Un Momento

Two galleries, alike in dignity, in old Osaka, where we ride the train.

Glaring across the loop-line tracks were Gallery Cyclops and Un Momento, and on the same sweaty, dense July night I was bouncing back and forth between the two of them, between openings for rival painters. At Un Momento, housed on the fourth floor of a yakuza hive, Dale Ronyap was showing 100 portraits of cow skulls. Nailed up on every space the walls could bare were cow heads. On canvas and cardboard, on skinned car seats and flattened bicycle baskets, on street-worn viagra ads and even the rusty bark of a toxic barrel, Ronyap drew, scratched and druelled skeins of stringy acrylic color into 100 sad children of Palestine, Texas. It was his sacrifice, offered to god that mumbled back to him from the blaring stereo speakers he always painted to. And, within the cacoon of his hecatomb, tonight he was the lecher and the king, shaking hands with paint-bloodied hands and watching the skin pucker on a 40 kilogram pig turning on an electric spit at the center of The Moment. He was well within his element, ranting long threads of words that as much made too much sense as made no sense. Echoing himself like a voice in a mirror. I could hear him from two floors down as I climbed the stairs, drunk enough to take one edge off and put another on--for how else can one see art? As I reached the fourth landing, I was met by Dale's Australian parrot cursing out an umbrella on a hat rack, saying, "Nevermind excuses, fuckwit, just scoot over."

For years Ronyap went everywhere with that bird on his shoulder, repeating short diatribes of bile against a select list of private and public enemies. So, even though he's now vastly reformed, the bird will still occasionally fly into a room and say, "Fuckin' hardass Osaka cops, who cares if it's not my fuckin' bike?" or "Dispose of needle safely. Dispose of needle safely." And, all of it in pitch-perfect Dale-drawl.

Trike Club

"The first rule of Trike Club is, tell a stranger about Trike Club. The second rule of Trike Club is, don't speak. The third rule of Trike Club is, disappear."

I was new and didn't know how to get laid in a new town. There are rules to sex-success in any place, and if you try to learn by experience, you waste a lot of weekends and a lot of money on a lot of alcohol on a lot of women. If you join a group, introductions get made, guidance is given, girlfriends have friends and secrets are spilled. In other words, you get a leg up--which I always intend as a pun.

I was introduced to Trike Club by Trevor--whose dj name was TV--and I thought it could be just the leg I was looking for. We met pressed into opposite back corners of the service elevator falling groundward from Cinderella's Tower, a free-talk lounge for aspiring princesses atop one of Umeda's dirty-bubble building. Pinned in by the dead-weight bodies of a dozen-odd descending Japanese office workers, we nodded from our respective corners and made the kind of eye contact that both keeps things distant and keeps things cool. Giving nothing up, but acknowledging each other as life-forms.

Then the pause when occupants of an enclosed space become aware of someone's toxic breath.

At floor 14 and falling, Trevor showed his hand and slowly slid the whitest business card I've ever seen across the elevator's matt-black steel wall. His middle-finger at its center, moving that luminous rectangle my way across the vertical flat while at the same time keeping its secret. A gesture I thought he probably learned from TV, but liked and was prepared to imitate.

I got the card just as we reached the ground. Everybody rumbled forth as the cartoon character's voice from the speakers urged us to depart politely and to not forget things we may have forgotten. Trevor vanished with them, leaving me holding the card. I stared at it and it glowed at every angle. It was blank except for at its center where--no bigger than a baby's fingernail--was a drawing of a tiny black tricycle.



On the other side, opposite the drawing, was printed TV.

sumo crowd dreams

Summer began with sumo dreams and each of the dreams started with sumo crowds. All those faces that float so well focused in the background on NHK. Beyond the foreground impact of flesh and fat-boy sweat, those faces loom back there like a wall of red-eyed witnesses. They form the background of judgement inherent in any crowd with mob potential. Each expression on each face broadcast in clear enough focus to be read with ease. The shock and hope and disappointment. And, usually, the faces are my favorite part of watching sumo. They make it nice to turn down the volume of the polite blow-by-blow commentary flowing from the plump sumo historians of NHK sports. The faces are the non-verbal truth of watching man strike man.

The strange thing is, I couldn't care less about sumo. It isn't like I know anything about it except that the guy with the smallest areolas invariably wins.

Of course, I stop to watch when passing by the Big Man screen in Umeda, but I'm not a fan. I'm more interested in how odd it continues to be to see baby-proportioned men in loin clothes ram each other from five feet apart.

But, at the start of that summer, sumo crowds filled my dreams for eight mornings straight. Never the exact same faces, but always the same dream senario. The dream started with close-ups on crowd members. Flashing from spectator to spectator, all the while the camera slowly pulling back and widening the shot. Never a familiar face in the crowd, and I wonder where in my subconscious they came from. I’ll probably never know. Not one of them was recognizable as an ex-boss or a train man or a female teller at the bank or even as significant strangers. But, they were all Japanese and stared out from the TV screen of my dream-mind. The faces arranged, directed and watching something with intense concentration, their eyebrows, lips and wrinkles revealing emotions of horror, disgust and glee. And the camera always expanding the shot, ever so slowly pulling back untill finally the sumo ring is revealed with me standing there buck naked and bent over at the center of the pounded dirt. Squared off opposite me: my landlady. She in a sumo belt and ready to lurch into the brawl.

And then, suddenly, the camera perspective always changed and I was looking out from within the my eyes in the ring. Her face fills the view. She is wearing her glasses with a faint purple tint to the lenses. Her eyes are sharp with the fury of every hound of Hell. I glance down. Her breasts dangle like golfballs in socks. And just then, for an instant, I think I have a chance against her. I think I won’t be destroyed, but then I notice her areolas are clearly smaller than mine.

Then, each morning, I awoke with an exhausted shock and it took me half the day to recover.

This was no scene from fight club. There would be no commaradary for the loser. This was to be a ruthless ritual of public humiliation that you know only widows who rent musty apartments can dish out.