In which our hero’s new roommate becomes an international metaphor for something god-awful.
People have all sorts of reasons for leaving their home country to live in a completely foreign land where they stick out like sore thumbs. Some are good reasons (personal fulfillment, sobering up, wanderlust, cultural curiosity), and some are questionable (avoiding the law, drug smuggling, sex tourism). MOBA, one of the most popular language schools in Japan, doesn’t care what the reason is, as long as you can pretend to know how to speak English.
I’ve had my doubts about MOBA’s hiring practices from the very beginning, and not just due to the fact that my roommate Sean only has a high school education, has never met a double negative he didn’t like, and had no problem getting a job as an instructor. I’ve also noticed a tenuous command of the English language on the part of a few of my coworkers who can barely string a sentence together correctly without breaking into a cold sweat. Like Stanley from New Zealand, who brings a briefcase the size of a tuba case to work and says things like, “Yeah, but he didn’t play like do that right down the middle without your mum crickety bum licker.” Or Pete from Pennsylvania, whom I recently overheard in a class explaining what the word broke means like this:
“You know if you have something, like a dish or a glass, and you drop it on the floor? Broke is what it becomes. For example, ‘My watch is not working. I think it is broke.’”
As an English teacher, and a kind of anal retentive one, when overhearing such egregious misteachings of the language in an adjacent classroom (we can hear everything through the thin walls), I often wish I could leave my class, jump into a phone booth on the street below, squeeze into my spandex, grab my magic Declension Dildo, and quickly emerge as some sort of costumed English language superhero (Conan the Grammarian?) whose mission it is to save people across Japan from the dangerous consequences (i.e., sounding stupid) that can result from mixing up the past and the present perfect forms of verbs.
“Here I come to save the day!” I would sing as I flew into master villain Pete from Pennsylvania’s room, slapped the hapless teacher silly with the Declension Dildo, and corrected the students before the mistake could be permanently etched into their brains. “Broken! His watch is broken!”
“How can we ever thank you very much?” the grateful students would say.
“Just use ‘broken’ in a sentence correctly,” I’d reply with a wink before sheathing my weapon, flying out of the room, and quickly returning to my class in normal clothes. My own students, having taken the opportunity of my being out of the room to have a quick conversation in Japanese, would be none the wiser.
But my doubts about MOBA’s commitment to excellence in English instruction have been confirmed beyond repair ever since the arrival of my new roommate, who took Sean’s place when his MOBA contract had ended. Sean is on his way back to Melbourne and his job as a customs agent at the airport.
“I’ve done what I set out to do,” he told me with a wink and a nudge over a farewell drink at our local bar.
Even without the wink and the nudge, I’d pretty much known he wasn’t talking about fulfilling his lifetime goal of scaling Mount Fuji or learning the traditional Japanese process of making washi paper. He was talking about making it with Japanese girls.
Sean is one of those guys who come to Japan for no other reason than the possibility of having sex with Asian hotties. It’s common knowledge around these parts that Western guys, especially those with limited sex appeal in their own countries, can experience the ultimate image makeover by just stepping off a plane at Narita Airport. All of a sudden, they’re exotic and hot. They’re like that tuneless, unwashed, and insufferable local band in your town that nobody goes to see but somehow develop a huge following in Japan thanks to some obscure seven-inch they managed to get released there because of their cute mugs and the voracious appetite of young Japanese girls for white boys playing guitars. In Australia, Sean was a pale, stocky, simian type, perpetually squinting like he is always staring directly into the sun. In Japan, he’s a sexual dynamo, in spite of the fact that, when he speaks Japanese to his lady friends, he sounds like Crocodile Dundee ordering a kangaroo burger at a sushi bar.
But what had Sean’s plan been in specific terms, I wanted to know.
“Six in six,” he says proudly, taking a swig of Asahi Super Dry beer.
I’ve never been too good with numbers. Was I meant to divide, multiply, add? Surely not subtract. I’m confused by it.
