SALON

Rolf Potts

Friday, Oct 23, 1998 8:20 AM UTC

Monica Lewinsky beat me out of an internship

The man who could have saved the dignity of the White House offers Practical Advice From a Guy Who Could Have Saved the Dignity of the Executive Office

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In the early pages of his novel “Libra,” Don DeLillo declares that his
investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s persona will “follow the bullet
trajectories backwards into the lives that occupy the shadows, actual
men who moan in their dreams.”

Were DeLillo to write a similar, intrigue-filled tale about Monica
Lewinsky, the trajectories (so to speak) of the Clinton sex scandal
would eventually lead to me.

Indeed, I am a man who occupies the shadows. I am a man who moans in
his dreams. I am a man who — in an extremely indirect way — could
have saved the Clinton presidency a lot of trouble.

On a chilly night back in February 1995, I was busy filling out an
application for a summer White House internship. Unbeknownst to me at
the time, a 22-year-old Californian named Monica Lewinsky was doing the
exact same thing. Like Lewinsky, I was ambitious, hard-working
and fascinated by politics. Like Lewinsky, I attended a small,
private college in Oregon. But whereas Lewinsky had a mediocre
academic record and had appeared in a national publication declaring her
passion for soap operas, I had a flawless academic record and had
appeared in a national publication for organizing a community service
project in suburban Portland. On paper, I was clearly the more
attractive candidate.

But, as history has long since noted, Lewinsky won a coveted intern
position at the White House and went on to forever change the Clinton
presidency. I, on the other hand, was left with nothing to offer
history save an empty mailbox and my own confusion.

What had happened to me? How had my good grades and good standing failed me? What did Lewinsky have that I didn’t?

At a very basic level, Lewinsky had a Beverly Hills socialite for a
mother. Beverly Hills socialites, as everyone now knows, are a great
resource if you need access to influential Democratic fund-raisers like
Walter Kaye. My mother, on the other hand, is a second-grade teacher
for the Wichita Public Schools. This is a great resource only if you
need something laminated.

But deeper lessons resonate from my failure to land a White House
internship. In spite of my own sad story, scores of non-politically connected young people land White House internships every
year. Furthermore, college students and recent graduates also find
internships at places like the United Nations, the National Forest
Service and Oregon Public Radio without the help of nepotism. Since I
also applied to and was rejected by all of these institutions in 1995, I
was left wondering if my failure to land a decent internship wasn’t part
of some greater conspiracy.

Why hadn’t my superior grade-point average and glowing extracurricular record made me a shoo-in for these positions? Who was behind this? Kenneth Starr? Linda Tripp? The military-industrial complex?

Three years of retrospect and experience has given me a pretty good
idea. For starters, good academic standing does not count for much in
the days of grade inflation. Add to this the fact that nearly everyone
has some sort of extracurricular nugget to put on a résumé, and you get
a better idea of how ambiguous the selection process can be.

But perhaps more than anything, internships are not standardized
academic contests: Internships — whether they be for the White House or
a greenhouse — are simply practical opportunities for young people to
experience a professional environment in exchange for menial work.
Thus, a wise internship applicant should rely less on scholastic
merit and good citizenship than on a clear understanding of what he
or she is getting into. In other words, not only should potential interns research the institutions they wish to work for, but they should also attempt to learn as much about their specific duties as possible. An application that
has been subtly tailored to this information stands a much greater
chance of being accepted.

A big problem with my White House internship application was that I
tried too hard to make myself stand out. My résumé was eclectic and
quirky; my personal statement flouted convention to the point of being
entertaining. And while the internship coordinators might have enjoyed
the diversion, I was giving them too many excuses to toss my
application aside in favor of candidates who had marketed their
strengths to actual White House intern tasks of selfless drudge work and political elbow (or what have you) rubbing.

Internships are not, after all, designed to arbitrarily reward creative
people; they are designed to let students get a taste of the real world
without disrupting it too much. Thus, an internship application should
not read with the unpredictability of a Quentin Tarantino script, but
with the pre-marketed verve of a Syd Field-formula blockbuster. My
White House application essay was essentially a wink-wink nudge-nudge
humor piece on the futility of party politics, when it should have been
a well-crafted declaration of all-purpose patriotism. My résumé
joyfully pointed to the random versatility of being a summer-camp
backpacking instructor one year and a TV newsroom intern the next; it
should have blandly emphasized that I’d honed by people-management skills
on a cast ranging from unreasonable teenagers to irate call-in viewers. Had I
taken a few moments to simply consider the mind-set of my audience, I
might have realized this.

