by Sarah Bird
“Oh, Jesus Christ on a crutch, now we have to wait for this little Up with People mission.”
“You sound just like Daddy.” Bosco says it in a surprised, complimentary way, as if Kit were trying to impersonate our father.
The Okinawan woman plucks the address away from Moe. “Hai! Hai! Hai! Sew gurroe.” Motioning for us to follow, the woman heads out at a smart pace, shuffling along in her zoris without lifting her feet, as if her ankles were on hydraulics.
Bosco runs after her, but Kit doesn’t move. “You know what? I’m just gonna go back and wait in the car. I don’t even care anymore.”
“Kit, come on. We’re gonna get lost.”
“You go. You’re the one wants it so much now.”
“Kit, please.”
“Go! Just go!” The schoolgirls at the Pink Shoe Shoe Store turn when Kit raises her voice.
“Look, I’m only doing this because Moe wants me to.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
“We both know you’ll win. Come on.” I point toward Moe’s and Bosco’s disappearing forms. “We can barely see them anymore.”
Kit cuts her eyes away from me. “How do you always manage to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Make me the bitch?” Kit hurries off toward Moe, leaving me speechless.
I catch up to Kit, Moe, and Bosco just as our guide turns down a narrow alley crammed with stalls. At a stall lined with clothes hanging from pegs on the wall, the owner uses a long bamboo pole to reach a fluffy pink dress and hand it down to a mother who holds it against a little girl wearing a white straw hat with the brim curled up, held on by an elastic band under her chin.
Shopkeepers crowd around us. “Bargain for you, rady!” “Fitty percent off!” “Best price! I make you best price!” “Come here my shop, beautifoo rady.”
Our guide with the string bag hectors them in Okinawan and they melt back into their stalls. She ducks into a T-shirt shop. It is claustrophobically small. The walls are patchworked with military insignias. Fanged death’s heads, dragons, screaming eagles, crossed axes, crossed sabers, flags, and bulldogs. A T-shirt with a jet streaking across reads RECON: SWIFT, SILENT, DEADLY.
Bosco stares at a T-shirt sporting a voluptuous nude beauty, her slanted eyes twinkling seductively, her nipples unnaturally pert. Beneath the woman is written: LITTLE BROWN FUCKING MACHINE. “LBFM.” Bosco mutters the letters. “So that’s what it means.”
“Very good for you, yes?” The owner, a slight man with a thin face, whips the T-shirt off his wall and drapes it across his forearm, presenting it to Bosco like a sommelier with his finest vintage.
“Come, come.” The lady with the string bag beckons frantically as she opens a door and points up a flight of stairs. “Sew gurroe. Go!”
Moe bows in front of the woman. “Domo arigato.”
The woman bows several times. Each time, Moe bows lower.
Waiting on the stair above us, Kit rolls her eyes. “What is this, early menopause?”
“We are ambassadors of our country,” Bosco informs Kit.
“Now who sounds like Daddy?”
Moe bounces up the stairs and we follow.
“What is this place?” Kit asks, when we reach the second floor.
On both sides of the short hall are doors made of plywood and held closed with galvanized steel hasps. We have no idea which way to turn.
“Five,” Bosco says. “The lady said go; that’s five in Japanese.”
“My little Nancy Drew.” Moe strokes Bosco’s hair, then knocks on a door with a metallic adhesive number 5 on it.
A voice barks out a harsh command in Okinawan. Moe hesitates. The command is repeated. She pushes the door open.
The sew girl sits behind a card table with an ancient black Singer decorated with gold scrollwork set up on it. She looks like a pixie, with a broad face and large ears that stick out beneath her spiky pigtails. Her bed is a mattress on the floor neatly covered by a peanut-butter-colored sheet. A pair of pink flats with the imprint of the sole of her foot pressed into the lining sit precisely beside the bed. She is doing handwork, stitching downy pink feathers onto the hem of a diaphanous shortie nightgown much like the one worn by the perky-breasted woman on the sign above Club Pink Pussy Cat. Hung about on nails hammered into the walls are an electric-blue vinyl Barbarella space-suit number with transparent breast cones, a crotchless silver lamé teddy, several pink satin Playboy-bunny-type outfits complete with cottontails and bow ties and ears dangling from the hanger, and some geometrically intriguing creations outlined in the stripper’s favorite, rows of breakaway snaps.
