Lost Girls and Love Hotels (2 page)

I’m six. Frank’s eight.
We’re standing in front of a cage at a service station somewhere between Moncton and Halifax, looking at a monkey. We’re on one of our marathon family road trips, driving from Toronto to Nova Scotia. Dad’s afraid of flying. He claims most airline pilots are drunks and womanizers, that they’re too busy nursing a hangover or goosing the stewardesses to be trusted with our lives.

Dad’s about to pop a vein. The car’s conked out again, and the mechanic tells Dad that he should sue the guy that sold it to him. “Ford Pinto,” he says, shaking his head. “You’d be better off driving a sewing machine.” My father works at a Ford dealership. He sold the car to himself.

Frank’s standing a couple feet from the cage, hands at his hips, leaning forward and squinting. He wears Coke-
bottle glasses that dwarf his head, glasses he’s crushed or lost three times already.

“Actually, he’s not a monkey,” Frank says. “He’s an ape. See? No tail. Monkeys have tails. Apes don’t.”

“Don’t get too close,” I say. Dad warned us: “You can look at the monkey, but DON’T GO NEAR THE CAGE!”

“He might be a gibbon,” Frank says.

I take a long sniff of the air—the smell of gas and sweat and hands greasy with junk food. Looking over my shoulder, I see Dad, hands balled up, biceps flexed, stomach held in. Mom’s lolling her head around, like she’s working out the kinks in her neck, trying to look anywhere but at Dad.

“Look! He’s thinking something,” Frank says. The ape’s head is tilted, shiny, black marbles of eyes scanning Frank’s face. Frank takes a step toward the cage, and the ape points at him with its wrinkled black hand.

I hear Dad scream at the mechanic, “Just fix the goddamn car!” I turn to see Mom pulling at Dad’s arm, Dad yanking it away from her. When I turn back, the ape has Frank’s glasses.

I scream.

Dad jerks his head around. It takes a moment for him to register the scene in his mind. The ape is examining Frank’s glasses, turning them in its strange, humanoid hands. It holds them up to its eyes and then pulls them away, grimacing.

“WHAT THE—!” Dad runs toward us and moves Frank out of the way. Frank wears a queer grin and touches the skin around his eyes.

“Okay,” Dad says to the ape. “Come on now, give me the glasses.” He’s trying his best to sound soothing and calm, but he sounds kind of creepy and psycho. “Good monkey.”

“He’s an ape,” Frank says.

“SHUT IT!”

The ape moves to the back of the cage and twists the wire frames. It holds one of the thick lenses between its teeth. Its lips curl back and it smiles. I think for a moment that Dad might cry, standing there impotently, his golf shirt soaked with sweat. After a minute or two, the ape hands the twisted frames to my father and spits out the lens with a loud “Puh-too!” Then it does what looks like a kind of dance around the cage. Dad holds the remains of the glasses at arm’s length. The ape continues its dance, stops to scratch its crotch, and then, as if to add insult to injury, tilts its head back and lets out a high-pitched howl.

In the car, Dad keeps asking Frank questions without waiting for an answer. “Are you deaf as well as blind? I said ‘DON’T GO NEAR THE CAGE!’ What part didn’t you understand? What kind of a moron are you anyway? Can you tell me that?”

Franks hangs his head. I wonder if he’s crying. Dad keeps on for miles and miles. Every now and then, Mom interjects with “Come on, Ted,” in a plaintive whine. Frank finally turns his face toward me, and I see he’s smiling, contorting his face to conceal a laugh. He reaches over, grabs my hand, and squeezes.

I
start out at Jiro’s under the self-delusion that I’ll have a few beers and go home. I start out with an image of myself in the morning, walking home from a tai chi class. Feeling like a cereal ad. Shoulders back. Chin up.

Jiro’s has four stools and one wobbly table. It’s on a busy corner near Roppongi station, but the entrance is hidden among a row of vending machines. Jiro’s is the kind of place you could walk by a hundred times and not notice—those that do discover the place treat it like a secret hideout, a refuge. It’s not much bigger than a bus shelter. But warmer. And stocked with booze. I’m a regular—the strange gaijin who drinks a lot. I sit in the last bar stool, next to the framed photograph of John Lennon. Jiro does his best to communicate with me with the English he’s learned from Beatles’ songs.

A trio of young construction workers occupies the bar
stools next to me. Tight spark plugs of bodies in bright knickerbocker pants. Leather split-toe construction slippers. A sprinkling of dust lies on them, like icing sugar. They sit lazily, pouring each other beer from tall bottles, raising their drinks to a lazy chorus of “
Kampai!
” Every few minutes, one of them steals a glance at me.

