Hurley Japan Tour - chrisnieratko.com

Hurley JapanTour

[ photos by bourqui ]

I've always had a weird thing with the Japanese, mostly spawning from that one day in December when they gang raped us at Pearl Harbor and fucked our whole world up, forcing us to jump into a war that we might have sat out a bit longer. Of course, in retaliation, there was that little A-bomb thing that fell out of one of our planes over Hiroshima that the Japanese haven't really gotten over either, and that adds to the sideways glares our countries continually give each other.

So when Markovich told me that Hurley was renting an American-style house in downtown Tokyo for two months and that I should go, I got an uneasy feeling in my guts. That feeling you get when you walk into a party and realize that an old friend is there, a friend you stopped talking to because you caught him trying to steal your car stereo, and you kicked his ass, but then he caught you porking his girlfriend so you would up kicking his ass again. You know that feeling? Like, "Great. This motherfucker." You look at him half, "Hey, what's up," and half, "Fuck you, faggot." Seeing him again, you start thinking about all the good times you had: getting high, running from the cops, ditching school and shit. Like that one time the other Chris wigged out on acid and went home and walked into his parents' room butt naked, while they were getting ready to go to sleep and told them to get out, that he was going to use their shower. And how they rushed him to the hospital and sent the cops to question us, and we had to answer all those questions while frying our brains off. And that one time when we were in the car smoking weed, and Jim Morrison was all singing. "Turn off the light, turn off the light," and the street light above us went out. Dude, that was fucked up. Those were good times. So there you are, both staring at each other from across the room, wondering if everything is cool, if all is forgotten. All that shit happened so long ago, it has to be forgotten by now. Then again, there you are. replaying all the bad times with the good. Maybe he's doing the same. You're like, "Should I go say something? No. Fuck that. Let him come say something." Finally, I said, "This is stupid. I'm going to go over and say 'what's up' to Japan." I don't have anything against it anymore. I mean, my "My dad died in Pearl Harbor" joke I always make is more to test peoples history and math knowledge than any real grudge against the Japs. I didn't even like that movie anyway. Ben Affleck is gay. I agreed to be cool if Japan was cool and didn't pull any kamikaze ninja shit on my ass.

Hurley bought me a ticket. I was in Japan for two weeks in November. I'd never been there before and didn't know if it was one of those countries that lives in the future, where it's winter in America and already summer over there. So I went on the Internet to see what the weather would be like when I was there. Twelve degrees is what my computer told me. Twelve fucking degrees. Who the hell plans a skateboarding trip in 12-degree weather? I had just come from Jersey where it was 28 degrees, and I hated it. Why the hell did I want to fly halfway around the globe to freeze my balls off in Japan? I don't even like the Japs. Wait. Did I say that? I meant the cold. I don't like the cold. For the entire week leading up to me taking tranquilizers and sitting in an airplane seat made for the tiny men of Lilliput and eating undercooked things I couldn't pronounce with the eyes still eyeing me, I pissed and moaned about the elements I was about to endure. "So where you headed next?" people would ask me. That's all people ever ask me, since I'm never around, and, when talking to me. it seems to be the only thing people want to talk to me about: where I'm going and the adventures I've been on, like I'm some kind of modern-day Indiana Jones. It gets old telling and retelling the same story. How come no one ever asks me about my feelings on the state of America or the new anti-privacy laws Bush somehow has passed abroad? Are political topics reserved solely for our staff activist, Mr. David "Fight the Power" Carnie? I can be serious too, you know. At least I think I can. I could try. Or at least pretend. Shit. I'm forgetting my point, which was whenever people asked me where I was going next, and I said, "Japan," they'd all get very excited. "That'll be great," "You'll have so much fun." and so on. after which I responded, "It's 12 degrees there today. I'm going to freeze my balls off. I don't want to go." Generally, most people were as confused by the idea of a skate trip in such cold temperatures as I was. I just threw my hands in the air and said, "Hell if I know."