Moe appears untroubled by these work samples and greets the seamstress in Japanese, but the puzzlement on her elfin face only deepens.
“Some Ryukyuans only speak Okinawan,” Bosco points out.
“Or something resembling actual Japanese,” Kit adds under her breath.
“Well, okay then.” Moe pushes Kit and me forward. Though a white-plastic table fan swivels its head around the room, the air doesn’t seem to move.
“My daughters are in a dance contest. Dance?” Her purse swinging from the crook of her arm, Moe illustrates her point with a little demonstration of the Twist that looks more like she is pantomiming a desperate attempt to regain control of a runaway bus. The seamstress blinks and Moe gives me a shove. “Show her, Bern.”
The look I give Moe asks her if she’s lost her mind.
“This is too weird.” Kit starts for the door.
Before she can reach it, I break into a feeble Jerk.
“Ah so desuka! Ah go-go! You want ah go-go?”
“Yes!” Moe beams, delighted at this communication. “Not the—uh, you know …” Moe trails off, gesturing toward Gate Two street, Turkey Alley.
“No fuckee-suckee,” the seamstress adds cheerfully. “Okay, okay. Onaree ah go-go.” She ducks down and pulls a box of magazines out from under her table. Most are Japanese; all are limp from wear. She plucks out the most worn of them all from the stack. It is a TV Guide from June of 1965 with the Hullabaloo dancers on the cover sporting the full go-go: spaghetti-fringe minidress, white boots, swaying mane of tousled blond hair. The seamstress stabs energetically at the prancing blonde. “Ah go-go! Ah go-go!”
Kit returns, magnetized by the image. The girl on the cover could be her. She takes the magazine. Kit is, if anything, prettier than this Hullabaloo dancer. “Yes.” She doesn’t stop staring at the cover. “Yes. But shorter. More sukoshi.” Kit holds one arm against her side, then chops at the spot on her thigh where her palm comes to rest about four inches below her crotch.
“Oh, now, I don’t think so.” Moe chops at a spot a foot lower. “Here is good. Jyoto.”
“Hai! Joto!”
Getting into the spirit, the sew girl jumps to her feet, whipping the long curl of a tape measure from around her neck to lasso Kit under her arms and take a swift bust measurement, which she writes down in a little notebook with the stub of pencil she pulls out from behind an elf ear. Turning her head to the side, she hugs Kit to her as she passes the tape measure behind her back and pulls it loosely around her waist. In practiced zips, she pulls the tape from Kit’s armpit to her waist, cervical to lumbar vertebrae, shoulder to shoulder, then down her leg, stopping at the spot mid-kneecap that Moe designated. Winking at Kit and turning to block Moe’s view, she pulls her tape measure down the four inches below her crotch that Kit asked for and marks that figure down as well.
Kit points to the magazine cover. “I want that material and that fringe.”
“Okay! Okay! Hai!” The seamstress starts bowing us toward the door.
“You haven’t measured Bernie.” Moe pushes me back into the room and holds up two fingers. “Ni girl-sans. Two. Go-go for number-one daughter too.”
“Hai! Hai! Okay.” The seamstress giggles as she snaps her tape measure off again.
As I raise my arms so she can loop the tape around my breasts, Kit heads for the door. “I’m gonna
go wait in the car.”
Oxygen
Have you ever been experienced?
I am onstage, close enough to see a trickle of sweat escape from under the chiffon scarf tied around Jimi Hendrix’s forehead, and, even in my sleep, I realize it’s a dream. The seat is great, but the sound quality—scratchy, monaural—is something of a disappointment. I would have thought that the acoustics in dreams would be better.
I have.
The incongruity of Jimi’s sublime guitar playing being amplified through a bucket is so jarring that the dream begins to fade away. What finally wakes me up, though, is the question: What is good music doing being played on the beautiful, the beautiful balloon of Okinawa?
