Why they Love us in the Philippines

Even as a dictator fell, the more serious business of servicing the U.S. Navy went on as usual

Now I lay me down to seaTo teach the Russians DemocracyIf I die before I berthNuke the fuckers off the Earth

Join the Marine CorpsVisit foreign landsSee rare and exotic placesMeet new and unusual people andKill Them

I'm so Horny Even theCrack of dawn isn't safe

The fleet is in! The T-shirt artists are ready with new slogans and designs. The U.S.S. Enterprise, escort ships and submarines, two months out of San Francisco. The vendors of pork satay and barbecued chicken have their grills smoking on the sidewalks of Magsaysay Street. An amphibious task force headed by the U.S.S. New Orleans. The jeepney drivers prepare themselves, along with the touts and tailors, money-changers and shoeshine boys. Twenty-eight ships at one time; things haven't been this good since Vietnam. Close to 20,000 men will exit the U.S. naval base, cross the septic Santa Rita--widely known as Shit River--and enter the Philippines tonight. Six thousand (official figure) or 16,000 (unofficial estimate) women will come down to meet the fleet. Call it invasion. Call it desecration. Call it recreation. Come along to America's home away from home, our largest foreign naval base. See the mild side, the wild side, especially the dark side of the free world's finest liberty port. Check it out. Uncle Sam's main squeeze in this part of the world. A wondrous, wide-open place, eager to talk, happy to party and only occasionally standoffish--as when the officers on the U.S. side of Shit River refuse to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons. And when the girls at a notorious Subic City bar, likewise coy, refuse to confirm or deny the rumor that a Navy man came in and bought a blow job. For his dog.

I love you, no shit,But buy your own fuckin' drink

You are sitting at one of the busier places on Magsaysay Street, and things are cooking along fine. A five-year-old girl has just belted out "Help me if you can, I'm feeling down," and an obliging audience of sailors and locals litters the floor in front of her with peso notes and coins. A singing comic jokes about his height, 5'11": five feet here and--heh-heh--11 inches there! Suddenly, the night is broken by the crackle of walkie-talkies, the anxious pushing together of tables, the rearranging of chairs, the appearance of gun-toting bodyguards. The mayor of Olongapo is out on patrol.

He isn't the sort of fellow who figures to cause a stir on entering a night club. He's a mild-mannered man who drinks nothing stronger than soda. But 40-year-old Richard Gordon is an Olongapo tradition. His father was a mayor--assassinated in office--and his mother was mayor, too. He denies being part of a dynasty and, to be sure, there have been non-Gordon mayors. Even now, his enemies conspire. But everyone agrees that he is the nonpareil host of party-all-the-time Olongapo, and he sees no reasons for the revelry to end.

"Close down the bases?" he asks. "It's baloney. It's all talk. Deep down inside, America and the Philippines know we need each other. For the following reasons...."

The Filipino Tom Jones is on stage, to be followed by the Filipino Johnny Cash, and much of the music and clowning are dedicated to the mayor, who is enumerating the benefits to the world, to the Philippines and to Olongapo that accrue from having America on his doorstep. It's a polished performance, much in keeping with his image as a walking-tall mayor, a reformer, organizer, crime stopper. There are even some old-timers who say the place isn't what it used to be since Gordon cleaned it up. Critics demur: Gordon didn't clean up the town, they say, he only lubricated it.

"The man on the street would say my bowl of rice depends on the U.S. Navy," he concludes. He glances around restlessly, not a man to linger over a second drink. "Shall we go to another place?"

Down the street, out onto the street. Temptation Alley: hard rock, Top 40, oldies but goodies, country-and-western, oil wrestling, foxy boxing--something for everybody, the thirsty, the hungry, the horny--and the mayor promenades through it all, bodyguards in front, car following alongside, heads turning, street people waving, smiling, sometimes pulling him aside to whisper confidences. These are his people, the mayor likes to say. Oh, sure, he could talk about cleaning up the public market, color-coding city jeepneys, renovating the hospital, disciplining cops, crushing pickpockets, instituting a "social hygiene" program that requires regular vaginal smears from the "hostess population." But his top achievement, he believes, is changing attitudes.

