In which our hero’s adventure reaches its musical climax and then everyone goes home with their ears bleeding.
–
Concert for Viola and Piano
Music by
Johannes Brahms
Tim Anderson, Viola
Toru Miyazaki, Piano
Sunday, July 22
3:30 p.m.
Steinway Salon, Tokyo
1-6 Kanda Surugadai, Chiyoda-ku
–
The flyers are all printed; the studio space rented; the sheet music dog-eared, ink-blotted, and bloodstained. It’s time for my great Tokyo debut-as part of a recital given by my friend Toru and me. It took a fair amount of cajoling on Toru’s part to get me to agree to this public performance, as standing on a stage in front of a roomful of sober people ready to get all judgy gives me the flopsweats under normal circumstances. Standing on a stage trying not to drop my viola in front of a roomful of blank-faced Japanese people who are probably expecting a competent viola player, having seen the fancy font on the flyer-now this really puts the fear in me. And facing these same people after I choke, throw my viola onto the floor, and scream, “I can’t do it! Everyone knows it! My thesis advisor was right! I’m a fraud!” and then jump stage left, get tangled in the curtain, fall over, and pee in my pants-this could be a real career killer.
But one evening as we drank Asahi beers in his neighborhood in Yokohama, Toru had somehow convinced me that I should just go for it and not worry that the entire audience would be silently judging me and wishing I’d taken a few more years to rehearse. At first I was absolutely against it.
“Don’t get me wrong, Toru,” I explained. “I loooove playing the viola. Love it. But only in a room by myself with the shades drawn and sirens blaring outside. Or in a fifty-piece orchestra where the sound of my playing can’t possibly be heard.”
Toru’s brow furrowed.
“Or, you know, with a guy going to town on a gigantic grand piano right next to me.”
“What means ‘going to town’?”
“I absolutely can’t be the only viola player in the room. I need a buffer.”
“What means ‘buffer’?”
“Besides, you don’t want me publicly embarrassing you, do you? You’re a great player! What if the wrong person should see us playing together? You could be ruined. Ruined, I say!”
“You are so afraid,” Toru laughed. “Why is it? You are American. Americans aren’t afraid of what other people are thinking.”
He’s right. After all, we did invent the deep-fried Twinkie.
“All Americans are not the same,” I said, enumerating in my head all the differences between myself and the Olsen twins. “Do all Japanese people have black belts?” I asked Toru.
“Yes,” he replied. “Anyway, it not important, the concert. We can play fine at performance, and besides, no people will come.”
“Do you really think so?” I said hopefully. I do love Toru’s streak of negativity whenever it comes to his own musical prospects.
“Yes, we will invite people and no one will come to see. It will be fine.”
He’d said the magic words.
“Oh, OK, I’ll do it. But nobody better come.”
So now here I am, sweating bullets as I prepare to fool the world (or at least a dozen or so people) into thinking I have musical talent. I’m tempted to make some amendments to the flyer Toru designed, in order to lower folks’ expectations just a little. A few that come to mind:
Concert for
Piano and Cheap Secondhand Chinese Viola
and
Tim Anderson on Viola,
In His First Public Performance
Since the Accident
But Toru won’t give his consent to these changes, so instead I’m going to make my grand entrance by walking onto the stage with a limp.
The studio space has a maximum capacity of fifty people. Toru, in spite of his earlier declaration that no one would come, thinks we should plan on having about twenty.
“You think we’ll have that many?!” I stammer, panicked.
“Just in case,” he says. He has invited his family and some family friends as well as his piano teacher and some of her other students. And me? Well, despite my mortal fear of playing the viola in public, I decided that, screw it, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do my best to make people that I know sit through it. So I post flyers at work and give a few to friends.
“It’s always been a dream of mine to one day wake up and be able to play the viola,” my colleague Udo from South Africa says to me as I hand him a flyer.
“Oh God, me too,” I say. “Wouldn’t that be awesome?”
On the big day, we arrive early and set up all fifty chairs, and it turns out that the good Steinway people weren’t lying with the “fifty person maximum” line. We would’ve had to tear down a wall to get a fifty-first chair in there. We warm up on our instruments and wait for the people to start trickling in. Toru’s mother and sister arrive quietly and sit down in the front row. A few minutes later Toru’s piano teacher walks in and sits in the last row, increasing our total attendance to three.
