Record Shopping in Tokyo, and a picture from August 1987

Tito went record shopping more weekends than not during the length of his stay in Japan. It was a very different experience compared to shopping back home in multiple ways. The stores tended to be cramped with narrow aisles between record and CD bins. There also seemed to be two types of record shops. One carried mainly domestic (Japanese) releases and the other was much broader in scope and had the Western artists that he and I favored. The small-ish neighborhood that he lived in (Kita-senju) only had the type of shops that focused on Japanese music so he traveled further afield to the bitter shopping districts to look for collectible goodies for both of us.

During one such sojourn to Shibuya, he took his brother along and had him take photos for me to see what sort of circumstances he was operating in. I couldn't read anything, but he did his best to describe the scenes in the pictures on his cassette tapes to me. One thing he told me was that some shops had a large number of promotional posters for new releases. He learned enough Japanese to request one of these posters when making a purchase and started up a large collection for both of us. The items that flowed between us were more than just material objects. They were ways of connecting our experiences at a distance.

This is one of the pictures that he sent me showing him standing on an overpass holding some of the booty from the day's efforts.

"Clothes Horse", and a 1987 photo

"You're turning into a clothes horse!" My mother said this after I put on my newest outfit. She had spent all of my life trying to get me to like clothes including treating every Easter and new school year as a happy time in which she "gifted" me with new togs. When I was fatter and younger, I hated clothes and had no interest in them because nothing looked good on my body. Now that I'd lost weight and looked better in them, she was criticizing me for being too interested in them. Such was the pattern with my mother who made sure that, no matter what I did, I was always failing.

This is the first picture of me that I sent to Tito. It was also the most adventurous piece of clothing that I ever wore in public as it was woven with gold threads throughout the "jacket" and "culottes" at the bottom. It was actually one integrated piece and a pain in the ass for going to the bathroom as it had to be pulled off entirely like a swimsuit. Still, I loved wearing it with black tights and felt I looked pretty good in it. When Tito got this picture, he didn't notice my clothes. Rather, he noticed how sparse my KISS pictures were on my wall in comparison to Aida and Jo who wallpapered their walls. I had plenty of posters, but I didn't like the "wallpaper" look and intentionally chose more space between my pictures.

Postage Shock, and a photo from August 1987

My first package to Tito after he started work in Japan contained the usual assortment of tapes. The main difference was that it had a long and confusing address which I checked again and again to make sure I'd copied it correctly. It was addressed to his school's office since I didn't have his home address yet.

Both of us knew that our postage costs were going to increase after our long distance relationship changed from transcontinental to international, but I had no idea how much more it would be. I handed my padded parcel over the the nosy postal workers and they weighed it up. It would have cost $2-$3 if I'd sent it to California. They charged me $20 to send it to Japan. (Note: In 2020 dollars, that's $45 for one small package.)

I told Tito in my next correspondence that I didn't know how often I could tape him with that sort of price tag. He came back and said, "Don't you know about "small packet"? I had no idea what that was, but the mail bitches who read my mail and vexed me so didn't mention it when I asked them if there was a cheaper way to send my package.

In the end, I had to educate the workers at our small town post office about small packet rates. They argued with me at first, and I asked for a rate chart. In the end, they sighed as if I were imposing a great hardship on them and acquiesced after I'd pointed out the existence of this much lower rate.

Tito sent me a photo of himself mailing a small package (via "small packet") to me from his local post office once he had settled in Kitasenju. Fortunately for him, the Japanese postal workers were far more knowledgeable and polite.

A drive with mom, and a yearbook photo from 1982

I was wearing a striped shirt and dark brown stretch pants while sitting in the front passenger seat. My mother said, "If you lost weight, you could move a lot easier." I flexed my legs and told her that I could move just fine. She paused for a moment and then added, "If you lost weight, you wouldn't sweat between your legs so much." I replied with, "I don't sweat between my legs." She got angry with me and said, "You know what I mean."

The truth was that I didn't know what she meant. I was 17 years old and she was 39. She was talking about her problems with being fat and assuming they were my problems, too. Even though I was morbidly obese, I could sit in cross-legged yoga positions and was very flexible. I also didn't realize that "between your legs" meant what my mother would call "the wee wee area," and not between my thighs. That being said, I didn't sweat in either of these places as I don't seem to sweat much at all (and still don't), but I guess she did.

What my mother didn't say was that she wouldn't be as embarrassed by me if I lost weight. I also concluded that she'd love me more if I did. I think that I remember that exchange in the car, which was not atypical for my mother and me as she often was critical of my fat while ignoring her own, was that I had reached an age where I understood what wasn't being said as clearly as what was.

The striped shirt I wore on that day lives on in local history as it was the one I was wearing when I was photographed with another classmate as "most artistic" among my high school classmates. I won't publish the entire page, but I will say that all of the other categories for people who were daring, flirtatious, musical, etc. showed people in staged positions looking happy and having fun. I guess the photographer not only didn't feel I (and my compatriot, whose glee at posing with me is clear in his countenance) warranted a fun picture, but not even a reshoot when I was ready and smiling instead of being caught in an awkward open-mouthed moment.

The Muralist, and a picture from June 1987

My bedroom used to be my parent's room. It had dirty mint-green walls and cruddy white baseboards. Several years after my sister and I moved into the room, I painted it white and the baseboards a light brown. These changes were meant to make it look less dingy, but also to allow me to paint on the walls.

When I was 11 or 12, I painted an enormous black and white illustration of a horse standing on rocks in a mountain-like landscape on the wall at the foot of the steps. As I got older, it started to mock me with it's imperfections. My mother protested, but I painted over it and promised to try again some day with a better horse painting. I was sidetracked by my infatuation with KISS so the horse never moseyed back to the foot of the steps. From the time I was 13 to 21, I painted KISS on my walls several times. One was a very large mural that never quite worked for me so I kept fussing with it until I grew frustrated and painted over  it. I was a perfectionist which allowed me to constantly fail.

I was painted my room's walls and even the floor in an effort to transform a pig with lipstick. It was never clean enough. The paint was never smooth enough. It always looked like paint had dried over dirt no matter how hard I tried, but it was better than the rest of our house. The lack of a carpet made it better yet since our pets "accidents" couldn't permanently stain or stink up our bedroom. I made the space mine, and filled it with things which divorced me from the rest of my family's tastes and interests.

My bedroom contained two pieces of exercise equipment that I paid for myself when I decided to lose weight and get in shape. One was a cheap exercise bike that had a tension control courtesy of two fiber pads that pressed on the sides of the front tire. The other was a mini trampoline. I used each of these for 45 minutes every day in an effort to bring my body to heel. It worked, but only so far. I was the only one in my family to ever do any sort of structured exercise, though my mother once bought one of those exercise pulleys that can be attached to a door handle. It was used once or twice and abandoned.

This is the second photo of me that I sent to Tito. I'm sitting on my trampoline with a poster of Paul Stanley behind me. My college graduation tassel is hanging on the wall and some ancient curtains that someone gave us are covering the window. During that time, I was experimenting with style and wearing bejeweled bolos with button-down shirts. I was also wearing black pants and sitting in such a way as to obscure my fat belly from view in pictures.