I spent my middle school years living next to a brothel, befriending the girls and their Madam.
When my father and mother divorced, my father moved into his business at the time, which was a tiny community video store (yes, back in the days where that was a thing). He carved out a special area behind a hidden door in the "Employees only" section and put down a small mattress, a TV, and a small fridge. This is where he lived.
This is a repost now that I actually have people reading my blog
I'd visit each weekend, and we'd crash back there. The rest of the time I would help run the store, fetching videos from the racks, looking up employee info, etc.
New Neighbors
A few weeks in, the empty storefront next door finally got a tenant. The windows were painted black and a big sign went up, "OKINAWA HEALTH SPA". Soon enough, the "health spa" was open for business.
As a very odd, non-religious geeky kid growing up in the South of the USA (NC to be exact) I'd already adapted to the fact that adults did "weird shit". All the praise Jesus stuff, weird ceremonies where they drank the "blood and body of christ" like at the Episcopal church, etc. At a certain point my mind just stopped asking why and lost all attempt at credulous reasoning on what people did.
When you loose your bullshit filter a few things happen:
- The world is a much easier place
- You are silly gullible to insane stories
- People will like you because you are so chill an open minded.
- None of them know it's because you've just sorta labeled the whole world as insane and decided to just roll with it.
So when the shop next door blacked out the windows and started having a constant streem of men come and go at all hours that was just "another thing that adults did". And I was right, way way more right than I realized.
The ladies
There were anywhere between 3 and 8 girls living/working next door at a time. The head of the group was Madam Kim. Kim was a really cool lady in her 40s who quickly became friends (yes, actual friends) with my father. All 3-to-8 of the girls were korean. Kim and a few others would often come next door and rent tapes when traffic was slow and in return would cook us delicious Korean food.
This was my first time ever meeting Koreans and it caused some real confusion for me.
I assumed Okinawa was in Korea
I assumed that everyone in Korea just wore bathrobes all the time like the Japanese wear kimonos
Korean massage is a violent contact sport that involves yelling.
This is basically what I assumed 80s korean fashion was like.
All the weed you can smoke
The #2 cash crop in NC after Tobacco was weed. The girls next door were HUGE fans and pretty much chain smoked joints constantly. I don't know much of the back story, but their pot hookup absolutely sucked and was eating too much into profits. After Madam Kim complained about the prices to my father he reached out to his contacts and was able to beat prices but for way better stuff. Instead of going the lower cost route, he charged her the same amount and just took the extra for his own stash.
What my father didn't consider is that even a small cut of the total pot volume of a bunch of chain smoking hookers starts to add up to a LOT of weed. More on that later.
So what were they like?
The girls, by and large, were sweet people. I don't know much of their backstories: only Madam Kim spoke decent English. They would sometimes spend time with me trying to teach me a word or two of korean but I was a terrible study. So without words, all I could really judge them on was how they treated each other, myself, and my father.
And the way they treated us was great. After a while, my father let them use his credit card machine and once he got payed by the credit card company he would in turn give them the cash. This worked out great because the only thing a spouse might see is that their husband spent a completely stupid amount on VHS rentals. That will be $100/hr for that cassette sir!
On slow afternoons they would cook bulgolgi and various other Korean dishes and we'd sit outside behind the strip mall eating off plastic plates together.
One day at a flea market I bought some birds that I thought would be cool. When I got back to my Mother's place she put her foot down: NO PARAKEETS FOR ME.
The girls LOVED the birds and happily adopted them from me. So now when I wanted to see "my" birds I would just wander over. How I didn't walk into a random sex scene I have no idea. But I know I came close a few times because suddenly there were secret knocks and things I needed to do before I visited.
All the single ladies
My father, recently divorced, had begun dating again. A few girls, plus Miki from next door. Real dating, not pay for play. Say what you will about my dad, he's pretty open minded.
The other ladies were various southern white women and one black lady I never met. Back then interracial dating was kinda weird and I have to admit I was surprised when I found out. Not offended, but even my no-credulity mind had noticed that people of a certain shade generally didn't mingle together like that in NC. Sad to say, even today my friends in bi-racial relationships who still live in NC report getting weird stares. Protip: Do not live in NC. It blows.
Now if there is one trait about my father that's consistent across his life is that he dates the wrong women for the wrong reasons. Miki wanted to marry him.
I know what you're thinking now: Oh shit! he didn't marry the hooker did he? No. He didn't. There is a saying you can't turn a whore into a housewife but it's wrong. Miki was a total sweetheart, no idea how she landed in the sex trade, but she would have worshiped my father for getting her out. Instead, he ended up marrying all the crazy white southern ladies. And then getting divorced in tears. For my father's sake, he should have married the hooker.
I bring this up because one of the defining lessons of this period of my life is this:
You can find good people in any profession, in any area. And bad people the same.
Most of the "rules" of dating that are drilled into us by American culture are not just wrong but actively hostile to happiness. But that's another post (if interested follow and comment!)
The Crooked Cop 2-fer-1 discount
What I didn't know at the time was that a ton of these brothels had recently sprung up across the area. Years later, when I tried to see if I could get in touch with these ladies I found out a lot more details. Basically, the whole of city council, the mayor, and the police force were having a great time getting their rocks off with the various trafficed asian girls.
Most of what follows was explained to me by my father when I asked him years later and years wiser. The way this worked was the cops would come in, bust the girls for prostitution, and then let them off for a warning or something small like littering if she made it worth his while. Those girls sure did a LOT of littering.
This was a defining realization for me about power and rules
The core of what these girls did was make people happy. How many businesses do you know where people enter frustrated and sad and lonely and leave an hour later feeling happier and relaxed like 100% of the time. Their job wasn't sex as much as it was to make the lonely feel loveable, the unappealing feel beautiful, the hopeless have hope. Madam Kim once confided in my father that the most money she ever made in her life she never touched the guy or vice versa. She just wore sexy underwear and talked to him and made him feel good.
Who the fuck gets to say these girls can't do what they want with their body? And who the hell gets to say that the people who show up can't have those needs filled?
Nothing has alienated me more from puritanical American culture than this realization and these experiences. That girls who make money making others feel good would be both seen as trash but also abused and manipulated by the rules of assholes. Worse, that the rule-enforcers cannot be trusted. Remember, it wasn't just the cops, but pretty much the whole government sleeping with these girls. Most of that money likely flowing to pimps and possibly organized crime (I found out later that Kim paid some guy in Texas).
Good job, government. Good. Fucking. Job.
The sudden, shitty, end
On one of my weekends with my father I came home from school that friday to find my dad on the phone freaking out. I knew something medical had happened but I had no idea what. The truth never occured to me, and still seemed impossible when my father finally got off the phone.
Madam Kim had a heart attack, a bad one.
It turns out chain smoking (she liked cigarettes, not just the weed) and birth control pills out the wazoo plus the stress of running a brothel and dealing with pimps and corrupt cops... not so good for your heart.
A few hours after my dad rushed her to the hospital, she was dead. I cried for a long time, I still cry a bit thinking about it now.
I never got to attend her funeral. Her body was flown to Texas, to her pimp, and good luck getting funeral details out of that guy (whose name or even fake name I never knew).
Without Kim, the brothel lasted a bit longer but the girls were moved around to the different brothels around the city and possibly the country. Eventually, the Okinawa Health Spa was no more. I don't know what happened to the parakeets.
The girls next door were one of the brightest parts of my very fucked up childhood. They taught me about some of the best and the worst about people and society. I hope this perspective makes a difference to those reading it.