God Hates Us All

16

“MY WIFE IS IN MANCHESTER, MY MISTRESS in Hong Kong, and my lover in Jakarta,” says the Englishman.

“You don’t have a license to kill, do you?” I ask with sarcasm that goes unregistered.

The Englishman grins, his head snaking toward me. “No, but I once saw a man die in my arms. What do you say to that?”

“I think you’re either totally full of shit or the most interesting man I’ve ever met,” I reply. “But either way, I think you’ve had a little too much of the yellow.”

“Impossible!” he growls, rising to his feet. “I’ve been drinking nothing but orange all night. Now let’s go pull your friend off that dancer before we’re all led off in wristcuffs.”

I’d met the Englishman, along with the Mormon and an American woman who called herself Janie, at the Superior Guesthouse, the hostel Ray recommended—a two-story wooden structure with a front door lit like a Christmas tree, hidden in a back alley between the ass-ends of a restaurant and a flower shop. The kind of place you can imagine the guidebook calling “an undiscovered gem.”

I don’t have a guidebook, and my discovery of the Superior is severely impeded by a blistering rain that begins right after I’ve passed the drinking circles. Coupled with darkness, visibility is a serious issue. I miss the entrance to the alleyway three times before stumbling inside, soaked and miserable.

The room can hardly be called a lobby after the Four Seasons—the small, wood-paneled cubicle has a lot more in common with a sweat lodge. I point toward the cheapest rate and am directed to a room with two bunk beds. Well-traveled backpacks claim dibs on the bottom bunks, so I climb onto the bed farthest from the door.

Sleep comes quickly, but it doesn’t last long: Two hours later, I wake up shaking. Or rather the shaking wakes me up. I open my eyes to see Ray. He reeks of alcohol.

“You asleep, man?” he asks.

“I was. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be having sex with a goddess right now? Getting all funky and shit?”

“Yeah, that one got kind of messed up.”

“What happened to taking advantage of her low self-esteem?”

“Hah! Turns out part of the test for becoming a goddess was spending a night alone with a bunch of severed animal heads. Without crying. She was fucking three years old. Bitch is a natural-born icicle.” Ray shivers for effect. “That, plus your going psycho didn’t do me any favors.”

“Sorry about that. I guess that makes us even for the whole international date line fuckup.”

“You should be thanking me. Imagine if you had to spend the whole weekend here. Let’s go get drunk. It’s on me, motherfucker.”

“What about us?” asks a British voice. We look over to see the Englishman, seated Indian style on the lower bunk across the room.

“I’d like to get drunk,” chimes in a voice from the bunk below me. Ray jumps back from the bed, discovering the Mormon’s head just inches from his crotch.

“Jesus Christ,” says Ray. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

“Utah,” replies the Mormon. “But that was a long time ago. Let’s go get drunk.”

Both men are clearly accustomed to being on the road. Each looks to be about thirty, with scruffy facial hair and billowy hippie clothes of indeterminate nationality. Neither has showered for several days.

“Where are we getting drunk?” says Janie, a big-boned but tragically low-waisted American girl with fashionable glasses. She’s holding a manila envelope.

“Is that what I think it is?” says the Englishman, referring to the envelope. “Has our shipment from San Francisco arrived?”

“My shipment,” Janie corrects him. “I know you’re going to try and treat this like your personal stash, but this is mine.”

“What are you going to do with a whole sheet of acid?” asks the Mormon.

“Whatever I want,” says Janie.

“Give us a taste, you sick tease,” says the Englishman, springing to his feet.

Janie relents. “You can each have one tab.” From the envelope she pulls out a letter-sized page scored into tiny boxes, each inked with a blue star. And, I gather, an ample serving of LSD. The Englishman and the Mormon hungrily accept their tiny tabs, placing them on their tongues. Janie turns to Ray and smiles. “Care to join us?”

“Me? No,” says Ray. “I don’t want to be seeing trails and shit when I’m forty.”

“That’s such an urban myth,” she says, then turns to me. “What about you? You look like you could use a pick-me-up.”

“Much appreciated,” I say. “But I’d prefer to keep my feet on the ground just now. I believe there was some talk of getting drunk?”

“We could take them to Suzie’s,” suggests the Englishman. “How about it, mates? Shall we storm Hooker Hill?”