Fully awake, I walk down the darkened hall, open the door to the boys’ room, and find that it has been transformed into the phosphorescent minerals room at the museum. The draped sheets of their bunk beds are neon-blue slabs floating in the illumination of a black light. The sports pennants on the wall are glowing blue triangles. I bump my head against the B-17, and it jerks about crazily on its line.
Buzz and Abner, hunkered down on the floor, are a pair of disembodied blue-white grins above blue-white boxer shorts and blue-white crew socks squatting beside a record player on the floor. The record player has belonged to all of us. It started life as my Christmas present when I was seven back at Yokota, and had just seen service earlier that day with Bob shouting along to his favorite Burl Ives song: “Watch the donut, not the hole!”
The twins are surrounded by puddles of jewel-colored albums, emerald, amethyst, sapphire, topaz. The one spinning on the turntable is ruby red.
Have you ever been experienced?
“Where did you get that?”
The spectral grins snap shut and Buzz’s and Abner’s hellhound eyes find each other in the dark. Abner cracks first. “Will you promise never—”
“—ever, ever—”
“—to tell anyone, ’cause—”
“—OSI would fry our asses—”
“—to a rich, crispy golden brown, ’cause—”
“—they’re all bootlegs!—”
“—pirated from Taiwan. We get the jump crews to buy them—”
“—for us for thirty-five cents. Thirty-five cents—”
“—for an album! Of course all the jump crews are—”
“—giant stoners! So they never get the ones we ask for, like—”
“—Jan and Dean—”
“—the Monkees—”
“—the Ventures—”
“—Lulu—”
“I never asked for Lulu, queerbait.”
“I heard you, Ab. You asked for Lulu.”
“I asked for Zu-lu, butt munch. It’s a really cool movie, and it’s got that choice soundtrack with all the natives ululating and that big uprising scene where they—”
“To sir-hir-hir, with love!”
Buzz interrupts Abner’s stirring defense with a surprisingly acceptable falsetto.
A solid thwock lands in the darkness. In the solar plexus, I guess from Buzz’s explosive gasp.
“Do you have any dance music?”
Buzz and Abner shrug and hand me a stack of albums. The covers are made from the same flimsy speckled cardboard that Taiwanese electronic equipment is packed in. The photo on the front of Jimi’s album is so poorly reproduced and bleached out that he’s paler than Queen Elizabeth. A lyric sheet flutters out of the sleeve. I hold it close to the light to read the spidery print and try to recall a Hendrix song entitled “Hey Ho!”
Hey, ho! Wear you joking …
It is only when I read with that gun in your hand that I realize they’re transcribing “Hey Joe.”
“That’s how all the Koza cover bands learn the songs.”
I shuffle through the albums: Cream, Grateful Dead, The Doors, Vanilla Fudge, Jefferson Airplane, the basic axe in the heart for Motown and any remotely danceable music. “Dance music?” I repeat. “I need dance music.”
“Strawberry Alarm Clock?”
“No. When I say dance music, I mean the kind of music humans might dance to. You have no actual dance music.”
“What do you mean no dance music?” Abner lifts the tone arm and puts a swirling magma-red-and-black album on. “This is great dance music.” The immortal Cream power chords play.
It’s getting near dawn …
Abner goes into a dreamy whiplash just as if he’d been to a concert and seen some psychedelically debilitated terpsichorean hanging from a monster amp like a streamer blown by the breeze of a fan.
“ … urreeek!”
“You’re gonna wreck it!” Abner lunges for Buzz’s neck.
Bob sits up. “Could you guys please not kill each other while I’m trying to sleep? Hey, that’s my record player. Why are all those records see-through? I want see-through records! You guys got see-through records! I’m gonna tell!”
Abner stops trying to strangle his twin. Buying bootleg albums from dope fiends is a RIFable offense. They both creep over to Bob’s bed and stand above him, grinning. “What color are our teeth, Bob?”
“Blue.”
“What color are teeth, Bob?”
“White.”
“This must mean—”
“Oh. I’m having a dream. Okay.” Bob pulls his Deputy Dawg quilt up to his chin, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.
Buzz turns back to me. “If you don’t think that’s dance music, then I guess we don’t have any.”
