He shifted his weight onto the bar, palms down. His bar, this evening, was packed.

Half Croatian, half Japanese. Fled Yugoslavia during the war, to the home of his mother: Inuyama (Dog Mountain), Aichi, Japan. The combination of his mothers and father's blood made for one intimidating looking bastard - in his face you could see all of the focused intensity of an angry Japanese mixed with that ogreish bluntness that Balkanites carry. He's well nice enough though, a good guy for sure. I smile to him crookedly, and take a seat at his bar.

"Shochu? (shochu is japanese liqour, about 50 proof, unusual buzz, almost no hangover)"
"We have a good mugi (barley) sho-chu - you want one?"
"Yeah, rocks double please."
He nods at me and looks to Will, at my left.
"OK, and we made some vegetable burritos for you guys - 2 left. You said you had some friends who don't eat meat."
I glance back at Joel, Kevin, the vegetarians among us (vegetarians I had challenged just days before, claiming with confidance that their diet was rooted somewhere in their past when, unsatisfied with their 7 inch collection, they had decided to find other ways to impress American indie girls). Joel, standing over 9 feet tall in Japanese terms, looks down at us, and blinks.


--


Adam glances at the rearview, then looks at me smiling.
"The fuck is that all about?"
There is a car behind me swerving wildly, as if to try and pass me on the two lane road we are moving along. The car's headlights swing back and forth in the fingerprinted rearview. My tiny Japanese company car is struggling under the weight of 4 foreigners, and the people behind me seem desperate to pass me for going just under the speed limit. For reasons unclear to me, their swerving kind of pisses me off, and I slow down even more as we drove up to a red light.

Suddenly the lights disappear from the rearview and the car behind me - a black car, a crappy looking Lexus or Diamante with a tint, pulls up next to me at the stoplight. In the oncoming traffic lane.

"Hmm.."

I glance at Adam, and recall something my stoner Japanese friend Miki told me once
"Cem man, there are some assholes in your neighborhood, some yakuza guys, kinda like real assholes y'know? You can recognize them by like, they've got a cheap big black car and with a tint and they mostly have, y'know, bad hair, like permed maybe, or a whats it called, mullet."

"Hmmm.."

The guys in the cheap big black car definitely have bad hair. The guys in the cheap black car pull into the lane in front of us, perpendicular to our car, blocking our path completley.

I look back over at Adam. Whenever Adam gets serious, his darker features seem to take over, and he seems to transform into a Mexican. At the moment, Adam looks really fucking Mexican.

"The fuck is this?" he growls, with no Mexican accent.

The light turns green, and the cheap black car continues to block our path. I think for a second, that there will be trouble, trouble that I want no part of. I imagine Foot Clan (TMNT) ninjas somersaulting out of the trunk and ripping my face off. I cut a left.


--


Cairo, November '03


They are smiling crookedly as we lean around the postbox, smoking. Everyone but a fat guy with glasses, who sputters to me:

"I, I will fucking kill you, you know, you understand."

I don't understand actually. Tourism is the only thing that works in the Egyptian economy, and as far as I knew, tourists like me were untouchable. Egyptian police were well known for their skill at torture and dissappearing acts - and harming tourism, the lifeblood of a barely functioning country, was practically asking for the pliers. My passport said tourist.

The fat guy with glasses nervously thumbs his cigarette, adrenaline causing him to flick the ember to the ground.
"Don't make za trouble in our business - and don't talk to my uncle an za bad way like that, you understand."

He claps me on the back, a little too hard. I had yelled at his uncle, the so named Mr. Ramadan, 2 days before for lying to Canadian tourists in an effort to get them to stay at his $2.00 a night hotel rather than the $1.50 one that my friends ran. I had screamed at him with insane bulging eyes for this injustice to Canada, for no real reason other than the fact that I hadn't been able to take a shit for 4 days.

Mr. Ramadan is leaning on the side of the post box, with his massive belly jutting out unevenly to the right like a thriving tumor. He looks at me.

"OKOK, my brother son is only very angry, no seriously, no problem, he calm down. But you don't make trouble in my business now, OK?"

