 
# Impossibly  
Glamorous

SECOND EDITION

2017 BY CHARLES AYRES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

**IMPOSSIBLY GLAMOROUS STUDIOS**

www.dtlahustler.com

Afterword by DJ Kamasami Kong

Interview with May Pang ©Radio Nippon

All other celebrity radio interviews ©Tokyo FM

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book was originally released under the author's given name Charles Ayres. Certain names, locations and details have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people mentioned in my book. The public personalities and famous people are all real. Romanized versions of Japanese words are written without the macron to denote the long vowel sound for ease in reading.

Cover photos of Charles St. Anthony in various costumes by Anatole Papafilippou

_Metropolis cover art by Kohji Shiiki_

Editing by Marcella Hammer and Fearless Literary Services

_(www.fearlessbooks.com)_

_Printed in the United States of America_

### **_THE CONTENTS_**

[CHAPTER 1  
 _Walking Pandemonium_](../Text/007_chapter1.html#ch1)

[CHAPTER 2  
 _A Dramatic Entrance_](../Text/008_chapter2.html#ch2)

[CHAPTER 3  
 _The Material '80s_](../Text/009_chapter3.html#ch3)

[CHAPTER 4  
 _Channeling Weirdonesia_](../Text/010_chapter4.html#ch4)

[CHAPTER 5  
 _Student Ambassador_](../Text/011_chapter5.html#ch5)

[CHAPTER 6  
 _Club of Piranhas_](../Text/012_chapter6.html#ch6)

[CHAPTER 7  
 _Tune in Tokyo_](../Text/013_chapter7.html#ch7)

[CHAPTER 8  
 _The Blue Envelope, the Skinny Envelope and the Fat Envelope_](../Text/014_chapter8.html#ch8)

[CHAPTER 9  
 _Start Spreading the News_](../Text/015_chapter9.html#ch9)

[CHAPTER 10  
 _Life Has Its Way with Me_](../Text/016_chapter10.html#ch10)

[CHAPTER 11  
 _President Nero's Legacy_](../Text/017_chapter11.html#ch11)

[CHAPTER 12  
 _What Red Flags?_](../Text/018_chapter12.html#ch12)

[CHAPTER 13  
 _Kentastrophe_](../Text/019_chapter13.html#ch13)

[CHAPTER 14  
 _Foxxy Lady_](../Text/020_chapter14.html#ch14)

[CHAPTER 15  
 _Kong Attacks Tokyo_](../Text/021_chapter15.html#ch15)

[CHAPTER 16  
 _The Tale of the Grumpy Samaritan_](../Text/022_chapter16.html#ch16)

[CHAPTER 17  
 _Roller Coaster 2008_](../Text/023_chapter17.html#ch17)

[CHAPTER 18  
 _Things Are OK with O-Tani_](../Text/024_chapter18.html#ch18)

[CHAPTER 19  
 _Rising Phoenix_](../Text/025_chapter19.html#ch19)

[CHAPTER 20  
 _The Day It All Changed_](../Text/026_chapter20.html#ch20)

[EPILOGUE  
 _Upgrade U_](../Text/027_chapter21.html#ch21)

AFTERWORD

MY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In loving memory of  
César Garcia  
(1976-2006)

_"Even if you are having a shitty day,  
as long as you have your make-up and hair  
done, you'll feel fabulous."_

## CHAPTER 1

## **_Walking Pandemonium_**

"Girl, what are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm Nair-ing my ass and listening to the Cure. Where are we going tonight, Charles?"

"Look César, I can't sneak out three nights in a row, and you know that power lesbian bouncer at The Edge doesn't believe my ID."

"Silence, motherfucker!"

I tried to picture César as he cradled his phone against his neck and smeared hair removal cream onto his butt cheeks. "Drag queens L'Oreal and Melinda Ryder are MCing the show, and I wouldn't miss them for anything. Pick me up at eight."

To sneak into The Edge we had to arrive before ten, when the lesbian doorwoman, Larissa, appeared. If Larissa was there, she'd cut up your fake ID right in your face, then threaten to toss you out on your bare behind if you ever came back — i.e., she did her job. But if we arrived before ten and hid in the bathrooms until the bar filled, we underage gays could dance to Crystal Waters and the Real McCoy to our heart's content.

César Garcia was the brother I never had and my first close gay friend in Kansas City, Missouri. Or perhaps I should call him "gay- adjacent," as César also made out with girls — though he squealed higher and pranced girlier than any homo I ever met. Whatever he was—homosexual, bisexual or polysexual— César was so obviously not-straight that he'd endured far more homophobia than me. Legend had it he'd been tossed out of Catholic school for slapping a nun. He'd then attended a rougher high school where the other students slammed him into lockers and called him "César Gay-cia" or "César Cock-munch." One clever redneck came up with "César Toss-My- Salad." I'd gone to quieter bourgeoisie Shawnee Mission East.

Since high school was perilous and got in the way of his partying, César quit, got his GED, and began his not-a-career of getting fired from jobs for coming in high or not coming in at all. César was unemployable. A nightmare for any boss. He got caught shoplifting black jelly bracelets from his gig at Spencer's Gifts and pillaging the Aveda at high-end salons. But he was still more fun than anyone else.

**_PhD in partying_**

César could turn any day of the week into a fiesta. Though he was unavoidable at our favorite hangout, Club Piranha, I got to know him when I hung out with a clique of Gothic lesbians — we just all ended up at the same parties. Whenever I wanted a night of adventure, I'd cruise my jalopy ten minutes down 95th Street to César's, and then we'd take off. César could dance like a superstar, do make-up like nobody's business and make you laugh any time, any day.

The boy knew how to party. He practically had a Master's Degree in Mind Altering Substances: marijuana, mushrooms, Vicodin, Percoset. César loved to experiment with different substances. Picking him up was like picking up a new friend every day. I could get Mellow César who had munchies for cookie dough or Speedy César in platform shoes, grinding his teeth or even Raver César with a pocketful of ecstasy. Fast César. Crying César. Fun César. Bitchy César. There were so many Césars to be met.

With my social life revolving around César and Club Piranha, I was not exactly on my way to becoming high school valedictorian. I'd been in Drama Club at Shawnee Mission East, but who had time for _Our Town_ and _South Pacific_ when there were parties to attend?

The Drama Chair at Shawnee Mission East grew displeased. She nearly tossed me out of Drama Club (gasp!) when I got caught smoking during rehearsal.

"I can smell the cigarettes on you. I think I smell pot on you, too," she'd accused. But I had not indulged in pot that day; maybe the smell was from the designer imposter's fragrance she bathed in.

Ironically, this led me to being banned from the gayest production ever put on at our school: _Cabaret_. Fortunately, with no drama class or productions, I had extra time to get into trouble with César.

I loved visiting the Garcias. César's family had an affinity for Mediterranean cuisine and an appreciation for gastronomy in general — they didn't subsist on microwave pizzas and Fruit Roll-Ups like my family. Nary a Manwich to be found in Casa Garcia. Booze flowed freely, myriad Mexican cousins visited, and music and dancing were always on the agenda. Seriously, César had so many cousins there seemed to be one _quiceañera_ per week. If you could chop up "FUN" and mold it like Play-Doh into a human form, it would be César and his family. He was a natural celebrity and walking pandemonium.

And if my life had had an MPAA rating, César would have knocked it from PG-13 to NC-17. One day I ran into him right after he'd had a threesome with some Goth lesbians. "All true Goths are bisexual," César asserted, as if this were a well-known fact written on the Statue of Liberty. César made out with Gothic non-lesbians as well, and occasionally even made out with me. "I just can't get enough,' he'd say. "I need both peen and poon."

He was a Goth Latino Don Juan. Edward Scissorhands meets Antonio Banderas.

**_Why we drove to Red Lobster_**

The only resistance César ever received was from straight men. When not making out with his gay and lesbian friends, César became infatuated with straight-ish men who never reciprocated. We'd find ourselves driving to Red Lobster to leave love notes on Dustin Davenport's car. Dustin had long greasy hair and the aroma of hush puppies. He never trimmed his nails, sweat stains circled his pits, and his goatee was never shaved into a recognizable shape.

But César thought this moron was the second coming of George Clooney. César spent hours analyzing Dustin's every utterance and wardrobe choice for traces of homosexuality, he wrote love poems to Dustin, and we'd have deep conversations about him over the phone.

"Dustin once wore pink bell bottoms to that party we all went to."

"But César, that was a costume party."

"His nails were totally long and painted black. He is a Goth bisexual just like me."

"OK César, number one, you are only bisexual when you are drunk and there are no men around. Number two, I think Dustin's nails are just long and dirty from working the swing shift at Red Lobster. Bringing out the seafood lover in you is grueling work, and he doesn't have time to scrub behind his nails and do his cuticles."

Whether gay, straight or inclined to bestiality, César and Dustin were not destined to be Andromeda and Perseus. It is unfortunate that the book _He's Just Not That into You_ was not out at this time, as it would have saved thousands of Hispanic tears and much gasoline consumed in vain errands to the Red Lobster on Shawnee Mission Parkway.

**_Disturbing the peace_**

César would leave stores with things he had stolen that you wouldn't know about until you got in the car. I was never party to the decision to make off with this contraband and was usually shocked when 20 minutes after leaving a store, he would produce a virtual cornucopia of items from his pockets. César was the Jack Sparrow of Johnson County. He stole heaps of cosmetics, bottles of vodka, and even a Halloween pump-kin once. Over the course of several years he reportedly made off with boatloads of product from luxury salons and a grand bottle of Thierry Mugler perfume from the counter at Saks 5th Avenue. After years of heists right under the eyes of store workers throughout the KC Metro Area, César finally got busted at Camelot Music for stealing a clearance bin tape of Billy Idol's _Vital Idol_.

I graduated high school a semester early, and the last Friday I was there César came to Shawnee Mission East with me as my guest in the dead of winter. We lied and said he went to school at Our Sister of the Worthless Miracle in LA. My first class was a Biology test, and we were rather sedate, it being 8 a.m. We both wore our PVC (vinyl) pants; he wore his blue velvet jacket which matched my green velvet jacket. We applied Gothic makeup in the parking lot, shaking in Kansas City's subzero temperatures. This was in January 1995. We looked like the faggot leprechauns of doom.

I'd been dying to terrorize the preppy Shawnee Mission East kids for years, and with César and me in full Gothic regalia, the school went ballistic. People were yelling and screaming at us. I was in my last semester of gym senior year; this was a class in which I'd long been terrorized by jocks.

"If I were you I'd just kill myself," some football players taunted us. "What's your phone number? Maybe you can suck my dick?!"

César yelled, "I have a phone number! It's 1-900-FUCKOFF!" We escaped further harassment by going to the counselor's office. During lunch we drove to César's, smoked ganja and then we took off for the International Center where I studied Japanese. Being high made studying the Kanji char-acters so much fun! Shogun and Sayuri took a ride on Jefferson Airplane. Those hep cats from Osaka became groovy, baby, groovy.

**_Hippies under the full moon_**

One night soon after, a fabulous full moon shone overhead. We were stoked because every full moon the hippies held a drum circle in downtown Kansas City. César and I wanted to go, but we were flat broke.

I called César on my Best Buy black cordless. "César, we need to come up with some money."

"My father is giving me money to start a Gothic dance club. It is going to be called La Ment. Get it, Lament?"

"Yeah, I got it César, that's a moronic name. Anyway I thought you said last week that it was going to be Dracula's Last Stop." it."

"Either way it is going to be the shit. Everyone is talking about it."

"Yeah, I'm sure it's the next Limelight, Peter Gatien. Look César, I'm dying for a little buzz before we hit the hippie drum circle. Do you have any weed?"

"Girl, you know where we need to go."

"But I don't have any money. I spent my last cash buying you chalupas and Oreos after the 2-for-1 beer bust. Now look, I didn't want to do take this route, but there's just one solution." The saxophone I'd played in junior high mostly lay around collecting dust. My older sister's friends had destroyed it during a kegger she'd thrown when my parents were out of town. The bastards had kicked my alto sax down a flight of stairs and it would no longer blow. But it _could_ be pawned for enough to buy us a dime bag and vodka.

The full moon glowed over the city as César and I went to buy pot from a notorious dealer named Handyman. The dealer had only his white briefs on, and when he turned around there was a big brown stain on the back. I looked up at the farm tools and bludgeoning instruments on the wall that served for décor, then turned to César, grabbed our Maui Wowie, and said, "Let's get the fuck outta Dodge!"

We went to join the hippies in their full moon drum circle in a dodgy part of downtown Kansas City. Dreadlocked white girls danced around a bonfire wearing the flammable-looking, purple flowy skirts that were in vogue with the spiritual chicks. Though none of the hippie girls caught fire that night, everyone was, in fact, quite well-lit.

César and I sat on a bench overlooking the deco-era brick buildings and knocked each other over, laughing about small-town gay gossip. Then I asked him, "This can't be all you want César, don't you want to get out of here?"

"What for? I have everything I need in KC. Great family, great friends."

"Oh you just like being a big rainbow fish in a small dreary pond. Not for me, César, I gotta get out of here."

"Bitch please, where the hell do you think you'll go?"

"Europe, New York, Japan, South America? Who knows?"

"You know what I want Charles? I just want to be loved."

"You are loved. You have more friends than anyone I know."

"No. Like a real boyfriend."

"Well, you need to clean things up. Slow down. Do less drugs. Get a career going."

"Okay. I'll think about it after we finish this joint."

"Come on César, don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to."

César was annoyed at me for quoting the overplayed TLC song, "Will you shut the fuck up and smoke?"

Some hippies were coming and we didn't want to share our blunts with them so we went inside a sketchy bus parked nearby. The last time this bus had been driven, the Partridge Family was popular and girls wore flowers in their hair in San Francisco. The bus was filled with old furniture covered in white fabric. It smelled like mold and garbage. So naturally César and I did the logical thing in a bus full of refuse: we started making out.

We both pulled back and laughed. "What are we doing?" A lot of gay friendships are based around the fact that there isn't a lot of chemistry and the window for becoming boyfriends had shut. César and I were no different. The full moon, Maui Wowie and the stench in a hippie bus had made us crazy for a moment.

**_Burning bridges with napalm_**

No one could burn bridges faster than César. He could napalm bridges! But we always forgave him. It was simply more fun hanging out with him than holding a grudge.

But not only did he atomize friendships and leave employers enraged, he also got banned from gay clubs. The Cabaret, a gay club, banned César after he went out with the owner and doorpeople, then announced that he was only eighteen and had been illegally entering their club. César had been a fixture at all the gay clubs for some time, so no one had questioned his age. After the Cabaret banned him and the Arabian Nights shut down, that left us one last resort I didn't want to turn to: the Dixie Belle.

We were always able to sneak into the Dixie Belle, a leather daddy and cowboy bar. César and I would run through and laugh at the circle jerks going on in the basement. One night I saw a physics teacher downstairs.

"Oh my! Charles St. Anthony? What are you doing here? You're not supposed to see me here," he flustered as he zipped up his black jeans and flounced off. Maybe this explained the twinkle in his eye when he explained Gibbs free energy. Having missed a peek at my teacher's Bunsen burner, César and I ran back upstairs and looked for daddies to buy us Michelob Light.

I missed the action another night at the Dixie Belle when César and some friends locked themselves in the private VIP bathroom. César decided he was Sid Vicious and karate-kicked the porcelain sink off the wall. And so, César was banned from Kansas City's foulest gay bar as well. Which should have earned him a medallion, or something.

Of course it was hilarious when his stealing and bitchiness was directed at someone else, but he would also direct it at his friends. Even at me. "Um, girl, I think this is my Elastica CD," I said one day when I came over for sangria and salsa.

"No, I totally lifted this from Camelot Music at Ward Parkway."

"Um, César, I don't think so. This is the limited edition CD I searched around for. Not only that, aren't those my Madonna tapes?"

A line had been crossed. Mess with a gay's Madonna, and you're bound for trouble. "I don't think this is funny, César."

"Why do you have to be such a shady bitch? They're just tapes, get over it."

He did this to all his friends, but the fact of the matter was you just had to get over it, because when it came down to it, there was only one Mr. Walking Pandemonium.

César and I had many ins and outs over the years. So at first it seemed fine — even funny — when he decided to start the morning by buying a 24 pack of beer at ten a.m., or mix three different types of pills with his Caipirinha.

"I don't think you should be mixing alcohol with those pills, César."

"They work faster!"

Indeed both César and I became victims to a common disease in the gay community. Gays commonly congregate in bars and clubs, and it's easy to reach a point when your desire to socialize with other gays conflates with hard-core substance abuse. We all had fun, but now I know we should have pushed him toward a healthier lifestyle. Hell, someone should have pushed me toward a healthier lifestyle. At the same time, I wouldn't trade my time with César for anything. He influenced my tastes in music, fashion and humor. I moved away from Kansas City and César, and there's lots I've forgotten. But I'll never forget the jokes we shared and what he taught me about making people laugh and standing up to bullies. About knowing when to walk away from a bully situation. And knowing when to run for your fucking life. He got me to reach beyond my immediate circle. He opened me up.

## CHAPTER 2

## **_A Dramatic Entrance_**

My first photographs did not exactly scream "glamour potential." I got stuck coming out as a baby — literally stuck in my mommy's hoo-hoo. On September 21st, 1977 at 1:11 a.m. my big head turned the wrong way. The doctors got their clamps and yanked me out. They had no need to spank the baby Charles Joshua St. Anthony. I arrived crying.

The staff at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City photographed a bruised, mutant-looking infant. My parents kept these newborn pictures hidden for years. _Let's keep the photos of the bruised, mutant-looking baby under wraps. Not good for the ol' self-esteem..._

My parents called me my middle name, Josh, reflecting the '70s vogue for J names like Justin, Jerome, Jennifer and Jonathon. Note to parents thinking of naming their children something, and then calling them by their middle name instead: Don't do it! I've wasted countless hours explaining that even though Charles is my first name, my parents called me Josh. People assume that your first name must be embarrassing to you, so they then, of course, use your actual first name to mock you. Teachers never know who you are. I was cursed with this Josh business until I gave up and just started going by Charles.

I would find out later that if pronounced incorrectly, the name "Josh" can sound like "Girl" ( _joshi_ ) or "Female Prisoner" ( _joshu_ ) in Japanese. But only those who take me to a romantic dinner at the Olive Garden and buy me a dozen roses are allowed to call me "Girl" and "Female Prisoner."

**_The Family St. Anthony_**

I was the second child born to Richard and Wilhelmina St. Anthony, and the younger brother of Victoria St. Anthony. Richard, Wilhelmina, Victoria and Charles. You would have thought we played polo and ate scones with Prince Harry before jaunting off to Charing Cross. Instead we were a broke family residing in America's "City of Fountains," Kansas City.

Our devoutly Christian single grandmother raised my mother in St. Louis. Though I am loath to call her a Bible thumper, she definitely _tapped_ the Bible or _swatted_ the Bible — whatever is one step down from thumping. Grandma's entire social circle revolved around church – par for the course for some people living in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

My father had eccentric, dreamer qualities that could inspire, yet be problematic. Richard St. Anthony grew up in an unhappy, broken household. His party-animal parents left the kids at home while they painted the town. Grandma Betty could pack booze away like Homer Simpson. She stood 5'2" with a pink beehive and had a liver like an oil refinery. Legend has it that Betty, in her youth, could down a keg of moonshine, burp a baby, and knit Christmas stockings all in less than five minutes.

Betty kicked alcoholism after she had a dream of my uncle pleading with her to stop. After Betty put down the sauce, she turned her attention to colorful plumage. She had a rotating selection of pink, purple or orange hair that later inspired my own follicular misadventures.

Betty repented in her later years, found Jesus, and became an aspiring novelist. God came to her in another dream and proclaimed he would give her money to build a theater for which she would write religious plays. As of today, the Almighty has yet to open a cosmic cash machine for Grandma Betty. Should she win the lottery, I will be sitting in the first pew of St. Jude's Theatre of the Pentecostal Delusion enjoying every minute of her Scripture based plays.

**_My father, his wench, and his far-sighted schemes_**

Raised in a party-hard atmosphere, when the '60s rolled in Richard St. Anthony was ready for their wild side. He spent his hippie years tooling around on his motorcycle and hitchhiking cross- country. The only picture of him from this era shows him with a buffalo skull on his head and a goofy grin. Perhaps the peyote was bad during the fireside "Kumbaya."

After a stint in the Green Berets, Richard went to graduate school for Plant Physiology and Horticulture. There he met Wilhelmina, a doe-eyed, conservative girl. Obviously the mo-torcycles and buffalo skulls did a number on her. He propositioned her after a Psychology class with the oh-so-romantic line, "Would you like to be the weekend wench?"

Was it the Jung they'd just read or the incense in the air? Had Jupiter aligned with Mars? She surprised my father and his cohorts by saying, "Yes." That weekend wench became his wench for life.

A few years later, they were married in a park. They walked down the aisle to "How the West Was Won." I'm unsure if Grandma Betty owned a shotgun, but they welcomed their first child, Victoria, into the world somewhat less than nine months after the wedding. I joined the household in 1977. By the time the '80s rolled around, Richard St. Anthony had brainstormed ways to support his growing brood — and change the world.

No one could fault my father for lack of ambition. "In six months we'll be living in Mission Hills" (Kansas City's answer to Beverly Hills), he'd proclaim. "By next year we'll have a corporate jet." Pretty big statements from a man who drove an antediluvian Toyota Corolla hatchback to a "business" that seemed to change focus every six months.

My father's early business ventures focused on renewable energy, which sounds nice and dandy now, but people didn't want to hear about this in the early '80s. People liked their IZOD shirts, jelly shoes, Spuds Mackenzie and Max Headroom. Renewable energy to protect our planet? Not so much. This was the pre-Al Gore, pre- Wangari-Maathai, pre-polar-ice-caps melting, irresponsible '80s. Back then if you told people, "The polar bears are going to starve and the entire nation of Tuvalu will soon sink underwater," what you got back was, "As long as Boy George is singing, it'll be a hit!" People didn't give a horse's dingleberry about the environment. And '80s eco-based ventures like my father's dried up like the Greenland ice shelf.

Our family finances, which had never been great, veered from rocky to abysmal as my father constantly hatched new plans to make oil from waste wood, start a biomass plant in Canada, or create "clean energy" from a contraption known as a "Gas-a-Fire" (or "gasifier" for people in the business). A "Gas-a-Fire" takes carbonaceous material such as coal, gasoline or biomass and transforms it magically to extract energy. The "Gas-a-Fire" of the early eighties probably made better flatulence than energy, and my parents needed to leave our spacious Missouri residence to move to the Kansas suburbs.

**_All you need to know about Kansas City_**

For those of you who slept through geography class, the Kansas City area straddles the border of both Kansas and Missouri. And now for a crash course in the social dynamics of Kansas City. During the Civil War, some wild and lawless Missouri people (a Confederate state) went and slaughtered people in Kansas (a Union state). To this day, tension between the two states has never subsided completely. Missourians think Kansas is salty and stale, while Kansans think Missouri is the gateway to Babylon.

My father insists we moved because the schools in Kansas were superior. Indeed, my sister Victoria's school on the Missouri side of Kansas City failed to notice she had dyslexia. My mother more dryly notes that our finances were ailing because the Gas-a-Fire failed to take the world by storm, and that's the real reason why the Show- Me State became the Show-Me-Outta-Here State.

We moved to a suburb on the Kansas side with the drab name of Prairie Village. Anyone reading "Kansas" and "Prairie Village" might think we ran around barefoot, wearing overalls, and sang "Old Susannah" while Granny made snake-oil tonic and then hunted opossums for supper. _If only it were that interesting._ Apparently there was a "prairie" and a "village" at some point, but they'd been bulldozed to make way for suburbia. The income strata of our area ranged from "Upper Middle Class" to "Shops the JCPenney Sale Rack." I called this sketchy Prairie Village fiefdom home until the end of high school.

**_Harbingers of a lifestyle to come_**

I experienced my very first puppy love at age five, for Dixie, a pretty blonde girl of Scandinavian ilk. I went to a Pre-kindergarten where Dixie was the reigning Queen Bee, a Regina George for the Playskool and _Candyland_ set. Woe to the kids who would try to withhold My Little Ponies from her. She would stomp on your Sundance while tearing the head off of Megan if you didn't hand over your Rainbow Dash by nap time. But I knew it was better to be on Dixie's side, hating life, than not to be in the Preschool Plastics at all.

Dixie also had fruit-scented dolls I coveted, named Strawberry Shortcake, Raspberry Tart and Custard. I could have cared less about GI Joe or Cobra Commander — I wanted fruity fragranced dolls. They smelled pretty! I think the toymakers may have laced Strawberry Shortcake and her friends with angel dust. Like catnip to a calico, sniffing those dolls got me high. They made me insane, lending very early inspiration for what would later become one of my Ten Commandments: **Thou shalt not sniff fruity scented dolls for hours on end. It could drive you CRAZY!** I could sniff that red-haired temptress and her apron for hours. Raspberry Tart and Custard might as well have popped Quaaludes while the Peculiar Purple Pie Man cooked up meth in the Berry Bake Shoppe. These toys were the forerunners to a decade in which American children became addicted to materialism.

My interest in becoming a media personality started around this time. I'd been a fairly quiet child previously, but suddenly a switch was thrown inside me. A deluge of words began pouring out. I became garrulous and would talk to every mailman and grocery sack boy... and I could talk with Dixie for hours. I would tell anyone within listening distance my address, birthday and parents' social security numbers. One of my earliest memories involves lecturing a Safeway checkout clerk on paramecium and amoebae after a special on single-cell organisms on PBS had bedazzled me. My mother sent me into time-out every time the postman came, lest I start telling him about the amoebae or, worse, ask if he had a penis.

I play-married Dixie by the swing set in her backyard but, of course, with first love comes first heartbreak. Her father's career took off, and one day she got taken to a magical, far-off place where the grass is really greener: California. I cried myself to sleep underneath my bed. I suppose most people would choose California over Prairie Village. Should you meet Dixie gallivanting about West Hollywood or Palm Springs, please inform her that if she has since gotten married then she has committed bigamy with a homosexual. I would like my alimony payments in one lump sum so I can pay my AmEx bill, or I may have to snatch a boatload of her panties to sell to Japanese businessmen!

With my father busy finding new ecological ways to make eco- conscious diesel fuel out of goat cheese or pineapple clusters, and my mother working for the U.S. government, the TV became my babysitter during my early childhood. In addition to the reruns and game shows, a new form of media had just hit the scene in the early '80s: MTV. I really, _really_ loved when we got cable and MTV as it meant my father was getting paid. I might be able to see "Fraggle Rock" on HBO. Of course, music video classics by the Cars or Flock of Sea-gulls entertained me, but nothing compared to Duran Duran. They oozed New Romantic polish and sensuality. And everyone had a copy of _Thriller,_ and I would dance the entire choreography from "Beat It" in our living room. I wondered why the video's denouement knife fight was so completely ineffectual.

My childhood musical taste was a harbinger of things to come. Aside from MJ, I really, _really_ liked "Lucky Star" by Madonna. It seemed to match the dolls my sister had, Rainbow Brite. Then Madonna came out with "Material Girl," the video that featured Madonna acting like Marilyn Monroe in a sea of cute '80s white guys. To this day I still shout, "Don't throw that away!" at the TV when Madonna's bearded suitor tosses a present in the garbage while Madonna chats on the phone: "He thinks he can impress me by giving me expensive gifts." Madonna struts her way through a sea of white, white, white dancers and one Asian guy. Since Prairie Village was not exactly a cultural melting pot, nor even a cultural cheese fondue, I'd never before seen an actual Asian. But I believed the Asian dancer's pain when Madonna snatched a diamond ring off his finger. I saw that Asian guy and thought... "I like _THAT_!"

## CHAPTER 3

## **_The Material '80s_**

_"We're Bradford Braves and in so many ways we're not bad, we're not good, we're the best..."_

So started the Bradford Elementary School Song, set to the tune of You're a Grand Old Flag. How I longed to be at the place where the big kids went, and to sing their corny song.... But it was my father who did most of the raving about Kansas public schools: you would think Bradford Elementary was Dartmouth, Oxford and the Police Academy rolled into one. Still, Bradford was truly, a worthwhile institution that reflected well on Prairie Village (a.k.a. PV) Kansas. Bradford teachers had helped my big sister Victoria beat dyslexia, and she was on her way to reading like a normal elementary school student. Curious George and Shel Silverstein would thwart her no more.

**_Early life lessons_**

Several hundred students attended this pint-sized "Harvard of the Great Plains," and the socioeconomic dynamics of this sub-urban microcosm were fascinating. PV kids shared classrooms with the Mission Hills kids — Mission Hills was where Kansas City sports legends, Hallmark company heirs and trust fund millionaires had their Old Money palatial residences. The income disparity was huge, with the Mission Hills kids flying to Aspen and Bora Bora for Spring Break while we PV kids rode minivans to such underwhelming destinations as Lincoln, Nebraska or Sioux City, Iowa. For PV kids, it was, "Branson, Missouri here we come!" while the Mission Hills kids dined on beluga caviar and jet skied at St. Barth's Nikki Beach.

Bradford Elementary had few racial minorities, but there were quite a few Jewish children. Come Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, a notable number of seats were left empty. Yes, I know that after New York and Miami, one does not think of Kansas as part of the great Jewish Diaspora, but I'm quite grateful to the Schwartzes, Goldmans and Greensteins I grew up with. When I made it to New York, I had a clue what matzo balls were and knew what _meshuga_ and _mensch_ meant.

My mother dragged me (moaning and hollering) by my IZOD shirt collar to my classroom on my first day of kindergarten. I intended to spend the day in abject bitterness. How dare they make me go to kindergarten with those goofy-looking, snot-nosed babies? Not only that, there were about twenty girls to the mere six boys in the class. No other boys to play tag with? Only six boys to discuss the latest exploits of "Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats" with? I felt like I was being shipped off to Leavenworth.

Then a seraph in a blue, black and red sweater descended upon us.

"My name is Mrs. Hartsock. A long time ago a little boy came to me and said in order to remember my name he put his hand on his 'heart' and looked down at his 'sock.' That way he could remember Mrs. Hartsock!"

Her voice was soothing as gossamer and her nature was gentle and pure. The cynic in me now fails to believe someone that pure could exist. I now imagine that Mrs. Hartsock lived some crazy double life. She taught "Stop, Drop and Roll" by day, and drank bourbon and attended mafia shoot-outs by night. She had kids reach for their Crayolas as the sun shone while whipping executives under the name "Pandora Sixx" in twilight.

**_Born that way_**

I was a naive child who had no understanding of gender differences and sexuality. I thought a man married a woman, and automatically she became pregnant. Pee Pee and Va Jay Jay no touchy touchy. (In my adult life Pee Pee and Va Jay Jay almost never touched either – but I'll get to that.). My birthday came first that school year, and my parents invited all six boys and no girls to my party.

I wish they'd invited some girls. Each boy gave me a Hot Wheels car and I remember being exceedingly disappointed. I would have preferred Strawberry Shortcake and her strawberry-crack-scented hair.

I do remember having a quasi-sexual fantasy of wishing I could "wrestle" the other boys in my kindergarten, shirtless like Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. Except my fantasy included wrestling on the beach on a desert island. It was a highly erotic version of _Lord of the Flies_ , minus the death and mayhem.

**_Frosted Shredded Wheat to the rescue_**

In addition to being naïve I was temperamental, which I think began with anxiety about my family's financial status vis-à-vis the ultra-rich Mission Hills kids. My parents did their best, but my five dollar JCPenney Sale Rack Couture had nothing on Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans, Reebok high-top sneakers and clothing budgets bigger than my parents' monthly mortgage. Maybe I needed to learn that "money isn't everything." Or maybe I was just a pain in the ass.

This anxiety affected my diet. To this day I detest pasta, no matter how delicious or gourmet, as eating spaghetti always meant we didn't have a lot of money, and will always remind me of squabbling parents and awkward silences.

Around age seven, the only food I wanted was breakfast cereal. My parents constantly badgered me saying, "You don't know what you're missing." I came to hate dinnertime with its standoffs in which I couldn't leave the table until I tried some Manwich or brisket. Eventually I would sneak off and get my cereal while my parents got distracted by "Hill Street Blues" or the like. This lasted a couple years, but the fact that I survived speaks volumes about the nutritional value of 2% low fat milk and Frosted Shredded Wheat.

**_Cootie free_**

In first grade, I would trot along merrily with a new He-Man lunchbox having fantasies about Man-at-Arms and enjoying a day of book learnin' with the seductively witchlike Mrs. Paseo. I remember being spellbound by her curled brunette tresses which swayed compellingly as she wrote sentences on the chalkboard for us to re- write and learn. When Mrs. Paseo dressed as a sexy witch for Halloween, she looked the part.

To add to my already growing laundry list of issues, at this age I was robbed of my innocence. My sister Victoria, normally so kind and responsible, committed an act so vile and reprehensible that she should be on a special list you can check in case such violators might want to live in your neighborhood. Her crime: robbing me of Santa Claus.

Victoria joyously reduced me to tears by telling me there was no Santa Claus. "You're so stupid, there's no Santa!"

"There is too! Things just work different on the North Pole with flying reindeer and all that jazz."

