Recap: Game 4

Soon-Mi threw two innings of vodka screwdrivers and retired. The rest of her defense followed shorty after. Wee decided to call the game early which just kills me because the gin was just then starting to fire in me, and after 11 hours of driving without a break, all the kids who had been sleeping were now quitting on me. F**k jet-lag. You can make excuses or you can make memories. Gen was equally energized and thus equally disappointed, so we stayed up an extra hour and talked about how sweet this was all going to be. Then he went and crashed and I went upstairs and hit the batting cages alone. End day 3.

Unsurprisingly I was the last one to wake up on Monday February 25th. My mom had been up and cooked everyone breakfast (I lu’ you momma, yes I do) and having eaten all my kids were occupied in photodocumenting every piece in my dad’s collection of antiques and Indian art, overflowing with idiosyncratic J-noise. I munched on cold leftovers and watched with amusement. I didn’t see Soon-Mi anywhere.

My parent’s ski cabin—or should I say lodge?—is just big enogh that a really stupid or really drunk person could get lost in it. I found a room I’d never seen before when I was leading my own personal little group of J-tourists around the night before. Of all the cool sh*t there is to see in my house howbeit, the thing that impressed them the most was the amount of bathroom suites. I s’pose things over 100 years old are a lot more common than privates residences in excess of 5000 square feet with 6 showers and 8 toilets where they come from. Yeah, it’s pretty much a lodge- -don’t hate.

Mom wanted to take the kids down to get them all fitted while the hardcore (Gen and I) decided we’d head for that gnarly back country sh*t - -(”Gnarles Barkley was here”)- -and meet them down on the front side. Oh yeah that’s the other thing, this place has a ski in to the main hill from my back yard. After about three cycles on a beauty day under the biggest blue sky you’ll ever see we went down to the lodge to meet up with our ski tourists. I’m impressed that the staff at the rental shop were able to outfit two women who are 4’10” and 5’1” and wear size 5 and 6 shoes and the only two guys in Montana who are the same height and weight as me and not 13. I assume the kids section was well exploited. The only thing harder for the staff than pronouncing their names on the order forms was accepting the fact that all of them were over 18. It’s not stop laughs with these kids. You would not believe the amount of attention Yuuki had gotten so far based solely on his hair. It was well understood that I was going to be dealing with a bunch a scrubs. Shin and Soon-Mi had started this year, Yuuki today and Gen…was from the East coast so…you know…Yuu, Yumiko and Chiaki so I was hoping they could keep up. Gen decided he’d play the snowboard instructor card and volunteered to work on getting these kids to turn in order to score points, I now had the choice of spending the day with all the grommies, newbs and seniors in order to spend time with Soon-Mi so I can (maybe) get laid, or ditching her to get hunt powder turns and entertain Gen’s supposed date.
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I’m standing on halfway down a bowl face in more or less knee-deep uncut gnar-pow watching Chiaki side slip down an entire face of turns. Yumiko and Yuu are wading around somewhere below me, flipping shit over this “impossible weird American snow” and bitching (in the cutest way possible) at me to take us back down to the front face and I’m now dealing with the fact that I drove 11 hours to ski the groomers with the park rats. At various points in my life, for various reasons, girls make me want to cry. At least Soon-Mi figured out a way to make being a newb look cute.

Oh well. This isn’t a web-journal about skiing anyways, that’s just the pretense under which we operate. Fast forward to the “baseball.” After a heart-breaking (for me) and joyful (for them) outing on the slopes we headed back to my place for a movie night and American junk food. We watched “Densha Otoko” (Traihttp://www.travelblog.org/Admin/photos-entry.html?diary_id=273747
Photos (10)n Man) which is the story of a hopeless nerd whom fate casts in a position where he befriends a beautiful woman after reluctantly saving her from adverse circumstances and then writes about it on the internet and a whole bunch of strangers read this and make posts advising him on how to go about wooing her.

…

Is it just me or does that sound familiar to anyone?

I snaked a posish, next to shorty on the couch and got gutsy and even dared to lay a single blanket over the two of us, and took a little too much liberty in “making room” for Shin on the other side of me. Hehehehe, I’m so f**kin’ smart. I got jealous because Gen was pretending he was asleep while clearly having dirty thoughts about Chiaki who was passed out in “little-spoon” position in his arms. I look over at Soon Mi, she’s wide awake enjoying the movie without the aid of my arms…damnit…
At least it was a good movie. My mom made us dinner and then I decided to get the party started by introducing team Japan to Jager-bombs. The affect was almost as devastating as…- -no I don’t wanna say it, it’s too easy, and I’ll get in trouble with all those PC-wifs.

