Monstress (14 page)

Ringo was the first to speak to us. “There's no porter shortage at all,” he said.

“No, but shorter porters they are,” Paul said, tapping each of us on the head. “But you can take these onto the plane if you don't mind.” He dropped his carry-on luggage to the floor. The other Beatles did the same.

JohnJohn picked up two bags. I followed his lead. But Googi just stood there, sweaty and pale. He was almost reverent in the way he looked at Paul, and he kept swallowing, like he wanted to speak. “My name is—” he finally said, but he was so nervous he mispronounced it.

“Huggengeim?” George said, one eyebrow raised. “Type of cheese, isn't it? All the same, nice ring to it.”

“Thank you.” Googi was beaming.

“Anything to say to the camera?” Paul asked. He looked back at John, whose face was hidden behind the lens, which was now pointed at us. “Go on, lads. Whatever you like.” My cousins and I looked at each other, as if someone was supposed to cue someone else, give him the right words to say. But none of us could speak.

“Come on, man,” Paul said. “Just give a shout. Wave hello. Anything at all.”

I could hear the camera rolling, the filmed moments passing by. I had no idea if these were the Beatles' home movies, something they'd watch again whenever they wanted to reminisce, or if it was for the whole world to see, a way of bringing them along as the Beatles traveled the globe. Our silence continued, so I thought of the things people said whenever they were caught on camera—bystanders on the TV news, or athletes in the first post-victory moments.
Hi Mom
. That was it. So I stepped forward and said it too, straight into the lens. I even waved, as if she could truly see me. My cousins did the same, and the three of us laughed nervously at ourselves. The Beatles started laughing too, and now we all laughed together, like we'd been chums for years. I said nothing else, never even told them my name, but it didn't matter. JohnJohn looked truly happy for the first time in months, and even now I'm sure there were joyful tears welling in Googi's eyes. I wanted to plant myself there, take root in that moment with the Beatles and my cousins, and never leave it, not ever.

Quick as it was, the picture of it is clearer to me now: the Beatles in a line, facing my cousins and me, a four-on-three standoff that should commence into battle. But what Uncle Willie finds when he reaches the top of the escalator is a friendly exchange between his enemy and his allies, a truce he never called. And when I turn to look at him I'm just stuck, like someone ankle-deep in hardening mud, and I can't run or hide or change my traitorous face. I betrayed my uncle, and the woman he loved.

So I acted.

“Now!” I said. I stepped away from the group, then pushed a potted plant over, hoping it would crash upon a Beatle like a fallen tree, pinning him to the ground. But it just landed softly on a wing chair and dirt spilled everywhere, soiling Paul's and Ringo's shoes. I kept going, throwing their bags across the room and into the fake fireplace, and Uncle Willie nodded, like everything was going according to plan after all, and he stepped forward, too. I picked up another carry-on, hurling it onto the down escalator.
Take that, Beatles!
was the intended message, but it fell like a tumbleweed, and George said, “That's my bag,” and Paul said, “He wanted to check that.” I ignored them both, and took the gift basket of mangoes at Ringo's feet and kicked it over, the fruit rolling onto the floor, and I picked them up and threw them hard against the ground like grenades. All the while, Googi struggled to work the flash on his camera, and JohnJohn took fast, nervous drags of his cigarette, looking confused in a corner of the room. “Don't just stand there,” I said, but as soon as I ran out of things to knock over and throw, all I could do was remove myself from the scene, too.

But Uncle Willie wouldn't stop, and soon he had John by the collar. “So
you
are the rascals who are more popular than Jesus Christ,” he said. John nodded, the camera still in his hand, and Uncle Willie tried shaking him into submission. He was near tears about Imelda, almost incoherent, and what I saw next was his hand curl into a fist and John's camera drop to the ground, the film popping out, my hello to the world overexposed, gone forever.

