left step
right step, and the people move around me on the street in a crazy ambling dance - the man with the dirty brown pants and polio uses two sticks to move along in a broken fashion, the man on the ground with one leg and a festering ankle tugs on my jeans and says BREADBREADBREAD in a kind of english, left step - and i look up to the broken sky looking down on Old Delhi through the tangle of wires thick and thin and long with exposed copper and rotting rubber - a tangle that could be a nest for some robot bird from the future, a robot birds nest eaten by robot Chinese in the all-too-distant future where the Chinese are rich and proseperous even out into the countryside -
left step and i see the wiggle of some guys dick as he sighs and pisses all over a street-side wall to my right, his cheap plastic belt, surely made in China, dangles off to the side and i smirk. right step left step right step left step right step and i look behind at the crowd of teeming people making their way down the street in the same way as I, and make eye contact with a group of beggars sitting in a line outside of a muslim samosa house, their matted hair and filthy faces blank. in front of them pass a group of schoolgirls in saris - oranges, yellows, reds, crisp blues -- it seems that for all of the gray filth and grime here there is an equal amount of vivid color.

a white mannequin falls over on its face in a shop i pass by, the full bearded muslim owner just looks at it from his resting spot in the shop, his wares spread out next to him, a box for money with an ancient rusty lock on it by his side, his old toes curled in front of him - if he wasn't so muslim looking, from the look on his face, i'd just assume that just drunk and too lazy to move, intoxicated-


--


"WHAT WRONG WITH YOU?? ARE YOU CRAZY?"

I am staring at my hands, palms up, mumbling to myself best as I can in what I think might be a muslim prayer of some type, just making sure to make an audible "b'ism'allah" every few seconds. Better that I play the “I am Turkish” card. I have been detained at Casablanca Mohammed V Airport and am surrounded in a back room by a group of angry North African officials who all want to headbutt me in the chest. They are holding my American passport. Lebanon is on fire.

"YOU HAVE PROBLEM IN MOROCCO, YOU ARE ILLEGAL HERE - YOUR VISA EXPIRE BY TWO DAYS AND YOU MAKE A FIGHT WITH POLICE OFFICER IN AIRPORT?"

My flight to Manila leaves in 15 minutes. Why did I drink all of that shochu that Yuki brought me from Japan, at 10:00AM on an empty stomach? And even if the guy was rude, why the hell did I scream?

"YOU CALL TO HIM MOTHERFUCKER?!!? YOU SAY TO HIM HE IS FUCK HIS MOTHER!!? ARE YOU CRAZY?"

Well, I guess since my colleague decided he would eat a handful of Moroccan hashish before our flight and since I don't fuck with hashish, I thought it would be really friendlike and polite if I would get similarly fucked out of my mind on rare Japanese booze so we would both be out of our minds. "Yes I am crazy"

"ARE YOU DRUNK? TOO MUCH DRINKING? YOU SMELL LIKE ALCOHOL - IT IS MORNING!!?!

12 minutes. My colleague is sitting in the gate with his head in his hands, too stoned to figure out a correct response.

"WE CAN KEEP YOU HERE PUT YOU IN JAIL, EASY" They all burst into screaming at me.

"I am sorry, I am very sorry. I must go, I must be on that flight." I switch to broken, drunken Arabic "Brother, I am sorry, I am crazy, please let me go, I am drunk, I am blind, brother I need to go."

“ANDAK MUSHKILLAH KABIRAH!! KABIRAH BIZAFF!! FAHEMPT?!!” The main soldier screams in Moroccan Arabic.

You have a big problem. Very big. Do you understand?!!


--

on her wall is a calender that reads "woody party".

"Jimu, i .. must ..take bath"
"ok maki."

met her on new years eve in Inuyama, a night of drinking and fun with ex punk-rock superstar Big Bad Bill. a night where we walked up some hundreds of steps up to narita-san temple, where we drank bottles of shochu, where we slept on floors and took morning walks to convenience stores for beer. my American friends and I found ourselves in a tattoo bar in a Japanese country town, La Calavera, owned by a massive half Croat half Japanese. Screaming drunks all around. Locked in an arm-wrestling contest - Japanese versus American. one by one we were all called to the little table surrounded by hooting drunk Japanese biker types. the Japanese all won. I lost to a guy drinking Zima, to my great shame. I met her that night with a blue and red striped scarf on. she was 20, and cute, and gave me her phone email at the end of the night.. 'white-elephant@..'

"after bath.. we. ..can sleep jimu?"
"yeah..”

she shuffled off into the tiny seamless plastic cube of her tiny apartment’s bath. she lived in Rokuban-cho Nagoya, in a poor neighborhood, in a public housing project filled with ethnic koreans and burakumin – a small minority in japanese society descended from the the low caste of Edo Japan.

her father left when she was 10, running from mah-jong gambling debts. she was trying to go to school, and worked in a hostess bar pouring drinks and flirting with old men for money. she told me this one night in a dark neighborhood bar in Imaike, the old gambling quarter, with old drunk men staring at the gameshow on TV.

“I have.. secret job.. I.. ”
she starts searching in her electronic dictionary and suddenly looks up, lips pursed
“I am an escort. I am an entertainer. Do you .. have problem.. ?”

I recall the conversation as I look around her room in Rokuban-cho. It doesn't look like the room of an escort, as I had so imagined when I was a teenager. There is a wall of stuffed animals. Dozens of them Donald Duck, their eyes all staring down at me as I watch a Japanese TV program about murders in America. She is obsessed with Donald Duck, her car is brimming with stuffed dolls in the front and rear dashboards. We spent a few days walking around Japanese shopping centers looking for Donald Duck paraphenelia, stopping in restaurants to eat ice cream, only to go on an buy more Donald Duck gear.

“Jimu..”

She calls to me from the bath. I walk out past her refrigerator, on which there is a postcard from Guam that she sent her mother with a big white-skinned musclebound fellow in a G-String on. Half of the fridge is covered in a Tom Cruise poster.

“Jimu.. can you.. give toothbrush .. in.. my.. bag..” Her head is sticking out of the plastic bath cube.

“Yeah, no problem. One second..”

Her mother comes in from work suddenly through the front door of the tiny apartment, about a meter from where I stand and upon seeing me, blushes and bows.

“Tadaima!” I say to her in totally incorrect Japanese, at that point not understanding that this is the opposite thing to say to someone who is returning home.

The tired woman looks at me with some confusion and smiles. She opens a plastic bag and pulls out some sashimi – leftovers from the shop that she works in 12 hours a day 7 days a week. With a quick nod and rapid movements that speak ingrained muscle memory she unwraps the whole package of sashimi and produces dinner for 3. I recall that Maki hates sushi and sashimi because she eats it almost every night. There is little else in their fridge but sashimi and juice. Maki’s mother and I sit together while Maki sings Japanese pop songs in the bath, uncomfortable silence as I watch the Japanese TV show host explain a gruesome Chicago triple murder. I imagine Maki singing in a dark bar in the gambling quarter, balding men groping her as she lights cigarettes for them. Maki’s mother looks at the screen as a very Japanese body chart showing stabbing locations appears, each of the 20 or so wounds highlighted with a red X.

“Jimu!”
says Maki. I look up, her head is sticking back out of the shower.
“you eat my. I hate.”