We take a cab to K-Town, just off Times Square. This isn’t the Times Square of my childhood. There is nothing grungy about this Times Square or this Korea Town, at least on the surface. The restaurants and dessert parlors are bright pink and lime green, lit up with neon and festive video menus that showcase barbecue feasts. We walk through the streets filled with drunken but well-behaved revelers as pop music blares from clean arcades and family-friendly record shops.
Pez checks something on his phone and then doubles back to an alley we already passed. We walk down it to a nondescript building entrance and then into a long hallway empty of decoration.
“Is this really the place?” he asks doubtfully, checking his phone again.
We go back outside and Pez looks at the address numbers on the building.
“This is it,” he says, shaking his head. We go back in and march to the elevator. He punches the button for a middle floor. When we get out, we find ourselves in the back of a line for a massive Korean restaurant. We can smell thin slivers of beef burning on open flames, and catch glimpses of people hidden away in private booths, occluded from each other by the high seats. It is a cave-like, shimmering room where patrons are getting drunk on small bottles of plum wine and sake.
“The karaoke rooms are in the back,” says Pez. “But I’ve been told they’re reservation only.”
I catch the eye of the hostess, a young woman with skin so white and glowing that she could be made of pearl slathered in paste, and inconspicuously offer her a rolled-up stack of hundreds. She smiles slightly and nods, taking the bills from my hand casually as she leads us back to the karaoke rooms, glancing over her shoulder to make sure management doesn’t see her taking our graft to privilege us over those with reservations.
“It’s two fifty for a room for the night,” she says when we make it into the back. I let her charge my credit card, rolling my eyes. There are five private rooms, each with a cutout picture of a different Korean pop star on the door. All the rooms are full. The hostess looks at me knowingly and I slip her yet another hundred-dollar bill.
She barges into one of the rooms (full of drunken Russians, not our Midwesterners) and proceeds to have a long, protracted argument with them. Eventually they leave, spitting on the ground, cursing her, cursing us, but also too drunk to actually care very much.
We take over the room and sit there for a minute, unsure what to do next.
Suddenly Pez stands up. “I’ll go investigate,” he says and wobbles off, feigning drunkenness. I watch from our doorway as he barges into each room in turn, pretending to be so wasted that he has forgotten where he is really going. Three doors down he lingers, then looks knowingly back at me. He shuts the door and skitters back down the hall to our room.
“There are five of them,” he says. “They are all beefy men in their early forties, I’d guess, with deep-set blue piggy eyes and greasy beards. Actually, they don’t seem so bad.”
“You like everyone,” I say. “What song were they singing?”
“‘Jolene,’” says Pez, raising an eyebrow.
“Fascinating,” I say, surprised by the choice. Dolly Parton’s not my first pick, but she is classic.
“They were all belting out the lyrics, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. One of them was visibly weeping.”
“Let me handle this,” I say.
We creep over to the private room together. I charge in first, but I don’t say anything until Pez closes the door behind us. I can feel him backing me up and this makes me slightly brave.
The men all stare at me, flabbergasted. I can tell immediately that they know who I am. I try to maintain my composure, to give nothing away, to meet them imperiously on the level of elite privilege that surely I must represent to these pudding-filled sad sacks.
“Gentlemen,” I begin.
One by one, they stand up. They form a semicircle around me, towering over my small frame as if I am a Union major general and they are my staff officers, ready to take a rebel bullet to protect me.
Then, as a unit, they all lean into me, squeezing me in a devastating group hug that nearly knocks me off my feet. They are overcome with emotion. I try to back away, but they lower their heads, leaning on me and leaning on each other, assaulting me with weepy neediness. It is a good thing they don’t seem to mean me any harm because I would be powerless against their coordinated beer-cheese bear hug.
“He was so beautiful,” one of them says. “Just a damn angel on Earth.”
“He put my youngest through beauty school,” another says.
“He got my jaw broke, that son of a bitch,” says an especially burly one, pulling a hand free from the hug so he can rub his close-cropped beard. “But then he paid to have it all fixed up and even made them give me a real chin. Then he bought me a goddang Jaguar car.”
“We miss him so much,” says the clearest-eyed one of the bunch, who also happens to be the shortest and trimmest. “He taught us how to be better men, actually. More humane. More feminist.”
“He also taught us how to be worse men!” chimes in the last one.
Everyone laughs. And it dawns on me that they are all talking about Henley.
This is some kind of funeral or wake for him. I can’t help but be touched that I am not alone in my misery, even if they were the ones who killed him.
“We have to be honest with you,” says one of the beef-eating bruisers. “We came here to the big city to find him and rough him up.”
“To
