Night School — page 2

It was a wonder we ever went to school at all, for the streets of Kowloon belonged to us. They were rotten and they were sinful. They were a sleepless hell of old whores and old drunks. But they were also the closest thing to paradise that the mind of any 15-year-old boy is capable of conceiving. The incandescent neon, the tooth-picking touts, the tattooed hard men loitering outside low-rent doorways, the Nepalese hash dealers in the sodden alleys—we wouldn't have traded a month in Kowloon for an entire upbringing in Manhattan or Knightsbridge. With no one ever being asked for proof of age, and plenty of spending money from cashed-up expatriate dads, we had the keys to every bar in the faubourg. Some nights, it would be tequilas and jazz funk at Rick's Cafe. Other nights, we'd pile into Red Lips to gawp at the 60-year-old tarts. Sometimes we'd visit the "Red Rat." Its real name was the Red Lion but nobody ever called it that and, now that I think about it, it was something to see during the simmering mayhem of a Kowloon night. Spectacular, floor-to-ceiling bas-reliefs of female pudenda, painted a lurid purple, graced the walls. The mama-san was an aged amputee who moved around the bar on her stumps, swatting at cockroaches and rodents (hence the bar's nickname) with a rolled-up newspaper. In the corner stood a jukebox that had not been serviced since the days of Vietnam War R. and R., its song lists (the Doors, Kansas, Dr. Hook) a kind of Who's Who of dad-rock. Guys who looked like they worked for the CID, or the CIA, or a cocaine cartel, would be lining the bar, beating time with great, foaming pots of beer. And one of the bar girls would always be leaning through the thick smoke of Rothmans and cheap Manila cigars to shout to me: "If you were my son, I'd kill you. What the hell are you doing here when you should be doing your homework?" (A question whose moral force was invariably dissipated by its follow-up: "You want another drink?")

	Kowloon had all the seething funk of a badass Asian port

Hong Kong island seemed anemic to us. Then, as now, it was all banks and boutiques. But Kowloon, with its restless scams, massage parlors and yammering streets, had all the seething funk of a drinking quarter in a badass Asian port. And at the end of a night of drinking, it had Bottoms Up and Pat Sephton's cool hand on your brow. It was always thus. In more than 30 years, Bottoms Up had only one proper refit (during which an extra bar was added). When you grow up in a city as ephemeral and as ahistorical as Hong Kong, that kind of constancy is manna for the soul. Walk into Bottoms Up, and someone has a beer waiting, Velvet's lining up the tunes and—by God—my father's apparition is drinking brandy at the bar, where all is forever 1982.

Or was. Because those famous hexagonal bars and thick drapes and wall mirrors have been atomized now. Forced out by escalating rents and an acrimonious landlord, Bottoms Up quit its premises this April and moved to the cross-harbor district of Wanchai, where it has been relaunched as a sports bar, with wide-screen TVs and Chilean wines by the glass; they recreated just one of the original bars, in a solitary back room. When I first heard that this was to happen—about a month before the demolition crew came—it sent me into an existentialist crisis. I can no more walk past the boarded-up old site than I can confront a desecrated family vault.

Bottoms Up was the last repository of my times, and it took them with it. All that's left on those streets in Kowloon today is the grim efficiency of contemporary retail: an HMV, a McDonald's, a Starbucks. "At least we'll always be able to see the old place on film, Velvet," I said one night, referring to my DVD of The Man with the Golden Gun. Velvet merely tutted and when I asked why, she finally drew breath and said: "That isn't Bottoms Up that you're seeing. They came to film the outside of the bar, Roger Moore stuck his head in, but then they went back to London and recreated the interior in a studio." Her admission was well meant, but it was like hearing a shabby truth about a dead relative. I feel cheated and don't know who to blame. Without even the movie to remember the bar by, these words, I imagine, are the only tombstone that my own, my native paradise will ever have.

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