Lala Pipo by Hideo Okuda

Author:Hideo Okuda [Okuda, Hideo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vertical Inc.
Published: 2008-04-27T17:00:00+00:00

EPISODE FOUR

GIMME SHELTER

1

As he did every day, twenty-six-year-old Koichi Aoyanagi, karaoke box employee, was cleaning up the vomit someone had puked all over the carpet. Karaoke boxes are never the first stop on a night out. Generally, customers show up after having been at a few places before—say dinner, a bar, and then karaoke. In other words, they show up drunk. To top it off, Koichi worked at a place called Mirror Ball, which was in the Shibuya Center shopping district, which meant that young people, who had no idea how to handle their drink, would get hammered, show up, and then start ordering things like chuhai or whiskey with water. For them to puke was almost axiomatic. The carpet would get covered in vomit two, three, sometimes even five or six times a night. And not just the carpet, either—the sofas sometimes would fall victim, too. Or the walls, or the mics, or even the songbooks. Whenever Koichi entered a room that customers had just emptied and found they had puked on something, he felt an urge to run after them, grab them by the collar, and say, “I think you left something behind.”

One time a volatile employee made some customers clean up after themselves, and got fired on the spot. The proprietor, who owned a whole range of cabaret clubs and sex parlors, often said, “Only by coming into direct contact with customers’ bodily fluids and vomit can you expect to become a rightful member of this industry.” Not that Koichi wanted to become a rightful member of anything—he was one of a growing class of perpetual part-timers in Japanese society, and had only worked in the karaoke box for three months. For a while he’d had aspirations to be a screenwriter, but recently he’d even given up watching movies.

“Make sure there’s not a trace of it left,” Ota, the manager, said as he stuck his head in the room. “Last time someone complained that the sofa was damp.”

“Yes, sir,” Koichi muttered in reply.

Ota was two years younger than Koichi and, for some reason, whenever he found puke, he’d make Koichi clean it up. “If I made one of the girls do it, they’d quit the next day,” he would explain, but that hardly sufficed as an explanation.

Koichi put on rubber gloves and wiped up the vomit with a rag. Bits of dried squid, corn, and other undigested foodstuffs were visible in the vomit, and since it was all soaked with alcohol it was quite aromatic, to say the least. Koichi tried to breathe through his mouth.

After he had cleaned up the vomit, he sprayed the carpet with a foaming detergent and scrubbed it with a brush. He finished it off with a dryer. The whole process took about ten minutes.

A group of high school aged kids had used the room. They ran down the stairs as soon as they had paid. They probably didn’t feel bad in the least about what they had done. Right about now they were probably pissing themselves with laughter outside.

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