God Hates Us All

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 hausfraus, 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.