I now work in the English department of a Korean technical college, and
I review job applications from young Americans each semester. Since I
am accountable to my bosses for all of my recommendations, I have to
select applicants who I believe will be patient with low-level English
learners, flexible within an Asian work hierarchy and willing to work
long hours for mediocre pay. Applicants who list glowing achievements
and extensive leadership experience often get passed over for those with
humbler work experience and proven adaptability. In the same way, a
given intern’s skills — even at the White House — must always match the
(often unglamorous) challenges of the intern job itself. Interns are
expected to observe the workplace, after all, not revolutionize it. (Although Monica Lewinsky seems to offer a vivid exception to this rule.)

A final lesson from my internship failings of 1995 is that institutions
look for work history patterns among applicants in the same way that
detectives look for killing patterns among serial murderers. As much as
anything, I suspect the White House rejected me for the likes of
Monica Lewinsky because — at age 24 — I’d had no hands-on
experience in politics. Nor did I have organized social-agency
experience to offer the United Nations, scientific field experience to
offer the National Forest Service or first-hand radio experience to
offer Oregon Public Radio. I’d spent my early college days trying new
things and being a jack-of-all-trades, and this lack of consistency no
doubt left me looking a bit flaky on my résumé. A person who is
dedicated to politics as a freshman ups his chances of landing a White
House internship as a senior. Considering that my freshman year was
dedicated primarily to rock climbing, my internship rejections begin to
make more sense.

These days — thanks to the luxury of hindsight — I get a Walter
Mittyish sense of pleasure from imagining my application being
melodramatically flung from the acceptance pile moments after Walter
Kaye pulled the fateful strings for Lewinsky. But regardless of
how my application packet met its demise, it still stands as a good
example of how not to apply for an internship.

“Destiny,” DeLillo wrote in “Libra,” “is larger than facts or events.”
For Lee Harvey Oswald, this might have been true. But for the rest of
us, destiny sometimes comes down to how we choose to present the facts
and events.

Thursday, Sep 24, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Letter from Pusan: The party’s over

Rolf Potts describes the heady rise and wistful fall of expat life in South Korea.

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PUSAN, South Korea At first glance, it’s hard to tell that the IMF era has hit Pusan. Nearly one year after the crash of the economy, the streets of Korea’s biggest port city still look as crowded and gaudy as they did one year ago. Groups of Korean men still swagger the sidewalks in golf-course plaids like Vegas Rat Packers on their way to three-martini lunches, middle-aged Korean housewives still dress for the market with the frighteningly self-conscious glamour of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and college-age girls still wobble on designer platform shoes and squawk into cell phones at bus stops. Traffic is still a breakneck blur of luxury cars and taxis, delivery trucks and mopeds, overused horns and under-heeded speed limits. And — towering on every horizon — enormous construction cranes still hoist I-beams, steadily adding to the city’s collection of bland concrete high-rise apartment complexes, which glow yellow in the early evening like cramped armadas of “Battlestar Galactica” spaceships, cruising nowhere.

To the untrained foreign eye, Pusan still looks like a manic boomtown. But the Americans and Canadians who have lived here for the last couple of years know better. This is because the seasoned expatriates of Pusan know their garbage.

Just over one year ago, street-side garbage piles provided an almost inexhaustible supply of perfectly usable desks, couches, tables, television sets, electric fans and personal computers for itinerant foreigners looking to stock a rented room for a few months. At the time, Koreans were still giddy from three decades of steady economic growth, and throwing out perfectly usable electronics and home furnishings was a sly act of one-upmanship among the middle class. Koreans looked on in haughty bemusement as young Americans enthusiastically carted garbage back to their apartments.

These days, what’s left of Pusan’s expatriate community has all but given up dumpster diving. These days street-side couches are usually stained and sodden; the desks and tables unusable; the cast-off television sets broken.

These days, the garbage of Pusan is just garbage.

I have been living and teaching English in this southeastern Korean city of 4.5 million people for nearly two years now. The city never fails to amaze and bewilder me. The act of walking down the streets of Pusan is an exercise in possibility. On a given day, I am equally likely to be greeted by a Buddhist monk wearing Air Jordans as I am by a woman in a stewardess uniform handing out promotional toilet tissue. I have stopped noticing details such as children screaming “Hello!” or men urinating in public or vegetable truck loudspeakers blasting “Home on the Range.” I can attain instant celebrity status on a given street corner by speaking a few phrases of Korean with a rough, drawling Pusan accent.

Even death has a creepy proximity here. One afternoon I was walking to a friend’s house when I turned a corner and saw a man pinned between a building and a dump-truck. He had probably been dead for about two minutes. The force of the collision had knocked his pants to his knees and crushed his legs like ribbons. This was not a moment I had prepared myself for, so I stood dumbly watching amid a small crowd of people, not sure what to do. Finally, someone went up and hiked up the dead man’s pants. It was the only reasonable option, and I think all the people there were surprised with themselves for not thinking of it first.

