The Pull of Gravity (6 page)

This wasn’t the first time a bar girl had died in one of the hotels, and God knew it wouldn’t be the last. But every time the girls reacted as if it had never happened before, with panic, fear, vows to never set foot in such-and-such hotel again, vows to quit working the bars all together. Then a week later, maybe two, it was like nothing had happened. And within a month no one could even remember which hotel it had occurred in, let alone the room number.

For one night anyway, money had taken second place to something bigger, and none of the girls put much effort into getting bar fined. That was okay by me.

Near midnight, I noticed Isabel sitting alone in a booth near the back. I had Cathy make me two glasses of rum and Coke, then carried them across to where Isabel sat. I stood in front of the booth for several seconds before she looked up and noticed me.

“You okay?” I asked.

She smiled, but there wasn’t a lot behind it. I held up one of the glasses, and shook it a little so the ice jingled against the sides, then sat down beside her.

“For you,” I said as I handed the glass to her. “Cheers.” We clinked glasses, and took sips. Well, I took a sip. I don’t think Isabel did more than brush the rim with her lips.

“Back home, I don’t think I could ever afford a drink like this,” she said as she set the full glass on the small table in front of us.

“You miss home?” I asked. I guess I was trying to get her to replace one kind of grief with another. So much for my reputation as the psychiatrist of Fields Avenue.

“Sure,” she said. “Of course.”

“Tell me about it. Your home, I mean.”

She scoffed. “Too boring.”

“I want to know.”

She stared at me for several seconds, trying to determine if I was being serious. “Okay,” she finally said. “My parents have a little snack shop. It’s along a pretty busy highway. Some days we do okay, some days not.”

“What about your house?”

She laughed and gave me a look like I was not as smart as she thought I was. “We lived in the two rooms behind the shop.”

“Just you and your parents?”

Another laugh. “And my four brothers and two sisters and grandmother.”

“It sounds kind of crowded.”

“It is.”

“Did Mariella live near you?”

“No,” she said. “Her family moved closer to Manila when I was still a baby, I think.”

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t meet her until I came here.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She shook her head, and we fell into silence. After several moments, Isabel said, “Do they know who she was yet?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The girl who died today. Do they know who she was?”

I unconsciously ran my hand across the stubble on my chin. “I haven’t heard anything yet. Do you think it might be someone you know?”

“No.” She looked around the room. “These are the only girls I know, and everyone’s here tonight.” She paused, then added, “Well, there’s Mariella. But I’m sure it’s not her.”

Mariella had moved on from The Lounge months earlier, but I didn’t think it was her, either.

“Do you think he killed her? The man she was with?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How can she go home with someone who would kill her?”

“We don’t know he killed her. It could have been almost anything.”

“I know, but if he did?”

“Okay. If he did, maybe he doesn’t look like a killer.”

“I think I could tell.” She wasn’t really telling me so much as making a statement.

“Really?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “In his eyes.”

“What if he loved her? A crime of passion.”

“If someone really loved me, they would never kill me.”

I was about to tell her there were many other ways to die from love that had nothing to do with breathing, but that wasn’t what she was really looking for. Once more our conversation ebbed, and we contented ourselves with sipping our drinks.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked once my glass was empty. There were other girls who needed attention, and I had already spent more time with Isabel than I should have. Of course, I always spent more time with Isabel than I should. I guess like with a favorite child, sometimes you couldn’t help yourself.

“I can’t help thinking how that girl has a family like mine somewhere,” she said. “And this week, instead of getting money from her, they’ll get her body.”

I thought she would start crying then. I know
I
wanted to. But her eyes remained dry. Even with just a handful of months in Angeles, she’d learned how to control her emotions, a fact that in the long run probably disturbed me more than the news of the dead girl.

•    •    •

The girls weren’t the only ones affected that night. About an hour before I closed, Dominick Valenti and Josh Harris stopped in for a drink. Both were ex-pats who lived in Angeles.

“No dates tonight?” I asked.

Neither had come in with a girl on his arm. I couldn’t remember the last time that happened.