"Even the small people are fired up, proud of themselves," he says. "I'm talking about the little people, the vendors of cigarettes and peanuts. Even the garbage scavengers who used to be chased off the base by American dogs and shot at by soldiers. Now they're admitted every morning. They all know the slogan: 'Aim high, Olongapo!' What's the line from New York, New York? If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere...."

He pops into Sergeant Pepper's and then into Zeppelin, crowded, cavernous places with hostesses by the hundreds, rock videos, booming sound systems and heavy-metal bands that invariably interrupt themselves to introduce "our beloved mayor" and dedicate a song--the Platters' (You've Got) The Magic Touch, say--to him. He calls on the newest, hottest place in town, the 900-person-capacity California Jams. Is there anything like this in Manila? he asks. The answer is no. Las Vegas? Maybe. This could be the Las Vegas of the East, the mayor says. Or the Riviera. Or the Singapore and Hong Kong.

Finally, he proceeds to a third-story club called Hot City and falls into a conversation with the owner. How much does a girl get if the American buys her a drink? Forty percent. And if the American wants to sleep with her, how much then? Forty percent. The mayor stares at the nightclub stage, the disco dance floor, the go-go dancers and hostesses wiggling in neon, so many of them that they look like bacteria dancing on a laboratory slide. For a moment, it seems as if his earlier enthusiasm for the Navy--for the 28,000 local jobs they provide, the $240,000,000 per year they pump into town--has abated. And though you know he detests what he calls "the Sin City moniker," you ask the question you have to ask: Do you ever get tired of seeing these Americans come ashore to screw your women?

"If the Navy wants to stay, we cannot stop them from staying," he says. "And if they want to leave, we cannot keep them here."

Then a smile returns. The weakness for quotations, slogans, song lyrics asserts itself.

"These are the realities," he says. "We live in a material world."

Pardon me, But you obviouslyMistake me for SomeoneWho gives a Shit

You journey out into the night, out of high-tech, heavy-decibel Olongapo, out toward the boondocks of sin, a place down the coast called Subic City; and along the way, you come to Barrio Barrettos, a funky, sleazy zone of beach houses and bars, many run by retired Navy men, chief petty officers turned into beachcombers, bartenders and all-round entrepreneurs. First stop is Casablanca Club--admission free till 7:30, 30 pesos after that; but hold on to your stub: They raffle off a girl at ten o'clock. Meanwhile, every night is fight night.

"We're trying to induce customers to buy pussy," club manager Lee Williams explains. "The money's in pussy, not beer. So we started nightly boxing. We thought it would be a fly-by-night thing. Instead, it gets bigger and bigger. I've got 50 hostesses who are boxing, going from cherry weight--that's 76 pounds--up to 125. We bought breast protectors, mouthpieces and headpieces, but the girls elected not to use them. They wouldn't look pretty, and that's important to them. They fight three-minute rounds, but what usually happens is you get two minutes of boxing and one minute of fixing hair. We've got a boxing coach and a training program every Sunday morning, and if they don't show up, they get fined. Of 50 house boxers, I'd say that 20 are good right now and a dozen others are promising. I've got five girls who would rather fight than fuck. And--hey--if you want a good fuck, get a girl who's just fought. I get reports back. 'I thought she'd be tried,' guys say, 'but she was on cloud nine!"

There have been some legendary contests at Casablanca, challenge matches when outsiders showed up to test themselves against the house boxers. Williams relishes the memory of two American girls, enlisted women, both weight lifters, who were promptly pounded into submission by his fighting go-go girls. "My girls are long-winded," he says. "They dance on stage for hours."

Tonight's fights, alas, are inconclusive. Despite a packed house and rousing cheers, tough-looking Cecilia Garcia runs out of gas at the end of the third round and is pummeled against the ropes by Claire de Guzman. Previously undefeated Tessie Ramos claims a wrist injury and retires in the second round.

"I'm not making excuses," Williams says, "but these girls are tried. With the fleet in, they've had a rough week."

