by Jos
They say he organized the ambush with help from the Walton Hellraisers, the gang he formed in 6th grade and also used to run perico with outside of Pancho’s bodega. But hell, perico wasn’t the only thing he’s run. I don’t know how he managed to be captain of two sports teams and two academic teams in high school while working as a copyrighted works distribution engineer on the side, but he made it out without getting caught and ended up graduating at the top of his class with a scholarship to Yale. He did all of this despite having grown up in one of the shittiest apartments in Washington Heights.
You know his place was shitty when getting arrested for pulling a knife was typical breakfast fare and scarred knuckles the main lunch entrée. He saw this simply as an extension of the personality his neighborhood required. He was in many ways a product of his environment. In the same way a goat tied to a tree is expected to accept that little radius as its reality, he accepted the streets like others would the Matrix.
His fellow goats attended day school in the alleys between their red brick buildings on 181st and Amsterdam. They attended mass and later preached their religion from the corner by Pancho’s bodega on 184th. But if there was ever a man who seemed to believe nothing for a long period of time, it was him: he was the goat that broke the rope. After a time he got bored of the small-time stuff, left the streets and dedicated himself to escaping from his former congregation. He was an apostate before he even knew it. An escapist to the core. His original plan was to go live in a different country every year for ten years. (He wanted to write a book about passing out in bars all over the world; it was something of an experiment on human trust.) I’m an escapist, too. I guess that’s why we met in South Korea -- we both happened to escape to the same place at the same time.
He was my roommate and drinking partner, which gave me tremendous access to his personal life. He was the only man I knew in Korea who sported a wild Mohawk, and that was the first thing I noticed about him. He would always give an “” followed by a “wassup.” He also tried to make others laugh at any expense. The nigga had a knack for self-deprecating humor. I guess that’s why I decided to room with him – we shared a very similar taste in sarcasm. Hell, we didn’t even know each other’s real names for like the first two weeks we chilled together. I gave him a false French name and he gave me a false Arab name. Sometimes his acting was weak, but fuck, it fooled me most of the time. On top of that, the dude was the type of Dominican mulatto who could blend in anywhere from Brazil to Harlem to Morocco. He traveled everywhere and got noticed only if he wanted to be. The natives often thought he was trying to show off by pretending to be a foreigner.
In Brazil he would walk around the baddest favelas and purchase merchandise at local prices. He was as good an imitator as Julio Sabala, his childhood role model. Maybe it was all in the sly, confident smirk, and luscious lips. He had an allergic reaction to ají tití as a kid and spent an entire month with badly burned lips. Afterwards, they developed a purplish color that well complimented their fullness. It was easy to get lost in them when we spoke. He told me he didn’t speak Spanish, insisting that we speak French instead.
I never figured out if he bought my French. My accent was good after that semester I spent abroad in Paris, but probably still too Americanized to fool him. But now that he’s disappeared, I may never know if he had been able to figure me out. He was always the kind to play along, which made it more difficult to know what he was really thinking.
The Disappearance
The Myeongdong hit had his fingerprints all over it. I don’t really give a damn and will never rat him out despite the reward being offered by the Korean police. After all, I have no real concrete evidence, just a hunch that he was the cat that organized all that shit to go down. I never took him to be the kind of unreliable guy to just walk out on his duties. He worked like a Korean mule his first year, but had a job that was much more relaxed than my own his second year around. I had to keep roughing it at my shitty hagwon just ‘cause I needed the dough. Even though his life was more comfortable than mine, he always seemed restless.
I guess the Yale mentality to make it big really got to him. He grew up ‘hood and street smart, but four years at that preppy-ass place affected him in all kinds of ways--hell, he even stood in contrapposto. Stashing away 1500 bucks a month as an English teacher in Korea was probably never gonna satisfy him. He wanted the big score; at least that’s what I tell myself. But maybe he just got tired of living with a half-Haitian “grand blanc.”