“Shit, man, everyone’s freaked out over the thing at Las Palmas,” Josh said. He had been an aircraft machinist at Boeing in Seattle who’d retired early at fifty-five. “Last thing I want is some chick whining all night about some dead girl she never knew.”

I tried to smile sympathetically, but I wasn’t sure I pulled it off.

“Heard she was from Slo Joe’s,” Dominick—Nicky to most of us—said. He was a career Navy man who’d gotten a taste of the beautiful brown girls when he’d been a young sailor like me, only ten years earlier in the seventies. Now all that was left of his service days was a blurry blue tattoo on his left bicep and a perpetual crew cut. He was one of Angeles’ truly big boys, his gut taking up more than half his lap.

“I’d heard The Lynx,” I told him.

“God, I hope not,” Josh said. “I’ve got friends at The Lynx.”

“You got friends everywhere,” Nicky said.

We all laughed, but there was an undercurrent of tension. I could tell what they were thinking. They wanted to know if they knew the girl, and if they did, they wanted to know how well. 

“Let me buy you both a drink,” I said.

When the beers arrived, San Migs for Nicky and me and a Heineken for Josh, Nicky held up his bottle and offered a toast. “To the dead girl,” he said. “May she find peace.”

•    •    •

Like most things on Fields, the truth was slow in emerging. It was over two months later before I had the full story.

The girl’s name had been Rosella Ramos. At the bars, she went by the name Vivian. She had been working at Jammers, not The Lynx, and had only been on the job for about four months. Somebody showed me a picture of her, but I didn’t recognize her.

Her papers said she was eighteen. Apparently the guy whose room she was in, an American from North Carolina named Steve or Stan—that was one thing I could never get cleared up—had met her on a previous trip. They’d kept in contact when he went home, and he even sent her money every month. She was new to the scene so to her this meant he loved her. And, who knows, maybe he did. But not enough, apparently.

When he came back, she latched on to him right away. Unfortunately, he probably hadn’t planned on spending his whole vacation with just one girl. Why he didn’t spend a few days in Manila first, sampling the offerings there before coming up to Angeles, I could never figure out. He had to know she was waiting for him.

Anyway, about halfway through the trip, he got the itch to try someone new. Only he couldn’t shake his
honey ko
—his girlfriend. He started going out in the afternoons, saying he wanted to spend a few hours with his buddies drinking and playing pool. He’d leave her in the room with the TV and tell her he’d be back in the afternoon.

Of course he was lying.

There were two levels of bar fines: long time and short time. Long time meant an overnight stay sometimes lasting until the next evening. Short time was exactly what it sounded like: a few hours of fun then everyone back to the bars. What this guy did was rent a room at another hotel, then take a girl at one of the early-opening bars out for short time so he could get in his extra-curricular activities that way. What he didn’t count on was his
honey ko
following him the third day he used this scheme. Once she realized what he was doing, she played it cool, and returned to the room without him knowing.

The next day, when he went to leave for his afternoon “with the boys,” she had a fit. She said she knew he was cheating on her. She said she didn’t want him to go. He told her she was crazy, that this was his vacation and he was going out. Before he reached the door, she told him she would kill herself if he left. Apparently he laughed, and walked out the door without saying anything. The truth is, any veteran of Fields would have done the same thing. Several girls threatened to kill themselves on a regular basis. It was drama designed to let them sink their nails a little deeper into their targets. They thought if they could get a strong enough hold, they might be able to shake a little more cash loose, or, better yet, bewitch the men to the point they’d marry them and take them away.

So the guy left Rosella alone in his room while he went out for a little stress relief. From this point, I could only guess at what happened next. As I saw it, there were really only two possibilities. One: Rosella was truly crushed to the point she didn’t want to live anymore and decided to end it all, then and there. But given the fact she’d been in the business for only a few months, I couldn’t believe she could have sunk so low so fast.

