It’s My Party, and I Can Order Chicken If I Want To

Running a fashionable 20 minutes late to my own party only added to the confusion since some of the dozen people waiting under Shinjuku’s huge Studio Alta screen didn’t know one another.

I picked through the crowd of 100 others waiting in the same spot to round up the group, and led the charge to Kaikyo, a cheap izakaya (Japanese-style pub restaurant) I had scouted out. I saw the outing less as a birthday party and more of an excuse to jilt my usual Saturday night date with the washing machine.

I worried about the dinner reservation because we only had the table for two hours, and were now running half an hour late.

“We can’t go yet!” Lawrence called out. “Delphine’s not here.” Pretty name, but who’s Delphine? I wondered. The eclectic group included Lawrence of France, his Fumi, his friends Delphine and Koya, the Napoli girls (of Naples, Italy), a teacher who quit my company, his Japanese friend Ken, my friend Maki, and Takafin, the T.G.I. Friday’s waiter I befriended last month.

I chose Kaikyo because it was an alternative to traditional izakaya fare with Western influences that I craved. Like rock music, big portions and popcorn otoshi (obligatory table snacks, usually pickled things in neon colors). Oh, and fried chicken. Actually, the biggest portion of fried chicken this side of the Mississippi. The Colonel’s got nothing on Kaikyo. Maki’s eyes rolled out of her head and onto the floor. She got full just looking at the platter.

“We’ll need two more orders of this,” I asked Fumi to tell the waitress. “And a forklift.” The Napoli girls, forever lamenting the sorry state of pizza in Japan, exclaimed, “This place is just like America – fried chicken all over the place!”

I sided with Takafin’s take: “let’s fuckin’ eat!” Takafin enjoyed eating and drinking as much as he enjoyed lacing profanity into his English with grammatical predictability. His construction of choice was: let’s + fuckin’ + verb (limited to eat or drink).

And eat we did. Communal bowls of Kim chi tofu, spinach salad sprinkled with baby sardines, radish the consistency of steak (or, “radish steak”) and baked curry bread smothered with melted cheese — not for the calorie phobic. If this doesn’t sound like your ideal birthday menu, then you clearly haven’t spent enough time in Japan. The concoctions grow on you. Of course, my priority was the fried chicken, which, depending on the batch, could have used a dunk in soy sauce or spicy Japanese mustard.

A few pitchers of beer helped wash down the juicy pork and egg dish, but nobody got silly. We saved that for karaoke. But first, a few thoughtful gifts – a bouquet from Maki, potted plants in proportion to my apartment from Fumi, and a personalized
daruma signed by the group. I looked up to smile. It was a Fuji Film moment. But then I stopped.

Gregory? Was that really he, the freaky Greek? Who the hell invited him?

Two friends of friends of friends joined the karaoke train rolling out of the restaurant and through the alleys of Kabukicho, once the seat of traditional kabuki theater and now the underbelly of Tokyo’s red light district of sleaze and sex and the gangsters who profit from it. Sort of like Times Square in the 80s, but without the garbage, graffiti and drugs.

“I know just the place,” I assured the group. Of course, all karaoke parlors are the same, but I felt loyal to one after researching it for my 24-Hour Tokyo article.

Gregory the photographer asked me how I had been, and if I had gotten any jobs. I was surprised he remembered. “There’s this Greek guy who has the same clean cut look as you,” he said. “He’s doing really well. Gets lots of jobs for suit shootings.”

We had met when I was considering getting a book of portraits photographed to show off at auditions to launch my now fizzling modeling career (okay, flat-line). Gregory was known to have the best price in town. But $200 was still too much of an investment at the time.

He offered a discount when we met at his studio one hot July afternoon. I had nearly blocked the encounter out of my mind. When I got home, I banged on my keyboard for an hour, saved the document, and haven’t opened it since. That is, not until tomorrow….