Let's Go Mad

by Rob Binkley

  Brian didn’t seem to mind. “Have you noticed we’re doing nothing but island hopping?” he said. “Indonesia, Australia, now this.”

  “Australia’s a continent.”

  “Technically. But who are they kidding?”

  “I love islands. When I was little I always told Jack I’d retire to one. Maybe I still will.”

  “Now I get it … Jack’s just a red herring. We’re going to the Philippines to find Utopia.”

  “Maybe. Hadn’t thought of it like that. But if Utopia exists it would have to be on an island, right? Cut off from the rest of the corrupt world.”

  “You may be on to something.”

  I didn’t let on how conflicted I felt about this leg of our trip, but Brian was right—we were island hopping on our sideways hunt for Shangri-la. We were going to the perfect part of the world for this kind of quest. Like Indonesia, the Philippines is an archipelago country made up of more than seven thousand islands.

  It’s broken up into three main geographies: the mega-islands of Luzon and Mindanao and the many small and beautiful Visayan Islands. If you’re a diver, surfer, big-city culture junkie, or just love to vacation on heavenly beaches, there is an island in the Philippines for you. Divers and beach bums should head straight to the Visayas, where island-hopping and diving is king.

  We planned to scour the Visayas for our Xanadu eventually, but we had some business to attend to first.

  We landed right in the heart of the action in the swarming capital city of Manila where we ran into a mass of holy mayhem the second we touched down. “The Book calls Manila the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ … Should we file an anti-defamation lawsuit?” Brian closed the book and handed it back to me. “So racist.”

  “Very funny. Drink it in, Rakow.” I gestured to the swirling chaos around us.

  “Will you stop mentioning drinks? I’m tryin’ to dry out over here.” He set his gaze on the insane scene. “Why is the entire world at the airport today?”

  “Hate to break it to you, but we’ve landed in the vortex of this country’s love for Easter. Everyone’s leaving to holiday in the provinces.”

  Brian laughed. “Great. Is the Savior in the building? I’m Catholic! Everyone go crazy at once!” he shouted, waving his arms at the swarms of Filipinos rushing to catch their plane.

  I can’t remember whose plan it was to fly on Easter weekend, but it was a terrible idea. The country’s overwhelming Catholic population had stormed the airport at once, the result of three hundred and fifty years of Spanish rule. Western religions may seem incongruous with this part of the world, but the Philippines is a very different animal from their neighbors in Southeast Asia like China, Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Instead of Hindu and Buddhist, they’re Catholic and Muslim. Instead of the pervasive Asian cultural influence you find on the mainland, the “PI” is very much rooted in Pacific Islander, Spanish, and (yes) American traditions.

  “You know more about this place than your stupid Book,” Brian said.

  “That’s cause I used to live here,” I said.

  This was Brian’s first visit to the Philippines. Not mine. The “PI” was my second home when I was a teenager. Being back felt like déjà vu all over again.

  We settled into a long queue for a taxi. Brian fell asleep on his feet and I got lost in my thoughts. I couldn’t stop thinking about the old man. Dad was a complicated guy who I never fully understood. He retired on Luzon, near the Subic Bay Naval Base, when he was in his early forties. He seemed like some character out of an adventure book when he told me he bought a trimaran sailing boat in Hawaii and was going to sail it for six weeks to the Philippines.

  Back then, I thought Jack was so cool, so glamorous, having this second life away from home. However, Jack seemed slightly less heroic when he never came back home to the States.

  He had a heart attack and died in the Philippines when I was twenty-one. He was only forty-eight; it was his second heart attack. He smoked, drank, and never exercised, so his debauched lifestyle finally caught up with him. By the time he croaked, I was already out of university and making my own money independently, so it was my job to fly over and get all his stuff. That was seven years ago.

