I DINED WITH THE CLOWN

When Soul Coughing played Japan in 1997, our tech Gentleman Jim called McDonald’s the embassy.

I didn’t want to go to Tokyo and eat at McDonald’s. But my brain got desperate for rest: I went to the embassy.

It wasn’t restful: at the counter, a girl in a maroon McDonald’s uniform raised her arm in a rigid hailing gesture, yelling the traditional welcome-to-our-restaurant greeting: “!!!!!”

We went to Denny’s in Kasukabe. I read a Murakami novel where a saxophone player hangs out at Denny’s: it felt defensible. Though later in the novel—perhaps in all Murakami novels—a dude makes linguine for breakfast.

It wasn’t a Denny’s as we knew Denny’s. The menu was pictures of unidentifiable food-cubes. There was a button on the table—an emergency bell?

We flagged a waitress down—a teenager. She was dumbfounded to be flagged down. She got a manager.

The manager demonstrated—so annoyed—how to press the button, making scary eye contact with us, speaking slowly in Japanese. We weren’t getting it. She spoke louder and slower, repeatedly touching the button, getting angrier that we weren’t picking up what she was laying down.

We loved it.

Seafood makes me ill, so I learn variations of Is there fish in this? in every language. When we pressed the button and the waitress came, I tried to say .

Imagine Roberto Benigni in Down by Law walking up to a teenage waitress and blurting, Please I can’t eat fish thank you!