"How could he possibly get to the house of every single child in the world? It would take a week, or at least nine days to do all that."

"Obviously Santa has the ability to defy the laws of physics and time. Mrs. Claus and Blitzen can tell you all about it."

"Yeah, well when I asked Mom, she confirmed to me that he doesn't exist. There is no Santa Claus!"

"Mom told you?"

I hated the other children whose innocent minds had yet to be polluted with the fact that their letters to Santa Claus, sent from the Prairie Village Post Office, were letters in vain, postal benefactions to a false idol.

"I'm going to ask Santa Claus for a dolly and a Cabbage Patch Kid. I wrote a letter all by myself," my classmate Clementine said to me before the Christmas of first grade.

"What kind of imbecile are you? Don't you know there's no fucking–"

Mrs. Paseo pulled me aside, and her claw-like nails dug into my arm. "Do NOT tell the other children about Santa Claus."

She was livid. "It will be our little secret."

In first grade, we began to become aware of the opposite sex more than we were in babyland kindergarten. Mrs. Paseo held an emergency class lecture one day.

"I am very disappointed in you guys." She paused for dramatic effect, "VERRRY disappointed." Oh no, what had we done? I had never seen the Siren-esque Mrs. Paseo this incensed. "Another teacher told me that some boys and girls have been KISSING at recess behind the wall of the school."

"What? Kissing? Not me Mrs. Paseo I swear!" _Who could those first-grade Lotharios be?_ I wondered.

"VERRRRY disappointed," she repeated. I swore to myself then and there I would _never_ disappoint Mrs. Paseo with such depraved behavior as girl-kissing.

Our Tomahawk Drive manor was a quick twelve minutes walk from Bradford, and walking home always cooled me off. I remember having a kiddy crush on the boy with the same route home as me, a fair-haired boy named Jordan Lamar. Too bad I never got to wrestle him shirtless on a desert island.

During one of these walks home I learned what the word "dick" meant. All small children have these moments — the instant they learn what is actually meant by a bad word. All these older kids had been saying "dick," and just as Jordan and I were about to trek home, I asked an older kid in a very loud voice, "What's a dick!?" He just pointed at his crotch and laughed at my shocked expression.

Jordan also introduced me to the word "gay." I wonder now how evident my budding gayness was, as my friends' parents rarely let us play together or do sleepovers.

"Do you know what _'_ gay' is?" Jordan asked me out of the blue, once, as we picked up acorns on the walk home (seven being an age that picking up acorns can be an event unto itself). "Do you love girls?" he continued. I really didn't understand why, but the other boys in first grade were always saying that girls had cooties. I didn't want any rumors of my "girl liking" to float around the school. I wasn't one of those youthful Casanovas, kissing girls and disappointing Mrs. Paseo!

"Well, I love my mother," I answered. I couldn't understand what he was trying to ask. Now I wonder if someone older had suggested that I might be "gay" and he was grappling with the idea while sussing out any sissyness. Jordan moved to the other side of Prairie Village not long after that, and I smothered my heartache with Oreos and Fruit Roll-Ups.

"Damn you Jordan! Why can't I forget you?" I could no longer walk home with Jordan, but I dreamt of playing He-Man with him for years.

**_The gayest cartoon in the world?_**

Second grade came around as the marketing machine that lured capitalistic '80s children went into full gear. Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears, He-Man, Transformers, Popples and GI Joes filled us with greed. But "Masters of the Universe" (He-Man) was my favorite — and _so_ gay. After school ended, I rushed home to view the latest exploits of Prince Adam in Eternia. I loved watching He- Man in his fur bikini brief and S&M-looking armor. The furor this 30-minute toy commercial slash cartoon caused among parents of the '80s seems quaint compared to the capitalist extravaganzas behind cartoons today. The show succeeded because of 1) its novel toy line and, 2) the fact that the U.S. was at the height of its Conan/Red Sonja zeitgeist. I blame "Masters of the Universe" more than Calvin Klein for an entire generation of gay men that would sell their mother before they gave up their gym memberships. Whichever homo sculpted those childrens' toys did an excellent job of giving He-Man the glutes, deltoids and hamstrings that are only attainable through enough steroid use to kill a sperm whale. Of course I wanted dozens of He-Man toys. Muscle men of every size. Muscle men of every color. Muscle men of every ethnicity and persuasion. In short, I wanted hundreds of muscle men in my bedroom to undress and play with at will.

Both my sisters (I'd collected a younger sister too, by this point) taunted me saying, "Those are just dolls. Dolls for BOYS!"

"They ARE NOT DOLLS!" I screeched back in my high-pitched, pre-ball-drop voice.

"The Masters of the Universe" action figures (NOT DOLLS) certainly had a homoerotic appeal. Usually they wore only a loincloth, S&M plastic armor and bulging muscles. I hoped to find the Power of Grayskull in my Underoos one day.

I desperately tried to avoid the juvenile emasculation that "doll liking" implied; however I also loved He-Man's sister series, "She- Ra Princess of Power." I kept this addiction a secret. She-Ra came on during school hours so I prayed to get colds so I could watch it. "Our heavenly Father, please send me a case of typhus or maybe just trichinosis so that I may watch She-Ra in peace." Thankfully, the Heavenly Father did not give me these diseases, but the occasional strep throat was like Thanksgiving, Pentecost and Christmas all wrapped in one.

My next childhood fantasy involved undressing my He-Man figures (you could take off their armor leaving just a loin cloth!) so they could "wrestle" each other. Tri-Clops would straddle Man-at- Arms, Mekanek practically fisted Beast Man, and Prince Adam and Glizzlor 69ed in the Evil Horde's dungeon.

The "Masters of the Universe" series included several glamorous female characters, but it was _verboten_ for boys to have the female action figures. I secretly wanted to play with Teela and Evil-Lyn as well, but only my younger sister had the female toys. Teela was totally diva in her gold heels — she could even walk across tight ropes in those heels in the cartoon. Teela made the acrobats of Cirque du Soleil look like a bunch of two-toed sloths.

You know those He-Man animators worked on the cheap. They obviously used the animation cells repeatedly with identical scenes occurring in each episode. The animators merely changed the backgrounds which fooled us '80s kids for the most part. He-Man threw the same boulder in every episode and dodged Skeletor with the same somersault.

But back when I was a Bradford Elementary School Brave, I could not have cared less about the fiscal realities of animating a homoerotic cartoon to sell toys for Mattel — as long as my NOT A DOLL He-Man action figure could lovingly spoon Skeletor in the back seat of the Attack Trak when no one could see.

**_Going Greek with the wandless wonder_**

I generally finished my class work early and spent the remainder of the day drawing at my desk, so it had become apparent that I was different. One day, I got pulled aside by my teacher and was sent for a battery of tests. Sitting with an unknown counselor in Bradford's art room, I put together puzzles, did dimensions tests, and talked about Rorschach inkblots. We were subsequently informed that I'd be one of the first students to spend one day a week with another teacher, Mrs. Wandless. I loved Mrs. Wandless and her name made me think that she'd once been a purveyor of wands until they'd been, unfortunately, confiscated by the police.

This gifted program was called "Enhanced Learning," E.L. for short, and it allowed me and a few other students a whole day a week to work on a project of our own. Mrs. Wandless stands today as my patron saint, the Saint Perpetua of Prairie Village. She was always kind, liked my eccentricity, and nurtured those of us who'd been sticking out in the regular classroom. I don't know if I was truly "gifted" or just strange, but I began self-studying Japanese in this creative atmosphere.

The naming of the program did us smart kids no favors. The E.L. (acronym for "Enhanced Learning") soon became short for "Enhanced Losers." Meanwhile, we Enhanced Losers spent a couple months learning about the Greeks and then got to have a Greek Day. We presented on the city-state of our choice. I, of course, was on the Sparta team, and our nemesis on Team Athens always yelled, "Fucking Sparta!"

Those wimpy Athenians had nothing on me. After several weeks of wrapping sheets around ourselves and pretending to be from the ancient city-states of Greece, I came away with some profound knowledge. I learned, for example, that "cretin" differs from "Cretan," and that "Gigantes" refers not to well-hung Corinthians but to a delicious dish of baked beans and Mediterranean herbs. To this day I enjoy a good bout of Greek role-playing with my boyfriends: Patroclus and Achilles go toga shopping; Agamemnon and Ajax the Lesser snuggle close inside the Trojan Horse. The possibilities for Greek-inspired play are boundless.

**_Kansas City, the C-List actress of American cities_**

As much as it's featured in this memoir, a brief explanation of my love for my unfairly maligned hometown, Kansas City, is in order. I think it's a marvelous place and I appreciate the fact that I grew up there. People who leave Kansas City for more cosmopolitan destinations must grapple for years with their hometown's unwarranted bad image. Sometimes, though, I wish the city as a whole would step up its game. If Kansas City were a contestant on "America's Next Top Model," Tyra would advise it to, "Find your light."

Kansas City resembles the C-List actress of American cities, a Tara Reid who longs for the status of a Julia Roberts. As lovable as she is, Tara never makes the short list for plum Oscar roles, just as Kansas City is never a big contender for hosting the World Cup or Olympics.

People from more sophisticated cities wince when I tell them where I'm from, and almost immediately make some reference to _The Wizard of Oz_. Get the fucking jokes about Dorothy and _The Wizard of Oz_ out now — Charles must be a real "Friend of Dorothy." We sure ain't in Kansas anymore! Are my friends a cowardly lion and a walking sack full of hay?

Sometimes the Wizard of Oz references come out at really rude moments. When I interviewed for jobs post-university in New York, one ill-tempered interviewer from Mikimoto Pearls mocked me during a job interview.

"You're from Kansas? JUST LIKE DOROTHY!"

"Does this mean I will not be an admin assistant for your company Mikimoto, which I might add purveys the finest of quality, cultured pearl jewelry?"

Despite the extraordinary number of fine pearl necklaces I have received from men over the years, alas, admin assistant at Mikimoto turned out not to be my calling. I blame Dorothy and her little dog, too.

People who have an inferiority complex about their hometown know that meeting people from bigger and more famous cities requires you to become a "Geography Warlock." Most people immediately think of wheat fields, Dorothy and Bible thumpers when you mention the "K" word: Kansas. They believe it to be a portion of the country that time, science and civilization have abandoned.

When you escape Kansas, you have to cast the illusion that you're actually attached to somewhere with better PR. If someone asks, "Where are you from?" I'll immediately answer, "I grew up in Kansas, then I moved to New York City." This is true and people are usually so disinterested in Kansas they forget about it in minutes. The next time they meet you they immediately say, "Oh you're that guy from New York!"

When I get the sense that someone will give me a tough time about being from Kansas, I simply lie and say I'm from Denver, since Denver's urban enough to be not-laughable. You rarely meet people from Denver, so your chance of being caught in this particular geographic tomfoolery is close to zero.

Kansas City lacks a monumental attraction that people might immediately picture and has no pop culture references aside from _The Wizard of Oz_. There's no image that would solidify Kansas City's status as a major urban area. To cheer for the major sports teams, the Chiefs and Royals, might be synonymous with "to waste one's energy" or "to labor in vain," an existential Task of Sisyphus for the sporting world. That doesn't stop Kansas City from having lofty aspirations, though. The major monument, Liberty Memorial, a giant tower erected to commemorate World War I, gets derided as resembling a "giant cock and balls," and has long been the hangout for gay teenage hustlers, bush queens and transsexual prostitutes. Tourist pamphlets which advertise the casinos and zoo proclaim KC as the "City of Fountains," and say it has "more boulevards than Paris, more fountains that Rome." Frankly, the nickname seems more laughable than effective. I can tell you for a fact no one in Paris, could they find Kansas City on a map, ever sat down stewing, "Putain de merde! Kansas City a plus des boulevards que Paris! Vee must make more boulevards, so vee can beat KC."

I recommend the catchphrases "City of Divas" or "Kansas Cities: Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun." Or possibly they should capitalize on the "cock and balls" image and change Liberty Memorial to a museum encouraging (safe) sex. Kansas City: the town with the biggest _cojones_ west of the Mississippi.

Certainly, there were some great aspects to growing up in Kansas. Traffic jams and pollution levels common in cities of comparable size are nearly unheard of. There's fine culture to be found: the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, with its stately neoclassical columns, houses a reputable collection; and the Nelson has European masters such as Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio and Rembrandt. In the Asian collection, my favorite piece is a 13th century Tamil Indian statue of dancing Shiva Nataraja trampling the "Dwarf of Ignorance" underfoot.

**_Sex in Stockton_**

The barbecue back home is so tasty and fattening that four meals of it will guarantee a heart attack — but it's worth it. And fortunately, with the staggering levels of obesity in the Midwest, one can be pleasantly plump and still feel like a supermodel. Have a muffin top? Got FUPA? No problem, you can still be a heartbreaker in the city of giant cock and balls.

Combine the population on both Kansas and Missouri sides and the urban agglomeration totals around two million people. But what does two million mean? First of all it means I didn't raise cows, didn't sing "Over the Rainbow" to my pigs, and I've never considered my cousins to be eligible bachelors. We had electricity. In fact, when summer came and you wished to leave Kansas City, our family's first choice was to go to Stockton.

When we tired of playing at the Prairie Village Pool and little league baseball, we made visits to our summer vacation touchstone: the Stockton Ranch. Stockton is located about three hours southeast of Kansas City in rural Missouri; it's a villa of only 1,900 people. In this area people speak with a distinct accent, and the pronunciation of the state quite noticeably becomes "Missou-RAH" not "Missou- REE." The county seat of Cedar County, Stockton has the distinction of hosting the Black Walnut Festival every September. The Stockton Black Walnut Festival is not to be confused with the Black Walnut Festivals in Camden, Ohio; Spencer, West Virginia; and Bethania, North Carolina — what is it with these hillbillies and their affinity for black nuts? Then again who can blame them? The Stockton event is the only one in which you may tour the Largest Black Nut Processing Plant in the World, which is cause for celebration in itself.

The Stockton Ranch had a front porch made out of concrete and white pillars. It had been passed down to our family when a great uncle died and most of it would have looked right at home in the biography of President Ulysses S. Grant. It still had the original iron stove on which Grandma made grits, gravy or any other type of vittles you could desire.

My sisters and I argued about who got the top bunk in the spare bedroom's bunk bed and who got the cot that daddy long-legs often crawled over. Grandpa kept beehives at the Stockton house, and Victoria, being old enough, would help him harvest honey. I couldn't be bothered to harvest honey. "Did I want thousands of honey bees to crawl over me and possibly sting me to death? I'd rather pour a bit of delicious Equal into my oatmeal, thank you."

Stockton, for as much fun as it was, always made me aware that Johnny Appleseed and I were not one and the same. Aside from skipping out when they wanted to harvest honey or dig for worms that could be used as fishing bait, the Legend of the Cherries haunts me to this day.

One summer, my grandparents wanted me to pick cherries in the orchard. I went out to pick the cherries. It was hot, insects were flying, and I was not having it. I picked about six cherries before I declared, "My hand is tired," and I retired to the air conditioning of the ranch house. Henceforth, my entire family would tease me, "We would ask you but your hand might be tired." My hand is still tired when it's time to do laundry, vacuum or cook anything besides Top Ramen.

I didn't mind catching fish, but I didn't wish to touch them, let alone gut the bass and crappies as Grandpa did. If you've ever fished using minnows as bait, you know that you poke the hook through their eyes, impaling the tiny fish. I couldn't deal. Victoria, being a courageous girl, could do this, but I didn't make a good country boy. I hated the cows at farmer John's place down the road. I hated the Walnut Festival. And, more than anything, I hated those goddamn cherry trees.

I received my first lesson in sex one of these summers. The barefoot girl from across the dirt road, Misty, was our playmate and she seemed so cool being all of fifteen. Fifteen is an age that sounds quite mature when you are eight or nine. We used to shoot off fireworks together and play with her dog while her Grandma and Grandpa kicked back highballs on the concrete porch — listening to the radio as the Kansas City Royals lost yet again.

The next year when we came back Misty had a baby. She let us hold it, and told us she could no longer sneak out late at night to help us filch the Stolichnaya Vodka.

"Where's your husband?" I asked Misty.

"Oh, I ain't got one," she said. I was shocked. I still thought babies just magically appeared when a girl got married. (I still didn't understand how Misty had gotten pregnant. Had she defied the laws of spontaneous matrimonial pregnancy?)

Grandpa, not enjoying the direction this conversation was going, said brusquely, "Well, she was just a-doin' something she wasn't supposed to." I couldn't imagine what this "not sup-posed to" thing was. That was that, and I went back to shooting off Jumping Jacks and bottle rockets. Praise the Midwest, or my complete and utter lack of intuition, for the fact that my childhood did, in fact, contain innocence.

## CHAPTER 4

## **_Channeling Weirdonesia_**

In fourth grade a new boy, Ignacio Salvador, joined the Bradford soccer team. I realized I had found one of my tribe.

He looked like the singers I worshiped on MTV, Duran Duran or Flock of Seagulls. With the frosted bleach spots in his hair he resembled the boy band, Color Me Badd, and kept claiming he was the next Menudo — which for Prairie Village, Kansas might as well have been a full-body tattoo and septum piercing. To the parents of '80s Kansas little Ignacio was a full-on freak.

I was a swishy kid, but Ignacio out-swished me. And, honey, out-swishing me is like out-golfing Tiger Woods or out-singing Aretha Franklin. I'm sure Ignacio likewise sniffed Strawberry Shortcake's crack hair and pined to watch "She-Ra." Did his He- Man figurines secretly nuzzle in the Attak Trak like mine? Only time would tell.

I was especially envious that he'd sung for a band at the water park, Oceans of Fun. Unlike the uninspired yuppie chil-dren at my school, Ignacio accomplished things.

I asked my parents to sign me up for drama class that year, and I hammed it up in musicals such as _Annie_ (how I longed to play Pepper). This led to all kinds of ego on Ignacio's part.

"Your parents told my parents that I'm your idol," he once said to me.

_Give me a break!_ I thought. Maybe Jem and the Holograms, but not your frosty-haired swishy butt. Thinking of himself as my idol was a bit of a stretch, but I admired his chutzpah.

I had a keen interest in history, and read books on Roman Emperors and Napoleon. This led to my listing "Emperor of the World" in a class survey of "What I'd like to be someday." This surely stood out next to the other kids' answers such as "Firefighter" and "Nurse." I planned to build a military base in Antarctica and invade the world with an army of clones. My junta would seize power over the capitals of the world.

In regular class, we all had to make up a country and come up with a short story about its civilization and life there. I chose to make up an island called "Weirdonesia" where everything would be weird. I can't recall much besides the name "Weirdonesia," but this was the year I became more interested in Japan — possibly the closest thing to Weirdonesia I could find. Though saying Japan is weird is certainly not PC, I think my creation of "Weirdonesia" signaled my desire to go somewhere completely different, where the so-called logic of the Western world would be turned on its head. Kansas City was the Capital of Ennui and a real-life Weirdonesia seemed like a far better alternative.

If you leave America to live in Japan, you'll constantly be asked, "Why are you interested in Japan?" Japanese people will ask this at least once a week so having a succinct answer is as necessary as eating with chopsticks.

**_The Karate Kid_**

Many things factor into why I became a Japanophile. In the '80s _The Karate Kid_ was hot, we all wanted Nintendos, and the news reports often said Japan would take over the world. These reports alarmed some of my adult relatives, who said things like, "We need you to study Japanese so you can talk to all our bosses someday."

In addition to the jingoistic paranoia of the time, the American protagonist in the mini-series _Shogun_ spoke Japanese and seemed like the coolest human on earth. I wasn't alone in my interest: my parents loved the _Shogun_ miniseries, despite the fact that the show had a bewildering beauty aesthetic and barbaric samurai suicide practices. Explaining the whole rigmarole of why I was drawn to Japan became annoying after a while, and I became tired of it, so now I just tell people now about the one Asian backup dancer in Madonna's "Material Girl" video, and I tell them I moved to Japan to meet him.

To encourage my interest, my father bought me a book of Japanese _kanji_ characters (which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system). The book had a bright orange cover and I made my own flashcards to go with it. My parents said that my studying Japanese was fine, so long as I could find a Japanese class that taught children. I called the Kansas City Japanese Consulate, using the phone book, and they gave me the number of a Professor Keiko, a translator and Japanese teacher at a local university. I spoke to Keiko excitedly saying, "I'm Charles St. Anthony, and I want to study Japanese. I can even count already: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju!" Keiko-Sensei seemed pleased at my enthusiasm, and while I was in fifth grade I started taking Japanese classes with her on Saturdays.

Keiko-Sensei had a small frame, large grandma glasses and a bouffant. She rented a room in the Plaza Library, and she mostly taught the children of American military fathers who'd brought back Okinawan wives. Although I'm not an anime aficionado, I had a good laugh at the Japanese comics some kids brought to class. Their casual displays of nudity and bodily functions seemed to show a playful side of Japan as opposed to the angry Shogun samurai. Weren't the Japanese supposed to be fearless samurai businessman? Who knew the Japanese also loved tales of large-breasted schoolgirls who can do kung-fu as well as they cook? At any rate, there was apparently this entire other side to Japan that I had no previous knowledge of, and if any Japanese men were as randy as the comic book schoolgirls, I was keen to meet them.

**_How to be a Japanese nerd (otaku)_**

A word of advice for people interested in the Japanese lan- guage: comics are like masturbation in Japan. It's something that everyone does but doesn't talk about. If you talk about reading comics then you are immediately pegged as an _otaku_ (nerd) or, even worse, a pervert who jerks off to "Sailor Moon" or makes love to his Dutchwife of "Ranma ½." Some of the Japanese comics and animation popular in America are especially nerdy. For example, "Dragonball" or "Doraemon" (a story about a robot cat) are nationally loved in Japan in the same vein as "Peanuts" or "Spider Man" in America. However, start going on about _Evangelion_ or "Bubble Gum Crisis," and most Japanese will give you the side eye.

The language in these comics can be exceptionally dirty and obscene. I once compiled a list of words I couldn't find in my dictionary from a comic I tried to read. I asked Keiko Sensei about the meanings, and her face turned white (well, white for an Asian). Among other things, I wanted to know words such as " _Kisama_ " or " _Temee_ ," slang banned on most Japanese radio and TV. It was like asking your elderly Grandma the meaning of "motherfucker" and "asshole."

"You should not say these things," Keiko Sensei said shaking her head. "Shame, shame fill the heart of Keiko Sensei."

Outside of Japanese class, there was time for puppy love. I assumed I would marry and spontaneously create children without ever touching a woman's hot pocket, and thought I needed to date girls as a way to prepare. I'd set my sights on Clementine, a hyperactive girl who threw her pencils at people, made crank calls and got sent to the principal's office on the regular. She specialized in being an all-around pain in the ass, so of course I was in love. Unfortunately this went unreciprocated. After finally working up the nerve to ask Clementine out she diplomatically rebuffed me. "I like you, but there's another girl in the other class who totally likes you so I can't." I use that line to this day to ward off unwanted suitors.

**_Playboys_**

The last year of the '80s was my final year in elementary school. I remember reading an article in the _Kansas City Star_ with predictions for the 1990's. This amazingly shortsighted article suggested that Madonna was on her way out while "Buffalo Stance" singer Neneh Cherry would be the next big thing. Of course Madonna continued conquering the world in the '90s, while you are going to have to hit Wikipedia to find whatever happened to Neneh Cherry. As the '90s began, the Iron Curtain came falling down and the Germanies seemed intent on reuniting. Times, they were a changin'... and for us tweens hormones were a ragin'.

We'd become little pubescent mongrels, and started rooting around our parents' houses for dirty magazines. One kid's father had a huge collection, boxes upon boxes of _Playboy_ which he'd stored in his attic: I think he'd saved every issue since the '60s. My father had some _Playbo_ ys featuring Madonna. Jordan Lamar's parents were all kinds of kinky, as they had the _Joy of Sex_ and _Penthouse_.

In a display of father-son bonding, my father handed me a bag full of his old _Playboys_ one day. "I don't read them much anymore," he said.

I didn't really wish to read them that much either, so I put them in a blue, Kansas City Royals bag my Grandpa had given me, and I left all these nudies in my closet. My mother had a homing beacon for finding these things, unfortunately, and it took her less than a week to find the porn.

She picked me up from school about four days later with the blue Royals bag in the car. "But Dad gave me the porn!" I explained. It was one of the strangest excuses I'd ever used.

**_My darling Clementine_**

At this time we studied part of the day with the notoriously strict Mrs. Quakenbush. This poor woman could do no right. If we talked in class we got our names put on the "No No Board," which we mocked her for. She got right up in our faces to talk sometimes, and her breath smelled like regurgitated cranberries. She also liked to use words that began with the letter "H." Mrs. Quakenbush would get right up in our faces and say, "HOW are you doing?" "HOW is your project coming along? HOPEfully, HAPpily." The funky breath was like a biological weapon of mass destruction.

The whole class went to war against her, and Clementine and I would enact schemes to torture her (though not a love connection, we'd joined forces as friends by this point). Mrs. Quackenbush's posterior was large and if you wanted to walk past her you had to really squeeze on by. We planted streaks of rubber cement or chalk on her Rubenesque derriere. We left stupid notes taped on her back and made her life a living hell.

Quakenbush was not to be screwed with, and she got me back. I was going through a phase where I drew pictures of evil Smurfs; and I'd drawn a caricature of something I called "Dirty Smurf:" a Smurf with his middle finger extended and a word bubble saying, "Fuck You!" Quakenbush confiscated this and showed it to my mother at the very next parent-teacher conference to come up.

My mother came home crying. "How could you use your creative talents for something so horrible?" I'm still trying to find an answer to that question.

Though we would all take different paths in the coming years, I kept in touch with darling Clementine via Facebook. She went on to move to Miami and become an anesthesiologist. My recollections of her make me imagine more of a "Florence Nightmare" than "Florence Nightingale." If you go for an appendectomy in Florida and wake up with rubber cement on your ass, don't say I didn't warn you.

## CHAPTER 5

## **_Student Ambassador_**

Junior High School should be skipped over. I had glasses, braces, sexuality issues, and — with regret I feel to this day — I quit jazz dance. People had teased me too much. "Only fags take dance," one student had taunted. How dare he make light of my desire to shuffle like MC Hammer or dance backup to C&C Music Factory?

"Gay" was also a pejorative kids used to refer to anything "bad," and I was terrified of being besmirched in that way. I knew that being gay involved liking guys, and so I was determined to like girls. So what if I slightly more than "enjoyed" being in the locker room during gym class? So what if I tended to go down a little too quickly if a guy tackled me during flag football? These urges could be ignored. I totally dug chicks, and chicks dug me.

One summer, I got cast in a large-scale theatre production of _The Wizard of Oz_. Something about performing _The Wizard of Oz_ while actually being in Kansas felt dirty — like a form of incest. But being from Kansas we were totally used to incest already, so it was a really good play.

Though I wish I had been the Tin Man or the Lion, I was still too small, so I became the Barrister of Munchkinland. If there is a way to draw bullies to you, it is to tell them you are the Barrister of Munchkinland. Talk about embarrassing: I can still recite the line, "We've got to verify it legally" with horrifyingly Munchkin-like precision.

**_It's a small world...._**

I carpooled to theater rehearsal with Glinda the Good Witch, and we discussed religion one day.

"How do you feel about the Bible?" she asked. I had tried to read the Bible as a child but had gotten grossed out after asking my Grandma why Lot got drunk and slept with his daughters in Genesis. Exactly how are they on higher moral ground than Sodom and Gomorrah? And what the hell was Noah doing on that Ark for forty days and forty nights? Didn't the excreta of two of every animal just make it unbearable? Unless Shem, Ham and Japheth had the world's largest pooper-scooper, it must have been an awfully aromatic ride.

"I like some of the Bible, but I can't believe all of it."

"Oh no you can't just pick and choose, you must believe it all!" Glinda said. "ALL OF IT!" Somebody had been drinking the Kool- Aid at the Plaza Unity Temple. Being lectured about believing in the Holy Scripture by Glinda the Good Witch seemed somehow ridiculously blasphemous.

While I was in junior high, my father's eco-business efforts were vindicated and things improved for my family financially. We finally got to go to Disney World! I'd never been to either coast and hadn't seen the ocean, so I was really excited. We loaded up two minivans — one driven by my parents, the other by my grandparents.

It is a hard four or five days drive down to Orlando through the Deep South and we listened to the cassette tapes of the _Top Gun_ and _Flashdance_ soundtracks approximately 17,000 times. While making our way through Georgia, I rode with the grandparents while my sisters rode with my parents. They cruised ahead when my grandparents' transmission went out. With no cell phones and no way to reach the rest of my family, we ended up all alone one day, as we were towed to an auto repair shop in backwater Georgia.

That day, the rest of my family played around in Atlanta, went to the World of Coca-Cola and had grand ole time. They saw the history of Coca-Cola changing from a cocaine-infused tonic to its stature today as the carbonated nectar of the Earth. They tasted the Colas from around the world, no doubt including sodas from Venezuela and Italy and Papua New Guinea.

I sat in a dusty auto shop in Northern Georgia where young boys, possibly seven or eight, showed me their "Ninja Turtle" comics and talked about their induction to the KKK. One boy showed me a picture of a bomb exploding and charring the body of Donatello, a turtle, black.

"Look! Donatello became a nigger!" said the mini-bigot. I was not amused.

We rented a van and continued on down to Disney World. Eventually we arrived at our Kissimmee, Florida hotel safely and the week flew by as we took in Space Mountain, _It's a Small World_ and the Epcot Center. At the time, they featured a special musical to promote the movie _Dick Tracy_ , and I felt a twinge of jealousy toward all those extras who could happily jazz dance without any accusations of gaiety. By the time Breathless Mahoney died, gay or not, I knew I needed to be dancing — if not on stage, at least for fun!

High school started and I opted to spend half a day at a new school project called "The Shawnee Mission International Center" where students from district high schools had a choice of studying Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Arabic. We would spend half of every school day studying our language of choice, then return to our home schools for the rest of the day. Such a foreign environment every day nearly sent us all into culture shock — leaving Japanese or Russian class and going back to the doldrums of Kansas.

"Is this Oak Park Mall, or am I in Novgorod?" The confused students leaving the Russian classroom would walk dizzily searching for beef stroganoff at Panda Express. I personally looked for ways I could extend the immersion time outside of the classroom and rake in a little cash.

**_Introduction to Japan_**

In order to save up money to go abroad, I took a part-time job as a busboy at Jun's Japanese Restaurant. Jun's had arrived under the first boom of sushi in the '80s, and pictures of local celebrities covered the walls. Wendall Anshutz and Anne Peterson, the two biggest newscasters in Kansas City, smiled from a framed picture like they did every evening on TV, and the signatures of different Chiefs and Royals players surrounded Wendall and Anne.

Yet, the picture that most impressed me was that of the American Gladiator named Gold who lived in the area. Gold, aka Tonya Knight, drove a flashy ride I remember as a bright yellow Porsche. With a bodybuilder male friend of hers in tow, she would devour several thousand calories of sushi, tempura and Sapporo beer before cruising off to her next glamorous destination — although they probably just went back to the gym for a few more lat raises. She had a magnanimous and friendly demeanor that was influenced by the extraordinarily large number of endorphins in her body, and the fact that her job required her to engulf several thousand calories per sitting.

Being the son of two working parents, I had a latchkey kid's unrefined palate. The St. Anthony household cuisine included lots of PBJ's and microwave pizzas. Buttermilk Eggos for breakfast, lunch and dinner? You got it at Chez St. Anthony. At Jun's, fish got flown in daily, and there was always an unserved California roll to snack on after work. Suddenly I went several pant sizes down, because I went from daily servings of microwave lasagna at home to having miso soup and vegetable rice every time I worked at Jun's.

Jun's Restaurant certainly might be laughable to people from the coasts, not to mention actual Japanese people. The "tatami room" was actually carpeted — no actual tatami flooring mats involved. You sat on the floor and had a space to stick your legs. The customers often poured enough soy sauce on the rice to turn it brown. The occasional redneck takeout call would come in for people wanting to get "Egg rolls and fried rice to go," much to the ire of the Japanese staff. "So as long as our eyes are slanty, we all serve the same thing, huh?" the hostess would huff.

The staff consisted of Japanese mothers who came to the country with their (usually military) husbands or students from local universities. When I first worked at Jun's, my Japanese was merely a string of vocabulary in a clunky American accent, but after a few months at Jun's, I spoke Japanese like the heroine in _Memoirs of a Geisha_. I would order sashimi in the kitchen and the waitresses would do a double take. "Sayuri, is that you?" they would say, stunned at my linguistic prowess.

In addition to the International Center and Jun's, Keiko-Sensei still had classes with the Okinawan military brats and me on Saturdays. Sensei worked her connections to get us nominated as Student Ambassadors to Kansas City's Sister City in Japan: Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture. Kurashiki is similar in size and general provinciality to Kansas City. Kurashiki's claim to fame is that Japan's folk hero Momotaro, the Peach Boy, came from this area — culturally speaking, I would compare Momotaro to a nationally- loved folk hero such as Paul Bunyan. Alas, Kurashiki is about as Podunk as Kansas City, and I am relatively certain their slogan is "More pagodas than Beijing, more temples than Thailand."