Given our history, I’m surprised he never came at me with a machete because he suspected I was lighting candles and shit to Yemaja. Well, that never would have really happened. The dude didn’t believe in religion, nationalism, race, or anything like that. He grew up in a Catholic bubble and saw nothing outside of it until he engineered his escape to Manhattan. Once there, he would cut class and spend his days riding the subway around the city. He was always curious and seeing the world inside of those metal wagons opened his eyes to the vastness of the world; he was amazed at seeing countless numbers of people selling the same belief inside different book covers and still turning a profit.
Once his childhood belief system was compromised, he thought of nothing but the afterlife, and the fear of death that can paralyze a man. However, he somehow lost all his fear of death after an intense smoking session in college. After that, he turned into a self-destructive nihilist, and eventually just a typical obnoxious, atheist Redditor.
Our philosophies differed, but our pasts united us in many ways. My mom was the well-to-do widow of a Haitian businessman and later married my father, a cateto from Granada. Radio Patio has it that Generalissimo Trujillo brought him over to “lighten the ‘Dominican race’.” And so he did. I’ve got pale-faced illegitimate brothers I’ve probably banged without knowing. Hell, I even met one of them on Facebook. My father was the town’s mujeriego; his classical Iberian looks made him the envy of all the guys and the desire of all the women. Joaquín’s father too was the secret child of an Iberian immigrant. I guess we clicked more on that level than on an American or Quisqueyan level.
Though we took different roads, we arrived at the same destination. Besides, being half a world away from our tiny island made those conflicts of our grandparents a story of the past. Korea was a land of new beginnings to us. There we could forget the past and rewrite our personal narratives.
The Plan
We lived in a sweet neighborhood. Haebangchon is right outside of US Army Yongsan Base Gate 3, close to Itaewon, the major party spot for foreigners. Living arrangements are generally cheap compared to most of Seoul. The area itself is considered a slum by a lot of Koreans. I guess that’s the assumption they make when they see foreigners walking around in rags. However, what we were in essence were Bohemians and hipsters. I’m not familiar with another slum where the average resident has a savings account, international mobility, and the fastest internet in the world. Since it was so easy to get a gig with a simple bachelor’s degree, we taught so we could support our love for the nightlife.
Moreover, Haebangchon had those wonderful hills that made it idyllic.
But the hills were confusing; you couldn’t easily predict which street would lead to which. There are alleys and shortcuts that don’t seem easily obvious. One minute you’re on a hill and the next on flat ground. Unless you go around exploring for a good while, you might not learn about the shortcuts.
The buildings are all two- or three-story brickstones which have the staircases on the outside and ornate gates with a very Eastern design. The only thing that sets them apart from the brickstones in the Heights is the ornate brick gates, outdoor staircases, heated floors, and lack of bathtubs.
Maybe the reason we both loved Haebangchon so much was because it reminded us of home. In many ways it was a small town. You’d walk around and know a lot of people on the street. After all, we attended the same bars and hooked up with each other in a spider web pattern. Not only that, but you could wake u
p on a Sunday at noon, walk down to the Friendly Mart bodega, put down a plastic chair and have makgeolli with a bunch of strangers. All we needed was Brugal and some bachata blasting from a stereo and no one would have been able to tell the difference between our neighborhood and a random pueblo in the DR or the bodega on 171st and Wythe.
During our first three months there we drank every night. Hell, the place was surrounded by mountains, littered with electrical wires over dimly lit streets, and you even had motoristas riding around like crazy. All we needed was blackouts, crackheads roaming the streets, a touch more crime, and corrupt cops looking for a handout, and we would have been back home.
Even our house felt like a wooden shack with a sheet-metal roof. The water pounded deafeningly whenever it rained, which made it feel like we were in a platanal. We also rented a basement from one of Joaquín ’s friends on Hooker Hill and just left the door open – the place was pretty safe; Korea has one of the lowest crime rates in the world – for our friends to walk in and join us. I always worked on Saturdays, but Joaquín and the rest of the crew would always have bangin’ parties down there. Although I wasn’t able to enjoy the Saturday festivities, our kick-ass cave became a sanctuary for anyone who wanted to smoke and chill on a Monday night. Of course, getting real llerva in Korea is incredibly expensive, going for 100,000 a gram. We had to settle for the next best thing: spice.
