Rappongi

  James Cox

  © Copyright James Cox 2023

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2023 by James Cox

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68513-102-9

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  For Dad

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Roppongi is my second published novel, but it was actually started over twenty years ago. “Never give up,” I believe is the operative phrase here. It was begun while I was stationed aboard ship in Yokosuka, Japan, in the 1990s. After the global insanity of the last two decades, I was driven back to a pre 9/11 world that existed before a seemingly daily dose of death and destruction became commonplace. The thriller is centered around the Aum Shinrikyo, an actual Japanese terrorist group active in the late 20th century. I witnessed first-hand their emergence in Tokyo while I was stationed in Japan. I simply added a few “What if’s” and I was “off to the races” in a matter of speaking.

  One important note: When I began this novel, I was drinking alcoholically. When I finished the final draft, I had been sober for a number of years. Thank God for rewrites.

  Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Yuko Kishinami, Peggy Zibella, the late Gil Gaunce and Harry Brose, the officers and crew of the USS McCluskey (FFG-41), USS Curts (FFG-38) and the staff of the New Sanno Hotel for helping me create a work of fiction based on truth.

  Once again, I am eternally grateful to The Meredith Brucker Writers Group: Meredith Brucker, Lynn Palmer, Ron Scibilia, Aly Kay, Cheryl Leland and the late John Leland. They listened to my weekly rewrites and gave me honest feedback, something that, in my opinion, is sadly missing from many writers groups today.

  I would be remiss if I did not thank the person who nurtured Roppongi along during a UCLA Writer’s Seminar that I attended, the uber talented critically acclaimed author, Susan Taylor Chehak.

  I’m grateful to my late mother, Lucille, who told me I could do anything I put my mind to and to “stop thinking negatively;” no mean task for an alcoholic with self-esteem issues. I love and miss you, Mom. Everyday.

  To my father, Walter Cox, a guy who tilted at windmills until one day the storm borne of a life of addiction engulfed him and carried him to the abyss. I found your unfinished novel behind the bar that summer day in August years ago. It was good, Dad, damn good.

  To my brother Walter who is also my best friend. I love you man. I really do. Thanks for the constant positive energy even in the midst of many trials of the soul.

  To my remaining siblings, Patrick and Maryellen, we made it and we came out pretty good, all things considered. To my beautiful nieces Tara and Ruth and Tara’s wonderful spouse Eric along with Ruth’s terrific dad, Rob and finally to Tara’s little munchkins Easton and Graham, I love you all. To Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob Smith who met in Akron in 1935 and saved my life and the lives of millions of others, my eternal gratitude and the promise that I will always be there whenever another alcoholic asks for help. To my current and past life muses, some here, some gone, Bien Cox, Ron Scibilia, Steve Beilman, Jimmy Thomas, Gino and Jeanne Ardito, Art Chamberlain, and Mrs. Biggs, my 7th grade English teacher who taught me how to diagram a sentence and to always be a gentleman, God bless you all. Last, but certainly not least, to my wonderful creative team at Black Rose Writing: Reagan Rothe, David King, Justin Weeks, Christopher Miller and Minna Rothe; thank you!

  Onward.

  James Cox

  May 30th, 2022

  Phuket, Thailand

  1

  TOKYO 1992

  “Here’s to the tilt in your kilt, Adam me boyo!” Dan Bronsan, Quasimodo with a Ph.D. Three hundred and fifty pounds. Fifty-five going on seventy. Boozer, philosopher and Celt today due more to the demographics of the bar than to any ancestry that may have existed within his loins. The old Woody Allen movie Zelig comes to mind. The one where Woody literally “becomes” the people he is with. Dan the social chameleon. That was it. Beneath the thatch of graying hair one was immediately struck by the lazy bloodhound-like eye peering this way and that like a lighthouse beam in the crazed control of a lunatic.

