SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME – the book

—HONG KONG, CHAPTER ONE—

I was in Hong Kong in 1982. I’m struggling to remember what moved me to go there. Now, part of Hong Kong is on an island. The other part is on the Kowloon Peninsula of mainland China. On the Kowloon side was a 6.5-acre area called the Walled City. It was an exciting place. I went there once.

Once.

Now I remember! There was a very respectable and responsible reason I ended up in the Walled City of Kowloon. Because that’s where the top-shelf cocaine was. At least, that’s what Gary, my laconic and wayward pal, insisted at the time. “I know a guy.”

Gary said that.

He didn’t expand on that point. It sounded a little suspect to me. “I know a guy.” That’s great. I’m happy for you. Some additional information would have been helpful. I wasn’t looking for his CV, but I did ask Gary if he would elaborate on the guy he knew.

“No,” was Gary’s reply. Gary was a man of few words.

At the time, Hong Kong was, in many ways, run by “secret societies,” which is a lovely way of saying “warring criminal organizations whose core competencies included drug dealing.” These societies (aka, Triads) also had exemplary track records in murder, extortion, human trafficking, assault, theft, kidnapping, sex trafficking, racketeering, arson, extortion, military weapon trafficking, and, when their mood was poor, dropping you down a bottomless hole where you’d spend the rest of your brief life. Plus, the most powerful politicians in Hong Kong were on one of their payrolls.

But I wanted the Coke. So we went to the Walled City, about which I knew nothing.

I should have asked first, but I waited until we were halfway there before asking Gary to enlighten me. 

He first told me that the place was commonly called “The City of Darkness.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Gary shrugged. “It’s dark.”

“Sorry, is the mood dark? Does the sun not shine on this city?”

“Both. Just be cool when we get there.”

“So, how does one be cool in the City of Darkness?”

Gary looked incredulous. “Don’t look anyone in the eye. Don’t yell. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch people. Don’t be a bitch. Don’t fuck up. Especially if things get rough.”

“If things get rough? Sorry. What are….”

“The six largest triads set up shop there.”

“You’re saying this as a joke, of course.”

Gary attempted to clarify. “You know the Bronx?”

“A little too well.”

“Shove all the Bronx into nine square blocks.”

This wasn’t the description I had been hoping for. At the time, the Bronx was a nightmare. It was a disaster zone of destroyed buildings, violent crime, and hopeless poverty.

“Let’s sum things up a bit, shall we? Yes, we shall. We’re already in a violent town governed by vicious syndicates. We barely speak English, much less Cantonese. We’re sticking out like two stupid round eyes. We’re going to the City of Darkness, where things could get a little rough owing to the rival triads. Sorry. Have I captured the salient points? Sorry.”

After a pause, Gary’s response was, “Yup.”

I grimaced. “Great. Fantastic. What could go wrong? Other than being kidnapped and forced to work 28 hours a day making fake Rolex watches or, just on principle, getting shot in the face, that’ll be a fun little nature walk. What the hell are we getting ourselves into? Sorry, but I shall now ask you a question of immense importance.”

“Okay.”

“How good’s the coke?”

Gary smiled. “You’ll see.”

I immediately felt better.

To provide perspective on Kowloon’s Walled City, it was so horrific that the Chinese government had it demolished a few years after my visit. The whole city is gone, replaced by a park where you can walk your dog.

According to Gary, someone built a rectangular concrete wall. I’m guessing he was drunk because I’ve seen two-year-olds draw better rectangles. The wall was approximately thirteen feet high and around seven hundred fifty feet by four hundred feet. It was constructed to protect against typhoons. 

“Government operation,” said Gary.

“How so?”

“No roof. Government operation.”

If you’re looking for protection from typhoons, a roof would be handy. The guy who built the wall might have sobered up, looked around at his creation, and had a lightning bolt of clarity. Something like, “What the fuck am I doing?”

Then he went home. 

According to Gary, the British or the Chinese government shuffled onto the scene shortly after that. Which government was a mystery. It may have been both. Hard to tell. Again, it was hard to tell who was in charge. Gary elaborated in as few words as possible that, around 1900, China leased practically all of the Kowloon peninsula but kept the Walled City. “Dunno why.”

I asked, “Why did China let the place turn to shit?”

“’Cause Britain kicked the China.”

“Why did England let the place turn to shit?”

“Dunno.”

It doesn’t matter who was in charge because one fundamental principle remains true regardless of nationality, race, sex, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation, lifestyle, or culture, and it is simply this: 

If a government agency, any government agency, gets involved, then the whole thing will go sideways. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s it. The party’s over.

