Time and a Ticket

by Peter Benchley

  "Good time for diddly," said the boy.

  "No," I said, "not good time for diddly."

  "Ah, yes. Sun just goin' down. Very good time for . . ." He made a circle with two fingers and moved the index finger of the other hand back and forth through it.

  "Thanks anyway, but I don't think so. We'll call you if we need you."

  "Okay, you lose." He started to go out.

  "Hey, by the way," I said. "Did you and that tailor arrive at our door at the same time?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Why did you let him beat you in?"

  "He say he tell manager on me if I don' let him in 'fore me." He turned and went out.

  As far as we were concerned, the contest was even now at one round apiece. That night, the pimps took a decisive lead. Some of the tailor shops stay open at night, but just as six in the afternoon is not the perfect time for purchasing "diddly," so at eleven at night few people are interested in buying suits.

  We were set upon four times in one block. Once in the hotel lobby, once in front of a nightclub, once in front of a drugstore, and once in front of a movie theater. The one in front of the movie theater had just finished his course in persistence.

  When we had gone through the "You like nice girl?" pitch, he started on a new one. "Maybe you like boys?" This was an intelligent ploy: if it was true, he had a sale, and if it was not, he figured he could insult us into proving our virility. But it didn't work.

  "No," I said, which left him no avenue of attack short of being boisterously insulting, which he was not about to do. Honor of the trade, no doubt.

  "You like see some dirty pictures? Four movies. Hot stuff."

  "No."

  We were walking, and he scurried along to keep up with us. "Two movies half price."

  "No."

  "How 'bout show? I got it real. Two girls do it, boy girl do it. Right front of you. You sit watch. They do anything you like. You the boss. You tell 'em, they do."

  "You have a large inventory," I said, "but no thanks."

  He had run out of goods, and, disgusted, he walked away.

  Perhaps the Hong Kong pimps will never get the recognition they deserve. True, their wares are to be found all over the world, and their prices are not remarkably low. Yet these people have great talent and great color, much more than the tailors, who already have a huge market and are only trying to take business away from one another. The pimps are continually concocting new sales techniques and offering new pleasures, working to expand their clientele.

  Being in Hong Kong was like being back in Europe, and for a week Charlie and I luxuriated in the cosmopolitan, vibrant atmosphere of the great city. We stayed in three hotels, from the austere (cheap and clean) YMCA to the middle-priced, plastic-furniture Shamrock, to the plush Mira-mar. We were fitted for suits at Maiwo Yang, for shirts at Mee Yee, and for shoes at Lee Kee. We sat on straw mats and drank bird's-nest soup and ate sweet and sour pork. We danced with two Pan American stewardesses to "Mountain Greenery" at a top-floor restaurant that overlooked the whole colony. We rode the Star Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong and back, drinking English gin and Scotch whisky from paper cups. We twisted with ladies of the evening in waterfront bars on the island of Hong Kong. We talked politics with a British shipper and a Chinese law student. We walked through the snake market at two in the morning and saw Chinese housewives carefully choosing the long, writhing serpents that would feed their families the next day. When a woman made a choice, the stallkeeper picked the snake out of the cage, made a small incision, and skinned it in an instant. The snake was still twitching as the man wrapped it in newspaper and dropped it in the woman's shopping bag. We could have spent another two weeks in Hong Kong without being bored, snooping around the narrow streets, window-shopping, meeting people, touring deep in the New Territories on the Red Chinese border. But every day the itch to get home grew stronger. It had first become noticeable in India, where the heat and discomfort and boredom of Ahmedabad and Bombay had made us long for the comfort and activity of home, and it had gotten worse when we passed the halfway mark and began what was, technically, the home stretch. At first, we had both been conscientious about seeing everything and meeting everyone, and even as far east as Bangkok we were still taking advantage of all our contacts. In Bankok, we had tried to make arrangements to go to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, the fabulous ruins which everyone had said we should see. But it was difficult to acquire the necessary visas and get plane reservations on the irregular and uncertain run between Thailand and Cambodia, and the trip would have cost us an extra week and a considerable amount of money. Six weeks earlier, we would have taken the trip and written off the time and expense to education. As it was, we had decided not to go.