Once we’re all warmed up and loose, Toru and I hop off the small stage and mingle with our public. Toru talks to his piano teacher, and I engage in some Japanese small talk with his mother.
Me: Hi, how are you? It’s been a while since I’ve seen you.
Her: Fine, thank you. Your viola playing sounds nice.
M: No, it sounds horrible. I need to practice for five more years.
H: No, it’s very pretty.
M: No, you’re wrong. My viola is a disaster. A musical earthquake.
H: [silent smiling]
M: Do you like my necktie?
Rachel and Tami, her clubbing sidekick, waltz in with water bottles and bug eyes, proving to everyone in the room that I do in fact have friends-sweaty friends hopped up on drugs, but friends nonetheless-and saving me from having to come up with another way to insult myself in Japanese.
“Did you guys get in really late last night?” I ask.
“We just left the after-party about an hour ago,” Rachel says, her kaleidoscopic eyes blazing. And now they’re at the after-after-party.
A few others show up in the next few minutes: my housemate Akiko and her friend, Kenji and Midori from my work, and an employee of the Steinway Salon, who gives us our receipt for the rental before politely declining my kind invitation for her to please please please have a seat and join in the fun.
Since we only have the place reserved for a few hours, Toru and I decide we should go ahead and start playing, even though our audience is only ten strong. I get up on stage, start the show with a few words in Japanese and English-thanking everyone for coming, inviting them to enjoy the show, and requesting that they please not throw anything-and then Toru and I launch into our Brahms sonatas.
People say that when you’re nervous on stage, you should simply imagine the audience in their underwear and it will calm you down. Or people always say that people always say that, but anyway, I decide it’s inappropriate to imagine Toru’s mother, sister, and piano teacher in their underwear. I find I always respond much better to imagining Marky Mark and the lead singer of A-ha lying on a double bed in their underwear. So this is what I do. It relaxes me and strengthens my bow stroke.
Now, I’ve also found that playing the viola on a bare stage with piano accompaniment and a silent and respectful audience is quite different from playing drums in an experimental rock trio with no discernible song structures and a singer who wouldn’t know a melody if it kissed him full on the mouth. For one thing, if you make a mistake in the latter, it may be noticeable, but it’s also the nature of rock and roll to take mistakes and run with them. Further, you can blame it on the booze and the drugs. However, if you make a mistake on the viola, there’s nothing to cover you. You are left naked and neutered in front of an audience that wants every note to be precise and clear; that counts on the steady harmonic cooperation between viola and piano; that is not likely to readily accept that you fucked up that high C because you were doing Jaeger shots before the show or because you are still reeling from the cocaine you had one of your roadies inject into your anus before you came onstage.
It’s the expectation of precision that scares me. One’s ear need not be classically trained to hear a stringed instrument falling far short of the intended note. But, thankfully, Rachel, knowing I’ll be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gave me a Xanax yesterday, which I downed about twenty minutes before beginning to play, so instead of fearing that every note I hit is being ruthlessly judged as hopelessly deficient by the audience, I’m floating on a cotton-candy cloud, playing my golden viola flawlessly for an audience of young virgin males in tunics. Drugs make everything so much easier!
Jo and Grant sneak in at the tail end of the first sonata, bringing the audience total to twelve and giving me that extra burst of adrenaline I need to attack the furious climax of the piece before bringing it to a soft and sweet, if slightly squeaky, conclusion.
The rest of the show continues without a hitch, except for a few problems with the high notes that make me sound as if I am strangling my viola rather than playing it. Strangling it real good. And my cell phone rings during the somber and romantic fourth sonata: Shunsuke, calling because he’s lost and can’t find the studio. Thankfully, though, he arrives in time to see Toru and I take our bows and leave the stage.
“Oh my God, Tim, that was great!” Rachel and Tami say in unison as they each hug me.
“Oh, please. That’s the drugs talking.”
“No, seriously,” Rachel says, petting me on the shoulder and taking a swig of water from her humongous plastic bottle. “I really don’t think it is. Tami, is it? It was good, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tami smiles, trying to stop her legs from moving to the beat inside her head.
Toru introduces me to his piano teacher. We exchange greetings in Japanese, and she lies through her teeth about enjoying the concert.