I packed for Antarctica. I had it all: long Johns, gloves, ski mask, goose-down coat, snow boots, sweaters, hand-held heat packs, electric socks, most of which I was wearing as I met my limo driver outside the airport in Japan. Walking on the curb, I lit a cigarette and thought to myself, 'Those pills really work. Twelve hours on a

plane out cold and now I'm in Japan, and I'm still feeling hot and sweaty and loopy." As beads of sweat snuck through my wool hat and down into my eyes, I realized it wasn't the pills that made me feel warm under the collar, it was my clothes. I was truly hot. I stripped down to a T-shirt, looked at my driver and said, "I thought it was supposed to be 12 degrees over here?" He looked at me, nodded, and said, "Today, ten degrees." That wasn't right. I'd experienced ten-degree weather, you don't walk around in a T-shirt in ten-degree weather. The driver recognized me as an idiot and said, "Ten degrees Celsius." Celsius. Not Fahrenheit. Celsius. I'd forgotten most of the world doesn't use Fahrenheit. I had packed every piece of winter clothes I owned, and it was like 45 - 50 degrees Fahrenheit out. Guess who felt like an asshole? There's a scene in the movie Do the Right Thing that sums up nearly all my conversations with the locals while I was in Japan. Radio Raheem, the big-ass black dude with the big-ass radio and the big-ass LOVE / HATE four-fingered rings, goes into an Asian-owned bodega for some D batteries for his boom box. Each time he asks for D batteries, the store owner misunderstands him and responds, "C batteries?" Raheem repeats, "Twelve D batteries." Again the owner says C. Back and forth they go D, C, D, C, until Raheem starts to yell, "D. motherfucker, D. I need 12 D batteries." And that was Japan in a nutshell. That, and, generally when asked a question they couldn't comprehend, most people just smiled, nodded their head and giggled. Everything was lost in the translation. It made solo missions quite difficult for fear of getting lost and ninja'd. One day I got brave and went shopping by myself, found an Irish bar with Guinness on tap, got drunk and forgot which way the train station was and which train took me home. I pleaded with dozens of fuckers for help, only to get repeatedly laughed at. I was like, "This is not funny! I'm lost. I need to get home." Oh, how they laughed. I began to think Japan wasn't over being pissed, and maybe it wasn't going to be cool. Then I started reading a book that got me to thinking that even if Japan acted cool that way shit did in the past was way worse than anything I'd done, and they can kiss my ass. The book was called Annihilation Zones: Far East Atrocities of the 20th Century by Stephen Barber. The Asian atrocities that it chronicled were so gruesome, it would even make Jeffrey Dahmer say, "Yo, those guys were fucked up." There's all kinds of craze in there about the shit Hirohito, Japan's emperor up to and through WWII, had his soldiers trained to do. Basically, his men were instructed to rape any man, woman and child that was found in any town or village that they overran, regardless if they were dead or alive. The soldiers' favorite method of killing at the time was decapitation with a blunt bayonet. In 1937 the Japs invaded the Chinese city of Nanjing and for six weeks tortured any inhabitants that hadn't fled. Over that time nearly all were killed, be it with bayonet or incinerated in warehouses. After a month, so many corpses lined the street that they began dumping the bodies in the river until it was so full of bodies that the soldiers could cross the river by walking on the corpses' backs. In all, 250,000 were murdered in that city alone. Here is a pretty jacked excerpt from the book: "In one incident in December 1938, the Japanese captured a young Soviet lieutenant who had been stranded behind Japanese lines. A rare Soviet capture, in contrast to the endless millions of Chinese, provided the opportunity for special treatment, in the form of adroit and sustained mutilation. The Japanese troops carefully carved five stars into his back, then a larger star, together with the hammer-and-sickle emblem of Stalin's regime, into his chest. The lieutenant's feet were set on fire until they turned black and his fingernails wrenched out with pliers. Bullet cartridges were then hammered into his eyes and the bones in his wrists and ankles were shattered with rifle butts. His ears were sliced off and his tongue pulled out by the root. The Japanese then rammed a large anti-tank shell into his anus (finally killing him) and sliced off his penis before inviting his comrades, who had been listening to his screams, to collect him." Some other notables were how the Japanese would wrap wet bamboo around prisoners testicles, then pin them to the ground with nails through their hands and feet in the hot sun. As the bamboo dried, it would tighten and eventually cause their balls to explode into the air. The soldiers would bet on how long it would take and how far they would go.

