Salon Wanderlust | Tokyo sex wars: part 2

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
Do you hate Bed and Breakfasts? Weigh in on why or why not in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Tokyo sex wars
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde
(11/09/98)
On the road with the Smokejumpers
By The King Teen
What happens when a punk-rockabilly band from San Francisco tours the country in a broken-down Big Orange Van?
(11/06/98)
This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news
(11/06/98)
Savvy tips for holiday travelers
By Dawn MacKeen
When can you actually demand money from an airline? Where can you find low-cost holiday fares? Christopher McGinnis knows
(11/05/98)
The Hollywood tourists never see
By Jeff Greenwald
A travel writer finds life-changing adventure on the sound stage of an NBC sitcom
(11/03/98)

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E M P O R I U M
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TOKYO SEX WARS: PART 2 | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
I tried hard to make myself comfortable in this new Tokyo. I befriended Samson, I dated a foreign stripper, I visited the new nightclubs. But my plan to rediscover my happiness in Tokyo was not working. I was ingesting more pills and powders than I had back in Los Angeles. The depression that had come on in Los Angeles had not dissipated here in Tokyo. Instead, with each rain-splattered day I became more sure that the melancholia was a permanent attribute, some delicate imbalance of neurological chemicals that could only be home-remedied with opiates. Here in Tokyo I should have been able to shake off whatever drabs had enveloped me back in Los Angeles. On the doorstep of Asia, continent where I had enjoyed so much of my 20s, I had imagined I would regain my lost enthusiasm for myself and for what I might become. But I found the opposite, with each night that I sat at the bar of RIP, with each evening that I made the rounds of topless Tokyo venues with Samson, I sank further and further into myself.

We sat around a steel table at Buzz while it cracked dawn outside, witnessing the narcotized dregs of a never-was rave party stumble around on a dance floor of black rubber on which spilled beer had pooled and dried into a sticky goo. Samson had seated himself between two heavy-chested, wavy-haired blonds, each about 5-foot-3. Both were currently dancing at Maniac, a small club on the third floor of a Nogizaka building, across the street from the Department of Defense.
Samson had run into them at 999 and was intent on luring them to work at one of the clubs for which he recruited. An acne-faced Japanese DJ who had been accompanying them was dispatched by Samson to go buy drinks while he laid out the benefits of working at Bachelor Party.
I was seated across from the girls who, bereft of makeup, appeared, beside their preposterously large bosoms, very plain. Next to me was Laney, a New Zealander who bartended some evenings at RIP. Laney was very handsome, with deep blue eyes and high cheekbones. In his shearling jacket he looked like a fighter pilot in a World War II-era cigarette advertisement. But Laney was so reliant on his rugged, charming features, he rarely bothered to think.
During Samson's pitch, the girls kept sneaking looks at Laney. And Laney, as he sat there, tapping his feet against the sticky floor and smoking his Marlboros, was clearly not interested in these two. He had his pick of the sex industry employees who traipsed in and out of RIP; this pair was unexceptional.
Noticing they were taken with Laney, Samson rubbed his chin, leaning over to Laney and asking for help.
"Listen, punk, I'm gonna get rid of this DJ. They're not comfortable talking to me with someone from their club here." Samson told Laney, "You just chat these two up. Tell them what a swell guy I am."
"Why?" Laney asked.
"You're not doing anything." Samson said. "You're just sitting there. Help me out."
Laney shrugged and Samson got up to look for the DJ.
When Laney slid over to chat with the girls, I was envious of the obvious glee he inspired in them. I could not imagine what it would be like to have women react to me as they did to Laney.
"So you're thinking of working for Samson," Laney said in his Kiwi accent.
The girls shrugged. "Do you think it's a good idea?"
"He's a real asshole," Laney said, lighting a cigarette.
The girls giggled. I looked at Laney. He winked.
When Samson came back to the table, Laney got up and left, both girls looking disappointed as he did so.
The rest of the night, Samson kept telling the girls they had to come to Bachelor Party. He guaranteed they would make $1,000 a night. They were making less than half that at Maniac.
