Moonlight over Tanashi
Where the dogs of society howl
You can't plant me in your penthouse
I'm going back to my plough."
I rolled over in bed at around 10:30 this morning when my alarm went off, brushed a spindly spider off my shoulder, and slammed on the snooze button. After rinsing and repeating a few times, I got up for good at around noon, checking my e-mail and Facebook and all the routine, monotonous things that keep me attached to my social networks in America. I decided to take the train to Shimokitazawa, because I heard it was pretty cool.
I spent god knows how many hours wandering around the narrow streets, looking into bohemian shops with straw hats and woven almost-ponchos hanging from pegs lining the walls, young men and women with teased hair routinely mumbling "irrasshaimase," in unnecessarily nasally voices to every new costumer that passes through their doorway. Bars, gyoza shops, sushi restaurants. Shrimp pasta, I think is what I ordered. That's what it tasted like, at least. Men with their shirts unbuttoned too low, women with overdyed hair and wedged heels that will give them ankle joint problems someday. Back to being purseless, which I prefer, like I used to in high school, I grabbed a wad of cash from my pocket and bought a strawberry cheesecake ice cream cone from a Baskin Robbins, the only familiarity in my day reduced to a "sutoroberi chisukeiki aisu kurimu kon". A saxophone player honked away on a side street. A group of men in fedoras left a cloud of overpowering cologne in their wake. I coughed.
Hours later, I found myself wandering the dimly lit streets of Tanashi, a cigarette constantly burning in one hand, the other jammed into my pocket. It crossed my mind how badly I want Mexican food. In your average American city, even in the towns with one road and half a gas station, you can find even a sleazy excuse for a Mexican restaurant, a handful of servers that may or may not speak English ready to throw a plate of seasoned rice and beans at you, topped with a glorious taco, enchilada, burrito, tamale; whatever hard-to-pronounce ethnic morsel you prefer. If the bartender has eyes for you, he might even throw in a free margarita.
The untied shoelaces from my boots clicked along on the sidewalk as I blew smoke into the black sky, someone on a bicycle passing me every five to seven minutes. In my walk I passed twelve apartment complexes, seven car dealerships, and four motorcycle dealerships. In between them were a few McDonalds' and generically named Chinese restaurants. It's the only street that has so far reminded me of Southern Oregon. Tanashi; home of bicycles, racists, condos, and car dealerships.
Still craving enchiladas, I found myself crossing the street at the same time as a young family leaving one of the Chinese restaurants. The mother was holding a toddler. I always feel weird when I find myself smoking around little kids. I tried to pretend that I didn't have a cigarette, coughing on my own smoke as to prevent the kid from getting a lungful of half-American, half-nicotene poison. I like to think I saved that kid a trip to the doctor when he grows up and ages, and the doctor says that he was this close to getting lung cancer, but thank god he didn't inhale one more breath of the foul toxin. He'll wonder who to thank, and somewhere I'll be smiling in my grave.
On my way to nowhere, I stumbled upon a group of people yelling outside of a van pulled over to the side of the road, that had apparently been rear-ended by one of Tanashi's faithful motorcycle owners. The driver of the van was steadily getting enraged over the hardly-noticable dinged fender, his bushy eyebrows raising higher and higher with each defensive remark the motorcycle driver made. I sat on the curb, lit up another cigarette, and watched the debate.
There is no Metropolis. There is no Utopia. There is no golden city, no haven of dreams. It's not Los Angeles, it isn't New York City, it isn't Tokyo, not Prague, not Paris, not Madrid, not Amsterdam. There is no perfect town, no perfect city, no place where you can waltz into the city limits with a briefcase and a smile on your face and be promised a job and security and a home and a wife and a family and happiness. There is no place where you can start from the ground up and build yourself an empire of wealth and prosperity. There is no place where people will willingly sit and listen to your problems without asking for $250/hr. Nobody cares about your poverty, your miscarriage, your cancer. And certainly, nobody cares about your dinged fender.
A silent cop car with lights flashing pulled up behind the scene of the automotive fiasco. I ducked out before I could somehow get pulled into the mess as the American who distracted the motorcycle driver, causing the accident. I mumbled some string of expletives as I realized that I'm running out of lighter fluid, and that I also can't have a goddamn enchilada.