I felt primed and ready for my Japan debut. The summer rainy season began in 1993 when I first arrived in Tokyo, and the government officials came and picked us up. I had arrived in Weirdonesia.

**_Gremlin eggs and my moment of truth_**

At first it felt like Kurashiki would never end. Cars were incredibly small but had extremely high ceilings and everyone drove with the precision of a NASA astronaut. No alley too small and no corridor too narrow! The dexterity of the Japanese behind the wheel truly impressed us exchange students, or as we were more pompously known, "The Student Ambassadors."

As a "Student Ambassador" to Kurashiki, I felt I had really risen in the world — obviously I was doing _much_ better than when I'd been a barrister to Munchkinland. I was fifteen at this time, still a virgin and I'd never tried cigarettes or alcohol. I thought haute couture was a relative of the halibut. And I relished the chance to see a country so modern yet completely different.

My host family was the Taniguchis. Mrs. Taniguchi's ele- mentary school-aged daughter peered curiously out from behind their mother at the host family meet-and-greet in a government office building. We took a drive (in their small car with its oddly high ceiling) back to their three-bedroom house in the suburbs. I knew I'd get used to sleeping on the floor, but the custom of taking off your shoes upon entering a residence really seemed strange. Did they not realize that my patent leather Doc Martens were part of an outfit? Also, a couple of the socks I had with me had ganky holes. I discarded these embarrassing relics at once.

At about this time, _The Bodyguard_ had become a worldwide sensation. Mrs. Taniguchi pulled out the CD along with the lyrics and asked for my help in understanding them. As I had yet to learn "Oooh, my darling you" or "Shooby doo" in Japanese, translating proved to be quite a challenge and my pocket dictionary wasn't quite up to snuff. Many CDs today come with the lyrics translated, but unfortunately this was not one. Mrs. Taniguchi brewed up some green tea, and somehow we got through the song. I have, "I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way," in Japanese firmly imprinted in my memory.

Another detail I learned about the Japanese, aside for their fondness for Dolly Parton-penned ballads, is their joy in torturing foreigners with their unique cuisine. They love to find out just what you can and can't eat. Japanese quiz you like this:

"Can you eat sea eel? The gamey texture really grows on you."

"You haven't lived until you've had raw horse!"

"Surely you Americans are being uptight about whale meat? The whales are slaughtered for scientific purposes before we eat them, and besides, Shamu doesn't mind, he is dead!"

Then came my moment of truth. Out come the gremlin eggs. _Natto_ , or more accurately gremlin eggs, are supposedly made of fermented soybeans. But I suspect some Mogwai were eating after midnight and copped a squat to create that mess. They are slimy, sticky, and they smell like the feet of a feather dancer after a night working the Moulin Rouge. Mrs. Taniguchi wrapped some _natto_ in sushi rice and seaweed and I dipped the roll into some soy sauce — and somehow managed to ingest it. With the anti-carcinogenic qualities it is supposed to possess, I recommend everyone eat gremlin eggs. However, because of the smell, it's probably best to follow up with Listerine and spray down with Febreeze before trying to get to second base with your boyfriend.

**_A lesson in tatemae and honne_**

This family also gave me my first lesson in _tatemae_ and _honne_. As people who have studied Japan for any length of time know, _tatemae_ is the face you put on not to hurt others' feelings and _honne_ is what you really think of people. If your best friend just paid $300 for a fuchsia-dyed mullet at a hair salon _tatemae_ would be when you say, "That looks cool!" and _honne_ is the voice in the back of your mind thinking, "That looks a hot mess." You put on your _tatemae_ helmet for dinners with the in-laws, and _honne_ is the bile that spurts out after that fourth margarita. Some people would call it "two-faced" while others might call it "being diplomatic."

I truly had an incredible time staying with the Taniguchis. We bonded, laughed and ate gremlin eggs while I pretended not to gag. Surely with such success as a student ambassador, a seat on the United Nations Security Council could not be far off. After a tearful farewell, I returned to Kansas City without drinking or smoking and still a virgin — but capable of eating gremlin eggs.

Keiko-Sensei called us together a month after our arrival to read the host family responses to the Student Ambassadors. Most of them wrote tender notes such as, "Our children really bonded like brothers and sisters," and, "It was an eye-opening experience."

After our tearful farewell, I expected a similar letter from Mrs. Taniguchi, but instead it read, "We wanted him to experience real Japanese culture, but he was not interested in REAL Japanese culture. He only seemed interested in techno and rock n' roll music, and we question the legitimacy of continuing such an exchange program. He did though act like a real brother to our daughter, and we enjoyed his company." OUCH! Were those tears of Mrs. Taniguchi at my departure tears of happiness for not having to deal with this pain in the ass American? True, like most fifteen-year-old boys, I did at the time like techno and rock n' roll, but I think she interpreted my disinterest one day to go to a temple as disinterest in "REAL" Japanese culture.

To fill you in on the experience, by the end of my stay with the Taniguchi's I had really had my fill of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. People who have studied in Japan know that these places always top the list of where to drag foreigners.

It makes sense, as religious wonders like the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Vatican are top tourist stops in Europe.

For tourists in Japan, shrines and temples are beautiful and serene, but after about twenty, they start to look the same. Unless you have a real educational background in Buddhism and Shintoism, which at fifteen I severely lacked, hearing about "the traveling monk Kukai" or the "Kannon Goddess of Mercy" meant nothing.

Today I can appreciate these things, but at least I learned the pride Japanese have in their religious ancestry. Mrs. Taniguchi's letter irked me though. How many Japanese go to France to hear about Mary Magdalene and St. Augustine? Do the Japanese who visit New York intend to only see the Cloisters and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine? No, they are out shopping on Fifth Avenue, getting drunk in SoHo and clapping along at Blue Man Group.

At fifteen, Kurt Cobain and New Order were my gods. I enjoyed the first few temples, but I didn't want them to be the only thing I saw on my first trip abroad. At any rate, I learned an important lesson in _tatemae_ and _honne_ and became more wary of the subtle signals Japanese might be sending (i.e. unless you feign interest in some 12th century relics that even most Japanese know very little about, they will talk smack on you.)

## CHAPTER 6

## **_Club of Piranhas_**

My tour as Student Ambassador ended in the summer of 1993, after which I started my sophomore year at Shawnee Mission East High School. I moved to the basement of my parents' Tomahawk Drive home and put up posters of my musical heroes. Siouxsie Sioux leered menacingly. Björk beamed from her "Big Time Sensuality" poster. Madonna posed nearly-undraped in gold pasties. Ironically, I thought that owning this half-naked poster of Madonna made me look heterosexual. I knew I was bisexual or gay, but didn't want people to know. This particular Madonna poster was a gay icon, but it also looked like the sort of pin-up a straight guy might like. Or so I thought — I was really only fooling myself.

I'd grown out of my baby fat and cut my hair short, ending an unfortunate attempt at growing it out. I felt more attractive and confident as I turned sweet sixteen.

Kansas City, like most provincial American cities, is heinous without a car. You couldn't walk in a timely manner to the supermarket, much less go to a rock concert or dance club.

So I took my first driving test. A malicious rainstorm pounded down on the rusty Toyota hatchback that had been used by my parents, my sister, and was now passed down to me. This added to my already nervous feeling, and the DMV tester wasn't in a good mood. Then, this being Kansas, the place most famous for tornadoes... a tornado siren went off. No tornado appeared, but like the lead character "Cher" played by Alicia Silverstone in _Clueless_ , I hit my windshield wiper lever instead of my blinkers, after which I started to freak. We never even left the DMV parking lot. The tester had me go in a circle and then told me to park. As the character "Tai" played by Brittany Murphy says in her pouting and ascerbic criticism of "Cher," I was "a virgin who couldn't drive."

I practiced in a nearby Olive Garden parking lot until I could operate a stick without hitting any Geo Trackers. Then I gathered my courage, took the test again, and passed with no problem. I had the keys to freedom!

"Be careful if you go to the Missouri side. There are some real weirdos in Westport," my mother would warn, not realizing that those weirdos on the Missouri side were exactly the people I wanted to meet.

**_Subcultural cocktail of my dreams_**

Finally I could shop for clothes that weren't from the sale rack at JCPenney. A portly DJ named Dizzy ran one particular shop that became my favorite, Be-Bop, a one-room hole-in-the-wall in Westport. Be-Bop sold the baggy jeans and shirts that had just become fashionable in more sophisticated locales. So I spent my newest Jun's restaurant money on a makeover and was one of the first kids at my school running around in trendy baggy clothes.

"Look at you in your tight-roll Gap jeans. You look so 1989!" I taunted the jocks and the cheerleaders. "Where do you think you are going? A 'Facts of Life' reunion special?" I scoffed at the bourgeois kids in their Polo shirts and Nikes. Obviously, I was on the path to Impossible Glamour and they were relics of a forgotten age.

My newfound mobility fueled my newfound attitude, but that was their problem, not mine.

Kids on both coasts had been dressing my way for a couple of years, but at Shawnee Mission East, I was an fashion icono-clast. An Yves Saint Laurent of the Midwest. A Gaultier of the Great Plains.

This might be lost on people who were not around to experience it, but during the Late '80s and Early '90s "Alternative Music" was an all-encompassing rubric covering everything that wasn't pop. Early hip-hop often got shoved into the alternative section of the record store, which meant that NWA might be next to Nine Inch Nails; Digital Underground beside the Dead Milkmen. The Alternative section of my local music store put Seattle grunge, techno, hip-hop and various miscellany side-by-side and I explored it all. And I stayed up way past the witching hour for MTV's "120 Minutes."

I had heard that for the underage set, Club Piranha's Alternative Night was the end all. Of course, no one at my yuppie high school was going.

"Why would you go to Club Piranha?" the cheerleaders squeaked. "All the people at Alternative Night are weirdos with piercings."

"Sounds like my kind of place."

"Not only that, my cousins from the Missouri side went to Piranha, and they saw a gay person there once."

That was all I needed to hear. One winter evening sophomore year, I cashed in my tip money from Jun's, popped a wheelie in the '78 Corolla hatchback, and cruised on down to Club Piranha. At that hour the parking lot at the 75th and Nieman strip mall was empty except for the one hundred or so cars of teenage clubbers clustered at the Club Piranha entrance.

Club Piranha spun lots of Erasure, Depeche Mode, Blondie, the Cure and heaps of techno in-between. We danced to early 90's techno favorites like the Opus III "It's Going to be a Fine Day." Barbara Tucker's vocals invited us to venture "Deep Inside." V.I.M. created my favorite techno track, a song that sampled snippets of Margaret Thatcher speeches called "Maggie's Last Party." The Iron Lady beckoned us to, "Come to the rave!" Thatcher's dramatic voice lent itself well to a club anthem saying, "It's a better record than the Labour Party ever had at any time." When Lords of Acid or Men Without Hats played, the floor detonated into a hormone-filled, alternateen dance orgy.

The best part of the clubbing experience was that it was a subcultural cocktail. Punks mixed with lesbians. Goths made friends with ravers. I called Club Piranha a "polysexual" club because straight skaters and punks occupied half the floor while Goths, ravers and some pretty gay-looking dudes ruled the inner half. Not knowing exactly where I stood yet, I danced in the middle. Girls in baby-doll dresses and knee-high boots flirted with Gothic guys in _Clockwork Orange_ gear. Baggy jeans with Vans sneakers were _de rigueur_ for clubbers at Piranha.

**_Coming Out_**

One night at Club Pirhana a nelly queen to end all nellies sashayed over to me. He wore a suit jacket and shorts with smudgy kohl around his eyes and Flock of Seagulls bangs. "I just need to know 'cause I ask everybody. Are you gay, straight or bisexual?"

"Bisexual," I answered as I did the "Roger Rabbit" away from this tragiqueen. So maybe "bisexual" was usually just a stopgap many gays say before admitting to their actual gay disposition, but even admitting I was not straight was a big step for me. Rather than fantasizing about wrestling friends on a desert island or making my He-Man toys molest each other, I desired to actually hold and be held by someone of like-minded virtue. I anticipated every Friday with great impatience and hoped to explore these feelings that had been a pastiche of shame, excitement and sensuality.

Everyone has his or her own "Original Club," a place where the music felt fresh, getting high led to fun (not addiction or hospitalization), and a new sexual smorgasbord opened up. You could indulge in life's vices — the Pleasure Points as I call them— without fear. You could drink beer and not worry about a gut. Cigarettes made you look cool and didn't turn your teeth yellow or cause emphysema. Pot, LSD or Robitussin... merely ways to get the party started. Club Piranha was my Limelight, Studio 54 and Roxy all rolled up into one.

My sexual orientation may have been obvious to everyone around me, but it hadn't yet become clear to me. I knew that if I were gay I'd be ostracized. And how did two men actually seal the deal in bed? Gay sex sounded scary and the news often ran horror stories about AIDS. I knew that Pedro Zamora, the HIV-positive member of MTV's "The Real World" had passed on. The fact that acting on my urges could lead to a painful and early death was very real and pervasive. Back then sophisticated treatments for HIV simply did not exist.

I'd "dated" a few girls by this point and there'd been pathetic attempts to make out with them. I figured that I would try to make a go of it with girls. My feelings towards men just weren't kosher and had no place on the sexual menu available at my school. I thought that if I needed to try being with guys, maybe I should wait until college. That way time and distance would give me a Demilitarized Zone, a Gibraltar, that could act as a buffer between myself and the emotional black hole of coming out. This "let's try dudes in college" idea worked until I found an A4-size, blue flier under the windshield wiper of my car.

The flyer read "Barely Legal" and it advertised another dance night for the underage crowd. The party promoters who'd put out the club invite directed us to the top of the Howard Johnson's in downtown Kansas City. The entire idea of a dance club atop HoJo's sounded a little suspect, but I was always ready to try something new. After working my job at the Japanese restaurant, I hightailed it downtown to arrive at this new club. The usual suspects were there. A few glamorous rave girls surrounded the most obvious gay guy on the scene, squealing and kicking up a fuss in the corner: César.

I looked around, thinking: _Hey, that guy looks pretty gay, too. And what's that limp wrist action going on over there?_ I later discovered that the organizers of "Barely Legal" had intended it to be an underage gay club, though the cryptic flier had just said "underage club." But the people who owned the space were having none of this "underage homo" business. Howard Johnson's shut the club down after just a couple hours of its opening, which ended up being about five minutes after I'd arrived. I hadn't even danced!

A mob of disheartened queers started for the elevator. Then a blonde guy in a red tank top came over and smoothly put his arm around me. "This party is finished, but what are you doing next?"

"Oh my God, a guy is actually hitting on me," my mind raced.

"Oh, I, um. I just smoked some pot and am kind of high right now. I think I need to go home and sleep." I had never been so scared, or turned on, in my life. I had lied. I was totally sober.

"Are you sure? Cause I got a few party favors we could do?"

_Party favors? What were party favors? And did I want to find out what they might entail? Were they like a piñata or noisemakers? I just didn't know._

Mr. Red Tank Top pursued, "Why don't we just go down to your car and have a smoke?"

Obviously a little sexual tension when someone picks up on you is good, but out and out terror is not. Mr. Red Tank Top got the hint as I shook my head looking up at him.

This happened in early 1994, and I visited Mr. Red Tank Top every night, in my imagination, while laying on my Tomahawk Drive waterbed, for months. Then I made up my mind. _I'm not sure if I'm gay or bisexual or whatever, but the next time I get the chance to find out I'm going to go for it._ "

A couple months later, an attractive, African American girl came up to me at Club Piranha. I danced around wearing a blue border striped shirt and my wide jeans from Merry-Go-Round. She pulled me aside. "I need to ask you something," said the mocha-colored beauty. I thought she was hitting on me, but then she said, "My friend likes you." She took me to meet this tanned, blonde California- looking guy with a bright, gorgeous smile and a slightly mischievous demeanor.

"My name's Freddy." He immediately offered to show me his Ferrari, and I would later come to find he was known around the city as "Ferrari Freddy." He gave me his pager number and asked me to call him the next day.

After working the restaurant the following night, I called Freddy's pager. He invited me over. Nothing had been set in stone so no pressure, he said. He was nineteen, three years my elder, and the Ferrari intrigued me. Was it his parents' cash? Where could he get that kind of money? Nothing could prepare me for the absurd, luxury-filled world in which Freddy lived. He abided in a palatial condominium suspiciously close to "The Great Dick in the Sky," Liberty Memorial. Everything at Freddy's condo smelled rich. My rusty '78 Corolla offended his refined and sophisticated tastes.

"Could you park that heap of shit down the street a little? My neighbors might say something."

His entryway had stone gargoyles, which should have been a giant red flag, but I trotted right into Freddy's condo with a cavalier skip. He had ridiculously expensive chrome and leather couches, and lots of crystal champagne glasses about the house. A Grecian-style male torso statue stood at the top of the stairs and a small platoon of cologne bottles held guard over his bathroom sink. "You want a beer or a Zima?"

"Umm, Heineken please." So I had a Heineken. Then another. Then Freddy decided we should do shots. I had never done shots before, but this seemed like a good time to start.

However starting with _eight_ shots was not as good an idea. I remember when he opened a bottle of champagne. Then I broke a glass.

"You fucking broke my champagne glass! Stan is going to be livid!"

I fell on Freddy and kissed him. And kissed him. Then he kissed me while pulling my shirt off. And we kissed all night long. I woke up, my brain liquefied, open condom wrappers on the nightstand. I was a non-virgin who could drive.

## CHAPTER 7

## **_Tune in Tokyo_**

I don't believe in a gay/straight dichotomy strictly. I think sexuality can be liquid and fluid, especially if you have ingested alcoholic fluids. I think most people exist at a certain basic sexual place at which they respond to others according to their own personal "percentage." For example, generally I get turned on by guys 98% of the time and by women 2%. I even have a specific type of woman: dark-haired and shapely... hence I understand the fervor over Indian stunners such as Aishwarya Rai.

During the summer of 1994, though I yearned to spend more time with Freddy, I was leaving to study abroad in Tokyo. Freddy, not being the type to patiently wait around, dispensed with me rather quickly. We did spend a few good days spinning around Kansas City in his Ferrari before he dumped me.

He continued to scream at me for breaking that one champagne glass. "Do you know what Stan would do to me if he found out I broke a glass? I had to drive three hours to the one shop that carries those glasses."

Just who was this Stan character? "We're only friends," Freddy explained. "Stan buys me these things because he likes being friends with me." I never did find out who Stan was or how this "friendship" actually worked.

Freddy was delusional — only a recently deflowered virgin in love could be blind to it. He would purposefully drive his flashy car down to the most ghetto parts of Troost on the Missouri side, just looking for trouble. He would yell obscenities out his window at total strangers and turn to me and say, "He wants me." Alas, our relationship was more Fisher and Buttafuoco than Bogart and Bacall — not a romance for the ages.

"When you get back to America, you can page me, just don't ever call me directly," Freddy dismissed me on the phone the last night before I left for Japan. So I got the heave-ho, and Moses came to me in a dream — only in my dream Moses looked a lot like Mario Lopez and wanted to hug me while shirtless. A commandment on his stone tablets read, **"Thou shalt not date hustlers with Ferraris."**

So the fling with Freddy was over, and I was headed back to Tokyo for another homestay program. Because I'd heard about all those other great families during my Student Ambassador trip, I thought this new visit might be even better than the last. Also, I would be studying Japanese every day at a school in Tokyo, a mesmerizing city I longed to taste more thoroughly. I was able to put together another package of scholarships and gifts from my parents and relatives, and was still using my earnings from Jun's to cover spending money. My family supported this study as Japan's economic juggernaut was still on the upswing, so these trips were educational. Also, learning about Japan and Japanese was the only hobby or personal interest I'd had that had stuck: saxophone, Tae Kwan Do, soccer, baseball, tennis, keyboard, drawing, drama, croquet, T-ball, football, painting, macramé... I'd dabbled in them all, but hadn't excelled in any. Actually, I kind of sucked at most of them. Japanese I _did_ have a knack for.

At this point, unless you're a hardcore Japanophile too, you might be wondering, what's with the Japan obsession? Well, I love learning language and I love art... and in Japanese even the writing is art. I loved drawing the Kanji pictographs that Westerners usually consider inefficient and cumbersome.

Each pictograph is a picture and reading them gives the written sentence a texture that you can't have with just 26 letters. Some of the combinations of characters to make words seem nonsensical, but you can create great stories in your mind to remember them. For example, "fashionable" ( _oshare_ ) is written "liquor" and "falling," so you can think up a mnemonic device such as, "Even though I was falling down drunk I still looked fashionable." Place names tend to be more understandable, the characters for Tokyo mean "the eastern capital" and you can imagine the terrain of old Osaka when you know that it means "large hill." Other cities seem more obscure as Sendai means "hermit on a platform" — referring to a mythical palace in Chinese antiquity. I personally have been dying to visit the city of Fukuoka, since its name means "hills of fortune/ happiness." What fortune and happiness could be waiting for me in Fukuoka? My City of Fortune and Happiness must have muscley samurai who will play "naughty ninja takes a bubble bath" with me.

In Japan you can see the playful way in which Japanese use foreign cultural exports. Websites have been dedicated to their playful command of English (or Engrish). A popular club in Roppongi, "Gas Panic," sounds like an assault of flatulence and a famous band, "Bump of Chicken" sounds like leftover McNuggets. There's a boutique called "Nincompoop Capacity," and I really need to download some music of the group "Ogre You Asshole." The Japanese pronunciation of Tokyo FM's Earth Day English catchphrase "Earth Conscious" consistently sounds like "Ass Conscious." The teenager inside me snickers at posters for the "BJ League," which stands for "Basketball Japan League." Some of the Japanese who study English with Australians take on the Australian habit of attaching "R" to the end of words, so Japanese can often say "Americar" rather than "America" if they've studied with Aussies. This is fine except when a radio DJ wishes to introduce Hawaiian music sensation Daniel Ho and calls him "Daniel Whore" (Trivia for the day: Japanese love everything Hawaiian).

In addition to the linguistic glories of Japan, I love the food. Their national obsession with diet and nutrition is amazing, and the food presentation in general is astounding. Social mores re: topics such as nudity tend to be relaxed, and American hot-button issues that just won't go away, such as abortion or school prayer, are rarely discussed openly, if at all, in Japan. Japanese rarely worry about being shot by guns, as so few people possess the things.

Certainly there are problems in the country. Volumes have been written about the high suicide rate, discrimination and moral decline... but in 1994, when I was there at sixteen, Japan felt like the most exciting place on earth. And the Japanese were warm and helpful to everyone, especially to foreigners like myself who were intent on studying the language and culture. I'd tasted blood, and now I wanted more.

**_L'enfant terrible!_**

One year had passed since my first excursion to Tokyo, and by now I had become drunk, had smoked and knew all about sex. As they say, once the horse is out of the barn, there's no use closing the door. I was a Clydesdale set free in a clover patch. I was a teenage hellion, and I made my host family, the Ishibashis, miserable. Japan's lax laws on purchasing alcohol and cigarettes aided and abetted my predilictions. So, at the tender age of sixteen, the other hell-bent American teenagers and I on our exchange program drank and smoked our way through Tokyo — buying beer in vending machines, staying out past curfews and generally driving our host families insane.

The Ishibashi's were facing outright rebellion when they set my curfew at 8PM. My crotchety old host father, Mr. Ishibashi, got on the phone with my real father in the USA. "We tell-a your son, no to drink the beer. He should no to-a drink-a the beer. We tell-a your son, but he do anyway." My father laughed. Being a teen of the sixties, my father had been up to worse.

I feel bad for the Ishibashi family now, as they were a conservative bourgeoisie family who'd gotten stuck with an Enfant Terrible. But back then, I didn't care. I was on summer vacation, and I just wanted to dance and party. During my first trip I'd taken my role as a "Student Ambassador" quite seriously. I'd worn a tired black suit and largely behaved. But now I was, "Gays Gone Wild: Tokyo Edition."

**_Back to coleslaw?_**

I returned to Kansas at the end of the summer, feeling rested, renewed. I called Freddy, and he begrudgingly saw me one time before he stopped returning my pages. He blew me off, but I was fine with that, now. I'd grown wary over the "just-my-friend Stan situation" and with good reason, too.

"You dated Coleslaw?" César laughed. He told me that Freddy was a former hustler and a notorious slut, who'd earned the nickname "Coleslaw" from allegedly performing a lewd sexual act that had involved KFC coleslaw. I want you to keep reading, so I won't divulge what he did. However I now have this gemstone of wisdom jotted down in my journal (the one with Uma Thurman as Mia from _Pulp Fiction_ on the cover). **Thou shalt not perform sexy times with KFC coleslaw.** The whole Freddy-Stan situation was major sketch, so in retrospect, I'm glad it deep-sixed when it did. Even worse rumors persisted that Freddy and Sugar Daddy Stan hosted wild sex parties in which they called up escorts from the want ads and made them humiliate themselves to entertain the guests.

Junior year began in September 1994, and I gained momen-tum from my year of debauchery. You might wonder how I managed to do so much partying without getting stabbed, maimed or addicted. Basically, my parents let me run wild so long as I got good grades. I have a bookish side, and I stayed in Sunday through Thursday; then, on the weekend, I played. I have never been a huge drug fan (PCP will drive you CRAZY!), and I never wanted alcohol more than once a week.

One time my club kid friends and I dropped LSD and dressed up like raver cats for Club Piranha. We put on costume cat ears and smeared kohl to make whiskers and Cleopatra eyes. We must have looked ridiculous, but this was the era of Michael Alig and the Club Kids, so our actions made sense at the time. We went into Hardee's and started purring at the register kid.

"Do you want a fries with that?"

"A milkshake would be purrrrrrr-fect."

"What? I don't get paid enough for this shit."

We were asked to leave, after I inquired if he'd ever seen so much lesbian pussy before.

We drove to Piranha, and our high hit us soon after. We were literally falling down and rolling on the dance floor. People started to look like Mogwais while pink hearts fluttered throughout the dance space. BJ the DJ yelled at us over the loudspeaker, "Get the fuck off the dance floor. This isn't Romper Room!"

**_Jasmine Poontime, my Yeti-American and Mom_**

I was ready for new love, and one night at Club Piranha I met the cutest guy... Jarred. His short blonde hair set off his porcelain skin, and he was the sweetest guy I'd ever known. He was from Topeka, which was a good hour outside Kansas City, and I found out he also moonlighted as Topeka's number one drag queen, Jasmine Poontime. I went to see one of his drag shows to see him do a stirring rendition of "Tits and Ass," from _A Chorus Line_ , while wearing Versailles-inspired Marie Antoinette drag.

He did have some quirks. For instance he'd get upset if he couldn't go to his day job at Hypermart dressed as a woman.

"Women can wear men's clothes. Why can't I work like that? I need to complain to the manager!" Jasmine Poontime complained. He said he was so mad, he was shitting egg rolls!

Now Topeka is the capital of red state Kansas, and home territory to the homophobic hate mongers of the Westboro Baptist Church. So Topeka was not ready for Jasmine Poontime, 24-7. He did have a point, though. What underlies our society's double standard against men dressing in female apparel besides misplaced misogyny stemming from our negation of the innate feminine dating back to the repression of the Goddess.... wrought at the hands of the early second century Christians? Statues of Jasmine Poontime should be erected at Hypermarts across the country, as she was practically the Rosa Parks of gender illusionist rights.

To make it as the boyfriend of Jasmine Poontime, however, I needed a new look. I snipped out a picture of Jean-Paul Gaultier from _In Style_ and took it to a salon and said, "Make me look like HIM!" The hair stylists in Prairie Village were elated to have a few minutes off from giving rat-tails and teased mullets. Let me tell you I looked FIERCE cruisin' Prairie Village!

But not everyone approved of my Simon Le Bon-esque glamour.

One science teacher took one look at me and screamed, "That looks real FAGGY!" As a science teacher, did this person have no respect for the magic of peroxide? Jasmine Poontime liked my Duran Duran look, though, so all was fine with me.

Even though I looked too gay to function, I had yet to come out to my parents. The thought of coming out terrified me. I couldn't count on being welcomed after delivering news such as this.

I'd heard that some of the hustlers who worked the Liberty Memorial had gone on the streets after being kicked out of their homes for being gay. Freddy was the only one of them who'd ended up with a Ferrari — the rest of them were doing anything strange for a little change. I was too dainty for such a life, so I led a ruse to keep my parents from finding out. Though my pretending to be straight was about as convincing as George Bush pretending to be a Rhodes Scholar.

One night Jarred and the Gothic lesbians came by my home. My mother was upstairs tuning out to "Murder She Wrote," and the circus cavalcade of us said hello as we grabbed some Nacho Cheese Doritos and then headed down to my room in the basement. I was the Basement Baby. It had been a few weeks since Jarred and I had consummated our relationship, so once it was just us and the Gothic lesbians in the basement, Jarred and I went at each other like two Sumatran Tigers locked in battle (in the most positive possible sense).

The Gothic lesbians went about their business too, and things got pretty intense. Some moans were uttered, as well as sloppy, teenage kiss noises. Jarred and I had only made it to second base when my telephone rang (I had a separate line from that of parents' upstairs in the house).

"What's going on!?" asked my mother. The airshaft leading upstairs had given notice of our illicit activities.

I quickly said to the black-lipstick Lesbos, "Okay, we need to leave, and I absolutely can't have my parents know I am gay. Do you wanna see me giving blow jobs to one-armed Charlie at Liberty Memorial next week? My gag reflex is not cut out for that. One of you hold my hand. Jarred, you hold her hand."

On our way through the living room with "Murder She Wrote" still on repeat, I lost hold of the lesbian's hand and stood there groping for it in front of my mother.

"Oh hi, Mom! Ha ha, just us teenagers having a good time. Don't worry, Leslie and I are practicing abstinence."

I turned to my supposed date. "Do you still have that purity ring I gave you?"

"We could hear some strange things from downstairs. Leslie's voice is pretty deep."

"She's part Yeti. Yeti-American women have deep voices." "And I have a cold Mrs. St. Anthony. I think that might have made my voice sound...male."

"I just can't stand all the sneaking around," Jarred told me one day. "You need to be proud of who are. Your parents will understand."

"I don't know Jarred. I don't want to end up on the street."

"Honey, you're gonna have to grow some balls if you want to keep Jasmine Poontime."

"I do have a pair of balls. You couldn't get enough of them the other day."

"Irregardless! I am sad to say we are going to have to end this." With that, my poontime reached its expiration date.

## CHAPTER 8

## **_The Blue Envelope, the Skinny Envelope and the Fat Envelope_**

Post-Poontime, I did manage to have an eventful love life and a great deal of fun — even if I did wonder when and how I would eventually come out to my parents. I could still easily manage the logistics, like saying I was "staying over" at a friend's house when the friend was usually my boyfriend.

I met Rashawn in a perfume shop called Scent Factory located in the progressive and trendy area of the Missouri side called Westport.

"How you doin'? You are all that and a bag of chips." The ebony stallion winked at me.

"Just so I know, are we talking sour cream and onion or jalapeño jack?"

"You trippin'."

I was slightly unsure if these words meant something good or bad, but he looked me up and down hungrily as if he wanted to dunk me like a glazed donut into a big mug of hot chocolate. Rashawn spent his days hawking moderately priced eau de toilette and his nights dancing away at the clubs. I admit I was smitten by his impressive dexterity and mastery of '90s dances such as the butterfly, the tootsie roll and the pony.

I loved Rashawn's club style, and I recycled his black gay slang such as "Trust, bitch!" and "Vitamins and minerals for the children!" I was unsure of who the children were, what they were trusting, and why they would want vitamins and minerals at midnight while dancing at the Dixie Belle, but I kept my ignorance to myself. We kept the beat alive dancing all night every weekend. Of course, one expression that I practiced to perfection with Rashawn was "getting buck wild."

One night, Rashawn wanted me to perform a certain sex act on him ("tuccus lingus" for "Sex and the City" fans), and this was simply not going to happen since I was pretty uptight. "Eat my booty! Eat my booty!" he commanded me, trying to push my head down to the Bog of Eternal Stench. I was overwhelmed. Rashawn did too many drugs, and despite being ten years older than me, had started asking to borrow money. Obviously the patchouli wasn't selling fast enough at Scent Factory.

We became _non plus_.

**_First Love_**

After that brief affair, I met my first love, Brandon. Since César had gotten banned from the Cabaret by then, and couldn't come with me, I put on some Q Ambient jeans and went dancing alone. I ran into Ferrari Freddy that night. "I didn't know they let junior high students in here," the bitchy blonde tormented me. "Don't you need to go study for your SATs?"

As Freddy and I were not exactly about to relight the flames of desire, I left for the other side of the dance floor. While there, a man came up from behind me and started to dance.

"You're the cutest guy in here," he said. I don't know how many boys he'd mowed down with that exact same line, but he was a Lawn-Boy and I was a daffodil in its wake. He looked like a Kennedy, and I made a willing Jackie O. I soon found myself neatly and completely in love.

Brandon came from a moneyed family in Dallas and he liked younger guys. He was 24 when we met, so dating a 17 year-old was something of a scandal among his friends. At that age, seven years makes a pretty big difference.

Brandon's friends ribbed him and made up a parody of the All- 4-One song "She's Got Skillz," changing the words to "YOUNG YOUNG eat 'em up think I'm in luck." I definitely had the potion and the motion to cure his ills. Brandon lived in a well-decorated apartment in the posh Country Club Plaza, just a fifteen-minute drive from Prairie Village, and I cruised down there to work my skillz on the regular.

