This is part one of three in my nauseating and overwrought effort to explain in ten thousand words or less how I ended up sharing a huge bathtub with a bunch of Korean businessmen in Centreville, VA last week. Please anticipate the climactic and mesmerizing conclusion. Oh, and there’s a middle part, too, I guess.

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Prologue: “dinner with ghosts”

In was winter when I left home; I had left for an archipelago six thousand miles away. I did so because I wanted to; really, I didn’t think much about anything, including the reason I had left in the first place. Despite repeated claims that I would most definitely, under no shroud of doubt, be raped repeatedly at one of those “gay houses” that seemingly dot every inch of the Asian metropolis of my destination (according to my family), I went anyway. I was told, several times, that traveling is “stupid” and a “mistake,” and to this I said: Okay. I purchased a not-so-expensive plane ticket under the firebombing of scrutiny, and in the thicket of doubt calibrated by what I can only assume was misplaced aggression.

There was neon glow, all right, and there was the casual solicitation of flesh that sent through me a twinge of uncertainty — an uncertainty about the lives of men in that neon glow. The sex was offered up like girl scout cookies, packaged neatly and smelling of peppermint chocolate. If you knew the right alleyways in Shinjuku to stumble into, you could find your chunky-chocolate-peanut-butter wrapped up tight, lined in the dozens, creamy brown and torn at the edges, waiting to be eaten.

However, I was not hungry. And even so, my Japanese Ice Cream Addition (JICA) aside, I was in no mood for 40-year-old women from mainland China, syrupy lipstick clinging to their pathetic and tired faces like melted rubber. Their lips quivered, and they ushered in the order: “Fuck me.” However, their eyes stirred in the darkness, and issued their true intentions: “Kill me.”

“Kill me, so that I might not have to do this anymore.”

There was one such lady, and she spoke to me; she smelled like a rotten Christmas tree, and looked like one, too: all lit up in neon like the kanji symbols above her ragged skull. I passed her and said nothing. When she continued to follow me from the train station, I finally said: No thank you, no thank you. I held my hands up to my chest, as if to feebly stop a train from running me over. A Korean call girl passed me by as the Chinese prostitute dragged her bruised legs across the pavement. This girl was much younger, and by the way she walked (fast) and the way she talked (fast), I could tell that her clientele came looking for her. This was in stark contrast to the dilapidated human trash bag that trudged on before me; a woman so worn down and sucked dry of any real human parts that she was perhaps an inch away from handing out free samples of her work like a deli worker. I’ll have a slice of the tired, sloppy 8-second blowjob, please.

I walked around the square outside of Shinjuku station. I’d taken the Yamanote line from Shibuya, after buying an overpriced cup of tea from the world’s premier coffee-maker. This particular Starbucks was in Shibuya Crossing, which is, apparently, the most frequented Starbucks in the world, as it rests in the most frequented crosswalk in the world, if you care about that sort of thing. And really, what does that even mean? A man might buy a cup of coffee there with a friend, and the friend, fanning the steam away from a 500 yen cup of bean water, will say, “You know, this is the most frequented Starbucks in all the world.” And the man might say, “Well, ain’t that something.”

There was a dead man sleeping eternally on the sidewalk. He was in his late 50s, and wore a handsome pinstripe suit with shiny black shoes that glimmered like a pond on a starry night. On his face was an expression of indeterminate origin: it was, after all, the face of death. He slept soundlessly. It appeared as though he had simply fallen over and died right there on the sidewalk, and who’s to say he didn’t. The nighttime crawlers scuttled about before the empty shell of what was perhaps once a man, and ignored his non-existence. It was as if they’d seen this sort of thing a thousand times before, and who’s to say they hadn’t. I approached the sleeping man with my cup of tea still in hand, not at all wanting to finish what was left in the cup, for the liquid inside had shared the air with death. A middle-aged woman with plain features was crouched over him, shaking his skeletal figure, rattling off the same four or five words in Japanese. “Sir, sir? Excuse me, sir? Hello? Sir?” His face was gaunt but not emaciated: this was simply a man who, in life, had been thin. Now he would be thinner, more skeletal, rotting there on the sidewalk like the hollow cadaver that he was. His mouth was slightly ajar, slightly sad, as if his final mark on this earth had been a groan and a somber stomach ache. Cheeks still tinged in blotchy pink misshapen circles, it appeared as though a sunburned man had been lazily patted with baseball glove covered in flour. For several moments, I felt sorry for the man I had never met, the one who had lost his life to what I can only assume was alcohol poisoning, just before catching the final train home. And to think, he was so close to making it. His wife, if he had one, would stay up all night waiting for him. But there he slept before my eyes.

I sauntered over to an underground restaurant; it looked like it’d been carved out of the side of a mountain. The doorway leading to the basement stairwell was old and wooden, decorated with Japanese trinkets rooted in various superstitions and traditions. Descending the stairs, I quietly asked my stomach if it had worked up an appetite, having witnessed sticky prostitution and death, all within the span of maybe ten minutes; he apologized and said yeah, I am, actually, though it’s not by choice or anything: it’s a biological necessity at this point, really. I said, okay, fair enough. Let’s eat.

