Made Café

"Seat Safety Switch" (seat-safety-switch)
11/07/2015 at 12:36 • Filed to: maid cafe, laguna seca, grid girls, race queen, the man from the government

He sat down, his rumpled brown sport coat the colour and pattern of a Winnebago interior. Above us, a single bare CFL swung in the invisible eddy currents of the room’s air pressure to and fro at the end of a length of obsidian Romex, the faint hum of its driver capacitors evident in the silence between us.

The man from the consulate stared at me, put his elbows on the table, and pointed at me in a gesture he had mastered over the years. I could sense his sloth and disinterest, pooling in the corners of his unfocused gaze. Finally he spoke.

“Tell me again why you are being deported from Japan,” he grumbled.

It’s simple, I explained. In one of my brutal car projects I had blown the number-two cylinder clear out of a twin-supercharged Suzuki Every Landy. I began to hoof it, coming across the circle of Hell occupied solely by pachinko parlors that is southern Akihabara. That’s when I saw her.

Four foot tall, interested yet distant, bad at English. She regarded me with a warm but accented “hello” in a squeaky voice, shoved a pamphlet into my hands. I looked down at it, but the only katakana I could read was in ancient HKS catalogues and the parts of the Subaru factory service manuals that didn’t have safety warning logos in front of them.

To make a long story short, I was now the proprietor of the first automobile-themed maid cafe in Tokyo. If I were a normal human being, with normal impulses, this would be fine. I would put some checkered flags on the wall, maybe some tacky 1950s Cadillac-themed couches. It would be a thin veneer over the desperate desire for companionship embodied in the maid cafe. But we had to go deeper. I needed authenticity.

When you walked in the door, I explained with great gestural emphasis, you would be overtaken by the smell of burnt clutch. Corded R-compounds laid around the grease-struck room, in which we had spared no expense to accurately represent an indoor race paddock at Laguna Seca.

My rant was stopped short by the man from the government, raising a single lean finger. I could tell he was a nailbiter, and had finger joints that had never been forcibly reset by dropping an EJ25 on top of them. We had nothing in common.

“That all sounds pretty, uh, good,” said the man, “but where did it all go wrong?”

I leaned back, the handcuff chain jingling harshly against the edge of the desk. Then I leaned in conspiratorially.

“Well,” I drawled, “it turns out they have really strict PPE rules in Japan.”