Chinese Adventure

The year was nineteen eighty one, I had arrived in the city of, Taipei, Taiwan, two days earlier by cab ride from the harbor of Chi lung. I'd hooked up with a beautiful young Chinese girl by the name of, Sammy, or at least that was what she was going by at the time. An hour earlier, while sitting in a movie theater, we had both dropped a couple of tabs of acid I had scored in Thailand, the week before. We each had a bottle of wine in our long coats. It was winter, so one had to bundle up well to be street urchins in the city.

Speaking of the city of Taipei, at that time, the population was around twelve million. The place was enormous, but what was really interesting, were the tunnels. Beneath the city, there was a complex series of endless tunnels. They led in countless directions and were very confusing. If one were say, tripping on acid and cannonballing slugs of cheap wine, it was very easy to become confused and get lost.

Well, to make a long story into four paragraphs, Sammy and I was just in this particular situation.  To make matters worse, we had just watched the movie, American Werewolf in London. There was this part in the movie that took place in the subway tunnels beneath London. So, both of us were sure that around every corner was going to be a snarling werewolf. For what seemed like hours, we clung to each other like we were blind cripples, creeping through that unknown subterranean world with bizarre and frightening works of art plastered upon every vertical surface in site. Our entire purpose was to try and escape our self inflicted sentence to this freakish hell and return to our warm hotel room and hide under our bed.

Finally, like a light shinning down from heaven, we found what looked like a safe stairway upward, that a werewolf wouldn’t be waiting on the top step to make Chop Suey out of both of us. So, we chugged the rest of our wine, gave each other a rather lingering kiss, and made a dash for freedom. Upon reaching the surface, we found ourselves on an island in the middle of a giant downtown boulevard with six lanes of traffic on each side. We looked into each other’s eyes, smiled, and ran for the sidewalk.

As recalled by G. Jones 2006