Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come For You? 4

The summer can be boring living off-base in Japan.  Deadly boring. Especially in the (then) tiny village of Chofu.  To a 15 year-old, ten miles to the nearest American movie might as well be a hundred.

For boys, there comes an age when certain things that were ultimate cool just a couple months ago .. are now the deadliest of sins.  One of those was riding a bike in public.
 
 

Another of those things were satin or silk jackets with “JAPAN” emblazoned on the back and a most colorful collection of embroidered dragons and devil’s heads on the arms and front.  The linings were always an outrageous red, with even more designs.  I saw several airmen wearing them at the BX the first week we arrived in Japan.  But, then again, I have never been accused of having great fashion sense.

For whatever reason, deeply imbedded in my genes was a love of color.  Not just color .. but COLOR!!  Bright, bold, garish, grab-your-attention, huge splashes of COLOR!!  Living in tedious, monotone, monochrome Fairborn, Ohio (by Wright-Pat AFB), I was in earth hue hell.  Everybody dressed alike, everybody thought alike, everybody WAS alike!
 

One day, in 8th grade, I wore red socks to school.  You would have thought the Commies had bombed downtown Dayton.  It was a stylistic faux pas of colossal proportions, according to those  8th grade taste leaders to whom such things were important.  I didn’t think, personally, it was any different from the Mickey Mouse socks I had worn in elementary school, but this was Junior High!  You had to FIT IN. And that meant no red socks.

Regardless, the red gene roiled incessantly in my subconscious.  (Years later, it was a plus, working in advance of  the circus, but that’s another story.)

So, the moment I was released from the shackles of Ohio-dom, I was on the prowl for color.  Living in Japan, color was everywhere.  Ladies in kimonos of many colors, men in multi-colored yukatas, workmen in colored headbands, Noh, Bunraku .. and the festivals! .. the festivals were a riot of color and music!  I felt as if I had been living in a drab, dull, Ohio, black and white, “Father Knows Best” TV world, and had suddenly been dropped into a full-color Busbee Berkely MGM musical.  The change was dramatic and immediate.  I had a need to immerse myself in color, and here it was, all around me.
 

On one of my first trips to the Fuchu BX, I spotted a black satin bomber jacket splashed with at least eight different colors.  The intricate embroidered dragon started on the back and furled its scaly yellow body across both sleeves.  The cavernous mouth breathed dense clouds of red fire across a map of Nippon.  The letters “JAPAN” were written in an ornate Oriental script below the map.  The Japanese merchant who had a small shop at the BX even embroidered my first name on the breast.  I thought it was too cool. Until I wore it for the first time.

There were a couple of nasty little 13 year-old eighth graders who lived near us in the rice paddies.  One of them (I think his name was Brad) started ragging on me unmercifully about the jacket.  “Hey, GI!” he’d say, “You got Wrigley's gum?”  That was what Occupation era kids in Europe and Asia would say to the conquering heroes, who always were good for a Hershey bar or gum to even former enemies' kids.  "You got Wrigley's gum? You got cigarette, GI?"  If you lived as a military brat in those years, that was an insult - to be called a GI.  (Later, of course, when we found out being mistaken for a GI would get us into bars .. well, then it was OK!)
 

	Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to me, elementary school kids and GIs were the only ones who ever wore those jackets, but especially the GIs.  Maybe back in the States, I would’ve popped the little cretin in the nose, but my dad had warned me about getting into trouble over here.  Hitting a younger kid would have immediately brought the APs into it.  I suffered in silence.  It was still chilly at night in summer, so I continued to wear the jacket in the evening.  This kid just would not let up.  “Hey, GI!  You sell MPC?”  One day, I wore my red socks with the jacket, and he fell off his bike laughing.  “Red socks??  Only GIs wear red socks!”  Thank goodness we weren’t on a school bus for everyone to hear this.
Elementary kids wait for the bus in Yokohama  and wear their Japan jackets to school.  The  one on the right would growup to be Marc Curtis,  the Webmeister ofMilitary-Brats Registry

I guess I wouldn’t be able to wear this jacket to school, after all.  Grudgingly, the jacket went into my closet, never again to see the light of day.  I never let on to Brad how much his kidding was getting to me.