Walk out of Casablanca, cross the street, and you can see that the evening is starting to cook. You'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss the fleet's rough magic, taking a seaside shantytown and turning it into Woodstock/Fort Lauderdale. There's action everywhere at such places as D'Booby Trap, the Florida Beach House, the Bamboo Inn, the Good, Bad and Ugly Bar. Cold beer, hot women, a happy hour that never ends. You can even check out Heaven. That's where you find Charley Fulfer, a frizzy-haired, affable ex-Navy, ex-merchant marine who decided not to go home to New Mexico.

"When I visited my home town, 80 miles from Albuquerque," he recalls, "the street was the same as it was when I was 17. Nothing changed. People talked about beef and hogs, and I wanted to talk about pussy in the P.I. I sounded like a pervert! When my mother asked what I liked about the Philippines, I said, 'Beautiful weather, (continued on page 162)Why They Love Us(continued from page 90) nice people.' When my father asked, I said, 'Little brown women.' My wife--I hated her, anyway--I told my wife when she was 40, I was trading her in for two 20-year-olds."

The way cooks dream of opening gourmet restaurants and bibliophiles devise the ideal bookstore, Fulfer designed his dream bar. With $2000 capital, he found a place called Saddletramp that had never prospered. "It was a shithouse," he remembers. "The first time I walked in, I cried. It had two barmaids, seven girls. Most of them were ugly, couldn't speak English and had Filipino boyfriends. I told the cashier she was fired. 'You can't do that,' she said. And I said, 'Well, you ain't getting paid and you can't stay here, so I guess you're fired.' Then I started slinging beer."

Heaven is a mellow, medium-sized place, with a pool table in front and a jukebox that's gone from rock to country-and-western records. ("You have fewer fights with shitkicker music," Charley opines.) Behind the bar are half a dozen rooms for "short times." Velvet paintings and a shark's jaw ornament the bamboo walls. Another ornament--icecold beer. That's Charley's doing: "To the Filipino, a cold beer is a bottle of warm beer and a glass full of ice cubes. You better believe I put an end to that shit fast." There are 26 girls, Charley's Angels, and seven barmaids, and the house's basic nightly goal for each is $100 in beer sales and "bar fines," which management charges customers who go outside or out back with the girls.

"The girls don't steal or fuck over their customers or hustle," says Charley, "and they get their smears on time. I don't care if three sisters died and their mother's getting pregnant, they go to social hygiene and they get their smears. Even the barmaids. Even the cherry girls."

Lately, Charley thinks he has gone about as far as he can go with Heaven. He thinks he may try another business or another country. But it's hard to picture another place that would suit him as well. "This is the last frontier," he says. "It's the last place with beaches and bars and girls and ships coming in and everything cheap and you can do what you want. Japan's gone. Hong Kong's about gone. Singapore never was. There's just Thailand and here. This is the last frontier."

Baby, As long as I got a face,You got a Seat

"Nothing is more important than our bases in the Philippines," President Ronald Reagan remarked not long ago. Under the current five-year agreement, which runs through 1991, it costs the U.S. $900,000,000 for the use of Subic Naval Base and its companion Clark Air Force Base, about 50 miles to the north. The Pentagon shudders at the thought of losing them and moving and at the estimated cost: five billion dollars or more. Even then, though various military functions could be parceled out and scattered from Seoul to Perth, a place such as Subic could never be duplicated.

"We're 21 sailing days from the West Coast, 14 more to Gonzo Station in the Indian Ocean and 70 minutes' flying time from the Russian base at Cam Ranh Bay," a Navy briefing officer remarks. He talks about power in the Indian Ocean, the western Pacific, the South China Sea. He points out the strategic straits of Sunda, Lombok and Malacca. He gestures at a sparkling bay flanked by the toast-brown Zambales Mountains on one side, the bulky green shoulders of the Bataan Peninsula on the other. "We've got room for a full Navy to come in here."

There are Filipinos, and not just Communists, who loathe the American military presence. Lawyer-politician-human-rights activist José Diokno, the best-known current critic, believes that the bases demean and endanger Filipinos, infringe on their sovereignty and corrupt relations with the U.S. Even Corazón Aquino expressed reservations about the bases when she campaigned against Ferdinand Marcos. Whether her high-minded doubts will survive when faced with economic realities remains to be seen.