Still, the girls resisted. I was amazed as I watched Samson buy them drink after drink, offer them cocaine, reiterate for the 12th time why Bachelor Party was a good idea. Even in my state of opiated exhaustion, I could tell that Samson's war of attrition style of career counseling was not going to work.
When I departed at 6 a.m., Samson was still cajoling.
The next day I found out from Laney that Samson hadn't convinced the girls to switch.
But Shore Patrol had gone by their squalid six-mat apartment with flowers, champagne and a picnic basket. They had agreed with Shore Patrol to go to work at Seventh Heaven.
"Don't mean nothing. I'm still faster than that punk," Samson assured me that night, patting the Polaroids he had taken to carrying around as a sort of good luck talisman. "Air Canada Flight 707. Two dozen very classy ladies."

My own projects weren't faring much better than Samson's. The interviews I had scheduled, at various government ministries, newspapers, politicians' offices and banks were unfolding as a series of lifeless briefings during which the bureaucrat, reporter, politician or banker in question would drone for a while about his innocence regarding the scandal du jour, and I would dutifully scribble notes and attempt to ask coherent questions. In the past, I had been able, somehow, to piece together these briefings and meetings into a coherent story. I would listen to the men in suits until something they said stuck in my mind, some scene they described or meeting they recounted, a moment that crystallized the political or economic climate I was supposed to make sense of. But that ability to organize, arrange and structure data into a story had been lost. I felt constantly preoccupied, as if those gigabytes of brain necessary to do the subconscious work of making an article, of writing, were now unavailable. My mind was busy with drugs.
The days slipped by, a procession of gray, damp afternoons and cold, wet evenings. Automobile headlights were particularly beautiful in the persistent light rain; they appeared as sets of silver moons, levitating through the Minato-ku streets. Even with Samson and the crowd at RIP and my loyal assistant who kept on arranging interviews and meetings though I was proving feckless at conducting them, when I woke up on the tatami-mat floor of my assistant's apartment, the rain pattering against the thin, wire-mesh windows, I had never felt so alone.
This feeling was different from the sadness that had engulfed me in Los Angeles. There, I was used to living in a state of perpetual, narcotized depression; and I was convinced that this was because I was no longer in Tokyo, no longer stomping the familiar ground where I had once achieved heroic stature. Back there, I had thought that if I could only get back here, to Tokyo, I would be OK. But now I only felt alone. The problem, I began to suspect, was not a matter of location. This solipsistic hatred transcended geography. I was here and I was the problem.
Then, one morning, I called my wife in Los Angeles. She did not say very much. She had bought a ticket back to Amsterdam. She was leaving me.
And that was it. As I stumbled up Azabu-Juban Shotengai to RIP, brushing past the early evening swirl, I realized there was nothing more for me here than there had been in Los Angeles.
But I still didn't know what it was I needed to do.

Samson had bivouacked the two dozen Midwestern strippers at a weekly mansion in Gotanda, about five minutes from the train station up a steep, cobblestone road. They appeared a vanquishing army of buxom amazons their first morning in that sleepy suburb of Tokyo as they made their way down in groups of twos and threes to the narrow shopping street that ran from the station. Blonds and brunets, accustomed to travel and shacking up in less than luxurious accommodations, most of the girls had their hair tied back in ponytails and their sleepy, jet-lagged faces unadorned by makeup. Clad in sweatshirts and sweatpants that failed to obscure prominent busts and ample, muscular haunches, they sought coffee, cigarettes, croissants, orange juice, cold cream and tampons. Samson had not counted on their being up this early; he had forgotten how jet lag afflicted the new arrival to the Far East, making it impossible to sleep until first light.
The salarymen, grandmothers and schoolchildren of Gotanda, heading out to the office, fruit stand and school, gawked at these exotic new arrivals who in the morning rain failed to carry umbrellas and seemed to have no idea where they were going. The foreign girls, whose profession was obvious perhaps only to the salarymen scurrying to buy newspapers and train tickets, had been given paltry per diems by Samson upon their arrival last night. Yet even the simplest financial transaction, at the bakery, pharmacy or coffee shop, proved complex and laborious. The girls had not yet figured out Japanese currency, instead holding out palms full of cash and coins and allowing the shopkeepers to choose the appropriate denomination.
