-- In Tokyo and getting into trouble again.
I’ve been in Tokyo for approximately one week. It started like all of my previous visits: seeing old friends, slurping down ramen, and drinking whiskey. But, somewhere along the way, something went wrong. A tiny change in the usual course of events and now instead of meeting Ed in India, I’m locked in this hotel room. The cops outside my door say it’s for my own protection. I suppose I should start at the beginning and tell you the story since I’ve got nothing better to do right now.
Originally, I was planning on flying straight to India and begin my trek across Southeast Asia. I imagined a Jack Kerouac kind of thing where I’d live on the rough and work on my writing. I’d backpack across countries like Thailand and Myanmar to eat, drink, write and suffer from massive diarrheal hemorrhaging. Ed agreed to meet me in Delhi, and we’d crank out two new screenplays. It was a perfect plan.
A dear friend of mine, as it would turn out, was going to be in Tokyo a week before I was to be in India, and she asked if I’d help her with a little interpreter work. How could I turn down a week of free room and board in Tokyo? I couldn’t. The thought of the bowls of ramen, the perfectly marbled wagyu beef, and the glistening surface of the perfect cuts of sushi were impossible to resist. I mean, I was probably going to be suffering from traveler’s diarrhea for the nine weeks in Southeast Asia, so why not feast for the week prior, right?
As you can already tell after having already mentioned it twice in just two paragraphs, I was acutely concerned with the idea of getting some kind of ass-kicking food poisoning in India or Southeast Asia, and by ass-kicking, I mean that literally. Kicking my ass so damn hard it stops working right. Thinking on that, you can’t blame me for wanting to gorge beforehand. And thinking on that, you probably don’t feel like eating any time soon.
For the first several days in Tokyo, things went according to vision. Heidi and I would work all day and end our evenings with ramen and Scotch, usually far too exhausted to do anything beyond 11PM. But one night, we had one too many glasses of Hibiki whiskey. As with all things that involve “one too many,” we found ourselves trapped in a snowballing chain of events that could only end in trouble.
Stumbling through the streets, Heidi turned and looked at me. “Let’s get another bowl of ramen.”
“What? Again? I want to, but I'm getting fat from all this ramen," I said. Noticing a brightly lit parlor, I said, “Hey, how about that instead?”
It was a pachinko parlor, a form of semi-legal casino slots in Japan. It’d be a first time for both of us, and Heidi’s a natural born gambler blessed with the right touch of luck. She smiled, and we walked in. Wading through the rows of smokers and chaotic pachinko machines, we sat down and began playing. You throw in some money, and you get a tray of steel ball bearings, which you then shoot through the pachinko like a vertical pinball machine. If the balls go into certain holes, you have a chance to win more balls. You trade the balls for prizes and then trade the prizes for money, a simple loophole to bypass the anti-gambling laws. After pouring about twenty bucks into the slots, I gave up.
I looked over at Heidi, and there were stacks of trays filled with the ball bearings. Dozens of them. She was doing really, really well. Beginner’s luck or not, she turned her twenty bucks into roughly five hundred dollars, and it was still going. It wasn’t long before she caught the curious eyes of the owners. I don’t think they were threatened by her wins, and it wasn’t like they accused her of cheating. Either way, I didn’t like them; mostly because of their unsettling interest in her, but perhaps a tiny bit for their unsettling lack of interest in me.
One of them, a middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and a white suit, spoke in Japanese. “You’re pretty good at that.” I translated for Heidi.
She thanked him and kept on going.
“You gamble? Mahjong?” he continued, again in Japanese. I translated again.
Heidi wasn’t into it.
The other guy, a young poster boy for the Yakuza with his pompadour and gold chains, whispered something about us being Americans.
“Ah souka...! Poker? You like poker?” Slick asked, this time in accented English.
“Poker popular in America?” added Pomp.
That caught Heidi’s eye. She’s very good at poker, even winning a tournament in Vegas once. She nodded enthusiastically. Crap. The whiskey was doing the talking.
Slick shoved me slightly aside and pushed in closer. He took a chance with English. “We like play with lucky people. Mean more fun game. You know what mean?”
“I like poker,” Heidi beamed, just oozing charm. I frantically waved my arms, widening my eyes so she would hear my pleas of “no.” Stupid me, my eyes were simply too small.
“Up,” Slick said, pointing to the ceiling. “Up, poker game. You play?”
