Hi friends,
How are you?!?! I hope you’re well. It’s been a while. I’m going to be writing Salve every second week to make sure I’m giving you something I’m proud of. This week we’re going abroad. Since we can’t travel, here’s a story from when we could.
xoxo,
Z
The summer was hot and I was 20. Old enough to cosplay as a salaryman in Tokyo but too naive to efficiently navigate the Narita Express from the airport to the city center. The directional signs were austere like the ones I knew from Singapore, but the Japanese characters squirmed like silk in the wind, at first familiar but then unhinged. The sky was on fire in welded spears of tangerine, magenta, and orpiment by the time I found my shoebox apartment and disturbed the landlord to locate a set of keys buried in a casual false rock.
This summer, I will be serious. This summer, everything will change. I thought as I laid out the corporate clothes I had bought and begun to resent on the futon. The linen mandarin collared shirts and chino pants formed a sad monotonous rainbow of blue, black, and beige. In the bathroom, a shower-head presided over the sink. I rented (by accident) an apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo—far from the image I crafted in my mind of bustling crosswalks and urgent neon lights. The cramped and squat buildings of my neighbourhood that I could not pronounce were a half hour from the closest train station. When I went outside for a cigarette I saw no people and heard no noise. I called my mother and wanted to cry.
the suburb
Later, a police officer who spoke no English showed up at my door and asked to see my passport. Deport me I thought, I’ve changed my mind. Through an app on his phone the police officer explained that I shouldn’t talk loud after the sun went down. Especially not with my windows open. It was not the right thing to do. I closed the window and turned off my phone. I waited for the roar of a passing car or the bark of an angry dog. I drifted off to sleep on top of my new uniform and dreamt of the shower-head falling off the wall to shatter the sink.
I hadn’t realised that July was so blistering in Tokyo. It was the kind of heat that pierced intravenously and ran amuck through the blood. On the long walk to the train station from my apartment, sweat collected in muggy swamps beneath my armpits and behind my knees. The new dress shoes cut ribbons on my ankles. I understood then why the waifish girls that worked at magazines in Manhattan wore flats on the subway from Brooklyn. My phone blew up with emails from the office about reimbursements for transportation that I knew I would never claim, dead dollars like the linen shirts and heavy chinos.
The office in Ebisu was open-plan so the higher-ups could jostle the drones in a friendly game of whack-a-mole with a meat cleaver. It was swanky, decked in primary colours and De Stijl fixtures on the 30th floor. Creatively bankrupt and abashedly corporate. The interns were older, to my surprise, and serious. My dress shoes clacked loudly on the floor. The interns wore sensible sneakers. I made the mistake of sharing that my Dad worked for the company. A Czech girl with a name full of consonants looked at me with open disdain. Are you a copywriter or an art director? She looked down her nose to ask. Does it matter? I laughed.
It mattered. I combusted on our first pitch and the Czech girl sat back with her arms crossed, delighted at my incompetence. After the meeting, I made my first friend. She was half Russian and quite brutish. Her name was unpronounceable so she went by Candy. I thought she was wonderful. Gently, she taught me the craft of a pitch. I looked at the photographs she described as a hobby and told her to quit. At the end of the first week, the creative director took the interns out for drinks. He regaled us with tales of his own brilliance. The Czech girl mooned and brown-nosed and said she wanted to be just like him.
The creative director made a point to ask the interns if they had boyfriends or girlfriends. I said I had neither, though a boyfriend wouldn’t go amiss. My colleagues looked at me with sad eyes and commended my bravery, then fell into an uncomfortable silence at the prospect of creating great works of art for the new Lexus car with a homosexual. I left the circle-jerk and went to the top floor of the office building which was locked. I shouldered the door a touch and it gave. I lit a smoke. The roof was large and the railing was low, I leant against it and the cool metal nudged at my hip bones. I wanted to fold forward and take flight. My goal of seriousness was abandoned. There was nothing serious to be found in advertising. The sunset embered like the end of my cigarette.
view from the roof
I took well to Shimokitazawa. Like a pig in S-H-I-T, my grandmother would say. The streets were narrow and nonsensical paths that lead to dead ends or roundabouts. It bustled with human traffic at all hours. The stores re-homed vintage pieces with missing buttons and hideous prints. I swam through the crowds upstream like a salmon escaping a hungry bear. With seriousness flushed down the toilet, I turned to my second goal—to make everything different. An aesthetic overhaul felt appropriate and Shimokitazawa was the mecca of reincarnation. I took a sudden interest in makeup and perused hundreds of stores with brightly coloured blush, peach under eye correctors, rainbow highlighters, and buttery lip tints. I spent a long time denying these delicate delights, but with the co-workers already afraid of my homosexuality, I leaned in.
