Video Night in Kathmandu (25 page)

Before I came to Manila, I could not have guessed that more than a thousand families in what Imelda Marcos, Minister of Human Settlements, called “the City of Man” made their homes in the central garbage dump. And before I arrived in the New Society, I would never have suspected that a security guard, after eleven years on the job, received, for a twelve-hour shift, exactly $2.25. Actually, that was quite a good salary for Manila—$55 a month was as much as a long-standing government official could earn. Yet the horoscope in the government-run daily was telling its readers that for all those born on August 24 the likeliest occupations were “polo player, horse breeder, international playboy, jet pilot and travel mogul.”

Until I came to Manila, I had not known that I was capable of social outrage. But then, one evening, one of my hotel security guards invited me home. We drove down Roxas Boulevard, the grand corniche that sweeps along Manila Bay and boasts the Hyatt, the Holiday Inn and many of the city’s starriest discos, as we passed, I noticed people living on the center divider of the road, huddling against the rain and the wind in shacks no larger than a bathtub.

Ten minutes later, we got out in a street of run-down tenements in Pasay City and walked down an alley thick with refuse. At last we came to a concrete shack. My friend pounded at the door. A frightened-looking girl opened it, just a crack, and let us in. There were two dark rooms inside, but there was little in the way of furniture. There was no room for it.

Stepping over bodies, we made our way to the far room. On a sagging bed, a man dressed only in boxer shorts tossed and turned. Beside him, his girlfriend lay facing the other direction, her head lolling over the edge, her eyes bleary from the joint she was smoking. Between them lay a baby. Next to the bed was a mattress on which a woman was sitting and two or three children were uncomfortably stretched out.

In the other room, there was a bare sink, above it two bottles of brandy. On the floor, a couple of kids and a baby and three adults were sprawled across a mess of bedding. Above them, the concrete showed through the wallpaper. There was a picture of a black-and-yellow sunset on the wall, a photo of a girl torn from some calendar and a portrait of some human-faced dogs seated at a dinner table. To get to the bathroom, one had to crawl out through the window.

The kids, dirty-chinned and dressed in faded T-shirts, scrambled about the half-sleeping bodies. At the sink, the young girl who had let us in rolled joints. The man in boxer shorts got up, stretched, went over to the sink and knocked back some brandy. The kids bawled. It was nighttime, but nobody seemed to be sleeping much. Lulu, the girl on the bed, smiled up at me. She worked in a bar, so she spoke fluent English; it therefore fell to her to play hostess.

“What can we do?” she said, motioning toward the man drinking at the sink. “He is college graduate. Commerce. But no job.” Her own position in the bar brought in a little money, of course, but she was twenty-nine now, and unless she joined most of her colleagues in going to Japan, she too would soon be out of a job. All the time she was speaking, her eleven-year-old son stared at me with bright eyes. Then he broke into a lovely smile. “Hip, hip, hooray,” he cried.

THUS THE UNNERVING
counterpoint continued: smiles amidst the squalor, and songs. In Japan, my previous stop, I had
grown accustomed to living in a kind of mobile isolation tank; here, as I walked down the street, people looked me directly in the eye, and flashed me cheering smiles as they passed. The girls at grocery-store cash registers drew me shyly into conversation; the high-spirited boys who worked in my hotel showed me their college books. And all day long, from dawn to midnight, music buzzed through the streets of Ermita.

Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore—West Virginia …” Sometimes the songs were played in the original recording, sometimes reproduced live, but with such high fidelity that it was impossible to tell if the sound came from jukebox or human voice. Either way, the sound was sunny and intoxicating. In Ermita, I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station.

I quickly noticed too that the talented Filipinos were able to turn their voices to any style or fashion. Yet they seemed most at home with sugarcoated Middle of the Road ditties: soft, straight-from-the-heart tunes, sweetened by pleasant melodies. There were forty-seven radio stations in town, FM and AM, but nearly all of them played the same AM tunes—easy listening as a background to easy living. I heard the Everly Brothers more often in Manila than ever before, and Simon and Garfunkel too; Peter Paul and Mary, and the Eagles. Country-and-western laments for lost love were everywhere too, and once, at a free concert in Rizal Park, I heard bankers perform duets from
Rigoletto
and miniskirted secretaries do arias from
La Traviata.
But in more than three weeks, I heard no hard rock, no New Wave, no eighties pop; no Talking Heads or Clash or even Twisted Sister—just ballads of heartbreak and high spirits, decorated with sweet falsettos and silvery harmonies.

