How I Almost Died In the Chungking Mansions (Part 2)
If you haven’t read part 1 yet I suggest you do so. Here is the real life Frank corroborating my story shirtless for some reason like he Chris Breezy.
…The weed comes out. And don’t get me wrong, I been around weed all my life but smoking certain strains (I never figured which) seemed to trigger my anxiety so I never really got into it. There was maybe a one month period in my life when I smoked regularly and then it took one bad trip for me to never look back on it again. AND here’s a fun fact that may or may not be true - I don’t know if the people in the Mansions do shit to their Heineken or they have some shady supplier but this ain’t no regular Heineken. Everything from the outside looks normal but man, this shit HITS. And no, this wasn’t because I was coming straight from work and I was already slightly tipsy because I actually went back one time sober for mandatory “research purposes”. I am an alcoholic and one 355ml can of Chungking Heineken made me feel tipsy as fuck. So to whoever is injecting heroin into the Heineken, keep it up because it’s economic and good for the environment because you drink less cans. Save the sea turtles. So after like 4 or 5 of these Heinekens I am FUCKED. All that JD combined with this narcotic liquid acted like compound interest from a loanshark company like PROM*SE and I knew that I needed to go home soon but somehow I was hanging onto my consciousness thanks to the sip of water I took at 11PM that night.
The joint gets passed around to me and I politely decline because I am one intake of anything away from waking up reincarnated as a dung beetle. Frank and Runner were fine, they came to Ozu later in the night so they didn’t drink much. Soto is kinda fucked but he’s a smoker so he’s doing alright. They ask again jokingly like “bro, just one puff” and with a smile, I’m like “Nah man I’m good, I’m not much of a smoker anyway”.
Suddenly the vibes turn hostile. It gets quiet as fuck. I can hear cells go through mitosis. A Filipino couple is arguing outside of Pulse. My Japanese ancestors are bitching about my tattoos but are pleasantly impressed by my height. Morgan Freeman is narrating in the distance. “At this point Yuri knew…. he fucked up.”
One of the guys breaks the silence and asks what I guess what was on all of their minds. “You undercover police?”
Now funnily enough, this wasn’t the first time I was asked this question in life. I am a pale Japanese man who grew up with brown people so people either thought I was a customer or some sort of informant when I was hanging around them. We used to get police checked over this sole fact alone. And random motherfuckers over the years kept on bringing up my EYES saying that, apparently, CID have the same type of eyes that I do which is fucked up. So my right eye only has one eyelid and my left eye has double eyelids meaning that sometimes my eyes are distinguishably unequal - something I was always slightly insecure about - and I grew up with people saying that was a CID trait like wtf!? You telling me that I was GENETICALLY predisposed to be a narc?
So HELL the FUCK NO. I yanked that joint so fast it was disrespectful, I feel like I gave the poor bredrin’s fingers a form of whiplash and we was just bonding over throwback stories. Both of our fingers were dry so we almost re-discovered fire. I damn near finished the joint myself and passed it and I told them something along the lines of “Mama didn’t raise no fucking narc.” I proved myself. Everything was 1017. Gucci. Babies smiled. Soca music resumed. A unicorn gave birth. A rose grew from the concrete. “Damn Jap Boy we were just joking.” Well I fucking wasn’t.
My last memory was the second time the joint came around and I said no, super firmly this time. They were cool with it, I mean I just finished their first joint by myself pretty much just to prove a point and now I’m just a waste of weed. I wish they thought I was a waste of weed before those 10 puffs but what’s done is done. After this, I have 0 memory and I am going off of what people told me.
APPARENTLY, I got up at one point, and I was actually fine. I told everybody thank you for a great night, shook hands with everybody, remembered everybody’s names, and left politely. That’s the last morsel of Japanese blood in me controlling the autopilot because trust me, the ratchet side of me was saying “WHO THE NARC HUH”. Frank actually walked me out and said I looked fine enough to walk the few blocks to my house. Soto came with me because I find out later that he was slightly less faded than me which meant that if he turned his head too fast, he would have blacked out off momentum alone. APPARENTLY after we leave the Mansions, we go into a random building and I’m looking for something - I have no fucking idea for what, for who, but it was a random residential building. I could have been looking for Bigfoot for all I know but apparently I was really searching and I never said for what. And funnily enough, I think Soto was also helping me search for whatever the fuck I was looking for too so it’s just two grown ass mans walking around a quiet residential for ….. absolutely nothing. You ever seen those meme videos titled “My last two brain cells working together?” Me and Soto were our last brain cells, combined. We eventually come to our senses and leave this random ass building and Soto bounces.
I wake up strapped to a hospital chair. I am so drunk still that my anxiety doesn’t even kick in - being trapped and helpless is actually one of my BIGGEST phobias - and I am taking a few moments to gather myself and evaluate the circumstances and the bare fuckery that I got myself into. It is a public hospital. Ok it’s not a police station so that’s a win. There’s mad elderly mans in beds surrounding me. They ain’t dead or dying though so that’s a win. I am in this hospital chair that seems to be in the middle of everything - I’m next to a hallway, I’m next to hospice beds, I swear some lady was giving birth to twins a few meters away, there’s nurses everywhere. I am awake now, as fuck, but nobody seems to care. I called out for the nurse for some water. Nothing. Cottonmouth, dehydration, I’m amazed my crusty ass throat didn’t crack and bleed internally and I didn’t just die right there, the first human to ever die from weed. Imagine how big of a loser I would be, I’d be remembered forever as public enemy #1 of stoners because the government would find a way to criminalise weed even more cuz of my bitch ass. They would build a statue of me just to tip it over and watch my cement head crack and I wouldn’t even blame them. FOX News would have a field day. Shit my mom is Japanese but a converted Canadian at heart so even she would call me a yowamushi. I call out again, and they turn to see where the voice was coming from, IGNORES me like I’m a 64 year old creep who pokes them on Facebook, then goes back to work. I was flabbergasted. Befuddled. Perplexed. I have my moments, but for the most part I think I’m a decent person. I keep calling out, and every nurse gives me a dirty look like I stole their cab at 4PM. If you’re from HK, you know that 4PM is the time that taxis switch shifts and there’s barely any on the road so this is a big fucking deal. Oh shit, I probably fucked up. I need answers and I was about to get them.
