by Jos
Muirne
I’ve told stories about Muirne’s drinking, but my friends back home never believed she was real. Half the time I didn’t know if she was kidding or serious. The religion she declared on Facebook was “Sheenism” and I strongly suspect that she actually lived a lifestyle not that different from Charlie. That was a wild woman if I ever met one. I would call her the Queen of Itaewon. If drinking were a marathon sport, she’d be a world-class athlete. She was once temporarily banned from Old City.
If you were to crash an Airplane into Old City, few would notice. “It was a rough place - the seediest mound on the hill. Populated with every reject and cutthroat from Lagos to Manila. It makes the worst bar in Detroit look like a luxury hotel by comparison,” but it was the most crowded place after 6 a.m. so a lot of the heavy hitters would go consistently to drink there.
To get banned from Old City has long been the most coveted trophy in the world of competitive alcoholism. Muirne managed to do it, but it wasn’t easy. She was playing pool one day when a random Filipino accidentally rubbed up against her ass as she was drunkenly stooped over and struggling to connect the stick with the white ball. After screaming, “Think you can just grab my ass, can’t ya?” she smashed a bottle, sliced him in the arm and then broke her pool stick on the four Nigerians nearest to the Filipino.
She was the toughest woman I knew, could hold her own against any reject on Hooker Hill. She’s the only person I know who was banned from Old City. You could get away with pretty much anything there. It was the kind of place where six Russian guys would fuck El Turco up just because they didn’t like the way he looked at their women. I almost got sliced by flying glass when this crazy Korean chick started throwing bottles at the balcony just ‘cause someone inside the bar had “dissed” her kicks. Old City is the only bar I’ve seen in Korea where the bartenders need stab-proof vests and gats. And indeed, the large Guinean bouncer always complained to Joaquín that he had to take at least seven trips a month to the police station to settle disputes.
Yep, Muirne was that kind of chick. She was an integral part of Sunday Funday. Her constant wrestling on the floor of the Wolfdog with El Turco, her drunken Irish songs and tendency to break out into tap dance made her a hilarious presence. My favorite Muirne moment was when she blacked out for a few hours at the Wolfdog. She jumped up suddenly at 8:11 p.m. and screamed, “I’m gonna be late for work!” and dashed into the bathroom to put on makeup and spray mist over the stench of soju. If you’ve never tried soju, you should know that the smell is pretty strong. Combined with the smell of kimchi, it is sometimes hard to hide the stench of a night out even after a long shower. Unlike Muirne, I always stuck to beer, and am glad I did because I never once blacked out during my outings with either of the two crews.
Confrontation
Muirne always loved confrontation. The Wolfdog was decorated with balloons for New Year’s. Muirne went around the bar and tied around 40 balloons together. She started walking around, eventually standing next to an older marine. After 20 minutes of having 40 balloons rubbing against his face, the guy snapped and started talking down to her. “Listen, girl, I served in ‘nam, you oughta show some respect for your elders!”
She screamed at him, “you think you can talk down to me ‘cause you served in ‘nam? Well, guess what!? I served in ‘nam too; I was a bartender, ya cunt!” Her favorite word was cunt. She probably unleashed about 50 cunts on the old man before he acquiesced and decided that it would be less of a hassle to leave the bar instead of face an Irish madwoman. Her ability to hold her own against anyone probably made her extremely useful to those who disappeared.
I didn’t really know anything about Muirne’s personal life. She was always too smashed to have a coherent conversation. No one knew about that part of her but Joaquín, and perhaps El Turco. I only wonder what they planned together while playing pool in the dark basement of Nillie’s Pub in Haebangchon. I can’t really figure out why she was useful and why she disappeared. Well, she had a pilot’s license and was known to be a functional alcoholic. If the Chill Out Crew carried out the Myeongdong hit, they probably needed someone to fly them discreetly to their hideout.
