The Ramen King and I (11 page)

The priest ties up Takezo with some rope. Then he walks Takezo back to his temple and throws the rope over a high tree branch, hoisting Takezo in the air so that he’s dangling, bound around his chest, from the tree. Takezo hangs there, alive, for several days.

I asked Matt, “What kinds of things?”

“First,” he said, “you’ll have to stop dating for a while.”

I wondered what he meant by “a while.”

“No dates and no sex for ninety days.”

I thought about Matt’s request. In my adult life, barely a day had gone by in which I wasn’t in—or in pursuit of—a romantic relationship. Three months seemed like an eternity. I could not imagine it.

“Are you kidding?”

“You can probably find another mentor who won’t demand this of you,” Matt said.

A beautiful woman named Otsu takes pity on Takezo, releasing him from the tree. She helps him escape, so the villagers capture her as bait. Thinking she’s being held in a castle, Takezo scales the castle wall searching for her. The priest, spotting Takezo on the wall, offers to lead him to Otsu. But instead, the priest guides Takezo to a small room filled with books; as soon as Takezo enters, the priest slams and locks the door, making Takezo his prisoner.

Three years later, Takezo emerges from the castle as a noble samurai warrior named Musashi Miyamoto.

“OK, I’ll do it,” I said.

Matt gave me his phone number.

“Call me at least once every day. Just check in, tell me how you’re doing. Also, I’m going to give you a writing assignment.”

“What kind of writing assignment?”

“Do you believe in God?”

As a kid I sometimes went to synagogue for holiday services. I had even gone to Hebrew school and had a Bar Mitzvah. But I didn’t really believe in God. The only time I ever prayed was during the baseball play-offs, when the New York Yankees were losing and I asked Him to help them. Sometimes I would propose deals with God. My standard offer was a promise never to masturbate again, in exchange for a Yankee comeback. I would look at the Yankees in the batter’s box, and if their helmets looked a little shinier, then that was God’s signal that the deal was on. The Yankees pulled off miraculous victories, but I never held up my end of the bargain.

“Not really,” I said.

“Listen, God for our purposes doesn’t have to be the old man in the sky. He or She or It can be anyone. Or anything. Just as long as you can believe that this person or thing has your best interests at heart. Is there anyone who can be God for you?”

Just thinking about Matt’s question embarrassed me. I glanced over at the girl typing on her laptop to make sure she wasn’t listening.

“Come on,” Matt urged. “Anyone.”

“Momofuku Ando.”

I just blurted it out, but somehow it seemed right.

Matt accepted the name without hesitation, even though he couldn’t pronounce it. “Momojuku Condo. OK!”

“Momofuku,” I corrected him. “Ando.”

“Momofuku Ando. Right. So, you’ll write letters to Momofuku Ando this week.”

“Letters?”

“Write to him about your past relationships. Anything you think is relevant. Be sure to include everything you can remember, and write a letter every day.”

The whole thing sounded ridiculous.

“I’m supposed to write letters to Momofuku Ando about my past relationships? And then what?”

“We’ll meet on Saturday afternoon in Dolores Park, and you’ll read me what you wrote.”

“That’s it? Just write letters and read them to you and I’m going to change?”

“No. The letters are just so you can see the scope of your behavior, so you can get it all down on paper. After that, we’ll work on changing. OK?”

I didn’t know what else to do.

“OK.”

Matt got up to leave, but then he stopped.

“By the way, who is Momofuku Ando?”

“I read about him in a Japanese magazine. He invented instant ramen.”

“You mean like Top Ramen?”

“Yes, that’s one of his brands. He also invented the cup. You know, Cup Noodles.”

Matt laughed all the way out of the coffee shop.

T
o understand how the inventor of instant ramen helped me change, it would be useful to know something about his life. No better place to start than Halley’s Comet.

You see, the baby who would grow up to invent instant ramen was born on March 5, 1910. That year, Halley’s Comet made one of its near-Earth flybys. To most people, this was nothing more than a coincidence.

Nissin Food Products, however, has always made a big deal about the connection. For example, on the page devoted to Ando’s birth in the catalog to the Instant Ramen Invention Museum, an illustration shows an icy white ball zooming past Earth. The entire planet is covered in clouds except for a small clearing, through which sparkling dust from the comet’s tail gently settles over Japan.

There’s no doubt about it. Nissin means to suggest that Ando—and maybe instant ramen itself—was sent from above.

A
round the time I started to shave, I would stare at myself in the bathroom mirror and wonder what I was going to look like in the twenty-first century. In those days, my favorite TV show was a science fiction series about a permanent manned station on the moon. Everyone on the show carried laser weapons shaped like staple guns, and one of the characters was an alien woman who could morph into whatever animal she wanted. The show was called
Space: 1999
, which made the twenty-first century seem very far away.

