She was but a girl—maybe not in body, but certainly in heart and spirit. Her name was Cora and she’d only been in Angeles a few weeks. She said she was 16 (the age of consent in the Philippines), but I sensed a little younger. She still carried the innocence of the province with her: astonished eyes, bashful smile and a strong sense of optimism. In every respect she was the classic old world definition of virginal: very young, very pretty, very catholic, and probably fertile enough to conceive from a bed stain.
Doc’s was a new bar just outside the main gate. I’d been hanging around mainly because of the hamburgers. It was hard to get a good hamburger in the PI and somehow, Doc (and American expat) had managed to do the trick. Cora would serve me hamburgers and beer on quiet Saturday afternoons and we’d talk. I enjoyed her company. It was good to talk with a girl without falling into the usual bargirl script. Though she was young, she was smart, plus (this is probably the part I liked best) she seemed to be enthralled with anything I had to say.
Maybe she saw me as a safe alternative to the other GI’s (especially the Marines)—quiet and non-threatening. I’d been kind to her and clearly liked her. But who knows the psychology at work in the brain of a 16 year old girl? In suburban America, she might have been pining away for some high school senior or college freshman. Mom and dad would have been there, standing watch at the gates with both a sense of responsibility and the law to protect them.
But Cora was enamored with a 22 year old airman with a growing substance abuse problem and a tendency towards hedonistic pursuits. She was totally vulnerable and headed for harm’s way. Her mom was certainly nowhere to be seen, and it’s even possible that dad had sold her into this life in the first place (it’s also just as likely that she ran away). The law here did not serve to protect young girls, it was simply Marcos‘ instrument of revenue.
Here in the Philippines, fifteen year old bar girls were not planning trips to the malls. They were working seven days a week to pay off a debt designed to drive them in one direction. So for Cora, her virginity was a growing financial liability. Every day she remained behind the bar, she built more debt to the owner—all to allegedly cover her room and board. She was trapped.
I knew that, but she didn’t. Cora believed she could earn her way out of the bar—maybe all the way to the USA–by crossing to the other side of it. She believed in a fairy tale (the ever popular, marital rescue scenario) and in it, I was Prince Charming.
But at that moment, in the light of a fading afternoon, I couldn’t see any of this. I was just enjoying her company.
She asked me to take her to a movie. A matinee of course because she was not allowed to leave the bar at night. She bugged me about this for several weeks before I agreed. So on the appointed day, at the appointed time, I picked her up and took her to the only theater in town. Ironically, the movie was The Ten Commandments (why they were showing this movie in 1982, I’ll never know). So for the next three hours the atheist and the virgin watched Charlton Hesston, Cecil B. DeMille, and God do very manly things.
It was close to four when we left the theater. She had to be back at the bar by six and I had food on the brain. “I’m hungry” I said, “were would you like to go?”, thinking she would name a restaurant.
But she didn’t. She looked at me, and in the most hesitant of voices, her lips actually shaking and her eyes down said, “to your house?”
This was my moment of realization. Now I understood what she really wanted. A better, more thoughtful man might have taken her to a quiet restaurant and talked to her. A genuine bastard might have taken her to his bed. I was neither, I hailed a tricycle and dropped her straight back at the bar with hardly a word.
I didn’t return to Doc’s for a couple of weeks. Nature had taken its course. Another young GI (probably several by that juncture) had interceded where I had failed. The resultant transformation was startling. Little Cora had become a whore.
She and a friend greeted me with derision and peppered me with insults to my manhood. I had, after all, rejected her advances—and just look what I had missed out on! She was a woman now! She didn’t need me!
Cora stood on my side of the bar, smoked cigarette after cigarette, and spoke to me in a gravelly voice. She yelled out crude comments in crude english to her fellow bar girls. Eventually, she drifted off to wrap herself around the body of another wiry airman. Leaving me in peace.
Everything I saw convinced me I had done the right thing. Let some other guy live with the guilt—I had a clear conscious.
It was a bullshit rationalization. My conscious was a lot more muddied than the asshole who had actually done the deed. And behind him there would have been a hundred more, lining up for the privilege, with the full support and backing of the United States Government. It felt good to tell myself that I was the noble one in all of this. I said no when others guys couldn’t. This moral superiority bullshit was just a way of covering my guilt for how I treated her.
For years after, I kept telling myself that to survive in the Philippines I had to grow a skin. I let myself think that though I could see the misery, I could not fix it; not with a few coins in a childs hand, or by trying to talk one young girl into going home. And I also rationalized away the damage I was doing as a willing consumer of the corruption and smut.
We airmen were living on an economic island of suffering—fueled by our paychecks, our hormones, our addictions, and our arrogance.
Just a few miles away from that base you would have found a set of values that are were pretty much the same as our own. For Cora, losing her virginity was the ticket to a short life of dancing, drugs, and disease.
I believe she lived, got out, made it to America and is now wrapped in peace, respect, dignity, and compassion. I have to believe that, it’s how I live with myself.
© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn, all rights reserved.