And if you want to see economics in action, check out the ship-repair facility, where 4500 Filipino employees--welders, pipe fitters, painters, carpenters and the like--some of them third-generation workers, service 200 ships a year, operating huge floating dry docks that can sink below a 50,000-ton battleship, then lift it out of the water, high and dry. Skilled workers earn perhaps $5000 per year, one seventh Stateside scale. "It's by far the lowest-paid work force the U.S. forces have anywhere," says a base employment officer. "And, base-wide, there are 40 applications for every vacancy."

There's Cubi Point Naval Air Station. More earth was moved for its construction than for the Panama Canal. There's the naval supply depot, 7,000,000 items in stock, ranging from transistors and diodes to gun barrels and aircraft engines. There's the fenced and closely guarded naval magazine, with 56 miles of fine road weaving through a 9700-acre rain forest dotted with 160 carefully spaced magazines. In late afternoon, as if in a scene from a postnuclear movie, rhesus monkeys wander over grass-covered bunkers where bullets and bombs repose.

There's more. There's housing and office areas, elementary and high schools, a main exchange store and minimarts, all replicating the confident America of the Fifties, land of softball games and icecream parlors, bingo games and beer parties, 50-cent movies, $1.35 haircuts, all garnished by an endless supply of 100-peso-per-day maids, cooks, yardmen and seamstresses.

"I can live here the way the British lived in India in the days of the raj," a young officer tells me. "I've got a yardman working for me, and I don't even have a yard. He'd wash my car, but I don't have a car. What he does is, he polishes my shoes."

Want to see something odd? Want to visit the saddest place on earth and sometimes the gladdest and, either way, final, smoking-gun evidence that They Love Us Here? Drop by the U.S. Navy Recruiting Station. The Philippines is the only country where the U.S. is permitted to recruit foreigners--400 males per year these days. Every year or so, the station takes applications for a month: That month results in 100,000 inquiries. The rest of the time, recruiters shred 300 unsolicited letters a day, except for some "classics" that go into an office scrapbook: the fellow who sent ten applications in one day, the fellow who sent a Valentine's Day card, the guy who wrote that he liked "world-wide adventure, the dollar, excitement and possibilities," the poor soul who pleaded, "I hope through the innermost chamber of my heart you will pity me."

If you're lucky, they'll let you sit in on the English-language-proficiency exams they give their Filipino applicants, a dozen eager-to-please youths, smiling, polite and, alas, terribly tongue-tied. One of the candidates this morning is a clear winner; he was raised in New Jersey. Three others are adequate. There are twice as many losers, though, and you remember them--the downcast eyes, hesitations, terrible, groping silences. You remember the floundering youth who suddenly burst into an irrelevant description of his home town--gorgeous black-sand beaches under a towering volcano--followed by an unasked-for paean to "sophisticated innovations in ships and armaments," and everyone knew he was rattling off something he'd memorized at one of the dozens of U.S. Navy preparation academies around the country. "It's gut wrenching every day," a recruiter remarks. "I've had them cry, get down on the floor, grab me by the knees and refuse to leave."

Finally, there's the 18-hole Binictican Golf Course, where aborigines, short, dark Negritos, live in bamboo thickets just off the fairway. Some Negritos work as trackers, escorting Marine patrols, and there are stories of their displaying severed heads on fence posts. Old stories. Thesedays, the golf-course Negritos retrieve errant balls from a jungle that has kraits, vipers, cobras and constrictors. You don't own golf balls at Subic; you just lease them from Negritos. Old joke.

Sixteen empty missile tubes,A mushroom-shaped cloud,And now it's miller time

Father Shay Cullen is not smiling. From the drug-treatment center he runs on a bluff overlooking Subic Bay, the Columban priest can see the city of Olongapo, the naval base, the coast road meandering out to Subic City. He can see the U.S.S. Enterprise anchored out at Cubi Point and there, in the very mouth of the harbor, another ship about which he has his doubts. It appears to be a freighter and has a few containers on deck, but Father Cullen suspects that it is a nuclear laboratory, a kind of atomic Flying Dutchman that never comes to port.

