ALEX HOFFORD

URBAN LEGENDS: The topless bar Bottoms Up in Hong Kong's Kowloon district was once a iconic, seamy hangout

My father had one heart attack that I knew of, and one that I didn't. The latter I didn't hear about until long after he died. But it took place in the crepuscular, tobacco-steeped basement of mirrors, drapes and topless girls that was Hong Kong's Bottoms Up bar in its sybaritic heyday. "We just thought he was messing around," says Velvet, one of the girls who worked there virtually since its opening in March 1971. "So I drew a chalk line around him for fun. And then someone was going, no, no, he really is having a heart attack." She lets out one of her lovely, infectious guffaws.

On account of my father—a wonderful man who, let it be known, could finish a bottle of F.O.V. cognac in 20 minutes—my family was well known in Bottoms Up. The old man used the place during his epic binges in Kowloon, the honky-tonk quarter across the harbor from Hong Kong island. One of my brothers or I would be dispatched to find him after the first 48 or 72 hours, and had to cajole him back up the stairs and into a cab home. Sometimes my mother—a woman of quite queenly hauteur—would stride in there to look for him herself, which is how she came to know Velvet. Thirty years later, the two of them can laugh about it. My mother now lives in Sydney, but when she last holidayed in Hong Kong she dropped by the bar, importing something of the atmosphere of a state visit. The girls and barkeeps were craning their necks to get a glimpse of her as she sat in the back with Velvet, sipping Pink Ladies, joking about and drinking to my father like two old friends at a wake.

There aren't many topless bars with that sense of family, but Bottoms Up was always one. It has long traded on its status as an iconic Asian hangout, name-checked by many a yellowing Fodor's and newspaper feature, and name-dropped by many a foreign correspondent and celeb. It has played up its fleeting, 60-second appearance in the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun to the point of embarrassment. But the real sell was always its conviviality. The girls there ask about your girlfriend or your children, and wow and gush over the photos. They'll pass on messages from whichever friend of yours was drinking in there the night before. They'll consecrate the memory of your dead in sorrow and song. And always, around the bar, there'll be some fast-fading guy, all liver spots and dark bags, who fought the communists with your father in '67 or got mashed with him in '78. They don't just know your name there. They know your genetic code.

I first started going to Bottoms Up when I was about 15, because its then owner and mama-san, Pat Sephton, used to give me the cab fare home. To the generation of international school kids of that time, the bar was something of a drop-in center. We would stumble down the stairs, hiccuping strawberry wine after a night of drinking in the parks, or belching Bacardi cokes after many hours in the Stoned Crow. Pat would coo and cluck and then call our homes to say that we were safe and on our way, for she appeared to know everyone's parents. And after we'd ogled some girls in the main room, she'd give us cups of black tea to sober us up, hand us HK$20 notes and see us all to purring taxis with a "Give my love to mom" or "Behave yourself at school tomorrow."

1 | 2 | Next

Aug. 18, 2004	Aug. 19, 2003	Aug. 20, 2003