The word “hooker” seems to demolish any objection Ray might tender. A few minutes later, the five of us are packed into a taxi headed to Itaewon, Seoul’s version of a red-light district. The Mormon—whose real name is Gene—uses the trip to explain how he’s arrived at his current station in life. He’d been on a religious mission to Indonesia, with his wife and newborn daughter, when he experienced an “awakening.”

The Englishman coughs theatrically. “More like a descent into moral disrepair.”

“I just realized that I wasn’t living the life I was supposed to be living,” replies Gene.

“Because you’re a queer,” says the Englishman.

“I am not a queer,” Gene says, looking directly at Ray. “Although this one’s got this whole butch thing that’s really turning me on.”

“Because you’re a goddamn poofter,” the Englishman says, as if stating the obvious.

The Mormon smiles with practiced tolerance. “I’m really not gay. Anyway, I’ve been traveling for two years ever since. I’ve seen so much of the world.”

“What about your family?” I ask.

“I tried to stay in touch with them at first. But after a while they didn’t seem so interested in hearing from me. I think we’re all just moving on.”

When the taxi arrives at Suzie’s, no one but Ray can find a wallet. Mine appears to have been stolen while I slept at the hostel. I take some consolation in the fact that the thief or thieves ignored my passport and plane ticket.

“The front desk should have warned you,” Janie says. “That’s the fifth or sixth robbery this week.”

Ray grudgingly pays the cab fare. “He’s got an excuse,” he says, pointing to me. “What about the rest of you?”

The Englishman raises his hands in surrender. “What can we say? We are but poor travelers. But if you’re intent on recompense,” he says, pointing to the Mormon, “I’m certain he’ll bless your knob with a thorough spit-and-shine.”

“Ha!” says the Mormon with a laugh. “He’s kidding. I’m really not going to, you know, do what he said I’d do. That would be a sin.” The Mormon’s leg vibrates nervously: The acid is kicking in.

“Just pay the fare,” Janie says. “And stop pretending that you don’t like being the moneybags.” Something tells me that Ray and Janie are not destined to be boon companions.

Inside, Suzie’s looks like it might once have been a car dealership. Large plate-glass windows provide natural advertising to the foot traffic outside and a colorful view of the gaudily lit neighborhood for the customers within. Most of the interior space is devoted to a dance floor, where a dozen or so Korean beauties in slinky dresses and their male partners—the clientele, I assume—twirl incongruously to the sounds of New Kids on the Block. The scene looks more like a USO dance than a bordello: A large percentage of the men wear American military uniforms. “Yongsan Garrison’s just west of here,” Janie explains. “Thirty thousand red-blooded, shit-kicking United States Army men.”

“How do the Koreans feel about that?” I ask.

Janie shrugs. “I guess they probably hate it. But not Suzie. Without them, she’d be out of business. Korean men are like totally straitlaced. They expect their women to be good little hausfraüs, dressed all conservative and staying home in the kitchen. If they saw Korean women acting this way, they’d go apeshit.”

I look again at the dancers in search of behavior that might drive the locals crazy—public nudity, pussy-powered Ping-Pong balls, etc.—but I don’t see much more than the occasional suggestive smile. As for the foreigners—Ray, in particular—the relatively demure dancing works like catnip. If the mention of hookers piqued Ray’s interest, the sight of this many potential sexual partners of Asian descent has him bug-eyed. “How does this work?” he asks, bouncing from heel to heel.

“Miss Suzie will take care of us,” says the Englishman. Miss Suzie looks like an older version of one of her employees, although with Asian women I never can tell—my best guess at her age is somewhere between thirty and seventy. She addresses the Englishman with comfortable familiarity. “Welcome back, Mister Christopher. You bring friends tonight.”

Miss Suzie leads us to a booth in the back. “I’ll send someone over with your drinks.” She pauses for a moment, carefully studying each of our faces. She bows gracefully and shifts her attention to another group, American soldiers who seem to be edging from boisterous toward rowdy.

“Shouldn’t she have asked us what we wanted first?” I wonder aloud.

“There are only two drinks on the menu,” says Mormon Gene. “Yellow and orange.”

Gene is clearly tripping—the pupils of his eyes, as is the case with Janie and the Englishman, are as wide as saucers—but a couple of minutes later, one of the Korean beauties presents a tray bearing two plastic soda bottles, recycled and filled with what looks like radioactive Kool-Aid. Yellow and orange. “Grain alcohol,” says Janie. “Be careful. This stuff will hit you like a brick wall.”

