MICHIKO WAS NOT ALWAYS A SUFFOCATINGLY PERFUMED bag of old painted bones. She had a certain enigmatic Eastern aura when she was younger and worked the snazzier joints. Before that, while she was still just a kid in schoolgirl clothes and white cotton panties (white panties used to be a big deal; you miss those times), she had been the moll of a notorious yakuza gangster who had his own portrait tattooed on the inside of her tender young thighs. Where he could keep an eye on things, he said. A rival gang leader kidnapped her and “blinded” the portrait with red splotches, and just for good measure added a mustache and blacked out two of the teeth before returning her to her lover. He also had his own hand, recognizable by its don’t-fuck-with-me dragon tattoo on the back and the superhero code ring on his pinkie, tattooed over her plucked pubes, the middle finger disappearing between her lips. Her lover responded by sending her back to the rival with the dragon tattoo reduced to a simpering please-fuck-me position, the ring finger chopped to a bloody stub, signifying a humiliating three-knuckled yubizume, and the middle finger blackened as though torched by its impertinence. The lover also tattooed Michiko’s ears with haikus celebrating the “black mist” of summer and winter’s “ice-heart,” which was a play on his own name, and inked the circles of a target on her buttocks around the bull’s-eye anus with the phrase “You’re next, asshole!” on the right cheek. The rival was not dismayed. With a simple stroke he changed winter’s “ice-heart” to winter’s “withered-dick,” which also turned out to be a play on the lover’s name, assumed the “asshole” could be either of them and so merely added a semiautomatic weapon on her left cheek with his gang’s insignia on the handle. On her face, he tattooed a snake, the head coiling out of one ear onto Michiko’s upper lip, its mouth biting its own tail, which was coiling out of the other ear, the face of the snake a portrait of the lover, the tail the lover’s own cock, which was famously (a favorite subject of the tabloids) tattooed with the Kanji symbols for “King of Water Business.” This the rival subtly altered to “King of Urine Business” and sent her back again. The lover accepted the biting snake, but put a face on the bitten tail with very big ears, mocking the rival’s donkey ears which he always tried to keep pinned under his black fedora (“Mister Hee Haw” is what the cops called him, and they loved to humiliate him by knocking his hat off), and applying the Kanji symbols for “Number One Hot-Ass Warrior” to the head. Then, just for fun (he loved her after all and wished her to be beautiful) he turned her breasts into magnificent mountainous landscapes with little bridges over streams that his own gang members posed on in their pinstriped suits, holding up placards that read: Do not dream mountains from anthills, pisant. The scene invited interpolations and the rival obliged by turning it into a classic yakuza bloodbath with his own gang, disguised as giant ants in black fedoras and suits, wiping out the lover’s gang. He decorated her belly with a bulbous raccoon-dog with testicles like beach balls, etched a crimson “4” on her forehead, the sign of death, inscribed a stormy seascape on her backside with giant waves crashing over the small of her back, and converted the target into a whirlpool with a fishing boat being dragged down into its dark center, giving one the sense, if one approached her from that direction, of entering the eye of the storm. Thus, she continued to get passed back and forth between the two yakuza bosses as a kind of message board, the gangsters coming to so admire each other’s art in the end that their rivalry, to the disgust of all their gang members, became purely an artistic epistolary one. They covered her with fragments of famous scenic and erotic masterpieces, always with implicit or explicit threats and insults, burned the signs of the zodiac in the appropriate places on her body, inscribed four centuries of yakuza history in all the blank spaces, covering even the soles of her feet, her lips and scalp, her eyelids and armpits. So obsessed were they, they might have started working on her insides had not their own lieutenants organized a public exhibit of Michiko in the city’s modern art museum and, at the moment that they bowed to one another, executed both of them with tattoo needles fired into their ears. Michiko meanwhile ended up tattooed from crown to toes with layers of exotic overwritten graffiti, a veritable yakuza textbook, slang dictionary, and art gallery, a condition that served her well in her subsequent career, once the museum, which claimed ownership of her, was paid off: she was worth a C-note just for an hour of library time. All of it fading now. Losing its contours, its clarity, the colors muddying, wrinkles disturbing the continuities, obscuring the detail. Suffering the fate of all history, which is only corruptible memory. Time passes, nothing stays the same; a sad thing. A haiku somewhere on her body says as much.
