My Friend Polo

I don't know why everybody expects me to know everything around here. "Omar, what's your car doing parked in my office?" "Omar, who the fuck hired Menudo to tile the break room?" "Omar, what ever happened to that Japanese woman you had living in your house?" What am I, Google? Get your lazy ass over to the library and look it up yourself, Curious George. AskOmar.com don't run for free and when I charge, I charge in pain.

I have to admit though; the "Japanese woman" question did get me thinking. I seem to remember something like that, some kind of foreign squatter in the Bricks Manor a little while back. At first I thought I must be remembering some lame sitcom, but according to resident prick Orson Welch, The Jap of Luxury went off the air years ago.

I definitely remember the house smelling like soy sauce a lot last year, and a quick peek into the compost heap outside shows strong evidence that there was a lot of chop-sticking going on around here during the same time period. So it certainly looks like this place was all Japped up for a good couple months last year. Weird.

I decided to hit the Internet for a little research, which mostly turned up strange cartoon pornography that's likely going to screw up my Saturday mornings for the next few years. But the most useful info came from the commune itself (no shit, we're on the Internet now) in the form of my own Polio columns from last fall. That was really a trip; I was wondering how in the hell people got to our site. Turns out all you have to do is search for "Japanese cat-piss cornhole" and you're there.

So now with that confusion out of the way, I'm faced with a question: What in the hell happened to my Asian live-in cohort? Jesus, you turn around for nine months and these people disappear on you, it's insane.

The last thing I remember, we were teamed up in this rickshaw polo tournament I had organized for charity. Osaka had been building up some serious skills carting me around town during those carless days, and I was getting pretty sharp at not eating shit out the back on sharp turns, so I figured we should put those skills to use for a good cause. There was some static about a school for training immigrants to pull Omar Bricks around town like a dogsled team not being a real charity, but those whiners were weeded out pretty fast and most of them had some pretty sad sack rickshaw-pullers anyway, to say the least. Mostly scrawny neighborhood kids or hookers trying to get off the street, Osaka and I would have poloed circles around them without either of us breaking a sweat.

In retrospect I wouldn't have minded if those guys stayed on, because the poloers who did stick around were a pretty rough bunch who favored a brand of full-contact rickshaw polo that wasn't for the faint of heart. I really felt sorry for anyone who parked their car on Brown Street that day, that's all you need to know.

In the end nobody there could match the skills Osaka and I brought to the arena, but they didn't need to since we flipped the 'shaw while popping a wheelie on the victory lap after I'd scored our first goal. Needless to say the rickshaw was destroyed, which Osaka probably wasn't too thrilled about since she'd paid for it and I'd talked her into getting one of the nice ones, really the Mercedes-Benz of rickshaws, it had a mini-fridge and a doorbell and everything. After the crash there was rickshaw shit all over the street, a stray dog even made off with the portable DVD player. It was a sad scene, especially for me, because I was right in the middle of Rollerball when it happened. I still don't know how that movie ends.

Come to think of it, I don't remember seeing Osaka after the crash, she may have given up on America or been kidnapped by the Triads for all I know. Hell, she could still be at the bottom of that pile of rickshaw rubble, but I bet they've cleaned that up by now. I probably could have stuck around and found out for sure, but the cops were on their way and we only had about ten minutes to make the half-off beers at Runyon's, so nobody was exactly volunteering to hang around for casualty detail.

It's probably all worked out for the best, unless she died. In that case, Osaka, or whatever your real name was, I'll never forget you. Again. After this time, never again. So I'll only forget you once. Probably, can't promise anything. But if you are still around and have learned to read English by now, Foghat's been sleeping on a pile of your stuff, so if you want it back you'll have to talk to him. Bricks out.

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