Photo by Risen Wang on Unsplash
When I told people I used the same treadmill as John Mayer, my celebrity experience received mixed reviews. Some folks were wowed, wanting to know everything. Who used the machine first? Did we exchange words? Fluids? Was his exercise program set at an incline? Did he have BO, and if so, how was it?
Others could care less, using my own celebrity encounter as a springboard to share their own, or to flaunt their proud ignorance of “dumb shit.” John who? The Mayor of which town? Some searched their brains for dusty, pop-culture corners. Didn’t he date one of the Kardashians? Taylor Swift?
But I’m jumping ahead straight to the climax, as I often do in bed. I'll go back to the beginning. Take it from the top where it all began. In a gym, of all places.
I was lifting ten kilo dumbbells and staring out over Shinjuku City. Tokyo spread out in a seamless, sprawling circuit board all the way to the horizon. Far off, Mount Fuji was laden with snow, rising grand and austere above it all. The mountain was veiled in wisps of winter clouds painted gold by the early evening sun, streaks ablaze with neon like the metropolis laid out over its roots. It wasn’t Netflix, but the view was entertainment on its own. It kept me going until I was maxed out, sweating, bulging, grunting; veins like angry earthworms on my temples.
I’m not a gym junkie, not someone, in fact, who uses gyms at all. Ever. So, I can’t compare to other facilities, other venues for breaking a sweat and sculpting one’s body. Nonetheless, while lifting my weights and looking out across the fantastic cityscape --the majestic mountain looming beyond, the jaw-dropping, urban expanse of Godzilla’s stomping ground, all at a vantage of 47 floors up in the air in the heart of a global tourism hotspot-- I couldn’t image many other gyms in the world having views quite so spectacular. It was reason enough to use a window-facing elliptical or stationary bike. It was adequate motivation to try out the gym.
In truth, it wasn’t the views that brought me to the gym for a workout. Unless, of course, we are speaking of the view of myself in the bathroom mirror, the swelling of my gut that had developed over the last few days. I visit Tokyo semi-regularly, roughly once every other year, travelling with my wife and her parents to visit my sister-in-law. I don’t know if it’s the matcha-frosted doughnuts at the Japanese Starbucks, the sudden influx of rice in my diet, or, just as likely, the breakfast buffet with its endless options and unlimited portions at the Park Hyatt Tokyo where we always stay, but, whatever the cause, every time we visit Japan I manage to gain a little weight over the course of our sojourn. It’s not something I suffer back at home in New Zealand, where I remain the same weight within a single kilo year-round. Even so, I’ve been through it enough during these week-long jaunts over to Japan to know that it’s bound to happen --I’m going to leave softer and larger than when I arrived.
How to combat this unavoidable eventuality? How to ward off gaining weight while vacationing in Japan? This time, I began to strategize in advance. I knew from experience: no matter how much I walk --from Shinjuku all the way to Akihabara, from Shibuya to Minato, my every morning stroll among the serene, curated paths of Yoyogi Park, coffee in Harajuku, back to the hotel, no trains, no taxis-- my waistline expands from the moment the airplane’s wheels tally their rubber against the runway. Welcome to Japan.
Well, not this time. No, sir! I was resolved. I would do more than walk the urban labyrinth of Tokyo. I would venture to new territories where I had yet to explore. My intrepid gusto would lead me to new heights --and if it failed to, the elevator would suffice. I was determined to change my ways: I would go to the gym.
I was all about lifting dumbbells, a routine better for gaining muscle than losing weight. But I swam a few laps in the pool, too, and on my third visit to the gym I would begin using the treadmill, discovering my love for the preprogrammed walks that take you through cactus laden deserts, flowering grasslands, alpine forests, or city parks, all on the little screen that times your progress and tells you your speed, incline, and the calories that you have burned. I would not have discovered my love for this particular gamification of exercise, with its digital landscapes and stats ticking away neatly in the corners, if my wife didn’t tell me that the man who had just left the gym is famous. Really, I owe it all to John Mayer.
“Famous?” I set down my weights and watched the man’s back as he left the room. “Like YouTuber famous or actually famous?”