"Olongapo is a city of 255,000 people whose livelihood and economic survival are based on sex for sale," he says. "It's an economy controlled by the two percent who control everything in the Philippines, and it's so tight here, it's probably just one percent. They'll tell you otherwise. They'll tell you that base employment is what matters. But our conservative estimate is that there are 16,000 people involved in prostitution. And then, what about the men, whom you turn into waiters and cleanup boys? Where's the pride and dignity? And the rest of the population in support services, renting apartments to girls and sailors so they have a place to shack up? And the legal profession, some of them spending their time servicing quarrels with sailors? And the police turned into a service also, geared to keeping the streets safe for free-spending sailors? It's all a form of dehumanization, an affront to human dignity."

Cullen is rough on Olongapo, skeptical of Mayor Gordon's reforms ("basically cosmetic") and harshly critical of the mayor himself: "He lives in a kind of self-induced fantasy." (The antagonism is mutual. Gordon calls Cullen a Judas Iscariot disguised as Jesus Christ.) But Cullen's harshest barbs are pointed across Shit River.

"The high tradition of the Navy, of officers and gentlemen, is being debased because of a lewd attitude, a failure to condemn wrong," he says. He thinks the Navy should leave. "If bases like this are so vital, they should be put in places where they're not vulnerable to political instability--places like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. There's nobody there, nothing but a few donkeys. An appropriate location for such a death-dealing facility."

Mess with the best,Die with the rest,U.S.M.C.

• A quartermaster who had just received a re-enlistment bonus may have hit his girlfriend while he was taking a knife away from her. The woman is asking $5000.

• A sailor is accused of using his cigarette to burst balloons that were part of the act at a downtown go-go place. Of course, he had no way of knowing that the balloons were filled with helium that would burn the dancer's face. He denies the whole thing, anyway. Nine hundred dollars.

• A lance corporal off the U.S.S. Pelileu recalls hearing that "getting laid was easy in Olongapo." He liked Olongapo fine. He liked Subic City even better. He did not like the letter he received from a waitress at Sergeant Pepper's, who accused him of (1) taking her virginity, (2) reneging on a promise of marriage and (3) giving her V.D. He denies everything. She starts by asking $27,000.

No Mesdames Butterfly here. We are in the world of "international legal holds," men kept on base while their cases wind their way through the Philippines' legal system. These are American men accused of such exotic infractions as grave slander, grave oral defamation, slander by deed ("That's giving someone the bird," a lawyer explains), concubinage and seduction. There are as many as 500 cases a year like these, some valid complaints, some fortune hunting. Almost none end in jail sentences, few in convictions: The system encourages settlement. "A lot of these situations come up when a man has gone more than one night with a girl," says Lieutenant Frank J. Prochazka, a Navy lawyer. "They rent a place, they set up housekeeping. There's emotion involved in the relationship. Whether or not it's stated, the girls get their hopes up of marrying and going to the States, and it's that extra emotion, even if it's one-sided, that makes things harder."

Call it the bar girls' revenge. You can't help rooting for them, the odds against them being so long, their stories so drearily uniform: born in the provinces, father a farmer/fisherman, family of six/12, came to the city to attend school/find work, remitting earnings to family that doesn't know/doesn't want to know about her. Lives papered together out of song lyrics and comic books, dreams of marriage to an American and escape to San Diego. On another part of the base, an eloquent but despairing black man fights a battle he cannot win against just such a group of dreamers.

"I don't have the slightest idea why your husband-to-be came 7000 miles to fall in love with you," Chief James R. Taylor tells a class of more than 20 pretty Filipinos who are parties to the nearly 1000 marriages proposed at Subic every year. His audience is captive: Attendance is required. In theory, Taylor hopes to encourage second thoughts among his listeners. In fact, he'll settle for first thoughts. He quotes figures showing that nine out of ten of these marriages will fail.

"I've got a simple test for you this morning," he tells the women. "Three questions. What is the full name of your husband-to-be? Where was he born? When is his birthday? I know that 80 percent of you don't know the answers."

Taylor is a performer. He takes to his task like a Southern preacher, winding around themes, rolling, crescendoing, diminishing, doubling back and gaining strength.

"Six months ago, some of you wouldn't have dreamed of talking to an American. You'd have walked to the other side of the street. But you came to Olongapo, and Olongapo is a fantasy city. It's not the Philippines you know about. It's not the provinces you grew up in. It's a carnival, a circus. And some of you spent more on a manicure and a pedicure and a hair style to come to this meeting than your family earns in a month."

