Blonde Yakuza Receptionist, Part 1: The Beginning
Bangkok, Thailand.
The new receptionist at my condo is stunning. She’s a fair-skinned local girl with platinum-blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses who dresses like she’s a bookkeeper at a children’s daycare in rural Hokkaido.
She has a nerdy, quiet look and this air of mature calmness and tranquility, like she wouldn’t take any of my shit. But then she has this massive, full-color, Japanese-style tattoo that covers most of her back and stretches across her shoulders, making her look like Yakuza royalty, like she’d be the one to start the shit. The contrast between her good-girl face and tattooed back and dorky clothes and slinky body short circuits the part of my brain whose job it is to sort women into categories in order to determine my chances of sleeping with them, from Easy Peasy to She Might As Well Be Angelina Jolie — I just have no idea, man.
Blonde Yakuza Receptionist has cold, dead eyes, like she’s seen some shit in the Tokyo underworld, like she’s discarded infant corpses in a dark alley in Shinjuku. She once looked at me with those cold, dead eyes, unblinking and humorless, while I impatiently instructed her on how to print my Myanmar visa application on the archaic printer in the condo’s main office. I could tell that she was formulating six thousand different ways to kill me, and it sent a shiver down my neck and through my spine and across my hip right to my crippling erection.
She’s Thai but has a Japanese fetish (“Culture and food, not the people”) and so looks the part (“I’m an otaku”), yet she dresses like a minimalist French woman. I don’t know what I mean by that, having never been to France. But everything’s just so effortlessly flowy and sultry, you know? Like her outfits are casually thrown together, but it’s probably done conscientiously, methodically. She comes off like that, like she knows what the fuck she’s doing. So she’s casual, but she’s definitely not sloppy: no stray hairs or dangling tampon strings.
We had drinks yesterday. It was the tail-end of the three-day Songkran festival, so the condo management left early, leaving her to tend to the office with the other young admin. Blond Yakuza Receptionist couldn’t leave the property, but she could at least dip out of the office. I had a box of wine that I needed to finish before leaving for Myanmar, so asked if she would help me finish it.
“Yes, I would like. To have a wine,” she said, in succinct, Japanese-y sentences. “Go to the rooftop and wait. For I will be there when I finish my duties.” I made my way to the rooftop patio, wondering which anime I was living, a children’s, Sailor Moon-type episode, or one of the perverted kind that’ll end with me in an octopus costume while devouring her feces-encrusted panties.
Fast-forward three hours and I was blacked out.
What happened was that her and her coworker weren’t drinkers — or were just normal-paced drinkers — and so I ended up finishing most of the box of shitty red wine by myself and promptly blacking out while the sun was still up. Then we went to eat at a Japanese Izakaya where I drunkenly berated Blonde Yakuza Receptionist with my newly learned Thai words before heading to Sway, a bar owned by my fellow Canadians in Thong Lo, where I criticized the entire Filipino race in front of the other admin, who happened to be Filipino.
I woke up in my bed with my night clothes on and and a dry mouth. I launched into my Hangover Protocol which was to take a cocktail of pills — multi-vitamin, potassium, zinc, magnesium, calcium, vitamin D3, BCAAs, omega-3’s and 100mg of caffeine — down a bottle of water and scour the 83 messaging apps on my phone for any sign of drunk texting women that I shouldn’t be drunk texting. There was a response from Blonde Yakuza Receptionist to a message that I didn’t remember sending.
“I will let you know about dinner tomorrow. I have to see about another plan first (^_^)” she said. What am I, not-first-fucking-choice?
I have a strict rule of not dating women that I’d have to see on a daily basis, in an involuntary, unintentional manner, like: classmates, coworkers, neighbors, bartender at the local pub, the cardio bunny in the bright pink neon sports bra at the gym — don’t shit where you eat. Chances are, things won’t work out — and since I’m single at the moment, that means that literally 100% of my past relationships have not worked out — and it’s just sensible to avoid having ex-girlfriends in places that you frequent on a daily basis. I suppose the condominium in which I live should count as one of those places.
But I feel that this time, it’s okay. I’ll be flying in and out of Bangkok in the next few weeks, and then for the entire summer on my way to Europe and then back to Toronto. So if this does end up being a terrible idea, at least I’ll only have to suffer the uncomfortable encounters and awkward run-ins for only a few days scattered throughout the next month. Then all that’s left is to avoid her Yakuza crime lord uncle, who’ll scour Bangkok and burn down any building that I stepped into in the past six weeks.
