Let me introduce the major players. First of all, you have my humble self, who fancies himself an adventurer and is known to take stupid risks at luckily non-critical junctures. Second, you have my favorite coat. It's a duster, in the style of the Old West, a long coat that comes down to my calves, with wide sleeves and two camel pockets and a slit up the back (for riding a horse). It's light brownish-tan (embarrassingly labeled "Mustard" in Sportsmen's Guide), and smells a bit funky, but it's very close to my heart. When I put it on I just feel like I'm ready for an adventure, whether it's a showdown at high noon or a pirate voyage or an expedition to Alpha Centauri. It looks rather like this:
Third, you have Charles, Gaia, Esther, Julia, Jeff, Elaine, Adam, and Anne; all the people whom I've mentioned in previous entries from Reading Town and the Newbies (except Erica, who was dreadfully sick on Friday and who had to bow out of...well, you'll see).
The setting is a housewarming party in an apartment complex in downtown Gohyeon, just across from Lotte Invens, the nicest set of apartments you'll find in the whole city. I mean Lotte Invens, not the apartment complex across from it. Charles's building is about twenty years old. Some people might think it's shabby; I call it "character." It's got two bedrooms and one bath, a decent-sized kitchen, and a spacious living area. Charles had already set up a couch, TV, and kitchen table before we arrived. Charles and his girlfriend Anne had recently moved in together (shhhhhhhhhhh!) and had invited the entire academy staff, sans the director and his wife, over for dinner and drinks.
A couple periods before the 9:15 whistle, Gaia surreptitiously passed the hat and sneaked over to Top Mart across the road to buy booze. After the closing bell we all slid over to the parking lot and divvied up the spoils. Jeff rendezvoused with us there, and he, Charles, your humble correspondent, and the booze went in Charles's three-cylinder Daewoo Matiz downtown to the complex. Adam and Elaine hitched a ride with Gaia, Esther, and Julia. We arrived and unloaded and then sat down for a beer. At Charles's invitation, Adam and I put some tunes on; I selected some jazz. I thought that seemed to fit the mood and I hadn't heard any for a while. (Despite there being a Western bar in this city called "Jazz Bar," they play mostly pop.)
We just sat and talked and drank for a bit. After the initial awkwardness of being in somebody's new and still somewhat bare apartment with a bunch of people you work with but who are from vastly different backgrounds faded, we got on quite well. Before we knew it, the food had arrived, brought up in a couple of metal lockers by a short and harassed-looking fellow in thick dark clothes. These last were obviously insulation: he'd come on a scooter, the usual method of transportation for delivery-men in Korea. You see them winging their way through traffic all the time, square plastic boxes printed with the logo of the establishment they represent fastened tenuously on the backs of their thrumming Daelim mopeds.
The lockers were unhinged and their contents arrayed on the table: battered pork with sweet-and-sour sauce, called tangsuyuk (commonly known as "sweet-and-sour pork" in the States; this was Chinese food) and seafood medley with wasabi. Gaia went a little overboard when she added the wasabi to the seafood and kneaded it in (donning a pair of amorphous, transparent gloves which automatically made me think "rectal exam"). I took my first bite and nearly incinerated my nasal passages. Man, it wasn't spicy going down, per se, but wasabi fumes rose to your nose and really raised some hackles.
Charles divvied up this bounty between our high table (what Adam had jokingly referred to as "the kids' table") and the Koreans' low one, distributed some chopsticks (Adam got a pair of handsome golden ones) and we all chowed down. I should mention now, before the time comes, that there was an added bonus included in the delivery aside from the food: goryangju, Chinese liquor, supposedly 100 proof. It was Friday night; Adam, Jeff and I were aiming to get drunk. This seemed like a convenient byway; needless to say, the revelation of it first brought out of the locker sent a ripple of interest around the kids' table. After everybody had satisfied their immediate hunger, we cracked it open and poured some shots. The result was disappointing. It reminded me, both in scent and flavor, of Jägermeister. That there may be no speculation, I cannot stand Jägermeister. It reminds me of mouthwash. Italian-sausage flavored mouthwash. This wasn't much better. It certainly wasn't 50% alcohol, either. Five minutes later I weren't feelin' no higher.
