Jonesing for CoCo’s Curry

They say, whoever they is, that scent is the sense most keenly attuned to memory.I ambled by a group of Japanese exchange students--I pace the halls, just thinking and floating, absorbing and avoiding, hiding in plain sight, if you will. The students smelled like my rides to Tokyo, on the JR or Keikyu lines. Or to Yokohama. Or home from my long hours of Service. I wonder how I smelled to them? Like a shipyard? Like recirculated air? The exchange students revive memories of short jaunts to the 100 yen sushi-go-round from my Uraga apartment overlooking Tokyo Harbor and not too far from where Admiral Perry first landed in Japan. How Time and history absorb all things. How colossal we are. Yet still infinitesimal. We are the dichotomy of everything and nothing. We know this. And can’t get beyond the confines of our own selfish being. I am reminded of Sake, and CoCo’s Curry. Red Door Ramen Shop—sadly now permanently closed—shoyu Ramen with gyoza. Soy sauce for dipping. I should move back. I should be a baka gaijin and reopen “Red Door” as it was. Some things should endure.

I reminisce about rush hour trains, commuters jammed into the hurtling tubes that slide down the shiny worn rails. Expressionless Men and Women in suits and white gloves packing people in like canned anchovies. The scent of travel stress, and work stress, not too different from study stress. I recall my iPod. The second generation iTouch, tucked into my pocket with headphone wires slithering out of it and up to my ears. I stand near the front so I can watch the rails. I’m listening to System Of A Down, They’re singing, “Chop Suey”. I’m thinking about John Galt. About Dagne Taggart pouring her life into work that strangers couldn’t comprehend. But the strangers want all the pieces without any of the risk. And The American Experiment; I see your self righteous suicide, I raise you that it’s not worth trusting. At this point we’re all hanging separately, pointing fingers at each other in blame-which brings me to the editorial process, and how this poem started years before elections could no longer be trusted, before cities burned, before the Oligarchy put down retail traders. I’m sad that somehow I was right but no one wanted to publish me. Perhaps I should have suggested we eat the Karens. Time is dripping through my fingers and it’s a few months before March 2011, again. I’m thinking about how Atlas has shrugged already and eventually the world will realize that it’s falling--like your insides when a roller coaster starts its descent.

If the mind is a labyrinth, I am rushing through the stone walls, memory guiding me, calling fervently in all directions, coaxed along by echolocation; the catalyst of this nostalgic torrent: the body odor of exchange students, it smells like home. It’s dance magic.

In Searsmont, Maine there sits a farmhouse, still. The house is old and has a barn. I’ve been back; it has magic for me. A pleasant magic where many places have been hostile. I’ve lived in seven states since then. And three countries. I’ve visited more than a dozen more. Bob Dole was somebody when I lived there. And Bob hadn’t peddled Viagra yet.

As free form memory persists down the rabbit hole I’m reminded of a boxer dog named Gizmo that used to wait for me to come home from school in the third grade in Searsmont, Maine. He was tethered to an 18 inch screw in the ground so he wouldn’t visit the sheep up the road. I feel that magic pulling every now and then; beckoning to be released. Is the world catching up with the tumble, fumbling and righting itself? Are we failing to acknowledge the rumble? As we focus on our superficial differences which we can’t control--ignoring the value systems we cling to regardless of historical success simply because the guy running for office is promising us what we want to hear. Never once considering the implications or paths that lead to our final solution. Refusing to admit that sometimes we’re all wrong and a different solution is possible. It all comes down to who pays, and we all want something equitable but stand in the way of equality with racially charged protests. We never say, follow your rules of engagement. We never admonish thuggish behavior. Or, at least not the people who need to. And all this blindness makes home unbearable. I’m wishing for an old farmhouse tucked into forty acres of forest and field because that home will never let me go. And half a world away from that farm house is home, too. And I’ve been back. It’s changed, but not much. Seven years later I found myself in the same CoCo’s, smelling the same smells, pulling hot canned coffee out of a vending machine for about a $1.25. I’m introducing old loves to a new love, and finding that we both love the same things. Dinner for two is about $19 and the cashiers don’t touch money so you leave it on a little tray. They drop the change into a little tray and it’s all so clean and tidy. We stay at The Conrad in Tokyo, a nicer place than I ever stayed before. We wake up at five a.m. to silence and morning mist. We walk by 7/11. We don’t fear for our kidneys. Instead we purchase a canned Chu-Hi, the big one at 10% abv, and purse Sake. Our breakfast is a pork bun. We walk around the misty park, and drink. Realizing that the land of the free isn’t that free. Like a lucky penny these joys have fallen through a hole in a pocket. They’ve ceased to be a part of you but want to be found again.

I have to remind myself that Gizmo, the boxer, also seized on the floor of an upstate New York McMansion long before his time. That I came back to the house sweaty and tired from pick-up basketball at the YMCA after school. He pissed on the floor in front of the Uncle Ming's Chinese delivery man. We put him down the next day. I found out after lunch.

For the most part all of my friends have been animals, or heathens like me. But mostly animals. Gizmo, whom I’ve told you about. Who followed me around a dusty back yard in Colorado. I was too young to be responsible for a dog, but I was anyway. And then a few years later Churchill, an English bulldog was brought home. I taught him to play linebacker. He was my only friend after Gizmo. Until I left home. I had to leave home. It wasn’t really home. It’s a sad reality that for 1% of us the prospect of war is better-more comforting-than the prospect of home. I had to pay to kill my best friend.

My grandmother who lived with us, though? Incessant packs of virginia slims a day since before Kennedy couldn’t kill her.

The Ambien that took Heath Ledger couldn’t kill her.

One night in a violent thunderstorm, in Fryeburg, Maine this time. I dreamed that she stood over me with a butcher knife. Hair askew like a demented Einstien. It had to be a dream because by that point she could hardly wipe herself. Getting up the stairs was a chore.

Surely it was a dream

In downtown Bangor, Maine they open a ramen shop. It smells like Red Door, the gyoza is great. But it’s occupied by hippie girls and not Japanese girls shouting out greetings. Falling sucks; but we’re all falling. Walls crumbling; people are irradiated. Attached to their devices and not talking to anyone anymore. They’re stalking and loving and pretending and doing all those things virtually that they used to do together. How many fantastic dinner conversations have been ended prematurely by a leftward swipe? And none of this was possible before I tasted fantastic ramen, or smelled train smells, or become irradiated, or become flooded with nostalgia by the body odor of Japanese exchange students? And here I am, jonesing for CoCo’s Curry, and the friendships founded in Honshu, Yokosuka, and forty lonely rural Maine acres.