Fat Jimmy
Fat Jimmy and Joaquín were tight. They had their drunken fights every once in a while, but that’s the beauty of being drunks in Korea. You get so drunk that you forget you had a fight with someone. Fat Jimmy hated and loved Joaquín in many ways. We were neighbors, shared the same alleyway, and thus the same air. Fat Jimmy was an asthmatic and hated us for all the incense, cigarette smoke, and spice that filled the alleyway and made its way into his living room. Of course, he was mostly chill and didn’t make a big deal out of it; he was also passive aggressive.
Fat Jimmy was the grandson of a Scottish tycoon and had a trust fund. He didn’t really have a job in Korea. He simply left every three months for a week or two to renew his tourist visa. The dude was an adrenaline junkie like none other. When I went over to his place for drinks I would see pictures of him in Afghanistan with Prince Harry. The light color of his hair complemented his tan uniform as he posed in front of tanned tanks. He seemed extremely natural; his bulging arms appeared designed for military combat. Of course, he was discharged early after being wounded in combat. He was wounded in an IED attack and lost part of his right ear. Perhaps it was PTSD, no one could ever really figure it out, but his asthma worsened after the Taliban ambush that resulted in his scarred ear. It got even worse when he came to Korea. Did he see friends die? He never spoke about it. The only reason I even know how he lost part of his ear is because I once asked his girlfriend. She was a little depressed the next day for revealing even that small element of Fat Jimmy’s story.
Every time O’Connor and I, who were chain smokers, took cigarette breaks out on our porch, he would join from a distance. I could definitely imagine him being enough of a risk-taker to wanna knock down a bank just for the lulz. But he was also half crazy, perhaps due to the PTSD. I remember him drunkenly chasing his cat down our street at around 3:20 a.m. while shouting, “Come at me, old chap! I’ll teach you some manners; this is bollocks!” Eventually he got tired of chasing the cat and came over for a drink of .
Makgeolli was always his favorite drink. It’s basically rice wine, but it’s dirt cheap (even cheaper than soju) and didn’t leave our lips tainted or our breath reeking. Joaquín and Fat Jimmy would drink at least a bottle a night each. It was the way they bonded, while drinking something that to the average observer looked like nothing more than milk. Before refilling each cup, they often said, “It would be great to be like Shiva and have six drinking hands.”
After he rested from the cat chase and finished his bottle of makgeolli, we headed to the Wolfdog. Fat Jimmy and Joaquín were so similar that it was almost as if they had grown up together. When they became extremely inebriated, they would talk exclusively in quotations. And they always went through phases together, too. Joaquín decided to do a Batman marathon just before we all took a week-long trip to a ski resort and thereafter started spouting random Arnie quotes from Batman and Robin for the following month. After streaking around our chalet trying to find a random Korean party to crash, they decided to sneak two buckets of snow into the living room and drop ‘em on the rest of us (we were distracted by our euchre and asshole games). As soon as they dumped the snow on us, they shouted in thick Austrian accents, “Everybody, chillllllll!”
Of course, it didn’t stop there. The next day, while hitting the bunny slopes, it was a bit windy. The dudes had for some reason decided to snowboard in their tees. At one point it got extremely windy and in sync they shouted, “Ze goggles, zey do nothing!”
Shouting Arnie quotes for the month following our ski trip became their raison d’etre. My favorite Arnie moment was when they donned green facepaint, jungle camo, and stormed the Wolfdog while screaming, “get to da choppa!!!” Every time they met a new person, it would be “ice to meet you.” Hell, they would often go around random people’s tab
les and say, “Allow me to break the ice.”
It kind of died down after a while, but a new personality got a hold of them. We all went over to El Turco’s place to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Afterwards they spoke in rough Japanese accents: “goooooo... playyyyyy.... have fuuun!” But I would say that my favorite personality was the Tres Equis guy. For almost two months, Joaquín spoke in a sensual Spanish accent, always saying something outlandish.