  So when we picked up our Hong Kong suits and shirts and shoes, we spent one last night on the town and, on the 18th of April, flew to Tokyo.

  16

  In japan, our blase approach to the problem of reservations finally caught up with us—with a vengeance. We arrived in Tokyo at midnight, in the teeth of an unseasonal downpour, and were curtly informed that there was not a room to be had anywhere in the city.

  "It is Golden Week, you know," said a stiffly formal Japanese. "Cherry blossom time. People come from all over the world for Golden Week."

  Accompanied by ten or twelve other people who had neglected to make reservations, we waited in the Pan American office until one-thirty while a tired, beleaguered clerk called every hotel in Tokyo and pleaded for rooms. In vain. We hailed a taxi and told the driver to take us to a hotel. He laughed. At quarter to three, after trying fourteen hotels and running up a $7 taxi bill, we were condescendingly accepted at a hotel and assigned to a three-room suite, for which we paid $22—in advance.

  "Only for tonight, sir," said the clerk. "The room is reserved for tomorrow. Checkout time is ten-thirty."

  The next morning, we went to the desk and started calling hotels. Four of the first five we called said flatly no. The fifth said they would put us on a list, and that we might be able to get a room sometime around the end of the month.

  "How about Japanese inns?" I asked the clerk. "Would any of them have rooms?" We had wanted to stay in a Japanese inn to begin with, but they were not listed in the phone book.

  "Japanese inns?" said the clerk. "In Tokyo? Tell me, are there any colonial inns in New York City?" So much for Japanese inns.

  Finally, we found a hotel that would have us ("Of course, you will have to stay in the unrenovated wing"), and although it was twice as expensive as we could comfortably afford, we accepted eagerly. When we had unpacked, we hurried to American Express to make reservations to go to Kyoto and Nara. We definitely wanted to stay in a Japanese inn in Kyoto, and we wanted to make sure that we had a reservation.

  "Are you serious?" said the man at American Express.

  "Why, yes," I said.

  "Well, I'll try," he said, "but you have about as much chance as if you'd asked me to move the emperor out of his palace and give you his bedroom."

  An hour later, he had an answer. "No," he said. "But there's always a chance that you could get something if you just showed up there. A cancellation or something."

  "And if we can't?" said Charlie.

  "Then you come back to Tokyo. Unless you want to sleep in the street." We were debating whether or not to take the chance, when the man said, "I can get you plane reservations to Kyoto, but I think you should know that it will cost the two of you about a hundred and twenty dollars round trip."

  "We're going to get home sooner than we thought," said Charlie.

  We thanked the man for his time. We went back to the hotel and tried to decide how to spend our glorious, fun-filled week in sprawling Tokyo, the biggest city in the world. We were unable to find our way around, for the streets are neither numbered nor named (in any language). We didn't speak the language, so every time we went out we had to ask the concierge to write on a piece of paper in Japanese where we wanted to go; when we got lost, we showed th
e paper to a passerby, who usually shrugged his shoulders or pointed vaguely in any direction that came to mind.

  A Japanese friend we looked up decided that as part of our education we should go to a Japanese bath. He said he realized that most Americans have heard wild stories about the Japanese baths, and he thought we should see for ourselves what they were like.

  To the Japanese the public baths are, very simply, a part of their daily life, and those who can afford it (for they are not cheap) stop in often on their way home from work. It must have been the occupation forces who first awakened the American mind to Japanese baths, and stirred it with tales of free love. Like hotels, there are respectable baths and not-so-respectable baths, the latter being more brothels-with-a-gimmick than places to bathe oneself. Regardless, what is to the Japanese a daily ritual has become to American tourists a source of curiosity and amusement, and Charlie and I were anxious to test the myth firsthand.

