by Sarah Bird
You know you’re getting old when your telephone cord is kinky and your sex ain’t. I’m a father figure to Zelda. She keeps asking me for money! I ain’t gettin’ any, just ain’t gettin’ any at all.
The clubs for noncommissioned officers staff sergeant and above are considerably more sedate. There are wives in the NCO clubs, many of them Asians, who seem to be enjoying an American diet. The food the chubby wives are, apparently, enjoying is a little better at their clubs. You can order a steak instead of just pizza and hamburgers. Some drinks come with umbrellas. The tablecloths are fabric.
I took Zelda there to this great restaurant. She orders everything on the menu—the caviar, steak, wine. I ask her, ‘Zelda, does your mother feed you like this?’ She says, ‘No, but my mother don’t want to take me home later and screw me.’ I ain’t getting any, just ain’t getting any at all.
But it is the officers’ clubs that make Bobby nervous and testy. “Hell, yes, I’m nervous,” he admits, as we drive to the gig at the Johnson O Club after he has told me for the fifth time that I’m killing him, that it is my sworn duty in life to assassinate Bobby Moses. “One word from some tight-assed bird colonel whose wife gets a bug up her butt, and I never tour Japan again.”
When we play an officers’ club, Bobby wears a little more Brut than usual, has his nails buffed, hits his roots with the Grecian Formula, slicks a little more Brylcreem into his hair, brings an extra tux shirt to change into at intermission.
I catch his nerves, spackle on an extra layer of pancake, and double up on the Maybelline for the Keene big-eyed-baby look he prefers.
The days take on a shape. I sleep as late as I can, then wander around the Imperial Palace for a few hours, feeding the swans. Around one, Bobby gets up and we go shopping. After the first expedition when he outfitted me to meet Luigi, I won’t let him buy me any more gifts. This doesn’t prevent Bobby from purchasing presents for every member of my family.
The day after we play Johnson Air Force Base, Bobby takes me to the Akihabara district to visit an endless array of discount shops where the phenomenal outpouring of Japan’s electronics industry is on display at a high-decibel level. Bobby buys a foot massager for my father and, the newest thing, a cassette tape player for the twins.
We spend the next afternoon in the Takashimaya department store. We start at the rooftop playground, where Bobby sits down and immediately starts snoring like a hibernating grizzly until a little boy wearing knee socks, shorts, and a sun hat with an elastic strap under his chin tiptoes away from his grandmother to touch the “sleeping” gaijin, whereupon Bobby turns, roaring, on the child, who runs away screaming in tears.
Downstairs, Bobby buys a play tea set and a chalk-white Japanese doll for Bosco. Bob gets a chemistry set, a kit for making a kite the size of a picnic table, and a happy coat.
We troll the Imperial Hotel’s arcade looking at cloisonné, ivory, coral, wood block prints, dolls in glass cases, binoculars, and pearls until Bobby settles on a sweater and matching purse both beaded with a cat design for Kit. Along the way, he orders two dozen lighters inscribed You Just Don’t Get It At All! Bobby to give away to club stewards and ranking brass.
But the person Bobby really likes buying gifts for is Moe. At shop after shop, he holds up a bolt of raw silk, a pearl pendant, a slide projector, gold-rimmed sake cups, embroidered hankies, and asks, “Will my buddy Moe like this?”
At each possible selection, I shrug and Bobby puts the item down.
“What does Moe like?”
The only thing that comes to mind is strawberries. “She told me she really craves strawberries.”
Bobby makes the sort of sour face he makes when something does not coincide with his idea of class and turns back to the jade mother and baby elephant he has been contemplating.
At the end of our shopping outings, we stop in at a mikuru bar for a “snack” of cake, pastry, cookies, and coffee, since Bobby maintains that he only eats the one meal a day. Then we head back to the hotel to start getting ready.
Around six, I meet Bobby in the lobby. Joe drives us to the first of what are usually two shows at whatever base we’re headed for that evening. While Bobby comes more fully awake during these drives until he reaches a state of edgy irritation that can spike into homicidal rage, I withdraw into the just-passing-through catatonia I perfected on endless bus rides to the inevitable new school.
