My public ministry among the heathen
by Tom Bradley
[ places - april 02 ]
"...in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. It shall be a jubilee unto you, and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." Leviticus 25:9-10
I was privileged to be in 'Boom Town' (as it is affectionately known among certain cloddish members of the foreign community) on the Feast of the Transfiguration, 1995. I wore raiment of dazzling white, white as snow, whiter than any fuller's bleach could make it, in commemoration of this day on the church calendar, when Christ's three best friends watched him chat with Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop. I can't recall what trio of transcendent beings I expected to see through the brownish sulphur and hydrocarbon solids of downtown Hiroshima.
That day also coincidentally happened to be the 50-year anniversary of the event that put this town on the map while nearly wiping it off. So I took it into my head to sit in sombre reverie on one of the mass graves at the epicenter, at the very minute the bomb went off half a century before. I suppose it was a means of releasing tensions built up during the Cold War or something. And I really should not have been so surprised when it turned out that a number of other people were seeking similar relief.
Not only bicycles, cars, taxis and buses clogged the entrance to world-famous Peace Park, but tens of thousands of multi-colored pedestrians, almost all of them gaijin (aka 'foreign devils'). Compounding the problem were several dozen international media trucks, downright 18-wheelers, which bristled like giant sea urchins with cumbersome satellite relay gear.
To skirt this route, I decided to duck in by way of the Monument to the Korean Bomb Victims, which is segregated in an obscure vacant lot across a back alley. It was the only place within blocks that seemed to have contemplative activity going on, in spite of the well-hyped orgy next door.
Neither the tourists nor the media people were coming anywhere near this monument. Except for a few praying and singing Korean nationals, and me, their fellow unsung nukee, it was deserted. These people were pulverized by the same blast that killed all the thoroughbreds memorialized across the alley, but, having been mere prisoners of war, mere slave laborers with lower-quality fluid in their veins, they didn't deserve admission to the sanctum sanctorum.
Dan Rather was not waiting at the Korean monument to interview me. And why should he care about this particular shrine? It's only the final resting place for a few thousand insignificant lumps of sub-humanity. An unacknowledged target of nuclear weaponry myself (and the "device" that flattened this town was an ant to the elephants that shat in my pre-teen face; I was born downwind in Utah, in the heat of the above-ground hydrogen bomb test era), I felt solidly in place at this obscure cubbyhole. I hesitated to enter Peace Park proper. Fearing that I lacked the genetic credentials, or wasn't dressed for it or something, I stood on tiptoe on the curbstone and surveyed the chaos before my eyes.
And, as usual in East Asia, I was being surveyed myself. Someone so vastly foreign is forever going to be the cynosure of every eye in this country, even loitering on the sidewalk outside a raging "love hotel" fire, with brunette adulterers, scorched and naked, leaping out windows and splatting left and right.
So, as everyone within eyeshot watches, how does this walking sideshow (let's call him Tom Bradley) celebrate the A-Bomb Golden Jubilee?
As if in preparation for a major overland trek, he shifts his weight from foot to foot, in order to get the blood flowing through his legs--which are as long as entire adults in some parts of the world. Squinting his eyes, which sting in a brief puff of combusted myrrh from the Korean altar behind him, he mutters to himself.
"I offer up my exiled condition on this poisoned and cramped archipelago. I devote my forehead full of the gory imprints of dwarf-level lintels, and my endocrine system exuding bits of decayed nuclei. With my own self, I atone for the greatest sin of my grandpappy's generation. Best foot forward. Two-three-four..."
At this moment, in Tom Bradley's perhaps slightly unbalanced mind, he can hear Max Roach blast out the opening drum riff from the classic recording of "Salt Peanuts" that was cut the same week this town was leveled. In time with the intro, this displaced Utahn shoots his cuffs and tucks in his shirt - which comes untucked again the second he exhales. Then, in time with the imaginary music, he crosses himself incorrectly, a devout expression descending upon his king-sized kisser.
As Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie come in, Tom lurches off, taking two steps to the bar, his foot hitting the petunia bed that announces the boundary of the park in precise time with the downbeat of the tune's A-section.
He moves at a brisk, skipping walk, a grin of unaffected joy on his face. He pauses at relatively unpopulated segments of the sidewalk to dance little jigs in time with a hot riff. Nudging everybody aside with his gyrating pelvis, bellying his way through queues, literally knocking the lovers of peace and international harmony flat on their asses, this is one unassimilated barbarian.
