GAIJIN STRATEGIES CHAPTER ONE

GAIJIN STRATEGIES


CHAPTER ONE



“Fuck it. We’ll go to Yokohama”.

What could we do? We were in Shanghai and had to get out. It was nice enough, fascinating in a cultural exchange kind of way, but I’d exchanged all the culture I wanted to. Time was running out, money was getting tight and we had to get out.

“I thought you said there was a boat going to Hong Kong?” said Ben.
“I thought there was a boat going to Hong Kong”, I said.
“You checked?”
“No, I didn’t check, but I thought there was a boat. I was told there was a boat. What do you want? I was wrong. I thought there was a boat and there isn’t.”
“You thought there was a boat? How did you think there was a boat?”
“Someone told me. They must have cancelled it.”
“According to that bloke in the office there, they cancelled it three years ago.”
“They didn’t cancel it. They just moved it.”
“To Yokohama.”
“Yeah, to Yokohama. It used to go to Hong Kong. Now it goes to Yokohama. That’s where the boat goes now.”
“Oh well. Fuck it. Yokohama.”
“Yeah. Fuck it. Yokohama.”

And that was that. That’s how I ended up in Tokyo. I was going to go to Hong Kong, but the boat changed its mind. One thing I’ve learnt in this game is to keep an open mind. Go with the flow, you know what I mean? When I was younger I used to say that life was like an apple. You’ve got to eat it now. If you keep it, save it, it goes mouldy. And then it’s gone. I said that to someone once. Thought I was being, you know, philosophical. He said “I think life is more like an orange. You've got to peel it before you get to the good bit.” Twat.


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That boat trip was the start of it all. Me and Ben – drifting on the sea heading off to something or other. Me, I’ve gone off travelling because I’m writing a book. Well, starting to write a book. I’ve got a great idea and I just wanted to get away from it all because life was getting too organised and formulaic, but we can get on to all that later.

Anyway, I’ve got an idea for a story. Listen, I thought it was a great idea for a story. Still do. It’s based on a true story, but then again, aren’t they all? It doesn’t matter. It’s a great story. A man, a student, decides to pay his way through college by being a sperm donor. So he gives his sperm and gives his sperm. It’s all good. This bloke – we’ll call him Will – is studying to be a doctor. He’s tall and blond, strong and athletic. The sort of bloke who your mother would want you to marry. This guy offers his sperm and it goes to the top of the sperm charts. He’s the perfect physical speciment.

But he’s got a secret, a secret even he doesn’t know. He (and here we’ve got to work on this a bit) has got a madness, a psychopathic madness – a congenital psychopathic madness.

Anyway, many years – well, maybe 10 years – down the line, Susan is having trouble with her daughter Molly. Molly is very bright, but she’s got an evil streak, a mean side to her that’s a little bit disturbed. And Susan doesn’t know what to do. She can’t ask her partner because she doesn’t have a partner. She never has had. A few lost loves, the usual catalogue of losers and chancers, nearlys and almosts. When Susan was 31, she met the man of her life, the Big Love. But – and we don’t need to go into the detail here – he was a twat, a lying, cheating, no-good dirty low-down hound dog. He wrecked her life and she swore – she absolutely swore – never to fall for a man again. She’d have a baby.
Anyway, back to the main story. Susan tries all sorts of things and, in the end, she goes to a parent-child therapy class because – obviously, she thinks that it’s all her fault. While she’s there, she meets another woman, like her the mother of a 10 year old girl. They start talking.

Can you guess where this one’s going? OK, let’s spell it out a bit more.

This other woman, her story is remarkably similar to Susan. She’s a lesbian but, that apart, it’s the same. Lost love, disappointment, betrayal. Refuge sought in a baby. Her baby is basically a good kid, but has got an evil streak. The same evil streak as Molly.

Now you know what’s going to happen. They start talking, they realise they both got pregnant after going to sperm donor centre in Eastbourne. Now then – this is the next question: how many other babies were born between 1980 and 1985?

So OK. That’s the pitch. It’s like a cross between The Boys From Brazil and maybe The Midwitch Cuckoos.

How many are there? Does something happen to them to ‘kick-start’ the inner madness that propels them? Shall we turn them into an army?



So anyway, I was sitting on the deck of this boat, it’s the middle of the night, dark and empty, just me and the night and the sea, and I’m thinking about the story – when the calm is disturbed by this couple. A big English bloke and his Israeli girlfriend. They were going at it big time, tearing into each other.

But then they saw us and found what they were looking for: an audience. We started talking, just passing the time. When I say, we started talking what I mean is he started talking. I started listening. Most of the time I didn’t know whether to interrupt or applaud, like I was at a show or something.

Always, there are two ways of looking at things. I could say that we met this bloke from south London on the boat who was off his tits and he read us this poem he’d written as a response to Paradise Lost. I can’t remember exactly now. He was the Devil or he was Milton and… Or I can tell you the more interesting version.


I didn’t know it at the time, but he was The One. I only met him for a brief time and I doubt that he even knew my name, but Graham was that person, and who changed my life. Graham Gaskin – and you can look his name up because this is all true – was there just at the right time and the right place to completely throw my life off course.

