My Knife

by Jos

  He was the only one of us with enough of an attention span to focus on the road. But he was like a perpetually shitfaced version of B.A. Baracus sans the Mohawk and body build, and with slightly less bling. The dude would go through his monthly liquor rations the first few days of the month. He would chug a bottle of military special tequila every Saturday night before he had to go to work. “Six rabbit tails well spent,” he would utter behind an ear-to-ear grin. He’d wake up red as a tomato in a pile of vomit. I guess he was the kind of guy who relied on mandatory PT to sober up. “There’s nothing like an hour of forced running to help a man sober up,” he often lamented. We used to joke that he was going to “overgold” and we’d be the ones burdened with cleaning up the vomit and gold. But he was trustworthy and we liked that.

  I guess one of the advantages of living near Yongsan garrison is that you can enjoy the civilian life with some of the army benefits. Itaewon is where we mainly benefited from living near soldiers. The Itaewon crowd always went wild, in contrast to the calmer college student party spot of Hongdae. His very first time partying in Itaewon, my friend Vinnie got a bottle thrown his way and immediately vowed, albeit unsuccessfully, never to go there again. Had any of the Itaewon party animals that we hang with gotten a bottle thrown at them, you best be sure bottles would be flying back like a motherfucker. And that’s exactly how Joaquín had met Bubba.

  Bubba backed Joaquín against four Nigerians outside of the reggae bar by Hooker Hill. Joaquín got into a Dajabón mood but instead of slinging rocks, decided to throw soju bottles. Bubba was right behind him. The Nigerian motherfuckers protected their faces before disappearing into a dark alley together. Why Bubba decided to back Joaquín I was never able to figure out. I guess in his drunken state, he decided to back the dude holding shit down even while outnumbered.

  I get the impression that Joaquín would open his door to anyone he could trust and was out just to have a good time. Bubba and Joaquín had had their drunken fist fights, but they always forgot about it the next morning. They each saw it as nothing more than boys having a little fun and venting the stress of work. After all, they had both been boxers in high school.

  Bubba didn’t seem like the type of cat who would rat anyone out and even though he had stopped doing coke, he wasn’t one of those boring-ass former addicts; he still loved smoking and downing bottles of high-class . Soju is cheap as fuck and gets the job done. I’m surprised Joaquín and Bubba never jacked a soju truck; but if indeed Joaquín carried out the heist, Bubba was gonna be the first dude to tell Smith to drop lead at the first sign of flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

  Lieutenant Smith

  Smith was the social glue to the rest of the risk-taking army crew. Joaquín could bring out his GI buddies from Calor, The Lounge, Helium, and other “classy” Itaewon joints, but not the kind that could be persuaded to blow up a building for the insurance money. Smith, however, was a risk-taking magnet.

  One thing about Smith was that he was perpetually shitfaced. Much more so than Bubba. “Two thousand years ago, Smith would have been a medicine man, a shaman,” Bubba would always say. The motherfucker would wake up and take a hit of whatever happy pill he could find and keep doing it until it put him out, be it the end of the night or a couple days later. Rumor has it that he was halfway to becoming a doctor before he got booted out of med school for “borrowing” his weight in prescription pharmaceuticals. But hey, he enlisted at the height of Bush’s mission to bring freedom to Iraq so the army was taking anyone with a pulse.

  Smith would often go out drinking with his buddy Jibbity. However, he never brought him out to smoke with us. Jibbity had the IQ of a rock. They were pushing a truck and told him to turn the wheels; the dude struggled for 15 minutes trying to push the left wheel before realizing that it would be easier to utilize the steering wheel. Smith loved hanging out with Jibbity because it made him feel sober. There was always a bigger fuck up than yourself, according to Smith. It made sense at the time.

  Smith, on the other hand, was a pretty sharp guy, and was by and large functional and reliable. That is, unless, he was trying to cut you open on the operating table. If indeed Joaquín carried out the heist, I’m counting on the fact that Smith was a key member of the crew that carried out the operation.

