Mr. Bluebird
on My Shoulder
I love cars. I could spend days caressing the voluptuous curves of a Porsche Boxter, basking in the dignified sheen of a polished, pearl-white Bentley and swoon to the muscular nobility of a fully loaded Toyota Surf.
For me, the Tokyo Auto Show is four massive exhibition halls of heaven on Earth. At least it would have been if I didn't have to share it with these guys whose gauges are three notches below empty.
Take this one jerk. I’m bent over the hood of a Nissan convertible, admiring the engine’s bulging air-intake cowling, and he just starts emitting exhaust into my ear.
“I had a Nissan once,” he says.
“Excuse me,” I say, pulling back from the masterpiece of steel and technology.
“Nissan Bluebird. Best car ever made if you ask me.”
I didn’t.
“Well, let me tell you. This thing was 10 years old when I bought it. Only paid $200 for the thing. I bought it from my boss, Tom Whitfield. (Like white field without the e) and the guy knew zip about cars. So when I went to pick it up, he was all nervous. ‘If it doesn’t start up, you don’t have to pay for it,’ he says. But it fired right up, and we took off down the road. At the first stoplight, the engine died and it wouldn’t start back up. The guy was apologizing and wondering how we were going to get it back to his house. But I just turned it over a few more times and it coughed back to life.”
Without a word, I headed for the Alfa Romeo booth. But Mr. Bluebird trails behind, cornering me by the candy-apple red Spyder and starting in again.
“He didn’t look as relieved as he should've, though,” he says. “I think he figured I wasn’t going to buy it, and he would have to call the junk yard to come drag it from his parking space. But I needed a car. And, heck, for $200, even if I had to replace the entire engine, I’d still have an operable vehicle for under 800 bucks.”
Yeah, I thought, $200 is less than $800. But, by that point, I'd totally lost concentration and was beginning to envision this guy being run over by a wine-red Cadillac Seville with the Tommy Hilfiger detail package. Don’t get upset, I told myself. Just walk away.
So I did just that. In a few minutes, I had reentered the magical world of cars and was happily reclining in the red and black leather interior of a Lambourghini.
“Hey baby, let’s cruise.”
There he was again. Sliding his pudgy posterior into the passenger’s seat.
“Gotta’ love those Italian cars, eh?” he says, grinning.
“That’s what I was trying to do,” I replied. Then they guy starts in again about his Nissan.
“Yeah, I had a friend who bought an Alfa Romeo about the time I bought my Bluebird. Man, he was in love with that thing. But his mechanic had more dates with it,” he snorts, laughing at his own pathetic joke.
That’s it, I thought.
“Hey,” I said. “Have you seen this baby under the hood?”
“Not yet, but I bet it’s so cool,” he says, gobbling my first offer of conversation.
“Let’s take a look,” I said, stepping out of the low-slung rocket of an automobile.
Walking around to the front of the vehicle, I gestured for him to take a closer look at the elegant knot of chrome, iron and magnesium that make up the engine. But just then, something kicked up a ruckus at the adjacent Mazda display, and the guy pulled his head up to look.
I saw my chance and took it. Gingerly, I lifted the lever that releases the hood. Like a precisely crafted piece of industrial sculpture, the hinges twisted silently as the hood swooped downward.
I didn’t stick around to see the expression on his face. I didn’t have to. The piercing wail I heard a split-second later was reward enough.
I didn’t see Mr. Bluebird again. As I made my way from the Makuhari Messe main building to the motorcycle annex across the street, I did notice several ambulences speeding by, but soon I was deep into an emotional moment with a Bimota 750.
By the time I left the site, I had all but forgotten Mr. Bluebird. Somehow, though, taking care of him like that boosted my confidence. Who’s to say it had anything at all to do with it, but the next month, I got the promotion I’d been angling for at the office. To celebrate, I went out and bought the Lambourghini.
For the next six months, I could only be reached by portable phone, installed in the dashboard of my gleaming Beamer.
Then one day, as inevitably happens even to the most perfect of motor vehicles, I found myself by the side of the road with an engine that would not start. (It turned out that it was a simple fuse that had burned out because the guy at the electronics shop didn’t install my phone correctly.) But I had no way of then knowing that, so I took a look under the hood.
Slipping open the latch and hoisting up the sleek, black engine cover, I noticed a coin-sized smudge of crimson on the inside edge. Then I spotted them. Down in the little groove that catches rainwater so it doesn’t drain onto the engine were three bloody, decaying digits, molded into a single gooey mass. One had managed to land standing, the other two supporting it from either side. It looked for all the world like, after all those months, Mr. Bluebird had somehow managed the last word. There he was, in my own Lambourghini, giving me the finger. 4
Don’t take my word for it though, please try them out for yourself. All you have to do is raise your head from that greasemark on your chest and move it a little from side to side. As you do this you will notice a flood of new sensations as something which we scientists call “light” comes bouncing into your newly-discovered organs from the sea of objects moving in front of you in a typical Tokyo street scene.
I have yet more astonishing revelations. Most of those objects bobbing around before you, are in fact your fellow Tokyoites! Once you use these frontal, light-sensitive navigational organs, which we will hereafter refer to by their medical name of “eyes,” you will notice that with a little physical co-ordination, it becomes possible to anticipate the movements of your fellow citizens -- and even foreigners! -- and so avoid bumping into them every 2 or 3 steps.
The best results are achieved when everybody uses their eyes together, then, by mutually turning only a few degrees left or right well in advance, it becomes possible to slip by people without even scraping shoulders, never mind lodging your elbows deep in their rib cages.
Once you have mastered these simple arts of anticipation and navigation, you might find that your once neglected organs have several other interesting uses. For example, as you deftly glide through the densest of crowds, you might happen to see other enlightened souls glancing back at you instead of careering into you as they stare down at their feet. As your frontal navigational organs detect each other and make what we medical experts call “eye contact,” you might experience a pleasant sensation and even feel like smiling at a complete stranger, or, if you have truly mastered your new organs of sight, winking! Once this has been accomplished, you have truly emerged from the primeval realm of push and shove and entered upon the sunlit uplands of mutual awareness and respect for other people’s personal space.
This article does not reflect -- in any way -- the views of Tokyo YY. On the contrary we enjoy bumping into each other. Therefore we like to encourage our readers to look even deeper -- wherever that might be :
However we fully respect the views of Tokyoites like C.B. Liddell; that’s why we publish their views without fear nor fervor. Ed.
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