It seemed the narrow market street, usually quiet at this hour, was in the throes of a large-mammaried occupation. Because of their trade, the girls were impervious to inquiring or curious eyes; they procured supplies and sipped $5 cups of coffee with sleepy insouciance that some of the locals mistook for arrogance.
If 24 strippers showed up simultaneously in your town or on your block, you would take notice. For the citizens of Gotanda, the sudden manifestation was cause for consternation, resulting in hushed conversations conducted while hanging out laundry and discreet calls to the local koban police box. News travels fast in Tokyo, and the arrival of two dozen women ideally suited to the demands of topless and bottomless dancing did not go unremarked among the salarymen on their way to work that morning. The sudden appearance of this pulchritudinous phalanx became a leading topic of discussion in various offices around Tokyo, and word of this surprising occurrence was passed from ear to ear until a cellular phone in a certain AWOL sailor's shirt pocket jangled with the news that by now had been exaggerated into a torrent of American womanhood washing up on southern Tokyo.
"Dude," a gravelly voiced Laney told Shore Patrol. "Hundreds of prime American babes, out there in the 'burbs.'"
Shore Patrol hailed the first taxi he saw.

By the time Samson showed up at the Lion Mansion to prep and acclimate his quiver of classy ladies, Shore Patrol had come and gone and had planted in the girls' minds the notion that Samson was underpaying them. Shore Patrol had told them that Tokyo clubs were desperate, willing to pay top dollar. Whatever Samson had promised them per night -- 50,000 yen? 100,000 yen? -- he could get them more. The prospect of providing for his clients at Seventh Heaven 24 fresh bodies and faces, none of whom had been seen on Tokyo laps before, was dizzying to Shore Patrol. He made lavish offers, disparaged the accommodation Samson had arranged and assured them the contracts they had signed with Samson were not legally binding.
"From my mouth to your ears," Shore Patrol told them before he left. "Help me help you."
Samson walked into cramped apartments that now housed tense, sleep-deprived women who had suddenly taken up the cry that their needs weren't being met. They had been flown halfway around the world by this bilker and they were not about to let the fleecing continue. As Samson tried to calm them and make sense of this sudden swelling of dissatisfaction, it leaked out that Shore Patrol had inserted himself into the situation, planting the seeds of dissent. Several of the women, already taken with Shore Patrol's Rutger Hauer-like features, so unlike Samson's vaguely rodent-like appearance, claimed that unless Samson met some untenable terms -- shorter working hours, no payout to the club at the end of the night, no groping during lap dances, more spacious accommodation -- then they would refuse to work at Bachelor Party. Despite Samson's protestations that Shore Patrol did not intend to meet any of these obligations, the girls were now perilously close to open rebellion and subsequent termination of any relationship with Samson.
After dispensing wads of currency and assuring the girls that he would search for better housing, Samson ducked into a restroom, snorted a line of heroin and reemerged, having reassured himself that the situation was under control.
He hopped on his Suzuki and fired back up to RIP. It was time to settle things with Shore Patrol.

Shore Patrol was sipping an orange juice and playing cribbage with Laney, who leaned over the bar to peg four holes. Randall and Haru were spray painting different colors onto the wallboard at the back of the bar, testing various color schemes for the strip club they now envisioned. There were about a dozen patrons in the bar, a few reading newspapers, a few sipping drinks or canned coffee. A Japanese kid in a blue vinyl jacket nodded on a stool next to the out-of-service pay phone. A salaryman who had apparently stumbled into the wrong joint hurried to finish the beer he had paid for. Two frizzy-haired blonds in black leather jeans showed up and quickly bolted themselves into the restroom for a few minutes.
The bar smelled like the usual combination of cigarette smoke and bug spray.
"Hey, butt boy," Samson said, striding over to Shore Patrol, who was holding all fives in his hand and was reluctant to set it down.
Shore Patrol turned and nodded.
"Those are my girls, OK punk?" Samson said. "Step off."
Shore Patrol nodded once and winked to Laney, who studied his cards.
