Deborah Vankin in Koreatown (Los Angeles)

"DO YOU LIKE KOREAN MEN?” my contact asks over the phone. She’s agreed to take me, under a fake identity, to an exclusive underground host bar. The price will come to at least $700, she warns, but it’s worth it: a private room, liquor and food, two men to wait on us, and the periodic company of the madam, who plays host to customers from the time the bar opens at 9:30 p.m. until the last person leaves — as late as 8 a.m. the next morning. Her family doesn’t know that she frequents such places — as often as every other week sometimes — so she’s requested to be called, simply, The Diva. We agree to meet at an old-style Korean saloon on Berendo Street.
_____Her pseudonym fits. A 31-year-old Korean woman who came to this country when she was a teenager, The Diva is pretty, even regal-looking, in an expensive black suit with a low-cut shell underneath. She carries herself like a wealthy woman who’s slightly bored. “Kids,” she sneers, as we walk past a table of spirited youngsters emptying a bottle of soju. “I prefer strong men who are in control.”
_____The waitress, a silver-haired Korean woman in a Hello Kitty apron, brings us an assortment of appetizers from an open grill in the center of the room and lots of beer. The Diva lights up her first American Spirit of the night. “The thing is,” she says, “it’s all about image. It’s all about money and power. You have to impress them to get in.” She takes my business card and scans my outfit. I exude neither money nor power. “Don’t worry,” she says, “we’ll come up with a good story for you.”
_____In the car on the way over to the host bar, The Diva spins my identity. “You’re a writer from New York, a really famous food writer . . .” She digs through her purse for a bottle of perfume and douses her cleavage. “And you’re here because . . . you’re doing a story on me. I’m gonna say you lived all your life in Japan. Then we can just bullshit from there. Don’t worry, girlfriend, I’ll put you on a pedestal.”
_____Just before midnight, we arrive at a generic storefront on a main street in
K-Town. The front door, painted black, is scribbled with graffiti. The Diva rings the bell, and a narrow slot on the door slides open. I make out a slice of forehead and two brown eyes. Then the owner swings the door wide open, and The Diva strides in. “Happy New Year,” he sings cheerfully, hugging her and swaying back and forth. He peers over her shoulder at me. “You with her?” he asks suspiciously.
_____The entrance is awash in a dim, velvety blue light. But for the occasional glint of a disco ball spinning in one of the private rooms off to the corner and the distant echo of a Korean karaoke love song, the place at first glance appears entirely empty. The owner shows us to our private room, which has dark, tinted windows on three sides. It’s spare but clean: white walls, violet trim and a low, U-shaped couch that curls around a wooden table. There is an assortment of bottled water, soda, an ice bucket and glasses of every kind — for beer, for water, for shots — all pushed neatly together at one end of the table. The objective tonight is clear: We’re going to sit here and drink until we can’t take it anymore.
The madam is a man, explains The Diva, pronouncing it “Ma-daahm,” as if she were French royalty. But he’s pretty, with full lips and shiny red leather pants. “That’s as good as it gets,” The Diva sighs. “Most of the others are straight FOBs — fresh off the boat.”
_____Later in the evening, when we are liquored up and looser, the madam will take my hand in his and say, through a translator, that he’s honored to meet me; that he lives in Koreatown, works in Koreatown and that in the three years since he’s come to the U.S., I’m the only non-Korean he’s actually interacted with — even spoken to — in this country. Though he understands nearly everything we say, he’s shy, he says, and avoids speaking English, even at the grocery store. “Nice-to-meet-you,” he’ll say. Then he’ll smile and turn beet red.
_____But right now the madam is leaning on Korean — and makes hardly any eye contact. Neither does our waiter, a cherubic-faced young man in a white dress shirt. He comes in and out quietly, dressing our table with plates of fruit — banana cubes resting in their peel, mounds of grapes, dewy watermelon triangles — and another with pretzel twists, salted nuts and dried squid.
