Shenzhen Zen

Desolation Row
Prior to hooking up for about the third goodbye party for a former editor who's leaving for a new gig in Manila soon, I met another former coworker for drinks and catching up in a hooker bar, Neptune II, in Hong Kong last night. As it happens, the USS Enterprise was also docked here for the weekend.
No Kirk, Spock or McCoy, but overall how surreal it was to to see all the 21st century US Navy swabbies and swabbettes cavorting on shore leave. I felt briefly as if I was in someplace like Chicago (my buddy is from Chicago complete with the honkin' accent) or just more or less anywhere in the US, except for all the Filipina, Indonesian and Thai bar girls.
I also felt like I was partially reliving my distant past as a waning Vietnam-era off-duty GI in Korea except now all the off-duty black troops weren't dressed in cheap Korean-tailored Superfly suits with stacked heels, pimp hats and grooving to the Chi-Lites, Temptations and Al Green, but were blinged out in baggy, saggy gangsta wear moving to 50 Cent, Beyonce with Jay-Z, and Eminem. The white guys weren't dressed like short-haired hippie wannabes and crunching to Black Sabbath, Grand Funk or Cream - most of them were dressed like the black guys and bumping to the same tunes.
The only thing that hadn't changed were the girls. Cleavage, rouge, eye shadow, come hither on steroids and for a few fashions that hadn't moved an inch since 1972, pants and white go-go boots.
I also kept thinking of Desolation Row:
They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown/The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town.
Speaking of which, while I was walking to that bar I passed a group of five 19-and 20-year old sailors outside a notorious clip joint and about to go in. ("Happy hour! Nice girls! One beer free!") I tapped one on the shoulder and said, "You guys don't want to go in there."
He said: "Why not?
"I'm a local, more or less. I know this area a little and that's a clip joint."
"A what? What do you mean? A clip joint? What's that?"
"They'll rip you off. Leave you with an empty wallet and a hard dick and nothing to show for any of it."
"Where should we go instead?"
"I'm going to a place that has two-for-one Jack Daniels and, if you're into it, mostly friendly girls that will charge but won't rip you off."
"Sweet, dude! "Where? Can you show us?" So I did.
So, I thought later as they melded -- two-for-one Jacks in hand -- into the grinding, booming morass of Neptune, I have finally done my part.
I have personally boosted the morale of US troops by ensuring that they can get drunk and laid as economically and pleasantly as possible.
Can Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld say the same?