5.04 Shortcut

No one in my family has ever been accused of doing a half-arsed job at anything. With us, it’s gotta be all or nothing.

My uncle Pierre, the sweetest man you might ever meet, is a case in point. He was a commander in the civil war in Lebanon during which he had been responsible for such pleasant wartime activities as kidnappings, extortion, and tossing rival militiamen off roofs of buildings, screaming as they fell to their death. Now he’s a successful businessman doing well in Dubai.

“Who knows?” I said to Azami. “Maybe it’s the Lebanese in me.”

“Of all things,” she asked, “why drugs?”

“At first it was just an occasional diversion, an escape from my unhappy marriage to Yuko. But then, the deeper I got into things, especially with the speed, I started to think of it as a short-cut.”

“A shortcut?”

“A way to squeeze more hours into the day,” I explained. “I could get by on less than three hours sleep when I was smoking. I could work all day, spend a few hours writing my dissertation, and still have time to do the things that really mattered to me. You know, the writing and designing and photography. I had so many goddamn ideas when I smoked, I could barely keep up. I believed it was a short-cut to get me from where I was to where I wanted to be.”

Across the still black water on the string of small wooded islands that divided the pond in half, someone was playing a tune on the saxophone. Badly. High school girls sitting on a nearby bench giggled, and joggers continued to jog round and round and round the park like gerbils in their tightly laced running shoes.

I was dying for a drink and told Azami so. Having managed to allay most of her fears, she agreed to accompany me to Shôkichi. And not a moment too soon: had the two of us arrived a minute later, we might have been turned away by the master. The small food stall was packed that night with a group of men and women in their mid-twenties. Most of them had turned beet red from the drink and filled the confined space of the yatai with a conviviality suitable for a Last Supper.

If Azami and I had been the only customers, I might very well have been tempted to confess my sins to the master who had already heard most of them over the past dozen years I’d been patronizing his food stall. Not knowing what tomorrow would bring, the only thing I could do was to eat, drink and try to be merry. Jesus should have shown such reserve.

I ordered a bottle of Kirin Lager and a bowl of edamame to share with the group sitting beside us and a number of grilled items: skewers of pork, chicken, and liver; asparagus, cherry tomatoes, and cheese all wrapped in bacon; salted mackerel, and so on. Normally, Azami would have gently cautioned me about my gout, but not tonight. After finishing the beer, I ordered another bottle, drank that then moved on to imo shôchû, served on the rocks.

Around midnight we left the yatai and walked hand-in-hand all the way home where we made love for the first time in ages.

I couldn’t help but feel that the poor girl was placing all her bets on a horse that wasn’t even fit for glue.

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注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved.

~ by Aonghas Crowe on January 27, 2010.