I was furious .. and embarrassed .. so I began to plot revenge .. it just had to be non-violent.  The plot began to thicken when my 15 year-old Japanese friend, Hiroshi, came into the picture.  He spoke fluent English, but looked the Japanese schoolboy, with the black woolen (hot!) Nehru jacket and white shirt they were forced to wear all year.  He rode a bike everywhere.

I was just at the age that bikes were starting to feel uncool .. I don’t remember exactly when that happened, but do recall my parents suggesting I ride my bike to the store.  “I’ll walk,” I said in my best sullen 15 year-old sulk.  They, of course, wondered why I’d even packed the bike for the PCS to Japan if I wouldn’t ride it.  At 15, things change.  Bikes are for kids, or so I thought, and I was no longer a kid.
 

An odd thing about Japanese bikes then: their brakes sqeaked like crazy.  What were those brakes made of?  Old rusty door hinges?  You could hear them coming a block away.  You'd hear one behind you, and you'd jump a mile, certain that a crash was heading your way .. but it was only a guy coming to a slow stop. In Japan, everybody rode a bike.  Guys in suits rode bikes.  People hauling poultry rode bikes.  Old mama-sans rode bikes.  American GIs rode bikes.  Cars were too expensive to buy and operate then.  Everyone rode a bike .. except 15 year-old gaijins.

Hiroshi, if I remember right, suggested the bike race.  He knew the town, since he’d ridden every square inch of it.  He and I would challenge little brat Brad to a bike race.  But there had to be a prize that would tempt him.  Hiroshi had found a huge old used brass shell casing, probably a mortar, from some Japanese bunker near there.  He would offer it up as the prize for the race winner.  He was right.  Brad wanted it when he saw it.  Kids love old weapons or old shells.  If we lost, we had to give Hiroshi some American cigarettes, or some crap like that.  But it was all for revenge.
 

I pretended to be Brad’s friend for the purposes of this revenge.  He really didn’t know how pissed off I was.  I would confide in him that we could beat this guy, Hiroshi, since his bike was a crummy Japanese pile of garbage, and ours were American bikes.  It would be no contest.  Brad bought it.  The hard part was getting him not to tell his little friends.  I didn’t want any witnesses.  He bought a story about the fact that the shell casing was illegal to possess.  It may have been, for all I know.

The race was set for a weekday morning, when our dads were at work.  Hiroshi had marked off the two-mile course with little pieces of white cloth tied to wooden stakes in the ground or on telephone poles.  The course wound all through the tiny streets and back alleys and countryside surrounding our American compound.  I let Hiroshi talk both of us into a race course we’d never ridden ahead of time, as a kind of a “gimmee” for his inferior bike.

The three of us lined up on the street.  Ready – get set – GO!  I took off first, to put some pressure on the little rat fink, Brad.  He started pumping furiously.  He really wanted that shell!  Hiroshi .. deliberately .. came out 3rd , pretending his gears were slipping.
 

A couple hundred feet down the street, two white flags on the right side indicated a right turn.  I deliberately missed the turn, and said, “Oh, merde!” having lived in France to learn such colorful words.  Brad laughed and made the right run and sped on.  I came back around, as Hiroshi passed me into the turn.  Brad looked around, to see that he had jumped ahead by a good lead, so he laughed again.

There was then a left turn, then another right turn, and Brad still led.  I almost caught up to him once, but pretended to slip on some gravel.  He laughed back at me, and I’m barely a length ahead of Hiroshi as we speed through the outside of town onto rougher road.  We pump up one medium hill, and fly down the other side.
 

There wasn’t a car in sight, just some Japanese guys on their bikes hauling stuff to market, so we really started to push on Brad’s tail to put the pressure on.  He was standing up on his bike, really putting on the steam. We keep passing Japanese guys who took their time on their bikes, almost slow motion.  No need to hurry.  We must've seemed strange to them.

The white flags then turned off onto a hard scrabble field, with tiny pebbles here and there, and I pretended to take another slip.  Hiroshi sped ahead of me, but still behind Brad.  Hiroshi came very close to catching up with him, then pretended to have his chain slip again, and let out some profanities in Japanese.  Brad laughed again.  He was sure he would win.