  I’m sure the dude could have made any type of explosive; after all, he was using the shit he was making. If he could keep a lab from blowing up, he could have made one blow up in even better fashion. Not only that, the dude knew no greed. Smith only cared about having enough dough to chill. He was generous as fuck and never asked for anything in return. I would have trusted him not to clip my ass over money after a job was done. I feel like he was the kind of guy who’d wanna get rich just to have fun giving it away. He always brought me a gift when he came to see me.

  Plantains are three bucks a pop on base. Every time he would come out from base, he would bring me a plantain to fry up. Romantic? You know it! Giving a plantain to a Dominican girl is better than flowers. Of what use are flowers? I don’t really see one. Did he seduce me with a daily plantain? Most certainly. After every smoke session we would sneak off to my room and pound away until my bed was drenched in sweat. Our affair was never formalized. He was in love with his happy pills perhaps more than he was with me. I still enjoyed fucking him though. He’d lick my pussy like a mineral-deficient cow licks salt. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss his tongue action and plátano de cada día.

  I miss him, but I never deceived myself. I knew our love was too risky. Smith didn’t really care about consequences. He’d brag about a lot of what he did to people he didn’t even know. It’s a miracle no one ratted him out for smoking in bars in Hongdae. But then again, he was counting on the fact that few Koreans can recognize the smell of pot, much less spice. That kind of risk-taking is fun, but not when you’ve got secret plans to execute. If Joaquín indeed called on him to carry out the hit, I’m sure he would have told him about the plan only a day in advance. At least, that’s what I would have done.

  Private O’Connor

  O’Connor and Smith complemented each other well. Smith was reliable in the present, not the future. O’Connor, on the other hand, was reliable in the future, not the present. He was the prince of disappearing before the crew disappeared. He must have been the master of hide-and-seek when he was a kid, made Osama look like an amateur. I’m actually surprised he didn’t get kicked out of the army. Not even those who shared quarters with him knew where he went. I would get calls from Lola on base asking me where the hell he was, as if I would know.

  Dude would often tell you he’d be coming over to see you in five minutes, and next thing you know the motherfucker would be passed out in the bushes or wherever after dipping into Smith or Lola’s liquor cabinet. Two thousand years ago he would have been a brewer. If I were setting up a coordinated hit that would require synchronized precision, I would never utilize the talents of an individual as unreliable. However, the fact that he disappeared tells me that his talents were put to other uses. O’Connor was half-Korean and fluent in even though he had never set foot in Korea before being deployed. But O’Connor’s true power came from his knowledge of computers. The motherfucker was using Linux before Torvalds.

  About two months before the heist, Joaquín was wondering how difficult it would be to empty out a building by fooling the security system. Of course, no specific buildings were mentioned by name. Some ideas were passed around. The most obvious would be to set off the fire alarm. Another, more elaborate one would be to send a fake government air raid drill instructing everyone in the building to leave the premises until instructed to do otherwise. Given the fear that Kim Jong-Il could blow Seoul to smithereens in a matter of minutes without warning, the South Korean government had become very effective at mobilizing its people through text messages. After all, even old s watched soap operas in the subway on their smartphones. Indeed, O’Connor theorized that this system was one of South Korea’s most powerful tools, but
one that also made it vulnerable to hackers. After all, he said, “How difficult would it be to break into a cell tower and send out a mass SMS to everyone in a certain radius? The North Koreans could instruct people to move to a certain area, one where they could use people as shields or a diversion.”

  Joaquín asked O’Connor how long it would take for authorities to realize that the system had been tampered with. “If the alert is benign and brief, it could be made to look like a malfunction in the system. At the most, 10 to 15 minutes.” At the time, the conversation seemed rather interesting and in no way suspicious. The nature of our conversations were often highly technical and theoretical. We liked to ponder different scenarios and imagine how things would play out. In a way it felt childish, the way some of my seven-year-old students with a one track mind get lost in their thoughts. Many in the crew always wondered how things could go wrong. Joaquín confessed to me that as a kid he showered with his underwear on just in case a war broke out and he needed to start running. They were the kind of dudes who always had survival in the back of their minds.