“Six ladies in six months,” he clarifies, looking at me.
Oh, I see. A girl a month. A cross-cultural experience of a lifetime easily reduced down to simple mathematics and sex. Cheap and calculating, yes, but I must say it’s always encouraging to hear about someone reaching his goals with little to no effort. But such little ambition! Surely he could have shot for nine or ten.
A few weeks after Sean’s departure, Ewan and I both receive faxes at work informing us that we’re getting a new roommate on Friday. His name is Ron Faust and he’s from the U.S., and that’s all the information they give us. Though we are both a little nervous at the idea of our home life being altered, it’s in the back of our minds that this Ron Faust could be a really cool guy who might breathe new life into the AF Building.
“Maybe he’ll be a good cook,” Ewan says.
“Maybe he’ll be a flutist,” I offer.
“Maybe he’ll be a necromancer!” says Ruth.
“Maybe he’ll be a fugitive,” says our neighbor Julia, who used to work at a prison in England. We all giggle in blithe amusement for the last time that week.
By the time Friday rolls around, we’ve prepared ourselves as much as we can. Ewan cleaned up the kitchen and common area and even bought some wine and crackers that he arranged on the kitchen table as a welcoming gesture. I put new batteries in the TV remote.
I wait around with Ewan for a while watching the Discovery Channel, but I eventually get sick of waiting for Ron to show up and leave to visit Julia two doors down. We get drunk and continue the “maybe he’ll be a…” game until things get really stupid.
“Maybe he’ll be,” Julia stammers, her head bobbing on her hand, “Madonna!!”
“Yes!! Or,” I begin, holding my index finger in the air to emphasize the seriousness of my point, “it’s also possible that he’s Cher.”
When I come back at midnight, the mythical Ron Faust still hasn’t arrived, and I see that Ewan has opened the wine, downed a few glasses, and even started in on the cheese and crackers.
Ron, it turns out, doesn’t arrive on Friday. Nor does he arrive the next day. After a few more days, Ewan calls the Tokyo head office of MOBA to find out what’s happened to him. All they know is that, apparently, he hadn’t shown up at the airport for his flight.
Three days later he still hasn’t arrived, and Ewan and I are happily getting used to the idea of not having a new roommate and maybe turning the unused bedroom into a fitness/meditation room. Then, two weeks after the day that he was meant to arrive, who should ring our bell at ten p.m. on a Friday but Mr. Faust himself. He is drunk and from Philadelphia. And he looks like a pirate. He has a scraggly, unkempt beard, glassy eyes, and when he says, “Hello, I’m Ron,” it sounds as if he’s just released a small collection of rocks from his lungs.
Stunned, I say hello and welcome him in. He limps inside, dragging his left foot along the floor as he walks, and I help him with his stuff. After we deposit his things-a bookbag, a rucksack with what looks like a rolled-up one-person tent attached at the top, and four plastic grocery bags-on the floor of his room, he stumbles back to the door and spends a good ten minutes making sure he’s able to use the key properly, repeatedly sticking it in, turning it round until the lock clicks out, turning it back until the lock clicks in, and pulling it out again until he feels he’s mastered the drill.
“Just wanna make sure,” he grumbles, sounding not unlike car wheels on a gravel road.
Afterwards, he comes into the kitchen where Ewan and I are sitting and takes a load off. Ewan and I sit looking at him and each other nervously, unsure what to say to break the ice. (I’m thinking, “Wow, you’re totally fucking wasted!” would be appropriate.) Ron sits slumped in his chair, breathing heavily like he’d just killed a person with his bare hands. He pulls a tall can of beer out of his jacket pocket and cracks it open, sucking up the rising fizz and foam. I guess he stopped by the 7-Eleven first?
