Ways to Die in Tokyo, page 2
Dave taps Fisher’s side with his free hand. Fisher immediately lets Dave’s arm go and starts to push himself off the man’s chest. Apparently it’s not fast enough for Dave, though. Dave shoves Fisher back, mutters “Fuck,” and pops up to his feet.
Fisher rises and stares at the big man, holds his arms out palms up. What’s your problem?
Ken says, “Chill, Dave.”
Dave wipes the sweat from his face with a hand and then wipes the hand on his shorts. Fisher hold his fist out for Dave to bump. Dave ignores it and sidesteps around him. They crouch, move forward until they bump foreheads and begin fighting for grips, which is mostly Fisher trying to control Dave’s wrists and Dave trying to break Fisher’s grips. Fisher grabs the back of Dave’s neck with his right hand. He seizes Dave’s right wrist with his left and drives forward, trying to get Dave to push back.
Dave falls for it. He resists, holding his ground, and then steps forward with his right foot. At that moment, Fisher executes a classic arm drag so that he ends up behind Dave with his hands locked around Dave’s waist. For a sliver of a moment, Fisher considers tossing Dave with a suplex. When properly executed, the throw will launch an opponent up and backward and land him on his neck and shoulders. It’s a high-risk move that could seriously injure Dave, and Fisher really doesn’t want to hurt the idiot. So instead he sits on his butt and shoots his right leg out, tripping Dave’s right heel. Dave lands on his right side, and Fisher once again achieves side control. Dave squirms under him, making little whistling noises with every breath. He tries to bench press Fisher off, a rookie mistake that even high-level grapplers sometimes make if they’re tired enough.
Fisher snatches Dave’s near-side arm, throws his right leg over Dave’s head and his left leg over Dave’s torso. He grips Dave’s wrist with the thumb up and stretches his arm between his legs, applying upward pressure with his hips to hyperextend Dave’s elbow. Jujigatame. A straight armlock.
Fisher slowly applies pressure and waits.
But Dave doesn’t tap this time.
Fisher applies more pressure. Dave grunts in pain, but still he doesn’t give up. Fisher stops applying pressure and is about to let Dave’s arm go when a tightness seizes his right hamstring. Cramp? Dave’s head moves under his leg, and the tightness is suddenly a hot, searing pain that takes his breath away, and Fisher realizes the asshole is biting him.
“AAAH!”
His reaction is automatic. Fisher reaches up with his right hand and pounds the bridge of Dave’s nose with the meaty part of his fist. As soon as Dave’s teeth release their hold on his leg, Fisher sits on his chest and hits him in the face with an elbow, and then another, barely registering the chorus of startled shouts issued by the other members, and then half the gym is rushing over and grabbing Fisher’s arms and dragging him off Dave.
Dave immediately jumps to his feet, his face bloody and contorted with rage. “Motherfucker!” He charges Fisher and a clamor goes up as three or four guys block his way. Trying to maneuver around them, Dave says, “You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!”
Fisher stands there, mouth agape, not quite believing what just happened, until Ken steps in front of him, points a finger in his face, and says, “Office! Now!”
Chapter Three
Waiting in the office for Ken, Fisher rubs the back of his thigh where Dave bit him. It smarts a little, but the skin’s not broken. The anger Fisher had felt just seconds ago is gone, replaced by a heavy gloom. He thinks of his family. He can’t help it. His anger is what had, in the end, dealt the final blow to his and Lisa’s marriage. One night she’d told him something devastating and he’d flown into a rage, and it scared her so badly she took the kids and left.
And now he’s gone and ruined another good thing. It’s not the first time he’s lost his shit at the gym, but this time he’s really done it. You never intentionally hurt a training partner, even if that training partner is a dickhead. Dave is a dickhead, and no, you don’t bite a training partner. But a little bite that didn’t even break the skin? That didn’t justify the kind of beatdown Fisher gave him. So who’s the bigger dickhead?
