When Pak Seungtae’s Harley-Davidson neared the police station, growling and spitting smoke into the air, the station’s conscripted policemen saluted him. He parked the bike in a corner of the parking lot.
“Lieutenant Pak.” One of the uniform-clad policemen approached him.
“What is it?”
“The chief of security would like a word with you.”
As soon as Pak entered the room, the chief of security stopped skimming the newspaper and took off his reading glasses. He said, “Just look at your outfit.”
It wasn’t the first time Seungtae had to hear this. The man went after Seungtae each time he saw him in his leather jacket. Everyone below the chief of police finally just let it go except for the chief of security, who kept making it an issue.
“Who’d guess you were a government-employed policeman in those clothes?” he said. “They’d think you were part of a gang.”
“Couldn’t it help when I’m working undercover? Like camouflage.”
“That’s a load of bull. The biker-gang assholes in our country can’t wear these kinds of clothes.”
“Why? Too pricey?”
“How could Chink-food delivery boys who work through downpours wear leather in the rain? A T-shirt from Dongdaemun Market’s more fitting.”
The chief of security twirled a pen between his fingers. “When did you make it to lieutenant?”
“It’s been three years, sir.”
“You’ve got men working under you, and just look at you. Do they ever do what they’re told? I’m telling you this because I worry about you.”
Seungtae flushed. “Is there something you needed me to do?”
Like a school principal who had called in a troublemaker, the chief steadily glared at Seungtae without saying anything. Finally he asked, “You still on the motorcycle every night, zipping around?”
“It’s not during work hours, so it’s not an issue, is it, sir?”
“Why’re you wandering outside your jurisdiction? We’ve got a lone wolf in our station.”
“But you’re aware of what I’m doing. I’m patrolling for biker gangs.”
“On a Harley-Davidson?”
“Yes.”
“You in the Traffic Department?”
“Kids are on bikes screeching all over the city center, making a mess, and the local force can’t stop them. If a local station sends out a patrol car to subdue them, they hop districts like grasshoppers. We need people exclusively responsible for pursuing and rounding them up.”
The chief of security said, “I know. But why’re you the one cracking down on them? That’s why I’m asking, are you in Traffic or Juvie?”
“I don’t directly bust them,” said Seungtae. “I’ve done this work for a long time so I know the kids. I go out and try to reason with them, and if that doesn’t work, I pick up a few for the local station, but you’re already aware of this.”
“Enough. Just don’t do it anymore.”
“If we leave the situation as it is now, it’ll become a social problem.”
“What’s a lowly lieutenant doing in a panic about social problems and all? Are you a National Assembly rep? Those brats. They roam around for a while then just turn in come dawn. So why’re you going wild trying to chase and catch them? Those slippery rascals, they’re always out of your reach, and even if you catch them it’s only a warning or fine for them. What if someone ends up dead? How’re you going to handle the backlash? Do you really want an investigation by the human rights commission, a headquarters inquiry? You think we’re backing off like this ’cause we can’t keep up, like the American police can? If we send out a chopper, crash into them with our patrol cars, and shoot off net guns, we can get them all, why not? We’re already catching wild boars, and you have any idea how sharp they are? If trained, those animals could even do basic arithmetic. I bet the smart ones have a higher IQ than some of these bike-racing shitfaces.”
“The public’s complaining a lot —”
“Seungtae.” The chief of security cut him off.
“Yes?”
“You think there’s a single guy in Korea who likes the motorcycle gangs? With the muffler removed, the noise is outrageous. They ride with slutty bitches behind them, they don’t give a rat’s ass about the centerline, drive the wrong way on the street. If you see them, of course you want to kill them right off. Take a look at the comments online. What’s the use of having fun? Why aren’t you using your guns? It’s an outrage. A mess. That’s one thing the public agrees on: they all hate them. But if we trust public opinion and tear after the kids, we get turned to shit in the press. You know what I’m saying?”
Seungtae stayed silent.
