CHASING LIFE by Steve Jovanoski Page A

that it wasn’t sewage overflow. But he was still pissed off, and his hair was a mess.
    The city was alight with neon. Some shops were closing for the night while others were just opening. People crowded around bus stops, waiting patiently while a sea of commuters rushed in and out of train stations. Taxis thronged the roads, but Dave resisted catching one. Several times he had to stop and backtrack to check the street signs. Even though they were written in both Cantonese and English, some thoroughfares had no signs at all.
    H e finally reached Lockhart Road, where a sea of colourful neon lighting flickered in a dazzling night show. Double-decker buses rumbled on each side of the street, spewing diesel fumes. The smell stuck to his skin like wet paper. But he loved it and felt the excitement surging in him with each step deeper into the city. The place had so much energy. Music poured into the streets and people were going in and out of all sorts of bars and nightclubs that dotted the road.
    While a massage was still on his mind, it was the girls outside the bars that capt ured his attention. He passed a dive bar where dance music boomed from the patio. He could see that inside, waitresses were serving drinks in short miniskirts and extremely tight tops that revealed their cleavage. White middle-aged and overweight men sat around the bar, chatting with provocatively dressed girls a third their age. He shuddered a little at a snatch of conversation that he overheard. There’s something wrong about a teenage girl calling a sixty-year-old man ‘honey’, he thought to himself. From their darker skin and facial features Dave guessed they were either Filipino or Thai.
    This scene didn’t appeal to him and he moved on to where four girls lingered in front of another bar. They were all slim and curvaceous with glistening skin-tight dresses, their faces plastered with bright red lipstick and too much foundation, on heels so high they could hardly walk. They danced provocatively with each other like they were having an orgy, right there in the open. Two of them blocked his path as soon as he was spotted, enticing him in broken English to enter the establishment. Dave found it bizarre. He was curious, self-conscious and embarrassed at the same time.
    ‘Hey, handsome boy.’
    ‘I like you.’
    ‘Come for drink , sexy man.’
    ‘You hot. Come here. I like you.’
    ‘I want to have your baby!’ One called out from inside, just to make sure she wasn’t outdone. They all broke out in laughter and Dave could tell they were taking the piss, poking fun at their own stereotyped image.
    He smiled uneasily and said nothing, feeling extremely self-conscious, as if the attention of the whole neighbourhood had turned on him. He walked briskly on and looked straight ahead as if wearing blinkers. The whole area felt like an open-air brothel. Now he understood why the hotel receptionist had given him that look. Because he was travelling alone, the man must have thought that he had come for the sex tourism, hence the directions to the red-light district.
    Dave had heard about Hong Kong’s renowned flesh-peddling market. In his state of mind, sleazy bars and cheap prostitutes were not a good idea. Julia was still with him. He carried her presence with him as if she watched his every move. These girls are after your money, Dave, he heard her voice say. Are you really that desperate? Hearing her imagined voice, he asked himself why he was there.
    No way would he follow in the footsteps of the men he saw, being relieved of his earnings and escaping reality for a few hours by drowning in alcohol and prostitutes. No way, he thought. He wasn’t sure what was sadder: the young girls selling their bodies to pasty-skinned white men who couldn’t string a sentence together in the presence of a woman back home, let alone hold a relationship, or the men who fell for the compliments and thought of themselves as somehow special and charismatic to those