5
5. Rock and Roll Becomes a Bird Without Feet
2. 1989, An Era of Turmoil (2)
“When the hell am I going to wake up?”
Fine, I get it. A dream filled with old memories is nice and all. But what kind of dream makes me do construction work?
After spending the day carrying bricks up and down temporary wooden stairs with no railings, my whole body aches.
Thankfully, I had rummaged through the container shelter and put on whatever clothes I could find. If I hadn't, I would have frozen to death.
I earned fifteen thousand won for working all day.
The moment I stopped by the office and received my daily wage, I almost lost my mind.
Then I remembered that this was 1989 and barely managed not to curse.
At least I had a permanent position, so they weren't taking a commission for finding me work. Otherwise, I would have earned even less.
Changhyun stood there blankly, fifteen thousand won in his hand, watching the laborers head back to their respective homes.
After everyone disappeared from his view, he even shouted at the sky, telling it to wake him up already, but the sky remained silent and the weather stayed cold.
In the end, regardless of what was happening, he still had to return home.
Even getting back wasn't easy. He had to rely entirely on his memories to figure out where he had lived around this time, and the only thing he could remember was that it had been somewhere near Sindang Jungang Market.
He couldn't remember the subway routes, so he went to the station and found that fortunately, he could take Line 4 from the terminal at Sanggye to Chang-dong, transfer to Line 1, and then transfer to Line 2 at Wangsimni to reach Sindang Station.
Fortunately, the moment he arrived at Sindang Station, his memories gradually returned.
The wholesale kitchenware market he used to see after leaving the subway station. The moment he spotted the shops along the alley, his memories came rushing back.
Go farther in with the shops on the left, then turn left at the second alley. Go two more blocks down the narrow alley and turn right. Follow the alley, barely wide enough for one person, and there would be a two-story house with concrete steps.
Around this time, right after coming to Seoul, he had settled into a single room behind Sindang Jungang Market. This was before words like studio apartment existed. If there was only one room, it was simply called a single room.
When you opened the door, there was a kitchen where it was difficult to tell whether you were indoors or outdoors. After passing through it, you finally reached the room where you took off your shoes before entering.
There was nothing but a single blanket.
One guitar and an amplifier were carefully placed on a stand, while a Walkman and cassette tapes were scattered across the floor.
“I remember this room too.”
He had probably lived here for about two years. The landlord's family lived upstairs, and they were good people. Since he lived alone, they often shared side dishes with him, and during holidays, they would always leave homemade pancakes outside his door.
Perhaps because the boiler wasn't running, the room was cold. Changhyun rubbed his sock-covered feet against the floor before returning to the kitchen to look for the boiler, only to slap his forehead.
“Ah, right. I used coal briquettes.”
How many briquettes were left?
The briquette storage area was outside the house.
The landlord's family had a briquette storage area, and Changhyun's briquettes were simply stacked beside it on the ground.
There were still four left. He took out two and lit them with practiced ease. Kids these days probably wouldn't know how to light a coal briquette if asked, but for someone who had lived through this era, it wasn't difficult.
He carried the briquette that had been reduced to white ash outside, placed it near the flower bed, crushed it with his foot, scattered the ashes, then returned with a fresh briquette.
It would still take a while for the room to warm up.
Wrapped tightly in his blanket and trembling, Changhyun tried to figure out what was going on, but he couldn't make sense of it at all.
“What kind of dream makes me do construction work and freeze like this?”
Just when it had reached the point where he could reasonably begin to question reality, the crudely painted yellowish-brown sliding door rattled open, and a familiar voice rang out.
“The reason I come here so often is because I have this expectation that something good will happen whenever I come here. Oh dear, oh dear! That day, I almost froze to death!”
What was that line?
He remembered it.
Ah, it was a catchphrase from a program called The Lonely Hunter that Choi Yang-rak used to do.
Changhyun pulled the blanket down just enough to reveal his head and smiled happily at the man in the leather jacket entering while spouting that childish catchphrase.
“Seonggyu.”
His name was Park Seonggyu. He was the guitarist in the band.
