Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford

by Charles Willeford

  In addition to hole-in-the-wall shops in the walled city, there were guys with carts and wheelbarrows selling miscellaneous junk in the streets, and the crowded streets were like a thieves' market.

  I found a small bar where a half dozen soldiers were drinking, ordered a beer, and asked one of the guys in the bar if he knew Henderson, my bunkie on the Grant.

  "What outfit's he in?"

  "I don't know. I just know he's in the Thirty-first."

  "I don't know no Henderson, but you could probably check him out at battalion headquarters. You should've written him a letter, if you're from Clark Field, and he could've told you where to meet him."

  "I didn't think of it."

  I left the walled city, not wanting to walk around down there by myself when it got dark, and caught a Willys cab back to the New Washington Hotel. I took a shower and cooled off under the overhead fan, lying on top of the bed.

  I was used to afternoon naps. Walking around in the heat had made me sleepy, and yet I was much too excited to sleep. I wanted to get a girl, but couldn't summon the energy to go out and find one. I called down to the desk and asked them to send me up two bottles of cold San

  Miguel beer.

  A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. The bellboy brought in the beer. There was a girl with him.

  "You want a girl?" he said.

  "How much?"

  The girl was young, about nineteen or twenty I thought, but she looked younger because she was wearing a short pleated navy blue skirt and a white middy blouse. It was the same kind of uniform girls had to wear four days a week at John Adams Junior High School in Los Angeles.

  She had her hair cut in a Chinese bob, and the back of her neck had been shaved.

  "Five pesos."

  "Two."

  "Five."

  "I'll never pay five pesos for a short time. How much for all night?"

  "Twelve pesos."

  I thought about it for a moment. I had planned to take a cab later that evening to the Santa Ana Cabaret, and to dance a little before taking out one of the women for the night. The cab would cost three pesos; there was a one-peso admission charge to the cabaret; and I would have to pay the establishment another three pesos to take one of the dance-hall girls out of the place. Then I would have to give her six pesos for the night, plus buying some dance tickets and a few drinks at the bar. The evening would cost a lot more than the twelve pesos this bellboy was asking. Besides, here I was, already showered and naked on the bed.

  "All right. Twelve it is."

  I gave him twelve pesos and paid for the two beers. I told the girl to take a shower. While she showered, I slipped into my pants and undershirt, my shoes without socks, and left the hotel. I had seen the Chinaman's store across the street from my window. I bought six more bottles of beer, some lemonadas, and a bottle of Honeymoon Lotion. I was back in the room before the girl had finished her shower. I bought the lemonada for the girl and the beer for me. I wasn't too cheap to buy the girl beer, too, but Filipino women are notorious for their inability to tolerate alcohol. One or two beers and they go a little crazy. They throw things, tip over tables, and so on. In this respect, I guess Filipinos are like American Indians. The men can't tolerate much liquor either, but the women are more likely to throw drunken tantrums.

  Naked, the girl looked like she was about fourteen, with adolescent chest bumps instead of fully developed breasts. Except for a four-inch scar on her left buttock (where her sister had slashed her with a bolo, she said), she didn't have a blemish on her body. She was delighted with the gift of Honeymoon Lotion, although she was disappointed when I told her not to open it. We talked and drank for a half hour before we did anything, and it was more like I a date than a business deal. She told me her name was Elena Espineda. She was studying to become a barber and would have her license to cut hair within a year.

  Elena wasn't a particularly satisfying lay, but I was used to that by now. At least while she was on her back the ugly scar didn't show, and she didn't keep asking "You through? You through?" like most of them did.

  Afterward I drank two more beers and sent Elena out to buy two pansit dinners and a deck of playing cards. We ate dinner at the little table by the window, and I tossed the beer bottles, when I finished them, into the street, just to make the passersby jump. (Sometimes, when I drink, I do strange things myself.) She placed the dirty dishes and utensils in the hallway, wiped the table with a trick towel, and I taught her how to play "go fish." She was very serious about this game, and she had a good memory for cards.