_____The owner herds in three young men who line up in front of us against the wall. They’re still for a second or two before the fidgeting starts, the staring into empty corners of the room. Then they bow in unison, turn and walk out single file. The Diva speaks animatedly in Korean, and the madam listens intently. “I ordered for us,” she says. “The cute one in the trench coat for me, whoever speaks the most English for you.”
_____When the madam returns with our “dates,” he dims the lights. Mine sits down beside me on the couch and pours me a shot of Crown Royal Special Reserve over ice. He’s clean-cut-looking, with spiky dyed black hair, a pressed Liz Claiborne shirt and Banana Republic pants. “Is there anything you need? More ice?” He gestures to my glass. “I’m Monte.” He’s adorable in a collegiate sort of way, speaks perfect English, was born and raised in Chicago. When I wince with the first sip of whiskey, he places a piece of watermelon in my glass to sweeten the bite. We struggle to make conversation, the small talk infused with all the awkwardness of a blind date. “I’m just doing this to get through school,” he tells me later, adding that he makes several hundred a night, about $1,000 a week.
_____For the rest of the evening, Monte (not his real name) dotes on me, anticipating my every need. When I help myself to a handful of pistachio nuts, he blocks my grip. “Let me,” he says, shelling the nuts and placing them in front of me. When I reach for a pretzel, he hands me a napkin; when I pick up a cigarette, he’s there with a match. There are no ashtrays, so he arranges a few shards of ice in the center of a cocktail napkin and pushes it in my direction with a smile. When I go to the bathroom, Monte escorts me, and when I emerge a minute later, he’s standing there in the hallway with his hands folded in front of him. “Would you like a hand massage?” he asks when we return. Then he cradles my palm and slowly, firmly, kneads the base of my thumb.
_____The Diva’s partner, “Sean,” speaks less English. He sits quietly, rolling and twisting a cocktail napkin. He lights the paper with a match, and just before it’s consumed by fire, he snuffs out the flames with his fingers. When the smoke clears, he presents us with a perfect, edge-burned rose. “Oohh, that’s soo cute,” The Diva says with a girlish whine and kisses him on the cheek. “Such a cute boy.”
_____The room next to us, a birthday party, is getting increasingly rowdy. Though we can’t make out much more than silhouettes gathered around a karaoke machine through the tinted windows, we can hear a group of mostly male voices chanting sloppily and wildly out of tune: “All day I dream about sex . . . all day I dream about fucking.” Sean places a drained egg, with an arrow drawn in red marker at the narrow end, in the center of a plate. “North, South, East, West.” He points to the edges of the dish. “Spin.” It’s a version of Truth or Dare, with all the expected questions (“What’s your favorite sexual position?”), the first of many drinking games this night.
_____“De-bo-rah, a tornado?” Sean asks, gesturing to my empty beer glass. He fills it halfway with Hite lager, pours in a stream of whiskey, and places a napkin over the lip. Then he whips the glass around in the air until a fuzzy, white spiral appears inside, twirling and bouncing off the edges. When he slams it down, The Diva picks off the now-soaked napkin and tosses it behind her so that it sticks to the glass pane. “The night is young,” she wails.
_____A little past 2 a.m., the waiter brings us a second bottle of Crown, and Sean presents us with a bouquet of chopsticks, each with a discreet number inked on the bottom. “Ladies first,” he says. “If you pick the King, you decide the command,” Monte explains. “The others must obey. Or drink.” It’s simple, PG stuff: a little French kissing between The Diva and Monte, the exchange of clothing between Sean and me. High school games. Until Monte commands that whoever has Number 1 (that’s Sean) must lick — he scans the table now crowded with empty, sticky shot glasses — must lick mayonnaise off Number Three’s nipple (that’s me). Or we drink. I’m wearing Sean’s sweater and The Diva is wearing my bra on her head. Sean lines up two shots of whiskey in front of me and a small container of mayonnaise. Then the lights go out, and he mutters something in Korean. “He says, ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with,’” Monte translates. “It’s your choice.”