Were it my shot to call, I’d go one of two ways:

1) Tell the guy who built the wall to return and make it disappear.

2) Hire someone to put a roof on it what with the typhoons and all.

The government officials, who’d also been hitting the sauce hard for a few months, decided to let people build a city within the wall. In an area no greater than 300,000 square feet. A whole city. There ain’t no “Suburbs of the Walled City” because there was a wall where the suburbs would have started.

You see where I’m going with this.

I looked at Gary. “Okay, who is going to want to live within a wall with no roof that was built because of all the typhoons?”

“Morons.”

Morons would have been my first answer, too, but, having been in the place, I didn’t spot any. Any morons, that is. Hong Kong, from all appearances, didn’t have many morons.

What Hong Kong did have was drug dealers, rapists, addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, gamblers, pimps, gang members, murderers, and convicts on the run. Hong Kong had plenty of those, and they moved to the Walled City of Kowloon.

Remember, within this rectangular wall, you’ve only got 300,000 square feet to play with. If you allocate each person a thirty-six-square-foot area, you have room for over 7,500 people. According to Gary, the current population in the Walled City was over 30,000. If that were the case, each person would have had nine square feet to play with. Think about that. You had thirty-size inches in any direction to yourself.

After World War II, the Chinese government set the precedent for Al Haig by announcing, “We’re in charge.” In charge of the Walled City, that is. The British responded, “You can say you’re in charge as long as you don’t take charge.”

Confused, I was shaking my head. “Did China agree to this nonsense?”

“Looks like it.”

Then, both governments refused to assume any responsibility for this disaster and sent memos saying, “I’m not taking it. You take it.” Both sides came to the very sensible agreement of pretending it wasn’t there in the first place.

The wall eventually fell, but the city could not improve matters on the square footage front.

There you have it. The government, or governments, created the problem by having some of Hong Kong’s finest set up inside the walls. They resolved the issue by ignoring the place.

Gary told me all this. I didn’t verify any of it, but this made sense based on what I knew about large governments. 

Since horizontal extension wasn’t an option, the folks went to plan B and stacked apartments on top of each other. The city residents should have hired an outside architectural consulting firm to work out ways to build lovely high-rise condominiums. They decided to go DIY all the way. Yet again, massive alcohol intake must have been involved with the vertical expansion because you had this tangled mess of rooms teetering up to 150 feet high on each other. The tops of these buildings leaned on the building next to them.

In a place that gets hit by typhoons.

What Gary told me next was my favorite part of this whole catastrophe. The local city planners decided on something that transcends alcohol abuse. These people must have lived on a strict diet of pure heroin, speedballs, LSD, paint thinner, and angel dust. There could not be any other reason behind authorizing airport expansion, so a runway started a half mile away from this mess of high-rise buildings. Airplanes were flying thirty feet over these buildings.

That’s the history, as I understood it at the time.

Getting anywhere in Hong Kong has always been a nightmare. The island part made Manhattan look like Boise, Idaho. The Kowloon side wasn’t much of a bargain either. And it was getting crowded as we approached the tiny town called the City of Darkness on the mainland. People in Hong Kong do not clown around when they are walking. No one saunters. Or meanders. They barge. The natives storm ahead with their eyes wide shut. It reminded me of New York City, but Hong Kong turned things up a notch by, without warning, forcefully shoving you out of their way if they wanted to pass you, which wasn’t nice, even by New York City standards. (At least New Yorkers had enough manners to give you a heads-up before passing you by saying, “Get outta my fuckin’ way, you moron!” It’s the display of these common courtesies that help make America great.)

The pace was frantic. And chaotic. We were elbow-to-elbow, and I was shoved around like a rag doll.

“Uh, Gary. Sorry. Death awaits us. Someone will trip us up, and we’ll be trampled back to the homeland. Or we’ll be kidnapped and forced to work 49 hours daily making fake Gucci purses. Sorry.”

“Relax.”

“I’m getting a little concerned out here. Is there any way we can find a way out of…”

“No.”

I had no sense of relief once we finally entered the Walled City. I had no sense at all because the place itself made no sense. The locals were at least a foot shorter than me, and they were all scrambling shoulder to shoulder in random directions like 1,000 cats on Adderall and anabolic steroids. A maximum of three feet separated the buildings, and water poured down the sides. There was a maze of small tunnels, all of which smelled like spilled bong water. It reminded me of my freshman college dorm room. (Story for another day.)

Most folks had their umbrellas open owing to the heavy rain courtesy of the broken water pipes overhead.