Despite such urban jadedness, Pusan has been dubbed the “Korean Riviera” by the local tourist authority in the hopes of attracting Japanese tourists. In keeping with this resort reputation, Pusan’s biggest hotel has a Las Vegas show. This summer I lucked into free tickets and witnessed the strangest spectacle to hit this corner of Asia since Dutch sailors first washed ashore 400 years ago: an unrepentantly 1960s-style showgirl revue performed by bare-breasted Russians to a room full of Japanese businessmen on the site of an ancient Korean fishing community. It was like visiting some vulgar, endearing vision of heaven.

Before economic hard times hit, the Vegas show was staffed with genuine American performers, and I saw them around town from time to time. They would show up at various university-district haunts in groups of two or three on Friday nights, and sometimes I would talk to them. They were remarkably down-to-earth. A job is a job, they told me.

I regret I never asked them the question that burned foremost in my mind. “What,” I desperately wanted to ask them, “will you be doing when you’re 60? How will you rationalize this strange time in this dirty Asian port town to yourself when your body is failing you and the world has become so efficient and sophisticated that it no longer makes sense to you? How will you rationalize this to your children? To your grandchildren?”

But then: How will I?

The early ’90s was a unique time for young Americans looking to
live overseas. Historically, American expatriate life — while
glamorized by notions of Hemingway in Paris or Kerouac in Mexico — has
consisted of upper-class Americans visiting foreign lands for study or
international business and working-class Americans seeing the world as
soldiers and sailors. But in the late ’80s and early ’90s the
dawning of globalization and the rapid economic success of East Asian
countries created a new niche for young Americans looking to live and
work abroad as English teachers. Unlike missionary or Peace Corps endeavors of past years, these were not volunteer positions:
These were well-paid jobs. Inspired by the promise of overseas living,
cultural adventure and wages better than most entry-level jobs in the
United States, thousands of young Americans set off for Japan, Taiwan
or Korea after graduating from college.
Of these three countries, Korea had the most lenient hiring
policies, and saw an unprecedented boom in foreign English teachers from
1993 to 1997. In the span of just a few years, Korean cities like Pusan
went from hosting isolated, self-sufficient populations of American
soldiers, missionaries and businessmen to supporting thousands of
young, semi-qualified expatriate journeymen who worked and lived among
the general population.
Considering its history of isolation, it’s a wonder Korea embraced
globalization so quickly. But then, Korea’s social and economic
progress in the last 50 years has been a wonder in itself, with the country having
transformed itself from a war-ravaged peasant culture to the 11th largest
economy in the world in one generation. By the mid-’90s, Korea was a
strange mix of cellular phones, squattie-potties, luxury cars,
semi-permanent architecture, urban bustle, environmental blight and a
newly empowered middle class.
A main distinction of this Korean middle class from its American
counterpart was its obsession with education. Ever since the days of
the Chosun Dynasty 500 years ago, Korean society has functioned as a
loose Confucian meritocracy, where advancement at various levels of
society has been based on standardized examinations. And while this
system has effectively turned bribery into a cottage industry in Korea,
it has also instilled Koreans with an almost fearful respect for
education. Learning is seen as the only dependable method of getting
ahead in the world.
Private extracurricular study institutes, called hagwon,
started to import large numbers of native-speaker English teachers
after the 1988 Seoul Olympics. As the spending power and social
competitiveness of the Korean middle class grew, so did the demand for
these foreign teachers. American English lessons became so fashionable
among Korean parents in the early 1990s that native-speaker hagwons
became a virtually unregulated entrepreneurial gold mine. Businessmen
with no educational background rented classroom space, printed
advertisements, imported Americans and made money hand-over-fist. It
seemed too good to be true.
Correspondingly, want ads were appearing in the classified sections
of major American newspapers, promising one-way airfare to Korea and
highly competitive wages for any American with a native understanding of
English, a college degree and a pulse. To many, this also seemed too
good to be true.
The golden age of middle-class expatriatism in Korea was under way.

