As they say, names and locations have been
changed to "protect the innocent."
Coming into the apartment on a Sunday afternoon, I caught my
roommate Dwayne fondling his girlfriend's breast. They were
sitting on the living room sofa fully clothed and watching
TV with those sappy "we've been married 25 years and still
love each other" expressions. But they had only started
going together three weeks ago. And he had dropped hints
when drunk that he didn't like Koreans -- why was he dating her?
Averted my gaze and ducked into the kitchen to fix a
sandwich. Too late! He caught me looking, and I could almost
hear those beetle brows come together with a snap. Dwayne
was very good at scowling, and he'd been doing a lot of that
lately.
"Five more weeks and the jerk will be bound for Canada," I
muttered to myself. "Let's hope he pretends he never saw me
looking." But Dwayne was PC-compulsive. After a five minute
pause he and his girlfriend came into the kitchen.
"Steve, have you met Lou Ann?"
"Well ... we've seen each other around. Hi Lou Ann?"
"Hi." She was a slender twig of a Korean woman with a very
round head and a very sunny face. I was reminded of a ripe
tomato in July.
"Lou Ann teaches piano," Dwayne said.
"Oh. Whereabouts?"
"The Ding Dong Musical Academy," she said.
"Ding Dong!" I chimed. She laughed, and Dwayne scowled again.
"Ease up, Dwayne," I said. "Just a little Korean whimsy." He
nodded curtly, and then they went out, leaving me to my
sandwich. From the kitchen window I could see them
walking down the street. She was hanging on his arm as
if she were really going for him in a big way.
But that was the whole point of the introduction. He had to
show me that his new girlfriend was respectable and middle
class, not some chippie he'd picked up in a bar. For Dwayne
was a prisoner of PC. He couldn't make a move without
worrying about the right way to do it.
* * *
Later that night Dwayne came back and walked into the kitchen
frowning and sniffing. "What's that smell?" he asked.
"Kimchi chigae. Pork stewed in kimchi. A recipe
from a book I bought in Seoul. Not too bad, but the
local restaurants do it better. Does the smell bother
you?" I could tell from his face that it did, but he
was too PC to admit it. Saying nothing, he took two frozen
hamburgers out of the fridge and popped them into the
microwave.
"Now it's all wrapped up," I said placatingly, covering the
bowl in plastic. "Won't contaminate anything. Now for
a few shots of that Wizard Air Freshener your Mom sent."
I was trying to be nice, but it didn't work. His mother
was always sending him things like air fresheners and toilet
seat covers. He had been sensitive about her gifts since she
sent him a Canadian cookbook, "Let's Break Bread Together,"
an anthology of church supper recipes and gushy prose.
I had said: "Hey Dwayne. Here's a recipe for 'Marriage
Stew.' It says, 'Take two rounded measures of sex and
saute with love and tenderness.' Are these breasts -- no,
must be testicles! Ever eat prairie oysters, Dwayne?"
Yes, I know. I grew up in New York City and have a
"trash mouth." But I had just wanted him to lash back, to
clear the air and tell me where to go. For now there was
something serious to say.
"You know, Dwayne, if you and Lou Ann want to do it, go right
ahead. But please give me advance notice, and I'll clear
out. How about a sign on the bedroom door 'Humping in
Progress'? Or a big wall calendar that says 'Always on
Sunday'? Just so I don't find the two of you doing it on
the sofa. I'd be embarrassed and you'd be devastated."
"Mummfsh!" He had his jaws around that burger and
wouldn't let go. He was very insecure and my teasing
just made his insecurity worse. So he just didn't want
to answer.
*
* *
What is it about Canadians? Of all nations they are the
closest to the U.S. culturally and yet, to my way of
thinking, very weird. Did they invent PC and then sell it to
the Americans? Consider those two "anchorpeople,"
Peter Jennings of ABC and Robert MacNeill of PBS, Canadians
who came south for the big bucks. With what icy control
they glide over the distempers of our world each
night! Rather and Brokaw are clods by comparison. They
have to work at PC, and the strain shows.
