Tokio Whip

by Arturo Silva

SCENE THREE: OLD/NEW BAR, IKEBUKURO

  Coming out of the department store, overloaded with vegetables and fruits and some firm, good-looking tofu, the Woman saunters over to Old/New, the bar with its Isamu Wakabayashi iron patinaed walls. It provides her a respite from the hordes of kids and their countryish parents (though never together, of course). It is very cool, gray, indifferent, very 80s, she feels comfortable here, very cool and mysterious herself. She orders one too many near-frozen sakés – in fact the second sets her off – and she recalls evenings at other Old/News (she always called it “Old and New,” however): in Kichijoji, with a Dutch friend, and where when business was sinking by the early 90s they’d sell off half the space to make way for a karaoke room; then there is the Old/New branch in Shibuya, with its Natsuyuki Nakanishi murals, purples and silvers à la some Japanese Klimt Nouveau, and where her American friend had insisted they go to a less “piss elegant” place for a drink; the one in Roppongi with its Noriyuki Haraguchi walls, also iron, but even more cool, severe (was the fish restaurant just across the street?, she can’t recall), and where her Swiss friend had forgotten her umbrella – it was still there a month later. In her inebriation she thinks the waiter – so long in coming – is her man. Would he like to see her home? She fucks him like crazy, says goodnight, and can’t recall a thing the next morning.

  ***

  The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

  – Andrei Tarkovsky

  Three miracles: my dream of a religious convention; the dream of a dragon-fly and being saved; and the one where they are fucking in the rice field and she has crooked teeth.

  ***

  R’n’L!!!

  So Calvin opens his skull and his brains drop out. He goes to his mother and says, “I let my mind wander and it didn’t come back.” She’s lying on the couch reading and says, “I thought you lost your mind years ago.” But the best is where he plays Godzilla and destroys Tokyo!

  “Nothing special, just talk, and suddenly just to talk with you.” Someone in Wenders’ Wrong Move. Japanese Noir – gotta find out more.

  I love that thing that Dwight Yoakum said, and that he said he was sayin’ it even if it sounded like white trash talkin’, that if Elvis had married Ann Margaret he’d be alive today.

  I made a huge salad with everything in it. Want some?

  I need a new pocket knife. Do you think I need to have a license to carry one here?

  Now let us take the word “lettuce.” Give each letter the numerical value of its order in the alphabet. A=1, ... Z=26. So, we get, T=20; U=21; L+E+E+22; and T+C=23. A neat order, transposed, TUVW. – Uhn, no, I don’t do this all the time. Hey, some people count license plates.

  And anyway, just remember, “Love laughs at locksmiths.” (Ok, ok: it’s Houdini via Buster.)

  Did you ever hear that Bill Anderson song, “He Died of Love at 3AM”? Me neither. Dylan mentions it in Don’t Look Back. Must be easily available; I should put it on the list and look for it. Oh, lazy-busy me.

  Another movie title. History is Made at Night.

  The major headache in my life right now – besides love, money, work, and your absence – is my clothes-dryer. Why am I telling you this? (Can either of you fix clothes-dryers?)

  Thursday I had no coffee at all. Friday I caught a cold. There is a connection, a lesson here, isn’t there?

  Forget that Zen stuff about the face you had before you were born. Can SV even remember the original color of her hair!

  ***

  I hate the country – two hours between trains, an hour between busses, and no record stores. It’s such a nuisance.

  – Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi-Silva, 1956)

  ***

  Seventy-two hours and counting. What’s the “X” in LAX for, anyway? Hiromi, you’ve got three credit cards, a week’s worth of tight pants, four days of pent up sexual energy, a box of condoms because you never know about American guys, and a heart of ... well, we’ll just leave the heart home this time. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to Los Angeles. Just because Hawaii was closer. A dumb one, Hiromi-chan. I mean, it wasn’t bad, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t LA either. The cars the freeways the boys. The first Disneyland – I hope it’s as good as ours, might be pretty run down though. Is there crime in Disneyland, too? Must be, it’s American, isn’t it? (Oh, I have to be careful, careful, careful. What if I was robbed? God, what would I do? Oh, please, don’t let it happen. I’m near the end of my savings. I couldn’t possibly come home empty-handed. Oh, what if I shopped – and then was robbed? What if I’m robbed on my first day there, what would I do? Will there be some sort of secret place where I can keep my money safe? Isn’t the country supposed to provide for people like me? Can’t I just call up Sumitomo Bank and get an advance or something?) Universal pictures. Rodeo Drive. Is that a branch of the Daikanyama shop? Let’s see: shop wisely (no problem, I’m from Tokyo, I was born to it); light lunches, and let the guys take care of dinner; drink moderately; look hot. Those American boys are suckers for Japanese women. Oh am I going to have a great time! But why isn’t Jurassic Park in my guidebook?

