Slimming Down and Other Stories

Slimming Down and Other Stories, a fictional work, is published by Alex Shishin at Draft2Digital.

Copyright 2018 Alex Shishin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions, Alex Shishin at Draft2Digital.

All the short stories in this collection are works of fiction. Similarities to actual people, places (except landmarks) and events in this novel are entirely coincidental.

Cover: Detail from a photograph by Alex Shishin. Copyright 2018 by Alex Shishin

Slimming Down and Other Stories

Alex Shishin

THE STORIES

The Policeman and the Cigarette

Yoichiro and Rebecca:  A Tale of the ‘60’s

The Divine Spark

Our Sonata

The Fishmonger’s Daughter

The Japanese Colleague

Bulldozer

Betrayals

Slimming Down

THE POLICEMAN AND THE CIGARETTE

When I was nine a black and white police care drove up our driveway. I was happy.  Police TV shows made me like policemen.  I smiled and waved. 

The officer who got out did not smile. His cap and uniform were dark blue.  He wore shades.  He held a cigarette in his right hand.  It was the 1950s and I thought his shades and cigarette were cool.

He asked my name.  I told him.

Where are you parents? he asked.

My mother comes home at four-thirty, I said.

Someone reported you committed vandalism at a construction site in X Court, he said.

Years later I would see this as a Kafkaesque moment.  Only, unlike Joseph K., I had a good idea who my traducers were.  There were boys from X Court who made my life miserable from the time I let on that my parents were Russian immigrants.  This called me a dirty Russian, and a dirty commie, and told me to go back to Russia" (I was America-born).  They did this behind the teachers’ backs and acted like angels to their faces, so I looked bad for making a fuss.

I wanted to explain this to the policeman. I was not a very articulate child, and shock made me less so.  All I could say was, Someone is lying to you.

I think someone is lying to me right now, he said.  You’re making it worse for yourself.

I do not remember if I replied. 

I’ll return at four-thirty, the officer said.  He took one last drag off his cigarette and snuffed it out in the narrow flowerbed next to our house.

My mother’s face went pale when she saw my face, which was tear-stained and red.

What happened? she asked.

I told her.

You didn’t, of course.

I didn’t, I said. 

The doorbell rang once.

Go to your room, my mother said.  I’ll talk to the policeman.

I was unable to decipher what the policeman and my mother were saying to each other in the adjacent living room.  I did not know what to expect. I only believed the game was already rigged against me. I was only a dirty Russian.

Fifteen minutes later my mother came to me and quietly asked me come to the living room. The policeman wants to talk to you, she said in Russian.  Don’t say anything back to him.

The officer had removed his cap and shades.  I noted his bloodshot eyes and downy close-cropped blond hair.

Speaking as if to a three-year-old he drawled, Awww, don’t be a-scared, son, we’re not gonna put you in jaaaaail. I’m just doing my job to find out some stuff.

An obedient child, I held back my rage.

Before leaving, cap in hand, the officer tried to calm my trembling mother by saying, We have to follow every lead.  You know what I mean?

After the police car was gone, I said, Who lied about me?

He refused to say, my mother said, I could file a complaint over the way he treated you.  But what good would it do?

We were too traumatized to eat dinner.  I further traumatized my mother by announcing that I wanted to become an outlaw.

I did not become an outlaw.  I became an activist, which put me at odds with the frequently unjust social order and policemen.  But that’s another story.  As a nine-year-old, I chucked Dragnet and Joe Friday and turned to Perry Mason as a role model. He was always beating the system and saving the innocent.

The day after the officer’s visit, my mother got up the courage to call the police department.  She was told the case was closed and my name was not on any records.

That was that.

Except the filtered butt of the policeman’s cigarette still protruded from out of our little flowerbed.

Don’t touch it! my mother said.  It’s dirty.  Don’t go near it.  It’s dirty.  Do you understand?  Dirty.

YOICHIRO AND REBECCA: A TALE OF THE 60'S

I. Just off the 707 at San Francisco Airport in June 1967

Yoichiro's suitcase collided with Rebecca's in front of Customs and Immigration; it opened, spilling the clothing that his mother had so carefully packed.

I'm sorry! Yoichiro cried out.

Rebecca (he would only learn her name when they were hitchhiking together to San Francisco) said, Wow, it's cool.  Here let me help you.

