Tatoo Blues

I want to relay a story about a bad day I had two Saturdays ago. Actually, I’ll skip over the really bad parts and jump right into the fray (and that’s a good definition of my life in general). I ended up that day with a friend who was going to get a tattoo. We went to the tattoo dude’s apartment in separate cars (completely unnecessary detail), and to make a really long story short, I ended up waiting for 3 hours in the living room with 3 guys, friends of the tattoo dude, who were hard at work. Their profession of choice was of the “Receptionist/Driver for Escort Service” category. All I can say is, I am damn proud of my gutter Japanese skills.
These guys knew I was a foreigner and were consciously/unconsciously shrouding the content of their conversations concerning shady/sleazy deeds by using the absolutely most Kansai-inflected dialect and verbiage… And I understood every word of it. I’m a big fan of yakuza flicks and have always loved studying the Kansai dialect, and probably know more underground/sleazeball slang than any Japanese not sniffing thinner or missing fingers. These guys were talking about the craziest shit right in front of me.
Some gems:
– I heard them consulting each other if they had girls in the stable that were anorexic, for some client with a thin-fetish they were had on hold
– One more than one occasion, I saw the old customer service trick where they say “please hold”, cover the mouthpiece and wait 30 seconds, then smugly tell the caller that whatever they wanted wasn’t possible (ad-libbing the reasons for why, as well)
– They referred to one of the girls as “the one who likes coke bottles”
– There was also apparently another girl who looks like a young Seiko Matsuda, with a third nipple
– In an academic bout between calls, I heard the most (sorry about this, Corky) retarded summation of the war in Iraq to date. I am an avid peacenik bloghunter, so this means a lot. Pre-war economic sanctions were described as “the UN not buying oil from Baghdad because Bush’s father said it was of poorer quality than Saudi Arabia’s oil”. (Actually, I kind of like that explanation)
– One of them shared a business revelation: If you drove around in a van and stole all the satellite antennaes attached to people’s balconies in Nara, you could ship them AND the van to Baghdad and make a fortune selling them on the street. I almost encouraged him to do it, because all I could imagine was the Iraqi headline in six months, “Jap’s Imported Loot Ganked by Local Entrepeneurs”.
Well, I think Net Nanny will officially bust a nut with this post.