When the hotel filled up in the summer, we could just lock the office door and put the closed sign in the window. When the fall arrived, we had to scrounge for business. We needed to keep the office open and unlocked to get all the business we could.
The bulk of the business during those times was the three-hour rental.
On the weekends, during the school year, my mother would lay down a folded comforter behind the counter for me and set an alarm clock by the bell. She would leave the office light on, telling me to turn my head and close my eyes, and it wouldn’t keep me up. Late nights were prime john time, and if the light was out, they might think the place was closed and go to another hotel or use our parking lot. My mother was too tired from watching the office the whole week while I was in school and needed to catch up on sleep on the weekends. As a woman, I’m sure she also didn’t relish the thought of being in the same room as the cock side of the money equation.
Some nights I just couldn’t sleep, even if no one came all night. When that happened, I would read the letters sections of sex magazines, which I could easily hide in the folds of the comforter when I heard a customer coming in.
I first saw the letters in an issue of Hustler when I was about seven. When I was with my mom, she’d thrown out all the porn right off the bat, making sure to rip it up in front of me. But that time, I found it under the bed, and shoved it under my shirt before she saw.
That magazine had an article on how to find hotels that charged hourly rates. It recommended going to non-chain hotels close to train stations. Or you could pick up hookers by the train stations late at night and they would know which hotels to go to. A fuckhole wasn’t only a cunt; it was also a place to hole up and fuck. Like our hotel. After reading the article, I wondered how much it would cost for me to get laid with a hooker, and how much money was in the cash drawer.
When I was ten, a john I was renting a room to told me he was picking up girls by the New Jersey Transit station in nearby Asbury Park. They wore short skirts and long coats, and carried open umbrellas.
After all my years at the hotel, I’d never seen any hookers—not their full bodies, anyway. They wouldn’t prance around the parking lot afterwards, trying to pick up more tricks. The most I ever saw was a dim face between the dashboard and sun blind of a car pulled up outside the office. Sometimes they’d be smoking or fixing their makeup.
The john told me they were $20, $5 extra to fuck them up the ass and $5 more for swallowing. So a room and a no-frills prostitute were $40 in total.
“It’s worth it to get laid, isn’t it?” he asked, as he filled out a registration card, moving as fast as he could make up the information. He was wearing a dark brown corduroy jacket, a grimy button-down shirt, and dark slacks. Silvery hair cascaded into the gap between his lobster-red neck and his loosened collar. He looked like he was about fifty.
“Are they pretty?” I asked. He laughed.
“I’m not looking for Miss America, but they’re pretty for black girls. The white ones are kind of ugly.”
“But how good is it?”
“How good is it? It’s great. It’s like following through on a good clean punch.”
“What does it feel like?”
“What does it feel like . . .” He was smiling. “Look, kid, just give me the goddamn key.”
I fell asleep once with the fifth anniversary issue of Celebrity Skin over my face and I didn’t hear the alarm go off. It was a lot softer than a BING! The clock alarm went on for so long, my mother got up and came into the office. I hadn’t fully awoken until she swatted my face with the rolled-up magazine.
“You go to hell, you look at these pictures!” she screamed, now kicking at my shoulders as I scrambled to my feet.
“I was just reading the letters!”
“You go to hell! Where did you get this from!?!?”
“I got it from cleaning the hotel rooms!”
“You don’t touch this anymore! You go to hell!” She never said anything more about porn mags and I continued to add to my collection. But from that day on, I would bring only my schoolbooks to read at night and left the magazines in my room. That way, she wouldn’t have to see them.
I once asked my mother why anybody would want to rent one of our hotel rooms for just three hours.
“They tire from driving,” she said. “They want lie down and take little nap.” We were distant enough to let that howling wind of a lie exist between our worlds. And it let me know it was okay to lie to her, too.
Late Friday was big for hourly rentals. The husbands could always say they were trying to finish up some work at the office before the weekend.