Spice
At 20,000 won a gram, spice gets the job done. It used to be sold as “incense,” and contains a synthetic form of THC which is hard to detect. It’s a designer drug for people who want to smoke but can’t. Testing for it is extremely difficult, so it’s pretty easy to pass a piss test--one of the main reasons a lot of soldiers and teachers do it. Also, the smell is so weak that we would smoke that shit on the street and in parks, even close to cops and without anyone even sniffing around. Its legality was questionable. Some synthetic variants had been made illegal, but the designers simply moved on to another variant. The strand we smoked in Korea had not yet been deemed illegal by the DEA, or so we were told. It generally looked like greenish cotton and felt like a strong sativa, though the effects were a lot more brief than real weed. Even if a variant we used were made illegal or hard to get, then a new one would be waiting to surreptitiously step in and take its place.
Is it safe? I know soldiers who have been doing it for years and are no different than they were before they tried it. I knew a teacher who’d go psycho, stare at a wall, and mumble to himself after even a little puff, but he’d go back to “normal” (he wasn’t really normal to begin with) after the high wore off. I guess only time will tell how safe it is, but for sure a lot of people were making a delicious amount of money getting it into Seoul.
Who the cats smuggling that shit in were, only a few knew, though some was made locally near the DMZ. I’m not sure how Joaquín made his contacts on base, but he introduced me to this LA chola named Lola who joined the army to avoid prison after being implicated in the beating of some Crip. The chick didn’t leave the gangs behind, she kept doing her shit and hustlin’ however she could in Korea. She eventually started dating O’Connor, a divorced Afghan vet who drowned the memories of his ex-wife with cheap gin.
They went into business together. Lola would deal and he would take care of security in case anyone needed to get smacked for crossing the line. I’m not sure if she paid for his services, but I presume that she paid in pussy and spice. It seemed like an acceptable arrangement at the time.
Joaquín attracted adrenaline junkies to our cave, niggas who liked to take risks, who didn’t care if it was illegal. You could say we weren’t afraid of many things, or perhaps that we were careless. I toked simply because I didn’t care much about getting deported from Korea. It’s not like anyone in the states is going to pull my Korean rap sheet and deny me a job. Of course, I wouldn’t do anything that would put me in a position to get my pussy jabbed by a butch coreana in Sing Sing. Like Joaquín, I learned to read Korean in my first year and stayed off the bar radar while working obscene hours and reading up on their laws, all the while looking for gray areas. But otherwise it was worth it; listening to the stories of people Joaquín and I invited over always allowed me to see the world in different ways. We’d spend our time thinking of shit we could do just for the adrenaline rush we’d get.
The Rush
We lived on a hill. Now, I’m not talking about a tiny hill. The shit was exhausting and took at least five minutes to climb. Joaquín wanted to see who could skateboard down the hill with a bottle of gin in one hand, a taegukgi in the other, and a cigar in the mouth. Of course, this was after we’d been doing shots of tequila for like an hour. I’d like to say that I knew he’d make it (he’d been skating since he could walk), but I was honestly afraid he’d fall and bust his ass. The dude went down the hill at probably 40 mph and almost got run over by a car that braked right before Joaquín made a hard left. He had to dump the gin. Broken glass flooded the street. Had he fallen, he would have hit asphalt full of glass shards.
But did anyone give a fuck? Nah, he convinced three of the other dudes to do it. One of them ended up with a busted elbow and had to be taken to urgent care after Smith failed to stitch him up and stop the bleeding. Of course, he came right back to drinks at our crib after getting fixed up. You do have to admire the efficiency of Korean hospitals. I once went in with no appointment and, after an x-ray, a sonogram, and having minor surgery performed on me, I was out in an hour with hardly a scar. And it only cost 110,000 won. But anyway, these dudes were not afraid of pain. Pain and guns were their main interests.