During these boom years, few Americans came to Korea to find
themselves or even to lose themselves. Most of them come to make money
or buy time.
I first considered the possibility of expatriate life in Korea when
my friend H-Man moved to Chonju City in 1994 and started sending me
postcards about hunting mutant chihuahuas in the sewers of Seoul,
teaching De Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” to classes full of Korean
housewives and watching “Die Hard” while drinking peach liqueur with
Buddhist monks. I didn’t believe a word of it, of course, but I
appreciated the idea that — if he wasn’t finding himself — he was at
least reinventing himself. Life overseas suddenly seemed more appealing
to me than graduate school, and — after a couple years of post-college
traveling left me penniless — I decided to go to Korea myself.
By the time I arrived in 1996, upwards of 10,000 Americans and
Canadians were teaching in Korea on one-year E-2 visas, and more were
coming every day. Of these new expatriates, an embarrassingly small
number of them had teaching experience, TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification or even a
genuine interest in Korean culture. Most of them were middle-class
Americans with lots of wanderlust, useless liberal arts degrees and a
keen desire to make fast money to pay off student loans or fund
international travel. Perhaps at no time in history had so many young
Americans been making so much money in a foreign country with absolutely
no grasp of the native language or customs.
Add to this the fact that many Korean hagwon bosses were charlatans
out to make a quick buck, and the problem became obvious. The untrained
recent college grads who naively assumed they would be treated by
Western standards of workplace fairness were suddenly forced to
supervise elementary-aged children at 6 in the morning with no planned
curriculum, to live in unheated shoe-box apartments and to play
hardball every month when it came time to negotiate overtime pay.
Scores of neophytes flew back home or bugged out on hasty tours of
Southeast Asia after just a few weeks of working in Korea.
However, those Americans and Canadians who chose to stay created a
vibrant Korean subcommunity. Perhaps to escape the rigors and
idiosyncrasies of work, teacher expatriates in Pusan formed poetry
circles, blues jams, rock-climbing clubs, underground newspapers, art
exhibitions, basement raves and Web sites. On a given
weekend, a bored American could attend a Bible study or a homosexual
support meeting, hang out with Russian sailors at a downtown disco,
work with Korean children at a suburban orphanage, ride with a
motorcycle club or go for a polar bear swim in the Strait of Korea.
Pusan’s expat cow-punk band recorded a tape and toured Taegu and Seoul,
and a local world-beat band consisting of Americans, Canadians and
Koreans made so much money playing college festivals and department
store promotions that they were investigated by immigration for
work-visa violations. The streets of Pusan began to look downright
cosmopolitan. Even the traditionally hooker-infested go-go bars
adjacent to the U.S. military base began to resemble Aurora, Ill.,
dance clubs on Saturday nights.
At the height of the Pusan expat scene, I lived in a huge house at the
foot of Kumjang Mountain with seven other foreigners. We all worked
long schedules and tutored privately well into the evening, but nearly
every night we would find time to sit on the upstairs balcony to drink
beers together. It was an oddly satisfying experience. Someone had a
Benny Goodman tape, and we never tired of listening to the tinny old
music as we looked out at the lights of the city. None of us knew the first
thing about 1930s swing, but it sounded curious, alien and exciting,
like transmissions from outer space.
At least once a month, my housemates and I would throw all-night
theme parties that would attract upwards of 50 people — Koreans and
expats alike. Our crowning achievement was a St. Patrick’s Day bash
that featured what could have been the only Korean bagpiper on the
Pacific Rim. He only knew three songs, but nobody seemed to mind the
repetition. Needless to say, our neighbors despised us.
In the same way that 1920s American expatriate life in Paris
exuded a grim revolutionary spirit of reaction to the world, 1990s
American expatriate life in Pusan took on a casual party spirit of
distraction from the world.
It’s too bad it couldn’t last.









































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Monday, Jun 22, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Ignorants abroad

An American expatriate weathers the slings and arrows of learning another language.

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On the afternoon of my first day in Korea, I exited a traditional restaurant to discover a very small boy clutching one of my shoes in front of his face, soberly staring at my size-13 loafer with great wonder and perplexity. “Shin-bal,” he said to himself in a very clear, serious voice. “Shin-bal.” In my best children’s show-host manner, I motioned and asked him to please give me my shoe back, but he remained as transfixed as Hamlet gazing at Yorick’s skull. “Shin-bal!” he intoned, as if pondering his own existence for the first time.

I eventually got my shoe back, but the little boy’s solemn one-word soliloquy haunted my memory for the next month. I found myself involuntarily repeating the word to myself when I was taking a shower or riding the bus: “Shin-bal!” Shortly before falling asleep or halfway through reading an e-mail: “Shin-bal!” Shopping for oranges or drinking a soju: “Shin-bal!”

The word was like a creepy old Carpenters song stuck on repeat in my subconscious. I began to wonder what the word could possibly mean. Was it a sacred mantra from an ancient Buddhist liturgy? Was it the name of a big-footed monster from Korean folklore? Was it an intuitive child’s warning of my imminent doom? Since I was living in a foreign land for the first time, my mind ran wild with possibilities.