“Hard day’s night, ne?” Jiro says, wiping the bar. A cockroach scuttles between my beer and me, and I flinch.

“Not dangerous,” Jiro says, herding the roach around with a menu. “More clean than Koreans.”

“Jiro!”

“I made a joke.”

“That’s not nice.”

“
Gomen ne
! More clean than American.”

“That’s better.”

I catch my reflection in the brass of the beer tap. And see what my face is doing. Contorting itself into a smile. Folding back into desperation like the snap of a rubber band.

I put a cigarette into my mouth, and Jiro has the match lit on cue. The smell of sulfur fills the tiny room. Jiro smiles. His face is like a parched riverbed—dry, deeply grooved, mud-colored. “Let it be,” he says.

The alcohol hits me quickly, a familiar warmth spreading through my limbs, an uncoiling. I order another beer. The construction workers send over a cup of warm sake. Tonight I will get pissed, I decide.

I wonder how easy it would be to become a drunk, not a regular, functioning boozer, but a real one—a puffy-
faced, hollow-eyed hag, slurring insults at strangers, staggering wasted at ten in the morning.

“Where from?” one of the construction workers asks. He has sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes and an aerodynamic cowlick that lifts his hair off his forehead like a gust of wind.

“Narnia,” I say.

“
So ka!
” He stares at me, his plump lower lip hanging down idly.

Jiro leans over the bar. “He loves you, yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, twirling my finger in the air.

“You have good eyes,” Jiro tells me.

“You have good beer,” I answer back. My voice is getting a slack booziness to it.

A roommate of mine told me once that she was sure I would eventually go mad. She was willing to bet on it. “You’ve got it in you,” she said, emboldened by a six-pack of wine coolers. “Something about your eyes.” She started laughing, the kind of laugh where no sound escapes except a low clicking from the throat. “My brother is schizophrenic,” I said. She laughed harder. “He thinks the traffic lights are messages from outer space.” She doubled over, moaning, eyes watering, waving her hand at me to stop being so funny. Funny. I figured, if I was destined to be crazy, at least it made good drunk conversation fodder.

The good part of drunk has passed. I’m struggling to focus my eyes. I think about the morning. The tai chi class seems unlikely. I imagine myself stumbling to the convenience store for a liter of Coke and a roll of antacid tabs. I wince at an olfactory premonition. The smell of me—pasty
tongue, booze, smoke. Less like a cereal ad. More like a cautionary tale.

The construction workers are slipping off their stools, barking things at one another, missing the glass when they pour beer.

Jiro’s has a squat toilet. My motor skills are barely present. I lean my shoulder against the wall and slide down into a squat. Dial the phone with my nose. Try to direct the stream of pee away from my shoes.
There’s been an accident…He got beat up Mags. You’d hardly recognize his face.

Stop. Save.

I haven’t recognized him for a long time.

In the narrow hallway leading from the toilets, I let the cowlicked one press me against the wall, his hand gropes around the buttons on my shirt, his mouth, open too wide, like he’s trying to get a good bite of a big apple, teeth hitting teeth with a disturbing scrape that’s loud inside my head. The feeling of being touched, the sound of his voice, mumbling through the kiss “
Suki, suki
” (I like, I like)—the awkwardness of it all makes me want to cry.

I think about taking him home. I imagine his body under the poofy construction pants and jacket. Something hard to weigh me down. But it’s too early. Barely ten. I have to let the night drag me on. I put my hand to his chest and push him away, surprised by the willingness with which he retreats. Surprised, too, by the draft that rushes down the narrow passageway and cools my skin. I indulge myself for a moment, then walk away to pay the tab. It’s time to find Ines and switch intoxicants.

I’m six. Frank’s eight.
In the basement, in the strange light of the makeshift tent. Lawn chairs and old sheets. Silverfish and mold. Frank with his thumb in his mouth, safe with the knowledge that Dad won’t come down here and call him a baby. He’ll stand at the top of the stairs and bellow if we’re needed for din-din. I honestly wonder if Frank’s full name is “For Christ Sake Frank.” No one ever says my name. I could be invisible. I like the idea.

Frank lies on his stomach, up on his elbows,
Guinness Book of World Records
open in front of him. Slurs the words around his pruney thumb. “Sidar Chillal of India holds the world records for longest fingernails. Measuring 20 feet 2.25 inches.”