Ray sneers at her. He grabs one of the disposable picnic cups that accompany the bottles, fills it with yellow, and chugs it down. Then he pours himself another.

Janie sneers back. “Oooh!”

Ray ignores her. “So what now?” he asks.

“That’s up to Miss Suzie,” replies the Englishman. “But don’t worry, you’re in good hands.”

When Miss Suzie reappears, she’s holding hands with a dancer she’s chosen, it seems, specifically for Ray. “This is Sunny,” she says to him. “You look like a good dancer. She is very good dancer too.”

Sunny, covered in a light layer of sweat from the dancing, smiles at Ray, not lewdly but like an innocent child being introduced to an adult. The effect on Ray is immediate. He throws back his second cup and in the same motion leaps to his feet and grabs Sunny’s hand.

“You like Sunny?” asks Miss Suzie.

“I like Sunny,” Ray replies, already leading her toward the dance floor. “Sunny days are here again.”

“What about you, Mister Christopher? Mi-Hi always talk about you.”

“That depends,” the Englishman says, calling after Ray. “Mr. Moneybags! Are you paying for our dances too?”

Ray continues toward the dance floor without looking back, using the hand that isn’t attached to Sunny to acquaint the Englishman with his middle finger. “I take that as a no,” says the Englishman.

“Next time,” says Miss Suzie.

“Except for the tragic-looking guy!” Ray yells back from the dance floor. “He gets whatever he wants!”

Miss Suzie turns to me. “He mean you?”

“No, not me.”

“What kind of girl you like?”

“Right now? I don’t know if I like girls at all right now.” She squints at me with a professional eye. “No. You like girls. Just wrong girls. Wrong girl.”

“Impressive.”

“I know,” she says, holding my stare. “Don’t worry. You find right girl. Maybe you dance with me tonight?”

“I’m flattered,” I say. “In America, the men have to ask the women.”

“So ask me, then. Go on. Your friend say it okay.”

“Ask me after I’ve had another few of these,” I say, raising my cup of yellow. She winks at me and moves on to another table. The Englishman, struck by a fit of acid-induced chattering, spends the next twenty minutes listing the pros and cons of maintaining intimate relations with three different women in three different countries. There seem to be a lot more cons, and I tell him so.

“You may be right,” he says. “But we’re men. What choice do we really have?”

Ray returns to the table once to drop off his belt pack and toss back an orange. The rest of the time, he and Sunny are the king and queen of this debaucherous prom. The Steve Winwood song on the speakers feels totally out of place, but that doesn’t stop Ray from doing his Saturday Night Fever thing, lifting Sunny off the ground and spinning her around his shoulders. The soldiers applaud. Gene and the English-man are too busily engaged in conversation to notice, a heated discussion over a secret worldwide conspiracy involving something called the Bilderberg Group. Janie’s busy too, rooting through Ray’s belt pack.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask.

Janie leaps back like I’ve slapped her. “Just, you know, looking. I’m sorry. I’m nosy.”

“Did you take my wallet?”

“No.” I examine Janie’s face for signs of guilt. She stares back at me with LSD eyes, twin lumps of charcoal, burnt out and extinguished, a sarcastic reminder of K.’s radioactive blues.

We manage to finish the yellow and the orange and, after a mock parliamentary debate over the merits of each, order and drain another orange. We are thoroughly smashed, although to be honest, the three acid-trippers are handling their booze a lot better than Ray and me.

Ray finally staggers back to the table, a clearly delighted Sunny in tow. “Let’s blow this clambake!” he yells. We’re rising to our feet to go when the music screeches to a complete stop. Conversations are abandoned mid-sentence. Someone draws thick black curtains over the plate-glass windows.

“What’s going on?” I whisper to Janie.

“Military police,” she whispers back.

“I thought this was all legal.”

“American military. There’s a curfew or something.” I look over at the table of soldiers, currently subdued but ready to explode at any moment into laughter, violence, or both. A nervous glance at the Motorola tells me it’s four in the morning: My return flight departs in only five hours. I mouth a silent prayer. I do not want to be detained. Please God, let me make that flight.

The patrol passes without further incident. The curtains reopen and the sound system springs back to life. Our momentum toward the door resumes as well. Ray hands a large wad of bills to Miss Suzie, who smiles at me on the way out.

“Maybe next time,” she says.

I nod, too drunk to come up with anything clever.

