I've always associated Wudaokou with the opening scene of Blade. A young American guy with a dumb and full-of-cum look is led by an attractive Russian past a burley bearded bouncer into a nightclub. It has every characteristic of a night club: flashes of darkness amid strobe and techno lights, minimal maneuvering, bumping, pushing, tugging, tripping, biting. And wetness. Everyone in clothing appropriate for Carnival yet still drenched as if they’d run through sprinklers. As we all know (if you don’t, consider this a spoiler alert for the movie Blade), the liquid is actually blood, the American guy's actually in a vampire-infested den, and just as he's about to get eaten, Wesley Snipes swoops in and wipes everyone out with a sword.
Last weekend, Yugongyishan, a miniature dungeon-style music venue hidden behind a wooden door near Zhangzizhong Road, brought a hip-hop legend, a man with a name of such repute that you quasi-expect him to show up in a red cape and mask with turntables strapped to his back, his superpower being the ability to spin tracks and scratch vinyls that forces enemies to dance (think Jim Carrey's The Mask when he sings his samba/Latin song and all the cops break out in song and dance).
Considering Beijing is the capital of the world’s most populous country and one hell of a city, it's a joke that the month's big social event is Lil'Jon at Spark. On a Sunday night.
Spark, by the way, was the hottest club in town until the owners decided to charge 200 motherfucking RMB for cover. (For guys, that is. Girls pay 100 RMB.) But Lil'Jon is Lil'Jon, and naturally, I had to be there.
I was disgustingly smashed on a recent Tuesday when the name came up. It's all anybody's been talking about nowadays, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, even though everything being reported is the same, vague crap. No one knows what's going on, so everyone repeats everyone else, with splashy headlines. The only guy with any balls to really stir up the pot is me… plus this other asshole, RFH, who published some fantabulous junk on this very blog. [Ed’s note: Goddamnit, Drake.] Well, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to get serious for a moment. That’s right, I’d like to talk about Bo and his hot wife, who I’ll refer to by the James Bond villain-like initials G.K.K., and WLJ, otherwise known as Bo’s “right-hander” (that’s what I call him: that trusty right hand).
My apologies for being out last week. The editor of this blog, Anthony Tao, broke some of his own self-aggrandizing journalistic rules when he said I was “sick” last week. That’s not true at all. In fact, I was simply incapable of reporting back to him because I had been coming off a bender over the recent Tomb Sweeping Day. [Ed’s note: that's being sick, you twit.] My body felt like it had been frozen and bashed with a spiked club (think the bad guy from Terminator 2). My liver probably looked like it just went through 12 rounds with Manny Pacquiao. But the stories, oh my, the stories…
I’ve been trying to be good during the week, those days consecrated by work, The Man, so one Thursday night I decide to mix things up a bit and go bowling.
Just south of the West Gate of Workers Stadium sits a KTV mansion with a huge alley one floor above. My friend Braxton and I walked in with a bag of beers and steely intensity. Now, I’m not one for bragging, but compared to the average Joe, I am a hulking monster on the lanes. I’m the Rudy of the wooden course, undersized and overlooked, but I will ruin your day if you’re the Georgia Tech quarterback and time’s running out in the fourth quarter of a blowout win. I’m a goddamn sniper when it comes to picking up spares. I average 160 to 170.
When I came to, a Chinese girl was the only thing that stood between me and five Chinese guys. They had a certain glare in their eyes, I remember. Like Kujo. A rage that was nearing its apex, which, if reached, would spill over and spell the end of me. As I think back on that moment now, what comes to mind is an amazing song from the amazing movie Mulan: “You must be swift as the coursing rain (Be a Man!), with all the force of a great typhoon (Be a Man!), with all the strength of a raging fire (Be a Man!)…” I think that about sums up what was going through my head.
We all have our routines when we're drunk or tired. My friend Drew recently introduced me to the idea of visiting spas. It’s a terrible idea. It can’t be good for the body, especially one as horribly abused as mine, to endure further dehydration in a steam room after 10-plus-hours of drinking. But there we were one night, half-naked in a wooden room, flambéing as steam filled the metal box around us.
The Beijing Comedy Club has been trying to gather a lineup of comics and failing miserably. People are just generally not funny. Which is why it’s my job to appear at these showings and laugh – just not at their jokes. They are so fucking horrible and stupid that it’s funny they think they’re funny.
The brutal winters of Beijing don't leave room for much activity, particularly for the expat in this spit-and-shit squat toilet of a city. Aside from sitting in your heated apartment watching Game of Thrones or Archer, pretty much the only other option on a Friday night is drinking the cold off your skin and making your way to a crowded smoky bar. This is a story of what happened when my friend – who we’ll call Drew – and I did just that last month.
