Joo Chiat

If you asked me what years were very good years for me, I would unhesitatingly tell you, 1992 and 1999. I don’t really want to elaborate, or maybe I may have blogged about this before. That’s why, when 2006 came around I was wondering if the time was ripe for a change. (ie every 7 years I get a year which is amazing)

When you look back upon it, it was a gradual change. It was nowhere as important to me as what happened during 92 or 99. But there was something there. I felt that it was easier for me to talk to people. I no longer had the knots in my stomach when approaching others, as I did in my earlier days. Whether or not that made me a better person, though, is something that’s highly open to debate.

In January of that year, my maternal grandmother died. It was actually a good thing, because she had been in a coma for 3.5 years. At the risk of sounding heartless I’m glad that her suffering was over. I met the cousins from the maternal side of the family, many of whom I had not seen regularly over the last 10 years. It turned out that we did get along. It was OK.

Around May of that year, Basketball Jones (I’m calling him that, but you guys should be able to guess who he is) asked me to join Harry Redknapp (ditto) and him at dinner. I thought, that’s a bit funny, but I did join in.

Basketball Jones was about to leave the department. He had just broken up. After a while I realized that he was in a state and he just needed people to go help him cheer up. I didn’t go, “hey that’s not fair people never do that kind of stuff for me”. I just thought, OK, let’s go.

After dinner, we ended up in a sleazy club in Joo Chiat. Harry Redknapp brought us there. Most of the bar girls were Vietnamese. Most were smart enough to have picked up Chinese, but a few of them didn’t know the language. I cynically thought, “well, I’m not going to waste time in here, am I?” So I grabbed somebody. It was OK, but it felt really strange to be groping a complete stranger, no matter how well-proportioned she was. I was looking a little enviously at Basketball Jones, because he got somebody I kinda fancied. But on subsequent visits I never saw her, and anyway we made it a point not to get girls that any other of us had been close to before.

It was kinda tiring, I got home after midnight, and the next morning had to get back to work. I remember meeting Basketball Jones in the hallway the next morning, we looked at each other and started laughing, and then we walked off without saying a word.

On the second visit, another girl came up to me and started fondling me. I told her to go away, but I took a second look at her, and said, “you’re OK”. Well there was this hanky panky. Let’s call her Winnie. At the same time, Basketball Jones had this girl, called her Apple, and he said that Apple reminded him of Fiona Xie. I don’t really know if that was healthy. He wasn’t having his way with Apple, wasn’t treating her like a sex object, the way that I was treating those who came up to me. I think that he had rebound-itis. (Rebound is a basketball term, is it not?) By then, Harry Redknapp had already found his regular, Peach, and was making her his mistress.

There was another trip, to Sentosa. Harry Redknapp got 4 girls (including to meet us there. It was very weird, what if people saw me? There was Winnie. There was Peach. Then there was this ah-nine (not to be confused with numbernine). I thought that ah-nine was really hot, but I couldn’t possibly be having two at one go, could I? We had dinner in one of the hotel restaurants. It was a nice balmy night. And after a long walk, they had to go to work. It was embarrassing for Basketball Jones and me, but Harry Redknapp seemed to enjoy making us flustered. (In fact I was so flustered that after this was over, I spent 1-2 hours sitting in Coffee Bean, reading a book, doing things that I felt were normal, in order to exorcise away that feeling of being unclean.)

I don’t really know if people at work suspected anything, other than us going for lunch together and discussing the night before. My mother was getting upset, asking me why I stayed out so late at night, and so often. I asked her if she ever worried about that when I was not at home for 4 years.

A lot of them, you had your way with them, and at the end of the night, you gave them “tips”. It would maybe amount to $20, $30? The girls would go fondle a few male customers per night. I don’t know what the mathematics would be like. Did they have to give a cut to the owner, did they have to pay rents on their crowded apartments? I don’t know how often they had to go back home before they overstayed their visitor’s visa. One of the pubs that we went to brazenly called itself the “U-turn” pub. The beer was often expensive - $40 a jug. But you got different kinds of jugs there as well.

I felt that I hardly connected with the people around there. I didn’t really identify with them. Winnie seemed to like me. And she got upset when I played with more than 1 girl. She seemed like a nice girl, and I might have considered hooking up with her, but for the fact that we met under such circumstances. It’s true that when you know somebody likes you, that person immediately becomes more attractive. Well, at least she made me start to think about what I wanted my girlfriend to be like. I want to believe that she’s a nice person, but like that old saying, what’s a nice person like you doing in a place like this?

Harry Redknapp carried on his affair with Peach during this period. She wasn’t that pretty, and her face reminded me of Patricia Mok. But she had a good body. And sometimes Harry Redknapp would disappear just to carry on his tryst with her. I never really understood what happened to her after this whole episode was over, but I suppose we all understood that these things didn’t last forever.

