Whenever the holidays come around, I think back to the winter of ‘97. I was in Hong Kong at the time, in the final stretch of an internship for Triad crime boss Jimmy Zhang Lao.
It was Christmas Eve, and the mood at the full release massage parlor where we conducted business was dour. The Henan Low Boys had just moved in from the mainland and were hitting all our means of distribution, which meant we were sitting on enough opium to get us all imprisoned, executed, and then imprisoned again.
As the intern, it fell upon me to guard the stash. I pleaded with Jimmy for the night off, as the previous year I had converted to a sect of Catholicism founded by a pair of blind Icelandic bootleggers and I’d managed to smuggle in a pine tree which I planned to set aflame, as per church custom.
At first, Lao was offended because a Hong Kong Christmas is slang for when a British national snorts cocaine out of a Chinese prostitute’s asshole. After I cut off the tip of my index finger in apology, I discovered the Chinese had no love for Christmas ever since a corporation tried to market Santa Claus as Super Exploding Red Gift Man and ended up blinding thirty-eight schoolchildren.
Dejected, I made my way to Zhao Yun’s Delectable Meat Products, the lunch counter which served as a front for our dope stash. Zhao was in a particularly sour mood that day, as a government inspector had accused him of leading a pet kidnapping ring. I asked if he had ever heard of Christmas, and he told me that he had once had sex with a woman who wore a Santa hat. After grabbing a plate of cat-fried dog, I made my way to the back room and decided to have my very own White Christmas.
I was eight bowls deep into the Pale Dragon when the Henan Low Boys burst in. Jimmy Joe Henan himself stood before me, a spectacular Asian mullet covering his aviator sunglasses and reaching into the collar of the denim jacket which enclosed his Frankie Say Relax t-shirt. He gave me the option of giving up the dope or getting shot in the dickhole. Since I figured he’d shot me in the dickhole anyway, I winged him with my pipe and took cover behind a crate of rancid meat. The bullets started flying.
I was outnumbered, high on opium, and low on luck when I heard the barking coming out of a padlocked door behind the Henans. I blasted the lock with my revolver, and out came a flood of kidnapped dogs which set upon the Low Boys. I was halfway out the door when Jimmy Joe yelled “Henan Low Boys dynamite number one!” and tossed a lit stick of dynamite. The blast propelled me into a billboard for Dr. Pang’s Tiger Cock Remedy Oil, but I was alive. The police arrived just as the exploded opium began falling from the sky like so many snowflakes. As the Low Boys, ash and dog semen staining their clothes, were led away in cuffs, I could only think “Blind Icelandic God bless us, every one.”
