by Young-Ha Kim
“The public’s complaining a lot —”
“Seungtae.” The chief of security cut him off.
“Yes?”
“You think there’s a single guy in Korea who likes the motorcycle gangs? With the muffler removed, the noise is outrageous. They ride with slutty bitches behind them, they don’t give a rat’s ass about the centerline, drive the wrong way on the street. If you see them, of course you want to kill them right off. Take a look at the comments online. What’s the use of having fun? Why aren’t you using your guns? It’s an outrage. A mess. That’s one thing the public agrees on: they all hate them. But if we trust public opinion and tear after the kids, we get turned to shit in the press. You know what I’m saying?”
Seungtae stayed silent.
“Why aren’t you saying anything? Are you saying you’re still going out there? Your ass must like the media shots of you on the Harley. Like you’ve become some kind of celebrity, yeah? A cop ought to be in the papers for doing his job well—you think it’s okay for a cop to end up in the papers for riding a Harley? I’ll give you some advice. If you want to be promoted, you better not pop up in the dailies. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
The chief of security looked intently at Seungtae and smirked. “ ‘Yes, sir?’ That’s so sincere. Maybe—your heart’s with the bikers?”
“Come on, sir . . .”
“I heard you’re part of some club.”
“Oh, they’re a different breed from the teen motorcycle gangs. Our members strictly abide by the traffic laws and —”
“More talking out of your ass! Honestly, I think you’re showing off your money. Wait till you get married and have kids and have to send them to school. You won’t have that kind of cash. How can a motorcycle cost tens of thousands of dollars? You keep riding one of those and you’ll have an inspector on your tail. It’s not like your father owns a fancy building in the Gangnam district, right?”
Seungtae stayed silent.
“I’ll lay off your hobbies. It’s not my business whether you go to Yangsuri or Sokcho on weekends, but I don’t want you messing around in someone else’s jurisdiction and causing trouble. And I want the criminal stats compiled by the weekend on my desk. You can go now.”
Seungtae returned to his desk and hung his jacket on a hanger. He’d slipped a full-length photo of himself from a year-old men’s fashion magazine under his desk’s glass panel. The project involved short interviews and photos of men who broke job-related stereotypes. A fund manager who played the cello in a string quartet, a junior high school teacher who’d won a Latin dance competition, a lawyer who owned a classical music record store, and others, gathered in a Gangnam basement studio. Seungtae had been labeled “the squad chief night-racing on a Harley-Davidson,” though he wasn’t exactly a squad chief.
“Bring handcuffs or some other object that shows you’re a cop,” the photographer’s assistant had said.
As requested, Seungtae brought handcuffs and a baton with him. He wore his leather motorcycle jacket and vintage leather boots, and carried the handcuffs in his left hand. He’d come with his hair gelled back, but the photographer didn’t seem to like it so he dug through the prop room and brought out a bandana. Seungtae liked the photo. He asked the photographer for the unused stills to frame and hang up at home.
No one who knew him ever thought he would become a cop. As a kid, he had been different from the other boys. He disliked macho sports like soccer and basketball, and was more interested in fashion, art, and music. He tried to fit in with the boys, but was slow to find interests in common with them. He followed the boys to a baseball stadium to watch a pro-league game, but he couldn’t say he enjoyed it. In his last year of middle school on a camping trip on Jeju Island, he met a man in his thirties, a supervisor come to help them camp. Seungtae got along well with him, and the man knew it too. One day the man took him aside to a cabin where the supervising teachers usually gathered, and asked him a few questions—a furtive Q & A —from “Do you have a girlfriend?” to “How many times a week do you masturbate?” Seungtae was embarrassed answering these questions, but he wasn’t uninterested. The man was kind and he seemed to be gently introducing Seungtae to an unfamiliar world. Then the man leaned in toward him and whispered, “The way it looks to me, you’ve got to be . . .”
Seungtae, who’d kept his head bowed down as they spoke, finally looked up. Their eyes met.
“. . . gay.”
Seungtae was shocked. He immediately denied this, and said there was no way he could ever be gay. The man continued. “You’ve never had a girlfriend, even though you’re good-looking, well built, and a good student, but you’ve never wondered why?”
“I just haven’t met the perfect girl yet, that’s all.”
“You really think that’s it?”
Seungtae continued to deny it, but he didn’t storm away.
“There’s a simple way to find out if you’re gay or not.”
Seungtae wondered what this method was, and waited for him to keep speaking. Instead of words, the man came to him with his lips and threw his arms around him. Seungtae squirmed. Deep down he worried about what would happen if he were actually gay, so he let the man continue to find out. He definitely felt aroused, and it was the first time he’d felt such sensations, but he’d never been with a woman before, so it was impossible to know for sure.