Ken walks in a couple of minutes later, shaking his head, and tells Fisher to clean out his locker. Fisher isn’t surprised. Silently he nods, then rises from his seat and goes to the door. He loves this gym, it’s his sanctuary, and now he’s lost it, and he wants to cry, which makes him feel ridiculous and angry and stupid, because he’s a grown man, and he’s acting like a big ridiculous pussy. This is his own damn fault, just like everything else.
“Hank.”
Fisher turns and meets Ken’s gaze. There’s genuine concern in the man’s eyes. He knows Fisher has been in a downward spiral since the divorce. Knows that Fisher has been trying to track down his family’s whereabouts for the past year with zero success.
Ken says, “I know you’ve been through the wringer, but I just can’t—”
Fisher holds up a hand. “I get it. I fucked up. Not your problem.”
“Look, wait a while for this to blow over. Maybe I can talk Ono-san into letting you back in.”
Ono is the owner of the gym. A busy hedge fund manager in his mid-fifties with a passion for MMA, he’s famously mercurial, and he’s given much bigger-name fighters than Fisher the boot for much smaller offenses than beating a fellow gym member bloody. Fisher reaches for the doorknob. “Thanks.”
Ken says, “Hey.”
Fisher turns and lifts his eyebrows. “Yeah.”
A sheepish expression comes over Ken’s face. “You ever think about getting some help?”
“You mean a shrink?”
Ken shrugs. “Yeah. I mean, no. Not a shrink necessarily. Someone to talk to. You know, to get things off your chest.”
A weak smile forms on Fisher’s lips. “That’s what I come here for. Came here for.”
Ken winces.
Fisher holds up a hand. “That came out wrong. Look, thanks for everything. I appreciate it.”
On his way to the locker room, two guys are talking quietly in the hall. One is a good-natured twenty-year-old kickboxer named Toru. The other is an older BJJ enthusiast named Yusuke who’s always complimenting people. They stop talking when they see Fisher coming, and as Fisher passes them, they turn their backs on him. Hurrying past the open door to the main training area, he hears Dave say, “I’ll see you later, Fish Boy.”
Fisher dumps the contents of his locker into his gym bag, leaves without showering, and trudges back to the station in a daze.
Trying not to listen to the little voice in his head saying, Loser.
*
The AC inside the train is blasting, a jolt after the walk in the sweltering heat from the gym to Tachikawa Station. The city scrolls by outside the window, the dark outline of the Okutama Mountains visible in the distance. In the foreground are the Musashi Plains, blanketed with the lights of factories, apartment buildings, and houses.
Fisher rubs the back of his right thigh where Dave bit him, tells himself to forget about getting kicked out of the gym, forget about the fight getting canceled, forget he’s over the hill and nearly broke and all alone.
Fuck it.
His shift at Lounge O, the hostess bar where he bounces twice a week, starts at eight. He keeps a change of clothes in the break room, so he’ll go there straight. He’ll be a couple of hours early, but he has a key and there’s a small sofa in the break room, and maybe he can catch a nap if Terry, the owner, isn’t there yet. Better than going home to his shitty little apartment.
He checks his phone to see if there’s a message from the PI he hired two months ago to find Lisa and the kids. Nothing. No surprise there, but it irritates him nonetheless because every time he looks at his phone, he gets his hopes up just a little, and every time the result is the same: a stab of disappointment followed by a flare of anger. He’s paid the fucking PI almost two grand, and he’s found exactly nothing so far.
The rustle of a newspaper draws his attention. An old guy, staring at him over his paper.
People stare at him, he gets it. He’s a big gaijin—a foreigner—physically imposing enough to make people gawk. He meets the old man’s gaze and forces himself to smile, his best “friendly foreigner” face. The man is maybe seventy but could pass for sixty. Slender, with a full head of neatly combed gray hair parted down the side, and smooth, pale skin. He’s wearing a polo shirt, polyester slacks, and loafers with monogrammed socks.
The smile doesn’t work.
The man tongues a molar, keeping his eyes fixed on Fisher’s for a second. Then he looks down at his paper again.
Whatever, dude.