Tom is incredibly conspicuous, even considering the greater than normal foreign presence in Peace Park this afternoon. The mood of the multitude is self-consciously morose, and it's neutralized by this single scampering Gargantua. He shouts along with the refrain of "Salt peanuts, salt peanuts," while gamboling along, almost floating. He displays amazing agility for such a mammoth creature, for he is sharing in the ecstasy of the resurrected and transfigured Christ. Tom is able to move with all the bashful-eyed, seductive grace of the tutu'ed hippo ballerinas in Disney's Fantasia. The effect is like the effortless skateboard-level flying one does in dreams. A shriven conscience seems to have anti-gravitational effects.
Small-to-medium-sized school children on a field trip break ranks and scatter in terror at his approach. They try to hide behind their teacher, who tells them to get back in line or the big devil will eat them up. Their larger classmates jeer, tug at imagined whiskers on their chins, stick their bellies out, and galumph along behind him.
He suddenly whirls about and roars, "Who has touched the hem of my garment? I felt the healing power go forth from my person! Which one of you little bastards yanked the tassel on my cloak? Was it you? Was it you?"
The kids squeal and retreat, but only an arm's length.
Several local office girls are standing somewhat farther along the path. They hover at a safe distance and ogle a skimpily dressed delegation of black folk dancers from Zambia or someplace like that. Yet even these preoccupied females do double takes when Tom be-bops through their midst like the Pied Piper with his youthful entourage. The office girls goggle and giggle at the American until he, or at least the lower half of him, is swallowed by the crowd; and then they get back to the feathered buttocks and thighs of the Africans.
Still farther ahead, a whole convoy of extreme rightists' sound trucks is double- and triple-parked among barbecued cuttlefish booths under the world-famous Eternal Vigil Clock, selflessly donated by Seiko Industries. Draped with vast posters praising the dead Emperor who brought hell-fire on this city, these sound trucks blare maniacal martial music and racist propaganda at an ear-destroying pitch. The aged fascists wrap their boneless gums around red and white megaphones, and scream paeans to Hitler-mustachioed Hirohito. In their radiating rising-sun headbands, they are like a hot spot on the hypocenter, a carcinogenic meltdown. The multitude weaves a wide circle around them.
Not content to be circumvented, the rightists charge from their vehicles and attack some youthful Japanese Red Army factionists, both male and female, whose identities are concealed under gas masks and crash helmets. The two small phalanxes collide in an explosion of literature, which the reds have been distributing. It is possible to catch a few glimpses of various seditious images printed on the pamphlets: mimeographed hammers and sickles, Che Guevara flashing his armpit curls, cruel caricatures of the dead emperor spasming and ejaculating ringside at the big Fukuoka sumo tournament, etc.
Both the pamphlets and the fighting are unusual for this polite city. But even staid Hiroshimites feel the urge to behave atypically on a day as strange as August sixth. It is, after all, unique but for one other in human history (that is, if you don't count a similar day the Soviets secretly visited upon the people of Eastern Turkestan in the early sixties).
At exactly the same moment that Charlie Parker comes in with his epoch-making alto sax solo, a gigantic figure blasts through the front line of fighting fanatics, cleaving this wall of humanity like a ham actor parting a stage curtain. Easily outstripping everyone by a foot or more, it's none other than you-know-who.
Tom has no political interest in anything that could possibly happen on these islands, and is devoid of civic piety in any country. He sees nothing in the rightists and the leftists but a nipple-high stymie in his path. Solely out of mild irritation at the inconvenience they pose, he uses his triple advantage in mass and momentum to bust the scuffle up. Almost offhandedly, he raises both arms and shrieks like Godzilla, scattering both sides in terror. With patronizing affection, he reaches way down and pats a couple of retreating commies on the butt.
Tom whittles a banana-sized forefinger at the funerary portrait of moldering Hirohito, whom the noodle-Nazis literally worship as a god. Over the music that blasts nowhere but inside his own brain, his mighty voice thunders cheerfully, in fluent Japanese, for the Paraclete has descended like a tongue of flame upon this gaijin's head.
"Shame! Shame on you Ojii-chan! Guilty as charged! The blood of millions oozes between your stubby fingers! Get thee to a proctology clinic! Living god, my pink and delightsome ass!" Tom grabs that body part and waddles like a goose. Four bars later, he turns and wiggles it in the deceased sovereign's face. "Cannibal god! Buck-fanged Moloch! Sink your yellowing dentures into this! Whoo-whoooo!"
