Whirl

“Oh yeah, we’d snort gasoline, paint thinner, any kind of get high”

At this moment I knew I was in over my head.

We were in Jacob’s crappy little apartment, in a crappy little subdivision, about a three miles from the base.

Jacob, (the guy talking), Sam and I were snorting speed. Well at least they were. I was watching and peppering them with questions.

I’d arrived in the PI about five months ago. By now it was all old hat, my tuition was complete.

Prior to reaching my teens I’d set an absolute, dogmatic rule with regard to drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol–I would never use them. My thinking did not stem from any sort of moral code, instead it came from fear. As a result of this self imposed policy, most of my adolescence was dedicated to finding a middle ground. One where I could keep the friends I had and yet not take on their expanding habits. That worked well until I left home.

When I arrived in Denver for tech school, I found myself isolated. The straight kids were the people whom I seemed to have the least in common. Many of them loved, even craved, power and authority. Their thinking was even more rigid than mine, their sense of humor was crippled, and half of them were jesus freaks.

So after 2 years of self-inflicted solitude, I’d decided to use this new assignment as a chance to re-set my lifestyle; to taste a few forbidden fruits.

At this moment I wasn’t so sure I’d made the right call.

Another friend arrived and we left for the bars. We were a long way from Fields Avenue, and there were no jeepneys around, so we started walking.

The weather was nice that night, not too hot (meaning under 90 degrees) and dry, very dry. It was nearing dusk. The road wound through some pretty bare stretches; places with no street lights; areas where the land was too low and hilly to build. But people lived here, uninvited.

Of the road, down in the gulley’s, you could see candles burning through cracks in the thin walls of several little shacks. These were fairly nice, as squatter’s shacks go. In Manila I’d seen families living under cardboard and garbage bags. These shacks were solid, made of plywood and tin.

The mothers were putting their children to bed. The coal fires, where they had cooked their dinner, were dying off. The men were sitting around them, smoking cigarettes and silently watching us pass.

I could feel their dark eyes on me. I wondered what it must be like to lay on the ground late at night, in a little tin shack with your children on one side of you and your wife on the other. Did every car or motorcycle passing on the road above remind you of what you could not give them? How do you keep them clean and safe? How do you keep them dry and warm when the rains come? How do you give them comfort when they are sick?

A jeepney passed and Sam flagged it down. I was glad to scurry off.

“Why?” I thought, “why did I feel anxious back there.”

I didn’t fear for my safety–I’d walked that road many times in the dark of night—so where did this uneasiness come from?

A few bumpy minutes later we disgorged ourselves from the jeepney in front of the main gate. Children swarmed us begging for money and offering to help us find entertainment for the evening.

In suburban America, kids this age would be in bed. Safe and content in their cartooned underwear, surrounded by plastic accessories. But these boys were on the streets, working hard to scrape up a few coins. Most of them were the children of bar girls, who were also working right now. It didn’t strike me as ironic that I may be chatting up their mother in just a few minutes. This was normalcy in Angeles City.

The four of us wandered into a bar we liked. The place was named Oliver’s at the time, but bar names in Angeles changed from month to month. It was a small dive. Maybe 25 feet wide and 40 deep. The bar ran lengthwise along the room. It looked much like any American bar might have looked in 1980. Dingy and smoke filled. There was a pool table in the back and a few tables towards the front of the place.

We were the only customers. We sat down at the bar and ordered San Miguel. At the time, this was the only brand of beer you could get in the PI. That would change.

As my friends talked, I sat back, nursed my beer, and took in the view. For some reason, all of the bar girls were lined up on the other side. I counted 18 young women. Eighteen of them to four of us; those were pretty good odds.

“Is this were the children in the gulley shacks will end up?” I thought. “Stuck on the wrong side of a ratio, in a dive best known as a good place to buy dope?”

I realized were my earlier discomfort came from.

A few hours ago, I’d walked into a pharmacy, parted with three dollars, and walked out with a few hits of Ionamin. A legal transaction in the eyes of the Philippine government (not the U.S. Air Force) conducted for purely recreational means. By American standards, I was not well off. Yet my disposable income was enough to keep a couple of Filipino families healthy and educated. I could not plead ignorance to that. I witnessed it every day.

Looking back tonight it would be wonderful if I could tell you that this moment of realization led to a major change in my behavior. But that’s not what happened. Instead I chose to turn back to the bar and order another beer. I chose short term pleasure over long term effect.

It’s easy enough to say this was an individual choice and it was. But despite our cherished individuality, our single choices mold the values held to by our society.

Uncle Sam was the most powerful nation on earth in 1980, maybe we still are today. We could have done so much with what we had. But the choices our nation made in that decade were not much different than the small moral choice I made that evening.

We chose to pour several hundred million dollars a year into the pockets of Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies. All so we could hold to a pair of military bases we really didn’t need. So our young airmen could strut their stuff on dusty streets, never bothering to look beneath their heels.

All so we could shoot the heady drug of imperialism into our leathered veins.

Any kind of get high.

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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.