Beaten up at Bananas

I came into the room like Sal Paradise into some beat crash pad to get over workaday blues and prepare for party goofs with the JET crew and… GOD damn if there wasn’t the most beautiful girl in that old room. She had more than a cute new face. It was like she had just been dropped off into the universe and was ready to, as Jack said, “take on new worlds with a shrug”. My word! Such a lively face—lithe even—yeah that’s an appropriate description. And and and not the kind of beautiful that’s like, “huh, yeah I guess she is real cute", like a whitewashed Dave Brubeck song. Rather this girl's being was like the ripping tearing straight-to-the-organs kind of beauty of John Coltrane whacked out of his gourd steaming out of control in “A Love Supreme”. And her eyes!! Even the most detached of Bodhisattvas' old heart would skip a beat sending him back into the hellish realms of desire and worldly attachment with just a look. Wonderful to see. I thought to myself, with all that’s rotten in this world there are and will aways be beautiful girls right around every corner.

Anyways the charm (and she was charming, too) of this girl was not lost on old Randy Brownstone who, believe you me, when he gets air of a beautiful girl is a thing to see. Childlike and smooth if making her was a possibility, even a remote one, he was there doing it all the right way. He reminded me of Dean in On The Road but without the madness and Benzedrine. When there was a girl like this in the room Rich ...er.. Randy was really in his Buddha nature. Unlike me, who unwisely turns to juice and tequila joy, ole’ Randy B stays on target. Never flustered. He’s a sight to behold!


I was deep in juice joy and running around digging the whole scene. We’d all be lying if we said we weren’t looking forward to it! Rashaan Roland Kirk wrote a poem about how great a particular crowd was because the patrons didn’t look like Saturday night people. He said that “Some people only go out on Saturday night; and they act like it.” And for all my midweek goofs in my college days, and all my drunken motorcycle rides, we couldn’t deny that we were defiantly Saturday night people.

And there I was, a part of the whole thing. I was genki as a yellow cap kid kicking stones on the walk from school, and I was listening to some gone Japanese girl dressed up as an angel talk about something I didn’t really know about, or maybe I was telling a story about some mindless adventure I’d had, or wanted to have. Either way, while she wrote on my hand, I looked up and saw the people.

The people!

People who had been real go-outers in far away homes in New Zealand, England, and all points around the English speaking world have been cooped up in the suit guglag that is the education system here or in any town in any country really. But we were without even a same-speaker to have giggles and glad talk with at work.

There were cats there who looked like they just came from some long lost Kansas or, say, Garden State, farm, let lose for what seemed to be the first time no longer with their good looking and faithful boyfriends waiting and worrying at home. Pretty much everyone earnestly looking for companionship. Most hadn't discounted the chance of sex and were all fumbling and gyrating (some stone sober even! God! how?!). Everyone with great gusto and biological sense of purpose. The whole scene was like the freshman dorm scene played out ad infinium across the middleclass-isphere.

And the people!

By this point I was well lit, and tried to get into conversations with beautiful girls all dressed in fancy East Coast degrees, but addled with my juice joy it all come out weird. It was if they knew all my faults and bad habits already and I babbled on incoherently. As I asked pointless questions and in response got back the WTFinstant message faces that I more then deserved. Had I been out here in isolated Kamiichi to long to properly communicate effectively with the future leaders of tomorrow? It appeared I had. Later in recounting the night, I guess others had the same experiences, getting the same rejecting faces, so I didn’t feel that bad. But as it usually does luck was to shine on me again…

This new groovy cat from far away Philadelphia’s was lucky enough to have a birthday that night. I liked him because he seemed honest and terrific and we'd been on a great rip though Tokyo. Before I knew it we were hit by the proprietor of this crazy bar with 4 birthday plastic cup fingers of plastic bottle tequila that sent my mind back to Sharkees of all the bars in Santa Barbara.

Oh man! I was fully right back there in Sharkees looking at a totally different set of people. Back in skanky old Sharkees, and me in jeans and t-shirt sadness looking though booze eyes at the storied women of California shanking their hips like a hurricane all while trying to avoid eyecontact with me. Was I really was the broke square that I saw myself as at the time? But I'd come out of my selfloathing soon enough and I was really just there to hang out with Chris and Rob and tell stories of the days' waves ridden, and how they’d gotten tired of hearing overhearing the gay sex in the apartment above and moved out, or other such bar talk. And as corny as it sounds, every conversation was really just a celebration of being young and enjoying the weird freedom we’d half deserved and half had just fallen into.

But I wasn’t there anymore. I was back in Uozu with Florence who was having herself a good time in the thick of it all to. She’s amazing, an honest woman, riding that fine-zen-line between feminist and feminine, able to get what she wanted and do it all her way. I dig her, I think she’s terrific. “Cool” doesn’t even suffice for her she’s something else. She was more than that. She'd best described by some adjective not yet percolated into the vernacular of the middleclass children playing Peter Pan games far from home. Anyways we talked and gossiped about the course of this night… natural and silly as always. Like two zen monks throwing bananas at each other, only we were at Bananas (that was the name of the bar) and not throwing them.

Somewhere in the pheromone fog of the place I was thinking of those that weren’t there. TokyoPUA was surely up in some Shibuya ward playing cool games at night with adventurous local girls looking for a laugh and something different. He would always write to me about regretting his wild actions the morning after. I don’t really believe that he's sorry for his actions, the relenting that is, but he was out there in the mix being really kinetic and I loved him for that.

Another group that didn’t make it was the too cool for that crowd. But we’ll let the melancholy Chet Baker, “they’re singing songs of love but not for me” crowd be. Some simply had to work the next day and stayed in, these are the same type of people that never get second notices from the bill man.

Then there were the others that I missed, that had escaped Neverland (not THAT Neverland) and went home for even fancier degrees and realjobs to show their proud grandfathers when they gather around for Thanksgiving or Sunday roast. We missed them greatly! Lastly we missed the brave adventurers who left the handholding world of the English teacher in Japan for journeys into to Tibet and other far out places on the Earth. These who truly let it all hang out deserve praises.

Anyways, the people at this great party were like the beatniks of the 50s. We were the outsiders of the community. We were seen as wild and unruly, but in a romantic, and lonely way. We were the free living in the midst of self-imposed worker bees who had sadly long forgotten the meaning of Saturday night. We didn’t think of ourselves as being at the bottom of the totem pole of ancient Confucian hierarchy, but rather the dumb drunk bastards dancing around it. Anyways... I’m getting rather carried away here.

Within an amount of time, I was sitting on the ground with back to the wall listening to the loveletter-life of Dorthey and Toto (the symbolism was not lost on me) thinking about her sweetheart at home and they way they were. I was far too long gone to try and be cool (ha) , and just wanted to listen and hear what she had to say (no, ulterior motives) when the lights went on at the club…

The show was over, and it was off to stage two, where it was all jamming to the beat, but I was done and had to work the next day so I went back to the apartment where I saw that amazing girl a few hours and God only knows how many tequila sunrises before. But she was gone, as girls like that usually are, and I folded the futon down, laid down and tried play Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson bop jazz in my tired brain’s jukebox and get to sleep. But I was not alone there. I talked half awake, though mostly listened really, to the wild and, to be honest, fairly raunchy stories of a wild Southerner doing things that I couldn’t even arrange in my head properly. It was all beautiful, and I must have passed out while she was talking, but like most nights like this the last thing I thought about was that Jake Kerouac poem that I carried around in that mupple head of mine:

“Man exists in milk and his rancorous music takes place in honey and creamy emptiness.”