Guns
One day we went to the range with our army buddies, who liked to brag about their accuracy and shooting skills. “I can shoot a hair clean off a man’s head from 500 yards,” Smith boasted. “That’s nothing. One time in Tora Bora I had 6 bullets left and got 7 headshots out of ‘em,” O’Connor responded.
Then Joaquín started musing about hitting the streets of Korea with M-16s: “The Korean police don’t even carry guns or armor. They’d be totally unprepared for heavy hitters like the two cats who held down North Hollywood in ‘97. Those dudes stormed into a Bank of America with automatic rifles, armor-piercing bullets, and 18 kilograms of military-grade armor. More than 2,000 rounds were fired before they got taken down by an army of SWAT and LAPD officers. Their mistake? They weren’t wearing leg armor.” I don’t know why, but Joaquín seemed to have intimate knowledge of almost every major bank robbery in the US. He knew how all of them were planned, down to the smallest detail.
What would happen if a group of heavily armed, trained dudes stormed into a bank in Korea? How would the Korean police force react? What would be the response? The way things were phrased was somewhat enlightening. In many ways, it made me afraid of how vulnerable Seoul was to wild maniacs. I never saw Joaquín as the type of dude to just leave anything to chance. Knowing him, I say he would be ready for a North Hollywood style shootout, but would much rather prefer to plan the shit out carefully.
Bubba
At some point in one of our “highpothesizing” sessions, before we knew Bubba, Joaquín thought aloud about the reasons why someone would join the army. “You either go in ‘cause you’re a patriot, you want power, or you’re an adrenaline junkie.” Muirne protested: “What about those who join for money?” But Joaquín had a fixed dice in his sleeve: “Money is power” was his cliché but apt response. “What about those who want to be part of a group?” asked Bubba. “That falls under patriotism,” he retorted.
None of the soldiers present protested. Their deep silence was in many ways an acknowledgment of Joaquín’s assessment. I thought his words were very real, but it wasn’t until Bubba told us his life story that I realized that a little modification to his theory needed to be made.
Yes, some join for the adrenaline rush, but Bubba joined ‘cause he was a junkie in every respect. The dude was snorting enough coke to single-handedly bankroll a cartel down in Veracruz. How he got th
e money for it I never asked. At the rate he was going he’d be lucky to make it to 24.
Bubba grew up in the deep country, poor as fuck. There was no way he could have afforded an expensive-ass rehab clinic à la Lindsay Lohan. His rehab clinic was going to be US Army Boot Camp. The dude spent his first six days of boot camp in withdrawal puking his guts out while others in the barracks were sleeping. Whoever slept next to that bucket had a time almost as shitty as Bubba.
But somehow the dude made it. I never quite figured out what led Bubba to smash his brain with blow every night. Sometimes he’d get the thousand-yard stare, and I could almost see him screaming and shouting in the middle of a warzone. My PTSD-dar has been wrong in the past, but I would stake a claim that Bubba was somehow mentally afflicted by some form of PTSD.
Perhaps that’s just senseless theorizing. After all, he was in a very heavy relationship with Jasmine, and she never pointed anything out. Hell, the truth might just be that the dude liked to be high all the time. I guess sometimes there’s no reason behind a person’s desire to get high as fuck all day and enjoy life for a short period of time until their body gives out.
He was a good soldier nonetheless. One of the best shooters in his whole squadron, in fact. I never really figured out the reason why Joaquín invited the people he did to smoke with us, but considering that he disappeared around the same time Bank got jacked for twenty seven million bucks, it would make sense that he would choose someone with good shooting skills. He could also fix anything. Two thousand years ago he would have been a blacksmith. On top of it all, Bubba grew up driving trucks in some of the roughest terrain in the South, which altogether made him a very useful asset.