Now, God knows I hate to judge, but this man does not appear to be in any shape to instruct Japanese people in the finer points of English idioms or irregular past verb forms (especially not irregular past verb forms). He looks like he’d been scraped off the streets of Philadelphia and shipped to Japan while still viciously intoxicated-without being told why. My guess: a Philadelphia MOBA headhunter had been desperate to meet his quota, went out onto the street, found Ron drinking from a brown bag and talking to his imaginary friend Crabcake, and thought, “Now there’s a MOBA English teacher!”
Visibly freaked out, Ewan soon retires to his room with a book he’d just bought about the history of furniture.
“Good night, guys,” he says in his affable way. “Nice to see you, Ron.”
“Yeah, ghghsshgrighsfheigls,” Ron replies, one eye looking toward Ewan, the other at the floor.
I am now left alone with our new tenant. I sit and try not to stare at him as he finishes the tall beer he’d opened only a few minutes before. He lifts the can above his gaping mouth and shakes the last precious drops in, his lips slurping against the mouth of the can, his tongue reaching out and over to catch any stray dribbles. He smacks his lips, puts the can down on the table, and proceeds to inhale and exhale so loudly he sounds like he’s got a mic on him. Satisfied that there is absolutely nothing else in that can, he hightails it to his room, rifles through one of his bags, grumbling to himself all the while, and once again emerges, limping into the kitchen with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
When he sits back down, he does something I totally don’t see coming: he takes off his left leg. Or rather, he takes off the prosthetic lower leg part and drops it on the floor. So that’s why he was limping. I decide not to ask him about it; he might not be finished taking off body parts yet, and I don’t want things to get awkward. Plus, he’s busy biting off the cap of the JD bottle.
I kind of want to throw up.
After taking his first swig, he makes a brief and barely understandable reference to being a Vietnam War veteran. It speaks volumes. Then he tries to engage me in a conversation about his girlfriend Debbie, whose husband is a real prick and he really wants to do the right thing by her so he is going to support the baby if it’s his and he told this to the husband himself, yeah he did, but he’s a prick and he wouldn’t listen and he just tried to pick a fight, so what can he do and the husband’s the one with the money so it wouldn’t be any good for her to leave him because where would they get the money for that cruise they were planning?
“Exactly,” I say, wondering if I have enough money to hire a security guard to stand outside my bedroom door while I’m sleeping.
For some reason, I am very hesitant to ask Ron any questions. Maybe it’s because I don’t see him offering any answer that can be understood by someone who hasn’t been drinking highballs for the past two and a half weeks.
My curiosity gets the better of me, though, and almost without realizing it, I ask him, “So why are you here?”
“To get away from Mom,” he replies without hesitation.
He’s joking, right? This is a joke. I’m being punk’d. OK, guys, I get it, where’s the camera? Come on, OK, you got me, ha ha, very funny, didn’t see it coming. Ashton, get your ass out here, you nut! You are awful, but I love you! Ashton? Guys? Guys??
“And her retarded fucking husband.”
I decide then and there that this Ron gentleman is the most fucked-up person I have ever met. Sure, I had some problems before coming here. I was a pothead. I was directionless. I was bored and uninspired. I was a part-time waiter. But this guy? He is like an amalgam of horror movie villains. Does his mother live in his attic? What’s wrong with her husband? Where does Debbie fit into this melodrama? A feeling of helpless dread takes me over. It’s fight-or-flight time, and since I’m a little fairy at heart, I decide to flee, back over to Julia’s, to unload my worries about being beaten to death with a prosthetic leg in my sleep-and to take solace in her well-stocked cabinets of English biscuits.
“It turns out,” I tell her as I make myself a cup of tea and arrange some McVities Digestives on a small plate, “that you were not far off with that fugitive comment. And it’s also possible, Ruth, that he’s a necromancer.”
Julia doesn’t blink. “Did you happen to see if he has any tattoos, like maybe a series of numbers or a gang symbol?”
I tell her that no, I hadn’t seen any tattoos, but that was probably because I’d been preoccupied with the prosthetic leg on the floor, the containers of booze that kept appearing from nowhere, and the fact that he only has one earlobe.