Fisher focuses on a banner ad: a splashy headline about a celebrity wedding. A self-taught Japanese speaker, he doesn’t speak like a native, but he’s fluent for all practical purposes, and he can read and write. He likes to think his nihongo ability would have made his mom and dad happy. Mom was san-sei, third-generation Japanese-American, and Fisher’s paternal grandfather was ni-sei, second-generation. Neither of them spoke a lick of Japanese, but Fisher remembers his mom sometimes making miso soup and kappa-maki sushi rolls with cucumbers from the garden. On New Year’s, she would make ozoni—soup broth with mochi—rice cakes—she had a friend send up from San Francisco.
The conductor announces the next stop. The train slows and comes to a halt. A few people get off, a few get on, and the train pulls out of the station slow, whining its electric whine.
An old lady sits down across from Fisher. She’s probably in her eighties, around the same age Fisher’s mom would be if she were still alive. Her hair sits atop her head in a tight bun and she has a heavily lined face, but her posture is ramrod straight and she’s staring intently at her smartphone as she texts away like a teenager. Fisher’s mom would’ve been a pretty hip old lady too. His dad, on the other hand, would’ve been one of those stubborn old bastards who constantly rant about how easy the younger generation has it. Fisher smiles at the memory of them, then feels the familiar pit in his stomach. They’ve been gone thirty years, and he still can’t think of them without thinking about how they died: gunned down by the feds on their pot farm in Northern California.
The train stops again.
Fisher checks his phone. Again, nothing.
He breathes in, closing his eyes, pushing the familiar cloud of sadness and guilt and self-loathing away. He opens his eyes, rubs the back of his thigh again. What is he doing? Why is he still fighting? Lisa had asked him to stop so many times over the years. Literally begged him after a kick to the left eye left him with a small retinal tear. What if the next time he lost his sight? What if he developed CTE? Why was he doing this to himself? To her, to the kids? To them. He was different. He’d become an asshole, she’d said. Sullen, depressed, angry all the time. No longer the cheerful guy she used to know. It wasn’t good for the kids, for any of them.
Give him a little more time, he would always say. She didn’t need to worry, he didn’t have CTE. His memory was fine, and he was only moody because he kept losing and he knew he could do better and he was sorry. He’d stop being an asshole. And if he couldn’t turn things around, he’d quit fighting. But he had no intention of quitting then. He wasn’t young anymore, but he couldn’t imagine hanging it up, even as he felt the wheels coming off. He was a good fighter, and in spite of all the losses, he’d never been knocked out. More important, though, win or lose, fighting gave him power, a feeling of control like nothing else he’d ever experienced. It made everything else life had to throw at him easier.
Over the past two years, he’s come to understand that it’s mostly bullshit, that feeling. Because you can’t stop time and you can’t control life. You can sure beat yourself up trying, though. And the worst part of it is that the ones you love most end up suffering the most as a result.
Lisa was gearing up to study for the bar exam when he told her he wanted to pursue his dream of going pro. He was closing in on thirty and had worked a succession of boring office jobs, and it was now or never. Lisa thought he was crazy. What if the fight thing didn’t work out? she said. Did he have a Plan B to fall back on? Why not go back to school and get a business degree or something?
Fighting was what he loved to do, he told her. And if he was going to make it as a fighter, he didn’t have any time to spare. He’d already fought in a few local smokers and done well. His name was getting some play in the MMA scene around the Bay Area, and he was confident that he was good enough to make a living from the sport, but he had a ways to go. Besides, he could always go back to school.
But what about kids? Lisa said. She was five years older than he was, already thirty-three. They’d discussed having kids now and then, but she’d brought the subject up more frequently over the past year or so. Fisher might not have any time to spare to start an MMA career, but, Lisa reminded him, her biological clock was ticking.
The two things weren’t mutually exclusive, Fisher argued. He could pursue MMA and they could still have kids. They’d lived on the cheap and scratched and saved and as a result had fifty grand in the bank. That was a lot of money. Fisher would work part time and train part time, he assured her, and Lisa could keep working her job at a tech start-up, and if she got pregnant, they’d make it work. It would take a bit of time, but eventually he was going to be making a lot of money, enough for her to stop working if she wanted to. Just watch him, he told her.
