American Dream

If I were to be desperate for a colorful character in a story, I would have to reluctantly have to consider adding the character of Yoshi. I remember one of his first days in the US when he could speak almost no English and a bouncing swarm of kids surrounded him, trying to get him to translate curse words into Japanese. He must have been about ten years old.

Always up to oddball stunts, Yoshi grew up to be a chunky teenager--his appearance was almost cartoonish. He had long, bushy black hair, wore mirrored sunglasses, blared rock & roll music on his headphones, and wore a bandana for a headband--usually with the Japanese flag in front. Straight out of a cheesy '80's movie.

We were in Boy Scouts together, and Yoshi was famous for not being able to wake up in the morning. All of us would have gotten up, made a fire, cooked breakfast, cleaned the dishes, packed, and broken camp, and Yoshi would still be fast asleep in his tent. Our scoutmaster would drag him out into the middle of camp, which Yoshi laughed off with a shrug. Being a caricature didn't seem to bother him.

When he was eighteen, Yoshi signed on with the US Navy for some incredibly long period of time. We all thought it was pretty funny that he would select the Navy, because poor Yoshi was the only kid in our scout troop who could never swim. Predictably, Yoshi was miserable in the structure and discipline of the navy, as well as suffered from incurable seasickness--it didn't take long for him to realize that he had made a huge mistake.

Six months after he left for the navy, I was surprised to see Yoshi in town again. He was hanging around my high school, leaning against his car witha fresh mop of long hair, mirrored sunglasses, etc. smoking a cigarette--somehow he had picked up chain smoking since I had last seen him.

He told me that he hated the navy so much that, as soon as he got out of basic training he had started to plot how to get out. He was assigned to a ship, and he said that the open sea freaked him out so badly that he couldn't sleep. His idea, hardly original, was to convince the navy psychiatrist that he was mentally unsound. He invented an elaborately detailed story about a strange man on the ship who kept following him around on a bicycle, chasing him and ringing the bell on the handlebars. According to Yoshi, the doctor bought his story and kept asking him very serious questions like "What does this guy look like?", "When was the last time you saw him?", and "Why is he following you?" Yoshi, who had likely faced dozens of counselors in his tainted youth, shamelessly played the part perfectly.

Whatever the reason, Yoshi was discharged pretty quickly and, the last time I saw him, he was working at a nearby convenience store. He was quite proud of his accomplishments in the navy: Getting through basic training without learning to swim, befuddling a top-notch psychiatry team, scoring free room and board for a few months, and getting out of a bad mistake relatively unscathed.