We empty into the street. The rain has let up, but the streets still glisten. The air feels cleaner. The roads are nearly empty, save for a few scattered men passed out over the handlebars of their motor scooters, survivors of the drinking circles I’d witnessed earlier.

We move like a pack of wolves. Gene and the Englishman are the advance scouts, chasing each other down the streets with an energy verging on sexual, at least for Gene. Ray and Sunny are the alpha dogs, king and queen, still dancing down the street. Ray serenades her with an old song I half-recognize. Sunny, thank you for the truth you let me see/Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to Z…. Sunny, a stranger to our alphabet, basks in the attention. Janie and I make up the rear. At some point she loops her arm around mine. I don’t stop her.

Gene breaks from his scouting and does a sort of jig in front of Ray and Sunny. He’s grinning like a madman. “Am I going to see you two do some fuck-ing?”

“No you will fucking not, you goddamn fairy,” replies Ray.

Gene giggles. “Maybe I’ll trade beds with Chris. That way I’ll be riiight beneath you.”

I sense a shift in Ray’s mood. “Back off, Gene,” I say. “Mr. Moneybags doesn’t have to rub elbows or any other parts of his body with our sorry asses. He’s staying at the Four Seasons.”

Ray stops as quickly as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Fuck.”

“You’re not staying at the Four Seasons?”

“Devi told me to cancel my room. ’Cause I’d be staying with her, right? Why waste all that money when I could be supporting some family of six in Nepal? Enough cow dung to last two winters… That fucking bitch!”

We idle for a while until the news settles in. The English-man finally breaks the silence. “Bollocks,” he says solemnly to Ray. “I guess Gene’s going to get to see you fuck after all.”

Sunny’s face clouds with confusion, her disposition, for the first time tonight, at odds with her name. “How much farther is this place, anyway?” Ray barks at no one. “I’m getting a fucking cab.” He drags Sunny toward an intersection with a higher concentration of motor traffic.

The Englishman catches up to them. “In all seriousness, mate, you’re not going to bring her back to the hostel.”

“Why not?” demands Ray.

“It’s against the rules.”

Ray reaches the intersection and flags a passing cab. “Fuck the rules.” He guides Sunny into the car and looks at me. “Hurry up.”

My arm is still intertwined with Janie’s. I could let go and sprint toward the cab, were I that kind of asshole. Instead, I split the difference, half-jogging as fast as her little legs will allow. Gene and the Englishman interpret my drunken chivalry as an open invitation. They race toward the cab, piling in before we can.

The cabdriver glares skeptically at the six figures crammed in his backseat. He’s even more concerned when we tell him we’re going to the Superior Guesthouse. “You ditch fare,” the driver says, his voice clearly singed by experience.

Ray searches for his wallet—no easy task, given the increasingly confused Korean hooker on his lap. “Seriously,” the Englishman says. “Let Sunny out of the cab.”

Gene, who’d beaten the Englishman into the car and earned the right to sit nearly on top of Ray, sounds his agreement. “He’s right. It’s against the rules. You should let her go.” Gene grabs Sunny’s chin between his fingers and speaks into her face. “You should go.”

“Get your fucking hands off of her,” says Ray, who has finally pried the wallet from his pocket. “I will break your god-damn fingers.”

“You should let her go,” says Gene.

Now Ray is screaming. “Where’s my money?” He looks at me. I look at Janie. “Why are you looking at her?”

“I’m not.”

Janie just stares out the window. “Mr. Moneybags spent it all at Suzie’s,” she says.

“She might be right,” I say. “I saw you drop a lot of money back there.”

“You should let her go,” says Gene.

“You should shut the fuck up!” says Ray. I catch the driver’s reflection in the rearview. He’s obviously regretting his decision to pick us up.

“You don’t even have any money,” says Gene. “You should let her go.”

Now the brakes are squealing. We’re thrown forward by the momentum. The driver is yelling at us. “No money?!”

All eyes turn toward Ray. He opens his door and scoots out from underneath Sunny, dragging her behind him. The rest of us quickly join the exodus.

“I call police!” screams the driver, speeding away.

We’re on a street that even in my short time in Seoul feels vaguely familiar—the major thoroughfare with the wide side-walks. Janie renews her grip on my arm. “It’s this way,” she says, dragging me along.

I look over my shoulder at Ray, who has Sunny’s hand in a vise-grip. His bleary eyes bulge white with cartoonish panic. “What do you say, Ray?” I hear myself using a delicate voice, like a negotiator talking a jumper off a ledge.