"Your girls?" Shore Patrol shook his head. "I didn't see any brands on them."
"Listen, butt boy. You and I both know what's right is right. This is my thing. These aren't some out-of-work hostesses walking around on Roppongi. I brought these girls over. On a plane."
Shore Patrol stood up to face him. "Hey, all I did was go down to see them, tell them what was what. If you're a little slow on the draw, then that's not my fault."
Samson squinted. "Who's slow?"
"You," Shore Patrol said. "You're slow. Maybe it's all that crap you take, the drugs, ruining your body, fucking with your mind. You're slow."
"One thing I'm not is slow," Samson waved an index finger. "I'm fast. Fastest guy in here."
"Bullshit," Laney chimed in. "SP's the fastest guy here."
"You ain't fast," Shore Patrol pointed an index finger at Samson. "You ain't nothing."
Samson, in a rage over Shore Patrol's poaching his girls and boasting of his putative speed, shouted out, "That's it. We race. Once and for all. We race."
"Now?" Shore Patrol asked. "When?"
Samson had already begun taking off his cheap suit jacket. "Now. Right now."
Shore Patrol held up his hands. "I'm in boots."
"So am I."
"It's raining outside," Shore Patrol told him, making no move to take off his leather bomber jacket.
"I'm the fastest guy in here," Samson said. "I'll beat you in shoes, barefoot, sneakers, boots. Rain. Snow. On fucking ice, you punk. I am faster than you."
"Fuck you," Shore Patrol told him, standing to peel off his jacket. "I'll race you for the girls."
By now Randall, Haru and several other regulars had gathered around to listen. Samson, reluctant to show his fear, slowly nodded, as if he was trying to convince himself he really wanted to go along with Shore Patrol's idea. "Then if I win you give me 20 girls. You give me 20 girls to bring to Bachelor Party. My choice."
Shore Patrol shrugged. "Then we race."

It was over before it really began. As both runners crouched in the stark, white light of the Pocari Sweat vending machine, Samson's gray, rayon shirt showing dark spots where he had sweated through the material and Shore Patrol's black, cabled sweater beading with water, the crowd stood at the entrance, cocktails and cans of coffee in their hands, cigarettes sending up narrow ribbons of smoke in the chilly, twilight air. Laney and I stood at the finish line, the front of the coffee vending machine, outside the front door of an old-fashioned, Japanese-style restaurant with a sliding shoji door. The street was slanted slightly downhill, the wet pavement giving way in one spot to a thickly painted white crosswalk and a subsequent meter of white stripes before resuming its slick blackness for the rest of the track. They would run into and out of the cone of one streetlight.
Randall, who held his arm up at his side, gazed, for some reason, at his watch, as if the race were being timed. The winner was first across the line. The winner would get the girls. The winner would make a fortune.
Randall held the runners in their crouch for an awkwardly long time. Several cars were forced to detour around the growing crowd that had now stopped to watch the footrace. A car honked. Someone sneezed.
"Go."
Samson slipped on the wet pavement. He never caught up.
Bachelor Party, running out of girls, shut its doors three weeks later.

I am lying in a natural hot spring bath, a damp towel splayed over my head, staring up at petals of snow swirling down from a black-gray sky. It is after midnight. My legs are aching. I have taken my last three darvon; tomorrow I will be out of drugs.
The hot water splashes into my ofuro bath through a two-inch-thick bamboo pipe that tilts on a wooden swivel to 45 degrees when water hits its carved, sharpened beak. I am trying to relax in my own personal hot spring, an ovoid stone pool set amid a Kamakura-style rock garden just outside my $1,000-a-night suite at the Goro Kaidan Hotel atop a 5,000-foot mountain in central Japan. The feeling as I gaze down the hillside at the strung lights of a funicular line, the twin headlights of mountain road traffic and the scattered yellow lights of other lodges and hotels, is that from here, it is all downhill.
I will leave Japan tomorrow for a drug treatment center in Newberg, Ore.
I hear that Samson is in Shanghai, where there is a burgeoning market for foreign strippers.