“That was John Mayer.”
There were no crickets in the gym, but if there were, you’d have heard them during that moment.
“The singer,” she clarified.
“Ah, yes.” I remembered now. As proof, I began singing one of his songs. “La da da da da da.”
My wife shook her head. “That’s Bubble Toes.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jack Johnson.”
I wondered how he got the nickname “Bubble Toes,” but later, I’d discover it was the title of the song.
“Those are two different people?”
My wife smiled at my repeated tendency to pair certain celebrities, and how, over time, their entanglement in my mind knots up to the point that it takes serious mental fortitude to unravel their separate, accurate identities. I did this with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, often calling either or both of them John Seymour Hoffman or Seymour John Reilly. To this day, their names and identities trip me up. When speaking to my wife, I clarify which actor I am referring to by saying the one who is dead or the one who is not. This was a last resort, after “The guy who played comic relief in Twister” proved an inadequate distinction beside “The guy who plays comic relief in everything.” I am even worse with Kylie Minogue and Nicki Minaj. This one is mystifying. It’s an odd pairing of celebrities, but one my brain has likewise intertwined. Anyways, John Mayer and Jack Johnson is yet another example of my limited ability to wedge apart linked pairs of certain individuals.
“Are you absolutely sure that was Jack Johnson?” I asked.
“I’m almost certain that was John Mayer,” she declared, then Googled him to match the tattoo on his right bicep. “Yup.” She showed me the phone. “It’s definitely him.”
We weren’t supposed to bring phones to the gym, and I figured the rule was to ward against sneaky, perverted photos of fit hotties doing yoga, their asses in the air or tits arched up to the ceiling, a camel toe on display while in the camel pose. But the Park Hyatt Tokyo is pretty swank --the same hotel where Lost in Translation was filmed-- which got me thinking: maybe the rule was a formality to prohibit covert snapshots of famous people staying there. Either way, my wife had brought her phone, using it to play me a John Mayer song.
“Oh, yes.” I nodded to the beat. “I’ve heard this one before.” I sang along to the only lyric I knew: “Your body is a wonderland.” It suddenly made sense. John Mayer was an exercise addict, someone who believed that our bodies are a wonderland, temples to be treated with reverence, or, in the very least, someone who visits the gym. No matcha-frosted doughnuts for Mr. Mayer.
Apart from my wife, I was the only person in the gym, so I had my pick of the long line of unoccupied treadmills. “He was on this one, right?”
My wife pointed to the next one over. “No, this one. See where his hands have gripped the rails and left a sweaty mark?”
I stepped onto the treadmill that John Mayer had minutes ago used for himself, placing my hands over the damp outline of his own. “Still warm,” I marveled. I thought I was immune to celebrity awe. Yet I cannot deny it: I felt like I had found God.
I keyed in the program for the Mojave desert and jogged a full hour, burning 570 calories, as much or more as a frosted doughnut. I was buzzing with a runner’s high, sweating like I had given birth, and my pregnant belly seemed to have dissipated a bit. I felt light, elated, euphoric. Had I conquered Japan? Had I beaten back the small degree of pudge that plagued me each time I came to Tokyo? I stepped off the treadmill a changed man. For starters, I would never again confuse Jack Johnson for John Mayer. My legs were tight with lactic acid. “My body is a wonderland,” I whispered into the warm air.
That night, there was a substantial earthquake. We have earthquakes in New Zealand, too, but back home I am level with the ground. My house shakes and my greatest fear centers around whether my books will become damaged if they fall from the shelf. In Tokyo, in the Park Hyatt, 47 floors up into the cold, winter sky, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake inspires fear that goes beyond damaged goods or toppled trinkets. The building swayed, back and forth, back and forth. Standing upright, I stumbled one way, caught my balance, then stumbled the other way. It was just like being on a boat in a rough sea. The main difference? We were high up off the ground.
A roof collapsing on your head will kill you on the first floor as easily as on the 47th. In fact, had we been on the first floor, 46 others would have come crashing on our heads if the building toppled to the ground. But in the face of fear, logic is thrown out the window. And from up here, out the window is a long way down. At the time, I would have given anything to be on the first floor.