At every club, Bobby pulls out my “charts” and the band plays some version of “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” that ranges from hideous to coma-inducing. The song, if it could be called that, is impossible to dance to, and by the second night I give up trying, realizing that my main purpose is to smile, serve as the butt of a few lame jokes, and demonstrate the possibility, however remote, that Bobby Moses might, in fact, be getting any at all. He really likes it when I pretend to get mad at his jokes and sleazy-sad innuendos. Once I accept that the essence of my segment of the act is to trot a selection of secondary sexual characteristics onstage, it really stops mattering how poorly I shake said characteristics around.
I go onstage each night secure in the knowledge that on the other side of the catatonic state is amnesia. By the time Bobby holds my hand and we take our bow, I have forgotten almost everything about my “performance.” The one element I cannot submerge is what Bobby has taken to calling my “signature.” “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” plinks uncontrollably through my head at odd times during the day.
The end of the night becomes the best part of the day, sharing a gargantuan meal in Bobby’s room. Even though Bobby makes such a big deal of “showing” me to my room that the staff, and eventually even Joe, think we’re sleeping together, after the first night the thought becomes exactly what Bobby makes it in his act, a joke.
In the middle of the second week, we take the bullet train north for a two-day tour at Misawa Air Base. The air is cool and the light has a wintry, spectral quality to it, as if it were bouncing off snow even though there is none. I think of a photo of my father and his crew taken during a TDY outside an inn somewhere near Misawa. Snow covers the ground. Sake bottles line the railing of the porch. All the men’s faces are flushed. They are in a line, with one kimono-clad hostess between each flier. The men grin, legs stuck out to the camera, doing the bunny hop. The wives had a fit about this photo. LaRue Wingo made a great show of tearing up her copy during a bridge game at the club with all the kids supposedly in another room watching a magic show.
A jet thunders overhead at an alarmingly low altitude heading due east. My father called Misawa a “staging area” and once returned from a TDY here that lasted three weeks with tiny totem poles for each one of us carved from walrus tusk and stamped MADE IN ALASKA and a bottle of American children’s vitamins in the shape of characters from the Flintstones that looked like candy and tasted like chemicals. No one even thought about asking how he’d gotten American vitamins and Alaskan totem poles at a Japanese base.
Near the entrance to the officers’ club in Misawa is a map. I trace a line almost directly west from the dot marking Misawa and my finger hits a knot of black lines where the borders of Korea, Red China, and Russia all snarl together. It is odd that, for all the years we lived in Japan, I never realize until that moment just how close we were to Russia.
Lacquer
Back in Tokyo, we move out of the Imperial. Bobby has arranged it so that our last three days of shows will all be on Yokota. “A buddy of mine’s fixed it so we can stay at the BOQ.” This same buddy gets an airman from the motor pool to pick us up. Bobby stuffs wads of thousand-yen notes into Joe’s pockets, and we drive to Yokota.
We enter Yokota at Gate Three. The guard waves the motorpool car on, and, just that easily, I am back in my childhood. All the bases I’ve ever lived on blur into this one, the prototype. Driving down Yokota’s wide avenues plied by Chevys, Fords, Dodges, I remember seeing the base that first time when we were in Major Wingo’s big overheated Pontiac. My heart leaps as we pass the base chapel, as plain and
nondenominational as a Quaker meetinghouse, where I made my first communion, where the bishop of Tokyo patted my cheek to confirm me. The smell of gas fumes as we pass the base service station reminds me of how my father would always tell the Japanese attendant, “Fill it up with ethyl.” The sight of the base library, a long prefabricated metal building, fills my head with the sound of rain beating on the tin roof and the oily smell of the kerosene heater.
“The bowling alley’s right up there.”
Bobby snorts when the triple-peaked roof of the bowling alley appears. “So you really did live here.”
“I really did live here.”
Though Bobby complains about his room at the BOQ being a “cracker box,” mine, although smaller, is vast compared to the one I had at the Imperial. I don’t miss the view of the emperor’s swans at all. The instant Bobby leaves to meet friends, I’m out the front door.