SALON | Nov. 10, 1998
Karl Taro Greenfeld has written previously for Salon Wanderlust on Ibiza, Samarkand, the expatriate circuit in Asia and Thailand.


	T A B L E_T A L K Do you hate Bed and Breakfasts? Weigh in on why or why not in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Tokyo sex wars By Karl Taro Greenfeld Drug demons and sex junkies in Japan's new demimonde (11/09/98) On the road with the Smokejumpers By The King Teen What happens when a punk-rockabilly band from San Francisco tours the country in a broken-down Big Orange Van? (11/06/98) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news (11/06/98) Savvy tips for holiday travelers By Dawn MacKeen When can you actually demand money from an airline? Where can you find low-cost holiday fares? Christopher McGinnis knows (11/05/98) The Hollywood tourists never see By Jeff Greenwald A travel writer finds life-changing adventure on the sound stage of an NBC sitcom (11/03/98) Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		TOKYO SEX WARS: PART 2 \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - I tried hard to make myself comfortable in this new Tokyo. I befriended Samson, I dated a foreign stripper, I visited the new nightclubs. But my plan to rediscover my happiness in Tokyo was not working. I was ingesting more pills and powders than I had back in Los Angeles. The depression that had come on in Los Angeles had not dissipated here in Tokyo. Instead, with each rain-splattered day I became more sure that the melancholia was a permanent attribute, some delicate imbalance of neurological chemicals that could only be home-remedied with opiates. Here in Tokyo I should have been able to shake off whatever drabs had enveloped me back in Los Angeles. On the doorstep of Asia, continent where I had enjoyed so much of my 20s, I had imagined I would regain my lost enthusiasm for myself and for what I might become. But I found the opposite, with each night that I sat at the bar of RIP, with each evening that I made the rounds of topless Tokyo venues with Samson, I sank further and further into myself. We sat around a steel table at Buzz while it cracked dawn outside, witnessing the narcotized dregs of a never-was rave party stumble around on a dance floor of black rubber on which spilled beer had pooled and dried into a sticky goo. Samson had seated himself between two heavy-chested, wavy-haired blonds, each about 5-foot-3. Both were currently dancing at Maniac, a small club on the third floor of a Nogizaka building, across the street from the Department of Defense. Samson had run into them at 999 and was intent on luring them to work at one of the clubs for which he recruited. An acne-faced Japanese DJ who had been accompanying them was dispatched by Samson to go buy drinks while he laid out the benefits of working at Bachelor Party. I was seated across from the girls who, bereft of makeup, appeared, beside their preposterously large bosoms, very plain. Next to me was Laney, a New Zealander who bartended some evenings at RIP. Laney was very handsome, with deep blue eyes and high cheekbones. In his shearling jacket he looked like a fighter pilot in a World War II-era cigarette advertisement. But Laney was so reliant on his rugged, charming features, he rarely bothered to think. During Samson's pitch, the girls kept sneaking looks at Laney. And Laney, as he sat there, tapping his feet against the sticky floor and smoking his Marlboros, was clearly not interested in these two. He had his pick of the sex industry employees who traipsed in and out of RIP; this pair was unexceptional. Noticing they were taken with Laney, Samson rubbed his chin, leaning over to Laney and asking for help. "Listen, punk, I'm gonna get rid of this DJ. They're not comfortable talking to me with someone from their club here." Samson told Laney, "You just chat these two up. Tell them what a swell guy I am." "Why?" Laney asked. "You're not doing anything." Samson said. "You're just sitting there. Help me out." Laney shrugged and Samson got up to look for the DJ. When Laney slid over to chat with the girls, I was envious of the obvious glee he inspired in them. I could not imagine what it would be like to have women react to me as they did to Laney. "So you're thinking of working for Samson," Laney said in his Kiwi accent. The girls shrugged. "Do you think it's a good idea?" "He's a real asshole," Laney said, lighting a cigarette. The girls giggled. I looked at Laney. He winked. When Samson came back to the table, Laney got up and left, both girls looking disappointed as he did so. The rest of the night, Samson kept telling the girls they had to come to Bachelor Party. He guaranteed they would make $1,000 a night. They