“Uh, Heid, maybe we should go? We have that thing later. You know, the thing?” I said, trying to signal in some way to walk away from this. I’ll tell you this much. I would make for a horrible secret agent. She didn’t even get that I was italicizing my words.
I found myself in an even smokier room upstairs, my nose stinging from the cigarette ash-infused air. Taking a look at the people in the room, something began to click. Everyone was dressed like an extra from a Beat Takeshi movie. It dawned on me. Pomp and Slick didn’t look like Yakuza. They were Yakuza. And I suddenly felt like I had a stomachache coming on.
Someone noticed my growing discomfort and instinctively gave me the medicine I needed, a glass of Yamazaki 12 on the rocks. All right, maybe these guys aren’t all bad, I thought. I followed the glass to the hand that passed it to me. A beautiful girl. She smiled and offered me a seat. I guess it couldn’t hurt to watch for a little while. I sat down and watched as Heidi settled into the game. The Girl fixed me another drink, and maybe another after that. I lost count.
It became clear, or as clear as my drunken brain could be, that they thought she was lucky, that luck fades. They didn’t think she knew her shit, which she clearly did. In a blur, as the cards flew by, Heidi bluffed, bullied and worked all of them until they were out, one by one like clockwork, until only Slick was left. I leaned over to the Girl and pointed at the pile of chips in the center of the poker table. “How much?” I asked.
“About eight million yen,” she answered. She lifted the bottle of whiskey to refill my glass.
I would have spit and sprayed my whiskey all over the Girl if I hadn’t gulped it all down seconds earlier. The shock passing, I accepted more whiskey. “That’s like…uh…” I tried to do the currency math in my head. “Around eighty thousand dollars…?” I asked tentatively, hoping she’d confirm my math. She did. “How the hell did it get that high?!”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “You don’t remember?”
“What do I mean? What do you mean?” I intelligently retorted.
“You are very drunk, Paul-san.”
And with those words, I realized I was. I put my face into my hands and tried to think back on the time that passed. A passing blur of face cards and poker chips blasted through my brain. And then suddenly, there it was.
As the men started losing, Pomp had remarked in Japanese, “I don’t mind losing chump change to this pretty girl. If it was real money, none of us would lose.”
Enraged by both his words and the exceptional amount of whiskey in my belly, I remember standing up and screaming in a mock Japanese accent, “Fakku you! Heidi bettah than all you Yaaaah Kuuuuu Zaaaah. She win even if each chip worth ten thousand yen.”
I think the men were about to beat me senseless when Slick raised his hands and simply said, “We accept the new terms.”
Sensing something amiss, Heidi had asked me, “Um, Paul, what’s going on?”
“Kick their ass! We’ll make these yakuza wannabes bow down!” I screamed. I’m not sure, but I think one of the Yakuza guys slapped me, but it could also have been the Girl. Anyway, it hurt, and it made me forget my train of thought. I’m pretty sure I had a steady stream of good insults in me before I was rudely interrupted.
And just as I remembered everything, Heidi lost the last hand. It was an all-in. Holy shit, which meant that we were all out.
Heidi shrugged, oblivious to the drunken trouble I’d caused, and got up to leave. Pomp forced her to sit back down.
Before Heidi could say anything, Pomp said, “Time to pay. All together, eight million yen. Please.” He then looked over at me and said, “Nooo, fuck YOU.”
And then I blacked out.
-----
When I came to, I was in the police station. There was no sign of Heidi, only officers asking me questions in Japanese, but their Japanese was so polite, I didn’t understand a lot of the words. I eventually discovered that the police received word that the Yakuza might be trying to collect a debt by selling an American Chinese girl.
“Why didn’t they sell me?” I asked. “Or at least my organs.”
One of the officers smelled the alcohol on my breath and simply said, “Your kidneys and liver won’t fetch much. We found you face-down outside a 7-Eleven.”
So here I am. In a hotel room. Waiting. The police are apparently going to wait for the sale to go through before saving Heidi so they can arrest Slick and Pomp on trafficking charges. They’re keeping me safe so I can be a witness. I’m telling you. If I had just gone to eat ramen like Heidi wanted, none of this would be happening. When she gets rescued, I swear I’m going to buy her at least one bowl of ramen. It just goes to show that you should never deny your gut instincts. (Get it?)
Okay, so the police just told me that their informant received word when the sale is going down. Apparently, it happens tonight on April 1st. Fingers crossed this information isn’t all bullshit.