The man called Seungtae once he returned to Seoul. He wanted to meet. When Seungtae refused, the man threatened that he would tell his parents about their talk and everything that went on between them. After that, he motel-hopped with the man a number of times. He took to thinking deeply and often about whether he was born gay or had become gay because of the man. The more he thought about it, the more he became interested in how he felt about boys his age. He tried hard to break free from the man’s net of suggestions. He decided that to do this, he would need to be more masculine and have a body to match, so he began to exercise. He spent two hours a day lifting weights in the apartment complex’s gym, and upon entering high school, decided that he would become a professional soldier or a cop. This new Seungtae who wasn’t considered gay by any of his family members or friends explored the sexual identity buried deep inside him. He began surfing gay sites, looking for evidence that he wasn’t gay, and ended up becoming addicted to those very sites. He became angry at himself. It was as if the world were laughing at his expense.
He concluded that the man he met at the camp was responsible for his unhappiness, and the next time he went to the agreed-upon motel, he punched the man in the face, brought him down, bound him with a pair of toy handcuffs he’d purchased at a store, and beat him with a police baton he’d bought near Yongsan subway station. He took it even further. But when he returned home, he started feeling sorry for the damaged, bruised man and cried.
In a way, it was as if Seungtae had been reborn through the man. To be precise, it was his words that changed Seungtae. The man told him what kind of person he was, but when he tried to move ahead, he couldn’t break free from those words. To the new Seungtae, the man he had met at camp was like a father, and by being violent with him he became physically free of him. But that didn’t mean he was mentally free of him. The man’s very identity became disconnected from its origin, and so was owned solely by Seungtae. He could no longer beat up or kill a father he couldn’t see.
Eventually Seungtae became the same age that the supervising teacher at camp had been, complete with a police badge. It was like a magical joker card—he could go anywhere and get complete access. At age thirty, even though he had been with several partners, he realized that he was attracted to teenage boys. Like the camp supervisor, he had the same desire to shape the boys’ identities—not so much a desire to cavort with teenage boys, but a desire to flex his power over them. He’d long known that kids like him were easily captivated by a stranger’s alluring words. Sometimes when they didn’t fall for it, he bullied them with violen
ce and authority, and each time, felt relief. A feeling that he was safe. He was becoming addicted to this feeling.
Seungtae’s night starts where the biker crews assemble. He watches them from his Harley. Cheap motorcycles fashioned to make maximum noise; teenagers smoking; kids unaware of who they are, unaware that self-awareness is necessary, but who have an instinctive, brazen desire to shake up the city with explosive noise and speed.
Sometimes he strides between them. He picks the toughest-looking one and approaches him, shows him his officer badge, and forces the kid to his knees. Korean motorcycle gangs are entirely different from those in America or Japan, which are made up of grownups and are part of a real gang. The Korean motorcycle gangs are mainly teenagers, just a fearful group of ragtag kids. They don’t sell drugs like the American motorcycle gangs, or start wars against the Yakuza like the Japanese ones. No matter how much they posture, they are, in the end, just kids. They might be dangerous when on the move, but parked and chatting with one another, they are easy to control. These kids don’t know their legal rights. They aren’t interested in a cop’s responsibilities during questioning. Seungtae behaves like a high school principal to these dopey teen gangs who speak to him in grammatically incorrect, respectful sentences. He asks the terrified kids for their school and home addresses and their phone numbers, and the kids answer. He knows that many of the bikes that the kids ride are stolen, but he doesn’t dig that deeply. Subtly frightening them is enough to realize his goal. But everything changed once Jae entered the picture.
Frequent rumors about the new guy Jae had begun reaching Seungtae. Jae wasn’t yet as powerful as he would become, but he was worth noting. The police still didn’t have a single photo of him, but Seungtae wasn’t really worried about it. Once a teenager was hauled into the station, he revealed everything, so Jae’s whereabouts could easily be confirmed. A large number of the kids that Seungtae encountered knew about Jae. What they said about his place of birth, his appearance, and where he lived was all over the place, but they were united on one thing: he was different from anyone else, and he was still powerful. Seungtae made a folder tagged JAE, tossed it into the file cabinet, and took out a file labeled OH TAEJU. Catching Taeju was his first priority.
27
Seungtae had waited a long time for a chance to nab Taeju. Of course if he really wanted to, he could get him right away and terrify him. He could turn him over to the civil court for violating traffic laws, and get him sentenced with a fine and community service. He was only a broke teenager without a lawyer, educated parents, or any clue about human rights abuses. But what Seungtae wanted was to put the noose around Taeju once and for all.
Taeju’s driving was bold and magnetic. A motorcycle takes on different styles for different drivers, and Taeju’s driving was like an effortless, dashing cursive. He turned corners smoothly—at a deep angle, without slowing. Even when patrol cars came at him from all directions, he wasn’t thrown off balance; instead, he continued to make quick judgments and lead his crew. To do that required being able to read the police’s next move. In the game that the biker crews had started on the baduk board of the city, victory or defeat depended on this battle of intellect. If the police force’s strategy worked, the crew would break up and the night would die down.
