Flower Lounge (12) Nightclub

Hollywood loves sex with a touch of perversion. Prisons on screen are often full of hairy, muscular, stinky, beastly cons, shimmering with sweat, indiscriminately sex-crazed without due respect to gender, age, religion, situation, or political persuasion. Maybe that’s reality, who knows? A bit bizarre, but reality often defies comprehension. Jails are supposed to be horrible anyway, right? Well, none of my business. At least that’s what I thought for many years.

In my subconscious indoctrinated with pragmatic survival strategies, anyone unlucky enough to be thrown in jail, guilty or not, should learn to lie low and suppress all non-essential desires until the storm passes. Sex, especially sex with a stinky specimen of the same gender, is truly very extremely absolutely non-essential, to a politically incorrect heterosexual man anyway. But what if the movies actually reflect the ugly incomprehensible reality behind bars? An irrelevant worry festered.

Fortunately, during my week at Lai Chi Kok, I couldn’t detect any sign of Hollywood. Though a ludicrous episode, though comical, was a bit unsettling when I extrapolated. An inmate in his fifties was caught masturbating while speaking with his visiting young wife on the other side of the glass partition. Everyone in the crowded room cursed, laughed, and screamed about his uncontainable outburst. It earned him some form of punishment and made him the talk of the can for days.

To me, the farcical incident highlighted a degree of desperation which justified apprehension. Rationally, I did not expect myself to be a hot target of sexual assault at this age. But cons were supposedly psychopaths, sparing nobody. Anytime, anyone, anywhere…

In a civilised jail like Tong Fuk, inmates are well fed, securely locked up in a scenic environment with ample fresh air. Besides a lousy fate, there isn’t much else to complain about. However, some basic things — sex, for example — are denied. It’s a jail after all, not a motel. But in practice, suppressing basic needs can backfire. The relevant authority obviously understands that, and draws the line, or blind, with that in mind.

One of the three toilets in my dormitory was fenced off with plastic partitions, loosely fitted with a wobbly door. The translucent panels were plastered over on the inside with newspaper and girly photos, using toothpaste as adhesive. This blatant violation of the rules was somehow overlooked by the guards. I noticed this exceptionally private corner on my first day, and hid inside it as if I had a bad case of diarrhoea to squat and think. A cellmate promptly noticed, and gave me a stern friendly advice: ‘Shit there!’ he pointed to the adjacent latrines. I said okay without seeking clarification.

Soon enough, I found out why. I had been faking defecation in the community Nightclub. The See Hing warned me off for my own sake.

Most evenings, a few inmates would take turns to visit the Nightclub, carrying magazines with images of middle-aged oversized women cladded in parachute-looking bikinis. It would be grossly misleading to label them pornography. In fact, they were so off-turning I wondered who published them, and who the targeted readers were. I hadn’t paid attention to newsstands for a long time but seriously doubted that these magazines were generally available. Well, just another Tong Fuk puzzle. Anyway, humans are extremely adaptable under extraordinary circumstances, and the boys were under extraordinary circumstances. Any remote suggestion of an almost naked female was enough to trigger their imagination.

The Nightclub was shared with commendable order and discipline, requiring no advance booking. The patrons also shared sticky magazines with each other. As the club was a convertible establishment, it needed a little preparation before use. The visitor must first place the grey plastic garbage bin upside down over the squat toilet-bowl. It would serve as a lounge stool, spanning precariously over the fissured ceramic can. In the unlikely event that some garbage had missed the floor and ended up in the bin by accident, he would have to first empty it onto the floor.

Dress code was audacious and unpretentious. There was no cloakroom service. More libertine visitors would stride to the club stark naked, proudly exhibiting an anticipatory erection, magazine and toilet roll in hand, declaring aloud to no one in particular his intimate intention: Yahoo! Nightclub time! I felt awkward and uptight in their reality. Whatever had happened to thugs in this world, it was a weird change.

Normally, once the club was occupied, nobody would disturb. It was the one square meter in Tong Fuk where an inmate could be alone and unseen. But there’s exception to everything. One evening, a few boys tiptoed towards it while one of their pals was inside. They yanked the door open, screaming police raid! It was delinquently amusing, though not nearly as funny as their convulsive laughter suggested.

Personal intimacy between inmates was rare and discreet, nowhere near what Hollywood suggests. Out of a total of seventy or so men in the Common Room, there was only one obvious couple. I didn’t share a dorm with them, so my observations were mainly from the dining hall and playground.

They looked in their late twenties. In the Common Room, they always sat together, like a pair of mandarin ducks, at a Number Gang table. They were not very social, keeping mostly to themselves, doing time together in front of the television. The smaller thug often lied down on the bench, head on the thighs of his bigger friend who would gently stroke his hair as they watched lunchtime soap. On Sundays, he got finger-brushed the whole day. That was the extent of their public display. The guards didn’t mind. Fine. But neither did their gangster colleagues, which surprised me. When I was a teenager, gangsters were skinny, tough, macho, violently homophobic. Hong Kong tough guys had become astonishingly liberal.

By tradition, rapists always had it tough in jail. Sex offenders were held well beneath contempt by both prisoners and screws. Their situation was no better than the fat rat Ming Suk bagged for the wild cats. Their stories are better relayed as fiction.

According to a young See Hing, this time-honoured practice had been waning.

Not too long ago, sex offenders were dregs of the scum. Career criminals despised them. They had to be away from home every now and then to serve sentences. ‘Anyone who dares take advantage of our women will get his dick smashed,’ a middle-aged convict assured me in no uncertain terms. And while the smashing took place, the guards would happen to be looking elsewhere. There was a tacit unanimity over the treatment of sex criminals. However, according to my interlocutor, sex crimes had become dubious and debatable these days. ‘Some chicks report rape to the cops to revenge a nasty separation or innocent cheating. It’s fucking nuts man!’

‘What’s innocent cheating?’ I asked.

‘You cheat, you know, without meaning to,’ he explained.

Punishing sex offenders who could in fact be victims of unforgiving girlfriends didn’t seem right. The underworld had its own rigid moral code and sense of fairness. Since romantic relationships have turned capricious and perfidious, and sense of honour obsolete, sex criminals can no longer be tortured without reasonable doubt, even though judges have ruled otherwise. In the eyes of common criminals, judges have no common sense.

What about the guards?

According to Googleable American statistics, my favourite source of bafflement, about half of all sex crimes in jail are committed by the guards. Thankfully, at least at Tong Fuk, the officers were bored and crabby, with seriously traditional tastes, and far from devious.

I used government thread to sew this biscuit wrapper into a useful storage bag

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Next episode Sitting in Flower Lounge

What prisoners do sitting in Flower Lounge