We’d each knocked back a bottle of soju at the practice room, and Bongguk and I were trying to figure out what to do — decided to head out to Hongdae and see if anything was going on.
We were going to walk, but this guy started the car.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Let’s take the car!”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“It’s fine, it’s five minutes away, what’s gonna happen?”
He turned left down an alley to park on the main street, and there was a cop waiting.
The second I thought, oh, we’re screwed — he floors it.
“Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?!”
“I’m screwed, I’m on a license suspension right now — got caught coming back from the ski slopes last week. If they catch me now, I’m done!!!”
He sprinted flat-out for about 300 meters, then turned right toward Hapjeong station, left, left, right — I looked back.
No one there.
“Oh man, that was close”
— right as he let out a sigh of relief, a police car pulled up behind us.
A five-minute chase followed.
I was just riding shotgun, a bit player in this whole action scene, but my heart was pounding harder than the lead’s.
The road kept narrowing and my field of view shrank down to a pinhole.
As we hit the end of the alley, Bongguk said:
“Hyung. We’re not gonna make it, are we?”
Bongguk got taken in, and showed up at the practice room the next day.
Luckily they took the circumstances into account — a 910,000 won fine, license revoked, and released with a warning.
Normally you’d get an on-the-spot summary judgment as caught-in-the-act, but he got lucky and ran into a decent cop.
Having seen the potential in
“We Are the Punx,”
Bongguk talked some board-clothing company’s president into it and put together
“Save Your Mind — For the Extreme Riders,”
a tribute album for skateboard and snowboard fans.
Nine skate-punk bands, two tracks each, eighteen tracks total — and without me even knowing, a remastered version got re-released in 2024.
Half Brothers had two tracks on it too, of course.
The money from this finally got Bongguk out of homelessness.
It only lasted a few months, but he had a place of his own, and for the first time in his life I got to mooch actual meat off him. lol
Bongguk, who was supposed to show up for practice, went missing.
No contact for three weeks.
Had he died somewhere?
I went by his place, called everyone I knew who might know him — dead silence, nothing.
One Sunday afternoon a call came in to the practice room.
“Hello?”
“Do you know a Jeon Bongguk?”
“Uh, yeah — who’s this?”
“Go to the Yeongdeungpo Detention Center.”
The line went dead.
I went to the detention center.
He was there.
Head shaved down to nothing, wearing prison-issue rubber shoes, he walked into the visiting booth.
I don’t know why the tears came so fast —
“you son of a bitch”
came out of me before anything else did.
Turns out he’d been stalling on paying that 910,000 won fine, and one day he got caught in a random ID check at a crosswalk and arrested on the spot.
Well done.
Really well done.
At the detention center, they knock 30,000 won off the fine per day — but you have to fold paper bags for it.
910,000 won meant a three-month sentence.
He’d been in for three weeks, and I paid 600,000–700,000 won to get him out.
Goddamn it, the things I end up doing because of this guy.