He was extremely skinny, and his nickname was Skeleton. He claimed that guitarists had to be thin for leather clothes to look good, so he deliberately kept himself skinny, but the truth was that this guy simply couldn't gain weight even if he ate three packs of ramen every day.
Seonggyu bent down and touched the floor.
“Ah, you mean that?”
“……”
That was another catchphrase from Nero 25.
Changhyun had momentarily forgotten about it. This guy was addicted to comedy programs. Then again, those were the days when the entire country was crazy about comedy programs.
Seonggyu pulled the blanket over, spread it on the floor, and lay down.
“Yeongsuk! Did you do your homework?”
He rolled around on the floor while spouting another catchphrase created by Seo Se-won. It had annoyed Changhyun back then, but after nearly forty years, seeing this guy again made him feel happy before anything else.
“I just got back from work.”
“Oh, you must be tired.”
“Yeah, I'm tired.”
“Want some ramen?”
“Are you going to cook it?”
“Of course. I can't make the landlord run errands for ramen too.”
Seonggyu suddenly got up and headed toward the kitchen, but then stopped, grabbed the doorknob, and looked at Changhyun.
Changhyun stared back at him.
“Why?”
“This is strange.”
“What is?”
“You just said a few things to me, right?”
“Why?”
Seonggyu counted on his fingers before raising his head.
“More than five sentences.”
“So what?”
“The great Baek Changhyun talked for more than five sentences without swearing even once?”
“……”
Right. He had been like that back then.
Every other word had been a curse.
Just wait until you get older. Once you're old, you realize how pathetic you look when you swear all the time.
“I don't swear anymore.”
“Why?”
“Just because.”
“Just because?”
“Yeah. It makes me look pathetic.”
Seonggyu looked down at Changhyun strangely, shook his head, and walked out.
“Good for you, really!”
It was another catchphrase from Love's Chain, created by Go Doo-shim. Watching Seonggyu leave to cook ramen while continuing his festival of catchphrases, Changhyun smiled faintly.
“Yeah. Around this time, my room was the band's hangout.”
He lived without ever locking the door, so even while he was at work, the band members would drop by to eat ramen or drink. That was why Seonggyu had entered without hesitation.
The room Seonggyu had left behind was filled with the strong scent of the father's aftershave he always used.
Changhyun sniffed the air and tilted his head.
“Can you actually smell things in dreams?”
Something was definitely strange.
Could this really be happening?
Could this not be a dream?
Had he actually returned to his younger days?
Why?
In novels and comics, people regressed after being hit by a truck or throwing themselves in front of an accident to save a child playing ball beside a road.
But he had simply eaten ramen, fallen asleep, and regressed?
Why? What had he done to deserve it?
Changhyun pulled the blanket over his head, leaving only his eyes exposed as they darted around the room. Then he noticed the guitar standing in the corner.
It looked as though he had carefully placed his most expensive treasure there, but in reality, it was the cheap guitar he had bought with his own money for the first time.
It didn't even have a brand. It was some cheaply made Korean guitar with a random name slapped onto it, but he'd fallen in love with its V-shaped body and bought it purely because of its appearance.
The sound had been terrible too.
He eventually bought a good guitar from the 1987 model line, but that was much later, and he bought it secondhand.
He had set the strings so low that they kept touching the pickups while he played, producing a sound like an old woman's scream.
The pickup selector only moved to the left, and the strap pin constantly came loose, so he had to tighten it frequently.
Still, that guitar had taken him onto a stage.
At first, he had looked for work at a stand-up bar, but he couldn't find any stand-up bar looking for a metal band. In the end, he used the money he had earned working to rent a warehouse and put on performances there.
His first performance had been held with twenty acquaintances sitting in the audience, but it had been an incredibly exciting experience.
There was a calendar hanging on the wall.
January 1989.
He didn't know the exact date.
I was discharged from the military in October 1988, so I'd been in Seoul for exactly two months after coming here following my discharge.
The current military service period was eighteen months. People complained even about that being too long, but during his time, it had been a whopping thirty months.
He had enlisted in 1985 and was discharged in the autumn of 1988, after which he came to Seoul.
