October 20, 2003
The Blue Merkin
Since you ask I’ll tell you why I’m so goddamn angry. If you want to know, I’ll damn well tell you.
but with the ball gag in my mouth I couldn’t give him a coherent response. I grunted and hoped it communicated my meaning of, relax, you can have all the money in the register.
There are the things that’ve been corroding at me all my life, like the whole little kid thing, and then there are newer things like that fucking redheaded fucker stalking me. Staring at me on the bus over his book, watching me in the reflection on the bus window like I’m not smart enough to see what he’s doing. Watching me from the street when I’m driving, me stuck in traffic yelling into my mobile phone, begging the fucking video shop to stay open late for me for ten measly minutes so I can return the DVD without paying a penalty and they refuse and there the goddamned redheaded guy is, on the street corner, down on one knee pretending to pull something out of a bag.
me, the hand holding the knife was the center of my attention, but then I noticed in my peripheral vision some movement. Someone else was in the shop. I hadn’t noticed. They must have been on the other side of the lube display, this giant pyramid of bottles and tubes. I didn’t need this. First rule: nobody be a hero. Just give him the money, turn the security tapes over to the police, let them handle it.
Being on the small side is the least of my problems. Kids are no big deal, you expect them to be stupid shits so you’re not surprised, they’re easy to ignore as long as they don’t fucking touch me. Adults are worse. It’s the adults that expect you to be somehow tender or childlike or innocent just because you stopped growing when you were seven and were never on the big side to begin with. All the goddamned Tin Drum jokes, Jesus Christ if I ever hear another one of them.
, but before I could complete the thought she was standing there, six feet tall with shoulders like Arnold Schwarzenegger. She pulled her sweater down to expose her knockers so they were completely hanging out, which distracted him long enough for me to hit his hand with the prostate. I brought it down as hard as I could and it sounded like something broke. His military knife bounced off the counter and stuck in Barbara’s cheek and he started yelling. “Scheiße, the hand is broken, Scheiße,” he said. “You broke it.”
Then she put him in a sleeper hold and he shut up. At first, I couldn’t think of anything to say, not surprising given the situation. I handed her some leather restraints and she strapped his hands behind his back; it was probably the first time anything from the shop had been put to a legitimate use. I finally took out my ball gag and thanked her. She was sublime if you define sublime as overwhelmingly beautiful. Blonde hair, smokey skin, dark and pale at the same time, built like a bodybuilder, but supple and natural-looking, not one of your square-looking, acne-all-over-the-back types, did I say fantastic tits already? and she moved like a dancer. She introduced herself, she had a thick accent but a quiet voice, some Spanish name that sounded like Musca.
“What brings you to the Blue Merkin?” I asked her as I started dialing Seiji’s number.
“The what?”
“That’s what I call this place since the letters on the sign burned out. Blue American is a stupid name for a sex shop.”
“Do they require that you to dress that way?”
I removed the knife from Barbara’s cheek and straightened her white wig. The wound looked pretty bad, but you can fix almost anything with super glue. “Do you have any idea what a Real Doll goes for?” I said. Seiji, you might not know this, Seiji was always doing these irritating, artistic displays. Right now he had me standing at the cash register squeezed in between this creepy rubber woman who looked like Barbara Bush with her white wig, and a see-through plastic man I called George, like those visible people you see in biology class that you can open up and take out all the organs, only bent over because Seiji had gotten burned on an order of lube he couldn’t move now so was trying to sell customers on any sexual practice he could think of that took a lot of lube. George was pretty robust, his organs were all heavy, solid acrylic, and it was his prostate that I’d broken the robber’s hand with. You know how it works, slip a prostate into an extra large leather codpiece: instant blackjack.
When you work at a sex shop in the seedier end of the Kabukicho, for a guy who more likely than not has Yakuza connections, or at least owes them a lot of money, you don’t just go flag down the first policeman who walks by when you get robbed. I called Seiji and while we were waiting for him we looked over the guy on the floor.
“Maybe I should go,” Musca said.
“Sure, if you want.”
“He looks like a god,” she said.