When I finally gathered up the courage to ask, a Korean friend assured me that — in no uncertain terms — shin-bal means “shoe.” It was at this moment that I decided it was time to get off my ung-dungi and study the Korean language.

Americans are notoriously bad language learners. Europeans get a kick out of attributing this trait to stupidity, but it’s actually quite practical: The average American has no use for a second language. America is too big and influential to bother with learning Portuguese or Swahili or Mandarin. My own foreign-language track record is a testament to such ambivalence. When I was in high school I took Spanish because the teacher let us make tacos every Friday. When I was in college, I took French to impress a girl. To this day, I can count to 10 in both languages. Barely.

Thus, I was a bit jittery at the prospect of learning Korean. It
didn’t help that most of my pre-arrival expectations of Korean culture
came from watching television human interest stories broadcast during
the Seoul Olympics. I arrived in Pusan expecting bicycles, flute music
and meditative people — and was greeted instead with traffic jams, disco
dance beats over music that was popular when I was in junior high and
charmingly extroverted people who drank like lumberjacks. My earliest
Korean lessons were a result of this incongruity.
For example, I once tried to elicit the use of descriptive words in
my English class by asking my students to explain various features of
Korean society. First on the list was to compare Buddhist monks and
nuns. Since my class was dominated by middle-school boys, I was
surprised by their immediate enthusiasm with the assignment.
“Yoo-bang!” they exclaimed in chorus. “Say it in English,” I told them.
They conferred with each other, but couldn’t think of an English word.
“Teacher, look!” one student said, cupping his hands and holding them
out in what looked to me like a position of prayerfulness. “Yoo-bang!”
I wrote the word “prayer” on the board and went on to the next item of
comparison. I probably wouldn’t have thought about it again except a
shy student named Jae-woo approached me before class the next day,
clutching his dictionary. “Teacher, nuns don’t have prayers,” he said.
“Yes they do,” I told him, mimicking the hand motion the student had
pantomimed the day before. “Prayers.” Jae-woo shook his head.
“Teacher, nuns have breasts.”
To save myself further embarrassment, I bought an English-Korean
dictionary that weekend. Of course, language dictionaries have their
own shortcomings — especially in a language like Korean, where the
alphabet resembles the falling blocks from the video-game Tetris, and
the difference between saying “It’s cool” and “I am going to kill you”
(both joog-inda) is a matter of subtle inflection. Whenever I find
myself relying too heavily on my English-Korean dictionary, I need only
think of the first time I gave a dictionary-based assignment to my
English students. By the end of class, I had a stack of papers that
read like performance poems a man dressed as a chicken might have read
at a Zurich Dada gathering in 1919. An example: “I’m not Buddhism
family./I’m atheism style./It’s not love./It’s sympathy emotion./
We’re back again./We’re not back again./He’s not poltroonery./
Because he’s owing to authenticity man.”
Dadaist homework aside, I have learned tons from my students. Not
just words and phrases, but approaches to language-learning in general.
Koreans are remarkably diligent students, and their meticulous, patient
study style yields results over time. Following their example, I have
dedicated myself to weekly self-study, and after several months of
consistent grammar-building, I can now entertain Korean friends,
neighbors and shopkeepers by earnestly mutilating their native tongue.
The drawback to this is that Korean is an extremely hierarchical
language, and I usually end up inadvertently insulting nearly everyone I
talk to.
For example, I once resolved to impress my new landlady by offering
her a cup of green tea. “Nok-cha mashi-le?” I asked her in an inspired
flourish. She looked at me like I had just offered her a cup of
lukewarm spit. Unwittingly, I had left off the respectful ending and
addressed her as if she were a child.
This might seem like a harmless
mistake to an American, but in a Confucianist country, speaking to a
middle-aged person in a tone reserved for children is like a Westerner
addressing his boss in the sweetly condescending tone reserved for retarded people. Sensing my landlady’s chagrin, I quickly covered my
mistake by good-naturedly insulting myself. “Sorry,” I told her. “I’m
a moron.”
Unfortunately, I said this in the informal style (“Mi-an hae,
na-nun pabo imnida.”), and in Korean it’s possible to insult your
listener if you insult yourself in the wrong way. I eventually smoothed
things over with my landlady by dragging out my Korean grammar book and
showing her that I was a mere beginner. In what seemed like a
non sequitur at the time, she suggested I take up mountain-climbing. In
retrospect, I think she was implying that I take up a safer hobby.
Nonetheless, my language efforts continue. The small bits of
progress that I put to practical use in the market or on the subway are
remarkably satisfying. And while the natives of a homogenous country
like Korea aren’t as familiar with accented versions of their language
as Americans (take the most ridiculous Mexican, Pakistani or Scottish
accent from an episode of “The Simpsons,” multiply it by 10 and that’s
what my Korean sounds like to a Korean), they are generally quite
gracious and pleased by the effort.
Even though I may never be completely fluent in Korean — even though
my new language skills will be mostly useless by the time I return to
America — this encouragement is what keeps me returning to my grammar
book week after week.
No doubt Sisyphus also enjoyed a few high-fives on the way up.

