A Trip to the Massage Parlor

Alright, it’s me again and I’m here to continue my story about the night that I got left high and dry by Monica after meeting her at Mike’s Cabin in Shinchon. 

So that night, it was cold (it was around mid-March) and it was raining, and fuck it was raining fucking hard too!  It was too late to take the subway, as the trains stop running at 1am, so I was forced to either stay out and drink til 5am or take a cab home.  If I remember correctly at this point it was about 2:30 or 3am and I was pretty drunk.  I was pissed off about Monica leaving all of a sudden and I was pissed off at not getting any, and I was pissed off at Korean girls and how utterly confusing they can be.  I’m standing in the rain with no umbrella on a busy street in Shinchon trying to hail a cab, but no cabs are stopping.  They pull up, the little red light is on inside showing that they are vacant and open to taking passengers, but no, they’re not open to taking a foreigner.  Time andtime again they passed me by only to stop a little further down the road to pick up a Korean.  I understand that foreigners get a bad rap here, andI also understand that some Korean cab drivers might not want to take on a foreigner because of their possible lack of Korean, but I don’t buy that 100%, because I’ve asked hailed cabs and asked them to stop and I’ve told them where to go in Korean.  I know how to say “Take me to _______ subway station” and I also know how to say “left” and “right” and “straight”.  Despite showing them that I can speak Korean, they still don’t pick me up.  Another strategy that I’ve employed in this matter, is to hold out a wad of 10,000 won notes and wave them down with the Sejongs.  Despite doing this, I still got passed cab after cab.  Finally, some ajjoshi stopped and picked me up, but it wasn’t until well after 20 minutes of waiting in the cold pouring rain.

I got home and there was this temptation nagging deep inside of me to fulfill my needs with instant gratification.  It is at this part of the story where I must provide some backstory to tell about how I came to visiting a massage parlor. 

Earlier that week myself and my two closest friends (guys I met at the orientation who got hired on at the same time as me) went out cruising to pick up some girls and check out some bars.  We went up to Nowon because we heard that there was a lot of cool bars up there.  Well we were wrong.  Nowonwas a bust, with the exception of one place that seemed alright.  Most of the bars on the street that we visited were the kind of bars where you have to pay some exorbitant amount of money for a whole bottle of whisky andinstead you’re really paying for the company of some cute young bartender.  Being English teachers we really didn’t have that kind of money, so we just stuck to looking for pubs, especially considering how most of those bottle service bars were completely empty!

We headed back to our neighborhood to drink in the local pub that we started to frequent, but on the way there from the subway station we passed by a place that we thought was maybe a bar.  It was in a dingy old rundown building, but it said it had something on the 2nd floor and then billiards on the 3rd floor.  So we figure it was a bar, but there was also these revolving barber poles.  Before I came to Korea, I read here about how barber poles  sometimes mean that a place is a brothel or a “special” massage parlor.  We were really looking for a bar, but all being new to South Korea we were interested in looking into what such a place had to offer. 

(Note:  For more information in the form of a video you can check out what these intrigued investigators have to say about the matter. )

It really is true though, you see the double barber poles everywhere and you really don’t know what to think.  In the West a barber pole signifies the place of business where a barber cuts hair and nothing else.  Here, they seem to be everywhere, single ones, double ones, giant ones, triple ones, and none of the Westerners or Koreans can even agree on what they mean. 

So, curious, we walked into this building and up the stairs to the 2nd floor where the place with the spinning barber poles was.  My mates had me walk in first because I know the most Korean.  I opened the door and walked into this dimly lit foyer.  I was greeted with a horrible smell, I dunno it smelled like a stable or farm animals or something…and beyond the foyer was a dimly lit hallway with little rooms and curtains separating them from the hallway. 

Sleeping on a mat was this old man who was suddenly awoken and up and standing at the surprise of three foreigners in his little place of business.  The guy was what smelled like farm animals, and he was old and crusty, and the only other way that I can describe him is by saying that he looked a lot like the old monk guy from the Eddie Murphy movie “The Golden Child” (1986). 

"Annyeong Haseyo!"

Realizing exactly what kinda place this was, and that everything I read on the internet must have been true (because really, everything you read on here istrue!) I got all nervous and got weak in the knees.  I didn’t know what to say, so I reverted to our previous mission of looking for a bar, so I just started saying, “맥주?  맥주? [mekju]”  which in Korean just means “Beer?  Beer?”

