The Rude Boys

I was thinking about an experience I had, once upon a time.

I was sitting in a bar in Osaka with a Norwegian sailor and a Japanese translator, and there was this gang of tough looking guys staring at us.

I tried not to provoke them. There were six of them to three of us, and they were all dressed in black leather and fifties style greased hair and were all doing their best to look tough and dangerous. I had no idea if they were posers or if they were genuinely tough guys or what; Japanese culture is very polite and civilized, but ANY society has its rough elements, right? And at the time, I spoke perhaps a dozen words of Japanese and dreaded getting separated from Shig the translator.

Meanwhile, Bjorn was drinking something clear and potent, and growing more disenchanted with our audience. He had begun to stare BACK at them with a disgruntled expression on his face. Did I mention he was six foot three, blonde, and built like a Maytag?

So Shig and I sat there and drank beer and avoided eye contact, and Bjorn and the Fonzie Gang sat and stared daggers at each other, and the tension mounted. Shig suggested it might be a good idea to pay the tab and leave.

And about then, one of the Fonzie Guys got up and strode to our table with purpose. He stood there and stared at me. ME. Oh, shit.

And then he glanced back over his shoulder at his mates, and I realized that he wasn't as confident as he was trying to seem.

And then he turned to me, BOWED slightly, and said, "Fuck you in the ass," in thickly accented English.

Well, I sat there, wondering what to say to that. Bjorn put his glass down, and Shig promptly began jabbering at him in mangled Scandinavian, trying to get him to calm down.

And my wheels spun. He'd BOWED, like a Japanese person does when introducing himself, but he'd also insulted me. What the hell? And did I mention I'd been drinking?

So I said, "Suck my dick until my head caves in."

Fonzie's eyes bugged. He looked at me critically. Bjorn burst out laughing. And Fonzie whipped out a little notebook and furiously began writing.

I realized that at the table behind him, his friends were all frantically writing in their own notebooks, or on cocktail napkins.

"Say that again?" said Fonzie, in English.

"Suuuuck... myyyy... diiiiick," I said, gesturing at my crotch, "until... my... heaaaaad," gesturing at my head, "caaaaves in," and I finished by making a collapsing motion with my hands.

Fonzie glanced back at his friends. They were all frantically taking notes, and seemed rather excited. He turned back to me, put the notebook away, bowed again, glanced at Bjorn, who was by now rather confused, and then he turned back to me.

"Suck my dick till my head caves in," he repeated with some satisfaction, and the hint of a smile. "Your mama suck donkey dicks!" And this time he stared at me, waiting for my reaction. Was he excited?

Everyone looked at me. I replied, "YOUR mama so fat, she ...has her own prefecture," because "has her own zip code" wouldn't work on a Japanese audience.

Fonzie burst out laughing, and his posse frantically began writing again.

And damned if it didn't wind up getting rather CONGENIAL after that.

We wound up pushing the tables together, and Fonzie explained himself.

Y'see, in America, when a fad sweeps the land, it just HAPPENS. One day, you hear that Hula Hoops or Air Jordans are the thing, and so you go out and buy the necessaries to be "with it." In Japan, in the early eighties, at least, they're WAY more organized about it, complete with dress codes and written protocols.

Our new friends were testing an offshoot of "greaser culture," and their name translated roughly as "rude boys." Thing is, they spoke decent English, more or less, but were painfully short on insults and profanities, as these are generally not included in the tapes and phrasebooks, and how did one assemble proper English insults without the tools?

And then they'd been in this bar, and had seen the big hairy faced Gaijin sitting over there with the giant yellow haired Gaijin sailor and their translator, and one of them had worked up his courage, and hoped he'd learn something before the fistfight started.

They were amazed and charmed at the idea of "insult duels," and upon realizing that we weren't going to start a fight in downtown Osaka, promptly began buying us drinks and pumping us for insults and profanities to pad their English lexicon... in a bizarrely cheerful and polite way, once the ice had been broken.

We sat there for what seemed like hours, drinking and laughing and ranking each other and our mothers to the dogs and back while they frantically took notes. We finally all went out for ramen noodles together, and finally made our goodbyes and weavingly waved down a taxi to get back to the hotel.

That was thirtysomeodd years back, but still counts as one of the weirder evenings I have spent. I do hope they heeded my advice, and didn't try their new phrases on American service personnel, who can be touchy. I'd hate to think I got any of them hurt; they were rather pleasant fellows, when one got to know them...

...and I am glad beyond glad that back then, no one had a phone in their pocket with video capability.