We are at the Red Point Sushi bar, far outside the neon-lit city center, on the third floor of a shopping mall and inside Red Point it feels like Los Angeles twenty-five years ago, when everyone took sushi much more seriously. The waiters sport mullets and balance trays of Philadelphia rolls; the track lighting cast long shadows on wooden tables with uncomfortable pale yellow chairs. MAGIC, EXOTIC, PASSION have been artfully etched into gray-white walls.
The man before me has a thin white hair. He looks weathered, but he laughs a lot; he smiles. He fashions himself a tough guy who once knew dissidents and read underground literature and spent many a night in darker dens. You can hear this in his voice, the history, the cold, the cigarettes and vodka, in his voice—gruff, warm. There are strange bandages wrapped around his fingers. Beneath the bandages, he says, there are beads, or grains of sand, special tiny rocks with hidden rejuvenating powers.
Then I awoke, no doubt to the painfully loud neighbors next door.