Her: I enjoyed your playing.
Me: No. It was horrible. I’m very sorry.
H: No, the music was very pretty.
M: My viola sounded like a…a car accident. Like a car accident.
H: No, no.
M: But Toru played very beautifully.
H: [silent judging of Toru]
M: Do you like my necktie?
H: You are so tall.
I’m thrilled that my Tokyo debut wasn’t a complete disaster. This concert will be my goodbye kiss to Tokyo, for I have decided that I must soon take my leave of the city and return to my home planet. Or, rather, Jimmy has threatened to divorce me if I don’t come home within the next month. So, because gay divorces can get really ugly-especially when there is a cat and a treasure trove of pop-up books, drug paraphernalia, and David Bowie CDs involved-I must return.
I came to Tokyo to wake myself up, to force myself into uncomfortable scenarios, to go record shopping. After two years, I feel the need to return home, to come back to earth and try to relearn its language. I’ve spent too much time away from the natural flow of my mother tongue. I see Japanglish phrases on T-shirts or advertisements, and they’re making a little too much sense to me these days. I saw a shirt on a young girl the other day that read:
I squint my eyes and pretend I’m snow board as I bosh the lip off double overhead power pump.
Melon Papa
I know exactly what that means.
Not that I’ve totally figured things out. Even the seemingly straightforward T-shirt messages are getting lost in translation: look at that ratty rock and roll hipster chick in the T-shirt that reads “Pretty Stupid” or the Harajuku chickadee whose black tee has “Cum Dumpster” painted in blood red on the front. Funny! But wait. Are they being ironic or brutally honest? Am I meant to a) wink, nudge, and laugh, or simply b) laugh? What used to make sense doesn’t anymore, and what didn’t does.
Sitting at my laptop one recent night trolling the Internet for cheap music, I came upon a listing for the 1988 Siouxsie and the Banshees album Peepshow that is shamefully undervalued. On seeing that there are forty-two used Peepshows available-some for as low as forty-five cents!-I remarked with petulant exasperation to myself, “That a great album, why it used so much?!”
My language skills are compromised. I need to go home.
And besides, the culture wars are in full swing back home in the mighty USA, and it would be a real shame to miss out on that festival of Christian love. My country needs me.
A famous traveler once said, “He who is tired of Tokyo is tired of not being able to get a decently sized pan pizza for under thirty bucks.” I’m sure someone said that. And I would have to agree, but I must say, my love for a big fat cheesy pizza notwithstanding, I’m far from tired of Tokyo. Like any great city, it sucks the life right out of you on a daily basis. But it also offers a multitude of small treasures to enjoy as it pummels you into submission: the reliable promptness of the reliably color-coded trains carrying reliably daft young creatures of fashion to their favorite two stops on the Yamanote train: Shibuya and Harajuku; the clash of the old and the new, like when you see a ninety-year-old woman literally fight a teenager for a seat on the train; the takoyaki octopus balls; the unintentionally existential English-language signs you see in random places, like the one I saw at Mos Burger that read, “Always close a door behind you.” Or the one on the door of a restaurant in Ikebukuro saying, “We are looking for our staff.” How sad. Where on earth did their staff go, leaving them like that?
Change is in the air here, and not just for me. I’ve heard through the grapevine that my old bookish roommate Ewan is engaged to be married to a Japanese woman, with whom he’ll return to Australia and no doubt render his family speechless. Donna also has nuptials in her future, as she’s taking her love of a guy in uniform to its logical extreme and getting hitched to an American sailor. And those new Edwin jeans I bought the other day, vouched for in advertisements by Brad Pitt himself, were out of style by the time I squeezed myself into them.
So I’ve started making preparations to leave. I’ve sent boxes home, started packing up my room, and attempted to sell anything of value I don’t need. I went down the road to one of the consignment shops in Koenji the other day to see if I could get rid of my little boom box, hoping to trade it and use the money to take myself out to lunch. The woman didn’t seem too interested in buying it, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to pawn it off on her, I gave up and told her she could just have it. I started to set it down on the floor, but, waving her hands like a hummingbird, she explained that she really didn’t want me to leave it, that she would really just prefer if I took it the hell out of her damn store. So I left the store with my boom box after a few irritated bows, left it outside the shop on the sidewalk, and took myself out to lunch anyway. When I walked back past the shop on my way home, the boom box was no longer on the sidewalk. It was probably for sale inside for two thousand yen.
