by Noël Alumit
“The marks on your body are gone.”
“I don’t hurt myself anymore,” I said.
“I know,” she said solemnly. She took a deep breath, speaking quietly. “Can you accept the fact that both your parents aren’t coming back?”
“They were supposed to.”
“But the reality is, they didn’t.”
“But they loved me. If people love you, they come back, don’t they?”
“Not always.”
“But they loved me, right?”
“I’m sure they did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Discolored in Parts
Dear Monty, June 9, 1993
Everyone is being real nice to me, telling me to just hang out. The Zoloft is working for me, things don’t seem as dramatic or edgy. I like this calm.
It also makes you come to me less often. I went to the downtown library specifically to meet you. I walked the halls for hours, pulling out books, blotching page 168. I found some books that I had blotched years ago. My blotch was still on page 168 in Gulliver’s Travels. I had existed those many years ago. All of the people who had checked this book out carried me with them.
I waited for you, Monty. But you didn’t come. Don’t leave me. Don’t disappear.
In March of 1993, they let me out. I did outpatient therapy. I still saw Dr. Chapman, but I didn’t live there. I asked her why they were letting me go.
She was frank. I was getting better, she said. I had stopped hurting myself. My skin is clear of marks.
She also added: the Arangans couldn’t afford my room anymore.
“I didn’t know they were paying for it,” I said.
“Where do you think the money came from?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I thought the bill was adding up and I would have to pay it eventually.”
“It doesn’t work that way. The Arangans have been footing the bill since you got here.”
•
Mr. and Mrs. A met me in the hospital waiting room. They looked humble, sweet. Amada stood by a candy vending machine. We looked at each other. I hadn’t seen them since I was committed. Before, I didn’t want to see them. Now I wanted nothing more than to have them take me away.
Amada approached me. She’d cut her hair. It was no longer past her shoulders. It hovered above her jaw. I don’t know what she saw when she looked at me. My face had healed considerably, but it was still discolored in parts, and scarred.
She said, “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. We prepared a little feast for you.”
We drove home, Amada and I in the backseat.
“I think you’ll like your room,” Mrs. A said. “We converted the den for you. It’s not the house in Los Feliz, but it’ll do.”
Mr. A stared at me intermittently through the rearview mirror. He probably thought I might do something crazy like jump around and scream. But he didn’t know that crazy behavior can just be sitting around, saying and doing nothing.
“You have to come over some time,” Amada said. “I have this cute little studio apartment in Burbank.”
“I’d like that,” I said. I moved closer to her. I wanted her to touch me, a kind touch. I knew she loved me. She told people I was nuts because she loved me. Betrayal is a form of love, I know that now. People hurt you because they love you.
She put her arm around me. “You’ll be OK,” she said. “You’ll be OK.”
“I know,” I said. I knew things were different. I had thought about my life. I had a lot of time. I was only twenty-five. There was lots to do. I thought of going back to school to get a master’s degree, get a real cool job. Maybe meet somebody, fall in love. My father was dead. I came to realize maybe my life would be better if I thought my mother was dead, too.
At home, we sat around the kitchen table eating Mrs. A’s food, carefully prepared lumpia, pansit, adobo, and rice. They watched me eat. No one said anything for the longest time. I had to break the silence.
“The food is really good,” I said. I smiled. I wanted them to know that everything was all right. That I was all right.
“Mom spent a lot of time on the food,” Amada offered. “Didn’t you?”
“Not so much time, it was no trouble.” Mrs. A said.
“She worked really hard,” Mr. A said. “She made one batch of lumpia. She didn’t like it and threw the whole thing out. Started all over again.”
“I just wanted everything to be perfect when you came home,” Mrs. A said.
“It is perfect,” I said. “It is.”
All three of them smiled.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I didn’t want to see you when you came to visit. I’m sorry if I made you unhappy. I’m sorry for everything that happened.” I truly was.
“That’s OK,” Mrs. A said. “You were just going through a hard time, that’s all. We all have hard times.”
After dinner, we watched some TV. Amada decided to leave. She wanted me to see her apartment. I said I would.
•
I met with Dr. Chapman, enjoying the comfort of her office. I sat on her wingback sofa, pink like the inside of a grapefruit. I had gotten used to placing my feet on a wicker chest she used as a coffee table.
“How has living at home been?” she asked.
“All right.”
“Have you hurt yourself?”
“No.”
“Your face is healing nicely.”
“I guess.”
“Have you dreamt about your father?”
“A few times.” My father was still there. He was in different states of decomposition. But I had a different dream. I told her about it: “He was young, probably the age I am now. I was younger, a boy still. We walked along the beach. We waded through the water, tiny waves hit our ankles, sheets of ocean fell at our feet.
“This belongs to us,” my father said, waving his arm to the sea.
“The sea belongs to everyone,” I said.
“We are a part of everyone, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then the sea belongs to us.” Dad walked, rather, hovered, over the water. He was going away from me.
“Where are you going?” I yelled.
“To the other side of the Pacific Ocean.”
“That’s so far away.”
