Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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Japan, day one

aka: Excuse me, but would you mind taking your face out of my lap?

My original intention was to write out some short little blips about our Japan vacation and combine them into into a few entries. That didn't quite work out. Foolish me didn't take into account that being on vacation meant that I was actually doing things. Things that may be worth writing about. OK, maybe not really worth writing about, but at least events that I wanted to include in an entry.

Which is just a long way of saying that the vacation entries are turning out to be longer than I thought and getting them up may take longer than I intended. So anyway, here's the first vacation entry:

Wednesday 06/27/01 through Thursday 06/28/01:

John arranged for Arturro to take us to the airport and being a bit of a worrywart when it comes to traveling, John wanted us to leave much earlier than we needed to. That was a good thing it turned out. All the extra time we had allowed ourselves was eaten up by the horrible traffic at the airport. Once we did arrive, things proceeded quickly.

A lie of course. I set off the metal detector, so John had to wait for me as a guard waved her little hand unit thingy around me. Once she determined that I wasn't carrying anything metallic, she let me through, where I was then "randomly" selected for a bomb/chemical test by another guard. So John had to wait for me even longer, as my luggage was swapped down for explosives and the like as the guard assured me that no, I did not look like a terrorist.

Eventually, they let me through and we settled in for a short wait to board the plane. The flight itself was both good and bad. Singapore Airlines was great. The flight folks were great and were constantly feeding us, giving us drinks and doing their best to make us comfortable.

I finally watched Pollock. It was a good film, although I think I need to see it again, this time without a flight attendant coming by every twenty minutes or so with offers of food and drink and blanket and extra pillows and more food. I think I missed some of the angry, tortured, artist angst ;-)

The food was generally really good. Salmon on a bed of risotto, curry shrimp, snacks, desserts. All good and John enjoyed the fact that the vegetarian meals were served first. He didn't have to wait for his meal until after everyone else had finished eating for a change.

John's only problem with the food was the snack boxes. They had an odd selection of chocolates, pretzels and a dinner roll. Except that that it wasn't quite a dinner roll. It was a Japanese style stuffed bread. Mine was stuffed with something vaguely sweet and John's was stuffed with meat. After a disgusted reaction from him, I had an extra dinner roll to eat and John got to spend some time being appalled vegetarian man. Not a big deal, only a minor problem.

A couple of hours into the flight, something went wrong with the entertainment system and for some reason, the only movie that was available to watch was Gladiator. They showed it over and over and over again. I had no interest in it, so I played video games and read instead. Not a big deal, only a minor problem.

I'm obviously setting up the one thing about the flight that was NOT a minor problem. In other words the man seated next to me. He started out ok. He wasn't that talkative and seemed more concerned with his walkman than anything else. The first time the stewardess came by offering drinks, he had some champagne. A steward came by later and he had a beer. Then a whisky. Then another whisky. Then yet another whisky. I lost track of how many drinks he had over the course of the ELEVEN AND A HALF HOUR long flight, but it was a lot of drinks. A FREAKING LOT.

He spent a lot of the trip asleep, but every time he woke up, he left his seat and went in search of a drink. Unfortunately he kept coming back to his seat.

He sat there listening to his walkman, volume turned up so loud that I could hear the music as well and he would wiggle around in his seat doing a sort of wiggle dance. He also waved his arms around a little and dropped the walkman. After dropping the thing a few times, he ended breaking it.

This bothered him. This bothered him a lot. He tried to fix the walkman by hitting it. When that didn't work, he started banging it on his tray. That didn't fix it either, so he took a nap.

A couple of hours later he was awake again and restless. Oddly, his answer to being restless was not to wander off in search of a drink again. No, this time he took off his sandals and tried to stick his his legs over the top of the seat in front of him. He didn't seem to care about the incredulous stares he was getting from John, myself and a couple of other passengers. He also didn't seem to care that had he succeeded, he would have ended up sticking his bare feat on somebody's head. After realizing that he wasn't limber enough to fold his body over like that, he got up and went for a drink. John and I just stared at each other with a "what in the hell is going on" expression on our faces.

We ended up doing that a lot.

During the "night," he managed to fall asleep (pass out?). He nearly fell out his seat and into the aisle twice. Both times a flight attendant came by, woke him up and got him back into his seat. In order not to fall over into the aisle a third time, he turned towards me. He reeked of alcohol. Dang was he stinky. Ugh. He started to lean into me. I nudged him, not entirely politely and he flopped over into my lap.

The reeking, drunk man had his reeking, drunk face in my lap. The reeking, drunk man who wasn't flexible enough to stick his reeking, drunk feet on top of the chair in front of him was of course, flexible enough to stick his reeking, drunk face IN MY LAP! I was not happy and I shoved him back into his seat. I barely kept myself from yelling at him and waking up half of the plane. He didn't apologize, heck, he didn't even wake up. He just sat there smelling up the place.

It may be shallow and petty of me, but it amused me to no end that the instant the plane stopped moving after landing at Narita airport, the guy shot out of his seat and raced to the toilet. Not as amusing, were the extremely loud noises he made while dealing with the after effects of drinking so much liquor.

Japan wasn't his destination, only a short layover. I hope that whoever he sat next to on the way to Singapore had a better time than I did.

It didn't take long to deal with customs and all that and it didn't take to long to get on the limousine bus (less limo, more bus) to Tokyo. We got off a the first stop and after waiting a bit, Carlos picked us up in his car.

Fourteen or so hours after we left Los Angeles and due to time zone/date line weirdness, more than a day later, John and I finally arrived at Carlos and Beth's apartment in Tokyo.

We had finally made it.

More later

nico

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