I look at the group of them. 6 dark eyed men, wearing dirty clothes and those ubiquitous symbols of poor Arab life - the filthy, dusty open toed plastic sandals, that you always see on the news, toes pushing out of them crusted in the filth of the old city. And I knew I didn't have anything to be afraid of, that they were just proud Arab guys. Arab guys whose old man had been dishonored by me (I had even used a word that one only uses to address dogs and beggars) - an American who was in their country learning their language, for all they knew, to work at the Pentagon and help destroy other Arabs. I was, I supposed, being an asshole.

"Yeah, no problem Mr. Ramadan. I was in a bad mood. My .. my family..."
"No problem Mr. Cem. We don't like problem, you dont like problem, we all like money, so no problem." He smiled in a greasy, but friendly way. "We are now eating - you can eat with us?"

Mr. Ramadan sent Mustafa, one of his employees who worked only for food as far as I could tell, off to one of the my favorite local places - the back alley teahouse of Hisham "The Theif". We ate together on a soofra of newspapers spread out on a small card table - eggplant, tomatoes with pepper and parsley and red onion, hummous, ta'miah, fo'ol, boiled eggs, and pita.

We ate, and ordered tea, brought over several blocks (as is the custom) on a tray by the skinny and exhausted Hisham himself, and smoked several packs of unsmokable Cleopatras. We waited for the sun to come, and more tourists from the airport to arrive, from early international flights; bleary eyed and suggestible, to be convinced that Mr.Ramadan's place was a far better place than the one next door.


--


Bone skinny like death, ribs pushing out, hard feet, no ass, mommy hairs that are just out of this world, economy sized can of lube, the green label push pump spattering like ketchup at the bottom, skin infection. I recall what I was thinking in DC before I left America: Fuck this, oh god fuck this, oh god I fucked this, oh god I'm leaving America, again.


--


"Have you like, talked to Will today?"

Dean, Will's roomate had called me.

Somehow I am still friends with Dean, even after he drunkenly trashed my house when I let him stay the night in my absence.

I returned to find the article outlines on my greaseboard replaced by scrawls of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donetello of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, along with a couple of deformed Pokemons. Next to a large empty bottle of convenience store sho-chu which he apparently had done in himself, sat an empty container of jew chocolates (those little gold coins that do tons to reinforce certain stereotypes) that my jewish roomate had left there, surrounded by empty chocolate wrappers and several empty bags of peanuts that he had scavenged from the kitchen. My laptop, sitting open amid all of this, was covered in a kind of chocolately film along the touchpad and keyboard, the origin of which became apparent when I started my $2000 Powerbook to find window after window of shockingly boring internet porn. While ugly blondes with ridiculous implants chortled under muscular guys in backwards baseball caps, and a RealPlayer stream of a dumb-looking insurance office secretary with a bruised leg being taken from behind by a farmer tanned client poured in, I began to understand that Dean was a member of the proud and mighty "Spit-and-Shine" school of masturbation, and that the chocolate film was actually Deans drunken chocolately spit - smeared onto my not inexpensive computer during an apparently lengthy night of self love. His spit and, well, shine.

"Yeah, no Dean, I haven't heard from him, whats up?"
"Yeah, he ran into some trouble last night, got in a fight with some Brazilians. Outnumbered 'em, tore 'em up real bad. Had to go to the hospital."
"Brazilians."

The factories in the Nagoya area, the giant automotive manufacturing engine that powers the Japanese economy, are filled with foreign workers of all types. Brazilians are by far the most common, along with Peruvians, due in part to some kind of Japanese migration to South America which took place after the war.

Around the main stations in Nagoya, curiously bulbous and oddly hairy men with ruddy South American features had repeatedly asked me for money - something that I never saw a Japanese person do. A friend I had made at the immigration office, a tiny quadralingual lady named Yuko who translated for confused foreigners, had clued me in to who these people were - Brazilians with 1/16 or more of their blood of Japanese origin. As part-Japanese, they enjoyed special residency status and were free to settle and work low-level factory jobs as they pleased. It was an attractive deal for them - the money was much better relative to their home countries, and there was apparently a thriving cottage industry developing around the forgery of heritage documentation. It was also a good deal for the Japanese, who with a shrinking polpulation and an ageing workforce, need backs for lifting and arms for carrying.

