Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (25 page)

“You’re off the force,” Travis told me, offering his hand and a smile.

“Huh?”

“It was good seeing you, Dave. Let me know when you’re back in town next.”

“Yeah, sure,” I told him, my throat a little dry from that crime-solving cigarette I’d smoked earlier. “I’ll do that.”

On the drive back home, it was hard not to question what had really happened that day. How many shots were actually fired and who pulled the trigger? Was the whole thing an inside job? Did the man with the bloody finger know the two boys on the videotape a lot better than he had let on? And did that woman in the pink jacket think it was maybe just a little bit sexy when I yelled at her in my manly cop voice? But on top of all these unanswered mysteries, I felt exhilarated. Even though neither Travis nor I found ourselves in a haze of gunfire or wrestling some perp to the ground before carting him off to jail or anything cool like that, there’s just something about being a lawman that makes you feel way more alive than, say, sitting around in your underwear eating room-temperature soup.

Part of me wanted to ignore that thing Travis said about my being “off the force.” But waiting at a stoplight on the way home, I couldn’t help but notice I was no longer sitting in a squad car. And suddenly my jeans and down jacket didn’t make me look so much like a guy working undercover as they did a guy who had just borrowed his parents’ Buick for a few hours. Even so, when the light turned green, I stepped on the gas pedal extra hard in an act of rogue defiance. Yeah, I knew I was in a 35 mph zone, but I gunned it right on up to 37 mph before turning on the cruise control anyway. I might have been a civilian again, but I was a civilian playing by his own goddamn set of rules.

About twenty minutes later and a world away from the crime-riddled streets of Cleveland, I pulled into my parents’ suburban driveway. After parking the car out back, I walked through the side door into the kitchen and threw the keys on the counter.

“How was lunch?” my dad asked, looking up from the newspaper.

“Who’s asking?” I said, still in cop mode.

“Your father.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. It was fine.”

I tried to just head up to my room after that, but my dad stopped me before I managed to get out of the kitchen.

“Have you been smoking?” he asked. “You smell like cigarettes.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do. Were you smoking or not?”

“Look, dammit, you don’t ask me any more questions because asking questions is
my
job, you got me?” I told him.

My dad refused to let me borrow his car for the rest of my visit for talking to him like that, but whatever—it’s not like you can expect a totally regular civilian to understand us goddamn lawmen anyway.

Big in Japan

If there’s anything I’ve learned about myself in this life, it’s that I can’t stop rocking. But here’s the thing about rocking and playing in bands: when you’re a young man, playing in a band is cool. Other guys think you’re cool, girls want to make out with you (or at least you think they do, which is what really matters), and you yourself are convinced that the only possible outcome of your rock ’n’ roll exploits is that you will one day go on to become the greatest rock god of all-time.

But then the years start to roll by and you get older, and maybe a little fatter. And suddenly you find yourself at an age where playing in a band can be kind of sad, maybe even downright pathetic. And it’s at exactly that age that some friends and I decided to form our brand-new rock band.

We called ourselves Valley Lodge
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and we knew it was all over before we had even started. We knew there weren’t going to be any platinum albums or stadium tours or groupies hell-bent on licking us from head-to-toe and maybe even making plaster replicas of our genitals. But none of that mattered because, when you’re rocking out, you don’t care about anything else. You don’t care about problems with money or women. Or even the fact that you’ve suddenly become that sad, old rocker dude you’d always swore you’d never be. All you care about is rocking out and then rocking out some more.

To that end, we rocked out whenever possible, which admittedly wasn’t that often since all the other guys in the band had wives and jobs and babies and other bullshit that tends to get in the way of things when you’re trying to rock the fuck out of people. As a result, we’d play every couple months or so. Usually about fifteen or twenty of our friends would show up, mostly because they felt sorry for us or pitied our unwillingness to let the dream die.

“You, um, er … looked like you were having a lot of fun up there,” they’d tell us after shows. “And it’s so great how you just don’t care how it looks.”

That was pretty much the deal for a while. Then one day everything changed. I woke up and—like most days—the first thing I did was check my e-mail. And aside from the usual spam about how I might learn to better please a woman and a couple of replies from some of the many “missed connections” ads I’d placed on Craigslist, there was another e-mail.

“Hello, Valley Lodge,” it read. “We are a record label based in Tokyo. We think you are so very great and would like to release your album in Japan.”

“Finally someone who gets it,” I thought. “Finally someone who gets how unstoppable we are at rocking people.”

“Fuck yeah, motherfucker, you can release the fuck out of that album!” I wanted to respond before instead writing, “Thank you. My bandmates and I would like that very much.”

Releasing an album in Japan would have already been way beyond my wildest, most delusional dreams. If those old pictures of Cheap Trick and Kiss playing over there are any indication, it’s the ultimate place for rock. So after I received another e-mail from the guy at the Japanese record label a few days later, I almost had a seizure.

“Hello, Valley Lodge,” it read. “We were wondering if you might be willing to do a tour of Japan in support of your album.”

“Hell yeah, we would. We’ll rock every man, woman, and child over there so hard you’re gonna have to mop down the entire country when we’re done!” I wanted to respond before instead writing, “Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun.”

Then I immediately called up the other guys in the band and told them how we needed to get on a plane with our guitars, our tightest pants, and our cocks and balls as soon as humanly possible. In my mind, we’d fly over there and, wherever the people of Japan needed their asses handed to them by our gravity-defying hot rock action, we’d just show up and kick them in the nuts with the handful of compositions we’d managed to write on those rare occasions when all three of the other bandmembers’ wives let them come to practice.

