Broke in the 1980s

Morning. Want some eggs?

Ted and I were sitting at Maru’s tiny folding table in his falling-down-with-junk kitchen. The only other space in his apartment was the six-tatami-mat “bedroom,” a step away. The floor there was still strewn with the three sets of futon and pillows we had just risen from.

Maru’s place looked like a child’s filthy clubhouse.

It was mid-summer and the three of us were having a hangover breakfast in nothing more than our trunks and t-shirts. Even at 9AM, Tokyo summer air is sticky hot and the cicadas are already well into their howling. It was the late 1980s when home air conditioning largely didn’t exist, so Maru made do with a single Toshiba fan that blew from the top of a nearby dish cabinet.

We were each smoking, sharing an overflowing aluminum Heineken ashtray set at the center of the table. I remember Maru talking idly about the beach or the guy at the bar the night before or about the awful neighbor lady. It didn’t matter—in those early years I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying in Japanese anyway.

As he spoke, the lit cigarette stuck into his mouth bounced up and down. He picked at some of his scrambled eggs, and then without pausing a word of his story, he put the fork down and reached for the cockroach spray standing next to his ketchup and soy sauce. Whoooooooooosh. Maru laid an enormous chem fog over the bug, which then scurried under piles of Asahi newspapers and old candy wrappers to die.

Maru put the aerosol down, returned to his eggs, and finished his thought. “And then Saito said we ought to be going to Zama Beach if it’s for a barbeque.” The cloud of roach spray hung in the air over the table. I pulled my plate back the few inches I could.

“More coffee?” Maru asked.

That’s my clearest memory of Maru. He was I’d guess about mid-thirties then, a good decade ahead of Ted and I. While all three of us were gay, none of us were in any way sexually interested in each other—I guess you could say Maru was big brother while Ted and I were the little foreigner bros he let hang around.

Yes, Maru was a slob. But he was more layered than that. Once he stepped outside past his rusted steel doorframe, he somehow presented very well—always combed, and dressed properly for occasions. He carried a name-brand leather clutch bag everywhere. (Of course, I quickly taught him the English word “fag bag.”)

He ran a gay bar in Shinjuku that was tidily kept and always clean. It was called I.O. Port. Maru was pudgy but I remember he had very nice eyes, rather wide and innocent looking. Like a good bar owner, he listened way more than he spoke.

I don’t actually know where he is today.

Maru once borrowed money from me, not a huge sum but considerable for me at the time. I never got it back, and within a few more years his bar was shut and he had disappeared from Tokyo. I think that, like for so many others of his generation, he had become caught up in the Bubble years and when that tide quickly ebbed found himself stranded with bills to pay. Hopefully not too big!

I sense that he simply skipped—I can see that. He’s likely doing fine today in his next adopted location. I imagine that he is fully grey, a bit wrinkled, but dressed carefully and nice-eyed as always. His apartment I’m positive is still an amazing mess.