We were moving at a fairly good clip, which was a challenge because it was dark, and the walkways were built for people under five feet. I was staggering along, hitting my head on drainpipes, concrete ceilings, door frames, light fixtures, cross beams, and wires hanging from the top. Plus, I kept tripping over everything, so I started lifting my feet higher when walking, which resulted in me stepping on things like rodents, dogs, and little old ladies. I walked like a cross between the Phantom of the Opera and Igor from Young Frankenstein, except I was dancing around, trying not to step on someone’s grandmother. 

“You’re sure this is the right place. I mean, you’re sure we won’t get kidnapped and forced OUCH!!!” I had hit my head on a flowerpot stuck on the ceiling. “What the hell is a flowerpot doing…”

Gary interrupted, “Shut up. Be cool. Blend in.”

“Blend in?!?! They’re only staring at me because they need a center for the basketball team. They’re going to kidnap me and force me to play basketball 361 hours a day just so….”

“Would…you…please…SHUT…THE…FUCK…UP?”

“Sorry.”

We stopped. Gary said, “I’m going upstairs to score. Alone. Wait here. Don’t fuck up. You hungry? That place over there serves good dog meat.”

He left.

I stepped backward to put my back against a building, but not before hitting my head on some bricks where the bottom of the second floor of the building stuck out over the first floor.

I looked around.

It wasn’t chaos that I was observing. It wasn’t even lunacy. It went far beyond that. This city caused my frontal cortex to shut down and go dark. It defied logic. It was impossible to think. I was in the fight-or-flight part of my brain but quickly realized I was trapped either way, so I just stood there and watched. 

Gary ran up a ladder as I continued looking around. There were brothels, opium dens, gambling parlors, Dog-meat R Us, people scattered on the ground in various states of drug withdrawal, pickpockets, pimps getting in scuffles with other pimps, and a church.

Yes, a church.

Two round-eyed white women guided a room of locals to sing a solemn and quiet English hymn. The singers progressively got louder, and the lyrics seemed to fall apart when they turned the volume to eleven. They were no longer singing in unison. Everyone began psycho-babbling. Loudly.

The scene reminded me of a pretentious modern music festival I attended in the late 1970s. Thirty people were on stage playing whatever musical instrument was available (cello, tuba, bagpipes, accordion, kazoo, clarinet, sitar, triangle, pan flute, etc.). All thirty people started playing thirty different melodies. At the same time. Foreign keys and varying tempos. One person’s song had nothing to do with the other twenty-nine. To start, they all played quietly. After fifteen minutes, everyone was playing as loud as they could. The entire performance lasted longer than middle school. Along the way, two people on stage started singing. They sounded like two chimpanzees in gastric distress.

The folks in this church kept babbling. Some were jumping up and down. Others were falling, getting back up, and flailing around for a while before falling again. A few were laughing, dancing, and crying simultaneously. Then they all got ecstatic—at the same time. 

It was a room full of around forty people going off the rails. 

Okay, this is fucked up.

No, this is thoroughly fucked up.

Now, here’s the strange part. No one other than me noticed the delirium. It wasn’t as if there was a closed door. These forty or so people piled on each other, flailing around screaming in ecstatic baby-talk, and no one batted an eye. The masses just kept walking past this place with facial expressions that said, “I wonder if I’ll have duck sauce on my dog-meat taco today.”

Just as quickly as it started, it ended, and they went back to singing the same hymn that started this riot in the first place. The round-eyed women were putting their palms on everyone’s forehead. I guessed to take their temperatures. It would have made for an excellent Lithium commercial. “As a doctor, I recommend Lithium to all my patients; otherwise, they’ll go bat-shit crazy like these people in that church.”

I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t intend to, but I made eye contact with one of the round-eyed women. I gave her my standard plastic smile but received no acknowledgment. Instead, she summoned the other round-eye over so both could stare at me. One of them, looking very displeased, started marching directly towards me. I wasn’t sure what was up her silo, but I figured she’d tell me soon enough.

“You’re the press.” She wasn’t asking.

“Uh, me? Press? Uh, no. Definitely not. Sorry. No. Okay. My colleague is upstairs trying to score some blow, and I came to pick up some dog meat on Rye.”

“You expect me to believe that.” Again, she was not asking. She looked stern.

“Uh, yeah. As I reflect upon it, I can attest that my previous statement was made on an expectation-free basis and is accurate, except I’m thinking of giving the dog-meat sandwiches a miss. But not the press. Sorry. My current ambition is to get the hell out of here very soon.”

