“So tell me a story,” I heard Jack Zee say as I opened my eyes.  “Tell me your best lunatic, perverted, crazy, drunk-ass story.  Because I can top it.” 

            He was leaning over deeply into my personal space, his brow twitching as rivulets of sweat rolled from crease to crease, bouncing past freckles like pinballs past bumpers.  Jack Zee!  He was tall and lean and bug-eyed, and there was something inside of him that ran too fast, a human tape recorder with only one button—fast forward.  He was a godawful sight for a respectable gal like me to wake up to, and did that mean I’d fallen asleep again? And where was I again, anyway? 

            I looked around: I was on a subway car, heading in to work.  Shit, I thought. It was still mid-August, and it was still swelteringly hot.  I was still on the other side of the world, still living in  a city of five million people shoehorned into a narrow coastal valley, and it seemed plausible that a million of them were on the train with us as that very moment.  Was I ever going to wake up and be somewhere else?  Here, every plastic seat was taken, every handhold clasped, every inch of chrome railing covered over in fingers intertwined.  Flesh pressed against fabric pressed against flesh.  Everyone swayed as the train changed speeds in rhythm with the stations, everyone breathed everyone else's breath, practically tasting them; everyone was hot and the windows dripped condensation. 

            Of course, this was exactly the kind of thing you had to keep your mind off of, unless maybe you specifically wanted to feel claustrophobic.  And who am I to say?   People get off to all kinds of things, after all.  I could tell you stories of men who ride the subways only at rush hour, groping any women pressed up against them.  It’s happened to me—some dark-suited salaryman sliding his open palm against my nylons.  All it takes is a quick jerk of the train, and perv-boy would have his feel.  But for me the subway was just a commute, a long, boring, painful commute.  This realization came as a sure sign that I was now fully awake.

            “Drunk-ass?” I said to Jack. “What a word!  Is that the kind of thing you're teaching the morning ladies?”

               "Drunk-ass," said Zee, his voice perfectly flat in the way a teacher’s voice is supposed to be in front of a classroom.  "Because in English you can use '-ass' as a suffix of intensity.  For example, you could say, Big Ed is one freaky-ass Buddhist.”  Big Ed was one of our fellow teachers—and he was in fact a Buddhist.   But was he freaky-ass? It seemed likely. Jack was very good at identifying the type.

               “But fuck that,” Zee said, . “We can talk English grammar later.  Right now I demand a story.”

               “Demand?” I said.  “That’s a big word.”

               “Okay, fine.  Sally, tell me a story, please.  I can’t take it any more.”  He looked dead serious all of the sudden.  We were good friends, and taught at the same English language cram school.  But I didn’t really know Jack very well.  He could be sort of shallow in the way that guys are when they act tough, but that didn’t bother me: I’d grown up with two older brothers who still lived back in Ohio.  It was the heat, I thought, that was getting to him.  It was so damn hot and humid.  He was liable to go off the deep end, I thought.  Hell, that’s the way I felt half the time.  But someone like Jack, with that nuclear personality of his?  He was a Chernobyl waiting to happen.   

               “Okay,” I said, closing my eyes and just feeling the swaying of the subway car under my feet. “Once upon a time in a country far, far away, there lived bunch of American college graduates who had majored in English or History.  This was in 1991, and back then there weren’t any jobs for people with those sorts of majors.  And as a group, you know, they owed a lot of money to a lot of banks in the form of student loans and credit cards, and then their mothers started telling them to get out of the house and look for a job.  But they didn't think much of the positions they were offered—like as shoe store assistant managers making only $15 K a year, which even in 1991 was a joke.”

               “Somehow I think I’ve heard this one.  Or lived it,” said Jack, grinning again.  “But do go on.  What did these unfortunate souls end up doing?”          

               “Well, they would have joined the Peace Corp in a flash, except that there was no way to defer their credit card bills.  So they worked temp jobs for a couple of years, but they knew they weren’t getting anywhere.  So they answered an ad in the newspaper.  It went: Teach in English in Korea. 20 hours/ week, 25K, housing provided. BA required.”