Option two seemed more likely. She knew from the previous days that her boyfriend returned around two p.m. each day. She planned it so that when he came back she wouldn’t be dead yet, but close. The signs of her faux suicide attempt would be on the nightstand, giving him little chance to misunderstand what was happening. He’d then call a doctor and save her life. This was her way of showing him how much she loved him, and how she would rather be dead if she couldn’t have him.

What she didn’t count on was that after their fight that afternoon, he decided to enjoy his new friend for an extra hour, and didn’t return until almost three p.m., a good half hour after Rosella took her last breath.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sometimes you would meet a guy who came to Angeles, and wonder what the hell he was doing there. These were the guys who seemed to have everything going for them: a good job, decent looks, an amiable personality. The kind of guy you’d think didn’t have any problem getting girls back home, a guy who was desired. That’s why the majority of the guys came to Fields—to be wanted. It wasn’t the sex. Well, not completely anyway. Because in Angeles, even the ugliest and oldest members of the Fat Guys Association, and the most socially awkward of the Dweebs ’r ’ Us Club could feel desired. Girls—young, sexy, beautiful girls—looked at these guys as if they had never met a more handsome, charming man.

Sure it was a game, and ninety-nine-point-seven percent of the time, it wasn’t true. Everyone knew it—the girls, the guys. But what you knew logically didn’t always translate emotionally. So when one of the girls gave you those big eyes, you felt it. Maybe not in the knees, but in the gut and sometimes even in the heart. And part of you, for a little while anyway, believed. That was the illusion of Angeles. That was the fantasy world you entered when you stepped onto Fields Avenue.
That’s
why you came.

Without the illusion, no one would ever have come within fifty miles of Angeles. Instead of being hypnotized by the parties and the girls and the perpetual buzz and flashing neon, they’d see the dirt and the beggars and gray, ugly buildings and brown, run-down shacks. They’d notice that some of the girls were just going through the motions and others tackled their “job” like trained professionals. They’d realize that, given the choice, most of the girls would have never come to Angeles, but because of the money, there was nowhere else the girls wanted to be. The men would see the tricks the girls used to get by, the ploys they’d learned to get more money out of their customers, the
shabu-shabu
—what they called the Filipino version of meth—some abused to make it through endless nights of drinking or just to forget about things, the prejudices they’d built up after months and years in the bars so they could still stand a chance of picking up a date.

It wasn’t just the guys who were blind. The girls, too, had their own sense of tunnel vision—eye always on the game, with the easy prize being the peso, or, better yet, the almighty dollar, pound or euro.

Others eyed the ultimate achievement, the grand prize: escape. So much so that many times they would end up giving themselves away for free to a man who promised much but had no intention of ever delivering anything except his own orgasm.

And like the guys, the girls, too, found themselves getting wrapped up in the atmosphere of Angeles. The life itself becoming a kind of drug, even more powerful than the
shabu-shabu
they got from their trike-driving boyfriends. And despite the fact that they were trying to sell themselves every night, if given the choice after only a few months working the bars, most of the girls wouldn’t want to leave.
You can take the girl out of the bar, but you can’t take the bar out of the girl.

So we were all myopic in our own ways, even the papasans. I can’t tell you how many of us had girlfriends at one time or another who were bar girls, ones who said once they were dating us, they would no longer go out with any customers on bar fines. And for a time we would believe that, forgetting why the girls were there in the first place. We, of all people, should have known better.

Blind, yet all of us knowing the truth. We were living the illusion. That’s why we were all there. “Believe,” the fairy would whisper in our ears when we arrived. “Believe and you are in for the experience of a lifetime.”

So when someone showed up who seemed not to need the illusion, we got confused. That’s how it was with Larry.

•    •    •

I met Larry, as he used to always remind me, at the swimming pool at The Pit Stop. It was hot (when wasn’t it?) and my day off. Long before, I’d begun the habit of leaving a swimsuit at The Pit Stop in case I was on Fields and in the mood for a swim. That was one of those afternoons.

As he told it, he was sitting at a poolside table reading a book when all of a sudden this big fat guy did a cannonball dive into the water. The splash apparently reached record proportions, soaking not only Larry and his book, but the remains of his lunch as well.

