Quotes of the Day

My father had one heart attack that I knew of, and one that I didn't. The latter I didn't hear about until long after he died. But it took place in the crepuscular, tobacco-steeped basement of mirrors, drapes and topless girls that was Hong Kong's Bottoms Up bar in its sybaritic heyday. "We just thought he was messing around," says Velvet, one of the girls who worked there virtually since its opening in March 1971. "So I drew a chalk line around him for fun. And then someone was going, no, no, he really is having a heart attack." She lets out one of her lovely, infectious guffaws.

On account of my father—a wonderful man who, let it be known, could finish a bottle of F.O.V. cognac in 20 minutes—my family was well known in Bottoms Up. The old man used the place during his epic binges in Kowloon, the honky-tonk quarter across the harbor from Hong Kong island. One of my brothers or I would be dispatched to find him after the first 48 or 72 hours, and had to cajole him back up the stairs and into a cab home. Sometimes my mother—a woman of quite queenly hauteur—would stride in there to look for him herself, which is how she came to know Velvet. Thirty years later, the two of them can laugh about it. My mother now lives in Sydney, but when she last holidayed in Hong Kong she dropped by the bar, importing something of the atmosphere of a state visit. The girls and barkeeps were craning their necks to get a glimpse of her as she sat in the back with Velvet, sipping Pink Ladies, joking about and drinking to my father like two old friends at a wake.

There aren't many topless bars with that sense of family, but Bottoms Up was always one. It has long traded on its status as an iconic Asian hangout, name-checked by many a yellowing Fodor's and newspaper feature, and name-dropped by many a foreign correspondent and celeb. It has played up its fleeting, 60-second appearance in the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun to the point of embarrassment. But the real sell was always its conviviality. The girls there ask about your girlfriend or your children, and wow and gush over the photos. They'll pass on messages from whichever friend of yours was drinking in there the night before. They'll consecrate the memory of your dead in sorrow and song. And always, around the bar, there'll be some fast-fading guy, all liver spots and dark bags, who fought the communists with your father in '67 or got mashed with him in '78. They don't just know your name there. They know your genetic code.

I first started going to Bottoms Up when I was about 15, because its then owner and mama-san, Pat Sephton, used to give me the cab fare home. To the generation of international school kids of that time, the bar was something of a drop-in center. We would stumble down the stairs, hiccuping strawberry wine after a night of drinking in the parks, or belching Bacardi cokes after many hours in the Stoned Crow. Pat would coo and cluck and then call our homes to say that we were safe and on our way, for she appeared to know everyone's parents. And after we'd ogled some girls in the main room, she'd give us cups of black tea to sober us up, hand us HK$20 notes and see us all to purring taxis with a "Give my love to mom" or "Behave yourself at school tomorrow."

It was a wonder we ever went to school at all, for the streets of Kowloon belonged to us. They were rotten and they were sinful. They were a sleepless hell of old whores and old drunks. But they were also the closest thing to paradise that the mind of any 15-year-old boy is capable of conceiving. The incandescent neon, the tooth-picking touts, the tattooed hard men loitering outside low-rent doorways, the Nepalese hash dealers in the sodden alleys—we wouldn't have traded a month in Kowloon for an entire upbringing in Manhattan or Knightsbridge. With no one ever being asked for proof of age, and plenty of spending money from cashed-up expatriate dads, we had the keys to every bar in the faubourg. Some nights, it would be tequilas and jazz funk at Rick's Cafe. Other nights, we'd pile into Red Lips to gawp at the 60-year-old tarts. Sometimes we'd visit the "Red Rat." Its real name was the Red Lion but nobody ever called it that and, now that I think about it, it was something to see during the simmering mayhem of a Kowloon night. Spectacular, floor-to-ceiling bas-reliefs of female pudenda, painted a lurid purple, graced the walls. The mama-san was an aged amputee who moved around the bar on her stumps, swatting at cockroaches and rodents (hence the bar's nickname) with a rolled-up newspaper. In the corner stood a jukebox that had not been serviced since the days of Vietnam War R. and R., its song lists (the Doors, Kansas, Dr. Hook) a kind of Who's Who of dad-rock. Guys who looked like they worked for the CID, or the CIA, or a cocaine cartel, would be lining the bar, beating time with great, foaming pots of beer. And one of the bar girls would always be leaning through the thick smoke of Rothmans and cheap Manila cigars to shout to me: "If you were my son, I'd kill you. What the hell are you doing here when you should be doing your homework?" (A question whose moral force was invariably dissipated by its follow-up: "You want another drink?")

Hong Kong island seemed anemic to us. Then, as now, it was all banks and boutiques. But Kowloon, with its restless scams, massage parlors and yammering streets, had all the seething funk of a drinking quarter in a badass Asian port. And at the end of a night of drinking, it had Bottoms Up and Pat Sephton's cool hand on your brow. It was always thus. In more than 30 years, Bottoms Up had only one proper refit (during which an extra bar was added). When you grow up in a city as ephemeral and as ahistorical as Hong Kong, that kind of constancy is manna for the soul. Walk into Bottoms Up, and someone has a beer waiting, Velvet's lining up the tunes and—by God—my father's apparition is drinking brandy at the bar, where all is forever 1982.

Or was. Because those famous hexagonal bars and thick drapes and wall mirrors have been atomized now. Forced out by escalating rents and an acrimonious landlord, Bottoms Up quit its premises this April and moved to the cross-harbor district of Wanchai, where it has been relaunched as a sports bar, with wide-screen TVs and Chilean wines by the glass; they recreated just one of the original bars, in a solitary back room. When I first heard that this was to happen—about a month before the demolition crew came—it sent me into an existentialist crisis. I can no more walk past the boarded-up old site than I can confront a desecrated family vault.

Bottoms Up was the last repository of my times, and it took them with it. All that's left on those streets in Kowloon today is the grim efficiency of contemporary retail: an HMV, a McDonald's, a Starbucks. "At least we'll always be able to see the old place on film, Velvet," I said one night, referring to my DVD of The Man with the Golden Gun. Velvet merely tutted and when I asked why, she finally drew breath and said: "That isn't Bottoms Up that you're seeing. They came to film the outside of the bar, Roger Moore stuck his head in, but then they went back to London and recreated the interior in a studio." Her admission was well meant, but it was like hearing a shabby truth about a dead relative. I feel cheated and don't know who to blame. Without even the movie to remember the bar by, these words, I imagine, are the only tombstone that my own, my native paradise will ever have.

• Liam Fitzpatrick
• We were young once—and the girls were topless