Since announcing my imminent departure, I’ve received many goodbye gifts from fellow teachers, students, and friends. The folks in my business class threw me a going away party and gave me a huge Japanese flag that they’d all signed. I received a wall hanging from a student and a CD of traditional Japanese music from the mothers of the kids I teach. I’ve gotten enough handkerchiefs to patch myself together a nice set of bay window curtains, and enough bottles of sake to render me legally blind.
So it’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in a massive field listening to a Japanese hip-hop band performing for me and hundreds of others at a music festival in the east Tokyo district of Odaiba on Tokyo Bay. One of the main sponsors of the festival is Shane British English School, whose advertisements always show a dorky-looking and pasty-faced British guy hanging off of a double-decker bus, inviting you to study English the way it’s meant to be spoken: Britishly.
There are many foreigners in attendance, and all the Japanese bands on the bill have been making admirable efforts to use whatever English they know when addressing the audience. The shirtless rapper wearing a sarong on stage just said, “It’s a lock and loll liot!!!” to whoops and screams from the crowd.
I’m here with the usual suspects of Jo, Grant, Shunsuke, and Rachel. A few minutes ago, Jo and I joined the mailing list for one of the Tokyo bands that played called Ex-Girl. They’re an all-girl trio wearing dresses and wigs that wouldn’t be out of place in a Las Vegas revue, and they play a glammy tribal punk pop of sorts. For obvious reasons, I’m desperate to be friends with them. In the flyers for the festival, it says they are from the planet Kero Kero. I wonder if they have Diet Mountain Dew and wheat bread there. Do they need English teachers?
After chatting to the Ex-Girl girls until our Japanese and their English completely give out, we get some more beers and rejoin the others for a boogie. As we all dance and swig and chatter, I find myself thinking about what I’ve learned on my Japan odyssey. A cloyingly American thing to do, but I am what I am, and I’ve got to tie this shit up somehow.
I’ve learned that sometimes assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me. When I’d first started teaching and asked my students what they eat for breakfast, many of them had replied, “Rice and miso soup.” I’d foolishly assumed that this meant they ate them together in the same bowl, like we Americans do with dishes like macaroni and cheese or Corn Flakes and ice cream. This is not so, as I found out when eating lunch with Shunsuke one day. He saw me empty my rice into my bowl of miso soup, looked around uncomfortably, making sure the waitress and surrounding customers were minding their own damn business, and said to me, “That like cat food. But it’s OK, you are foreigner.”
Or the time when I wanted to send a Japanese card home to the folks and had bought one at the convenience store, assuming it was an all-purpose card. When I brought it home, Akiko told me it was a card intended for a person whose family member has recently died. I sent it to my folks anyway, telling them that the Japanese translated roughly to, “Happy Earth Day.”
But I am tired of teaching. My mojo in the classroom never fully returned, and I’ve taken that as a sign that I’m meant to move on to something else, something that involves a little less of what some gaijinfolk call Japanger:
juh-pan´-gur, n.: the overwhelming feeling of frustration and displeasure, usually of Western people living in Japan, resulting from doing daily battle with the sometimes maddening idiosyncrasies and inscrutable behaviors of the Japanese people
But I will miss those many moments when I could actually feel my students reaching out to me from the dark corners of the language barrier and communicate from their heart. I asked an advanced class one time to write me a short essay about a person they admire. Most of the students conveniently forgot to do the assignment and simply avoided my classes for a few weeks until they were satisfied that I’d forgotten. One student, a university female, wrote one sentence: “I most admire my cat because her life is so easy.” Not really what I was looking for, but at least she’d turned something in. Then, one day a few weeks later, I found a neatly typed essay from Masahiro, a retired banker, on the top of my stack of papers to grade.
The Person I Most Admire
As well as my father, I admire my mother the most. During the WWII, our family was living in the northeastern part of China, then called Manchuria. I was born in Shenyang in 1943, and my younger brother in Pyongyang in 1945. My father was from Hokkaido and began working for Manchurian Railroad right after his graduation from a college in Shanghai. My mother, born in Tokyo, married him through an arranged meeting in Tokyo held only once a little before the WWII took place, and left for Manchuria.
