MellsBells’ Neighborhood

Lotus

Dear Guardian of Hostesses,
Please keep away frightening, obnoxious, or otherwise undesirable customers.
Please keep my customers healthy and happy.
Please take away the sadness that I see in their eyes sometimes.
Please keep all of us girls from losing our way in a cloud of hangovers and rejection.
How wonderful would it be if you could make all our dreams come true?
Could you make Mia a successful actress? She's already 37 and she hasn't given up yet. Don't you think she deserves a break?
Could you give Dancer Girl a career as a singer/dancer? She's not as focused as she could be, but she works really hard.
And how about giving Chiba Girl a nice man to love that would love her back so she can rest her tired 42 year old bones for once in her life.
I would ask you to please make my boss less lazy and cheap, but I know that I would be asking for too much.
I would also ask you to teach mama to speak politely, but that would really be asking for too much.
And for me, could you please give me some peace and calmness so that I can quit without running back, and so that I can pursue my dreams too?

While I was opening the club last night, I saw a huge, huge, HUGE cockroach. It was so thick and shiny and substantial, and it even had pincers on his butt, so I thought it was a beetle or something. But it was a big godfather cockroach alright.

I actually don't mind the small ones so much. But these big ones just freak me out. The last time I saw a cockroach this size was when my next door neighbor died and his body was left to decompose for almost a week in the middle of a humid August a few years ago.

Anyway, I tried to deal with this godfather cockroach by trapping it under one of those bucket things that hostess clubs use to keep ice in, but I wasn't really getting anywhere. Then all these salarymen come walking in like they owned the place. They were already drunk and kind of rowdy. We weren't opening for another hour, but we never turn away money, even when it's dirty smelly sweating rude and disgusting money. These guys weren't that bad really.

They saw the godfather cockroach. "Look at that!" they all shouted. I screamed and freaked out because the cockroach was going crazy and the customers were all being stupid and chasing it, then one of the guys grabbed it with a wet towel then threw it on the ground and started stomping on it, making a big stain on the new carpet and probably spreading its microscopic eggs all over the place.

Jesus. I don't think I've screamed more in my life.

I was all alone in the club. Nobody from any of the clubs or bars nearby came to help. They probably didn't hear me. I wasn't being attacked, but I was screaming like I was.

*****

You never hear about underwear thieves in America. But it's just a fact of life here. So I hang my undergarments up to dry in my room.

So I really don't appreciate the stupid annoying Japanese guy hanging up his underpants on the communal clothing line. I don't want to see that! He seems to think that I want to see his bare upper body and his brief-clad butt too. I think he has a problem with boundaries.

Stupid Neighbor's Underpants

*****

Since I'm posting cell phone pics, here are two more. I went to Kanda Shrine a few days ago after meeting Baldy on his lunch break. He's betrayed me by becoming a salaryman. I saw a cute little Yebisu statue (I think it was Yebisu) surfing in a wave. He looks like Princess Leia here. Then I saw a little kitty hanging out by the place where you wash your hands. She posed beautifully for me!

Leia

1 comment

Shrinekitty

I'm not proud of myself, but I did a little experiment tonight. I took a picture of myself before going to work, and just now after work.

Obviously I'm hardly able to keep my eyes open in the after picture. After a single drink my eyes just immediately go all droopy and I just look wasted. I can't help it.

Sitting on the train with Best Friend before work tonight, I saw an advertisement featuring a photograph of a very familiar looking girl. The chick on this ad looked so much like me, it was scary. She had my crooked teeth, she had my eyebrows, she had my round face, she had my nose, SHE LOOKED JUST LIKE ME! Best Friend joked and asked me if I was sure I hadn't just forgotten about doing this job. She said I probably did the job, got paid for it and immediately spent all my pay the next day.

My memory is pretty crapadoodle, but I'm 99% sure that I didn't do this job.

Here are my before and after pics for tonight. I'm not proud of it, but that's what happens on this job.

That awful flood in Myanmar, then that awful, awful earthquake in China. What is happening to the world?

Dancer Girl's soon-to-be ex-husband's a refugee from Myanmar. He hasn't been able to get in touch with his family since the flood. He doesn't know if they're alive or dead.

He came out here on his own, his parents are still back there. As a refugee, and then as an illegal alien, he couldn't even hop over to Korea, much less go back to visit his family. But I guess knowing that they're there and not seeing them is very different from knowing you'll never ever be able to see them again because they're gone. He's a really crappy husband, but he's not a bad human being. Poor guy.

Japan's a little crazy island. In recent years it's held up pretty well for constantly being under attack by Mother Nature. Which just means that we're over due for something. Way over due. I think a huge earthquake flattened Tokyo every 60 years for a long time. The last one was 80 years ago so everyone's wondering why this next one's so late to the party.

We finished early tonight, thank god. Mama was tired too. She's always tired. Oh my god, I'm turning into her...

Tomorrow Totoro's coming. Remember him? No? It doesn't matter, they're all the same. He's very short and shaped like a totoro, and he has an Elvis hairdo. He's bringing ten people with him. God help me.

She really has super powers. You'll do anything for her.

Some oyaji favorites. Teresa Teng singing in Japanese. This one's for you, LazyWong!

There's Tsugunai, Aijin (in a wedding dress, not quite Like a Virgin!), and Toki no Nagare ni Mi wo Makase (you were close, Lazy!). I do the tried and true hostess move with that song. The oyaji will be like "時の流れに身を任せ〜〜〜" and then I'll echo him, like "任せ〜〜〜〜！！！" and then fall over drunk or something.

