The following Saturday, Hymie and Sifter came around to my place to start the evening. We had some beer and Sifter rolled up a cone. This was to become the traditional start for all of our debauched nights from then on. We smoked ourselves into a pleasant buzz and headed for Susukino.
We met some of the Rugby crowd – Logan, Jamie and John at Hino De Honpo and later headed for a nearby club called Plastic Theater. There were a lot of fine babes there. We used the Gaijin get in free cards again. We all hung out a while. Of course Sifter was getting all the attention. There were a couple of girls working on him – one he’d been supposed to meet and another that liked his looks so much she was trying real hard. Hymie was getting all sleazy on some slut – we were all pretty drunk. I couldn’t find any girls in this whole club of hotties who were the slightest bit interested in me.
This is where I developed my three, two, one theory. It was never actually proven conclusively but here’s the way I started to look at it: if Hymie, Sifter and I went out on the pull, and met three eligible tarts, two would be into Sifter and One would be into Hymie. I would always be left out of the loop. I shook my head in disgust and headed to Mirror to see if I could find Ian. He wasn’t there but Tatsuya was on the door and Nochi was playing good trance. I bumped into a girl I knew - one of Sifter’s old flames; a big-busted, round assed hottie called Aki. We chatted for a while and got to making out. I took her home and we ended up having sex on the sofa and on my bed in the loft. She was surprisingly tight for such a big girl. She was also given to hollering and squealing with porn star theatrics, but wasn’t as blatantly fake as Subway Girl had been.
I told Sifter the next day and he called me Slim Shady. He’d ended up going with a different chick from either the one he’d been supposed to meet and the one who’d been trying so hard. Hymie said he’d disappeared to another dance club, Precious Hall and he’d also pulled a hottie and scored. The three of us had all done fine on our own, but since it had been a helluva dry spell I considered myself especially lucky.
Aki came around about once a week after that. Although she didn’t like to use the popular Japanese term Sekusu Furendo, that’s what we were. But I wasn’t satisfied with just one lover and I wasn’t going to make Aki my girlfriend. She sounded suspiciously theatrical when we were having sex, and while she was surprisingly tight inside for a big strong girl and she knew how to move her hips, I still wondered how effectively I was pleasing her. Now I felt like I was on a roll, I needed to spread myself around.
I talked to Hymie about how Sifter and Muktah had met Young through language exchange at International Plaza and sitting in the Submarine one day, we hatched a nefarious plot: I crossed the park and went a block north to the Plaza and checked the message board. I saw an ad pinned up by two chicks who claimed to be eighteen-year-old college students. I took down the contact number they left for one of them and headed back to tell Hymie.
The girl’s name was Keiko and we arranged to meet at the plaza the following day. She turned up with her friend Eri and Hymie and I were moderately impressed. Both girls were tall and in reasonably good shape. They were well dressed. Eri was more attractive, with long black hair and a rather voluptuous figure, but was really only pretty rather than beautiful. Keiko had a more slender figure and dyed brown hair, but also had braces and freckles. We went over to Mister Donut in Tanuki Koji, a long arcade running across Eki-mae Dori about halfway between Odori Park and Susukino Station. We sat down, had coffee made small talk. The girls had just graduated from High School and wanted to improve their English before starting college in a month. They were enrolled at Hokusei, a women’s two-year vocational school only a few blocks from my place. Hokusei was known as a den of sluts.
Eri and Keiko revealed a certain innocence – they’d obviously not been among the Enko crowd in high school. They showed us pictures from their senior year trip to a hot spring resort in Honshu somewhere. Eri looked fantastic in her bathrobe. They told us they’d never had boyfriends. We were looking for bad girls, not virgins, and we decided these two weren’t really a good catch. But a couple of days later Eri called me directly. I’d actually thought she’d hit it off better with Hymie. Obviously she and Keiko had come to an arrangement: Keiko had found us but Eri had decided she wanted to get to know me. She was reasonably pretty and her youth and innocence added to the allure. Hymie suggested it would be a great side project to work on Eri while I was getting steady sex from more experienced women, and besides he said, “She wants cock.” He had a remarkable knack for gauging people’s intentions.
I agreed to meet her that Saturday.
It was around that time started to develop another of my favorite ploys here – the Three Dates Plan. Having too much free time between classes and after work (most of us could stay up late as we started work anywhere between eleven and one), I usually whiled the hours away scheming and devising strategies to get laid. I presumed these things just came naturally Hymie, instinctively. As for Sifter – he seemed so popular he wouldn’t even need a technique. It was as though most girls decided to sleep with him the moment they met him anyway. But I never believed I was that lucky; I still needed structure, and for Eri I rolled out the prototype of a system that with a few tweaks and alterations paid off big dividends in the long run.
Japanese women are curious about foreigners. If they are generally adventurous enough to go on a date with one, they are quite open to novel suggestions. Eri was young and even more curious and open to non-traditional dating practices. Of course this was a language exchange anyway, not a date. We met around 5pm at Peco-Chan; the small plastic statuette of a cartoon mascot for Fujiya, a restaurant and cake-shop in the basement walk between beside the lift entrance to my office. Peco-Chan, and the giant TV screen known as Hiroshi-Kun across the concourse next to Mitsukoshi, were the popular meeting spots for dates in the wintry months. They were both just outside the subway ticket gates, a few dozen paces from the entrance to pole town and most importantly underground and warm.
First we went to the American Pub, a place close to the Susukino end of Eki-mae Dori. This was a reasonably well-sized Izakaya, where foreigners were known to get seconded to seats near the door or in out of the way corners. The waiters in Izakayas were usually chick-magnets – especially to the high school and college girls who thought any twenty-one year old loser with a menial job was cooler than the boys they knew – and they weren’t going to tolerate competition from table-poaching Gaijin at this place. The beer was cheap Happoshu, malt liquor, and the snacks were average. After that I took her to a pool hall to learn what the Japanese called Biriado.
This was an excellent way to break the ice and seem exotic and different. Only the most dedicated Japanese players were any good at pool; it was considered a foreigner’s game and we were all assumed to be experts. Most poolrooms were to be found in multi-level game centers, a floor above a bowling alley and below a video arcade. I took her to a nearby pub that had a table and since it was early, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Pool was also an excellent way to test the waters for body contact. Under the pretence of showing her technique, there were plenty of opportunities to touch her waist or brush against her quite closely. While some guys might take the chance to cop a grope, I learned it was better to use this opportunity to guage Eri’s reaction to being touched by a man in a non-sexual manner. She wasn’t overly flirty, in fact she was a little nervous, but she seemed comforted by the closeness. I was looking forward to a slow seduction.
I considered the first date to be pretty successful. Eri had to go early to be home for dinner. I escorted her to the station like a gentleman. I didn’t bother angling for a kiss – it would be very unlikely that such a straightlaced girl would kiss me in public even if we were already lovers. Besides it wasn’t part of the grand plan. I headed back home to get ready to go to Susukino and get drunk with the guys.