At one in the morning, there were about a dozen rooms that had to be cleaned to be rented out again.
I yawned and rubbed my eyes before picking up a plastic bucket in each hand and followed my mother out the office door. She held a bundle of folded sheets, pillowcases and towels. My mother had a mop of straight black hair that dangled down to her shoulders. As we walked along the curved part of the U-shaped driveway, the light from the outdoor spotlights reflected in the smooth crescents in her hair.
When we got to 11A, my mother knocked on the door to make sure they had left.
Once upon a time, 11A had been 13, but then it had been changed so the rooms on the odd-numbered wing went from 11 to 11A and then to 15. Nobody wanted to rent a room 13. Like they wouldn’t get lucky or something if they did.
My mother opened the lock with the master key and turned to look at me.
“You have everything, right?” she asked. I nodded and shook the buckets.
One of my buckets held a few spray bottles of bathroom cleaners, air fresheners, and rug cleaners. A worn toilet bowl brush dangled over the side of the bucket, the bristles pressed flat against the battered wire rim.
My other bucket was packed with soap, rolls of toilet paper, and sheaves of sanitary labels. The soap bars were slender white rectangles embossed with “THANK YOU” on one side, like we were thanking our customers for taking a shower and trying to be clean. The soap lathered up about as well as a Lego block and would break into pieces if you tried to use it more than once. Our toilet paper was so thin you’d feed fingers up your ass.
Each hotel room was basically the same except that some of the black-and-white televisions had rabbit-ear antennas and some had inverted wire coat hangers. The rooms all had a simple desk, a night-stand, and a chair made of pressed wood. Push on any of the furniture the wrong way and it would splinter apart. There were burn marks on the desks and nightstands, even though each room had chipped-glass ashtrays. The two windows had shades as heavy as burlap. When they were closed, they blocked out sound and light and also the view of the parking lot.
The bed consisted of flimsy metal frames and creaky box springs with broken slats of wood topped with a doughy mattress. Two limp pillows slouched against the pressed-wood headstand. Some of the head-stands had stickers on them with instructions on how to operate the vibrating motor for a quarter, but the motion devices had been ripped out and thrown away long before we’d owned the place. The wall-to-wall carpeting looked like every marching band in the country had dragged flour sacks of grime across it. Every color in the carpet was corrupted into a different shade of dark green.
The bathroom tile wasn’t much better, but at least we provided soap and clean towels. We weren’t classy enough to have vials of shampoo because we ordered from the economy section of our supplier catalog. Only the standard and luxury sections had shampoo.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub and scrubbed at the gunk in the shower with the toilet brush, shaking a can of some no-name imitation of Ajax so that it snowed into the scummy tub. I scrubbed again.
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was straight like my mother’s, but about twice as thick. It stuck out sideways at odd angles like clumps of crabgrass. My eyes were bloodshot and my face looked old and tired.
I finished with the toilet and slipped a paper la
bel around the folded rim and seat cover. I shook the toilet brush into the sink, then scrubbed it against the edges of the sink and the faucet handles.
My mother had been stripping the sheets off the bed. When she stopped, I turned to see what was the matter. She was looking at a dark spot on the mattress and frowning.
“We have to flip this one,” she said, nodding her head towards the stain in the other lower corner. I pulled at the seam of the fabric until I could get a good hold on the thick, mushy mattress, then helped her wrestle it off the crooked bed frame. Most of the mattresses and bed frames were from a demolition company that would strip everything out of a house before pulverizing it.
Soon the mattress was turned upside down and pushed back into place. There were dark brown stains—all near the same area as the wet one—on this side of the mattress, too. Some were oval-shaped, some looked like warped coffee-cup stains, and others looked like little amoebas with several pseudopodia. They were dry, though, and that was all that was important. My mother unfurled the new sheets and threw them on top.
The wet come stains were now on the underside of the mattress.