  Chapter 4

  GOTANDA–MEGURO

  Roberta’d been here six months; she was feeling comfortable here, feeling herself, making her own way; as for Lang’s imminent arrival she was ambivalent, curious and felt I suppose she didn’t really have a choice but to “welcome” him, put him up for a while, see what developed – and so he got the little living room – until he up and left.

  ***

  Love means acknowledging the dangerousness of the way and feeling the incomprehensibility of the coincidence with another.

  – Robert Musil

  What did I say, overhear? Lang meditates to himself. And what the price I have paid for it now? Tried my best to be a man – the one you want? – a woman and child, tried to love, friends, family – and you, Roberta. All that sunless steel, concrete boys with cars and curtain walls, wanting only facts and not their feelings, blinding me to the facts of the feelings of it all, of what we were in fact doing or not to one another – the loved, the non-loved, the not-yet loved, all these Names of Love, strangers all, the frail flesh in frail breasts. And what have we – I – come up with? – faith lost. Betrayed from within. How, why did I go on for so long in that contempt, that negativity that threw me over in time, refused to get me through. Sick finally of all of us, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, the natural antagonisms.

  We know, dammit, what we know. And then we forget it all.

  It’s not supposed to be this way. What the hell’ve I been doing all this while, Lang?, the silver-haired, 35-year-old boy/man asked himself as the sun set– in Tokyo in Lang in this his long moment of self-candor.

  Boy, indeed. Hadn’t Roberta once asked him to “Cheer me up, Lang,” and he’d quoted Bernhard, “Man is wretched and only death is certain,” and she laughed and asked him to “Say something nice now, Lang, something about men,” and he came back with, “They’re all boys at heart,” and she tried again, and he hesitated a moment and then added, “A few of them might grow up and become men, and a few of them might become more,” and she called him an angel and he told her he had been, “Since the day I was born, Roberta,” and she loved him all the more, all the more despite the familiar and too truthful sting of those words of his that would remain with her long after she’d decided to leave him for however long necessary, remain while she was making her way in Tokyo.

  Whadda’ya’ hear, whadda’ya’ say? Love is there – in the window, at the door, in yer arms, m’boy, yer thin, thin arms. And look where it’s gotten you anyway. What did I do? Spoke to her. Listened. Doubt the love in hand? The name of a woman. Never enough there to dive into, but ever thinking there is more ahead: overthrow, dissolution, some further union down the line. (Say it simply, the heart of the matter, the responsibilities of memory. In this sea, this maelstrom some call the
heart’s desire. Runes upon – walls is it? – Poe’s gates of ice.)

  No, to achieve some newer music with the frail material allotted us? Something new, free of contempt, no malice aforethought. (The way Marianne years ago seemed to fly across the room into my arms.) Something blue …

  A dozen years, two or three cities, one woman (who refuses to be one ((Who refuses? Who too many? Who more or less than enough?)) ) And now, this place, city – who are these people – this distant love – that I walk among, listen to?

  Oh Roberta. This impossible city and you of all people in it and me of all ... My comeuppance. If I go, you’ll stay. If I stay – (Where would we go? But no –you’ve already left.) Oh, Blaise. I should’ve stayed home. Maybe I have; it’s where the heart is, they say.

  No – I’m a dead man’s ghost.

  No – I can change, I swear. I’m not yet the man I want to be, but soon enough the man you want … just a few weeks more – won’t you?

  Ten thousand ways to love. A bird of thought. A palm perhaps, a kiss, a greatness deferred for some other occasion. “Waiting for someone … to come out of somewhere.” No, don’t kiss me yet, soon already I’ll be yours, kiss you too much.

  What the city? Who the woman?

  I never wanted to come here. She’s set up now in the Low City, needs to be alone, demands it. Accepted. I make my way then. And what is this place, this Kichijoji? A lot of foreigners, grocery stores and restaurants, even a Parco – you get off the train and the whole world looks fifteen years old.

