Prologue
A, who had been dozing off while sitting in a convenience store chair, jerked awake at the sound of his phone ringing. It was Han from Hwangje Room Salon. Han informed him of the customer’s destination in his usual friendly and casual tone.
A left the convenience store and rushed to the room salon in one breath. It was close enough to reach in a heartbeat, but customers hated waiting, so he hurried almost pathologically.
“Drink this.”
Han held out a vitamin drink toward A, who had arrived out of breath.
“It’s okay.”
He waved it off, but Han didn’t pull back his hand until A accepted the drink. Having no choice, he took the bottle and said, “Thank you,” and only then did Han smile.
“Hyung, you’re really strange. Everyone else is happy to accept things when offered, so why do you always refuse? Are you worried I put something weird in it?”
His tone was somewhere between a scolding and whining, but his face was all smiles.
“It’s not that…”
As he tried to make excuses, Han said, “I’m just kidding.”
A awkwardly put what he’d received into his jumper pocket.
Shortly after, a man who appeared to be in his fifties, thoroughly drunk, came up from the basement with two women. Han quickly approached and put the man’s arm over his right shoulder. As if on cue, a foreign car pulled up in front of the room salon. A young man dressed in the same waiter outfit as Han got out of the car. It was Kim.
Kim handed A the car keys, then helped Han get the drunk customer into the back seat. Only one of the hostesses who had followed them out got into the back seat.
The middle-aged man, barely able to control his own body, struggled to touch the woman however he could. The woman made nasal sounds and didn’t reject the man’s advances.
“Ahjussi, let’s go.”
The moment the order was given, A started the car.
Sticky moans and lewd talk could be heard from the back seat, but neither of them paid any attention to A’s existence. As always, A played the role of a ghost.
After helping the woman bring the customer all the way to the motel room bed and coming back down, it was already 3 AM.
Standing with his back to the motel located in the entertainment district, A caught his breath.
His whole body ached from that brief exertion. He massaged his right shoulder as he walked toward Nonhyeon-dong.
This was A’s second year working as a substitute driver. He worked autonomously from 7 PM every evening until there were no more customers, but only three days a week—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—he became the exclusive driver for Hwangje Room Salon from midnight to 5 AM. He had gotten the exclusive driver position three months ago.
It was unexpected good fortune.
After a traffic accident left him unable to do physical labor, the substitute driver work he started was harder than he’d thought. Compared to distribution centers, construction work, or delivery truck loading and unloading, it was less physically demanding, but the mental stress was no joke.
Since 99% of customers using substitute drivers were drunk, all sorts of things happened. Of course, 80% of customers went home quietly, but the remaining 20% tormented people terribly. They had nothing but a single car, yet they threw their weight around so much. Getting yelled at drunkenly was cute compared to cases where customers cursed unreasonably or even got violent, which weren’t uncommon.
Especially when the weather got warmer, they’d nag about smells. They never thought about how bad the food and alcohol smell from their own bodies, the reek of cigarettes and sweat was, but they’d nitpick the poor substitute driver’s body odor and give him hell.
Do you avoid shit because it’s dirty or because it’s scary?
Having no choice, he always carried a cotton t-shirt to change into and shower cologne in his sling bag. Even though the shower cologne was cheap, it smelled pretty good, so he often got asked what perfume he used. At times like that, his shoulders would rise with unwarranted pride.
After experiencing various incidents over two years and becoming not just accustomed but indifferent to substitute driving work, in mid-March, A arrived in 7 minutes and 30 seconds for what should have been a 20-minute distance after a customer’s command—not a request—to come within 5 minutes, and he was drenched in sweat.
Despite his hard work, the customer had already left with another substitute driver. A, panting and wiping his sweat, informed the office of this fact and trudged into a nearby building to change clothes in the bathroom.
The person he met in the bathroom at that time was Han. Han recognized at a glance that A was a substitute driver and asked if he’d be interested in working at his establishment.
He didn’t trust the proposal from this flashy-looking punk he was meeting for the first time, but desperate times called for desperate measures, so he followed him out. Thanks to that, he became an exclusive substitute driver for the room salon.
On his first day of work, when he asked why Han had offered him the job, he got the bizarre answer, “Because you’re similar to me.” No matter how he looked at it, he didn’t seem to resemble even the dirt under Han’s fingernails, but he just nodded vaguely.
He signed an exclusive contract with a base salary of 300,000 won plus separate substitute driving fees.
The work was simple. As soon as he arrived for work, he drove the old van wrapped with the room salon’s name and brought the hostesses who came to work somewhat late to the establishment. Besides that, he helped with the commute of the hostesses, waiters, and including the madam and manager, and occasionally ran errands here and there.
Except for the kitchen auntie, all the other employees lived near the establishment, so the travel distance wasn’t far, and even for errands, it was convenient since they only went about 30 minutes away.
The exclusive driver role, which could be called the main source of income from the exclusive contract, wasn’t much different from what a substitute driver does. The difference was that all the destinations were motels.
