61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Test Icicles take it to the Streets of Rage and Cole goes Sega ga-ga for Segagaga.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Today on Hooksexup's TV blog: Is Ashley Alexandra Dupré developing her own reality show? Our sources say... maybe!
Walking around Manila I spot casualties everywhere I go: dissolute middle-aged white guys with pot bellies wearing the standard tourist uniform of thongs, shorts, and T-shirt. Asian women accompany them, sometimes a third their age, sometimes a few paces back, sometimes holding hands. Their faces are blank, but their thoughts are loud and clear: I'm feeding my family. I'm helping my sister through college.
I've been here alone on business for six weeks. Every day, every time I walk out of my hotel, cabbies approach me and ask if I want to meet "a college girl" or see girls at a bar or visit Angeles, the town near the old American base where foreigners go to find prostitutes. I'm not singled out because of an obvious aura of despair or anything like that any white male is approached in this way. I've been tempted, I admit. My wife and I have not made love for over a year and then not for six months before that. But it's hard to be attracted to a woman whose eyes say, "You're only a meal for my family."
I've been married for ten years. I have a child. I'm thirty-nine years old, and saddled with the usual American debts and regrets that make inertia more palatable than revision. Also, I'm a writer and I hate clichés I've been hearing about the cliché of the male mid-life crisis half my life. Everywhere you go in the Philippines, sappy American songs about love are playing. In the taxis, the movie theaters, the buses, in restaurants and bars. The songs are the worst. Captain and Tenille. Afternoon Delight, for God's sake. And awful Filipino songs that actually make Afternoon Delight sound like "Eine kleine Nachtmusik." Lyrics like, "I want to be your candy man. Let me take you to bouncy land." When Karen Carpenter died, her soul entered a karaoke bar in Manila. But after a while, the songs get under your skin.
Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecilia" is playing when I meet Sarah: "Cecilia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily." I've only just arrived in Manila and meet her at the trendy restaurant where she works. She's been trained as a teacher, but is having second thoughts. Through a friend she's found a job at this upscale restaurant, not as a GRO (Guest Relations Officers women out to please and profit from foreign businessmen), but as a bartender. The owner of Sarah's restaurant forbids his employees to date any of the customers, an unenforceable rule, but one that Sarah strictly adheres to. Her English is very good, and I feel so comfortable in her presence that I could talk to her all night. I tell her I'm married. I show her pictures of my family. She has a boyfriend. We talk a bit about my writing and it turns out that she once met the Filipina woman who is the subject of the book I'm currently writing. We talk so long, she gets in trouble with the manager. She's different from other Filipinas I've met. She's darker than most, and like most of the citizens of the world, Filipinos look down on dark-skinned people. Skin-lightening salons are a common sight in the mega-malls of Manila. Instead of giving in, Sarah flaunts her darkness. She has incipient dreadlocks in her hair and wears colorful beads in them on the street, she's mistaken for a foreigner. Other Filipinos think she's Jamaican or Cuban. They speak in English to her. She laughs or gets angry when she overhears passersby whispering about her in Tagalog. She tells me she's never had a Filipino boyfriend.
One day, Sarah and I go for an afternoon snack together, during her break time. Halo Halo, it's called. A Filipino specialty, a pudding-like concoction of various fruits and sweetened root vegetables. Maybe it's the Halo Halo that does it. Or maybe Valentine's Day sends me round the bend: almost a national holiday in the Philippines, second only to Christmas. No one wants to be "a lonely Valentine" in the Philippines, but I am. Lonely in the land of love. The guards at my hotel look at me disparagingly that night as I walk past them alone. Or maybe I just imagine it.
For ten years I've hung on, like this is some kind of lifeguard test: how long can you hold your breath underwater? Ten years? A lifetime?