I hoarded like a magpie, convinced that new things could conjure a new person. I shopped with Candy and she whispered encouragement over the nape of my neck as I lingered on garish accessories. The best store we found was like an acid trip in a teenage girl’s bedroom. There were neon bunk beds stuffed with vintage tees, cotton candy pink walls with dreamy lilac clouds, decapitated Barbie dolls lined up on the window sill, an old macbook playing Britney Spears music videos on a loop. Shoved in a corner I found a pair of truly hideous white platform sneaker boots. I was terrified of the courage they required. I traced the meaty soles and plugged my pinkie finger into a shoelace hole. You have to get those, Candy whispered. They were made for you.
the acid trip teenage bedroom
On the weekends we went to Roppongi, the party district. I went to meet Candy and a new friend, a boy, who was not into guys but held the door open for me, touched the small of my back, and laughed at everything I said. He had bucked teeth and wonky eyes. His skin was like a sprinkle of cinnamon on top of a latte. I wore black velvet pants from the women’s section in Uniqlo that flowed in the evening breeze like the sails on a tall ship. At an Irish bar there was a crew of marines in town for the night. I ordered a cider and shrunk into the walls, hoping to avoid them. The boy laughed big and loud when Oasis played and I forgot to be vigilant, to keep myself small, to wind it tight and make it still.
Then one of the sailors was whispering something in my ear with a forceful grip on my forearm. He was very tall, had a lot of tattoos, and a vein that pulsed arrestingly in the middle of his forehead. I didn’t catch what he said, but it sounded a lot like are you a faggot? Then there was broken glass and a commotion and I was herded out by Candy and the boy into the middle of the street. I caught my breath under the red haze of a sign that read BAR. I lit a cigarette and we walked to a seedy club where Candy rubbed up on the boy who looked uncomfortable and went home without saying goodbye.
I made one other friend at work, an American, who tried whale meat at dinner. When she realised the Czech girl—the de facto leader of this motley crew—hated my guts, she undercut me in a pitch for Amazon Prime and kept her distance. I felt better about this when I learned that she was a Trump supporter. The interns talked in circles about the high art of advertising: there’s nothing more powerful than selling. The boss took polaroid photos of us to hang on the walls with our favourite photoshop tool written underneath. I chose liquify. It was the only function I needed to edit my jawline and sharpen my nose.
I was doing mockups with Candy when my Dad called to say that the dog was dying. His kidneys are shot, he hasn’t eaten for days, the vet is coming over. First I argued that he was fine when I had left three weeks ago. He isn’t fine, he’s 16 years old, we expected this. Then I said I wanted to be there, I had to say goodbye. You won’t make it in time, he can’t wait, it’s not fair. I crouched on the floor outside the office like a bereft child. There were times when Sampson, the miniature schnauzer, was my only friend. I was too old to be acting like this and too naive to reckon with loss.
A week later my Dad flew into Tokyo for a business trip, which he organised on purpose to rescue me from the interns. I left the shoebox studio in the suburbs with the shower on top of the toilet to join him at The Westin. In Tokyo, you can still smoke inside. In the hotel room, we slid open the balcony doors and plonked ourselves in front of the setting sun with two packs of Marlboro’s and a bottle of merlot. For a long while, we said nothing. There was only the melting sky, recalibrating. When it was dark and the traffic slowed down and a slight breeze came through the doors, my Dad said:
I miss Sampson.
I do too.
We loved him the most, the two of us. Didn’t we?
He was ours.
sunset from the westin
Candy took my picture on the last day in Tokyo. I took time to apply the makeup I acquired from Shimokitazawa with a heavy hand. I wrestled my legs into a pair of fishnet tights and covered them with jeans that had generous rips. I finished my reincarnation with the sneaker boots, which after a couple of weeks were stained in red wine. The man in the mirror looked like a new person. Before we left to take pictures, I stood defiantly in front of my father and challenged him to question my new form. He blinked and furrowed his brow. What’s with the fishnets? He asked. I bristled and said that I liked them. Okay then—let’s rock and roll.
Candy posed me in front of a circus shop with screaming yellow billboards. She directed: crouch down, turn around, put your hand on the floor, stick your legs out, jump in the air. I did all of those things and hoped that the earnest smoulder I threw at the camera would show that I had become resilient, defiant, and in charge. After the shoot, Dad invited Candy for a drink. He asked eagerly to see the photos and was disappointed to learn they were on film. We happened upon an Izakaya bar that seated three. In between cold shots of sake and gulps of salmon sashimi, my Dad rested his arm on my shoulders and proudly claimed me.
candy shot
When I arrived in Singapore with the sneaker boots kicking around in my suitcase, I noticed that the frangipani tree outside of our apartment was dying. The bark had become brittle, the flowers were eggshell instead of canary yellow. I tapped the trunk gently before heading up to the apartment where Sampson’s water dish sat untouched. His pillow was still creased from where he sat. I sat there for a while and remembered the goals I had set in Tokyo. This summer, I will be serious. This summer, everything will change.