Green IslandCandy Finds a Capsule Hotel and Shnade Gets His First Apartment
October 11th 2010 09:49
Candy and Shnade. Two robots at different stages of evolution. Unlike many other robots these two have the chance to make it to the next level, to get one step closer to self-awareness. Even one small step is not an inevitable event in a person’s life. It is not like turtles looking for the sea after being hatched. Such is the extent of our robot hood. Mankind is still in his infancy because he still stupidly believes that when his conscious mind defines a thought either verbally or silently that the mental creation, the ideation holds any real sovereignty over his existence.
We imagine that our mind is like a Captain Picard saying, “Make it so.” And it is so.
In truth, our unconscious rules the roost. And the unconscious made its mind up, in some ways, millions of years ago: the womb, mother’s tit and then fighting, fucking and getting territory. These are the imprints we are born with – just like those baby turtles are hardwired to make the treacherous journey to the ocean. The supposed ‘civilized’ part of our unconscious came into existence at the eleventh hour. Perhaps the new moral and intellectual circuits emerged to stop us raping everyone’s mother and stealing their car. The irony is that the supposed civilized part of our unconscious has no less been guilty of wreaking havoc. All those ‘isms’ that needed loads of people to be tortured and killed fares no better morally than the lower circuits of the unconscious that produces motherfucking carjackers.
And then there are the higher levels. The levels beyond reason, beyond socially conditioned morality, beyond dualism and dichotomy: levels where awareness has finally woken up to the limitations of itself to explain itself; has woken up to the dismal realization that it’s mostly bad. Human nature is like first world coke – so cut with shit, it’s hard to recognize what’s getting you high the coke or the shit.
Only when we do wake up to our own helplessness and lack of autonomy can we move on: to re-program; to re-boot. We are like a virus riddled computer. Only few people know the back-up CDs exist.
Are we going to see our hero and heroine re-boot, re-program? Are we going to see them step up towards the light?
Candy is starting to question. She is beginning to see the patterns of behavior in which she wheels around and around, and she is beginning to suspect there is an emotional rottenness at the centre of the circle. Shnade on the other hand is picking over meager offerings of positive things in his life to confirm his blossoming belief that he is getting somewhere. He’s not sure what that place is, other than that it contains groupies and drugs that he is striving for, but he’s getting there.
And so let me leave the meta and plunge you once again into the tale.
____________________
Candy arrived at Narita Airport at one in the morning. Delays in Korea and a late take off in KL made it worse. And then immigration had looked at her strangely; despite her return ticket they seemed reluctant to grant her a tourist visa. They took her aside and called in a woman in a smart black skirt suit to translate. “What did you do in Argentina? Did you take cocaine in Bolivia? Did anyone pack your bags for you in Kuala Lumpur?”
Candy passed weed out the idiot 101 and so after a long twenty minutes of humming and hawing they let her re-join the line and gave her a stamp in her passport.
Naturally they got the dog to sniff all over her and her dirty day-bag (her backpack was still in a bungalow in Koh Ma). The dweeb at customs made her empty out half her small pack. Why he was certain that the bottom half didn’t contain some dog sniffer proof contraband was laughably beyond Candy’s understanding.
Eventually she crossed the line and passed beyond no man’s land. That symbolic point when you feel you have fully arrived in a country.
At a long information counter Candy was told that all the regular trains had stopped running and that she would have to take a taxi into Tokyo.
But this is Tokyo, isn’t it?
Apparently, Tokyo was an hour away by train and over a hundred bucks away by taxi. Fuck that. There was a bus leaving for some backwater places going in a few hours. But why would I want to go to those places? Candy was working without a Guidebook or an idea about where she was going or what she was doing. She knew this, but somehow had gone beyond worrying about either possible danger or mental aberration.
What the fuck she had thought when she was in the travel agency in KL with her credit card clutched in her hands. There was money on it. It was more money for free. And better: it wasn’t stolen or gained by sleeping with someone or selling something illegal. Still she hesitated and listened to the whir of the fan and the traffic outside. She didn’t want to be there and she sort of wanted to go to Japan. Yet, she had still felt it was wrong to go AWOL with credit card debt and then to take money from her parents who had probably paid off the previous debt and were still willing to sink more money into their daughter. It wasn’t guilt. That was the strange thing. It was probably the realization that she didn’t feel guilty that in the end made her choose a round trip ticket to Tokyo. What the fuck? Zen and manga and money. Not the beach, but still worth a look.
