Yokosuka Nursing the Blow

You could have more than drinks, merely by asking.

It was a souvenir shop on the Ginza Strip. I leaned over the display case.

I folded my arms to show her how disinterested I was.

According to Jackie’s letter

“I wish you could talk to me,” I say. She tilts her head and a sad, mechanical smile crosses her face, leading me to believe my tone of voice is something she hears often.


The letter I received from Jackie today said she was ending our relationship.

The souvenir shop sits to the right of the tea house. The keeper, a thin-haired man with large, mismatched ears, sits at the back of the store, watching his customers from behind a counter filled with gold, silver, and jade trinkets. The shelves on the left side of the shop are full of wood and fishbone carvings. Mostly of old Japanese people. On the opposite side of the store, miniature geisha dolls are posed on the shelves. Jackie loves these mysterious, five-inch dolls with their powder-caked faces and their colorful, finely detailed kimonos. I’ve sent her over a dozen.



Nursing the Blow:

She walked me through the bar, and led me through the beaded curtains of a door in the back.

All I wanted was to get out of there as quick as I could.

She stared a while at her hands in her lap, then raised her head and looked at me.

He felt her cold hand on him.

She took a plastic bottle of lotion and slicked her hand.

She didn’t offer again. Instead, she . . .

(Theme) He balanced himself on the wooden beam, his arms out at his sides, his steps slow, deliberate, careful. Once in a while he’d feel himself slipping to one side and he’d quickly shift his weight. He’d be steady again, afraid to move forward, impossible to move back.

She reached down and curled her right hand around it.

There was nothing intimate about it. That much was clear to him.

He nodded at the old man, and the old man nodded back.

I sat up straight, relaxed my shoulders and tried to think of Jessica back home.

Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this. Hogan leaned closer, forgetting the whine of sand hitting the windows. The case was full of fabulous junk, most of it undoubtedly made in Taiwan and Korea, but there was no doubt at all about the pick of the litter. They were the largest Chattery Teeth he’d ever seen. They were also the only ones he’d ever seen with feet -- big orange cartoon shoes with white spats. A real scream.

The old man sat bolt upright behind the counter, and stared over at me with a concentrated glare.

He would wander the streets of Yoksuka alone, telling himelf, yes, she still loved him.

He climbed the creaky, wooden steps.

“Like this, like this,” he said, holding her fingers lightly and guiding her hands.

“May I see, please?” I examined the geisha.

He thought about her even less as time passed.

The mama-san asked me to wait on the bench by the door. She disappeared up the steps. The place (Describe and Internalize here) A few minutes later she came back down and gave me a nod. I got up off the hard bench and started up the steps.

Finally, someone from upstairs, a woman, called down and said something in Japanese. The mama-san nodded at me and I got up off the hard bench and started up the steps.

She sat in a practiced position. To my left, and she held my penis in her left hand.

I returned two days later.

Maybe it hadn’t hit me when I was at the department store that in a couple of hours I’d be dead. Or maybe I was afraid that the cashier would guess that I was going to kill myself.

During the next twelve months, I bought another seventeen geisha dolls.

A maze of alleyways, pedistrianized, no cars or even scooters allowed.

There was a buzzing sound in the back of my head.

How many altogether?

Moonlight sloped gently into the room.

Have you ever done this before?

I wanted to tell her I wasn’t sure we should be doing it, but she already had her blouse off.

I made two complete rounds of the store before settling on a geisha doll.

Apparently, she had a bedroom at the top of the stairs.

There’s no sign hanging outside, no indication that it isn’t a private residence. Most people found the place by word of mouth.

Every surface, corner, cranny and crevice was filled with souvenirs. I took it all in. Silently.

She slowly unbuttoned her silk blouse. Under her shirt she wore a silver chain, nothing else.

She unfastened my belt, loosened my pants.

She smiled. You’re lonely, aren’t you?“
I didn’t answer.
Me, too, she said.
And I thought about which gesiha I’d select for Marisol. Perhaps it would be the one with the woman fanning herself.

“Let me show you something. Come upstairs.” She had photographs on the wall. A child, a young girl of about six.

Souvenirs lined the shelves, arranged in no sense of order.

Next to the . . . stood a very impressive.

This was his first experience with a woman of this sort. He had never been with a woman other than Jayne. And it surprised him the points of similarity the two women shared.

Again and again he would ask himself, “

He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with someone else during his absence. Maybe this would be a good thing, he thought.

He came out of these thoughts all at once, realizing

Carlyle listened, hardly able to believe his ears.

While he was sitting there with the glass in his hand, trying to remember what it had felt like to be married and intimate with someone, the phone rang.

“Okay?” she asked. She wiped her hands on a face towel she was holding. It was an old towel with faded flowers on it.

I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. The truth was finally sinking in.

Until then he’d always promised himself to be faithful to Elaine, but now that faithfulness was strangling him.

“My wife thinks I’ve got a woman in every port,” he said. “She thinks I’ve forgotten all about her.” He laughed. Some tears came to his eyes. He wiped them away with the heel of his hand.

He passed it to me across the counter.

Expressions of loneliness and resignation contorted the pale powdered faces of all the dolls lined up on the shelves.

As far apart from one another that we were, how was what I was doing hurting anyone.

She had this look about her. I knew that look. Lost.

Once she finished wiping me off with a rag, all that was left was an emptiness as massive as the sky itself.

She put the lotion down next to the rag.

The taste of her saliva.


“I wish you could talk to me,” I say. She smiles. It is a sad, mechanical smile that leads me to believe that my tone of voice is something she hears often. she hears

Sweat dripped off his forehead and ran down the side of his face.

The images coming and going, rapidly changing.

Feeling her cold hand on him down there, he drew a long, deep breath and closed his eyes.


I put a hand on her breast and left it there.

He wandered the streets of Yokosuka, taking in the city with his own eyes, by himself.

He listened to his own feet strike the damp pavement.

She unfurled her fingers delicately.

Next to the souvenir shop was a small eatery, never crowded.

Looking at the dolls made me realize just how far from home I really was. And just how alone.

Stupid me, I asked her if . . .

I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even recall the details of her face.

What I could remember was the sound of her crying in the middle of the night. In the darkness.

(Base this on the fiction piece 'Nursing the Blow')