Not all was fun and games with Brandon. He resembled JFK in the looks department and also the wandering eye department. A notorious flirt, I had to keep my eye on him when we went out. He went to Club Cabaret without me one night, and I staked out the club door. He came out with his hand around his trashy ex-boyfriend, Alfred!

"Motherfucker!" I yelled as I pushed Brandon with a look on my face saying, "You have some explaining to do!" Some-how, we made it through this impasse and continued our lovely relationship.

Things had been going great when a life-changing invitation arrived in the mail. A bubbly girl from school invited me to a house party she was having. At the bottom of the letter thempost-script read, "Bring your man. I want to meet him." I left this card on the desk in my room in the basement and went to school. When I came home the card was gone! Dammit, my mother had found it! When it came to finding porn and incriminating letters in my room, she had the detective instincts of a Basset Hound.

My father came home that night, blue envelope in hand. "What does this mean?"

I meant to say I was bisexual. Why dash all your parent's hopes at once? It seemed like a better idea to say this as a stopgap, rather than coming clean and telling the truth.

Then I stammered out, "I'm gay."

The silence in my room was very awkward for the next couple minutes. My father withdrew from my basement chamber.

**_Exposed_**

"Brandon! I'm scared!" I squealed to my boyfriend over the phone.

"Oh, you'll be fine," Brandon said, but his voice wavered. I could tell he wasn't convinced.

"What if I get thrown out of my home? I might have to go on the ho stroll at Liberty Memorial giving hand jobs to truck drivers just to be able to afford Twizzlers and a Big Gulp. My life is over! I'll be an outcast! I'll become a petty street urchin living under a bridge and bathing in 7-11 bathroom sinks. Finished. Destroyed. Hoisted by my own petard! Awash! Set to sea!"

"Look will you just calm the fuck down Faye Dunaway? You could practically get an Oscar for that performance. Things will be fine. I think."

I spent some tense days alone. I mostly hid in the Basement Baby chamber that week. Then, my mother called me from work after school one day, "Don't worry son. No matter who you are we still love you."

The whole situation died down, but I now had the mental relief of being openly myself. Going on sleepovers at Brandon's became a little less innocent, but the episode brought my boyfriend and me closer. Brandon and I spent the rest of my high school time openly involved, and I loved him very much.

**_Looking for a tornado out of Kansas_**

My desire to leave Kansas City was my biggest reason to avoid hard drugs, and even with my colorful weekend social life, I did in fact have my nose in the books on weeknights. Dorothy needed a tornado out of Kansas, and I knew that higher education would get me out of the Great Plains better than anything else — I simply didn't have the legs for modeling. Also, I didn't possess the ability to juggle so I couldn't join the circus. Seriously though, like so many other small-city gays, my ambition was to migrate to one of the great gay capitals.

Just within the USA, the wealth of choices seemed marvelous. I could join the glitterati of Los Angeles or move to the gay holy nation of San Francisco. At this time, however, only one city really beckoned me with her siren song: New York City.

The uptown campus of Columbia University has been my spiritual touchstone ever since I'd first laid eyes on it during a trip to New York with my father. I'd walked from the urban mishmash of Manhattan's streets into this spacious and surprising open campus with its stately, Greek-influenced buildings. You really don't expect such a fabulous, gorgeous space when you first walk in from Broadway.

The students at Columbia moved with a purpose. They had somewhere to go, things they needed to do and test tubes to rattle. I wanted to be one of those people moving with purpose and doing more things with my life than dancing to the Real McCoy at the Dixie Belle.

The gilded gates opened and God sent me an enormous beacon that long-ago day — a flash of what my destiny could be. There in the center of the Columbia campus was Barbra Streisand! It was a like a homosexual Annunciation, only instead of the Galilee I was in the Upper West Side, and in place of the Archangel Gabriel was Jeff Bridges.

St. Perpetua, the Virgin Mary and the cherubim of heaven's gate all raised their voices in unison to say, "Come to Columbia!" There standing in the middle of the quad, flipping her hair and laughing with directors... was THE Barbra Streisand. She was filming _The Mirror Has Two Faces_ on a big movie set right in front of me. There could be no clearer idea in my mind of where I needed to be.

Still high from my discovery of Heaven on 116th Street, I had decided to go shopping downtown to New Yorkify myself. My mission was to buy black PVC pants. I took the 1/9 down to Christopher Street, and I ran up and down Eighth Street, admiring the raver-hooker finery in the old Patricia Field boutique. I glimpsed transsexual superstar Amanda Lepore at work nonchalantly arranging eye shadow and matte lipstick.

At a nearby clubwear shop, I eyed a pair of cute black vinyl pants. A Caribbean guy with dreadlocks, who was eating rice and beans, said, "I give you these for cheap," and he knocked off $20. I opted to try these out at the Limelight. Since I'd had a holy revelation, shouldn't I go to a club in a church? My father, more concerned for my safety in New York than anything else, said he would come, too. "I'll just have a drink at the bar and you can go dancin'," Dad said in his Missouri drawl.

This was November 1994, and a scary club kid that looked like Cruella Deville worked the entrance of Limelight. My father didn't blink an eye. He went in to have himself a drink, and I went into the chapel and danced all night to the best house and techno I'd ever heard. Hundreds of partiers writhed while Eastern European and Asian models danced on pedestals in the center of the room. My father explored some of the other rooms, where he saw naked people dancing. I suppose the most surprising thing about the evening was that here we were at the epicenter of New York nightlife at the time, with drag queens and ecstasy-addled queens and people dressed up as chickens, and my Dad, in his KC uniform of a plaid shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, had a better time than me.

"New York sure is a real cool place. I can see why you wanna go there," he told me, after. He'd won cool points for the rest of our lives.

As high school came to a close, the university offers started coming in. I knew I had to go to Columbia University. But the CU admissions office at Morningside Heights did not agree with me. They sent me a skinny envelope. I received the most promising financial offer from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "I wonder if I can wear my PVC pants when I intern for a senator?" I wondered as I filled in the paperwork to accept their generous offer. GWU was on a coast, it was a big city, and I thought I'd made the right decision.

I moved into Thurston Hall, on F Street, less than five blocks away from the White House. This Den of Sin housed approximately 1,100 freshman students. I got a corner room on the third floor with five other guys, and that is where I made my first straight guy friends. These cool heteros had come from New York or California. I had to get used to the fact I didn't shock them in the least.

"You mean you're not going to throw rocks at me or slam me into a locker?"

"Yo, I think that's mad cool, I got mad respect for you being yourself. Yo, here, smoke on some of this blunt."

So, with a bit of tolerance, and a great deal of kine bud, I was welcomed into the capital of the great United States.

As you can imagine, an entire building of horny freshman college students is just a sex explosion, hence Thurston Hall's alternative appellation, "Thrustin' Hall." Things were no different back in September of 1996 when Notorious B.I.G. was on the radio and ganja was in the air.

With my birthday being one of the first of the school year, dozens of freshmen in Foggy Bottom were ready to PARTY HARD on my behalf. I was 19, cute, and ready to take over the world. Everyone was coming with us to Tracks, a club in a former airplane hangar in Southeast D.C. Everyone had gotten their booze on, and one of my few recollections of that night was of someone pouring vodka into the red wine I had been drinking. We were that fucked up.

I had on the PVC pants and a tight, blue, rayon shirt. I'd put rave glitter on my face, and — being bamboozled — also put on half the bottle. A friend laughed, "You looked like a comet hit your face." I stumbled out the heavy front doors of the dorm, barely able to walk, and hailed a cab. Unfortunately, it wasn't a cab, but the university police car. They shut down my party quick. I got driven to the hospital and almost had to get my stomach pumped. I screamed at the nurses and everyone to let me go, but they were not having it. "You can either stay here, or you can go to jail. And, believe me, Bubba's gonna _like_ you there." The university cop spoke the wise words of a modern Socrates. Okay, lesson learned: **Thou shalt not drink red wine mixed with vodka.**

With all those New York kids around me, I became accustomed to East Coast style and dialect. "You don't say tennis shoes. Those are fuckin' sneakers!" the Jewish New Yorker next door corrected me in a Woody Allen accent. Here, more than ever, I longed for the city just a few hours north. So I sequestered myself in my room, avoided getting high off the chronic fumes all around me, and became the nerd to end all study nerds.

"Come on, let's go clubbing at Tracks," my straight roommates would tempt me.

"Nu-uh, I got 97% on my last Poli Sci midterm and if I don't get at least a 98.5 on the final I will never get to New York."

"Oh, come on, I know someone's PVC trousers are growing cobwebs. You know you want to dance."

Being a connoisseur of all forms of nightlife, not going out felt to me like torture at Guantanamo Bay. But finally, after weeks and months of tortuous studying, writing and biting my nails off, I mailed my grades, application and recommendation letters to NYC. By this time, I had a beard like Methuselah and birds nesting in my hair. I hadn't moved from my desk in approximately 7.5 months. And at last the fat envelope from Columbia arrived.

The Streisand covenant had been fulfilled. St. Perpetua, the Virgin Mary and cherubim had listened to my prayers. I packed my bags to leave for NYC, and I sang...

## CHAPTER 9

## **_Start Spreading the News_**

I moved into my new building on 116th Street, a homey old dorm that mostly housed students from Columbia's sister institution, Barnard College. As soon as I got there, I staked out my area of the room by plastering the walls with my raver-Goth-rockstar décor. Then I went out for falafel at Amir's on Broadway. Meanwhile, my new roommate, Esteban, arrived to move in. I later found out that our Latino doorman told my Venezuelan roommate's family in Spanish, "You are going to be living with some gay guy."

Apparently, Esteban's family took a look around at my rock n' roll craziness and freaked out. "You can't live with this freak!" So Esteban poked around and confirmed for himself I was gay.

I arrived back to see the gay lifestyle magazine, _The Advocate_ , on his desk. Hooray!

I have a feeling someone in admissions was on my side. My application essay was a tearjerker about being gay and growing up in Kansas. Esteban, well, he was really into campus opera. Admissions must have put two and two together. Or, rather, gay and gay together.

I'd lived with breeders in Washington DC. Now I had a roommate to share in the gayness.

I loved every single thing about Columbia. All the students seemed so intelligent, and everyone in my clique could speak at least three languages. "You only know Japanese? You better get a move on you slacker," they would berate me.

Columbia requires students take a course called Contemporary Civilizations in which you read the works which shaped Western thought and philosophy. A much-lauded professor from Romania taught this course, and she was constantly yelling and screaming. "All these people outside, they are assholes! Al Gore, he is an asshole!" Al Gore was on campus giving a talk. I don't consider Mr. Gore an asshole, but this professor's animated delivery was pure entertainment. Somebody really needed to take a bong hit and chill! We went to this professor's home to watch Romanian movies, talked philosophy and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. Even though talking about Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche made my eyes cross in boredom, I really dug some of the hot Eastern European men in those films.

This was the education I'd been waiting for. Out of everything this professor taught us, I take with me one phrase. **"You must EAT LIFE!"** she would say, which I interpreted to mean I should live life to the fullest. Imagine that life is a giant angel food cake in front of you... and devour it like a fat kid after gym class.

Living with Esteban, I had the perfect partner to comb the great gay landscape that is Manhattan. I would give him rundowns on pop culture, and he would let me taste the meaty Venezuelan dumplings his grandma made. While we ate them, I would grin and mouth "yummy" even though the Caracas dumplings kind of made me gag. We studied six nights a week; on the seventh we went out and got stewed. We ogled the muscle gays in Chelsea and danced to the gay punk rock night at Squeeze Box. One night I went out to bar lounge, G, and met a ridiculously cute Puerto Rican guy named Oliviero.

That night I made the bad decision to get drunk and smoke dope: a combination of chemicals that has proven to be disastrous for me on multiple occasions. I took Oliviero back to West 116th Street and had the hottest sex of my entire life with him. Paint peeling off the walls, panting, nasty, heaving, wild, Puerto Rican sex! I slept, and then for some reason I woke up in my next-door neighbor's room. And why was my neighbor washing his refrigerator? Post-Boricua coitus, I had gotten up, sleepwalked over to my Korean neighbor's room, pissed in his refrigerator then climbed into bed with him. Oliviero, Mr. Amazing-Sex-On-Wheels-Puerto-Rican, was not impressed.

Five days later, I had to go to the nurse. Oliviero had given me the clap. Humiliated, lonely and dick-hurting, I had the perfect reason to hide in my room during finals.

For part-time cash, I got a weekend gig at the fashion label Raymond Dragon in Chelsea. A huge poster of Raymond himself hung up on the wall, so you could tell Mr. Dragon was of the humble kind. A former porn-model-turned-fashion-designer, Raymond Dragon was his actual name, only shortened. His birth name was Raymond Dragonajtys, pronounced "Dragon-itis," which sounds like an inflammation of the Dragon. His Wikipedia article suggests his penis measures 8.5 inches (21.6 cm) so let's just say it looked like he had an inflammation of the dragon going on in his crotch as well.

Raymond and his Australian partner ran the shop. I would steam down stretchy muscle-T's and pick out outfits for the cute Chelsea boys. Insults about who was sniffing the crotches of the swimsuits got bandied about, and a great gay time was had by all. Raymond was always quite nice to me — truly a porn star with a heart of gold.

**_The Donna Summer Store_**

Once, _HX Magazine_ did a special on Donna Summer for some comeback concert she was having. We put a big display of Donna Summer up in the window. A deranged old bag lady came stumbling in the door one day. "Is this the Donna Summer store?" No, it is a store run by a former gay porn model for nelly queens who wear tight shirts so they can find someone to buttfuck. In a way, yes, it was the Donna Summer store.

A sexy red-haired man and I held down the floor, and occasionally had a joint in the bathroom. Janet Jackson's _The Velvet Rope_ and Madonna's _Ray of Light_ were in heavy rotation while we swooned over Muscle Mary customers, swiped their AmEx cards and gawked at the mini-dragons in their swimsuits. As you can plainly see, I utilized my time in New York City to capitalize on my Ivy League education.

**_Awesomeness at Issey Miyake_**

Post-Raymond Dragon, I spent summer 1998 interning at the sales and marketing office of Issey Miyake. At this point in time, I hoped to use my Japanese language skills and East Asian Studies degree to work in the Japanese fashion industry. I would help check the invoices of Sak's and Barney's, and they would dispatch me to help straighten up their Pleats Please display at Bergdorf Goodman. Pleats Please, for those who don't know, is a line of clothing made of dozens of yards of fabric pleated down into single skirts or dresses, so it really isn't constructed for those eco-sensitive types.

Issey Miyake USA had recently opened the first Pleats Please boutique in SoHo, and they sold like crazy due to their ability to look fashionable for women of a variety of ages and sizes. Some die hard customers made Pleats Please their daily uniform, and the phone rang off the hook at Miyake as interior decorators clamored to learn about the boutique's treated windows that changed translucency as you walked by them. However, some Pleats Please came in neon greens and unfortunate teals that made some women say "No, thank you" to "Pleats Please."

Anypleats, Issey Miyake perched on the upper floors of an enviable location on West 18th Street, was quite a step forward from Raymond Dragon, since no one accused me of sniffing the bathing suit crotches. And since the intern pay barely covered the subway and lunch fares, they gave out free clothes as compensation. I loved being twenty years old and traveling about New York in $800 sweaters. Sure, I could barely afford a Frappucino or a belt to go with my $1,500 trousers. And yes, my phone might get disconnected and my electricity shut off. But as long as I could pump through Chelsea in head-to-toe Miyake I was in heaven.

The PR girls would get off the phone and chirp, "Sharon Stone's people just called and asked for that dress at the Madison boutique. Should we give it to her?"

We would gossip about the magazine editors, and if the conversation turned to how _Vogue_ always seemed to overlook Issey, the marketing reps would frown and shake their heads, "Anna doesn't like Issey."

The fashionista guys at Issey invited me to some incredibly fashionable parties. Like the _Mean Girls_ , we had an awesome time, drank awesome shooters, listened to awesome music and just soaked up each other's awesomeness.

**_And now for some tawdry interludes...._**

It's ironic how little money I had that summer. Esteban and I stayed together in our dorm on campus. He did his science thing and I did the fashion thing. We didn't usually have money to go out, except for must-go events, so we spent an entire summer subsisting on falafel at Amir's on Broadway and watching _Pink Flamingos_ by John Waters on repeat.

One time we did have money to go out, Esteban dragged me to a leather and fetish bar, The Lure, down in the not-yet-trendy Meat Packing District. I really didn't feel up for this, especially when we had to take our shirts off at the bar. Though not obese, I am not one of those muscle gays who have never eaten a crouton. I drink a Starbucks latte daily. I like Guinness Beer and Chilean red wine. I suppose the body-positive way in the gay community to describe my body would be to say I'm a "cub" — not quite big enough to be a "bear." If I ate three or four Big Macs a month, though, I think I would officially enter bear territory.

So there we were in The Lure. Esteban took off alone in search of some beefcake, while I stood keeping my latest drink company. Just as I was thinking, "How long must I endure this?" a Matthew McConaughey-lookalike hunk came up and wanted to get to know me.

"You are one hot little cub," he said.

"Oh why thank you," I stammered as I thought to myself,

"Marry me! Embrace me!"

"You know how we could really enjoy tonight? How about tryin' this on?"

In his hands was a gimp mask with a leash. Since by now I had had three vodka tonics and a Budweiser, I was loosened up, "Ummm, OK! Try anything once, right?" He showed me off around the bar, leading me with a leash. He then pulled me up on a stage where we did some PG-13 sex play. I bade my Dom Daddy farewell, and Esteban nearly sobbed on the 1/9 train home, "I leave Charles alone for five minutes, and he's in a gimp mask onstage." I thought my experience was unique, but apparently the exact same thing happened to the comedian Margaret Cho. I consider this a badge of honor, since I like to have as much in common with the Korean- American comedy doyenne as possible.

Another tawdry moment in my education came when I worked a short stint at Columbia's East Asian Library. I could work a super- short shift and get _un poco dinero_ for checking in books and putting them back in place. The library housed thousands of books in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and it had many floors below the ground level shelving heaps of academic books.

One time I asked a man named Darren, a grad student I was having a fling with, to come help fulfill my fantasy of playing "naughty librarian and lascivious bookworm." I acted like I was restocking the shelves in the abyss of books, and he came and groped me in a dark corner. Bounds of _The Tale of Genji_ got knocked over, _Chrysanthemum and the Sword_ was violated. There were throes of passion to make Sei Shonagon blush into her pillow. Then we heard the footsteps of my boss. Zippers zipped and we scurried away, hopefully undiscovered.

Darren and I continued our samurai sword fight after I fin-ished work at his place. I laughed about our tryst and said, "What would you say if that escapade ended up in a book I write someday?"

He tapped a journal on his nightstand. "What would you say if it ended up in a book _I write_ someday?"

**_On not finding my inner Buddha_**

Summer came to a close, and I left New York to spend a year at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS), a small school of fifty foreign students down the street from the grand reddish- orange gates of Heian Shrine. When I matriculated there in the autumn of 1999, the school was situated behind a zoo, so we could listen to elephants trumpeting and ostriches squawking while reading about Commodore Perry and studying for the Japanese proficiency exam. Mandrills and flying squirrels interrupted our lessons on "Five Step Verbs."

Frankly, after my Issey Miyake experience, I wasn't much inclined toward finding my inner Buddha. I'd found my inner celubutante. I snickered at my fellow KCJS students and their lofty intentions of opening their _Satori_ or hunting down some rare version of _Evangelion_. Zen chanting and poetry of the Kamakura Period interested me not. Plus, I'd seen the glories of the goddamn shrines and temples ten times over. To hell with that shit! I wanted to learn Japanese so I could work in New York's fashion industry. Swathed in Issey Miyake shirts, jeans from Patricia Field and a couple of Gaultier Junior duds from Century 21, I set out on a mission to pillage and terrorize Kyoto, AKA "Japan's treasure chest."

**_On being a fun accessory_**

If you're Caucasian in Japan, inevitably you'll be asked to perform for some form of media. The Japanese believe that including a honky or two will "liven things up." Double points if you're Black or Latino. Sometimes Japanese media types will ask you "to act like your race." Black men will be expected to pull their jeans low and act like a rap star. Latino men will be expected to wear a sombrero and talk like Speedy Gonzales. In a country where more than 98% of the people are Asian, ethnic minorities are seen as fun accessories and no one worries much about cultural sensitivities.

So, despite being a cub, I was asked to take part in a modeling production for a struggling brand called Trank Mary, a clothing line that blended traditional samurai styles with Comme des Garçons edginess. We were instructed to hold out our arms and fly like airplanes while bobbing down the catwalk. Was I Japan's Next Top Model? A Linda Japangelista? Probably not, but the now-defunct Trank Mary catwalk experience definitely helped boost my ego. That is, until my dreams of becoming the next Tyra were cut down after a stylist for the brand fondled my stomach just before the show.

"Someone's a little soft. This just won't do." That was my last attempt at runway modeling.

**_A walk on Kyoto's wild side_**

Interestingly, when I first arrived in Kyoto, none of the Japanese I met had heard of Columbia University, which shows what kind of circle I ran in. This was all the better as talk of the "Manhattan Project," in which the atomic bomb research was carried out at Columbia, is not exactly polite conversation in Japan. At least I could come and go without worrying about high expectations re: my academic prowess.

Ambitiously, I decided to make extra money working part time as a "host," which is basically a young man who sits with middle- aged women and drinks with them — the male counterpart to a "hostess." I'd seen the "happy-shiny" part of Japan; now I was hell- bent on checking out Japan's underbelly.

I made friends with a hostess girl at a dance club, and she introduced me to a place called "Aquamarine." Aquamarine was a "snack bar" rather than a "host club," but it fit the bill of an adventure-filled part-time job nonetheless. At a snack bar, customers purchase expensive bottles of Bourbon such as Hennessey, and "keep" them at the bar for repeated visits. It's called a "snack bar" because the staff puts out a small dish with some chips or candy in it. This sounds quaint, but when you get the bill you might be surprised to see you paid $50 bucks for a couple of Jujubes and another $20 for a glass of bourbon in a Dixie Cup. Lesson: always ask the prices when you first enter a snack bar.

Generally, the snack bar clients showed off a bit, and started their nights by ordering a few beers for the staff in addition to getting their own drinks. Apparently, workers in the snack bar industry have livers made of Teflon.

The Aquamarine bar held a max of twenty-five people. There, along with two Japanese bartenders and the Master, Koh-San, I chatted with people all-night, usually closing as the sun came up. There was a high-tech karaoke system, and I was repeatedly asked to sing the Western songs that are perennial favorites in Japan. As Christmas approached, I drunkenly butchered Wham's "Last Christmas" at least seventy-two times.

I could passably warble Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven," but I needed to avoid attempting "Hotel California" lest people's ears start to bleed. My singing range possibly stretches five notes, and I gave those five notes a workout over the course of my year in Kyoto.

Although it is generally understood that gangsters were part of this underworld, the Aquamarine experience was much more wholesome than one might expect. Professional Japanese singers would occasionally come in and perform some enka favorites (enka being Japan's folksy version of country music — this is the traditional-sounding music you hear at Japanese restaurants outside of Japan). Off-duty hostesses came in with customers after their own bars doors closed and they still wanted to party.

Aquamarine occupied the basement of a multi-level building in the nightlife district "Gion," a location famous in historical novels for its geisha houses. Although very few geisha houses still operated when I lived in Kyoto from 1998 to 1999, every once in a while a geisha could be seen in full kimono and headdress. Geishas would dash more quickly than Ethiopian sprinters into and out of alleys before you got the chance to really take in what you were seeing, so it was fun to try to spot them.

The gay scene in New York had blown me away, but Kyoto's gay scene was miniscule. Around a dozen gay bars operated in the city, all tiny snack bars, and there was an unexceptional club night once a month at Kyoto's Club Metro. Most Kyoto gays, I came to discover, took the hour trip to Osaka's livelier Doyama gay district for the nightlife.

**_Speed-dating in Kyoto_**

Gay life in Kyoto was rather closeted. But I needed romance! So I went to a gay bar matchmaking party (similar to a speed dating party) and met up with a handsome hairstylist named Nobu.

Nobu lived with his former lover and boss, Mr. Sonodera, a much older man who owned the hair salon where Nobu worked. Spending the night at your boyfriend's place while his former paramour makes of voodoo doll of you in the basement is no laughing matter. **Thou shalt not date a guy still living with his ex.**

This strange nexus of jealousy and employment would lead to Nobu and I going our separate ways, but not until we spent a rather randy New Year's holiday at his parents' home in Osaka. We feasted on crab while Nobu's father pestered me to send him Viagra from the USA.

"You better promise to send it. I need this! It's been years since Nobu's mother and I have done the hoochie coochie!" With Nobu still in the closet, the parents readily allowed Nobu and me to sleep alone together in their spare bedroom. We rang in 1999 like porn stars there in his parents' house — complete with fireworks and chandelier-swinging.

Not that his randy father would've cared. "I like this president of yours, Mr. Clinton," he told me at the height of the Lewinsky zeitgeist. "I'm his biggest fan."

**_Getting an AIDS test in Japan_**

Though I should go more often, I always make sure to get an AIDS test at least once a year. So I found a test center in Kyoto. Getting results still took a couple weeks then, and those were those anxious "But what if?" weeks where you recount every possible poke, rub, and frottage that might have passed you the virus.

When Japanese teachers grade something, they make an "O" in red pen if your answer is correct and an "X" if your answer is wrong. The doctor called me over to show me my test result, and there on the paper was a big red "O." I was petrified. Had I contracted HIV? My heart pounded. No, this wasn't the end of the world. New treatments were being developed all the time. But how much would the treatment cost? I felt faint. What was my virus load?

Then I looked more closely. The big red circle was in front of the characters _insei_ — meaning negative.

Two characters you needed to know if you were a sexually active adult in Japan.

**_Thank you Hikaru Utada_**

Though I spent my weekend nights at Aquamarine, I con-tinued to spend my weekdays, nose-in-textbook, soaking up enough Japanese to attempt the highest level of the Japanese Proficiency Exam in 1999 (which I passed). Also, by the end of my time in Kyoto, everyone suddenly knew Columbia University — Japan's newest pop star, Hikaru Utada, had ex-pressed interest in attending. This made a world of difference for Columbia's PR in Japan, and people treated me like the disciple of Steven Hawking or some Rhodes Scholar with more important things to do than pour high balls for middle-aged Japanese executives at a snack bar. Being younger than me, Utada actually did matriculate in the Autumn of 2000, but following in the footsteps of Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill, she became the latest in a series of famous Columbia dropouts who went on to become international superstars. If I'd known dropping out was so lucrative, I'd have left kindergarten to become like Duran Duran back in 1983.

## CHAPTER 10

## **_Life Has Its Way with Me_**

After I returned to New York and Columbia University in the autumn of 1999, I went into full-on study nerd mode. I passed many a weekend night making flash cards to browbeat info into my brain's gray matter. And I pounded out my senior thesis, a 100 page opus on the Japanese fashion industry, a brilliant work that exactly three people have read. After finishing my thesis, I took the top level (ikkyu) Japanese Proficiency exam. To pass this exam you need to commit several thousand Japanese Kanji characters to memory... and I passed with flying colors, which puts me on a nerd level somewhere below fluent speaker of Klingon and above Renaissance Faire serving wench.

Nerd or not, I still wanted the most glamorous, fabulous, sequin- and-PVC-filled future I could possibly get. I prepared résumés to send out, made a list of the top ten places I wanted to work (including Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, MTV, Universal Music and others). But I had the odd premonition I would end up in grad school. Just as in _Field of Dreams_ , a voice whispered in me. The voice sounded like Miss Cleo from the Psychic Readers Network and said, "Take your GRE and prepare a thesis statement, and it will come."

Adults of the world had warned me that you can easily hit the corporate glass ceiling without a Master's degree or MBA. Not only that, I had read that people with a Master's degree earned approximately one million dollars more over a lifetime than their Bachelor's-only brethren. But was I ambitious enough to do grad school? I was still a party fiend, and grad school didn't sound like a party. In fact, Columbia's grad students looked like the Skeksis from _The Dark Crystal_. I would see grad students huddled over their books in Columbia's libraries crying for virgin blood and a margarita. They emerged from the catacombs of the library only to beat their chests and shake their fists at the sky.

Grad school sounded like it blew hard chunks. I was mulling over the possibility of just calling my education a day, going back to Kansas City and working at Cinnabon or Sunglass Hut, when my Japanese professor pulled me aside.

"Have you considered graduate school?" I was asked. Columbia granted a single scholarship yearly through the Mitsubishi Trust Yamamuro Memorial Scholarship Foundation, and I'd been nominated for 2000. Why they thought my ditzy, party animal (yet studious) ass needed a scholarship I will never know, but maybe they just wanted someone with a little panache, a soupçon of determination and a whole lot of moxie. I had those qualities in spades and diamonds.

The Mitsubishi Trust Yamamuro Foundation Scholarship, though being a mouthful to say, provided my entire academic expenses, a stipend allowance, and even plane fare over to Japan. I would have to send my regrets to Sunglass Hut, but living in Tokyo as an adult was way too good to pass up.

I applied and was accepted to Sophia University's Master's program, and left for Tokyo in September 2000. Having host families had prevented me from letting loose in previous visits, so I decided that this time there'd be no stinkin' host family to keep me from oodles of sake and boatloads of cute J-boys. My vision of my fun life in the neon labyrinth of the Japanese capital was very deceptive, though. Many more challenges awaited me in Tokyo than I expected: psycho job situations, a crazy abusive boyfriend, everything but the Bubonic plague (and I should probably get vaccinated for the Black Death, just in case.)

**_My tough new mistress_**

I arrived at Narita with only two bags to begin more than a decade of life in Tokyo. At Sophia University, I lived in a dorm so close to class I could literally roll out of bed, brush my teeth and be in any class in eight minutes.

My previous experience of working at the bar in Kyoto, and watching the Japanese going ga-ga over certain American songs, had made me curious about the music industry in Japan. Why did some music make it from America, while other music did not? Why were Mr. Big and Cheap Trick living gods in Japan, while only a tiny minority of Japanese knew about other platinum selling American artists? Why did the Japanese demand I sing Wham's "Last Christmas" (a song about heartbreak) during the holidays, but no one ever asked for "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?"

I was interested in the concept of cultural exports. For example hockey, Taco Bell and _Memoirs of a Geisha_ flopped in Japan. In contrast, things that caught on within the archipelago included hula dancing, flamenco, KFC and Audrey Hepburn.

Hepburn, with her petite and buttoned-up look that Japanese women can relate to, is practically a cultural obsession. I hoped to dissect this kind of "cultural import" in the sociology-oriented Asian Studies Master's curriculum at Sophia University. By doing a case study of Western music in Japan, I reasoned that I could diversify my résumé beyond just fashion and get my Master's in Asian Studies. This would allow me to make my way to the top level of nerd-dom, higher than creator of _hentai_ anime or defeating the Lich King in World of Warcraft. I would miss my beloved New York City, but when destiny calls she fucking hollers.

Tokyo can be a tough mistress, so in moving from New York, there had been some adjustment. Japanese work really, really hard, or at least long hours. In Japan you generally feel pressure to stay as late as the boss stays, while in the USA you sort of expect your boss to work later than you since he or she makes three times your salary. Twelve hour days and two hour commutes are common everywhere in Japan, which is why Japanese employees die of "exhaustion from working too much" ( _karoshi_ ) or commit suicide at a relatively high rate. And Tokyo's an especially tough city to hack. The social pressure to perform in school and work is intense. You're expected to be on time, to be slim, to work like a maniac, to go drinking with the boss till 4 a.m., and to somehow make it into work by 7:30 a.m. the next day.

That being said, appliances work, streets get paved, things just generally run... and run smoothly due to the fact the Japa-nese are a nation of tightly-wound overachievers. Until they go drinking. Drug use of any kind, even marijuana, carries a big stigma in Japan, but getting so drunk you pass out in the bushes of your office in a tutu? Perfectly acceptable.

If you wish to plan a life in Tokyo, come warned you are likely to work and drink to excess. I think the release that comes with alcoholic intake is the thing that keeps corporate Japan from imploding, considering the amount of self-flagellating anxiety the Japanese race heaps upon itself. There are two types of drinkers in Japan: the people who are drunk after half a glass of beer and turn red — "the Asian flush" — and the people who spend thousands a month just drinking with almost no side effects whatsoever. These people are not considered alcoholics in Japan. Usually you call them "boss" or "Mr. President."

**_Music Man_**

A friend of a friend who worked at Sony Music hooked me up with a part-time job as assistant director at a radio production company. Japan's radio world takes some explaining to understand. In the USA, radio is a vital and powerful media. For every ten dollars it takes to advertise on American TV, conventional wisdom says it takes three dollars to advertise on radio. In Japan, for every ten dollars it takes to advertise on TV, it takes about one dollar or less to advertise on radio. In essence, due to its being a car-based society, American radio is comparatively healthy and vibrant. Japanese radio, however, operates as an anemic niche market catering to music lovers, provincial residents and upper-middle class car drivers.

