New Jack City

Jack and the rest of us during a respite from the night

Hyun made his triumphant debut in China last week, and it was clear that he immediately shared a vibe with the city. I think perhaps it’s because he’s now an alcoholic. The relationship is that much sweeter when you’ve got moonshine in common.

Wilkie, currently working in Beijing, deftly organized his schedule to coincide with Hyun (heretofore known as Jack…it’s a long story) and his arrival at Shanghai. Similar to Wilkie’s last visit to our beloved city last September, I hooked up a table at Pegasus on Friday night for the all-you-can drink special.

Little did we realize what we’d have in store for us as we coolly sauntered onto the premises. It had been a blistering hot series of days, and the darkness ushered in a welcome breeze that combined well with the club’s hip-hop, evoking the halcyon days of our college togetherness.

The drinks came hard and fast. Jay hooked us up with a nice table in the middle of Peg, with a free bottle of Johnny Walker to boot. Looking back now, we might as well have called that bottle Harry Houdini with the way it slithered out of our grasp and disappeared into the ether. It wasn’t one of those moments where a disproportionate amount of people were drinking more than the rest; this was equal-opportunity binging, folks. Before I knew it, John (Tina’s little brother) was macking on the two forty-year old Russians sitting across from us, and Jack was pulling a Thomas Edison and inventing all kinds of strange movements behind the couch. My own brother Andrew was waving his hands in all sorts of directions, as if he were hailing bullet-cabs flying through the air.

Embrace of the drunken imbeciles

Mike, of course, was as red as my ass after I’ve slapped it a few times with a ketchup-stained 1992 Toyota Corolla.

Then suddenly, the table that had been holding all of our drinks completely smashed into a million pieces…completely untouched. It was an incredible scene, and if we had all been sober we might have paused to consider what might have caused a huge glass table to disintegrate like that. Of course, that would be too much to ask, and we grooved away into the night and onto Guandi.

It wasn’t until the next day, a good 23 hours later when Eddy remarked “wasn’t it crazy how that table just got destroyed last night” that I remember it even happening. Subsequently consumed by the renewed visuals for the next three days, I’ve rationalized the causes and narrowed them down to two scientifically reasonable explanations for how a table can be smashed the way it was.

1) Pegasus is haunted

2) The sheer intensity and power of our combined dancing created a force of such magnitude that, a la Michael Jackson in Moonwalker, it became concentrated and destroyed the nearest shatterable object. Somehow, probably during Lil Jon’s exhortations on sweat dripping from balls, we had tapped into a mystical musical essence, and for the briefest of moments treaded water that only the King of Pop had dipped in before.

Damn, we’re good

Jack, Wilkie, and me trying to recover outside the club