Say Goodnight, Gracie

New Guy, Maybe

New Guy is not so new anymore and we talk about whether or not he’s going to renew when they offer him the standard six-month contract extension.

On paper the job is 29.5 hours per week. The reality is that it’s a 45 hour per week job. That doesn’t, of course, include the commuting time, which adds another seven or so hours to what The Brain considers to be the workweek.

On paper it’s a teaching job. In reality, this is not a school but a business and often we’re not so much teaching English as we are being encouraged to sell English.

New Guy and I aren’t kids, but we work for a couple of kids. We work for The Five Year Old (who has apologized to each of us several times in the last week because she keeps bursting into tears over the unhappy love affair she’s having with another teacher--and this is between bouts of bingeing and purging in the bathroom we all share). We work for Boy Wonder who has learned his English the old fashioned way: from modern American gangster movies and rock and roll song lyrics, so that the other day his post-meeting words of encouragement to us were from a T.Rex song. “Get it on,” he said, enthusiastically. “Bang a gong?” I suggested helpfully.

And it’s funny, right?

Well, it would be funnier if it weren’t for the fact that we, New Guy and I, actually have to rely on The Five Year Old and Boy Wonder for more than just the standard work-issue incompetence. Right? New Guy and I work in a foreign country and we don’t speak the language, so these crazy kids are really our basic connection for all things outside the company as well. For example, when I wanted a phone and a bank account, I have to ask a five year old for help. And if you think she’s incompetent at her job, you should see how she handles the real world. In another job, in a country where I spoke the language, I could walk away and deal with all these things on my own. But I don’t speak the language, so I can’t.

The reality is that I haven’t learned much Japanese since I’ve been here. Why?

One reason is that I speak English for a living and I can’t speak anything but English at work. For ten hours a day, I speak English. There might be time for Japanese lessons if the job were 29.5 hours, but it’s not.

Oh, honestly, if I wanted to, really wanted to, I could take Japanese lessons, but I don’t really want to.

My life has settled into work/commute, getting ready for work (including all the mundane things that one does in the course of a life: which boil down to shopping for food and doing laundry), the gym, and drinking. (And don’t worry. When I say “drinking” I mean it in the Japanese-English sense: I go out for three hours after work to maintain the group dynamic, have two drinks and dinner, and come home. I’m not getting smashed every night, and I don’t consider it to be any more dramatic than someone who comes home and has a beer and a glass of wine with dinner.)

Anyway, no, I haven’t taken those Japanese lessons. I haven’t had the time or the motivation.

At training, one of the trainers suggested that we make up a list of things that we wanted to do--and that’s a great idea--and that we get up early and do those things. Great idea, right? Right. Some teachers have managed this. Mostly they tend to be the teachers who live in smaller towns and who can walk to work in a few minutes. Those teachers can get up early, take advantage of their small town existence, and make it to work at noon. Great. The trainer who said this has the requisite Japanese wife and I’m guessing while he’s out taking advantage of all that Japan has to offer, she’s home taking care of the cooking and cleaning and shopping. She’s ironing his shirts and taking his suits to the cleaners.

Me? I get up early so that I can do all this on my own.


Kyuchi-san

I see from my Monday attendance list that Kyuchi-san has signed up for my lesson. Do you remember Kyuchi-san? He’s the thirty year old computer programmer who loves sports, heavy metal music, and David Lynch movies. (His favorite Lynch film is Mulholland Drive, which is also one of my favorite Lynch movies, so we’ve talked about it a couple of times.) Normally Kyuchi takes the same class from another teacher on Friday evening.

I walk into the class and say jokingly, “You do know it’s Monday, right?” He looks at me quizzically and I continue the joke, “Kyuchi, it’s not Friday. You’re here on the wrong night!”

He says, “I wanted to see you.”

Huh? He’s at a high enough level of English that I know that he knows what this means. And this is Japan, where such a statement has all kinds of implications that I could never feel comfortable teasing out.

“Well, it’s nice to see you,” I say, lamely.

We go through the lesson, and at the end, another student asks a question. When I finally get out of class, ten minutes after the end of class, he is waiting in the lobby. He isn’t waiting for me--maybe--or at least I don’t think he is because he’s standing near the elevators. I go over and thank him for coming to class. I tease that he should always come to my class, and he says he wants to, but it’s too early for him to make it easily. I nod, understandingly. The elevator doors behind him open and he doesn’t see them, so I gesture at the elevator and he waves it away.

The elevator doors close.

I smile at him and wait...and there is nothing forthcoming, no small talk, no anything. I start and keep up the usual patter (we call it “Lobby Talk” around here and it consists of simple questions that even the lowest level students can answer, “How was your day?” “Did you work today?” “How was your weekend?” “Any plans for after your lesson?” and so on, ad nauseum.)

He takes the next elevator down.

It’s Monday night, not one of my drinking nights, so I go home and surf the ‘net for a while and eat something and--yawn--go to bed. A couple of hours later, I wake up. I haven’t been dreaming. I listen. The next door neighbors commonly fight at this hour but I hear nothing but quiet. I reach for my phone. It’s 3:27 a.m.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I lay in the dark and fiddle with my phone. I look at all the features I will never use. I check my email. I flip through the phone book and look at the old entries for Ben, Ellaine, Seth, the Ex-Student. Tonight, something makes me hit the button that activates the television set.

The tiny screen flickers on in the darkness but there is no sound. I’ve left the phone on “manner mode,” the silent mode that inactivates the ringer. I deactivate the manner mode and adjust the antenna and the screen flickers to life. I hear English. It only takes a couple of minutes to I figure out what I am watching.

The movie is Mulholland Drive, Kyuchi-san’s favorite.

If I could see into the dream, the dream that is my waking life, I might be able to interpret this seeming coincidence. But I am blind at the moment, so I sit and watch the movie instead.

Ato De

On Wednesday, I go up to Kachi-Kachi with the usual group: The Bimbo and her friend, Chujitsu and his wife, Kyuchi-san, Sho-chan. Kyuchi comes up late and sits across from me. I tell him about the coincidence, but I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to say makes it across the language barrier in the loud bar. He nods.

We drink for awhile, then he has to leave to catch his last train. He lives in Chiba, so his commute home is closer to ninety minutes.

We say goodnight.

I leave in three weeks. There’s not even enough time or energy to be miserable about anything having to do with Kyuchi-san.