  Here I was, back again. Ironically I’m at my lowest point in life and succumbing to all my fatal flaws at once. Guess it’s only appropriate I pay a visit to the place that created them. I don’t know what I expected to get out of this, but I felt I needed to say goodbye to this place and put old memories to bed that I’d blocked out ever since Jack said “adios” to the world with a beer in his hand and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “What are you thinking about?” Brian asked from his trance-like state.

  “The great and powerful Captain Jack, who had a heart attack,” I said.

  “Why’d he leave you and your mom to come here?”

  “I asked him a few times but he never explained. All I knew was Dad docked his trimaran at Subic Bay, bought a bar, and that was that. I didn’t ask too many questions. Didn’t want to make Jack angry.”

  “But they stayed married … Who does that?”

  “It wasn’t a conventional setup. I didn’t have a normal childhood.”

  “Yeah, no shit. Neither did I.”

  After waiting in line for hours amid the throng of traveling Catholics at the airport, we finally caught a taxi to the bus station. The drive normally took fifteen minutes but it took us two hours. In the taxi, Brian marveled at how our cabbie jockeyed for space in the congested, narrow Manila streets.

  “There are absolutely no road rules here except the driver with the biggest balls wins!” Brian kept ordering our taxi driver to “punch it!”—which, of course, our guy didn’t understand since he spoke no English. So we inched our way past all the familiar skyscrapers that jutted into the polluted Manila haze, slowly scooting our way through all the shantytowns and past all the new, shiny shopping malls with all their American stores.

  We were snarled in traffic for so long I almost told the driver to pull over so we could spend the night in Manila and Brian could experience all the city’s many speakeasies I used to drink in. But I was feeling selfish. I was on a mission to see my old home on Subic Bay. I didn’t need to keep Brian entertained all the time.

  We finally arrived at the bus station and waited for three more hours with what seemed like another million Filipinos. Eventually we snagged a bus to the city of Olongapo, which bordered Subic Bay and was a two-hour trip that took us six. At this point, Brian was not feeling very chipper about the hellish commute (he’d been sober for far too long to enjoy anything), but I knew what to expect. I leaned into the punishment. I was here to pay my dues.

  Olongapo felt like a ghost town. The Subic Naval Base, a relic from World War II was long gone. There were still things to do, but all the hotspots from back in the day (Olongapo, Barrio Barretto, and Subic) had fallen into hyper-attrition. Everything had changed since the Navy boys left. The sixteen thousand servicemen who used to run amok here when it was the world’s largest naval base had all gone back to their wives. All that was left were locals, drunks, go-go dancers, and lost ex-pats.

  There were still large hotels opening up; it looked like more Filipinos were vacationing here. But when I was a kid, there were over a thousand bars within ten miles of each other. It was beyond madness to a fourteen-year-old like me. In my mind, it was like the USO scene from Apocalypse Now every night. At least that’s what I told my friends back home. Every bar had its own stable of girls. It was quite an eye opener—especially since my dad owned one of the bars.

  We checked into the Marmont Resort Hotel, where I used to stay when I was a teenager, then went out to see what was left of the town. We were both dragging so we decided to break our hiatus from drinking to avoid any hardcore delirium tremens.

  “Maybe just a few beers to keep us going?” I said.

  “I thought you’d never ask. Beer’s not really drinking anyway,” Brian said.

  M
y internal compass led us straight to my dad’s old bar, Jack’s Tavern. It had closed long ago, but a new one had opened in its place. Perched on beautiful Subic Bay with the white sandy beach as a backdrop, it was surreal to step inside the building and smell the new air that smelled like the old air, full of stale cigarette smoke, beer, body odor, and cheap perfume.

  “I must’ve drank a million rum and Cokes in here when I was a kid.”

  Brian ordered a Singha, the only beer in town; I walked around the joint touching things to see if they were real and not part of some dream.

  “Where are the go-go girls? You promised women.” Brian was testy. I could smell the girls’ perfume in the air.

  “Must be on a break,” I said.

  Brian was not impressed. “This place could use a thousand air fresheners.”

  “Isn’t it great?”

  “I’ve smelled better.”