By the time I return a few hours later, Ron is well into his fourth or fifth tall beer and has downed about half of his bottle of Jack. He has somehow managed to pry Ewan away from the cocoon of his bedroom and is talking to him about his girlfriend and his mother and the prick and the baby, and Ewan looks as if he is questioning his very concept of reality. I retire to my room to read and try to get some sleep.
I fall asleep enumerating the various ways one might lose an earlobe. I wake up about an hour later to the sound of Mr. Faust banging around the apartment, cursing, throwing things around, and generally grumbling like Grendel. I get up and peek out my bedroom door. All I can see is his shadow moving along the hallway floor and the shadows of the things he is throwing (the TV remote, a magazine, some Tupperware).
I fall back asleep and awake later to an eerie silence. I get up and clamber out the door and down the hall to the kitchen. It’s strewn with beer cans, dirty dishes, cigarette butts, crumpled-up pieces of paper, and small puddles of Jack Daniels.
Among all the crap on the table I find a small letter that he’s scribbled to an unfortunate soul by the name of Debbie. It is written in the penmanship of a three-year-old, but I am able to make out its contents. He talks about his new roommates, saying about us that we’re “good guys, but I won’t be surprised if one of them has to kiss the sidewalk soon.” Cue maniacal laughter.
Hmm. Evil’s afoot. What is Ron Faust’s plan? Is he concocting a plot to get rid of us? Perhaps he’s considering making our rooms into fitness/meditation rooms. Ewan’s would work better for that, I think.
Since I’m now wide awake, I decide to sit down, have a piece of damn toast, and read the Entertainment Weekly a friend has sent me from home. I’m settling nicely into an article about Michael Jackson, who always makes me feel better about my life, when Ron comes back in and sits down with several more beers and a fifth of vodka. He asks what I’m reading, and I show him. When I stand up to put my dish in the sink, he picks up the magazine, scoffs, and says, “Do you really get off on this stuff?”
“Um…,” I mumble, not sure how to answer, “I just read it; I don’t touch myself or anything.”
He doesn’t really appreciate the joke.
“Well, I always read the articles in Playboy. They’re really good. Course, I look at the pictures, too.”
Gross.
Then he starts talking about this woman who’d bought his car a few weeks before he’d made the big move to Japan.
“She had a great stack, though not much of a face, I’ll tell you. It wouldn’t stop a clock, let’s put it that way.”
It’s very interesting to hear a man who is about as sexually appealing as a toilet seat talk about someone else’s lack of physical attractiveness. Kind of like hearing Tony Danza say that he’d broken up with a girl because she sounds stupid.
Ron starts warming up to me once he gets his tenth or eleventh drink in him. He asks if I want to share a Valium with him. He says we’re kindred spirits. I beg to differ and decline the offer, though I am ve-heh-ry tempted. Instead, I say my good nights and go back to bed.
In bed I wonder what Ron’s mother looks like. I wonder if their relationship has ever crossed any moral boundaries, and as I’m drifting off to sleep with the word “Debbie” dancing in my head, I jump awake, having had an epiphany that won’t be silenced. His mother and Debbie are the same person! And the husband is his stepfather! And he’d left the country because something terrible had happened that he’d needed to escape from! He got his mom pregnant! I have it! It all makes sense now! Gross!
Having had such a monumental breakthrough, I have trouble falling back asleep. I toss and turn for several hours, listening to Ron curse and burp and piss and yell throughout the apartment. The sun rises and I hear him cursing to himself at the front door right outside my room. He opens the door, and I can hear him throwing things out and over the balcony into the garden below.
It is then that the screw turns, and, the sleep deprivation allowing my polite Southern façade to crack, I bolt out of bed, throw open the door, and shriek, “What the fuck are you doing?!!”