At the Base Exchange, I show my ID card, but the guard won’t let me in because I’m wearing blue jeans. I point out that I bought the jeans I am wearing at the Kirtland Air Force Base Exchange and that I can see a rack of blue jeans in the women’s clothing area. Yes, the guard agrees, you can purchase jeans at the BX, but you can’t wear them into the BX.
I come back wearing an obscenely short skirt and am instantly admitted. I buy a package of Georgia peanuts and a Nehi grape soda from a vending machine, then wander through the comforting array of American products. Levi’s jeans. Breck shampoo. Dial soap. Right Guard deodorant. Craftsman tools. Weber grills. Huffy bikes. Louisville Slugger bats. Voit tetherball sets. Cases of Coke. Bags of Fritos. Bottles of Tabasco sauce.
Behind the BX a row of Japanese-operated shops marked CONCESSIONS sell silver, lace, china, wrought iron, porcelain, dry cleaning, and haircuts. The Look Optical Shop promises Your Order Will Receive Our Best Attention.
The parking lot of Yokota Commissary is as full as if a typhoon were about to hit. Kota Kabs cruise, watching for wives at the exit followed by Japanese bag boys pushing one or more carts loaded with groceries. Next door, the Yokota BX bulk sales booth does a brisk business. A tower of six-packs blocks both side windows. Pyramids of half-gallons of vodka, scotch, and rum sell for $1.80. I stare at the parking lot and remember the rainy day Major Wingo spun doughnuts here that would have killed us if my father hadn’t grabbed the wheel.
Officers in pressed khaki and shoes black and shiny as patent leather march purposefully past heading toward Wing Headquarters. Wing Headquarters looks like the administration building of a large state university. American and Japanese flags fly outside. I walk on toward the officers’ club.
On the street a car slows down and creeps alongside me until I look over and glimpse the Kota Kab logo on the door. I smile with relief at the driver of the two-toned black-and-white Chevy Bel-Air. I am certain that I rode in that very cab. I peer at the driver and wave in recognition. Yes, I’m certain this is the cab and that is the driver who used to take me to ballet lessons at the Youth Center, where I hid in the bathroom for several months until the teacher asked Moe why I’d never shown up. I remember the look of the MPC, military payment certificates, in my hand as I passed them to this driver. There were no coins, just those bright bills colored turquoise and magenta that the military used to thwart black-marketeers. Then I realize that the driver behind the wheel is my age and could not have been driving a Kota Kab ten years ago. Embarrassed, I wave him away and hurry on.
At seventeen hundred hours a scratchy recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” blares out through speakers planted all over the base. Every car stops while all the flags on base are lowered.
When the national anthem stops, I trudge across the large field in front of the Richard Bong Theater where Santa’s helicopter, in a whirl of dust and bits of cellophane from cigarette packages that had been shredded by relentless mowing, used to touch down.
As I walk toward the base theater, I recall the last movie I saw there, Pardners, with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. This was months after Martin and Lewis had ceased to be pardners, and my step when I’d approached the theater that day was burdened as Kit and I walked up to pay our fifteen cents apiece to view the celluloid eulogy.
In front of the theater is a plaque dedicating the Richard Bong Theater to the memory of Richard Bong. I stop to read the plaque and learn that Richard Bong was the Army Air Corps “Ace of Aces,” dying in 1945 at the age of twenty-five and winning the Medal of Honor for “voluntarily and at his own urgent request engaging in repeated combat missions including highly aggressive sorties. His aggressiveness and daring resulted in shooting down eight enemy airplanes during this period.”
The Bong Bunnies. So this was the man, this lover of the “highly aggressive” sortie, that my father and his friends had named themselves after.
I check out the poster for that day’s feature, The Happening. Anthony Quinn’s and Milton Berle’s faces are contorted in expressions of comic panic as a gang of extras in hippie wigs that appear to have been borrowed from Raggedy Ann and Andy close in on them. A swirl of script advises, Go with the flow, man! Berle and Quinn are dressed as mafiosos, a fashion style very similar to Bobby’s. The hippies are barefooted. I vaguely recall avoiding this film more than a year ago when it passed almost instantaneously through theaters in the States.