He kept hammering away like that, all upbeat, and finally got her to say okay.
“If that’s what you really want to do,” she said. “Of course I’ll support you.”
At Shinjuku Station he transfers to the Oedo Line and rides to Roppongi. He climbs the stairs and exits the subway station.
Famous for its nightlife, Roppongi is crowded with revelers even this early on a Wednesday evening.
Lisa kept her promise to support him. She became a working mom, paid most of the bills, and he took her for granted, took the kids for granted so he could chase his dream, and look where that’s gotten him.
At a crosswalk, Fisher waits in a throng of people for the light to change. On the side of a building across the street, a family of four smiles down from a billboard advertisement for a dental office. Big, toothy smiles.
It’s not too late, he tells himself. He can get a full-time job, teaching English maybe, or translating. His resume is pretty thin, but he’s bound to land something eventually. He’ll save up his money, maybe go back to school. Then he can be the husband and father Lisa and the boys need him to be.
The light turns to green.
He moves with the crowd into the street. He’s got to get out of this rut, though. It’s the only way he’s going to be able to get his family back.
Chapter Four
Lounge O is filled with the sounds of conversation and laughter and the clink of ice cubes in glasses. Bouncy J-Pop emanates from speakers suspended from the ceiling and reverberates off the mirrored walls.
It’s just after 9 p.m., and Fisher and the owner, Terry, pour mixed nuts from plastic bags into little glass bowls. The cook is out sick tonight, so Terry and Hank are having to fill in for the guy, and it’s not pretty. Unable to find anything, Terry has been walking around in more than his usual state of irritation. He fumbles his bag and sends a shower of salted peanuts, almonds, walnuts, and macadamias skittering over the counter and onto the tile floor.
Fisher grins. “Damn.”
Terry narrows his eyes at him. Light glints a soft white off his polished dome. “Don’t say it.”
Fisher’s grin widens. He can’t help himself. “That was nuts.”
Terry closes his eyes and winces. He wipes his hands, which are the size of mallets, with a towel and signals to Yuki, the floor manager, to come get the bowls.
Fisher grabs a broom and dustpan from the storage closet next to the kitchen and goes to clean up the spilled nuts.
Lounge O is on the fifth floor of a skinny building a stone’s throw from the ritzy Tokyo Midtown shopping complex. A long, narrow room of less than a thousand square feet, it’s got a row of four plush, red velvet booths on one side and a long, dark wood bar on the other. Behind the bar is a narrow doorway that opens into a closet-sized kitchen. A slim corridor at the far end of the room leads to a pair of tiny restrooms and a break room.
Eight girls are working tonight: Mari, Erika, Ayako, and Kiyomi, who are all Japanese, and Sarah, Liz, Rosalind, and Maria, who hail from Detroit, San Jose, Manila, and Brazil, respectively. Each of the booths is occupied by two or three salarymen and two of the girls. At three of the tables sit bottles of Chivas Regal, necklaced with little name tags on which Yuki has printed in neat uppercase letters the names of the regulars who paid for them in advance. Called botoru keepu—literally “bottle keep”—the system enables regulars to come in anytime and party with their favorite hostesses and not have to worry about paying for their booze.
Occasionally a group of foreigners will come in, shit-faced and loud, looking for sex. Fisher tells them, always nicely at first, to kindly leave because Lounge O is not that kind of place. Which they usually do without much fuss. When they don’t, Fisher switches to scary mode and informs them that if they don’t get out right now, he’ll make sure they spend the rest of the evening in the ER. Luckily he’s never had to make good on the threat, because if he ever did, the cops would come and he’d probably be in trouble, but more important, so would Terry.
Sex is not on the menu at a normal hostess bar. Sex appeal, for sure, but as a rule the women working at places like Lounge O don’t sleep with customers. Fisher has come to think of them more as amateur psychologists. Their job is to talk with the men, drink with them, laugh at their jokes. Listen to their complaints about their bosses, their wives, their kids.
