the heel press

Friendship cannot cross all borders

It is cold. The rain has let up but there's still a chill in the air as spring lazily scratches his ass and stirs. We stand around idly, waiting, playing with conversations neither one of us are particularly invested in until someone starts plucking away on shrill metal guitar strings behind us.

We look into the ceramic lined cave where there are clusters of Japanese teenagers sitting around fiddling with their instruments and chatting. Occasionally the first few bars of a love song come out, unannounced and proudly non sequiturial, only to be cast aside for a Nirvana cover seconds later.

Hirakata train station is elevated and sandwiched in between two massive department stores with two underpasses providing the only break from the great wall of concrete and steel. The first is for cars and all their distant relatives: buses, trucks, bicycles, grannies on Vespas. The second underpass is purely pedestrian and at night becomes the camp site of bored troubadouring teenagers. It's walls and pillars are decorated with colorful shards of old pottery. I think of that old credit card commercial Martha Stewart used to do every time I walk through it: her new card is so useful! Her only problem is what to do with all her old cards! [Pan out to a shot of Martha finishing off a cut-up-card fresco on the bottom of her pool]. Smooshed in between the two underpasses is Kiddie Land, where teenage girls gather to oggle any number of Tarepanda and Hello Kitty products while hardcore gangster rap blares "MOTHER FUCKIN' this AND MOTHER FUCKIN' that" overhead.

Beyond us the taxi cabs sit in a nice intimidating row, lights on, their drivers smoking and watching the orderly lines of people waiting for buses very carefully. It's twenty minutes to feeding time when the last bus leaves and the mileage rates for a cab go through the roof.

I mean, what are you going to do? Walk home?

We are waiting for that last bus, it's late and normally the wait would not bother me but tonight there's a jolt in my bones that just wants to move, to get just a little closer to home as soon as possible.

"Do you think he takes requests?" Tammy asks suddenly, referring to the grungy looking Japanese boy and the clump of musically-challenged supplicants at his feet.

I shrug. "Maybe, what are you in the mood for?"

"Gackt."

"Oh right, only if he does the dance moves too."

We giggle.

"But he can do the new one, the pretty one with the guy with the dreads in the video."

There's something witty I can say in response to that, I'm sure there is, there must be. But I can't think of it. The conversation is drowned out by the waiting waiting waiting and all the greedy gossipy little things I really want to ask Tammy right now. Things I have wanted to ask her since she sat up straight at the table we were all crowded around and announced in between spoonfuls of her curry: "Sedrick and I are getting married."

It was unsurprising only in the sense that Tammy always made irresponsible and erratic decisions with such conviction, as if it were obvious and natural and needed no explanations.

Sedrick is about my age, shy and awkward-- he looked sheepish as he put his arm around Tammy's shoulders ... like he fully expected our calligraphy teacher to jump out of the storage closet and slap his knuckles if he didn't. Tammy is ... well Tammy's old enough that her age is fluctuating on a daily basis: 28 today, 30 tomorrow, 27 when I first met her months ago, perhaps 29 in three weeks. Together they have an Oedipal relationship that freaks me out just a little.

But since Sedrick was sitting right there, I couldn't ask the first question that came to mind-- an innocent, unassuming but all too effective 'He proposed?' something that could masquerade as a normal remark but hit upon the fact that Sedrick had been just along for the ride since the relationship started five months before.

I desperately want to ask this, but with our friends all lining up to cast their all too presumptuous and all too accurate warnings about the match already. My sense of loyalty kicks in: she really should have someone on HER side, someone really should just be happy for her...

So I ask instead, "do you want to walk?"

"What? ...Home?"

"Yeah, it's not far."

Actually that last part is debatable. It's not far from the train station to our school and it's not far from our school to our dorm, but whether the two distances together equal a sensible stroll on a crisp night or a crazy impulse is purely a matter of opinion.

"Sure."

We come out of the ceramic tunnel, walk past the Baskin Robbins where some of our Japanese friends work and chat enthusiastically with us in English, and cross into the park.

Okay, it would be dishonest to call it a park since it is only a slightly wider stretch of sidewalk with a few trees and wooden benches, but that's what everyone calls it. It's only function, as far as I can tell, is as a night gathering place for businessmen, teenagers, and (yes) foreigners to drink cheap beer bought at the convenience store across the "park" and avoid going home. It's also where the skateboarder practice their craft after the song writers chase them out of the cave at night fall.

And there we sit, breathing chilly night air, listening to the clatter of board and concrete, and trying to ignore the karaoke session that has broken out two benches away. But above all not walking.

"You think it's crazy don't you?"

Before today it was so easy to go 'no! of course not!' and fake all the cheerful wedding talk that's supposed to happen. But today we went to the onsen and the strange scenery of her perfect affair came out as we soaked naked in a pool of volcanic spring water, ice cold droplets of rain striking our flushed foreheads, cheeks and breasts.

The unsolved murder of his father, the assumption of the "family business" by his older brother, an "accident" that he wouldn't talk about that ruined his pro-sports ambitions, coming to Japan "because Europe wasn't safe" ... Sedrick had spun a tale that was either true or an escape route. I couldn't bring myself to tell Tammy it was probably the latter.

"Do you think it's crazy?"

"I think it sounds like his family's in the mob."

"But that's crazy!" She laughs, and I know from the character of that laugh that she likes the idea of it being true. Hell, I like the idea of it being true. It could be useful to have connections to the scion of a Dutch crime family.

It's one thing to tell your friend that her marriage plans are rushed and poorly thought out, it's quite another to tell your friend that her fiance` desperately does not want to marry her. I couldn't even tell why she wanted to marry him. They only seemed happy in the purely academic sense of the word, like they had made a pros-and-cons list one day and decided they were in love.

But what could I say? Tammy was pushing 30 and getting daily lectures on life from people barely old enough to drink. She had been flogged by adulthood two or three times already and she couldn't pretend that she hadn't. She could be "young" and "hip" and retreat to irresponsibility to cover her tracks but she couldn't give up the feeling that all she'd lived, all she'd been through should be for SOMETHING.

At the end of all these false starts there should be something to take home.

"Just be careful," I say, handing her a beer. "I don't want to see you get hurt."

In the end we both pretend that what I'm talking about is Sedrick's possible mob connections. In the end we walk home through the dull silences and the distant conversations. And later I will think that maybe she doesn’t believe the mob story either, maybe she just brought it up to hear someone’s concern without all the snobby words of wisdom passed down through the lips of twenty year olds.