I look down at the area where our shoes had once lain just inside the door. They’re all gone, except for one of my sneakers that he still has in his hand, poised to toss. Taken off guard, he turns to me and starts fumbling for an explanation, but since in the past five hours he has ingested innumerable beers, a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, a Valium, and an ocean of vodka, an answer isn’t forthcoming.
I storm out the door onto the balcony and look over the railing. There, four stories down, is a wonderland of footwear tossed away like so much rubbish.
I turn back and look at Ron, my nostrils flaring, my eyes surely bulging. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking stuff, do you understand me? Don’t you fucking ever fucking touch my fucking stuff!”
I run down the stairs, stumble into the garden, and start picking up all the shoes and carrying them up to the apartment. It takes me two trips, which gives me a good chunk of time to get even angrier. When I’ve retrieved all the shoes and brought them back up, I stand at the threshold of the front door and glare at Ron, leaning against the wall in the hallway looking confused. I am ready to use the “F” word some more.
“You fucking drunk insane fucking idiot, what’s your fucking problem?!!”
Meanwhile, Ewan has finally come out of his room and started being my yes-man, punctuating my railings (“You need to fucking dry out! Fucking shit fuck!”) with the occasional sober “exactly” or “that’s absolutely right.”
It turns out that Ron, in his profound delirium, thought Ewan and I were playing a cruel joke on him. He couldn’t find his leg on the floor and naturally jumped to the conclusion that we’d thrown it over the balcony.
I ask him why the fuck he fucking thought that fucked-up shit, and he says, “Because of the argument.”
“What fucking argument?” I ask with petulant exasperation. “What are you fucking talking fucking about?!”
He must have interpreted our conversation in the kitchen earlier-the one in which he’d offered me a Valium and I’d politely declined-as an epic struggle between opposing forces that had ended in a vengeful prank. I should have just taken the damn pill. (It’s not like me to dismiss offers like that out of hand.)
I take advantage of the fact that he’s sorry and prostrate, and I send him to his room with no more vodka.
“Go to fucking bed!” I command him. Still confused and very, very drunk, he sheepishly obeys and limps to his room.
I’m awake for good now. Ewan and I have a cup of tea in the kitchen after cleaning up the remnants of the past eight or so hours and try to think of what to do. Meanwhile, Ron is in his room snoring like a hacksaw. Then, of course, he starts talking-screaming, really-in his sleep. At one point I hear him shout, “Hey, fatty!” but since neither Ewan nor I can generally be described as such, I figure he’s safely asleep and dreaming of Debbie/his mother.
Ewan and I can’t figure out how he had gotten hired by MOBA. Yes, they hire some idiots, but how had Ron stayed sober long enough to get through the interview? Had he not made a bad impression when he’d creamed his coffee with whiskey and then wet his pants?
I spend the whole day at work telling everyone about what happened and worrying about what I will find when I return home. Will he be selling all my CDs for a hundred yen by the side of the road? Will he have turned the refrigerator into a medicine cabinet for his many pharmaceuticals? (Actually, that might be nice.) Will he have killed, crushed into powder, and then snorted poor Ewan?
How could this have happened? Is MOBA so desperate for teachers that they’ve resorted to raiding American rehab clinics, luring the conscripts out with the promise of limitless Absolut and tonics? It’s true, the English conversation school industry in Japan is one of the most fiercely competitive in the country. On trains, magazines, television, newspapers, and billboards everywhere, advertisements for language schools abound. Even celebrities, always up for making a quick buck in the lucrative Japanese market, get in on the fun, allowing their images to be used to convince the Japanese public to say screw it, get a second mortgage, and sign up for some English lessons. Which means you have the baffling phenomenon of Celine Dion’s face on an Aeon English School poster beckoning people to come to Aeon and learn to speak English like an overwrought French Canadian.