While waiting at the airport in KL, surrounded by people listening to iPods, she had a cold flush at the thought that her reluctance to take the money pointed out to her that she probably hated her dad.
That was a scab that she tried not to pick.
What the fuck. She was here now. She might as well get on the plane. She can always buy a ticket back to Vancouver. This was all free time before the gathering shit storm.
And besides, she was seeing the world. What a trip – she had done two continents and had gone so far east that she was virtually going home: from the bottom of the world in Argentina to the edge of the clock in Japan.
And so it was that she ended up late at night without a place to stay in Narita Airport. She’d been on the proverbial road long enough to take it all in her stride. After the initial shock of being denied days and days of peaceful withdrawal in Thailand she finally rose to the challenge of living once again in a chocking urban environment where nature lost out to cars and concrete. The adrenalin rush of travelling again was doing her good.
Now I just need a plan, Candy thought.
____________________
Shnade was a sex god. He had given Tomoko the full benefit of his experience. He had released his genius bearing seed directly into her sweet box. Shortly after that he had made Tomoko get dressed and leave. He didn’t bother to ask her if she wanted a cab or had money for a cab. He just politely bundled her back into her pants, dress and blue high heels and gently shoved her out. There was no way that he wanted Jay coming back and finding his woman undressed and in the arms of his buddy.
Shnade went to bed after saying goodbye to a hung-over Tomoko.
He awoke midday on Sunday to find Jay back. Jay looked kind of stern and serious to Shnade. He wondered whether Tomoko had already confessed. He was about to find out.
“Shnade, there’s something we need to talk about.” Jay began.
Shnade offered no response so Jay continued. “Look, man. You now have a job and a guitar. And well I want my privacy back. I think it’s time that you take your school up on that offer of an apartment.”
“OK, man. You want me out of here. I can do that.” Jay was confused. He had been rehearsing this situation on the train back from Osaka. He had always imagined that he would be confronted with Shnade’s non-rhetorical ability for talking his way into some dubious moral authority, for avoiding the question, for committing to the imprecise. Instead he got a simple ‘OK’.
“OK, man. I’ve been meaning to move out for a while, but I was worried that you might take it as an insult. You being a Christian and all. And us both being American and all. But I can see that you realize that I can’t be held back. That’s my destiny.”
Destiny was a re-discovered word for Shnade. He had been working on a song that he was toying with called ‘Destiny of Rock Part 1’. It had some bad boy power chords. It was sick.
And with that brief afternoon chat over, Jay left the apartment to go on a date with Tomoko. Shnade found his pipe and his empty stash and got a pin and started to scrape the pipe to get his wake and bake on. He needed inspiration to work on the new song. Thoughts of having to pay for rent or having to confront Jay about sleeping with Tomoko were already pushed outside his immediate focus to the fringe of memory.
____________________
Candy slept the night in the airport. She had been told by several travellers about how safe Japan was and so she felt little trepidation about doing it to save money. She got a surprisingly good sleep curled up on the floor next to a rolled down barrier of a closed shop. At seven am a Japanese woman with orange hair and tiny eyebrows gently spoke to her to wake her up and get her to move on.
Candy bought a sandwich and filled up a bottle with free drinking water. The sandwich looked like it was bursting with ingredients in the shop but when she sat down to eat it she discovered that all the fillings had been deviously pushed to the front. After two bites all she had was cottony, thin white bread devoid of nourishment.
There was still no plan. The only thing she had decided was that she would go to Tokyo. So she went downstairs to the railway station and got on a slow train to the centre.
Well she wasn’t sure where the centre was. When she arrived at Tokyo station, she got on another tube and headed for a place called Shinjuku. It sounded vaguely familiar. She got out the building and looked around. Ugly, uninspiring modernity. She missed the crumbling colonial facades of South America; she even missed the chaotic ramshackle and ad-hoc bustle of Bangkok and KL. At least in South East Asia she would have been able to afford a taxi or tuk-tuk and it wouldn’t have been hard to track down a backpacker hostel or cheap guest house. Here there were no backpackers. It was a Sunday morning yet it felt like a weekday. There were school kids and people in suits everywhere. Don’t they take a day off?