I suppose it was nice to be able to shed your inhibitions in an environment like this. I kinda enjoyed the feeling that Harry Redknapp, Basketball Jones and I were buddies, we were quite literally partners in crime. Now I know where that term comes from. It was around the time of the World Cup, so we just had extra excuses to stay out late, we could say it was the World Cup. It wasn’t a good World Cup, though – the matches were quite boring.

I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t think that much about Winnie. I sometimes wondered why she was so nice. Maybe she felt that deep down I wasn’t the sleazy type? Maybe I was a little unpredictable when playing with her, and she liked it? Most probably she saw that Harry Redknapp was so nice to Peach, and thought that I was possibly cut from the same cloth. Well she was wrong. And I have to say that Harry Redknapp has his way with the ladies. Basketball Jones kept on calling him his “idol”. But I wondered if it wasn’t at the same time a form of emotional manipulation, so that Harry Redknapp would still want to bring us out.

There’s nothing wrong with having an episode like this in your life. You watched those coming of age movies (one example is HHH’s “A Time to Live, a Time To Die”) and you had those teenage boys visiting prostitutes to be schooled in these sort of things. Well these were not prostitutes (and I did not shag anybody throughout these 2 months that these things were going on). But I was grateful to Harry Redknapp for showing me a different side of life in Singapore.

But much as I was grateful to him, I wasn’t completely eager for these things. I drew the line – after Basketball Jones returned to his homeland, all this was over. Joo Chiat, the Geylang tours, the late nights watching football. There was the small matter that Harry Redknapp was married with kids. One time, we even had lunch with his wife so that he could show her that what was going on was completely innocuous. The conversation was forced and stilted, I don’t think she was completely convinced.

And there was this thought at the back of my mind that I was never the sort of person who did this sort of things regularly. I enjoyed the fact that I was breaking convention like this. I always wanted to do naughty things. But was this a lifestyle? No way. I remember, there was once we went out, had a lot of hanky panky. The next evening, I was at the wedding dinner of one of my school friends, all straight-laced, civil servant types. The juxtaposition was just too glaring.

So I promised myself, this was the end. And it was. There were 1 or 2 trips after Basketball Jones was gone, and that was it. It’s not sinful to have a short period of time where you did all this stuff, but once you made a habit of it, you’ve crossed the line. And as much as this had to teach me about girls, sometimes it teaches you all the wrong lessons. Girls are never this submissive in real life. Things don’t work this way in real life. A lot of it wasn’t pleasant. It was a little distasteful towards the end. I only went with it because I felt that I had to.

Anyway, back to 2006. Shortly after Basketball Jones left, I got my act together and organized a department gathering. We had everybody go to East Coast Park. It was a nice, sunny day. I think I was also going through a period at work, where I was getting along fine. (Well I never got along that fantastically, but around that time was as good as it ever got.) A lot of barriers that had existed when I first started work were starting to crumble. I got to the point where I was comfortable going to work. This was not the same as saying that I was the model employee – I still fell short of that. But a lot of things that had seemed impossible now seemed possible. There were possibilities in the future.

The bunch of colleagues I had then, they were my favourite bunch. You could pick other colleagues who were there at different times, and say, some were smarter, some were more hard-working. But that batch was my favourite bunch. Maybe there was just a very high concentration of friendly people. By 2007, many of them were gone. By now, of course, most of them are gone, except 1 or 2 bosses.

However, just as in 92 or 99, I felt that I did not entirely fulfill the possibilities that were opened up during that year. After moving 2 steps forward, I often felt like there was the inevitable step back. 2006 marked the time when I started feeling comfortable with my job. Before that I was emphatically not comfortable in it. I was pissing off a lot of people and they returned the favour. It was a gradual process but 2006 was a watershed. In case you’re wondering, it was more the being part of a gang with Harry Redknapp and Basketball Jones than the hanky panky with the ladies, although it was the latter that made us a gang for a short period of time. I became comfortable with my job, but that was the danger: I became too comfortable in it, and that explains why, of this writing, I’m still in that job.

I’m only starting to come to terms with what I should have done after that, after losing a great deal of my emotional inhibitions in dealing with people. I’m wondering how I could have capitalized. I still don’t know the way forward. It’s all a blur.

A lot of times in America, I told myself, wouldn’t it be nice if I had the maturity of an older person, I could just go up to people and then work things out, make things happen. A lot of the times, I wanted to do that but something just stopped me. I ended up being a passive observer a lot. Well even as a passive observer I learnt an incredible amount of stuff. But I knew that the next step would be getting rid of my teenage awkwardness. Well it’s finally happened. Very late, but it’s happened.