It was May. According to the Daily Yomiuri foot-and-mouth disease had befallen the cows and pigs of Miyazaki prefecture, and there was a vet shortage. This brought me back to my student days in Scotland, where the same disease had been debilitating cows and ruining farmers, so the farmers put buckets outside their farms, saying “Dip your feet!” to keep it from spreading further.
In response, when Alexandros threw a party at his house in Lion Crescent, he put a bucket at the door and wrote “Dip your feet!” on the side people could see when they came in. On the other side, visible from the inside of the house, he wrote “Barf Bucket”. The phrasing was Brad’s. Alexandros wasn’t really part of the crowd at Brad’s place – which I called Caress’s place because in my opinion she was the boss there, and the house deserved her name – but he came around sometimes for weed. Caress was a sweet, gorgeous 21st century Beatnik with big titties, corkscrew curls, and a doll’s face whose lust for adventure knew no bounds, so she had the best weed connections.
One night we were sitting at Caress’s house and Alexandros came around. Brad opened the door and told him to come in. But Alexandros said no. He just wanted to know something, so he talked to Brad by the door. He usually talked only to the boys. He felt more comfortable talking to them. Girls made him nervous. He was always trying to get one (‘pull’, we called it – meaning you took somebody home to have sex with after a party) and his despair was funny to us. At 7 Clachan Place, girls were the dominant force, so Alexandros never stuck around. We were the kind of girls that intimidated him the most. We were funny, smart, and pretty, smoked weed, laughed a lot, and didn’t want to have sex with him.
I was sitting on the kitchen sofa looking up at curls of smoke rising from my mouth. Alexandros’s and Brad’s conversation hit my ears as clearly as a wet, Greek greeting kiss. Alexandros: Hey Brad, what you write on a bucket to be sick. Brad: (his usual helpful, mild-mannered self) To be sick? Alexandros: Yeah, you know, drink too much beer, err ehe… (retching sounds) Brad: O, a barf bucket? Alexandros: What? Brad: You mean like this err ehe… (retching sounds). Alexandros : Yes, yes. Like this. Brad: I don’t know. Barf bucket? Alexandros: Barf…How you spell that? Brad spelled the word ‘barf’, as Alexandros wrote it on the bucket in big ugly block letters.
I exploded. The whole scene was so funny to me, I kept chewing up pencils for days on end as I kept thinking back to it in my Japanese classes, where it was embarrassing to suddenly laugh out loud, especially as people kept messing up their sentences, and would have hated me for laughing. I always got it right. I couldn’t afford to laugh. I had to be sweet like Brad and just help people learn what they really needed. B-A-R-F.