We were having dinner at Buddha’s Palate for Fat Jimmy’s birthday and Joaquín said to a random female acquaintance of Fat Jimmy whom he had never met: “The day Joaquín made love to you was the greatest day of your life. For me, it was just Tuesday.” Here’s a guy with a Yale degree, who, instead of communicating using lines from classical works, communicated exclusively in B-movie quotes. Fat Jimmy and Joaquín would often take on the personalities of the people they were imitating. They were actors. Sometimes the line blurred between their real personalities and those they impersonated.
The absurd was their poetry, the bar their stage, and unsuspecting n00bs their audience. If you were to ask ten people about Joaquín and Fat Jimmy, they would all tell you something different. Fat Jimmy disappeared, too. He had wealth and military experience. Maybe he was the real mastermind. The whole month before everyone disappeared, they did not perform any characters. People were more silent. But it was also the start of fall, so I just attributed it to the weather. Perhaps bank robbers was the last role they played together.
Jasmine
Jasmine was El Turco’s female counterpart. I didn’t really believe in fate until I met her. Jasmine came to Korea the very same week that El Turco did. They met in a random bar in Hongdae and after drunkenly making out hopped into a cab for a private session in the nearest love motel. In their drunken state, they led themselves to believe that the cab driver gave them incorrect change in order to squander their plans to enter the dark building with heart-shaped beds which would support their bodies together for the night. The cab driver protested and Jasmine, who had arms thick as a sailor, started ripping the front seat apart in her rage. Not soon after, the police came and took everyone to the police station.
While at the police station, Jasmine decided to make a boost for the door and disappear into an alley. Of course, the Seoul police don’t really give much of a damn about anything. They figured that they already had her friend, so they could force him to pay the cabbie. El Turco paid the taxista for damages and completely forgot about Jasmine.
Some six months later, while they were both smashed at the Wolfdog, El Turco told the story of how this girl ran out of the police station during his first week in Korea. The cops were trying to force him to provide the name of the girl who had bolted, but he honestly couldn’t recall. It was at that moment, months after they had gotten used to seeing each other passed out at the Wolfdog, that Jasmine remembered the incident and El Turco recognized her. That’s the way it tended to work, no one ever had the full picture of what happened on a certain night. We had to work together to figure out what had happened.
Jasmine was undoubtedly the ultimate rebel. She came to Korea to escape her minister Kiwi parents. That she smoked more than Snoop, drank like a heartbroken bachatera, and fucked like a porn star was completely unknown to her family back home. I didn’t really learn anything about her until our vacation in Thailand.
Thailand
A few of us in the Funday crew spent a solid week in Ko Pha Ngan partying in preparation for the Full Moon Party. We went during the winter to escape the harsh Seoul frost. Everything in Thailand was cheap, which was the best part. I was spending no more than thirty dollars a day for room, board, booze, cigaweed, and gloop. Booze and weed we had already grown used to, but gloop was a whole ‘nother world. The way that mushroom made me lose track of time was probably the reason I wanted to continue doing it. I lost like eight pounds by going on 17-hour-long binges when I would forget to eat. It was probably the easiest diet I’ve ever done, considering that I was euphoric enough to dance away in the sand and swim around the island without getting fatigued.
Of course – and I feel like this phrase is overly used in my repertoire; it’s like everything crazy that happened to us was not at all unexpected – bad decisions were made. Tequila man pissed his pants and passed out in a towel in a desolate corner of our inn. We spent a total of 3 hours looking for him. But Jasmine outdid us all. At first we discussed that she should get a henna tattoo to impress El Turco, for whom I suspect she still harbored feelings.
We drank, smoked, and did shrooms ‘til late morning during the full moon party. We passed out on the beach at around 8 a.m. and when we woke up later in the afternoon, we found Jasmine caressing the area around her vagina. At first we thought she was masturbating, but soon realized that she was rubbing lotion on her newly acquired, bona fide tattoo. She had tattooed the following words around her snatch: “El Turco put his kebab in this stand.”
