The Island

When we approached the hotel, gray and cracked in the distance, like the perfect setup for a campy summer horror movie, we realized, the hotel was in fact, an island. We crossed a small bridge and began driving along the water to the biggest, hoteliest looking building we could find. When we arrived at the check in counter, the procedure was typically short, find the gaijin name, smile at them, give them something to sign, show them where their room is. This system was thrown into a bit a fix when he pulled out the map of island though, it had a golf course, windsurfing, it’s own onsen, bike rentals, boat rentals, 3 restaurants, miniature golf, a basketball court, and a series of cabins spread in the slightly forested area in the middle. When he pulled out a map of “the island” and tried to explain it in Japanese, and we nodded and sounded impressed, but we had no idea what the hell he was talking about. We figured it out as we went along. The place was a resort, self-contained, and inconveniently located a half hour from the nearest bar. Suffice to say we made use of none of these fine attractions on our island, though I was close to trying to play golf.

We settled into a palatial suite, compared to our last room, it was about 40 feet long, had 3 beds, a couch, a desk, a table, two chests of drawers, two closets, a fairly large bathroom, and a small fridge. All of the island’s eateries had closed for the evening, so we decided to go back near town to Denny’s (Joyful). It has all the comforts of home, it’s open 24 hours, and there’s a button on the table you press when you’d like to summon a tiny Japanese woman to bring you food. Coffee, Soda, Water etc…were all you can drink for two bucks. You can get burgers there, but they don’t come on a bun, you just get a hamburger patty slathered in sauce on a plate, but your body doesn’t really miss the bread too much. It was time for some crucial decision making, sane people would have gone to bed, and woken up early to explore this prominent and unique new city that opened up before us. I’ll spare you the trite remark here, we argued over whether to get a cab to the bars or load up on liquor and drink in the hotel room. After discovering a cap ride would be about 70 dollars, one way, from the hotel into town, we decided on the liquor, some ice, and some mixers.

As we left the 7-11, towing Jack Daniels, Vodka, and Rum, with various mixers; that’s right, in Japan, liquor is a convenience store item, we noticed three remarkably attractive Japanese girls, sitting in the car next to us, and their lucky guy friend walking back to drive them wherever they were going. I had a new destination in mind. We exchanged pleasantries, well, we said good evening at least, and then the conversation took a turn downhill, because I was out of Japanese. I held up the booze and said, “Partyu?” They giggled gregariously, but we weren’t getting anywhere, we needed to work on the driver. El Angel Solo, once again proving her vast worth, refused to flirt with the driver, even though she loves Japanese boys. To my dismay the car drove away in the opposite direction, but I was still holding a bag of liquor, so the night wouldn’t be a total wash.

We trekked the 15 minutes back to the hotel, blasting something or other out of the IPOD speakers in the Suzuki Alto – which by the way is named Yama – meaning mountain. Yama purred like like a three-legged asthmatic cat with one lung, on dialysis, in heat…and we poured the first drink in the hotel room. El Charro put on some hip-hop, but underground stuff with amazing lyrics…which I could make out maybe 20% of. It was definitely more intellectual than magic stick, slim shady, and “In da club” put together. It was more like 50 Cent doing a dramatic ghetto reading of War and Peace. I was not entirely happy with the situation though, our vibrations were mellowing out too much, and I feared we might fall asleep well before dawn. After I finished my Jack and Coke I informed the group that I would DD if we decided to go find something to do in the city of Beppu. 12 minutes later psycadelic trance was blasting from the IPOD speakers now re-located to Yama’s dashboard.

We weren’t proud of it, but we used a “Let’s Go” book to figure out where the best nexus of debauchery was located. As travelers we hate using a tourist book to guide us to where somebody thinks we should go, but we were moderately desperate and wanted to do less wandering and more…debauching. We parked in a parking garage somewhere near the train station and set off to boldly go where only a few thousand gaijin have ever gone before. Beppu has the reputation of being the “Sin City” of Japan. Comparing it to Las Vegas is about the equivalent of comparing Amsterdam to Disney World.