AT THE BACK DOOR, MICHIKO PLEADS SOFTLY: COME see me, baby, Michiko fuck your ears off! and hands you a folded piece of paper. You kiss the yellowing “4” on her forehead (up yours, death), pat her picturesque patoot and slip away into the dark hollow night. Foghorn somewhere. A cat’s anguished howl. As if expressing your grief for you. You find a lone streetlamp by which to read the note, but you hear Michiko scream and then running footsteps. Coming your way. You duck down an alleyway, scale the brick wall at the end, jump down into somebody’s back garden on the other side. There’s a lonely woman undressing in a window, silhouetted against a drawn blind. On the other side of that blind lies another story, better maybe than the one you’re in and one you might reasonably pause to explore as a kind of intriguing sidebar, but first, by the light of the window, you read the note Michiko passed you. It says: Urgent. See me at Loui’s. No signature. The handwriting could be Flame’s. On the other hand, you’ve never seen Flame’s handwriting. You play out the story behind the blind in your mind and, as the silhouetted woman lifts her slip over her head, hurry on down the glittering night street toward Loui’s Lounge.
Loui, or Louis (you’ve never known for sure if Loui was his name or if that was a neon typo, but everyone calls him Loui) is a pal of yours. You helped him duck an assault and battery rap brought against him by his latest ex by uncovering some dirt about her she didn’t want brought out in court. To wit, that she was a klepto and aggressively into shoplifting, if the bigtime moves she made (she could strip out whole stores right under the owners’ noses) could still be called that. You didn’t tell him how you found out, he wouldn’t have liked that part. The mob likes to eat here and for some obscure reason, maybe just happy bellies, they have taken Loui into their confidence, with the consequence that he is, indirectly, a source of useful dope about them. He knows if he gives anything away he will be executed in a cruel manner and buried in concrete at the bottom of the sea, and in his anxiety not to reveal what he knows he invents elaborate disinformation of his own, which with patience can usually be decoded. His lounge is an upscale joint with underdressed hatcheck girls, aged whiskeys, live torchers who mix with the clientele, slots in the back room, and prime rib on the menu. The cocktail napkins use the motif of a drunk in a tux, leaning against a lamp post, and the clock over the bar repeats it, the drunk’s arms as the clock’s hands. Happy hour starts at 5:45 when the minute hand rises to a full erection.
You chase off the wimp who’s sitting on your customary stool at the bar and order up a double on the rocks, ice being potable in this hole. Joe the bartender, wearing a poker face, greets you as he would a stranger, which probably means that something’s up. Flame is in the middle of a song about a brutal lover called the Hammer (there are rhymes like wham her, jam her, slam her, and goddamn her), who can be lethal (. . I know you think you’re the big cheese, but, baby, don’t kill me, please, she sings), and you expect her to drop over after her number, but before that a big-fisted suit sits down on the stool beside you and offers to buy you a drink and you realize things are not as you thought. I’ve got one, you say. Have another, he says and signals the bartender. Beware of geeks bearing gifts, you say, and pull your glass back. Suit yourself, he says with a shrug and taps his own glass for a refill. Just trying to have a friendly conversation, mac. What about? You’re looking for a body, he says. Yeah? Stop looking. The Hammer is ramming: It’s just a little trick, Flame sings, but it’s got a mean kick. . You can see that the suit has a gat pointed at you from his jacket pocket. You’d be dead before you reached your own. You set your glass back on the bar and shrug at Joe. If you insist, you say dryly.