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Tuesday, May 19, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Student protests bloom

In a letter from South Korea, expat American teacher Rolf Potts takes a close look at one of the students' annual spring rituals -- political protests.

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SOUTH KOREA — Before I set out to work in Asia, a friend told me that the best way to avoid the initial culture shock is to embrace tunnel vision. All the new sights, sounds and smells, he said, should be treated like they were part of some voodoo superstition where you lose your soul if you look too long into the lens that’s taking your picture. Obviously, my friend had never been to Korea.

Six weeks into my stint as an English teacher in the southern port city of Pusan, I was drilling pronunciation with a class full of middle school girls when I heard what sounded like shotgun fire outside. I opened my blinds and looked down to see 100 or so helmeted police in black storm trooper outfits and plexiglass shields charging up the street through a cloud of tear gas. Directly in their path — forming a vague skirmish line at the front gate of Pusan National University — a mob of masked student demonstrators hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The spectacle looked like a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of “Star Wars.”

I had a great view of the drama. I took my students to the window and excitedly asked them to interpret the action for me. They became bored after about 10 minutes and politely asked me to finish the English lesson. When tear gas started to seep into the classroom, they calmly tied handkerchiefs around their faces and sat waiting for the next part of my lecture, looking like a studious platoon of Zapatista guerrillas disguised in burgundy middle school uniforms.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was part of a rather normal springtime ritual in Korea. As is the case at many Korean colleges, Pusan National University students have the option of joining political demonstration groups in the same way that they can join a reading circle or a ham-radio club. Street protests — which are always held during the mild spring months — have become a theatrical, somewhat listless coming-of-age ritual for young students here. A bar mitzvah with the possibility of hospitalization, if you will. Something to do on a Tuesday.

My boss at the time took sadistic pleasure in the demonstrations. Positioned in the waiting room under a big yellow banner that bore our language school’s slogan, “You Can Do” (an admittedly embarrassing maxim, the professional equivalent of a real estate agent operating out of a pup tent), Mr. Jang refused to let any of the teachers cancel classes or dismiss students early. He was slowly going bankrupt after having owned our language school for 12 years, and sometimes I wonder if the student demonstrations outside were all he had left in life. At 5 feet tall with an overgrown shock of hair hanging in his face, he looked like Jim Bowie as envisioned by Jim Henson, feverishly rallying troops at the Alamo. The mere sight of him restlessly standing watch over the front door had enough Pavlovian resonance to send “The Muppet Show” theme song jangling through my subconscious.

Two weeks into protest season, Mr. Jang turned up sick, so I sent my middle school girls home and went outside to get a closer view of the action. Out in the street, the student protest leaders stood in ranks, waving banners and singing songs that sounded suspiciously close to “Edelweiss.” At the fringe of these ranks, a small task force of students stockpiled rocks and toted crates of premixed Molotov cocktails with all of the feverish excitement one might find shortly before an American college keg party. Fifty meters down the street, a deep rank of riot cops checked their padding and limbered up behind their shields, as if preparing to shag fly balls at a batting park.

The impasse lasted about 20 minutes. The cops made a few loudspeaker warnings; the students waved their flags and pulled some more songs from their repertoire. Things didn’t really get going until a trio of masked students brought out a small cardboard coffin, draped it with a paper American flag and set it on fire. I was later told not to take this personally; that the flaming American flag is merely a traditional motif at demonstrations, as innocuously lost to history as mistletoe at Christmastime.

The riot cops, however, took the open flame as their cue to close ranks and attack. The students fell back to the PNU front gate as the cops moved in swinging truncheons and extinguished the fire. The students rallied after a couple of minutes, and rocks started to fly. The riot cops retreated, regrouped and charged again. The students responded this time with Molotov cocktails. This went on — ebbing and flowing like a majestic liquid dance — for about half an hour. I stood on the sidewalk mesmerized by the strange glamour of it all — not noticing until the last minute that a huge black truck had pulled into police ranks and tilted a cauldronlike tear gas cannon at the students.

I have since been informed that this cannon can fire 50 rubber-sheathed rounds of tear gas at once. All I noticed at the time was a staccato of orange flashes and a deafening roar.