I was unaware of this when I first came through the doors of La Vie, a radio production company which creates programming for several of Japan's major FM stations. Its twenty or so employees had a funky _je ne sais quoi_ with trendy clothes, purple hair and/or raging attitudes. The company was situated in fashionable Ebisu and everyone there made an effort to exist at the edge of fashion, in a music world sense. No fuddy duddy black suits for these producers, designers and web engineers.

Though this might seem like a conflict of interest, and in some cases it is, Japanese radio stations often delegate any overflow their staff can't handle to production companies. Also, unlike radio programming in the US, which usually consists of an entire day based around a certain musical format, Japanese radio has several hour long "programs" that are easier to pitch to advertisers. In many ways, Japanese radio resembles the evolution of America's MTV. Rather than play a full day of videos like in the '80s, they switched to a format of many "programs," making it easier to attract advertisers — much to the chagrin of music lovers everywhere. Blocks of music are cut up into small blocks of information segments, and rather than hearing an entire song, Japanese radio DJ's will start talking over the song halfway through to tell you about the artist's plans or other news.

Despite the dire straits of Japanese radio in the new mil-lennium, I had gotten a plum job at one of the top stations. I began waking up at 3 a.m. to be an assistant director (or AD) for the morning show at 76.1 Inter FM, Tokyo's English language FM station. I got up in the pre-dawn, made coffee for the radio personalities, wrote an "International Top 5 Chart," fetched faxes, and then from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. I brought in listener emails. Inter FM seemed to be pulling in listeners, but the neediness that resulted from the station's lack of funds and inadequate staff was palpable. The studios had fallen into disrepair. Unloved and unwanted faxes got stacked in Himalayas of paper. Overworked production managers slept on couches. The first show I worked at, "The Music Man's Morning Show," featured the venerable radio DJ Yaguchi, a jovial middle-aged man with a face that truly suited radio. His assistant, the effervescent Yuriko, spoke some English and read Japanese "corners" (Japanese for "Feature" or "Segment") emailed in from our diva-esque scriptwriter working remotely. The show featured a "Where are they now?" segment on one-hit wonders and yesterday's favorites that provided a great education on which foreign music actually made an impact on Japan. We discussed Shanice, Switchblade Symphony and Limahl, and the Music Man informed the world what they'd done once their fifteen minutes had elapsed.

Rap music that becomes popular in the USA is not always internationally marketable. While Michael Jackson and the melody- based tunes of the '80s dominated the Japanese charts back in the day, America's move to lyrically based rap music made Japan's own domestic music more attractive to the Japanese music-buying public. Though Eminem and Lil' Kim got their share of attention in Japan, Japanese had no idea of what Bone Thugs n' Harmony or Flo-Rida were going on about without carefully scanning the translations in the lyrics cards. The difficult rap lyrics coupled with the monotony of merely repeating sampled beats has made most American rap music a tough sell in Japan. Certainly hip hop has become a dominant form of music in Japan, too, but songs with too much focus on the lyrics will fail to catch on.

**_Starpower – Japanese style_**

To become successful worldwide, an entertainer needs to be distinctive enough to make both foreigners and children respond. Entertainers who make a visual impact, such as Kiss, have a following in Japan — while less visually distinctive artists might sell millions in the US but have almost no following in Japan or other non-English speaking countries. If I were to guess which contestant of American Idol has sold the most downloads in Japan, I would guess Adam Lambert simply because you know who he is immediately by looking at him, whereas many of the other winners look so normal as to be unmemorable.

It seems obvious, but Western acts who put in the time and effort to come to Japan are rewarded with a rabidly loyal fan base that remembers them long after their memory has faded back home ( _Cheap Trick Live at Budokan_ , anyone?).

Also, British artists put up more competition than American artists vying for a slice of the pie in the lucrative Japanese market — still the second largest music market in the world. Thus, when former Spice Girl Emma Bunton (a.k.a. Baby Spice) had a number one solo record in the UK, which I think sold about 12 copies in the USA, she still came out to Japan and made an appearance on the morning show where I worked. With her toned-body and shiny rainbow-belt on some low-rise jeans, Emma happily plugged her _A Girl Like Me_ album on Inter FM, singing an impromptu version of _Grease_ 's "You're the One that I Want" in the studio. During her Spice Girl days, the outrageousness of the other girls outshined her a bit, but here in person she seemed charming, "kawaii" (cute) and every-inch a star suitable for Japan. My subculture friends from high school would have crucified me for loving a Spice Girl, but when you're enjoying life as much as I was, what's the harm in a little fun pop?

I began meeting more and more famous people, at least musicians, and they were an entirely different breed of human for me. For one thing, they moved quickly. They would dash in and out of elevators and doorways like scurrying prairie dogs. Stars love to smoke cigarettes, and they could smoke wherever they wanted: in the studio, in the office, in the hallway. Laws regarding tobacco consumption were for mere mortals.

I remember sitting in on an interview at Tokyo FM with a certain Japanese megaband's lead vocalist. He quickly pranced into the radio station's recording studio, his stringy long blonde hair bouncing along, looking like Janice from the Muppets. I don't remember much of what he said, but I do remember being amazed that they assigned an assistant just to hold his ashtray.

I also learned that stars are especially difficult to physically approach in Japan. Generally, important people in Japan sit on the innermost side of a table, where they're surrounded by any number of publicists, managers and henchmen.

Famous people could pop in the radio station at anytime, and without being expected, as their management kept their movements a secret. A smiling Jay-Z flashed me a peace sign as he scooted toward the elevator at J-Wave. I remember walking in Inter FM one evening to be surprised by the sight of the rapper Eve lounging in a corner with what I recall was a purple braided weave the color of grape Kool-Aid.

Working in showbiz in Japan you get to see a different side of your home country's stars, who often look bewildered and confused on Japanese TV. People in the Japanese music business hold that Canadian artists are the easiest to work with.

One handler to the stars told me, "Celine was a dream. I love working with Canadians."

The same cannot be said of Canuck rockers Sum 41, as an insider whispered to me. "They were drunk and puking the whole time." Maybe they were just from the wrong side of Saskatchewan, as Canadians usually received top marks for politeness.

The band that held worst reputation at Inter FM was Slash and the Snake Pit, who (allegedly) came in completely obliterated drunk and trashed the studio. But I would have been disappointed in Slash had he _not_ destroyed something. Not to be outdone, Chaka Khan went on a bender (allegedly) and disappeared for several days, causing her record company to panic. I would like to stress, of course, that these stories these are merely rumor and conjecture and might very well be Snake Pit and Chaka Khan Apocrypha.

Sometimes the stars themselves are unhappy when dealing with the Japanese media's antics. One oft-repeated rumor was that Jennifer Lopez's publicist ripped the tape out of a TV camera after some Japanese comedian, who was supposedly imitating her, started rolling on the floor as if in a seizure. This was supposed to be funny, and it probably was for everyone but J. Lo. "Interview's over!" the publicist told everyone in front of the aghast diva.

Beyoncé seems to have a good sense of humor about the craziness: one interview featured hairy comedians from Okinawa in unflattering Destiny's Child drag. On another show, Beyoncé politely smiled and laughed when the barefoot and portly Naomi Watanabe, a female comedian known as the "Japanese Beyoncé," greeted La Knowles with a terrifying rendition of "Dreamgirls" in which Watanabe looked like a gyrating pig in a pink dress.

I met a laidback Patricia Field at Tokyo FM. We talked about her dyed-fire engine red hair: "I keep it this color to be nice to people. They can remember me more easily." She also apologized that her staff had turned me down for a job at one of their downtown boutiques back in the '90s in New York City. "It is what it is," the _Sex and the City_ stylist offered diplomatically.

Working at the "Music Man's Morning Show," I got tickets to see the industry showcase performance of Destiny's Child at their first Japanese performance in 2001. They had recently gone through their tumultuous member changes and were busy promoting their _Survivor_ album. As movies tend to be stronger venues for promotion in Japan than music videos, I would go so far as to say that their "Independent Woman, Part I" addition to the _Charlie's Angels_ soundtrack had helped convince the Sony Music people that they were big enough to get promoted in Japan. _The Writing's on the Wall_ , which sold eight million copies in the US, barely made a dent in Japan, but the tie-in with a hit movie surely moved them into the "heavy promotion" shortlist at Sony Music.

If there had been any doubt about whether or not to promote Destiny's Child in Japan, a beautiful, bountiful and bounce-able Beyoncé easily put an end to that. The twenty-minute showcase set was at Shibuya AX with industry insiders and Japanese celebrities. All had a glittery evening. The producers of the radio show were shocked at my dancing as I accidently spun, kicked, twirled and knocked over some Harajuku girls during "Bug a Boo."

"What came over you Charles? You were dancing like a maniac."

"Look, you don't understand that I am genetically programmed so that when Destiny's Child sings, a trance takes over."

"You nearly killed those Harajuku girls. You really should watch out."

Unfortunately, I had graduate school finals the day Destiny's Child came to Inter FM, so I didn't get to meet them — and as a result I will curse my graduate school forever. I hope there's a Destiny's Child reunion to look forward to someday....

## CHAPTER 11

## **_President Nero's Legacy_**

A friend from Osaka called as I readied to sleep on Tuesday night, September 11, 2001, "Turn on the TV! They're attacking New York!" I stayed up all night watching and arrived early by taxi to Inter FM the next day. Being the premier English-speaking radio station in Tokyo, we frantically reported on September 11 since we knew many expats would be listening — people were going haywire. The FM reporters watched the CNN screens and followed minute- by-minute updates. Even here, across the globe from NYC, there was real dread as to how this might snowball into a global conflagration. I remember crying as I listened to President Bush address the US and the world on the radio.

"Goddamn, hanging chads." I lamented the election results of a president who we thought was going to come and go without much note in history.

The Bush war years ushered in the darkest years of my own life. Gone were the carefree days of clubbing and partying. They were replaced with an almost comical unraveling of what had hitherto been my promising life. My first misstep came after September 11, as I had planned a flight a couple of days later to visit my family for the first time since leaving the States. The flight home was scary and solemn. This post-911 plane to New York was almost empty, but I felt an urgency to visit the city to give emotional support to my friends. Giving up and backing down was what the terrorists wanted, and I was in no mood to let them ruin possibly my last reunion with many of my friends in New York. Seeing the "Missing Persons" notes around the city accented the fact that New York was in post- traumatic stress mode.

I mostly hung out at friends' apartments, as it didn't feel right to be going out on the town. I shopped, but there wasn't a "Hey let's go shopping!" feeling.

I did need a security blanket that would last through the Bush years. At a vintage shop near Astor Place, I came across an amazing blue-tinted faux fur coat that went down to my knees. What drag queen had worn this coat before? Esteban laughed when I showed it to him, "Charles has _cojones_ the size of bowling balls. I know you're going to go back to Tokyo and wear that coat everywhere." That's exactly what I did. That coat warmed me through several cold Tokyo winters.

The weary months following September 2001, with their anthrax threats and the rush into Afghanistan, made the Japanese wary of the USA. The love affair between Japan and USA had been souring for decades, and the US's reaction to 9/11 was like pouring vinegar and chili sauce into lemonade. It seemed to hasten the Japanese disenchantment with the US in more ways than I thought possible. Suddenly, the Japanese around me only wanted to visit Australia, Canada or Europe. "Traveling to the US is such a bother anymore, why even go?" people would say.

The unpopular wars coupled with the Bush administration's "ostrich-head-in-the-sand" policy toward the Kyoto Protocol and global warming made being an American in Japan much more difficult. People regularly assailed me with remarks such as "I don't see what's so good about America," or simply said, "I hate America" to my face. Some graffiti near Harajuku read "We hate Bush."

For a while I lived near the Communist Party Headquarters, and when I walked by every day I saw a poster with a scowling woman in a baker's uniform that bore the caption: "How long will we let America push us around?"

I always wanted to say to this Asian, pinko Betty Crocker, "Don't blame me bitch, I can't even get married in the US." This baker was cookin' up his own muffins of discontent with American leaders.

A Canadian colleague who was talking about Japanese studying in the US asked, "Who wants to go study in America anymore?" If people said this to my face, who knows what they said about my country behind my back? Everywhere I went I heard that Americans were obese, ignorant, unfashionable bullies. But at least they had Beyoncé. In Tokyo I have felt that it is a bigger liability to be American than to be gay, and here I was a second class citizen in America who could neither openly serve in the military nor get married.

**_Cultural a la carte_**

"The Music Man's Morning Show" got guillotined Septem-ber 2001. Luckily I was one of the few staff who avoided get-ting the axe. Radio revenues had plummeted and the ten-plus employees of our show were trimmed to a core group of five.

The new DJ, Mr. Guy Perryman, was an emerging media man, well known throughout the gaijin expat community. Guy wore head- to-toe black everyday and had a cosmopolitan pizzazz from having lived in the UK, Australia and Singapore. He'd perfected the art of having a cultural à la carte lifestyle. This is an acquired taste — such as vegemite or black licorice. Once you love it, you can't go back. As Guy explained to me, he loved England, but he also loved living in Tokyo because that way he didn't have to be British.

He had positively redefined himself in a way that dislocated nationality. Being an expat, you have the luxury of taking the positive things of your home country and marrying them with the good things about the host country. In Japan, I could forget about America's President Nero while enjoying the great music that's America's legacy. I could take advantage of Japan's excellent diet without having suffered through its grueling education system.

**_End of an Era_**

At a meeting at the radio production company, I received a gift of a sample MP3 player. None of the older directors wanted this device, but being of the Napster generation, I knew the thing would be useful. It was tiny, held about twelve songs and ran out of juice in forty minutes. When I was listening to "Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" and Crazytown at the gym, what I was actually hearing was the death knell for most Japanese radio.

Inter FM's earnings continued to slide, and as 2001 ended, they informed me they were laying us off. They replaced me with lackeys who would work for free. Guy stayed at Inter FM working for next to nothing in exchange for plugging his online ventures. Inter FM has undergone a lot of restructuring, but is still the premier English language FM station in Tokyo.

Although the production company La Vie's contributions to Inter FM were no longer needed, they said I could stay and help at the Japanese language FM stations. I moved on to work at Tokyo FM, but, of course, I had to complete my hazing. Japanese companies often haze young initiates at New Year's parties, and I would get mine.

They had seen my dancing skills at the Destiny's Child concert, and apparently this made quite an impression on them. They made me and another two new initiates don camouflage skirts (yes, you read correctly, that was "skirts"...) for their New Year's party, which was being held at a specialty restaurant in Tokyo's dumpster, an area called Kamata. Behind some partitions, I squeezed my little white booty into a camouflage skirt so I could lip-synch to a simple remix they made stringing "No, No, No Part 2," "Independent Women Part 1" and "Survivor" together. I insisted on being Beyoncé, and I gave more leg than a bucket of Popeye's that night. The guitarist of Japanese rock legends, Glay, joined the festivities and left a tip of ¥1000 (about $12) in my panties so obviously my "Bug a Boo" was off the rip.

My continued work at La Vie was clumsy to say the least. Most tasks went to the Japanese natives, and my physical health was suffering. After finally acclimating to 3 a.m. wakeups, I was now relegated to helping out with shows which ran late, late night at 81.3 J-Wave — a complete reversal. My body was not happy with me. This could have been an easy enough switch, par for the course in showbiz, but with my master's thesis defense imminent, I was under a lot of pressure. Not only this, I had decided to make a case study of the La Vie company for my thesis. More and more, I needed the cooperation of a company that needed less and less of my help.

On top of these pressures, La Vie had started a "self- enlightenment" program aimed at the younger workers. We were to create weekly goals for ourselves and got berated and badgered re: these goals for hours at our weekly meetings. Setting goals seems simple enough, but we junior assistants already had bags under our eyes at twenty-three years old from working seventy-hour weeks and sleeping on floors and couches in the FM studios. I remember one assistant director going to the hospital after his foot had actually started to rot from his not-going home and changing socks in four days straight of work.

They generally let me off the hook since I was a student, and they didn't make me adhere to as stringent a policy. But the fun and convivial atmosphere of La Vie was dying. The young bosses at La Vie had gone on an ego trip and rather than simply telling people they need to work harder, they would scream and lecture the younger members for an hour every Monday. Working at 3 a.m. and getting lectured every Monday was starting to pall. I began to feel that this wasn't what I had signed up for.

A journalist friend of mine named Kate Drake from _Time_ magazine's Asia edition was reporting on Japan's latest diva, Ayumi Hamasaki. Kate's work would contribute to what would become a cover story on Ayumi. She asked for some help with her stories, and for the piece on Hamasaki I spent a couple of weeks calling the entertainment company, Avex, on Kate's behalf. Since Ayumi was by far the biggest star in Japan at the time, the record company guarded their cash cow ferociously. "We need to check the cover! Ayumi always checks every cover she's on," Avex's managers hissed at me.

"Not even the US President gets to check a _Time_ cover," Time's Hong Kong office fired back. Somehow though, the prestige of being on a _Time_ cover had gotten through to Ayumi's people, and Ms. Drake was on her way to Tokyo to meet Japan's pre-eminent diva.

Kate shadowed me a few days to get a taste of the music business, and we took her to a five-star meal in Yokohama's Chinatown. She sat in on one of the La Vie Monday meetings where the bosses spent forty-five minutes yelling at a fellow assistant director, "You'll never make it in this business!"

Kate leaned over to me and said, "Your company is scary! My boss would never do something like that at _Time_." An outside observer had confirmed to me that my enjoyable Tokyo Weimar Republic was becoming a Tokyo Third Reich.

## CHAPTER 12

## **_What Red Flags?_**

By June 2002, I informed La Vie that I would no longer be working for them. I buckled down and prepared myself for the long haul into my thesis defense, set for January 2003. I had completed all my case study interviews at La Vie, and when the company disbanded in the summer of 2002, my thesis would become an interesting portrait of a failed company.

In July of 2002, I had a moment of respite and went drinking with my Parisian friend Geneviève. She studied marketing with me at Sophia University and had all the _joie de vivre_ that had been missing in my life.

"Push your ass," she said in her _anglais adorable_. "It is a full moon, and we must go out."

My love life had been relatively quiet during graduate school. Aside from an Okinawan dancer who ended up leaving me for a woman, I'd been single for three years. Like Macy Gray sang, "Love is a desert, and I need it to rain."

Most people who have gone to a graduate school would concur that grad students are the sad, the few and the poor — huddled over their textbooks twitching from too much coffee and not enough sleep. I still lived on the Sophia campus, along Shinjuku Road. Shinjuku Road stretches from the Emperor's Palace down past Sophia and St. Ignatius Catholic Church. The road continues from this poncey area down past the gay district and finally into Kabukicho (a seedy nightlife area). Kings, bishops, homos and whores all use this boulevard. By the light of the pagan moon, Geneviève and I took a fateful cab ride to 2-Chome — the gay district pronounced NEE CHO-MEH.

We grabbed some vodka tonics at Advocates, the open-bar café that is ground zero for Tokyo gay nightlife. Sitting across from me was a guy with a bright smile and an easy laugh. He had short- cropped hair and a sleeveless shirt that exposed his toned arms. Maybe it was the full moon or the toothy, dumb smile, but it blinded me to all the red flags about to start waving my way. I was about to fall in love with an S.o.P.S., Son of a Panty Snatcher.

Superficially speaking, Kentaro, whose grandfather was American, inherited the good physical aspects of both Asians and Caucasians. His build was larger than the average Japanese. His natural tan and passable English made him a much sought after guy on the scene. Actually, his mixed race status made him look more Latino than Asian despite having no Latin blood, and I think most of the world knows I love Latinos just as much as I love Asians — I'm an equal opportunity provider. I was smitten by this Japanese guy that the Notorious Cho would describe as "Asian Adjacent."

Kentaro and I started dating. He didn't have steady employment (first red flag), and his father had just gone bankrupt prompting Kentaro's (or Kent as I called him) sudden move to Tokyo from the countryside (red flag 2). On one date, we went to a bar that for some reason was filled with ice-skaters from Disney on Ice, which was touring Japan. These men spent their days gliding along dressed as Sebastian from _The Little Mermaid_ or Dopey Dwarf. They were all, of course, muscley, toned and a big bunch of slores. One of them, I believe King Louie from _The Jungle Book_ , began flirting with my man. Sure, what is a little harmless flirtation? But when Kent failed to protest that King Louie's hand fondled his ass while I was on a date with him, I knew it was time to go home (red flags, bells, sirens). I threw my drink down and ran outside. Kent came chasing after me apologizing and placating. "It's just, I love you," I blubbered.

We were standing by a putrid stream that ran near the Hotel New Otani and Akasaka. Was it the stink of the sewage? Or the fifth margarita? I don't know, but Kentaro calmed me by raining kisses down on me. No matter how many times we kissed, my mind kept flashing back to my horoscope on a popular astrology website, which I had read that morning. It had warned that today might contain the biggest mistake I would ever make.

We continued dating, and I really thought he was "the One." He told me his sob stories about growing up: his father had left his mother when he was a child, granting him a childhood of poverty and isolation up in the countryside, where the other kids made fun of him for being mixed race. In his loneliness, he decided to take English classes offered by friendly American Mormon missionaries in his hometown (huge red flag, banners, red tapestries even). One day they would study phrasal verbs, and hey, what about the Book of Job? Contractions and tag questions followed by Letters to the Corinthians? This was a group that converted through English acquisition.

Kentaro said Shakey's Pizza banned the missionaries of his hometown from their all-you-can-eat-pizza buffet, as the greedy and fat American missionaries would eat all the pizza before the Japanese could get any. "No Mormons allowed!" read the sign in English, posted by an angry manager.

Kent spent a year studying in the US, dropped out of university and did some missionary work himself in Japan's provincial cities. Then he joined his father's company, which at the time did a very lucrative business importing foreign watches. Kent's father had returned to his life and paid his son a princely $6,000 per month — until people found out the Rolexes came from the wrong side of Hong Kong. This unleashed the wrath of Rolex, driving Kent's father, the future panty snatcher, to bankruptcy. This chain of events preceded his son sitting opposite me at Advocate's Café on a full moon.

By chance, we both had plans to visit New York City in August 2003. He drove some strange elderly man that was a "friend-of-the- family" to visit his friends and relatives across America (you guessed it, red flag). Before I met up with Kent in New York City, he called me back home and said, "This geezer keeps asking me to get in bed with him."

I was not amused, but I sucked it up. I was in love or — whatever. Grabby Gramps paid in full for Kent and me to stay in our suite in the Crowne Plaza in New York City so we decided to make the trip. The "Electroclash" movement was peaking and we checked out Luxx in Brooklyn, which was bustling with hipsters flaunting asymmetric haircuts.

**_Don't go there girl!_**

I didn't have much time for partying this trip to New York. I spent the daytime using my alumni reading pass to scour Columbia's libraries and citations indexes for articles on the music industry and sociology. Issey Miyake's office had moved down to tony TriBeCa, so I took Kent down to Franklin Street to say hello to everyone and run around SoHo. Walking across a brick-paved street near Houston, Kent suddenly asked, "Why don't we live together when we get back to Tokyo?" I was elated, I'd never been close enough to a boyfriend to live with him. Kent, who'd spent several weeks trying to distance himself from me, suddenly seemed to be opening up. So what if we'd only been together a month, what could go wrong? Now if my life were a horror movie, this would have had to be the moment in which the dumb, large-breasted blonde decides to look in the basement, and you yell at the screen: "Don't go there!"

We returned to Tokyo and immediately started looking for a cheap place we could share. Kent found a "gaijin house," a temporary dormitory-style dwelling for people of all nationali-ties. A company called Applehouse ran dormitories that had creative English names such as Big World 21, Big Love 21 and Big Up 21. These are funny names except when you have to write on your résumé that you live in a building called Big Zeus 21. Kent and I took a look at Big Wing 21 and moved in that week. It looked like a dormitory, and they had commissioned a painter to draw Keith Haring-like murals on every wall. All this company's gaijin houses had similar murals, some with odd religious and sexual themes. I distinctly remember one mural at Big Passport that included a picture of a dog biting a man's penis (OUCH!).

We barely had $100 left when we moved my stuff in a rental car. I was going through a Cher phase at the time, so we listened to her _Living Proof_ CD with the ominous track "When the Money's Gone." My ears almost started to hemorrhage as she repeated the refrain,

_Oh will you love me baby  
When the money's gone  
Money, money money's gone._

Kent struggled for cash with intermittent day jobs such as scrubbing toilets or stacking boxes at factories, and my savings dwindled. Just before my birthday in 2002, his mother called with terrible news: a doctor had just discovered that she had breast cancer. Kent's father had abandoned his mother when Kent was very young, and after years of supporting two children working at bars and hostessing gigs, she lived alone on welfare in a cold and barren township near Osaka. Kent went to see her immediately in the hospital, and I joined him a few days later.

We spent some time everyday cheering her up post-mastectomy. Once again it was September, and we spent my twenty-fifth birthday quietly hitting some hot springs and checking in with his mother. We returned to Tokyo in the midst of not only our own financial crises, but also his mother's inability to pay for her treatment. I sifted through articles and recorded interviews for my thesis all day and madly sent out résumés at night.

The week before Halloween in 2002, I came home to notice that someone had been emailing out of my computer's Outlook Express. To my despair and horror, Kent had been thinking of pulling through our financial crises by becoming a hustler, and some very unforgiving emails had come in from the escort agency asking, among other things, the length and girth of his dick. The escort agency also asked if he did house calls and what positions he was best at.

I texted Kent saying things were through between us, and when he burst through the door at Big Wing 21, I started reading out loud from email he'd sent the escort agency. He hit me. He knocked me out of my chair and sent me crashing onto a coffee table, destroying it. He punched me again, and since he was stronger than me, tried to keep me in the room.

"You're not going anywhere! How can I come up with the money to help my mother?"

Money could be found, and prostitution was not the answer. I wondered why his first idea was to prostitute himself. Commercials for short term, high interest cash advances ran day and night on Japanese TV — if he _really_ needed money, options other than selling his cooter abounded.

I got up and left Big Wing 21.

I walked around, crying and alone, at the rotary of Ogikubo Station that had closed for the night. I came home near daylight to a tearful Kent who was apologizing, promising he'd make amends, pleading that I should just give him another chance. The only thing that stopped me from throwing him out was that I was a mere couple months from my thesis defense, and didn't want to imperil the hundreds of hours of reading, interviewing and struggling that had brought me to this critical juncture. I didn't have time or money to move and start over. I was paralyzed by Cupid's taser gun. Too bad it took me too long to realize, **Thou shalt dump abusive, cheating boyfriends who try to prostitute themselves on the Internet.**

**_A peaceful respite in Apple House_**

I allowed Kent to stay if he promised to pull his weight. Our relations did, for a few months, improve. His relatives pitched in and made sure his mother got the cancer treatment she needed. My parents made sure I could pay my rent. I also picked up a well-paying gig teaching English to the engineers who designed endoscopes for Olympus. Considering that they made microscopes to go up your butthole, it was fortunate that I had all sorts of lube-oriented idioms I could teach. I worked tirelessly, finally completing my thesis that took social scientist Sarah Thornton's idea of "subcultural capital" and used it as a lens to create a case study on a radio production company.

"Well, you did it," a professor told me. "I thought you'd come to me with some half-done mess."

Her confidence in me was awe-inspiring. I now had my Master's, and the thesis that I spent two years writing — like most Master's theses — now collects dust in a vault at Sophia University.

Kent and I were eager to leave Big Wing 21, which was expensive and dirty. A platoon of cockroaches marched into the common kitchen every night after lights-off. Legions of roaches played flag football and tangoed across the stoves and pans, making cooking less than desirable. The place was filthy. If only roaches scrubbed mildew and swept the floor like in the whimsical Disney comedy, _Enchanted_.

Kent negotiated a deal with the company that ran Apple House, a rent reduction in return for his cleaning the houses. We packed our bags again, rented a car and moved into Big Apple, or B.A., singing a song from _Evita_. "I want to be a part of B.A. — Buenos Aires — Big Apple!"

A boisterous group of female English teachers from England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, whom I dubbed "The Ladies of the Commonwealth," occupied this communal living house. There, I got an education in British English. I learned that a "slapper" was a "bimbo" and "fugly" translates as "mingin'." You put on your "trainers" (sneakers) to go to the gym, and calling your friend "a posh cow" could be a term of endearment — like how Americans say "stupid ho."

Coming to Japan to learn about England seems odd, but these freewheeling ladies couldn't have come into my life at a better time. For a while, I felt peace. I spent my days teaching English at a far- flung outpost, then having a beer with the Com-monwealth Ladies, and I'd curl-up at night with my partially-reformed boyfriend. Over drinks and smokes in the garage, the Ladies and I came up with names for the difficult to pronounce areas of Tokyo. We lived in Higashi Koganei, which became "The Gash," and nearby Musashi Koganei and Musashi Sakai became "Mushy Cocks" and "Mushy Sack," respectively. The area that houses the Japanese parliament, Kasumigaseki, we dubbed "Krusty Testicles."

Various vagrants and miscreants also populated the Apple House at this time, adding coals to the conversational fires with the Ladies of the Commonwealth. In particular there was Mr. Scraggly, a Canadian visitor who liked waltzing around with his krusty testicles dangling through the holes in his shorts. Then there was a Japanese S&M dominatrix. She secretly kept ferrets in her room, flagrantly breaking the no pets allowed policy. Also, there was a freak girl who always made her exit through windows. She had scars on her wrists, and when we discovered that someone had made a bowel movement in the communal showers, we knew it had to either have been Window-Girl or Mr. Scraggly.

Kent admitted to me around this time that he had been in a porno movie, which was hot yet disturbing. He was cleaning the Apple House and I was living rent-free, so I erred on the side of forgiving. Talk about the red flag to end all red flags. Actually, knowing my boyfriend was a porn star was kind of a turn-on.

"But I only did one," he confessed.

**_Tatemae and honne redux_**

I needed to get a new visa to extend my stay in Japan, so I got a job in an "English Factory" type school called NOBA, in Shinjuku. I planned to keep teaching to take my time in finding a job I really wanted, but this NOBA — which is an acronym for nothing in particular — had a variety of teachers from North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Some instructors really threw themselves into the work and thrived on the close interaction. Other instructors were just passing through to get money for beer and a good time.

NOBA had a language unto itself. It wasn't just a "school," it was a "learning studio." The Japanese weren't "students." We were to call them "clients." You weren't a "teacher" but an "instructor." You almost expected the "erasers" to be "nubs of disappearance" and "toilet paper" to be called "anal discharge vouchers." The "clients" could book lessons online or on their mobile phones, and choose the instructors they wished to study with.

Interestingly, the most popular instructors were not native English speakers. One enthusiastic man from Singapore was constantly booked, and a French man with a winning smile had Japanese women bringing him cupcakes and chocolates. English was not about England or the USA anymore. It was the global language of business and chutzpah.

The novel booking system intrigued me, but I just wasn't cut out for that much one-on-one tutoring with people I hardly knew. Teaching lesson after lesson drained my mental energy. Also, I'll be honest if a fun student — err client — had booked you, then great. If someone boring booked you, you had no means of escape. Also, 98% Japanese all make the same mistakes, even as adults, when learning English. Generally in any given day people English teachers in Japan will hear "go to shopping" (go shopping), "southern island" (tropical island) and hear fifty stories about Hawaii to see "Fula Dancing." Japanese are far superior to 98% of foreigners in Japan, who simply just butcher Japanese, but it gets really old fixing the same English mistakes time and again. Of course when you ask a Japanese student of English where they plan to go abroad next it was usually France, Italy or Hawaii, places they don't really need to speak English. This might sound strange for Hawaii but many Hawaiians in the tourist industry speak enough Japanese so that English is not required for visits to Hawaii. Either way, I ended up pretty annoyed that the students were spending thousands of dollars to take English classes in order to not go to English-speaking nations.

I was a bad teacher. Not only can I barely speak English myself, but I didn't really want to be at NOBA, at least not for the amount I was being paid. I venture to guess that many other instructors felt the same, often frowning until the chime rang ushering in the students. And then everyone forced a smile like Mr. Bean, utterly terrified that a student would complain, as they often did.

The fact that students could complain about you at any time via email kept you on your toes, something the confrontation-hating Japanese seemed to do with glee. Here you could see the _tatemae_ and _honne_ at work as the client might leave a lesson looking satisfied and fire off a complaint via text message to your boss. One student complained about a Belgian coworker that, "Mr. LePoint's nose hair sticks out." I suppose in a one-on-one learning situation having nose hair peeking out is mildly offensive, but did this Japanese student really need to get the Belgian in trouble?

I had a real blow-up with a student that first month in April 2003. I taught that day from a business English textbook called _Business Directions_ , which featured a lesson on "What would you say in English to avoid this uncomfortable situation?" For example, if you don't want to go drinking you could say, "I'll have to pass," or if you would like to stay home from work, "I have diarrhea" (A boss will never check to see if you actually have diarrhea.). One of the situations included going to a "Turkish bath," which my student had taken for propositioning something improper. She sent off a detailed complaint accusing me of talking about dirty things in class. My boss confronted me about the situation.

"Charles, were you sexually harassing Mrs. Watanabe?" "Bitch please. You _KNOW_ that question is on page 185 of the textbook. I promise you on a stack of Bibles I will not take these students to any Turkish baths."

"If something like this happens again, we might just have to reevaluate your working here."

