tokyo tales: gino's blues

It was the bottom of the fifth inning, and the full moon was hanging over the scoreboard in left center like a fat omen of plenty. The crowd was vibrating, and Gino was riding on the edge, challenging the entire Tokyo police department to single out this one fanatic Yakult Swallows' fan who was blowing a mean saxophone, managing to hit all the high notes of one of the endless, repetitive cheers without knocking over the pint of Sapporo in the paper cup standing dangerously close to his swinging elbow.

Gino was on his second beer, and the score was in his favor, 5-3, Swallows over the Dragons. A mild breeze was blowing through the right field stands, cooling the late Tokyo summer night in 1978. The two trumpet players—who along with Gino and his sax made up the cheerleading brass section—were looking ragged. They’d been leading the cheers of the crowd with the same seven notes in varying degrees of tonal structure and accuracy for over an hour. But Gino was starting to get his second breath, and he was riding on a season-long . . . no, a life-long high that had peaked on this night. If the Swallows didn’t pull it off, he thought, his dreams of cheering on a championship team in person could end pretty much where they were now.

He’d popped a new reed into his mouthpiece just before leaving home for the stadium. The cops hadn’t let him take his reeds or mouthpiece, not to mention his sax, when they’d led him away two months ago. That was back when the idea of a pennant was just a wet dream for a junky high on the Swallows and the finest heroin in Tokyo. When he’d gotten home from the detention center yesterday, he was grateful to find that even though they’d tossed his apartment and found every hidden gram of H, they’d left his reeds where he’d always kept them.

* * *

It was the bottom of the seventh inning, and the head cheerleader, a carpenter named Okano who had been leading the Swallows' bleacher bums for as long as Gino was a fan, caught his eye and waved his folding fan in an elaborate twirl of greeting. Okano wore suteteko, the long summer underwear, and he kept the lists of cheers and the choreography of hand movements that accompanied each one under his wide harumaki bellyband. He was a renegade cheerleader with a contingent of fans that far outnumbered the conservatively dapper-dressed cheerleaders sponsored by the team’s corporate management. Most of the hardcore fans that followed Okano hated the Swallows' management, and many believed that from the top down they were in the bag for the hated Yomiuri Giants. Their beliefs were hardened when Okano had been ordered to stop leading them through several of his most original cheers.

So Kuttabare, kuttabare Jyaiantsu! —Go to hell Giants!— was gone from the list. Gino had pushed mightily for replacing it with another that he and Okano had come up with: “Kuso kurae, Jyaiantsu!”—Eat Shit Giants! for which Gino had written a riff in B flat that featured a wicked shit-eating crescendo. He thought he’d almost convinced Okano to offer management the same suggestion that they were giving the Giants. Until, of course, he’d been taken away. He hadn’t heard it tonight and supposed it had gone the way of the other “unacceptable” cheers.

Gino was readjusting his reed when Hilton drove a fastball into the right field corner. He jammed the mouthpiece between his lips as Wakamatsu scored and the entire right field stands unfolded their plastic umbrellas and burst into Tokyo Ondo, the exuberant festival dance song that had become the official fight song of the Swallows. He filled his lungs and let loose, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He wasn’t sure if his reed was off kilter or his ear drums blown. One of the trumpeters was banging his cheap instrument off of Gino’s right temple as he swung back and forth, but he was too absorbed in following Okano’s antics to care. The carpenter had climbed the fence separating the fans from the field and was hanging upside down: one tabi’d foot clenching the wire fence, the other pushing off one of the steel struts to hold his body horizontal. He had a fan in each hand, and was waving them in frenetic spiral patterns. Gino felt his fingers were holding Okano suspended in space; he did everything he could to hold him there.

* * *

It was the top of the eighth, and Gino, the whole stadium, and the Dragons knew they were whipped and obviously wanted to end it. They were swinging at anything that came close—including, it seemed, more than a few mosquitos that were attracted by their sweaty panic—if it would mean an end to their miserable season spent mostly at the bottom of the standings. Gino, convinced he’d done everything he could to guarantee a Swallow’s win, was starting to wonder if the common-sense thing to do was get out of here. He’d had five beers, as well as one chikuwa, two of the sad excuses for hot dogs that were served in Jingu Stadium, a hand-made onigiri rice ball with a salmon center from a very cute girl who’d shoved away the eager hand of her boyfriend in order to give it to him, and an unrecognizable clump of something sweet (he hoped it was candy) that had been pushed in his face by a two-year-old dressed in a miniature Swallows uniform.

But he was kidding himself. Leaving the stadium now would be like pulling out in the midst of the best, wildest, most anticipated sex of his life. Besides, none of the policemen that were starting to take their strategic security positions seemed to pay any attention to the bobbing and weaving brass ensemble, despite the way they were attracting the attention of swarms of reporters and photographers, press credentials swinging from their necks like cheap jewelry. So Gino stayed.

When it ended, the Dragons had been slain by the good guys. Gutted. Quartered. Left to rot as Gino blew his last blasts to the heavens, set aside his sax and raised his voice along with the 48,348 other hoarse voices as the Swallows made their heroic lap of the outfield. He’d been a fan for eight years, a pittance by the standards of some of his bleacher neighbors, and he respected the diaspora that some of his fellow fans had experienced. He knew that the huge majority of the people tonight were fair weather fans who’d started coming to games after it became obvious that they had a good chance at taking it all. But nothing mattered now. His Swallows were champions. His Swallows had kicked the Dragons, the Whales, the Tigers, the Carp, and yes, especially, the Giant’s ass. His Swallows, perennial underdogs, had taken their team and their seedy, once deserted grounds to the peak of the Central League. By the time Gino managed to reluctantly escape the stadium, it seemed like he’d shaken hands and pounded the backs of at least half of the entire crowd.

