Chapter 5

Rage and Rancor

Brawl With The Money Machine

Now Wednesday, five days had past since my grueling experience of being laid bare and near defenseless in the urban sprawl of Guangzhou, and I wasn't going to take it any more. Not exactly sure where I needed to go to acquire my emergency passport, I went to Hill Bar after a breakfast of bao dze and do nai; pork-stuffed bread and soybean milk. I sat in the place most people who frequented there associated me with--a small table perched outside the entryway, where I watched the streaming traffic on Huanshi Dong Lu flash by. I, along with a small group of regulars used to pull these tall and ludicrously heavy bar tables and their equally tall and heavy stools out in front of the place a few years before, much to the chagrin of the owners. Finally they realized that perhaps it was a good idea if the foreigners sat in front. It just might attract others to come in, so they invested in some light weight tables and chairs and low and behold! Our mutiny against sitting inside the bar was thwarted. The manager conceded and now our shifty band of ne'er-do-wells had permanent residence outside, a small victory for the local riffraff.

The late morning came and went and I had yet to find anyone who could tell me what to do. I had called the listed number for the American Consulate on a friend's phone, but all I got were recordings and nothing about replacement passports. Morning bled into afternoon and six beers later I remember looking out onto the traffic as the dull, red taxis zoomed by like dusty, frantic beetles, the lethargic buses lumbering by like tired pachyderms, the constantly moving scene became a hypnotic caravan of steel insects and mammals and I felt as if I could simply fall forward in my chair and become a bus-elephant or taxi-insect and blend into the monotony of it all.

I wondered off mid-day to the corner store and bought twenty yuan worth of spicy fish balls on skewers and broiled sausages, returning to the bar and giving away most of it to the wait staff. I ate a little and continued to drink. By the time someone I knew that could tell me where to go for my passport, the day was over and I was pleasantly polluted. I moved inside and sat with some friends, unhappy with myself that I hadn't accomplished anything other than spend a 150 RMB on beer. Another semi-talented Filipino band set up stage and howled away, or perhaps that was me and my equally sloshed friends who were howling, I'm not sure.

Sometime near midnight I was getting hungry again, so I started to go to the same place I had eaten the night of the robbery, but a friend stopped me and recommended I go to another place not so far away. Perhaps because it was the middle of the week, or I was too drunk, or maybe the police in one of their rare enforcements of city regulations cited the vendors and chased them away, I couldn't find hide nor hair of anyone selling food in the area my friend told me to go. Frustrated with my misfortune, I decided to withdraw some money, since I had spent most of what I had taken out that Monday for my hotel. That was my undoing.

I began looking for an ATM in the area and I had to mill around a bit, having never needing to use an ATM in this part of the city before, and eventually after walking to and fro I found a 24 hour ATM spots, next to a bank. I entered the small brightly lit glassed in room and tried the first ATM before me, with no success. The card slot wasn't even open. So I moved on to the next machine. It took my card greedily. I entered my PIN and then my transaction amount. A few seconds passed, then I distinctly heard the whirring noise that ATMs make when the mechanism inside is counting the cash out into a tight bundle of bills. Then the small door slid open abruptly and I stood still for a few seconds looking at an empty hole. The apparatus that usually has the money clamped within it's rubberized claws contained not a single bill.My mouth fell open as I looked at the screen. In bright green glowing letters it spelled out very clearly, "Please take your cash". Then just as suddenly as the door had opened, it slammed shut, the screen went blank and then...nothing. Absolutely dead silence. No whirs or lights blinking. I recall staring at the ATM screen, now blank and void of any information. The seconds ticked by and I began poking at the main two buttons, ENTER and CANCEL. Still nothing. The entire weight of the past weeks' frustrations crashed down upon my mind. No money. No card. No I.D. to try to retrieve my new card. No hope. No luck. I remember yelling at the machine. I remember pounding the button panel with the palm of my hand, staring at the still blank ATM screen. And then oblivion. It was as if I had been transported in a time machine from one point to another in a millisecond--ZAP! One moment I was in the ATM room, the next I was blocks and blocks away, feeling bewildered.

Standing in front of the Garden Hotel, several blocks from where I had been and feeling extremely disoriented, I shuffled along the street now, not having a plan or a single idea in my hollow, clueless head. After zombie-walking half a block, I found myself standing directly in front of the 24 hour Net Cafe that I often frequented. With no more than 20 RMB in my pocket, I went in, payed for several hours and found a quite, secluded place to close my eyes and not think of anything. I drifted off into a different oblivion from the Friday night before, and this would turn out to be the last peaceful sleep I would have for the next three days.

I awoke around 10:00 am, noticing that the computer screen before me was in the non-active mode; evidently the staff didn't wish to wake me and tell me my time had expired hours before. I went directly to the Hill Bar, and although I knew it wouldn't open for two more hours, I did know I could go around beside the building and snooze on some chairs in the beer garden. I dozed on and off as the sounds of the traffic kept me awake most of the time. It was about 11:30 am when I tried the side door and it opened. The place was empty, except for one person at the bar. From his hunched back and bowed head I recognised the unsavory form of a letch named Peter. I couldn't believe he was there at such an early hour. Had his life become such a wreck? Here it was, not even a weekend, and he sat there, drinking. He turned in my direction when he heard the door open, his face grizzled with three or four days salt and pepper stubble, his eyes surrounded by puffy bags of gray skin, blood-shot in the corners. His faced attempted to make a friendly smile, but it only managed to mold into a leering half-grin; villainous.

I told him what I could then recall had occurred with my bank card during the night. I told him that an ATM had swallowed my card and I wanted to go to the bank and retrieve it. He said he would go with me, no doubt thinking if he did so, I would invariably give him some cash; he had become someone I loathed recently, because of his constant borrowing and his creative excuses as to why he still had no money. He was in debt to me for several thousand Chinese dollars, as well as to Daisy, the girl who helped me with the police report. We left after I paid his tab, of course.

When I got to the area I thought where the bank was, I felt at a loss. Nothing looked familiar. It was then that I realized there were a lot more banks on those closely packed streets than I previously realized. I went looking for the kiosk, but nothing at all seemed to be familiar. At some point I lost track of Peter, "typical" I thought. In the bank I found myself in, a smartly dressed woman approached me and I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It felt like several sets of eyes were watching me, which wasn't uncommon in China, but still...as I looked behind her, the ATM room attached to the bank didn't look familiar, so I left. I gave up and headed back to Hill. As I did this, I took notice of several police cars in the area--now I had goose bumps as a chill ran down my spine--why did I feel so strange and where was Peter anyway? A block from the bank I ducked into an alley that had two large metal gates for closing it off at night, but they were open now. I immediately ducked behind the gate and peered through the two inch gap between the gate and the wall, down toward the way I had just come. I now saw Peter a block back, near the bank I had just been in, talking with two uniformed policemen. He had a habit of back-talking the authorities and perhaps now he was entangled in just such a situation. I slipped out from behind the gate, realizing I was only being paranoid, perhaps a little hung over and jumpy from a lack of sleep.