“He’d give good back scratches,” I say.

“Uh-uh. Look.” In the upside-down photo, Mr.
Chillal’s brown wrinkly hands sit on a table, yellow fingernails coiled like corkscrews next to a ruler.

I squeeze my eyes shut. Worry that Mr. Chillal will show up in my nightmares. “Ewww,” I say.

“Cool huh?” Frank says.

The thump of footsteps upstairs. Shouting. Words I can’t make out. I think this is how adults talk. In shrieks and expletives. Tears and slammed doors. That all conversations end in one person going for a drive, or two people retiring for an impromptu nap. Squeaking beds and extra showers.

“Let’s have a fight,” Frank says.

“But you’re bigger than me.”

“Not a fistfight.” He sits up cross-legged. Takes his thumb from his mouth. “Like this.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Opens them and screams, “How can you be so goddamned stupid?”

My back straightens. “I’m not stupid.”

Frank smiles. “Good. Good,” he whispers. His face gets hard again. “If I have to pay another bill from your harebrained shopping trips so help me God.”

“But—”

“But, but,” he mocks. “I work all week. What do you do?”

“—”

“Tell me. What do you do besides get fatter?”

I stand up and the tent starts to come down. I can’t get out.

“Useless!” Frank says.

Tears rush to my eyes, and Frank pulls me down by my wrist. Goes through the motions of kissing me. His mouth clamped shut, rubbing his face on mine. My heart is beating too fast. I’ve never noticed it in my chest before.

Frank stands up and adjusts the sheets around the lawn chairs. “That’s completely gross,” he says, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “I don’t know how they can do that.”

Sounds have died upstairs. I still try and listen. Creaky bedsprings and quiet reproaches.

Frank holds his finger in the air. “Ding! Ding! Ding!” He holds the book close to his face. “Quiz time!” Presses the book to his chest and adjusts his eyeglasses on his nose. “The smallest woman in the world was how tall?”

I think about small. So small I could hide in the cracks in sidewalks, in the space between the bed board and the mattress. So small my ears couldn’t pick up sound.

“Hint,” Frank says. “Smaller than you.” His glasses slip down on his nose again.

Smaller than me. Frank looks anxious. I think of numbers. Something bumps upstairs. I look at my blobby arms. Think of dolls. The quiet of dollhouses. The basement door opens, and I wait for the scream.

I
t doesn’t take long to find Ines. Like we are connected by a homing signal. Except it never leads us home.

“Sweetheart,” Ines says. Ines, no matter how drunk she gets, no matter what kind of dive she’s drinking in, always looks like a cosmetics advertisement. As though someone is following her around with a soft pink light. She’s wearing tight jeans tucked into a pair of black biker’s boots. A sheer pink blouse open to below the level of her bra, her black hair falling in ropy tendrils over her shoulders. She’s the kind of girl who never inspires envy so much as awe. The way one looks at a lean, smooth panther roaming the Serengeti in
National Geographic
. She is another species altogether. “I danced for some gangsters tonight and got a tippy-tip,” she says. Opens her purse. Ciggies. Lipstick. Five condoms. And a Ziploc of white stuff. Cocaine is a rare commodity in Japan. But Ines always seems to have some.

We head to the washroom. As we pass the bar, a tall black man hands me a plastic flower. “I’m not in love,” he tells me. “I
am
love.” I want to tell him to keep it to himself, but Ines has my hand. Dragging me across the dance floor. The air changes in the thick of the bodies. I glance now and then at the faces. Blissful swaying heads. Shut eyes. Misery clothed in ecstasy.

In the toilet stall, hope arranges itself in little lines. I can almost feel the dopamine engage. Like a Pacman gobbling up my angst. It’ll take a lot of gobbling to make a dent. I glance at Ines’s watch. Eleven-ten. Still so early. Time flies when you’re having fun. Time seems to crawl for me always.

I crouch and examine myself in the shiny silver of the toilet-paper dispenser.

“How much farther to rock bottom?” I ask Ines.

“You think too much,” she says, handing me a tube of lipstick. “Pretty yourself up.”

You wander around the bar for a while. The music is good and it’s just getting better. A queer mix of techno and Japanese pop—bleeps, blips, and strange words. You find a place to stand. To call your own. A boy reaches out as he walks by and he touches your hair. “Like a baby hair,” he says, and you smile. The smile erupts from somewhere around your belly. And a light goes on. Miraculously, it’s that time of the night—shortly after one—when life seems full of possibility. You don’t know how or why you ever felt
low, ever felt hopeless, ever felt anything less than a goddess, sculpted from ivory, imbued with a cutting wit and a sensitive soul. You reek of sex appeal. Everyone is here to see
you
. You’ve been sent to Japan, you surmise, to show them exactly what hot is.