“Not so far. When you miss me, come to the beach, Santa Monica or Malibu beach, and stand in the ocean. I’ll stand on a beach in the Philippines. The Pacific Ocean, green water, will connect us.”
I told this to Dr. Chapman. She brought it to my attention that water is a good conductor of electricity.
•
Amada lived in an apartment complex overlooking some movie studios. Her place was a caramel brown, and posters from movies released in the past ten years or so hung on her wall. One poster was of Blood Prom at Hell High, the very first movie we did as extras. She had a video of it and we sat around and watched the movie, fast-forwarding to the scenes that we were in. Me in a classroom, me walking in the halls, me sitting on a bench eating lunch. We laughed at the shot of Amada with an ax in her head.
Amada showed me videotape of some of the TV shows and movies she’d done. They were quick takes of her delivering a line here and a line there. In most of her scenes, she gets killed or commits suicide.
“If I die one more time, I’ll kill myself,” she said.
“You’re good at it.”
“Why do Asian women have to die all the time? And it’s usually over some white guy. She dies in Madame Butterfly, and she dies in that musical about Saigon. Why do white guys feel that some Asian woman is willing to die for them? Fuck. If I knew an Asian chick who was willing to die for a white guy, over any guy, I’d kill her myself.”
Amada told me getting acting gigs had been rough. She’d been doing a lot of office work to get by. “I know I have what it takes to make it as an actress.”
“It’s such a tough field. Thought of doing something else?”
<
br /> “No. This is what I want.”
“What if you fail?”
“Then I fail. I don’t mind that. Geez. What’s so wrong about failing? So what. So many people put so much emphasis on succeeding. I would rather be a failure than someone who never tried. This is what I want. Supporting myself as an actress is what I hope for. Hope is important. What do you hope for?”
“I hope my scars go away.”
“Your face doesn’t look that bad. It almost looks normal. You just look like you got into some fight. You should tell people that. Your face is messed up ’cause you got into a fight defending my honor or something. Tell you the truth, the scars on your face make you look a little dangerous, a little wild. Some people like that.”
“I’m not talking about the scars on my face.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
An Asphalt Tattoo
Dear Monty, July 20, 1993
This month has seen independence, both for the U.S. and for the Philippines. On July 4th, we joined a neighbor’s barbecue, watching fireworks explode in the sky like dreams bursting, rapidly falling on us like tears. On July 14, Mr. and Mrs. A celebrated the anniversary of the Philippines’ Independence from Spain by driving into Glendale and having a feast at a Filipino restaurant.
I’m thinking of finding a job, maybe moving out. I don’t want to be so dependent on the Arangans anymore. They’ve taken care of me for a long time.
What do I do next?
I applied for some jobs waiting tables. I gave some resumes to an employment agency. I was asked to explain a three-year gap in my resume. “What did you do in those years?” one employer asked. I was ill, I said.
I called up the place that used to get me jobs as an extra. I got a gig working on a movie. It was about the Vietnam war. I thought they would stick me in a crowd, my face buried among the masses.
“Perfect,” Madame Director said to me. “We can use you for all the camp scenes.”
This movie was about battered American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers put in a prison camp.
“Imagine everything that you’ve ever had has been taken away from you,” Madame Director told us, “and you’re devastated. Got that?”
She did a series of closeups of all the Asian extras looking sad and pathetic. I thought about my parents. I found myself crying, wondering about them—how their lives were, and how I wasn’t a part of it. I remembered my dad telling me how he wanted me to have a good future and that’s why he wrote against the Marcoses. I remembered my mom telling me she’d come to America and how we’d all have a life together. It all amounted to nothing. The Marcoses fell because a senator got shot and his wife took over. Did it really matter whether Dad went to prison or not? Whether my mom searched for him?
The sad thing was that maybe it was best that we never knew each other. I liked thinking of them as brave people, not broken ones. They left this world thinking that I went off to the States, am leading a great life, married maybe with kids.
“Cut! This isn’t working. There’s not enough light. Too much darkness. We’ll have to do this again,” Madame Director said. “Logan, make sure we get these same extras for the next couple of weeks. I don’t want continuity fucked up with different prisoners, is that clear?”
“Gotcha,” said Logan, an Asian guy who had the crappy task of making sure the extras were lined up for work. I liked his smile.
The Vietnam picture was kind of fun. I’d gotten to know some of the other extras. They were cool. All of them were aspiring actors. Some of them had heard of Monty, seen his films.
“He was a swell actor,” one extra said. “Monty Clift was in the same mold as Brando or James Dean—that fifties method actor type. Really got into his parts.”
Then Logan jumped in. “Saw him do The Misfits. Directed by John Huston. I have a thing for John Huston. Man’s man.”
I’d been watching Logan hang out with Madame Director, hanging on her every word, running around doing stuff for her. Logan told me he wanted to make films. He went to the American Film Institute to learn how to become a screenwriter. He was working as a production assistant waiting for his big break.
I thought that of all the extras, he liked me the best. He’d call me to remind me of the call time for the next day. “Don’t forget. Nine in the AM.”
