Pacific Rims

by Rafe Bartholomew

  Bakekang’s racial themes reflected long-standing color prejudices—an ugly and indisputable colonial legacy—that kept wealthy, often mixed-race elites separate from darker skinned indios who toiled in rice fields or peddled cigarettes in urban slums. This rigid class structure was as responsible as any government policy for making social mobility no more than a fantasy for most Filipinos. Some of the “offensive” themes in Bakekang could also be attributed to cultural differences in the way Americans and Filipinos talked about people’s appearance. In Manila, if someone gained weight, their friends might giggle and say, “Wow, you got fat!” A guy with dark skin might hear something along the lines of “You’re really black, dude!” I tried to tamp down the indignant—or was it uptight?—American raging in my mind: Why is it your business if I gained weight? So what if someone has dark skin? Also, I reminded myself that the Philippines had a different kind of historical baggage than the United States when it came to institutionalized racism. The country had its own set of racial hang-ups.

  After that responsible discussion of Philippine attitudes toward race, I should also admit to being a sellout. Bakekang’s subject matter made me uncomfortable, but I never really considered taking a principled stand and refusing to act in the show. While Miss Mona ran through the sordid details, I looked at Twan again, and he shrugged as if to say, “What can you do?” If he could live with it, so could I. Besides, this was our chance to appear in prime time!

  Now that we’d sold our souls, it was time to do some soap opera acting. My character, Brad, was an American businessman living in Manila. In my first scene, Bakekang notices me in the street and introduces herself. Before the first take, two flirtatious gay makeup artists patted foundation on my cheeks, then opened up several sachets of jet black conditioner and rubbed it into my scalp to make my hair darker. According to the show’s inscrutable racial calculus, Bakekang’s audience liked their white men tall, dark, and handsome, not tall, fair and blondish. Sunshine Dizon introduced herself and thanked me and Twan for agreeing to work on short notice, then she settled into the massage chair where she waited between takes. I asked Miss Mona if I could see a script. She cocked her head and squinted at me like I had asked for a still-beating goat heart. Eventually, she nodded and left to find my lines. Because Bakekang aired five nights a week, the crew worked at a blinding pace. So fast, it seemed, that the acting was based on broad narrative arcs more than scripted lines. A script did exist somewhere, but the stars didn’t bother memorizing lines. Instead, they improvised within well-worn genre tropes.

  It took Miss Mona fifteen minutes, but she managed to scrounge together three pages of dialogue for the scene I was about to shoot. I hadn’t acted since high school, when I played a raccoon-eating mountain man in a five-minute comedy skit, and I had no clue how to carry myself in front of a TV camera. Peering at my lines through brown adobo sauce stains on the crinkled dialogue at least made me feel more prepared, although I’d hardly whispered my way through the pages when director Gil Tejada touched the small of my back and asked, “Ready?”

  I didn’t know the lines. Nobody cared. I knew the gist of them and it was time to shoot. Once the camera was rolling, it was like I was transformed, except instead of stepping into my character, I became a walking parody of bad acting. When Bakekang chased me down on the street, calling “Mr. Foreigner!” and offering to serve as my tour guide, I turned her down in a voice I’d never heard before. Higher-pitched than my normal timbre and with a foppish inflection, it was like I was trying to do an accentless Hugh Grant impression. Even worse was the vacant look in my eyes. There was no anger, no confusion, no human quality whatsoever.

  We kept shooting deep into the night. As the story progresses, Bakekang follows me to a restaurant, where I bump into Carl, my black American friend played by Twan. My character finds Bakekang repulsive and wants to get her thrown out of the restaurant, but Twan fancies her and invites her to stay. Twan convinces me to play wingman and let Bakekang hang out with us so he can seduce her, while Bakekang plots to use him to get closer to me. Before long we’re pounding San Miguel beers and belting out karaoke standards at a local watering hole. At the end of the night I’m plastered, so Bakekang stuffs me into a cab and gives Twan the slip. He jumps into the next taxi and follows.

