But I think I’ve come up with a satisfactory answer to this white-dork-with-Japanese-hottie conundrum which will allow me to at least get beyond the sheer bizarreness of it all: the girls want free English lessons and they probably figure that the dorky ones make better teachers. And GaijinMan is more than willing to oblige, for why not? He has the best of both worlds. First, he gets to parade around town with a stunning woman, no doubt sending digital pictures of them together back home to his old chess club buddies. Plus, due to the language barrier, he can rest assured that if his girl’s going to nag, at least he won’t be able to understand it.
But it wasn’t until I found myself the
Now God knows I’m not a full-time stud. Sure, there were a handful of broken hearts when I gave up the game, raised the rainbow flag, rented the billboard, and announced my homosexuality to the world. But I have never been a great charmer of the ladies (or the men, for that matter). So it took coming to Japan to teach English for me to realize my potential as a potent and desirable beast. A lady-killer.
I have a fan. Her name is Yasuko, and she’s a young architecture student learning English so she can study in the States. She’s also a little emotionally vulnerable and needy. And has no gaydar.
I first met Yasuko when I was assigned to administer her level check, a procedure that every new student must go through so we can place them in the right class. She was a returning student, so it was my job to make sure she would be able to manage in the level she was in before.
I sit down, introduce myself with a smile, and ask her how she is. She looks at me wide-eyed, like an animal caught in the headlights of an approaching car. And what kind of car is it? Well, since you ask, it’s a gleaming, sexy, cobalt-blue man machine called Tim.
She trembles a little as she replies, “Fine, thank you,” and attempts a smile.
“Don’t be scared,” I say by way of encouragement. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions, and you answer them the best way you can. It’s just like chatting.”
She smiles and seems to relax a little. “Chattingu, hai,” she says.
“So, why did you decide to take English lessons again?”
She launches into the story of how her longtime Australian boyfriend just broke up with her and now she has no friends because all her friends were his friends and now they won’t speak to her and he keeps saying bad things about her, and she’s so lonely, and now she has no one to speak English with and she thought she was going to get married and so on and so forth. So she decided to come back to English class, presumably to get another boyfriend and meet some new people to hang out with.
I feel bad for her because she seems really desperate and lonely-two emotions I have a long history with. I do my best to put forth an image of brotherly concern and sympathy, reacting to her narrative with lots of concerned furrowing of the brow and “gee, gosh, I’m so sorry.”
In an attempt to steer the conversation away from her personal troubles and towards something more neutral, like what she does for a living, I ask, “What do you do?”
She sighs, and her bottom lip starts wobbling.
“Shit,” I think, wondering if maybe she worked as her ex-boyfriend’s personal assistant and now was out of a job, too.
Then comes a torrent of big, fat, bell-bottomed tears bursting forth from her increasingly blood-red and puffy eyes.
“God, are you OK?” I ask, offering her a tissue from the pack in my pocket lest her nose decide to spring into action.
Through a barrage of mucus and hiccups, I learn that she was just laid off from her job as an office lady at a company that publishes elementary school textbooks. Basically, nothing is going right in this girl’s life, nothing at all. And then she met me. And nothing is continuing to go right.
We finish the level check, and even though her English is a little erratic and unpredictable and she said things like “I am such loneliness,” and “friends don’t happy for me,” I place her in the same intermediate level she was in before since I can’t bring myself to saddle her with any more bad news.
I wave at her as she walks away and wonder if perhaps I’ve found someone-a poor, friendless, frantic female- who is in desperate need of a gay man in her life. Though I’m far from a thoroughbred homo-I don’t have nice clothes, I cut my own hair, I would rather go to the record store than the gay bar, and often I don’t even wear cologne-she could certainly do much worse, and I have lots of pictures of my cat, which Japanese girls just love. Plus, I’m smooth and hairless like a porn star.
I could be the Will to her Grace, the flame to her unlit cigarette, the, um, Bette to her Midler. We could traipse about the city, doing all the things that Japanese girls and their sexy, gay best friends always do: chat about boys over green tea lattes, talk trash about Harajuku girls over pachinko and pizza, and crash one of the many arcades in Shibuya, where we’d saunter up to the Dance Dance Revolution game, I’d slam the machine with my strong gay hip, and she’d follow the lights on the floor, which beckon her to just say “fuck it” and dance the Charleston. As she launched into the cancan as an encore to the oohs and ahhs of onlookers, I’d fold my arms, lean against the change machine, and say to myself, “My work here is done.”
Sadly, Yasuko has very different plans for us, and they don’t involve pachinko, the Charleston, or even Harajuku girls. A few days later, she starts showing up to all of my classes. In very suggestive clothing. At the first class she attends, she wears a tight, navel-baring pink sweater and an ass-grabbing skirt. Trying to avoid looking at her small but admittedly perky and friendly-looking breasts, I say hello and ask her how she’s doing.
“Much better,” she beams.
The next time I see her in class I start to get a little worried. Not just because it was only a few hours later in my afternoon class, but also because she’s changed into an outfit that shows more skin than I am prepared to handle in my capacity as her gay English teacher. I struggle to avoid her amorous gaze, feeling like I’m lost in the wrong fantasy. Is one of the straight male teachers down the hall fending off the advances of a wayward and totally fit male college student and amateur aikido competitor named Takeshi who loves coming to class with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and staying for extra help after class? In his boxers?
I start trying to behave in a demonstrably gay manner in class so as to fend off her intensifying affections. Lots of limp-wristed gesticulations and discussions of musicals. I also sink so low as to say that my favorite movie ever is
She is crazy for me. I am a manimal. A manimal.
Yasuko even goes so far as to talk to Rachel about me, I’m surprised to find out. Rachel assures me that she told her in no uncertain terms that I am as gay as the day is long and that there is nothing short of permanent hypnotism that will make me venture into a relationship with a woman. But there is one key thing that has kept Yasuko from accepting Rachel’s explanation, one thing that allows her to cling to the dream that I am her knight in shining hair gel.
“She said you look at her tits,” Rachel tells me, looking at me like a mother would her teenage son. “A
I do love tits. It’s a peculiar strain of gay that I have: I’m a queer who would like nothing more than to have the opportunity to squeeze a pair of pert breasts every now and again. Have I been that obvious? I guess so. But the girl wears a Wonderbra, for God’s sake. And even though I’ve never had the desire to rip her shirt off and place my face betwixt her supple mancushions, even though I would rather she just come to class wearing a scuba diving suit, even though I have been having a recurring nightmare where I’m being chased down a dimly lit hallway by one of her nipples, I can’t help but look at them when they are displayed so wondrously. It would be like trying not to notice the lightning during an electrical storm. Impossible, unless you’d had your eyes sewn shut.
I ask Rachel to please come up with a nice way to tell Yasuko that, OK, yes, I did look at her tits a few times, but I also often look at lit candles and sparkling electrical sockets-that doesn’t mean I want to touch them with my tongue. Also that I can’t give her what she requires. And that she really needs to quit showing up at every single one of my classes.
Rachel promises to come up with something, and I’m able to relax and get back to my daydreams about Takeshi.
A few days later, I am walking to my class and I see Yasuko standing outside my classroom, wearing that familiar tight pink sweater. I shudder, fearing the worst: that Rachel was unable to convince her of my disinterest