“아니요!  아니요!” (“No!  No!”) he yelled as he quickly pointed to the door and seemed to just brush the foreigners all out with a swift swish of his hands. 

Outside of the “special” massage parlor we all laughed at how I tensed up and didn’t know what to say and how I just acted like a confused foreigner and started asking for beer.   It was a funny night and we all laughed about it, but I didn’t really look at neighborhood quite the same after that.  Here was a place like that right by my home, within walking distance of my apartment.  If ever I felt lonely or wanted some sexual satisfaction, I could just walk over there and get some.  It was different, because in NYC prostitution is illegal, and there are certainly rub and tug massage parlors throughout New York, but they’re not common and they’re not so obvious as they seem to be here.  To find one in NYC you’d have to look for an ad in the back of the Village Voice and then do some hunting to actually find the place.  Here you walk down the street and you see double barber poles spinning everywhere.

With more of a prevalence, prostitution becomes more of an option. 

That night that I came back home from Shinchon after being left high and dry by Monica, I opted for the next best thing.  Confused with Korean women and how to get by here, I was frustrated and in need of some sexual release, something to help get out all the pent up steam from moving over here and starting work here and adapting and having to learn new customs and ways of doing things.  So I figured I’d take a trip to the local massage parlor and test out their wares. 

I’d never been to such an establishment before.  I really didn’t know what to expect.  I went in from the rain, and was greeted by the same old guy who was laying down again.  I didn’t know what to say, but I remembered seeing 안마 [ahnma] outside and looking it up.  It means massage.  So I went in there and this old guy’s looking at me, and I had a hat on this time (to be more discreet, I figured if I was going to become a john, I needed to be discreet about it).  I felt a little embaressed about my last time there.  I was hoping he wouldn’t remember me.

I doubt he remembered me, but that didn’t really matter, because there I was standing in front of him and I didn’t know what to say again.  I could order myself a beer, I could order myself food, I could direct a cab to my apartment, but I didn’t know what to say to a pimp in a brothel, I didn’t know how to order or prostitute or even what I should say in such a situation.  So I pulled together what little I knew:

“안마 주세요” (which pretty much means, “Give me a massage”).

The old man led me down the dark hallway with the different rooms.  I could see that none of them were occupied because the curtains were all up on them.  In each room was an empty bed with a single pillow on it.  At the head of each bed was a sink and a mirror.  He took me to the end of the hall and then down another hall that led to the left.  There were probably around 10 or 12 rooms in the place, all of them empty.  I was quiet and cautious, afraid of seeing someone.  But no one was there.  I didn’t know what to expect and my heart was pumping fast.  The adrenaline was flowing, and I was nervous, but ready.  He turned the light on inside this little room all the way at the very end of the hall in the room furthest away from his little mat where he slept in the foyer.  I thought this would be good—I wouldn’t feel so self conscious about him possibly hearing some sounds that came from the room.  I know that during the act, he’d be the last person I’d want to visualize or think about, and knowing that he’s right outside the door would make things difficult. 

He took off his shoes and stepped up onto the wooden floor of the room.  I did the same.  He pulled back the blanket on the bed to show me…well I guess to show me that it was indeed a bed.  I took jacket off and sat down on the bed trying to relax myself through my nervousness.  Then the old man put up his fingers and said some indecipherable number plus “won”.

It was time to pay the man.  He held up 8 of his 10 digits.  I stood up to get my wallet out of my back pocket.  Standing next to him I realized how much taller than him I was.  I also realized that in this little room we were standing pretty close to each other.  I tried not to think of that.  I tried to think of the hot girl that would come in and take my clothes off.  I pulled out a 10,000 won note, thinking he meant 8,000 won.  “No” he shook his head and showed me 8 fingers again, this time pointing to my 10,000 won note.  He was trying to tell me:

“80,000 won.”   

Ouch.  That’s a lot.  About $80 U.S. dollars.  A lot of money for…well I wasn’t even sure.  Would I just get a massage?  Would I just get a handjob? Or sucked off?  Or fucked?  Would that cost extra?  What if she wasn’t hot?  What if she was fucking ugly?  Could I get my money back? 

Regardless of all this, I didn’t have any money anyway.  All I had was 12,000 won, quite shy from the 80,000 this ajjoshi was asking from me. 

