My Year of Meats (6 page)

“His name is Joichi Ueno,” I explained to my ex-flight attendant PA. “That’s pronounced ‘Wayno.’ He likes to be called John.”

The flight attendant groaned. I shrugged. Actually, I was the one who had given him the nickname, during the initial planning meetings for the show. Kato told me he was so proud of it that he insisted on using it all the time, even to his colleagues in Japan.

“Listen,” I continued sternly. “Don’t give him attitude. This is the big man, the Chief Beef. I’m giving you a major responsibility here. I want you to pick him up at the airport and fall in love with him, and more importantly, I want him to fall in love with you. Got it? Your job is to take care of him, keep him out of the way. You are uniquely suited to this assignment. The two of you have similar tastes.”

As the representative of the ad agency in charge of marketing the meats, Ueno was my de facto boss. He was a real hands-on kind of guy and he always showed up for the commercial shoots. Each episode of
My American Wife!
carried four attractive commercial spots for BEEF-EX. The strategy was “to develop a powerful synergy between the commercials and the documentary vehicles, in order to stimulate consumer purchase motivation.” In other words, the commercials were to bleed into the documentaries, and documentaries were to function as commercials.

We had bigger crews for the commercials. I didn’t coordinate them, since I am a documentarian, but I was asked to help out, in order to reinforce the synergy.

It’s good to unbalance these agency guys right from the get-go, and renaming them is an effective way to start. Ueno was a large, soft-bodied man, with smooth, damp skin and a stunningly profound halitosis, indicative of serious digestive problems, which rose, vaporlike, from the twists of his bowels. He had gone to a Christian college and been a member of the English Speaking Society, where he studied the language assiduously in order to explain to Americans why the Japanese were unique. He had one weakness, which I happened to know all about, having done my part on previous shoots to both cultivate and exploit it: he loved big-breasted American women. Strapping Texas strippers were a very effective tool in the unbalancing of John Wayno.

So I assigned my flight attendant to him with specific instructions to “get Wayno wasted.” The two of them toured all the strip joints in Austin that night, and accordingly, on the first day of the shoot, John was still drunk and docile. We were shooting a square dance scene; the girls were wearing short, frilly dresses that looked like inverted chrysanthemums, and John sat quietly on a sandbag in a corner of the set where he could look up their skirts as they sashayed by. We finished Day One on schedule.

That night, though, he resisted our combined efforts at temptation and got a good night’s sleep. Day Two was a nightmare. It was the most important day, ten hours of tabletop, and we were shooting the Presentation of the Meat. To stay on schedule, we needed to get two shots: the Sizzle Cut, a big fat slab of raw steak hitting the griddle; and the Presentation, the same steak on a platter, perfectly seared and carved to reveal a moist and tender pink interior.

John hated everything. The choice of plates was inadequate. The vegetable accessories were unappetizing. The meat was dull and lifeless. He complained about the marbling and fussed with the hues, peering over the shoulder of the food stylist as she labored with her little camel-hair brushes to achieve just the right blush of pink. Eighteen hours later he was still unsatisfied with the Sizzle, then the meat wranglers ran out of glycerin to make the beef glisten and the American crew walked. I found him all by himself on the empty set, leaning over a platter of steak, breathing on the lettuce and morosely tweaking a pea. John Wayno had a dark and lonely side to his personality.

Of course, when he saw the dailies, everything was gorgeous, and he was as pleased as if he’d shot every plump and juicy frame himself.

That night we all went club hopping. Between the whiskey and the lap dancing and the warm sense of a job well done, old John Wayno was in heaven. The young Texas beauties were breaking his heart. He wept freely as one—her name was Dawn—straddled his tenderloin and offered up her round rump for his inspection. When she pivoted to face him, the tears in his eyes rolled down his mottled checks and splashed the pert pink tips of her nipples.

“Japanese girl not like this,” he cried out mournfully. “Scrawny, you know? Not happy-go-lucky.”

Dawn winced at the warmth of his carrion breath. She lifted her ample tit to her mouth and licked off his tear, then scampered away with a hundred dollars of our production budget tucked inside her G-string.

John sighed mightily and wiped his eyes with his neatly pressed handkerchief. You could tell that his wife back in Tokyo had packed his bags. He looked around the room with great longing. His eyes came to rest on me.

“You, Takagi, are good example of hybrid vigor, you know?”

“No.” I was sitting in the corner, minding my own business, making mental notes for a fax I was going to write later on that night. I didn’t think I needed to be drawn into this conversation.

“Yes.” John Wayno surveyed me critically. He reached across the table and took my jaw in his hand, turning my head from side to side. I held my breath. I fully expected him to pry open my mouth to inspect my gums and teeth. Then he let go of,my face and shook his head sadly.

“We Japanese get weak genes through many centuries’ process of straight breeding. Like old-fashioned cows. Make weak stock. But you are good and strong and modern girl from crossbreeding. You have hybrid vigor. My wife, never mind her. We try for having baby many, many years, but she is no good. Me, I need mate like Texas Dawn to make a vigor baby.”

He leaned back in his chair, took a long drink, then waved at another dancer, who came trotting obediently over. As I exhaled and watched him, I started counting categories:

When I’d put enough distance between us, it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of the world who has ever recalled Shonagon in a strip joint in Texas. I liked that.