Suddenly a dozen other bodies rushed up the escalator, and they looked like real airport security guards. “Come on, everybody,” Uncle Willie shouted, “for Imelda!” “For Imelda!” they shouted back, and the mob closed in. I didn't know if Uncle Willie had planned this from the start, if he recruited true Marcos loyalists because he knew we would fail him in the end. I called his name, fighting through the crowd to reach him, but when I touched his shoulder he swiped my arm away and told me to leave him alone, to get out, to go. Then someone shoved me, and I fell backwards to the ground. Next to my hand was a mango, so I picked it up and threw it hard against the painting of Imelda Marcos, hitting her in the center of her chest. An orange, pulpy ooze bloomed like a flower, then dripped down like blood. I wanted to call out to Uncle Willie, to show him what I had done, but my cousins grabbed me, pulling me toward the escalator. “It's over,” JohnJohn said, “let's go!” We ran down, and all I saw when I looked back was my uncle vanish in the haze, his war cry in the name of love drowned out by all the Imeldamania.

We ran through the corridor and headed for the entrance. “What about Uncle Willie?” I said, and my cousins said to forget him, that there was nothing we could do. I kept running, sweating in the thick polyester blazer, the name tag flopping up and down against my chest. I finally stopped at the long line of policemen trying to contain the thousands of fans who cried out, “Beatles, don't leave us, Beatles, don't go.”

In the end, airport police broke up the fight, which lasted only minutes after we fled the scene. No arrests were made and the Beatles made it to their plane, none of them seriously injured, but they never came our way again.

“Y
es,” Googi told reporters, “I witnessed the whole thing.” We ended up making the papers, the international news, and for the first time the world came to us, calling late at night, knocking on our doors early in the morning for interviews. Googi basked in his brief fame, and JohnJohn tried to use the spotlight to expose the corruption in the Marcos government, but reporters just stopped their tape recorders and put down their pens when he spoke. I stayed quiet, letting everyone else remember and tell the story however they wanted.

But Uncle Willie made his role in the attack known, and what he got in the end was a reprimand from the President himself. And Imelda Marcos—essence of Filipina womanhood, face of our country—called the incident a breach of Filipino hospitality, and she offered more quotable wisdom to help the people understand what had happened. “In life, ugliness must sometimes occur,” she said. “But when such ugliness happens, only beauty can arrive, ‘to save the day,' so to speak. Despite the ugly events of the past days, beauty has returned, so let's focus only on the beautiful things and let beauty live on.” Ashamed for any embarrassment he brought to the First Lady, Uncle Willie issued an official apology, and resigned soon after.

But he didn't disappear. “I still have one million energy,” he said. He took a job as an airport shuttle driver, carting tourists to nearby hotels, and on his lunch break he'd hang around the terminal, making sure Imelda Marcos's flights were on schedule, and offering unwanted advice on how best to handle her travels. “They say I am a pest, but I know they still need me,” he said. “Imelda still needs me.”

Years later, after I joined my mother in California, I made a final trip to the Philippines. Googi had run off to Hong Kong with an English businessman years before, and JohnJohn was dead, one of the few to take a Marcos bullet in the People Power Revolution of '86. But when I walked into Uncle Willie's apartment, everything felt the same: the ceiling fan still creaked when it turned, beads hung in the doorway, and there was a case of San Miguel in the refrigerator. The only difference was that Imelda Marcos's presence had grown. There were more stories and pictures crowding his bedroom wall, some of them recent, as if she were still the First Lady.

We did very little that week; Uncle Willie was eighty years old, and all he wanted to do was nap or watch television. But late one night, he told me he had something to show me, and he put a videocassette into the VCR. “Watch,” he said, then pressed the
PLAY
button. The screen went blue, and suddenly the Beatles appeared on the screen, doing an interview in which they mentioned the incident. “Do you remember the battle?” Uncle Willie asked from his wheelchair. “How bravely we fought?” I smiled and told him I could never forget.

I turned up the volume. “I hated the Philippines,” Ringo said bluntly. George and John agreed, smoking before the cameras, but Paul was more introspective. “It was one of those places where you knew they were waiting for a fight,” he said. Uncle Willie nodded, confirming its truth. I stared at the Beatles' faces, and I wondered if they remembered mine, if they would know who I was if they saw me now.

“If I had become an American, like you,” Uncle Willie said, “I would have been knighted.” I didn't tell him that they do that only in England. In America, you might get a compliment in the papers, maybe a medal for bravery, but nothing that big. You would be the same person as when you started, long before the fight. That much I'd come to know. Still, I told him yes, that most certainly he would have been knighted, and I proceeded to create for him a picture of the ceremony, of Uncle Willie on his knee and Imelda on her throne, a sword in her hand, its blade gentle on his shoulder.

