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“You got any money?”

“Money?”

“You got twenty thousand on you?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s all from ticket sales.”

“I’ll have a word with this yakuza guy I know. You stay where you are. I’ll call him right now.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Shirokushi?”

“What?”

“Can you get a discount?”

“Listen, Ken-yan, they crack your head open, you’ll never be able to study again. They crush your balls, you’ll never have another hard-on.”

Shirokushi called back in a few minutes to say it was all set up, and before long the yakuza arrived. He was half black and, by coincidence, had once been a student of my father’s. He brought Pimples into Boulevard with him. We reached an understanding over a glass of soda water, and Pimples retreated. He looked back at me as he left, the hatred in his eyes tempered by sheer astonishment that I knew anyone like this.

The yakuza snatched up the twenty thousand yen with his
pinkyless right hand
,
then asked me how my father was doing.

“He used to slap me around a lot, but he was a good teacher. I remember once I did a picture of a church, and he said it was really good. Your father plays pinball, doesn’t he?”

“Every once in a while, I guess.”

“Tell him to come to the Palace Pinball Parlor. I’ll make sure he wins.”

He said he didn’t think I’d be having any more problems of this sort, but that if I did I could call him any time. Then he shuffled off in his sandals, his black sports coat hanging loose over his shoulders and flapping in the breeze.

*

We began filming
Etude for a Baby Doll and a High School Boy
—an extravaganza on standard eight-millimeter film, part color and part black and white.

The first day, we filmed Iwase’s face from the nose down and Lady Jane walking down a long corridor in the negligee. There was no story. It was a surrealistic treatment of the daily life of a student in a boys’ high school who couldn’t feel love for anyone except a milk-drinking baby doll.

Iwase played the student, a born loser who finds the doll lying naked in front of his grandfather’s grave. He falls in love with it, and the doll stimulates certain dreams in his mind. Lady Jane appeared in the dream sequences.

The Bell & Howell we’d borrowed from Masutabe made a satisfying whir as it rolled. Unfortunately, I got the expo sure wrong, and the first and second reels came out blank, but it was still great fun making a movie of our own.

Partly because of the twenty thousand yen I’d paid in protection money, we had to give up on having Lady Jane ride a white horse across a meadow in the highlands. Adama kept pushing for the big white dog, but I was dead against it, and in the end we settled for a white goat that lived near his place. So one day we all boarded a bus and headed out there to film on location.

“I made some lunch for us,” the angel said, holding up a basket that smelled of sweet egg rolls. I sat there wishing I could eat lunch alone with her. The conductor on the bus, a man with a hideous face, eyed us sourly as we played a silly little game called “Gorilla Boogers.” To any question anyone asked you— “What’s your name?” “What’s your favorite food?” “What’s your house made of?” “What’s your hobby?”—you had to answer
“Gorilla boogers,”
and whoever laughed first lost. Lady Jane and Ann-Margret always cracked up at the first question, and Adama won hands down. “Gorilla boogers,” he’d say, again and again, without ever seeming to find it the least bit funny.

Once we were past the suburbs, the bus rolled along beside a river, then headed up a mountain road. The autumn sunlight glistened in Lady Jane’s hair, and the soft swells in Ann-Margret’s blouse jiggled each time the bus swayed. The ugly and ignorant-looking conductor stared at us with loathing in his eyes as we laughed and shouted. That stare of his felt great. It seemed to me that we were just like the high school kids I’d seen in American movies of the fifties.

The goat was in a field beside a lazy river where pampas grass waved in the breeze. I set up the camera on a slope overlooking the field, intending to film Lady Jane walking along behind the goat, holding it by a rope, but the goat kept turning its ass to the camera and dropping
little balls of shit
or taking to its heels so suddenly that Lady Jane was jerked off her feet. Eventually the animal broke free, and Adama chased it for about five hundred meters.

We sat on the bank of the river to eat our picnic lunch. There were rice balls, pickles, egg rolls, fried chicken and cauliflower, and even pears for dessert. While the birds warbled and chirped in the trees, Iwase played the guitar and we all sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “April Come She Will.”