I’m relieved. I’ll play out the farce of entering Kit’s dance contest, embarrass myself to a few bars of “Fever” or “Come On-a My House,” then see Kit off at the airport. As I’m handing the bootlegged albums back, another lyric sheet flutters out. The scrambled words are so psychotic, they jump out at me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a tambourine starts beating and a lead guitar plays in time to the rhythm embedded in the nonsense syllables and the song comes to me. Excitedly, I wave the sheet at Buzz. “Do you have this one?”
Buzz swirls the circles of color at his feet and plucks out an album the red of a cherry Charms sucker. A second later, the notes, half calypso, all pop, plink out sounding somehow right on a nursery room record player, and I am on my feet dancing before the first jangle of the tambourine. The first line on the lyrics sheet, Hey Roderigo! Dates when no raking! becomes Hey where did we go, days when the rain came in Van Morrison’s irresistibly danceable anthem to a brown-eyed girl.
It is like oxygen after the last few weeks of “Up, Up and Away.” The twins goof along with me, pretending to make fun of the kind of guy who is not them or any guy they would ever be, but a stupid kind of guy who would seriously dance. Who would dance like a toy monkey on a pole and pick lice out of his brother’s head and eat them in time to the music as they sang out words from a Taiwanese lyric sheet.
The transcribed lyrics my brothers shout out bop with poetic hilarity that makes me love their author. When Van lamented that it was so hard to find a way, the little transcriber in Taiwan, no doubt leafing furiously through his well-thumbed Chinese-English dictionary, heard that Sew hearts fight a highway. Van’s casting of his memory back there, Lord, was refracted on the lyric sheet into mammary backstairs roared. In the parallel universe of Taiwanese lyric transcribers, making love in the green grass behind the stadium turns into making love in the Negroes beehive. Then it’s break time for our industrious transcriber, who returns with a mug of his favorite hot brew only to discover that Van shares his passion and stadium becomes Stay tea! Yum!
But, clearly, our friend, scribbling furiously in the back room at a factory spinning candy-colored albums into the world, had an insider’s knowledge of the drug culture ravaging the West, for Van’s brown-eyed girl is revealed for what she truly is in his transcription: Brown HIGH Girl! Sha ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra! Ra tea tah!
Jergens
Okinawa’s weather clock is off. It is ten in the morning and the sky is still as gray as the endless reinforced concrete buildings we dr
ive past on Highway One. Moe at the wheel, grim as the weather, is still upset from the screaming fight she had with Kit, who refused to drive to the Kokusai Hotel with us for the dance contest. I can’t say exactly why I agreed to come with Moe. All I know is that if Kit hadn’t almost forbidden me, I would never be doing this.
Moe’s mood darkens when we hit Naha traffic. Three-wheeler trucks and diesel-belching buses stream around us. A chunky woman in a pink dress and zoris riding a moped cuts in front of our car. Moe slams on the brakes and her right arm snaps out reflexively.
“Moe.”
Moe notices that the back of her arm is pressed tightly against my breasts and drops it. The scent of her Jergens lotion lingers. She slaps the steering wheel as traffic halts altogether. “Perfect!” Construction workers in black rubber boots and yellow safety helmets perched atop rags covering the men’s hair begin jack-hammering concrete next to the car. She grips the steering wheel tightly.
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have worn the costume. Kit is wearing hers.”
“I brought it with me. I’m not walking around Naha in it, so can we drop the fucking costume.”
“Is that the kind of language your father and I are paying to have you learn?”
“Sorry. Fornicating costume.”
“That’s nice. That’s lovely.”
“You’re mad at me because I don’t want to show my ass in some stripper outfit?”
“No one is showing their ass and it’s not a stripper costume.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Bernie, I’m just trying to help you.”
“You’re only about fifteen years too late.”
Daughters always know where to put the knife in.
Naha traffic finally starts moving again. Moe presses the accelerator. The station wagon surges forward and dies. A hornet swarm of cars honk as they swerve to avoid us. Moe stomps futilely on the gas pedal several times.
“Stop pumping! You’re flooding it!”
The honking grows more shrill. Moe’s hands drop from the steering wheel and tears stream down her face. She looks back at the traffic blocked behind her. “What do they expect me to do? I am doing the best I know how. What the hell do they expect me to do?”