In high school, I was the kind of guy who would awkwardly ask his date if he could kiss her. In Tagalog, the word for love and the word for expensive are the same: mahal. As the old saw goes, if you have to ask the price, you probably can't afford it. One day Sarah and I go swimming together at a local hotel, and in my high-schoolish way I make a poolside confession of my "feelings" for her. What I say is this: "Would you think I'm terrible if I told you I was developing feelings for you?" The most tortured sentence I've ever uttered. "No, I wouldn't think you're terrible," she says, but she laughs off my feelings, says I just miss my family. Maybe she's right, I think, and I resolve to be just friends as I lie in a deck chair and spend the rest of the afternoon just watching her swim.
A few days later, on her day off, we take the bus to Olongopo, near an old U.S. naval base, to go snorkeling for the day. At the beach we're surrounded by a gang of vendors selling crafts. They won't leave us alone and there's nowhere to safely store our belongings while we swim. So I rent a room for the day this is supposed to be a day trip. She has to be back at work the next morning.
The hotel room has a leftover valentine stuck on the door. The other people in the hotel don't care what we're doing. They're used to it. An American sits in the lobby complaining loudly to the hotel clerk, a Filipino, that he's been screwed in his retirement plan. I'm standing in a corner. Sarah sits on the bed, watching me pace. We've just returned from snorkeling. An old man and his grandson took us on their banca to a nearby island where we snorkeled for a few hours, though there were hardly any fish and trash littered the sea floor. We posed awkwardly for a photo that the old man took of us. He naturally assumed that she was my kasintahan (main squeeze). On the banca ride back, I watched Sarah shiver in the breeze, staring off into the water, her bead-filled hair lifted behind her, and I thought, Usually, I wouldn't forgive myself if I did anything, but this time I won't forgive myself if I do nothing.
And now in this air-conditioned room in Olongopo, I'm making one last goofy song-inspired declaration of my feelings.
You know, I don't think I'm feeling this because I miss my family.
I like you but you're married.
She tells me I'm making her nervous. She asks me to sit down. She tells me she's sleepy and wants to take a nap. Her shift ended at 3 a.m. last night. She's snorkeled half the day. And now this makulit (persistent) American is giving her a headache. What am I doing? I don't know. I'm exhausted, too. We lie down together, fully clothed, sleep for an hour, and when I awake, I look at her, take her hand. She takes my hand, and I lean over her and we kiss, the longest kiss I've ever had. I didn't know it was possible to kiss this long. I slowly bite and suck each of her fingertips, trace her ear with my tongue, work my way patiently down her body. We make love in ways that have been off-limits to me for ten years. I haven't even seen my wife naked above the bed covers in all that time. Sarah says the two of us click, and this is true. We click. After we make love, she says, "Do you think I'm terrible?"
"I think you're wonderful."
We eat lunch at a nearby place called Pumpernickels, owned by a German, maybe a former casualty. Sarah and I sit on the patio listening to a Minah bird as garrulous and makulit as me. Kumain ka na? Have you eaten yet? The first Tagalog phrase I commit to memory. Taught to me by a Minah bird in a cage. No matter what you answer, it asks the same question. The Minah bird speaks as a lover might, and Sarah, enthralled, answers as though he might really understand her.
Pangit, the bird says. Ugly.
Anything but ugly. And then, "What's your name?"
Sarah.
We stroll along the beach at sunset, arm in arm. We walk to the end of a sandbar. The tide is coming in and I think we can walk no further, but Sarah spots a further sandbar a hundred feet out. She wades in fearlessly and I follow helplessly. We stand on the sandbar with the water swirling around us and again we kiss as the water laps our feet. On the walk back, we watch the hills around us burning to make kaingins: fires burned by subsistence farmers from the little that's left of the forest so they can feed their families. The fires are lovely; the results devastating.
It's impossible to resist love in a place like this not in spite of the danger but because of it. Bravely, you ignore irony and the little reminders of your tendency towards self-destructiveness. You snorkel and see trash on the sea floor, hardly any fish. You stroll along the beach holding hands and watch the kaingin fires burning on the already-denuded mountainsides. And make love in a room with a sickly valentine hanging on the door, maybe self-deluded, but gloriously so. Back in Manila, she comes to my room. The hotel guards smirk at us both I'm not imagining that. I've succumbed. I'm not so strong, after all. She starts coming to my hotel room every night after her shift ends, in the afternoon after her shift ends, whenever she's free. I forget about my business, neglect it. We're secretive. She banishes me from her restaurant for days on end. She doesn't want her coworkers to suspect anything, but they suspect anyway.When I'm allowed back, one of her friends whispers, "Here's your best friend," when she spots me.