One day when the festival was only a week away, Lady Jane and I found an opportunity to be alone together. Coelacanth wanted to have a slide show behind them while they were playing, and I decided some photos of her would be just the thing.

We met at Boulevard and had a poignant cup of English tea, then headed for the American base. You couldn’t go inside, but there were a lot of picturesque buildings nearby that I thought would make good backdrops: a cream-colored movie theater that looked like a Greek temple; the officers’ quarters, with their ivy-covered walls; a Mickey Mouse clock tower; a church with its steeple painted pink and blue; a beautifully groomed baseball diamond; a cobblestone street where people took their collies for walks; a road lined with plane trees whose fallen leaves danced in the wind; a row of red brick warehouses...

“Is the film finished?” said Lady Jane, smiling into the lens and sweeping her hair back with long, delicate fingers.

“All except the editing.”

“Do I look funny?”

“No, you look great.”

“Did you keep the part with the goat?”

“No, the goat’s out. The image is all wrong.”

She suggested we go to the beach when winter came.

“Winter? It’ll be cold.”

“I know. But I’ve never seen the sea in winter before.”

I imagined us clinging to each other in the cold wind, and my heart began to pound.

Hours went by without my having any sense of time passing, and the next thing I knew the sky was the
pale purple
of sunset.

“I love this time of day,” she said, her hands clasped behind her back as we headed home. I was taking care not to step on her shadow. “It’s over so soon, and then it’s night. But it’s so pretty. I wonder if the way I feel will be like that—if it’ll change all of a sudden.”

“The way you feel?”

“Come on, don’t be mean. I told you how I felt by sending you those roses.”

I stopped and focused the camera.
“I,”
I said, and clicked the shutter.
“Love,”
I said, and clicked the shutter again.
“You,”
I
said. Lady Jane smiled shyly. It was a smile to end all smiles, but it got lost in the gathering darkness and didn’t show up in the prints.

VELVET UNDERGROUND

“Chickens?”
Adama said, more loudly than he needed to. It was at lunchtime, four days before the Morning Wood Festival.

Almost all our preparations were complete. Thanks to Ann-Margret’s over-the-top, weepy-voiced method acting and Father Saburo’s meddling,
Beyond the Blood-Red Sea of Negativity and Rebellion
was a long way away from what I’d conceived it to be, but we were through rehearsing and ready to roll.

I’d finished editing the film, too, and we’d made arrangements to secure a projector and all the musical instruments and amps and speakers.

“Chickens?” he said again.

“Yeah. I’d like to get about twenty of ’em, but eight or so would do. You know any place we can buy them?”

“Butcher shop, I guess, but how we gonna eat eight whole chickens?” He must have thought I wanted them for a party afterward.

“You got it all wrong. I want live chickens.”

“What the hell for? Don’t tell me you’re gonna wring their necks, rip ’em to pieces, and slurp up their blood on stage?”

I showed him a photograph I’d torn out of
Art Today.
It was a Velvet Underground concert in a ballroom in New York. On the ballroom floor were cows and pigs, glass cases full of mice, parrots on perches, a chimpanzee on a leash, and even a pair of tigers in a cage.

“Pretty cool, eh?”

“Tigers and monkeys and parrots—yeah, that’s cool. But chickens? It’ll look like an egg farm.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken.” As usual when I was playing the intellectual, I chose my words carefully. “The important thing is the spirit behind it.
Lou Reed
used birds and animals at this concert to suggest the chaos in the world today. The least we can do is make a gesture in the same direction.”

Adama was well aware by now of my tendency to lift ideas from other people. He snorted and said:

“With chickens? You’re going to suggest chaos in the world with chickens?”

But if Adama was anything, he was open-minded; he said he’d call a man he knew who had a poultry farm near Slag Heap Mountain. Adama was loyal—not to me, mind you. He was a believer, but it wasn’t me he believed in. He believed in something that was part of the very air we breathed in the late sixties, and he was loyal to that something. It wouldn’t be easy to explain what that something was.