At the time, a private's monthly salary was 3,500 won, while a sergeant's was 4,600 won. Since he had barely spent any money until his discharge, he had come out into society with roughly 100,000 won, which was a considerable amount of money.
He remembered that cigarettes cost 500 won in 1989. So 100,000 won had been quite a lot.
The average worker's salary at the time was 540,000 won, but just like today, the average worker's salary was always higher than his own.
By modern standards, that 100,000 won was worth close to 700,000 won.
A bus ride cost 140 won, ramen cost 100 won, and soju was around 300 won. And as he'd seen earlier, the subway only went as far as Line 4.
In other words, he had returned to an era when not only did he have no cell phone, he didn't even have a pager.
“Wow. This is insane.”
No, it couldn't be.
When he went to sleep tonight and woke up again, he'd be back in his shabby rented room in Hwanghak-dong.
There was no way this could be real.
It wasn't as though he were in the lyrics of a song by Im Jeong-hee.
The door suddenly flew open, and Seonggyu rushed inside.
“Trivet! Trivet!”
“……”
Since his memories were hazy, Changhyun first looked around the room.
A magazine called Monthly Popsong was lying on the floor.
“Here.”
He quickly grabbed the magazine and placed it in the middle of the floor. Seonggyu, looking as though he was about to die from the heat, put down the pot and immediately grabbed his ear.
“Oh, fuck, it's fucking hot. Wait, I'll get some kimchi.”
Seonggyu went back into the kitchen and returned with kimchi.
That was what the landlady had given him the previous month, which was why it was still sitting inside a large kimchi container.
Seonggyu opened the lid, pulled out a large cabbage leaf, tore it into pieces with his hands, put the kimchi into the ramen pot, and stirred it vigorously with chopsticks.
“Finished!”
“……”
Right. This guy had always eaten it like this.
Come to think of it, because he always felt bad about getting free ramen, he would always bring a couple of bottles of soju.
Judging from the way Seonggyu was subtly reaching into his clothes, it seemed he had done the same today.
“Welcome the god of soju!”
“Haha, you crazy bastard.”
“Oh, His Highness Baek Changhyun has finally returned. You're swearing again. Here, take this.”
“Sure.”
Having a drink with an old friend after so long made Changhyun deeply nostalgic.
How wonderful would it be if all of this were real?
Trying desperately to hold back the tears welling up in his eyes, he barely ate any ramen and simply kept drinking his soju.
Seonggyu asked,
“Aren't you hungry?”
“Yeah. I must have eaten too much at the workers' cafeteria for lunch.”
“Then I'll eat it all.”
“Go ahead. I'll drink the soju instead.”
“I cannot permit that, my friend.”
“Haha.”
One glass, then another.
Before he knew it, his face had turned red.
Just then, another guy suddenly threw open the door and shouted.
“You bastards! You're eating without me!”
It was Yongjun.
Jo Yongjun.
He was the band's drummer.
This guy was tall but skinny too.
Back then, Changhyun had possessed nothing but pride and confidence in his looks, so he insisted that anyone doing rock had to look this good.
That was why he had formed the team with guys like these.
Later, Yongjun would work at Nakwon Musical Instrument Arcade before eventually taking over a small shop and becoming a musical instrument dealer.
Yongjun had probably walked for quite a while in the cold weather. He hunched his body and rushed inside before crawling under the blanket.
“Why is the room like this? It's freezing.”
Seonggyu said with his chopsticks between his teeth,
“Changhyun just came in a little while ago. He put in some coal briquettes, so wait a little.”
“Ugh, it's cold.”
“Hey, did you come empty-handed?”
Yongjun rustled around under the blanket before tossing a bag over.
As expected, there were two bottles of soju.
Apparently, soju was the admission ticket to this room.
Yongjun poked his head out from under the blanket and asked,
“What about Jinwook?”
The moment he heard that name, Changhyun's body froze.
All the good memories shattered at once.
Choi Jinwook.
The band's bassist and the final member of their group.
And there was something else.
He was a drug addict.
And he was the person responsible for disbanding the entire band that had once shone so brilliantly in their youth.