  A beautiful spring day in Tokyo. The tall, bent figure sitting at the bar next to Dan would not be aware of this. Dan’s words just adding to the ambient noise that Adam Welsh hears buzzing around his head. Numbing in a way. A feeling of serenity for this thirty-six year old alcoholic. Fire Controlman First Class Adam Welsh, drinking away the pain here at the Sanno Hotel bar. A year or so to go till retirement. Then what? No matter. Anything but this. Some type of change. Anything but the living hell he was in now. The problem, as Jack Bender was always quick to point out, was that no geographic move would make a difference. Adam Welsh would be there wherever he went.

  “Adam, have you even heard one word I’ve said. Jeez, well here comes another round anyway. Maybe it’ll improve your disposition. I worry about you my boy.”

  A curious feeling of impending doom mixed with euphoria engulfs Adam Welsh as the dark figure approaches. This Angel of Death, gliding towards him, maneuvering through the assemblage of lost dreams and hopelessness, his fellow travelers in despair. Closer, closer, until she is in front of him now. The receptacle is delivered. The daughter of John Barleycorn smiles.

  “Here is your drink, Adam San,” she says, and floats away.

  Adam takes the double Jack Daniels with trembling hand and brings it to his lips, bracing for yet another fall from the wagon. Down the hatch. The brutal bite (He never drank for the taste) and then the warmth. The glow. The filling of the void that only alcoholics know. Mission accomplished. He is normal. The sins of the father repeated. This the way Dad had gone.

  Five years ago at Rikers. Middle class white man dying alone on the infirmary floor at Rikers Island prison. Adam remembered seeing him on the stoop years ago puking the scotch; Dewars, no Cutty for him. It was gangster booze and wasn’t that how that scumbag Joe Kennedy made all his money during Prohibition?

  “Adam, if I ever see you drinking, I’ll break your arm,” and then puking again.

  No way. Adam would never drink that horrible stuff. But a funny thing happened. He did, and it wasn’t for the taste. Effect. All effect. He felt normal with the booze, and now this normalcy was taking his soul. He had probably died at thirty. They could bury the body later.

  Adam thought about the A.A. meeting. God it had only been last week. This was going to be it. He was done with the booze. Yet after the meeting, he drank again. Life was a shambles. Seventeen years in the Navy. Still a First Class. Two rehabs already. The new Navy. Zero tolerance for booze, drugs, and don’t even look at a female the wrong way - or the right way for that matter.

  Would I need another visit to the emergency room? Jesus, the last one was bad. A lost weekend of booze and women (more of the former than the latter) capped off by a day at the Tokyo Bowl, or Big Egg (so called for the oval appearance of Japan’s version of the Houston Astrodome.)

  He drank with Benny Carter. Good game. Kansas State against Nebraska. Adam surprised at the Kansas State’s quarterback. Great arm. Never heard of him, though. He remembered thinking the kid must have had a father who was there. Always there for him. Shit, maybe even a real-live TV dad. Laughing a bit to himself.

  They had the flask of scotch, but then the shakes came. They always came, but these were different. Coming out of his skin. Thank God Jack had been around.

  Jack Bender, thirty years sober, retired Navy ET1. He’d been in Japan forever. His wife Yumiko who somehow loved him even though the bomb at Hiroshima had incinerated her family. Little Yumiko, a mere child at the time, safely away in the hills. Her family wiped from the planet before her tears could even begin to form. All these years later and still the hate and anger could engulf her just like the cloud had engulfed her mother on that beautiful/horrible day.

  Jack Bender was a good man though. He had helped a lot of people through the horrors of the booze. Perhaps because Yumiko had lived in her own hell she could more readily understand her husband’s.

  Jack had taken Adam to the emergency room that night a few weeks ago. Adam ended up spending a week in the hospital detox. Got out and felt great. Good enough to drink a double bourbon in Roppongi the very night he got out. Insanity.

