Hokkaido Highway Blues by Ferguson Will

Author:Ferguson, Will [Ferguson, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

THEY DROVE BY twice to check me out. They were laughing each time, and I wasn’t in a good mood.

Like so many pairs of friends, one was short and talkative and the other was big and good-natured. Ren and Stimpy. Timon and Pumba. “Hey, you! Where you going?“ It was the little one. He was calling from the passenger window of a white rent-a-car. I was across a very busy intersection from them.

“North,” I said curtly. “I’m going north.”

“North! North? Where north?” they were laughing it up at my expense.

“Just north.”

They had a quick huddle. “Okay,” they said. “You can come with us, but you have to help us meet girls.”

Their names were Makoto (Mac) and Tomoyuki (Tom) and they were cruising the backroads of Japan. “We came all the way from Hokkaido,” said Mac, as I lifted my backpack into their trunk. “We’ve been driving the coast. We were going south, but we can take you north. We don’t care. We have no schedule. We’re free!”

“Free,” echoed Tom, the bigger, quieter one.

“Look at that!” said Mac, stepping back and pointing as though he had just now noticed it. “Hokkaido license plates! Take a picture. You can show it to your friends back in Kyushu. They’ll be amazed.”4

“Tunes,” said Li’l Mac as I climbed into the backseat. “What kind of tunes do you like?”

They scanned the radio until they found something loud and cacophonous and then plied me with drinks and snacks until they had thoroughly won me over. Tsugaru City dissolved into rice paddies, wet and newly planted, and the rice paddies dissolved into mountains. Somewhere along the way we passed the Statue of Liberty holding a banana.

Mac had been to America and his English was good, but idiosyncratic. “Florida was hot excellent. They had alligator crossing signs down on the highways. Crazy wild. And in Denver I show up and they have a stock car rally. It was just chance. Luck. I love cars. I drove in the States at one hundred kilometers an hour. Excellent.” He swept back his hair. It was parted down the middle and flipped up in pop idol waves that kept getting in the way whenever he turned his head.

The road banked from turn to turn and each vista became more dramatic. But Mac and Tom didn’t want to talk about scenery, or even cars. They wanted to talk about girls.

“What is your technique?” asked Mac. “How do you meet them?”

I don’t have a technique. So I lied. I told them what my college roommate used to do. He would go to a laundromat and—in plain sight of a lady he liked—he would prepare to pour Mr. Clean floor polish into the washer. The woman would rush over to stop him, and he would act dumb and helpless, saying “I thought cleaner was cleaner.” She would then scold him in a playful manner and, next thing you know, they’re in bed together.

“Japanese women love Americans,” said Mac. “They think you’re exotic. We’ll take you with us, as bait.

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