Club Ratatouille

On occasion in the past I’ve alluded to a story about why I hate nightclubs. I finally posted that story on Twitter a couple weeks ago:

One night in Osaka in search of a free drink I hung out at a bar going up to other white guys offering to translate if they wanted to chat up the locals. I ended up getting totally sloshed for free getting dragged to various clubs to play interpreter. I got 3 guys laid that night

This sounds like a positive experience, not something that would sour me on clubs forever. Let me tell you what I didn’t tell you…

Me and nightclubs go way back, especially in Japan. When on holiday on the island archipelago, unless I take concrete steps to prevent this from happening, my evenings go like this: I head to a bar. I (clumsy but functional in Japanese) meet some local guys at the bar. They want to go to a club. “Well it’s getting late but you guys go ahead.” They insist, they pay my way in. Alright fine. We’re at the club. Now they want to hook me up with random girls. Their strategy, typically, is to physically shove me into her and run away. No no, I say with my body language, I’m a gentleman, I’m not here to hit on you, bowing hastily and slinking away. In search of my benefactors I find they’re in the corner trying to romance some specimens of the fairer sex who seem to be doing everything in their power to pry away, aside from actually doing that. Such depravity. Eventually I get tired of the cig smoke and hit the bricks.

Well, tonight I want to do something different. I head to the HUB and strike up a convo with three Americans this time. They keep eyeing a group of three girls nearby. I’m like “you know I speak Japanese, I’ll help translate.” “Hell yeah,” of course, comes the response.

Now, this would be very out of character for me. I’ve never just gone up to a woman at a bar and just struck up a conversation with no context. To guys, all the time, but never to women, because there’s something at stake. In my mind’s eye I see the “ew are you hitting on me?” face. After that I’ve got to extract myself awkwardly and have my ego bruised. Not so with guys: if he doesn’t want to talk, he’s just a guy who doesn’t want to talk, nothing to do with you.

But in this case, they’ve got me done up like the chef kid from Ratatouille. They say something in English, I pass it along in Japanese. Nothing is at stake for me; if they get cold-shouldered it’s their fault. If success happens then I at least get to take some of the credit. To make a short story short, it works, easily. Next thing you know (you will be shocked to hear this) I’m getting dragged to the club.

At some point I’m not needed anymore. It’s loud and interest has been generated anyway. He goes in for the kiss. She pulls away. He buys more drinks. They’re both pretty sloshed now. He really goes in the for kiss. She sorta lets him do it. Another drink. Now she’s reciprocating a bit. Now she’s really reciprocating. A drunk and cynical David Attenborough is in my head trying to improv an explanation for this… behavior. Eventually they shuffle off. I’m standing there solo, drink in hand. I’ve suffered permanent hearing damage. If you licked my skin you’d get an instant nicotine buzz. It looks kind of exactly like this:

A lanky multilingual software developer stands, drink in hand, wearing an expression of Mona Lisa-esque ambiguity, watching the fruits of his labor from the corner of his eyes. A couple embraces drunkly. A man is wiggling his fuckin shit while his lady looks on in unrepressed awe. A suave motherfucker is leading his conquest towards the exit and certain impregnation. A buff and fuckable bouncer stands at ROK ready. God damn, I’m thinking. I went out of my way to help these guys out, and what did it get me? A future hangover and…? Now I’m fully convinced that my fate in life is to go out of my way for people but never get the same in return. I gotta set a boundary around myself, or I’m just going to get taken advantage of.

I let this moment stew for a while, in the cauldron with many others like it. I hid more and more of myself from the world, lest I end up being a weeaboo King Solomon, whose main contribution to world history is being a wise old fart who could solve everyone else’s problems but didn’t have the hay arranged in his own barnhouse.

I wish I could say there was some Big Thing That Happened that made me come to the correct realization. Indeed it was sudden, but it was tiny: I talked to someone about it all for the first time. Suddenly my thoughts felt a little more concrete, and my wants didn’t seem like selfish fantasies but normal and solvable deficiencies. At the same time, I got the chance to read some incredibly raw and relatable writing. I don’t know if by coincidence my frontal lobe was finally done cooking or what, but it just clicked. It’s not that the reading taught me everything I needed to know, but that I was able to look at my own situation from the outside in, shouting advice at the author and realizing mid-sentence I was really shouting it at myself.

I thought there were stakes. There are no stakes. Not that nothing matters, quite the contrary. But, I was way, way too far into my own head about almost everything. Yes, some people will take advantage of you, and you have to be careful not to give them too much, but these guys weren’t among them. I happily volunteered, after all. If a French rat chef under my hat could do things through me, I could do them myself. So many other moments in my life were stories of people I could give my whole self to, and they’d change my life in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I didn’t see them before, but they were there in my memories, and I finally had to media literacy to understand them. You have to be vulnerable in order to find them, and that’s scary, but it’s worth it.

You don’t need the rat. The rat was inside you the whole time. The rat has been inside you for years. You only need to realize one thing to let the rat out of your body: nothing is at stake. If your first thing doesn’t work, you go to the next one. And then again, and so on, until you’re at the love hotel of life, making raucous, passionate Ratatouille¹. Actually, isn’t there a scene at the end of the film where the rat pilots him into a kiss before finally letting go of the reins? I guess those Pixar guys have been to Osaka.