Pawnshop English

(*this is a piece of fiction)
We call him Pawnshop. This is on account of his barrio dialect of English and predilection for whispered deal making on all matters of daily life; working hours, the booty he reaps from vending machines, miniscule loans he promises to pay back with favorable interest rates, or trying to store extra furniture in your apartment.

We both worked in an English language institute on the second floor of a seedy retail building in a benign Seoul neighborhood. His short legs and fantastically large pompadoured head lived a majority part of their life in an always unspecified Texas city and had returned seven years ago to his native Korea (no doubt a product of the US policy to deport foreign national felons; my bet is stolen cars or a fake calling card pyramid scheme). He calls himself a native English speaker and the crooked non-English speaking conmen who run the underworld of private language institutes in Seoul don’t know the difference. They don’t pick up on his Latino-gangster cadence and are happy to have a slicked up hustler on their team to cut corners and fleece whoever walks in the door. This is the story of how Rick (aka Pawnshop) ended up on the Nigerian Express.

When he wasn’t trying to sell students the chachkis he’d won from the crane arcade game on the sidewalk he would be scouting. Pawnshop had a connoisseur’s eye for women of a certain moral and physical flexibility. His vintage; a housewife in the waning Indian summer of her beauty, abandoned by a husband for the slavery of Samsung or Hyundai middle-management. Or ‘bitches’, as he categorized them generally.

Dressed like a Reno pit boss in a shiny silver suit, bedazzled pastel tie and a clashing stripped shirt, he manipulated the over-ambition mothers projected on their child. “She’s a good kid,” he would say, ”but if she’s gonna be the top percent she needs her own personal lessons.” He would serendipitously have an opening in his afternoon schedule. Couple the boasting of his conquests and a pinch of adult imagination and one could fill in an accurate story line of transparent seduction followed closely by daytime adultery. The saccharine flattering of insecurities and a couple pieces of cheap jewelry (probably from the sidewalk arcade game) were no-doubt pivotal elements in the sting.

Pawnshop had his fingers in many a suspect pie. In addition to regularly needing to store some durable good or consumer electronic in a colleague’s apartment and a chronic short-term cash flow problem, more than one Monday would find him sporting facial cuts and black eyes. Our faux concern would be met with staggeringly idiotic excuses: ‘I crashed my scooter into a house’ or ‘I was caught in a mob at the baseball game’ or‘the door-to-door yogurt bitch ran me over with her cart’. It was known by one and all that Pawnshop lurked in the nefarious corners of Iteawon; the sleaziest neighborhood between Atlantic City and the International dateline, populated by hedonistic expats, American GI’s, Russian prostitutes and their partially evolved pimps/import-exporters, thuggish groups of African men, and the drunken outcasts of Korean society. It’s a truly nauseating place that weakens faith in humanity and where Pawnshop was like a hog in slop. This is where he collected his scars, earrings, tattoos, and hustles.

On a gray Tuesday afternoon not soon forgotten, the house-wife hustle came to a public end. An irate salary man stormed the reception of the language institute spewing high-volume gibberish and demanding blood and money. Pawnshop’s rooster swagger vanished, replaced by fear, confusion and the frantic darting movements of a decapitated chicken. Whether it was a vengeful child or a case of Dutch crabs that betrayed Pawnshop is still unknown. But what’s known is the threat of prosecution under Korea’s strict adultery laws was his tipping point.

He left out the back door and didn’t come to work the next day or any other thereafter. A few days later I got a text message asking for me to bring something from his desk. A request I’d patently refuse were it not for the rare opportunity (one in a life-time, some would say) to be involved in something so seedy and scandalous. At lunch the next day I found him in the back corner of a back alley noodle shop wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat (my request to drop them off at his flat forced the admission that he “evacuated” it and is sleeping in “bathhouses and shit like that”). It’s at this meeting, with a cocktail of excitement and anxiety, that I realized I was talking to a man with much more in his moral debit column than knocking off vending machines and knocking up bored housewives.

Along with trying to sell me the four VCRs he’d been storing in my apartment, he disclosed the outline of his plan to leave South Korea “quietly”. With South Korea effectively being an island the only departure options are airplane or boat, both of which require a passport check Pawnshop was desperate to avoid. With the help of an “African buddy” he’d get some papers and be off in the next couple weeks after he’d raised some money. He was, of course, speaking of the “Nigerian Express” run by the countrymen of it’s namesake and the last option for all foreigners with stealthy ambitions to avoid the particularities of the South Korean prison system.

