He closed the book. “Think about it,” he said.
I looked at JohnJohn, and all I wanted was for him to laugh, to make a joke about the First Lady, anything to break the stone look on his face that stays with me even now.
“This isn’t about her,” I whispered.
“Then who?” he said. Before I could answer, he started up the escalator, Googi right behind him.
Uncle Willie was about to go up, but I grabbed his arm and held him back. “What if we lose?” I asked.
He blinked twice, like the question made no sense at all, so I repeated it, and followed it with more—what if the Beatles defeated us, and refused to apologize for what they’d said about the First Lady? What if the police arrived and threw us in jail? He could end up fired, and what good would he be to Imelda Marcos then? With every question I knew I might be sacrificing my only chance to meet the Beatles, which would be one of the great regrets of my life, but this was my last chance to save Uncle Willie, so I had to keep going. “We could lose,” I said.
“With you at my side?” He gently removed my hand from his arm. “Impossible.” He stepped onto the escalator, and I watched him rise up away from me, then step off at the top. Finally, I followed.
Gate VIP was a small square room furnished with a couch and two wing chairs, a Victorian-style coffee table in the center. To the side was a fireplace that didn’t look quite real, and above it was a painting of a life-size Imelda Marcos, her head slightly tilted, her arms reaching out. “Run!” Googi whispered to me. “Before she destroys us with her one million energy!” I told him to shut up, but it really did look like those Imelda-arms were out to pull us into her, either to cradle or strangle us to death.
Uncle Willie called us to attention and reviewed the plan once more. As soon as the Beatles arrived, he would escort them to Gate VIP and have them proceed up the escalator. The three of us would begin the attack while Uncle Willie and his own security team detained the group’s bodyguards. “And then finally, I will join you up here to crush the Beatles,” he said. My cousins nodded as if they were with him each step of the way, but I was fixed on the mess of paisley knotted at his throat, how wrong it looked in the daylight, and his cologne smelled sour and sharp, like vinegar mixed with rubbing alcohol.
“But who are we?” I asked. “What are we supposed to be doing when they arrive?”
“Just act like you’re supposed to be here,” Uncle Willie said, pointing to my name tag, “as if you belong.” Then he shook each of our hands, wished us luck, and left.
Standing there alone with my cousins in a room meant only for the most important travelers in the world, I believed I was answering a call of duty. I kept my fists clenched and my head up, ready for the fight, but all we had on us was pen and paper for autographs, a camera hidden in Googi’s pants pocket, and “Ticket to Ride” boomed inside my head.
When I was a kid, Uncle Willie would bring me to the airport, and show it off like it was his. “You see all those people leaving and returning?” he said on my first visit. “I am the one who is responsible for them.”
“Where do they go?” I asked. I was seven, maybe eight years old.
“That way,” he pointed skyward, then moved his hand to the side. “Then that way.” I always assumed he meant to the States.
Uncle Willie lifted me up, brought me close to the window overlooking the tarmac. The glass felt hot against my forehead, and I could feel the vibrations of the planes’ revving engines. But when their wheels left the ground, I had to look away; I couldn’t believe that something so big and heavy could stay afloat in the air. I thought of emergency landings, of airplanes bobbing in the middle of the ocean, all the crashes I’d seen on the news. “Will you go, too?” I asked.
Uncle Willie shook his head, promising me that he wasn’t going anywhere, that his job was to stay behind to make sure everything ran just right. I loved him for that. Growing up, I watched branches of my family break off as they headed to the States, aunts and uncles taking my cousins with them. For years my mother watched her sisters pack as soon as their husbands’ requests for transfer went through, and fighting with my father was how she dealt with being left. I’m stuck here, she would say. Why didn’t you join the service like the rest of the men? Where is your ambition? Don’t you at least want your son to be somebody? My mother stood behind me when she said this, cupping my shoulders with her hands, presenting me as an example of my father’s failure. He looked at me apologetically, but he never said a word.
