Recently I read what follows and, let me tell you, like a cop car flashing its lights at me on a lonely road at night, it grabbed my attention:
Excessive alcohol consumption over a lengthy time period can lead to brain damage, and may increase your risk of developing dementia.
What? Really? Is it too late for me, then, since I have ‘lengthy periods’ of excessive alcohol consumption lined up behind me like delivery trucks at Walmart?
Plus, you may have noticed that alcohol has made cameo appearances in these essays. So should I worry that I may soon start putting my car keys in the freezer or a frozen pizza in my car?
Let me tell you about a time in Kyoto that shook me up considerably. The year was 1997.
Kyoto is a city I knew previously, for back in the 1970s, when I lived in Tokyo, I used to go there with friends a few times a year to visit temples and shrines, as well as a bar called “Jittoku” that one of our Kyoto friends had fashioned into existence out of an old sake warehouse. It was a fabulous bar, full of “old” Japan and customers who loved it.
What we did at Jittoku, however, was drink until the night turned into day again. We had a merry time, with lots of laughter and camaraderie. We were in our twenties, after all, the decade for abandonment if there ever was one.
Well, the day I’m talking about now was two decades later, and I was not a kid anymore.
I’d been wandering around Ponto-chō, a famous Kyoto geisha district just west of the Kamo River. I was back in Japan to research my novel, Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show. At the time I believed that Ponto-chō would play a part in the novel, but later I cut that section - or saved that section, I guess should say, for another, much later, book.
When I finished my research and wandered out of Ponto-chō it was only 4 p.m., but I saw a sign above a restaurant that said, “All you can eat, All you can drink,” (tabehōdai-nomihōdai in Japanese) and, no matter that I wasn’t hungry, my lizard brain said ‘Yum!’ before my discerning human brain could register any complaints.
After living in Las Vegas with its buffets, I understood ‘All you can eat.’ But ‘All you can drink,’ too… for one price? Not only that, but the restaurant was Korean, meaning there’d be tons of bulgogi, mountains of rice and kimchi, and who knew what else… As for the drink, it was either draft beer, low-grade saké, or an even lower-grade soju.
But my lizard brain controlled things by then, and into the place I went.
When the wait staff tried to show me to a table I said that I’d sit at the bar. I was alone, after all, and wouldn’t hog a table just for myself. I remember thinking that was “bigamy,” as Groucho Marx might say. But there was no one with me to laugh.
“What’ll you have? Beer?” asked the bartender.
I was about to say ‘yes’ but the look on his face changed my mind.
“Soju,” I said.
Maybe the look on my face made him do what he did next, which was pour six fingers of soju into a water glass. Six fingers! Now, a six-hand horse would be about the tiniest horse in the world, but six fingers of any kind of booze is mammoth! About the size of your morning glass of orange juice.
Still, I thanked him, took a drink, and then made a face like a baby might make when biting into his first lemon. Yew, argh, yuck!
I held the soju in my mouth, but I couldn’t spit it back into the glass, so soon I swallowed it.
The bulgogi came next… MOUNDS of it, and just about the same quality as the soju. I ordered a beer to wash it down, and also to wash the soju taste out of my mouth.
Those at nearby tables were watching - I was the only foreigner in the place - when a guy at the bar started matching me, plate of bulgogi for plate of bulgogi, bowl of rice for bowl of rice, and, most devastatingly, beer for beer for beer for beer.
I’m not proud of this story but I’m going to tell the rest of it anyway, for if I can do so correctly it might prove - to my current non-lizard brain, at least - that I am not demented.
When I left the place at six o’clock, I was like most drunks are when leaving their favorite bar at midnight. That is to say, I was nothing like I had been during my “Jittoku” days, for I had no friends to keep me company and no jokes to tell them, anyway… In truth, I had nothing save a tumbling mind, an aching body, the loneliness of a novelist lost in the middle of an unending novel, and, of course, that thing we all have… the inexorable passing of time.
The Kamo River promenade had groups of people walking along it by six o’clock, and its benches were full of lovey-dovey couples. It was a romantic evening, after all, and the river was beautiful, with hordes of happy ducks quacking along.
I needed to find a place to rest, so I flopped down on one of the benches, scaring the bejesus out of the couple nesting at its other end.
“U wa-a!” said the woman.
“Kuso!” said the man.
I laughed to try to ease the situation, but they got up and hurried away, leaving me alone and drunk and full and stupid.
But not stupid enough to do something like that ever again… not once, as far as I can remember, in all of the years that have passed since that pitiful day in 1997.
So how would you say I am doing with that “excessive alcohol consumption… may increase your risk of developing dementia” thing? Am I out of the woods by now or not?
And what do the italics in the penultimate paragraph above this one represent?
Postscript…
Anyone in or around Tacoma, please remember that next Saturday, September 10, I will be at the Pacific Northwest Shop, at 2702 North Proctor, between the hours of 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., for a signing of my new novel, The Grievers’ Group.
Also, though it may seem ironic after the subject of this essay, that same evening, from around 7 and for a couple of hours, I’ll be at The Blind Pig at Millhouse, just down the street from the Pacific Northwest Shop. Please come by for a drink or a talk. I would love to see you.
Post-postscript…
Because of my travels, there’ll be no 'Note from a Decrepit Boat Ramp’ next week. The essays will resume on Sunday, September 18.
Wonderful! I hope to see you there.
Not sure if we can make it to the PNW Shop, but hope to connect in the evening🤗.