The Tattoo (14 page)

I turned around. “Ken, my name’s Ken.”

She stepped toward me with that angry look on her face. She reached up, grabbed my chin, and turned my head. “You Japanee boy?”

“Yup.”

“Japanee boy, you like job? You come tomorrow night, I give you job, okay? You come back.”

With that said, she walked away. I headed home and waited for the adrenaline rush to fade. I couldn’t believe it, I was going to get to work in a strip bar. When I got home and turned on the light, I gave Musashi a wink as I threw my keys on my table.

I worked for Mama-san for about five years. For five years I had a wad of hundred dollar bills lining my pocket. For five years, I slept with painted and plastic women. I mean, sex with some of those strippers, for them it was like shaking hands or something. If they thought you were cute enough on a given night, they’d want to shake your hand. For five years, the poverty in my life evaporated. I stopped going to Ka‘a‘awa and Kahaluu. Once in a while I’d talk to my father, Koa, Freddie, or Kahala on the phone, but I never heard shit. I was too wrapped up in my bliss to really listen to any of them. School was no longer on my agenda. I figured, why should I go to school for a few more years, work hard, and end up with a job which paid less than the one I had? For a while, I figured this life was my calling. It was like an epiphany. I wrapped the shroud of the Club tightly over my head, and rolled around happy in it. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

I started as a bouncer at Club Mirage. I worked six nights a week, from about nine at night till two in the morning. Mama-san paid me cash. With that, and what the bartenders and strippers tipped me, I walked home with about two hundred and fifty dollars a night. As the months rolled by, Mama-san began giving me more and more responsibilities. Within a year I was running the place when she wasn’t around. I couldn’t believe it. I was twenty years old, not even old enough to drink, but there I was, helping run the most popular strip bar in the state. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the partying I did with the dancers after work. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll! Twosomes, threesomes, drinks till eight in the morning, and always, the music played. I figured I had found my religion, hedonism, and it was led by a god who didn’t answer dreams, but instead drowned them out in a pleasant way.

I remember my first night at work, after the last set, I helped Iris, whose real name I never knew, off the stage. She was one of the prettiest. She was young, about nineteen, local. She was from the suburbs of Moanalua, I think. Her skin was still tight, unscarred. She had this funny streak of white running through her black hair. She smiled and stepped off the stage naked and tired. I looked down at her garter, and saw all sorts of bills hugging against her leg. I remember asking her, “Why do you do this?”

She laughed. “It’s all for the money, honey, it’s all for the money.”

For me, that summed it up nicely.

Mama-san, I came to find out, was into more than the bar business. Besides the two bars she owned, she had a hostess bar a block away on Kapiolani called Club Nouveau. She was into prostitution, loan-sharking, and gambling. She and a partner owned a massage parlor called Happy Hands, where you’d pay fifty at the door, and “tip” your masseuse for any other services rendered. In her loan-sharking, she had lent out money to dozens of Korean immigrants who were starting their own businesses in town, whether they were jewelry and apparel shops in Waikiki or bars along Keeaumoku or Kapiolani. She had two sisters — one ran an illegal casino in downtown, the other ran Club Nouveau. Her partner ran Happy Hands, while she took care of Club Mirage and the loan-sharking, the two most profitable businesses. There she was, this little lady from God-knows-where in Korea, running her own little empire. A real rags-to-riches story. And once again I found myself riding on the coattails of someone bigger than me. Again I was knighted into a kingdom which I was not born into.

It was great for the first several years. Mama-san kept paying me more and more. Besides staying at the bar, sometimes I’d pick up money for her. The loan-sharking thing, which they called the “Tanomoshi,” was great. She did what no bank would, she lent out tens of thousands of dollars to the new-comers who had no credit or collateral, and charged them outrageous interest. Koreans, for some reason, always seemed to want to open their own business, unlike Filipinos who always seemed to work for somebody. The thought of enormous debt seemed something that the Koreans thought of as necessity rather than hardship.

