Face value

I got a lesson in Asian values last night, and the lesson came, of all places, at Dugg’s A-go-go. Two weeks ago, if you had asked me to describe Asian values I would have pointed out that there were men in sunglasses going through my neighborhood handing out cash to every male voter and a bottle of fish sauce to every female voter. But last night my friend Beer changed my mind.

Even though Beer was born with a penis, and still has hairy-chested Y-chromosomes swinging their shoulders up and down the sidewalks of her cells, she spends her evenings selling her body to strangers and spends most of her earnings on shoes and jewelry, and I think that earns her the option of feminine pronouns. Her career on the catwalk came at the expense of several elaborate surgical procedures, years of hormone therapy, and quite a bit of money. The money came out of the bank account of a man named Solly Greenblatt, a Los Angeles native who made his money in dry goods and who thought that Beer deserved to be a girl. After her operations Beer lived in a celibate relationship in L.A. with the octogenarian Solly until the earthquake of ‘94, after which Solly’s “no-goodnik” son Herman put Solly in a home and gave Beer an economy class ticket back to Thailand.

I was sitting with Beer last night because the American visitor I had brought out for the obligatory trip to Patong Beach had left the room with one of the girls who rub elbows with Beer on the catwalk, promising to be gone only a short time. Beer and I have known each other for a couple of years, and because I enjoy listening to her say “Oy-veh!” and “Nu, vat’s da problem?” she is the only woman in Dugg’s for whom I’ll buy a drink. We watched the other girls dance and had as much conversation as a man can have while “Achey-Breaky Heart” is being broadcast at jet-exhaust volume and thirty half-naked young women are doing everything short of self-immolation to draw his attention.

Despite the horrible music and the knowledge that I would never be physically closer to any of those young women than I was at that moment, I was happy, because Moe was gone, even if just for a short time. Moe was an American hotelier from Vietnam, in Thailand for the first time, pawned off on me by my neighbor and his brother-in-law Hector. All evening Moe had been in my face with stupid observations like “In Vietnam the girls are twice as pretty and a quarter the price.” Not only was Vietnam cleaner, cheaper, and more beautiful than Thailand, but the opportunities for business were everywhere, and anybody with white skin and half a brain, which sums up Moe’s résumé, could be a millionaire inside a year.

Most annoying were his comments on the relative merits of women in the two countries. As we were having pizza on the street early in the evening he’d said “These Vietnamese dames, their mommas teach ‘em to take care of their men before they take care of their babies. The woman I got now, ain’t nothing she won’t do for me. Since I been in Saigon I aint mixed my own drink one time. She does my laundry, my cookin’, my cleanin’, she even washes my car!”

At that point he had launched into the inevitable descriptions of the sexual favors he enjoyed at the hands of his paragon, a litany of positions, attitudes and noises that continued uninterrupted from the pizza joint down the street and through two more bars before the deafening blast of Dugg’s sound system cut him off. Despite the fact that by his own admission he had enjoyed more sex in the last week than a hutch full of rabbits enjoys in a month, and despite the superiority of Vietnamese women, we were only in Dugg’s for five minutes before Moe was scrambling to leave with the first girl who squeezed his biceps and asked for a cola.

Since I didn’t want anyone squeezing my biceps I signaled Beer to come on down and have a drink. Almost immediately the clock struck midnight, the management pulled black-out curtains across the doorway, and two women went onto the catwalk and began one of those ‘sexy shows’. In the relative quiet I asked Beer if she’d ever do a show like that, and she said “Uh-uhhh. No vay, boychick. Not for a million dolluhs.”

“How about a tattoo?” I asked, looking at a fresh and obviously infected purple dragon on one of the performer’s hips. “Nope. Uh-uhhh. I had enough needles stuck in my tuchus already. How ‘bout you? You evah gonna shave ‘dat nasty beard off?”

I told her that I would go to my grave with my whiskers in place, and that was when she taught me something about Asian values. “You would shave if your wife asked you,” she said. And she said it just as matter-of-fact as if she was saying “My butt’s sticking to this vinyl bar stool.” She was right, of course, I would shave if Mem asked me to, though I’d be mad as hell. And the woman that used to be a man, the naked dancer who hides her Adam’s apple with her hand when she laughs, who practiced geriatric home-care to pay for aesthetically pleasing but functionally inert organs which she now rents out by the hour to auto company executives from Taiwan, she new it, and she was sitting there giving me a lecture in family values.

I gave Beer a tip and she kissed me on the cheek and I left. Independence, self-reliance and accountability are Western values, and I felt no guilt at ditching Moe. 

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author. 

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