“You should let her go,” repeats Gene, and it’s one time too many. Ray is spinning on one leg, dragging the other like a tetherball around a pole. There’s a sickening crunch as his flying foot connects with the bridge of Gene’s nose. Gene crumples to the ground, holding his face. Blood spurts out through his fingers.

Ray isn’t finished yet. “I told you to shut the fuck up!” he yells. “But you couldn’t shut up!” Ray kicks him again, this time in the ribs. The blow lifts Gene off the ground, several feet into a curb. Ray closes the distance.

I unspool from Janie and dive toward Ray, wrapping my arms around his waist and knocking him to the ground. I hold him there as he swings wildly, eager to continue the fight. We struggle for I don’t know how long before I feel his body go limp, the anger fleeing like a vanquished spirit.

Gene sits on the edge of the sidewalk holding his ruined nose. The front of his shirt is stained red. Men in business suits, Monday morning commuters, emerge from a nearby subway terminal, surrounding Gene like water passing a pebble. Despite his condition only one man stops—across the street, to talk to a policeman. Both look back in our direction.

“Are you cool?” I ask Ray. “Because we really need to get out of here.”

He nods weakly. I lift him to his feet and lead him toward the entrance to the subway, the most obvious route of escape. We sprint down the steps into the terminal until turnstiles block our path. We pause to catch our breath. Sunny has for some mysterious reason chosen to follow us. She gestures at the turnstiles and says something in Korean, pointing toward a row of electronic vending machines built into the wall.

I snap at her like a condescending parent to a toddler in a tantrum. “No money. I know. You don’t understand a word we’re saying. No. Money.”

Sunny turns and walks away. Or so I think, until she accosts a man in a business suit. He brushes her away and she moves to another. I don’t understand the words being exchanged, but begging looks the same everywhere. The men who don’t ignore her offer an equally translatable expression—shame, a Korean girl so scandalously involved with two broke and broken white men. Until a stern-faced man with neatly combed white hair and wire-rimmed glasses hands her a few coins. Sunny clings to his sleeve, effusing until he pulls away in embarrassment.

Sunny returns from the vending machine with three tickets, handing one to me and pressing another into Ray’s palm, which is as limp as the rest of him. She leads him by the arm toward the turnstile, guiding his ticket into the machine. She watches to make sure I do the same, then follows us onto the train. Luck is on our side: Ray has committed his almost certainly felonious assault above a subway line that happens to terminate at the airport. Sunny sits next to him, providing a shoulder for his slumping head.

We arrive at the airport three hours before my scheduled departure. “Breakfast,” says Ray, the first words he’s uttered since the fight.

“I thought you didn’t have any money.”

He pulls a green credit card out of his wallet. “American Express.” He smiles weakly. “Don’t leave home without it.” The airport diner takes plastic. We drink a pot of coffee and sit in silence. Sunny, wearing sunglasses appropriated from Ray on the train, greedily devours a huge stack of pancakes.

At the entrance to customs, both Ray and Sunny hug me good-bye. I look back at them several times—despite the party clothes and the sunglasses, they remind me of that painting, the one with the farmer and his wife.

“Did you enjoy your trip?” asks the customs clerk.

“‘Enjoy’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind. But it sure was interesting.”

“How nice. Your luggage?”

“No luggage.”

“No luggage?”

“What is it with you guys and the luggage? Can’t someone just drop in for a visit?”

The clerk apprises me for a moment before returning to the paperwork in front of him. “It says your job is ‘international businessman.’ But you carry no briefcase?”

During happier times, maybe twenty hours ago, I’d written “international businessman” on my customs declaration card. A joke. “This was a social visit,” I say, glancing at the teenage soldier with a machine gun who stands nearby. He looks a lot less like a teddy bear than yesterday’s version. “I don’t mean to sound impatient, but my plane is leaving very soon.”

“Of course,” the clerk says. “I just make one phone call first. Make sure you’re not drug dealer.” His smile doesn’t reassure me. Why did I have to be such a smart-ass with the “international businessman” thing? What if they found the dope I flushed on the way over? Visions of strip searches and various tortures pass before my eyes. What if they make me take a lie-detector test, and ask me if I’m a drug dealer?

The clerk finally hangs up the phone and, after a pregnant pause, stamps my papers.

“I hope you enjoyed Korea.”