In Borneo, Japanese soldiers forced British prisoners to line up single file for hundreds of yards and to fuck each other in the ass for hours. Any man that came before they were ordered was decapitated. Remember how I said everything was cool with me and Japan? Fuck that, and fuck those dudes. After getting halfway through the book, I began to feel very uneasy each time someone would smile and giggle at me. Then I remembered the story James Atkins told me about some of the skaters getting jumped in the Roppongi and nearly getting their throat sliced with a glass bottle. The Roppongi makes the shadiest parts of Tijuana look like a tourist resort. It has the bright-light, tall-building, eyes-in-every-alley feel of pre-Guiliani Times Square, but with a worse overall scent of evil in the air. We were warned to avoid the Nigerians, muscle-bound black men who dwarfed Shaq who wouldn't think twice about leaving a foreigner dead. My only visit to the Roppongi district was short and not without incident. Our first stop was a model bar. Walking up to it, we were told that the men should keep their heads down and not socialize with the girls inside. The Japanese Mafia, apparently, liked to keep the girls to themselves. Being drunk, most of us laughed off the warning, but as we stood in line, we watched a young man get dragged out by the back of his neck, taken into the alleyway, beaten senselessly and left for dead. After the thugs reentered the club, I walked around the corner to see what damage had been done. The kid's nose was on the side of his face, his eyes were purple/blue and inflating as I watched, and his teeth looked almost strategically placed on the ground near his head. I walked back to where everyone was, described what I'd seen, and we all decided to go somewhere else. Along the way, Don Nyguen stole a large bottle of Jack Daniels, when and where I can't recall, but he had stolen it nevertheless. At the next bar, Justin Roy was drinking from the bottle of Jack, and the night seemed to be going well. We were in a dive bar that played rock 'n' roll, and the bartender was content that we were ordering a steady flow of booze. Then Justin made the mistake of setting the nearly full bottle of Jack on the bar. The bartender snatched it up. Justin and I were like, "Hey, that's our bottle. What the fuck?"
"My bottle now," he responded. We both lunged over the bar and got a handle on the bottle and began playing tug-o-war with the bartender. He refused to let go, so one of us punched him in the face. He let go of the bottle. We told him off and ran out of the bar. The bartender then hopped the bar, ran outside and told his Andre, the giant Nigerian, we'd just punched him. The Nigerian nodded, mad dogged us, then did this funky whistle that could've only been a call for back up, not that he needed them against our frail, drunken asses. From around the corner came four more men, bigger than the first. We were dead. That's all I could think. I'm going to die over a stolen bottle of Jack Daniels. I was too drunk, too slow, too lost to run anywhere. They'd find me, catch me, torture me, tie bamboo to my nuts and shove a grenade up my ass. This was going to be my last stand, and my legs refused to even hold me up. It all happened in slow motion: They moved forward, we stepped back, and, in a whirlwind of fear, one of us jumped in front of a moving cab. We jumped in, threw money at the driver, and we were off. For a few moments there was only silence and the sound of the wind whizzing past our open windows. Then there were hugs and laughs and high fives. We'd lived without even a hair misplaced. We were stupid Americans, and we were invincible.