  And so the stage was set for the climactic bed scene. It was past midnight, and the crew was pressed to finish before 1:00 a.m., when the overtime clause in Dizon’s contract kicked in. There was no time to bother reading lines, so instead Tejada just ordered me and Twan to take our shirts off and get under the sheets with Bakekang. He explained how the scene would unfold: The shot opens on Bakekang. She yawns and looks to her left, where she sees me nuzzling peacefully at her side. Success! Then she glances to the right, sees Twan’s black foot and wails in horror when she realizes we engaged in a booze-fueled threesome. “Brad, then you wake up,” Tejada told me, “and you say, ‘We had sex with this monkey?’” Until then my character had been mean and dismissive, but none of the lines I butchered earlier in the evening had been this reprehensible.

  I asked if I had to call her a monkey.

  “Of course you have to call her monkey,” Tejada said, while the crew nodded in agreement. “That’s what makes it funny!” After delivering the primate punch line, I was supposed to drag Bakekang out of bed, down the stairs and out the door, then throw her on the ground while calling her “ugly bitch.” I was outnumbered. I caved. I did it. So now not only do I have a clip I can use to seek more soap opera work, but also proof for future generations of Bartholomews that grandpa was a racist monster.

  We filmed the scene in a small bedroom, baking under television lights that felt like heat lamps. The temperature climbed past a hundred degrees before the director ordered all three of us under the covers. It took six or seven attempts to find the right angle for the shot, and between takes me and Twan jumped out of bed so the giggling makeup artists could pat our sweaty chests with Kleenex. Once we were rolling and Bakekang started screeching, Tejada ordered us to “react.” It was pretty common in Philippine telenovelas to cut between close-ups of characters making assorted forlorn, lusty, outraged, or dumbfounded faces. These reaction montages could stretch for minutes without dialogue, just actors beaming emotion into the camera. For a talentless amateur like me, this was terrifying. The passing seconds felt like eons, and Tejada kept urging me to “React!” My well of expressions ran dry almost immediately; after that I racked my brain for any configuration of features that might make an impression, but I mostly came up empty. Whatever my “reactions” looked like, Tejada wisely edited them out of the episode.

  If you watch the show (it’s available on YouTube),75 you may notice a plot inconsistency in my bed scene. Bakekang and her beaus get drunk enough to have a ménage à trois and black out, but when we wake up the next day, me and Twan are both wearing pants. This suggests that after the threesome, we had the presence of mind to put our pants on before passing out. Our inexplicable moment of clarity was made necessary by Philippine TV’s decency laws, which say that men cannot appear on screen in their underwear. Violence against women? Check. Frothy hate speech? No problem. Man in boxer shorts? Forbidden. Makes sense, right?

  That was pretty much the end of my role in Bakekang. I continued following the show over the next few months to see what happened. Thanks to a little showbiz magic, Bakekang gave birth to fraternal twins fathered separately by me and Twan. This, I learned, was called a heteropaternal superfecundation, an extremely rare but possible occurrence. Throughout the show, Bakekang committed various acts of shameful neglect against Charming, the half-black and therefore ugly baby. First, she placed the infant in a chute marked IF YOU’RE EMBARRASSED at a nunnery. Then she tried to sell the child to a blind woman. None of it made me particularly proud, although I briefly became a minor celebrity. People recognized me in malls and on jeepneys wherever I went. Horrifyingly, children really seemed to enjoy my character; I hoped it was the overwhelming goofiness
of my performance. It became hard for me to walk down the street without hearing some seven-year-old voice chime, “Bakekang!” The kids, often too young to understand the difference between fiction and reality, wanted to know why I was so mean to Bakekang and asked if we still lived together. On a few occasions, parents asked me to pose for cell phone pictures while holding their babies, which felt every bit as creepy as it sounds.