“What can I get for 12,000 won?”  I asked in English, not even trying to say it in Korean.  “Huh?  What can I get for 12?  Handjob?”  With my hand I made the international symbol that means ‘handjob’ and he laughed.

“Hehehe!” he laughed from his raspy throat, “Nothing.”

And he laughed at me some more and I could smell the horrible stench of his breath as it came through the gaps in his smile. 

Humiliated, I put on my jacket with a feeling of defeat, dressing myself when all I wanted to do was be undressed.  The old man stepped off the wood floor and into his slippers.  I tried to just shove my feet into my sneakers, but caught the back part of them too far underneath my foot.  I struggled to shake and shimmy my foot in.  My humiliation and embarrassment surely didn’t help me.  The old man ran off.  As I got my other foot in, he came back with a shoe horn, which was now unnecessary.  I followed him down the hallway again, and just before the lobby there was a doorway with a curtain of beads.  This doorway led to a backroom that was dark and only lit with a blue light.  Behind the beads I could only see the sillouette of a woman, a tallish, kinda curvy woman, standing there poised and waiting, ready to be told to come out and work.  She must have heard me and the commotion I made with the old man. 

I walked out and imagined the old man telling her the story, 

“Would you believe that silly foreigner?  All he had was 12,000 won!!!  What did he expect to get with that?  A pat on the head?”

I went home feeling even more defeated and confused at this place.  I contemplated going down to the ATM and taking out 80,000 no 100,000 won and fucking the shit outta that whore, but no…that was just way too much money to spend on that. 

I calmed myself down by jerking off.  Sometimes its the only thing you can do.  I fell asleep and woke up the next morning–going another day without sex hadn’t killed me.  I was still sexually frustrated, that was for sure, but I could live.

Little did I know that in just a few days I’d get laid for my first time in Korea…

Saying Hello

A stranger in a strange land.  One of the most common literary themes used by writers is that an individual who is isolated from those around him tries foolishly to bridge the gap and build relationships.   Another common theme is that through such alienation, comes self-knowledge.  I hope to experience the struggle in building relationships as well as self-knowledge and write about it.  These are literary themes that I plan to explore in the artwork of my life here in Seoul.  This is my first time living in another country, so far away from home.  To be quite honest, I wasn’t very well traveled either.

When I first landed in Incheon Airport and was sent to training and orientation, I was very disoriented, and culture shocked,  I actually needed the orienation, the decompression period to help me re-adjust.  I could write all about how the different cars and street signs freaked me out.  How the brightly painted parking garage at Incheon Airport amazed me at first, and how even simple things like vending machines had me gazing in wonder…

“Wow, what’s a Ghana chocolate like?”  And now that I’ve been here a few months, I know that Atlas is my favorite candy bar here.  

But at first, I was truly culture shocked.  At the orientation and training, I frantically tried to make friends.  It reminded me of being back in college.  I was very clingy.  Very very clingy.  It wasn’t cool.  Looking back on myself, I hated myself that week because I was so desperate for friends, for some inkling of something to remind me of home.  Not surprisingly, I clung to a fellow New Yorker. 

We didn’t really date, so much as we just got to vaguely know each other and occassionally we would sneak from the group to go make-out. 

She was cute, but nothing too special.  I quickly lost interest in her when I started going out with my friends and meeting more women.  But at first, it was frustrating.  I had heard all of these things to watch out for from posts I had read on internet forums where guys wrote about the craziness and quirkiness of Korean women, and also things I heard from friends of mine who had been in Korea during their service in the army.   They warned me of bar girls and women who end up being prostitutes.  Of course, I think they hung out at different kinds of bars, but nevertheless, I was weary of women when I first came here.  I also heard that women can be extremely difficult to understand and figure out because of the cultural differences.  I heard that a lot of times they’d send out mixed signals and guys would think “yeah I got this, this girl is going home with me” only to be duped and left to go home by themselves.  That sometimes women just wanted put out to a guy.   

Contrary to that, I also heard that being a white guy here came with privilege.  I read and heard about guys coming over here, ESL teachers coming and teaching and sleeping with hundreds of women.  I read about how Asian women look towards white people as the ideal of beauty, and that even ugly guys, even the fat, bald, early 30’s slob of a loser can find a hot woman and get laid.  There’s countless threads on websites like www.eslcafe.com about this subject, and dear reader I am sure that (if you haven’t already) you can read even more threads and posts and news articles and editorials about the reputation of Western ESL teachers in Korea, as well as the general attitude taken towards them.  I feel that I need not get into that too much here.     