  "You will give me all your kings," she said solemnly, in an even flat voice, knowing I held three of them. And then, when I handed them over, and she made a book, she broke into squealing peals of delighted laughter.

  After drinking so much beer, I had to take a leak. When I got up from the table to go to the bathroom, she said: "I can pee farther than you."

  I laughed and shook my head.

  "You bet me five pesos‘?"

  "Sure." I knew that I could piss farther than she could, and I didn't want to take her money.

  "Why not just see for fun. I don't want to take your money."

  She went to her black patent-leather purse and took out a five-peso bill. She placed it on the table and weighted it with a beer bottle.

  I took a five out of my wallet and put it under the bottle with hers. The floor was covered by a tightly woven rush mat, not a rug, and I backed up against the wall and peed. My bladder was full, and the stream must have been at least four or five feet away as it splashed on the mat.

  "You finished?" she said, widening her smile.

  "Let me see you beat it."

  She got down into the corner of the room, stretched her left leg up against the wall, and kept the other leg straight out on the floor. Then she reached down and pulled open the outer lips of her vagina with two fingers, and shot a stream of urine from that one corner all of the way across the room into the far corner by the opposite wall. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it. I could feel my jaw drop.

  A man is supposed to learn from experience, and I should have learned from the bet in the Silver Dollar Bar that a man is foolish to bet on another person's game. I would have lost money on that one, too. And here, this little snip of a girl had beat me at what every man considers his own special province because of his built-in nozzle. But a woman, if she pulls back on her urethra, and practices, can always piss farther than a man. Of course, it was worth live pesos to learn this information about a woman's capabilities. Not many men know about it, and those who just hear about it won't believe it until they witness it. I doubt if very many women know they can do it, either. Most American women would probably consider it unladylike to practice pissing for distance.

  Elena had won money on this trick before, she told me, and she had never had any trouble in getting a man to bet. As a rule, she said, she bet ten pesos, but she liked me because I had given her the present of the bottle of Honeymoon Lotion.

  I thanked her for saving me five pesos, and laughed.

  "You are happy? You not pissed off?"

  "I'm pissed off, all right," I said, laughing again. "But ako malagaya ini ibig gita!"

  Saying this in Tagalog pleased her, and when we went to bed the second time I got another surprise. Elena Espineda knew as much, or more, about making love as any American high school girl, and I got the best piece of ass I ever had in the Philippines.

  ***

  I WOULD HAVE HAD MORE FUN IF I HAD HAD A BUDDY with me, but even so, I still enjoyed the city. The next morning I explored the town, using cabs and carrimettas. I visited the Manila Hotel on the bay, where General MacArthur lived in the penthouse, and drank a cold beer in the bar. I lunched at Legaspi Landing, a restaurant-cabaret that was a hangout for sailors on leave.

  There were a lot of sailors in town. When the sailors came back to Cavite all of the prices went up temporarily, and there was an enmity between sailors and soldiers because of
the price escalation. As a rule, the Asiatic Fleet stayed at sea for two or three months at a time, which enabled sailors to save their money. Then when the fleet returned to Cavite and the sailors were given leave, they had two or three months' pay in their socks (they didn't have any pockets in their uniforms). They never bargained or argued.

  There was another serious inequity here. A common sailor (seaman second class), who was the equivalent of a buck private, was paid thirty-six dollars a month, whereas an army private was only paid twenty-one. Although no soldier in his right mind would have traded places with a swabby, this inequity was resented. After three months of charging around in a tin can (that's what sailors called their destroyers) in rough Asian waters, the sailors were all half-crazy when they got back to Manila. But there is a principle to be considered. The work of a common sailor and a buck private is at the same level, so why were sailors paid iifteen dollars a month more than me? What it proved was that admirals are smarter than generals and could get more money from Congress than generals could. And if generals were as intelligent as the admirals, and could get more money for us, but didn't, then it proved that they didn't have our welfare at heart. A general would have to be pretty damned stupid if he didn't realize that a fifteen-dollar-a-month difference in pay would be resented by every private in the Army. Did generals think we were unaware of the pay differential?

