The Phoenix and the Vortex - Part 1

The week before I was to register for my junior fall term at NYU Film my father, Toshihiko, sat me down and told me the bad news: he was having a bad year and couldn't afford to pay my tuition. This wasn't entirely a surprise and wasn't the complete mind-bending soul-searching catastrophe that would push me into a massive, coagulating funk and escalating ever downward spiral. It was more like: hey, I can take some time off to sew some cowboy seeds, bum around like Kerouac and Kesey, earn some cold hard large, take some girls on some non-Dutch dates, pray I get lucky, and finally focus on screenwriting.

My father had been a minority small business owner since he moved our family from Detroit to Queens and a year later took over a small Manhattan industrial design firm whose owner, fallen on hard times with waning health who wanted out of all the pressures and hassle of running a business rat race, literally handed it over to him, hook, line, and ball and chain in 1961. He took over the lease and kept all the furniture and equipment and it was like: adios! Hasta la vista, maricone. It was the start of an entrepreneurial run that would keep my father struggling, nail-biting, and sleep-deprived for the next 34 years.

As anyone whose family is engaged in a small business enterprise would certainly and instantly suss up to -- even scream aloud if given the correct amount of water, air, and sunlight --surviving is no small Jobian task; in fact, it is a 24/7/365 test of mettle, persistence against aneurism-inducing odds, ingenuity, fast-talking snake-oil salesmanship, and an absolute disregard for normalcy, sanity, and 9 to 5 safety in a "regular job" with benefits and a clear exit strategy (retirement, old age, disease, taxes, and death).

When I imagine my father as a 20-something, working as a house boy in Detroit for two men in an "open relationship" and ridiculed for being a catamite, so he could save every penny to buy art supplies: brushes, pencils, paints, and art board. As a Japanese-American just released from an Arizona World War II desert internment camp and relocated 1,500 miles from his father's missionary career at a Buddhist Church in California, he was absolutely clueless about what these vicious taunts meant and, once cognizant, turned redder than a radish dipped in pig blood. He was a neurotic homophobic ever since.

Dad attended Cass Tech in Detroit, a high school that embraced the visual and performing arts. Amongst his classmates was Edna Galoolie, a starving and stunning theater ingenue who would later change her name to Ellen Burstyn and win an Oscar for her portrayal of a working class single-mom waitress in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, directed by Marty Scorcese (a bizarre twist of fate and lost opportunity that haunts me like a wraithe to this day). He kept in touch with her over the years, telling me how loose she was an ambitious working-her-way-up actress.

In high school he was left back a couple years because his English was less than Shakespearean, but I understand he was very popular and fancied himself a crooner in the style of Sinatra and Crosby, often singing ba-ba-ba-boo drivel at high school sock hops and soda jerk joints with jukeboxes. I have already noted he was a be-bop Bird and Miles and Ella junkie, saving up pennies to nab the latest vinyl from those hep cats in downtown Motown, playing them till the grooves filled with dust and static and those jitterbug scat lines and mellifluous sax riffs burned into his brain stem.

He was driven as an artist enamored with American cars and sketched and painted them feverishly in dusk-till-dawn marathons, with a youthful joie de vivre and spark that must have shone bright as the twin suns of some Heinleinian solar system quintillions of light years yonder. I dare say he must have been talented because, right after graduating Cass Tech, he landed a job at Chrysler Automotive in their fabled styling department. My father got the job of his teen wet dreams and hobnobbed with the Caucasian auto design royalty of America. By golly, he was made.

I'm not sure why, but my Dad must have tired of toiling his young life away in the ghetto of big three automotive haute couture for minimal remuneration and even less creative satisfaction. Maybe the big wheels weren't ready to let some greasy, slant-eyed Jap kid from a country we just atom bombed to submission get the one-up and raise his people's creative profile and aspirations. As I understand it, he soon took another job at an industrial design firm in Detroit, Sundberg-Ferar, and must have grown tired there too of white authoritarianism and humdrum dead-end assignments designing furniture knobs and utilitarian kitchen appliances.

In a heartbeat, Dad hopped a plane and traveled to New York City with a job offer to work for a toy manufacturer, Deluxe Reading Company, on a humongous 24" plastic and vinyl doll that was the rage of its day, Suzy Smart. He stayed in Queens with his Philippino Chrysler-alumni best bud Rey Isip's family while mom packed and rented our tiny home in suburban Royal Oak, Michigan. I took my first propeller plane ride from Detroit to New York at age 5 and distinctly recall seeing an Oz-like cityscape of tall, sparkling, majestic skyscrapers on a crisp autumn day from a bird's eye view 2,000 feet up. I had no idea my life was to be forever transmogrified from a tree-lined small town hamlet to a brick and asphalt purgatory of hunters and the hunted.

