Holidays in Hell

by P. J. O'Rourke

  MACH-7 SUPER MACHINE

  Compact and Portable

  90% Local Materials

  Durable, All Metal Parts

  Very Simple and Practical

  Will Create Job Opportunities for the Out-of-School Youth

  Here was a paradigm of the Aquino administration-nowhere on that sign did it say what the MACH-7 SUPER MACHINE was supposed to do.

  I asked Franco, the driver I'd hired for the duration of my stay, if things were better since Cory took over.

  "Oh, yes," he said. "There are lots of firecrackers. This was forbidden before."

  Some things had changed in Manila. There was a new statue of Cory's husband, the martyred Ninoy Aquino, in the Makati business district. Ninoy is portrayed on the steps of an airline ramp, at the moment the assassin's bullets hit him. The original bronze casting had a clear plastic rod, with a dove of peace mounted on top, emerging from Ninoy's left clavicle. This made the hero of the anti-Marcos opposition look like he was getting crapped on by a pigeon. So the rod was removed and the bird attached directly to the shoulder, for a Long John Silver effect. Ninoy now looks like a drunk pirate in a business suit falling down the cellar stairs.

  The police were easier to bully, at least if you were a "Hero of the Revolution." Franco had nipped a big "ABC PRESS" placard from the Manila hotel and stuck it in the front window of his car. This was enough to get us waved through most of the nighttime roadblocks set up around Manila, supposedly to keep communist infiltrators from coming to town. But one evening I was on the way back from a party with Tina and Black Star photographer John Giannini. Some grubby-looking over-armed cops motioned us over for a search.

  "They think I'm a prostitute," said Tina. "See, the sergeant is unscrewing his flashlight already. That's where he hides his payoffs."

  "Rank him out in Tagalog," said Giannini.

  "Believe me," said Tina, "it would be much better if I speak English."

  Giannini, who is a big guy, got out of the car. "Just what's the problem here?"

  "Well," said the policeman, "we are holding these roadblocks of narcotics, illegal guns, robberies and guerrillas."

  "We don't have any," said John.

  "Well," said the policeman, "when we were seeing two foreign journalists with a Filipina ..."

  "Three foreign journalists," said John. "Miss Luz here works for The Washington Post."

  Washington Post? Big nervous smiles from all the police. They knew what had happened to the last strong-arm type who ran afoul of the Yankee newshogs-he's ass-canned and stuck off in exile with his fat, crazy wife and her shoe collection. "Please be our guest to go," said the sergeant.

  Other things, I didn't have the heart to go see whether they'd changed or not. There's a ski slope-size pile of rotting, burning trash on the north side of town called Smokey Mountain. A thousand people, many of them sick and dying, live in the filth. I never want to go back there. There are some kinds of desolation that leave you impotent in the fucking that's life. I could turn my pockets out for the Smokey Mountain residents, but that wouldn't go far. I could throw up, but I don't see how that would help. I could pester the dump-pickers as I had in '86 and write it up in a colorful way and make a buck off the thing, which is what I guess I'm doing anyway. I asked Giannini, who'd just been to shoot the place for Black Star, if Smokey Mountain had changed since Marcos.

  "It's bigger," he said.

  "But are the people any better off?"

  "Yeah, they've got more garbage."

  Of course I was happy in Manila. I had Franco standing by with the car. I had a big room at the Manila Hotel, General MacArthur's wartime HQ. No doubt, if I hung around long enough, somebody'd take another whack at insurrection, and I could write about that. Meanwhile, I spent my afternoons by the hotel pool and lolled through sunset cocktails at Tina's house, chaperoned by the maid her father had sent up from the family sugar plantation on Negros Island. Some of the local journalists chartered a boat, and we went sailing on Manila Bay. We drank at the servicemen's bars on Mabini Street and joked with the lackadaisical, semi-naked gogo dancers. We went to parties and dances. There is suffering on earth, I know. And plenty of that suffering is in the Philippines. But, if I can't subtract from the world's sum of misery, do I have to add to it personally? It's one of these questions I mean to take up if I ever get religion.

