A Look Back

James drove the corkscrew through the foil, worked it brutally into the
cork, then ripped everything out. It took three tries, but he finally
got some red in my glass.

“Fucking wine,” he muttered under his breath, presenting it to me.

“Thank you, my good man.”

He said something I couldn’t understand, eyes lidded, than sat back in the lounge chair and stared up into the night.

“Like back yard,” he muttered, before falling asleep as quickly as if I had hit him with a brick.

Yeah, the backyard was nice. So was the wine. I’d like to say it was a
sign of maturity now that I could sit in my own backyard, drinking wine
on a good Saturday in between hard working weeks. James still rode a
motorcycle, but he was an office worker just like me. The degrees were
tucked away into drawers and our time was worth money now.

I suppose everyone misses the college days, though.

My old room mate in the dorms was John Kreibel. He was an overweight
Star Trek fan, as sad and hopeless and borderline homosexual as you can
get. James insists that my unique brand of homophobia – that is,
everyone but me is gay and part of a sinister plot – is simply how I
interpret the fact, according to him, that everyone is basically
lonely.

James lived in town, proud of an independence that had been forced on
him. He’d been kicked off campus after he put a deer’s head in the
laundry machine at my dorm. His reasoning for committing such a bloody
crime was, quite simply, “I must have been drunk.” It was the
ultra-conservative, mega-virgin freshman girl who found the head and,
according to my RD, they ended up having to rush her to the hospital so
she could be sedated. She left school a month later, never to be heard
from again. One of many lives James would destroy completely.

Kreibel never left the dorms on the weekends. I was usually a shut-in,
but I did tend to drift down to the APO suite. They’re the service
fraternity, so you could always bet dollars or doughnuts or what have
you that the 12 members at my campus would be involved in some sort of
bi-sexual orgy fueled by vast quantities of bathtub gin. Welcome to the
world of real Christians. These service fraternity types are real
D&D, LAN party kids, mind you. In a small town college, those are
the ones you want to hang out with. They’ll unwittingly share their
booze with you and then hold your hair when you throw it back up. Kind
people, really.

Every once in a while, I would wear out my welcome in the APO suite.
That’s how I met James, who spent his weekends ambling from dorm to
dorm and staying over with an ever increasing succession of temporary
girlfriends and tolerant well-wishers. Curiously, nobody at my college
had ever seen him out during the daylight hours.

He ran into me at a deck party hosted by a handful of the popular
independent kids. I had staked out a corner and stuffed a bottle of
scotch down my pants, working it in as far as possible while a confused
lesbian blathered in my ear about how, being a total and confirmed
lesbian, she really wanted to prove that she could suck my cock like a
pro. James nearly knocked her over the railing when he lurched towards
me and grabbed my shoulder.

“Nacho!” He screamed in my ear.

“Um…” Fight or flight.

He had heard about one of my classic stunts – mixing Budweiser,
blackberry brandy, Smirnoff, Triple Sec and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
in a glass and drinking it down in thirteen seconds. Back then, I was
somewhat immortal where such things were concerned.

He glared at me drunkenly and leaned close, “All true?”

“Afraid so.”

He patted my shoulders, then massaged them lightly, “You, sir, are my number one.”

I didn’t see James again for several weeks. I’d just lost a girlfriend
in a violent, somewhat famous explosion and had been doing my best to
drive Kreibel over the edge. The big man had taken to sitting in the
dark, smoking cheap cigars, drinking scotch and listening to the
soundtrack from Star Trek: Generations.
He would, on many occasions, masturbate, whether or not I was in the
room. I had learned to tune him out and plugged headphones into the TV
for long nights of horror movies. I was averaging eight movies a day,
three on weekdays, and feeling rather proud that my intense trivial
knowledge was still intact after the somewhat crude distraction of a
committed relationship. It was a Saturday in November when James burst
into my dorm room without knocking. He glared around with a lunatic
twitch for a moment, his eyes settling on a surprised Kreibel and,
then, on me. I calmly stared back.

He waved distractedly at my head and I took off my headphones, “You’re the only one I can trust anymore!”

“I don’t really know you,” I replied.

“Are you queer?”

I shook my head.

“Pussy and only pussy?”

“Yes.”

“Does God come into your house, in any form?”

“I’m afraid not.”

He nodded. “Then you’re the only one.” He pointed at me, turned his hand and beckoned with his finger, “Come.”