  The Sanno Hotel was located in the center of Tokyo. Convenient to the bar and entertainment district of Roppongi. The bar where Dan and Adam were imbibing this Thursday afternoon, a cosmopolitan upholstered sewer that on weekends attracted a mix of State Department employees, Japanese nationals, expats and the usual sailors and marines on liberty. All looking for romance with the liberated New Age women of Tokyo; the modern day geisha who though the country was liberated in 1945, were just now beginning to join in the emancipation, much to the chagrin of the Japanese male.

  Dan Bronsan was not always this bulbous mound of flesh that sat with one lazy eye frantically searching for a target. He had been born in New York to a good Catholic family.
His mother was so dedicated to the Church that his father said she had in fact been a waitress at the Last Supper. Dan was schooled by Jesuits and could speak on any subject related to the history of the Church. His childhood was uneventful save for a brief stint in seminary when he was twelve, which ended abruptly with the onset of puberty he liked to say. After a tour in the Navy, where he first had the opportunity to visit Japan, he returned to New York and became an engineer. Of course, what Dan had done was take some engineering courses at the undergraduate level. To hear him tell it, especially after a few Beefeaters, Dan Bronsan was a veritable expert on the subject of telecommunications. He wrote a paper from which he was awarded a Ph.D. The degree was not from an institution that one would instantly recognize. His friend and sometime tormentor, Art Chambers used to like to tell him that it was from the same place that the Reverend Al Sharpton had received his degree. This inevitably lead to the usual string of epitaphs and charges of racism from Dan the liberal Democrat launched at the “Ignorant Neo-Nazi,” Art.

  Despite all this, Dan had worked his way through the complex hierarchy at Svenson to become the Chief of Training at Svenson Telecommunications, Tokyo. It mattered little to Dan that he had landed this position in spite of what he knew or didn’t know of electrical engineering. What Dan Bronsan did have was the ability to teach. A gift. He could communicate to his Japanese students in a way that few if any gaijins in the field could match. Of course, the Dan Bronsan that existed outside of the classroom in social settings was very different indeed. The term, “Pompous Ass,” seemed to be invoked by both friends and enemies more often than not.

  “His Holiness, Peter O’Mara! As I live and breathe.”

  Adam struck sober by Dan Bronsan’s exclamation. The name cutting through the din.

  Peter O’Mara, the Irish Ambassador to Japan approaching the space between Dan and he. A shutter going through Adam. The Catholic priest, Father Ribauld, years ago at St. Rose’s. Altar boy practice over.

  Please stay, Adam. You’re my best helper. Eleven, maybe twelve at the time. The feelings of shame, guilt. All rushing back now as Peter O’Mara pulls up a bar stool and lightly touched Adam’s leg.

  “Adam Welsh, I would like to introduce you to Ambassador Peter O’Mara. Hailing from Belfast, but aye we will not hold that against him. Anyone who pours the Jameson the way this man does has got to have a bit of the Irish Republican in him.”

  “Now bite your tongue, Danny old pal. There may be some Orangeman spies about. One never knows these days. In any case, I have had the pleasure already of meeting Adam. I can call you Adam, Petty Officer Welsh?”

  The knowing look passing right by Dan. In any case the word “subtle” was not in Dan Bronsan’s vocabulary. The ambassador and Adam Welsh had in fact met before. A glance at Adam as the ambassador addressed him would have tipped this fact. The revulsion palpable.

  “Mr. Ambassador, nice to see you again.”

  Dan missing everything. The alcohol buzz precluded any chance he may have had of picking up the utter contempt and hate floating in the air that separated Adam from this O’Mara fellow.

  “My God, you do get around. The New ‘Yawk’ thing I guess. Maybe something to it after all. Aye, Peter, if you ever need a room at the Sanno, this is your man. Mr. Sanno, they call him. Got a room on New Year’s Eve, a bloody suite no less. He’s promised to get my daughter, Kelley, one as well; that is if I’m off me head enough to let her fly over here.”

  “So you could get me a room, Adam?”

  “I think it’s time for a head call. You know you only rent it, right, Dan? Please excuse me…Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Hurry back, Adam. We have a lot to catch up with. I may be joining you shortly. Kidneys don’t hold as much as they used to, don’t you know?”