               “Actually,” said Jack, “the one I answered promised round trip airfare and a month of paid vacation in August.  But I still haven’t gotten reimbursed for my airfare.  And I’m going to need more than a month to get over having to teach Saturday mornings.”

               “Well, that’s beside the point.  And anyway, I’m the one who’s telling this story.” I opened my eyes again and gave Jack a hard stare.  “The people in my story lived at home in the basement and would rather have eaten shit than taken a job in the mall as an assistant manager. And if you’d been the one to run up your credit cards during a year abroad in Spain, and you weren’t getting any action because your boyfriend was living at home too, well , it wouldn’t have mattered who was paying for the ticket, as long as it was a ticket out.”  I took a deep breath.  “And then the clincher was the monk who never sleeps,” I said.   

               “The Monk?” Jack said.  “Well of course the Monk never sleeps.  I mean, except on holidays, when all the bars close.”

               “No, no, not that Monk.  Some real monk.  The agent who recruited me told me all about him in my interview.  A Monk who never sleeps.  You know how those agents are. He started telling me about how I could go visit monasteries in my free time, and how he could introduce me to the monks and that kind of shit.  He totally sold me on coming to Korea.  And the kicker was the monk who never sleeps.  Supposedly he lives at Pomo Temple.”

               And at that moment a gaggle of middle school girls got onto the subway, and one of them spied us.  A whispered cry went up.  Mi-gook sarum, Americans!

               “Heeeellllllloooooo,” a particularly brave middle schooler hollered out, over the clanking and rattling of the subway. “American, hey you, American! Do you Englisheee?  Do you Englisheeeeeeee!!!!!??????”  They didn’t seem even the slightest bit disappointed when neither Jack nor I so much as glanced their way.  Perhaps we weren’t real to them, just as Hollywood actors aren’t real in any sense that you or I understand.  Certainly these girls weren’t real to us—they, their lives, their reality.  They were Korean middle school girls in uniform and we, well, we were hung-over expatriate English teachers on the lam from student loans and Republican presidents.  We were polar opposites, never the twain shall meet, and so on.

               “Sally,” Jack said, “you got taken by your school’s hiring agent.  I mean, when have you ever been to a monastery?”

               The answer, of course, was never.  I worked all the time, even Saturdays.  And when I was off, I went straight away to the Monk—the bar—for a drink.

               "Okay," I said, not wanting to concede the point, “so then when I first arrived in South Korea, I met this Texan named Doug one day in the street and he told me where to find the Monk. This was when you were still up north in Ulsan." 

               "Ah, the real Monk," Jack said.  "When I lived up in Ulsan, I dreamed of a bar like the Monk.  There's absolutely nothing depraved or interesting about Ulsan, I'll tell you what.  Until I found the Monk, I didn't think there was any way I was ever going to finish out my contract.  And by the way, you’ve slipped out of the third person.  Very sloppy storytelling…"

               "…and so one night on the way to the Monk," I insisted, because it really was hard to get a word edgewise with Jack, "Doug taught me this charming subway game called Fashion Salary-man.  And it was really one of those things that helps you to cope, you know, when you first arrive here.

               “So Doug had been here for almost 26 months,”  I told Jack, “and he was on the verge of having a meltdown.  I mean, he really went off the deep-end.  He was out drinking every night, smoking up a storm, having marijuana shipped to him hidden inside cassette tapes.  He more or less stopped going in to work and his director got him deported on the pretense that he was giving illegal private lessons.  Which of course he had been, but he'd more or less stopped even that.  He mostly just sat around in his apartment smoking pot all day long.  But he was always ready to party at night, and I'd drop by his place Fridays and we'd go to the Monk.  Because, if you can believe this, back then I only went out on Friday nights, because I always so busy planning my lessons.” 

               The stop after Myon-yon-dong was Onchung-jong.  The middle school girls got off en masse, and an old woman dragging a crate full of dried fish got on.  The departure of the girls made everything less crowded; it was even possible to grab a bit of hand rail.  I felt suddenly very tired.   It would’ve been nice, I thought, to be going home now, after such a long day at work, and after having to put up with this commute. But we weren’t going home, so I kept talking, letting the stations slip past.