I was going through his pockets. “His name is Udo,” I said, showing her his foreigner card. “He’s German.”
I went back around the counter where I had a small space heater because my ass was getting cold hanging out of the chaps I had to wear like that. “Do you like wearing that?” Musca asked me.
“Dress code,” I said. “Seiji thought a blonde midget in S&M gear would give the store a little what he called brand identity.” She was checking out my package, I could tell. Although I’m very short, my equipment is average-sized, which makes it look big on my frame.
“You remind me of that singer from Led Zeppelin.”
That flattered me. I heard that a lot: like Robert Plant, but ten years younger. Unfortunately, I still look like him – have you seen him lately? Jesus Christ, scary, knowing I’ll look that way in ten years.
I got her telephone number before she ran out into the rain, leaving behind two pairs of nipple clips and some silver thumb-cuffs. I slipped them into my pocket. Everyone needs a lucky charm.
It had been raining without interruption for a week.
Seiji finally showed up. He knocked on the door of the shop – I’d locked it just in case – and I let him in. He came in shaking rain off his umbrella.
“Malcolm, what happened? Hora, you catch robber? Bakayaro, dude!” It might help understand Seiji if you knew that Seiji had spent a lot of time in Hawaii “studying English” once upon a time.
“Seiji, this is Udo. Udo, Seiji.”
“I can’t feel my hands,” Udo said.
“Udo, mellow out, man,” Seiji said. He handed Udo a ten thousand yen bill to keep him quiet. We went behind the counter. Seiji insisted on watching the security video first thing. He pulled out the tape and we watched it.
He had a shit eating grin on his face, which on Seiji was always bad because that was the Seiji has an idea expression.
“Malcolm,” he said. “Overpower movie.”
“What?”
“Like crush video, only overpower. Little guy and naked woman overpower German. Who that babe?”
Seiji explained his brilliant idea – overpowering would be the new bukkake, he said. “Overpowering much bigger than vomit fetish or crush,” he said. “Bigger maybe than roricon.”
You have to hand it to the Japanese, no one can invent fetishes better than those guys.
He gave Udo another bill, and a Xeroxed document in Japanese. “Sign release form please, Udo,” he said.
Seiji found someone else to run the cash register at the Blue Merkin and shopped around for a video camera. The good part was, I didn’t have to wear those fucking clothes anymore. The bad part was we couldn’t find Musca anywhere. We checked all the strip clubs, all the soaplands and callgirl things and enjo-kosai things we could find, all that sort of stuff, but no one recognized her from the grainy screen caps Seiji had printed out from the security cam. He finally gave up on her and had Udo and me interview some other girls while he went about selling the security video as his first product.
Put yourself in their shoes: rainy season, a fifteen-minute walk through trash and piled-up abandoned bicycles from the nearest subway station so you’re wet and sweaty when you arrive at this dingy blue apartment building with sick-building syndrome written all over it, where you have to climb three flights of stairs because the elevator doesn’t come (on your way up you see it’s stuck with doors half open on the second floor) and you finally arrive at the scratched orange door, double-check the number from the note in your pocket, knock cautiously, someone says “come in” and you do, and there on the sofa of the bare casting room sits a German god with his right arm in a cast, and me behind the desk because that way I look less tiny.
Most leave right there, like, injured guy and midget, right. Twenty-five make audition appointments, fifteen find the apartment, a dozen leave right there, without saying another word. I admit there may have been some creepiness.
But a couple showed up and fled not. Like this one. Looked around like there might be a mistake, where are the Japanese casting people? Why are there no other girls waiting their turn? What the hell is this?
“I’m here for the, um, audition?” She re-checked her note. “An, um, over… um…”
Udo it turns out was quite shy back then so I helped her out. “Overpower video, yes. Have you got any film experience?”
“I’ve been an extra in a couple movies… I’m actually an English teacher…”
Who hasn’t been an English teacher in Japan, I think, that and Christ do I hate ellipses. But we’re desperate. “Look, Agathe,” I say, since that’s her name. “I’ll be open with you. This is an art film. Sure, it’s for the fetish trade, basically, but there’s no explicit sex, no nudity on your part. It’s an artistic conceptual film.”