So anyway, I guess when I first came here I thought that it would be so easy, that I would walk down the streets and bitches would be in heat in for my cock.  Haha!  boy was I wrong!

My first night out in Seoul I hung out with some other expats in Itaewon.  We went to Gecko’s and Wolfhound, and I was really very unimpressed with the talent.  Gecko’s reminded me of a white trash bar back home, complete with military tough guys, and bad music.  Wolfhound was more like a Euro trash boys club—I was just sorry that I didn’t bring my rugby jersey and alcoholism with me.  So looking for a place more “Korean” (in Itaewon its actually kinda hard).  Not to knock those places too much, but they really weren’t what I was looking for in a pub.  If I wanted to hang out with all guys, I’d join a soccer team.  If I wanted to not get laid, I’d go to church.  Another night in Itaewon my friend and I went to M1, some ritzy basement wine bar that made me reminiscent of New York.  It was complete with the white leather couches, lounge pillows, over priced drinks, and its too hip to be cool dj ‘spinning’ the best dance music his gyopo friend could burn him on a mix CD.  If I sound bitter or jaded, or pissed off, or mad, its because I associate M1 with the experience I am about to recall. 

So as I sat at the bar in M1 talking to my friend, enjoying a 7,000won Filipino beer, I noticed that there was two pretty Korean girls sitting next to me.  They were hard not to notice, they were so hot.  One of them, the one sitting closest to me, had legs long as a mile and was proudly displaying them in a short short skirt.  She was sitting on her barstool, shaking her head to the music and swaying the long wave of her brown hair.  She was dancing in her seat like she could hardly contain herself, just grooving to the music in her own little world.  It was a weeknight and there was hardly anyone in the place.  So it wasn’t like anyone was really dancing or anything and it wasn’t like there was a real dance floor anyway.  So I said, “It’s a shame there’s not a dance floor here, or you’d be able to dance”.  I was just being nice, trying to talk to her…but what she said really shocked me.

She looked at her friend, then looked at me with this arrogant, snobbish look, with her nose just slightly up in air she asked, “Umm, do you know us?”

I couldn’t believe the attitude on this little trick.  The fuckin’ nerve of her!  Thinking she’s so hot that she could blow me off like that.  I told my friend and we both cracked up laughing at her and her attitude.  It’s something that my friend and I still joke about now.  Every so often we’ll just say “Umm, do you know us?” and die laughing.  It really was funny that she’d say something like that.  I mean really, I was just trying to be nice and strike up a conversation with someone that I’m sharing some space with, but some girls here won’t have that.

I had heard about this element of Korean culture–this insular thinking of Koreans that prohibits them from speaking with strangers.  Like in a bar or a club, they have to be introduced by someone that they know, otherwise they won’t talk to you.  So yeah, my first attempt at talking to a girl in Korea and I got horribly shot down.  Since then, I have managed to successfully chat up women that I just met, but it came with time and patience.

Another time I struck out was in Shinchon (not Shinchon…yeah, that’s what I said Shinchon, not Shinchon–if you live in Seoul you know what I’m talking about, the constant confusion between 신촌 and 신천 which to the Western ear sound very similar).  So anyway, I was in Shinchon (the one on the north side of the Han River, the one near Hongdae, and I was in this bar/club that moreso resembles a Canadian’s dream home.  I was at this place called Mike’s Cabin.  That atmosphere of Mike’s Cabin is more like a truck stop Canadian gay bar.  Surprisingly, it’s a good place to meet Korean girls who might be interested in Western guys, that is of course if you can stomach the campy decor and the hordes of other lame ass white guys there sitting at tables drooling over the women.  The DJ knows how to DJ and knows how to play a good variety of music from her mp3 collection, which says a lot more than what others in Seoul can do. 

So anyway, shortly after the M1 “Umm do you know us?” shoot down, I bucked up and got back on the horse trying not to get knocked down.  My friend Andre introduced me to the place.  Andre’s a solid dude, he’s been in Korea for something like 5 years and he pretty much knows how the game is done here.  Andre started talking to this girl, she was playing foosball with some Pakistani guy.  Right after their game finished he grabbed me and said “We’re playing foosball!”