               “We'd be riding the subway and Doug would be, like, look at that guy's outfit.  Have you ever seen anyone dress like that before?  And he'd be pointing at some salaryman wearing plaid socks and yellow pants and a shirt of a different plaid and then a checkered jacket and maybe a sun hat with a green plastic visor or something. And Doug would say, that's not just ordinary bad taste.  That's bad taste for a reason.  It's like he's doing it on purpose, to win a prize or something.  And that idea really stuck in our heads.”  And as I said this I instinctively scanned the subway car for contenders.  Two or three instantly stood out, but the best was a skinny man with a wispy goatee.  He had on black shiny jeans and a pinkish-orange jacket that sported on its breast pocket a gigantic, embroidered patch in the shape of Arnold Palmer’s head.

               “We’d be riding along and then Doug would start shouting, fashion salaryman! Fashion salaryman!   And then Doug would start giving a running commentary, like he was a sports announcer.  Look at the grace in this one, he'd say, strips and colors so out of balance, pants too tight, glasses crooked.  A powerful showing.  Or he’d say, an obvious amateur, look at all those missed opportunities,… why, his socks match his shirt!”

               “But one time,” I continued, “we were on our way to the Monk when Doug pulled out a bowling trophy from his bag.  I don't know where he got it from, but he walks up to this one salaryman and hands him the trophy and makes a little speech in Korean, saying, please, accept this award as a token of our appreciation for your bad taste.  And the poor guy was so stunned that all he could do was take the goddamned thing and stare back at us!  Then Doug started clapping and I started clapping and everyone in the whole subway car just stared at the poor guy, and his eyes were all buggy with embarrassment and all he could do was just stand there.  It must have killed him.”

               “Wait, this is the Doug who taught at the Happy Kid Academy, right?” Jack asked me.  “But I heard he really got kicked out of the country because he screwed his principal's wife.  She was one of his conversation students, and got all loopy about him and showed up on his doorstep one morning and refused to go home.”  

               “Really?” I said.  And it figured, because Doug had been pretty careless with his love life—certainly I’d heard enough about him that I’d always turned down his advances.  But I’d never heard about the married woman before.  “well, I mean, there was more to him than that.  He was a Zen-kind of guy, too.  Before he fell apart, anyway.  He lived in a little apartment up above a traditional teahouse, and had a library of books on meditation.  Isn't that how you're supposed to live in Asia.”

               “Fashion salaryman,” said Jack, shaking his head.  “I can't believe you two spent your time looking at random men in bad clothing.  Now I would've spent the time trying to decide which girls looked the easiest.  That'd be a game more to my liking.  Like, imagine if this subway car were suddenly lost through a dimensional portal and dropped on a deserted island.  Who would you want to screw?  Because I can tell you right now who I'd want to get with…” He looked around, then settled on a tall girl with a bow in her hair and silver lipstick who was sitting across from us.  “Her, with the space lips.”

               This girl was all show, all flash, with a face heavily plastered in make-up and a dazed, happy expression.  Why did guys always go for this sort of thing?

“Her!” I practically shouted. “You know, Zee, I just don’t understand your taste in women.  I mean, she looks like a fucking poodle.”

“Hmm.  Let’s just say I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.  And she reminds me of this girl I met at the Hyatt in Kwangan-li...”

Jack was really getting into it, but then the strangest thing happened.  The man with the wispy goatee and the pink golf jacket motioned to poodle girl.  They both got up as the train pulled into a station.  He took her bag, and then he turned to us and spoke in perfect English.

               “You two really make me sick.  Can't you think of something better to talk about in public?  Because it’s pathetic.”  I was left slack-jawed on the train as they got off.  The Korean dude spoke English.  Holy shit, I thought.  Holy fucking shit.  I could feel my face turning red.  But once the doors were safely closed, Jack raised an eyebrow and grinned.  He wasn’t the least bit chagrined.

            “We're busted,” he said.  “Just like your fashion salaryman!”     