The general public trusted that the police had pitched camp in order to arrest the biker crews, but that wasn’t true. All the police did was cut off their tail and slowly drain their strength. Trying to arrest them would be an expensive, inefficient strategy for maintaining public peace. The bikers’ leader combated this pressure by trying to maintain the group and continue riding. But an exceptional leader would reattach the tail that the police had cut off and regain strength.
As the police tried one strategy after another to take hold of the situation, the other drivers on the road became only vague obstacles. A large-scale motorcycle rally is like the Crusades. The participating feudal lords and their knights never pledged unconditional fidelity to the king; if something displeased them, they returned to their kingdom. The leader’s main role in a large crew made up of smaller crews from the metropolitan area was to command and direct the other bike leaders, but it was impossible to hear anything over the explosive sound blanketing the night streets. The leader’s riding skill was his only form of leadership, so his strength plummeted if he wasn’t visible.
This was Taeju’s weak spot. He was a leader impatient with the slow ones in the back. If the tail was snipped off here and there, he would be left brashly speeding off on his own. By two in the morning this kind of motorcycle rally lost momentum and broke up. The smaller crews that had been cut off inevitably roamed the streets until they were caught in police traps, or parted ways, exhausted.
Recently a snitch that Seungtae had planted came in with an important tip. This kid became a spy after Seungtae smacked him around and threatened to send him to reform school. He had collected a few of these little spies. There was even one kid who turned over an entire list of riders from the previous night’s motorcycle rally. In any case, the snitch told him that Taeju had a Yamaha R1 that was stolen from a shop in the Chungmuro neighborhood. The situation was complicated: the shop where the bike had gone missing was, of all things, one that Taeju knew well. As soon as the owner called him, Taeju got his kids moving and tracked it down. Within four days the thief caught by his crew handed over the bike to Taeju and fled. The problem was, Taeju hadn’t returned the bike to the shop owner and continued riding it. A Yamaha R1 could do that to you. The shop owner hadn’t turned Taeju in to the cops and seemed to be hoping that the biker would return it on his own.
“Are you sure Taeju has it?” Seungtae asked the snitch.
If they could recover the stolen property before Taeju returned the motorcycle to the owner, the police could get him as an accomplice in burglary.
“I tell you, it’s huge!” The snitch even pinpointed where Taeju was staying.
Seungtae said, “Kid, here, that’s worth five coupons.” In the future, if the snitch was caught for a minor offense, he would be released without any problems, up to five times.
As soon as Seungtae confirmed where Taeju was, he got moving. He had to catch him before Taeju returned the bike or sold it overseas—stolen motorcycles regularly ended up the next day at the port in Pyeongtaek, and the day after, on a cargo ship headed for Cambodia. From a distance Seungtae saw Taeju smoking a cigarette and chatting. Definitely a Yamaha R1. As soon as the kids started moving, Seungtae got on his bike and followed. The gang drove conservatively through the city’s evening rush-hour traffic, then made its way down to the Han River walkway. The kids bought instant ramen at a convenience store and hung out some more. Meanwhile, Seungtae called the nearest district police station.
He said, “Come by as if you’re doing your usual inspections. They’re not wearing helmets so you can get them for that, first. Since it’s a stolen bike, there’s a chance they’ll run for it. If they do it’ll be difficult to catch them, so make sure you have support. The kid with dyed red hair is Oh Taeju—don’t let him get away, no matter what. Weapons? I don’t think they’ll have any. Yeah, I’m here with them, but now isn’t the best time to approach them.”
The local force did as Seungtae had instructed and the arrest went smoothly. Afterward, Seungtae followed the patrol car. He ate a sandwich at a café near the district station, then walked in while the four bikers were being coerced into making their statements. The kids looked at Seungtae as the traffic officers saluted him.
Seungtae asked, “Who stole it?”
Taeju angrily protested, “But it’s not stolen!”
“You’re lying, you’ve got a motorcycle registered as stolen.”
“Someone I know had a bike stolen, so I recovered it for them.”
“Then why’re you riding it? You should’ve gotten it to its owner . . .”
Taeju hesitated, unable to think of what to say. “I was planning to return it . . .”
“Whe
n? Next year? Even not returning money you find on the street is considered embezzlement of lost property.”
Taeju frowned and lowered his head.
“Hey, look at me. You don’t recognize me?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Hey, Oh Taeju! You don’t recognize me?”
Only then did Taeju begin to guess that the inspection might not be an accident. “Who are you?”
“The pig on the Harley-Davidson. You really don’t know who I am?”
Taeju carefully studied Seungtae, then glanced at the Harley parked outside. His suspicions were being confirmed.
Taeju asked, “You didn’t come ’cause you got called, did you?”
Seungtae requested that the kids be transferred to the main police headquarters. And Taeju needed to buy time on his home turf and slowly cook up a plan.
28
As soon as Seungtae entered, as usual the chief of security had something to say. “Still in those clothes?”
Seungtae just scratched his head.
“You still riding that motorcycle all night long?”
“As you ordered the other day, I’m using it only to commute to work and back.”
That was a lie. He did everything on it but bust the gangs.
“Is that true?” The chief narrowed his eyes.