We’ve all got one, the person who changes everything. I’m writing this book about all that at the moment called The Nazi & The Jew about a young middle class Jewish man who, through a series of strange, some might say unfortunate, circumstances, finds himself in jail. At first he’s told that it’s all going to be OK, that it’s a single cell and he’ll be out soon enough. He’s scared by at least he’s by himself and then…. Late at night the door opens and in walks in a prisoner officer. The screw explains that the prison’s over-crowded and that Aaron, the Jewish bloke, is going to have to share. In walks in Razor, all shaved head and tattoos, a Nazi who’s one of the top figures in Combat 18, the psycho military wing of the British fascists, gangland figure and general Nazi nutter and Aaron’s worst nightmare. The cell door bangs shut and there they are, alone together.

What happens to them, how they get on, that’s the story. It’s part Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, part humanist tale and it will be a huge hit, a big seller made into a feature with Tom Cruise, but that’s for later. The important thing here is the bit about meeting a person who changes your life. That strange conjunction of place and time and people.

Anyway, we’re standing on the deck of this boat going to Yokohama and it’s the middle of the night. A beautiful night. And there’s this bloke giving us this rant about Milton and Paradise Lost. He could have been 25 or 35. Big build, longish hair, nondescript clothes. Jeans, t-shirt, that kind of thing. He was good-looking, but rough. Like he’d been away too long. And God knows where he’d been away to. Wherever it was, it hadn’t been in the Style supplement and it hadn’t been featured on the ad breaks in How To Look Good Naked. I’d gone away looking for something different and this, this was something different.

“Tokyo, huh. Fuckin place Tokyo. A zoo. Full of hooligans and fuckin Japs. You got a story going on there or what?”

Meeting this bloke, I was part thrilled, part terrified. Part of me was thinking “How cool. I go away, looking for an adventure and in the first half hour I meet my very own Dean Moriarty, some wild spirited free thing with energy to burn and a soul on fire”. The other part of me – the middle class, middle aged bloke who drives a Volvo and knows his National Insurance number off by heart – is frankly terrified and wants this bloody idiot to just go away. He was at best boorish and at worst dangerous. No, he was definitely dangerous.

“No, no story. No story and no idea” I said. And explained. “I was supposed to be going to Hong Kong. I had a job on a newspaper there, the South Morning Post, I think it’s called, but then the boat to Hong Kong stopped two years ago and the only boat now went to Yokohama and…” Even as I said it, it sounded rubbish. God knows what it sounded like to him, but it was the story.

“And you?” Graham said to Ben.

“And me” said Ben. “I’m just along for the ride.” You don’t trust this, do you, I thought to myself. Probably not a bad call.

“Sounds to me” said Graham “you’re gonna some dosh. Tokyo’s no place to be skint”. Then came the good bit.

“You wanna make a bit of cash? Easy money.”

Me, I was already suspicious. Ben was more interested. “Go on” he said.

Graham smiled at Ronit and then at us. He made a big dramatic looking around gesture – like he needed to. It was the middle of the night and we were on the deck of a boat. It wasn’t Piccadilly Circus.

He opened his bag and pulled out a pair of shoes which were about three sizes too big – and smiled. The significance was lost on me. I just thought it was odd.

“You’re a shoe salesman?”

“Something like that” said Graham and reached down into his bag again. After doing the dramatic looking around bit again – there’s nothing like milking the moment and Graham, a performer at heart, knew how to do that – he produced an inner sole which was about an inch thick and covered in thick cling film. Me and Ben might have been at the start of the story and about as worldly as a new born seal cub, but I knew what Graham was holding. Dope. Compressed dope. Moroccan.

He put the inner sole inside the shoe. “All you’ve got to do is walk. You ain’t got a problem walking, have you?”

No one said anything. I didn’t say anything. Ben didn’t say anything. The Israeli girl – Ronit – she didn’t say anything either.

“Look” said Graham, “I wouldn’t ask, but I’ve got three shoes and” – and he pointed down at his feet – “only two feet”.

No one said anything.

“I mean I’ve got three fucking soles. I can put two in my shoes, but I need someone else to go through with the other one. Just wear the shoes, walk through and I’ll give you a grand. Easy. Listen” he looked directly at me. “It’ll sort you out on Tokyo, get you started. Otherwise you’re gonna be in right shit, believe me”.

I remember looking at Graham and seeing all these Japanese war films in my head, sadistic guards beating people up – “Ve hav vays of making you tok!” OK, that’s a German war film, but you know what I mean. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Melly Chlistmas Mr Rawrence.

He’s going to walk through customs at Yokohama with these clowns shoes that are way too big and sell this lot in Tokyo. A lunatic.

I declined. Polite, of course, but firm. “Sorry, mate. I just haven’t got the nerve for that sort of thing”. Ben was tempted, I could see Ben was tempted. I could see all sorts of things. Like… Ben fancied Ronit and was showing off and I was thinking that on the list of bad ideas, flirting with Graham’s woman was off the scale.

Ben declined. Thank fuck for that.