*  *  *

            We got off at Pusandaeha'gop, the university district.  The station there was warm and brightly lit, paneled in orange and yellow squares and so big and high-ceilinged that it seemed deserted despite the rush hour crowds.  There was a noodle stand at one end of the station, a coffee shop at the other.  Jack and I made for the coffee shop. A group of boys and girls were standing around there as we came through the turnstiles.  Sweat glistened on their faces: it was as hot inside the station as it had been down on the train. 

               "Hey! Hey, Americans," one of the boys called out, "maybe you go home now, okay?" The girls all giggled and one of the boys took a long drink out of a bottle of clear liquor.  But this was a common occurrence, and it barely registered         

               The main street of Pusandaeha’gap was narrow and crowded and lined with tall buildings, all concrete, and there was indeed litter everywhere.  I remembered how when I’d first arrived, I’d tried to will all the trash away.  Didn't the Koreans care, I’d asked myself?  But no matter how much I tried, the streets of Pusan remained the same, because in fact the question wasn't whether the Koreans cared or not, but why I insisted on worrying about it.  But that was a lesson that took a long time to learn. 

               There was another kind of beauty to the streets, though.  It wasn't a beauty that arose out of orderliness, but rather a beauty of energy and motion.  Flickering neon signs advertised for pool halls, pharmacies, bars, bakeries, coffee shops, nightclubs, love hotels.  Steam rose from trays of dumplings out front of the street-side dining halls where university students were having their evening meal, their chopsticks flicking in circles, chasing the steam.  And there was a stifling dampness in the air, a humidity mixed with soot and auto exhaust.  It made the air almost grainy, but seemed to make the lights of the city even brighter, trapping all the energy right there at street level, letting not even a single photon escape.   Had Jack learned this lesson?  It didn’t seem likely.

               "Now here’s a story," began Jack, "that’s well worth the time."  He said this as we plunged into the street, into a melee of cars and trucks mixing freely with hoards of pedestrians, everyone jostling for position.  We passed a McDonalds so busy that a line formed out front of it, and then a little further on passed the main gates to the university.  We took an alley that was a shortcut to the Monk, and there were women there in the middle of the alley gutting eels, washing the entrails down into the storm sewer, and there were crates stacked high with cabbage, and dozens of parked motorcycles.  A crowd of youths in black leather jackets sat cross-legged atop a couple of low-lying, linoleum covered tables, playing cards and drinking.  They surely noticed me—but this group was too cool to say anything, content to just sip their soju as we walked by.    It made me feel like going back and giving them all hugs.

               "And the eels?" I asked Jack.  "Do the eels figure into your story too?"

               "They could, you know, they could…"

               "Oh. Bullshit.  I’ll match your eels and I call.  Let’s hear your story."

               "Fine, fine," said Zee.  "I’ll start it with the eels, just to show you."  He thought about this for only a second.

               "When I first woke up here in the republic, like when I first opened my eyes after arriving in the middle of the night, the first I thing I saw was my principal leaning over and staring me in the face," Jack said.  "He had let himself into my bedroom without so much as a knock and announced that he was taking me to lunch.  He didn’t ask if I wanted to go, or anything.  He just told me what I was doing.  He was, you see, really old school Confucian."

               "And of course it was an eel restaurant," I said.  "But I like eel.  Doesn’t sound perverted to me."

               "I like eel too," Jack protested.  "But this was my first day.  No one likes Korean food their first day. And at the restaurant the woman who ran the place just reached into the fish tank and pulled out a wriggling eel and sliced him open and diced him up and threw him into a wok that was right there in the middle of our table.  And all of the eel parts, they were still moving, right as they were cooking there at the table.  All wriggling around and curling up."

               As Jack talked, we walked past a whole litany of student hang-outs, going past the Genghis Khan Antique Bar and the Alpha-Omega, past the Tequila, the CNN, the Shaq, the Café Trendy and the Smog Bar.  But we passed them all by.  The Monk was a far, far better place, and worth the extra-long walk.