With ambition big as a baleen whale frolicking in the arctic circle, after a year he said, "Sayonara, ku-ichi!" to the toy biz and joined an industrial design company on West 37th Street but, after arriving, realized he had stepped into a fecal quagmire of partners (called "associates") bickering over money, clients, bills, credit, cash flow -- all the mundane business matters that need attending to that people who wanted to be artists contemptuously avoided like oozing punjab lepers on their front stoop. The owner asked Dad to simply take over the reigns as he'd decided to ditch the merry-go-round and take safe harbor as a salary man in another firm.

Pop must either have had some incredibly mentalist foresight and sensed limitless opportunity, or otherwise he was more doomed than a mentally challenged quadrapalegic in a relay race during the special olympics. My mother would swear to the latter (and does to this day, her mantra being, "Your father had no business being in business."). I think he was young, naive, filled with ambition, with a gambler's penchant for quick fortune and blue sky optimism, for he seized the moment and took over the company, changing its name to the improbable and impossible to pronounce Toshihiko Sakow Associates, Inc.

I can't say the acorn fell far from the big-ass oak tree. Like flies drawn to the flame and feces, I would drop deep into the bottomless tar pit of over-ambition many a time in the years to come. It's like alcoholism or dwarfism or sickle cell anemia: it's all in the chromosomes, dude (and Dan would turn to me suddenly with a straight poker face and proclaim with one twisted mouth corner in his best Newark boyz-in-the-hood parlance, "How you know you got chrome-zomes, boy?" Chunks would just blow out my nostrils and I would get the full-on acid reflux cackle till-my-ribs-almost-burst laugh spasms every time).

My old man hustled his ass off over the next decade and made a go of it. He traveled all the time, flying to conventions in Chicago and other far off and mythical (to me) cities like Boston, Vegas, San Fran, and Dallas, wining and dining potential clients at the better HoJo's and Steak and Brews, kissing babies (some well over 20), and squeezing out odd-job product design assignments for companies like Mattel (Barbie catamarans!), Panasonic (easier for white ghost gaijin to pronounce than Matsushita Electronics), Royal Typewriter (relics from the age of coelacanthes and trilobytes -- not to be confused with kilobytes), plastic hamster tube cages, and consumer electronics ad-nauseum (radios, cassette recorders, LED clocks, stereo components, you-name-it-he-done-'em).

I know. You're shaking and scratching your head (perhaps even noodling your gonads), wondering aloud if I have lost my mother-lovin' rose-colored marbles, and muttering what-the-f--k is the point of this incessant, non-stop, flow-of-conscious bullsh-t off-topic rambling?

Be kind and nice to me (it's so damn mentally exhausting finding just the right verbiage) and hear me out. Pretty please with maraschino cherries?

My father is my personal hero, the nemesis of unspeakable (and hard to pronounce) evil in the free world, a cathedral of light and hymns in the scorched ravages of Chernobyl, the guru who taught me so many life lessons and priceless blood-stained and hard-fought truths and self-realizations. I will never, ever, ever be able to repay his mountainous, boundless kindness and unconditional love. Although I tried my damndest before he passed in 2000. Guess I didn't try hard enough.

He was a 5'3" (same Napoleonic size as me) artist and entrepreneur, with the gift of gab who made friends as easily as George W pissed-off liberals and middle eastern theocracies, who people felt instantly drawn to for his easy, good natured self-deprecating humor, twinkling brown eyes, modesty, and utterly arresting used car sales skills. He was smoother than a newborn's butt cheeks, and could be hilarious and kidding around one moment and serious as nails the next. The eldest son of a Jodo-Shinshu Buddhist Japanese missionary who was left behind In his hometown of Fukui because his parents thought they would return home in less than 5 years, but got trapped in America by WWII and never left. He was talented. Driven. He fought each day like Muhammed Ali against George Foreman, Moses against Pharoah, and General Patton against Rommel in the dusty Sahara, until he utterly and completely gave up in 1996 and slowly broke my heart.

I loved and admired my father beyond all words, as much as any child could love their parent for giving them life then teaching them how to live it. His presence beats in my heart every living moment of my life and I am so sad he left me alone to battle on.