He just had to take the men who wanted a second round among the customers who visited Hwangje Room Salon and the establishment’s hostesses to motels. Only at these times did he drive the customers’ cars, and transportation back wasn’t provided. He didn’t particularly need a car anyway. The place where he took them was a motel district 10 minutes away, but 10 minutes was just an expression—it was definitely a distance that could be walked round trip.
A’s role wasn’t just responsible for the customers’ transportation. Since most were in a state of heavy intoxication, he had to safely escort the customer from the vehicle to the motel room. During that short time going to the motel, there were few customers who went quietly with good manners, but since he only had to endure for 10 minutes, honestly it was a piece of cake.
The substitute fee he received for carrying customers to the motel bed like that was 15,000 won. It was the cost for barely 10 minutes of driving, and there was no establishment fee—meaning no commission was taken—so the conditions were quite good. A, who had been worrying a lot because his substitute driving income had decreased significantly at the time, was able to breathe a sigh of relief thanks to this. That had already been three months ago.
Han, who had proposed the exclusive driver position, only started asking A various questions after entering his second month of this work. Even though A wasn’t the only substitute driver who had passed through the room salon, he interrogated him thoroughly as if he had just learned about the existence of substitute drivers for the first time.
The reason was obvious. Because substitute drivers as young as A were rare.
Everyone did that. Not just Han, but substitute driving customers also always asked how such a young person came to do this work.
At first it was awkward to talk about, but now he’d learned the knack of answering appropriately. He lied that he was a university student currently on leave, and that he was working to earn tuition and living expenses because his family’s financial situation was difficult.
The lie worked well since most people saw A as three or four years younger than his actual age. While there were good adults who told him to hang in there or gave him tips, there were also many who spoke down to him as a matter of course and looked down on him by comparing him to their own children.
A answered Han’s questions mostly honestly. The common story of how his older brother was scammed by a business partner while running a business and incurred a huge debt, and how he and his family ended up sharing that responsibility together. How he drifted between construction work and distribution centers, then luckily jumped into delivery work during COVID and made some money, but just one year later nearly died from being seriously injured in a traffic accident. The fact that the perpetrator happened to be a worthless bastard with neither the means nor the will to pay settlement money, so he ended up shouldering the medical bills and motorcycle rental costs entirely. And how, while hospitalized, he started substitute driver work through the introduction of a substitute driver ahjussi who was in the same hospital room—he spilled it all out in detail.
On the other hand, Han didn’t say a single word about himself. A, who was too busy with his own survival to be interested in others, didn’t bother to ask.
Han, like typical room salon employees, did customer solicitation and service, serving and carrying drunks, and when business ended, he rode in the van A drove to his lodging. In the villa with 4 rooms and 2 bathrooms lived the madam, two hostesses, and Han together.
After seeing them off to their lodging like that, A’s day also ended.
He took the bus home at dawn when others were going to work. He returned to his half-pyeong gosiwon an hour away from Nonhyeon-dong, washed up, and lay down.
He slept exactly 4 hours, then got up and this time headed to a frozen distribution center in Gyeonggi-do. It was a position he got as a substitute after a hyung he’d met while doing substitute driving hurt his back. It was work dismantling and repackaging pollock imported from China. Unlike delivery truck loading and unloading, it didn’t require much physical strength, and the hourly wage wasn’t bad considering the short six-hour work shift.
His body still wasn’t in good shape, but he could do that much work. Of course, just because he could do it didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. After finishing work, his right arm hurt as if it would fall off, so he had to take more painkillers than usual.
Regular painkillers didn’t work, so he took narcotic painkillers, and he’d started taking tranquilizers to suppress the anxiety and panic disorder that developed because of his brother, but reluctantly quit them because of driving.
Why do I have to do work like this? He flew into a rage a dozen times a day, but there was no other way. He could only endure.
Working nearly 18 to 20 hours a day while taking painkillers like that, the money he earned was around 4.5 million won. About 500,000 won had been added in the past three months since being hired as an exclusive driver, so it wasn’t such a small amount. However, all that money was used to pay off loans, interest, and private loans.
Besides that, the substitute driver application license fees, management fees, commissions, insurance premiums, as well as food costs, transportation costs, and gosiwon rent were barely covered with yet another debt.
Naturally, his food, clothing, and shelter were poor. He couldn’t even dream of new clothes, and there were many days when he made do with the rice and kimchi provided by the gosiwon. His only luxury was buying eggs and seaweed, which says it all.
No matter how energetic a man in his twenties might be, there was no way to withstand the daily repetition of grueling labor. Day by day, his skin became dull and dark circles settled under his eyes. A, who used to always be asked if he was a university student, recently even started hearing that he looked older than his actual age.
His harsh life nibbled away at A’s youth and life bit by bit.
A, as on any other day, showered in the gosiwon’s communal shower room and fell asleep in his half-pyeong room.
While dreaming of the completely ordinary days of the past.
While lamenting his circumstances, just like that.
