Pasar 3: Showtime

The appointed hour had come.  The accordion was found collecting dust at Pasar had been repaired, the cafe had been set up for business, we'd sent off our documents to apply for our work visa, and most importantly, the flag was finished.

Design by Jenn Thomas of Jenn Thomas from Jenn Thomas/Jenn Thomas, featuring Jenn Thomas

Modelled by Jenn Thomas

Under the full moon, Jenn and I set up our instruments on one of the three empty stages.  We'd spent the day rehearsing and dragging wooden furniture back and forth across the yard, finally determining the arrangement best suited to polite appreciation and/or dancing on tables.  By 7:00, nobody had turned up.  We started on the beers that we'd brought to share with our hosts.  By 7:30, the starting time for our concert, we were still alone and on our second beer.

Eventually, our audience arrived: a dozen or so married women from the neighborhood, bearing snacks and bottles of wine.  Fortunately, that didn't stop them from taking advantage of the Pasar Moon kitchen, which turned out curries and one delicious pizza after another.  Jenn and I took the stage for our first duo concert.  Under the circumstances, our old band's name, Raku 3, seemed inappropriate, so we went by Jenn's stage name, Jenny Dreadful.  It felt good to be performing again; after all, we'd carted our instruments around the previous 1,000 miles, so we might as well get some use out of them.

The show, sadly, was lackluster.  This was our first time performing in nearly a year, and though we'd spent the past few months jamming by the roadside, we weren't quite as polished as we would usually like.  The audience was pretty different from our usual crowd of friends appreciative old drunken bachelors, too, having turned up more to hang out with one another than to see us.  Still, we gave it our best go, and the contributions to our nagezen basket (literally, "thrown money") were generous, except for the person who gave us a wedge of cheese.  Despite the protests of Aki, who was oddly absent from this event except while we were playing, we deposited all of our takings right into Pasar's donation box.  He told us about how Pasar is meant to be a space to support artists and musicians, and that the usual policy was to comp all non-WWOOFing artists their room and board.  The money was ours, he insisted, not the venue's.  When he left to get a cigarette, we dropped the cash into the box; after all, we had just found a job, and places like Pasar need support themselves.

When all of the pizza had been eaten and our donations had been counted, Natsu stood before her friends and patrons to explain the bill situation.  From this year, she said, Pasar would not set any prices for its food or drinks, but would instead rely wholly on Love Donations.  Whatever the customer was moved to pay for what they received, that would be what they should pay.  If ever there is a customer who can't afford a dime, then their meal should be eaten with clear conscience.  "Japanese people are very bad at this because they're so shy," she had told us earlier, "but this is important to our idea of Pasar Moon."  They listened patiently, receptively (despite Aki's doubts) as she spoke, and when she finished, they all contributed heartily to the box.  More beer was opened in celebration, and we retired to our room to pack up our instruments.

As I flipped the lightswitch, I caught a glimpse of something dark and thin scuttle out from behind Jenn's pillow.  My heart sank, as I knew instinctively what it was.  I calmly put down the ukulele, told Jenn to step back, and screamed my little heart out: "Mukade!"

Attention, current or future mortal enemies: if you could just skip ahead to the picture of a ducky, that would be great.  See you there!

Centipedes are my greatest fear in the world, and are my persistent theological proof that we are not living in the best of all possible worlds (additional proofs involve the non-existence of a Spider-man or -men).  On the rare occasions in which I've encountered them, I've turned into a squealing, useless bag of slop (more than usual, even).  Fortunately, in this case, Natsu-san heard my cry and ran to the rescue with a cup of hot water and a set of tongs.  She plucked the foot-long, writhing black nightmare up and dropped it into the water, where it danced about in fury before falling into a very convincing faux-death.  As far as I know, it still lives at Pasar, feigning death and waiting for me to return.  She told me then that there had been several mukade spotted that day, one of them having stung Aki on the leg mere hours before.  Perhaps it had something to do with the full moon, she suggested.  Maybe they just didn't like the show.

We took what was left of our beers into the living room, leaving the party to collect our thoughts.  Jenn rubbed my back and reassured me that that was probably the last centipede anywhere in the whole world, and that there was no chance of another one living under my pillow and waiting until we fell asleep to lay eggs in my eyeballs.  Natsu came to find us before too long, and saw me in a daze.

"Are you in shock?" she asked.  I nodded limply, and explained that I would probably be unable to sleep that night or any other night.  She nodded back solemnly. "OK, let's get drunk.  Do you drink tequila?"  

We spent the next hour or so trading recipes for tequila shots and discussing our lives.  What we spoke of I won't reveal here, suffice to say how stricken I was for the first time at the appropriateness of their names ("Natsu" meaning "summer," "Aki" meaning "autumn"; Natsu is in her thirties, Aki in his fifties).  If there were any other mukade that night, I didn't notice; Natsu's home remedy was extremely effective.