That's where I'm going.  I got a tip from a friend that one of the roommates of the MIA traction case I'm being paid to track down hangs out here.  Figures.  This whole gang of flakes supposedly lives somewhere in Yun-Gi-Dong, and in Yun-Gi-Dong, the foreigner riff-raff tends to roll downhill towards the Shark Bar.  If I knew exactly where the fuckups lived I wouldn't have to step foot in this Sodom and Gomorrah of moral decrepitude; but I don't. So here I am.  It's one of those all night joints, strategically positioned across the street from the US Army Base.

    Come to think of it, all sorts of riff-raff hangs out at Shark Bar ... or the Stanky S if you're talking to the regulars.  It's got the Korean hooker barfly set, the Korean barfly slut set, the foreigner barfly slut set ... male and female ... the angry GI barfly set ... then there's the Siberian express of Russian 'hostesses' who usually roll in around 5:30 on nights when business on Texas Street is slow, guaranteeing lots of spandex and fake fur ... then you've got your average Korean Mafioso with their clan tattoos and plates of fresh fruit ... packs of young Korean bad girls who get their kicks of lying to their folks and breaking curfew, not quite sluts or barflys, often not knowing what sort of trouble they're getting themselves into when they end up drunk and in a yogwan with a drunk sex crazed way-guk (foreigner) ... drunk English teachers ... American actors ... Canadian spacers ... Aussie fuckoffs ... drunk British engineers ... awww hell, everybody's drunk I guess.  Who knows what you'll find trolling the murky neon waters in the early hours at the Stanky S.  I hope to find the guy I'm supposed to talk to about the immobilized yet unreachable Randy Gainer ... or Randy Ontario as I've heard that his friends call him.

     I just want to bag this whole case, so I can collect my fee and go home.  I've been checking out all the normal avenues for foreigner location, friends from his hagwan, bank records, cell phone records, and I haven' come up with shit concerning a current address for this poor mangled  bastard.

     Neon ... that's a consistent theme in this town ... every color of gas filled tube rides the vertical spectrum as you pass through the city streets.  The signs will lead you anywhere you want.  It just depends on where you care to go.  Tonight, the tubes are taking me down a dirty flight of stairs.  The way to the basement club is lit overhead with black light, and the walls are covered in the sort of black velvet artwork that you buy in an American shopping mall and hang in your dope den at home.  The mushrooms are smiling.  The naked ladies are outer space barbarians with swords and wings.  The pyrimids are looking back at you through illuminatian third eyes.  The walls will breath for you if you're on the right stuff.

     All these silly thoughts in my head and I'm not even through the door yet.  That's what I get for being a low rent dick, I suppose.  Ahh, the life of a paper detective ... it's the big time baby ... if you're two feet tall.

    But, as I near the door, all my thoughts get wiped: the thumping hip hop bass hits my skull and clears it out.  The bass boom is in full effect ... ba ba booooom ba ba ba booooom boooooom boooooom ... 'What deese bitches want from a nigga?' .... ba ba boooooom ba ba ba boooooom ... 'What deese bitches want from a nigga? ... in a flash I'm transported from my personal thought space to the communion of a couple hundred hearts beating as one; like one of Funkadelic's alien's put it, 'One nation under the groove'.  Ba boooooom ba ba ba boooooom ... ba boooooom ba ba ba ... 'Y'all gon make me do my thing ... up in heah ... up in heah! y'all gon make me act a fool ... up in heah ... up in heah!' ... ba ba ba booooom ba booooom ...

     At that, I find myself inside the Shark Bar.  A few lonely heads holding up the bar snap my way as I enter; automatic social conditioning? Quick eye contacts and shallow probes for signs of the few stock desires that orbit the drunken brains in a joint like this: sex, drugs, money, friendship, rivalry.  Look at me, in my department store suit and with my average business man hair cut.  I loosen my tie to take the edge off, but shoot their eyes down with squint glances that say, 'I don't have what you're lookin' for man ... I ain't got what you want little lady.'.

