The fat guy smoking Pall Malls, he says he almost married one of those girls. Honest. He met her in a bar one of the last times he was in the Philippines and fell in love, almost bought her a ring and took her home. It didn’t work out, though, and he doesn’t say why because it doesn’t really matter. He shrugs.
The skinny kid with the knobby head understands. Same thing happened to him, sort of. She was 19, beautiful, didn’t wear makeup or anything. She was so…what’s the word? Simple. You know? “Just give her the American necessities and those are, like, her luxuries,” he tells the fat guy. “Let her live like a queen.”
The fat guy grins. His front teeth are missing, and he’s got hair like an oil slick, long and black and greasy. Oh yeah, lots of those girls want an American husband, and they’re not picky, either. “As long as you’re not married and you’ve got an income,” the guy says, “you’re good to go.”
It’s four o’clock in the morning in a Japanese airport, thirteen hours out of Detroit Metro, on a layover in Nagoya before the last 1,700 miles to Manila. The fat guy and the skinny kid found each other in the smoking lounge as if they had picked up a shared scent, a couple of misfit white guys dragging halfway around the planet.
Then another, a fellow traveler in a red running suit, walks over. He’s fiftyish and pudgy with gray hair and enough of a beard to cover a weak chin. He’s never been to the Philippines before, he tells them, just heard the stories about the bars and the girls, and now that he’s divorced, what the hell, treat himself. Still, he’s a little nervous about the whole thing.
The skinny kid knows that feeling, too. He was nervous his first time. It’s kind of weird, the way you can buy a girl for a couple of bucks, a different one every night, every hour if you want, walk around town with her and not even pretend it’s anything more than a cash transaction. “I walk into this place with my arm around this local girl, you know, and there’s all these guys sitting around looking at me,” he says. “And I’m thinking, I’m gonna get my ass kicked, you know?”
The fat guy’s grinning again. He knows where this is going.
“But then they’re all like, ‘Hey, American, come and drink with us!’ ”
“Oh yeah,” the fat guy says. “And after ten minutes, you’re not talking to them. You’re talking with them.”
They all nod, even the guy in red.
“Seriously,” the skinny kid says. “They love Americans.”
She has a birth certificate that says she’s 19. It’s false, and obviously so, because she’s only 13, but nobody cares, because in the dark, under all that rouge and shadow, she looks old enough. All the girls—the other ones onstage, the ones waiting tables, the ones cuddling up to customers, sweet-talking foreign men into buying them drinks—look old enough, which isn’t very old at all.
An American man is yelling at her. “Hey, you!” he says. “Yeah, you. Dance! You’re getting paid to dance.”
She doesn’t really know how to dance, and the high-heeled boots she’s wearing make it even harder to fake it. Her arms are in close, holding her own bare torso in a loose hug, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, gently twists her shoulders from one side to the other. Is that dancing? Is it close enough? Do they even care, the men watching, the Koreans and the Japanese, the Americans and the Aussies, the fat guys and the skinny kids sucking on stubby bottles of San Miguel?
Mamasan, the bar manager, will pay the girl 120 pesos to wear her bikini from six o’clock in the evening until three o’clock in the morning. She is supposed to dance for half an hour, then go work the room for a while and wait for her next shift onstage. If one of the men in the club buys her a drink, Mamasan will cut her in for fifty pesos, put it toward her debts: 1,300 for the boots, thirty-five more for a week’s laundry. Or maybe one of the customers will buy her for the night, give Mamasan 1,000 pesos—“bar fine,” they call it here, a term that’s both a noun and a verb—to take her out of the G-Spot, maybe to another club or a restaurant first but probably just to his hotel room. The girl would get half of that, about $9 American.
It’s her first night at the G-Spot. She’d gone looking for work a few days ago—up Fields Avenue, past Club Fantastic and Camelot and Stinger, past the sidewalk shops selling shirts , past the shoeshine boys and the peddlers with their bootleg Cialis, past all the other bars looking to hire dancers and waitresses and GROs, which is short for guest-relations officers, which is long and awkward for prostitute. “Must have happy personality,” the signs say, because no horny tourist is going to bar-fine a girl who isn’t any fun.
