Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 2
Hog heaven
Once he’d paid to lose his virginity, he discovered that he lived in a cornucopia of opportunities to indulge his desire for more. He learned that he could order a woman directly through one of the pedicab drivers who stationed themselves at the intersection near Frank’s house and at a lower rate than the mid-level whorehouses near Yanping North Road. But since he had no place to take her, he would have to pay at least 30NT for a hotel room which made it about the same as the whorehouse. He tried to introduce Mellon, the only American friend he had made so far in Taipei, to this vast realm of the senses, but Mellon didn’t want to go. He couldn’t understand why. He, too, was horny as sin. His monthly allowance was twice his. Maybe he was scared. Or maybe he had qualms. He decided he was scared and saw it as a sign of weakness.
What was so bad about whores? Having no sisters made it hard to understand the equation from the other side and, not knowing who or what they really were, he imagined they were whoever or whatever he wanted. He didn’t think it was simply the general complex of misogyny, unending fascination, and idolatry of the OS in the American ’50s that gave rise to his whoremongering because all his buddies were steeped in that, and yet a fair number, maybe a third, sneered at men who went to prostitutes as much as they denigrated the women themselves, considering the men weak and the women scum. Then they went on to ruin their marriages with affairs that your run-of the-mill whoremonger like he would soon become and many millions in China, Japan, and Korea deemed unnecessary and messy. Like his friends back home in the States, Mellon didn’t read what he read. He figured if he had read Miller, Genet, the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Frank Harris, Kerouac, etc., he, too, would have realized that real men paid hard cash to sate this desire for pleasure and relief. But maybe it wasn’t his under exposure to avant-garde and erotic literature that predetermined Mellon’s apparent lack of interest in dipping his wick in Chinese oil.
Just as his own predisposition had always been to refrain from taking what is not given, and nothing he read of the lives of thieves changed that even a bit, Mellon was probably unalterably predisposed to refrain from sexual misconduct and he could have read those writers unmoved. More likely, they would not have held his interest. But he didn’t think like that. Caught in his own perspective, he saw Mellon and others like him as chickenshits, lacking balls. He looked down on them and their cowardice and relegated them to the realm of insignificance, richly deserving denigration and scorn. That he was setting myself up for a fall did not occur to him.
He began to pay to take Sue out of the whorehouse on ‘dates’. They charged him an ‘all night’ fee, about $8. In his tightly constricted social sphere, and under strict marshal law (it could be tightened or loosened depending on the concrete situation) there was only one place in Taipei that he knew of to take her dancing, the Friends of China Club.
This indiscretion was the one time he was chastised by Frank. Members of the club had been complaining—member’s wives, especially, didn’t like it. The more jaded of the correspondents, low-level diplomats, and occasional military brass looked on with amusement, even a wink. Here she was, an inexpensive lady of pleasure—well, what could a poor boy afford, really, on thirty-five dollars a month allowance—dressed in a gaudy skirt and a drab home knit sweater, broken down high-heeled shoes, which she couldn’t operate properly, whirling around in their face, trying to dance the jitterbug, slow waltz, cha-cha-cha, rumba, samba, late-night tango, and even one of the new, but tamed, rock-n-roll songs with an American kid, in their club!
It was the liquor. A couple of gin and tonics and he was lit and flying. He took Sue to the club three or four times before Frank called him aside one evening and explained the seriousness of the whole thing. Some of the wives didn’t see the humor in this display, wondered what this aberrant child was doing here anyway, and these people had way more power and status than a poor news stringer like himself. He’d just have to confine his garish displays to other premises, pretty much anywhere else, in fact, other than the Friends of China Club. Frank said he could still go there to bowl, though, by himself or with Mellon. But Frank offered no alternate venue for taking his new friend dancing because there wasn’t any.
Except, and it was a long stretch, Lucky Bar. It’s much smaller, more intimate atmosphere pushed him cheek to jowl with his fellow compatriots, and the sound of English in one version or another could be heard pretty much anytime, and the bargirls were expensive and sparse and likely intelligence assets to boot. But the one time he ventured inside with Sue, they asked him in some of the best English to be found in the city of Taipei at that time, to leave.
He re-centered his operations on the snooker halls near the whorehouse district around Yanping North Road. This provided a viable alternative to the Taipei American School where, according to his visa, school enrollment, and promises made to parents, he was supposed to be. It was an area where the rudiments of a life of debauchery could be swiftly mastered. And it was a minute’s walk from a short time with Sue, if he had the dough.
For him, Taipei in 1958 was a good place to play hooky and get nooky. Flunking several classes in his junior year of high school was a small price to pay for an education in a sport like snooker, a trivial sacrifice for the uplifting ambiance of the whorehouse district itself, with its dirt-cheap rates, and his new friend, rotgut plum brandy. And there was no competition because there was no other foreign boy on the face of the planet in 1958 that could sample at will, if he had the money, these specific delights on a regular basis. The people there misjudged his age as easy he misjudged theirs. Lots of the local 23-year-old males had as smooth a baby face as he did.
If this was not enough, the whorehouse district was a good place to practice Chinese, although the accent of the pimps and petty con artists at the snooker tables, whenever they made an effort for his sake to speak standard Mandarin, was strong and low class. He discovered that he could mispronounce Mandarin by what seemed to him a wide margin in the direction of Fat Pang’s Shanghai accent, or Skinny Shi’s Sichuan accent, or Lazy Worm Wu’s Shandong accent or Bill Zhang’s Shanxi accent or the Taiwanese accent of any number of the clientele and still be understood, but if his pronunciation veered off in the direction of western American English, even the slightest amount, people didn’t have a clue what he was trying to say. However, a few years later, at the Far East Language and Literature Department of the University of Washington, his brief experience in this polyglot world made it easier to grok a difficult class in the phonology of ancient Chinese. You never know what’ll be useful.