  Unfortunately, the phone messages and telexes from Rolling Stone were beginning to pile up. "What are you doing over there?" "What the hell are you doing over there?" "What is this story supposed to be about?" etc. I had to earn my keep. I had to go explain why the Philippines hadn't immediately turned into Japan or Singapore when Cory took over. And I had to find some nastiness to illustrate the problem. "No bodies, no by-lines," as journalists say.

  Up in the hills the communist NPA, the New Peoples Army, was plugging along with its decade-old civil war. That might be a good excuse to stay for another couple of weeks. However, the NPA were press-shy at the moment. They'd had a cease-fire with the Cory government and some peace talks, but, when the communists found out Cory wasn't going to give them a hug and hand them the country, they coped a mope. My fellow reporters were lined up all over Manila waiting on NPA contacts so they could slog through the hills and get an earful of Bolshi gripes. Some had been waiting for more than a month.

  I complained to Franco. "If I just keep going to polo games," I said, "and working on my tan and taking Tina out to dinner, sooner or later my editors are going to catch on and I'll be covering the Bon Jovi Iowa tour. I've got to find some trouble to get into."

  "You want to talk to NPA?" said Franco. "My Uncle Carlos is NPA, the brother of my wife's mother. I will take you there tomorrow already, to Marlita, in Pampanga province."

  "But, Franco," I said, "you're a real Coryista."

  "0h, yes."

  "Don't you argue with your uncle?"

  Franco looked confounded. "We go a couple times in the year to see the family of my wife," he said, as if that explained any possible political contradiction. This wasn't exactly like the American Civil War-where brother fought brother and all that.

  So I got up at dawn the next day. The front-page story was headlined, COP CHIEF SLAIN IN AMBUSH.

  "The Police Chief of San Luis, Pampanga," read the lead,

  was killed in an ambush shortly before noon yesterday by jeepney riding communist rebels ..." San Luis was the town next to Marlita.

  About thirty kilometers from Marlita Franco and I stopped for a cup of coffee. A teenage kid gave me a careful look and then jumped on a motor tricycle and sped up the road. Franco nudged me. "You see, they know you already."

  I'm not sure what I was expecting in the uncle-an addled old veteran of the Fifties Communist HUK rebellion I guess-certainly not the fat and amiable politician who greeted us at the door of a cement six-room house, the only sizable home in the village. Franco's Uncle Carlos had been a barrio captain in Marlita for sixteen years. There was a pickup truck in the carport and an immense color television in the living room draped in a sort of chintz slipcover with tassel-fringed curtains pulled back to reveal the screen. Professional wrestling played the whole time we were there. Full liquor bottles were displayed around the room along with the kind of large china dogs won at carnival booths.

  "People here like the NPA," said Carlos. "If things are stolen, the NPA will help. Once you need the help, if you are right, the NPA will help you. But if you are wrong . . ." Carlos made a grave face. I'm willing to bet he's recently seen The Godfather on that color TV. `:.. they may be the ones to kill you."

  "I understand there was a little trouble over in San Luis," I ventured. I didn't know if the police chief bump-off was a touchy subject or what.

  "Hah!" said Carlos. "The police chief shot for corruption! The third police chief in Pampanga this year!" Apparently it wasn't a touchy subject.

  "He was charging ten pesos to each person for each load of vegetables to go to Manila. People complained to the NPA."

&nbs
p; Then Carlos started in on the mayor of Marlita. "The mayor here, if his son has a birthday, he will tell the barrio captain, `You give me one big pig, one sack of rice.' The barrio captain has to collect it," said Carlos, pointing at himself. "The NPA is always helping people," he added ominously. So, Mr. Mayor, if you happen to read this, I recommend you look for other work.

  "How many NPA are around here, anyway?" I said.

  "One or two only-by day," said Carlos and winked. "Group by group at night."

  As we talked, a number of young men were strolling too casually in and out of the barrio captain's house. I gathered the NPA guerrillas were trying to make up their minds whether to schmooze, shoot me or skedaddle. Mrs. Carlos kept stuffing us with food- sugar rolls, heaps of steaming rice, fresh eggs and beef stew from a can (canned foods, like the full liquor bottles, are rural status symbols) and jugs of iced water, iced tea and Pepsi Cola, all this at ten in the morning. Just before I burst, word came the NPA would chat.