The Number One hit while I was in the Philippines was, without a doubt, “We Are the World,” the song recorded by the superstars of U.S.A. for Africa to raise money for the starving in Ethiopia. The anthem of hopeful charity had, in fact, become a virtual sound track to Philippine life. One morning, as I walked
into Mister Donut for breakfast, the bespectacled college boy behind the counter began swaying rhythmically to the song as it came up on the radio. That same day I walked into a restaurant for lunch and heard Bruce Springsteen rasping his way passionately through the same plaintive refrain. The same appeal was drifting out of an open-air restaurant, sung by two young boys with acoustic guitars, as I walked down Mabini that evening. And at Calle Cinquo Restaurant that same night, cheers arose from the audience on two separate occasions as two different girl groups struck up the song’s intimate opening bars.

On many a night, I could imagine nothing in the world more pleasant than just to wander through the streets of Ermita, catching the music that pulsed out of bars and beer gardens, hearkening to the siren call of caprice. One typical evening, I went to eat at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor (“We Serve Fun”) and was entertained by Euphoria, a tight, hard-driving seven-man group, six of whose members took turns on lead vocals. Every one of them had a beautiful voice and for every sad song—“I am just a poor boy/Though my story’s seldom told …”—they had a singer who could reproduce the exact pitch of the original recording. Then I dropped in at a beer garden where three women in Swingles-singers dresses and two middle-aged men in Travolta-ish black suits and white waistcoats danced their way through sleek, synchronized Manhattan Transfer-type numbers. Then I made my way to My Father’s Mustache, a folk club where the waiters came dressed in three-gallon hats with sheriff’s badges pinned to their chests and holsters around their waists. The walls of the place were decorated with sepia prints of American men in cowboy gear, and the theme song from
Bonanza
pounded out of the sound system. Onto the stage—designed in the shape of a Conestoga wagon—strode the Pony Express band, dressed up in Stetsons and bandannas. A fast-strumming banjo man, a fiddler and a girl with a tambourine careened into a roaring version of “Red River Valley,” then raced into “Freight Train” (complete with choo-choo whistles). “Hi, y’all,” drawled the lady singers after they had finished their overture, “we’d like to do a song by Hank Williams.” Out came “Jambalaya.” “Yee-hah,” cried the guitarist. “Whooo-ey,” called the bassist. And the fiddler played like the devil.

On my way back home that night, I found myself half skipping,
so infectious was the happy music. And as I entered my hotel, I heard the receptionist breaking into a rendering of “We Are the World” so pretty that my heart felt like singing along with her.

“Where There Is Music,” said a T-shirt in a Mabini gift shop, “There Can’t Be Misery.” “Music,” said another in the same store, “Is the Medicine of a Troubled Mind.”

Such wishful slogans were not difficult to believe so long as I was inside some folk-music club, watching a smiling singer under flashing orange lights. But as soon as I was back on the streets, amid the clutch of urchins and the cracked fences, it was harder to imagine that music could change the world. And as the days passed, the gray skies of Manila, its sense of peeling dereliction, began to wear me down. I did not know how to cope with the beggars, how to be of assistance to the large-eyed girls in the restaurants. I did not know what to make of the glossy ads for the Manila Casino (on Imelda Avenue), which offered free entrance to tourists and cried, “Game and Gain in U.S. Dollars. Watch that hot dice dance! Tumble at the table!” I needed some fresh air.

And so one day I took a bus out to Angeles City, the small town around Clark Air Force Base, one of the two American bases that help bind the ties between the United States and the only country it has ever directly ruled.

It was not hard to tell when we had arrived. For an hour or so, the bus drove through rice fields and small villages, past huts guarded by wide-eyed gamins. Then it drew up to an unkempt T-junction surrounded by vacant lots, gas stations and fading billboards. On one side of the road was Shakey’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken; on the other a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet (“Open 24 Hours. World’s Finest Coffee”) and a Drive-Thru Donut King. On the far side of the junction stood a rusted roadside shack called the Jailhouse Rock Disco and next to it the Café Valenzuela (“Pride of the Highway”). In the near gray distance gleamed the Golden Arches.