Now he turns on the men, the absent suitors. Sometimes he adopts a Leon Spinks imitation, getting the part of a shuffling street-corner dude, all shrugs and monosyllables. "Your boyfriend thinks you're cute, so petite, so small, so cuddly, like a Barbie doll. He never had a beautiful girlfriend before. He got the ugly, snaggle-toothed girls, the nappy-haired ones nobody else wanted. Now he's got himself a Barbie doll. He sticks out his arm and you fit right under it. He can put his hand around your tiny waist. He can sit you on his lap and move you from knee to knee, just like a doll. But what happens when he doesn't want his Barbie doll anymore?"

It's heartfelt, decent advice, all of it, and mostly in vain. Taylor knows it. The girls know it. "You want to go to America," he concludes, a trace of despair in his voice. "You don't care who buys the ticket. You just want to get there."

Liquor in the FrontPoker in the Rear

You hear about Subic City from a guy named Pete, a burly, balding naval officer. "I used to live there," he says, "and I would go to get a blow job with the same casualness with which I'd buy a six-pack of beer, and for the same money. What am I going to do back in the States, talking about getting sucked off under a table? What do you do with yourself when you come from a place where you can fuck a woman up the ass for two apples and a candy bar? It sounds weird, but you just have to be there."

You hear about Subic City from a bright young Navy wife. "I told my husband that as long as he doesn't bring back any diseases, if he goes out there for relief while I'm away in the States, it's all right. If he were with a pretty American girl, or an ugly American girl with brains, I'd be worried. But I've been there, and I know the girls. L.B.F.M.s--little brown fucking machines."

You hear about Subic City from a guy on the Shore Patrol. It's the town where anything goes, the bargain shoppers' paradise. Back in Olongapo, at a place like California Jams, a "short time" with a girl costs 630 pesos (about $31). Here in Subic City, you can pop into a room in back of the bar for 100 pesos (five dollars). Sex shows? By arrangement. Sample blow jobs? You name it. A great little minorleague town, where the girls are either too young or too old to work in the big leagues.

You hear about Subic City from a short, bespectacled chap who'd define the term nerd anywhere else but who walks like Johnny Wadd in the impoverished Philippines. "Subic City," he says, "is the home of the three-holer."

And now, here you are, and it looks like a Mexican town, something the Wild Bunch might ride into, everything facing a main street, with jeepney after jeepney of sailors tumbling out, the smell of barbecue mixing with diesel fumes, cute, lively, incredibly foulmouthed girls saying hello and asking what ship you're from and offering head, and the jukeboxes from a dozen bars playing all at once, and the song you notice is Julio and Willie doing To All the Girls I've Loved Before, and you climb to King Daryl's, where dozens of girls await just you, and you take a chair right at the edge of the balcony, with a King Shit view of the street, and you have a beer in one hand and a pork-satay stick in the other, and a woman between your legs, which are propped up against the railing, and you know you have come to a magical place, all right, a special magic for a 19-year-old Navy kid, the magic of a place where anything is possible. And cheap.

You go down a street, past the Urgent Inn, past Blow Heaven (Service to the Fleet), and head for the most notorious bar of all: Marilyn's. Where the record for short times by one woman in one night is 27. Where the business card offers, among other things, doggy style, "with barking and yelping." Where the girls don't flash their teeth when they smile; they show off their gums. Want a girl? An orgy? A menthol blow job, cigarette and gum included? Or step into the corner with your buddies, sit down at the famous table for a game of smiles. Drop trousers as you sit. Movement under the table, a girl or two up to no good. And the game of smiles begins. The last one to smile wins.

Even on quiet nights, weekdays, there are special entertainments in the land where America is loved. Behind the bar at Marilyn's, one of the barmaids shows off her child, one-year-old Valerie. Who waves, smiles, laughs and flicks her little tongue on cue, when her mother whispers, "Blow job." A nativity for Subic. Little Valerie. Harbinger of a generation that may realize a paradox: that if the base ever shuts down and the fleet sails away, it won't be because it didn't belong here. It will be because it did.

"'It's the last place with beaches and bars and girls and everything cheap. This is the last frontier.'"