I hurry on to West Area. My longer grown-up stride causes me to miscalculate and my alma mater, Bob Hope Elementary, takes me by surprise. The pines that were saplings when I attended now tower over the two-story building. I step over the picket fence encircling the school and walk in the front door. Even in summer, it smells of the damp lacquer umbrellas of the locals who clean and cook, of the wet woolens of the children, of the kerosene burned to heat the drafty buildings. At the end of the dark hall, silhouetted against the bright light pouring in through the double doors, I spot the unmistakable hourglass of Miss Ransom’s shirtwaist dress and understand the psychology of the abused child who still longs for the bad parent, for I bound toward her as if I had been Miss Ransom’s treasured pet.
“Miss Ransom!” I run to the end of the hall where the figure is turning and face a stranger.
“Excuse me?” She holds a stack of paper monkeys curled into the letters of the alphabet and still smelling of singed plastic from the laminating machine. She is barely older than I am.
“Oh. I thought you were someone else. I used to go to this school. You don’t happen to know a Miss Ransom.”
“Ransom?” She shakes her head no to that name and the other three I mention. Her glossy eyeliner has collected in a ball at the inner corner of her eyes. “ ’Course, this is my first year here. I think it’s everyone’s first year here, actually. The students’ll have to tell us where the toilets are.”
“They’re back there. Next to the office.”
“I was only kidding.” The new teacher pushes the bar opening the big metal doors. I go back out the way I came, flag down the next Kota Kab that passes by, and tell him to take me to Fussa.
When he stops, I’m sure the driver has made a mistake. We are in a miniature version of Tokyo. But after he repeats Fussa three times and points to the earth beneath us, I step out of the cab. At first, it seems that the little town I once lived in has vanished completely, but between the canyons of high-rises, I find alleys lined with benjo ditches and crammed with paper-screened houses, pachinko parlors, and small shops where the owners wash the sidewalks from blue plastic buckets. I can’t find our alley, though, nor is it possible any longer to see Mount Fuji, but that is not what I’m looking for. I scrutinize every female face that passes and see Fumiko in all of them and in none.
Polish
“So, Zelda, who’d you look up?”
“No one.”
Bobby has called me into his room while he finishes his preparations for the night’s show. I’m already made up and have done my hair. I sit on his bed in my bathrobe and paint my nails with the clear gloss Bobby uses, while he combs and recombs his hair. His tux is in a garment bag
and he’s wearing a sport shirt and slacks. He angles his head to the mirror, scrapes at his part where the roots are growing in, decides he can make it another night without a touch-up, and pats his hair back into place.
“No one? You were gone all afternoon and you didn’t look anyone up?”
“No.”
“You did live here four years, right?”
“Right.”
“And that’s a long time for the Air Force.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so this is like your hometown. So, you’re in your hometown and you don’t look up anybody?” Bobby is doing what he does when his preshow jitters kick in, sprinkling himself with extra Brut.
“Do you have to wear so much aftershave?”
He stops and holds the bottle up.
“This is Brut. Your idol, Bob Hope, wears Brut.”
“Bob Hope is not my idol. He’s a tired old hack who tells jokes that aren’t funny to captive audiences of GIs.” A suicidal glee overtakes me. I can’t stop myself. “Because he’s such a has-been that no one who has a choice would ever come to one of his shows. And Bob Hope doesn’t wear Brut. Nobody but a—” I want to say “loser” so bad I can taste the word but manage to stop myself. “Bob Hope doesn’t wear Brut.”
“So you been hanging out in Hope’s dressing room a lot.”
I mumble an answer.
“What? I didn’t catch that.”
“You don’t get it. Bobby, you just don’t get it at all.”
“Hey, that’s my tag line! It took me thirty years to come up with a signature. Find your own!”
“It’s all yours, Bobby.” I stand up to leave.
“Touchy, touchy. What? That time of the month? You wanna borrow a couple Midol?”