She looked around briefly and said, “You better come with me.” She grabbed my arm and led me to the room where forty people just had simultaneous orgasms.

“I’m Jackie.” She still looked annoyed.

While being careful where I stepped, I replied, “I’m mystified.”

“Your name.” Still not asking. She sounded Australian. Or, British.

“Mine? Uh, yes. Right. Wait, it’ll come to me. Uh, Drew, actually. I mean not ‘Drew Actually.’ Just Drew, actually. Actually, I need to stop saying actually all the time. May I ask a question?”

No answer. Just raised eyebrows.

“What just happened in here?”

She paused. “So, you’re not a writer?” Finally, a question in the form of a question but one that surprised me.

“No. Not at all. No. I just wasn’t sure what to make of it all. I was watching and wondering what in the world was going on.”

She snapped, “It WASN’T of this world.”

Well, that narrows it down. Thanks a lot, Sweetheart. 

I didn’t say that. I just thought about saying it.

“Oh. Well, I’ve transcended my state of mystification. I’m now, officially, clueless.”

“We can discuss while you wait for your colleague.”

“Oh, him. Yeah. As I said, he’s completing a, uh, little transaction. His attorneys are reviewing the paperwork as we speak. He should be back once the contracts are notarized.”

She shook her head. “Heroin destroys lives here. I’d appreciate it if you don’t support the dealers. You’re financing the Triads.”

“Sorry. Right. It’s my first and, presumably, last time here. I didn’t know this place existed until an hour ago. Why did you ask if I was a writer?”

She asserted that journalists would linger outside, take photos, and write derogatory articles about her and the church. Occasionally, a TV reporter would waddle by, capture some footage, and air stories with all the scorn they could muster. Most often, they told the public that the church was a joke or was harming people with false hope.

I apologized on behalf of the journalists.

If you’re an American and new to international travel, be advised that the citizens of the country you’re visiting, regardless of country, will be expecting apologies from you on behalf of the entire country or specific segments of it. It’s a good idea to rehearse a few.

Western Europeans will whine at you about our US government, citizens, tourists, news agencies, businesses, and bad attitudes. They will not stop until you offer an insincere apology. It should be along the lines of, “Yeah. Whatever. Sorry, Chief. Can you stop whining like a little bitch for five minutes?”

All Chileans will await your apology the minute you set foot in the place. Given what our government got up to, the apology might have to be more heartfelt. “I am a disgusting worm. Not worthy to lick your boots. I suck. We suck—the whole country. Everybody sucks. I am sorry that we are so evil and should be destroyed. Perhaps you might accept this handful of American money instead of torturing me to death, justifiable though it may be.”

They’ll take the money. Consider it a cost of doing business.

Then, there is our mainstream news media. We’re up there with Australia. The rest of the world judges us based on our news broadcasts. I was surprised by this. Considering we Americans can agree that the news in our country is a clown show, I’d have thought we’d be given a pass.

I think it has something to do with spreading propaganda. I’m not sure.

Sometimes, you can get away with dissociating yourself from the entire mess. Other times, you must take one for the team and say you’re sorry we allowed any American news outlet to exist.

A generic apology will suffice. “Just to clarify, none of us watch the news for information. It’s entertainment. Kinda like a first grader’s version of ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ People like stories about dead people. Lots of ’em. Piles of dead people. We can’t help it. Dead children are better—a big pile of dead children. Dead children next to a daycare center exploded after a propane truck, and the propane poured down into a valley, causing an entire community to go up in flames, so people are running for their lives. Children running for their lives. Naked children running for their lives away from the fire until they fall off a 400-foot cliff and die due to the crappy economy. But not me. I don’t watch it. Uh-uh! But, look, I’m sorry they’re so stupid. I’ll yell at them as soon as I return to Gomorrah.”  

Jackie smiled, finally. “You are forgiven.”

(Have you noticed the news shows love to interview the grieving mother of the five-year-old who died ten minutes after he fell off the cliff? They want to interview the poor woman in front of the camera. If they can’t get her, then they’ll grab any mother. It could be a mother from another country. No one cares. “Honey, tell us about the despair. And pain. And torment. Are you considering thinking suicide? If so, then how? If not, then why? What do you think your dead kid means for the Republican Party in the next election?” 

This is one of the many reasons I don’t watch the news.

I just wanted to mention that.)

Jackie and I looked at each other briefly before she asked, “When you saw us, what did you think happened?”

“I had no idea. Still don’t.”

She smiled, “There may be one or two things you should know. Grab a chair.”

 We sat down. 

She was ready to explain.

And I was ready to listen.

—END OF CHAPTER ONE—

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