A Fool In The Sun

“Give me hundred pesos for whiskey!”

I tilted my head to look up at him.  He had stepped up suddenly, blocking my path, as close as Peter Pan’s shadow, ready to be sewn back on.  He was about fifteen, and thin, but he was taller than me.  His face was disturbing.  It was a face with no affect.  He wasn’t angry, or excited, or amused; he was empty.  Because he was empty I knew he was indifferent to whether I lived or died, and which it would be might hinge on one hundred pesos.  Even if I could take him, which was doubtful, I sensed that a number of others in the crowd were part of his gang, and I couldn’t take all of them.  Refuse him, and they’d be on me in a pack.  Take out my wallet, and not only would his gang be on me, there was the larger group, thousands of starving people.  Flash money and I might literally be torn to pieces.

I spent the first five months of that year in Asia.  Like a pinball careening between bumpers I moved around a lot, from Manila to Jakarta, from Hong Kong to Genting Highlands, with side trips to Seoul and Cheju Island (pardon the spelling, but I learned Korean using McCune-Reischauer, and prefer it to the new method); I was in the air, on the ground, and at sea.  The nexus of my stops was Singapore.  In those days cruise ships launched themselves from the World Trade Centre, and several were floating casinos.  The rules were favorable, the limits were high, and if you put enough money on deposit the cruises were free.

Even professionals do not win all of the time.  I lost the first few cruises, and with the constraints travel and border crossings put upon my ready cash I ran short.  Luckily, I had a friend in Hong Kong named Woody who wired me a fresh supply.

All good things must come to an end, and the seagoing casinos decided they liked keeping their money more than they did catering to me.  They made their wishes known in a gentle way. I was welcome to play, but my limits were lowered, and the decks were shuffled too frequently for me to eke out a profit.  So I was slowly working my way north and east, with a planned stop in Hong Kong to repay Woody, but first some R & R in Manila.

In those days I used to stay at the Park Hotel in Manila, and it was at their swimming pool one afternoon that I got a call from Woody.

“Would you like to see how real Filipinos live?”

Woody was not in Hong Kong betting the races; Woody was in Manila, visiting a girlfriend named Anna Marie.  They were going to visit her family the next day, and invited me to come along.  They’d see me at noon.

We met in the Park’s lobby.  I had an envelope in my safety box with twenty thousand dollars, the bulk of what I owed him, so I asked if he’d like it right then.  He said he would, so I retrieved the envelope and passed it to him before we set out.

I’d been to Manila quite a few times, and had been places, but most of my time was spent in two neighborhoods, Makati, which was upscale, and Ermita, which was not.  Ermita was a jungle of Go-Go bars, kids selling everything from shoe shines to pornographic keyrings, and currency exchanges where the guards sat outside on stools with sawed off shotguns in their laps.  It looked like a Mexican border town just before the banditos rode in.  But as we rode in the taxi, heading to wherever Anna Marie’s mother lived, it dawned on me that Ermita was a safe zone.  There was no profit in dead tourists, so the businesses kept the predators out of the neighborhood.  Where we were going we’d be the only tourists, and from what I was seeing out the window, I was missing Ermita.  I kept thinking: “It can’t get worse.” But we rode for an hour, and, it did.

At last we came to a place where we stopped.  The road had stopped awhile back, but the ground was baked hard, and the taxi kept going.

“Anna Marie, are you quite sure this is safe?” Woody was not very observant, but the wrongness of where we alighted woke him up.

“Oh, sure,” she said blithely, “I come here all the time.” As she said it I watched the taxi driver hammer down the locks on all his doors, spin the car around, and peel off in a cloud of dust.

It was high noon in Manila, and there wasn’t the memory of a cloud.  The sun might as well have been shooting death rays at us.  Under that sun were roughly ten thousand people.  They had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, no jobs, nowhere to keep cool, nowhere to sit in the shade.  So they gathered there under that sun, and they shuffled aimlessly, going nowhere slowly. They looked like something out of a George Romero movie: High Noon of the Dead. 

Behind them was a shanty town.  When I was a boy we built a fort behind the garage, with piano crates and corrugated iron.  The town was much the same, scrap metal, and scrap lumber, and sometimes scrap cardboard, all fastened together until it covered acres.  There were no gaps between rooms, no individual shacks, but there were passageways through its sprawl, dark and dripping.  Somewhere in the interior, near a junction, we stopped.  We had somehow acquired a girlfriend of Anna Marie’s, and the two women parked us on a pair of plastic stools.  There was an old woman on another stool across the lane, who stared unblinkingly at us while we waited.