“Where?”

“The gates of hell, you motherfucker! Where do you think?”

“I don’t really – ”

“Motherfucking cunt son of a- ”

“Okay, okay!”

We ended up a floor below mine in the suites reserved for the Japanese
exchange students. They were all English-challenged and, by reputation,
on some sort of lunatic fringe. James took my arm and dragged me into
one of the suites – a common room surrounded by four dorm rooms. The
common area was full of Japanese, rolling and dancing and cheering to Safety Dance, of all things.

James pressed his lips to my ears, “We can dance, we can dance,
everything’s out of control!” With a screech, he leapt away and threw
himself into a half dozen little Japanese. They fell to the floor while
I was grabbed and pushed against the wall.

A zit-covered kid with a rising sun headband shoved a boiling hot
coffee pot into my hands, except the pot was full of a tanned liquid.
“SAKI!!” he screamed in my face.

Knowing full well the direction my life would take from that point, I took a sip of the steaming Saki.

“No, no, no,” the kid said, taking the pot, “this, like,” and he poured
the near-boil Saki into his throat without flinching. Sputtering and
with eyes wide, he screamed “SAKI!!” Then he handed it back to me.

The radio clicked over to Human League as I took a more manly gulp of
the hot stuff, then I screamed “Saki,” as well, to appease the natives.
Everyone cheered.

The night James and I became true friends is only a series of flashes
in my mind. The Japanese kids had seven six cup coffee pots running a
seemingly endless supply of saki. There were moments where it felt as
if I had stumbled into some Haitian Day of the Dead ceremony, where the
afflicted convulsed and fell to the ground with the help of their
colleagues. They would be dragged off to rooms, or simply into the
corner, as the core of the party boiled and screamed from the center of
the suite, the stereo plugged directly into everyone’s bones and blood.

A Japanese girl grabbed me when Peter Schilling’s Major Tom (Coming Home)
blasted at full throttle into the air. We danced close, her eyes
smiling, and I sang along. Four…three…two…one; Earth below us,
drifting, falling, floating weightless, calling, calling home…

Second stage was cut and I was in orbit when she led me away to a dorm
room. Three party casualties lay huddled in a corner, drunken eyes
trying to stop the vomit spin, as the girl pulled down my pants and lay
her mouth on my cock. My eyes closed, a bottle of vodka somehow in my
hands, I drank with a gaze fixed on the Ramones poster on the wall. She
moved me like a barber, sat me down, tilted my head one way, then the
other, move it back. Rucking up her long skirt, she climbed on top of
my cock and I felt myself slide into her, a sort of distant knowledge
of what was happening lingering around me, but all so fleeting. All so
simply…physical.

“There is nothing physical down here,” James was saying a half hour
later as I leaned out a window and tried to breathe. “You could move
through walls, if you wanted.” He was leaning next to me and staring
into the night, “You could do anything now, and it wouldn’t matter.”

I blinked, then stared, then closed my eyes.

There was a long pause throughout the entire world. I was going to throw up.

Then I was okay.

Let’s spin.

“Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me…”

James screamed with laughter and punched me hard, “Well I talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it…”

We re-entered the core of the party and this land was our land, this land was their land. Funky Town
always knew how to keep a man from throwing up. James and I danced an
absurd parody of disco. I think saki’s about the only thing that can
get me dancing.

Every voice in the party raised in a shout: “SAKI!”

James was handed six cups of boiling saki. To my drunken horror, he
began chugging it. Even the Japanese kids looked terrified, ready to
split if James fell dead.

“You’re a fucking machine,” I shouted at him after he quit on the four cup line.

“I am not here.” He replied, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling and spreading his arms out.

The party’s closure came at about 4am. I was sitting between two
Japanese students and their broken English discussion of Haruki
Murakami was enough to pique a literary curiosity that, years later, I
would follow up on. Little did I know that even that tiny conversation
with strangers, the side door mention of a Japanese author, would shock
and change my life when I finally opened that author’s work. Murakami –
an artist who would shape my later life. Everything about that Saki
night would set me on a clear path; though, then, I had no clue. James
and I walked back up to my room, shouting “Saki!” the whole way.

It was no surprise to return and find Kreibel wide awake, still smoking
and drinking, listening to Star Trek music. James laughed, turned off
the music, then turned to Kreibel’s angry face, “Tea! Earl Grey! Lots
of cock!”