  Carlos, Franco and I drove along a levee through the rice paddies to another barrio two kilometers away. It was a group of forty little houses on a rise. Small children, the watchdogs of Philippine villages, could see everything that approached. Dozens of paths spread from the barrio toward Mount Arayat, where the guerrillas hide. Dozens of vapor trails spread in the sky, too, from F -16s. The NPA's Mount Arayat base and the U. S. A.'s Clark Air Force Base are twenty kilometers apart.

  Although the Pampanga River runs through Marlita, the rice paddies were parched and fallow. Carlos said it had been a dry winter, too dry for a second rice crop. "What about irrigation?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "The irrigation pump is broken."

  We drove by it, a little gasoline job the size of a rider-mower engine. They were killing each other over nickel-and-dime corruption in these villages, while the wealth of the entire community could be doubled with one high-school shop-class water-pump fixit project. Understand that and you can understand the whole Third World. And please phone or write if you do.

  Once we were inside the second barrio, a dozen kids showed us where to park. We got out of the car, and an old man motioned for us to follow him. He took us to a little house on stilts, weathered black and half-hidden by a bamboo grove.

  But the old man wouldn't just let us inside. First he had to lead us through a vegetable patch beside the house and over a fence into a chicken pen in the backyard, out through a hole in the chicken wire, into a pigsty on the other side of the house, over another fence and back to the front door. I guess this was supposed to confuse us as to our exact whereabouts.

  The house had no windows. The light came through the bamboo-slat walls and floor as though we were in a world made entirely of Levolor blinds. Seven NPA fighters were sprawled in two tiny rooms. They were finishing a meager lunch-bread crumbs and a couple of dried fish tails were left on two communal plates. Three guns were visible, one Armalite, which is what the Filipinos call the M-16, and two Korean War vintage Chinese Communist infantry rifles. Half a dozen .223-caliber Armalite bullets were arranged neatly on a table in a corner.

  The NPA leader was called Commander Melody, not an unusual moniker by Philippine standards. There are Manila tycoons of sixty who call themselves "Boy," stuffy dowagers known as "Baby" and one of Cory's cabinet ministers has the given name "Joker." Commander Melody was in his forties. He was barefoot and dressed in camouflage pants, a sky-blue T-shirt with the logo of the Benedictine Sisters on it, a jean jacket, and a red, white and blue cotton beach hat. His men were only a little younger and clothed more like teenage New York bicycle messengers than Viet Cong. Part of a large, faded tattoo was visible on Commander Melody's ankle, the kind of tattoo worn by Philippine street gangs. The commander had the skinny, somber intensity of an ex-fuck-up.

  "How do you feel about Cory Aquino?" I asked. "Is she better than Marcos?"

  "Yes. Marcos-a dictator man," said Commander Melody. "Not democracy. If our own new constitution . . ." He trailed off, wrestling with the English. Commander Melody thought for a moment, then made a pronouncement. "We will now surrender over our guns if we can find a good government that we can keep."

  This was strange. The NPA national leadership had just announced a new offensive, to carry revolutionary violence into Manila proper."Do you feel you can surrender to Cory?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "How about General Ramos? Do you trust Ramos?"

  "Yes."

  "You can surrender to him."

  "Yes."

  I was mixed up. "Well why don't you, just, you know, surrender?"

  Commander Melody told me a story which, I think, was supposed to explain that. He said he'd been an ordinary citizen, driver of a Manila jeepney bus, a jeep with a long covered bed and two beach seats in back. He'd had an accident and killed three policemen. This seemed pretty careless, even considering the way people drive in Manila. Anyway, he'd been sentenced to ten years in prison and had escaped and headed for the hills.

  Commander Melody said the NPA was hungry, poor, almost out of bullets and tired too. "Our guys, always climbing mountain, then to barrio, and toward city." He and his men all shrugged like the whole thing was getting to be a pain in the neck.