Over the next two weeks I received dozens of text messages reading like desperate newspaper classifieds trying to sell anything not nailed down. The most tempting was the key to the cash box for cigarette vending machines for “only $250”, which I’m sure sold quickly. The text message auction came to an abrupt end and I thought so too had Pawnshop. Then a week or so later it was with mild delight and acute paranoia that I agreed to meet him for a “coffee” at 11 pm in a bus station bar to discuss “some business”.

He was disembarking the next day from the port of Inchon but wanted to tell me about his business plan. It turns out the Nigerian Express is a two-way street servicing not only Korea but also Vietnam. And it is in Vietnam where Pawnshop planned to grease together his next scheme. “I’m gonna start an English language institute like the one’s here but only better,” he said lighting his cigarette for dramatic effect. At length he elaborated on his plan for a “street smart” English academy teaching the important stuff like buying and selling, not “grammar n’ bullshits like that”. It would be for people needing to know how to “survive in the tourist industry” (aka ripping-off tourists) and would be taught “mostly in the streets” using real-life situations and other “good ways to study English”. Students would also be training for the “hospitality and massage industries”, but that would be mainly for the girls.

What unfolded was the outline of a franchise-able English academy to train conmen, pimps and massage girls and he was giving me the opportunity to become a ground-floor investor for only $1000. While I assured him it was a can’t miss business model, I had to pass as my capital was tied up in other investments at the moment. Disappointed, he put on his sunglasses, glanced over both shoulders and boarded the midnight bus to the coast and the waiting Nigerian Express.

Trans-Siberian Picnic Part 6: Novosibirsk to Moscow

Trans-Siberian Picnic – Part 6

Novosibirsk to Moscow

Platzcar is a very communal affair and when people aren't sleeping the passengers from the upper berths sit on the beds and use the tables of the people in the lower berths. With the upper berths not tall enough to sit (indeed, barely tall enough to bend your knees) you spend most of the trip climbing up and down to your bed. So far across Russia I had been lucky enough to have the bottom birth and have the luxury of feeling generous sharing my space on the bottom birth as opposed to the feeling of imposing by sitting in the space of others. On the last leg my luck changed.

I was unfortunate enough to be racked above another three generations of a family on their way home to Belarus: Grandpa, Mama and little Sasha (Alexander) aged 2 years. While a bit strange, Grandpa and Mama weren't unpleasant people but they spend the entire three days engaging in child maintenance of their little imp.

Sasha is a loud, devilish little boy completely immune to any verbal of physical punishment. His intelligent eyes stare right at the party is his manipulating or torturing, gaging their tolerance and interpretation. When all else failed, his favorite attention grabber was tipping over his little plastic potty at our feet.

Grandpa had three pastimes. The first was loudly and ineffectively yelling at Sasha. The second was throwing Sasha's toy of the moment out the window when his yelling didn't produce an effect. His third pastime was consulting consulting his 1968 CCCP train table, which he did obsessively. He would insist, at no one's request, that it is still 92% correct. At every passing station or geographical marker he would feverishly consult the mileage and location. Once he had done so he would confirm to us, with a sense of gravity and importance known in religious services, that his time table is correct and the town we just passed was indeed XYZ and kilometer 1874. Ah, yes! And one more of his favorite tasks was pestering each boarding passenger for the latest football scores.

There were, of course, periphery characters but there is no way not to be overshadowed by grandpa and his spawn.

With this stable of company I watched Siberia officially slide past out the window as we clickity-clacked into the Ural Mountain region. One would not be able to tell if they were in the Urals had a book not said so because in this part of the region nothing gets higher than 1500 ft. The scenery does change slightly, less conifer trees and long stands of forest and more deciduous trees and grassy planes. In the Far East the green was vibrant and spring-like but as I moved west it became a summer green, not as deep and with more frequent shades of yellow and brown.

Also, the movement west steadily brought more infrastructure and development (a VERY relative term in this very sparsely populated country). In Eastern Siberia and the Far East you would spend hundreds and hundreds of your day's km's not seeing anything man made beyond the tracks. As you move west, into official Europe (and closer to Moscow) you get to admire the Soviet/Russian ability to make every population center look industrial. They managed to sterilize nearly all living quarters for 9288 km, making them exactly as uninspired and oppressive from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, through Siberia to Europe. In my taste, they rival strip malls as the worst plague-like blights infesting the modern landscape.