Save the I-Hotel

T
he human barricade surrounding the International Hotel was six deep, two thousand arm-linked protestors chanting,
We won't go!
Save the I-Hotel!
Inside, dozens more crammed the halls, blocking the stairwell with mattresses, desks, their own bodies. But it was past midnight now, fire engines blocked both ends of Kearny Street, and police in riot gear were closing in, armed with batons and shields.

“I hate this street,” Vicente said.

“It's nothing,” Fortunado said. He stood at the window watching the protest below, his fingers between the slats of the blinds. “Just traffic.”

“I'm telling you, it's the Chinese again. Their parade always clogging the city.” He sat on the edge of his bed, folding a thin gray sweater over his lap. They were in his room on the third floor of the I-Hotel, next door to Fortunado's. “Don't worry, Nado. We'll make it through.”

Fortunado closed the blinds, wiped the dust from his fingers. “We will,” he said.

The threat of eviction had loomed for more than a decade, and now it was happening. The mayor of San Francisco had approved the hotel's demolition and ordered the removal of its final tenants, the elderly Filipino men who had lived in the I-Hotel for more than forty years. Earlier that day, protest organizers had gathered the tenants in the lobby to prepare them for the fight, and told them to stay in their rooms until the very end. “But pack a bag,” they said, “just in case.” After, Fortunado hurried upstairs, woke Vicente from a nap, and though he meant to tell him about the eviction, he told him they were taking a weekend trip instead, just the two of them. He hadn't named a specific place, but Vicente was easy to persuade. These days, he barely recognized the world as it was: he never knew the day or time, his oldest friends were strangers, and just three weeks before, Fortunado found him on the corner of Kearny Street and Columbus, only a block from the entrance of the I-Hotel, asking strangers to help him find his way home. Now, the shouting in the halls and the sirens on the street were simply the ruckus of a Chinese New Year in his mind. He knew nothing of an eviction, had no sense of a coming end.

Vicente's hands shook as he folded another sweater. Distant sirens drew closer. Fortunado thought,
This is what it means to be old
. Now, he wished youth back, and if granted, he would offer it up to Vicente, who would make better use of it. He imagined Vicente springing to his feet and running down the stairs to claim his place in the barricade, his fists raised and ready to defend their right to stay. He was, Fortunado always knew, the stronger one.

I
t was August 4, 1977. They had lived in the I-Hotel for forty-three years.

They never meant to stay so long.

They met on a September night in 1934. Fortunado had been in the States for five months, working fifteen-hour days in the asparagus fields just outside Stockton; this trip to San Francisco was his first chance to get away. He stepped off a Greyhound bus at the end of Market Street and wandered the grid of downtown, unable to distinguish the places that welcomed Filipinos from those that refused them. It was dark when he finally spotted a trio of Filipino men smoking cigarettes outside a barely lit doorway, and though no one said hello, they stepped aside to let him through.

He entered a long, narrow dance hall filled with mixed couples, Filipino men with white women. A gray-bearded man with a cane circled the room, calling out, “Dime a ticket, ticket a dance,” and in the corner, a half dozen women sat in metal chairs, waiting for the next customer. A banner that read
Welcome to the Dreamland Saloon
sagged on the wall above them.

Fortunado bought three tickets, moved closer to the dance floor. He watched the couple closest to him. The man danced with his eyes closed, whispering into the woman's ear; the woman yawned, then scratched something from her teeth.

Fortunado put the tickets in his pocket and took a chair by the wall. This would be a night of music to enjoy alone, nothing more, and it would be enough.

A new song began, and a man with a beer in each hand stomped across the dance floor, pestering girls for free dances. “Sorry, Vicente,” a girl with a long cigarette said, “no money, no honey.” She blew smoke in his face and walked off. “Your loss,” Vicente shouted back. He finished one beer, then the other. He was tall for a Filipino, lanky in his fitted blazer and trousers. He zigzagged through the crowd, bumping into couples, then suddenly tripped over the ticket man's cane. “I'm fine, everybody,” Vicente shouted, gaining his balance, “I'm just fine,” and to prove it he began dancing alone, swaying side to side with some imaginary partner. He was a drunk, pathetic sight but Fortunado couldn't help but laugh.