Ridiculous as it may seem, Dwayne's mother had sent him to
Korea to become PC. He was a Nova Scotia boy, and the family
had been in the fishing business for several generations.
Dwayne had grown up helping out on the boats and you could
see it in his walk, rolling on the balls of his feet like a
dancer. He also had a weightlifter's build, broad
across the shoulders. "Big Dwayne," his Korean students called
him, although he was just six feet, my height also. But he
could "walk tall."
His mother was ambitious, making sure that he finished
college, the first member of his family to do so. With a
degree in business administration, Dwayne worked in the
office and occasionally directed fishing crews. But after a
few years the fish went south (or wherever fish go) for the
winter and the business went south also. Father was ready
for retirement, but what should Dwayne to do?
Then Mom swung into action. A "career change" was called for,
something more genteel and middle class than fishing, which
she had never liked. What about teaching? In Canada, as in
the U.S., public school teaching is tough to enter without
the right credits. Maybe a private school? In any
case, he had to get away from fishing. Teaching English in
a foreign country was one of the few options available.
There are many Canadians in Korea "getting their tickets
punched" for Canadian jobs.
So last summer Dwayne and I were footsoldiers in the ragtag
TESOL (Teachers of English as a Second or Other Language)
army that now circles the globe preaching and teaching the
virtues of the "international language." I came because I
was middle-aged, divorced, and very bored with technical
editing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Almost anyone can become a TESOLer. All it takes is a
four-year college degree in any subject. Before coming to
Korea I had never formally taught anybody anything. But a
Korean friend suggested the idea. "You know your grammar,
Mr. Stephen," he said. At the time, any place seemed better
than Cambridge. I jumped on a plane for Seoul.
My friend had given me a letter of introduction to the Dong
Soo Industrial Group, a huge conglomerate located some 60
miles from Seoul. The first interview went well. They would
hire me but .... The job was only part-time, editing and
coaching salarymen for the TOEIC (Test of English for
International Communication) examination, about 25 hours a week.
And I had to be connected to some sort of organization. The
Oriental mind recoils at the idea of free-lancers floating
in space. The obvious solution was a "hogwon," or private
language tutoring school. A few phone calls and one was
found, the Happyland Bilingual Academy. Most of their
students were elementary and middle-school children, but they
cheerfully accepted money from anyone. So I signed the
standard year- long contract and moved into the apartment
provided. Dwayne (who had already been there nine months)
was my roommate and three other Canadians lived down the
hall. All were much younger than I. We had little in
common, and I wound up spending my weekends in Seoul.
*
* *
Dwayne had a strange habit which I found disgusting but also
fascinating. He would use the toilet and walk away
without flushing. Two weeks after moving in with him, I
complained. "Low water pressure man, low water
pressure," he mumbled, sidling away. Well, there was low
water pressure maybe 5 percent of the time. The toilet was
full of crap maybe 50 percent of the time after he used it.
I'd had a fair number of roommates, but never one with this
particular problem. Hadn't his mother potty-trained
him? As I got to know him better, he talked about the
fishing business and made a chance remark that cleared it
up. The boat he was on had a hole in the deck high
above the water line. This was a "Turkish toilet"
above which you squatted. Just let fly and Mother Nature
took care of everything.
My theory is that Dwayne had an anal fixation, but nothing
like the one described by Freud and his disciple Karl
Abraham. They say: "The first phase of anal erotism is
linked to evacuation and the sadistic instinct to
destruction of the object."
Sadistic hell! What Dwayne and the farmers and
fishermen want is the reassurance that Nature will absorb
their wastes and go on. Thus I have seen elderly
Korean men shambling into an alleyway to urinate rather than
use the public toilet next door. It is, if you'll
excuse the expression, a kind of morning prayer that all's
right with the world. His non-PC asshole was rebelling
against him.
*
* *
I gritted my teeth and vowed that, since he was leaving in a
month, the problem could simply be flushed away. It
was not his toilet habits that caused the final blow-up --
it was sex.