Of course Mama-san, with her Tanomoshi, ran the risk of people not making money and skipping on their loans, and sometimes it got ugly. Sometimes I had to collect for her. After all, new businesses go bankrupt everyday, and sometimes these people had no way of paying. Mama-san was always squeamish about resorting to violence, but you can only reconsolidate a loan so many times. Some of these Koreans would be like a hundred grand in the hole, and sometimes because of this another hole had to be dug. She didn’t like to do it, besides she’d rather get at least some money back. But she couldn’t survive with the reputation of being somebody that’s soft. Who can? Only those who can bear being the jackass among the strong. That sure wasn’t her.

So, yeah, I collected, but I left the hole digging to the others, the evil-looking Koreans Mama-san owned. They were the ones way too young to remember the Korean War, but they looked like they remembered anyway. I left the killing to them, while I beat people, people who Mama-san thought would be scared of my violent Japanese looks. She thought I’d remind some, who were old enough, of the Japanese occupation of Korea. These people were usually honorable enough to attempt to fulfill their debts, but nevertheless, these people were sometimes guilty of a heinous crime in this world. They weren’t making money. Immigrants from Asia looking for something better, just like my ancestors, instead finding the same damn thing. Embarrassingly, it wasn’t a time in my life when I got tangled up into moral dilemmas. Coke never got me, but money did for a while. It seemed the more I got, the more I wanted. It was my narcotic, my passion, my reason for living. It was my fairy godmother.

I was a sight back then, wearing thick, gaudy gold chains around my neck and wrist, wearing designer shirts which were a size too small on my weight training-induced two-hundred-pound body. I remember this one rope chain I had, half an inch in diameter, which I wore every day. I wore it so much that a pale ring began to form around my neck. It wound tight around my jugular, almost like a dog collar. It screamed, “Hey, look at me, I get my money illegally!” It’s kind of scary when I think about it, the first time I saw Mama-san, I wanted to laugh at her gaudy appearance, her jewelry, her overly-painted face. But after a while I became what she was, I became a son who worshiped the same idol.

After a while, after partying with the strippers, I noticed that they did an extraordinary amount of drugs. I didn’t ask why, I was just interested in capitalizing. I dug Freddie up and he’d come to town to drop off coke, weed, and the up-and-coming drug of choice, crystal methamphetamine. Freddie, he’d drive anywhere to get his hands on more blue cats.

Sometimes, when I did collections, I’d skim some, telling Mama-san that the portion I gave her was all they had.

I dabbled in sports gambling with a buddy of mine, a silent partner, making about fifteen grand every football season.

I still collected cash from Mama-san, from the regular bouncing and collecting.

Altogether, I must’ve been making a hundred grand a year, tax free. My crummy one bedroom turned into a two-bedroom condo on the thirtieth floor of the Marco Polo building right outside of Waikiki. It was a real high-class place, with security cameras and a guard at the door. It even had tinted revolving doors, the kind I’d see on T.V., the kind in places like New York City. I remember the first time I saw the night guy standing by the door. He was this middle-aged Korean guy, his broad face sagged like a bulldog’s. His belly hung over his tightly cinched belt. I tried to give him a twenty-dollar tip. For some reason I figured that’s what people did. He thanked me, but refused. So every Christmas I gave him a bottle of soju instead. He’d smile, take the bottle and say, “Tank you.” He’d bow slightly several times, looking a bit too happy in receiving his gift.

My twenty-inch television grew about forty inches. Leather sofa, glass tables, plush burgundy carpets, my Otsuka framed print of Miyamoto Musashi hung from a cement, not wooden, wall. My piece of shit Celica became a brand new black Porsche Sportster. I kept my money out of the bank, and put it in my books at home. Between the pages of pieces like
Macbeth
,
The Odyssey
, and
Native Son
, thousands of dollars served as hidden bookmarks. I marked my very favorite pages with thousand dollar bills, other good pages I marked with hundreds. It seemed safe at the time, I figured books were like kryptonite to thieves. I thought I was an original, one of a kind. Besides, my thirty-thirty turned into a Glock and a sawed-off shotgun. The shotgun was under my bed, and the Glock was in a case under the seat of my car. So I was confident. I was living large, and my fairy godmother never told me that the clock would strike twelve.