were making less than half that at Maniac. Still, the girls resisted. I was amazed as I watched Samson buy them drink after drink, offer them cocaine, reiterate for the 12th time why Bachelor Party was a good idea. Even in my state of opiated exhaustion, I could tell that Samson's war of attrition style of career counseling was not going to work. When I departed at 6 a.m., Samson was still cajoling. The next day I found out from Laney that Samson hadn't convinced the girls to switch. But Shore Patrol had gone by their squalid six-mat apartment with flowers, champagne and a picnic basket. They had agreed with Shore Patrol to go to work at Seventh Heaven. "Don't mean nothing. I'm still faster than that punk," Samson assured me that night, patting the Polaroids he had taken to carrying around as a sort of good luck talisman. "Air Canada Flight 707. Two dozen very classy ladies." My own projects weren't faring much better than Samson's. The interviews I had scheduled, at various government ministries, newspapers, politicians' offices and banks were unfolding as a series of lifeless briefings during which the bureaucrat, reporter, politician or banker in question would drone for a while about his innocence regarding the scandal du jour, and I would dutifully scribble notes and attempt to ask coherent questions. In the past, I had been able, somehow, to piece together these briefings and meetings into a coherent story. I would listen to the men in suits until something they said stuck in my mind, some scene they described or meeting they recounted, a moment that crystallized the political or economic climate I was supposed to make sense of. But that ability to organize, arrange and structure data into a story had been lost. I felt constantly preoccupied, as if those gigabytes of brain necessary to do the subconscious work of making an article, of writing, were now unavailable. My mind was busy with drugs. The days slipped by, a procession of gray, damp afternoons and cold, wet evenings. Automobile headlights were particularly beautiful in the persistent light rain; they appeared as sets of silver moons, levitating through the Minato-ku streets. Even with Samson and the crowd at RIP and my loyal assistant who kept on arranging interviews and meetings though I was proving feckless at conducting them, when I woke up on the tatami-mat floor of my assistant's apartment, the rain pattering against the thin, wire-mesh windows, I had never felt so alone. This feeling was different from the sadness that had engulfed me in Los Angeles. There, I was used to living in a state of perpetual, narcotized depression; and I was convinced that this was because I was no longer in Tokyo, no longer stomping the familiar ground where I had once achieved heroic stature. Back there, I had thought that if I could only get back here, to Tokyo, I would be OK. But now I only felt alone. The problem, I began to suspect, was not a matter of location. This solipsistic hatred transcended geography. I was here and I was the problem. Then, one morning, I called my wife in Los Angeles. She did not say very much. She had bought a ticket back to Amsterdam. She was leaving me. And that was it. As I stumbled up Azabu-Juban Shotengai to RIP, brushing past the early evening swirl, I realized there was nothing more for me here than there had been in Los Angeles. But I still didn't know what it was I needed to do. Samson had bivouacked the two dozen Midwestern strippers at a weekly mansion in Gotanda, about five minutes from the train station up a steep, cobblestone road. They appeared a vanquishing army of buxom amazons their first morning in that sleepy suburb of Tokyo as they made their way down in groups of twos and threes to the narrow shopping street that ran from the station. Blonds and brunets, accustomed to travel and shacking up in less than luxurious accommodations, most of the girls had their hair tied back in ponytails and their sleepy, jet-lagged faces unadorned by makeup. Clad in sweatshirts and sweatpants that failed to obscure prominent busts and ample, muscular haunches, they sought coffee, cigarettes, croissants, orange juice, cold cream and tampons. Samson had not counted on their being up this early; he had forgotten how jet lag afflicted the new arrival to the Far East, making it impossible to sleep until first light. The salarymen, grandmothers and schoolchildren of Gotanda, heading out to the office, fruit stand and school, gawked at these exotic new arrivals who in the morning rain failed to carry umbrellas and seemed to have no idea where they were going. The foreign girls, whose profession was obvious perhaps only to the salarymen scurrying to buy newspapers and train tickets, had