  It kinda happened at different points in their lives, but they all just eventually stopped caring about survival. Even then, Joaquín and O’Connor always felt the need to warn me about my diet and lifestyle. The way they did it was mostly endearing, as if they truly cared for my well-being. Sometimes, though, they would come off as paternalistic, even hypocritical when they insisted that my “drunkorexia” and chain smoking were bad for me. Maybe if they hadn’t been alcoholic spiceheads, I would have been more inclined to sympathize with them.

  Joaquín would always tell me to enjoy every single year to the fullest because what mattered was not the quantity of years lived, but rather how much pleasure you could enjoy in that time. I could never figure that out about him. He was a walking contradiction; a hedonist in everything that did not concern food or cigarettes. I guess he saw cigarettes as something that did not provide pleasure.

  O’Connor, on the other hand, was a hedonist in every respect. He would enjoy whatever life had to offer him. He set few limits to his hedonism. At times it was difficult for me to assess whether he was a hedonist or a nihilist in recovery. The only indication that he was not totally self-destructive was the fact that he joined us on Mondays to chill and that he seemed to care about my well-being for some strange reason.

  Some people grow close because of race, religion, or a political belief. Unilaterally, our “race” as foreigners in a homogeneous society was: ; our Mecca: Hooker Hill. Individually, most of us were atheists or agnostics with no attachment to anything. The soldiers who came to the chill out sessions joined the army for every reason but patriotism. In any case, our group was strictly foreign.

  O’Connor was special in that he was the only one with blood who came into our sanctuary. Even O’Connor was reluctant to let in a Korean national. The more degrees of separation between us and the police, the better we could insulate ourselves from the Korean legal system. We could never truly know if a random Korean we befriended on Hooker Hill would have a cousin who’s a cop.

  Moreover, a Korean national facing spice charges was going to go to prison and face a lifetime of consequences, whereas a foreigner would face mere deportation and a new start at his next destination. Most foreigners caught smoking in Korea do so after being ratted out by a cornered Korean national. My friend Vinnie got ratted out by a cornered Korean and ran out of the country faster than a cheetah on meth after an undercover cop delivered him salvia and told him he shouldn’t order that from the U.S. (It wasn’t illegal at the time, but he got the message that they wanted him to get the fuck out.)

  O’Connor’s knowledge of Korean made him our standard. Since everyone else’s knowledge of the language was limited, we relied on him to guide us around, talk to ajummas and ajeossis, etc. We mirrored our actions after his. If he did it in public, we knew it was socially acceptable. We trusted him that much.

  Seoul Lovers

  Joaquín trusted one of them. She had proved herself to him many times, that much he confided in me. When Joaquín got arrested for smashing a window in Hooker Hill over some spilled makgeolli, she came to bail him out. She was there for him, no questions asked. Did Joaquín love her? I believe he felt a lot for her, but the relationship started on shaky grounds.

  She was aware that his eyes wandered and always tried to tie him down with fe. She was the type who vacationed in Punta Cana and, given her nature to be easily influenced, was drawn to the brujos who promised her a way to amarrar her man. When Joaquín was staying with her, she would feed him frog dust and would keep a portrait of him upside-down by the door. She would stand over his bed with a cigar in her mouth, a cat’s tail in one hand, and a red handkerchief in the other. Of course, Joaquín’s grandmother always made sure he was protected by Papá Bocó (that brujería shit didn’t work on him). Yep, Joaquín was better protected than Amarfis and his Attack Band.

  When I recall their relationship, I think of how Joaquín described cities. Ancient cities sprang up gradually over time – development was not heavily regulated and future technological developments were not planned for in the system. Such a model worked in the past when progress was slow and people had simpler views of the world.