  At five-thirty one afternoon, Charlie and I, led by our friend, entered a four-story building, outside of which hung three neon signs in Japanese. They were translated for us as saying, "Finnish sauna baths," "Individual Turkish baths," and "Group baths." We climbed to the second floor, where the ticket office was, and our escort bought three tickets.

  "What kind are these for?" asked Charlie as we walked to the waiting room.

  "Individual," said the man.

  We sat in the lounge for perhaps five minutes, when three young women came in, two from a corridor that ran off the lounge to the right, one from a corridor on the left. Two of the three women were small and round, like fat lady gnomes. The third was tall and husky. The two little ones headed for the Japanese man and myself. They took our hands and led us off down the corridor on the right. As we left the room, my chubby little filly and I, I glanced back and saw Charlie being marched down the other corridor by the big one. He walked rather stiffly, I thought, not with the determined gait I knew to be the real Ravenel.

  My girl was clothed in a loose-fitting white bathrobe, and as soon as she led me into a small anteroom, containing only a massage table, and closed the door behind us, she shed her bathrobe, revealing a pair of white panties and a white bra.

  She knelt down and took off my shoes. She went around behind me and peeled off my jacket, then motioned for me to take off my tie and shirt, which I managed to do. Then she waved her hand at me and said, "All," and walked into the bathroom. Gingerly, I took off my socks and threw them over my jacket. Then I stood there, unsure of what to do next. The girl came back into the room, and when she saw that I still had my pants on, she said "Tch-tch," undid my belt, removed my trousers, and hung them up. "Off," she said, pointing to my shorts. After a moment's hesitation, I pulled down my shorts and stepped out of them. "Good," she said, and clapped her hands. She smiled broadly, and I saw that her two front teeth were black.

  When I had spent ten minutes enclosed up to my chin in a steam cabinet, the girl said "Out," and pointed to a stool not much bigger around than a salad plate. I sat down on it, and she picked up a bucket of almost scalding water and threw it over me. I leapt to my feet, but she pushed me down again and began to rub me with a bar of soap. When the soaping was done, she jammed me into the tiny tub, where I lay half submerged in steaming-hot water for about a minute, with both legs sticking full length over the end. The girl laughed at my position and said, "Beeeg mahn."

  When she had dried me with a bath towel, she shoved me face down onto the massage table. She began at the calf of one leg and worked up to the thigh, then down the other leg, slapping me first with the back of her hand, then with her palm. After the slapping, she worked on my back with her elbows, digging in and moving her arms in small circles.

  "Did you learn this one from de Sade?" I said, groaning as her elbows burrowed into my back.

  "Wha' say?"

  "Forget it."

  She stopped for a moment and I thought the ordeal was over. I began to sit up. "No," she said, and she hoisted herself onto the table.

  "Now wait a minute," I said, but it was too late. She placed one foot on my right thigh, the other on my left, and began to walk up my back. I had heard tales of petites masseuses running up and down your back, but this girl was anything but petite. I felt as if a hefty Landrace sow with feet like Primo Camera was trying a primeval bossa nova on my back.

  "Okay?" she asked politely. I groaned, and counted myself lucky as I remembered that Charlie's girl was bigger than he.

  "You're some lot of broad to be doing the 440 on my vertebrae," I said.

  "Wha' say, Joe?" she said.

  "Oh, God!"

  She jumped off the table, turned me over, and repeated the whole process on my front, slapping the thighs, digging the elbows into my sternum, walking on my stomach. Then she grabbed my left hand and wrenched thumb and little finger in opposite directions. There was a sharp crack. The girl giggled. She took the three middle fingers and crunched them together, then yanked them apart. Another crack. She reached for my right hand. "Oh, no, you don't," I said.

  She laughed, and said, "Okay, Joe." She grabbed my ears and pulled me into a sitting position.

  As I dressed, I moved my limbs to see if anything was broken. Everything seemed to be in order, and to my surprise, I felt relaxed and well.