For all the changes in geography and traveling companions, the much anticipated stops changed little. The exact same products were sold from east to west by similarly desperate looking people. When the train halted the women would stock up on food while the men would buy beer and stand around shirtless smoking cigarettes and looking thuggish. It wouldn't matter if the stop were at 8 am or 11 pm, identical amounts of beer and vodka would be procured.

I'm very thankful my trip across never pinned my next to one of these smoking drunks. Although, on the Irkutsk to Novosibirsk leg, there was an impressive drunk who twice fell the 5 feet from his upper birth with a fleshy smack on the floor. The second time people tisked their tongues, shook their heads and let him lay there till he managed to pull himself up tens of minutes later.

-9288 Km

-7 time zones

-7 ½ full days on the train

-Countless bowls of instant ramen

-At least 174 million trees I watched pass out the window

-Hundreds of towns, hamlets and villages in the middle of no-where

-Thousands of factories left to pollute till they fall in on themselves as a tribute to the USSR's effort to industrialize everywhere

-And, I only read 87 pages...who has time to read on a picnic?

Train travelers in this part of the world are notorious for getting ready for their stop excessively early. Two hours before the train lurches to a halt at their intended destination, people will change out of their traveling spandex, bother the comfort of all other passengers to collect their luggage from beneath the beds and from the overhead shelves, and then squat on others beds and in the aisles waiting. I find it ridiculous, not a charming quirk. But the approach of “the capital city” inspired my already annoying neighbors to start the process six hours (SIX HOURS!!) before Moscow.

The incremental increase in the visual standard of living that started in Vladivostok over 9000 km ago drastically accelerated in the final 100 km to Moscow. It doubled the previous increases.

My short visit included only the relative center of the world's most expensive city, but none-the-less the contrast was staggering. The streets are chocking with high end shoe stores, upscale restaurants, the worlds finest retailers.

After a gauntlet of dodgy characters at one of the seediest, but most beautiful, train stations on record I was helped by my new friend from the train. Lyosha, a jolly 21 year old delivery truck driver with tattoos on his hands to commemorate his recently completed army service. He kindly escorted me and my baggage from one train station to the next (I stored my luggage there until the next morning when it was time to fly). We skirted around the police who were stopping all brown-skinned people demanding their papers and probably their money (throughout my entire trip I was never once asked for my documents). Lyosha had the wonderful quality of finding the bald-faced rudeness of the common Russian as amusing as I did.

I had only part of a hot and sunny evening in Moscow, so I spent it in the center. After the internet wilderness (hence the postmortem blog postings) I was desperate to find a connection, but it wasn't easy in the decadence of central Moscow. It seems the internet cafes were pushed out by Prada, Mont Blanc and Coach. Across the street from Red Square and Lenin's tomb there was only one establishment offering wireless interent. So it was there I surfed, at the end of my journey with a sense of irony, shame and indulgence as I sipped a Coca-cola and munched on a Big Mac.

Trans-Siberian Picnic Part 5: Novosibirsk

Trans-Siberian Picnic – Part 5

Novosibirsk

With gasping relief my luggage and I poured out of Wagon 29, Train 63 into the 10 pm Siberian dusk. I was met my bright-eyed Emily, a friend and former KZ Peace Corps Volunteer, and a waiting taxi.

Novosibirsk is said to be Russia's 3^rd larges city with about 1.5 million people. Like Vladivostok it was a closed city until the early 1990's. Emily lives in the scientific/academic suburb called “Little Academic City” (clever name). During the Soviet times this perfect and sterile little planned city housed many of the USSR's top scientists. It was designed to keep them comfy, happy and working on the things military superpowers need scientists to be working on.

Knowing its history I couldn't help but feel like I was walking around a well manicured, tree lined prison community. I enjoyed imagining the people who had lived in Emily's apartment, wondering what their lives were like. Did they enjoy their life and despise the west? And if so, how would they feel about a couple of Americans eating cheese, drinking wine and listening to Frank Sinatra in their apartment. If not, did they always live under supervision and were they forced to live and work in this velvety academic gulag?

I thought about this for hours, at least until the early evening of Sunday when I got food poisoning from some tasty but bad peach yogurt. I then spent much of the rest of my visit on my hands and knees heaving into a Soviet academic toilette.