I'd come into the apartment the next Sunday afternoon after a
weekend in Seoul and wanted a shower. To get hot
water, you had to press a red button inside Dwayne's
bedroom. His door was closed. I sensed that Lou
Ann and he were in there. There was a strange cigarette
lighter on the coffee table.
Walked into the bathroom and found the toilet full of
crap. That did it! He deserved no mercy. I
pounded on the door and shouted as loudly as I could, "Hey
Dwayne, hot water please!"
I could hear the two of them whispering. "OK, OK,
done!" Dwayne finally shouted back.
Took my shower, went into my bedroom, closed the door, and
started reading. Then they turned the TV in the living
room on, as loud as it would go. The war was on.
But I had a cassette player with good volume and a tape of
blues singer B.B. King in concert. All they had was a
Kevin Costner movie on the one English channel. B.B. can
outshout Costner any day of the week. After a
half-hour they gave up and left.
The work week began and the sniping continued. He
complained in a written memo that I'd used the coffee pot to
heat soup and put the forks in the wrong drawer after
washing them. I did more than my share of
housework. By Thursday morning I sat down at my computer
at the Dong Soo Group and composed a letter which I then
glued to his bedroom door while he was sleeping that
afternoon. The entire reverse side of the letter was
smeared with glue -- he'd have to rip it off in little
pieces.
Here's the letter:
"Dear Dwayne:
"It's clear that you were mightily pissed off last Sunday
afternoon when I knocked on your door and asked that you
push the hot water button. Did you lose your erection
just before orgasm? Poor baby! Now you, a guy who
can't remember to flush the toilet, are leaving notes on
housekeeping!
"Well I did forsee that something like this would happen and
did suggest that we work together on a system whereby one of
us would not be around when the other wanted to get it on.
You did not respond. It's clear that you're just like Bill
Clinton. Planning is impossible -- you want it bad when you
want it and right now!
"OK, but I have rights too, among which is the right to a hot
shower after a long day. If Sunday's episode is repeated, I
will go to the school's director and complain. Sure sex is a
"private act." But the apartment is small, the walls are
flimsy and transmit sound readily. When you screw, you
compel me to walk around on tiptoe. I resent this
compulsion.
"It's also clear that you have no respect either for yourself
or me or anyone else. If you had respect, we could have
worked something out beforehand. Most of all, you have no
respect for the poor girl who's in love with you. Even
prostitutes get hotel rooms to screw in, but you won't spend
the money.
"OK, we have one month to get shed of each other. I will try
to stay out of your way and hope you will do the same.
Steve"
Walked off to class feeling smug. What could Dwayne
do? I had all the bases covered.
*
* *
Classes were over at 6 p.m. and no Dwayne. Friday was a
Korean holiday. Three days in Seoul to enjoy myself.
Then he came bursting into the classroom doorway. "I'm
going to punch you in your damn mouth!" he shouted, dancing
on the balls of his feet and swinging his right like Kid
Gavilan about to throw the famous "bolo punch." Then
he stopped and spat on the carpet."That's what I think of
you," he said, rubbing the spit out with his foot.
Two chubby Korean children appeared at the door, 12-year-olds
curious about the noise. "Out!" he shouted, slamming
the door in their faces. He turned to me. "Let's go
down to the parking lot and settle this."
That was silly. The school was in a busy commercial
section with police always on patrol. Two foreigners
fighting would simply have been arrested, thrown in
jail, and sent over to Immigration in the morning.
Very suddenly the fight went out of him. "You ... old,
you ... old. Who the hell do you think you are?" he
sputtered and then stopped. Even now his PC would not
allow him to insult me with a reference to age. Then he sat
down heavily in a chair and began gasping like an exhausted
swimmer staggering out of the surf.
"So rude ... so crude ... arrogant!" The last word was
a snarl, "r-r--gant!"
"I don't like you!" he suddenly wailed, his voice becoming
higher and shriller like a little boy who suffers playground
humiliation. "I just don't like you. Ugh! Ugh!"
I felt a sharp twinge of joy. That was why I had
written the letter in the first place, to get him out of my
face, to be free of his smothering presence and black
scowl. Now he would go elsewhere to shit and screw.