We had better success with the whisky. Turns out Charles had a bottle of blended Scotch socked away; we partook of it gladly. Well, by and by the booze ran low. According to Korean tradition, the youngest guests at the party make the beer run, so Jeff and I sprang into action. Following Charles's directions, precise despite his buzz, we headed out into the night and located a Kosa Mart, a marginally seedy convenience store chain omnipresent in Korea. We snatched up four more pitchers of beer and a bottle of soju and some cider (at Elaine's behest; she was "soju warrior" for the evening and was working on mixers). A few hours and some increasingly alarming conversation later, these too were used up, so Jeff and I sallied forth again, only in a considerably less coherent state than before. We were far gone. Kosa Mart had closed up shop for the night, which left us inebriated bozos to locate an ulterior venue and procure fresh supplies. It was in the cards that we'd locate a playground instead.
You can imagine what happened next. Jeff and I, yelling our fool heads off, sampled some of the playground's motion-related delights. We found this one gizmo that I suppose was a stealthy attempt to tone students' abs while ostensibly giving them the ride of their lives. It consisted of two handles, stationary, over a platform on a hinged metal arm that swung laterally back and forth. There were two of these machines, facing each other. Jeff and I hopped on and did our dangedest to swing that mother into a 360. We couldn't quite get the trick of swinging in the opposite direction in perfect coordination; unsurprising given how much liquor we'd consumed. Hooting and whooping, we exited the playground with jubilant minds and throbbing abs.
And then, lo and behold! There was a GS25 (or a Family Mart, or whatever) just down the street. We entered and purchased some alcoholic reinforcements. I got more beer (and soju and cider for Elaine) while Jeff nabbed some baekseju (literally "thousand-year wine"), a finer Korean liquor distilled from rice and flavored with a variety of herbs. It's more expensive than soju but more highbrow. I'm not fond of the flavor; it reminds me of potpourri, to be honest. But it's fine sipping, especially when you're too drunk to really taste it appreciatively.
Somehow Jeff and I made it back to Charles's apartment. Esther and Julia and long since departed; Gaia was tenaciously hanging on to the bitter end. Finally we capitulated. We walked out into the night in search of cabs. Charles gallantly escorted Gaia to find hers while we waited. In the process of waiting, Jeff and I looked over and noticed yet another playground, this one attached to Charles's apartment complex. There was no denying the primal urgings of my inner wellspring of joy, which commanded me on no uncertain terms to go swing on the swings. Jeff and I, in a whimsical repetition of our escapades earlier that night, ran over and leaped into the saddles and in another moment were swinging through the cool night air. After a few seconds of this my inner wellspring of joy commanded me to jump, so I did. I leaped from the saddle at the peak of a particularly energetic swing, went flying through the air, hit the ground, couldn't sustain the Superman impersonation, lost my footing and landed heavily on my shoulder, rolling for a few feet before coming to a jolting, exuberant halt.
Finally, we foreigners flagged down a cab and went back to my apartment. When the chips are down and brains are at their soggiest, all roads lead to my apartment. I had to promise not to brew up any cocktails to coerce Adam and Jeff to come 'round. We sat around my place, listening to tunes, sipping baekseju and discussing God knows what. The party finally broke up at around 4:30 in the morning. I'd fill you in on the details of everyone's departure, their demeanor and parting words, and the thousand other small joys of the host; but I'm afraid I simply can't remember 'em.
