Ashes

Another assignment from my writing book: to open a story with "first time I heard song x".

[WARNING: RACIST CHARACTER AHEAD]

The first time I heard “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads was on my way to my father's funeral, all the way in Japan, at a seedy Tokyo nightclub.

The song was fitting, I thought. Ironic, even. The man burned down everything we were, setting fire to our lives, to the very semblance of family, dumping us in the ashes of infidelity. All for a woman whose name I can't pronounce or spell. He may have poured the gasoline on everyone and everything but she lit the match and encouraged him to throw it. The adulterous inferno they caused left us choking on the smoke for years to come.

Don't call it an affair. Call it arson.

I took the 9:30AM flight. Took a leave from my job, my wife, and the dog that never liked me. I hate that dog too. Ungrateful bitch. Probably will find a way to eat the half-eaten club sandwich I forgot in the fridge.

Anyway, the flight was an absolute blur. Complete xanax fog. When I woke up I was pissing in a Tokyo International bathroom with the sun splitting like a rotten egg through the window into my eyeballs. Sure, I was there to attend the funeral. Not really, though. I was mainly there to sort out the will. No way would I trust that Jap with that kind of paperwork. The slanty-eyed slut can't be trusted with anything, especially the affairs of a phony Irishman that was my father.

He was a lot like this city, actually. A man at war with himself. He too lost touch with who he was, if he ever even knew. Yeah, he was Irish by blood but he couldn't step-dance to save his life, family meant nothing to him, he never appreciated Irish music, he rejected Catholicism, and hewas an awful storyteller. The fat fuck loved the food though, and the St Paddy's Day Parades, and obviously the pubs. He wore his Irish identity like a cheap Halloween costume he could put on and off as he pleased. Tokyo has one foot stuck in the past and the other in the future, one hand clenched on its roots and the other reaching for innovation, unsure what it wants to be. Its hybridization of modernity and tradition bothered me at first. Why couldn't it make up its mind? Cherish your heritage or embrace the times totally. It initially was depressing to see this interpretion of modernity as just being more American. Can't they develop their own personality instead of stealing from ours? McDonald's restaurants spreading like STDs, Mickey Mouse t-shirts worn by its so-called rebellious youth, and Talking Heads played by its namby-pamby DJs at nightclubs.

Tokyo may have been assured of itself at one time. Now? It seems as if it's either striving off cultural invaders in a losing battle or deliberately selling off its soul. I can't decide which is sadder. But, honestly, either way, good riddance.

I arrived at the hotel close to 11PM. Checked in, put my stuff in the room, and walked out into the cityscape. First place I stepped in to get away from the all opressive static outside was a jazz club called The Blue Koi. Noticed all the squinting eyes, and it wasn't due to the lights. There barely were any. I noticed the stench of deceased brass, if there could ever was such a thing. Was probably the scent of every dead saxophonist the band on stage was offending. The rhythms they were playing belonged to us, not to them. Every note bled animately, in ways I haven't felt in ages. It enraged me. So I could only manage to stay for one song, maybe two, before I left. Jazz was American and the jazz they were playing was the wrong kind of American, one that spoke in tongues I didn't understand. They didn't even have a single American on stage with them.

Back into the washing machine that is Tokyo's streets, a disastrous hodgepodge of rotting individuality, I walked until my feet hurt. It's not certain how long I walked for. It didn't even feel like walking – it felt like floating. So floated I did until I found it: Neon Lotus. Floated in like it was a dream I'd never wake up from.

I'm not sure what I expected or wanted; whether it was clearly Eastern or clearly Western it made me think of my father. I didn't wanna do that until I had to the next morning, but what else is there? The Poles? Were there North or South Pole themed nightclubs? Not likely.

This place smelled like burnt rubber and cheap perfume. It wasn't a jazz bar this time around. This was a nightmare in a velvet trench coat. DJ at the turntable spinning tracks like a madman running out of ideas. A gothic cowboy in all black. Cowboy hat. Sunglasses. Denim jacket. Denim jeans. Painted nails. Chuck Taylors. Fucking ridiculous. Looked like a rejected extra from the set of The Warriors. He didn't even seem comfortable in his own attire. None of it seemed like it belonged to him, none of it suited him. This wasn't his true self. Once more, I'm reminded of this city – how it's trying to build something new out of bygone eras with the incoming one only to show what they're building is more of the same.

Regardless, I took a seat at the bar, laughing at the whole scene, and that's when I saw her. Akin to a delicate geisha built from credit card bills and ashtrays. Holding her drink like a bomb she wants to go off. A woman with my father's face. Half of it, at least. The cheekbones, the jaw. She was too young to look so hollowed out, weary, and alone. I had to approach her. I had to tell her. Didn't matter if she couldn't understand what I was saying.

“You look eerily like my late father”, I said.

“Your father's dead too?” she asked.

Flabbergasted by her fluent English, I asked back “You understand me?”

“Yeah, I'm only half-Asian” she replied.

We stared at each other. Both gave a particular look with our eyes. We both sensed its meaning. It was the same look my father would give whenever he was caught in the act. The same look I presume everyone gives when caught in the act. The look you get and give when you know the game is fixed and you have no choice except to play along. Even if it's until death. Even if it means dying.

“I never heard about you.” I cruelly confessed.

She broke the eye contact here. Looking down at her fidgeting fingers. So I looked away too. Looking down at my restless legs. That's when the DJ queued up "Burning Down The House" by Talking Heads.

“Funny. I never heard about you”, she cruelly countered.

The breath of a hundred cigarettes felt thicker than ever. It began to sting my eyes. I could feel my heart wanting out of its chest. My apparent half-sister, sitting next to me, had seen the man who destroyed her life in my face – and me seeing him and his destruction in hers. The two of us facing forward, I raised up my glass and she with hers.

Clang.

We didn't drink to the dead. We drank to the wreckage. We drank to the ruins we inherited. I threw my drink back and left.

Returned to the obscurity of Tokyo's chemically-lit streets, now weeping in a deluge, with the weight of my father's failures wearing me down I about collapse into the wet gutters of this godforsaken place.

Somehow, that man managed to burn down two houses. Where was the rain then?