I understand the need for teachers to meet the demand of an English-starved public. In Japanese grade schools, kids learn English reading and grammar starting in junior high. But since most English teachers don’t speak English, they are ill-equipped to prepare their students for any real-world English-speaking scenario. So a handsome student named Tatsuya can graduate from a Japanese high school, walk right up to a native English speaker named Cheryl in a dimly lit bar, say something as basic as “I can buy you any drink?” in order to woo her, and because Tatsuya’s pronunciation is so horrendous, Cheryl will promptly hold up her hand and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.” Their relationship will end at roughly the same time it started. Very sad.
The tragedy of Cheryl and Tatsuya is why native English speakers are a hot commodity here, and all of the competing language schools understandably need a constant influx of teachers from America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in order to meet the demand. But I’m old-fashioned, I guess. I think prospective teachers should be able to do more than present a valid passport and pass the height requirement. They should at least have to pass a breathalyzer.
I call the accommodations department at the head office and talk to Kevin, the man in charge, who thankfully has already spoken to Ewan, so I don’t have to start from the beginning. He apologizes and says that there must have been a mistake.
“We’ll try to get him out of the apartment as soon as possible, but since it’s the weekend, you know, it’s a little difficult to arrange these things.”
“Oh, please,” I say. “Please please please get him out of there.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He calls me later and says that they won’t be able to move him until Monday night-three days hence!-but that they will definitely be moving him then. He offers me a pearl of advice.
“You and Ron should just attempt to stay out of each other’s way until then, if at all possible.”
Well, that sure ruins my dinner plans. Thankfully, Kevin has spoken to Ron and assures me that he is very sorry and has agreed not to come near us.
When work is over, I prepare myself to return home, with anxiety in my heart and, thanks to my friend and colleague Donna who has a boyfriend at Yokosuka base, a mild sedative in my belly.
Mamta, a teacher from Australia who lives directly below me, says she’ll go home with me.
“I know you don’t want to be alone with the one-legged man,” she says.
When we arrive, Ewan is there, alive and well, but Ron isn’t. We all sit down and have some tea and watch a Discovery Channel program called Travelers that sends young, wide-eyed Americans to exotic places so they can say things like, “I just love shopping in another culture!” We all agree that Ron is a better roommate than any of the retards on the show would be.
To prove our point, a skinny white girl from Ohio named Kim tries on an African head wrap at a street market and says, “Oh, this is totally me!” I start desperately wishing Ron would come back and put us all out of our misery. Right on cue, Mamta looks down the hall at the door and says, “Um, Tim? Yeah, the police are here.”
I stand up and walk to the edge of the hallway leading to the door. Just outside it stand two policemen, leaning in and saying to me, “Your friend? Your friend?” while pointing to-you guessed it-Ron. Not surprisingly, he is drunk as a wombat. I speak to the policemen in my rough Japanese, and they explain, with the help of hand signals and mimicry, that they’d found him on the bridge down the road stumbling and generally looking like a scary foreigner. I thank the officers and apologize, going against my gut instinct to fall to my knees and offer them money if they will just stay the night. They leave Ron propped up against the wall just inside the door, and I go back to the kitchen.
Ron stands in the hallway for some time, leaning against the wall so as to remain more or less vertical. I slump down into a chair at the table and exchange unsure looks with Mamta and Ewan.
“I suppose it’s good he didn’t accidentally fall into the river,” Mamta offers, and we all nod in agreement before changing our minds and sheepishly shaking our heads in embarrassed disappointment.
A growling sound comes from the hallway, followed by the words “Can’t we talk about this?”
I hear him take a few steps toward the kitchen and say, in a more menacing tone, “Where’s that guy who thinks he’s better than everyone else?”
“Who’s that?” I wonder aloud before realizing he’s talking about me. I think this evaluation of my character is completely unfair. Sure, I am most definitely better than certain people, like most of the people I went to middle school with, all the gorgeous guys who have ever ignored me, and anyone who has ever told me I look like Bert from Sesame Street. But I don’t argue. Nor do I raise my hand and say, “Over here!”
