Hotel Honolulu

38 Trainee

"This is my friend," Buddy said to Pinky, nodding at me. "He wrote a book! Go on, angel, give him a kiss."

She was too shy to kiss me. Looking at her unmarked face, I saw someone who seemed to be entering the world for the first time, and uninterested in it, perhaps even repelled by it. I saw what Buddy meant by "angel": inexperienced, childlike, innocent, just beginning to learn the coarse language of life.

Her posture, the way she hunched her shoulders, was like that of a trapped bird, one captured in the wild and still fluttering with fear, her heart pounding like mad. Her smallness made her seem even younger than twenty-three. She wore a T-shirt, and her blue jeans showed her narrow hips and spindly legs. If a woman is a woman for the alluring way she stands, the opposite of a coquette is an adolescent boy. Wearing a baseball cap, she looked like a Little Leaguer.

"Funny thing," Buddy told me. "She was in the dining room alone this morning. She bumped into the table and the flower vase shook a little. I was in the downstairs john. I heard her say 'Sorry.' To an empty room. Is that beautiful or what?"

Her face told nothing except her age. Her smile was trusting. She was glad to be married. She held Buddy's hand the way one of his children

might have, staying in his shadow like a triumphant pet, as an angel sometimes seems to be.

"Isn't she a sweetheart?"

I knew nothing about her at the time. I wanted to know everything. I did not succeed at that, but in time I learned enough. It was a lesson in faces.

Uncle Tony, her mother's brother, the man who had brought her to the hotel room and, in front of Buddy, said, "You won't need this, Pinky," as he unpinned her Trainee badge, had been her protector. Her father was a factory worker in Manila. Pinky lived with her mother and Uncle Tony and a brother and sister in a small hut on a crowded slope of huts, San Antonio, outside Cebu City. Uncle Tony was her first lover.

She had been twelve at the time. She was relieved when she saw it was her uncle kneeling next to her that night. She had feared it might be a stranger. "It's Uncle Tony," he whispered. Her mother was away, working at one of the tourist hotels. He did not wake the others. He kissed her, putting his sour tongue in her mouth. He slipped his hand between her legs and poked his finger into her. She lay bewildered, counting, to calm herself, wanting him to stop.

A pair of shoes in white tissue paper was propped on the table the next day.

Her mother had just returned from her shift. She said, "Say thank you. Give Uncle Tony a kiss. It's a lovely present."

She kissed Uncle Tony. The next time was two weeks later, on her mother's night-shift week. He had given her a pair of pink panties when he came home from the bar. He told her to wear them. That night when the children were asleep he turned the lights out and said, "Take them off." When she hesitated, he said crossly, "Who gave them to you?"

In the darkness he put his mouth on her and used his finger again. The rawness there reminded her of the pain she had felt the first time, which she had never felt before.

"Now you can put them on. They were a present, you know."

After that, whenever her mother was working the night shift, Uncle Tony came to her mat on the floor.

Hold this, he said.

She could hardly get her fingers around the warm thickening thing that reminded her of her small brother's arm.

Tighter.

His smothering mouth was on hers, his tongue tasting of adobo and beer. Her mind went blank. She was counting again, not to any particular number. She knew that in a few minutes it would be over and he would leave her. Yet it never ended when she wanted it to.

Nearly always there were presents — underwear, once a blouse, another time a dress, but candy was the usual thing.

"Give Uncle Tony a kiss," her mother said.

"She don't like her Uncle Tony," Uncle Tony said.

"I love you, Uncle Tony," Pinky said.

She was afraid until she understood that when she kissed him, he would not harm her.

At school the envious girls teased her whenever she wore something new. Seeing her new shoes, the girls were cruel. That year some of them came to school holding a Walkman, with earphones. She waited until the night-shift week and told Uncle Tony she wanted one. He seemed glad to be asked. He came to her mat the next night and knelt and said, "Open your mouth." And she did, almost choking as he said, "Make noises." She had her Walkman.

The old man Bong-Bong in the hut next door watched her all the time. She had turned thirteen. Bong-Bong was a landlord. The way he eyed her convinced her that he knew her secret and made her afraid.

"Come here, Pinky."

She did not move.

"If you don't come here I'll tell your mother."