Almost all of the bars in Beppu are hostess bars. The streets then had only two major features in the small alleys, and side streets around the hostess bars. Florists, and very attractive Japanese women dressed up in terrific evening wear. Let me explain. A hostess bar is like a strip club, except there’s no nudity, trashiness, or really anything entertaining going on. It’s an extremely expensive bar where attractive Japanese girls will flirt with you and pour your drinks. These establishments exist because to be honest Japanese men have “no game.” They have a lot of trouble, attracting and or copulating with Japanese women on a day to day basis. So they throw themselves into their jobs, get really stressed out, never have sex with their wives, and blow all of their money to goggle at girls who pretend to be interested, and hope to god they look like they have enough money to get the hostess to accompany them to a love hotel, for 7 minutes of small bodied ecstasy. As a result of so many hostess bars, a number of florists have sprung up in the area, since girls are always impressed by such a unique and thoughtful gift as a fistful of soon to be dead brightly colored things. The streets normal odor of urine and failure was slightly overpowered though, which is a plus. The attractive Japanese women standing outside were of course, hostesses, and they were quite fetching, but I wouldn’t pay them exorbitant amounts of money to tell me how good looking and cool I am, that’s what my mom is for. She thinks I’m the coolest best looking guy in the world.

Finally we found a normal bar. We cantered in, and I was immediately impressed by the décor. Here’s a picture to save you the imagining…just kidding I never take pictures of anything. There were couches squared against all the walls, of crushed velvet. The passed out guy in combat boots also added to the ambiance of the establishment. As the DD I sighed and ordered a coke while the rest of the fellowship began boozing in earnest. It was still a mellow trip, but at least we were out of the hotel room. We stayed for a few drinks, reminiscing over what had happened in the last 6,000 words of the blog, and had a gay old time, which, consequently, is not to be confused with an old gay time, because that’s just disgusting.

We moved outside again and began looking for a club, or an abandoned factory, or anything remotely exciting. I forgot to mention that other than the bartender and the passed out guy in combat boots, we were the only people in the bar. During our meander around town, we happened into the tallest human being I have ever seen in my life. This guy had to be pushing 7 feet tall. We immediately started a conversation, the fact that he was a big black American dude, probably meant he knew something about Beppu that we didn’t. We asked him if there were any clubs, or gatherings, or people in the city. He said there wasn’t but he would show us the way to a cool bar.

As it turns out the guy was a basketball player, shocking I know, and he played for the semi-pro Oita Heat. Apparently there are about 12 basketball teams in Japan, all consisting of mostly American expats. He took us to his friend’s bar, which according to the owner was designed to feel like your bedroom at home rather than a bar. There were really comfortable chairs and couches, the walls and ceilings were painted in camo, the walls were covered with posters of Bob Marley playing soccer, and he had a huge tv connected to every game system known to man. The bar was predictably empty except for the fellowship, a giant basketball player, and the bartender/owner of the establishment. We stayed here for quite a while, as it was comfortable and it didn’t appear that we’d find anything better anyway.

Eventually the basketball player left and the owner came over with his English dictionary and did a pretty good job of keeping up a conversation in English, while we failed miserable to say anything valuable in Japanese. He apparently designed a lot of shirts and sold them at the bar, most of them revolving around ye olde cannabis culture. El Charro came to Japan partly to get an insider view of the fashion industry, no he’s definitely straight, calm down. El Charro also purchased two of said t-shirts at a very accommodating price from the owner. Who managed to explain all the cryptic insider drug slang to us before we left.

We rolled out sometime around 2 AM and decided we were hungry again, and we knew exactly what was still open. We went back to Denny’s (Joyful) again, with the exception to the meal being the vast quantities of beer drunk by my compatriots. El Angel Solo wanted to go to Karaoke, I didn’t particularly feel like going to sleep, and El Charro was planning to drink himself into a coma, and Karaoke seemed to fulfill the how and where of the equation.

We went to Karaoke, me for the first time…sober. I ordered a beer and we went to it. Not more than an hour into the rock out session El Charro was passed out on the bench, and my diseased throat was aching, so we cut it short fairly early, woke up El Charro, and bounced back to “the island.” Once unburdened by the albatross of DD around my neck, I went straight into the JD, on the rocks, and we turned on some music, and stayed up to watch the sun come up over the water from our balcony. Immediately followed by some vomiting and passing out until tomorrow afternoon.

All Signs Point to Insanity

I awoke to an impossible combination of a bus full of nuns, a helicopter full of orphans, and an all you can eat buffet of endangered species at Woodstock, crashing through my window, crawling into my ear and tap dancing on my brain…at least that’s what the ringing phone sounded like. When that high pitched ringing sound we desperately wanted to avoid burst into the room, it was somewhere around 12:30, and our check out was scheduled for 11 AM. I would like to say that we had prepared the night before, packed our things, organized ourselves, etc…but we’re lousy tourists, and damn good alcoholics. It’s in these awkward moments went your freshly jolted body is springing around the room piling clothes into your bag and smell testing for a single moderately clean shirt that the thought of paying extra for the room creeps into your mind. You brush your teeth like they’re covered with spiders, throw water on your face, get dressed so fast that you barely avoid zippering your testicles and rush down to the concierge to tell them the phone was broken.