“My jeans are too tight. Could you hold this?”

I’d forgotten about the envelope with the money.  I had deep pockets, and a Guayabera shirt that covered the bulge, but I wasn’t happy to be carrying the money.

About ten minutes passed before they returned, and we set off deeper into the maze.  We came to a door that had been cut into the wall.  A wire stapled to the wall disappeared into a small hole next to the door.  Anna Marie knocked, the door opened, and we entered. 

Inside, attached to the end of the wire, was a bare light bulb.  The room was four feet deep, six feet wide, and six feet high.  At one end were two shelves that served as beds.  Four people lived in that space: Anna Marie’s mother, step-father, teenage step-sister, and Anna Marie’s baby.  The step-father wasn’t home, so there were only seven of us squeezed inside.  After “komusta ka?” there wasn’t much to say, so we left.

We were back out among the zombies when I met the whiskey drinker.

I considered my options.  Give him money and I was probably doomed.  Refuse and I was also doomed.  Those seemed to be the only options, but perhaps I could stall.

“Okay, sure. Please speak to my accountant.” I waved in Anna Marie’s direction.  She had gotten us into this mess; even if she and Woody were unaware there was a mess.

“What?”

“My accountant. Please speak to her. She handles all my cash disbursements.”

“What?”  His face finally showed emotion: befuddlement.”

“You want one hundred pesos, right?” As we were talking, Anna Marie had flagged down a pair of cabs. “I want to give you the hundred pesos, but I don’t do cash disbursements. Only my accountant does that.”

Woody and Anna Marie had boarded the first cab.  Her girlfriend was in the second, and I squeezed in next to her.

“What?”

“I said I want to pay you …” Did I mention these were pedicabs? Our driver was in his seventies, and having trouble overcoming inertia.  We were moving, one foot at a time.  “… but I have to refer you to my accountant.  That’s the way it works. I authorize payment, and she handles the disbursal.”

By now we were rolling.  We weren’t moving fast; he could have caught us by walking briskly. But we were putting distance between us.  We left him standing there, looking confused.

Within a few blocks we were in a neighborhood with real housing, a nice looking neighborhood.  We pulled up to a duplex, got down from our cabs, and went inside.  We were in a cozy two-story home, but why on earth were they turning off the air-conditioning, and stuffing towels under the door?

Then the purpose of the trip was revealed.  Anna Marie and her friend, and Woody, apparently, wanted to smoke syabu.  In the West it is known by other names: meth, ice, crank.  In Asia it is called quite a few things, but in the Philippines it is called syabu, smokable methamphetamine.  Wonderful!  If the police burst in, I had twenty thousand dollars in my pocket.  They wouldn’t arrest us; they would kill us and pocket the money.

Which doesn’t justify joining the group while they smoked. I hadn’t touched drugs of any sort in years. On the other hand, I had never smoked an amphetamine product.  Given the risks I had taken while I didn’t know what was going on, I might as well take one risk knowingly. So I did.  The high didn’t impress me.

There’s not much left to the story.  I never learned why Anna Marie let her family live in those conditions while she had a nice house half a mile away.  I can only assume she was not a nice person.

I ended up carrying the cash to Hong Kong, even personally depositing it in Woody’s bank. Before completing the transaction the police were called and the teller strip searched. Hong Kong banks suck.

Years passed.  I wrote a mystery novel set in Manila, some scenes based upon what I saw that day.  Woody died.  He was only sixty-two, but cancer is cancer.  He had become astonishingly rich.  He left a will so unusual that a few years after his death it was the basis for an article in an Australian magazine.  His fortune, nearly a billion dollars, was entirely liquid, comprising four bank accounts.  He divided it between his two legitimate children, after a series of small bequests.  A dozen or so girlfriends or ex-girlfriends each received one million dollars.  Except one who for some reason got only twenty thousand pesos.  Anna Marie’s name wasn’t in the list.

Last year the Filipinos elected a president who vowed to get tough on crime and drugs.  There have been nearly ten thousand EJM’s, Extra-Judicial Murders of alleged drug users, since then.  But the poor still smoke syabu and I imagine that the zombies are still shuffling in the noonday sun.