The gas canisters whistled over my head and skittered along the sidewalk beside me, belching their peppery powder in looping clouds. I took off running amid a surge of panicked students. The air around me dulled into a stinging gray haze. I hurdled a pile of burning cardboard, rounded the corner into an alley and waited out the charge of riot cops among a handful of students and shopkeepers.

I’ll admit it was a thrill. For a brief, adrenalin-pumped moment, I felt like it was all a part of something larger than me: something meaningful, something monumental.

It wasn’t.

The students in the street had been demanding the resignation of then-President Kim Young-Sam in the wake of his alleged corruption. The thing is, President Kim’s term was due to expire in a few months anyway. He wasn’t up for reelection. Those students might as well have been out protesting gingivitis.

Ironically, the big loser of the evening was me. At home that night, Mr. Jang saw me on the TV news and busted me the next day. I had to work Saturdays for the next two months.

I’m not bitter from the experience. In a way, I don’t even blame the students for protesting a lame-duck president. These days, self-righteous political melodrama is hard to come by, and if you can’t wrestle angels, you may as well chase after the wind.

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Tuesday, Apr 28, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

The Mystical High Church of Luck

Rolf Potts goes to Las Vegas with $5 in his pocket, discovers the Mystical High Church of Luck -- and ends up losing $100.

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I understand this now: Things don’t happen in Las Vegas. Things are happened in Las Vegas. All actions in the town are so meticulously predicted and orchestrated that spontaneity itself exists only as the ghost of compulsion.

Perhaps this can explain why I rolled into Las Vegas with $5 and ended up losing $100.

The plan was simple: My friend Jeff and I were going to conquer Las Vegas by being cheap bastards. We knew that Las Vegas is a brilliantly marketed town that has taken the American Dream, distilled it into a cheery doctrine of potential wealth and replaced the dismal idea of the work ethic with a voodoo religion called Luck. Skeptical of Luck and its dogmas, we decided to milk the city for its gaudy entertainment value and vanish like the proverbial mouthful of sailor’s lies come dawn. We each took $5 from a kitty we were saving for Mardi Gras, jammed our jackets with lukewarm cans of leftover Pabst Blue Ribbon and locked up our van in the Hacienda lot at the south end of the Strip.

The act of walking the Strip itself was delightfully entertaining, since it involved plowing through a gantlet of scruffy men who had positioned themselves every few feet on the sidewalk to pass out glossy flyers for strip bars, private dancers and Nye County whorehouses. In spots of heavy pedestrian traffic, the sidewalks of the strip looked like lunatic fencing competitions, with brochure-pimps tirelessly lunging and feinting their flyers amid the tourists.

Jeff and I trudged all the way up the Strip and each blew $2.99 of our $5 budget gorging ourselves to the point of agony on lukewarm cuisine at the infamous Circus Circus lunch buffet. We spent the hellish ensuing hour digesting and watching tightrope unicyclists at the free Circus Circus circus upstairs. Once we had fully recovered, we came back downstairs to stroll the casino and pretend to gamble, since it is standing policy in Las Vegas for casinos to give free drinks to anyone who is gambling. Jeff and I bellied up to the dollar slots and pulled on the levers for 15 minutes, but the barmaids didn’t seem to be impressed. Jeff sent me up to the bar to get some glasses, so we could drink our Pabst.

The bartender was a flashy young guy who was suavely trying to console a blond, firm-bodied barmaid who stood two stools down from me. “Chin up, babe,” he said to her, winking sympathetically and biting his lower lip. “They’ll come around with those tips. You’re an angel. Just keep showing ‘em that smile of yours. Make ‘em think you’re their special one. You never know who might give you a $100 bill.”

Not used to hearing someone my own age call someone else my own age “babe,” I assumed that the bartender was jokingly talking like a cheesy Vegas person in an attempt to improve her spirits.

“This really is a circus, isn’t it?” I said to the bartender when the barmaid was gone.

“What’s that, pal?” he said spunkily, not really looking at me.

“Working here is the postmodern version of running away to join the circus,” I said, thinking I was being witty with him. “You know, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ only we’re the clowns.”

“How’s the luck today, champ?” he said with a toothy smile, acting more like I had pulled an invisible voice-box string labeled “conversation” than made a specific statement.

His non sequitur caught me off-guard. “Um, I haven’t really started yet.”

“Gotta put that trust in Lady Luck.” He grinned like a chipper zombie. “What’ll-it-be-for-ya?”

“I’ll just take a couple glasses of water.”

The bartender shot me a stunned and somewhat disgusted look. It took him about 20 minutes to get the water.

Drinking contraband Pabst Blue Ribbon in the Circus Circus casino
is not nearly as entertaining as it sounds, so Jeff and I backtracked
down the Strip looking to slum poolside at one of the glitzy hotels.