The crew during my time in Japan mostly consisted of the Hollywood team: Susan and Kris Markovich, Don Nyguen, Justin Roy, Dorian Tucker and Phil Ladjanski. Other than that, there was Dudelander (the temporary TM), Dan Bourqui, Stacey Lowery, Kyle Leeper, Renee Renee, Jeff (filmer) and Joel (the Hurley guy that held everything together)
Fashion week was taking place in Tokyo while we were there, and Mrs. Markovich was getting her model on. It's funny how disarming she is, good looks aside, one forgets that she is a supermodel. She isn't equipped with the traits one would expect from a high-caliber fashion model: Arrogance, shallowness, vacancy are all unusable terms when trying to describe her. The fact that she was the only girl in a house full of dirty, foul-smelling, untidy dudes seemed to go unnoticed by any of the house's occupants. I'd like to see Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell pull that off without throwing a temper tantrum. In contrast, we were able to see some of the worst byproducts of the fashion world when we went out to a karaoke bar one night with a bunch of models that Susan had met while working the catwalk. They were mostly cunts and pricks. Pretty faces that have survived their whole lives on good looks alone. To talk to them was to talk to a dead deer head mounted on the wall. I sat back and watched as they brutally made their way through Madonna song after Madonna song, thinking, "All it would take is one face-altering car accident to turn these people to suicide." Overall, aside from the near-death thing in the Roppongi, me and Japan got on quite nicely. The money was kind of bananas. I remember paying $3 for a doughnut, then, assuming there was a discount for a dozen, tried to buy a couple dozen for everyone in our house. The guy behind the counter tried to tell me it was $72 for two dozen doughnuts. I, of course, told him to fuck off. Then there was Dudelander, the team manager who got fired for not only being incompetent, but trying to make out with three of his riders. Otherwise, things were cool. I got lots of toys. There of course were the guns, and Renee Renee was there (for comic relief, I suppose), and Phil Ladjanski, the new Hollywood am, was a real treat. Phil is a stoner on par with Adam Alfaro and Jeff Spicolli. I'm actually working on a script right now that teams them up like Cheech and Chong. When we were bored, Renee Renee and I would think of tricks to play on Phil. One night we told him that his boy Yoshi called me and said he had a bunch of girls at a hotel, and they were having an all-night pot party, but Phil had to call by 7 p.m. Renee purposely told him at 7:05. And I just so happened to be on the phone at that time. He was like, "Dude! I need the phone. There's an all-night pot party, and I'm missing it." He was freaking out. It was so great. I stayed on the phone close to 30 minutes just to watch him spazz out. Finally, I got off the phone, he called Yoshi, and Yoshi said he had no idea what he was talking about. Renee and I just giggled as his brain tried to work out the problem. He paused, then said, "Maybe it was a different Yoshi, let me call you back." He hung up, thought it over, and said, "I don't know any other Yoshis." Another fun one was the morning after the filmer hooked up with this chick from New York. He came home and showed us some Polaroids he'd stolen from her photo album, one of which had two topless chicks holding a telephone. When Phil walked in, we showed him the photos and lied that the filmer had had sex with, the two girls. Phil was in hysterics, not sure if he should be happy for the kid or pissed at himself. "I've been in Japan four weeks," he said, "and I can't even hook up with one chick, and he's fucking two chicks at the same time. This sucks." It didn't help that he'd been dissed by one of the English models that seemed easier than a downtown whore two nights earlier. He got so bummed that he went and smoked the rest of his weed. On the flight back to L.A., I sat next to an 18-month-old baby that cried and screamed much louder than the loudest setting on my walkman. As I tried to stay awake through Minority Report I wondered, "Why does Tom Cruise suck so bad now? I mean, this is still the same guy that did Cocktail and Top Gun, right? The two greatest movies of all time. So what the hell is his major malfunction?"

Toy Guns!

