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DEBTOR NATION

Chapter 1 ♦ AIRMAIL FROM AFTERLIFE

1976

One rainy summer day, I packed my backpack and went to America. I was seventeen. I knew what I was doing: I was escaping from the debacle at home. And I was looking for something. For what exactly, I didn’t know, but I’d go look for it in America. There, the heat burned in my nostrils. Lawns were brown. Cars were big and air-conditioned. Girls went gaga over my accent. Guys thought I was cool. And I fell in love with it all.
          Three years later, I was paying my way through college in Texas when the notion of home, distant and convoluted as it had become, blew up with gratuitous violence. A Boeing had crashed into a mountain in Turkey, killing all 155 people aboard. I heard about it on the radio. But I didn’t connect the dots.
          A few days later, I found a message from the operator in my campus PO Box. Telegram, call Western Union, it said. I called from one of the pay phones. My heart was pounding in my temples, and I had trouble hearing the lady on the other end.
          “I’d read it to you,” she said. “But it’s in German. I think you better come by and get it.”
          “I’m fixing to go to work. Can’t you try to read it to me?”
          “Oh dear.”
          “Is it long?”
          “Two lines.”
          “Can you spell it?”
          “Well, I guess I could. Are you ready?”
          I pulled out a notepad and pen. “Ready,” I said, though I knew that I wasn’t ready, that I’d never be ready for whatever she was about to spell.
          “E-L-T-E-R-N new word,” she said, “A-M new word M-O-N-T-A-G new word M-I-T new word F-L-U-G-Z-E-U-G new word I-N new word D-E-R new word T-U-R-K-E-I—”
          “Stop! Please.” I couldn’t write anymore. Parents on Monday with plane in Turkey.... German sentences, even in abbreviated telegram style, had the main verb at the end, but I didn’t want to hear the main verb, didn’t want to hear it spelled out letter by torturous letter. “Thank you. That’s enough.”
          I’d escaped the debacle at home and had gone as far away as possible. But this wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I stood there in a daze, brain deadlocked, numb, clutching the receiver, drowning in abysmal emotions.
          Then I went to work. It was just a part-time job, but now I needed the money more than ever. Afterward, I drove to the Western Union office and picked up the yellow slip of paper with twelve lines of all-caps alphanumeric gibberish and two lines of readable text. It was from my sister, sent from the town where she was staying with friends. But it didn’t include their phone number. And my brother was on vacation somewhere. So there was no way to reach him either.

Next....

TESTOSTERONE PIT, the novel

Wolf Richter

Chapter 1 ♦ Circle Jerk

It was Saturday, the biggest day of the week, and everyone was working bell to bell, over forty salesmen, though Ferronickel didn’t know exactly how many he had because some hadn’t shown up and might have started selling cars some other place, and because he’d hired a bunch of new guys an hour ago.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he sang in a basso profundo voice as he marched across the showroom in his asymmetric gait. He was the general sales manager at the Ford Superstore. His Tabasco Sauce tie was loosened, his collar unbuttoned. His gut that hung over his belt strained his shirt. He had puffy eyes and was full of mean energy, ready to explode, ready to force things to happen. He blew out the door, came to a halt on the porch that surrounded the showroom on three sides, and lit a cigarette.

Al Millikin, one of his four sales managers and perhaps the best closer in town, was watching Mad Boxer work a customer on the truck lot. Potential deal.

“Why can’t he bring that guy inside and write him up?” Ferronickel said.

“He ought to tell him we got free pussy on the showroom,” Millikin said.

“Don’t give me any ideas for our next live remote.”

“Come to think of it, that would be a hell of a lot more effective than the classical rock-and-roll shit we’ve been doing.”

“For our male customers.”

“We could alternate. Free pussy one day, free Godiva chocolates the next. We’d have both ends of the spectrum covered.”

“You’re a fucking Einstein, Millikin.”

Reginald Pierce, another sales manager, a big guy with a shortish Afro, was jumpy and his eyes darted about. He fretted about Whacker Packer, Hackman Jones, JoAnn Delouche, and several other salesmen who’d formed a dope ring by the plate-glass window. If left alone, they’d make up rumors, complain about dealership coffee, and infect each other with morale problems. He singled out a young guy.

“Freddie T, are you going to participate in a circle jerk?” he growled. They called him Freddie T because of his unpronounceable Greek last name. “Or are you going to sell something?”

It startled them; they’d forgotten all about selling. And they drifted apart.