Before I managed to get sick we got to spend my one full day touring Novosibirsk and exchanging train tickets. A very clean city with a well-developed infrastructure and a thriving natural resource based economy. Lonely Planet (without who's help this trip would have been a non-comical disaster) lists about two things of historical or cultural interest. They didn't miss any. But just wandering the streets for a day gave me a good feel of what life may be like in this functional city.

I spent all the next day up until the last hour before the taxi came lying in bed with a fantastic case of general malaise. Had I a spare day in my itinerary I would have postponed the train ride. Instead, I indulged in a taxi, as I had no energy to lug my luggage through the public transport system, and crawled into Train 67, Wagon 5, Birth 16.

Trans-Siberian Picnic Part 4: From Irkutsk to Novosibirsk

Trans-Siberian Picnic – Part 4

Train from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk

The train itself was on its way west to Europe with a collection of different wagons painted and outfitted differently depending on their home/destination: Warsaw, Berlin, Minsk, etc.

I was in a “new” platzcar wagon on its way to Minsk...it was a little rolling piece of hell. The “new” windows were triple paned, which is probably great for the -50C winter weather, but when they don't open and the car is beat down by the sun 18 hrs a day they facilitate a convection-oven effect.

In fact, only a few windows in the entire car opened, and even then only the top 6 inches folded back a crack. Barely enough to squeeze one's hand through and definitely not enough to create any breeze. It was miserable.

But the picnic continued and the hospitality of my neighbors was just as warm. First there was Victor, a retired engineer happy to meet a “real American” and even happier to have a captive audience for his stories, wit and wisdom. Unfortunately, he thought it'd be a good idea for us to have a warm beer in our hot cabin, and surprised me by buying two from the conductor. Him being of modest means and the culture making it nearly impossible to refuse, I drank it and felt rummy for the rest of the day.

After a few hours of stories and round of “idiot”, Victor exited and three generations of a family entered: Vanya (2 yr. old boy), Tanya (mom), Olga (grandma).

The Ruben-esque proportions of the women and the three bags of food the lugged on gave me comfort I would be eating well while sweating away. Vanya ate like a golden retriever, never letting a minute pass without shoving something in his mouth and Olga had a Mary Poppins-carpetbag which never ran out of food. The charming side effect of this supply and demand equation was that little Vanya was constantly filling up his little plastic kiddy toilette. It sat on the floor and its contents would slap around till the meal was finished or the WC was free.

But they easily bought my tolerance with their good food and jovial nature. There were Russians from a little radio-active city in KZ called Semipolytinsk, so we passed the time talking about the old country. This is how hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of Siberian Taiga passed.

In the late afternoon of the second day the train inexplicably stopped and cooked in the sun for two hours. What little draft there was disappeared and I could do nothing more than wiggle my hand out the window and work my Korean hand fan overtime.

This mysterious delay divested was of any 10-20 minute stops we had scheduled until Novosibirsk still hours away. Claustrophobia and the early signs of heat-stroke had me inconsolably cranky and had I not been able to escape at Novosibirsk this happy tail would have had a hellish conclusion.

Cooking along with the passengers was a black poodle puppy traveling in the wagon attached to a guy about my age named Alexander. A port inspector in Vladivostok, he knows a bit of English and thought he would entertain himself by practicing it with me. I pet the puppy, nodded, agreed, asked “why?” a lot, and did my best not to get annoyed.

All the while the train rolled along the “Russian Iron Roads”, through the unimaginably large treed landscapes. “Click-click, clack-clack” tens of thousands of times over the seems of the tracks.

Trans-Siberian Picnic Part 3: Irkutsk & Lake Baikal

Trans-Siberian Picnic – Part 3

Irkutsk

We pulled into the train station during a brilliant purple lightning storm. As a result the train station looked like a refugee shelter. Wet and desperate looking travelers littered the beautiful vaulted halls. Police were combing through the crowd in pairs looking for nefarious characters (of which, in my opinion, there were about 20x too many) and asking to see tickets and documents. Those without propers documentation were escorted out the door and into the waiting arms of the horizontal rain.

I tried to get a “resting room” for the night on the second floor of the train station but was curtly barked at by the fat, purple haired Russian woman behind the desk. After telling me how stupid I was to ask if there was a free room at this hour on this kind of night, she said I could go to the “resting hall”. I told her she could go to hell, in English, then found my way to the “resting hall” which was manned by her twin sister and co-valedictorian of their Soviet Hospitality Institute.