I thought he did this for all the extras, but I was wrong. A couple of them said Logan never called them. They just showed up depending on what Madame Director said the day before.
Logan came up to me and asked if I wanted a ride home. I’d been taking buses everywhere.
“Sure,” I said.
Logan drove a beat-up Dodge hatchback. It looked like it would fall apart if a strong breeze came by. He cranked up his radio, a Stevie Nicks song played. Logan sang along with it. He really got into it, swaying and crooning. He couldn’t sing worth shit, but it was fun to see. He was alive.
•
“Why do you have to buy this expensive food?” I heard Mr. A say to his wife in the kitchen.
“It’s not expensive,” she said.
“Get the cheap stuff. No more designer things.”
“Campbell’s soup is not designer.”
“Buy generic brands only.”
“I know things are hard, but I will not start eating differently. It’s bad enough that I can’t buy as much as before. It’s bad enough that everything is falling apart.” Then Mrs. A sighed, sounding like a bird breathing its last breath. “This is not how I pictured my life.”
She sat in her bedroom and looked through family albums. Some of those albums go all the way back to the thirties. She showed me her life as a poor girl, putting herself through secretarial school. “I was not bad-looking back then,” she said, winking at me, a small smile brightening her face. “Back then there were only so many things a girl could be. I met Mr. Arangan at my very first job. He had been an accountant for two years by then. I was not his secretary. I was the boss’s secretary. I could tell Mr. Arangan had eyes for me. A girl could tell that, you know.
“We started dating. He was so tender, like a gentleman. Even back then we wanted to go to the States. Have a home in Los Angeles. San Francisco maybe. But how? We applied to go to the United States. We had waited for six years. We had friends who had waited close to twelve years to go to America. We thought we would have to wait forever.
“The boss said he could help us. He knew men at immigration and could help us get to the U.S. within a year. All we would have to do is help him with some finances, help him with money matters. We were barely into our twenties. We didn’t know what we were doing. The boss said he would even give us money to start a business if we wanted. We said Yes. We wanted to leave our province, leave all that poverty.
“We didn’t know the money matters he wanted us to take care of were for dirty politicians…”
“You could have stopped taking money, stopped—”
“You say it so easy. Have you ever been indebted to someone for giving you a wonderful life? We just took what cash they gave us, changed it into American dollars for them. Put it into an account somewhere. That’s how we got into this mess. It kept getting worse.”
She closed her albums, placing them in the far end of her closet. “This is not how I pictured my life,” she said again.
I felt a little sorry for her and her husband. I hated them for helping out the Marcos regime, but they were just people, I guess. They’re not my parents, but they got beat up in other ways.
•
Logan invited me up to his apartment.
“Can I touch it? Your face I mean,” he said. I knew he meant my scars, but it was weird to talk about my face like it was disjointed from my body.
I nodded.
His finger slowly traced my longest scar, which runs from my right temple to my jaw. His hand was so close to my mouth I could smell the residue of the burrito he had for lunch. Then he placed his palm against my cheek so his thumb touched the lingering bruise under my eye.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really. The swelling has gone down a lot. You should have seen me before. I have to go in for an operation soon. When my face hit the street, a lot of dirt and shit got imbedded into my skin, leaving these green/purple marks on my face. An asphalt tattoo they call it. Doctors had to scrape some of the dirt caught in my skin.”
His hand never left my face. He came closer, his face inches from mine, his eyes touring my scars like an astronaut examining the deep craters of the moon. His other hand lifted my face, tilted it this way and that. He was incredibly close to me. I heard our clothes rustling together as he maneuvered the angle of my body to see my scars better.
He had a little apartment, about the size of a large walk-in closet. He had to share a bathroom with other people down the hall. Straw hats and posters of tropical flowers adorned his walls. He had a bed frame made of bamboo bleached the color of wheat.
A small formica table with two crates for chairs sat near his kitchen, a little cubbyhole with a hot plate. Burlap cloth rested on the table. A wooden Polynesian statue, a miniature version of the towering ones you’d see in postcards from Tahiti or Hawaii, was on the table.
His closet door was wide open. Names like Ocean Pacific and Lightning Bolt were embroidered into his clothes. All his shirts had a surfing motif: men on surfboards, waves crashing onto rocks, palm trees swaying to a tropical breeze.
I imagined him wearing these shirts, the exotic and mysterious plastered across his chest. His shorts were corduroy, thin lines of brazen fabric running up and down his thighs. He had at least a dozen pairs of shoes, all Vans, designed like checker or backgammon boards, solid colors and muted ones, with thick multicolored laces—shades you would see on a clown’s face. He had a circus at his feet.
He told me he was born in Maui and his folks moved to San Francisco when he was sixteen. He studied economics for a while at U.C. Berkeley, but dropped out to lead a more artistic life. He has two brothers and a sister. His parents blamed themselves for his being gay. They believed that if they stayed in Hawaii instead of moving to San Francisco, which has a large gay community, they would have never had a gay son.