  “I have a certain nostalgia for this place,” I said as I nursed a beer and got to talking about the past.

  “Dude,” Brian interrupted, “will you finally tell me what the hell you’ve been yelling about in the middle of the night?”

  I admitted I’d been having what some might classify as “recurring nightmares” ever since Jack died. Brian had no idea this had been going on until we embarked on the trip and started sharing rooms.

  “He only comes around when I’m sleeping off a night of binge drinking. Guess my scrambled brain conjures him like some twisted side effect from all my years following in his tippling footsteps.”

  “C’mon, you’re no tippler, Binkley. You’re a semi-successful entrepreneur on the lam who occasionally dabbles in the depraved arts.”

  “That’s a nice way of putting it. Point is, Jack’s been visiting me on our Cirrhosis Tour. He came to me in LA and then again in Bali—and on our last night in Australia.”

  “I thought you were haunted by Felix the amorous Aussie.”

  “I’d almost deleted that from my memory bank. Thanks for the reminder.”

  “What are friends for?” Brian smiled and then looked up at the ceiling fan. It was hardly moving. We were jetlagged and lethargic; the extreme heat kept us stationary so we kept talking. I told Brian the whole story about Jack’s unique setup here.

  “Since Dad and Mom never divorced, she’d fly in from California to visit him a few times a year. She knew what was going on. I was the only one in the dark.”

  “Why didn’t you invite me over here when we were kids?”

  “I wasn’t allowed to bring friends. I was kind of embarrassed by the whole thing—but Mom seemed at peace with it. She even made friends with the go-go girls who worked for Jack.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Sex workers can still be nice, church-going girls.”

  “She is an amazing lady.”

  “She’s a saint. It’s funny how you take after your parents … you adopt their flaws without even realizing it. I followed in Jack’s footsteps traveling the world … I still drink like him, still travel like him, and seem to have the same moral backbone.”

  Brian laughed. “You have a backbone, Binkley, but it’s not always full of morals.” He got up to go to the bathroom.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He didn’t answer so I let it go and stared into my lukewarm beer. I tried to talk to the bartender. “Do the bars here still compete for who has the coldest beer in the village?” The bartender looked at my warm beer, shrugged, and walked away. Guess not. When I was a kid, Jack made sure his beer was always the coldest. He was that kind of guy—competitive like me.

  I looked up to him even though I was confounded about what he was doing. He never asked me to keep his secrets; everything was hidden from me. I don’t think there was a lot of deception going on between he and Mom. I was the one that didn’t understand. I was young and never wanted to challenge the situation. I knew they still loved each other; they were just stuck in an outdated institution that doesn’t really work….

  Marriage.

  Over a few more Singhas, I told Brian about the times I went fishing and drinking with Jack and the village elders.

  “Wanna know how Olongapo got its name?”

  “Not really, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Jack told me warring tribes once lived here, and the only peacemaker was this wise old man named Apo. He was like the Martin Luther King or Gandhi of his time.”

  “Go on,” Brian said sipping beer.

  “The warring tribes didn’t like Apo, so one day he disappeared … They found his headless body in the jungle. The tribesmen went looking for Apo’s head, but the search was eventually called off—until one day when a boy, who had never given up the hunt, found the elder’s head on top of a bamboo pole.”

  “Apo got James Earl Ray-ed.”

  “Legend has it, the boy went from village to village to alert the town, kinda like Paul Revere. He cried, ‘Olo nin apo! Olo nin apo!’ which means ‘head of the elder’ in Tagalog.”

  “I’d have been pissed if he woke me to tell me that.”

  “But once the warring tribes made peace and were wondering what to name their new town, they decided to honor Apo, and the Paul Revere kid … And that’s how this place got its name, Olongapo.”

  “Cool story, bro.” Brian was itching to go back to the hotel.

  “I can’t sleep yet. I want the nightmares to end … I need to wander. Maybe I’ll feel his presence somewhere. Maybe being here again will finally quiet the ghost of the old man,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Brian sighed.“All right, you talked me into it.”

