chapter 5 restoration

ten am, monday morning, get a mail from mark but not even got time to read it, on my way to meet a client. my only client. I placed one guy with this company three months ago and that one, single, solitary, lone, out there on his own guy was not only the first recruit I placed but, also, the last.

this job is the worst I have ever had, and I’ve had some bad, tough jobs. I’ve done factory work, doing quality control on the electrical boards of range rovers in a factor, sat for 10 hours a day staring at wires; washed dishes in a miniscule kitchen within slapping distance of the most cantankerous, mean hearted son of a bitch of a chef you’d ever dare to come across, for a shameful wage; even worked in mcdonald’s – that one brings the most shame, I have to say. but absolutely nothing beats this -

being
a
recruitment
consultant.

try worming your way into the good books of the big recruiters for hitachi, toshiba, sony, sega every day, through various, shameless, degrading ploys that they see right straight through every time, and see when they do see through you, which is every time, see if you don’t feel like some crusty-mouthed crack addict offering blow-jobs for a fiver in a wind-bitten alleyway. in february. a particularly cold february.

we evolved from proteins, came up from hot sulphur spumes deep in the oceans (I saw it on discovery), formed skeletons, swam about a bit, crawled out of the oceans onto the mud, got hairy and jumped up into the trees, jumped out of the trees and got less hairy, then began a process of human evolution so wondrous and breath-taking, that, well, it takes the breath away, and for what? so I could become a recruitment consultant, working 10 hours a day for Maseda San and his sidekick Barrow Boy Darren? and when I'm not out of the office, which is almost always, I sit in a little booth that faces a lovely piece of wall, painted beige, naturally, in a grimy office on the 12th floor of the towering ssc building. and in tokyo too - vibrant, exciting, pulasating, out-of-my-reach tokyo. something went wrong, and I'm the proof. I‘m going backwards. devolving. am i the everyman? no, I am, perhaps, the no-man.

an aside - I was reading last week about cattle. cattle that are used exclusively to produce milk – milk cattle. these cows, you have this idea of these big bellied bovine wandering sleepfully about on rolling meadows, chomping the greenest grass below weeping williows and magnificent oak trees, spending hours simply chewing the cud before farmer clangs his bell and they all come a-wandering back below a velvety dusk sky. well, you’re wrong. those poor fuckers almost exclusively stay tethered up in a cage too small for them to ever turn around in, attatched to computerised teet squeezers that periodically drain them of milk.

so, you want to know what my spiritual animal is? it’s a fucking milk cow. not a leopard. not an eagle. not a dolphin. no, a fucking mechanically teet-squeezed milk cow. that’s me. squeeze my teat. hear me roar.

I'm meandering. it’s monday, it’s to be expected. I’ve been doing this job for a year now. and I suck at it, to use the american vernacular. to pull you in they fill you with tales of ferraris and porsches, of record monthly figures and quick promotions, and none of it ever comes true – all bollocks. unless you're a proper dick, it seems, as all the bosses are, well, proper dicks. they pay me a basic of y200,000 a month, which sounds ok, but when you consider my rent is y100,000 a month, and I have made only one deal in a year, it’s not easy. combine this with the horrendous price of a night out on a saturday (and maybe friday too), and it’s really not easy. but what am I going to do? I got sick to the back teeth with teaching english and my japanese isn’t fluent, I can’t read kanji so well and I don’t want to go back to the uk. the rest of asia is cheap, but it’s so cheap that you get paid cheap too. debts are hard to pay off. and tokyo’s hard to leave. so when I got offered this job I took it, I was grateful, hopeful – even expectant. but it isn’t working out too good at all. maybe I should stop going out? I should, it’s draining me, of lots of things, of money, time, - essentially, though, draining me of me – but what else is there? I have to leave my head once or twice or week, or I’d go mad.