The year I turned twelve, she finally got to go. Her younger sister sent her a ticket with a small note attached that said For your VACATION USA! and my mother started packing that same day. Tourist visa only, she assured me the morning she left. I wanted to see her off at the gate, but a sign read NO WELL-WISHERS BEYOND THIS POINT, and the guard refused to let me pass. I wanted to tell him that the sign didn’t apply to me, that I didn’t wish my mother well at all, that in fact, I wished her a terrible trip, a time so awful she would take the first flight back to Manila. But my father reassured me that tourists couldn’t be gone forever, that she had no choice but to come home. I took that technicality as my guarantee for her return, but six months later, on the back of a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, I learned that the visa had become a green card. The weather is good for my health, for my skin, she wrote. You should see how well I look. My father gave it a glance, said, “Her life,” and handed it back to me, then left to play mah-jongg at the corner cantina. Uncle Willie was there, and he told me not to worry. “She’s away,” he said, “for now.” But that was just another version of the truth, an easier way of saying, She left us.
I thought leaving was a terrible thing, the saddest of acts, something you do to the people you love.
But in junior high school, Uncle Willie got me a part-time job at the airport helping passengers with their bags. While I dragged and pushed along heavy luggage, they would walk ahead of me, fanning themselves with their tickets like they were flaunting their travels. I never checked their destinations; all I knew was that they were leaving for someplace far away, and that their eventual return would be a triumphant one, like astronauts coming back from outer space. I daydreamed myself into those airport reunions I witnessed throughout the day: I would get off the plane and find my family waiting, their arms spread out in welcome, my cousins asking question after question, everyone impressed by the way I’d changed.
When I finally took a monthlong trip to visit my mother in California for my fourteenth birthday, my homecoming was a disappointment. Only Uncle Willie was waiting for me at the airport, and all he asked about was my return flight, whether or not the service was satisfactory, if I was able to sleep away the long hours to make the trip feel quicker than it was. “It’s good that you are back,” he said, loading my bags into the trunk of a taxi. He paid the driver and told him to take me home. I rolled the windows down, and the backseat filled with a mugginess I hadn’t really noticed before. It clung to me, and all I wanted was to feel cool again, the way I did in California. When I got home, no one was there; my father was out, and JohnJohn and Googi didn’t collect their souvenir Tshirts until the following afternoon. For the next month, I slept through the day and paced the house at night, restless and sweaty, my body and mind still on American time. Back then I thought it was the seventeen-hour difference that inverted my days. Two years later, in that moment when Googi tapped me on the shoulder and twice whispered, “The Beatles are coming,” into my ear, I knew that jetlag had had nothing to do with my ruined sleep.
We heard voices below. From above we watched Uncle Willie direct the Beatles toward the escalator. As planned, there were no porters to assist them with their luggage, and I heard Paul complain about the weight of his bags. “Porter shortage in the Philippines?” he said.
“No porter?” Ringo asked. “I’ll take whatever’s on draft, then.”
Uncle Willie hurried them along. As soon as each Beatle was on his way, he looked at us and
nodded. It’s up to you now was what I read in his face, so I shut my eyes, trying to remember the plans he drew on the tabletop the night before, the X ’s and arrows indicating who and where we were meant to be. But all I could picture was Uncle Willie’s reflection in the glass, shadowy on one side, full of light on the other; there one moment, gone the next.
Then the Beatles finally came. Before that day, I’d known them only as a single sound of blended voices among guitar riffs and drumbeats. I would play their records and watch the needle curve along the grooves, then try to work my own voice into their harmonies. I always sang in secret, embarrassed by my voice; when no one was in the house I would sit on the floor next to the stereo speakers, belting out their lyrics like they were truths about myself. And now they were here, and they were real, entering my life one by one as the escalator steps rose and vanished into the floor: Ringo, then Paul, then George, and finally John, who was holding a Super 8 movie camera, and filming every moment. Each Beatle was dressed in bright, loose-fitting shirts that seemed to change color with the slightest movement, and when they stepped closer, I saw that their skin was the same way. Their white English faces were unexpectedly tanned, pink in the cheeks and red at the ears from the Philippine sun. It was a sign of their travels, evidence of a bigger world, proof that you could move through it and keep it with you. I remember standing there by that fake fireplace between my cousins in our borrowed blazers and fake name tags, thinking, This is it. This is the real thing. This is what it means to be in the world.