I love foosball, so it was no pain on my end.  I was quickly introduced to the girl that Andre was talking to and her friend Monica.  At first I thought Monica was tall for a Korean girl, but really it was just her high as fuck high heels.  She was pretty good looking, long straight hair and bangs cut straight across her forehead as if her hair stylist cut along the straight edge of a bowl.  She had tiny lips and produced an equally tiny smile as she spoke.  Occasionally she’d look into her cell phone at her Korean/English dictionary to help her find the right word to say. 

At foosball, Monica and I were one team, and we were playing against Andre and his girl.  This was a good way in, it got us talking and working together.  It was sorta like a cute couple thing, and I quickly realized that Korean girls go gaga for that kind of cutesy couples shit.  It makes sense, what with them loving couple t-shirts and all that lame crap.  So I figured that if I could get a girl to do ‘cute couple’ shit with me just after meeting her, I could easily get her to do raunchy kinky couple sex shit with me later in bed–  boy was I wrong again.

So I bought her a couple drinks and things were going well.  Andre had said something that offended Monica’s friend and she wasn’t digging him anymore.  Andre felt kinda ashamed or embarrassed or something, and he cut out and left.  I was sticking with Monica for the long haul and hoping I could take her home with me that night.  I don’t really live close Shinchon, so a cab was definitely in my future plans as Seoul believes in this retarded idea of closing subways at certain times (while public transportation in Seoul is pretty good, there’s a lot of things that Seoul could definitely learn from NYC).

So we were talking and dancing and drinking and everything was going well.  I was just happy to actually be talking with a girl and not getting snubbed and to feel like I was back in the game.  It’d been a while.  She was a smart girl, and her English was pretty good, although her pronunciation was hard to understand.  The fact that the speakers were loud and blaring music didn’t help things either.  I was thinking things were going pretty well.  Her friend was occupied with some other guy not that Andre was gone.  They were dancing, we were dancing, and the DJ was playing some pretty good music. 

Then out of nowhere, up walks some blonde-haired blue-eyed Adonis.  He doesn’t look like he’s fluent in Korean, but he just starts belting it out.  Monica’s friend was quite impressed.  He had a thing for her alright.  She seemed to forget the guy she was dancing with and we was all over this blondie who was actually from Sweden.   Monica explained his situation to me, he’s a student studying here.  Part of his studies meant that he had to study Korean full time, so this bastard’s fluent and picking up girls like its nothing, while I’m over here struggling, typing on some little ass keyboard looking up words in my cell phone! 

This guy knew the Korean game and he knew it well.  He had Monica’s friend crawling all over him, and I was just fudding around with Monica trying to think of how I could get her back to my place.  I had nothing.  I was like a fighter pilot trying to shake the Red Baron on my tail.  I pivoted left, I pivoted right, I dove down and spun in a spiral, I pulled every maneuver I had in my book but nothing seemed to work against the enemy that I did not know. 

I think that nothing would have gotten her to come home with me that night.  But that didn’t stop me from blaming the Swedish guy.  The Swede fucking prick bastard (who I have actually run into in Seoul quite a few times–I can never forget his arrogant macho face) didn’t really help things.  He was being really super aggressive with Monica’s friend.  At one he just grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards him and just started making out with her. 

Then Swede-boy starts saying they need to go to Hongdae, that he has friends there to meet up with.  So Monica says “I have to go” to me, and I’m confused–like what the fuck does Swede-boy have that I don’t have?  Why not invite me along?  Why?  Cuz Swede-boy’s a pushy aggressive dickhead? 

(Note:  I would later discover that Swede-boy’s pushy aggressive attitude was something that was not only accepted and tolerated by Korean women, but also something they enjoyed and looked for in the opposite sex, but more on that later).

Yes, so that’s exactly what happened.  Swede-boy pulled her by the hand right outta the club and Monica followed her friend.  Off they went to Hongdae, and I was just glad that I got her phone number in time…  I remember calling it just to make sure that it was real.  I left there feeling like such a fucking loser.  I look back on that night as being a night of desperation and loneliness, but also one where I learned a great deal about Korean women and how to pick them up. 

I left Mike’s Cabin alone, with nothing to show for myself but horrible buzz and a raging hard-on hungry to get laid.  This led me to my first experience in a Korean brothel/whorehouse/massage parlor (whatever the fuck you want to call them)…but as this post is already close to 2,500 words, and I love a cliffhanger, I think I’ll leave this post just how it is.  Besides, the brothel story deserves its own separate post, so I’ll leave that for your anticipation.