Stuck in a crap relationship and a crap job, I felt my life was becoming a complete and utter...

## CHAPTER 13

## **_Kentastrophe_**

While visiting Japan to gather material for another article, Kate Drake, my friend at Time magazine, had said to me, "I totally picture you as one of those foreigners they put on TV here." I'd been envious of the foreigners on Japanese TV for a while, but didn't particularly fancy myself the TV-ready type. I have pale skin (I prefer the term melanin-challenged), am often overlooked in the gay bars, and am not particularly disciplined about what I eat: I don't consider myself fugly, but nobody has ever confused me with a young Robert Redford.

One day I was complaining about the horse shit I was dealing with at NOBA, and Kent told me, "You're funnier than those other foreigners on TV. You should be up there." Kent searched online and made up a list talent agencies that dealt with foreigners in Tokyo.

"I get the feeling you're going to be really popular," Kent said. I loved Kent the most during this era. It had been more than a year since he'd punched me, cheated on me or tried to prostitute himself using my PC. We would fall asleep together holding hands and he'd make coffee for me in the morning. "Is this the face of a star?" he joked with me some mornings. Kent did shine a light on a path that would bring me excitement and glory as well as disillusionment and suffering.

For foreigners taking part in Japanese showbiz, you generally want to plant as many seeds as you can. You can register for as many agencies as you want when you first start out, so I signed up with eight of them. Of course if you become a regular cast member in a major TV show, you will usually need to sign exclusively with the agency that got you the job.

Using just a Polaroid and not even a real head-shot, I got sent on my first audition. I went to a production company near Inter FM's old studio in Tamachi, and I was incredibly nervous since the agent had said, "Wear a tight shirt." I went in wearing a silky, red and white Katharine Hamnett number that accented my recent attempts to get back in shape. I recited some lines with a couple other Americans, and a week or so later the casting office called to give me the news. I had been cast in a huge commercial campaign for a lottery featuring Kinashi, a famous comedian. Those years in _Annie_ and playing the Barrister of Munchkinland had finally paid off.

This commercial was by no means glamorous, though. I wore a tight yellow bodysuit, got in a public bath, and then had to slap my ass with a towel. You know, the first things you do when you play the lottery.

Posters with my face, Kinashi, and the tight yellow body suit went up in every train of Tokyo. I used money from this commercial to pay for a new apartment in Tokyo's version of the East Village, Koenji. Since Kent needed to find a job (yet again), we made a deal that I would pay the first three months rent myself while he looked for a job.

"Kent, this is like the fourth job you've quit in a year. First the English school, then the real estate agency, then the temp service and now you quit a comic book shop? How hard could it be to stand behind a register and ring up used editions of 'Dragonball Z'? Were your hands tired? Did you actually have to _do_ something?"

"Someone kept eating my ham sandwich in the company refrigerator."

"Then buy tacos or a rice ball. You don't fucking quit your job. This is really it, I'll pay for the first few months or so, but you need to pull your weight in the future."

I tried to encourage him, since he had gotten me on TV. I tried to be big about it and buy him little tokens of appreciation such as a designer wallet, watch and other things. I remained hopeful that he'd find new work, because as good as he was at quitting jobs, he had even more of a knack for getting them quickly. He was charming and attractive and knew how to pucker just right when he needed to kiss ass in a job interview. In less than ten days, he had a new job at a sports gym in the neighborhood. Finally, things seemed to be going well, and we furnished our little space cutely with the finest of IKEA and Tokyu Hands.

A friend of mine was visiting from New York, and it had been years since I had seen her, so I told Kent that we might be out all night. After a long day of wiping down bench presses and folding towels, I could tell that Kent was beat. He told me he just wanted to stay in rather than come out with us.

I went to meet my friend, who turned out to have jet lag, and we actually decided to call it a night after a couple beers so we could have energy for the Imperial Palace and Great Buddha the next day. I wanted to go home and see Kent, too. He'd looked so tired, and he really had been working hard at his new job as a counter boy at the gym.

When I got back, I opened the door and saw that all the lights were off. Strangely, there was an unknown pair of gray Vans in the foyer. "Chotto matte, chotto matte" (Wait a second, wait a second) Kent said. Did Kent have someone over? I heard some shuffling.

Thus we began an era that I would come to call the "Kentastrophe."

Thankfully, they were not _in flagrante_. The offending Japanese man scurried out the door. He was tall, slim and UGLY! Had Kent broken my heart for an ugly hookup? I examined my PC's history using Internet Explorer.... And sure enough, Kent had been chatting on a S&M site called Bondage Buddies.

Kent and I got into a throw-down verbal battle.

"You are so goddamn dirty! You brought some guy here to the apartment I just rented for us? And you found him on my computer? And my friend from New York is going to stay with us tomorrow. You want her to sleep on those sheets after you fucked some stranger on them?"

"We hadn't fucked yet, I only just touched his dick." As if this improved on the situation somehow.

"You know, I'm happy in a way, because now I don't have to feel bad about dumping you."

No one got punched, and no dishes got broken.

This gave me an easy out for a relationship that I'd my doubts about to begin with. Anytime I would try to have a serious talk about splitting up, Kent would come crawling back, profess his love to me and say how much he needed me and wanted me as his life partner. I believed him and that's why I had overlooked the past peccadilloes and just paid for the apartment, so we could make a happy home together.

Now he had physically abused me, couldn't hold a job (he would quit the sports gym that week as well) and used my computer to cheat on me in my own house. Just who needed whom and for what?

I went out, had a cup of coffee at a nearby McDonald's, and wrote Kentaro a letter telling him that I loved him, but that we needed to end things. I wish I could have been one of those gays that are really cavalier about sex. Some gays would've caught their boyfriend with a guy from Bondage Buddies and joined right in with them. I needed someone a little less adventurous, and he needed someone more in tune with his Whore of Babylon morality. It was time for the Kentastrophe to hit the road.

And wouldn't you know? The cheating, unemployed lowlife was also a mama's boy. He left and went crying all the way back to his mother's outside Osaka. Intermittently emailing, he spoke of coming back to Tokyo and getting back together once things had cooled down. I firmly replied that he was a triple threat, and not the J.Lo type that is singer/actress/perfumerator. I wrote in the email that Kent was a triple threat of abuser/deadbeat/ philanderer. And then I pushed "send" and thought I'd just sent Kent out of my life for good. I needed to get out of this. I needed to assert my right to be happy.

The next week I got a text message from Kent's sister asking what had happened. So I told her: I'd caught him cheating and I'd tossed him out. End of story. She said he had been acting funny since he had come back. "He kept saying over and over, 'I've done something terrible, I've done something terrible to Charles.'" Then, apparently, after he'd learned that I wanted no more to do with him, he'd consumed some quantity of pills and had been carried off to the hospital. How deadly a combination of pills he took I never found out. Did he down two bottles of barbiturates washed down with vodka or seven aspirin and a Gatorade? Anyway, he had my attention again. He had wormed his way back into my life.

Now, catching your partner cheating on you is bad enough, but I was even less prepared to deal with a suicide attempt. I felt like sirens were going off in a Star Trek ship after the Romulans had just unloaded a bunch of photon torpedoes. Counselor Troi's hair is disheveled from falling to the floor of the bridge, and the trilithium crystals are about to explode. I was a total mess. For the next few months I officially came off the proverbial rocker. I had paranoid delusions. I thought gangsters were after me. Friends and family received hysterical emails of my plight.

I spent the next month drinking. That was all I could think to do, and cans upon cans of Asahi Super Dry stacked up into a silver Kilimanjaro in our apartment. I took hours-long baths. Kent, who'd been released from the hospital, would text and chat with me online. "You're all I want. I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you."

And then, in a weak moment, I allowed Kent to come back. Not only that, I got a career-making phone call. On November 11, I was to appear on a segment of Japan's premier live daytime television show "It's Okay to Laugh!" ( _Kazuyoshi Morita Hour Waratte Ii Tomo!_ ). I'd always thought exposure on this show might be akin to going on "Late Show with David Letterman." In the drunken haze I was living in, I thought about really shaking things up. I needed to grab everyone's attention!

I went on "It's Okay," still half drunk from the night before, and I made a ruckus throwing out every gay reference I could to a shocked live daytime audience. The segment, hosted by boy band member Masahiro Nakai, asked a group of English teachers what problems we had teaching English. I said (very honestly), "These girls keep coming on to me, and these hoochies need to get a clue."

This is true, and as evident as my gayness might be to the Western eye, sometimes this was just was not the case in Japan. Many old fashioned Japanese people think "gay" and they imagine "drag queen" or "transsexual" as in men who dress as or possess the spirit of a woman. Female students often leaned in seductively during class, clothes tricked out. "Sensei what does this mean?" they asked me. They left their phone numbers while unwittingly casting pearls before swine — or digits before homos as it were.

The TV show commentators followed up with, "Who is your type?"

"I like [martial artist] Cane Kosugi. He can attack me anytime!!"

"But what happens if a guy comes on to you while you teach English?"

"I might take a look, but I have a husband myself!" I deadpanned.

I remember coming home to Kent, and our hugging. "My mother was watching in Osaka," he said. "She thinks you've lost your mind."

I can barely look at the video of the "It's Okay" tape today, as I can see the crazy in my eyes. But I realized something important that day. I'd always felt quite insecure about my looks, especially in the gay community where "fit and gorgeous" are fairly common descriptors. In junior high no one wanted to "go out" with me. All my boyfriends had cheated on me. But there, on the TV screen, was an attractive man. Odd as it may sound, in real life I may look common, but on TV I looked marvelous.

I don't have the face angles of Cindy Crawford or Phoebe Price, but just the joy in my heart from being able to be on such a public venue set me apart — me the nerd, the misfit, the Barrister of Munchkinland.

The "It's Okay" adventure boosted my notoriety, and Kent and I tried to take those broken wings and make them fly again. Instead, our broken wings just got battered and fried like so much Popeye's Chicken.

We argued. We shouted. Finally, we exploded.

"Don't you want to climb the mountain of life together? Don't you want to reach that peak with me?" Kent pleaded.

Climbing the mountain of life with Kent, I had a feeling he might push me off a precipice or kick me into a valley before we got anywhere near any peak. "If I stay with this man, I will never have that happy life I have dreamt of," I thought to myself.

"NO!" I shouted. "Sayonara, Kent," I said as I grabbed my black Gaultier business bag and flounced out the door to work.

I came home from NOBA that day to a pile of his things on the floor with the cell phone I'd bought him cracked and smashed into two pieces in the living room.

"Fuck! I just paid for that, too!" I said to myself. The apartment, being too expensive to afford on my own anymore, became deathly quiet and scary. Then, as if the year couldn't get any more ridiculous, someone who had seen me on TV started stalking me. I walked along Yasukuni Road in Shinjuku talking on my phone to my talent agent and across the street I heard someone grunting, "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" I thought it was just the regular Tokyo crazies, but I looked across the street to see some wild-eyed middle-aged man in a cheap black suit staring at me.

"Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" he grunted like a gorilla and looked directly at me with deranged eyes. As I'd witnessed this man several stations away from home, I didn't think much of the encounter. But then, alone in my Koenji apartment one night, I got the eerie feeling I was being watched. I couldn't sleep, and drifting in and out of consciousness, delirious, I heard the bamboo plants that grew alongside our second story apartment shake and hit the window. Then I heard the terrifying grunts again "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" I called the police, and they cased the area to no avail.

I packed some belongings, and the next day after forty sleepless hours, I trekked over to Sakura House, run by another company specializing in accommodations for foreigners. This time I was rolling a solitary suitcase behind me in a cold December downpour. If there were a VH1 countdown of the saddest moments of my life, this day would come in at number one. I took my sole suitcase to a closet-sized room near Harajuku in one of the Sakura House's foreigners-only dormitories. My socks were wet, and I was alone and had only enough money to carry my possessions suitcase by suitcase on the train, rather than hiring a moving company. But at least I had escaped.

Yolanda, a diva friend I had become close with at NOBA, helped me carry the last of my belongings and wiped my tears as I moved into Sakura House. Even the VP of NOBA came to console me. He took me to Starbucks and listened to my problems over a caramel macchiato.

"I had a gay friend in San Francisco once who committed suicide, and I never got to hear what he had to say," he consoled me. "That's why I'm here for you now."

A NOBA manager commanded my friend Yolanda to watch over me, "You're tight with Charles, right?" they asked her. "Make sure he's OK." Kentaro never came up with the thousands of dollars of rent and utilities money he owed me. By that point I considered it what Dear Abby calls "tuition in the school of life." With no money, a broken heart and a little more wisdom I moved on.

## CHAPTER 14

## **_Foxxy Lady_**

Pain? Anger? Betrayal? Poverty? I'd had it with tough times and was ready for happiness. I'd fallen in and out of love with pop music, but 2004 seemed to yield many pop songs I could groove to: OutKast's "Hey Ya!," Britney's "Toxic" and Chingy's "One Call Away" made me want to dance my Mojo back.

An Australian hostess who lived across the hall would come knocking on my door past midnight. "Bitch, the party is just getting started," she'd slur as she spilled champagne onto her purple sequin dress.

We would boogie to Ciara's "Goodies" while dishing about which of the Sakura House studs we wanted to snog. Somewhere else in the world, John Kerry assured us he could beat Bush, and Japan's well-coifed Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, charmed Japan with his progressive policies and off-the-cuff manner. In addition to feeling sad about the dismal events in New York and the Middle East, I'd just struggled through graduate school, a failed company, and a messy break-up to end all messy break-ups. I wanted happy days again, and looked for them at Sakura House near Harajuku, where I now felt I belonged. I liked the house's cultural makeup, which in-cluded French, Fijian-British, Korean and Alaskan-Goth.

I'd transferred to the NOBA Learning Studio near Harajuku, which had greatly lifted my spirits. Harajuku area, as you can probably guess, had many fashion-forward _etudiants_. In Harajuku it's easy to get wrapped up in café talk and shopping, so students often canceled their lessons — in which case we teachers still got paid but were left free to read HuffPo on the web or flip through the latest _Heat_ magazine. The students, when they did show up, were generally enjoyable and a pleasure to teach. Though teaching at NOBA occasionally made me want to drill holes in my skull, the change of scenery was superb.

Screw being a victim! I needed love and romance. I put up an online personal and began dating three guys at once: a florist, an aerobics instructor and an airline worker. Dating and love were an adventure again. It was just a couple months after the whole Kentastrophe, and even though I was still a bit unhinged and my screws were quite loose, I felt like a new man.

I attended a going-away party for a friend who was moving back to New York City. This led to our drinking the night away at the Pink Cow, an artsy ex-pat restaurant and event space in Roppongi (formerly it was in Shibuya). The Cow has a plush interior with a gallery of local artists on the walls, and decorative bovines peer out at you from various corners. A California babe, Traci, ran the joint with her Japanese business partner, Naoya, and they served up California wine and American-size burritos: hard to come by in Tokyo. We got to chatting, and I happened to tell her about my history of dating the fabulous Jasmine Poontime back in Kansas City.

"That's great!" Traci said, "You need to do that here. I have always wanted to do a drag night!" I'd never before considered a future as a drag queen, but I definitely lusted to bring back the costumes, the glitter eye shadow and the wildness of my raver days. With all the trauma of graduate school, world events and shitty boyfriends, I was ready to bring back the glamour! Bring back the fierceness! Foxxy Lady had arrived!

I had originally considered the drag name "Vivienne Foxx," but since there already was a famous drag queen named "Vivienne Sato" in Tokyo, I picked the drag name "Natasha." Natasha sounded foreign and just a little bit dangerous. Thinking back on it now, I should have curtailed my partying around this time, but I had my teaching and translation gigs going and work as a TV personality coming in steadily. I wanted more! Something closer to my drama roots, something comical and interactive.

I never intended to become a woman; I just wanted to dress up and act like a total diva. Natasha — my id, my alter ego and my celebrity doppelgänger — needed to be let out like a 10-inch Puerto Rican schlong needs to be let out of jockey shorts.

My Aussie hostess friend helped me pick out exquisite Lucite heels with purple glitter on them, a gorgeous auburn wig from Tokyu Hands, panties three-sizes too small to tuck my manhood properly and I was set to go. I spent hours planning out my numbers — from Whitney Houston's "I'm Your Baby Tonight" to Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted Snake." I envisioned Natasha Foxx to be a rock n' roll bimbo from the '80s. The girls from Sakura House helped me pick out the trampiest shades of lip liner and eye shadow for my debut.

Looking back, my numbers shuffling across stage in those 6- inch heels were more laughable than memorable, but I packed the Pink Cow once a month in the summer of 2004. The first party, it happened to fall at the same time my younger sister was visiting Japan on holiday. We had somehow managed to keep Natasha's debut a secret from my younger sister, despite the fact purple glitter from my Lucite heels was so scattered about the Sakura House common area. The glitter got into people's eggs and miso soup. I practiced my step ball change and chassè in my room for hours everyday, and my sister of course noticed the bumping noises coming from my room.

"Oh, Charles is just tap dancing!" they said. The other Sakura House residents helped me to successfully cover-up my practicing.

I told my sister we were throwing a big party for her. Some of the girls from the house took my sister to meet us there, while I in full drag rode in a separate cab to the Pink Cow. Apparently she cottoned on when she arrived at the party and I wasn't there yet. "We're waiting for the entertainment? Oh... Charles is the entertainment!"

I was ridiculously nervous backstage when Traci, the Pink Cow owner, came back to give me a bottle of California red to calm my nerves. "Oh, just a glass," I thought. Then I had another glass. And another. My entrance music started playing, and I came out to a roaring crowd. I waved out to everyone, and then fell FACE FIRST down the stairs to the stage! Press-on nails ricocheted, my wig went askew, but I got up and performed "I'm Your Baby Tonight." It might has well have been, "I'm Your Loser Tonight."

I ran backstage for emergency altering and nail affixing then got right back out there. I pulled people up on stage, dirty danced the straight guys in attendance and behaved like an insane crack whore. But honey, I was FIERCE! And I've got pictures to prove it.

After 2004, I didn't have time to do Natasha Foxx much, but I revived her for Halloween festivities every year. On the final Halloween that I did Natasha Foxx in 2006, my big closing number was ABBA's "The Winner Takes it All." I ended my drag career as I started it, flat on my ass. I had been wearing those same tired Lucite heels all that time, and after all the spinning, kicking and twirling, those bitches finally gave out on me. The exquisite Lucite came completely unhinged and I fell to the ground. I mouthed the words to, "The Winner Takes it All" with a solitary high heel in hand as the song reached its big climax. You can be flat on your ass but still be a winner.

I got particularly sloshed that night, and I hobbled over to Shibuya's über-stylish La Fabrique club. I stumbled down the stairs. Visibly too drunk to enter, the buff Japanese doorman insisted, "Oh you're not going in tonight."

"I HAVE to go in! Don't you know who I am!? I am A BIG STARRRRR!" Then I spit on the doorman. They kicked me and punched me, sending the contents of my purse spilling across the Shibuya roads. I galloped away as fast as I could, being drunk and walking in one heel. Playing my alter-ego Natasha Foxx, I learned that I, by far, had the best legs in my family. Also, during a particularly intense meditation session, Buddha himself emerged on a hot-pink lotus before my eyes. While noticing Buddha's rock hard pecs and his happy trail leading down to Nirvana, I stuck my thumb up his Chakra and the Enlightened One told me, **"Thou shalt not spit on the doorman."** Sadly, this was the final Natasha Foxx Halloween Extravaganza, but you never know, the Foxxy avenger might return.

## CHAPTER 15

## **_Kong Attacks Tokyo_**

A radio director friend from my old Inter FM morning show days called me up. "Charles, can you come to Tokyo FM this week?" I'd helped out a bit during graduate school, but it had been years since I had been there. I put my shiny silver vest on under my prized Hamnett suit and took the Metro down to Hanzomon, right next to the Imperial Palace. I swung open the door to a conference room and was a surprised to find a baker's dozen of Japanese men in somber black suits and a jovial Caucasian with bleached hair and an Aloha shirt. We made our introductions, and I minced over to the other cracker's side.

I thought to myself, "I wonder how this is going to work out?"

I signed on to be an assistant and translator for this radio legend making his move to Tokyo. The talent, DJ Kamasami Kong, had at one point an enviable trifecta of radio jobs flying him from Osaka to Hawaii to Taiwan every week. The sponsors for his Osaka show, which paid for him to live in the Osaka Ritz Carlton, had pulled out of his sponsorship deal, and Kong decided to make the move to a new market: Tokyo.

After decades in Asia, Kong spoke some Japanese, but needed someone there to translate the Japanese scripts into English and facilitate smooth communication between him and the director. The show was in English, because the Japanese like hearing English on the radio — most Japanese understand bits of the English and enjoy the American rock DJ atmosphere. A Japanese female assistant spoke in Japanese on the show so that important details regarding the guests, news and sponsors were not missed by the Japanese listeners. With Kong's name value and the pull of Japan's venerable Tokyo FM, Kong's show "Ride on Saturday" got interviews with some of the biggest names in music of today and yesterday. In the course of a year I translated into Japanese interviews with Swing Out Sister, Earth Wind and Fire, the Pussycat Dolls, Akon, Ne-Yo, Olivia Newton John and Bananarama.

Since this was a morning show, I once again got to feel the joy of waking up at 3 a.m. to make jet-fuel coffee and try not to pass out on the job. Tokyo FM rewards its early-waking employees with an astounding view of the sunrise over the Emperor's Palace, as our on- air studios are on the seventh floor of a building overlooking this spiritual epicenter of Japan.

From April 2005 to the end of March 2006, we did the "Ride on Saturday" show, and it was one of the most fulfilling jobs I had in Japanese show business. Record companies invited the "Ride on Saturday" staff to concerts — a highlight of the year being our trip to see one of James Brown's last performances. Brown belted his tunes with his "I Feel Good" panache, and his dancing was nothing short of remarkable for someone of his age.

Although we got nice perks, there was business to be done. Every week on "Ride on Saturday" featured "Mail Order," live advertisements we made with the "item-of-the-moment." These items included lotions, tongue-brushing aides, all-forms of toiletries and rose extract pills that would make your poo smell like flowers. One day we advertised a pack of grayish "germanium balls" to put in the bath to help deodorize and keep hair and skin soft.

"Chocolate?" I offered to Kong in the on-air studio. They looked almost like candy, and not knowing what it was he put it in his mouth then hastily spit it out.

Gagging, he said, "Did you almost just kill me!?" Maybe I had, but it was funny (sorry, Kong). The Germanium balls really did resemble chocolates, though.

Another time we got to interview one of the grand divas of the Japanese pop scene, Yuming Matsutoya. She's like the Japanese Cher — she's been on the scene for decades, mounts extravaganza theatrics and of course, like any long-running diva, has an enormous gay following.

I got to try out my interpreting chops this day, and had my best suit on to be ready. She came in, hair pulled back and wearing a skirt that showed off the sexiest pair of legs I'd ever seen on an elderly woman. She talked about her new music and told us about the Tempur-Pedic pillow she takes with her everywhere, even on tour. During one part of the interview, she discussed going to the fortuneteller, but dismissed omens, saying, "I only believe the good parts." Diva say what?

Being a gifted songwriter, Yuming possesses an enormous vocabulary, and she used some Japanese words I hadn't heard before, even after my hoity-toity Japanese translation course I took with Donald Keene at Columbia. I asked her to repeat one phrase, and Yuming gunned me down with eyes that said, "You dare ask ME to repeat?"

After the interview she haughtily joked, "Look at this guy in his suit, he could be a banker in those clothes!" The grand diva had not been amused by my performance, but I had done well enough to continue to translate and interpret dozens of celebrity interviews that year.

Other interviews included a talk with Japanese pop rock legend Tatsuro Yamashita and songwriter Sugar Shikao. Sugar Shikao had a funny moment in the interview when we discussed his songs, each one inspired by a different girlfriend. "Here we go... this song is about yet another girl," I explained to Kong in English.

Sugar got the gist of what I was saying and scolded me, "Don't say it like THAT!"

We conducted one of our first interviews with British pop veterans Swing Out Sister, a group that still gets fêted as legends when they come to Tokyo. In the US, they're largely remembered for their 1986 hit "Breakout." The willowy, Corinne Drewery fronts the band, and she was our first major interview with a Western act. In interviews with the non-Japanese, I would generally accompany Kong to a hotel or record company office and standby while Kong did the interview. After the interview, Kong would edit the sound files on Audacity and send it piecemeal to me to write out a rough translation in Japanese. After which the director would edit my Japanese into "broadcast-ready" Japanese to be read on the air by a female assistant.

Swing Out Sister had been to Japan over thirty times, and their melodic hit songs, along with their strong live performances, had endeared them to the Japanese public.

We played their largest hit last on Kong's show, and Corinne introduced it in that Spring 2005 broadcast: "This is the song that started our career...it's called 'Breakout' and you're listening to it on Tokyo FM."

Just before New Year's Eve of December 2005, the remaining members of Bananarama, Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward, came in to promote their new album, _Bananarama Drama_ (after various member changes, the group functions as a duo now). The women were in the party mood already, and one had apparently put back some beer before the interview. The ladies were hilarious and sharp, so when Kong made the American mistake of attempting a British accent in front of British people they howled, "You sound like you're from Belfast (Northern Ireland)!"

Bananarama had taken time off after their successful run in the '80s but were back on the scene to joust with the pop tarts of the '00s. Being New Year's, when asked their resolutions they said they had sworn off resolutions.

"Every year it's the same," Keren said. "Get more exercise, quit smoking, quit drinking, I don't keep them at all." When asked their New Year's message to the Japanese public, they said, "You should buy our album."

In addition to the hit makers of yesteryear, we did get our share of up-and-coming artists, several who were just starting their careers as global stars. I met Akon, fresh on the heels of his "Mister Lonely" hit, in the offices of Universal. He was wearing a T-Shirt which said "Tokyo" in Japanese characters and sported an enormous, newly acquired, bling necklace: a platinum and diamond "convict chain." The now wealthy Akon seemed eager to spend his cash, talking about how much he loved the shopping in Tokyo and that some of the spicy foods reminded him of the cuisine of his home country, Senegal. With all his success was Akon still "Mr. Lonely?" "Um, yeah, that's what the song says," Akon pouted. We joked that his lonely days were over, and he recommended the Japanese try some Senegalese Thebouidienne (a dish of fish on red rice). We shook hands and our time with the emerging superstar was up.

In contrast to Akon's confident swagger, Ne-Yo seemed more introspective. We came into the Universal offices again to see that Ne-Yo had doodled some cartoons all over the whiteboards while waiting. Ne-Yo had just made a record with the song "Let Me Love You" by Mario, the most played song in American radio history — until Mariah Carey usurped this title with "We Belong Together."

Ne-Yo had just released his album and expressed his shock at his recent lifestyle change. He had gone from "begging and pleading" for people to listen to his music to the Golden Boy of R&B poetics. "Currently, I'm about to work with Beyoncé on her new album," he boasted about his forthcoming venture that would result in the hit "Irreplaceable." He talked about his creativity coming from being "a pent-up very angry kid" — which led his mother to put the pen and paper in front of him and tell him to "write it down." Ne-Yo mentioned he loved the energy of Japan, the real "get-up-and-go" that hectic Tokyoites have that he said helped him creatively — a total contrast to laid-back California where he lived. Ne-Yo taught me a lesson that serves as a great outlet to this day: **In times of trouble, thou shalt write it down.**

My favorite portion of the Ne-Yo interview was his descrip-tion of the inspiration behind the song "When You're Mad," a song about a woman he once loved.

"(She was) one of the most beautiful women ever, that when I look back now I think, wow! How did I manage to be with her?" The R&B chanteur said in our February 2006 interview. "She had this face that she would make whenever she was mad at me that was literally just the most sexiest thing I had ever seen in life. I actually remember doing little small stuff to make her upset at me so she would make this face."

Post Ne-Yo, the Pussycat Dolls were dripping with glamour. Kong hadn't heard of them at the time and deferred to me when the record company asked if he wanted to interview them.

"Should I do the Pussycat Dolls? Who are they?" he asked me.

"KONG! If you do not interview the Pussycat Dolls, I will never talk to you again!" After seeing their picture, Kong was more than happy to do their interview.

Kong had each Doll introduce the girl next to her, which we hoped would lead to some throw down fights and hair pulling. Sadly the Dolls were too professional to say anything leading to a catfight.

"Next to me is Jessica. She is from Miami and seduces you with her eyes up on stage."

"Next to me is Nicole. She is from Hawaii but grew up in Kentucky. She has a real powerhouse voice and is good at hitting those high notes."

Hardly the interview of the century but still fun. We asked about the concept of the Pussycat Dolls and they talked about the "girl empowerment." Apparently thrusting about on stage half-naked makes one feel power. "There's a pussycat doll inside every woman," one of the girls asserted.

Alongside these newcomers we got to get up close and personal with some true legends. From a philosophical Yoko Ono from a December 2005 press conference interview:

"I wanted to sing about the message of peace, and the message in my songs is the same as in John's. I'm singing about the emptiness of a world when violence is often the way people solve things. After that 'Imagine' a world with peace, I am able to sing with everyone. I thought that would be best."

Verdine White from Earth, Wind and Fire (on their high energy performances after thirty-five years):

"I get it from these guys [points to other members]. We have fans from long ago and new fans. I am happy that we are able to perform. I am still happy we have a lot of fans – we have a lot of new fans, a lot of older fans. I'm always excited about going out there to perform. I try to give my all every night, and I have much fun doing that" (January 27, 2006).

Christopher Cross (on producing his daughter Madison's music):

"Madison is now thirteen and making a record. It is about her friend who passed away (from muscular dystrophy)...You really feel joy in raising a child by getting to share your life's worth of experiences with a child. You forget about the pain of changing diapers and worrying about what time they'll come home at night as teenagers and feel good in the studio. This is a bond that goes beyond father and daughter, something that we can do together as artists" (February 2006).

Possibly the greatest disappointment we had, other than the show ending, was our fumbled attempt at getting an interview with Stevie Wonder. Being the consummate showman, at the press conference at a posh hotel in Ebisu, Stevie made up impromptu jingles for each TV and radio station in attendance, and he was generally jovial. The marketing crew behind Stevie did not want to allow any radio interviews and had declined them all.

Kong, being well connected and crafty, happened to know Stevie's brother who often accompanied Stevie. Kong spent an afternoon running in and out of hotel rooms, dodging the record company goons, and Kong had triumphantly gotten some time with Mr. Wonder. I came in and got to meet the smiling Stevie.

"How you doin'?" Stevie shook my hand while his platoon-like entourage of twenty or more watched me with eagle eyes. Well Kong got his interview, no doubt locked away in a safe somewhere, and the Universal people called me into an adjoining room, telling me that Universal would sue Tokyo FM if we broadcast this interview. Sadly, the Tokyo FM people backed down, and Kong's once in a lifetime interview remains locked away. "Hi this is Stevie Wonder with Kamasami Kong, on Tokyo FM, YEAH!" was all the Tokyo FM airwaves ever got to play.

We made another notable misstep on "Ride on Saturday." Sean Paul, still hot from his hit single and duet with Beyoncé, called us one day from a car with his entourage. His cell phone had weak international connection and we could barely hear. Sean Paul rapped through crackles and pops on the phone, and unfortunately most of the short talk was of too poor quality for broadcast. Mr. Paul rapped on as Kong and I stifled our laughter at one of the world's biggest stars (at the time) rapping in vain into a cell phone. As we only had a couple minutes and could not retake the interview. The sound files got tossed into the garbage.

Though most of the musicians were forthcoming and amicable, one diva-esque barb remains stuck in my mind. Kong interviewed Kenny G, and in a story that would be relayed to me later, Mr. G searched around for something to wear after doing an appearance on TV. Kong, having lived in Hawaii for years, had a uniform: shorts, aloha shirts and (Lord, save us) Crocs. Kenny G said, "Oh, what should I wear?" then eyeing Kong up and down snorted, "Why am I asking YOU!?"

By far my favorite interview came with Australian rock royalty Olivia Newton-John. We saw her concert, and the bubbly Newton- John pulled out her classics: some _Grease_ , a stripped down "Physical." Her singing voice was in top form, especially for a woman who had recently battled and survived breast cancer. In the hotel room interview, she discussed how she had no problems with being known as " _Grease_ Star Olivia Newton-John," noting that fans from three generations would attend her shows: parents and grand- parents, who saw _Grease_ when it first came out, and seven-year olds who had just discovered the film.

Kong mentioned that after _The Sound of Music_ , _Grease_ is the best selling musical film of all time, to which Olivia replied, "Not bad for an Aussie Sheila" ("Aussie Sheila" being slang for "Australian girl") (March 9, 2006). She complimented Japan's culture saying that every time she comes, "It has always been peaceful and clean. It always blows me away there can be so many people and it can still be so quiet. No one's honking their horn, and people aren't shouting. I love it!" She introduced her old hits, and a song that her daughter Chloe had written for their CD promoting breast cancer awareness.

We did a rundown of her biggest hits where Olivia Newton-John introduced each song:

_The One that I Want_ — "You're the 'One that I Want' is of course the climax of the movie _Grease_ , and John Ferrer, my Aussie friend, wrote that song for us. He wrote it in one night because he was told by the producers they needed the song by the morning, and he stayed up all night and wrote it in like an hour. One of those messages from above or something. It's a classic, and I've performed it with many men around the world, and it's always fun."