Even the Red Army factionists, who feel no surplus affection for the imperial system, are taken aback at this outlander's disrespectfulness. So it is not surprising when a novice storm trooper among the rightists feels the urge to attack our narrator. Wisely, he allows himself to be restrained by his older associates, and Tom is left to prance, unmolested, deeper and deeper into the A-Bomb Day Golden Anniversary celebration.
By this point in his progress, the expression on his face has intensified into one of bona-fide religious ecstasy. Tears of joy flow from his eyes, as he periodically raises them to the heavens in beatific reverence and gratitude. On this Feast of the Transfiguration, his raiment has begun to glow like a really clean undershirt in a black light tavern. Meanwhile, the Bud Powell inside Tom's head has already torn into his unbelievable piano solo, so it's time to dance on.
He comes upon a huddle of wheelchair-confined prepubescent hemophiliac AIDS patients, hand-picked from the deep rural institutions where they will be hidden away for the rest of their brief lives. Video crews from everywhere except America are interviewing them for the wisdom that might tumble from their translucent lips regarding man's inhumanity to man. This is as close to being mainstreamed as they'll ever get in such a proud nation; so Tom drags a CNN man over, to catch them with a creepie-peepie before they're sent back to the dungeons.
To the rubber-gloved, surgical-masked wheelchair wrangler, Tom explains, again in flawless Japanese, "These kids ought to make my president really nervous. Don't worry about a thing. We'll send him a copy of the videotape, and he'll think twice before pushing the button."
Having accomplished that, Tom continues his ministry, bearing glad tidings of great comfort and joy to the benighted heathen.
He goes among a platoon of Hiroshima city cops in full dress regalia: white gloves and gaiters, silken shoulder braids, golden epaulets, and so on. With fastidiously curled fifth fingers, they roust the barefoot transients, who quietly reside every other day of the year in washing machine cartons picturesquely tucked among the azalea bushes.
A few of these bums break away and hobble over to greet Tom, their new pal, and he freely allows them to come into contact with his person. They gape in toothless wonder as they run blackened fingers over the red hairs on the backs of his orangutan hands. They stand on tiptoe, stroke his orange beard, and babble like pleased babies. Their dirt-crusty bodies begin to glow, ever so faintly, as some of our protagonist's newly acquired holiness rubs off on them.
Miraculously enough, the bums can hear "Salt Peanuts" too; so they all link arms and dance a group-jitterbug to Dizzy Gillespie's explosive trumpet solo. Tom leads them by the hand in complex figure eights and cha-cha-cha patterns on the sidewalk, constantly interposing his body between theirs and the clutching claws of the police. He yells the most exquisite Hiroshima gutter dialect down on the cops' heads, his words just audible over the raucous jazz.
"Why not let them join the party? This is their home! These cats are Ground Zero's regular and rightful denizens!" He pauses to slap a white-gloved hand away from a grimy Adam's apple. "Why are you doing this? To prettify this dump? For the benefit of today's visitors? Are you kidding? Have you even bothered to look at your international guests?"
He calls the cops' attention to the people in question. Moving in oceanic waves across Peace Park are Ivy League humanities professors, hermeneutic post-modernists, Navahos and Maoris and Ainus and such-like, along with abstract-expressionist painters and surrealist mylar photographers in their uniform beatnik goatees, plus countless wizened potters, folksingers, performance artists and moccasined English-language haiku poets, along with an entire universe of post-menopausal flower children in Nehru jackets and medallions--not to mention all the refugees from various other post-World-War-II decades, who show up in Japan on jumbo jets once a year, to invade my adopted hometown in horrific numbers, to swell a throng around the glitzy epicenter, to hold silent prayer vigils and photo opportunities and strike consternation in the hearts of world leaders who might otherwise be inclined to start a really devastating nuclear war.
Dominating an entire quadrant of this hootenanny was a twenty-foot-high memorial portrait of Yoko Ono-san's croaked squeeze. It was being adored by a multinational coven of ecofeminists, who swayed back and forth, their hands held high in peace signs. Whenever there was a lull in the rants and chants from the sound trucks, I reluctantly heard them singing, or maybe moaning, over and over and over again, "All we are say-y-y-y-ying, is give peace a cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ance..." They tried to harmonize in simple thirds, but couldn't manage it, and did their best to drone each other, and everybody else, into a Za-Zennish stupor.