And in a month he'd be gone completely.
But there was a last act to his tantrum. He staggered
to the door and groped for an exit line. Finally he
said, "You have no people skills. I hope you stay in Korea
for the rest of your life!"
*
* *
Out in the hallway the three other Canadians were waiting for
us, their brows knitted in PC concern. Dwayne ran past
them into the teacher's lounge, and they looked at me
questioningly.
"This is what happened," I said. "You know the red
button for hot water? In our apartment it's inside Dwayne's
bedroom. I knocked on his door and asked him to push
it while he was having sex with his girlfriend. A week
before I'd asked him to work out a schedule or system, but
he refused to listen. When he got angry, I compared him to
Bill Clinton. He just went ballistic, and you can see
the results."
They just nodded in humorless PC style and filed into the
teacher's lounge to hear his story. Picked up my
textbooks and teaching aids and walked out. Through an
open doorway I could hear Dwayne once again gasping, "Oh the
letter ... the letter ... so rude ... so crude!" I had
to get the hell out of there. Took the next bus to
Seoul and spent the weekend with friends.
*
* *
Back in the apartment late Sunday night and no Dwayne.
I took a shower and went to bed, wondering with some
apprehension whether he would attack me while I slept.
But the lock on the bedroom door was sturdy and a fire
escape led directly to the street.
My last month with him was an ordeal. Silence on both
sides, but he had a talent for hostility that I
lacked. Unexpectedly, in the apartment or at school,
we'd meet and he'd start glaring. Was this a tactic to
intimidate me? I got his class schedule from the office
and arranged my comings and goings to avoid him.
The Canadians were no help. "Do you understand," I
finally asked the three of them, "why Dwayne is so angry?"
There was a long silence. "Well ... something about a
letter," one said.
"Did he show you the letter?" No answer, and I knew
he'd ripped it up.
"Let me say this," I concluded. "The guy has serious
problems -- he's mentally disturbed. But I'm no
psychiatrist. In that letter I promised to stay out of
his face if he stayed out of mine. Just so you
understand."
They nodded unhappily. He was their friend, but they
didn't understand him any better than I did. PC was on
my side this time and would keep him from knocking my block
off. He took the TV set into his room and seems to
have spent his last few weeks in Korea watching ESPN and
reading "Hustler" magazine (banned in Korea).
*
* *
But now I think there was a "figure in the carpet," to use an
old-fashioned literary phrase. Lou Ann suddenly
disappeared. No one saw her, either around the school
or with Dwayne. I asked the Korean teachers, who did
not like her.
"She wants to escape Korea," said one curtly. That was
it. For a Korean woman, dating any Westerner is
off-limits, especially in a small town like this. But
there is a small minority willing to buck tradition.
For example, I have gone to the movies with Korean women and
we had to endure catcalls from teenagers. Lou Ann
wanted to get away from all that, I now believe, to marry
Dwayne and move to Canada. And, like the wimp he was,
he had used the quarrel with me to break off with her.
"Honey, it will never work. The world is against us ...."
*
* *
So what is the moral of the story? To
conservatives PC is ridiculous, phony pretentiousness and
arrant hypocrisy. To liberals it is an ideal of
human brotherhood and world community.
But let's get real. Dwayne was a Nova Scotia working
stiff, and PC had little effect in shaping his real
views. A year of teaching had prejudiced him
against Koreans, yet when Lou Ann came along he leaped at
the opportunity for easy sex. The blow-up gave him an
exit strategy for getting away from her. No, he
wasn't "disturbed" as I thought at first. Just
devious.
Suppose he had disregarded his mother's advice and gone north
to Alaska where fishing jobs are plentiful. I can
imagine him now, scowling and squatting over a Turkish
toilet while the winter wind bites savagely at his bare
ass. Not a life that I would like. But at least he'd
be a better person and his own man.
We want to hear what you think of our
advertisers. For Information about our advertising policies and rates
or to offer feedback about one of our sponsors, please visit our Sponsorship
Page