MISTER PORMA
R. Zamora Linmark
Definition of “Porma” from Bonifacio Dumpit’s Decolonization for Beginners: A Filipino Glossary
Porma, adj: 1. Formal attire. 2. Proper. 3. Well-bred.
DRUMROLL
Voice-over: Live from C’est Si Bon at the Pagoda Hotel, welcome to the Third Annual Mister Porma Pageant.
Spotlight sweeps across the grand ballroom, brushing the coifs of the boisterous crowd. The bubble of light halts center stage, where a man is flashing a wide grin, awaiting recognition and adulation.
Voice-over: Please welcome this evening’s host: Dave Manchester.
A haole transplant from Los Angeles, Dave Manchester has graced fashion magazine covers and appeared in numerous TV and print ads in Hawaii, Japan, and the continental United States. He’s featured in a forthcoming issue of Gentleman’s Quarterly.
“Aloha and magandang gabi po to everyone. I am Dave Manchester, your host for this evening.”
Decked in a see-through barong Tagalog shirt and black Armani trousers, the Irish-American model swaggers across a stage decorated with banana leaves.
The poet and novelist R. ZAMORA LINMARK is the author of Rolling the R’s, which he’s adapting for the stage, and Leche. Born in Manila in 1968, he grew up in Hawaii and now divides his time between the United States and the Philippines.
“Mga kababayan.” Dave pauses to translate what “countrymen” is to those who do not know Tagalog. “Without further ado, here are the five finalists of the Third Annual Mister Porma Pageant in the traditional opening parade.”
Blackout.
Silence.
Bright lights. Music. The theme from Hawaii Five-O by the Exotic Orchestra of Arthur Lyman.
The Big Five make their dramatic entrance from behind the banana tree:
Honolulu-born Virgilio “Virgo” Salcedo is first; pure Ilocano; twenty-two years of age; attending Honolulu Community College, majoring in auto mechanics.
Next, Arturo “Art” Dwayne Pascual Johnson, twenty-four, born at Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City, Pampanga; half African-American, half Visayan; has lived all over the United States, Japan, Germany, and Korea; currently a pre-law student at the University of Hawaii, Manoa campus; resides in Schofield Army Barracks with his parents;
Then, Filipino-Hawaiian Shane Kawika Lacaran, twenty-two, fresh-man at Kapiolani Community College (Diamond Head campus), hopes of becoming a veterinarian or an orthopedic surgeon;
Then, Kenzo Kahoku’okalani Parubrub-Kajiwara, twenty-three, of Hawaiian-Okinawan-Filipino descent, presently in his last semester at Connecticut College in New London; majoring in modern dance;
And last but not least, Manila-born Vince Formoso De Los Reyes, who is twenty-three years of age and of Filipino-Spanish-American descent. Nervous, Vince pauses to wipe the sweat coursing down his face.
“Right on, Vince.”
“Go, Vince.”
“I love you, son.”
Am I hallucinating? Vince wonders.
No, he isn’t. Those four words that went in one ear but refused to go out the other belong to none other than his mother, Carmen Formoso.
Vince should’ve known better, should’ve braced himself for Carmen’s last-minute appearance (“apparition” is more like it), should’ve obeyed his sixth sense, which went on red alert as soon as he entered the spotlight, when his nervousness was quickly replaced by an agitation caused by the strong force emanating from the third row to his right, a presence clamoring for his attention.
“Kick ass, son,” cheers Carmen, who resembles a Mexican telenov ela actress. All her three children—Vince, Jing, and Alvin—inherited her huge eyes that can speak about love and hurt in a hundred languages.
What the hell is she doing here? A stupid thought—considering the Mister Porma finalists were featured last night on Emme Tomimbang’s TV show, Island Moments.
Vince scans the front rows for his father, doesn’t see him; only his sister, Jing, his brother, Alvin, and Maggie, his mother’s perky aerobics instructor, had all seen Emme’s show.