Lou Massago gesticulated on the phone in one of the closing booths. He wore a white button-down shirt, a red and blue tie, slacks, and ostrich-skin boots. A scar curved upward from the right corner of his mouth, giving him a lopsided grin even when he was serious. His eyes were set close together and peered out from under his bushy eyebrows with ferocious intensity. But he had a soft voice when he wanted to, and now he wanted to because he was talking to a customer about a 15-passenger van that had come out of the rental fleet. There were ten of them. They were scratched and dented and had too many miles on them, and they were overpriced, and no one could sell them, but he was king of sales, and if he could sell them, it would prove he could sell anything.

He hated working the phone. He needed his customers in front of him, needed to stare into the whites of their eyes. But no one had sold any of those vans yet, and to prove he was king of sales and could sell anything, he’d decided to sell them all. Besides, the Saturday rush hadn’t begun yet, and calling old customers was more productive than standing around waiting for something to happen.

Next....

Monday

Sep122011

Don't Try This At Home

Monday, September 12, 2011 at 1:00AM

Once again, fugu poisoned do-it-yourselfers. On September 10, a couple in Nagasaki, Japan, made sashimi out of a puffer fish the husband had caught in a nearby bay. An hour after eating it, the wife complained about numbness around her mouth and in her limbs. When he also developed the symptoms, they called the emergency number, and both were hospitalized. The toxin soon paralyzed them, and only rapid intervention in the emergency room saved them from asphyxiation. They remain in critical condition.

Fugu is a traditional delicacy, now eaten in high-end restaurants that specialize in it. Despite its comical look, it can be deadly if handled improperly. Depending on species, certain body parts, especially the viscera, contain tetrodotoxin, a colorless, tasteless, odorless neurotoxin that is 1,000 times more toxic than potassium cyanide. The lethal dosage is only 1-2 mg (Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare).

If untreated, people die within four to six hours. There is no antidote, but if you make it to the hospital and get hooked up to a respirator in time, your chances of survival are pretty good.

The edible parts are limited to muscles, skin, or milt, depending on the species. Japan's Food Sanitation Law specifies the safe parts of each of the 22 species it recognizes as edible—of the hundreds that occur in the seas around Japan. But many of the completely toxic species look very similar to the edible ones. Hence, the law stipulates that only licensed specialists may sell or prepare fugu. However, the actual licenses and ordinances that regulate its handling are issued by local governments.

Fugu is an old passion whose risks have been known for a long time. There were even efforts to regulate its consumption after an incident that decimated a group of samurai. In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi summoned samurai from all over Japan to the coast in preparation for his invasion of Korea. The samurai, unlike locals, didn't know about the dangers of fugu. They delighted in its textures and flavors and even ate the viscera. They died at a very inconvenient time, just before the invasion. Hence, Hideyoshi ordered his surviving vassals not to eat fugu. The ban morphed into a samurai tradition that was carried into the Edo period, though commoners kept eating it. And so apparently did samurai, albeit with a sense of guilt—based on the logic that they should preserve their life until they needed to die for their lord, rather than squandering it through culinary pleasures.

These days, despite ongoing warnings by the national government and local health offices, people continue to catch this deadly fish and prepare it at home without proper training. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, fugu poisoned 451 people from 2001 to 2009, but killed only 23—thanks to immediate hospital treatment. In almost all cases, unlicensed do-it-yourselfers had prepared the fugu.

Curiously, it has been whispered among fugu lovers that the liver is an utmost, if forbidden and extremely dangerous, delicacy. Old texts already described it as such. At the apex of pleasure, the flavors and textures combine with a tingling of your lips and with the thrilling thought that this might be the last bite you'll ever eat.

Definitely, don't try this.... Tokyo Tidbit: Permit Required For Deadly Pitfall

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Reader Comments (4)

Why take the risk? I can understand people trying heroin or bungee jumping, but putting it all on the line for a bit of fish is just daft.

October 4, 2011 |

Fugu better be good if it can kill you! After you eat it, you don't want to be thinking, '... hmmm. Should've just gone for the ramen to be honest.' Always carry a So You're Going to Die pamphlet just in case.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVrTepl2hvs

February 19, 2012 |

Raul

I mistakenly ate one I caught in Mexico in 1974 but I just naturally chose to eat only the white flesh part which saved my life. It was a very wild night with extremely vivid stars. They found me washing back and forth in the surf in the morning. Its good bragging rights but I wont be doing it again.

February 26, 2012 |

davidoff

Davidoff - you're a lucky man to be able to talk about it.

February 28, 2012 |

Wolf Richter

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