Roxas’s northern part was the administering rational self, while southward, towards Baclaran, other human needs were met. These glitzy nightclubs were expensive, the favorite haunts of politicians, businessmen, and the scions of wealthy families. If Filipinos were the Latinos of the East, Manila was our pre-Castro Havana: the clubs had their own big bands and floor shows, as well as beautiful, well-groomed hostesses whom a customer could “table.” That meant having her sit with him as he paid for “ladies’ drinks,” outrageously priced, watered-down cocktails the lady could drink all night without getting drunk. Invariably, the loveliest women wound up as mistresses of the clubs’ well-connected clients. One of my teenage fantasies was to have an exquisitely lovely hostess as an inamorata, unbeknownst to her sugar daddy whose largesse would benefit a young lothario as well.
Neither I nor my friends could afford these clubs. They could be dangerous, frequented by the sons of powerful politicians, spoiled and spoiling for trouble. Accompanied by bodyguards, they would swagger in, seemingly taller because of their command of men and money. Anyone looking at them with even a hint of disrespect was to be confronted, invariably roughed up. Men could, and did, get killed just for the wrong “look.”
The clubs on the boulevard straddled the boundary between Manila and Pasay City. Manila was by no means a haven of prudes, but Pasay had a seediness that encouraged and thrived on libidinal energies. Plying the boulevard were so-called taxi girls, courtesans of the night who would cruise around in a hired cab until hailed by a trick whereupon the cab would take the couple to one of many nearby motels. Sometimes, when the john wanted to save money, the back seat would have to do.
The sidestreets flanking the clubs had smaller bars—often featur-ing strip shows—and casas, or brothels, for the ordinary pocket. Streets named after saints and places of pilgrimage—San Juan, San Antonio, Antipolo—offered tawdry experiments in love. The touts and pimps, in addition to their stable of whores, had couples of varying ages, partners paid to demonstrate their lovemaking skills in brightly lit rooms furnished with a bed and chairs for clients to sit on. The exhibition was known as toro, which means “bull” in Spanish. The man was the toro, the woman to be impaled by him. Like carnival barkers, the touts described the extraordinary talents of these men and women. Did one wish for a young couple, sturdily built, still ruled by passion rather than craft? Here, Boss, this way please, for wonders you’ve never seen. Or perhaps you were more interested in an older pair, a man and woman who could make the Kama Sutra come alive, dispassionately, and even invite you to participate. It was one way of learning about the subject, since sex was never discussed in my family, nor, as far as I knew, in my friends’ families, and certainly not at Catholic school, where the body existed solely so we could deny it.
Aside from the requisite girlie magazines and badly lit porno flicks—which for some reason were referred to as “fighting fish”— young men learned by going to these institutions of lower learning. The first time I witnessed toro was with José, a good college friend of mine, who was also a poet. One evening, we were with Q, an older writer, and a friend of José’s. Q, already known among Manila’s literati and with a reputation for generosity towards struggling writers, had taken us out to drink and dine. Afterwards, inebriated, we piled into a cab and headed for Pasay. Q had suggested watching toro, to which José and I had lustily agreed.
The couple the pimp brought out was young. The woman, petite, her taut brown skin shining under the fluorescent bulb, was friendly and chatted with us; all the while she rubbed herself with sterilizing alcohol. The toro, engaged in similar ablutions, seemed taciturn. He was of regular build and, after foreplay had gotten him sufficiently aroused, a little too eager. At one point, we heard her whisper, “Just a moment.” It was clear who was in charge of this show. Whenever she wanted a realignment, she would pat him gently on his rump. The practiced ease of their lovemaking was saved from mechanicalness by his strained eagerness and her gentle cheerfulness. In the end, they reverted to the missionary position (how Catholic, I thought) and, as in fighting-fish flicks, he climaxed on her belly. I remember his mute but eloquent orgasm, but I don’t remember hers, or if she had one at all. More likely, she didn’t. In a reversal of everyday macho etiquette, men came first in bed, and women rarely followed, the onanistic showiness meant to show us that there was nothing fake to this lovemaking, though there may have been no love to begin with.
It was only later that I—fresh from university and working in one of Makati’s office mills—would sometimes visit a casa, along with my colleagues, after a night of drinking. “Casa” was the right word: it was a home, albeit nondescript, the parlor marked by cheap furniture and almost invariably a religous shrine in one corner. A middle-aged woman in a house dress—the stereotypical picture of a housewife— would greet us with a smile and call out for her “girls” to emerge from their rooms. Our visits weren’t so much a question of sexual initiation as they were rites of passage for male bonding, a camaraderie we naïvely believed would exorcise our doubts about ourselves and the society we lived in.
The Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila, the exclusive and exclusively male university I had attended, would have had fits had they known about this extracurricular activity, and would certainly have expelled anyone frequenting the casas. There were whispers, however, of one or two priests being seen in these less than reputable establishments. In one of those peculiar interpretations of God’s charity, the men of the cloth could be forgiven, but not us.
Such nocturnal forays were common enough among us. We were young, we were horny, we wanted a life that wasn’t just books, term papers, or innocent soirees and dance parties with the well-bred and sexually repressed colegialas enrolled in Manila’s Catholic schools. When slow numbers came up, the usual ploy for a colegiala to preserve her expensively perfumed honor was to use her left arm as a wedge, limb angled on the man’s shoulder, hand lightly balled into a fist that held the promise of a quick but gentle parry to the throat to discourage any attempt at intimacy.
Some of them were more adventurous, and showed it on the dance floor. If the colegiala placed her left arm around your shoulder in a tentative embrace, it was to encourage you to hold her tight and perhaps feel her a bit. The idea was to close that space where a train could roar through to one where not even an ant, as we joked, could pass. Theologians loved to call this an occasion for sin, when two voices within us engaged in debate about the pros and the cons of an act or a thought. On that dance floor, I don’t have to tell you which “voice” most of us listened to. I kept in mind what Saint Augustine would say, when he was still very much a man of the world and sainthood seemed an impossible prospect: “God, forgive me…later.”
I was at the Ateneo because my two older brothers had graduated from there and my father had attended it for a couple of years in the prewar era when it was still part of Spanish Intramuros. My first year at the Ateneo’s lower grades was spent in temporary quarters, mostly Quonset huts in Ermita, while a new, sprawling school-complex was being erected in nearby Quezon City. The huts, structures of wood and steel with arching semicircular roofs, were relics of a bygone age. The playground had huge jacaranda trees; at one end was a high wall that separated our school from Assumption, an exclusive all-girls’ school run by French nuns. During my last two years in high school, when the Ateneo had long moved to the spacious grounds and modern edifices of Loyola Heights in Quezon City, I served as an acolyte, along with some friends, during La Semana Santa, or Holy Week, masses at the Assumption Chapel. La Semana Santa was when Manila and the whole country stopped to indulge in an orgy of ritualistic sor-row over a man salvaged by the Romans. It was also a time when a great number of city dwellers hied themselves to the provinces and the beaches to escape the suffocating heat of summer. Church icons were hidden under lavender cloth while music of an appropriately funereal nature came over the airwaves. Old women gathered at makeshift roadside altars in Manila’s neighborhoods to chant and sing in keening voices the life and death of Christ in a traditional form known as the Pasyon.
My friends and I served mass not so much out of intense religious feelings but for the opportunity of seeing the lovely colegialas who