“It only being marketed in Asia?”
“Your relatives in the, what, U.K. judging from your accent? They’ll never see it if that’s what you’re worried about. The clientele is very, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh restricted.” Shit, I think, what a time for my stammer to flare up. Picture it, she’s being interviewed by a midget with a high voice and a stammer and she sticks around, how desperate can she be?
In fact, we even ended up making one with Agathe. I didn’t think a single inch of film would ever really be shot, so I was surprised. She looked like a good kid so I told her to demand her fee up front from Seiji, because, like, try collecting afterwards.
Seiji sketched out a pizza-delivery scenario: Agathe is a stewardess watching television, I come up the stairs with a pizza (it was filmed in the same apartment as where we interviewed the actresses – Seiji’s brother’s apartment while the brother was away in Hawaii studying English; we ate the pizza when we finished). She opens the door for me, Udo forces his way in, pizza goes flying.
Seiji thought at first it was the seminal overpower movie, defining all the necessary elements for the following ones: the toss (Udo threw me onto the sofa), oddness (Barbara and George were standing around in the background), bondage (Udo starts taping up Agathe), surprise (I crack Seiji’s highschool golf trophy over Udo’s head), genuine unconsciousness (Udo crumples to floor) and finally, more bondage, as Agathe and I tape up Udo.
Seiji took Udo to a clinic he knew. Agathe and I hung around the apartment for a while. Agathe said she’d go wash up, she had tape sticking to her. Fine with me – night had fallen outside and the black glass of the sliding door to the tiny balcony reflected, from where I sat, a perfect view of her getting undressed and prancing around the bathroom. Wonder if we could work that into a video, I thought. Refrection movie, dude.
“You look like Robert Plant, you know that?” she said from the bathroom.
“I’m Seiji’s backdoor man,” I said.
“His what?”
“When I work at the Blue Merkin (I’d explained the name to her previously) I don’t go in the front door, I go in this small door in the back alley. He thinks it makes the gaijin cashier more mysterious if I just appear and disappear without anyone seeing me come or go.”
“Seiji all there?”
“Who is? As long as he pays us up front we’re okay. If you can consider someone dealing with him at all in the first place ‘okay’.”
You may have heard about Japanese loan sharks, yakuza, etc. and all that shit. Drinking with Seiji, he’d intimated that he’d had business dealings with such people. They’re same as anywhere else: every now and then they have to kill someone who doesn’t pay so everyone else takes them seriously. Unfortunately for Seiji. Late one January morning, as I made my way through the garbage cans and crows and slush to open up the Blue Merkin and saw footprints going up the alley to the back door but not back out, I stopped and looked around.
One pair of prints, not Seiji’s. No one hiding in the alley, no cars. Malcolm puts two and two together. In the movies, I would have snuck in and had a look around, but in the movies I would have been this kung-fu guy, or had a gun, not a midget with nothing in his pocket but his lucky charms.
See, Seiji’s idea for overpower videos had not panned out. He blamed it on us losing Musca. He’d sit up nights comparing the security footage with what we’d produced, trying to duplicate the effect, but it never worked. He tried another one with Agathe; then he canned her and tried one or two other women. He had to borrow a little money for all this.
Anyway, I saw the footprints and figured, fuck. Nice knowing you, Seiji. I mean, I was Seiji’s midget. Anyone who knew him would know I was connected with him, and I didn’t need that. No thank you.
In all, from the time I saw the footprints to when I walked back out of the alley, casually but at the same time as fast as I could move, maybe thirty seconds elapsed. Back out the alley, up the street and of course there’s Musca in a 7-11 watching the clerk warm a cheese burrito for her in the microwave. Angels are like cops, I think, never there when you need them, always hanging around when it’s too late.
On the other hand, when you’ve been looking for someone as long and with as much desperation as I’d been looking for her, when you finally find them you don’t think, “what an odd coincidence, how suspicious,” no matter the circumstances. They could be crawling out of a snake’s asshole in the Amazon and you’d say something like, “Musca, Jesus, how good you look!”