Unfortunately, security at places like the Luxor and the MGM
Grand is comparable to that of the White House, so we had to settle
for the outdoor veranda at the golf-themed Sheraton Desert Inn.
Sitting in our underwear in an outdoor jacuzzi, we drank the rest of
our Pabst and smiled dumbly as the cleated retirees clicked by on
their way to the adjoining golf course. Somewhere in there we
caught a buzz and elected to gamble our remaining $2 away.

Damp and smelling of chlorine, Jeff and I trudged over to our
dream casino: a nickel-slot joint that advertised 18 doughnuts for
$1.50. We reasoned that if we had any luck at all on the nickel slots,
we could cash out in doughnuts and ride triumphantly out of Las
Vegas.

We weren’t there five minutes when I hit a jackpot and won $30 in
nickels.

Somewhere high up in heaven — in what was no doubt their most
thrilling pissing contest since Job — God and the devil put down a
wager on me. This time the devil won.

I took the $30, gave half of it to Jeff, swaggered into the Mirage
casino and set up camp at the quarter video-poker machines.
Inexplicably, my streak of good fortune continued. Full house.
Flush. Three of a kind. The quarters kept showering down into my
tray. Chowderhead that I am, I metamorphosed into an obnoxious
winner, yelling loudly and slapping high fives with Jeff. As if on
cue, a seductively clad barmaid showed up to offer me free drinks.
Somewhere around my third or fourth Heineken, I hit a straight
flush, turning four quarters into $50 worth of change. By overall
Vegas standards, my jackpot was jack squat, but I celebrated like a
high roller.

A couple cocktails later, I was sitting at the dollar video-poker
machines at the Treasure Island casino, shoving my last token into
the slot. It had taken me about 10 minutes to lose everything I’d
won at the quarter and nickel machines.

Still, I had been born again hard into the Mystical High Church of
Luck. I was convinced of my immortality. When my last token bore
no fruit, I haughtily denounced the Treasure Island, reloaded to the
tune of $100 at the conveniently located ATM, and took a tram to
Caesar’s Palace. I was broke again after about 15 minutes.

Jeff steered me away from another conveniently located ATM and
took me to the bar for a cappuccino. Sipping our coffee, we
exchanged what we hoped were meaningful glances with a couple of
girls across the bar. We didn’t have the courage to actually go and
talk to them, since we weren’t up for explaining how “our place”
was parked in the Hacienda lot. Plus we still smelled like chlorine.

Sobriety heightened my sense of moral indignation at what I’d
become. Too proud to blame myself, I started to spout bitter
rhetoric about Las Vegas.

“Where does all this money go?” I asked an uninterested Jeff. “Do
people live here? How much does the guy dressed as Caesar get
paid? Or what about that guy with the unicycle at Circus Circus?
Where did he come from? Did he dream of being the Circus Circus
unicycle guy as a kid? Is this self-actualization for him? Is there a
hierarchy for unicycle guys in Las Vegas? Do they belong to a
labor union? Is there really all that much difference between going
to work every day to do tricks on a unicycle and stocking food in a
supermarket?

“Have you ever looked at a photo of those chorus girls? Where do
they come from? Why do they all look alike? Are they clones? Is
there some town out in North Dakota that breeds chorus girls
specifically for Las Vegas? Are chorus girls classified as livestock
in Nevada? And why are there so many performers who
impersonate dead people in this town? Why not do a celebrity
impersonation of me? Or you? Or those girls over there? Why this
obsession with dead people? Is this heaven? Hell? If so, where are
the normal dead people? Where are my ancestors? Is there anything
original or alive in this entire city? Is everything here nostalgia?
Are we supposed to be already feeling nostalgic about tonight? Was
I supposed to feel nostalgic when I was saying that?

“I want a casino where the bartenders wear T-shirts and rubber
flip-flop sandals and give you warm beer in cans, and the barmaids
dress up in cut-off jeans and fuzzy bedroom slippers and bring you
Halloween candy as a consolation when you go on a losing streak,
and everyone who wants to gamble has to first go up to a
microphone and tell the story of their first kiss, and people only get
free drinks if they make ironical allusions to the laws of entropy or
the Articles of Confederation or the Pauline definition of love. Shit,
Jeff. Let’s open the place up ourselves. We’ll call it Jeff’s. Or better
yet, we’ll just hang an electronic reader-board out front, and
whenever a customer wants to change the name of the place, we’ll
change it. What do you think, man?”

Jeff didn’t even pause. “I think it’s time we left Las Vegas.”

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Page 8 of 8 in Rolf Potts

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