Retrospect
I’ve spent countless nights considering all of my friends who disappeared. I filed a missing persons report for Joaquín, but the cops never got back to me. His family hasn’t heard from him either, and for a few months I called his mom on a regular basis to see if they had gotten word of him. His Facebook has seen no activity since he disappeared, nor the accounts of any of my other missing friends.
I wish I knew where they went, why they left without saying goodbye or leaving a note. I believe that my friends were too resourceful to have all been kidnapped. Besides, in the six months since they’ve been gone, there has been no ransom note. Nothing to indicate that something bad happened to them. In fact, maybe all is going well for them. I finished my contract in Korea last month and returned to the States. I refuse to say where specifically. Something in the back of my mind leads me to think that I could also disappear inexplicably if this email, this collection of ramblings that tries to configure meaning to what’s happened, somehow finds its way into the wrong hands. Nonetheless, I think I can safely conclude what happened to the Chill Out Crew.
Parte Tres: The Hit
Temptation
I’m a pretty good artist. I’ve tried to paint all the possible ways they could have just disappeared. There’s no way in this world that I would abandon everything (family, friends, name, etc.) unless the sum were substantial or the motive was revenge to redress a wrong committed perhaps generations earlier. There’s that Mexican proverb: “A thief who steals from a thief shall be forgiven for a hundred years.”
The Bank located in Myeongdong is the largest private bank in Korea. At any point in time, millions upon millions of dollars and euros are flowing in and out. Over 27 million dollars went missing. That’s a lot of money split any way. I don’t know if I would abandon everything I know for that much money.
I can’t say certainly if I’d be willing to risk it all, but if the opportunity were presented to me at the right moment, I might. I understand the mentality of the people who disappeared. I knew them well. They all had something in common. They didn’t back down from a mission. They were good friends. They all just wanted to chill and not have to worry about money. Jimmy Caravaggio didn’t need the money, but I can see him being persuaded by Joaquín del Monte to follow him to the “gates of hell” with the promise of an adrenaline rush.
Fuck, what would be the risk? Maybe I would spend a few years in prison. Perhaps I could even use my female charm to cry and come off as the victim of an organized criminal conspiracy that forced women to cooperate in criminal enterprises. When I think about it that way, the risk of spending a few years locked up versus a lifetime of freedom in a tropical paradise of my choosing doesn’t necessarily have a disproportionally high opportunity cost.
Escape from Seoul
I can only theorize. Joaquín’s Seoul Comedy Improv buddy Antoine could steal a magnetic card for the bank’s secure doors from one of the employees. Knowing him, though, he could have just used his Nordic good looks to seduce the magnetic card off her pants. I
can say with certainty that I would have used Muirne as a pilot. Fat Jimmy would have used his connections and wealth to rent a craft under an assumed name, one possibly with fake transponders. They could have easily made their way from Myeongdong to a nearby airport, and, before authorities were even alerted, be well out of Korean airspace like the specter of a legitimately registered vessel.
Hell, Myeongdong is a strategic location to carry out a hit. It’s only a mile away from Haebangchon. A group of foreigners decked in hanbok and wearing king Sejong masks would only have to rush the mile across Namsan tunnel, ditch their disguises, and blend in easily in the diverse area around Yongsan Army base that, as I’ve mentioned earlier, resembles a maze. The local cops would probably know the area well, but they would in no way be able to deal with a group as well armed as the North Hollywood dudes. The SWAT guys would get divided, be prevented from taking their armored vehicles into the tight alleys, and eventually get washed out like a bucket of gusarapos. Hell, the motherfuckers even had access to Stingers, so it wouldn’t have been hard to take down a chopper.
Even better, the military connections of Lt. Smith meant that it would be easy to sneak on base (technically American territory) and use American bureaucracy as a buffer that could delay authorities and permit an escape out of Korea. That would have been my escape plan. Of course, I would prefer to just walk out of the bank without anyone being tipped off that anything went down.