  Who the city? What the woman?

  No, that’s not, dammit, what I need to say. Recall all. (Everything fixed in memory. Somewhere in the brain they say, it’s stored, and apparently can all come out. I remember standing before the Rokeby Venus and thinking it would be quite a while before I saw it again and so I determined then and there to fix every inch in my memory-eye. (The flesh, contours and folds, like the Master’s lace.) But is it all retrieved only on the deathbed? Do I start babbling like the Dutchman?) Hell, what do I want to say? No, no, let’s not get sentimental, boy. Say your beads. “Swift, Musil, Joyce; Swift, Musil, Joyce.”

  No new language, no new truths, and none eternal, either. Me, myself and I. And Roberta? Yes, all the while, Roberta and her times. An end to pain. Pun intended? Leave it to the reader. No, take that back; we know and love the reader too well, we know what he’ll do to it. Leave it to ... well, any or all of us; who’s a reader, anyway? Shit, enough of that sort of talk, all we say, half-digested, and who’s competing anyway?

  I have forgotten so very much.

  And I? Now new or the same again?

  “Not find happiness? A right to live?” Who said it to whom? You know, I fell, I think now, less for what you said than for the voice you said it in. Falling for a voice, then the eyes and smile, the mind and humor in the hips.

  And me – it’s been too long since I worked on my Buddy Holly imitation.

  Now it seems or never for Lang.

  “What profiteth it a man, Lang?”

  (From whence these phrases and images?)

  “If I pull the skin back for a closer look at the frail scrotum …”

  (What did she say?)

  “Oh, you’re only another part of another love story.”

  (You’ll never get out of these blues alive, Lang.)

  “Ahi mi! My splendors and miseries lay about me!” Palm out, hand to brow, I fall back on to a sofa, and whisper in tears, “why all this violence?” – and expire.

  (Lang, wake up, Lang!)

  A stolen kiss and a broken word and now look at all the damage transpired. The way you left her then, walked out of the room and she knew you’d come back. The way she left you now, walked out of the city and you now so unsure. Then the short note, and a couple of weeks later a call from Tokio. Love – all of it – had been offered me – (To me, to be so blessed, of all my sex, center of all beauty!) – and I held back. You refused: remember: a promise, loyalty, wholeness, time. Freely refused, and freely condemned. Not God’s will, yours, Lang. And now you are in Tokio where madness seems a form of an unknown love and she is asking you to leave her herself her city.

  And only some few women some few men willing to try again. (What movie was that?). He walked into his own labyrinth, and never saw the sun again. Damn, Lang, can you finally halt what you like to refer to as your desire and refuse to acknowledge as resentment and recall her to you now and give her back what she saw in you once – not faith, but maybe its possibility?

  I saw her figure on the street, a Klein blue bag, a string of hair that refused to stay in place, a swimmer’s legs, and … in her smile was my peace, in her eyes my Paradise. All those Robertas to discover! Our life and times, the unions and separations of those first months together – who left whom then? And why? Not so much indecision as only that when the decision came it would be irrevocable, permanent, the first day and last.

  The will to serve.

  And then the years, the innurral and renewal, and then again until you brought it to its inevitable end, pushed her to it, nothing she desired, never anticipated: that you you turned into. And what disappointment – coming just when you seemed, she thought, so ready! Resentment was hers then, rightfully. And she so ready, “I can only give you everything,” and it really was oh so true and you could not see it for the life of the city you needed to embody – a city you had no concrete idea of, no Tokio of the mind yet. But if this too be a man, what is indeed to be said or done? That is what you recognize now too late to make amends. “Amends”? As if there were repairs that could be made. Not towards her, not now, no longer. In yourself, in prospect. To be a man, woman, child. Finally, at this stage, you must or never be a man.

  Oh, live up to your name now, Lang, now or never!

  Ah, Roberta, Tokio … all the time before me. You, Roberta, new? Changing-changeless. Isn’t that what they say of Tokio? Ah, now, Carole Lombard, she would have understood.

  “I opened my heart to the whole ...” – well, to the city – “and I found it was loving.”