In reality, however, we were scheduled to do a four-city tour starting in Osaka.
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We arrived after a sixteen-hour flight, instantly finding ourselves delirious with jetlag because apparently the time difference between America and Japan is like six-to-eight weeks or something. By the time we actually got on stage, we were just plain hallucinating.

“Hello, Osaka,” I said, testing the microphone. “We are Valley Lodge from New York City and we have come to rock you!”

Most of the people in the audience just stood there in silence after I said that, presumably because they didn’t understand a word of it, but maybe also because we looked like we were about to die. My bandmates and I were a little confused, too, because even though the club in Osaka was a lot like the ones we’d played in New York, there were actually people at this one. Lots of them. In fact, the place was packed.

“Are these people here to get their asses handed to them by our gravity-defying hot rock action?” I wondered. “Or are they just here to watch a bunch of old dudes muddle their way through a couple songs before they start pelting us with beer bottles, ashtrays, and whatever else they can send sailing at our heads?”

There was only one way to find out. So I gave my bandmates one of those hot rock nods that signifies the start of a hot rock show and we launched into our first hot rock jam. And that’s when something crazy happened, the people in the audience actually knew the song. They even sang along.

“That’s weird,” I thought.

In my fragile state, a part of me worried we had just become the victim of some elaborate prank where some wily bastard convinced a bunch of Japanese people to show up to the club and pretend to like our band. But then I realized that would take too much planning
3
and instead decided we should probably just play another song and see if it happened again.

And it did.

As we powered our way through our second number, I looked out into the crowd of people packed in there like, um, whatever those little salty fish that come in a can are called, and saw them once again bobbing their heads along with the music. Pretty Japanese girls were mouthing along with every word I sang and leather-clad Japanese rocker dudes were pumping their fists in approval. It was electrifying to finally play for a crowd of people who were there not because they were afraid we might blow off their wedding if they failed to show, but because they actually thought we were good at rock, maybe even kind of awesome at rock.

“Do you think you can handle some more, Osaka?” I screamed, basking in the adulation.

Adding to the relative insanity of it all was that it was all taking place in Japan, the most mind-blowing place I’d ever seen in my whole life. None of us had ever been there before and we found everything we encountered to be completely fascinating.

“Look, a vending machine that dispenses beer right in the middle of the street!” I said to my friend Carl, whom we brought along to give the appearance of an entourage, before insisting he take a picture of me pounding a can of Asahi right next to a police officer’s head.

“The soap dispenser in this men’s room is remarkably well-designed and efficient,” my friend and Valley Lodge guitar player John would tell me.

“Not to mention completely adorable!” I’d respond.

“I know, right?”

“Heeheeheeheehee!”

As awesome as everything was, though, it didn’t take long for us to realize that the reason Japanese tourists took so many pictures when they come to America isn’t because they were culture shocked like us. They just think Americans are total morons. We couldn’t disagree, either. We felt like pantsless cavemen compared to these people.

From Osaka we continued on to Kyoto
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for not only the second show of the tour, but what would also mark the very first time we’d just played a show and then actually had another show to play right afterward. Prior to then, we’d always played every show like it was our last—not because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but because—between the jobs, babies, and other stuff I mentioned earlier—we truly didn’t know if all four of us would even wind up in the same room together again. To actually have another show lined up made us feel like a real band.

“How was the club last night compared to the venues you play in America?” Ryo, a translator assigned to help us survive the tour, asked me in the van.

“It was much, much smaller than what we’re used to,” I lied. “But we really enjoy playing intimate shows like that. Really gets us back to our roots, you know?”

Embrace the fantasy, I figured.

Our show in Kyoto was another stunner, simply because it once again resembled a show in which a real rock band gets on stage and there are a lot of people there to not only see them, but actually to enjoy them, and—who knows?—maybe even secretly fantasize about passing each band member around like a goddamn rag doll as they take turns licking him from head-to-toe.

“We did it again!” I said to my bandmates as I leaned up against our van and guzzled one of those beers you can drink right there on the street and no one can say a damn thing about it.

And that’s when our expectations were once again exceeded.

As my bandmates and I stood there patting ourselves on the back for what we were certain was another successful rock assault, five uniformed college girls stumbled out of the club we’d just decimated. Four of them were hammered and one of them was really, really hammered, so much in fact that she couldn’t help but collapse on the ground and immediately start hosing down the streets of Kyoto with what appeared to be roughly five gallons of beer, nine pounds of noodles, and an unquantifiable mass of unidentifiable pink stuff.

“Maybe we’re not so different after all,” I thought.

But then something just plain insane happened. Two of the hammered girls peeled the really, really hammered girl off the sidewalk and carried her off into the blurry (at least to her anyway) night. Then the other two hammered girls got down on their hands and knees and began cleaning up all the puke. As my bandmates and I watched this all go down, our heads practically exploded. Needless to say, we got some pretty great pictures of that, too.

From Kyoto we soldiered on to Nagoya
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, high-fiving, whipping off our shirts and twirling them over our heads every inch of the way. The Nagoya show was yet another scorcher, a super blast even. And I should probably tell you all about it someday. But the fact is, we’ve got more important things to discuss here: Tokyo, the main event, the final stop of the tour, and the culmination of our fantastic rock ’n’ roll journey.