  But I didn't dislike sailors. After more than six parsimonious months at Clark Field, I was spending my money as recklessly as any sailor on shore leave.

  That afternoon I took a long nap at the hotel. Then I had a sirloin steak at Tom's Dixie Kitchen and took a cab out to the Santa Ana Cabaret at eight P.M. The Santa Ana Cabaret was the largest in the world, and it had the world's longest bar. There were two orchestras, one at each end of the cavernous dance hall. When one stopped playing, the other started. Hundreds of Japanese lanterns provided a dim but adequate glow throughout the cabaret. There were dozens of dance-hall girls, but not all of them were women. Many were boys dressed as women, and they were called binny-boys, the P.I. term for homosexuals. The binny-boys wore their own hair long, and with their evening gowns and high heels, it was almost impossible to tell the difference. Dance tickets were ten centavos apiece, and each dance lasted about two minutes. My grandmother had taught me how to waltz, but that was the only dance I knew well. At the Saturday night dances at the Eagles' Hall in Riverside I had learned a kind of two-step that could get me through almost any song, but I was a poor dancer. I waited for slow numbers, and a waltz only came around about every twenty minutes or so. Then the girl I picked out—or the binny-boy—wouldn't know how to waltz anyway. Even with high heels, the girls were too short to dance with comfortably, and they moved as little as possible, too, saving their feet for the long evening's haul. I gave up on dancing and stayed at the bar, hooking my elbows over the edge, watching the action. Four sailors were trying to teach the Big Apple to four dance-hall girls, without noticeable success. The giggling girls thought the sailors were crazy, but the sailors were deadly serious.

  I talked to a sailor at the bar who had purchased a pinch bottle of Old Duff Scotch. He offered rne a drink, and I poured a shot into my empty beer glass. Then he asked me to watch his bottle while he danced. I finished my drink and poured another shot into my glass before he came back to the bar with a binny-boy. I could spot this one all right. He had long hair, but he was also wearing a switch, and the color didn't quite match his own hair. Otherwise I wouldn't have been so positive. His arms were smooth, and he had narrow shoulders like a girl, but those narrow, boyish hips of his were not meant for delivering babies.

  'The sailor's face was flushed from drinking and dancing, and he was not,as the saying goes, "feeling any pain." But he had bought me a couple of drinks, and he seemed like a nice guy.

  "I think," I told him, "you've got yourself a binny-boy there."

  "Think?" he said, bristling. "I know damned well I have. That's why I came out to the Santa Ana. What about it?"

  "Nothing." I shrugged. "I didn't think you knew, that's all."

  "And she's a real sweetie, too," he said. He hugged the binny-boy. It was common knowledge in the Army that sailors, when they were out to sea for a few months, fucked each other. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them did it to get the rumor started. I had assumed, once they got ashore, where women were available, they gave up the practice. The sailor had another shot and asked me to watch his bottle for him again. When he got about a hundred feet away from the bar I took the bottle with me as I left the cabaret.

  The next morning I caught the train back to Angeles. The passenger cars were full, and there were chickens and ducks, with their feet tied, under almost every seat. Filipino passengers didn't travel light, either. They all had bundles and baskets and even pots and pans with them. Most of the women had babies, too, but the babies didn't cry. If a baby started to cry the mother would masturbate the child for a minute or so until it stopped. As a consequence, Filipinos have the most tractable and happiest babies in the world.

  I had an aisle seat, but then a vendor came through selling baluts, and I had to leave. Baluts are fertilized duck eggs, with the little ducklings half formed inside. The eggs are set out in the sun to cook, or to spoil, in my opinion, and when people break them open the stench is terrible. The contents area combination of embryo, yellow feathers and gooey stuff, and it's disgusting to watch people eat them.