  We left Jack’s and walked around in Barrio Barretto (an area of Subic with a slew of bars). I ran into some old friends. I saw Casey, an old pool shark who had been here for ten years. “Hey kid, the son of Jack is back! How long’s it been?? We all still miss that scallywag! You’re all grown up now. Wanna shoot a game?”

  Brian almost fell for it until I warned him: “You don’t want to bet Casey at pool.”

  On our way to the next bar, we ran into an old rummy I used to drink with on the beach behind Jack’s bar. I couldn’t remember his name because I never knew it. We slapped backs and kept moving. Brian looked at me. “It’s like a reunion of old debaucherers. Is that a word?”

  “It is around here.”

  Later we ran into Pany, who was still the bar manager at Midnight Rambler, which was right across the street from Jack’s Tavern. He hadn’t changed a bit. Pany was this gay, bodybuilding Filipino, very eccentric—awesome guy.

  “Shame what happened to Jack,” Pany said. “So sudden. Hasn’t been the same here … You miss him?”

  “I try not to think about it too much.”

  “He’s an emotional compartmentalizer,” Brian said.

  “He wha?” Pany’s English wasn’t too good.

  “Don’t listen to him, Pany. I remember the last time I saw you. I was here selling all his crap and shipping everything else back on a US naval carrier … I was drunk for thirty days straight….”

  “I remember,” Pany said with a laugh. “You go loco in head.”

  “How’d you sell all his stuff wasted?” Brian asked.

  “I lived on energy drinks during the day … I never slept,” I said.

  Brian replied with something resembling genuine concern, “You have PTSD. You need grief counseling.”

  “I did seek counseling. I took my loss out with the local female dancers!”

  “You’re still doing it,” Brian said. “What’s the definition of insanity?”

  “Listening to you?”

  “Repeating a failed action over and over and—”

  “Will you please stop psychoanalyzing me?”

  “I’m just sayin’, man. Think about it.”

  “All right. Enough about Jack, you guys. This is the time in the night when I think about other things!”

  Back in the compartment Jack went.

  The rest of the evening go
t extremely fuzzy. Maybe Brian was right. Maybe I was insane to be looking for solace at the bottom of a bottle. Maybe I was still running.

  All I know is Brian and I broke our “beer only” rule and shared two pitchers of Mojo with Pany, which was so strong Brian and I couldn’t remember any more details. I think we did a Subic City run, which was the shady bar area where anything goes. I remember it got wild—it always does here—but I have no idea how wild thanks to the Mojo. Brian assured me the next morning we had a great time at the Main Attraction, the new go-go bar in town. He knew fun was had because he “woke up with an eight-ball from the pool table” in his pocket—whatever that meant.

  That afternoon we hauled our bodies out of bed and checked into the Samurai Hotel, which was extremely cheap. We were trying to conserve our nest egg since we blew through too much of it going crazy in Australia. But you get what you pay for here—and we did. Our room had only one small bed, which was not a pleasant proposition, but at least we both knew we wouldn’t try any funny business.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon looking for a money exchanger. After getting our hands on some Philippine pesos, we were in no condition to be walking around in this tropical environment with extreme hangovers. So we hired a Jeepney, which are leftover American Jeeps from World War II that people still use for public transportation; they were everywhere. Our Jeepney cost five cents every twenty minutes.

  I had the driver take us to a swimming hole that was under a waterfall in the jungle; it was hard to find but I knew the way. The driver had to cut through some farmer’s fields to get there. He thought we were crazy because there weren’t any signs, but we finally made it.

  It was still the same beautiful waterfall and swimming pond I remembered. It looked a little smaller, but after tasting the seedy side of Subic City, it was a much-needed slice of paradise. “Now, this is what I’m talkin’ about.” Brian was finally impressed by something in Luzon.

  “Jack took me here. This is what I always envisioned Utopia to be.”

  “Is this Utopia?” Brian asked.