“Look. OK, you ain’t done anything like this before but it’s OK. The Japs don’t do anything. All you’ve gotta be is polite and smile, that’s all. It’s what they do and it’s what they want us to do. You can call them anything, do anything but as long as you’re polite, it’s OK. You’ve got to remember, they think we’re some kind of dirty sub species anyway. They don’t expect anything proper.”

Nothing.

“Nah, no sweat” said Graham, “I’ll sort it”. Did he say that a bit too easily? There was an alarm going off in my head somewhere but I didn’t hear it. This bloke – who I’d already decided was trouble – had taken us into his confidence, shown us his inner sole – inner soul? Oh never mind – and made himself really vulnerable. And he’d let it go with “Nah, no sweat. I’ll sort it”. I wasn’t so much fresh off the boat. I was still on the boat.

I didn’t think any more of it at the time, though later on someone – Brad the Canadian, I think – told me that Graham’s usual trick was to hide the dope in some poor unsuspecting bastard’s back pack, let them take it through customs – and then steal the bag from them on the other side when they’d got through. Didn’t do anything like that with us. Don’t know why. Maybe he liked us. God knows.

We sat up the rest of the night, the four of us, smoking a bit while Graham told us stories about how he’d paid for the trip by blackmailing an MP he’d had a fling with. “I’m gonna write it all down and make it into a TV film. Those bastards won’t forget about me”. All I remember thinking was “Why are you telling us this?” Whatever. Back then I was so naïve about this lark I’d have believed anything. The last thing I suspected was that it was all true – but sometimes the last place you suspect is the first place you should look.

Customs was a joy. Graham insisted on walking through with us, talking to us and laughing all the way. The Japanese were pretty much like he said – they looked at us like we were slightly dirty, like they just hoped we’d go away. Curiously, it was kinda how I felt about Graham. But they humoured us and let us in.

We got through. I was terrified. He didn’t seem to give a toss. But we got through. Looking back, I don’t know why I was terrified – that business of dropping the dope in someone else’s backpack hadn’t occurred to me at all – that kind of thinking was completely off my radar. Maybe it was some kinda instinct thing. We got through.

Tokyo. We were in Tokyo. I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting that was. Tokyo. That was amazing. A month ago I was in London and now I was in Tokyo. Well, I was on a train going to Tokyo. Just me. And Ben. And Graham. And Ronit.

It was a strange journey, didn’t take long and to be honest I can’t remember much about it. I remember Graham rolling one his trouser legs up and revealing an inner sole gaffer taped to his leg. I remember that. I also remember him asking us where we were going to stay.

“I dunno” said Ben. “Some hotel in town. We’ll ask around, maybe go to tourist info or something, and find something for a few days and…”

“Like fuck you will. You’re coming with us. You ever heard of the Palace?”

“The palace?”

“The Maharajah Palace. That’s where we’re going.”

We’re going to Tokyo and we’re going to stay in The Maharajah Palace. You’ve gotta laugh. There’s a kind of inconsistency there that appealed. If I’d have thought of Tokyo and play some sort of word association game, I’d have come up with words like hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again. I’m not sure the words maharajah and palace would have come up in the top 100.

OK. Let’s turn it round the other way. If the words Maharajah Palace don’t make you think of hi-tech, shiny, electronic, space age, digital and maybe electronic again Tokyo, what did they make you think of? Opulence. Grandeur. Exotic baubles, rubies and emeralds and gold, great swathes of elaborately embroidered cloth, shimmering with their gaudiness. Probably not rusty corrugated metal and ramshackle wood. Probably not some pre-fab held up by its own indecision as to which bit should collapse first. If I’d have seen the place – regardless of where it was – I don’t think I’d have been helped. If I’d have seen the place I might have come up with Large Garden Shed. Or Decrepit Old Shack. Or Complete Fucking Dump. Maharajah Palace. It was probably funny once.

The Palace was a zoo. Well, not even a zoo. In a zoo, the animals have some kind of morality. In the Palace… that very concept was kinda dubious.

If you were the romantic type, you might say it was a rogue’s gallery. If you were a realist, you might want to move to somewhere a bit more hi-tech and shiny. Me, I thought it was charming.

It had the air of a hideaway, a place where people were… well, not exactly on the run. That’s a bit too pulp fiction, a bit too romantic, but it was definitely somewhere that felt outside the boundaries, somewhere the normal rules didn’t apply. There were probably other rules that applied.

A few years later, I was hanging out with a Norwegian girl there. I remember talking to her and a bloke called Mark, who the house doctor at the time. Elke was a sweetie, a poppet, but she was very clean living and fresh. It wasn’t so much that she was naïve, it was just that she hadn’t really considered the options before.

“How many people here take drugs?” she said to Mark.
Mark thought a bit. And then he looked at her. He didn’t really need to say anything but she knew.
“Everyone?”
Still he didn’t say anything.
“Everyone except me?”
Mark gave her some rabbit about how she was beautiful and pure and different and that’s what made her special, but she was lost in thought.

Like I say, she hadn’t really considered her options. It didn’t take her long to re-adjust, but that’s another story.