Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология
Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии


Blacks back to Africa, Bono finds the trade routes that the history books leave out.



We pull back up to the hotel and run upstairs to ablute ourselves before hurrying back down to a big hotel function room where Phono­gram Nippon has laid on a Japanese banquet that would make a glutton weep with gratitude. Lovely handmaids in traditional kimonos float through the room with serving trays like foot-bound seraphim, offering marinated pork, spiced chicken, steamed shrimp, baisted lobster, and beef so succulent it would make a carnivore of Morrisey, a meat eater of Linda McCartney, a cannibal of a cow. The Zoologists, sated for days on fast food and room service, nearly moan for joy with every mouthful. It being a traditional Japanese feast, there are no chairs—we are ex­pected to sit cross-legged at dining tables raised just a foot or so above the floor. After a few awkward moments of contemplating the yoga position, the sophisticated Westerners opt for sitting on the edges of the tables with their plates in their laps.

The Asian Phonogram executives ignore any breaches with perfect manners and grace. They make warm speeches of greeting and give large wrapped gifts to Paul, Regine, Sheila, and the band. McGuinness and Bono get up and make courteous acceptance speeches. Paul thanks the Japanese executives for all their hard work on behalf of U2's recent albums and this tour and says that for Zoo TV's melding of art and technology to succeed in Japan probably means more than anywhere else. Bono says that he likes Tokyo so much he hasn't slept since he arrived.

The Principles open their presents: carving-board clocks with chop­sticks for hands and twelve different sorts of plastic sushi where the numbers should be. "Hey, Paul," I say, "It's quarter to salmon!" The Japanese, at least, are too courteous to groan. Anton points to Bono, engaged in intense discussion with two of the record executives, and says that what's really remarkable about Bono is that he can talk with wealthy foreign businessmen and with hookers in the red-light district and be equally interested in each.

Everyone wanders around the room, chatting with the hosts, listening to another traditionally garbed woman playing the koto, a sort of sitar, and stuffing desserts in their pockets. It's hard to reconcile this elaborate gentility with the decadence we slogged through last night—until I drop my expectations and consider that this is exactly the sort of discrepancy

473

I live with every day of my life. At home in New York I am used to stepping over an unconscious junkie on my way out of a black-tie charity fundraiser in an elegant museum around the corner from a porno parlor. Same in London or Los Angeles or Berlin. Why be surprised to see equivalent cultural hypocrisy in Japan? It, too, is full of Earthlings.

When the banquet breaks up we head off to pick up our man Willner at his hotel and jump back into the nocturnal hoopla. Bono, Eric, Nassim, and I meet Hal in the bar of his hotel. God knows what Willner's Japanese employers make of his sleep-deprived, deteriorating state. He is looking a lot like the picture of Dorian Gray. (I myself have been covering the mirrors with bath mats since Sydney.) We might stay sitting in the dark corners of this quiet lounge all night, but someone recognizes the Englishmen at the next table as Deep Purple (they're big in Japan) and we decide to split before they want to jam.

We go back to the car and end up leaping out at some restaurant that looks inviting but where we get chased from room to room and table to table by frantic orientals whose manner suggests that each time we sit down we are committing some awful atrocity we cannot comprehend. Finally the owner (how the hell do I know if he's the owner? Maybe he's the janitor's shell-shocked cousin) shoos us down into a corner stall in the basement where we sit down on mats around a low table and—look out—now some Asian adrenaline-case is hopping on one foot, yanking at his shoe and sputtering what is clearly an order to get our boots off. We do so and he collects them and takes them away for God knows what wicked ritual.

I can only take this humility thing so far," Bono says sharply. Pretty soon he's gonna get a bare Irish foot in the side of his head."

After another fifteen minutes of antic condemnations in an Eastern tongue, we give up, climb the stairs back to the street, and set off in search of more nightclubs, speakeasys, and tattoo parlors. Paul Oakenfold, the Zoo deejay since B.P. was cast out of Eden, is spinning the forty-fives tonight at some disco in town, but we do not know where. It is an indication of how far out of normalcy everyone around U2 has become that it was assumed we could just dump ourselves in the middle of the biggest metropolis in the world, where none of us speak or read the language, and find our friend without instructions. And we were right! Bono, with his divine gift for bumping into people he knows

474

everywhere on earth, recognizes a young woman coming down the alley and shouts, "Yoko!"

"Bono; Hi'"

"Do you know where Paul Oakenfold's playing?"

She sure does and she can show us! We are soon underground, in a big frantic disco with films of naked women's privates flickering on the wall while U2's "Lemon" pipes out of the loudspeakers and the Tokyo subculture shakes its booty. There are lots of Zoo people here already, dancing, drinking, and sweating up a storm. Pretty soon we all join in, except for Willner, who stands slouching on the sidelines in four layers of shirts and coats grumbling about the idiocy of the disco beat. He is subjected to the further indignity of becoming a human coatrack for the rest of his party as they stink up the ballroom. After a half hour or so Hal cracks under the esthetic assault of a rhythm than never changes and hurls himself onto the dance floor, doing the monkey with the sunken eyes and miserable expression Richard Nixon would have worn had he ever done a guest spot on Soul Train.

After quitting that bacchanal (and losing Nassim to better dancers), Bono, Eric, Hal, and I return to some of the gin mills we visited before, as well as some that were I to describe them could get even casual readers of this book excommunicated. At 5 a.m. we are tramping the back alleys with nothing to guide us but the name of an after-after-hours club that was given to us by Mick Jones of B.A.D. We follow the instructions of stray pipe-heads and whoremasters and finally come to the payoff. The club sits on the fifth floor of a sort of decayed office building that appears to be made of stucco. To get to the barroom we've got to climb a staircase that cuts back and forth up the outside of the building. We start trudging, pulling our coats tight against the freezing December wind and wondering what this waterfall we're walking against is made of. It's not water—it seems to be beer, running down the steps around our shoes as we haul ourselves up to the second landing, the third landing, the fourth landing—ascending against the current.

When we get to the fifth floor, where the club is, the flood has not abated, so we stick our heads around to the sixth floor landing and are more than a little appalled to see that it was not beer we had just waded through, but urine. The men's room is overflowing and the drunken patrons are hanging out their snorkels and pissing down the stairs.


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