You drift away from the post you were leaning against. You don’t need anything to hold you up. Oh, the buoyancy of the night! As you move through the crowd, all eyes are on you. Anybody here could be yours for the evening, but you don’t need sex—you are beyond sex, you are, in fact, beyond physicality—although you are astonished at how good your body looks.

You’re talking to a guy from Minnesota, who teaches at a university you’ve never heard of.

“My main area of interest is contrastive linguistics,” he tells you. “I mean, determining why culture undermines language acquisition. Why people fail to communicate.”

The words seem to dance out of his mouth. Trying to concentrate makes you dizzy. A little nauseous.

He twitches. “Am I boring you?”

“No, no.” For a moment, you get lost in a pocket of time. Stare off toward the shooter bar and wish you could go back six drinks and four snorts of coke. Back to the effervescence and hope of the two-beer buzz. “Can you buy me another champs, darling?” you say. More booze to hold back the self-loathing.

Ines holds court with a huddle of Greek or Brazilian or Israeli boys. Fuck, she’s gorgeous. When you go over, she
kisses you on both cheeks and then square on the lips. The boys squirm. Ines is so French. The name, the accent, the long legs and effortless style. She’s from Calgary, but what does geography matter?

“I’d like to introduce you to Giorgio,” she says, waving her hand in front of her man-harem.

“Which one’s Giorgio?”

She gives you a quizzical look. Bunny wrinkles on her nose. “Oh they all are.”

Ines is
so
funny.

Then you ask the question. “I need another toot. Where’s the stuff?”

Ines laughs. “It’s gone, lovey. That’s it. Gone. Bye-bye.”

In an instant, you are you again.

I start to power-drink. Sake in one paw, beer in the other. Try to backpedal to wasted. Neurotransmitters starving for white food. Like a zombie I wander onto the dance floor. I don’t understand why everyone in Japanese clubs dances facing the DJ, as if it was live music, as if there was something to see. Then it hits me—no one here is on drugs. They are all here for the music.
For the music
!

Then again, I am here for the music, too—because the music matches the drugs I’m on. Was on. In fact, the music matches me—the thumping bass-beat, the spiraling rhythm. It seems to be building toward something, up and up, toward some release, some moment of catharsis. But it just spirals, back eventually to where it started. I’m not building toward anything at all.

The crowd is thinning. My eyes are drawn to the sad collection of debris on the dance floor. Some straws and discarded cocktail napkins. Abandoned event flyers. The room seems too big. Too bare.

In the bathroom, the line of girls chirrup at their reflection. Little speakers in the stalls broadcast flushing noises to disguise the tinkle of pee. Taped to the hand dryer is a missing-girl flyer. I’ve seen it before. A blonde with shiny lips and tweezed eyebrows. A dead girl, most likely. I drop my head. Study the floor tiles. I can feel the dead girl’s stare.
Stop it
, I think.
I’m trying to have a good time
.

When I finally get a stall, I yank at my tights and sit down. Someone sprays perfume, and the scent wafts over—a sweet, juvenile smell—vanilla and fruit salad. I stab at my mobile phone. Fold over and lean into the earpiece. Listen to Frank. Some American girls rush in, all sweat and twang. One of them says, “You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.” The tap comes on.
I’m a hundred and twelve years old.

“Then we’re all fucking nuts,” the American girl replies.

I know what you mean, I think. Me, too.

You’d hardly recognize his face. Happened at some sports bar on The Danforth. He’d stopped taking his drugs and—

Enough. Save.

Flush.

I know my rule: When coming down from drugs, do not
gaze upon oneself in a mirror. I always ignore my rule. But I’m used to what I see. Baggy eyes and sallow skin. A sinful waste of youth. I fashion my fingers into a rake and tend to my hair—pull the fringe down heavy over my forehead. If I squint and hold my head at a certain angle, I manage to look sexy. A blue Pat Benatar. If I stand back and think,
I loathe you all
, I look even better. A shrunken runway model after a three-day drug binge.

A Japanese girl asks me if I can use chopsticks. Then she asks if she can please squeeze my boobs, holding her cupped hands out to me. “Sure,” I say. Pull my shoulders back a little. The girl gives me a little grope, scuttles like a crab back to her friends, and I realize that I am no longer above physicality. I need sex.