Despite of their dream of having better days as a railroad officer when the war ends, my father, like all of Japanese and Manchurian Japanese citizens, was aware that Japan would be defeated by the Allies. And the day came. Our family had to stay in Manchuria but live separately, as he was ordered to take care of Japanese pioneers, who mostly came to this continent to develop lands and engage in agriculture, and merchants to return home in Japan safely. My mother and I fled to north part of Korea, where my younger brother was born. It took him more than a year to get together with his wife and sons.
I was two to three years old then, but I can imagine that she took me on her back and fled to Pyongyang. Soon after the birth of my brother we returned to Manchuria, where father was waiting for us. It was already the time when Manchurian Railroad was no longer operative, and we still had attacks from the Chinese army, robbery by Siberian soldiers, and so forth, though the war had really ended in Japan. My parents often took me to the railway area to pick up coals spilt from trains. Those gathered coals could sell and helped our living.
Years passed since we came back to my mother’s birthplace, Tokyo. She was so strong physically and mentally like many of other Japanese women at that time that we could be safely flee to anywhere. I admire her power and high spirit to return home, as I learned how tough days they spent. More words would be necessary to describe what troubles and accidents they met if space allows. My father died of cancer 26 years ago and 28 years after we got on board an American frigate leaving for Sasebo from China.
A devastating and lovingly told story. I was full of awe and wonder at the brutal odyssey of Masahiro’s life, his honesty, and his skill in retelling it in a language that was not his own. Since I felt that correcting his grammar was completely pointless and, in fact, rude, I simply wrote, “Thank you, Masahiro, what an amazing story,” made a copy of it for my scrapbook, and placed it in the graded pile.
Feeling quite overwhelmed, I picked up the next piece of homework with a sigh and saw that it was from Tomoyuki, the young J. D. Salinger freak. His assignment was to list one thing he thinks should be banned and explain why:
Getting on the train in a drunken stupor should be banned. Have you ever taken the Yokosuka Line at night? It’s quite terrible. There are a lot of fucked up sons of bitches on the train, tarzans spitting, swaying, etc. Most of them have terrible breath. Some guys throw up on the floor, others begin to fight out loud. It’s extremely noisy and stinky in the train. To make matters worse, whenever they make trouble with other sober passengers, the police don’t punish them strictly. Japan is a paradise for drunks.
In a word: poignant.
Best of all was the dialogue turned in by Yohichi the movie cameraman, an intermediate student. The assignment was to write a short dialogue in which two people are deciding what to do for the evening, and there must be at least one conflict involved. Yohichi’s conversation went like this:
A: What do you want to do tonight?
B: I don’t know.
A: How about marijuana? It’s very fun.
B: But it’s not lawfulness. I don’t want to go jail. How about mushrooms instead? It’s lawfulness.
A: Sounds great!
Was he listening in on the conversation Rachel and I were having the other night in the lobby? Plagiarist.
In so many ways, Japan is America on Opposite Day, which is what has kept my eyes popping open every morning for the past two years, eager to see what absurdities it would bear witness to in the next sixteen hours. It’s not just that Japanese verbs come at the end of Japanese sentences. It’s in our very essence that we Westerners feel like we’re peeping into the otherworld of the looking glass when we stare into the eyes of a Japanese face. Where in America we tend to go to the movies and have conversations with the movie screen, a Japanese cinema, no matter how funny or exciting the film, is as still and reverential as a Shinto shrine. A good-looking draft beer in America will have at most an inch of foam at the top, and if there’s more, we will ask for it to be topped off. Here, if your draft beer comes with less than a quarter of the glass full of creamy, bubbly, delicious foam, the customer will think the beer is old and stale and might ask for a new one. If someone compliments your spouse, saying something like, “Oh, your wife is a great cook,” it is customary in America to say, “Yeah, isn’t she great? How about that bean dip, huh?” and then perhaps slap her on the butt affectionately. But in Japan, it is considered proper to reply with an insult, like, “Oh, that silly bitch couldn’t cook her way out of a to-go box. That shit was take-out.” Something like that.