I think it's a very natural thing for people to derive pleasure from inflicting pain on others, it gives off a certain sense of power and purpose. It's also just plain fun sometimes to watch someone bleed. I'm sure Ted Nugent would agree with me. If there were times early on in my stay in Japan that wrapped in boredom, they were instantly forgotten when the guns were brought into the house. The Japanese produce toy guns that are exact replicas of actual automatic, semi-automatic and single-shot firearms, right down to the etchings on the stock and handle. The only difference is, they are made of plastic and shoot hard rubber balls. Most are air pump, gas and battery powered, but are significantly weaker. The hand cock air power ones pack a more bitter sting than any BB gun I've ever felt.
There were guns in the house before I arrived, but the possibilities weren't fully explored until everyone owned one. Originally, there were three guns, all very weak. I shot Renee in the face at point-blank range with one, and he barely flinched. The day of the Hollywood signing, new arms purchases were made, and no one would feel safe again. No longer were paper targets used; from then on, humans were the score. People began sleeping with loaded guns under their pillows. There were no timeouts, no truces. The only real rule was, don't shoot Susan anywhere that would leave a visible mark; otherwise, anything else was fair game. Stacey Lowery caught one right below his eye, causing a black eye. I got hit by Renee Renee's Mac 10 on the cheek, giving me a welt that lasted six days. After a while, the house became too small for all the shooting, and we took our guns to the street, shooting pedestrians in the ass, firing through packed trains (I hit a very elderly man in the forehead by accident on one misfire). In the States, if a cop saw you on the street with these guns, you would be shot and killed. They look that real. In Japan, the people just laugh and laugh at the crazy Americans. We became so bored at times that we played Uno with the guns, giving people the choice of drawing only three cards and shooting themselves in the face, instead of drawing four. If you got too drunk at the card table and dropped your gun, heaven forbid, all eight other players were to shoot you point blank in the face. At times people's faces looked as though they had chicken pox. I wish I could show you what some of them looked like (we had AK-47s, Uzis, 357s, snub-nosed pistols, sawed-off shotguns, anything you can think of). I will say that the guns made the trip worthwhile. As I went through security at the airport, to head back home, I saw the outline of the gun on the X-ray machine's screen. Three bag checkers looked at me like they'd just found their most wanted fugitive. I just gave them a half-smile, put my hands in the air and said, "It's a toy gun." Then everything made sense to them, and they just laughed it off and waved me through. I could have been lying. I could have had a real gun. But they didn't care. The Japanese love those toy guns.

Dudelander

I'll keep it brief. Hurley hired some am to be their temporary team manager and help organize the trip to Japan. From what I was told, he just shit-bagged it the whole six weeks before I got there, blowing ungodly amounts of company money on booze and Whatnot. Then there was a tattoo party at the house two nights before I got there. The kid decided he wanted "road warrior" tattooed on his forearm in Japanese. Not having a term for that, the tattoo guy instead tattooed "wild samurai" on his forearm in Japanese. For most of my stay, this was Renee Renee's go-to joke. Whenever it was quiet, he'd start making fun of the kid's "wild samurai" tattoo. It got to the point where the poor kid looked at his arm and said to Renee, "Because of you, I hate this tattoo and have to live with it for the rest of my life." Everyone called him Wild Samurai, until the night we started calling him Gay Samurai. We went to this futura party one night, and WW Samurai got real drunk real quick. Next thing we know, he tried to make out with one of the guys right in front of all of us. Then he turned to some random Japanese guy and put his hand over the Jap's mouth and made out with his hand, fake kissing the dude. The dude pushed him away, gave him a crazy look and walked off. Feeling sad from two rejections, he grabbed another Hurley guy by the back of the hair and tried to forcefully stick his tongue down his throat. It was all very disturbing. Being gay is one thing, but at least most gays have the common courtesy to woo you before trying to make out with you. So began the calls of Gay Samurai. But that name just didnt have flair. In the cab on the way home, Gay Samurai put his hand on the inner thigh of his coworker and tried to make a power move, while in our cab, Renee and I were trying to come up with better names. Rainbow Warrior stuck for a moment, but still didn't pack a real punch. Having just watched Zoolander on the flight over, I suggested Dudelander, personally the best term I've ever heard of. For the next two days, we called him Dudelander, until Hurley told him to get on a flight back to California ASAP so they could fire him. Growing up in Jersey, there was a skateshop called ADC. Most skaters said it stood for Andy Does Children because the owner, Andy, well, you get the picture. I'm just saying, kids, ask around and find out about what kind of person your team manager is before you go taking candy from him. You never know.

Comments

boosh
12 Mar 2007, 22:19

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsFjlLXP9GU

matt g.
23 Jul 2007, 09:17

hahaha nice youtube link.

sam
25 Feb 2008, 02:13

Rainbow Warrior was a greenpeace boat in New Zealand that was attacked by French spies. That isn't a joke. That's why you should never let hippies name boats - real sailors know you have to give them ladies names, or incorporate 'Shark' or 'Hunter' into the title. The use of Rainbow is completely unacceptable. Plus, once a boat has been named, you can't change it. That's why, even though everyone hated the shitty French spies for blowing up the Rainbow Warrior, they were kind of glad that there could be a new boat with a name that wasn't completely lame.

They should have called it Dudelander.