former person

Some people would say I drink too much. I drink alone, cheap fruit flavored liquor in big bottles like the 40s we used to drink by the river back home. I drink with people: vodka and lime, beer, whisky. I don’t really like it, but heroin has left a hole. I drink in and out of hangovers and blackouts, I wake up with women I don't know if I slept with and women who don't know if they slept with me. I drink in bars and in restaurants and in parks and at home. Tokyo is a great city for drunks because there are more bars than you could ever go to, so if you embarrass yourself in one you never have to go back.

Tokyo is beautiful, though not in the sense that Paris is beautiful, in Paris terms it is ugly, an unzoned tangle of concrete buildings cheaply tiled and wedged together with little spaces between them that only the stray cats can squeeze through, narrow streets, little strips of sky overhead crossed with electric wires, everything plastered with advertising, bright colors and neon signs blinking, music from every shop and touts shouting themselves hoarse.

There are always hundreds of people in sight, often thousands, and the scale sometimes disassociates you, and you feel yourself carried along in the murmurations of the crowd in the way tides used to tug at you when you were a small boy, swimming at the beach in Ireland with your mother looking on, and you let the current carry you, down escalators and through color coded subway lines and circling round stations like crowded tidal pools, sometimes for hours, and you are happy to be relieved for a time from the burden of will. 

You figure out how to order in restaurants and you eat until you no longer look like a skeleton or a vampire or a ghost though you still at times feel like one.

I met a disoriented Scot once, probably from the kind of empty place I used to live, lost and looking around with dismay, his face bathed in advertising light. 

He saw my white face and clawed at me with a sweaty hand, trying to find some place I'd never heard of. I told him I liked Tokyo, he shook his head and said in his ridiculous accent no no no, it's hell man, it's an urban hell man, it's just too fucking much. 

I suppose I can understand his perspective, but to me the city is calming in the manner of very loud music or very bright lights.

I lie. 

I make up things about myself, not really interesting things, just things that aren't true, the kind of things I dully imagine constitute a normal life. I tell people I played baseball in high school. I say I spent six months on a swordfish ship, that I drove a car for the post office, that I was a line chef for a summer at a sports bar. I don't mean to, really, I just can't imagine telling the truth about myself which I still understand mainly a series of conclusive proofs of my essential maladapted failure, so I lie instinctively and defensively, like a burned man averting his face.