               "So for three months I’m in Ulsan," Jack said, "and I don’t see another Westerner.  It’s just me and my director and his wife and pretty soon I realize that I’m the only teacher.  It’s just me teaching out of an office underneath their apartment.  They feed me all my meals and ask lots of questions when I leave the house.  I ask them where to get a drink, where to go dancing, how to go and have a good time in Ulsan, and they tell me that no one drinks or dances or anything there.  Ulsan is full of good Christians they tell me, because the wife is a born again, you see.  Then she goes off to visit her mother and my director grabs me after class and says, ‘Mr. Zee, you have been here three months and work very very hard.  Maybe you need relax?’.  And of course I say, yeah, maybe I need relax."

               Jack was talking a million miles an hour now, oblivious to everything around us. We passed a man in a black suit crumpled in the gutter, reeking of booze and vomit, but Jack just neatly sidestepped him. A taxi roared by, honking at both us and the drunk, but Jack didn’t so much as alter a syllable.   

               "You say you needed relaxation?" I asked.

               "I did," he said. "But perhaps not the same as what my principal had in mind.  I honestly thought it was a coffee shop he’d taken me to until the waitress sat down in his lap and lit his cigarette.  Then he made her light mine, and she lit it by leaning as far away from me as she could and then reaching the match over.  It was so weird.  And then I realized she was terrified of me.  I don't know why.  Maybe she'd never seen a foreigner before, or she'd heard that all foreigners have AIDS.  Lots of people believe that, you know.  And of course she was thinking, like, am I going to have to do it with this mi-gook?  And all I could do was think, my fucking principal’s taken me to a goddamn brothel, for pete’s sake!” 

               As Jack told me this, we were walking further north, and the neon lights and the crowds of people had grown thinner and the buildings had leveled out at one or two stories.  In this neighborhood there were single family homes, square two story buildings with flat roofs and courtyards full of potted palms that were just barely visible through the front gates.  Some of the homes even had grassy lawns inside their courtyards, and all of them had sharp metal spikes or barbed wire set along their walls.  I imagined I could understand why: the desire to scale those walls and sit down in that grass would be a powerful temptation.  It was better that the spikes make clear right off the bat just how impossible such a fantasy was.  The city was concrete and asphalt, and it was unforgiving in this regard.  You had to accept this in order to make it in the Korea, because you could never afford to live in a house with a grassy lawn, no matter how good your salary was when converted into U.S. dollars.  If that's what you wanted, you were better off going home.

               But then we could see the Monk's glowing blue sign just a little way off in the distance and we were almost there. It was hung on the side of a commercial building in the middle of the district. The Monk itself was on the second floor, its windows and doors dark, but we knew they were just covered over in thick black fabric.  Up close you could read the sign, which read:

Thelonious Monk Club

 Live Jass and Cock-Tales!

Now Open

               It was all very quiet and dark, the whole walk from the time you left the main streets and the university behind.  Then suddenly you were there and you went round to the back and up a staircase, and at the top you opened a door and threw back a black curtain.  You never knew if the place was happening or not until you got there and pulled back that curtain.  Weeknights were usually slow.  But this night we had been assured by Big Ed  that every Westerner in the city was going to be there; it was my contract anniversary, a big deal, and the very best excuse to party.  It was, in fact, the anniversary of my second contract.  For two years I had been waking up in Korea, which meant something, I supposed.  I just didn’t know what. 

               Big Ed worked at the same institute as Jack and me, and on top of that, all three of  us shared the same apartment.  That was how the situation in Korea generally was: you lived with the same people you saw everyday at work.  It was only on nights when the whole Western crowd met at the Monk that you ever got to see anyone Western besides your co-workers. The rest of the time you were immersed up to your eyeballs in the ocean of Korea.  But it wasn't just an issue of sink or swim.  You needed gills!  And certainly it didn't hurt to drink like a fish.    

               “And so this girl is terrified of you but she’s nibling on your ear and sitting in your lap,” I said as we walked up the stairs to the Monk, “and then what happened?”

               “No, no, the one who lit my cigarette was the one who was afraid I had AIDS.  The other one was nibbling on my ear,” Jack said, curtly, “but the whole point of this is that I let it slip later to my principal's wife that he frequented whorehouses when she was out of town.  I didn’t exactly let it slip on purpose, or anything, but she connected something I said with something else, and next thing you know she divorced him, the institute folded, and I was free to move to Pusan and find a new contract.  So it all worked out perfectly!”