After about an hour of somehow not getting a panic attack being strapped in a hospital chair for the whole place to see as if I was about to get publicly executed, a nurse finally comes over like “Do you know what you did last night?” Ah fuck.
Now, my house is only 5 minutes away from the Mansions. And the following few paragraphs was all a recap, told to me. By this nurse. The following paragraphs will also be told in third person because I am no longer acting as Yuri now. This is his alter ego … Takahiro. APPARENTLY, Takahiro made it to his house on Austin Avenue. So he actually managed to make the entire 5 minute walk. Frank's guesstimate was correct, I had enough sanity left in me to walk home. BUT what was unfortunate was, Frank didn't factor in the elevator ride or my alter ego Takahiro and Taka’s bitch ass decided that he wasn’t built for no elevator in that condition so he decided to rest on the curb next to his building instead, probably to “rest his eyes”. Either not ready for an elevator ride or couldn’t remember the passcode of the door. It’s 3789#, I remember this almost 4 years later but HE probably couldn’t on that night. This would have been about 6 in the morning. Police pull up on Takahiro, probably out of concern out of anything. Poor officers. They try to wake Taka up, and he does…but thinks he’s getting arrested and flips out when apparently they were just trying to help. He is so faded that he has no idea that he is literally an elevator ride away from home. At this point Taka wouldn’t know the difference between the Chungking Mansions and Soho House. Taka was white boy wasted. Or in more politically correct terms, Caucasian-male-debilitated.
They handcuff Takahiro and instead of dealing with his fuckery at the station because technically he didn’t break any laws, they drop him off at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Taka seemed to have caused quite a stir, desperately trying to leave and calling the police “lil bitches” numerous times, and the hospital staff, God bless them, figured he was in no condition to be alone at home as he could have probably died from alcohol poisoning at that point, and had to strap him to the hospital chair just to monitor him until his stupid ass finally fell asleep. End of third person.
I must have said sorry to this nurse 100 times, it’s almost like I cheated on this woman. “I’ll be better” “It’s not you, it’s me” LOL. Finally she unstraps me from this execution chair that probably housed numerous wastemans across Yau Tsim Mong, gives me my possessions back and lets me go. I genuinely hope she’s doing well, she had every right to keep me in that chair longer but she didn’t. I think it’s a flex here to say that I didn’t lose a single thing. I had an iPod classic still at this point in my life, yup, 256GB, and that shit was intact. That iPod had hits from way back still on there downloaded through LimeWire and I wasn’t about to re-download “Chain Hang Low” by Jibbs. I was missing one of those earphone foam things though which actually super pissed me off but besides that and my dignity, I didn’t lose anything. I was discharged from the hospital at like 10 in the morning, took mad pics of my hospital wristband and sent it to all the worried people who were wondering if I was alive and we laughed all morning about how stupid Takahiro was. I remember Frank’s voice message of him cackling away until he couldn’t breathe. Fuckin’ dick. And yes, I made it to work on time as well. No amount of Pocari Sweat was gonna save me on that day.
Now, that wasn’t the last time I drank at Chungking. Actually I blacked out three more times after that, once while shooting HKG and twice while shooting Chungking. I just had to make sure and really confirm that Chungking was not a safe place, and not in the way the media portrays it. But the vibes is too good and the beer is too drugs and Frank’s feet are a fire hazard so it’s almost impossible to not die there. All the nights went super smoothly though and guess what. Fucking NOBODY ever dared question if I was undercover police again. NOBODY. Shiiiiit ask them about Jap Boy, they know.
I don’t really know how to conclude this story, but here are some key takeaways.
With a $100, you get the same feeling - if not better - of popping a bottle in a club and buying drinks for everybody. Actually yeah, definitely a better feeling because these dudes genuinely appreciate these gestures and they never forget shit like that.
Go to the Mansions and try the Heineken from the first floor. Go take a drug test after and let me know if you test positive for heroin or any other amphetamines. For science.
If a brown mans ever offers you a custom suit and you decline, and then he offers meth right after, ask some questions, give him a chance. He’s giving it his all out there and he’s worth hearing out.
If you’re ever strapped to a hospital chair, don’t resist and try to break free, all you’ll do is piss people off and now look, you’re out of breath without moving a literal inch. Just mad head movement.
No bar in Hong Kong can ever do what Ozu did.
If you are borderline close to death from alcohol intake and somebody accuses you of being an undercover cop because you don’t want to smoke their joint…
DO EXACTLY WHAT THE FUCK I DID AND WAKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL CUZ MAMA AIN’T RAISE NO FUCKING NARC.
Thanks for reading, love y’all. Find my friends here: Frank’s IG / Runner’s IG / Soto’s IG