2.18 Imagine that!

A few days after the opening of The Zoo, Jean rang me up.

"Hey, man, want to party?"

It was well past eleven and I was already half a bottle of wine away from hitting the sack.

"Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"I'll come by your place and pick you up, then."

"Pick me up?"

There weren't many gaijin in town who had their own car. The few who did usually drove rusting jalopies that had been fobbed off by friends who didn’t want to shell out a couple grand for the shaken, the vehicle inspection. It came as quite a surprise then when Jean pulled up in front of the Family Mart downstairs in a brand new Mercedes wagon.

"Hop in," he said. I did and off we went, aggressively powering down narrow streets like a bat out of Hell.

“Where’s the party,” I asked.

"I am the party,” Jean replied. “But, first, I have to stop in at my warehouse. If you don't mind."

"Not at all."

Jean's warehouse was located in industrial area of the city, only a few blocks from the Customs house. Narrow corridors separated rows and rows of metal shelves stuffed from floor to ceiling with the same merchandise I had seen at The Zoo. Two tattooed and pierced employees busied themselves under the glow of fluorescent lights unloading boxes that had just come in from Holland and Thailand. Dozens of plastic bongs, silver accessories packed in bubble wrap, knit caps, shoulder bags made from hemp, canvas shoes, wool scarves, skeleton figures, and pillow-case sized bags filled with dried psilocybin mushrooms. I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy shop.

"Give me a sec, will you?"

"Sure, take your time."

Jean sat down at a desk and placed a call to Switzerland. The guy was amazing. One moment he was ordering his staff around in Japanese, the next he was on the phone speaking German having funds moved from a Swiss bank account to one of his suppliers in Thailand. I had a couple of years of university German under my belt, enough to order bier and würst at a kneipe in Heidelburg, but this Jean blew me away with his fluency.

When he was finished I asked him if it were smart to be doing what he was doing so close to Customs.

"Oh, the cops are watching me every step of the way," he said. "Make no mistake about it.”

As soon as he was finished we took off for Bayside Place, a woebegone shopping mall the city had built ten years earlier at the port connecting Fukuoka City by hydrofoil to the islands in the Genkai Sea and beyond to South Korea. Jean had a small boutique there as well, one of several that he operated all over the northern part of Kyushu. He needed to check on something at the shop, so I tagged along.

It was much smaller than the Zoo and lacked its subversive edge. It was also dead quiet like most of the shops in the mall.

“There’s no future in retail,” Jean told me as we entered the shop. “From now on I’m going to focus on wholesale.”

I picked up a pair of cheap canvass slip-ons selling for 3,900 yen and made a face.

"Those canvas shoes you were just snickering over . . . "

"Snicker?"

"I saw you. They're as ugly as shoes get, yes, but I sold over fifteen thousand pairs of those canvas shoes alone last year. Imagine that: Fifteen thousand Japanese kids wearing my shoes. All I need is three or four hit items a year like those ugly shoes and . . . "

15,000 times 3,900 yen . . . Christ, that almost 60 million yen, about $500,000.

It was a staggering amount of money for someone who was busting his balls ten hours a day and making less than a fifth of what Jean earned with those ugly shoes. I had long suspected that I was in the wrong business; now, I was certain of it.

"And, how much do you buy them for?" I asked.

"It's not as simple as that," he replied. "C'mon, this place is depressing me."

We left Bayside Place and walked to the end of the deserted pier where lovers were meant to gaze upon the romantic skyline of the city before heading off to one of the nearby love hotels to screw each other’s brains out. Only, there wasn't much of a view to speak of. Across the harbor were general cargo sheds, silos, and a tugboat. Beyond that was the stadium for the City-run boat races and the city’s elevated expressway. An uninspiring skyline of fifteen-story high buildings and neon billboards could just barely be seen in the distance.

Jean asked me if I smoked.

I pulled a pack of Gauloises out of my jacket breast pocket.

"Ooh, Gauloises blue. I haven’t had one of these in years."

He took a cigarette from the box and put it between his lips. Digging into the hip pocket of his cargo pants for what I thought was going to be a lighter, he took out a small Ziploc bag with a black ball of clay in it.

"Smell this," he said.

It was hashish.

"I hope you appreciate this. It's from your Beqaa Valley."

He passed the hashish over a flame to soften it, then tore off a small amount and returned the rest to the Ziploc bag.

"Consider it a gift," he said, handing me the bag.

I couldn't believe my luck. "Thanks!"

"Hold this a sec," he said, giving me the small amount he'd torn off.

He then pulled the filter off the cigarette, tossed it into the water, and started to remove the tobacco from it. Gesturing for the hashish, I placed it in his palm and rubbed his hands together in a circular motion, blending the tobacco with hashish. From another pocket, he took out some Zigzag papers and rolled up a spliff. It had only taken Jean less than a minute.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had smoked. Lighting up and taking that first toke, I let out an embarrassing rail of coughs.

"Man, you want to cops to find us," Jean said looking around nervously.

"No . . . " Cough-cough-cough. "It's just that . . . " Cough-cough. "It's been . . ." Cough-cough-cough. "It's been fucking ages." Cough.

I passed the spliff back to Jean and then the rush hit me.

"Woa . . . " I had to lean against the breakwater to keep from swooning.

With the spliff held between his index and ring fingers, Jean took a long hit from his cupped hand, then, without exhaling, made the following observation: "An Arab and a Jew sharing a spliff. Imagine that!"

"Never call someone from Lebanon an Arab," I said taking the spliff back. "They'll consider it as an insult." Cough-cough-cough. "I understand what you're getting at, though. What the world needs is more pot, and fewer bombs." Cough-cough.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.