               We were met at the door by Sung-Whan, the owner of the Monk.  He was carrying up several cases of beer that he’d bought around the corner at a Happy Mart, and we held the door open for him so he could slip behind the black curtain carrying his cargo.  Sung-Whan was growing his hair out long the way that Jack wore his.  He could pull it back now into a little ponytail and he was maybe one of only a dozen men in the whole city who had hair that long.  He was also a musician and a true freak.  In America, of course, having long hair is just fashion.  Lawyers have long hair.  That senator from Colorado had long hair.  But here, to have long hair was to be denied employment, to be hassled by the police, to be declared outside the social order. Note incidentally, foreigners in Korea found themselves in exactly the same situation, minus the part about employment, although there were heavy restrictions on our work visas.  And it didn't matter whether we had long or short hair, just that we were foreigners.  But Whan was a true outcast. He didn't even live with his family, even though he wasn't married, and he was always going on about the bands he was going to book. 

               “Monk is the most famous jazz club in Asia,” he’d told me once, and he’d hinted more than one time that Pat Mentheny was going to come down and play a show the next time he was in Seoul, which would happen the next time he was in Japan, which would happen as soon as his new album was out.  But Pat Mentheny never came as far as I know.  In fact, no one ever played at the Monk except the house band.  But Whan had a giant jazz collection on CD and never allowed even a measure of pop music to be played over his speakers.  Sometimes late at night when the place was wall to wall with Canadians and Americans, he would play some Reggae or Ska, and he would clear away the tables from in front of the stage so that people could dance, but this would only happen when he'd been drinking as well and the evening was going really well and the momentum was heavy.  He'd be out there dancing and a crowd of customers would be behind the bar serving drinks, spinning the tunes and taking the money.   Or else he'd be trying to get everyone back out from behind the bar, but either way it meant things had rolled along and out of his hands.  That was the only time he allowed anything but good pure jazz to be played at his place, although Jack and I had been noticing things rolling along and out of his hands more and more often as the months passed.  Later, in fact, he would tell us that all the bad air and the late nights were wearing him down, and he was thinking about closing the Monk.  He wanted to get married, but the girl's parents wouldn't let her marry a bar owner, and especially not the owner of a bar that catered to foreigners.  And also he had made a lot of money, he said, and wanted some time off to travel in Europe.  But in those days, when possibility hung so heavily in the air, and when the Monk would never shut down for the night before three or four am, there was no talk from him of marriage or of giving up the Monk.

               We followed Sung Whan through a small hallway of darkness and velvet but we could already hear the house band.  It was hot in there as well, jungle hot, hothouse hot, and you half exepcted you were going to find Mayan ruins or dinosaurs or headhunters or something.  And the evening had the sweet taste of possibility about it, a taste that was sweet like a bite of pure frosting off a cake, made sweeter by a long week of work.  I stepped into the Monk and all of that workweek and all of the world outside fell to the ground like so much dirty laundry and socks.  I was at the Monk, and it was like putting on a velvet smoking jacket.

               “Stepping into the Monk is like putting on a velvet smoking jacket,” I said.  It didn't sound as good out loud as it had in my head.

               “Only if you bought it second hand and it’s got puke stains on it,” said Jack, shouting over the noise, “but hey, I’d be wearing it all the same.  It’s better than a whorehouse in Ulsan.”

               Inside it was a tidal wave, an explosion. I could feel everything latent in the evening now surge forward. The Americans were all over the room like a high tide, overrunning the chairs and leaving only the tables high and dry, like little islands. Everyone was very excited and speaking very quickly, and not incidentally, were already quite drunk.  The men were dressed in jeans, leather jackets, slacks, t-shirts, sweaters, turtlenecks, you name it;  they sported goatees, long sideburns, longer bangs. The women wore their hair long and straight, their shirts cut low, with only trace amounts of make-up on their lips and around their eyes.  Westerners every one of them, they’d poured into the little Monk and filled it to bursting.  There were calls for beer and orders for whiskey and soju and even makoli, the local rice wine. Cigarette smoke crept in curling, peacock plumes up to the ceiling.  The band (an actual jazz combo, dug up from some hip but obscure corner of the Pusan National University music department) played louder in response, shaking the joint (though not quite managing to play entirely in tune).  And at the head of this crowd was Big Ed, our co-worker.  He had undoubtedly been the first through the black curtain that evening and the first to call for a beer.  He was good and toasted, and seeing us, he climbed up on top of a table and addressed the assembled clientele.  Even the band stopped playing.

