Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (19 page)

"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."

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
pesos.

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.

I don't know why the ASPCA gets its boxer shorts in a wad
every time our Hispanic cousins have a cockfight in the Bronx.
This is a lot less violent than the Super Bowl and who wants an
extra-crispy quarterback anyway? Each cock gets one razor-steel
spur about half the length of a ball-point pen. This is tied on the
back of his claw just below the drumstick. The fights are one or two
sneezes long and, as a visual spectacle, resemble watching someone kick a down vest with a pointy-toed boot. Feathers fly, spectators holler and-voila-dead clucker. The fun parts are betting
and screaming and, especially, arguing the merits of this or that
combat fricassee. I was good at this. Nobody spoke English, but
that isn't a handicap if you can do a pantomime of Big Bird.

After the main event, one of the owners let me hold his
champion-another source of amusement to all. Apparently there
is a cool way and a nerd way of holding a fighting cock, and I was
the worst chicken grasper anyone had ever seen.

Franco was hungry again, though we'd eaten enough for six at
his uncle's house. I wasn't hungry, but the girl running the roadside
food stand was so pretty I was willing to stand there and eat things
for days if that would keep the gleam in her enormous brown eyes.

Franco bought a disgusting batok which is a fertilized duck
egg in which the duckling has been allowed to grow until it's almost
ready to hatch, then it's hard-boiled. The result looks like an antiabortion movie produced by the Duckburg branch of the Right-ToLife organization. You eat its little feathers, beak and bones and
all. It's bar food in the Philippines. I had a bite and, believe me,
batok is not going to replace buffalo wings as the USA's favorite
happy-hour snack anytime soon.