We came off the field back onto the road, which started to rise steeply.  I could see Brad ahead, straining to make the grade without slowing down, but the hill was a struggle.  We were maybe fifty feet behind him.
 

Then he got to the top of the hill and started the downhill slope.  We got to the top of the rise to see him fly down the long, long hill that ended in a bend to the left.  He wasn’t coasting, either, but pumping hard to increase the lead.  By the time we started downhill, he was ahead over a hundred feet.

Brad took the turn with little decrease in speed.  There were another two white flags ahead, indicating a left turn off the road, over a dirt burm.  We raced to catch up with him now.  We were flying down that hill.  Brad caught air when he leaped the dirt burm, heading into a downhill track onto more dirt that went down another hundred feet, leading out onto another field.  We were right on his tail.

The white flags could be seen all the way across the dirt field, up another hill, and then turning back onto the road on the other side.  There was a dirt road to the left of the field, but the flags pointed across the unimproved, hard-packed field.  We all must have been going 30 miles per hour down that hill, but it felt like 60. Brad hit the bottom of that hill flying, with a brief look back, to see that we were closing in on him.

 He hit that field, pumping with all his might, but heard a “CRACK! CRACK!” as he rode.  He kept pedaling, but started to slow down a bit, inexplicably.  He kept pumping, and the “CRACK! CRACK!” kept following him.  Then, his front bike tire started to nose forward.
 

Brad looked quickly around at us, to see that we had veered off to the left, onto the dirt road, instead of the field he was on, and we had stopped to watch him.  He was fifty feet into the field.  I could see the panic in his face. His front bike tire sank further into the earth .. except it wasn’t earth.  It was the hardened, thin crust of a farmer’s field .. an acre of human excrement, and looking like an ordinary dirt field.  Thousands of gallons of poop, plucked from the benjo trenches alongside the roadways of Chofu by honeydippers, then spread over the field to prepare it for planting, and baked hard in the summer sun  .. but not hard enough.

Under the cracking crust, it was pure, unadulterated semi-liquid .. and very stinky!  Brad’s bike was sinking fast into the ever-deeper crap, and he made a fatal error – he tried to turn around fast.  The bike slipped sideways, and down he went into the putrid, primeval plop headfirst.  It was only about nine inches deep, but he seemed to be swallowed up by it.
 

He came up screaming the foulest of epithets at us!  I never knew that eighth graders knew that kind of language! It was in his ears, his eyes, his nose and covered his hair.  He shook his t-shirt, and chunks fell out.  He stood there screaming, and then he stomped. That was a mistake, since it caused more to fly up into his face.

We, of course, were falling down laughing on the ground.  It was the laugh of revenge gone perfectly right.  Payback, in spades!  To make sure he knew why this absolutely nasty trick had been played on him, I yelled, “Red socks, Brad, red socks!”  And he shot me a uni-digit salute.  My stomach was in pain from laughing.

Hiroshi and I hurried (lest Brad decide to throw some of that on us) to get back home.  We hid across from the compound where Brad lived to watch him come home.  Half an hour later, there he came down the street, still caked with much of the souvenirs of his adventure.  We watched as he snuck around to the back of his house and used the garden hose to wash himself .. and his bike .. off.  I guess his mom wasn’t home, because within seconds of entering the house, we could see his arm thrust outside the back door, throwing his clothes into the trash can.

Amazingly enough, he never told his parents .. or anyone else.  I think he was too embarrassed to mention it.  I never got in trouble over it, nor did he ever again give me any lip about my red socks or my souvenir Japanese bomber jacket.  I pretended like it never happened.  Soon, before school started, his family was transferred Stateside, and I never saw him again.  I continued to wear red socks thereafter .. but not the jacket.  It vanished.

And, one other thing .. it was the last time I ever rode a bike.
 

Brad,  if you read this,  and you’re now a  Hell’s Angel  in San Francisco or thereabouts ..  with a lot of outlaw biker buddies .. or you're an inmate in  Soledad, soon to be paroled ..  I live in Alaska.

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