Candy wandered aimlessly down side streets. She only had a small bag and so it was no problem to roam without definite purpose, to soak up the feeling of the city. Something was sure to happen.
After forty minutes she was lost. Not that she was meant to be any place; but she no longer knew where the train station was. She saw a Starbucks. Something from back home. She had an idea.
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?” Candy politely asked a young man in a dark blue pin stripe suit and wet combed back hair looking intently at his notebook computer.
He looked up with a grimace that changed to a smile when he saw the young blonde with a pretty face and swelling tight t-shirt smile at him. “Sure. Why not?”
The young man with the power suit and slick tonsure hesitated. Candy sat down opposite him in a big foamy chair and didn’t start up a conversation. Wade-Radley III snapped out of his lust and returned to his facebook account.
Candy knew about men. Superficial, predictable but also some of them were lovable. Not this one. She wanted his help. She also wanted not to appear desperate. Desperation was very unattractive. That she knew. She looked around. The place was a mix of foreigners and Japanese: mostly young people, and mostly on computers. Everybody in the airport had been listening to iPods, on the train everybody had been playing with their cell phones and here it was notebook computers. Had people in Japan abandoned spoken language for its digital substitute? Candy noticed that a few people were smoking cigarettes. She found a crushed packet of Malaysian cigarettes in her bag and lit up.
“Hello. Can you help me? I need some information.” Candy addressed Wade-Radley III in a demur voice and caught his eyes.
He spoke to Candy’s breasts: “What do you want to know?”
“I’ve just arrived in Japan and I need a cheap place to stay. Are there any hostels or cheap guest houses in Tokyo?”
“Nothing is cheap here. Even your coffee cost you five bucks. I’m sorry I live here I don’t know about being a tourist.”
He really was a charmer. Lasciviousness competed with arrogance. Candy remained silent but aimed her green eyes at the upper class jerk.
Wade-Radley would normally have brushed aside any demands on his sympathy. Sympathy and charity were lefty ideas that only encouraged poverty but he felt pinned between the fine curves and piercing gaze of the woman in front him.
“Why don’t you check for me online? I would really appreciate your help.”
Wade-Radley opened up a new tab and did a search.
Within ten minutes Candy had written down the address of a hostel in Shibuya. She even got Wade-Radley to explain to her how to get to the nearest train station.
As she was leaving she asked, “Sorry to be rude. My name’s Candy. What’s yours?”
“James Wade-Radley. Pleasure to meet you.”
“And what do you do in Japan, James?”
“I’m an English teacher.”
Candy turned her back on the twit and sniggered to herself as she went down the stairs to the exit.
____________________
Within a week Shnade departed Jay’s apartment, leaving him only trash, empty bottles and blackened safety pins.
The school paid the key money and all Shnade had to do was pay a month’s rent in advance. That was a chocking moment for him. Five hundred bucks! Shnade thought about what type of guitar or amp he could get with 5 notes. He thought about all the resin he could score with 5 notes. He had never wasted money on rent before. First he had lived at his parent’s home in Arizona rent free, then in the back room of a bar in Waikiki for free, then at Otoko’s parent’s place for free and then finally at Jay’s pad. What did he need to pay rent for? He could bang chicks and do sneaky bowls anywhere. This was not the way forward. Fuck he would have to buy stuff for the fridge. Do cleaning. This would not do.
Shnade did the only thing he could do. He moved in and put off the landlord with a bullshit tale of needing to get to the bank to take out the rent money. It’s that bitch Tomoko’s fault. If she hadn’t seduced me I would have been able to carry on staying at Jay’s. Women were trouble, but trouble is never far away when you are a rock legend.
That made Shnade consider setting up a night with his new band, Pagnet or whatever it was called. He could pull another number with the door take. He just needed to find a sucker nightclub owner. And then Shnade had an even better idea. It burst into his doped stained thought patterns like a divine intervention, like destiny. Taka’s jacket. He remembered how worried Taka had been when he left his jacket in the hostess club. He suddenly realized Taka always had the same jacket with him. Odd for a rich dude.
