Writing under the Influence

and by influence, I mean Vietnamese Iced Coffee

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

It was supposed to be a lemons and lemonade situation.

I drove up to Seattle’s University District this morning. A very dear friend is moving away, and I offered to take some of her bookcases from her. (If I had my Patsy Stone moment on television, I might say: You can never have enough books and bookshelves.)

I had, however, failed to measure my little car’s interior for all dimensions. Sure, with the front passenger seat down, I had enough length, I think, but I did NOT have enough breadth.

I called the rental truck place—no vans to be had. Panicked, I called another dear friend and asked to borrow his truck. Success, I think. He’ll call me shortly, and Hiro and I will drive down to get the truck and then return to Seattle.

I did all the phone calls while parked in the U District. And because I had driven north on I-5 and had seen how bad the southbound traffic was, I asked Siri to take me home the back way. To Rainier Avenue and then to Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.

That route took me past my all-time favorite Vietnamese Bakery, Q. Even though I knew the wait times would be long, I called Hiro for his order. One grilled pork banh mi for him, one sardine banh mi for me. And two Vietnamese iced coffees.

And now I’m jittery. My caffeine habit has dwindled over the past few years, and I can now get by on most days without it. But Q’s iced coffee, as delicious as it is, has set my nervous system on fire.

In this state, there are dozens of things I want to write about. Kyoto sarcasm. The hunt for a retirement home in Japan. The changing outlook for marriage equality in Japan. The books I’ve read, put down, and am reading instead. Recent interactions with literary agents. My latest nonfiction piece out in the world. The odd snark of Nicholas Bornoff, author of Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, and Sex in Contemporary Japan. Pride activities in Seattle. A potential plan to fly to Japan in December. My increasing anger at US politics. Today’s heavenly birthday of Prince. My evolving fascination with patterns. New t-shirt designs. Summer travel plans. Why I hate Netflix. Why we’re not going to shop at Trader Joe’s anymore.

So maybe not dozens.

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It’s now Sunday morning.

My friend with the truck called and Hiro and I schlepped from Covington to the U District and back. Thank goodness my friend with the bookshelves was a tech-head because figuring out how to strap the bookshelves down within the truck's bed was beyond my grasp (a given) and even challenging for Hiro.

When we finished dropping off the truck back in Covington, it was nigh on 9:30 PM, the caffeine high had finally dissipated, and both Hiro and I put the fam in famished. We had dinner at Red Robin (for the first time in a long time), and both of us were surprised at how good the service was in Covington and at how good the burgers were. Once home, we slept like stones.

Earlier in May, I had written some potential newsletter topics. So, instead of working through the chaos of yesterday’s under-the-influence stream-of-consciousness mental gargling, I’m going to offer something more lucid.

Expectations and Reality

People sometimes ask what I expected when I moved to Japan in 1988.

Did I expect to have to re-enter the closet?

Did I expect I’d be assigned two uniquely difficult homestays before being allowed to live on my own?

Did I have concerns about the food? About transportation?

I had very few expectations. Very few worries before departure.

I had studied Japanese for three years. And despite my inability to put in any time within the language lab and despite my shoddy track record for submitting homework assignments, my teachers often remarked on how natural my Japanese sounded.

I had an ear for it. In part because I grew up in a house where music was welcome and my ability to sing and play the piano was lauded, making me hear (and emulate) more and more music. In part because from the moment I started at my day school in seventh grade and entered the Latin classroom and the French classroom, I realized I loved foreign languages.

And partly because I was (I thought) good at code-switching. I was a feminine boy, always alert to criticism and quick to try and find more ways to sound more masculine. The fact that so few people were surprised when I came out during my senior year of college suggests, however, that any attempt to butch things up was not entirely convincing.

I had good Japanese skills, and within a month after arriving, I had enough confidence to stop peppering my speech with hesitation noises. (In English, those are sounds like ummm, and like that let the speaker slow down and clarify their thoughts. In Japanese, the most common hesitation noises are ēto and anō and even sō desu ne.)

It helped (a lot) that the minor yakuza boss who fathered my first homestay family found my hesitation noises really annoying.

But besides the lack of language concerns, did I have other expectations or concerns?

Nope. Nothing.

In addition to my Japanese language classes at college, I took every other Japan-related course I could: religion, culture, art, and literature.

Was I, therefore, sure I knew what to expect?

Again, nope.

What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting

Whence came that mental vacuum?

Japan was a convenient destination. Yes, I found the homestays painful to endure. Still, once I had my apartment at the end of October 1988, I put away the calendar where each passing day was crossed off with a vividly red X. I stopped thinking about how I had been one-twelfth of my way through, one-sixth of my way through, one-fourth of my way through.

You see, I hadn’t run to Japan.

I had run from the United States.

From the New York Times’ record of AIDS headlines. Note that Reagan, in the seventh year of his presidency, finally seems to talk tough about ending a disease he GLEEFULLY ignored and otherwise morally condemned until then.

I most likely became aware of my attraction to other men when I was eleven, in 1977.

AIDS, first noticed as an outbreak of pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States by the CDC in 1981, was a looming threat throughout my years in high school and college.

And although I had been secretively (but significantly) sexually active in my teens, my college choice, located in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts, enforced a closeted celibacy that no doubt saved my life.

Was I reading the New York Times or other information on the new pandemic?

Absolutely not.

When my father died in 1980, I learned an (erroneous yet) unintended lesson.

There were other things that I could be in the closet from.

Things like grief. And anger. Emotions I had decided at the far-from-wise age of fourteen were too painful to experience. Emotions I had decided to lock away.

And when I realized that AIDS amplified an existing fear (because, growing up Catholic, I had internalized that nostrum about the wages of sin being death), I promptly and resolutely constructed another closet, wherein that fear was consigned.

As an aside, I used to mock Catholics for behaviors that signaled that if they ignored something hard enough, it ceased to exist—irony of ironies.

Even with my emotional closets and enforced ignorance, I still deeply, fatalistically, and perhaps far too dramatically knew that any choice to remain in the United States, as eager as I was to rejoin the celebration that is sex after closeting that for four years would mean death.

If Not Japan, What?

I chose Japan. That choice led to ten years of a glorious life in a country that loved me as much as I discovered I loved it. That choice brought me more than thirty years with Hiro.

But as an editor friend reminded me, I had agency. I could have chosen something else.

Except…

I hadn’t prepared any alternate plans. All my tamago were in a Japanese basuketto.

My college thesis professor had asked me to follow him to the University of Southern Illinois to continue studying nesting behavior in mice.

But even before my senior year’s research began—spoiler: the two species of mice in my lab, Mus musculus and Peromyscus leucopus, do NOT need to be raised with nesting materials to know how to build nests—the thought of a career that included daily murine pap smears revolted me. I put off taking the Biology LSAT, telling said professor that I would do so after returning from Japan. How blithely I dissembled!

Were there other thoughts of careers or professions?

Nope. Nary a one.

I had, apparently, also constructed a closet for thoughts of a future that did NOT include Japan.

Other Notes

Definitely read this—a queer Asian masterpiece of a novel.

I’m currently reading this and liking it a whole lot. (Thank you, Liz, for recommending it.)

I’m also reading this and am not yet sure how I feel about it. It starts very drily, which is either an intentional framing or perhaps the academic tone the writer is pursuing. We shall see.

And if you’d rather read something I wrote, and, to be honest, who’d blame you, check this out.