In the version of my future I would see while staring in the mirror, I was always posing for a family portrait. My future wife was standing next to me, and in front of us our two children. My wife was of average height, thin, with dark hair, but I couldn’t make out any features of her face. I couldn’t see the children’s faces very clearly either, but I could tell that one was male, one female. My future self ’s hair was shorter than mine in the mirror, and he wore glasses. He seemed dependable, honest, strong. Normal. The head of a family. Which is to say, when I imagined myself as an adult, I saw a man who was very much like my father. Of course, as it turned out, I was not much better than the writers of
Space: 1999
at predicting the future. Because in the early years of the twenty-first century, humans had not yet stepped foot again on the moon, and I was single, reading letters addressed to the inventor of instant ramen aloud in Dolores Park.

We sat near the top of the big sloping green. Matt listened from a few feet away, chewing on a blade of grass. He bobbed forward and back, as if to release energy that might build up and explode if he sat still. While I read the letters, he stared out over the Mission District rooftops toward the downtown skyscrapers. On a clearer day, he could have seen all the way across the bay to the loading docks in Oakland. Every once in a while, a white bulldog ran by, its jowls dripping, in pursuit of a just-launched tennis ball. Couples—some gay, some straight—lay on blankets around us. Like Dolores Street (at the bottom of the hill), Dolores Park was dotted with palm trees, the result of a post-1906-earthquake attempt to dress up the neighborhood. When I first moved to the city, I hated the palm trees because they seemed out of place. But now their out-of-placeness was exactly what made them beautiful.

“Read that part again,” Matt said.

It was the part about cheating on Harue with women I had met through the America Online member directory. Matt closed his eyes, bowing his head while I reread the section. When I reached the end a second time, he opened his eyes.

“Put a star next to that passage,” he said.

I drew an asterisk in the margin of my notebook. It felt good to have Matt not only listen but also give me this kind of mysterious instruction.

While reading the last letter, the one about Amanda, I began thinking about the differences between Matt and me. In particular, I felt ashamed that I was rich enough to afford a weekend at a Lake Tahoe ski house yet all I could do was complain about it. Was he thinking of me as a spoiled brat who made too much of my problems? Our daily phone calls were usually about me, but Matt had begun sharing glimpses of his life. He had been homeless for part of his adulthood, and he had battled an addiction to alcohol. He had gotten sober a few years before we met, and he was working as a counselor at a rehabilitation clinic. He rented an apartment, but it was above an all-night S&M club, so he rarely got much sleep. I had never interacted with anyone like him, let alone shared with such a person the intimate details of my life.

When I got to the part about the ski house, Matt asked me to put a star next to that section, too, and to reread it.

“I once met a guy like Hadman,” he said when I was done. “Down in the Tenderloin.” The Tenderloin is a San Francisco neighborhood with a tough reputation. “And this guy was about twice as big as me, and he said some nasty stuff. So I felt the way you felt, but in my case I used to carry a gun.”

I was afraid to ask, but I asked.

“Did you shoot him?”

Matt pulled up another blade of grass, sticking it in his mouth with the first one.

“You don’t want to know about that. I did a lot of bad things.”

It struck me that the letters to Ando were not only the story of how things had gone very wrong in my romantic life, but also the story of how two seemingly very different men wound up sitting next to each other in Dolores Park.

After I read the last letter, we sat silently on the grass. The wind picked up, rustling the papers of my notebook.

Matt was the first to speak.

“How was that for you?”

I thought back over the previous week. Every night, after I came home from work, I had gone straight to a coffee shop and written a letter to Ando. When writing articles for the business magazine, I would agonize for days over the wording of single paragraphs. But these letters, once I got going, practically poured out of me.

How was it for me? If you had asked me before writing the letters if I was an honest man, I would have said yes. If you had asked me how I treated people—especially those I was close to—I would have said that I treated them very well. If you had asked me if I was living a full life, I would have said yes, and as evidence I would have proffered my career, my funny adventures at Japanese restaurants, and my MBA. If you had asked me why I was still single, I would have said that I simply hadn’t met the right person, and that as soon as I did, I would be so overwhelmed with desire that I would have no trouble remaining faithful to her.

Now I had to admit that the truth was very different. I had lied frequently to people I cared about, and had regularly betrayed them. I had promised myself over and over to stop, but I couldn’t stop. My activities and career decisions—nearly every decision in my adult life—had been motivated primarily by the need to meet new women.

“Matt, I feel like maybe I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster, even though you might have done some monstrous things.”

Somehow, because Matt said it, I was open to the possibility that it might be true.

“Will I ever be able to have a normal relationship?”

“Only Ando can answer that.”

“What?”

“What you need to do now,” Matt said, “is turn over your life to Ando.”

“What does that mean?”

“Repeat after me,” Matt instructed, closing his eyes. “O Momofuku.”

In my mind I was already praying—that the couples on the lawn weren’t close enough to hear us. I felt like an idiot, and I wondered if Matt was a religious zealot. In my America Online dating profile, in the space for a personal quote, I once wrote, “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” I had heard the line in business school, attributed by one of my professors to the management guru Jack Welch. It reflected perfectly my belief that everything in one’s life was under one’s control. If you wanted badly enough to stop cheating on women, you simply stopped. If you committed not to date or have sex for a certain amount of time, even if it was difficult, you summoned the will to do that. I certainly didn’t think that praying—let alone to an old man in Japan—was going to help. But Matt had been nice enough to sign on as my mentor, and I didn’t want to upset him. Besides, I didn’t know what else to do.