been given paltry per diems by Samson upon their arrival last night. Yet even the simplest financial transaction, at the bakery, pharmacy or coffee shop, proved complex and laborious. The girls had not yet figured out Japanese currency, instead holding out palms full of cash and coins and allowing the shopkeepers to choose the appropriate denomination. It seemed the narrow market street, usually quiet at this hour, was in the throes of a large-mammaried occupation. Because of their trade, the girls were impervious to inquiring or curious eyes; they procured supplies and sipped $5 cups of coffee with sleepy insouciance that some of the locals mistook for arrogance. If 24 strippers showed up simultaneously in your town or on your block, you would take notice. For the citizens of Gotanda, the sudden manifestation was cause for consternation, resulting in hushed conversations conducted while hanging out laundry and discreet calls to the local koban police box. News travels fast in Tokyo, and the arrival of two dozen women ideally suited to the demands of topless and bottomless dancing did not go unremarked among the salarymen on their way to work that morning. The sudden appearance of this pulchritudinous phalanx became a leading topic of discussion in various offices around Tokyo, and word of this surprising occurrence was passed from ear to ear until a cellular phone in a certain AWOL sailor's shirt pocket jangled with the news that by now had been exaggerated into a torrent of American womanhood washing up on southern Tokyo. "Dude," a gravelly voiced Laney told Shore Patrol. "Hundreds of prime American babes, out there in the 'burbs.'" Shore Patrol hailed the first taxi he saw. By the time Samson showed up at the Lion Mansion to prep and acclimate his quiver of classy ladies, Shore Patrol had come and gone and had planted in the girls' minds the notion that Samson was underpaying them. Shore Patrol had told them that Tokyo clubs were desperate, willing to pay top dollar. Whatever Samson had promised them per night -- 50,000 yen? 100,000 yen? -- he could get them more. The prospect of providing for his clients at Seventh Heaven 24 fresh bodies and faces, none of whom had been seen on Tokyo laps before, was dizzying to Shore Patrol. He made lavish offers, disparaged the accommodation Samson had arranged and assured them the contracts they had signed with Samson were not legally binding. "From my mouth to your ears," Shore Patrol told them before he left. "Help me help you." Samson walked into cramped apartments that now housed tense, sleep-deprived women who had suddenly taken up the cry that their needs weren't being met. They had been flown halfway around the world by this bilker and they were not about to let the fleecing continue. As Samson tried to calm them and make sense of this sudden swelling of dissatisfaction, it leaked out that Shore Patrol had inserted himself into the situation, planting the seeds of dissent. Several of the women, already taken with Shore Patrol's Rutger Hauer-like features, so unlike Samson's vaguely rodent-like appearance, claimed that unless Samson met some untenable terms -- shorter working hours, no payout to the club at the end of the night, no groping during lap dances, more spacious accommodation -- then they would refuse to work at Bachelor Party. Despite Samson's protestations that Shore Patrol did not intend to meet any of these obligations, the girls were now perilously close to open rebellion and subsequent termination of any relationship with Samson. After dispensing wads of currency and assuring the girls that he would search for better housing, Samson ducked into a restroom, snorted a line of heroin and reemerged, having reassured himself that the situation was under control. He hopped on his Suzuki and fired back up to RIP. It was time to settle things with Shore Patrol. Shore Patrol was sipping an orange juice and playing cribbage with Laney, who leaned over the bar to peg four holes. Randall and Haru were spray painting different colors onto the wallboard at the back of the bar, testing various color schemes for the strip club they now envisioned. There were about a dozen patrons in the bar, a few reading newspapers, a few sipping drinks or canned coffee. A Japanese kid in a blue vinyl jacket nodded on a stool next to the out-of-service pay phone. A salaryman who had apparently stumbled into the wrong joint hurried to finish the beer he had paid for. Two frizzy-haired blonds in black leather jeans showed up and quickly bolted themselves into the restroom for a few minutes. The bar smelled like the usual combination of cigarette smoke and bug spray. "Hey, butt boy," Samson said, striding over to Shore