  Joaquín met her one night at Crafttools in lovely Gyungnidan, the neighborhood across the road from Haebangchon. They slurred their names at each other and he asked: “When you gonna let me tap that?” In a matter of minutes, they were walking up the hill to our place. It went on like that for many months. They each saw each other simply as fuck buddies. Could I ever do that? Perhaps if I didn’t nail the guy too often. Too many chemicals go through my system when I fuck a guy that often and for such a long period of time. She fell in love with him, or so she confided in me. Madly in love! Two thousand years ago she would have been a follower of Bacchus. As for him? I think he needed a modern city.

  A modern city is built from the ground up. The streets are planned, the transportation system is thought out, and there is room left for future developments in city planning. East Asians are good at this with their planned megacities and long-term ideas. A planned city is more efficient, there’s no doubt of that. But new cities lack the charm of those old European towns. They’re cold and without character. When a city develops gradually over time, it’s nearly impossible to simply make it efficient and apt for the modern world. Seoul was rebuilt after the Korean War, but lost its ancient charm in many ways.

  Perhaps Joaquín preferred something that worked extremely well; he wasn’t so much into aesthetics. However, he couldn’t resist her charm. Sure, he sometimes missed having a lot in common with his partner, but most of the time she kept it interesting; she would let Antoine cop a taste of her nipples in the middle of the bar, he’d get pissed, and they’d have awesome make-up sex later. However, Joaquín and his main lover had their own little war that helped them realize they weren’t perfect for each other, as is the nature of existence. Nothing is ever perfect.

  She rebelled against conservative roles, or at least she tried. Her parents were overbearing during her youth and as a rejection of that she abandoned every conservative doctrine. I believe that he would want her to be near him. I don’t see how she could have been part of the plan, but if he were to tell her to pack up everything and leave with him the next day without telling anyone, she would be the type of girl to risk it all and leave her life in Seoul behind. Her love was that strong.

  They got along most of the time. Killed their tension with sex, but not all was spicy kimchi and cold makgeolli. Joaquín once went into the Friendly Mart by his house in Apgujeong with her. He purchased the ingredients for poju and, as he was paying for his drinks, she took advantage of the cashier’s distraction to give herself a five-finger discount on an expensive bottle of wine at exactly 4:27 a.m. Joaquín didn’t find out about it until days later, when he casually went into the store and was shocked when the owner handed him a piece of paper that read “thief” and pointed at his ches
t. “Not me!” he protested. The ajumma waved her right hand, shook her head and said, “Aniyo, chingu.”

  The ajumma showed him the CCTV footage, and he saw evidence with his own eyes of how he had been used. He had laughed it off when he’d seen her do it in the corner stores in Itaewon. But now it was evident: he was the black guy she used as a distraction. After Joaquín apologized to the ajumma, asked for a copy and paid for the wine, he confronted her. “I’m sorry, it was just so easy,” she sobbed. “I just wanted to see if I’d get away with it. I promise never to do it again.” Joaquín let the whole thing go and, ‘cause he’s a person who values discretion, didn’t tell anyone but me.

  After all, Joaquín believed that a person should keep petty domestic issues where they belong – in the house. She, on the other hand, would get smash drunk and air every minor grievance not only to me, but also to Jasmine. Especially, and most dangerously, to Jasmine. Jasmine walked up the staircase to Sam Brian’s one day after five days of drinking non-stop and confronted Joaquín publicly in the middle of the bar, screaming at him, “I don’t like how you use women for sex!”

  He looked around nervously at a hundred watchful eyes just before Jasmine started throwing a sequence of punches at him. It’s a good thing he just took the punches by blocking his face, ‘cause if he’d fought back, that woulda been more ammunition to use against him. Yep, Jasmine made Joaquín feel like a rapist right in the middle of a packed bar.

  Though they were only FWBs, she once saw him leave Molly’s with Susan. Instead of saying, “I can’t continue in an open relationship with this man,” she continued drinking, making it all the way up until 11 a.m. at Old City, where, in a spark of Sunday morning drunk genius, she decided to cab back to our place and start smashing the door down angrily. I opened, worried, thinking that she was in grave danger.