Shenzhen Zen

Desolation Row
C was outta town most of the weekend on business and left to my own devices I immediately chose to tutor handicapped, low income Filipina and Thai refugee children with Spike (see his blog, Hongkie Town http://laowai.blogspot.com/ for his version of events) on Saturday night.
On Friday night he and I had watched Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home at his Library of Congress-style ville stocked with seemingly every box set, vinyl album and DVD issued within the last 40 years and more. As such Dylan's Desolation Row was still an insistent ear-worm burrowing through my brain on Saturday when we gave up the idea of a Macau sleaze tour package (roundtrip ferry, hotel, and, uh, female ``guide service'') in favor of the local options in Wan Chai.
I gotta say I don't know how he does it. It was like being out on the town with the King of Hearts and Tarts -- a guy with an amazing mix of true sincerity and good natured lechery in one often simultaneously cynical package.
As for me, I went into sodden, slightly sullen-looking journalistic voyeur mode watching the hookers transform themselves from early (7 pm or so) arrivals with still-wet hair from their wake-up showers into whatever it was the men on the prowl wanted them to be.
I wound up sitting with an entertaining Filipina working girl who'd been in Hong Kong since 1985, easily the oldest one there though she wore it well. Like Spike, she seemed to have the entire place wired and (correctly) told me without prompting or hints that
1. we'd never spoken before;
2. I worked for The Standard;
3. had been in the bar three times previously within a year;
4. had never picked anyone up, and then went on to dish the dirt on a coworker whom I'd previously thought of as your basic lovable rogue, but not a philanderer.
It was like being with a combination red light psychic/gossip columnist.
``They never forget a face or a history,'' said Spike, pausing a minute from wooing an old Thai flame (``Best sex I ever had!'') while putting the good natured munch on about six others. ``Just like a journalist.''
I wish.
I left alone, muddled, somewhat in awe of her mental skills and missing C more than ever.