  Adam about to lose what little food he had in his system as the disgust and shame overcame him. Rushed headlong into the stall. Thank God no poor soul inhabited it. He power-puked off the seat. Most of it found the bottom of the toilet though. A success. Time passed. Why was the bastard here? He needed a drink. The puke helping clear some room for more poison. The alcoholic way. Thoughts of his father but only for a second.

  The ambassador was behind him.

  “Are you all right there my boy?”

  Turning now, the ambassador’s member out of his pants. O’Mara laughing out loud now. Christ, you could hear him back at the bar, Adam thought. Turning away abruptly. Pissing in the urinal now.

  “Jesus my boy. Don’t worry; I’m not into that golden shower stuff. Get yourself together and get back to the bar. I’ll buy you a few. We need to talk. In private, of course.”

  Adam Welsh had performed oral sex on Peter O’Mara, Irish emissary to Japan about a year earlier. The fact that the act was staged while Adam was in an alcoholic blackout making it no less devastating. It occurred in the men’s room at Paddy Foley’s Pub, an Irish bar located in the Roppongi District of Tokyo. Adam was drunk of course. Pictures were taken appearing to show Adam engaged in the act. No picture of the ambassador of course, other than his member. All four inches of it. The Irishman’s disease. Still, enough to keep Fire Controlman First Class Adam Welsh in the pocket of Peter O’Mara, ambassador to Japan and I.R.A. liaison to the Aum Cult. Adam for his part did not know why.

  “Bill Clinton will be one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had. Christ, you Nazi bastards are already out for blood. The guy will be a great statesman. Read my lips on that one. I mean look at the man’s family? That’s the true test of character. Have you ever seen more of a loving couple than him and that one, Hillary?”

  “Well I’ll say one thing for him, he should be given the Navy Cross for banging that one. We know he did; at least once.”

  The bar in an uproar now. Dan holding court in rabid debate with one of the “Unwashed” as he would have no doubt called this young sailor who was pushing the Republican talking points. Adam had seen it all before. The ambassador missing though.

  The Japanese waitress beside Adam now.

  “Excuse me. Adam San. The gentleman would like you to join him.”

  O’Mara at the table just off the dance floor here at the Sanno. This being a Thursday, no DJ on duty. They would be alone.

  “Jesus, God help me,” Adam murmuring under his breathe.

  “Yes, yes, thank you very much. Please bring me a Jack Daniels. A double please.”

  A glance over to the bar. Dan busy with his new found antagonists. It seemed that the man was not happy unless he was involved in some type of confrontation. O’Mara motioning Adam to come over now. He could not ignore it. Had to go. Staggering now. He’d had more than enough for a buzz. Of course the puke had helped and the sight of the Irishman’s flaccid Chipmunk would make anyone sober.

  “Sit, sit, old pal. Please take a load off.”

  Then, under the breath, reeking of stale whiskey, “Me cock is in its house. Not coming out just yet. No worries.”

  This meant to be O’Mara’s way of breaking the ice. Welsh could have killed him. The temporary presence of reason but more likely the absence of a weapon the only thing stopping him.

  “Haven’t seen you at Paddy’s lately. Miss you. Miss our chats. Things going well aboard ship? How is Keiko?”

  “Talk of anything, anybody. Leave Keiko out of our conversations. We spoke about this before. She doesn’t exist as far as your concerned.”

  Trembling. Visibly shaken.

  “Aye, my boy. Certainly. Here’s your drink now. Take a good blast. Things will be fine. Just need to get your head straight. Everything’s going to be just fine. Thank you so much, my dear.”

  Using the leprechaun look for the waitress. Safely out of earshot and then, “Look you fucking piece of Yankee dung, we… you have a problem. I need access to certain areas of your base. I’ve told you this before. If you would draw a sober breath perhaps you would hear me. At least remember. Bender is your friend. We need him. I need to, shall we say, monitor his movements. For his own good, of course.”