The “resting hall” had pale green and white ornamentation around the windows, doors, ceiling and thresholds. The grand room is lit by dozens of florescent lights blaring down from behind large chandeliers onto 10 or so big, cheap couches that had seen their prime years ago.

I wove together a web of the straps from my three bags, inserted my leg in the middle of it and slept the next 5 hours till sunrise on the least crusty of the couches. A privilege for which I paid about $10.

When I woke I saw on the other side of the hall three Korean smiles attached to giant backpacks. (I met them on the boat from Korea to Vladivostok) They giggled and laughed about their first Russian train experience then we set off to get breakfast and put them on a bus to their next adventure. Sad to seem them go, again. Their positive attitude was a wonderful vacation from what you normally run into.

I checked into the Downtown Irkutsk Hostel, had a thorough and indulgent session of the three S's, then set out to survey the “Paris of Siberia”, as I believe it was once known. (Why does everywhere relatively undesirable have it's own “Paris” or “Venice”?)

All literature and most people warn not to be outside in Irkutsk at night as it gets “a bit seedy” and unsafe. I'd argue strongly that the seediness doesn't only describe the nocturnal hours. It has a world-class percentage of drunks per-capita, even my Mother Russia's vaulted standards.

Drunks aside (usually aside the road) it is a beautifully rugged city with an incongruous architectural composition spanning the past 150 or so years. The most charming and photogenic of which are the wooden houses with lace-like carvings around the shutters and eves. Many more are criminally neglected than not, leaning, folding and chipping away after dozens, if not a hundred, Siberian winters and summers.

I passed my few days wandering the streets and sights with friends I met along the way. I shared a couple sunset (11 pm!!) beers with Vladislov, the middle aged physicist and tour guide, as well as a couple of upbeat Macedonian women traveling and educating themselves abroad. (They even had vague and notions of taking their experience and education back to Macedonia). We sat at a cafe on the bank of the swift and voluminous Angara River (the only one exiting Lake Baikal) and talked about all matter of things as long as they revolved around Slavic cognates.

I had lunch and saw some churches one day with Aleksandra, the young party girl from the train. After she was picked up at the train station by a thuggish looking fellow far too old for her with a look of depravity in his eyes, I figured she needed some positive influence and company...she was also kind enough to buy me a SIM card for my phone, naturally forbidden to foreigners. Especially Americans.

Lake Baikal:

Depressive weather slowed my setting out for Lake Baikal, which is about 70 km from Irkutsk. I bumbled around the grounds of the decaying bus station till I found a front seat in a mini-van navigating the potholes to Baikal.

The nearest town on the lake is called Listvyanka and shares the feel of seedy seasonal beach side towns the world over. The frigid wind off the huge lake (more water than all 5 Great Lakes combined) coupled with the drizzle and lack of shelter made for a pretty uncomfy scene. About the time I thought there was nothing worth doing, having already confirmed the lake is indeed big and wet, an aging and lethargic Soviet passenger hydrofoil arrived to ferry people to a little wooden town only accessible by boat. I hopped on.

“Bolshee Katee” is a tiny town hand made out of wood from the surrounding forest. It was founded during some gold-rush of long ago but now houses visitors wanting a “rough” vacation and locals with an immunity to, or a tolerance for, cabin fever. Of course in the winter when the lake freezes over, it is accessible by dog sled or the big, rugged Soviet vehicles that look like utilitarian monster trucks.

After wandering through the rock and grass streets I made my way back to the dock to find it sagging under the weight of people. It was the last boat for 24 hours and without a spot on it I would have been stuck with nowhere to stay and would have missed my train onward the next day. I was literally the last one on the boat. They pulled up the gangway behind me but there continued a verbal bridge of profanity from the dock to the boat, constructed by the 20 or so suckers who got left behind.

That night, my last in Irkutsk, I laid low and played round after round of “idiot” with a nice Finish couple I met in the hostel.

I spent the morning of the next day unsuccessfully trying to navigate the apathy and laziness of railway booking agents in order to change my ticket. I found out a friend from Peace Corps KZ is living in Novosibirsk and I wanted to change my layover from Yekaterinburg to there. I later decided to just get off the train early instead of changing my ticket, then monkeying around with the last leg to Moscow later on.

As is the endearing tradition here and in KZ, people go to the train station to see friends and family off as a matter of duty. Unexpectedly, Aleksandra met me at the train station to do so. When I thanked her and said how nice it was, she informed me she was bored and had nothing to do anyway...and she only lives a couple of minutes from the station. Ah the warmth!!