When we were good and drunk enough, I finally got a chance to be alone with her and chat her up proper. We were alone, in a big house with a lot of empty rooms. She was wearing a black sweater and a long wool skirt and leggings, looking a lot more relaxed. There was so much I wanted to ask about her that you just normally can’t ask on the internet. (You can ask me though, I’ll tell you just about anything- -if I haven’t already written about it already…) I get her talking about school, start by warming up lips, and deepening the mood as we move on to her living alone and her family, what her parents do, what her brothers and sisters took in school. Get her talking about herself—not you Ted, you talk too much about yourself, nobody wants to hear that sh*t—make it clear that you’re interested in her. Get in her head, figure out what makes her tick, then exploit it. In baseball, every hitter, every better has a tendency, you have to study it and mix in your own intuition and take a swing. It’s different between leagues too, for example in the bigs, most of the time when the count is 3-2 the next pitch is usually the fastball, whereas Japan the 2-3 pitch (remember, they count strikes, balls in the J-league). What pitch is a Korean-Japanese pitcher gonna give me after three rum and cokes and gin and juice at a ballpark that’s a lot higher altitude than Coors Field? I wasn’t sure and I was working the count, using the liquor in me as an excuse to pull pieces of hair back off her face and tell her how pretty she was when Chiaki came out of nowhere and calls “time” and that screws the whole rhythm of my swing up. Where the hell is Gen? - -As usual, my #2 batter is leaving me stranded…

We moved over to the chairs across from the couch where Chiaki was stretched out and I switched modes and let the conversation take it’s own route and stayed silent for a while and decided I’d put my head down in her lap just to stir things up. It’s amazing how cute I find people when their being all awkward and confused- -Perhaps it’s just comfortable for me to make a girl outwardly demonstrate that she’s feeling like I feel the most of the time when I’m around her. Eventually Soon-Mi gets tired and decides it’s time for bed and that leaves Chiaki and I to pass the time over my sixth MGD in the cages. I’d go hitless for the night, but I decided I’d be a nice guy and do what I was supposed to be doing with Soon-Mi with Chiaki as to do some “scouting” on Chiaki.
She told me all about growing up in the South, about her grampa who taught her to cook while her parents were out working overtime in Fukuoka, about leaving home for Tokyo and growing up into the talkative hipster that sat drunk in before me on the couch. I eventually sat down next to her and decided to dig up her dating history as there was nothing for me to lose from asking the question. I guess that’s when it got dramatic, I suppose. Like the rest of them she had a few lost cases she left far behind in the Kyuushuu hillsides along with the rest of the south for Tokyo. I lost a girl to college once, I didn’t tell her that though. That’s not heartbreaking, it happens to a lot of us. What was of most interest to me—and more interest to Gen I guess—was what had been going on since we left off with her in the summer. Right around the time we met her she had recently gotten out of some wack relationship with some guy who treated her like and got rid of her when he got bored with it- -I wondered then if Yuki might tell her friends (- -or strangers) the same thing about me…Why is it always about me? S’pose that just made Gen a rebound hitter that she happened to meet twice thanks to fate (and me)…It got worse when she told me he’d called her again back in January and she did why I always do and spent another night with someone she shouldn’t have. I s’pose it’s not right of me to air somebody else’s dirty laundry for a change but I guess the reason I feel I need to is because I know I’ve made too many girls feel the way she was feeling at that moment recounting something that she needed and I wanted to have told. And like I’ve said before, I seem to be able to justify it to everyone but the mirror.

The subject needed changing and I’d opened the door a long time before. She gets very quite all of a sudden and asks me what I was planning on doing- -about Soon-Mi.
“I’m that easy to see through am I?”
“You put your head in her lap and stared up longingly into her eyes.”
I shrug.
She shrugs right back.
I’m busted and that’s good because I figured if I was honest I’d have a better chance with this all star defence than if I tried to catch them sleeping or steal. I told her everything that you know about it, only less articulate and more Japanesy-like, sweeten it up here or there and move the moment of “realization” closer to the minute I met her.
“So what do you recommend I do?”
She shrugs and smiles. I can tell by now that’s what she does to tactfully avoid answering a question.
“Well, do you think she likes me.”
“Saa naa…(who knows?)” with a gentler shrug, and a wider grin.
“Well- -I mean she flew all the way here, there’s got to be some meaning in that.”
“I guess so…”
“…”
“…”
“Well…what do you plan on doing?”
“About what?”
“…Gen.”
She’s goin’ in full reverse now, and it’s a good thing she’s not out on the mound otherwise she’d be in trouble. She just smiles and shrugs again, the darkness hides the ostensible signs of nervousness.
“…What about him?” She asks.
“That night at the park, when he slept over at your house” I know I’ve just opened this up too wide, “What did you think about him then?”
…She doesn’t want to answer that one either. “Does he like me?”
“I don’t know. Gen’s the kind of guy that doesn’t talk to other guys about stuff like that. We’re awkward that way.” Lie. “What it’s look like?”
She shrugs again.
“Well what about now?”
“Him or me?”
“Either or.”
“…I like you.”
What? I cock an eyebrow and tilt my head and start a sardonic smile.
“Not like that, asshole.”
I fake disappointment.
“You seem like a really dependable guy. I think you’re very honest and very kind. She- -she’s a very special girl…and a really good friend. And she’s kind of alone and I think a little confused right now…about everything since she moved to Tokyo all by herself. I’d really hate to see her get hurt…But- - I think I’d be comfortable with a guy like you dating Soon-Mi.”
Oh sh*t is this the vote of confidence I need to- -
“- -That said,” There’s always an ambiguous “but” when the best-friend is talking, “we have to spend six more days together…I don’t want you to make things awkward for us.”
“…Got it…so…you think I should do it at the airport?”
“Do what?”
“Kokuhaku.” (the confession)
“And if you did? …”
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“Oh shit it’s 4am” she whines.
And that ends my day 4.

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At Bats 4
Hits 0
1B 0
2B 0
3B 0
HR 0
RBI 0
Struck Out 4
AVG .000

Yeah, I’m feelin’ like Ich right about now, we’re both off to a slow start- -but stick with it, I promise not everything I write is going to sound like a HBO version of a Jane Austen novel.

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