The fat guy was me, of course.

My memory had me splashing only a little water on his book, but I guess I was chastened enough to buy him a beer. I barely remember the incident at all so it was really Larry’s version and the way he told it that stuck with me. Whether it was true or not, that’s how it happened.

Whenever we were in a group with three or more people who hadn’t heard the story, he’d tell it. He would impersonate the wave as it grew in the air, then came crashing down on him. And when he played the part of me, I suddenly became this aw-shucks oaf who had no idea what had just happened. As far as I could tell, Larry never had a mean bone in his body. So when everyone laughed, I would, too. Even though I’m sure I heard the story a hundred times, it was always funny.

The first time
I
remember meeting Larry was about three days later at The Lounge. It could have been ten p.m., it could have been eleven. I do know it was before midnight because every night at that time we’d play “Love Shack” by the B-52s, and the girls did a special dance Bell had choreographed for them. It was the only organized dancing that we ever had, and I remember that night I watched it with Larry.

I didn’t see him come in. I was in the back dealing with a problem with one of the girls, a dancer named Tessa. She’d received a text message earlier from her boyfriend in England telling her that he’d found out she was still working in the bar, so he was dumping her and not sending any more cash. Something like that happened on Fields several times a week.

Tessa had spent the next two hours furiously texting back and forth trying to convince him he was wrong.

“Either go home or put it away,” I told her.

I’d found her in the changing room, sitting on the floor, her back against the wall and her knees pulled up in front of her. “I’m almost done,” she said.

“You’re done now,” I said.

I started walking toward her, intending to confiscate the phone for the rest of the evening. But she was quick and whipped it behind her back before I could make my grab. Mobile phones were a disease among the girls, and texting each other was so common that some girls could type a message on a phone keypad faster than most people could type it on a computer. But we had a rule at The Lounge: No mobiles while on duty.

“Papa Jay, please,” she pleaded.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve told you before,” I said.

On cue, water began gathering in the corners of her eyes. “He want to break up with me.”

“Tessa, enough.” This wasn’t the first phone violation she’d had. “Either give it to me or go home and start thinking about finding a new job.”

She was silent for a moment. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

I stared down at her, my face blank. I put a hand out so she could put her phone in it. “Do you really want to find out?”

“Papa, please.”

I learned a long time ago from a buddy in the Navy that sometimes you got more out of someone when you said nothing, so I continued to stare. After a moment, she pulled her phone out from behind her back and put it in my hand.

“You’re so mean,” she said.

I put the phone in my pocket, then put my hand out to help her up. Once she was on her feet, she pushed up on her toes and kissed me on the cheek.

“Just joking,” she said, the tears magically gone and a smile returning to her face.

“I’m sorry your boyfriend’s breaking up with you,” I said. No matter what, I still cared about the girls.

“Oh, he don’t break up with me,” she said. “I tell him, no one love him like me. He finally say he’s sorry and everything okay.”

“Then why didn’t you just stop when I came in?” I asked.

“I was telling Natalie what happened.” Natalie, I knew, was a friend of hers who worked down the street at Torpedoes.

We walked back out to the main room, and that’s when I spotted Larry. He was sitting at the bar talking with Cathy, but he didn’t look familiar. I said hi to a couple of the regular customers as I made my way back to my normal spot at the end of the bar. Once I was sitting again, I motioned for Cathy to bring me a bottle of water.

The music was right at the level I liked it, loud enough to create the illusion of a potential party, while low enough that conversations were possible. At The Lounge, we played a mix of contemporary and retro pop: Hoobastank, Shaggy, Duran Duran, the Gorillaz—stuff the girls could really dance to. Thankfully, by then, “Livin’ la Vida Loca” had long since left our playlist.

The music was grooving and the girls seemed to be having a good time. Laughter broke out occasionally from where some girls were doing a little one-on-one entertaining with the customers. No sex, not in the club. If you wanted sex at a bar, you needed to go to one of the twenty-four-hour places on Santos Street where the girls would offer a blow job before you even sat down. The bars on Fields weren’t like that. We considered ourselves to be on a higher level and the girls felt the same way. There was a definite social structure. If a customer did visit a bar on Blow Row, he would do well not to mention it to any girl on Fields. The entertaining in our place took the form of tickling, joking, talking and possibly, if things were going well, a little kissing.