* * *

At ten o’clock on the morning after the nine innings of wonder, Gino was driven from his bed when his front door was forced open by Detective (first class) Watanabe and his assistant, Shimizu, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. They gave Gino some time to dress, less time to shave, shit and shower, and no time to gulp down an instant coffee so he drank as he walked. By 10:42, he was sitting across the table from public prosecutor Fujino, whose black demeanor was beginning to cloud the remnants of Gino’s high from the night before.

“Where were you last night?” growled Fujino.

“Home,” said Gino.

“Home?” said Fujino.

“I stayed home.”

“We can’t have convicted drug users who’ve been told to leave the country running around town, can we?” said Fujino.

“That’s why I stayed home,” said Gino, looking down at his shoes. “But unfortunately for me, there’s no way I can convince you, is there? Because you didn’t follow me. You told me you wouldn’t. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“No, we can’t afford that kind of manpower and never will. But we do get the papers,” said Fujino, slamming a newspaper on the table between them.

Gino tilted his head, trying to get a straight look at the paper. It looked like a copy of Sankei Sports. He couldn’t quite make out the characters in the headline, but even upside down he knew it was trouble. Even upside down, he could make out the shot of the red-faced, full-cheeked horn players blowing the blues out of a miserable history as the Yakult Swallows won their first pennant in the history of the ball club.

“That’s you on alto sax, isn’t it?” said Fujino.

“Yes,” said Gino. He wondered if deportation was now off the table. He’d first met Fujino soon after being corralled in a roundup when his dealer had dropped a syringe, along with a notebook detailing his customers and their buying patterns on a Meguro back street. Gino figured he’d come off pretty good—four years of a suspended sentence and deportation—considering that he had confessed but hadn’t given anybody up, but he really didn’t want to spend time in prison. “That’s me on alto.”

“Okay. You do remember our agreement, don’t you? Early release so that you could prepare for your departure. As long as—that is—you didn’t leave your house.”

Fujino was looking pissed and Gino decided to pull out all the stops. He shuffled his feet, bit his lip, bowed his head, and spoke in the most submissive tones he could render. “But it was the Swallows,” he said.

“I know about your Swallows,” said the prosecutor. “Who was it that helped get you copies of the sports papers when you were in detention? Who told you about Manuel’s home run leaving the entire stadium? And Matsuoka’s one-hitter?”

“It was my last chance to see them,” Gino mumbled. “Maybe ever. And it was a chance to wrap up their first pennant. Ever. Maybe their last, too, as far as I’m concerned.”

He was trying to keep from going teary. “I’ve been going to Swallows games ever since I got to Tokyo. I sat in the outfield when it must have been the only place in this city where you could feel alone, and it became like home to me. I was at every game this year until you picked me up, and it was the only thing that got me through going cold turkey in a jail cell and admitting all my screw ups to you guys. ‘The Swallows are winning,’ I kept telling myself. ‘The Swallows are winning.’”

Fujino picked up the newspaper, and walked around the desk to drop it in Gino’s lap. There was no doubt it was Gino on alto: it was an inspired photograph, filling the entire space above the fold and then some. It was shot from below, and the wide-angle lens looked up at three horn players, the middle one a foreigner blowing his heart higher than any drug could take him, leaning back at an extreme angle against a dark sky peppered with confetti and streamers like novas and comets. There was a backdrop of disjointed hands thrust skyward in celebration, and the musician next to Gino had lowered his instrument, his lips pressed to stifle sobs while tears ran down his face.

The emotional high from the night before returned, sweeping over Gino with such force that he was unable to stop his fists from clenching and a huge, idiotic grin from spreading across his face. He shrugged his shoulders and looked up in resignation. Fujino was grinning back at him, but he followed it with a slap to the back of Gino’s head.

“So what were you thinking? Did your thick skull have you believe that no one involved with this case—none of the cops, the prosecutors, the judges—was a baseball fan? That nobody would be watching the sports news? On the night the pennant gets taken for the first time ever by this underdog Tokyo team. . . . Damn it, Gino, I saw you three times on television last night, and I was in the middle of an argument with my wife. I’ve been answering phone calls from my bosses all morning. What the hell were you thinking?”

Gino knew now that he was in the clear; Fujino was breaking his balls but clearly enjoying it. About half of the people in the office had come over to rubberneck the interrogation, but most were also grinning and those who weren’t, he guessed, had to be Giants fans. Gino turned back to Fujino, lowered his head and made a series of small bows. Each was followed by a light slap on his head from Fujino.

Then Fujino seemed to notice the crowd growing around them. He reached down and grabbed a pressure point above Gino’s elbow between his thumb and forefinger, easily lifting him from his chair. “Come on,” he said. “I’m sending you home, and this time you’d better stay there. If I catch you off your own property until it’s time for the bus to the airport tomorrow, you won’t see a baseball game for a very long time.”

Fujino led him down the back stairs to the street. There was a taxi waiting, and Fujino grunted at the driver before shoving Gino roughly into the back seat. The prosecutor rested his hand for a moment on the door frame, then reached under his arm for the newspaper he’d tucked there as they left the room upstairs.

“Sign this,” he said and it wasn’t a request. Gino shrugged and showed empty palms; he had nothing but the clothes he wore as they dragged him out of the house. Fujino fumbled clumsily in his jacket pockets with no success until the cab driver finally reached back with a pen. Gino looked up at Fujino, who was watching Gino’s hands make a nervous scribble over the ecstatic face in the photo. He took the paper from Gino’s grasp, stuck it back under his arm and wagged his finger as he turned away.

The cab lurched forward. Gino leaned back, happier than he’d ever been in his life. The Swallows were champions of the Central League. And nothing would ever be the same.