     The neon tubing didn't end in the stairwell ... it continues diverging and re-converging on tracks all throughout the bar ... lining the mirrored walls ... lining the mid-room pillars ... tracing meaningless patters across the ceiling like collision course racetracks to nowhere.  The dance floor is thirty or forty deep with body rockers, booty shakers and crotch grinders. The robotically un-soulful songbirds and drill sergeant rappers weave their modern loveless tales from the overhead sound system; it's all set to variations on the booooom booooom ba ... boooooom booooom ba ba ... mostly that standard 3/4 time ... with the occasional James Brown 3/3 funky drummer beat rearing it's bobbing head.  At the risk of sounding like a whiney bitch, I manage to reminds myself that these are the exact same songs the dj was playing last time I tracked a case lead here.  It was about four months back, when I was being paid to reel in another Canadian, a drunk who hadn't showed for his hagwon kindergarten classes in a few weeks.  Can you blame the poor asshole? What with the bass pounding his head at night, and the screams of a hundred kids rattling it all day.

     I manage to navigate through the crowded table galley, packed to the elbows with Pusan's horniest socialites.  This is the biggest party in a big town ... a small party in a big city ... a living party in a dead city; at least the biggest where the music isn't all Korean techno-pop and the clientele isn't so intent on controlling racial continuity and social piety.   Ahh ... the Stanky S ... Pusan's most happening social orgy.

     At the bar, I wrap my fingers around a cheap fruit drink with liberal tequila and tripelsec content; lemon where there should be lime.  No limes in Korea, except for a few British folks milling about.  There's no one I want to talk to at the bar yet.  A few soju drunken GI's, identifiable by their cubicle hairdos, a few women who might look very sexy after a few of these fruit drinks.  I remind my self to keep in mind that this is a business call, not social, not testicular.  I head for a table in the center of the room; the only unoccupied one; but it still has jackets slung over the chairs and packs of smokes on deck; I figure I'll risk it.

     Sitting alone at the table, I manage to sift through the layers of bass and rhyme and tune into some of the nearest conversations, not really keeping up on whose mouth is saying what, just listening for leads on a fellow who goes by G-bra, who's supposed to know exactly where I can find poor ole' Randy Ontario.

     I'm good at the passive eavesdropping part ... I'm a virtual organic-audio-scanning device.

     I hear the Stanky S inevitable, "Lookit the tits on that one ... and the ass!  I jus' got to hit dat, yo!"

     And another lockeroom verbal transaction, "Ha ha dude, once you go Asian, there ain't no other persuasion!"

     To which the friend replies, "Ah yeah m'man! You know it's all about the right line at the right time ... bay-bee!  Go on son, dog will hunt! Ha!''

     Then there's a weirdo conspiriatory anarchist in passing, '' Dude ... the Cupid Car Crash Club ... the Nation of Ulysses and their 13 point plan to destroy America ... Afghani rebels ... dude, they're all connected with bigfoot and hanger 18 ... the government is so fucked up ... the only answer is to refuse to participate in the evil system ... you know, like, you just gotta be strong ... refuse to work ... sit home and drink beer in the hammock all day ... each fart and burp is a protest against the man! The man must be farted and burped into oblivion I tell you!  Into Oblivion!''   

''Yo dude,'' replies his friend, ''calm down. ''You're scaring all the chicks away.''

     The weirdo is eyeing me, seems to have tuned in on my listening his rant, ''Yeah, I'll can the free speech, this place is probably crawling with Freemasons and Illuminati and over-serious authoritative english teachers who consider themselves to be saviors of society anyhow.  Shit man ... lookit the gap on that one ... her legs go all the way up and to the other side of the rainbow ... if you know what I mean ... heh heh ...''

     I hear travelers spinning their tales, "Yeah, I heard Borucai rocks, but the coke was sooo cheap in Cosa Mui."

     And I hear the friend's response, which chills me to the bone.  I have to look at this one; he's pekid, almost green, chain-smoking, with the drink never leaving his hand. He looks like he tried to cheat death and got caught in the act.  ''Yeah, I was down there in Thailand for a while.  I'd rented this Yamaha 440cc bike to roar around town on.'.  I hear him drag on his ciggarette as he bears down to tell the serious tale,"Pfffffft.  I was just cruising around through all the chaos.  I thought I understood the whacked out system of driving.  Y'know, like you gotta run all the red lights and shit.'' 

    Then he's pulling on his drink again, beginning to slur his speech. ''Well, this ... mmm, dude, don't talk about thishhhh one, y'know what I mean?  I was just cruising through a red in Bangkok, near Cosan Road, when this little fuckin' girl, no more than seven years old, runs out in front of me.  I didn't even have a chance to swerve and lay the bike down. I just saw her flying through the air and landing on her head; before I even heard the sound or felt the thump vibrate up through the steering column. And uhhh, I freak, you know, run off the road into a vegetable truck, which fucks my nose and hand all up.  But I jump off and run over to check her out.  She's fuckin' dead, you know ... uhhhh man. 

