come up with an excellent T-shirt idea: a black shirt with white text that reads
I LOVE.
Period included. Maybe even a Japanese version?
"俺は愛する。"
Maybe black, with white design? Ripped-off sleeves? Someone make a shirt like this for me, someone with access to a shirt-machine. I'll wear it wherever I go. In winter, I'll wear it over something heavy.
)
I removed an article from insert credit last week. Rather, I had it removed. It was an article I'd written in November of 2002. I wanted it to be posted when it was at least three months old. This was done; the article was posted in April of 2003, upon my return from Japan. The article is now gone.
I let it stay on the website for four months. In those four months, other articles were written that referenced that article. When the article disappeared, it left holes.
I like holes in the internet as much as I like the idea that, if all the computers in the world are turned off, the internet will still, technically, "exist."
I like being inside a website with white text on black, and then clicking on a link, and suddenly seeing a black-text-on-white 404 error page. Where did the page go?
More than anything else, I like getting emails from readers who begin by complimenting me on my latest article, continue by referencing an article (not by me) which references the deleted article, and then asking where the deleted article went.
This shows me that these people read my new article, read another article, and then saw a link to an article of mine that they know they've read. I like my hypothesis:
They would not click on the link if they hadn't read and enjoyed the article which has been deleted.
I like when they ask where the article's gone, and I pretend, "I don't know."
I like the hole. I like the adventure of it.
Most other people don't. They immediately fill the hole, or else keep digging around it, to make their whole world a hole, and I say to those people:
My love was never yours. It wasn't anyone's, except mine. If you wanted love, you needed to make your own.
You can't share love, and no matter how early, it's too late to try. It's always too late to try. Life isn't about trying, or even thinking about trying. It's not about doing, either. It's about being.
Love is. Mine is, anyway.
Only now, from you who I always saw and heard clearly, I die, as the sun rises over Chicago.
This is the end.
Thank you for reading.
--tim rogersの最後の冒険が始まってる