Whatever it was, though, it made us free. It saved us from being bound to a single set of values.

We went to the farm that evening.

It was smack in the middle of a vast expanse of potato fields. The smell of chicken shit was overwhelming, and from a distance the din of hundreds of hens clucking sounded like static on a radio.

“Whatcha gonna do with ’em?” said the man who ran the place as we walked around inside. He was a small, bald, middle-aged guy who looked exactly as you’d expect a chicken farmer to look.

“We’re going to use them in a play.”

“A play? What is it, a play about a poultry farmer?”

“No, it’s by Shakespeare. And there’s just no way to stage it without chickens.”

The farmer didn’t know who Shakespeare was. In a dark corner at the far end of the shed, about twenty listless chickens sat bunched together, hanging their heads despondently. The man started snatching them up and stuffing them into feed sacks—two chickens to a sack. The birds made a brief show of resistance, flapping their wings a few times, then gave up and went limp.

“Awfully relaxed chickens,” Adama said.

“They’re sick,” the man told us.

“Sick?”

“Yeah. You can see there ain’t much spark in ’em.”

“It’s... it’s not some sort of disease that people can catch, is it?” I asked.

The man laughed. “Don’t worry ’bout that. After your play you can wring their necks and eat ’em if you want. Nothin’ll happen to you. What I mean by sick is... well, if they were people, I guess they’d be seein’ a shrink.”

He explained that there were always a few chickens that would suddenly go into a slump and stop feeding.

Adama and I stood waiting at the bus stop as the sun sank toward the horizon, stretching our shadows a long way down the road. The chickens squirmed and rustled every now and again in the four sacks we were carrying.

“Adama, I know I said I wanted them as cheap as possible, but look at these birds. They’re practically dead.”

Hanging around with neurotic chickens was putting even us in a bit of a funk. Being with people—or birds or dogs or pigs, for that matter—who had no spark in them tended to lower a guy’s spirits.

“Just listen to you. You didn’t want to spend much ’cause you promised Matsui you’d take her out to eat
steak
after the festival.”

“Huh? Who told you that?”

“Sato.”

“Sato, right, that’s right, I was going to invite you and Sato to go with us, of course.”

“Bullshit. You were planning to use the ticket money to eat a steak dinner alone with Matsui.”

“No, wait, you don’t understand what—”

“Forget the excuses. We’ll all eat together. Everybody.”

“Everybody? Hey, steak’s expensive, man.”

“We can afford to go to Gekkin. I already made reservations.”

Gekkin was a workingman’s Chinese diner that was famous for its homemade meat dumplings. My dream burst like a bubble. I’d been counting on having steak and wine alone with the one I loved, and I’d already invited her to the fanciest restaurant in Sasebo. I planned to take her there after the show, when the sky was the lovely twilight color it had been the evening I took her picture. Lady Jane had smiled and bowed her head, which I’d assumed was a sign of consent. But then she’d gone and told Ann-Margret. I couldn’t believe it. Jane!
How could you!

“Listen, Ken...”

“What?”

“I know you’ve got a lot more brains and talent than most people, but...”

“Thanks. And look, I really did mean to ask you and Sato to come along with us.”

“What about Iwase?”

“Oh, yeah, Iwase, too. He was in on it from the beginning, after all.”

“And Fuku-chan? If it weren’t for him we couldn’t have got the amps and speakers, you know.”

“Right, right.”

“Then there’s Shirokushi. Shirokushi sold ninety tickets, man, and look how he helped us get out of that mess with the industrial arts gang. And Masutabe lent us his camera. And Narushima and Otaki and Nakamura—they sold a lot of tickets, and they promised to help us set up the equipment.”

“I really appreciate it, too. All those things.”

“What do you mean, you appreciate it? If you want to thank them, the right thing to do is to feed them after the festival. Well, isn’t that right? I know I might have expected something like this from you, but I’ll tell you, when Sato told me about the steak dinner it really made me sad, man. Sure, the festival was your idea, but you couldn’t have done it on your own.”