At the end of the stairwell, past the browning curtains that hung over the entrance, was a homey little restaurant that wouldn’t look at all out of place as the set for the Japanese version of “Cheers”. It was a place where you could feel comfortable at any age, I felt. The entire place was made of a dark sort of wood, and with the low lighting and back-slapping-friendliness vibe, I wished very much to share that very room with those very people at that very moment in time. “Terribly sorry,” said the hostess, “but we only have the ‘traditional room’ available.” I nodded, sighed under my under teeth disguised as an open-mouthed smile, and was led to a little room in the back. The room was partially hidden behind the same shabby-looking curtains that hung over the entrance to the restaurant, and the dreary interior appeared to be a Pre-War Japanese bedroom of some sort. On the walls hung paintings and artifacts from the 30s, shrouded in a thick film of dust. The wallpaper was a stained brown and yellow, and under the hushed glow of what must have been a single 15-watt light bulb stolen from the workshop of Thomas Edison, it was a sad-looking place. The room was gloomy and dark, so much that I wondered what purpose the light bulb had even served in the first place. Surely, it made everything that much creepier; I’d have been more comfortable in the dark. The little room meant to convey a mock-house of sorts, and even had a small, fake window with a faux outdoor exterior painted on the opposite side of the fake panes, giving it an otherworldly look. It was as if I’d been invited to a dinner party hosted by sadistic ghosts. When the waitress left me to my bottled Coca-Cola, I waited breathlessly for several moments in anticipation for the bloodied apparitions of dead generals to appear before me and kill me for my beverage. The ghosts did not come. Ghosts, I thought, were probably sad enough as it is. They didn’t want to be in that fucking room any more than I did.

The waitress returned to the squalor of the tar-covered bomb shelter, obviously frustrated to have to spend more than five seconds inside of that mangy pit of loneliness with me, and hastily delivered the delicious food that had been ordered for me: okonomiyaki (basically a fucked up pancake), what appeared to be pieces of seared beef strips on an oversized toothpick (some might call this “beef on a stick”), another round of syrupy water in expensive glass bottles, and thick, rain-sprinkled pieces of crunchy cabbage to be dipped in a reddish-black soupy mixture whose name and ingredients were never revealed to me. The cabbage, once liberally coated in that tarry-looking dip, quickly became my best friend. I happily crunched it down, not at all aware of what I was eating, and not at all sure as to why I’d eaten anything in my life up until this point that wasn’t cabbage dipped in an enigmatic black sauce.

Once I had eaten all that I could carry inside of me, I paid my tab and was rewarded with a little bag of crunchy brown puffs of flavor; I ate them, despite disliking them, and crowned whatever I had eaten as my final meal for the night — my dessert, the caboose on the tail-end of my hunger.

I stood at that place and “hmm”ed a great deal, perhaps “hmm”ing for several minutes or even hours. How long I stood there “hmm”ing, I don’t know. At the stroke of some black hour, I screamed a great scream and, stuffing my face with a snack that was neither filling nor the least bit appetizing, I spun around three times, gasped twice, and pulled from the tight pockets of the Japanese jeans I’d purchased just three days earlier, a ticket for the midnight bus to Kyoto. I was to leave that night. More appropriately, I was to leave that morning. However, this had been a night of sex and death, and in between cabbage and Coca-Cola in a room populated by ghosts that were permanently on vacation, I had simply forgotten about my midnight affairs. Staring at the ticket that had become creased and ragged from the many days of walking in the rain and living in the warm depths of my jeans, I realized that I had precisely 15 minutes to catch that very bus. I wasted no time in disposing what it was I had been eating (???), and hopped on a near-empty train to Ogikubo where a small cache of my earthly possessions had taken nest. The automated woman spoke to me from the invisible speakers in both Japanese and English: “The next stop is,” she paused for half a second before continuing, lovingly sounding out every syllable like an android mother, “O-gi-ku-bo.” The MIDI chime played over those same speakers to signal that we’d reached our destination, and the little tune rattled my brain around my skull like a forgotten Christmas carol as I raced to the robotic doors that had opened and would again shut in three seconds. An old man with hateful, twitching eyes waiting to board the train violently clicked his tongue to declare his disapproval of my white existence. Furious and in mid-jog, I clicked back with a toady snap inside my mouth. My tongue made a sort of deep, crunchy “cluck” noise that reverberated around his crusty scalp like the the sound of bucketful of quarters slamming into the surface of the ocean. He stood there, lips pursed in bewilderment, and for a moment there was a mutual feeling of respect that clattered against my ribcage like a bat trapped in a woodshed. My foot left the train and met the platform with a chalky slam, and I ran until my muscles screamed and dispensed kerosene into the back of my throat.

The bus bound for Kyoto waited for no one three prefectures away. I intended to meet it before it left. There were, after all, many baths with full-grown men to take. And so I went to the Kansai region with cabbage in my heart, but I almost didn’t.