               “First of all, I want to make it perfectly clear to everyone here that, yes, I was in fact, and have in fact been tonight, in a state of most shameful public nakedness”  Loud cheers greeted this. “Hey, hey!” Big Ed went on, “Hey, wait, because...hey, shut up and listen for a second, okay,” he hollered, and it did quiet down momentarily. 

               “Let’s just say it was hot and there was a fountain, and I wasn’t going to let the fact that it was in the middle of a shopping mall stop me.  But I have to make it known, you see, that besides being shamelessly naked...,”  everyone roared again, but Ed shouted over the top of them, “that besides being naked, as of tonight, that lovely lass Sally has been in Korea for two years!  And to mark this point of long…”  He stopped.  “Fuck!  What’s the word?”  Then he remembered:  “Of longevity, yeah, longevity.  So to mark this point of longevity, we’re not going to stop drinking tonight until every last one of us is passed-out dead in a corner, in a puddle of puke!”  And with that, Ed unbuttoned his pants in a single, swift motion, dropped them down to the table top, and stepped out of them entirely.  Wearing only his shirt and boxers, he took a bow amid applause and catcalls.  He was, as his name indicated, a big guy.  Big and broad shouldered, with an ample tummy that now rolled over the waistband of his exposed underwear, he wore thick glasses with black frames that made his eyes look too small for his head.  But there was no mistaking the intelligence behind them.   His was like the engine of an Italian sports car stuck inside the body of a Ford pickup.  Worse, his sense of morality was like one of those temporary spare tires that you find nowadays in the trunks of most cars—which is to say, you wouldn’t want to travel very far on it.

               “Edward,” someone shouted, “put your pants on before I spank you!”

               “Is that a dare or a promise,” he said.  Someone tipped over the table he was standing on, and he was forthrightly held down.  Someone did indeed start spanking him and a line quickly formed, with people waiting their turn.  He got whacked pretty good before finally managing to escape.  “Grab him again,” someone shouted. “Let's rape him!” added someone else.  This was followed by peals of laughter.

               “Maybe it's time for a whiskey,” I said to Jack.  The room was very crowded now, but we’d managed to make our way up to the bar.

               "What the fuck was with that," said a woman next to me suddenly.  I hadn't really noticed that she was there, and it took me a moment to realize she was talking to Jack and me.  She an American accent, but I didn't know her, an obvious Newbie.  She was looking at Jack and me like she was waiting for an answer.              

               "Two whiskeys it is," Jack said.  But Sung Whan was already swamped with orders, and we had to wait for him to work his way over to us again.  The woman, meanwhile, was still waiting.

               "Will you fucking listen to me!” she shouted. “What’s wrong with this place?"

               Jack looked over at me and it looked like he was debating whether he wanted to say anything or not.  But it’d been a long day at work.  It’d been a long ride on the subway.  There’d been those kids hollering at us. And maybe my stories hadn’t been sufficiently drunk-ass enough to relieve all that pent-up stress.  It’d been a long contract, and he still had a year to go.  I guess he was pretty near the breaking point—maybe not quite as badly as Doug had been—but pretty close.

               "Look," he said finally to the woman,  "I'm sorry you're in Asia and things aren't the way you'd thought they'd be.  I'm sorry that this is a big concrete third-world city and not a Shangri-La of mountain villages and wise and noble teachers to show you the Way.  So look, I know you.  We're all the same here.  You answered that ad to go and teach English in Korea.  Everyone sees them in the papers all the time back home, but you actually did it.  Back home that makes you gutsy.  You're sick of shopping malls and HBO and Republicans.  Here it makes you average.  But that doesn't mean that the Koreans have to make their country into something that passes muster with us.”  He paused here as Sung-Whan handed us fresh whiskeys.