  In fairness, Bakekang tried to have a moral ending. As Charming and my fictional daughter, Kristal, grew up, it became apparent that the ugly sister was kinder and more responsible than her fair-skinned twin. Kristal did become a showbiz baby, but she was selfish and mistreated her mother. Charming, on the other hand, loved Bakekang unconditionally and repeatedly bailed the family out of trouble. At the end of the series, Kristal sacrifices herself for Bakekang, who was going to be shot by a rival stage mom (this is a telenovela, after all). Kristal took the bullet for her mother, and Charming’s loving example was credited for inspiring the selfless act. By then, however, the series had been contaminated by so many vile prejudices that this message of hope seemed like too little, too late.

  The series eventually ended and I was forgotten. I was pleased, however, to have continued the proud Philippine tradition of following basketball into entertainment, and I liked to think my wooden performance was worthy of my hoops forebears like Jaworski and Arnaiz. At the end of Bakekang’s run, I drifted back into the basketball world, ready to follow the bouncing ball to other strange corners of Philippine society.

  The Alaska clubhouse was quiet for a change when I arrived before one late season practice. For once, Willie Miller wasn’t pouring all his guile and gumption into some prank like jolting unsuspecting teammates with a low-voltage prod the trainers used to stimulate strained muscles. Dale Singson and John Ferriols weren’t snickering over some Cebuano video meme downloaded to their cell phones. Roe and Mike Cortez weren’t cocooned in their noise-canceling headphones. The players were leaning forward to get a better look at a television—they squinted, nodded in response to what they saw, whispered observations into each others’ ears. They were engaged.

  Rightly so, I thought as I took in this studious tableau on my way through the narrow hallway that opened up into the lounge’s main room. I figured they were watching game tape of the Barangay Ginebra Gin-Kings, the team the Aces were preparing to face in a one-game playoff for second place and an automatic berth in the semifinals. Alaska and Ginebra finished the regular season with 12-6 records, tied behind 13-5 Red Bull. In the PBA, the top two teams skipped the first two rounds of the postseason while the rest of the league battled to reach them in the final four. That made the sudden death Ginebra game the biggest of Alaska’s season. Winning would give the Aces two weeks to relax—time for lingering injuries to heal and for the coaching staff to plan a championship surge. In recent weeks a strained hamstring had forced Roe to miss a rematch with Red Bull and James Penny, the only import who’d bested him all season. Cone’s all-Filipino lineup gave Penny and Coach Yeng Guiao a scare; Alaska even took an eight-point lead in the third quarter, but the undermanned Aces eventually lost. Roe returned and looked healthy in a season-ending victory over the Santa Lucia Realtors, but the extra weeks of rest would improve his chances of surviving the playoffs without reaggravating the muscle. Mike’s comeback from torn knee ligaments was only a month old, and while he had shown flashes of his preinjury brilliance, he still hadn’t found a consistent rhythm on the court. A bye to the semifinals would mean more time for his game to return.

  Most of all, Cone wanted to avoid the early playoff rounds, a battle royale that began with a single-elimination tournament of the bottom four teams, one of whom would prevail with a spot in the best-of-three quarterfinals. The loser of the Alaska-Ginebra game would drop to the quarters, where Cone suspected they’d play the San Miguel Beermen. Aside from being the PBA’s hottest team—the Beermen won eight of ten games after losing their first six—San Miguel was a frightful match-up for Alaska. With a stingy defense, playoff veterans and an experienced import,76 they mirrored the Aces’ strengths. A month earlier the Beermen dealt Alaska one of their worst losses of the season, and Cone was determined to avoid facing them in a best-of-three joust where one bad game could put the Aces on the brink of elimination.

  It came as a slight surprise, then, to emerge from the hallway and see that the players weren’t absorbed in Ginebra tape but were instead enraptured by a local variety show called Wowowee. This shouldn’t have been such a shock. The most important game of the season would get its share of the players’ attention, but not at the expense of Wowowee, a two-hour program that commanded a massive TV audience every afternoon. Pop culture experts had even cited Wowowee’s frenetic pace to explain why Filipinos loved basketball. Wowowee first aired in 2005, but its format, the “noontime show,” had been a broadcast staple for decades. The myriad entertainments offered in a given Wowowee episode included gigs by popular musicians; lengthy booty-shaking sessions performed by a platoon of half-naked lasses; karaoke belted out by sundry members of the Philippine underclass; humiliating and heartrending testimonials of poverty; and a delirious crowd ready to erupt at every punch line dropped by Willie Revillame, the effervescent, everyman host whose very soul seemed to be carbonated.