In other words, on that summer day, exactly the wrong people were being ejected from the festivities. Our normally soporific municipal park was under occupation by die-hard Hiroshimizers, the western world's sole surviving class of people who would feel obliged to tolerate homeless types. It would have tickled them pink to be spare-changed by authentic Oriental hoboes. It was the megaphoned Moloch-worshipers whom the police should've been giving the bum's rush to. They were the ones jeopardizing municipal tourist revenue.
By this time, the transients were filled to the brim with my communicable grace, and the oppressors had their chance to regroup and overcome their trepidation of the Caucasoid who loomed and preached in their faces. So I was magnanimous enough to permit the cops to do their job. Render unto Caesar, and all that.
As nobody at the precinct had consulted my superior reading of the crowd's mood, the cops went charging into the cardboard shantytowns in the bushes and, with their spotless ivory dress-truncheons, busted several greasy heads. They stuffed a miniaturized Toyota paddy wagon with raggedy bodies, and sped off at full siren about twelve yards down the street, where they got stuck in the same traffic jam that I had skirted via the Korean monument.
I started to wonder, as I fruitlessly scanned this Cecil B DeMille circus for familiar faces, whether I was the only reasonably sane resident of Boom Town within five blocks of this depressing shindig.
But then I saw, across the park, on top of a modest but serviceable rise, a codger in a Hirohito/ Hitler mustache, resplendent in white gloves, a silk ribbon sash, and a blood-colored carnation, which obscured almost the entire front of his boy-sized morning coat. Here was my transfigured Christ. But where had Moses and Elijah shambled off to?
He was somberly releasing clouds of diseased doves from chrome-plated cages. Directly upon release, the poor animals, which had plastic olive branches stapled symbolically to their upper beaks and ankles, bellied straight into the gravel like overloaded sailplanes, to be trampled to grease spots by stampeding Hiroshimizers.
The pigeon fancier was none other than our beloved mayor, old What's-his-name, a Liberal Democratic Party boy all the way. He was the other reasonably sane resident in attendance today, besides me, and he'd come with bells on: all dressed up in a clown suit, a deluxe boutonniere stuffed in his buttonhole. You'd never catch his Catholic counterpart down south doing that routine.
The mayor of Nagasaki is a co-religionist of my Papist wife, and a heroic man. Those rightists I saw in the sound trucks, armed with ordnance provided by the Yakuza, periodically try to assassinate the mayor of Nagasaki. They've put at least one bullet in him already, because he says incorrect things about the Holy Family in Tokyo. And yet he stands firm as an eighteen-year-old's hard-on. That's how much heroicity of virtue this old mackerel-snapper possesses. The mayor of Nagasaki is definite beatification material, a man of genuine spirituality.
And it makes sense that I did not wind up pissing away my middle years in his scenic city. As a Nagasaki "expat," I could never boast, or lament, of coming full circle in my life, of winding up in a mirror image of my Utah hometown, suffering a poignant recapitulation of my boyhood, in yet another irradiated city overrun by religious naifs and nuts. In Boom Town II, I would have no cause to compose such jeremiads in the first place. I would be obliged to serve as mouthpiece for the philosopher king--which is no way to write nonfiction with the hard biting edge that today's tough marketplace demands of a memoirist such as myself.
Philosopher king though he may be, the mayor of Nagasaki's chamber of commerce is a complete failure. Nagasaki's Ground Zero is even tackier than Hiroshima's, with its array of eyesore statuary from various other vanquished burgs across the globe. You wouldn't catch Michael Jackson laying wreaths at their hypocenter. Or even Mother Teresa, for that matter (if she wasn't already sitting on the right hand of our Heavenly Father) - although I guess it depends on how much money you slipped her, and whether you could score enough amyl nitrate poppers to keep her happy on the plane, and whether you could recruit a couple really cute Filipina pinkies who were willing to dress up like nunnery novices and let her whip their naked bottoms with a rosary and gnaw on their toes in the hotel.
Yes, I have spent years with my head buried deep in the umbilicus of post-modernism, glamorous Boom Town. Once a year in the summer, in pathetically named Peace Park, I listen to liberalism's last gasp. My fellow North American exiles assure me that I fail to grasp the sheer significance of the oddly warmish soil upon which we waste what's left of our lives.
This is it, they tell me. This is where the contemporary age began. This is where we all became existentialists, consciously or un-, where all of us - not just the philosophy grad students and the black bop musicians in the Big Apple, but each and every single mother's son of us - were finally taught to grasp Universal Absurdity.
I'll buy a big load of that.