  It was only sixty miles to Angeles anyway, and I didn't mind standing on the platform between the cars, watching the greenery and smoking. It had been a memorable three days, and I would have a lot of interesting things to tell my buddy, Canavin, when I got back to Clark Field.

  TWELVE

  CANAVIN, WH0 HAD TAKEN A COURSE IN ANATOMY at the University of Pennsylvania, claimed that he already knew about the vagina's labial overlap, but he hadn't known that a woman could pee farther than a man. He expressed his doubts about the truth of my story about Elena Espineda and her remarkable ability. But I didn't argue with him. It invariably happens that way. When a man is told something he doesn't know, he almost always thinks it's a lie, simply because he hasn't heard about it before. I know I have the same tendency but I've learned to be a little more open-minded about learning new things than other men. After all, I hadn't believed Elena either, and my skepticism had cost me five pesos. Because he had gone to college for three years, Canavin was an established authority in the barracks, and I think it irked him to learn something he didn't know from a junior high school dropout.

  Actually, some of the pronouncements he made were funny. It would happen something like this: Two guys would come up to Canavin, and one would say, "You've been to college, Canavin, and we want you to settle a little argument for us."

  "Okay."

  "Who's the best fighter of all time? Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis?"

  "Jack Dempsey."

  "See!" one of the guys would say triumphantly. "What did I tell you?"

  The two guys, satisfied, would leave, without any further questioning of Canavin's subjective opinion. No one ever asked him how he had arrived at his decision or how three years of college made him an authority on boxing. But such was the awe of the men in the squadron about the benefits of a college education.

  Canavin was so smart about so many things, however, it wasn't difficult for most people to accept his expertise on matters that he couldn't possibly know anything about. His reputation as an authority was enhanced even more when he had an article published in Mabuhay magazine, a monthly that dealt with Philippine culture. Canavin's piece was about three thousand words long, and in it he discussed the great loss to the Philippines of its Spanish heritage. He also provided a few sensible suggestions about how to revive some of those forgotten traditions, including mandatory teaching of Spanish in the public schools. It was a well—reasoned article, I thought, and I was impressed by the photo of Canavin in the magazine, in uniform, with his name in italics below the picture.

  Th
e editor had also paid Canavin fifty pesos for the article, which was even more impressive. A copy was passed around the barracks, and everyone wondered how Canavin knew so much about Filipino culture. The article caused an old guy named Ramirez, a maintenance man in Utilities, who had a son fighting in Spain, to look Canavin up. He talked to Canavin, in Spanish, about his son's chances for survival.

  When Canavin found out that Ramirez's son was a Rebel, he told him that his son's chances were excellent. The Alcazar had fallen recently, and Canavin felt that the death of all those brave young students would provide the exact incentive Franco's troops would need to complete their overthrow of the Loyalists.

  Canavin wasn't happy about the Rebels, though, and he tried to talk an air mechanic named Powell out of joining them. A recruiting officer from Franco's air force had talked to some of the men in the squadron in Angeles. He wanted a few skilled airplane mechanics to go to Spain. The majority of the men in the squadron, like Canavin, were against Franco, but the offer was too good for Powell to turn down. The Rebel recruiting officer would buy his discharge from the Army, send him by boat to Spanish Morocco, and then Powell would be paid $200 a month, in addition to his board and room. There was also a bonus involved for traveling money, so Powell took the man up on the offer. If a man had a year's service, he could buy out of the Army for $120. The more time a man had in the service, the cheaper it became to buy out. Powell had more than twelve years' service, so it only cost $35 to buy his discharge. Powell mailed a postcard from Alexandria, Egypt, addressed to all of us in the squadron, and the first sergeant put the card up on the bulletin board. But after that he was never heard from again.