 

People Who Look Pleased with Themselves

 

I was at the top of that list.

Three years earlier, when they moved into the
danchi
complex after their honeymoon, “John” had instructed Akiko that it was her duty to purchase condoms until such time as it was appropriate to cease practicing birth control and start a family. Kneeling on the futon next to her, he broached the subject as he plucked a condom from the box.

“That’s the last one,” he said, “from the honeymoon supply.” He ripped open the foil packet. “You have to take care of buying them from now on. As a married man, it’s not appropriate for me to do it. Make sure you always have plenty on hand—this brand.”

He dropped the torn wrapper onto her bare stomach. She smoothed the ripped foil carefully and studied the label, “Mandom SuperPlus,” then pressed it carefully between the pages of the cooking magazine she’d been studying.

“You don’t suppose you could possibly learn to do this too?” There was an edge to his voice. He straddled her head, his penis inches from her nose. She watched, cross-eyed, as he slowly unrolled the thin rubber sheath down the shaft. She reached up and held it between the tips of her finger and her thumb and tugged obligingly.

How does one buy condoms? During their sex that night, she had been wholly preoccupied with the problem.

Next to the market there was a neighborhood pharmacy, but when Akiko went the following day, she saw that the condoms were behind the counter, out of reach. She deliberated for a long time over American painkillers and then bought a spare bottle of shampoo and an unnecessary box of mineral bath salts from a famous local hot spring. It was hopeless, she realized as she paid.
A box of Mandom Super
Plus,
please,
She could hear the words in her head, but she would never be able to say them out loud to the salesgirl.

The only other option was the vending machine on the corner by the liquor store just down the block from the train station. Akiko waited until dusk.

There were actually three machines on the corner. One sold the condoms. The one next to it sold pornographic magazines. The magazines were displayed in two vertical rows, with strips of mirrored foil discreetly shielding from view the nude parts of the girls on their covers. But in the dim yellow glow of the streetlamp you could still see the top halves, and you could still get the gist, whether it was high school girls in sailor uniforms, or tortured women bound in fetal positions with ropes that crisscrossed their breasts, or nude nuns, even.

The third machine sold batteries.

Akiko was in a hurry, afraid that one of her neighbors, returning home from work to the
danchi,
would pass by and see her. She put her coins in, pressed the button, and quickly pocketed the pack that came out. As she turned away, she caught a glimpse of her eyes reflected in the foil that shielded the girls in the magazine machine. The girls peered back from their covers, but her own eyes, fractured in the wrinkled foil, were the ones that looked lifeless.

On the way home, seeing that the street was still empty, she sneaked a quick peek at the package in her pocket. They were the wrong brand, not Mandom SuperPlus. “John” would be angry. He would stare at her with contempt.

“Just don’t think about it,” she counseled herself, taking a detour so she could walk a little longer along the embankment by the train tracks. She liked it there. Plum trees lined the tracks; since it was March, they were just starting to bloom, and the blossoms, lit by the streetlamps, were bright against the cold, dark sky. “Think about something else instead.” So she thought about the vending machines, but couldn’t understand why the three types of machines were grouped together, next to each other like that, occupying the same street corner. If you bought the pornography, why would you need condoms? And how did the batteries fit in?

The extra shampoo would never go to waste. She decided that she would pack the bath salts in “John” ’s suitcase, as a surprise, the next time he went to America. It would be a considerate, wifely gesture, if indeed he noticed, and would perhaps make him feel nostalgic for home.

As it turned out, he did notice. He returned the gesture by bringing her a package of prickly neon-colored rubber rings, “Texas Ticklers,” that he’d bought in a vending machine in the men’s bathroom of a truck stop in America. She looked curiously at the quivering apparatus sitting in the palm of her hand. It looked like a small pelagic squid, like something she remembered from her cousin’s fishing tackle box. “John” lay on his back, waiting, and she attached it to him with a dexterity that she was practicing to hide her distaste.

Sex with the squids on was more abrasive than usual, and after a couple of tries, she asked “John” if it would be all right not to use them anymore.

“Fine, whatever.” He shrugged, obviously offended. “I bought them for your pleasure.”

“John” felt it was unseemly for couples to announce a pregnancy too early in a marriage, but after a year, he announced it was time to try. By then, though, Akiko had lost weight and her menstruations were beginning to dry up. She hadn’t told “John” because it hadn’t mattered. But suddenly her periods became his business, and as soon as they did, she stopped having them entirely. After the second year, he began to grumble; his mother was expecting a grandson, he said, people at work were beginning to talk. But still, nothing. Now, in the third year of their marriage, he was stony with rage.

I had a lover in the Year of Meats. His name was Sloan and he was a musician from Chicago. A mutual friend had sort of set us up, but I was never in New York much and he was always on the road, so it was months before we actually met in person. Instead we got into this phone sex thing. I’d call him up late at night from some trucker’s motel in Gnawbone, Indiana, or wherever we happened to be shooting, and we’d have these libidinous conversations that went on into the night. Production paid the bills, so it didn’t matter how long we talked. When we weren’t on the phone we’d fax, and I could usually count on a transmission waiting for me at the front desk when I’d check into a new motel. It made things interesting, helped mark the time. I always wondered if the desk clerks read our faxes or listened in to our calls.