The Heaven Reunion: Part 1

When I first received an email from Mama Mari's cell phone, I was suspicious.  Why was she contacting me out of the blue like this?  We hadn't spoken since Heaven closed down, and I'd figured she was back in Manila, engaging in one of her many business ventures.  But most importantly, why would she want to contact me?

"Are you still in Tokyo?" "Where do you live now?"

After responding to this initial set of queries prefaced with the required OMGgoodtohearfromyou, I was hit by a sudden wave of paranoia.  This wasn't Mama Mari at all.  The Mama Mari in all of my viciously painful memories (brought to me courtesy of early sobriety!) would never want to speak to me again.

This was someone else.  Someone who took Mari's phone and found my email address in her list of contacts.  Someone who wanted to know where I lived!  It dawned on me that various "old friends" from the hostess world could be looking for me, and not with the best intentions.  And God, what if "Destiny" was behind this?

Mama Destiny is my mortal enemy, who has probably forgotten all about my existence by now.  I'm sure she's been quite busy ripping apart the hundreds of girls who've worked under her since I stormed out of her club screaming. 

Mama Mari, on the other hand, is the anti-Destiny.  I adored working for her.  She even inspired my memoir (through the course of which my 'black and white thinking' is even more evident.)

As I thought so much to myself, Mari and I exchanged a long series of text messages.

"I'm SO glad u stopped drinking," she wrote.

My paranoia stopped: this was really her.  No other Ginza Mama would dare say something so unprofitable.  Mama Mari was always a bit too human to succeed as a Ginza Mama, and Jade and I speculated that this was one of the reasons that Club Heaven had to shut its doors two years ago.

"You wanna meet up next week," she asked. "I live close by, with my son." 

Of course, with her son.  He would have to be a teenager by now. 

"Ok, can I invite Jade too?"

"Jade is still in Tokyo? Great."

So Mari called up Jade, along with another former hostess named Isabelle.  And within a few days, the date of our "Club Heaven" reunion was set.

I spent the days leading up to the reunion trying to think of the easiest way to tell Mari and Isabelle that since we'd last met, I'd written a memoir about my experiences as a hostess.  About our experiences, more accurately. 

How would one go about breeching such a topic?  By the way Mama, I liked working with you so much that I wrote a book about you.  It's coming out in two weeks.  Hope you don't mind. 

And I'd have to fess up to all this sober, no less.

(to be continued...)