Vicente saw him and walked over. “If I'm so funny,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, “then where's your girl, big shot?”

Fortunado shrugged.

“With all these fine girls around? Your head must be broken.” Vicente flicked Fortunado's forehead twice, like he was checking the ripeness of a coconut. Fortunado swiped his arm away, and warm beer came spilling over Fortunado's head.

“Idiot!” Fortunado got to his feet. “You want to dance so badly? Then take them.” He took the tickets from his pocket and threw them to the floor, shoved Vicente aside, and walked off.

In the washroom, he ran a red cocktail napkin under warm water, wiped his head and dabbed the beer from his shirt, the lapel of his jacket. He thought of his life in America: the hot, dusty hours in the fields, the muggy nights in the bunkhouses, all the workers who passed the time regretting the new life and lamenting the old. They were new arrivals too, most of them Filipinos, and they never stopped telling him:
Nobody knows you here, just the work you do, just the color of your face.
They called America a mistake, and now the dream was to find a way back home, to the life you knew and the person you were. Tonight was meant to prove that he had been right to come.

He looked in the mirror. The shoulders of his borrowed blazer were wider than his own. The sleeves fell past his knuckles.
Fool,
he thought to himself.

The door opened and he saw Vicente in the edge of the mirror. “Never pay for dances,” he said, setting the tickets on the sink. “That way, you find out which girls want your dimes and which ones really want to dance with you.” He reached for Fortunado's lapel. “Messy boy. Wear mine.” He removed his jacket and held it out, a peace offering.

“I'm fine with my own.”

“Suit yourself.” He lit a cigarette, introduced himself, then asked, “What's your name?” a question Fortunado had not heard since he was hired in the fields five months before. In his life now, weeks could pass without ever hearing his name.

So he told him.

“Fortunado.”
Vicente shook his head, exhaling smoke. “Too long. I'll call you Nado.” He stamped out his cigarette on the wet, crumpled napkin and stepped toward the door. “This place is dead, Nado. Let's move on.” He held the door open, and though Fortunado didn't move, Vicente continued to stand there, waiting. Fortunado realized that Vicente had come to the Dreamland alone too.

They walked up and down the streets and Vicente named them: Kearny, Washington, Jackson, Clay. Certain blocks felt more familiar than the rest, those lined with small eateries and shops named Bataan Kitchen, the Manila Rose Cantina, the Lucky Mabuhay Pool Hall. All around, Filipino men smoked, laughed, and drank from silver flasks, hollering for each other and darting across the street, as if this city had been theirs from the beginning. And sitting on the top step of an apartment building was the oldest Filipino Fortunado had ever seen in America, gazing at the moon as if it held the face of the one he loved.

“Manilatown,” Vicente said. “Our small place in San Francisco. Just like home, eh?”

Fortunado shook his head. This was better.

They continued walking, and Vicente told his story: he came here alone from Manila at the start of '33, scrubbed toilets and floors for a miserable half-year before finding better work as a bellhop in the Parkdale Hotel, a decent job with barely decent pay, but the best you could do in times like these. “It's hard out here, sometimes,” he said, slowing his pace, “you get lonely, you get scared . . .” His voice trailed off as though these were his final words for the night, the truth he finally had to admit. But then he stopped, turned to Fortunado. “So be tough, okay?” He smiled, then punched Fortunado gently on the arm.

Hours passed, bars and restaurants closed. They found themselves at the end of the city, and walked along the Embarcadero. “Look there,” Vicente said, pointing toward the water, and through the dark Fortunado saw it: the beginnings of the Bay Bridge. It would be the longest steel structure in the world, eight miles connecting San Francisco to Oakland. For now, it was only a line of towers rising from the black water, half-hidden in fog, and Fortunado wondered when it would be finished, if someday he might travel across it.

“I don't want to go back,” he said.

“Then don't,” Vicente said. “What's in Stockton anyway?”

Nothing. Just the hard, thin mattress Fortunado slept on, the canvas bag filled with the few clothes he owned, and more days in the fields with the kind of men he dreaded becoming.