At least that’s what I said, and not, “how odd to see you here, so close to the Blue Merkin, just when someone’s snuffed Seiji inside.”
The microwave went “DING”, she paid for her burrito and her other stuff, cans of olives and tomato sauce and stuff mostly and I told her about Seiji as we left. “The movies didn’t work out,” I said. “He thought it was because they lacked you. And now he’s dead in the Merkin.”
“Did you see him?” I said I hadn’t. She wanted to go check. “Geeze, just let the police find him,” I said. “Let’s go get alibis somewhere and let them find him. Let’s take a shinkansen to Osaka or something for the weekend.”
She insisted though, and I figured, she can be the kung-fu guy in this movie. I unlocked the front door of the shop, to which I of course had a key, and we went in. Behind the counter, yep, there’s Seiji dead on the floor, in a big pool of blood. Above him, there’s Udo rifling through the goddamn cash register.
“Udo you fucker, I don’t believe it,” I said. “How could you?”
“He owed me money,” he said. “The bastard cheated me.”
“Man, I always told you to get paid up front,” I said.
“Don’t come any closer,” Udo said. He had a new butterfly knife, covered with blood, he waved it at me a little, then went back to filling his bag with cash. I couldn’t believe how much cash the register held. Normally Seiji comes at night and deposits it or whatever.
I threw a blue plastic bottle of lube at him, but missed. “Nothing more dangerous than a midget with lube, is there?”
“Don’t try anything,” he said. He brandished his knife at me again, then returned his attention to his money. I quietly uncapped another bottle and squirted lube all over the floor. Worth a try, I thought.
Udo filled his bag and came out around the counter on his way out of the store but only made it to the puddle of lube, where he slipped and fell on his back, cracking his head on the floor, hard.
“Musca, give me your bags,” I said. It did strike me as odd that she had her knockers out again, but I was concentrating on immobilizing Udo. I found the biggest can of beans and hit him with it until he stopped moving, then got the thumb-cuffs out of my pocket and secured his hands behind his back.
Then I just sat there on his chest, breathing hard, exhausted from the adrenalin.
“Fuck,” I said. Udo was still breathing, so I sort of rode up and down a little on each of his breaths. Despite everything, I was relieved he wasn’t dead.
“Musca, call the cops this time,” I said.
Seiji stood up behind the counter. “Cut,” he said. “That was great, Malcolm,” he said. “That rocked.”
A guy stepped out of the back room, then a second one did, carrying a camera. Both were lighting cigarettes, Mild Sevens.
Seiji immediately started watching the footage in the camera’s little monitor. “This is much better. Secret to good overpower movie is actor must believe is real,” he said. “Bakayaro.”
I got off Udo and walked out of the Merkin. “I thought you were a fucking angel. You knew,” I said to Musca as I passed her. Of course. What a coincidence, Musca at the Merkin at just the right time.
“Malcolm, you’re a big star,” Seiji shouted after me. “You famous, bakayaro.”
, and found out years later, fucking around doing a Google search, that Udo is a TV star in Germany now. Still looks good. And he gives acting workshops. Whatever.
I walked to Agathe’s place, it took me five hours because she lived way the hell out in some suburbs exactly across town and I wasn’t hurrying. We’d had a certain rapport and I’d entertained hopes that we might get together for a while. I got to her place just in time to see her being led out in handcuffs, muscled around by eight policemen. I heard later it was some drug charge, she’d held some pot for a friend who got caught and cut a deal. I visited her in jail a few times.
Not exactly my day.
to open a bar and call it The Blue Merkin, of course, but I never got together enough money, and I didn’t want to borrow the cash after what happened to Seiji, or didn’t, but could have. Agathe turned out to be Polish, she just spoke good English. We hung out after she got out of jail and that’s how I ended up here. She’s opening an English school and I’m helping her out.
Of course it started to rain at this point. I walked for a while, then stood on a bridge crossing a filthy canal and watched the raindrops hit the water. I reached into my pocket and tossed the nipple clips into the dirty water. They hardly made a splash. The rain picked up and it made a hissing sound as it hit the water, and the tires of cars driving past made hissing sounds too on the wet pavement.