Of course, these modern buildings in Tokyo are built for tremors. They can, and have, withstood worse earthquakes, and will again and again and again. They are built to sway, exactly as the Park Hyatt had done. It’s the flexibility that keeps them from falling like poorly stacked Legos before an excited Labrador. But as I mentioned, logical thinking was in free fall. Calm and reason was modern art on the pavement far below. Watching the horizon rise and fall like a triggered polygraph test, I’d be lying if I told you that I figured we were safe from harm.
“Oh my god. Earthquake! Let’s get out of here!” This was my idea.
Attention, there has been an earthquake. For your safety, remain in your rooms. This was the automated voice, whose advice alternated between Japanese and English for what seemed like eternity, but realistically, maybe ten minutes.
I looked out the window and turned pale. I hadn’t had a drop of booze, yet somehow, I had the spins. There was a crane mounted on the roof of the nearest tall building, its thick cable and heavy hook spinning in wide, whirlpool gyrations. Beyond, Mount Fuji was pale, somber, no longer lit ablaze by neon fire from the sun. It looked cold, and lonely, like a massive tomb.
“We are going to die.”
For the sake of my wife --maybe my dignity, should it outlive this moment-- I kept the idea to myself. But I’ll admit it now, it certainly crossed my mind. I thought, This is it. I’m going to die in Japan. I’m going to fall to the earth, miles below, in an avalanche of crumbled skyscraper. On the ground, each molecule of my body will be minced by innumerable tons of concrete, my liquid insides marinating the devastated city street. I will be entombed, buried beneath the rubble, where, unrecognizable, I will lie beside the crushed bones of John Mayer.
My body. His Body. Any body. Anybody. Reduced to smears, our identities will be utterly unknown, our very DNA a mess among the dust and chaos. Under certain abuses, one man’s corpse is the same as the next. What will remain of my face, my limbs, my bones? Not much. I might be the Pope, Arnold Schwarzenegger --who’s to say? And John Mayer? His ruined body, no longer a wonderland, will likely be misconstrued for someone else’s. His tattoos will be flayed from his gym-sculpted biceps. They will longer serve to distinguish his identity. In the end, not much will be left of him. Who’s to say that smudge of raspberry jam isn’t what’s left of Jack Johnson?
These were my thoughts as I oscillated up in the air, as the skyscraper I was in undulated among the clouds. Eventually, the building’s drunken movements slowed, then stopped altogether. The voice recording continued for a time, then that, too, stopped. Everything was still, and safe, and quiet.
That night, I went to bed filled with gratitude for being alive. In the morning, I woke to a large buffet breakfast and replaced the gratitude with food. Without an earthquake to remind me I was mortal, once again, I took everything for granted. Out and about on my morning walk to Yoyogi Park, coffee in Harajuku, I treated myself not just to one, but two macha-frosted doughnuts.
My wife raised her eyebrows at my doughnuts, at me, exhibiting surprise and disapproval. “Two doughnuts?”
I took a Mount-Fuji-sized bite and spread a macha-stained smile. I almost died last night, I wanted to say. So yeah, today it’s two fucking doughnuts. “You only live once,” I offered instead.
“Fine by me,” she said in a way that suggested it didn’t seem fine by her. “You’re the one who wanted to avoid gaining weight this trip. You’re the one who told me last night that your body is a wonderland.”
It’s true. I did.
But that was then, in the heat of the moment, and this is now. I finished my first doughnut and started on the next. “Whatever,” I declared with an air of irritated wisdom. “As if Jack Johnson knows a damn thing about anything.”
“John Mayer,” my wife reminded me, shaking her head and walking off, leaving me with my doughnut to watch her drown in a sea of foot traffic in busy, bustling Tokyo.
James Callan is the author of the novel A Transcendental Habit (Queer Space, 2023). His fiction has appeared in Carte Blanche, Bridge Eight, The Gateway Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand. Find him at jamescallanauthor.com