I stand and walk over to the kitchen drawers. “There you are,” he says. Meanwhile, I start pulling all the cutlery out of the drawers to hide in my room.
Finally he makes it to the kitchen, launching into a litany of good deeds that he’s performed today.
“I did all the dishes.” I look at the drying rack. He’s washed two soupspoons and a rice bowl.
“See how I washed all the dishtowels and hung ’em up?” he adds, pointing to the balcony. I go out to the balcony and find hanging two formerly white towels covered with big brown blotches and smelling like Ron’s breath had the night before. He must have wiped up the Jack Daniels puddles with them, I figure.
“And I took out that big trash bag.”
“Where did you take it?” I ask him.
He looks uncomfortable and says nothing.
On a hunch I look down to the street and see the bag slumped against some shrubbery, a milk carton sticking out and leaking droplets onto the greenery.
“Great,” I say, coming back inside and taking a seat at the table. “Thanks.”
He twitches and tilts his head, detecting a lack of authentic appreciation. Then he looks at me the way a person looks when he’s about to snap another person’s neck, gets in my face, and says, doing a spot-on imitation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, “You wanna live here? I just bought this building. And I ain’t leaving.”
He steps back and lifts his arms and shoulders into a shrug.
“Guess you’ll have to.”
“You, um, bought the AF Building, Ron?” I ask.
“Yes sir,” he spits. “It’s just gonna take a few days for the money transfer to go through.” Then he turns and plods off to the bathroom.
I look at Mamta and Ewan, utterly speechless.
“Look!” Mamta says, pointing to the television in the corner of the room. “He didn’t break the TV!” Bless her, she’s grasping.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s beginning to look like I’ve traveled all the way around the world to the safest country on earth only to be drawn and quartered by an unhinged Phil-adelphian. Monday night seems so very far away.
“Listen,” Mamta whispers, “why don’t you and Ewan just bring some of your important stuff down to my place. You know, just to be safe.”
We agree this is probably a good idea, since there’s no telling when the Beast will decide to start throwing things over the balcony railing again. So I pick up my laptop and a stack of CDs. Ewan collects all his books.
We go downstairs and drop off our stuff. Ewan stays with Mamta, and I go up to Julia’s to see if I can stay the night if things become life-threatening. As I’m filling her in on the recent developments in the saga, the doorbell rings. Julia answers and it’s Mike, who lives in the apartment between Julia’s and mine.
“Hey, do you know what’s going on in Tim’s flat?” I hear him ask.
I run out of the apartment and look towards mine. The door is wide open, the police alarm from the kitchen is sounding, and Ron is inside screaming. I go down to Mamta’s and get Ewan. We decide to go up and get everything of importance out of the place, in case Ron has started a fire or something. I grab the rest of my CDs, and some work clothes and shoes. Ewan gets more books. Mamta offers to help, and Ewan quickly makes use of her, handing over his encyclopedia of arthropods and his giant collection of historical maps of the world.
But our mass exodus is halted when we can’t get the front door open. The handle won’t turn. Ron is on the other side, blocking us in. We can hear him outside shouting at Mamta’s roommates, who had come to make sure we were alright.
“Oh my God, we’re trapped!” I say, clearly kind of starting to enjoy the drama. I look at Mamta and Ewan with their arms full of useless books, and we all laugh. Then we look worriedly toward the door, because we really are trapped.
I could force the door open, but I am really afraid to do anything that will result in Ron being thrown off balance, for there’s a second balcony and he’s standing directly between it and the door. So we put everything down, go into my room, open the window, and watch as Ron wields a fire extinguisher to keep at bay the group of MOBA teachers from nearby apartments who have gathered around him, some people looking scared, others covering their laughing mouths.
We wait at the window until he finally moves away from the door. We quickly gather up everything and make a run for it. As we bust through the door, Ron is busy threatening the others congregated outside-the entire floor of tenants at this point, including a few mystified Japanese people who have never seen a real American crazy before.
“What’s your name?” he demands of Mike.