They made their way to 848 Kearny Street and entered the I-Hotel, where Vicente kept a room for six dollars a week. He offered his floor for the night and Fortunado accepted, rolled up his coat for a pillow and used Vicente's as a blanket. It was his best sleep in America yet. The next day, Vicente loaned Fortunado twelve dollars for two weeks' rent, and he checked into number 14 on the third floor, the room next door to Vicente's and exactly the same: a small, narrow space with a twin bed, a corner sink, a three-drawer bureau, and a single window that looked out on the 800 block of Kearny Street. Below, Fortunado could see two Filipino groceries, a barbershop, a Chinese laundry, and on the rooftop across, an unfinished billboard with a half-painted picture of a crate of apples, the word
new
written in yellow letters beneath.

“Not much of a view,” Vicente said.

Fortunado opened the window, letting in a breeze. “Good enough for now,” he said.

F
ortunado was twenty years old that night they met. Vicente was twenty-four.

Now, Fortunado was sixty-three. Vicente, sixty-seven.

Neither of them married. No one in the I-Hotel ever did, and when they wanted to, the law forbade them. No Filipino could bring a wife or fiancée to the States back then, and there were no Filipinas here. Marrying white women, even dating them, was illegal, and always dangerous. The same week he arrived in California, a Filipino field worker was beaten to death for swimming in a lake with his white girlfriend.

The law changed in 1967. “I've been alone this long,” Vicente had said, “what would I do with a wife?” He was fifty-seven by then, too old and too late to bother with marriage. “She'd want a bigger place, something expensive. No thanks, I'm fine where I am.” But during their Saturday afternoon walks through Chinatown, the sight of a wedding banquet in a Chinese restaurant made him silent, suddenly tired and irritable. He would hurry back to the I-Hotel, pour himself a shot of Du Kang, the gold-colored Chinese liquor they drank as young men, and pace the short distance of his room as though trapped inside it, then finally sit at the window with his hands on the sill, staring down at the slow-moving traffic. From the sidewalk below, Fortunado would watch him, knowing Vicente's regrets—the years of come-and-go women, the time and money wasted on prostitutes, the better life he might have lived had he been brave enough to try. And Fortunado would think,
I'm sorry
.

Somewhere close, glass shattered. Vicente looked up from his packing, turned toward the door as if to investigate, then brushed his knuckles against his jaw. “I want to shave before we leave,” he said. He went to the sink and turned on the faucet, waited for cold water to turn hot.

Fortunado went to the door and looked through the peephole: protesters crammed more furniture into the stairwell, others hammered wood planks over windows already boarded up, and at the end of the hallway, three men chained themselves to exposed pipes running down the wall while the rest cheered them on.

Fortunado double-checked the locks, tugged at the knob, and made sure the door would hold. “It's just the parade,” he said.

F
ortunado had left Stockton with no money and no plan, but in the beginning, San Francisco worked the way America should: he had a friend, a room of his own, and soon after, a bellhop position at the Parkdale Hotel.

Vicente lied to get Fortunado the job: he told his boss that a cousin with three years' experience as the houseboy of Seattle's ex-mayor had just arrived in the city, looking for work. “I told them I've known you my whole life,” he explained, “so try to act like it.”

The following morning, they caught the first cable car on the California line, rode to the top of Nob Hill, and stepped off at Powell and Mason. Straight ahead was the Parkdale Hotel, seven stories high, twenty windows across, and from where Fortunado stood it seemed the rest of the city had vanished behind it. Inside, a dozen marble pillars held up the lobby's mahogany ceiling, a brass staircase spiraled upward, and in the copper elevator doors, Fortunado could see his reflection: his bellhop uniform fit tightly and made him stand up straight, his pomade-slicked hair gleamed under the light, and the dozen buttons on his coat could be mistaken for gold.

Those months in the fields stooped over in the dusty heat, the brim of his hat casting an unending shadow on his face—that was someone else's anonymous life. Now, when Fortunado crossed the lobby, he would welcome guests in his best English, and they, in turn, regarded him with courteous smiles. But the best times in the day, those moments when he believed he was where he belonged, were when he passed Vicente in the hallway or on the stairs: Vicente would nod with a quick smile of recognition, and sometimes, when no one was watching, he would reach out and punch Fortunado on the arm, just below his shoulder.