There’s something in that jacket. Dude yes. There was his score.
Shnade sat in his new apartment at 10pm on Monday night. He sat on an old couch in his living room come bed room and gazed through the open sliding door at the kitchen. His one cardboard box and big carry-all still unpacked in the corner. Now where was that pin? He had some focus time ahead and he needed to get high.
____________________
On the way to the hostel Candy found a small women’s clothes store. They had a box outside with 500 yen clothes. She chose a couple of T-shirts and then went inside to look for underwear. She found some cheap panties but the bizarre frilly and padded bras wouldn’t do. She paid and left.
Sakura House hostel was nothing like a hostel. There were no cheap dorm beds; just hotel rooms. The cheapest was 70 bucks a night. Some fucking hostel this was. They were very polite and completely ignorant at the front desk as to where Candy could stay for 20 bucks a night. It was their duty to be helpful but not to help. In the end Candy took the room because she wanted a shower, a change of clothes and a bed for a few hours.
She checked out a minute before check out time the following day and as she was handing the key over she tried one more time to get some useful information from the girl at reception:
“How much is a capsule hotel?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know, madam.”
“Do you know where there is a capsule hotel near here?”
“No.”
Candy wanted to punch the over-made up young face with false eyelashes. Focus girl.
“Can I have a map of Tokyo, please?”
“Certainly, here you are madam.”
“Now, can you write in Japanese ‘capsule hotel’ for me?”
This request took a while to comprehend but eventually the young receptionist remembered how to write and carefully held the pen and wrote a few neat characters.
Candy took the memo and map, picked up her bag and said: “You are a fucking moron. Goodbye.” And headed for the stairs.
It took all day and many bizarre conversations with people in uniforms, random westerners and women with mud colored faces and doll like costumes but eventually she found a capsule hotel. It was 30 bucks a night. That was still expensive, but half the price of a supposed hostel.
The hotel had a shower block, a small kitchen, a common room and two long rows of capsules piled two high where people slept. They looked like kennels for dogs that were waiting for a new owner or death.
As soon as Candy crept inside her capsule she felt claustrophobic. It was a honeycomb tomb. It was an experiment in space deprivation. She hated it. She resolved to stay out of her tomb room as long as possible and get drunk.
She ate a pot noodle and drank cheap cans of beer in the common room. And it was there that she met her first normal person in Japan. His name was Hero. Only it was spelt with an ‘i’ not an ‘e’. Hiro spoke fairly good English and was neither pretentious, aggravatingly dumb nor caught up in a cartoon existence. He was reading a cartoon book but he was refreshingly normal. He wore a U2 T-shirt, baggy shorts and had a utility 10 dollar hairstyle. He went out to the 7-11 and bought some beers and invited Candy to sit on the balcony with him. They sat and smoked cigarettes and swapped life details.
Hiro was from somewhere up North and was a University student in Tokyo. He had been kicked out of his university accommodation for the summer holiday and was spending a few days in Tokyo chilling out in the big city before he went home and found a job for the summer. He was studying International Relations and Law.
“What’s that?” Candy asked.
“I’m not sure. Sort of about politics. It’s not too difficult. I have a friend studying math at the University he talks all the time about paradoxes and insanity. I’m glad I’m not studying math.”
“Tell me, Hiro. What do foreigners do in Japan for work?”
Hiro paused to sip his beer and light another cigarette. “I’m not sure. You are the first foreigner I speak with who not my teacher. I think most foreigners in Japan work for foreign companies or they teach English. Many Brazilians work in factories. And some foreign women work as hostess. That’s big money.”
“What does a hostess do?”
Catch up on earlier installments of Candy and Shnade:
Candy and Shnade Reach the Line (Part 8)
Candy Gets Religion and Shnade Gets a New Guitar (Part 7)
Shnade Gets Drunk with a Serial Killer and Candy Arrives in Bangkok (Part 6)
Candy and Shnade Move On (Part 5)
Candy Trips in the Jungle and Shnade Trips Up (Part 4)
Candy Comes in the Jungle and Shnade Becomes the Man (Part 3)
Candy in Bolivia and Shnade in Hawaii (Part 2)
Candy in Argentina (Part 1)
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