so, my client, sakamoto san. I get to his office, we do the bowing thing, he sits me down, I explain away the fortunately decreasing bruising over my eye (shaded by foundation and concealer (too embarassing to recount the process of actually buying) as the result of a bicycle accident, and thankfully he politely goes along with this. this guy I have to say though is a nice fellow. he took me out one night after I’d placed that one guy with him, took me to a sushi restaurant, and spent a fortune, the kind of sushi place that has no sign outside, looks just like a regular old tokyo house. I remember the guys sat next to me, when they’d left my client told me they were top yakuza movers, you wouldn’t have guessed it for a second, they mixed seemlessly with the high-flying businessmen. it was that kind of place.

so he gives me some tea, and he starts talking about this new position he has that he’d like me to help him with, the guy has to be a linux wizard, at least 5 years experience, project management skills, on and on. and suddenly it’s like I'm watching a party political broadcast with the sound off, here’s this guy in a suit at a desk with this incredible panoramic city view behind him, and I can’t hear a word he’s saying, he’s sort of going in and out of focus like one of those annoying 3-d pictures that were popular years ago, the ones that looked like nothing but had a hidden image behind all the jumble – except here there’s no image to be seen, no hidden reality, just the steady relentless throb of something uncannily resembling utter boredom.

why can’t I love my job? be enthusiastic? if I could just do it a bit, just a little more convincingly, I might get more deals, I might be able to eat a bit better, relax more, buy myself a new suit. but I don’t know, seems to me that what I’d pay to be more enthusiastic is more than I could ever earn being that enthusiastic. does that make any sense? I know, I sound like a fucking idiot. god, maybe I'm a loser. just a loser, nothing else. winners get enthusiastic. and losers… well, don‘t.

and god this guy can talk, he seems genuinely excited about all this, the office, the chair, the desk planner, the potential new recruit, he seems to be energised by it all. what’s his soul like, i wonder? if, as I suspect, mine’s festering up in the hinterlands like a sheep’s carcass stuck forever on a high scree ledge, in non-stop driving sleet - I wonder, how about his? is his clean? maybe his is a sanitised waiting room, sealed for freshness. muzak playing, organ renditions of organ renditions of well known, slit-your-wrist love songs. he looks clean, like someone who has never had a moment of self-doubt, someone who just knows how to make things work – business, deals, life, just gets on with it, someone who - and then I hear a ‚ka‘ suddenly, at the end of his monologue – ka in japanese is a verbal question mark, handy when you’re drifting and not really listening, cos you know you’ve been asked a question – but I don’t know what the question was, that’s the only problem.

-what?
-excuse me?
-I'm sorry, could you repeat that question once more, my japanese, it’s very poor, excuse me…
-no, no, your japanese is very good. as I said, could you collect the resumes of some suitable applicants and get them over to me as soon as possible?
(was that it? why did it take him so long if that was all he needed to say?)
-samuel san?
-uh, sure, of course…
-ok, and if you could let me have that new percentage scale sheet you said you’d bring…
-hmm? ah! yes, one moment, I’ve got a copy here.

I reach down for my briefcase, bring it up and position it on my knees, but the latch is stuck, so I smile and bring it up onto his desk. I place it just to the left, fiddle the latch and open the lid right back - due to bust hinges it opens flat out - and there… I know he’s seen it – I know he’s fucking seen it cos he couldn’t miss it, it’s staring up at us like a smoking gun for god’s sake - hi, I'm oswald, lee harvey, that’s right – and right there, in a shiny white and black box, sat dazzlingly atop a crisp white sheet of a4 - is a brand new bottle of ‚regain‘, which, as the clerk at the drugstore this morning told me, is ‚japan’s most popular hair restoring tonic‘.

-ha!

eascapes from my lips, the kind of ‚ha‘ you make when your arse releases a bit of wind that is a bit more than just a bit of wind, I whip the lid back up and fumble as quickly as I can for the percentage sheet, then slam the case shut. I look to him and hand him the sheet but I see his eyes are resting just above my brow, and a flicker of amusement on his lips.

I get up, bow, needless to say not too deeply, leave the office, get in the lift and say to myself

-oh… fuck my life.

indeed. oh fuck my life.