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Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop)

I'll never forget the night before Ali, Doug, Ryan and I left Tokyo. When I try to describe it, I constantly find myself ending the story with, "I guess you just had to be there." Maybe it was only surreal in my mind.

 

Sometimes I worry about telling the story too many times to an unreciprocative audience. Regardless, here's a play-by-play of what happened that night, and I hope you can find some sort of humor in the minutes that passed:

9 p.m.

The four of us had a less-than-favorable-but-not-entirely-bad experience at a yakitory restaurant a couple days prior, so we decided to give a different another yakitory restaurant a shot.

Shout out to Doug who can (almost) always lead us to places with English menus or pictures of the food because we’d be very hungry without him.

 

9:30 p.m.

Like any traditional yakitory restaurant, the place where we ended up had small and fairly cheap portions, and we could order as many as we wanted.

Everyone but me ordered a drink with some kind of alcohol in it.

Ryan didn’t like that the boozy matcha drink he ordered wasn’t sweet, so I drank it and he ordered something else.

Ali ever so practically used a page from the little notebook I was carrying around to write down the dishes and the quantity of what we wanted to order. I was tipsy and very proud of her ingenuity.

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10 p.m.

All of the dishes came out, and I have never had more fun eating a bowl of edamame in my life. The shells were so soft and fuzzy contrasted with the smooth bean...it was a sensory phenomenon. We were all feelin' our drinks by the end of our meal.

 

11 p.m.

After we left the restaurant, we agreed that we should stay up late so that we could all sleep on our flights the next day. That way we’d be less jet-lagged once we arrived back in the States.

Ali wanted to stay out and keep the night going, and none of the rest of us objected.

The plan was to find a karaoke or an ‘80s themed bar, so we scoured the streets with the help of Google Maps going up and down hidden staircases.

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11:30 p.m.

Ali led us to a fancy bar where all of the lights were tinted a little bit blue and they had fancy liquors like Chartreuse. The menu was entirely in Japanese except for one full-page add for mojitos, so Ali pointed to that and held up four fingers for the poor waiter who had to deal with our already tipsy and giggly table.

The drinks came out, and I drank mine quickly.

Details from our conversations are a little bit fuzzy for me, but I just remember a lot of laughing and feeling very happy to be there.

 

12 a.m.

We were drunk and playing Shabooya Roll Call, and when it came around to Doug, he improvised the verse,

“My name is Stephen!

You don’t know me!

I stole Doug’s skin!

And you’re all next!”

All of us spent the next five minutes gasping for air from laughing so hard. Doug seemed proud of his joke. He should be. I still think about it and laugh every time.

 

12:24 a.m.

The check came out, and the bar was cash-only. We all dumped out our heavy collection of coins and pooled together all of our yen.

We didn’t have enough cash to pay the bill.

We were also still a little drunk.

Doug promptly left to find a 7/11 where he pulled out an extra ¥10,000 less than 15 hours before we had to leave the country.

Ryan tried to explain the situation using expressive charade gestures to a confused waiter who (still) did not speak English.

 

1 a.m.

We paid the bill and left to find another place to get a drink and spend all of the money Doug was just forced to withdraw.

 

1:13 a.m.

Ali found a promising staircase that led to a basement bar with ‘80s music, so we followed her lead.

The four of us walked into a small room with maybe five tables.

There were exactly three other people there, all of whom were workers at the bar and spoke no English.

A Duran Duran music video was being projected onto an entire wall, and the place was silent other than the lyrics to “Hungry Like the Wolf” blasting through the speakers.

It straight-up felt like we entered an alternate reality.

 

1:15 a.m.

We sat at a table situated near a corner and flipped through a three-inch binder filled with hundreds of sheet-protected pages listing songs and music videos we could request in the nearly empty bar.

Ali -- our bold and unsung hero of the night -- stumbled through ordering us all whiskey sours.

We drank some more as ABBA and Whitney Houston music videos played in the background.

 

1:30 a.m.

It was getting late, and we were getting tired.

Our conversations were slowing down, and we’d go through moments of silence where we’d all check our phones or let our eyes wander trying to keep them open by soaking in the bizarre situation.

 

1:56 a.m.

We were at the bottom of our drinks, reveling in a lull in our conversation, when out of nowhere……

“SKA BA DA BA BO BE DE BE DO BE DE BE DO DOP

I’M THE SCAT MAN!”

The music video for Scatman started blasting in the tiny, quiet and empty basement bar in Tokyo at 2 a.m., and I felt like I was in a fever dream.

1:57 a.m.

You know when you laugh so hard that the laughs turn silent and your abs start to hurt? I was at that point, conceptualizing how absurd everything felt in that moment.

 

1:58 a.m.

The next few hours after that were a blur because I was so tired and delusional from trying to process the evening’s events.

 

4 a.m.

We made it back to our tiny beds at the very hot and humid hostel and spent the hours leading to dawn sending each other memes in a Facebook group chat, trying to stay awake.

 

9 a.m.

Our last morning in the city was spent bumming around doing last-minute souvenir shopping until we had to head to the airport.

 

2 p.m.

The four of us made it to Narita International Airport satisfied and exhausted.

I was still trying to make sense of everything that happened only about 12 hours before, but a part of me was (and always will be) ok with leaving that night as something inexplicable.

 

I guess you just had to be there.

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