Tune Mom out, Vince thinks. If I want to leave this rock, I must block her out of my mind, erase her from my memory. Erase her and Dad and Jing and Alvin and Dave and Maggie.
Focus.
“Come on, dude, hurry up.”
Focus.
“Shut up and let the guy speak.”
Go!
“Last December, I completed my B.A. studies in film and literature at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and graduated with highest honors.”
The mention of “highest honors” elicits awe from the audience.
Charged with adrenaline and confidence, Vince leaves the spotlight, thinking: Hello, East Coast; good riddance, Honolulu.
But Virgo, Art, Shane, and Kenzo are just as determined to take home the title of Mister Porma. Who wouldn’t be? They’ve come this far, having beat out one hundred forty-five other applicants (breaking last year’s record by twelve, according to pageant coordinator Evange line Encarnacion).
In order to qualify, the applicant had to be at least twenty years old, of Filipino descent (copy of birth certificate), a resident of Hawaii, and, as stated in Section 1G of the contract, “of good moral character, never engaged in any activity which could be characterized as dishonest, immoral, immodest, indecent, or in bad taste.”
WILD
Virgo and Art return to the dim-lit stage and pose with their arms folded over their chests.
The audience goes wild.
A loud noise from the stereo speakers (a record needle screeching on vinyl?) cues Vince and Shane to walk downstage, holding bamboo sticks.
“Oh, man, not the tinikling again.” The room breaks out in laughter.
Also known as the Philippine bamboo dance, the tinikling is the most overperformed opening number in Asian American pageant history. Every contestant must’ve danced in and out of those poles enough times to do it blindfolded. It was used in the first two Mister Porma pageants. Fortunately, this year, the pattern was broken. Thanks to Edgar Ramirez, this year’s choreographer. As he told the Big Five in their first rehearsal, “No more bamboo dancing!”
Bright lights flood the stage as the music begins: an instrumental medley of Paula Abdul dance tunes from her Shut Up & Dance CD, with Edgar supplying appropriated lyrics at the last minute because he could not get permission from ASCAP.
Vince takes a deep breath, then rolls his eyes to Virgo making the sign of the cross.
Kenzo, the fifth finalist, will make his entrance later. What’s more important is that the four finalists remember the mambo.
According to the five-dollar program, the opening dance number is a tribute to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Instead of the Jets and Sharks, however, the friction is between Da Manong and United Stars gangs of Kalihi, Honolulu. Vince and Virgo
represent Da Manong gang, immigrants seeking a better life in Hawaii. They are identified by the iron-on sticker of the Philippine flag on their shirts. The United Stars consists of Art and Shane, who, like the WASPy Jets, are locals protecting their territory from FOBs; they wear red-white-and-blue bandannas around their heads.
Vince and Shane begin swaggering sideways downstage while Art and Virgo taunt each other backstage.
The beat picks up. Shane swings his stick and nearly whacks Vince on the face.
Vince narrows his eyes. “Come on, man,” he sings, “do you really wanna / fight me / forever?”
Shane nods, motions Vince to screw the sticks, brah, and fight him like a man. Vince accepts the challenge, tosses the stick to the floor, then spits at him.
Grinning, Shane wipes the thread of spit across his face with the back of his hand.
A push-and-shove match ensues. Biceps and triceps flex. Hands ball into fists.
Shane throws a right straight punch and misses. Vince smirks, does the mambo and then the cha-cha. Seeing an upper-cut opening, he seizes it.
Shane hunches over; the audience gasps with him.
Vince ambles over to Shane, who is trying to rise. “Hey, man, you okay?” he whispers, unsure if Shane is acting or not.
“You fuckin’ fag.” Shane’s fist heads straight for Vince’s crotch.
Vince grunts as Shane’s knuckles land on his right hip.
“That blow is low / almost TKO,” Art and Virgo chant. Now, it’s their turn to rumble in the spotlight.
“You just like him,” Virgo sings to Art. “Just by your eyes / can tell they fulla lies.”
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