Sometimes you just need the time to understand. Most times there will never be enough time.
Mighty and I hacked community gates in Irvine (key-key-12345-key) and finally walked into a living room that was an angular joke the Freemasons would have told. A woman sat on a beige couch against a beige wall and regarded the flat panel opposite her with heavy-lidded eyes. Her pills paused her against the present and the room was quiet with pharmaceutical waiting. But it was her son we came to see. It's funny how different generations slice the reality pie. Mom was a Pertofrane zombie and #1 Son sought independence with his own stoned wisdom. He spoke elliptically in an effort to mystify small moments happening in plain sight. A giant upended Shure VoiceMaster was his 'Beatles fuzzbox' and the rows of manga figurines populating shelves someone built for him (def. not mom) were 'pages one through ten of a very thick catalogue'.
But what #1 Son did have going for him was that he was in firm possession of One Cool Thing. He was once a sponsored skateboarder and he was taken to Shibuya on a press junket where he popped Anti-Caspers for highly impressionable consumers. While there, a Yazuka subset of Burakumin put him in a van, bagged his head, and...tattooed him. #1 Son thought for years that he was tapped by the underground, that he survived a war- but actually he was made an info mule. He was made a carrier of certain privileged information.
The Burakumin know that nothing ever really happens in these little right wing hamlets south of Los Angeles. People live, get medicated, and die. There is no real hunger or strife beyond dinner table battles stoked by beige couch media consumption. So they tattooed a number on him, in Katagana. It's genius, actually, and proof that nothing ever goes unnoticed, nothing is ever forgotten anymore. The same powers that flagged #1 Son's visit to Shibuya betrayed him after his return to Irvine: Facebook. He flaunted his trip and later paraded an account of his experience in that elliptical way, 'I had a naked lunch with some public enemies, got inked,' basically putting a target on his chest where the tattoo sat, waiting to be collected by the Burakamin. The reason for the tattoo was this: some Japanese gangsters had many bank accounts to keep track of, too many actually, and the practice of using human bookmarks came into vogue. The talented hands that inked some of the most nefarious butchers of men were now employed hiding locations and account numbers in plain sight on living breathing people who interpreted the violence done to them as a chapter in their Life of Righteous Adventures. Because of this, a police investigation into a Yakuza clubhouse revealed nothing beyond a rabid appetite for media and the pedestrian worship of D-level American stars on Thrasher tearouts. Every picture, however, hid a gateway. Every little star was a bookmark.
#1 Son was 98 pounds of gender bent bearded boy. He had his heavy lids, his skater moue and his generation's internet irresponsibility. All in a bone cage with a 24 inch waist. How boring is America when kids like this rate and merit praise? Mighty and I heard from friends in Japan that he represented a risk, that his postings were becoming coffin nails and that we had the choice of warning him or collecting the message ourselves. We chose the second option. Because wise men know they can never save another person, only themselves, from the fire.
The way we got the tattoo can't be told here. Insert the 5th. We are merely messengers on the high speed rail. #1 Son now sports a chestplate covered with skin made in a lab from spider web fibers. The ensign who sold it to us claimed it was bulletproof. We hope #1 Son never finds out that particular answer. Now he has Another Cool Thing to tell people he will never meet. Girls will swoon and he will have the hero glow for a month or two. Ah, America. Full of incomplete people celebrating fragments of experiences they are too wired to evince completely.
Cut to yours truly making a withdrawal and fading into the dark. Happy endings are the best kind.