“Why aren’t you saying anything? Are you saying you’re still going out there? Your ass must like the media shots of you on the Harley. Like you’ve become some kind of celebrity, yeah? A cop ought to be in the papers for doing his job well—you think it’s okay for a cop to end up in the papers for riding a Harley? I’ll give you some advice. If you want to be promoted, you better not pop up in the dailies. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
The chief of security looked intently at Seungtae and smirked. “ ‘Yes, sir?’ That’s so sincere. Maybe—your heart’s with the bikers?”
“Come on, sir . . .”
“I heard you’re part of some club.”
“Oh, they’re a different breed from the teen motorcycle gangs. Our members strictly abide by the traffic laws and —”
“More talking out of your ass! Honestly, I think you’re showing off your money. Wait till you get married and have kids and have to send them to school. You won’t have that kind of cash. How can a motorcycle cost tens of thousands of dollars? You keep riding one of those and you’ll have an inspector on your tail. It’s not like your father owns a fancy building in the Gangnam district, right?”
Seungtae stayed silent.
“I’ll lay off your hobbies. It’s not my business whether you go to Yangsuri or Sokcho on weekends, but I don’t want you messing around in someone else’s jurisdiction and causing trouble. And I want the criminal stats compiled by the weekend on my desk. You can go now.”
Seungtae returned to his desk and hung his jacket on a hanger. He’d slipped a full-length photo of himself from a year-old men’s fashion magazine under his desk’s glass panel. The project involved short interviews and photos of men who broke job-related stereotypes. A fund manager who played the cello in a string quartet, a junior high school teacher who’d won a Latin dance competition, a lawyer who owned a classical music record store, and others, gathered in a Gangnam basement studio. Seungtae had been labeled “the squad chief night-racing on a Harley-Davidson,” though he wasn’t exactly a squad chief.
“Bring handcuffs or some other object that shows you’re a cop,” the photographer’s assistant had said.
As requested, Seungtae brought handcuffs and a baton with him. He wore his leather motorcycle jacket and vintage leather boots, and carried the handcuffs in his left hand. He’d come with his hair gelled back, but the photographer didn’t seem to like it so he dug through the prop room and brought out a bandana. Seungtae liked the photo. He asked the photographer for the unused stills to frame and hang up at home.
No one who knew him ever thought he would become a cop. As a kid, he had been different from the other boys. He disliked macho sports like soccer and basketball, and was more interested in fashion, art, and music. He tried to fit in with the boys, but was slow to find interests in common with them. He followed the boys to a baseball stadium to watch a pro-league game, but he couldn’t say he enjoyed it. In his last year of middle school on a camping trip on Jeju Island, he met a man in his thirties, a supervisor come to help them camp. Seungtae got along well with him, and the man knew it too. One day the man took him aside to a cabin where the supervising teachers usually gathered, and asked him a few questions—a furtive Q & A —from “Do you have a girlfriend?” to “How many times a week do you masturbate?” Seungtae was embarrassed answering these questions, but he wasn’t uninterested. The man was kind and he seemed to be gently introducing Seungtae to an unfamiliar world. Then the man leaned in toward him and whispered, “The way it looks to me, you’ve got to be . . .”
Seungtae, who’d kept his head bowed down as they spoke, finally looked up. Their eyes met.
“. . . gay.”
Seungtae was shocked. He immediately denied this, and said there was no way he could ever be gay. The man continued. “You’ve never had a girlfriend, even though you’re good-looking, well built, and a good student, but you’ve never wondered why?”
“I just haven’t met the perfect girl yet, that’s all.”
“You really think that’s it?”
Seungtae continued to deny it, but he didn’t storm away.
“There’s a simple way to find out if you’re gay or not.”
Seungtae wondered what this method was, and waited for him to keep speaking. Instead of words, the man came to him with his lips and threw his arms around him. Seungtae squirmed. Deep down he worried about what would happen if he were actually gay, so he let the man continue to find out. He definitely felt aroused, and it was the first time he’d felt such sensations, but he’d never been with a woman before, so it was impossible to know for sure.