MONTE TELLS ME that most of his clients are wealthy, older women who come here to either entertain business clients or escape domesticity for the night. But the bar is also frequented by his counterparts, the women who work at hostess bars in K-Town. “They feel comfortable here,” he says. “They make like $10,000 a month.”
_____“What if you don’t like the client you’re set up with?” I ask.
_____“It’s hard. Sometimes they throw up and we have to clean it up. But we don’t have a choice. We have to entertain them. It’s our job.”
_____“And sex?”
_____“I’m sure it goes on, but we’re told not to. We’re not prostitutes.” Then he adds: “But sometimes we want to — if the girl is really hot.”
_____In the back, by the bathroom, the boys who aren’t entertaining clients sit slumped around a rickety card table, their cell phones, keys and Palm Pilots resting beside them, smoking and playing poker. “They’re waiting until they can leave at 3 a.m.,” Monte says. Then the owner steps into the dimly lit hallway and rushes us back into our private room. “You’re not supposed to look in there,” he scolds playfully, fingering the edge of his Dolce & Gabbana vest.
_____The party next door to us is full-on into a George Michael song: “You gotta have faith, faith, faith baby . . .” Monte pours me another drink, the one that will finally taste all right and make the ceiling spin. “Let’s karaoke,” Sean says. The Diva launches into a deep and throaty version of “Hotel California.”
_____We’re slow dancing, Monte and I, to a Korean band called Country Chicken when the madam checks in on us. “Do you like light shows?” Monte translates, kissing me sweetly on the cheek. The waiter brings us a platter of raw snails over ice garnished with slips of seaweed, and the madam escorts in a young man who, in baggy pants, a knit ski cap over a bandanna and silver hoops in both ears, might as well be deejaying at a club in Hollywood tonight rather than working at a male host bar. A glow stick dangles from each of his wrists, and he’s named, he tells us, after a car engine. Diesel, we’ll call him here. “Just watch,” Monte says, falling back onto the couch. The lights go out, the techno music goes up and Diesel spins his sticks into small lime-green circles that grow increasingly wide until they fill the room, bleeding together, creating hearts and triangles and diamonds. He twirls them above his head like a cowboy with a lasso, making enormous rings that loop around us and then unravel into long trails of light.
_____“She could make you famous,” The Diva tells Diesel afterward. “She could write about you in her column. Really important person in New York.” She’s taken my fake identity so far that Sean and Monte now believe I am the writer who Sex and the City was based on. “Carrie Bradshaw, wow,” says Monte, picking bits of raw seaweed from a pool of now-melted ice water. We’ve killed two bottles of Crown Special, had three rounds of beer after that, and made a mess of the once impressive-looking fruit platter. It’s close to 5:30 a.m., so the waiter brings a tray of hot green tea to help prepare us for the ride home.
_____“You know, you have a really nice body,” Monte says, helping me on with my coat. “Carrie Bradshaw,” I joke, changing the subject. But when he replies, “Sex and the city,” he’s not talking about the TV show. He presses his cheek against mine and whispers into my ear: “Call me. We’ll go out for coffee sometime.”
_____Outside, the sidewalks are deserted. “Don’t do it, don’t call him, girl,” The Diva warns. “Don’t be gullible. These guys know what they’re doing. They’re looking for their next sugar mama.”
_____On the way home, she tells me that host bars are harmless, really just a way to have an easy, bite-sized dating experience when you don’t want to wade through the sea of singles in L.A. “I pay my damn money, I do what I want to do, I play as much as I want to play, and if I want to take it further, I do,” she says. She turns off the engine at my apartment so that we can talk further. “I’ve done that, you know, I’ve gone beyond. But in the end, it’s not about happiness. It’s about intoxication, about having a good time. And damn, we’re paying for it.”

Deborah Vankin is an editor at the L.A. Weekly, in which this piece originally appeared as part of a larger article. (www.laweekly.com)

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