_Hopelessly Devoted to You_ — "That's another John Farrer song. Beautiful, beautiful song, I love it. I loved it, because he wrote it in the theme of a fifties song, but it's still got a mod-ern feel."

_Magic_ — "Is another John Farrer song that I roller-skated to in the movie _Xanadu_ , and it is one of those songs that musicians come up to me and say, you know that song is a real classic as far as sound recording and sound was concerned, as well as being a great song. It kind of set the standard for sound in records, and it was a new sound for a pop single at that time."

_Xanadu_ — "Xanadu was written by Kent Glenn of E.L.O., and he produced it, and I got to work with him, and it's just a great song."

_Physical_ — "It's kind of interesting, because I was very afraid of this song. I recorded this song, and I called my manager, and said, 'Please take this song off the radio, I'm too scared. I'm too scared that it's too much. I've gone too far,' and he said, 'It's too late, it's gone to radio,' and it was one of the biggest records in my whole career. It was ten weeks at number one in America. I'm very proud of the fact that it was banned now; at the time I was very nervous. But when I listen to it now, it sounds kind of like a lullaby compared to everything on the radio now...it's pretty mellow in comparison to what we hear now."

After we interviewed Olivia, we received word that the show would wrap after March of 2006 (radio and TV in Japan generally start new seasons in April). After such a memorable year, we were devastated the show would go off the air. Since it was such a monumental year, it was heart-wrenching to say goodbye to the incredible staff and of course to Kong himself, a man whose heart was just as great as his talent.

A few weeks passed, when out of the blue I suddenly received a message via MySpace that jolted me from media activities all together. It came from my old Club Piranha friend Arwen Angel in Kansas City.

"Hey there!" she wrote. "I wish I was writing with better news, but I wanted to be sure you were aware that César is in the ICU at St. Luke's Hospital." She went on to tell me he was in a medically- induced coma.

I let the news sink in, lit some candles and sent some messages via MySpace to cheer him up.

"Don't worry, César. I might be able to visit the US later this year, when I hope we will be having a laugh and going to beer bust like old times."

After I sent the message, I had a look at his page and saw that the people writing were not writing "get well" messages, but rather R.I.P. messages.

My high school comrade, César, passed away just a few weeks before his thirtieth birthday. In the years we were apart, César had changed a great deal. In fact, he had made his spiritual peace and taken to reading Psalms from the Bible. He quit drinking, smoking dope and taking drugs, and from what I understand, he had at long last seemed to defeat the demons that plagued him and found solace in spirituality.

Out of respect to César and his family, I will refrain from mentioning the details of his sickness and death and instead explain my own feeling of loss over this beloved friend.

César was the first friend I had who was openly gay (or bisexual), and his approach to living life at the fastest possible speed was fun. When a favorite of our songs came on — he really loved "Pictures of You" by the Cure — he could sing it better than Robert Smith. When César wanted to put on make-up he didn't just do make-up, he could make art on your face.

I really envied these talents that came so easily to him. He had so much going for him, and his death gave me a great sense of loss. Personally, I wish we'd all pushed him to be more health-conscious. We all enjoyed the party with him, but did we look out for him enough once the partying was over? He was mourned by a great number of friends and relatives who all loved him so much. In a way he had a very good life, since he experienced a lot of joy and love. But we would have done anything to hear his mischievous laughter once more.

## CHAPTER 16

## **_The Tale of the Grumpy Samaritan_**

Despite the excitement of my career, my personal life had sunk to an abysmal low. Following the Kong Show I had a rather nice run of appearances on TV and radio. Forget the adage "Rich and Famous." Usually the way it happens is "Famous with a Shitload of Bills to Pay." I loved being on TV, but financially my life was going down the drain. I began charging my rent on my credit card and my Japanese taxes piled up. I couldn't afford to go out or to do anything. Living on a few hundred dollars per month, I began falling into a deep depression. Seriously I could have made more money working the swing shift at Taco Bell than I was on Japanese TV and radio. I reached a point where the "rut" I was in started to feel like a grave.

About the only friends I saw were my comrades Yolanda, a writer, and Azumi, a model. I had met Azumi in 2006 on the set of some TV shows, and she was truly a femme fatale. Even though she was Japanese, she had an incredible hourglass figure – she had a body of Jessica Rabbit in proportions that simply entranced her onlookers. She was so pretty that she often dressed down in jeans and a baseball cap. By dressing down she could get men to focus on the smart things she had to say. Otherwise, with "the goods" right there in the store window, men simply could not keep themselves focused.

She spoke near perfect English from having lived in London during her teen years. Azumi and I hung out off and on, knew many of the same people, and had a similar love of bitchy gossip and irreverent humor. I envied Azumi's power over men. Sports stars, producers and real estate moguls all chased after her. Directors would personally call Azumi and power players were at her beck and call. Of course I was insanely jealous of such attention by these amazing suitors, as the only man I might hook up with on a TV set might be the gaffer or maybe the guy catering donuts if I were lucky. She knew of my financial plight and kept encouraging me to move in with her and her boyfriend. I refused for months, but near the end of 2007 it seemed like doing this was my only option, now that almost all of my cash sources had dried up. I couldn't afford the apartment I was living in anymore.

Even though Miss Azumi had many suitors, she did in fact have a live-in boyfriend, and it actually was his place. They had an extra room, and I could help split the rent. It would just be short term, right? I could get back on my feet, live in a nice apartment and have fun with their dog. It didn't seem like an idea of the disastrous sort. But probably the only more disastrous ideas in history might have been Napoleon's march on Russia, Mariah Carey's _Glitter_ and, of course, my previous decision to live with my ex-boyfriend, the Kentastrophe.

Enter Azumi's paramour, Dwayne, who happened to be from Wichita, Kansas. He got a degree in computer engineering which he put to use designing video games for Konami. He had met Azumi during his student days. I always suspected Dwayne must have been incredibly well-hung or have a homing missile for a girl's G-spot, as I could never figure out why a bombshell like Azumi would go out with Dweeby Dwayne.

Of course Azumi assumed that with Dwayne and I both being from Kansas we would bond, but of course Wichita and Johnson County where I grew up were worlds apart. Despite my own humble upbringing, Prairie Village situates in Johnson County, one of the wealthiest places in the USA. Some areas have Old Money and are painfully bourgeoisie, so Johnson County does have a reputation for snobbery. To people from Prairie Village the denizens of Wichita look like the redneck relatives of the people in "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo." And as much as I wish I had the self-esteem of Honey Boo Boo, mixing Johnson County with Wichita can be like pouring exquisitely fine olive oil in a can full of Red Bull. This was a combination that was never going to work.

When Azumi first introduced Dwayne to me at a gyoza dumpling shop, she squealed, "You guys are both from Kansas, you both should have a lot in common."

All the while, I just thought to myself, "In common with Wichita? Bitch please, I'm from Johnson County." Though this might sound exceedingly arrogant on my part, this scenario is common enough to have spawned a group on Facebook.

I kept these hubris-filled thoughts to myself. Dwayne seemed nice enough even if his Old Navy khakis, white fratboy ballcaps and chewing tobacco habit made me bristle with indignation. I could get past these issues, but the fact that Dwayne was kind of a homophobic asshole kept our friendship from ever gelling. We weren't going to become BFFs — more like UFFs "Un-Friends Forever."

Dwayne and Azumi's relationship seemed to be going downhill, and by the time I moved in with them they acted more like a brother and sister than lovers. Also, Dwayne har-bored anxiety that the girl he once loved was moving on to bigger and better things. It must have been painful for Dwayne, a simple video game designer, to have a girlfriend who was being pursued by rich men and heavy- hitters. I suspected Azumi's relationships with her wealthy suitors were more than just platonic, and poor Dwayne just looked more and more like a big chump. I would have felt sorry for him if he wasn't such a jerk.

At any rate, the very first night I met Dwayne at a gyoza eatery, the shop only played hits of the Beatles on the audio system. Azumi had gone outside to field a phone call from a "work associate" while Dwayne and I listened to "A Hard Day's Night" awkwardly. His eyes reflected the rage of a man wishing to maintain his dignity, and having Azumi's down-and-out gay friend living with them surely compounded his confused mental state and made me a convenient scapegoat. I had been staying over at their house only a couple of days when I realized that I had just taken a big dive into a pile of dog excrement.

Dwayne's biggest problem was that he was still living in the past. The freshness date on their union had passed, and now their relationship was like a moldy papaya stinking up the refrigerator. In his mind, she was still the hot filly studying English literature at university, and he was still the cool dude making pseudo-intellectual chatter with his buddies, a group of similarly maturity-impaired straight males. They made a club that called themselves "The Stealth Posse" which was basically a giant douche convention.

Dwayne and Azumi also got off on PDA: public displays of arguing. At home, in restaurants, at the station, in cafes, they bitched and snapped at each other most hours of the day — especially if there was audience to watch. And of course, their incessant banter had all the wit of "Archie" comics.

"What the hell are you talking about," Dwayne would say.

"What's wrong with what I'm doing?"

"That's idiotic," Dwayne would follow.

And so they would fuss at one another exactly like this. Sixteen. Times. Per. Day. Then sometimes Dwayne would scream and nearly become violent.

"Don't fucking piss me off," he randomly yelled at Azumi when I had asked him help me plug in Internet. Was the Wi-Fi wireless system making him angry? LAN cables sparking a furor? They were playing out roles better fit for teenagers named Jughead and Veronica.

"Yolanda, I'm living in a madhouse." Yolanda was again my rock during this. Yolanda lived within walking distance from me and in order to get me through the Christmas season, she would invite me over and buy me cookies at the Starbucks closest to Harajuku Station. In more dire times she would lend me cash. I would go visit Yolanda and we would laugh at the Dwayne's grumpiness. In fact, we dubbed Dwayne "Grumpelstiltskin" (merging "Grumpy" and "Rumpelstiltskin").

The situation was like a Molotov cocktail; only a match needed to be lit. The ugliest dog in the universe, Bandit, would light the match.

When I first walked into the apartment, I was sure I would love Bandit.

"He is one of those Schnauzers! We got him at the pound," Azumi told me. I expected to be bowled over.

When I first took a quick tour of the place, Bandit lounged across their sofa, shedding gray dog hair all over the place. And Bandit scared the hell out of me. There on their couch stretched out the ugliest fucking dog I'd ever seen. He would have won the Golden Globe for Ugliest Canine in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy. Or, maybe the Golden Dingleberry. He had some bald patches on his haunches and his teeth were all yellowed. On top of this, he reeked of rotten eggs and manure. Anyway, dog was fugly.

Bandit scowled over at me.

"Hi, Bandit! I've heard all about you!"

Bandit was not having any of this. Ignoring me, he jumped off the couch, farting as he walked away off into Dwayne's office showing off his massive balls.

Dwayne, being pet-ignorant, was loath to get the dog fixed. "I can't cut off balls like that, they're magnificent," he defended Bandit.

Well, any dog lover knows that as much as you love your puppy, puppies need their balls cut, even puppies with really big balls. This is especially true in a city like Tokyo where space is at a premium.

Being a sexually active Schnauzer, Bandit marked every spot in the apartment. He marked my sneakers, marked the coffee table, marked my mattress. He had pissed on several mattresses which now sat unused and stinking up Dwayne's office area. Also, being a pound dog, he'd never learned he needed to shit outside. So this fucking ugly, mean, brainless Schnauzer shat and pissed all over the condo.

I desperately needed to create some stability while getting myself together, so I really, _really_ worked at making this roommate situation work. I washed their dishes daily and scrubbed the mold off their bathroom walls. I cleaned up Bandit's diarrhea _constantly_. But Grumpy Dwayne would never give me any credit, partially because of the emotional war zone that was their relationship, and partially because I believe he had an incurable case of homophobia.

"You left the sponge is in the wrong place," Grumpelstilskin would complain.

I did everyone's laundry. "Oh, you didn't hang the clothes right," he would correct me.

I shared the expensive liquor that celebrities gave me. "Feel free to have some, Dwayne," I would smile.

"Ugh," Grumpelstiltskin would grunt dismissively. I realized this wasn't exactly the Tale of the Good Samaritan. Not even the Mediocre Samaritan. Nor the Humdrum Samaritan. This was more like the Tale of the Grumpy Samaritan and his Moronic Schnauzer.

In mid-December after Bandit pissed on my blanket, I caught a cold as I couldn't stay warm at night. And I sank to a new low. Now I had no blanket, and no money for a new one, so I pulled the blue fake-fur coat that I'd bought after 9-11 over me so I could stay warm. Poor, cold and isolated (and still impossibly glamorous), I lay cold in my room and cried myself to sleep for several nights while Azumi and Dwayne yelled at one another from the other side of the room.

"What the hell are you talking about," Dwayne.

"What's wrong with what I'm doing?"

"That's idiotic!"

For hours on end, Grumpelstiltskin played _Final Fantasy_ , but never could he be bothered to watch me on TV. Azumi usually didn't watch me on TV either, but she managed to fit hours of watching "Judge Judy" into her busy pouting and posing schedule. "The Stealth Posse" would come over and they would play video games, curse, drink and shout all night. As if they were still in high school. Only they were all knocking on 30.

New Year's Eve arrived, and I was ready for a good time. That was until Dwayne yelled at me, "You ate my bean jam bun you asshole!"

I ate his bun? This was the man who was routinely pillaging my groceries. He'd used hundreds of dollars of my soaps, cleaning aides, toothpaste and other toiletries. I'd even lent him Chanel soap to scrub his grumpy butt with. He could spare a fucking bean jam bun since they cost a mere dollar.

"Your boyfriend called me an asshole. What did you ever see in that dickhead?" I fumed.

"Well there's good and bad in everybody," Azumi squeaked in his defense before going into her room to write all about our problems on MySpace for her friends back on Kyushu island to snicker at.

I went out hoping to join the New Year's festivities in Shibuya but couldn't get into it and rode around alone for several hours on the train before going home to drink alone in my room.

Azumi pulled us all together. "In my hometown in Saga, Kyushu we say that we can't start a new year with bad feelings. We need to talk about things and resolve them before carrying the bad feelings into 2008."

I confessed that their arguing made me uncomfortable, and they made me promise to try harder to adhere to their sponge placement procedures. "Hey, why don't we make a grocery envelope, and we all put in ¥2000 per week, that might make more sense than nitpicking over bean jam buns and ketchup," I suggested. Grumpelstiltskin winced and apologized, as he tended to wimp out when actually confronted. We made up and toasted. Forced friendliness comes easier when you are pickled. The clock struck midnight and all was well!

As we were settling in to sleep, I got a text message. "Hey, it's me! Just visiting from Italy! Why don't you join me at XXXX hotel." An old hook up had just written me. Lord have mercy, could I believe my eyes? Peace, alcohol, New Year's and now hot Italian sex? Had God finally smiled upon me? The sun was starting to rise on January 1, 2008 and I was hot to trot! I threw on my coat and galloped to the bus stop to catch the first bus running in the New Year.

Azumi and Dwayne weren't around when I left, but I didn't think anything about it. I went straight to the hotel thinking all the way "This is going to be the best year ever!" I texted Azumi "Off to Gay Land" on my way downtown.

## CHAPTER 17

## **_Roller Coaster 2008_**

Twelve hours and five orgasms later, I came home. Spring in my step and sunshine in my smile, I could have farted diamonds and stuffed animals. I get home expecting a radiant New Year's enjoyment to be had by all I felt excited about 2008. It was Olympics Year and Election Year. Not only that, Beyoncé, Britney, Christina and Madonna were all coming out with a new albums. Seriously, every homo about wets his 2Xist underwear when hearing something like that. It even looked like Hillary Clinton might become our first female President, though a handsome gentleman named Barack Obama seemed to be gaining on her in the polls. 2008 was sure to be a red-letter year, and I had six Italian hickeys on my neck to prove it.

Grumpy had to ruin my fun almost immediately. I got home, the lights were drawn dark, and Azumi and Grumpelstiltskin were still in bed. I heard a faint moaning. What on earth had happened? Were they that hung over? It turns out that they had locked themselves out. Of course when I'd left I'd assumed that they'd taken their keys with them. I locked the door after I had left, like any sensible person would do. They, on the other hand, had _not_ remembered their keys when they'd gone out. After going out to buy toilet paper, they hadn't been able to enter their home again for several hours in the cold of winter, packages of Charmin' in hand, and had to get their landlord to let them back in. Then Grumpelstiltskin, being the delicate flower he was, had caught himself a widdle cold.

Frankly, I loved this. After all his childishness and unkind-ness, after all his drama, Dwayne coughed and simpered like a baby. As Kathy Griffin would say, every one of Dwayne's coughs was like a "hug from Baby Jesus." Every moan, a kiss from the cherubim. His rashes and puking? Divine retribution! And where did he come off getting indignant? Is it my responsibility to carry the keys of other people? Was I Dwayne's keeper? And had I gone out without locking the door, how much would they have complained then? I never would have heard the end of it.

Unfortunately, this added fuel to the fire. Did they HAVE to piss on my parade? Things finally seemed up for me, and Grumpy was putting on this wounded buffalo act. Azumi wrote me a note, "Please, apologize to Dwayne. He is very upset and thinks you locked him out." I just rolled my eyes and put some oranges in a bowl for Grumpy. I am very real with people, and I don't apologize to people when they are the ones at fault. Azumi, Bandit, Charles, and Grumpelstiltskin: it was becoming clear that one of us would have to eventually go, and Bandit looked intent on staying.

Grumpelstiltskin would vent on me, I would complain, and Azumi would express her frustration by blogging about this on MySpace, making me beg to ask her to take posts down. Frankly I didn't want my business paraded out over the Internet. I prefer it in a sordid, tell-all autobiography where it belongs!

The first couple months of 2008, I scrambled for money and continued my jobs. I simply avoided Grumpy and Azumi as it was cold, and I preferred to hide in my room. Then came the night of the eclipse on February 20, 2008.

I came home early, and I went in my room to look around. Not only had Bandit chewed my one remaining Issey Miyake sweater to shreds, but he'd left a heaping pile of dog shit on my stereo. "I'm going to fucking kill your dog!" I screamed. "Where is he? Where is that asshole?" I stomped looking for Bandit all night. I mourned my marvelous Miyake knitwear and cursed the day Bandit was born.

Our roommate situation didn't last much longer. About a week after that I was going to the store and I asked Dwayne, "Do you need anything?"

Grumpelstiltskin just grunted. That ignited the dynamite in my brain. I came back and yelled at him, "You need to be more fucking respectful when you talk to me." Being the confrontation pussy that he was, Dwayne just tried to roll in his blanket and ignore me.

"I don't want to live in a place I'm not welcome," I said to Azumi as I prepared to move out.

I left and did not speak to Dwayne again. I may or may not have drunk texted Azumi calling her quasi-boyfriend a "cunty bastard" and threatening to "run his dingleberry ass out of town." But after mold scraping, turd-scooping, Cinderella-style scrubbing their house, I was glad to have escaped their den of insanity.

I broke out the suitcase again, and brought it to Yolanda's place in Harajuku. "I'm homeless," I told my parents. "Then why don't you come home," my mother said. The last thing I wanted to do was to run off to Kansas, tail between my legs. My talent manager flew into emergency mode. It was that week that I met him up in the northern part of Tokyo, and my talent manager introduced me to O- Tani.

## CHAPTER 18

## **_Things Are OK with O-Tani_**

I moved into an upper room in the home of a rich, elderly woman. Everyone called her simply "O-Tani." She lived off the royalties of her deceased husband's songs and the wise investments they had made over the years. She had a Shiba Inu who loved me and endless bottles of French wine that she imbibed from frequently. Approaching eighty, this woman still smoked and drank like a champion, and we spent several nights in which she handily drank me under the table.

O-Tani and I got on grandly, and after the grim period in which I'd lived with Grumpelstiltskin, my career suddenly had an upswing. _Harper's Bazaar (Japan Edition)_ sent me to a press film screening to write an article on "English from _Sex and the City: the Movie_." I attended a prescreening and wrote up an article teaching Japanese women such useful English phrases as "the one" and "booty call."

**_A Symbolic Return..._**

Every year since 2005, I'd done the international PR for the Tokyo Earth Day Concert at the Budokan. Even with my packed schedule, I felt this was an important event and every year I'd made sure to clear my evenings during this concert, so I could help out. Japanese stars such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra would sing with foreign stars like Daniel Powter or Santana for this once-a-year extravaganza at the Budokan. Part of each ticket went to Nobel Prize Winner Wangari Maathai's "Green Belt Movement" in Africa to plant trees. Every year, a new mini- forest would spring up with the proceeds from the Tokyo Earth Day Concert.

Though she wasn't slated to perform, we'd gotten Madonna to give us an environmental message for the Earth Day 2008 Concert, "I think one thing that people can do every day is just think about the energy they waste, whether that's leaving lights on or wasting water," La Ciccone encouraged the Budokan Audience. "I'm a bit of a Nazi in my own house — I'm constantly going around turning off lights and not wasting water and recycling. I think if people just think about how much energy they waste just every day, and they try to cut down on that, that's a step in the right direction. I think everybody should ultimately drive hybrid cars. There's a lot of things that you can do... Ride bicycles, that's a good one." We played the message from Madge both in the Budokan and on the FM broadcast of the concert.

The once-Material Girl continued to impress upon the lis-teners the need for better infrastructure saying, "There needs to be more of an infrastructure in the cities and the communities and the towns to give people more protection. London, where I live, is a great city to ride bikes in, but there's not enough bike lanes. It's quite dangerous to ride bikes there, except for certain areas. If they would change the zoning and make it safer to ride a bike, then people would do it more often." Now I finally got to translate a comment for the woman who brought me to Japan in search of the Asian in her "Material Girl" video. Life had come full-circle.

**_Too much information_**

Meeting your favorite famous people can be such a mixed bag. Sometimes it goes great, such as when I met punk legend Siouxsie Sioux after a concert in Osaka in 1999. "So what are you doing in Japan?" she asked in her Chislehurst accent.

I somehow stifled my urge to yell out, "You're a goddess!" and she signed my CD jacket and loaded into a van with her husband/drummer, Budgie.

Meeting New York's most talked about club kid performer of the '90s, Kevin Aviance, at a Tokyo Club was a similar pleasure. This singer of club bangers like "Alive" and "Rhythm is My Bitch" posed with me for a snapshot and even bought me a Heineken.

That spring, one of my idols tapped me to work with him, a Japanese art world impresario who we will call Mr. X.

Unfortunately Mr. X didn't much impress me. He'd designed the Chunky Bunny character, and I adored this animal and religiously wore the T-shirt to sleep. Despite being cute, his illustrations were often subversive, edgy and original. His people had asked me to work as on-the-floor reporter at his gallery event, and I willingly said yes! What a great opportunity, I thought.

I went to the gallery space for a pre-meeting and they gave us the scripts for the following day. Only the script didn't read "Charles," it read "Weird Foreigner." Now I never think of myself as strange, merely as following my own bliss. Who were they to cast me as the "Weird Foreigner?"

"He really is weird!" a bespectacled fat man bellowed upon first seeing me. Is that Mr. X? And did he just insult me? I had hoped the artist of my adorable Chunky Bunny would be a lovable, pillow soft artiste, possibly wearing a beret, paint brush in hand. This man looked like the Japanese version of Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies. I half expected him to yell out, "Get in me belly!" He had designed a hideous outfit for me to wear, a skin-tight body suit with a tattoo print, yellow spats and a loincloth. "I bet Charles will say 'I don't need a cup, I fill out the loin cloth just fine,'" Fat Bastard laughed as I tried on the outfit.

"For your information, I DO fill out the loin cloth just fine." I thought I would try to salvage the situation. "Mr. X, I absolutely love the Chunky Bunny. I actually have a stuffed animal of him perched up on my shelf!"

"You're such a weirdo," Mr. X dismissed me. This would be the first and last time that I worked for Mr. X, and if you ever see the Chunky Bunny, please boil it _Fatal Attraction_ style.

**_The four tatami chaos-adjacent home_**

I needed to leave O-Tani's house and looked around at the few places I could afford. _I don't care how run down the apartment is, I just need to stay in central Tokyo_ , I reasoned.

The landlord of the first place the realtor showed me did not care for foreigners. "You know the landlord is really old," the realtor said which is a euphemism in Japanese real estate for, "We don't like your kind (i.e., we won't rent to white people.)." The second place the realtors showed me was next to a pawnshop (no) and another one was situated above the meetinghouse of a strange quasi-Christian cult (no). I found a four and a half tatami mat space ( _yojohan_ ) in a rough part of Koenji, the rock n' roll area of Tokyo. This is just shy of seven square meters so basically was the comfort level of an ant farm or a rabbit hutch.

_Most famous people in Japan have lived in four-tatami room apartments at one point_ , I rationalized. It's a rite of passage. I figured some students or struggling comedians might be living in the apartments next door. Well, no comedian lived next door, but the neighbors were still funny. The upstairs neighbor asked me to come have tea in his place. He was obviously one of those pathological pack rat people. Stacks of books, papers and knick-knacks overwhelmed the tiny space. I caught site of one book's author — Marquis de Sade? SHIT!

"So, do you have any hobbies," I asked my neighbor, a gaunt man in his mid-to-late twenties.

"I'm interested in chaos," he answered.

He kept twitching and laughing when nothing had been said. He startled me then, but I felt compassion for him later when I surmised he might have been mildly autistic. I quickly sipped half my tea and left that room never to return. I would hear him bounding down the stairs at 3 a.m. every night, off to God knows where, possibly the place of autistic Sadists in search of chaos?

That one conversation ended our social contact. He wanted "chaos" and I yearned for "stable" or at least "stable adjacent." The rest of the building housed mutants I did not wish to see, so I hid in my own place on the first floor.

**_Metropolis At Last..._**

The reason I bothered to keep moving forward despite dealing with a lot of horse shit is that I'd finally landed the cover of Japan's most-read English magazine, _Metropolis_. To accompany a feature interview with me, I researched the gay world of Tokyo for an article on gay life beyond what you can easily find online. I hit the streets to interview fifty gays one night, and I sought out the city's lesbian community, which was undergoing something of a renaissance due to "The 'L' Word" being a big hit in Japan. A writer named Trenton Truitt interviewed me for the piece. I paced frantically around Shinjuku Times Square, and told him about my life over the phone. Nobody knows _Metropolis_ in the USA, but it resembles _Time Out_ or _The Village Voice_ in that it is quite trendy and has information about events and personalities around town. This was so huge for me I could barely get the words out. Trenton asked about my time at Issey Miyake and my work in Japanese media. I pleaded to Mr. Truitt at some point, "Can you please describe me in the article as a 'L'Enfant Terrible?' I've always wanted a magazine to call me that!"

Worth repeating from the interview was our talk about the telltale signs of Japanese gay men using "gay-dar." Obvious things were the same as the West — for example, well-groomed facial hair or Abercrombie and Fitch clothing. Then I explained to him the "opposites" game — a linguistic trap to find out if someone is gay:

"In Japanese, I say 'hot' they say 'cold.' I say 'north' they say 'south.' Then I say _semeru_ (attack). Straight guys say _mamoru_ (defend, like in soccer) but gays might slip and say _ukeru_ (receive). As you can deduce, 'semeru-ukeru' can refer to active-passive roles in gay sexy times" (Truitt, Trenton. "Long Live the Queen." _Metropolis_. July 11, 2008).

My _Metropolis_ feature came out, and I grabbed a stack of magazines from a restaurant near Harajuku and passed them out to strangers even in Starbucks. "Look it's me," I danced wildly before the terrified bean jockeys. The pictures? Flawless. The articles? Loved it. My face grinned three pages away from a doe-eyed Mischa Barton picture. And the photo of me in a crown with a vortex of rainbows around me is my favorite photo ever. So Truitt didn't describe me as "'L'Enfant Terrible,' but I tucked my favorite phrase into my mind for later usage.

**_The grapes of snatch_**

I went drinking late one night at the Chestnut & Squirrel, a lesbian bar I had plugged in an article. This name sounds strange, but it's actually a naughty Japanese pun. Chestnut and Squirrel in Japanese are "Kuri to Risu" — say it fast and it sounds like "Clitoris." I met this insanely fun rock lesbian at this clit club who had read the article.

"My name's Natasha," she said.

"No way... that is my drag name," I replied. "Natasha Foxx!"

She pulled out her business card for the English school she worked at, and the card read, "Natasha Fox." Both of us were Natasha Fox (give or take an X)! It was one of those moments when "Twilight Zone" music plays and you wonder "Am I in the Matrix?" Could this one-in-a-trillion chance meeting actually happen?

"Girl, we are so hanging out," we exchanged in emails. "We need to be seen together," she texted me.

I am sure I am the only _Metropolis_ cover boy ever to have lived in a four-tatami room hut at the time his magazine came out. Things were not well in the hovel apartment area. One night I awoke to hear a girl screaming. "Help! Help me!" I looked outside and saw a man's back as he ran down the street. I went out and a crying girl came stumbling down the stairs from the next door apartment building. I called the police and held her hand while she told the cops what had happened, "The attacker grabbed my breasts, and then tried to put his hand over my mouth." I gave my report to the police, and the girl moved out soon afterward. Her landlord gave me some gift certificates for Sapporo Beer as a token of their appreciation. They went to good use.

A bunch of bars, music shops and rock clubs center around Koenji station and Yolanda had moved in the area too, living on the opposite side of the tracks. Yolanda and I walked down the steps to leave the station one day, and a man in a white hat dropped a small envelope. We took it to the station attendants who said, "You need to open this for us in case there is money inside."

I opened it, and a clear bag, stuffed full of ganja popped out! "This isn't ours," we said as we made our quick getaway.

"Dammit," I told Yolanda later, "I could have used that. I haven't had any kine bud since college."

"You were using _The Secret_ ," she laughed.

"Need to put 'BAG OF WEED' up on my Vision Board," I joked. Why could _The Secret_ channel narcotics but not a decent apartment? Also, a picture of Mario Lopez (don't judge) had been on my Vision Board for several years, and AC Slater had yet to ring up and ask me on a date. Was the universe telling me to chill out?

I became more withdrawn and depressed each day as my finances worsened. The people around me seemed disinterested in my plight as long as they could get work out of me for as cheap as possible. Sure, media attention and fame could be fun, but being broke and famous was no fun whatsoever. Then I would look at my mounted cover of my _Metropolis_ cover on the wall, with me smiling in a crown emblazoned with the title King of Queens in a rainbow aura. This picture was so beautiful to me, and I would say to myself, "Does the King of Queens lay around depressed in bed all day?" and pushed my ass to get up.

That was when I ran into an old friend who gave me an update on Kentaro, the Kentastrophe. "Whose life is he messing up now?" I asked. "Make sure not to lend him any money, you won't get it back."

"Charles, there is something you need to know. A couple years ago the police arrested Kent's father."

"What?" I had never met his father, but I remembered he had gone bankrupt and was something of a jerk. Then I looked at a picture of Kent's father from a news site on the web. He looked just like Kentaro! And their last names were the same. He was the son of a notorious panty snatcher! The police had apprehended his father for snatching a large amount of female undergarments.

"Lord have mercy!" I just laughed and laughed on the phone.

I'd dated the panty snatcher's son. I called Yolanda, and we couldn't stop laughing at the S.o.P.S.

"Oh no!" Iexclaimed. "What?"

"Yolanda, what does that say for my taste in men?"

"He's a snatcher!"

"Snatch!" Yolanda and I laughed over the phone like complete imbeciles.

_"Grapes of Snatch."_

_"The Great Sntachby."_

_"A Dingo Snatched my Baby."_

_"Snatcher in the Rye."_

We continued laughing at all the snatch-related things we could think of. We felt slaphappy. Or snatch-happy, as it were.

"Guy Ritchie's film, _Snatch_."

"That's just kind of normal."

Well, that's another life lesson I wish I hadn't learned:

**Thou shalt not snatch panties.** Did I feel vindicated? My ex- boyfriend, the man who ruined my life, was now blacklisted from normal society. I dumped him four years ago. He broke my heart and left me penniless with no way to pay my rent. I literally was left begging friends for help.

"Snatcher of 3,000 Panties Gets Eight Years," read the headline of the _Japan Gazette_. My ex-boyfriend's father had become an infamous criminal for the most base of crimes. Over several years, he had stolen mountains of panties to sniff in his living room to satisfy his wanton sexual thirst. Oddly enough, as damning as it is, stories such as this are somewhat common in Tokyo. What is fascinating to ponder is what does one do after actually accumulating the Mt. McKinley of female undergarments? Breaststroke through them? Sail off into a panty _Fantasia_?

Fortunately, the police apprehended him after several tipsters had noticed a middle-aged man nicking knickers from outdoor laundry racks. Considering the panty snatcher's son had stolen my money, and his sister had been busted for shoplifting at Disneyland, it appeared that dishonesty had been encoded in their DNA. Somewhere between his mitochondria and his RNA resided the nucleic acid sequence making him a "dishonest derelict." The apple definitely did not fall far from the tree, or should I say, the poison did not fall far from the ivy.