  "Do you consider yourself communists?" I asked-the old 50,000-Casualty Question, Ground War in Asia category. This is the only thing Americans ever really want to know. It's how we decide whether to send in Oliver Stone and his platoon of pals to atrocity everybody.

  "We are not looking for that," said Commander Melody with some heat. "We don't need a communist country. We know communist countries are dictatorship countries. We are only fighting for our rights."

  "But the ideology of the NPA . . ." I mumbled vaguely. One thing they don't teach you at the Close-Cover-Before-Striking School of Journalism is how to badger people who've got guns.

  "There are big differences upon our procedures," mumbled Commander Melody, pretty vaguely himself. I guess he was referring to NPA internal snits and quarrels.

  I nodded sympathetically. "What would it take to get you to make peace with the Cory government?"

  "If you are not rich, you can't do your own business," he said. "Better if Cory makes a lot of factories for poor people to work in." Much better, I would think, but Commander Melody didn't seem to have any specific suggestions about how that was to be done.

  "How could the United States help?" I asked.

  Commander Melody's eyes lit up, and his mouth dropped open. "They would help our organization??!!" He looked like a kid who'd been told that next year would have Christmas on every weekend. It broke my heart to disabuse him.

  "No," I said, "I'm afraid not. They think you're communists."

  Commander Melody nodded. He'd known all along it was too good to be true. "We have no justice," he said, "so our justices are guns and bullets." He told me they had just completed a mission. (" . . . jeepney riding communist rebels," the newspaper had said, and jeepney driving had been Commander Melody's profession before he took up politics.) And he said they delayed another mission just to talk to me.

  I took this as a hint for a donation.

  Now, nobody hates a commie worse than me. And Commander Melody's line of hooey aside, the New Peoples Army is communist. When they were negotiating with Cory, their demands were straight out of the Mickey Maoist Club bylaws. They are red as a baboon's ass, and that means freeze-and-assume-the-position as far as I'm concerned. I've been to your communist countries. They are crap your-pants-ugly, dull-as-church, dead-from-the-dick-up places where government is to life what panty hose are to sex.

  But then I looked at Commander Melody in his Gilligan's Island hat. He and his ragamuffin bunch were sitting there with the entire population of the barrio acting as their lookouts. They were underarmed and underfed, but, you know, I think they were having a good time too. I'd rather be running around the country at night with a gun than sitting in jail. I could understand why they weren't too eager to surrender. What the fuck, I gave them a thousand pes
os.

  Commander Melody held up an Armalite bullet in one hand and my sheaf of peso notes in the other. "This will buy some answers," he said. If they were going to shoot mayors, they couldn't be all bad. Maybe they'd take a shot at Ed Koch.

  It was hard to figure what kind of story I could write about Commander Melody's goofy NPA. But it was a flagrantly beautiful afternoon-much too pretty to spend the whole day indoors playing with guns. I'd worry about what to write later. "Bahala na," as the Filipinos say, which is an untranslatable phrase containing the same germ of philosophy as the Arabic inshalla or the Spanish manna or the English you must have me mixed up with somebody who gives a shit. Franco and I decided to fuck off and take a drive in the country.

  It was Sunday, cockfight day. We stopped in the town of Santa Ana, about half an hour south of Marlita. It seemed like the people there hadn't seen an American in ages. They all waved and shouted "Hi, Joe! Hi, Joe!" just like they'd shouted to my dad, forty years ago.

  Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport-two armed entrees battling to see who'll be dinner. The Santa Ana cockpit was an open-sided structure with grandstands, the most elaborate building in town except the church. The "pit" itself was raised, dirt-floored, about twice the size of a boxing ring and enclosed with blood-smeared glass panels.

  The roosters are allowed to peck each other's behinds to get them in a bad mood. Then the owners carry them around for everyone to see. The bookies are right in the ring with the poultry and follow in the wake of the McNuggets display taking bets. If you bet big, you get to sit down in the front and press your nose against the glass. Would "Joe" bet?-a subject of great interest and levity in the audience. The birds are bred not only to be crabby but to have insane plumage. I won 100 pesos on a chicken that looked exactly like David Lee Roth.