    "People and cops are everywhere, swarming around me.  I barely even saw her before they'd carried her little body off in a cart.  The cops take me in, they're being pretty cool, I'm not too loaded or anything.  They even give me some smokes and Thai tea and a tranquilizer once I get to the station.  They can tell that I'm all freaked out about it.  But they're just being all quiet about it. Most of them speak pretty good English, and they tell me that they found the parents and are waiting for them to come in before they decide what they're going to do about it.  And uhhh ... you know, the bitch of it and like, the saving grace was that the parents, they were all twisted up, a little shocked.  Their English wasn't anything and they're poor as fuck; the cops do all the translating; and I'm shitless white, like pale at the thought of a murder rap and Thai prison.  But then one of the cops comes to me an says, like, ' You know, this is a sad thing that you did, but it's done, and she's dead.  The parents don't want to press charges, they just want $1000 US to bury their little girl and forget about it.'. Then he says, ', And we,', meaning himself and the other cops, ' we want another $1000 US, so that we can go out and get fucked up and forget about it.".  You know, I'm like Johnny-on-the-spot with the money.  I drain my bank account, and borrow a little more from my girlfriend, who's freaked about dating a killer, and pissed that we have to cut the vacation short.  I just want to crawl into the ocean and forget I ever was.  Dude, it's just all fucked up, you know, the price of this pretty little girl's life is two grand, and I'm happy to walk ... hell, she was dead, and of course I'm just absolutely head fucked ... there's no denying it.  I don't even know her name.  There jus' ain't no wrong or right about it to me... that's all I can figure. I'm still dreaming about it all the time; you know, a couple grand can buy you out of jail maybe ... but no amount can buy you out of this hell!".  He's beginning to cry and pound his temple with his index finger.  " Now I'm just back here, tryin' to drink it all away, but you know, that only works until you wake up the next day ... uhhh ... I ain't never goin' back down there again ... thass for sure ... shit ... you're the first person I ever told about that to.  'Cept for my girlfriend who was at the beach when it happened, and my sister who just told me what a fuckin' ruin of a person I'd become.  Shit man, thanks for listening ...''

     And the first traveler has been dragging away at his smokes and slurping on his drink with wide eyes the whole time, ''Duuuuude.  I really wish you hadn't told me that .... duuuude.  Fuuuuuck.  I just gotta get laid this morning to even begin to forget about that fucked up shit.  Maaaaan!".

     I'm sitting there, wishing I hadn't heard it either.  Every time I hear a tale so twisted as that, my view of the world becomes that much irreversibly paler.  But I, just as so many others, harbor that morbid fascination, the part of me that defies my every instinct to shy away from sickness I find in the naked world.  It's no wonder that so many find solace in the order of scholastics and academia, the relative calm of viewing the world of man from atop the philosophical mountain.  It's sick shit like that lost soul's tale that makes me want to go back for a doctorate, burying my nose in tombs of theory, cultivating the illusion of civility and making a life for myself in the cave of ethical adherence. But the job always seems to bring me back; I fear it'll be my undoing one day; setting my ship out to sea in the world of filth.

     Then, from the chaos of the crowded dance floor emerge two sweaty Russian girls, danced out, in their glam-rock bedazzled outfits.  I normally avoid trouble on hot flesh wheels when I see it, but after the travelers ninety pound hammer of a tale, I'm happy for any sort of diversion.

     The first one, a blonde,  looks at me with a mask of revulsion and begins to mutter unintelligible Russian ... racial slurs I'm assuming.  Then she breaks into every korean bad word she knows, trying to shew me away from their table ,which has enough empty chairs to accommodate them, myself, and a few more of their friends. ' Sheep-secky ... sheep-baal ... kay-say-gee ... ddong-duegii!', she's saying to me in her shitty han-guel mal.  Stock phrases centering around such culturally transcendental insults such as fuck-off-motherfucker-dog-baby-shit-pig.'.  Her assault comes as no surprise to me, as I've found that a lot of the Russian chicks who are imported from places like Vladivostock and Cabarovsk by Korean club owners, to serve as hostesses and dancers, are usually a little down on Korean men.  It has a lot to do with the fact that they're often exploited, fucked over in a variety of different ways by their Korean bosses; basically treated like parcel'n'package tramps, sometimes a step below that of your average working prostitute and maybe a step or half step above the position of sex slave. No wonder she bears the huge fucking chip.   So I sit, wearing a steadfast grin, making no attempt at moving away from the table.

