Hate the players and the game

She speaks Cebuano, Tagalog, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and English – never finished the sixth grade – and gives head like a dream. This is what she tells me as I bum a square. A Marlboro light that smokes like a filter-less camel – we’ll talk about that later.

She left the province to come to Manila to find work because there was no money at home. At sixteen she and her childhood sweetheart had their twins. By the time they were four he was married with a child on the way and she answered an ad for a massage parlor.

The money trickled in. Just enough to bring her mother and four brothers up from the province, pay rent on a small two room apartment – about 400 square feet – and put two of her brothers through college; now in their third and fourth years. She lives in a “dorm” that costs 3000 pesos a month and averages two thousand pesos a day. Because of her hours the twins – a daughter and son – now live with her mother in a room above the local fish market. She misses the terribly and keeps a video clip of “we love you” on her Motorola PDA.

She takes three days off for her menses and one day off a week to rest. After two fucks she’s had enough; some days there are no “dates” so she sits from six in the evening to six in the morning on the wrong side of a two-way mirror. Some days, during convention season, there are as many as ten. The pain on her cervix tells her she needs to quit but the two mouths at her mother’s house convince her she can hold out for three more years.

“J” is a quick-witted conversationalist and natural polyglot. She graciously tutors me on my nearly forgotten Japanese. We sit on the steps behind the brothel sharing squares and telling stories. Keep in mind that the exchange rate is 47.8 to 1 at the time of this writing down from 55 to 1 over two years ago – we’ll talk about that later too.

She hates Koreans because they are insecure, demanding, and abusive. The Japanese on a whole are just a little weird, and the Europeans are perverts. She says she’ll do just about anything for money as long as a condom is involved. That stipulation has gotten her ass beat on more than one occasion. She has tattoos and scars; it’s hard to tell which are which.

Behind this brothel is a nexus in the global capital system – an intersection between the demands of capital and the requisites of eating and breathing here on planet earth. Here in the streets of Manila, behind this island of tourist indulgences, the brutalized casualty of capital wears the face of a twenty six year old mother of two, who translates for me as I hustle another 5000 pesos in a crap game with the drivers (we agree to spilt the take).

We’re all out back smoking, waiting; while mid-level pencil pushers get their weenies waxed. In from China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Japan – I’m the only American – certainly the only Black. The American play land is in another enclave with the Brits, the Germans, the South Africans and the Kiwis and the Aussies. The drivers tell me what their “bosses” think of America, why there are no Americans here and why “this is just the way things are.” “J” is twenty-six and looks fifty. Her skin is worn, pock marked and leathery from to much make up; her voice is raspy and hoarse because she chains smokes four packs a day (cigarettes cost about a dollar here – 40 pesos); she prays to La Virgin that she will see her children safely in a better life; she can’t see her father because she can’t bear to face him and answer “where does the money come from?”

She tells me that if she makes payout she can leave and see her kids tonight, she also tells me that she makes the best Bangus a lugaou.

More later.

Pussy, Paper, Poetry, Power and Pistols