The skinny kid with the knobby head understands. Same thing happened to him, sort of. She was 19, beautiful, didn’t wear makeup or anything. She was so…what’s the word? Simple. You know? “Just give her the American necessities and those are, like, her luxuries,” he tells the fat guy. “Let her live like a queen.”
The fat guy grins. His front teeth are missing, and he’s got hair like an oil slick, long and black and greasy. Oh yeah, lots of those girls want an American husband, and they’re not picky, either. “As long as you’re not married and you’ve got an income,” the guy says, “you’re good to go.”
It’s four o’clock in the morning in a Japanese airport, thirteen hours out of Detroit Metro, on a layover in Nagoya before the last 1,700 miles to Manila. The fat guy and the skinny kid found each other in the smoking lounge as if they had picked up a shared scent, a couple of misfit white guys dragging halfway around the planet.
Then another, a fellow traveler in a red running suit, walks over. He’s fiftyish and pudgy with gray hair and enough of a beard to cover a weak chin. He’s never been to the Philippines before, he tells them, just heard the stories about the bars and the girls, and now that he’s divorced, what the hell, treat himself. Still, he’s a little nervous about the whole thing.
The skinny kid knows that feeling, too. He was nervous his first time. It’s kind of weird, the way you can buy a girl for a couple of bucks, a different one every night, every hour if you want, walk around town with her and not even pretend it’s anything more than a cash transaction. “I walk into this place with my arm around this local girl, you know, and there’s all these guys sitting around looking at me,” he says. “And I’m thinking, I’m gonna get my ass kicked, you know?”
The fat guy’s grinning again. He knows where this is going.
“But then they’re all like, ‘Hey, American, come and drink with us!’ ”
“Oh yeah,” the fat guy says. “And after ten minutes, you’re not talking to them. You’re talking with them.”
They all nod, even the guy in red.
“Seriously,” the skinny kid says. “They love Americans.”
*****
There’s a girl on a small stage in a bar called the G-Spot Lounge in Angeles City, a sprawl of cinder block and tin about an hour northwest of Manila. She’s wearing a sky blue bikini that matches the powder Mamasan swabbed on her eyelids, along with enough blush and mascara to make her whole face itch. She hasn’t worn makeup since her first Communion, and then not so much.She has a birth certificate that says she’s 19. It’s false, and obviously so, because she’s only 13, but nobody cares, because in the dark, under all that rouge and shadow, she looks old enough. All the girls—the other ones onstage, the ones waiting tables, the ones cuddling up to customers, sweet-talking foreign men into buying them drinks—look old enough, which isn’t very old at all.
An American man is yelling at her. “Hey, you!” he says. “Yeah, you. Dance! You’re getting paid to dance.”
She doesn’t really know how to dance, and the high-heeled boots she’s wearing make it even harder to fake it. Her arms are in close, holding her own bare torso in a loose hug, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, gently twists her shoulders from one side to the other. Is that dancing? Is it close enough? Do they even care, the men watching, the Koreans and the Japanese, the Americans and the Aussies, the fat guys and the skinny kids sucking on stubby bottles of San Miguel?
Mamasan, the bar manager, will pay the girl 120 pesos to wear her bikini from six o’clock in the evening until three o’clock in the morning. She is supposed to dance for half an hour, then go work the room for a while and wait for her next shift onstage. If one of the men in the club buys her a drink, Mamasan will cut her in for fifty pesos, put it toward her debts: 1,300 for the boots, thirty-five more for a week’s laundry. Or maybe one of the customers will buy her for the night, give Mamasan 1,000 pesos—“bar fine,” they call it here, a term that’s both a noun and a verb—to take her out of the G-Spot, maybe to another club or a restaurant first but probably just to his hotel room. The girl would get half of that, about $9 American.
It’s her first night at the G-Spot. She’d gone looking for work a few days ago—up Fields Avenue, past Club Fantastic and Camelot and Stinger, past the sidewalk shops selling shirts , past the shoeshine boys and the peddlers with their bootleg Cialis, past all the other bars looking to hire dancers and waitresses and GROs, which is short for guest-relations officers, which is long and awkward for prostitute. “Must have happy personality,” the signs say, because no horny tourist is going to bar-fine a girl who isn’t any fun.
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