What we forgot was that we weren’t in New York, or California, we were in Japan, the land of I’m sorry. When we walked downstairs with our big puppy dog eyes, they had the polished brass cojόnes to tell us they were sorry for waking us, but that it’s past check out. They couldn’t even dignify our irresponsibility with a glib remark, or feigned anger because they hate their job. Sometimes these people can really get on your nerves.

Well, I had a solid 6 hour coma after the debauchery of my birthday, and now it was time to go ahead with the simple task of navigating around the island of Kyushu toward our hotel without an atlas, an ability to read road signs, any idea where we currently were in the grand scheme of things, hung-over more than a little, and on anti-biotics, which I popped before we left the hotel. We trekked to the airport parking lot, found the car, opened the doors, and waited outside with the doors open for a solid 15 minutes so the car could reach a temperature around hot enough to cook chicken in the oven. The current temperature inside of my Suzuki Alto hovered somewhere around the center of the &*$*ing Sun.

We got on the expressway (6$) and drove, maybe in the right direction, for about ten minutes. Then the expressway split 5 ways; Route 1, Route 2, Route 3, Route 4, and Route I hate Japan. None of the signs were particularly helpful as we couldn’t read them. I asked El Charro which one, and he gave me a look like he’d been drinking all night, I would have asked El Angel Solo, but she was a woman, and we weren’t in a kitchen. I took Route 3 and we leapt through the lanes, driving like angry people who want to get somewhere but know they not going the right way. We gave up, got off the expressway, turned around, and got back on the expressway the other way (6 $). We came to the same mouth of asphalt tributaries and chose Route 1. Why not? El Charro came out of his stupor enough to start looking at the old maperoos. One page computer printouts of random parts of the city, and the island of Kysuhu, it would be what an atlas looked like if designed by 140 monkeys with ADD, and ADHD, and Alzheimer’s, and AIDS too, just for the hell of it. El Charro decided we were going the wrong way again, so we got off, and got back on (6 $). We took Route 4, it lead us past a giant tower, and a domed baseball stadium, home of the Fukuoka Hawks, because El Charro’s Asahi animal spirit guide swore to him the night before we needed to pass these two structures to get where we were going. So far the ride had taken 1 hour. We were within 5 miles of where we had started.

I said to El Charro, “I swear to God if we drive past this dome again, I am going to invent a time machine so I don’t have to wait to murder your first born.”

This was not a pleasant hangover.

We stayed on the toll road for a while, if we were going in the right direction we would have to come to what El Charro’s students called, the most confusing off ramp of all time, afterwards it was supposedly smooth sailing to Beppu on the expressway. We were cruising a solid 130 Km an hour (The maximum reading on the Suzuki Alto dashboard is 140) and we saw the toll gate. We paid the toll (3 $) and proceeded down the impending stretch of…single lane country road. The speed limit was 50 km/hr (30 mph) and there was no traffic. All rational signs pointed to the fact that I would have to invent a time machine, but El Charro’s was sprightly and optimistic. In possibly the best line of the trip so far, possibly dwarfing his confession that he had gone on a week’s vacation with absolutely no money on him because he left it in a drawer in his apartment, El Charro’s turned to me and with a note of sincerity blurted, “Well, it feels like we’re going East, I mean it looks like we’re going East.”

We drove on for about a half hour, and then turned around, following a few other lost vacationers the wrong way down a one-way street for a while, which wound to the point where we were all going the wrong way over a one way bridge, and finally ended up in a town. We were lost, hung-over and hungry. We stopped at a supermarket and had an obligatory pee/sandwich break…in that order…kind of. We drove straight for another half hour afterwards and in some horribly bitter turn of cosmic spite spied the highway in the distance. The same set of tolls we had passed to enter this god forsaken, “East-looking” wasteland. I checked for cops, then I checked for traffic, and then made an illegal U-Turn, through some cones, 50 meters from the entrance/exit of a toll-booth, on anti-biotics. Picture yourself driving towards the George Washington Bridge, deciding you didn’t want to go over it, and turning around in front of the toll-booths, then picture yourselves being the only white people in a 5 mile radius, driving a car with your boss’ phone number on the back of it. We kept driving.