Ringo was the first to speak to us. “There’s no porter shortage at all,” he said.
“No, but shorter porters they are,” Paul said, tapping each of us on the head. “But you can take these onto the plane if you don’t mind.” He dropped his carry-on luggage to the floor. The other Beatles did the same.
JohnJohn picked up two bags. I followed his lead. But Googi just stood there, sweaty and pale. He was almost reverent in the way he looked at Paul, and he kept swallowing, like he wanted to speak. “My name is—” he finally said, but he was so nervous he mispronounced it.
“Huggengeim?” George said, one eyebrow raised. “Type of cheese, isn’t it? All the same, nice ring to it.”
“Thank you.” Googi was beaming.
“Anything to say to the camera?” Paul asked. He looked back at John, whose face was hidden behind the lens, which was now pointed at us. “Go on, lads. Whatever you like.” My cousins and I looked at each other, as if someone was supposed to cue someone else, give him the right words to say. But none of us could speak.
“Come on, man,” Paul said. “Just give a shout. Wave hello. Anything at all.”
I could hear the camera rolling, the filmed moments passing by. I had no idea if these were the Beatles’ home movies, something they’d watch again whenever they wanted to reminisce, or if it was for the whole world to see, a way of bringing them along as the Beatles traveled the globe. Our silence continued, so I thought of the things people said whenever they were caught on camera—bystanders on the TV news, or athletes in the first post-victory moments. Hi Mom. That was it. So I stepped forward and said it too, straight into the lens. I even waved, as if she could truly see me. My cousins did the same, and the three of us laughed nervously at ourselves. The Beatles started laughing too, and now we all laughed together, like we’d been chums for years. I said nothing else, never even told them my name, but it didn’t matter. JohnJohn looked truly happy for the first time in months, and even now I’m sure there were joyful tears welling in Googi’s eyes. I wanted to plant myself there, take root in that moment with the Beatles and my cousins, and never leave it, not ever.
Quick as it was, the picture of it is clearer to me now: the Beatles in a line, facing my cousins and me, a four-on-three standoff that should commence into battle. But what Uncle Willie finds when he reaches the top of the escalator is a friendly exchange between his enemy and his allies, a truce he never called. And when I turn to look at him I’m just stuck, like someone ankle-deep in hardening mud, and I can’t run or hide or change my traitorous face. I betrayed my uncle, and the woman he loved.
So I acted.
“Now!” I said. I stepped away from the group, then pushed a potted plant over, hoping it would crash upon a Beatle like a fallen tree, pinning him to the ground. But it just landed softly on a wing chair and dirt spilled everywhere, soiling Paul’s and Ringo’s shoes. I kept going, throwing their bags across the room and into the fake fireplace, and Uncle Willie nodded, like everything was going according to plan after all, and he stepped forward, too. I picked up another carry-on, hurling it onto the down escalator. Take that, Beatles! was the intended message, but it fell like a tumbleweed, and George said, “That’s my bag,” and Paul said, “He wanted to check that.” I ignored them both, and took the gift basket of mangoes at Ringo’s feet and kicked it over, the fruit rolling onto the floor, and I picked them up and threw them hard against the ground like grenades. All the while, Googi struggled to work the flash on his camera, and JohnJohn took fast, nervous drags of his cigarette, looking confused in a corner of the room. “Don’t just stand there,” I said, but as soon as I ran out of things to knock over and throw, all I could do was remove myself from the scene, too.
But Uncle Willie wouldn’t stop, and soon he had John by the collar. “So you are the rascals who are more popular than Jesus Christ,” he said. John nodded, the camera still in his hand, and Uncle Willie tried shaking him into submission. He was near tears about Imelda, almost incoherent, and what I saw next was his hand curl into a fist and John’s camera drop to the ground, the film popping out, my hello to the world overexposed, gone forever.
