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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
Karl Taro Greenfeld paints an epic portrait of drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde.
Oct 30, 1998 | Samson and Shore Patrol crouched side by side in starter's stances at the vending machine outside RIP, a roach-infested bar off Roppongi-dori. Only a few of the dozen spectators standing in the twilight drizzle knew that the race, from the Pocari Sweat vending machine to the UCC coffee machine, was to decide the future of two Tokyo strip clubs.
Both men were athletic, and each was sure he could beat the other in a 100-meter footrace. Anytime, anyplace, they had challenged each other for months whenever they met.
Their enmity had been born at 2 a.m. one Friday night when they simultaneously approached an attractive Swedish girl who had shown up at Ying Yang in a coral blue cocktail dress, with Balinese warrior tattoos on her fleshy upper arms and high, white stilettos strapped to her bony feet. As she bobbed her head to sip her vodka rocks, Samson and Shore Patrol appeared before her.
"You looking for work?" their voices chorused, Samson's tenor complementing Shore Patrol's bass.
The girl sucked at her drink through the hollow swizzle, swung her gaze from Samson to Shore Patrol and back to Samson, and shrugged.
"Work?" Samson asked.
"Dancing?" Shore Patrol queried.
The Swedish girl, whose stringy blond hair rose around her head like a shabby lion's mane, smiled at the two earnest, would-be headhunters, "Try elsewhere, you losers."
And she walked away to join a Japanese businessman who awaited her in a corner booth.
Samson and Shore Patrol sized each other up for the first time.
Samson, 27, never told anyone his real name. He was, he told me, from somewhere in eastern Canada; perhaps it was Nova Scotia. When I met him he tried to sell me a knockoff Breitling watch.
Shore Patrol, 24, admitted to being from San Gabriel, Calif. He had been so nicknamed because one evening when an American serviceman at RIP had jokingly shouted out "Shore patrol!" Shore Patrol had managed to clear the premises so quickly that he appeared to be out the door before the bottle he had dropped hit the barroom floor. An AWOL U.S. serviceman, he was thereafter known as Shore Patrol, or SP.
It was Shore Patrol's hurried bolt from RIP those months ago that had won him the reputation for blazing speed. Shore Patrol, who had been a sprinter in high school, relished the rumors about his quickness that had spread among the clientele at RIP.
Yet Samson, who had not witnessed Shore Patrol's run for the door, was skeptical. Samson had also been an athlete during his youth, a fleet-footed high school wide receiver playing Canadian rules football. It irked him that someone else should be known as the fastest runner in the crowd. He had been sizing Shore Patrol up for some time and was convinced he had better wheels than SP, and whenever talk of SP's barroom flight came up, Samson shook his head and told anyone who would listen, "That punk ain't fast."
I had been sent to Tokyo by Vogue to write about the most expensive hotel in the world. Before I reached that mountaintop hot-springs resort, though, I was sidetracked by the crowd of scumbags, lowlifes, cutthroats, thieves, dealers, pimps and hustlers who hung around RIP, a has-been dive that in its glory days had hosted the likes of Keanu Reeves, Sting and Seiko Matsuda but was now relegated to serving Asahi in cans to Samson and Shore Patrol. Randall, the frizzy-haired, tattooed, rugby player-sized Aussie who ran the place along with his partner, a straight-haired, weedy Japanese actor named Haru, were desperately seeking a scheme that would enliven their bar and restore its former status as a hot spot. Various ideas came and went as to how to refurbish the joint. One evening I came in to find Randall busy behind the bar killing cockroaches with arsenic-smelling bug spray and beaming because he had stumbled onto the idea that was going to turn RIP around.
"Piercing station," Randall said, as baby roaches scurried across the bar toward me. "This whole piercing craze is about to hit Tokyo. The Japs will go crazy for it."
I shrugged and ordered my J&B and soda.
"We're out of Scotch," Randall told me, slapping at cockroaches with his bare hands. "How about a nose ring?"
But RIP was wallowing in perpetual decline, consigned to being a backwater of the Roppongi party scene that fewer and fewer of the party people deigned to drop in on anymore. As it devolved into a place where the trendy dared not tread, it evolved into the perfect hole in the wall for those who did not want to be seen, for those who needed a darkened, quiet, secluded spot where they could conduct business with other similarly light-of-day-shy creatures. In Tokyo, with its paucity of spacious living situations, deals are usually done in public places. Even as Randall and Haru scratched their heads trying to come up with a new theme that might woo the smart set back to their establishment, they were inadvertently luring a new clientele that came precisely because the smart set was nowhere to be found. RIP's location down a seldom-traveled side street 50 meters from Roppongi-dori made it centrally located yet discreet. RIP became the venue of choice for shady dealers.
The decor was suitably frowzy, languishing in a state of disassemblage because Randall and Haru were forever coming up with feckless new themes that would require tearing down bits and pieces of the bar but would be abandoned before any reconstruction took place. There were stretches of exposed steel beams and two-by-fours. Chicken-wire plaster braces showed through behind the racks of empty bottles. The dance floor had been stripped away, revealing that the bar had been constructed over a parking lot.
I too was in flux. My nascent marriage to a Dutch woman was showing signs of miscarrying. A contracted novel I had completed and sent to my publisher was about to be rejected. Needing a break, I had cobbled together a few queries and had cajoled my editor at Vogue into assigning me this relatively easy story about the most expensive hotel in the world. I had also convinced the Nation to provide a few thousand dollars in the form of a research grant; I was to produce for them an article about the Japanese economy, then in a severe slump. But I had been in Tokyo for more than two weeks and my research had ground to a halt; I had not been anywhere near the mountaintop retreat I was sent to write about.
Instead I had found among RIP's shadow-dwellers kindred spirits. They were all hiding out from something -- those of us over 30 from what we had become, those still in their 20s from their inevitable futures. There was no mystique about the place, no hallowed past or gilded myths to toast; it was the absence of mystique, the total lack of any kind of decor, that spoke to me the first time I walked into the place.
There was another problem I had come to Tokyo to escape. In Los Angeles, during the writing of that doomed novel, I had taken to ingesting prolific amounts of narcotics. I didn't take these drugs -- vicodins, percocets, dilaudids, morphine-sulfates, talwins, darvons, codeines, the occasional balloon or bindle of street heroin; basically, all the hairy-chested analgesic opiates -- to help me write; I took these substances to make me feel better about how badly I was writing. I had convinced myself that what I needed was a quick trip back to Japan, where I had been relatively drug-free during the five years I had lived there in the late '80s and early '90s. What was required, I was sure, was a return to the site of former glories, to where I had written numerous magazine articles and come up with the material for my first and only book. My life in Los Angeles, with its failing marriage and dimly plotted writing projects, was without luster. Tokyo, on the other hand, was where my life could regain lost sparkle. I would become the person I imagined I used to be: vital, charming, intuitive, a thorough journalist and artful writer. My drug addiction would magically fall away from me, like a tearaway jersey ripped from a streaking tailback.
But Tokyo had changed.
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