The man called Seungtae once he returned to Seoul. He wanted to meet. When Seungtae refused, the man threatened that he would tell his parents about their talk and everything that went on between them. After that, he motel-hopped with the man a number of times. He took to thinking deeply and often about whether he was born gay or had become gay because of the man. The more he thought about it, the more he became interested in how he felt about boys his age. He tried hard to break free from the man’s net of suggestions. He decided that to do this, he would need to be more masculine and have a body to match, so he began to exercise. He spent two hours a day lifting weights in the apartment complex’s gym, and upon entering high school, decided that he would become a professional soldier or a cop. This new Seungtae who wasn’t considered gay by any of his family members or friends explored the sexual identity buried deep inside him. He began surfing gay sites, looking for evidence that he wasn’t gay, and ended up becoming addicted to those very sites. He became angry at himself. It was as if the world were laughing at his expense.
He concluded that the man he met at the camp was responsible for his unhappiness, and the next time he went to the agreed-upon motel, he punched the man in the face, brought him down, bound him with a pair of toy handcuffs he’d purchased at a store, and beat him with a police baton he’d bought near Yongsan subway station. He took it even further. But when he returned home, he started feeling sorry for the damaged, bruised man and cried.
In a way, it was as if Seungtae had been reborn through the man. To be precise, it was his words that changed Seungtae. The man told him what kind of person he was, but when he tried to move ahead, he couldn’t break free from those words. To the new Seungtae, the man he had met at camp was like a father, and by being violent with him he became physically free of him. But that didn’t mean he was mentally free of him. The man’s very identity became disconnected from its origin, and so was owned solely by Seungtae. He could no longer beat up or kill a father he couldn’t see.
Eventually Seungtae became the same age that the supervising teacher at camp had been, complete with a police badge. It was like a magical joker card—he could go anywhere and get complete access. At age thirty, even though he had been with several partners, he realized that he was attracted to teenage boys. Like the camp supervisor, he had the same desire to shape the boys’ identities—not so much a desire to cavort with teenage boys, but a desire to flex his power over them. He’d long known that kids like him were easily captivated by a stranger’s alluring words. Sometimes when they didn’t fall for it, he bullied them with violence and authority, and each time, felt relief. A feeling that he was safe. He was becoming addicted to this feeling.
Seungtae’s night starts where the biker crews assemble. He watches them from his Harley. Cheap motorcycles fashioned to make maximum noise; teenagers smoking; kids unaware of who they are, unaware that self-awareness is necessary, but who have an instinctive, brazen desire to shake up the city with explosive noise and speed.
Sometimes he strides between them. He picks the toughest-looking one and approaches him, shows him his officer badge, and forces the kid to his knees. Korean motorcycle gangs are entirely different from those in America or Japan, which are made up of grownups and are part of a real gang. The Korean motorcycle gangs are mainly teenagers, just a fearful group of ragtag kids. They don’t sell drugs like the American motorcycle gangs, or start wars against the Yakuza like the Japanese ones. No matter how much they posture, they are, in the end, just kids. They might be dangerous when on the move, but parked and chatting with one another, they are easy to control. These kids don’t know their legal rights. They aren’t interested in a cop’s responsibilities during questioning. Seungtae behaves like a high school principal to these dopey teen gangs who speak to him in grammatically incorrect, respectful sentences. He asks the terrified kids for their school and home addresses and their phone numbers, and the kids answer. He knows that many of the bikes that the kids ride are stolen, but he doesn’t dig that deeply. Subtly frightening them is enough to realize his goal. But everything changed once Jae entered the picture.
Frequent rumors about the new guy Jae had begun reaching Seungtae. Jae wasn’t yet as powerful as he would become, but he was worth noting. The police still didn’t have a single photo of him, but Seungtae wasn’t really worried about it. Once a teenager was hauled into the station, he revealed everything, so Jae’s whereabouts could easily be confirmed. A large number of the kids that Seungtae encountered knew about Jae. What they said about his place of birth, his appearance, and where he lived was all over the place, but they were united on one thing: he was different from anyone else, and he was still powerful. Seungtae made a folder tagged JAE, tossed it into the file cabinet, and took out a file labeled OH TAEJU. Catching Taeju was his first priority.