By extension, this crime would taint my ex-boyfriend as well. Though I hadn't seen him in a couple years, it gave me a sense of closure. It actually made me quite sad. Certainly I had loved this man at one time. We had shared good times: making stir-fry, listening to Cher, dodging angry creditors. I shouldn't feel that good about the hoisted hosiery. But, I did catch the bastard in bed with another guy, so this denouement felt kind of good. He was just a Son of a Panty Snatcher. An S.o.P.S. if you will. Good riddance!

"Well better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," Yolanda said.

"Yolanda, whoever thought that phrase up is history's biggest asshole. He gets a dark cell in Hades next to Hitler and Attila the Hun."

So what if the whole S.o.P.S. relationship had been a total fiasco? Life throws you a curve ball, you still need to hit a home run. Life gives you lemons? Squeeze them into a glass of Belvedere. Whatever may happen, and whatever comes your way, you still need to bring it and own it.

**_Yoko Ono, May Pang and me_**

Unfortunately, I failed to own it at this particular juncture. December 2008 arrived, Yoko Ono arrived, May Pang phoned in and I cracked. Back in radioland, I translated a one-off interview Kong had done with Yoko Ono in which she promoted her Dream Concert series, which goes to build schools in Africa and Asia. Ono, who wore sunglasses, a hat and a Keith Haring necktie, went on to talk about her favorite places in the world such as Liverpool, Paris, Berlin, Geneva and her home, New York City. She mentioned that Iceland was a particular favorite, partially due to its geothermal energy sources. Even at seventy-five, the lady proved to be as elusive as ever, with Kong asking her, "I think you were to John Lennon as Mona Lisa was to Da Vinci, what do you think?"

"They say that Mona Lisa was actually a man, and I'm not a man."

"What do you think people misunderstand about you?"

"I think people misunderstand a lot of things, but it protects me because no one knows who the real me is."

By complete coincidence, right about then a radio director friend needed me to interpret an interview with May Pang, the woman who'd had a love affair with John Lennon for nearly two years starting in 1973 in a period that is known as the "Lost Weekend." Her photographic journal, _Instamatic Karma_ , had just come out in Japan, and the weekly Beatles program called "The Beatles 10" on Radio Nippon had gotten her for an interview that Beatles fans would be falling over themselves to hear. For such a big interview over the phone, I slept over on the bunk beds at Radio Nippon so as not to be late for the early morning call to May Pang for this December 2008 broadcast. The following are some excerpts from the radio broadcast that May Pang herself has kindly given me permission to reprint. We asked Ms. Pang if John had any plans or discussed writing music again with Paul McCartney:

May Pang: "Well let me go back for little bit here, in the book there is a picture of John signing, his signature was the last signature of the breakup of the Beatles and now they were free but at the same time, on their next level to do whatever they wanted. And John around January of 1975, asked me if I thought it was a good idea for him to get together with Paul to write music again, which, of course, I immediately said, 'Yes.' And John thought, 'Why?' and I said together as a writing team, they couldn't be beat. Their work, the music was just phenomenal, and at one point and even during that John had thought about a concert or two or maybe a reunion of the Beatles. And there are some clips on the Internet, on YouTube, where you could see in certain interviews that John had actually referred to the idea of the possibility of maybe getting the Beatles back together for a concert or two."

Radio Nippon: What was her breakup with John Lennon like?

May Pang: "Let me impress upon you that it was unexpected, John and I were planning to buy a house and to go down and see Paul and Lynda in New Orleans, because they were planning to make a new record which ultimately became _Venus and Mars_. John wanted us to go down, and at that point, I think would have done some writing with him, and you know, it would have been a nice surprise for the world. But just prior to that John had gone to see Yoko after her insistence that she had a message for him to quit smoking, because John had been complaining that it was interfering with his singing ability — to hold notes. And just so you know Yoko and John always was (sic) in communication. It was never that they were not talking. They were always in communication, she called all the time, and so this was nothing new, but she insisted that he come over and this was Friday night, because the stars were right, and that she had the person over to help him quit smoking, it was about hypnosis, and then something happened, and I did not see him again until the weekend was over. I tried to call and Yoko would always say, 'You know, right now he's in session.' I finally saw him again that Monday, and he was a bit nervous. And then he looked at me and said, 'Yoko has allowed me to come home. And it is better for me to be there because of immigration purposes, but we could still see each other, but I should be living at the Dakota. He was afraid, John was always afraid that immigration was going to kick him out cause he wanted to live in New York, so all the plans that John and I made, whether to see Paul or buying a house were gone. But, I will say that in the next five years, no matter what I did always hear from John. I did see him at times, and I did always hear from him. Even the last year, 1980, he called me from South Africa. So we had connections no matter what."

Radio Nippon: You didn't say,

"Don't go back to Yoko?" May Pang: "(I could tell) that the way it was going, the urgency in her voice, the way she wanted him to come it was going to be quite difficult. She had more experience, she was seventeen years older than me, and she knew how John was. So for me, I was just happy I had his love, his friendship, that couldn't be broken. I am to this day close to his first wife Cynthia, and I'm still in touch and close with their son Julian. So whatever it is, I know I will always, around with John, I was always in his head. And that couldn't be taken away."

We had time for some light-hearted questions as well; for example, we asked May Pang about the UFO they'd observed in August 1974 over New York's East River. She had been changing to meet the pizza man when John called her out to witness the UFO. She'd attempted to take a photo, but something triggered her film to become overexposed. Pang described the object as, "a circular, cylinder black saucer, white lights going on and off around the rim, and one solid red light on top, and when you look up at it — it was very close to us — what you could see was a heat wave, like when you see when you are driving and it is very hot, those heat waves."

"He was so happy to see something, he was just amazed," May Pang recalled. I asked her how was it that something like this could go unreported in a place like New York City where there were so many people, to which May replied, "Well, here, because the fact is, we were on the balcony, and I'm screaming, 'It's a UFO!' and the date and time of where we were, it was a Friday night in the summer, and in New York City where we lived everybody was gone." May Pang then told the Japanese radio DJ's that they should come to NYC and see the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, Little Italy or Koreatown, "and of course if you go to Times Square, now that looks like Tokyo, like Shinjuku or someplace." We say goodbye, and she said, "Thank you, arigatou!" After the goodbye, we played at her request, "#9 Dream" from the _Walls and Bridges_ album, a Lennon song that features May Pang's backing vocals. We stopped recording and May Pang and I chatted about how happy we were that Obama had gotten elected. We ended that recording on a chill Tokyo December morning with a sense that we'd touched a bit of history.

Despite the fascinating work I was fortunate to be part of, the heady highs and frustrating lows of roller coaster 2008 had taken their toll on me mentally. Scraping to get by, doing everything I could to keep moving forward — my mind and body needed me to stop. I looked in the mirror: the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be left me paralyzed. I'd been giving more than my "all" for a while and suddenly my gas tank was empty... and then I closed myself off from the world completely. Though I should have been celebrating, for some reason my mind filled with darkness and I felt completely burnt out. I closed my curtains to the outside world. Phones off. Mail off. Mind off.

## CHAPTER 19

## **_Rising Phoenix_**

"Charles! Charles!" my talent manager was rapping at my window. Almost a week had gone by and I hadn't left my room. A Tower of Pisa made out of Domino's boxes was stacked next to a Petronas Tower of Asahi Super Dry cans. I just continued to lie there as I had for the past week.

Japanese TV mogul Dave Spector, who had always given me good advice, lectured me via email, "If you want to be loved and appreciated, get a job at an animal shelter." I always enjoyed advice from Dave, since he doesn't sugarcoat things. I'll just say his was one of the nicer emails from people.

"Charles, are you there?"

"I'm here," I finally squeaked out to my manager, Mr. Tagawa, outside my apartment.

He took me for lunch and listened to my story, "You wanna go for a drink?" I was now for the most part unemployed. Beers at 1PM? Why the hell not?

I had been afraid I had no one to depend on, but it turns out there were many people who cared and were willing to be "there" for me. Mr. Tagawa got me a round trip ticket and after a very turbulent airplane ride, I touched down for my first Christmas in America in ten years. At my transfer at O'Hare, I nearly kissed the feet of the dark and beefy security officer whose nametag read Napoleon. I kind of wanted to run away to St. Helena with this Napoleon, but I got on the plane to Kansas City filled with Yuletide-ready Midwesterners.

I had Grandma's cobbler and watched raccoons and possums from their porch. I had trail mix. I had sugar cookies. I had enough food to gain fifteen pounds. I returned to Tokyo somewhat stockier, but I'd received the break I needed. Work started pouring in again despite my recent breakdown.

Back in Tokyo, I worked to piece my world back together. I questioned what lessons I'd learned in life, and thought about what I'd done wrong. Days were spent rereading old journals.

**_The "Charles Commandments"_**

Using all the lessons from my life, I started putting together the "Charles Commandments:"

**I**  
Thou shalt not sniff fruity scented dolls for hours on end. It could drive you CRAZY!

**II**  
Thou shalt not date hustlers with Ferraris!

**III**  
Thou shalt not perform sexy times with KFC coleslaw!

**IV**  
Thou shalt not drink red wine mixed with vodka — nor mix alcohol with herbal refreshments!

**V**  
Thou shalt EAT LIFE!

**VI**  
Thou shalt not date a guy who still lives with his ex!

**VII**  
Thou shalt dump abusive, cheating boyfriends who try to prostitute themselves on the Internet!

**VIII**  
Thou shalt not spit on thy doorman!

**IX**  
In times of trouble, thou shalt write!

**X**  
Thou shalt not snatch panties!

When I was done, I fell asleep with my space heater on, and the faux fur coat I'd bought after 9/11, which I was using a blanket, caught fire. Luckily, I didn't burn my place down, but I did char a gaping hole in my beloved coat. I'm not very materialistic. If one treasured item gets mangled, stolen or torched, I figure it was probably time for a new one. I needed a new look and a new Charles anyway. But what kind of look did I want?

Azumi called after a year of our not speaking to one another to see if I wanted to work on a show she was doing.

"So, Dwayne and I aren't living together anymore." Surprise, surprise! Why did they have to go and throw away all that good love? Obviously a more gallant knight was waiting out there for Azumi. Also, I appreciated her gesture. I had felt abandoned by her at Grumpelstilskin's house, and maybe she was a pretty good friend after all.

I also met Natasha Fox (the genital female one) in stylish Naka Meguro — it was easy to access for me in Tokyo and her in Yokohama. We had lunch at fashionista favorite eatery Cha-no-Ma, where we enjoyed some avocado and tuna donburi. I had tea, but Natasha ordered wine. She told me about her new girlfriend and I told her about my drama. On this day I was feeling a particular Mary J. Blige desire for _No More Drama_. Could the universe cut me some slack already?

But that was not to be. I told Natasha, "When I had that surgery last month the blood work said my liver score was a bit high, so they had me do blood work for hepatitis." And then I asked her to come to the hospital with me, to get the results. She agreed to do this, and we waited for what seemed like eons at the Yoyogi Hospital before the doctor called me in. They'd said that the tests would be ready Monday, but then I heard that they didn't quite know what I had.

"The preliminary results show that it probably isn't hepatitis."

"Probably isn't?"

"The results aren't completely ready."

"But they were _supposed_ to be ready today," I complained. Natasha and I walked to El Torito, a Mexican place down the street. We hadn't been sitting for five minutes when my mobile phone started its ringtone of Lady Gaga's "Just Dance."

"Shit, it's the hospital!" I got the call and heard that they wanted me to come back, as they couldn't give the results over the phone. I cabbed it to the hospital and there they told me, "You don't have hepatitis. Your liver score has gone down, too." _Guess I shouldn't have gone drinking the night before the blood test._ "You're still young, go on a diet and we'll see you in six months." Time to slow down my abuse of life's Pleasure Points.

I cabbed it back to El Torito again. Natasha Fox and I clicked salty-rimmed glasses as we margarita-toasted my liver.

"I want you to take a look at this." Natasha Fox handed over her Mac notebook. On it were her stories about growing up in Oregon, complete with her lesbolicious adventures. Natasha Fox was writing her memoirs.

"No fucking way!" I yelled. "What?"

I pulled out the first draft of _Impossibly Glamorous_.

## CHAPTER 20

## **_The Day It All Changed_**

At the end of February 2011, I had resigned from Radio Nippon. But my ambitions to get my story told in this book did not come to fruition quickly. I first considered calling my book Memoirs of a Gay-Sha, but decided that was just too cheesy. Then for a year it was L'Enfant Terrible, but not enough people knew what this meant. At any rate the rejection letters piled up, and I had to rise at the crack of dawn and pour myself a cup of ambition to work the 9 to 5.

Though I still appeared occasionally on TV and radio, my main source of income became a licensing firm in Shinjuku Ward that had made a killing licensing the toys and apparel of the Pink Panther. In addition to MGM Studios, which owns the Pink Panther, we also representeded Paramount, Sony and Dreamworks. I assisted the Hollywood side, but I was also assigned the task of licensing a character called "Angel Cat Sugar."

Now Angel Cat Sugar, a new character by the creator of Hello Kitty, is the princess of Angel Land. Being an angel, I suppose that means Angel Cat Sugar is deceased. Angel Cat frolics about Angel World with her buddies, three mice called Parsley, Basil and Thyme. I think even Simon and Garfunkel would gag hearing that. Anyway, I grew up with subculture kids and ravers so selling this saccharine sweet cartoon cat made me ill at times. There were days I called it Angel Crap Sugar or Angel Dust Sugar, so in a way I felt very appreciative that this feline provided such endless fuel for comedy. Angel Cat Sugar was so sickeningly sweet I secretly kind of liked her, and our Italian-designed baby clothes made a great present to send to various new parents – now in my 30s, my heterosexual friends of the same age were pumping out children left, right and center.

The best part of representing Angel Cat Sugar was that during my tenure at the licensing firm, the program expanded throughout the entire world. Angel Cat was already a success throughout Europe, and under my management branched out through North America, Asia and South America. I got to visit quite a few interesting locales such as London, Hong Kong and the yearly licensing extravaganza at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

My personal favorite, though, was the trip I took to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE's government prohibits homosexuality, and I was banned access to such quality websites as gaydar.co.uk and manhunt.com (oddly my Grindr iPhone app worked). In spite of this, I knew exactly how to find the gayest place in the city. No matter how draconian a country's laws are regarding gay activity, a solid bet to find other queers is to hang out at the most fabulous hotel near the airport.

Why, pray tell? Because that is where the flight attendants are most likely to be, and where there are flight attendants, there is usually a bar or club in the hotel where they unwind after a long-haul flight. That is one way to find other gays in a country where gay activity is severely punished, but even in a cosmopolitan city such as Dubai you would do so at your own risk. Anyway, I enjoyed Dubai so much not because of any deal or contract regarding Angel Crap Sugar, but rather because I had a lovely _aventure_ with a swarthy Emirati policeman. I almost want to revisit Dubai and shoplift something so I have the chance to meet him again. "Catch me if you can!" I would yell at the coppers as I ran and then dramatically fell to the ground after stealing some tomatoes or bubble gum at a souk market.

However, not all was fun and games at the licensing firm, and after a couple of years I decided it was time to move to greener pastures. I submitted my resignation here as well, and as of March 11, 2011 I was happily unemployed, or "fun-employed" except for some regular radio work. I had time to cook anything I wanted, go swimming and just enjoy the city. I had sent a couple of photos the morning of March 2011 to the producer of a radio show I was taping. And I routinely sent out CVs half-heartedly searching for work in Tokyo. But in fact most of my belongings were in cardboard boxes, since I was considering leaving Japan.

I remember feeling particularly unmotivated as I took the train to Yotsuya, where my gym was, and after swimming less than a kilometer I took a break and headed to the steam sauna next to the pool. Then I felt some shaking, and it didn't register the significance of this, at first, as earthquakes happen all the time in Japan. But then the shaking grew stronger, and I thought, "This sauna is all stone and tile, I could die in here."

I realized that this was going to be a huge quake, and so I left the sauna, got down on the ground and covered my neck next to an elderly Japanese woman.

"Lord Jesus, Mary and Joseph, do not let me die here on this goddamn swimming pool floor," I prayed, illogically combining piety with blasphemy.

The children at the swimming school were all told to get out of the pool and crouch on the floor, and the kids started screaming and crying while the pool made waves about 12 cm high. For some reason dirt was being washed up onto the ground.

We were lucky they build structures to be quake-proof in Japan, as otherwise the glass ceiling of the indoor pool could have cracked. We all evacuated the gym, and parents came rushing over to pick up their children from swimming school.

I was in no mood to breaststroke again, and so figured I would just go to the radio station early as my radio show's guest was arriving at 5 p.m. But the trains had stopped, and there was a line for taxis which was about a half-hour long. So I walked from Yotsuya more than an hour to Radio Nippon in Roppongi. I didn't realize how big the quake had been nationally; I just thought, "Oh, that was a pretty big quake."

I had to walk quite a distance: past Akasaka Palace and through an area jam-packed with offices. People were leaving their buildings and standing as far from the buildings as possible. I saw office ladies (female admin workers) with construction helmets they must have had at their offices just in case of such an emergency. Some people stood in the center dividing area of the streets to be as far away from the glass and windows as possible.

There was not much visible damage, just a few broken windows, but I was annoyed at having to walk so far. I turned on my iPhone's music, and remember pumping down the street to Rihanna's "S&M." I hummed to myself, "'Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it," completely unaware that a true tragedy was occurring several hundred kilometers to the north in the Tohoku Region. I checked in to say I was fine on Facebook, since my iPhone's Internet was connecting just fine.

Once I arrived at Radio Nippon, our producer told me she'd been trying to call me for more than an hour, but the phones wouldn't connect. We all sat inside, away from the windows, and unfortunately we had to cancel my show for that day as a bigger quake could trap us in the soundproof studio. Everyone felt dizzy from motion sickness, and now that I was in a building I was more aware of the aftershocks that kept coming in every few minutes. But it wasn't until I saw NHK's TV reports of the tsunami up north that I realized the extremity of the quake. Most news reports on TV had said that only one hundred or so casualties had been amassed. I quickly erased my earlier remarks on Facebook, as I realized that this was not the time to be making glib comments.

To get back home I'd have to walk at least four hours, so I decided to go for a drink with a radio director to gird my loins for the marathon. It was odd to see the streets filled with people walking, but this was all we could do since the trains had stopped. Things felt apocalyptic with masses of people walking the streets silently, and the cars in a stand-still gridlock. Lots of rumors were going around as to which trains might be running. Someone on the street told me the Ginza Line was in service; so I walked another hour to Akasaka to find out that the Ginza Line was not working either, and that the rumor was wrong.

I ended up hanging out at a British style pub called the Hobgoblin. I stayed the rest of the night at my photographer friend's apartment. When we woke the next day, we saw that the trains were tentatively running, and I returned home and spent the day scanning the BBC, CNN and any other news source I could find.

Though I didn't see much damage in Tokyo first hand, later I found out there had been quite a bit of damage in bars and restaurants. Fearing aftershocks, all the swimming pools were shut down and so were concert halls and other venues. The earthquake, as was widely reported, bent Tokyo Tower and shifted the entire land-mass of the country.

People had made a run on the food, water, flashlights and toilet paper so there was none to be found. Many of the shops had closed, and due to several power plants becoming incapacitated, people were running lights dimly to conserve energy. Not only was the tone of the people darker, but the city itself became darker.

After I ran out of toilet paper, and couldn't find any in the shops, I had to "borrow" toilet paper from the washroom of a nearby 7-11. Being desperate enough to gank TP from 7-11 was a real low point in my life. I felt remorse and I do know stealing is wrong, but taking a giant crap in my $300 Juicy Couture jeans would be even wronger.

In addition, there was the nuclear fiasco from the Fukushima reactors. At this point there was just a blur of different news sources citing different results from various explosions. I re-ceived emails from friends and relatives abroad — some merely concerned and others hysterical — and soon I started to feel panicky myself. I considered leaving Tokyo for a bit just to put some distance between myself and the situation. I started hearing that the bigwigs in various companies were evacuating the city, and then the embassies began to recommend ex-pats to leave Japan as well. Although the severity of the nuclear disaster was still somewhat unclear, the disruption in infrastructure and supplies were clearly making it hard to live here. The French, British and Australian Embassies had all advised citizens to vacate, and I was waiting to see what the US Embassy would say. Then I received an email from a Japanese friend:

"Just a while ago, the President of XYZ Corp., Mr. John Doe emailed me that information from the French, American and Canadian Embassies has been pouring in saying that the Japanese media has not been telling the truth, and the facts about the true danger of the situation can only be ascertained from the foreign press."

This email went on to say that a great number of casualties in Fukushima had been unreported. We were advised to flee to Western Japan if possible. The day following this email, I heard that the American embassy would make their announcement. I threw a bunch of clothes and irreplaceable items in a suitcase. That day around noon, I met my hair stylist friend Enrique for lunch, lugging my baggage behind me. We headed to a Starbucks among the skyscrapers at the Southern Terrace of Shinjuku.

He laughed at me as I was wearing a somewhat over-the-top outfit to try to cover as much of my body as possible including gloves and ski goggles. He thought I was overreacting. I told him the rumor I'd heard, which was that at 6 p.m. There'd be a major announcement from the American Embassy advising Americans to leave Japan. While Enrique and I ate, his boss called and said he was taking his small children out of the city until things calmed down. I grabbed my bags and headed to Kyoto.

I stayed at a small business hotel near Gion (the geisha district) in Kyoto, and decided that between being unemployed and Japan facing an unprecedented national crisis, now was a good time to repatriate myself in the USA. I'd spent a dozen years in the Land of the Rising Sun, so expected to be quite culture-shocked on my return. Where could I go to find a nexus of safety, job opportunity and gay- friendliness? Kansas City, the City of Fountains? Should I make another run on the Big Apple? Maybe surprise everyone and take my business to Zimbabwe? In the end, I clicked my ruby slippers and went to...

SAN FRANCISCO!

See you in the Castro, bitches!

## EPILOGUE

## **_Upgrade U_**

I had the good fortune to visit Tokyo for business in April 2012 — more than a year after the March 11 Earthquake. About one-third of my foreign friends had abandoned the city. Those with small children had moved their kids to the countryside to spare them possible effects from the radiation. News reports dubbed foreigners who left "flyjin"–a pun combining "fly" and gaijin ( _foreigner_ ). After leaving Tokyo, I realized the term "flyjin" now applied to me. Had I jumped the gun by leaving Japan? Was I total wuss? All I have to say is that it's impossible to maintain adequate levels of glamour when laid up in a hospital bed due to exposure from radioactive cesium. Not even Elizabeth Taylor could make that scenario work.

Personally I don't consider myself a wimp. I survived growing up gay in fucking Kansas. Sissies need not apply. Look-ing back, I can see that I was starting to burn out on my ex-pat life and the whole Japan experience. It was time for me to move forward, and the thing that shook me out of my velvet handcuffs and literally shook me up was that earthquake. Japan was like a best friend I'd spent every minute with for a couple of decades. No matter how close the camaraderie, you eventually need some space to discover who you are on your own, and to get to know new places and new people. I needed to evolve, and as wonderful as Japan is, she wasn't letting me change. At the end of my stay in Tokyo I was becoming bitter and jaded: I didn't think the Harajuku girls looked cool anymore, I just wanted to push them out of my way. I didn't think the efficient commuter trains a modern wonder, just stinky and full of perverts. And if one more flipping person had asked me if I could eat with chopsticks, I would have started to punch random people.

After a year of life in California, I had the chance to revisit my old Tokyo friends again. Clink went our glasses of strawberry- flavored mojitos in the poncey bar, Two Rooms, a stones throw from Harajuku. At Two Rooms I drank with a Tokyo PR maven and a budding film-maker. Unlike the flyjin, these two had stuck things out in Tokyo. The subsequent power vacuum in Tokyo left by the flyjin had led to those courageous (or foolhardy) few who had stuck around reaching new career heights. I was happy for them.

Speaking of flyjin, I had by now moved into a travel-related business myself. Over the next round of mojitos, I joked with my friends about the fact that anyone who works in travel is constantly besieged with requests for flight upgrades. People seem to believe that travel industry workers can wave their upgrade wand and magically move you up a class... so I'll have you all know, I'm not the upgrade fairy.

To the general public, upgrades just look like an open seat on an airplane. But Business Class can be thousands of dollars more expensive than Economy. From the airlines' perspective, granting an upgrade is the same as selling a Ferrari for the price of a Mustang. For my corporate travel clients I do in fact work long and hard to secure them upgrades, but I just can't dole out upgrades to every Tom, Dick and Henrietta.

Still, it was nice to see my Tokyo friends. The budding friendships I'd made in California had yet to prove their longevity, though, of course I had new stories to tell, new men I had met, new dramas I was living. Whether the move to California would prove a complete upgrade was hard to say — but San Francisco was giving me what I needed — a chance to once again, rewrite the way I lived life.

## **_Afterword_**

_by DJ Kamasami Kong_

Before first meeting Charles, I had a bittersweet departure from the Ritz Carlton in Osaka. I made Osaka my home for the better part of two decades, and still, half the room lay strewn with empty cardboard boxes filled with tapes, transistors, memorabilia and appliances. During my stint in Osaka, I met pop upstarts like Britney Spears and Destiny's Child, as well rock and roll legends Prince and Paul McCartney. Our sponsors kept me in the Ritz Carlton, which of course made life oh-so difficult. The budget guillotine fell and unfortunately MY show was on the chopping block. Rather than puttin' on the Ritz, I was put out of the Ritz (actually it wasn't that bad; they threw me a farewell party at the Ritz, but I still had to leave). Our sponsorship dried up in Osaka, but a new opportunity laid just three hours away on the bullet train: a spot opened up for a weekly Saturday morning show.

I boarded the bullet train for Japan's other great metropolis, and most cosmopolitan city, Tokyo.

Certainly I had worked in Tokyo before, a commercial here, a TV spot there, but taking a morning show at Tokyo FM — the key station for the largest FM network in Japan — upped the ante quite a bit. I felt a certain anxiety as I boarded an elevator up a ten story building and entered an executive room filled with men we refer to as "the suits." Nary a Metallica T-shirt nor Led Zeppelin tattoo were to be found on these FM program directors, producers and advertisers. Rather, they were steely faced businessmen that knew numbers meant sponsors and sponsors needed numbers.

I wore my uniform of an aloha shirt and jeans. I felt just a little apprehensive. Then something happened to break the tension. The door flew open in the conference room and another Caucasian face walked in, or rather _minced_ in. Clad in a shiny black suit with a metallic vest on underneath, this guy, who looked to be in his late twenties, came to my side. He looked as out of place as the Lucky Charms leprechaun in a Supreme Court hearing.

"He help you," the bespectacled Japanese director said. Charles sat right down, opened a chic black notepad, and interpreted the whole meeting.

"Then at 5:45 you'll be doing a segment called 'Hawaiian Breeze' where you inform the listeners as to what's going on in Hawaii," he translated. "Then at 7:30 you'll be doing a radio shopping segment where you introduce the product of the week." Subject/verb, subject/verb. He quickly jotted down words in quick procession, then matter-of-factly told me the information. After 30 years flying between Hawaii and Japan, I understand Japanese fairly well, but this little guy seemed to have a secret geisha stored up in his brain. He was going to be my assistant/interpreter for my Tokyo FM morning show, and it seemed like I was in capable, if somewhat eccentric, hands.

"Lord have mercy!" he said with a slight Missouri drawl. "That meeting was intense! Come on Kong, let's go get something to drink!"

We decided to have a real Japanese style meal — at TGI Friday's in Roppongi (there's only so much fish you can eat). He quizzed me on celebrities I had met over carbs, ribs and chicken fingers, all dipped in mayonnaise.

"Oh tell me more! What was Michael Jackson like?" We discussed our excitement at the celebrities slated for my new Tokyo FM show and during a pause in the conversation he said, "Just so you know and hear from the horse's mouth, yes. I'm totally gay."

I almost choked on a chicken finger. Being a heterosexual guy, the inclination of the young men I meet is not the first thing that flits across my mind. Now that he mentioned it, he did have a little spring in his step. I'll take it there — he was light in the loafers. He was lighter in the loafers than Fred Astaire on a space walk.

This was my introduction to Charles St. Anthony, who seemed to inhabit a world both serious and absurd. He definitely had a certain hunger. A lust for color. A lust for glamour. A lust for foxiness.

A couple years later I joined Charles, this time in the trendy Pink Cow at an event with the dubious moniker Foxxy Lady. "Motherfuckers!! Pink Cow, let me hear you scream!!"

Gone was the suit and the serious act. He wore clear Lucite heels, a crooked wig and the name Natasha Foxx. Even in heels, he minced about, lip-synching to "Cold Hearted Snake" or "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls. He put his (quite nicely shaped) legs up on the tables, terrifying the other straight men there. You know he thought he looked fierce.

His slurred speech led me to believe his last glass of Spumante canceled out when his fishnets ripped. A condom wrapper was stuck in his auburn wig. I played along until the Ricky Martin "Shake Your Bon Bon" contest ended, when I safely escaped the Japanese gay guy with assless chaps who kept asking me to play rodeo.

By 2010, our Saturday morning show was long gone, but we got together every April for the Tokyo FM worldwide broadcast of the Earth Day Concert from the Nippon Budokan, which I host. Charles sat next to me with the script he translated from Japanese into English and wearing headphones to getting directions in Japanese from our director.

"Good evening ladies and gentleman. This is your host Kamasami Kong. I'll be bringing you the Earth Day Concert, which encourages you to make Earth Conscious Acts. Every April 22nd we think about this planet we call home, and we take action to preserve our future."

We watch on a TV monitor as out trots Japan's hottest female idol sensation, AKB48. The singers of AKB48 consist of a squadron of — you guessed it — 48 girls in short skirts and school uniforms that could get the blood of most men to a raging boil. The hottest and sexiest girls out of the 48 members were cherry-picked to perform to show Japan's hot passion for environmental awareness in 2010.

Charles yawned. "Kong, if I have to see these bitches one more time, I swear I am going to start dry heaving."

"Oh come on Charles."

"You're right. It is for a good cause, and the ticket sales are planting trees for the Green Belt Movement in Africa. I will refrain from vomiting for the duration of the concert. If I lose my lunch during AKB48's song 'Virgin Love,' you only have 48 whimsical Japanese schoolgirls to blame."

"Nobel Prize Winner Wangari Maathai, founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, would be touched to hear you say that."

Charles is a little over the top and has a distinct point of view. Saying they broke the mold when they made him would be an understatement, but Charles St. Anthony has shared some good times with me on the airwaves and out about Tokyo. And I suspect he will continue to contribute positively to his various endeavors in the years to come.

**Robert Zyx  
DJ Kamasami Kong**  
 _October 2010_

## **_My Acknowledgements_**

Special thanks to my parents, sisters and studly brothers-in-law for their support during this process. Thank you to the entire Garcia family for your contributions and understanding.

Big hugs and thank you to DJ Kong for the Afterword and being the coolest disc jockey on the planet. More thanks to Jeff Richards, David Labi and the team at _Metropolis_.

Thank you and hugs to J. Hoff, Marcella "Rojo Caliente" Hammer and Jane Rhodes for all the commas and editing contributions. Big bear hug to Sari Friedman and D. Patrick Miller for lending their panache, magic and talent.

Special appreciation to Yolanda and Mr. Tagawa for being true friends.

A big kiss goes out to Traci Consoli, Naoya-San and The Pink Cow staff in Roppongi, Tokyo. Check out: **www.thepinkcow.com**.

Air kisses to Chad Fabulous, the most rockingest hair stylist. Check out: **www.chadfabulous.com**.

Further appreciation goes out to Dave Spector and Michael Musto.

Lucite dreams of Mah Boo Anderson Cooper to Michael K.

A special _obrigado_ to Clementine, Brandon, Esteban, Kate Drake, Natasha Fox, and Cydonie Brown. Props, snaps and major kisses for Honey D, Madame Blackheart, Arwen Angel and everyone who ever went to Club Piranha (Pogo's).

 Second Book:

_San Francisco Daddy_

Follow Charles St. Anthony's adventures as he rebuilds his life in San Francisco. In this novella-sized, mini-memoir Charles finds the humor in every situation—whether it be dating fiascoes in the Castro or beating a path down to Silicon Valley. He takes you on a tour of the New Age Babylon by the Bay!

_Um beijão para D________._

_Você arrombou as portas para do meu coraçao._

**###**

Keep the hustle going by signing up to the mail list at dtlahustler.com.

Follow Charles on Instagram/Twitter: @kingcharles0921

Check out Charles St. Anthony's humorous short reads on the gig economy:

Uber Diva

She's sitting on a secret. In Uber Diva Charles St. Anthony skewers the rideshare business while providing a bird's eye view of what it's really like to drive for Uber and Lyft. Meet the freak passengers and learn the tricks of the trade. You'll find out how you can be a 5 Star driver (and how to avoid getting spanked with 1 Star as a passenger).

DTLA Hustler

DTLA Hustler hit #1 in the "humorous short reads" ranking, becoming Charles St. Anthony's second book to hit #1 after Impossibly Glamorous did in "actors and entertainers" category. In this mini-masterpiece you explore the food scene of the downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) Renaissance. See how Charles did this while losing weight simultaneously by delivering on foot and bicycle. Packed with photos and cute visuals, this brisk read gives you the down low on how to make money while becoming a "Skinny Sensation." Pick up a copy and get hustling today!