And there they were, utter strangers, squatting down on the floor together picking up his shirts and underwear. She had stringy long blonde hair and eyes as blue as the skies and sea of his native Kyushu.  Her face would have been aquiline, except for the traces of baby fat.  Without really meaning to, he looked into her paisley blouse and saw her suntanned breasts quivering big and braless.  She smiled directly at him. 

What's you're sign? she asked.

Sign?

You know.  Birth sign.  I bet you're Scorpio with Libra rising.

"Inoshishi.  I'm pig."

So where's you're badge? 

Seeing his blank face, she said, Do you know English?

A little, he said.  I am English student, za San Frisco State.

Far out, Rebecca said. I mean really far out.

Far out, he repeated.

Right there, in front of Customs and Immigration, love at first sight occurred between a freaky eighteen-year-old girl with love beads around her neck and a bespectacled and crew cut twenty-year-old Japanese guy in uncomfortable pressed clothing. What was their mutual attraction in the summer of 1967?  Years later, in the midst of their cohabitation, they would reflect on this moment on one quiet foggy afternoon.  Yoichiro would confess that in Rebecca he saw the experienced woman who would finally give him that necessary nudge into manhood.  Rebecca would reply that in him she saw a boy unsullied by life, someone exactly unlike her ex-lover, Sundog, the lead singer and sham mystic who told her when she showed up in Honolulu full of jet lag and high expectations that he couldn't do a heavy scene with her because he was into this Polynesian chick.

The whole truth be known, Rebecca was stoned when she got on Yoichiro’s plane in Honolulu, having eaten a bag of very potent weed before boarding in case her luggage was searched.  She was not in the habit of taking strange men home with her and leading then directly to the mattress that was both her couch and bed in the tiny room in the Victorian flat on Haight Street which she shared with eleven other people.

II. Yoichiro’s parents warned him to stay away from hippies because they took drugs and probably had diseases

And the soft, affectionate naked girl resting delicately in his arms, the first non-prostitute he had ever made love to, was decidedly a hippie.  Everything about her said hippie: from her clothes (now intermingled with his on the floor) to her room with its psychedelic posters advertising Jefferson Airplane and Jimmy Hendrix. Yes, she even smelled hippie.  (That wonderful scent of musk!  Decades later when he smelled a passing trace of musk on the Ginza, Yoichiro would imagine sexual intercourse more beautiful than all poetry.)  In his soft-focus state of mind, Yoichiro felt no guilt about not reporting directly to the dormitory at San Francisco State College and telephoning his parents as they had so earnestly requested.  How could he?  He had stepped, ever so lightly, into another universe where stern Japanese fathers and overprotective Japanese mothers were irrelevant.

A few hours before he had been a mere provincial boy for whom Tokyo's subways were yet an alien muddle.  Then, unexpectedly, he found himself lugging his grandfather's prewar cardboard suitcase down Haight Street in the midst of the Summer of Love next to a hippie love goddess who insisted on stopping ever few meters to wrap her arms around his neck and push her exotic-tasting tongue into his mouth.

And the colors!  The sights!  Hippies sitting on the sidewalk or on cars; hippies passing joints; hippies begging for spare chance...

Here Yoichiro’s memory would forever remain a cheerfully chaotic pastiche.  Familiarity would bring perception (hence, memory) into focus; he would remember less pleasant things. Dog shit on sidewalks.  Speed freaks.  Petty theft.  Horrid dirt everywhere.  But none of this could ever negate that first euphoria; it would run like a bright gold vein through the many strata of his future life.

Entwined in Rebecca's arms he listened not to the fading echo of his parents' admonition: Study hard; this is your last chance to learn English! But to Rebecca's neighbor's stereo blaring acid rock. He listened to it as he would listen in the mountains of Miyazaki to the sound of an unknown bird.

Rebecca awoke and rubbed her face against his hairless chest. Oh your skin is so smooth, Yo-chi, she murmured.

Back in Miyazaki City, Yoichiro’s frantic parents, now joined by equally frantic relatives, were calling the Japanese Consulate General in San Francisco, which was closed.

III. His mother especially warned him about diseases

Yo-chi, darling, Rebecca said at the communal breakfast table the day before he had to register for his English courses, I think Sundog gave me the clap.

The three housemates present were sympathetic.  What a drag.  You can't ball for a week.  Better get down to the clap clinic pronto. Long wait after twelve.

Eh? Yoichiro said.

The free VD clinic was out in the Mission district.  As they changed from a