I finished work at 4am last night, plus I hung out with a customer until almost 7am, yet I somehow felt completely fine the whole time. But for some reason I'm completely shattered right now, and it's only 2:45am.

Customers seriously blew tonight.

Well the ones earlier in the night were cool. But the last ones were just a LOT of work. For some reason it was three males and three females (!?). All co-workers. They were celebrating the oldest woman's 40th birthday. Don't ask me WHY they were doing this in a ghetto Roppongi hostess club. Another one of life's mysteries.

The girls asked me some weird questions. Like don't I feel uncomfortable with such a high slit in my dress and isn't it weird to have my boobs all out. I said no. Then one girl said "that's good, she's natural." Except I'm not, if they knew all the mechanics I had going on under the dress to keep my boobs up etc., natural is not a word I would choose. When one of the guys kept rubbing my upper arms (he's obviously one of these upper arm lovers) they asked me if that bothered me. To be honest, I hardly noticed it.

I was so stressed after work, I almost went out for a drink. But I'm actually so tired, I just had to come home.

I've been slacking on this, so I'm gonna do a Things on Tuesday right now (even though it's technically Wednesday here):

Loath:
- cheap red wine. it makes me sick to my stomach!
- getting my period. besides the fact that it makes me happy because it indicates a lack of a baby (ever since I got pregnant i'm constantly paranoid), I still hate dealing with it.
- realizing that i'm mentally preparing myself to bid farewell with Tokyo -- my home, my heaven, my hell, my purgatory, my release

Love:
- my bed
- the dance classes I now take every week, taught by Dancer Girl
- my friends that support me

Here's a picture of me being exhausted in front of my computer, smeared makeup intact.

Sleepy

Just when I feel like mama's not too bad, she goes and acts like a queen bitch again.

She's stopped drinking so hard, and that has really made her much more pleasant to be around. But she still drinks quite a bit, and sometimes I'm almost certain she's had a few before coming to work. Tonight started out alright, but it wasn't long before she was being exceptionally unpleasant. Almost back to the hard drinking days.

One of my most favorite customers of all time is undergoing tons of tests right now. His doctors think he has cancer of the throat or something. He's a hard drinking, hard partying salaryman. He works hard and definitely plays even harder. So on the one hand it's just time to pay the piper. You can't live a life so selfish and so reckless and expect not to have any consequences on your health. But I'm still worried about him. I can't write him a get-well-soon letter though, because that would get him in all kinds of trouble with his long-suffering wife. There's a famous song by the Taiwanese pop princess Teresa Teng called "Aijin" which means "mistress." Customers love this song, and the song talks about how she's not able to walk with her man in public but she still loves him. I always think "shut the f*** up!" when I hear that song, but I guess that's kind of what I feel like at the moment with this customer. I'm not his mistress or anything, but I do care about him, and I wish I could tell him I care and I'm praying for his health.

I feel kind of sick because a customer took me out after work and fed me tons of sea urchin. I LOVE sea urchin, it's just so delicious. It's like delicious butter. But you're not supposed to eat so much of it. I feel like puking.

Best Friend came to the club to pick up some stuff I had, and she met Dancer Girl. It was weird, because I feel like they know each other, but in fact they had never met before. They both said "oh, I've heard so much about you." Best Friend was acting kind of awkward. She used to thrive in hostess club environments, but I guess they trigger more than a few unpleasant memories now.

おやすみ

There are so many hostesses. So many girls in heels and makeup and fancy hair.

On my way to work I see them on their cell phones, on the arms of guys that pay for them, following the young slick men who manage them, or buying a snack at the convenience store before work. On my way home I see them staggering around, halfway dressed out of their work gear into casual clothes (stockings and funky shorts, or in my case tonight, a sweat suit and Patsy Stone hair and face), alcohol breath and perfume wafting out of them. One girl kept drunkenly dropping the rice ball she was trying to buy.

Two girls came into the club while I was opening it up. They wanted an interview. They'd never worked as hostesses before, but they wanted to give it a try.

Where do they keep coming from?

What am I doing with my life!?

I'm gonna flip out when I quit. But I just can't keep doing this.

I don't know how this happened, but me and Mama are suddenly kind of friends. I used to just hate her so much! Now I feel like my hatred for her was a bit unreasonable. But she just seemed like such a lazy rude bitch, and I think I had a lot of issues of my own.

There's a new Family Mart convenience store that happily opened right above our club. There's a convenience store across the busy intersection, around the corner, and also diagonally across from us. But I can't stress to you how excited a convenience store DIRECTLY ABOVE THE CLUB makes all of us girls.

Since the convenience store just opened, they're selling a whole bunch of stuff for cheap. So after closing the club, me and Mama went to look around and buy some stuff. I kept saying things like "Mama look over here, these are all 50yen off," and stuff like that. Then I realized that we might possibly look like an actual mother and daughter pair. Which slightly freaked me out.

I got an obnoxious email from a customer. After I sent him a slang-ridden email (it wasn't even that bad), he told me that he doesn't like that type of language. I immediately apologized. I know that I'm just like a flavor of ice cream or whatever, and he's telling me to not do something that irks him, the way you might ask for your banana split with no sprinkles. But it still kind of pissed me off. I'm not a banana split, I'm a human being! But not to him, I'm just a hostess.

So after work, I went on my own to Slugger's bar, and he made me feel better.

I can't wait to pass out in my messy bed right now.

おやすみ