  Lang sits in his darkened room, the eyes focussed in thought, the mind hovering above the city he is only recently, slowly, coming to recognize. How does one become a city? What do we mean when we say we fulfill ourselves, our nature, only in the city? That we are only wholly human and moreso in the city, and wholly cities in you, Tokyo?

  (Tokyo, I gave everything to you– body and soul, I’m all for you – absolve me, release me now with grace ascending so that I might live again, and rely on the expectation of a peaceful death. If I am not all yours, not a true Tokyoite, then I am unworthy, a reprobate, and I will get the death I deserve.)

  There is light inside the tunnel, too. With faith, belief, whatever it takes me now. Friendship, toughness, tenderness. “Without which nothing”: Godard’s beautiful ending. “Love or destruction”: Aleixandre’s beautiful beginning. “Brothers in mourning, sisters cradled in sisters’ arms”: Bergman’s beautiful memory. Roberta and Lang, together in Tokio – in our lifetime, Lord? And Gertrud. To be able to say at the end: I have loved. In the city, in the woman, in me, Lang, the man women love to – women love to what? Might I only know it in this city, this woman?

  “Banal” van Zandt called the people. Or what is the difference after all between fucking and talking? (“To fuck and be fucked. ‘Oh, by Jaysus, but I am be-fucked.’ A love by any other name.” – Oh, Lang, get a hold of yourself!) Ok: to live one’s time, place, at most, no less than that; this: to describe a mood, to describe an arc – a style, a geometry. No more nor less. (Christ, why all this now?, where from, what gash, now of all places and with all that’s transpired ((“loose usage” – so regarded by whom? – that too, where from?)) with all that’s transpired between Roberta and me? From whence this gush?

  Years together in our fashions and it still was new. Roberta as the USA: red hair, blue eyes, her milky white skin –tight dresses and lipstick. Northern Roberta, black eyes and a blue dress; Spani
sh Roberta, black hair and a red dress. The angular Roberta, the reclining Roberta, Roberta at her desk – Roberta, your body changing according to your moods, your “circumstances.” Your small breasts became large those months and then small again. Looked Chinese once, and now once more so American. And now again changing – a sort-of Japanese look. Ah, but throw any bolt of cloth at you and any way it falls it looks made for you. And that voice still. (And speaking what variety of languages.) The monotone, the rush, the strung together phrases, the leaps across thought and grammar, the resistance, the edge, the profundo and the moderato. Within, between and above them all, the One and the Many, unique, you, alone, the multiple capital ARE.

  People are good. I have seen and known a few good people.

  (The mother’s skull in a dream of death for the newborn babe and I see you whole.)

  But that’s not what I wanted to say either. Or is it? You wanted to say something that speaks like children with as much control over their bodies as … that speaks of some however small tenuous or inappropriate connection with – with what?, where? – Beijing? … that speaks to a woman who’s asked you to leave and with whom you want to stay.

  (But what am I to do with this Tokio? Roberta’s not going to play guide and hostess. Better call van Zandt tonight … “Everybody’s tryin’ to be my ....” To be my what? Never met so many one-conversation bastards. Well, folks, you’ve come to monologue’s end, your telephone cards have run out. What happened to the ear that listens, the two-way street? What was that line about hangers-on, friends and virtue? And every artiste here seems to have a tale of despair and final triumph against the philistines – but they’re the system. Leave ’em all behind, Lang – I’ve got work to do. So, JG, write a novel when yer 25, and then leave, tend yer garden and seek wisdom. And if you do have children, remember Voltaire’s advice: kill ’em before they begin to think of heaven.)

  Whose were those young, innocent faces I passed today? Young couples holding hands. Skirts swinging, leather bags, comic books, laughter and silence. A remembrance, a view from a bus window, a young couple’s first kiss. To compassionate. “Running with instinct,” and what remains, eh? “Young Couple on the Run: An Essay in Aesthetics.” I wonder if I still have a copy of that somewhere. To recreate myself, or better – to cleanse myself of years of one-liners, of my own embellished tales told too many times, hardly a mythology, only silly in the end. (Perhaps destructive. “Believe Christ and His Apostles …”) That’s maybe one biography; look for the other one, the faces, voices I’ve so neglected and that were there with me all the while, there in the shadows, in the corners and backgrounds, on the verandahs and stairs, too unassuming to come forward. (My Noir set as redone by Minnelli. ((Or Phil and Tina: “It’s those little things that mean so much, so very much.”)) )