It is here that we finally approach the principal reason I ripped my favorite coat, which up to this point had been hanging safely in my room for the entire evening, unmolested. Shortly before everyone left I somehow mustered the cohesiveness of mind to notice that I'd lost my watch. I'd stuck it in the breast pocket of my short-sleeved button-down after work and hadn't touched it since. After Adam, Elaine and Jeff lurched through my door and back to their respective domiciles, the realization came. Through the cloying, lethargic waves of drunkenness my brain somehow managed to put two and two together. The swingset. The leap. The roll in the sand. My watch must've fallen out at that crucial, asinine juncture and was probably even now lying embedded in the sand of the playground adjoining Charles's apartment building. I vacillated. I was still drunk as a lord. The hour was ungodly. Dare I stride down to Shinhwa Apartments, bold as brass, and search? Or should I await the sobriety of the morning and venture down in the full daylight, at the risk of chance passersby claiming the watch during the delay? In the end, stubbornness and an idiotically severe sense of frugality won out. I wanted to shut the book on the night in good conscience. I couldn't leave my watch lying on some playground. That would be like leaving a fellow party-goer out in the cold. More importantly, I'd paid 19,000 won for the blasted thing. I wasn't going to lose it to some schoolboy who noticed it glinting in the morning sunlight on his way to school. (Yes, there's school on Saturdays here.)
So, throwing caution to the winds, determined to get the thing over with, I donned my favorite coat, the aforementioned mustard duster, and strode out. I cursed myself for a fool almost immediately. The soonest glimpse of the eastern sky revealed it to be a shade of dark blue. The night had gone; dawn was approaching. Tomorrow wasn't a school day, but under the tenets of my recently-instituted code of conduct, I still planned on making my weekend days productive. That meant waking up sooner than noon, and in the state I was in that would be a tall order indeed. The last thing I needed to know was that I wasn't even getting a jump-start on daybreak.
Nonetheless, I pushed on. I'd come too far. I had just the sense to realize that I looked as ridiculous as I felt. My new ascetically-short haircut clashed horribly with the long, sweeping dimensions of my coat. When put to it, I couldn't even come up with a halfway sound reason why I'd donned it. Perhaps the half-articulated idea that I looked somehow fiercer and tougher when wearing it had dictated my choice. That instinctual need to conceal my true proportions and fool prospective enemies with the illusion of increased size, like a cat arching its back and raising its hackles, had impelled my hand to the coat-rack. Or maybe it was that goofy feeling I mentioned earlier in this treatise, and the readiness for adventure and the thirst for a quest I always feel when I put that coat on.
Whatever the reason, it was immaterial at the moment. I looked for cabs and there were none. Before I knew it I'd walked all the way to my destination, the better part of a mile, without incident. The sky was getting lighter all the time; I quickened my pace, fired by the urgency of a good morning's sleep. Instead of taking the long way around to the parking lot and entering the playground by the customary route, I hopped the fence. I passed the swingset and found my watch with absurd ease, even given my intoxication. I felt as Renton did in Trainspotting, discovering the opium suppositories on the "floor" of the Worst Toilet in Scotland: "Yes, a f---ing godsend!"
Then the unthinkable happened. Tragedy struck my seemingly foolproof attempt at lending closure to the night's festivities. As I hopped the fence to leave the playground, the voluminous sleeve of my favorite coat caught on one of the bars of the fence and ripped. For a moment my mind couldn't process that catastrophic bit of information. Then I examined the rip in the stark light of a streetlamp (and the soft glow of the burgeoning day) and cursed myself again. I found the watch, but it was small consolation. All the way home I chunnered away at my own stupidity and clumsiness, silently for fear that the cab driver would boot me out for a loony.
Home again at last, the light in the east now changing to purple and pink, I took off the coat, hung it up (fortunately it faced the door, so the right sleeve was nearest the wall and concealed from my view, meaning I would not be reminded of my folly), undressed and fell into bed.
There is now a four-inch gash in the bottom of the right sleeve, and I have nobody to blame but myself. I took out my paltry miniature sewing kit and surveyed the damage in the light of day (and sobriety), but it was a pointless exercise. The gash is too wide, and my needle and flimsy thread are not up to the task of repairing the heavy canvas. My only hope now is to access a clothing repair shop, either here or in Anchorage. Judge me as you will.
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