Coming out of the elevator on the sixth floor I thought I must have got off at the wrong stop. In front of me were two giant ornate doors plastered with studio shots of some very handsome ladies. Posing seductively in lingerie, they were all smiles, Adam’s apples and silicone boobs, with a few manicured man-hands clutching the overflowing breasts of fellow Y-chromosome cohorts. There was certainly no subtlety here. Even the door handles outdid themselves. Of Dionysus like proportions, they were golden penises thicker than you could get your hand around and a foot in height. With disturbed amusement, I turned to the other side of the narrow corridor to see a plain door with a discreet sign next to it: Greengrass. This was the right floor after all.
Inside, I stood in semi-darkness. Eric Clapton played softly in the background. My pupils dilated, and when the room came into focus it was surprisingly small and demure. The walls were hung with prints of tasteful masterpieces and lined with turquoise, deep-buttoned seating. Still, it lacked the grungy feeling of Jack’s. Everything was low to the ground, hard-angled and decidedly masculine.
A dozen tables skirted the perimeter of the room, each with round, cushioned stools beside them. There were no windows. At one end, a karaoke machine lay dormant, the wall behind it dominated by a large audio system. It made me distinctly anxious. An unobtrusive bar occupied the opposite side of the room, and it was here that three men in pressed white shirts were sitting. I must have startled them with my unannounced appearance, as they dropped their three cigarettes into an ashtray like schoolboys caught smoking, but when the oldest stood and solemnly gestured for me to approach, the smoking resumed.
I was taller than him, but without heels we were probably the same height. He wore a peculiar black bow tie and his hair was unnaturally shiny, as though freshly sprayed on with aerosol paint. His face was heart-shaped. Kind eyes, tiny mouth, bad skin.
He looked at me expectantly, his hands clasped behind his back.
‘Komban wa,’ I bowed. ‘Nathan from One Eyed Jack sent me to your club. I’d like to find out about working here.’
Nodding, he motioned towards a tiny table between two liquor cabinets filled floor to ceiling with bottle. The absurdly low table was no higher than my knees, and as we sat across from each other I felt like a Girl Scout at a secret powwow. With both hands, he presented his name card. An inscription read ‘Nakamura Nishi’ beneath three large kanji characters. He was the club’s manager.
Normally, hostess clubs are managed by a mama-san, an older woman who is typically an ex-hostess herself. She maintains relationships with the customers, cataloguing their personal preferences while simultaneously presiding over the girls like a mother hen. In the case of Greengrass, however, it appeared that Nishi had been installed as a kind of male mama-san.
I made my introduction and formalities mostly in Japanese, and he smiled without parting his lips until I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Finally, he spoke.
‘Prease, I am Nishi. Nakamura family name. You speak Japanese berry well.’
‘Thank you, but I don’t really. Just a little. Chotto! I held up my thumb and forefinger measuring just an inch in the international sign for ‘just a little’.
‘My Engrish not so berry good. I am sorry.’ Nishi’s head bobbed up and down on his shoulders as he laughed without noise. He placed a piece of paper in front of me that seemed to outline the club’s system — a jumble of paragraphs about wages, bonuses and the conditions to be met in order to receive them. It was surprising that you were fined twenty-five-hundred yen for being sick and ten-thousand yen for not coming to work, but from their point of view I suppose it was necessary. Each point took Nishi several minutes to explain, a combination of his poor English and incredibly slow and humbled manner. With an endless stream of clarifying questions on my part, I slowly began to grasp the differences in his club’s system that ‘some girls do better with’.
The hourly wage was higher, but guaranteed hours were shorter. The bonus system sounded promising, but it required the building of continuous relationships. I wasn’t sure about that. It sounded awkward and made earning potential a lot more complicated than showing up and knocking back as many standard drinks as you could every night — the paradoxical advantage of Jack’s.
Here, in order to earn a decent wage, you had to be popular. Customers had to ask specifically for you, and to achieve your bonus you had to reach a quota of a certain number of dohans, which were pre-arranged dinner dates with customers before escorting them into the club. Otherwise, you were on the minimum-wage wagon.
Greengrass certainly fit my preconceived notion of a traditional hostess club, closer to the geisha system from which it stemmed than the high-flying One Eyed Jack. Instead of a mirrored stage and half-naked cabaret dancers, here the karaoke machine and its catalogue of songs provided the secondary entertainment. Hostesses were valued for their conversational skills (otherwise known as ego pampering), rather than just as drinking partners who could hold their liquor and look hot in a skirt. However, the biggest distinction between the clubs was how much more money you could pull at Jack’s for doing essentially the same job. A couple of hundred dollars a night multiplied over three months becomes a dynamically decisive factor. If I could work at One Eyed Jack, I would.
When Nishi had finished, there was only one crucial thing I had left to know. ‘Do I have to sing karaoke?’ I was definitely not going to sing karaoke. That was my worst fear, but Nishi’s head bobbed silently up and down.
‘No, no. Chelsea-san not singing. Only customer. Some girls sing. Some girls sing too much, give me berry bad headache. You come Friday night, okay?’
Today was Thursday.
‘Ummm, can I let you know tomorrow? I need to think about it.’ I didn’t tell Nishi it all depended on whether Nathan from One Eyed Jack said yes, and I wanted to discuss it with Matt. ‘Can I call you tomorrow after, I don’t know, seven o’clock?’
‘Okay, tomorrow. I wish for you to decide Greengrass. I wait for your call. If Chelsea-san say yes, I will be berry happy man.’
‘Hello, is Nathan there please?’
A soft female voice instructed me to wait, so I waited. And waited. I kept waiting until I worried my phone credit would run out. Just before the sickly sweet J-Pop oozing into my ear started to cause irreversible cavities, a man picked up. ‘Nathan is not here.’
‘Okay, I was in last night. He told me to ring at seven about working there.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Chelsea.’
‘All right. I don’t know anything about it, but he’s not here and he won’t be here until Monday.’
‘Monday?’ I repeated in disbelief. But Nathan had been so specific about tonight.
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘So should I call back on Monday?’
‘Uh ... yes, call on Monday.’ I hung up and pulled out Nishi’s card from my wallet. It was all a bit mysterious. Monday was three days away and somehow I suspected I wouldn’t get an answer even if I waited until then.
Ring, ring. ‘Moshi moshi!’
‘Hello, Nakamura-san? This is Chelsea, I came into your club last night. I’ve decided I’d like to work for you.’