  The Wowowee segment that so enthralled Alaska’s players that afternoon was a performance by an R&B strumpet once linked to John Ferriols, the team’s resident hunk. Roe was impressed: “This show got some thick Filipinas.” Then Pokwang, a comedienne cohost with the bony physique of a sixties pole vaulter, a severe, angular face, and an affinity for colored wigs, made her grand entrance. With her machine gun patter, delivered with the same aggressive intonation as the barkers who herded commuters into the backs of jeepneys, Pokwang struck a jarring contrast with the dulcet femininity of John’s chanteuse. Nearly everyone in the room was laughing, except Roe, who reconsidered his earlier assessment: “That shit is nasty.” The joke was on him and anyone else naive enough to take Wowowee seriously.

  The binding agent in Wowowee’s unsavory brew was money, or the lack thereof. The show was structured around a series of games, with preselected contestants competing against each other and against participants pulled from the crowd, often based on their willingness to humiliate themselves. Throughout the program, Revillame rewarded each correct answer with cash from a bottomless stack of 1,000 peso bills, each worth about twenty dollars. In one regular segment, Revillame interviewed guests from a chosen, often neglected niche of Philippine society: orphans, construction workers, jeepney drivers, women who work as “guest relations officers” in girlie bars. Baring their souls for millions of viewers while the in-house keyboardist set the mood with somber, reflective chords, Wowowee contestants often had tears rolling down their cheeks by the time Revillame finished with them. Then, with hardly any transition, he would ask: “What’s your talent?” and the contestants chose to sing or dance. This formula enabled Wowowee to televise surreal moments like dishwashers’ children serenading the crowd with tone-deaf Air Supply covers and macho security guards’ deluded attempts at dirty dancing.77 After performing, contestants received a few bills from Revillame’s pile. But the prizes weren’t limited to these minor disbursements. The show also gave away million-peso rewards worth between $20,000 and $40,000, and occasionally participants won jeepneys or even new homes.

  Another of Revillame’s favorite ploys was to recruit the most disoriented members of the studio audience—drooling senior citizens, clueless Americans, or overenthusiastic naifs who would gladly debase themselves for two minutes of fame and a fistful of cash. These were cheap laughs, but they were damn funny. Try suppressing a laugh when Revillame convinces an elderly woman in a duster to dance sexy for him, or when he talks Tagalog circles around a portly Westerner in a trucker hat. The show reached its exploitative zenith when children appeared as guests. Wowowee often selected kids from poor families as contestants, and Revillame milked their hard-luck stories for a nation
of captive viewers. The children, too young to be self-aware, would reveal tear-jerking details of their lives, such as when Revillame asked one girl what she wanted to tell her father, who was watching at home. She looked into the camera, eyes welling with tears, and said in Tagalog, “Daddy, please don’t get drunk tonight.” The revelation made my stomach turn; then I inched closer to the screen to see what she’d say next. I thought I’d never see that kind of twisted intimacy on live television again. Then I started watching more Wowowee and realized the show averages two or three such breakdowns per month.

  Wowowee cast a spell on its audience. The daily carnival of nubile bodies, inane humor, and voyeuristic thrills pulsated from segment to segment with snowballing momentum. The longer you watched, the deeper your trance. By the time you emerged the credits were rolling and two hours had vanished. This time-warp quality seemed like an important part of the show’s appeal. Millions of Filipinos, in the city and the provinces, employed or jobless, spent multihour chunks of their day just waiting. Waiting for a customer to buy a can of corned beef. Waiting in line at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. Waiting on a twelve-hour bus ride to Manila from the Mountain Province. Nothing killed time like Wowowee.