   Her friend has a little more sense about her, she's gently forcing her friend down into an empty chair and giving me an eye roll to show that she want's no part in the anti-Korean sentiment.  She tries to tell me unsuccessfully in Korean that her friend is racist towards Korean men.  I ask, "Do you speak English?  I'm a Korean-American, and English is my first language."

    "Sure," she says, sitting down herself and lighting the smoke between her friend's lips.  "I speak a leetle Eeengleesh. Vat's yer name?', she asks with a cute-but-tough sort of smile coming across her gaunt face.

    "I'm Sam," I tell her.

    ''An yer fazzer ees from the Koreeea?" she asks.

    ''No, my mother.  My dad was American Army, in Korea when they got married and I was born.  But I was raised mostly in the US.'.  I tell her. ' And I'm betting that you're from Vladivostock ... or Cabarovsk, maybe?"

     ''Da,'' she replies in a way that I'm beginning to find very disarming. ''Vladivostock.  I vas a pheesical therepeest, but I can make so much more of da moneey here, you know, doeeng the dancing and theengs.''

     Like an idiot, I've all but forgotten my search for the elusive G-bra at this point.  ''What's your name?'' I ask.

     ''I'm Sveltlanya Karinina Dajvonovsk." she answers.  I'm sorry I ever asked. "But call me Lana," she says, ''And deese is my friend, Olgey," She's gesturing to the first girl, she-who-was-not-born-with-enough-middle-fingers, who's mask of revulsion has dropped into a dull expression of drunken boredom.  ''Sam, vat ees yer jub?" she asks.

     'I'm a priv-" I catch myself just before I make the sort of tiny fuckup that'll blow a job, "er, I'm a private businessman ... you know, an entrepreneur ... I sell ... uh, paper products."

     "Oh, das ees so eenteresting,'' she says, lying in her saccharine sweet little way. But it's too late, I'm hooked on the smile, the sharp look in her worn eyes, that tells me that despite the fact that she's probably had one of those classic Russian princess-fallen-from-grace lives, she still loves to have fun.  I decide that I'm going to try to make her laugh. Before either of us can speak again, I pull a little trick with both my hands where I ball them up together, and slide them apart, making it look like I'm pulling off the tip of my index finger ... a tired little sight gag that I over-use in efforts to transcend language barriers.  It works and she laughs, no, she giggles, even better.  Her turned out friend sees it too, and sneers, hocking a loogey into the ashtray.

     ''Sam,'' she says, ''I theenk I like you.''  It's amazing what a laugh will buy you these days; a friend ... a fuck ... a wife ... it's even more amazing, the thoughts that run through the head of a man smitten; I don't care where he's coming from, or where she's coming from ... you have to figure that it's one of those wordless universals that bind our species together, in that perpetually procreative way. I'm beginning to curse myself for having landed in that place.

     Then she turns to her friend, who I've deemed in my whip judgment to just be downright nasty.  They exchange some rapid fire Russian that rolls between sounding like the beginnings of a cat fight, and the inner-planning's of KGB sex spies.  My instinct is to bail, and I ignore it of course.  Her friend grimaces, hocks another one into the ashtray and waves her off with a look of 'girl-talk-to-the-hand-dismissal', and then Lana's up and has my hand, dragging me away from the table.  Suddenly she's behind me with her hands on my hips, and she's whispering hotly in my ear, "Sammy, come and party vis me, Moscow style ... we go back here to see my friend ... hees name is Gee-bra.''

     It's the feeling I get, the moment that name rolls off her rag doll lips, 'Gee-bra,', that is the precise reason that I love my job. I just get kicks off the occaisional clockwork nature of social randomnimity.  I'm there like the hair on a big fuckin' Russian bear.

    She propels me through the throngs of Stanky S partiers ... back through the tables, past the bar, and up to the glowing door that says in English, Russian and Korean, 'Norray Bong ... Singing Room',.  For a second, before I manage to get the door open, my head comes back to the throbbing bass lines which I'd managed to overcome for as long as it took to find my mainline. Ba Boooooom Booooom Ba ... Ba boooooom boooom ba .... 'up in heah ... up in heah! ... ba boooom booom ba .... ba boooooom booooom ba ba ...