One day she calls at midnight and tells me she's not going to show up, that she's going to go out dancing with some friends. She won't tell me why and she hangs up. I panic. I throw on some clothes and comb my hair. I'll meet her at the restaurant, find out what's wrong. I open the door of my room and she's standing there, laughing.
We fly to postcard-perfect Boracay together, with its beaches that are supposedly the best in the world it's true, but it's not true, too. Like everything else in the Philippines, it's been overused, and now the waters are polluted with colloforms and the white sand is a little gray in places. Shorts and T-shirt and thongs seem right here. Sarah buys me a tie-dye bathing suit and a muscle shirt and thongs, and the transformation is complete. I have become what I dreaded. Sarah catches me laughing. She asks what's so funny and I tell her.
"But it's okay in Boracay," she says. "It looks natural here." As we make love, the songs flood me, all golden oldies: Wise men say, only fools rush in . . . Oh yes, I'm the great pretender . . . All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go, the taxi's waiting outside the door . . . I can't say I feel guilty because I don't. I have become a lover of clichés. Give me a stupid song and I'll sing it. I want to be your candy man. Let me take you to bouncy land. But I haven't lost my mind completely. I still have a sense of humor, a sense of irony, of consequence. I know when I return to the States, I will either enter the great re-education camp that is my marriage or head to the hills and burn kaingins for miles. But right now, there's a joy in me that seems impossible to lose, even if I know it will soon be replaced by pain and confusion.
I'm trying not to think about any of this. Right now, I'm rubbing oil on Sarah's back and I marvel at how relaxed her muscles are. Sarah is the first person I've ever met whose body isn't contorted into a question mark of tension and anxiety. I marvel at her shoulders, her skin it all gives under my palms, as though I'm kneading water, the waves breaking outside our room.
any white male is approached in this way. I've been tempted, I admit. My wife and I have not made love for over a year and then not for six months before that. But it's hard to be attracted to a woman whose eyes say, "You're only a meal for my family."
She has a boyfriend. We talk a bit about my writing and it turns out that she once met the Filipina woman who is the subject of the book I'm currently writing. We talk so long, she gets in trouble with the manager. She's different from other Filipinas I've met. She's darker than most, and like most of the citizens of the world, Filipinos look down on dark-skinned people. Skin-lightening salons are a common sight in the mega-malls of Manila. Instead of giving in, Sarah flaunts her darkness. She has incipient dreadlocks in her hair and wears colorful beads in them on the street, she's mistaken for a foreigner. Other Filipinos think she's Jamaican or Cuban. They speak in English to her. She laughs or gets angry when she overhears passersby whispering about her in Tagalog. She tells me she's never had a Filipino boyfriend.
American sits in the lobby complaining loudly to the hotel clerk, a Filipino, that he's been screwed in his retirement plan. I'm standing in a corner. Sarah sits on the bed, watching me pace. We've just returned from snorkeling. An old man and his grandson took us on their banca to a nearby island where we snorkeled for a few hours, though there were hardly any fish and trash littered the sea floor. We posed awkwardly for a photo that the old man took of us. He naturally assumed that she was my kasintahan (main squeeze). On the banca ride back, I watched Sarah shiver in the breeze, staring off into the water, her bead-filled hair lifted behind her, and I thought, Usually, I wouldn't forgive myself if I did anything, but this time I won't forgive myself if I do nothing.
and I follow helplessly. We stand on the sandbar with the water swirling around us and again we kiss as the water laps our feet. On the walk back, we watch the hills around us burning to make kaingins: fires burned by subsistence farmers from the little that's left of the forest so they can feed their families. The fires are lovely; the results devastating.
me laughing. She asks what's so funny and I tell her.