  "School?" said the girl.

  "Teacher," I said.

  "Smoke?"

  "Fire."

  The girl laughed. "American?"

  "Flag."

  The girl looked at a clock on the wall, said arigato, and pushed me out the door.

  We spent the next few days running between Tokyo University and America House, an academic institution for Americans in Tokyo and for Japanese who want to study about America. We talked to teachers and students, business men and politicians, and we noticed that in all our conversations one subject came up again and again: the reasons behind the riots that forced President Eisenhower to cancel his trip to Japan in i960. Though the subject was always the same, the way it was brought up varied, depending on whom we were talking to—sometimes it was mentioned in a tone of humble apology, sometimes in a tone of angry defense. Our last day in Japan, we asked a man who was working with America House why the Japanese felt compelled to dwell on this unfortunate incident.

  "With some people, it's a feeling of guilt," said the man. "They want you to believe that the riots are not indicative of how the people of Japan feel toward America. With others, it's just the opposite. They want to impress upon you Japan's independence, her unwillingness to submit to any one nation. They want to get all foreigners out of Japan, and they hate the idea of any alliance that demands something from them. That's one of the main troubles with Japanese society today—it's riddled with this sort of conflict."

  The roots of these conflicts, he said, lay in the defeat in 1945 and the subsequent shakeup of the old, formal, highly stratified society. For hundreds of years, the Japanese people had nothing to do with the outside world. The average Japanese man took no part in the governing of his country, and his whole life revolved around local and family affairs, which were controlled by a strong ethic designed only for small groups. The Japanese were never taught to think in terms of "democracy" or "liberty," but in terms of "honor" and "duty." So "government" per se was an alien concept.

  They did not choose their present form of government— it was set upon them after the war. Similarly, they did not choose to be allied with the Western bloc. They just happened to have been conquered by its strongest member. But the government and the alliance served Japan well for the first few years after the war. The country was financed and defended, which left Japan unconcerned with anything but the construction of a solid economic basis for its society.

  It is only in recent years, since Japan has become strong on its own, that it has begun to demand a say in its national and international affairs. And the more demands the Japanese achieved, the more power they had; and the more power they had, the more demands they made.

  To a ce
rtain extent, the conflict in Japanese society is between generations. The older generation, deeply loyal to Japanese tradition and ethic, is cautious, concerned with the safety of Japan and willing to wait and decide which side will be the winner before committing itself. The younger generation, which has no solid background of tradition, and which is beset by fears of war and weakened by lack of knowledge about the world, chases new ideas with the fervor of a dog chasing rabbits. While they are in school, Japanese youths are taught by some Marxist professors, and they hear from the powerful Teachers' Union that ". . . peace is what the people want, but the capitalists do not make money from peace, and so they see it as a terrible threat to them." These words and others, such as "imperialistic warmongers," make the students, who are pitifully uninformed about the Communist countries, easy prey for the left-wing Zengakuren, the Communists, and other militant groups.

  Japanese neutralism is motivated by two qualities: cynicism and terror. The Japanese want to be defended, but they don't want to defend themselves. They are afraid of a nuclear war, and while they want to have some voice in preventing it, they don't want to align themselves with either side for fear of upsetting the balance of power.

  "Japan's is an awkward position," said the man from America House. "She doesn't want us to think she's going communistic, because she's not. She doesn't want the Communists to think she's going to the West, because she's not. So she ends up by appearing to have no ideology at all, except neutrality. The sad part is that she doesn't have any clear-cut ideology. And perhaps it would be unrealistic to ask that she did."

  17

  “Good afternoon," said the voice over the loudspeaker. "This is your captain speaking. Our landing in Honolulu will be delayed approximately twenty minutes. A military convoy is taking off, and we have to wait until they're clear of the field."

  "Oh, swell," I said. "Now I suppose he'll run out of gas." I could practically hear the strains of "The High and the Mighty."