Patrol, who was holding all fives in his hand and was reluctant to set it down. Shore Patrol turned and nodded. "Those are my girls, OK punk?" Samson said. "Step off." Shore Patrol nodded once and winked to Laney, who studied his cards. "Your girls?" Shore Patrol shook his head. "I didn't see any brands on them." "Listen, butt boy. You and I both know what's right is right. This is my thing. These aren't some out-of-work hostesses walking around on Roppongi. I brought these girls over. On a plane." Shore Patrol stood up to face him. "Hey, all I did was go down to see them, tell them what was what. If you're a little slow on the draw, then that's not my fault." Samson squinted. "Who's slow?" "You," Shore Patrol said. "You're slow. Maybe it's all that crap you take, the drugs, ruining your body, fucking with your mind. You're slow." "One thing I'm not is slow," Samson waved an index finger. "I'm fast. Fastest guy in here." "Bullshit," Laney chimed in. "SP's the fastest guy here." "You ain't fast," Shore Patrol pointed an index finger at Samson. "You ain't nothing." Samson, in a rage over Shore Patrol's poaching his girls and boasting of his putative speed, shouted out, "That's it. We race. Once and for all. We race." "Now?" Shore Patrol asked. "When?" Samson had already begun taking off his cheap suit jacket. "Now. Right now." Shore Patrol held up his hands. "I'm in boots." "So am I." "It's raining outside," Shore Patrol told him, making no move to take off his leather bomber jacket. "I'm the fastest guy in here," Samson said. "I'll beat you in shoes, barefoot, sneakers, boots. Rain. Snow. On fucking ice, you punk. I am faster than you." "Fuck you," Shore Patrol told him, standing to peel off his jacket. "I'll race you for the girls." By now Randall, Haru and several other regulars had gathered around to listen. Samson, reluctant to show his fear, slowly nodded, as if he was trying to convince himself he really wanted to go along with Shore Patrol's idea. "Then if I win you give me 20 girls. You give me 20 girls to bring to Bachelor Party. My choice." Shore Patrol shrugged. "Then we race." It was over before it really began. As both runners crouched in the stark, white light of the Pocari Sweat vending machine, Samson's gray, rayon shirt showing dark spots where he had sweated through the material and Shore Patrol's black, cabled sweater beading with water, the crowd stood at the entrance, cocktails and cans of coffee in their hands, cigarettes sending up narrow ribbons of smoke in the chilly, twilight air. Laney and I stood at the finish line, the front of the coffee vending machine, outside the front door of an old-fashioned, Japanese-style restaurant with a sliding shoji door. The street was slanted slightly downhill, the wet pavement giving way in one spot to a thickly painted white crosswalk and a subsequent meter of white stripes before resuming its slick blackness for the rest of the track. They would run into and out of the cone of one streetlight. Randall, who held his arm up at his side, gazed, for some reason, at his watch, as if the race were being timed. The winner was first across the line. The winner would get the girls. The winner would make a fortune. Randall held the runners in their crouch for an awkwardly long time. Several cars were forced to detour around the growing crowd that had now stopped to watch the footrace. A car honked. Someone sneezed. "Go." Samson slipped on the wet pavement. He never caught up. Bachelor Party, running out of girls, shut its doors three weeks later. I am lying in a natural hot spring bath, a damp towel splayed over my head, staring up at petals of snow swirling down from a black-gray sky. It is after midnight. My legs are aching. I have taken my last three darvon; tomorrow I will be out of drugs. The hot water splashes into my ofuro bath through a two-inch-thick bamboo pipe that tilts on a wooden swivel to 45 degrees when water hits its carved, sharpened beak. I am trying to relax in my own personal hot spring, an ovoid stone pool set amid a Kamakura-style rock garden just outside my $1,000-a-night suite at the Goro Kaidan Hotel atop a 5,000-foot mountain in central Japan. The feeling as I gaze down the hillside at the strung lights of a funicular line, the twin headlights of mountain road traffic and the scattered yellow lights of other lodges and hotels, is that from here, it is all downhill. I will leave Japan tomorrow for a drug treatment center in Newberg, Ore. I hear that Samson is in Shanghai, where there is a burgeoning market for foreign strippers. SALON \| Nov. 10, 1998 Karl Taro Greenfeld has written previously for Salon Wanderlust on Ibiza, Samarkand, the expatriate circuit in Asia and Thailand.