Inside, the walls of McDonald’s were decorated in the style of an Arizona coffee shop; a faded picture of John Wayne; another
of the Lone Ranger and of Chief Red Cloud; a drawing of a Typical Cowboy; a map representing “Guns of the West.” Opposite me, frowning over his breakfast of burger and fries, was a big American kid, with blue eyes and a broad, open face. Above his snakeskin boots and jeans he wore a short-sleeved blue shirt made up of a collage of headlines from the New York
Times
and the Miami
Herald.
And seeping sweetly out of the music system I heard, yet again, the willful optimism of “We Are the World.”

I waited to hear the end of the song and then went out along the town’s main drag, the MacArthur Highway (sometimes spelled McArthur, sometimes spelled Hi-way). It was, I thought, the saddest-looking place in all the world—one long, gray strip of cardboard signs and cocktail lounges and beat-up bars with neon signs for beer in their windows, all lined by a rickety wooden porch. The stores had electric guitars in their windows, and “Harley-Davidson” warm-up jackets; sometimes they had baseball caps with “Playboy Club” on the front, or “Hillcrest Baptist Church”; sometimes they had army shields that said “Eternal Vigilance” and “Ready to Report” and “Pride in Uniform.”

There were plenty of motels too, all with air conditioning, swimming pools and wall-to-wall carpeting, some advertising such additional frills as Betamaxes, Magic Mirrors, Drive-Thru service and free transportation to the base. There were also billboards advertising “bold movies” at the local cinemas. Mostly, though, there were bars—the Valley of the Dolls, the Spanish Fly, the Lovers Inn. The sign outside one of them said simply, “Wanted: Girls Immediately.”

I could, I imagined, have been in any of the desolate small towns of the American West, where used-car lots and twinkling motels and dilapidated cafés run all the way out to the desert. But here there were not stores, but shacks; and here there were shanties, not houses, along the riverbank. There were “Pickup for Hire” signs in all the hardware stores, but there were also signs that said “Goat for Hire.” And the children playing in the streets were not exactly All-American: the little boys bouncing tennis balls had black skins with Oriental features; the little girls at the candy stores were dark, but their hair was sandy.

As I continued looking around, a plane rumbled through the
heavens and a few minutes later it began to rain, pouring down hard on the stucco roof of the Question Mark Lounge, on Louisa’s Patio (“Tourists and Returnees Hangout”), on the bar that promised Candy’s Models and the Sunshine Café (“No Hustlers / Shoeshine Boys / Poofters / Dunces”). I hailed a jeepney (the souped-up secondhand U.S. jeep that provides mass transport in the Philippines) and took shelter on one of its benches, looking out into the grayness as we juddered past the Ponderosa Club, Mark and Donald’s hamburger joint, the Harlem Disco A-Go-Go, Coney Island (“the All-American ice cream”). Most of my fellow passengers were little girls just out of school, eyes dark and faces bright in their tidy Holy Angels uniforms.

The jeepney bounced me off to the far side of town, and then turned around and took me back to the Friendship Highway. I got out, though the rain had yet to abate, and began walking again. “Born in the U.S.A.” was thumping out of one of the bars, accompanied by a steady pattering on the rooftops. A gangly American teenager in a crew cut was leading a pretty little Filipina into one of the motels. Another tall man with a blond crew cut and a clean white shirt was marching purposefully through the downpour, a badge on his heart saying “Church of Latter-day Saints.”

And as the rain kept coming down, I took shelter on the streetside patio. Beside me, under a falling roof, a jukebox stood forlornly against the wall. A teenage Filipina in pink curlers strolled out of a pool hall and pressed a selection. Then, as the first chords of “We Are the World” began to come through, she started to sing along with it softly, rocking her baby in her arms as the rain continued to fall.

THE PHILIPPINES
is not just the site of the largest U.S. military installations in the world. It is also perhaps the world’s largest slice of the American Empire, in its purest impurest form. The first time I landed in Hong Kong, I felt a thrill of recognition to see the pert red letterboxes, the blue-and-white road signs, the boxes of Smarties that had been the props of my boyhood in England; upon arriving in Manila, I felt a similar pang as my eye caught Open 24-Hour gas stations, green exit signs on the freeways, Florida-style license plates and chains of grocery stores
called “Mom and Pop.” The deejay patter bubbling from the radios, the Merle Haggard songs drifting out of jukeboxes, the Coke signs and fast-food joints and grease-smeared garages—all carried me instantly back home, or, if not home, at least to some secondhand, beat-up image of the Sam Shepard Southwest, to Amarillo, perhaps, or East L.A.