The life was more than entertaining during those years, especially at Mirage. Of course there were the strippers. Iris. Did her. Epiphany. Did her. Crystal. Did her. One time Crystal took me home with Chanel and I did both of them next to a glass table covered with glasses of margaritas, weed, glass pipes, and little plastic bags of crystal meth. The threesome. Everyman’s dream. Didn’t officially date any of them. Most of them had on-again, off-again boyfriends who were either dealers, surfers, or musicians. These were guys they usually met at work.

Watching the customers was also very entertaining. We had all types walk through the red velvet curtain. College students on a limited income. Japanese tourists brought in by limo from Waikiki. Blue-collar guys dressed in t-shirts and jeans. Drug dealers, with their tight shirts, huge gold necklaces, and wads of hundred dollar bills. Haoles walking in with that “surfer” look; shorts, t-shirts and slippers. Huge Hawaiian strong-arms who collected protection money from all the bars, including ours. Businessmen wearing slacks and aloha shirts. Most were either boyfriends or husbands. A few were of that lonely I-never-get-laid breed. On any given night, every type of thirsty man came crawling to the Mirage.

It’s funny, you’d figure that the dealers or strong-arms would give us the most trouble. But the cops were often worse. At least the dealers and strong-arms were big spenders, sometimes dishing out hundreds per night. But some of the cops? They figured once they’d gotten their badges, it was discount city wherever they went. And they were right. Nobody, especially a woman like Mama-san, wanted the cops on her. Even if Mirage was a legitimate business, she had the whorehouse disguised as a massage parlor, the loan-sharking, and the casino. Besides, in the Club itself, drugs flowed in and out every night.

Those two cops who came that night Mama-san offered me the job were always there. The Portagee and the Japanee. It didn’t matter, on or off-duty. Both were married. Both were alcoholics. Both were dirty. They weren’t dirty in the sense that they stole, murdered, dealt drugs, or even used drugs, instead they were the type of cops who abused power. Everything in Mama-san’s kingdom was free to them. Drinks were free, “massages” at the whorehouse were on the house. And in return, they turned their backs on any criminal activities Mama-san was involved with and they served as protection for her. I should’ve been happy to have them, but something about the whole arrangement bothered me. Maybe it was because they had too much power and they knew it, or maybe it was just that I didn’t like the fact that they were hired to do a job which they didn’t really do. I mean, if you’re hired on as a strong-arm, kick ass, if you’re employed as a cop, catch criminals. Do what you get paid to do.

Cops... It’s hard to blame them, though. Their job is to deal with shitty things that happen. If you see enough shit, you want to have some beers and relax. And when bar owners start kissing your ass, what’s a man to do? The bar becomes his favorite place. These two, the Portagee and Japanee, loved Club Mirage.

And I loved it, too. We moved with the times. I had an ATM machine brought in. I told Mama-san that she should hire a D.J. During football season, we had Monday Night specials. Cheap beer, free pupus, and a satellite dish bringing in the game live. Other sporting events. Everytime Tyson fought, we made a bundle. A lot of customers would step into the trap and stay well after the satellite spectacle was over, even when beers went back up to five dollars.We ran things smart and professionally. And just as business was hitting its heights, and I was making more money that I ever did before, the clock struck twelve and in came Claudia Choy.

I met Claudia
Choy, the third sun in my life, four years into my time in town. I never saw her coming, never knew she had even existed. But one night there she was, real, walking through the entrance of Club Mirage. She was looking for her mother. I remember when she first walked in, I was standing behind the bar. Her long, straight black hair was wetted down from rain. Her blue jeans and black t-shirt were equally soaked. The black lights revealed the dots of white lint which decorated her shirt. I couldn’t see her face at first because of the dim lights, but as she neared the bar, I saw the naked tanned skin spread out on her high cheek bones. I saw her roundish eyes which revealed some haole blood. I wasn’t too surprised to see a woman here, a few came in every week. But Claudia didn’t look like the usual party girl that came once in a while, hanging on the arm of a guy, or a couple of other party girls. She walked in alone with no make up, no jewelry. She just looked around the place in a disinterested manner as she slowly made her way to the bar.