It was an average night—my favorite kind. And I was doing my favorite activities: sitting on my stool, drinking a beer or the occasional bottle of water, and scanning the room to make sure everyone was having fun. I didn’t notice Larry approaching until he was already starting to sit in the chair next to me.

I smiled and nodded at him. “Evening.” I was, after all, the consummate host.

“So this is where the Cannonball King hangs out,” he replied.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, a funny little smile on his face. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

My immediate thought was that he was one of the many Angeles regulars who came at least once a year. I considered faking it and saying, sure, I remembered him. But I’d been burnt doing that once so, instead, I shook my head. “Nope. I don’t.”

He let out a hearty laugh. “Monday, I think,” he said. “In the afternoon. The Pit Stop pool?”

I still wasn’t following him, so I shook my head again.

“Me reading a book, you deciding to displace as much water as you could in my direction.”

That, I did remember. Vaguely, anyway. It had happened several days earlier, and by this point in my Angeles adventure I had become an expert at the short-term memory purge.  “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. I guess I owe you a beer.”

He laughed again. “You already bought me a beer. But I guess another one wouldn’t hurt.”

Cathy, who had wandered in our direction, took the cue and got him a San Miguel.

“Larry,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “Larry Adams.”

We shook. “I’m Jay,” I said.

“This your place?” he asked.

“What? The Lounge?” It was my turn to laugh. “No. I just work here.”

“Not a bad place to work.”

“It has its upside.” I finished off the last of my water. “Hey, Cathy.” When she looked up, I said, “I’ll take a beer now.”

“Here you go, Doc,” she said as she set the bottle in front of me.

“Doc?” Larry asked.

“Not officially,” I said. “This your first trip to Angeles?”

“Yeah,” he said. “First time.”

“So, what do you think?”

He watched the dancers for a moment before answering. When he did, the tone of his voice had gone all serious. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“No shit,” I said, then started laughing louder than I had in weeks.

•    •    •

The rest of the evening we spent talking about things like deep-sea fishing, laptop computers, and the exchange rate of the peso to the dollar. I found out he was from San Francisco, California. I’m not sure if we got into what he did for a living, but later I knew. He owned, in his words, a modest same-day delivery service based in the Bay Area. He was thirty-seven and had never been married.

It wasn’t until well after midnight, when we were both a little drunk, that the subject of the girls finally came up. Sure, that was surprising, but Larry wasn’t your typical tourist. For that matter, I wasn’t your average papasan.

I had just returned from a run to the CR—comfort room, what they called the toilet in the Philippines—and found him eyeing one of the dancers. She was a tiny girl, not even five feet tall, with long black hair that reached the top of her ass, and breasts only slightly larger than expected on her thin frame. There was a whole set of categories—the spinner, the stunner, the runner, just to name a few—and she was a spinner, a small, light girl you could just pick up and spin around anyway you wanted.

“That’s Nelly,” I said.

Nelly had noticed Larry looking at her, and had moved into full-on flirt mode.

“What?”

I nodded toward her. “Your new friend.”

“She is cute,” he said as if he hadn’t expected to find anyone like her.

“You want me to call her over?”

I could see him struggling with it for a moment, then he shook his head. “That’s okay. I was just enjoying the moment.”

I took a sip from my sixth (or was it seventh?) beer of the evening. “You got a girlfriend already?”

“You mean here?” he asked.

I nodded.

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“No problem. I’m just…” he paused. “Not ready, I guess.”

I could almost hear the click in my beer-dulled mind telling me I’d just heard an important piece of information. But it was a few more seconds before I realized what it was.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you tell me you’ve been here something like four days already?”

“Five,” he corrected me.

“Okay, five. Maybe I’m just hearing things, but I think you just said you haven’t been with anyone yet.”