“I’m not telling you,” Mike says.
“What’s your name?” He points to Julia.
“Thaddeus,” she says.
“What’s your name?” Holly, Mamta’s roommate, this time.
“I don’t have a name.”
“Well,” Ron growls, “I’m going to remember your names and I’m going to find you and you’re going to be sorry!” Then he burps and kind of sneezes.
We sneak behind him and spirit our stuff down to Mamta’s. From above someone yells down that two police officers have arrived, yay!
I run up the stairs ready to tongue-kiss both of them at the same time and, with a wink and a lick of my lips, invite them over to Julia’s later. Turns out the two officers are the same ones who had brought Ron home earlier, after the bridge incident.
The party has moved back inside my apartment, so I open the door and see the two cops standing over Ron, who’s sitting in a chair in the middle of the darkened hallway, his arms folded, his expression defiant, his face beet-red and shiny.
Erica, one of Mamta’s friends who’s half Japanese, serves as interpreter.
“I own this place! This whole place!”
Erica translates directly with a wink wink, nudge nudge.
The officers look at each other, confused. After a long, winding conversation that takes in all of Ron’s hijinks as well as Erica’s attempt at explaining that not all English teachers behave like this, the officers tell us they can’t do anything because it isn’t illegal to be publicly drunk in Japan, and anyway, he hasn’t hurt anyone. (But what about what he’s done to my feelings?!) They take down our details as a formality, and after accepting my heartfelt apologies on behalf of my entire country, they leave.
The door closes behind them, and we all silently turn our heads to look at our tormenter.
The good thing about a drunk like Ron is that, though he can ingest award-winning amounts of booze, he will reach his stopping point, and suddenly. Leaning back further in his chair and struggling to keep his eyelids raised, he reaches that stopping point. Down, down, down he goes, backwards toward the floor, the chair giving way under his greasy girth. He roars and spits all the way down to the floor, a trip that happens in slow motion. Then thud. Binge over. Yay, gravity.
Folks gathered outside begin to scatter now that the show’s main performer appears to have passed out in epic fashion. “Goodbye, y’all,” I say. “Thanks for coming. Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow. G’night. Be safe.”
I step over Ron and walk to the kitchen, where Ewan sits looking tired, confused, and desperate to take up smoking. “It’s over, Ewan,” I say, patting him on the shoulder. “Let’s go to bed.”
The next day, I receive a call from the MOBA head office at work. He is out. They’ve moved him somewhere else; I don’t ask where. I get home that evening and find that all of his stuff is gone. I walk back to the kitchen and see a final parting gift from Ron on the tile floor: a big brown turd. I turn around and walk to his room. It is completely empty, except for one item on the floor: a small paperback book that had presumably fallen from his bag on the way out. The title: Networking in Japan: Making Those Important Contacts.
Also, my Entertainment Weekly is missing.
A few days later, gossip swirls that Ron has gone missing from his new digs and still hasn’t shown up for work. All of us gasp at the idea that Ron is freely walking the streets of Fujisawa carrying all of his belongings and throwing empty beer cans at old grandmas on the street. What if he decides to pay us tenants at the AF Building a visit? He is our landlord, after all.
Finally, after two weeks have passed, Ron calls the MOBA head office and says, no doubt slurring every syllable, “I’m ready for work!” But at this point MOBA has written him off and decided to do something unprecedented in their history: pay for a teacher’s flight back home before he’s even started work. It’s the right decision-for the security of the nation.
That night, Mamta sees a particularly interesting item on CNN. A flight from Japan’s Narita Airport bound for New York’s JFK had to make an emergency landing in the Midwest because an unruly American guy had attacked a stewardess.
I’d bet my very soul that this guy had been drinking Jack Daniels. And reading my Entertainment Weekly.
# of times I’ve visited Takashimaya department store just to use their fancy, high-tech “Washlet” toilet: 3
# of train suicides that have made me late for work: 2