When you walk into a low-end American restaurant, you are lucky to be greeted with a smile or any degree of enthusiasm by any employee. They’re usually too busy talking to their coworkers about how they’re supposed to be on break and how this is such bullshit that they haven’t had their break and when the fuck are they gonna get their break? When you enter a food joint here-no matter if it’s the grimiest of noodle bars-you are met with the welcoming screams and cries of the entire staff, starting with a few of the floor people and trailing around the place until every person employed by the restaurant has greeted you loudly with an ear-piercing “HELLO! WELCOME! GOOD AFTERNOON! PLEASE SIT DOWN! HELLO! WELCOME! GOOD AFTERNOON! PLEASE SIT DOWN!” Then just when you think you’re safe, you get up to leave, trip the wire, and set off the alarm of “THANK YOU! PLEASE COME AGAIN! THANK YOU! PLEASE COME AGAIN! THANK YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN!” Sometimes it’s enough to make you long for the days of being completely ignored by the cashier at the drugstore as she prattles on and on to her coworker about how her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend is a total slutmunch.
No matter how well you think you know this place, no matter how much you think you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the Japanese psyche, you will always be trumped, be it by rice and miso soup, pixilated pornography, Dance Dance Revolution, or thirteen-year-old girls swooning over animated images of young men falling in love with each other and doing it all night.
After the concert, Rachel and I go out for a sayonara dinner in Shibuya, and as a goodbye gift, she gives me a wallet and a framed picture of me sitting in the Vagina Room. Rachel has been telling me for months, ever since she found out I was planning to leave, that I’m not really going to leave, that I will chicken out at the last minute and try to move in with her in the studio apartment she recently rented in Okubo.
“Are you excited about not going home?” she asks as we feast at a table by the window of our favorite Indian curry shop. “The Chemical Brothers are playing a show next week.” Then she sings in her best falsetto, “I can get us into the after party…”
“I’m torn,” I say, fumbling with my cool new holographic wallet. “I really want to go home to Jimmy, and, you know, find something new and different to do with my life, like, I don’t know, study dog grooming or something. You know, I’ve got to get serious. I’m not going to be young and handsome forever, and eventually I’m going to lose…”
She looks at me with sad, puppy-dog eyes.
“Oh my God, really? Where are the Chemical Brothers playing?”
I look out at the bustling city around me, the city that helped once again unlock my sense of adventure and awe as it smacked me affectionately in the face every morning and said, “Time for breakfast rice and salmon!”
“I’ll tell you what, though, I am going to continue studying Japanese,” I say.
“Really?”
“Yeah. You know, I’ve already dedicated so much time to it. I figure, well, why not?”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Rachel replies, thinking maybe she should start taking some lessons. “Then again, you know, why?”
She has a point. Japanese will be about as useful to me back home as a Hello Kitty diaphragm. I guess it’s my way of clinging to my Japanese experience and making sure it stays with me even after I’m gone. Whatever, I plan to continue my study of the language at least until I get my first job back home as a temporary substitute data entry clerk.
I hang out at Rachel’s place in Okubo until about three a.m., say goodbye, and walk down her tiny side street towards Shinjuku Station. I will wander around for a few hours until the station opens and I can get on the first Yamanote train. Maybe I’ll take it around a few times and enjoy the view of the city waking up. Perhaps I’ll fall asleep on the shoulder of a drunk, sweaty salaryman and then get beaten awake with an umbrella by a 103-year-old obaasan, who will then kick me out of my seat so her older sister can sit down.
On my way to the station, three different Korean prostitutes offer me “massages,” and I politely decline. It’s an honor just to be asked. Just a few feet beyond where the third prostitute approached me is a bike stand where two policemen struggle to wrestle what must be a stolen bike free from its chain.
I do have some regrets. I’m still in debt. I still have no great job prospects or get-rich-quick schemes. And the closest I came to meeting a Japanese lesbian was when I saw an older woman on a passing train sporting a classic feathered Alabama mullet.
Most disappointing of all, I was never asked to be on Japanese television. But really, once you’re on Japanese television, where is there to go but down? Anyway, you can’t have everything, and besides, once I get home and brush up on my English, the world will be mine for the taking.
As I hunch down into the seat of the 5:35 train, I think about the sign I saw posted on that glass door leading to Mos Burger:
Always close a door behind you.
Sound advice, but I think maybe I’ll leave this one open.