Suddenly a dozen other bodies rushed up the escalator, and they looked like real airport security guards. “Come on, everybody,” Uncle Willie shouted, “for Imelda!” “For Imelda!” they shouted back, and the mob closed in. I didn’t know if Uncle Willie had planned this from the start, if he recruited true Marcos loyalists because he knew we would fail him in the end. I called his name, fighting through the crowd to reach him, but when I touched his shoulder he swiped my arm away and told me to leave him alone, to get out, to go. Then someone shoved me, and I fell backwards to the ground. Next to my hand was a mango, so I picked it up and threw it hard against the painting of Imelda Marcos, hitting her in the center of her chest. An orange, pulpy ooze bloomed like a flower, then dripped down like blood. I wanted to call out to Uncle Willie, to show him what I had done, but my cousins grabbed me, pulling me toward the escalator. “It’s over,” JohnJohn said, “let’s go!” We ran down, and all I saw when I looked back was my uncle vanish in the haze, his war cry in the name of love drowned out by all the Imeldamania.
We ran through the corridor and headed for the entrance. “What about Uncle Willie?” I said, and my cousins said to forget him, that there was nothing we could do. I kept running, sweating in the thick polyester blazer, the name tag flopping up and down against my chest. I finally stopped at the long line of policemen trying to contain the thousands of fans who cried out, “Beatles, don’t leave us, Beatles, don’t go.”
In the end, airport police broke up the fight, which lasted only minutes after we fled the scene. No arrests were made and the Beatles made it to their plane, none of them seriously injured, but they never came our way again.
“Yes,” Googi told reporters, “I witnessed the whole thing.” We ended up making the papers, the international news, and for the first time the world came to us, calling late at night, knocking on our doors early in the morning for interviews. Googi basked in his brief fame, and JohnJohn tried to use the spotlight to expose the corruption in the Marcos government, but reporters just stopped their tape recorders and put down their pens when he spoke. I stayed quiet, letting everyone else remember and tell the story however they wanted.
But Uncle Willie made his role in the attack known, and what he got in the end was a reprimand from the President himself. And Imelda Marcos—essence of Filipina womanhood
, face of our country—called the incident a breach of Filipino hospitality, and she offered more quotable wisdom to help the people understand what had happened. “In life, ugliness must sometimes occur,” she said. “But when such ugliness happens, only beauty can arrive, ‘to save the day,’ so to speak. Despite the ugly events of the past days, beauty has returned, so let’s focus only on the beautiful things and let beauty live on.” Ashamed for any embarrassment he brought to the First Lady, Uncle Willie issued an official apology, and resigned soon after.
But he didn’t disappear. “I still have one million energy,” he said. He took a job as an airport shuttle driver, carting tourists to nearby hotels, and on his lunch break he’d hang around the terminal, making sure Imelda Marcos’s flights were on schedule, and offering unwanted advice on how best to handle her travels. “They say I am a pest, but I know they still need me,” he said. “Imelda still needs me.”
Years later, after I joined my mother in California, I made a final trip to the Philippines. Googi had run off to Hong Kong with an English businessman years before, and JohnJohn was dead, one of the few to take a Marcos bullet in the People Power Revolution of ’86. But when I walked into Uncle Willie’s apartment, everything felt the same: the ceiling fan still creaked when it turned, beads hung in the doorway, and there was a case of San Miguel in the refrigerator. The only difference was that Imelda Marcos’s presence had grown. There were more stories and pictures crowding his bedroom wall, some of them recent, as if she were still the First Lady.
We did very little that week; Uncle Willie was eighty years old, and all he wanted to do was nap or watch television. But late one night, he told me he had something to show me, and he put a videocassette into the VCR. “Watch,” he said, then pressed the PLAY button. The screen went blue, and suddenly the Beatles appeared on the screen, doing an interview in which they mentioned the incident. “Do you remember the battle?” Uncle Willie asked from his wheelchair. “How bravely we fought?” I smiled and told him I could never forget.
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