               "That's not what I was saying," she said.  "I like it Korea.  It’s the people here, at the Monk, the Americans.  Us Americans.  I mean, what the fuck, that guy took off his clothes, for crying out loud.  I mean,…"  But Jack cut her off.

               "I can even tell you your future.  The clinical progression of culture shock means you'll pretty much love your first month, hate the next four, start to feel better around month 8 before going into a really black depression that will ride you hard until close to the middle of your second year.  By then you'll start to cope in more sensible ways, but before that you'll either break your contract and go home, or else you'll be spanking my roommate with the rest of 'em." Jack polished off his drink all in one gulp.  "So don't be saying we're all fucked up here." 

               By this time Big Ed had gotten his pants back on, and was smoking a cigarette and talking amiably to a group of Kiwis who taught at a private college out by Kwangan-li Beach.  The newbie woman got up and moved, but she didn't leave the Monk.  After all, where else could she go?  Once you knew where the Monk was, it was irresistible.  You’d get up late and rush into work and teach all day long and all you’d want to do is go home and sleep.  But then you’d be on the way home and the weight of everything would press down on you, the feeling of being alone as you walked through the busy streets, of looking different from everyone else, the weight of all the comments.  And then you’d suddenly find yourself going down that familiar street, the Live Jass and Cocktales sign showing you the way. 

               This new woman, I thought, she’d find it out soon enough.  No matter what you dreamed your life in Korea would be like, once you knew where the Monk was, your life in Korea was no more than what it was, end of discussion.

               “Except that’s not what you were supposed to tell her,” I said to Jack.  “Because, you know, what she really wanted to hear was the story about the monk who never sleeps.”

               “You don’t think that Newbie needs to know the truth?” he said.  “Would you prefer I tell her some sugar-coated fantasy of oriental mystique?”

               “No, it’s not like that.  But think about it.  What are you going to tell people when you go back home.  No one’s going to listen to you if you start ranting about how the middle school girls staring at you on the subway drove you to start spanking your co-workers.  You need a calming kind of story, really.  A good story to end things up with.”  I took a sip of my whiskey.  I used to tell my brothers stories like this, when I was a kid, when I was stuck babysitting them and I was trying to get them to go to sleep.  It was important, I knew, to get the words to roll off your tongue and springboard from the lips in just the right way.  “You see, there’s this head monk, and he lives in a honest-to-God cave. I have no idea where this cave is, but it’s surrounded by a thick green forest and there’s a stream where huge torrents of white water come crashing down through a field of slate gray boulders.  And there’s a thin sliver of bamboo forest growing on either side of this stream, living off the dampness of the spray.  Down in the valley I figure there must be a monastery, something really old with a stone pagoda and a red gate.  And there’s a path from the gate up towards the cave, and the stones lining the path are all covered in moss.  You’re going to need a story like that to tell.”

               “It sounds wonderful,” Jack said, sipping on his drink.

               “Yeah, you know, it does.  And then when you get up to the cave, well, that’s where the head monk lives, and he never sleeps.  Sure, he his eyes droop a little when he meditates, but he never sleeps.  Hasn’t for years.  He just looks out over that forest and thinks about the sound of that stream slipping through those boulders.”

               “And the guy who hired you said this was all true?”

               “Sure.  And Doug claims to have met him once, before Doug went and flipped out and all.  He claimed it was all true—or at least, as true as anything Doug ever said.  The monk supposedly meditated all day and all night, and only came out of it to eat.  Doug told me that when he met the monk, he talked about how he wanted to learn English.  So, you know, he could probably show us the Way.  Maybe you could trade out with him for English lessons." 

               "Is that so?  I'll be damned."  Jack looked so much calmer now.  And could it be that he had just made a non-sarcastic comment? He was going to make it after all, I thought, with no regret for having come here, with no twinge at the thought of the choices he’d made.  And on top of that, I felt that I’d won the story contest pretty handily.  It was all enough to make a girl thirsty, and I sure wasn’t dead in a corner yet.

               “Sung Whan,” I called out, “More whiskey!  Lot’s more whisky!”

 

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