A couple of my buddies had moved to Angeles City several years earlier. It was only a two-hour drive inland from Subic so it seemed like a good idea to join them. My only regret was Lily, but there was nothing I could do.
After I moved to the Philippines, and even later, after I’d started my fourth life in Bangkok, I would send Lily cards and presents on special occasions, and sometimes for no reason at all. I still do. But I’ve been smart enough not to send them to Lily directly. Instead, I’ve always mailed them to Maureen’s sister in Temecula. We had always gotten along and I think she was sad to see me go, so I’ve hoped, when the appropriate time comes, she’ll give everything to Lily.
I’ve often wondered how much Lily really remembers about me now. Perhaps I’ll never know.
I settled down in a three-bedroom house on a half-acre of land that had a built-in swimming pool out back. It was only a couple of blocks from where my friend Hal Dogan lived with his Filipina wife, Dolce.
“I think the real reason people like us come here,” Hal once said to me, “is to disappear.”
And he was right. Angeles City was great for that. Like a black hole, pulling you in and hiding you from the rest of the world.
We spent a lot of time after I first got there barbecuing, drinking, playing cards, watching baseball games on satellite TV, and forgetting about pretty much everything else.
For a time, things were fine, mellow and relaxed. But soon mellow and relaxed became stagnant and bored. And after three months, I began looking for something exciting to do.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was back in the early days-my sailor days-when I’d been introduced to the go-go bars of Subic Bay and Angeles. Those days had been wild with sex shows and naked pool parties and beautiful Filipinas willing to do anything you wanted. And if they really liked you, they’d even do it for free. I was young then, and a lot of it was too much for a small-town boy from Arizona to take. But not all of it.
I couldn’t help it. No one could. If you were a heterosexual male with even a faint pulse, you couldn’t resist the FYBs, short for what Hal called fine young babes. All that flesh, right in your face, and offers coming at you from every direction.
“You take me home, I keep you up all night.”
“Look at my tits, they’re all yours, baby.”
“I like you, baby. I make you really happy.”
They’re smiling and rubbing against you and you’re young and far from home and they’re saying “you’re so cute” and you’re looking at them thinking the same thing and they’re telling you they want to come home with you and you’re wanting exactly that. You can only say no so many times. And once you say yes, it’s all over. You’re hooked. What you don’t realize at the time is your life will never be the same. If anyone asked you, “Have you ever paid for sex?” you might tell them no, but you’d know the truth. And in the eyes of my aunt Marla, and those who thought like her, you were now categorized and forever branded a “sexual deviate.”
When I expressed my newfound boredom to Hal, he told me that he sometimes filled in as a papasan at one of the bars on Fields Avenue. Since my retirement move to Angeles, I had yet to return to the go-go scene. There was no real reason for this. I just hadn’t felt the urge. Maybe my growing weight had something to do with it. Maybe it was how miserably I had failed with Maureen. Whatever the reason, I had all but forgotten about the nightlife that was only a few miles away. So when Hal suggested I come with him one night, I agreed. Anything, I thought, to mix things up a bit.
The bars were pretty much what I remembered. Perhaps there was a bit more neon, a little more polish. But the girls were the same-young, brown and beautiful-and the scene seemed just as crazy as ever. The men were older. There were still some young guys around, but the steady flow of sailors and Marines and airmen was gone with the closures of the American bases. At first I thought it was funny and a bit sad, these middle-aged-and-older men looking for comfort from girls half their age and sometimes younger. I had always thought it was a sign of youth to fall prey to these desires, but that these older men were true sexual deviants.
Only then, as I sat in the bar as one of those older men, watching the girls, chatting with them, laughing with them, and talking with the men, too-men who back home in the U.S. or Australia or England or wherever they were from had regular jobs and regular lives-I began to think maybe I was wrong.
One of Hal’s friends came by the bar around ten p.m. He was a barrel-chested Aussie named Robbie Bainbridge. Robbie and I hit it off right from the start, and we spent several hours drinking and talking about everything from how to make a perfect margarita to the political situation in nearby Malaysia.
When it was time for him to leave, he threw a thousand pesos on the bar and told the bartender to keep the change. He stuck his hand out to me, and we shook.
“Good meeting ya, Jay,” he said as he stood.
“Thanks,” I said. “Enjoyed meeting you, too.”
“Come by my bar tomorrow night if you get the chance.” He’d mentioned earlier that he owned a place a few blocks down on Fields called The Lounge.
“Sure,” I said. “If I’m around, I’ll come by.”
He leaned in toward me. “Make a point of it,” he said softly so only I could hear. “I have something I’d like to talk to you about.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t really have any other plans. “I’ll be there.”
• • •
The next night I stepped into The Lounge for the first time. It was early, half past eight, and there was only a handful of customers scattered around the room. On stage, half a dozen dancers were wearing hot pink bikinis, and more were milling about the bar, either talking amongst themselves or entertaining the customers. I didn’t see Robbie anywhere, so I walked over to the bar.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five and probably stood no higher than five foot two. She was thin, had long dark hair and small dimples in her cheeks when she smiled.
“I’ll take a mineral water,” I said. In the Philippines, mineral water was the same as your basic drinking water back in the States.
She retrieved a bottle quickly and set it on the bar. She then wrote something on a piece of paper and stuck it in a wooden cup in front of me. My tab for the evening had begun.
“First time here?” she asked.
“Here, yeah. But not Angeles.”
“I didn’t think I had seen you before. What’s your name?”
“Jay. What’s yours?”
“Cathy.”
I unscrewed the cap from the bottle and took a drink. “I’m supposed to meet Robbie. Do you know if he’s here yet?”
“Robbie?” she asked.
“Said he was the owner.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “Papa Rob?”
“Sure, I guess. Is he here yet?”
“Not yet. But not long, I think.”
She moved away to help another customer, so I turned around to watch the show. Some loud pop song I’d never heard before was blaring over the sound system. (Months later, after hearing the same song at least twice a night every night, I knew it was “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin. By then I had become an involuntary pop expert.)
Unlike strip bars in the States, where it was usually a single girl on stage dancing a choreographed routine, in Angeles there were always multiple dancers, none of whom seemed to have a real plan of attack. There was a lot of swaying back and forth, and some swinging of the hips. A few of the girls danced with each other, occasionally with moments of mock foreplay that would inevitably end in laughter, while others just seemed bored.