You could always see them in the immigration office, standing in lines, sitting in groups, disheveled and at odds with the rigidly efficient Japanese environment. The boys dressed in the sloppy oversize style of teenage latino would-be gangster: hunched shoulders, hands in pockets, bubble graffiti hats, and clunky white sneakers. The women chewed gum endlessly, the girls sat quietly. They all had the aire of poverty, of hours spent watching TV crowded into small rooms, of sex on bare mattresses, of frozen food and card games. It was always a shock for me to see them, such a stark contrast to the fastidious and deferential Japanese; it was dangerouly easy to think of them as crude, and it made me wonder more how I must appear to the Japanese.

My opinion of these people, their flamboyant and outward tempermant so much at odds with the reserved Japanese, was already low. Now it was lower.

"Is Will alright?"
"I don't know man, he was in the hospital. They stole a bunch of his shit."

Will. From Athens GA, musician, music fan of the same species, insane and when drunk. The first night I met he we ended up wrestling after finishing more atskan sake than anyone ever should. Its really been consistantly the same since we met, except its usually sho-chu.

I remembered that I was supposed to be with with Will the night before, when he was attacked, that we were supposed to go to a Japanese noise show with Melt Banana as headliner.

"Wait, wait - last night?"
"Last night, yeah."


--


Bone skinny like death, ribs sticking out, she was tied up, to a board of some type, naked. A handsome, mostly dressed man with Western features and a black tee shirt who must have been about 5 or 6 years older - so 19 or 20 - was fucking her, jamming himself into her from several impossible angles. Explosions and geysers of juices shot from between them like some kind of fucking typhoon, a slick running down her leg, his black shirt shining from the rain of body fluids. Her body was thin and underdeveloped, her eyes were half shut and completely lost, her mouth half open as drool poured out. He suddenly finished, coming with all the terrific hydraulic force of 5 hand grenades exploding in a bukkake pond, her eyes rolled back and neck went slack. After panting for a while, emitting large PANT-PANT-PANT-PANTs in Roman script and Katakana, the man unties the girl and they hug like old friends, creating a large cute looking heart above them.

Wide eyed, I look up from the comic, dumbfounded. It is one of many just like it at the convenience store. To my right and left, stand 3 other men and one schoolgirl, all reading comics; and in stores across Japan stand tens of thousands of men and women just like us, waiting for the bus, reading comics. I look at the schoolgirl. She is reading the same one as me.


--


Joel looks back at me, and to Adam, to Kevin, to Will, to Devon, smiling. We had, every single one of us, just had our hairy white gai-jin asses beaten by Japanese bikers, rude-boys, and punks in a drunken arm-wrestling challenge. The Japs, of course, all cheated.

Yet, despite my humiliating defeat by a man drinking Zima and wearing a god damned bola-tie and a blue leather jacket, I am happy. I am lucky to be around such an amazing group of guys, if only for a week or two.

K, the half-Yugoslavian half-Japanese barman who owns the place is laughing insanely, whiskey in his eyes, tattooed arms around his beautiful wife. It will soon be midnite of this New Years Eve, or it may have passed an hour ago, we have no idea, and wouldn't care anyway.

Adam and Joel, old friends who behave more like brothers, are laughing with eachother.

In a few minutes we will all be ambling towards a giant Buddhist Temple amid throngs of Japanese. For the moment though, we are still inside the bar, bouncing around to Operation Ivy and Blue Hearts with people who we can't communicate with.

I step towards a girl named Maki trying to figure out something to say that she might understand.

"Damn Gina, where you going?! You walk when I say walk, you chew when I say chew, woman!"

I turn around to find Kevin smiling, crookedly.

"Ginnaaaaaaa!!" he screams.

Damn, Gina.