Soon afterward we stopped at some kind of market to ask for directions. A gentleman with his wife and kid was kind enough to help us out. I forgot to mention that for the duration of the driving on this trip, we are listening to our IPOD’s on my nifty little battery powered IPOD speakers in the car, Jumping Jack Flash was playing at the time when I decided to really murder El Charro’s first born. Beppu was due East of where we started, in the two hours we’d been driving, the bulk of it was spent going…drum roll…Southwest. SOUTHMOTHER%&*!INGWEST!!!! The guy did manage to map out our route perfectly for us though, we recognized all the streets because we’d already turned around on them at least once and we now had a damn good idea of the way we should go. We thanked him vigorously for his much needed counsel, and I politely asked him if he had any uranium for my flux capacitor. El Charro winced a little.

We made another U-Turn. We headed back toward the toll booth we went through once, made an illegal U-Turn in front of, and then went back through them again. When we passed the Dome again I gave El Charro the best shit-eating grin I could manage, and then I changed the music. I needed angry driving music, because I was an angry driver. I put on the album Ignition, by The Offspring. The opening lines of the song session appealed to me at this moment, the thought of LAPD police brutality resonated within me, and the thought of burning down a few buildings leapt over my heartstrings.

Steve: “Ok, for the next 40 minutes, while my angry music is playing, nobody look at me, nobody talk to me, nobody breathe near me, if you open your mouth once before this album is done, I’m just going to head straight for a gas tanker”

With the exception of the music at full volume, the car was dead silent.

When the music had finished we were approaching the off ramp our students had told us was the hardest part. After what we’d been through already this morning though, I didn’t think it could be that tough. We approached a sign that quoted distances of a few dozen destinations, and we recognized one as the correct one, things were going ok. Then we approached THE SIGN.

This sign was about twenty feet long and ten feet high. The roads were in 6 different colors. The best way to describe would necessitate inventing a few extra dimensions, but I’ll try to explain it in two. Picture, if you will, 4 pretzels. Now interlock them. Melt them into each other. Stretch them out. Wrap them into a perfect trapezoid. Color them different colors. Now write Japanese characters in all the empty spaces.

El Charro: (Pointing to the sign) There’s our exit!
Steve: Umm…
El Charro: The little white one on the left

The little white one on the left looked like it was a smudge of white-out on the corner of the sign. It was like a tiny alien popping out of the chest of a real exit.

Steve: That’s our exit?!
El Charro: Yeah dude I’m 100% sure, that’s the exit we have to take.

We took the exit. Nothing happened, we were driving down a highway in a string of already similar looking wrong highways. We gave it a chance though. Ten minutes later, we saw a sign that stated the distance to Beppu, our destination. El Charro and I screamed our heads off, I was honking the horn like crazy, turning on the windshield wipers, flipping my blinders on, and if crashing the car would have been apt celebration, I would have gladly done that too. I looked behind me, and El Angel Solo was asleep. She slept through the entire sign adventure. The most complicated sign in the history of travel, worse than the silk road, the trail of tears, the Oregon Trail, and Magellan’s circumnavigating the globe put together, and she slept through it.

We ambled at a moderate pace (burying the speedometer) for a couple of hours, with a brief stop for doughnuts and sun glasses at a rest station. Then as we approached Beppu proper, there was some odd happenings on the highway. We started seeing police cars with their lights on, driving down the highway…very slowly. I, as a driver, was confronted with a spectacle I’d never seen before, and I had no idea how to handle it. There were a half dozen police cars going in both directions on the highway, driving at very low speeds. The lights were flashing, a lot of people were lined up behind them, and some people were blatantly speeding past them.

I decided to play it safe in this situation, we probably could have blasted past them, maybe we would have gotten pulled over, maybe not. Despite the fact that most people in Japan treat us like Gods, not because we deserve it, but because we’re white, the police are a whole different ball game. There’s not actually any crime in Japan, so the police find it increasingly difficult to exercise their power trip. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets them off like arresting or pulling over a Gaijin. We’re like black felons with no license driving past and smoking a crack pipe in plain view. Essentially we are a drive-by orgasm for a bored and power hungry cop.

We followed slowly and arrived in Beppu proper, the only problem was our hotel wasn’t actually in Beppu but about 17 km outside of the city. We somehow made it without incident, parked at the hotel and heaved a massive collective sigh. Our 3 hour journey had taken roughly 7. But part two of Golden Week was about to begin…on anti-biotics.