Tell her what? There was so much to tell. She went into BongBong's feeling tiny, because his hut was so much bigger than her mother's, and it had different smells. Bong-Bong took her on his lap. He arranged her hands, placing them where Uncle Tony had placed them, as though he had seen everything.

"You know all about this. Kneel down."

Her fear had been that he would hurt her. But not at all, and she was glad and grateful, and he was quicker than Uncle Tony. He gave her money and made her promise that she would visit him again.

In time, Bong-Bong's presents added up to a thickness of pesos, which she saved and hid. How could she explain where the money had come from?

She dropped out of school. "I want to work." She said she had a job, but each day she went into Cebu City, where she met other girls, who looked like schoolgirls. They were thirteen and fourteen and some were older. They used a particular shaded portico one of the girls had found.

The girls had friends who were men like Uncle Tony and Bong-Bong — no worse. Pinky went with the men.

The secret lay in saying yes. If a man threatened her, she did not run or hide, but instead went closer to the man. There was even a smell she recognized. And when she touched the men she was safe; they would not hurt her after that. They held her tightly, defended her, sometimes gave her money. This was in cars and in the rooms of the abandoned building

beyond the portico. The closer you went, the safer you were. She felt confident enough now to spend the money on clothes. She bought a pair of orange vinyl hot pants and high heels.

Pinky's mother was now with her father in Manila. Pinky looked after her little brother and sister. Uncle Tony still touched her in the dark now and then. He lay on top of her, too, as the other men did. She wondered why she was not pregnant, and then one month she knew she was. One of the girls gave her the name of a man who said he was a doctor. He locked his door and lay on top of her and said, "Sometimes this works." Then he opened her legs and put them in a clamp and used a piece of glittering metal that might have been a knife. It hurt. She bled.

"That will be five hundred pesos."

She did not have the money, and she was angry with herself for having spent the money on clothes. The doctor said that he knew where she could earn the money, as a dancer.

"I can't dance," Pinky said.

"They will teach you."

He took her to a club in Cebu City and said, "This is Mama." Mama gave her a room and food. "This is worth two thousand pesos," Mama said. "But you will earn it very fast."

Mama was kind. Pinky danced naked, wearing a dog collar and platform shoes, and afterward she sat with the men in darkened booths.

She knew all the rest. The men were Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, even Americans.

"You can't dance, but they like you," Mama said.

At noon when the girls woke up, they had a meal together, like a family, at one table, Mama at the head of it. "What is this adobo?" Pinky asked. It was made from a cat. Even on her hungriest days at San Antonio she had not eaten a cat.

One night a Japanese man sat with her in a booth. He did not touch her. He said, "Put this on." It was a blouse, which she slipped over her sequined bra. The man raised a camera and blinded her for a second with his flash.

Some days later, preparing to dance, she saw Mama beckon to her. The same Japanese man was sitting with Mama in a booth. He had a suitcase. He said, "Open it."

"They are all yours," Mama said. The suitcase was full of folded clothes. "You are going on a trip with Mr. Nishiwara."

"Call me Tony," the Japanese man said. Another Tony. He gave her a passport, Republic of the Philippines. It was her face in the little picture, but beside it was the name Tina Cojugo, four years older than Pinky and with a different address.

That night she flew with Tony the Japanese man to Guam, and was driven in the rain to a small house crowded with Filipinas. Seeing Pinky crying, a woman hugged her and comforted her. This woman, Rosa, was a manager of the club, which was called Club Night Life, near the beach at Agana.

At Club Night Life the customers were mostly Japanese. Pinky danced. She sat with them in the booths. Now and then they bought her for the night by giving Rosa five hundred dollars. In their hotel rooms the Japanese men took pictures of her naked. They watched her on the toilet. Often they did not touch her, only took pictures. But one man tied her to a chair and blindfolded her and splashed on her. He returned another night, but Pinky refused to go with him.

To punish her, Rosa locked Pinky in a dark room in the house. Though she had no idea how long she had been in the room, when she was released into the light Pinky fell to her knees and hugged first Rosa's legs, then Tony's.

In the month before Christmas, Japanese Tony brought her to Honolulu to work in another club, the Rat Room, dancing on a stage that was a mirror and sitting with men, mostly Americans, some Japanese.

Tony still sometimes brought her to his room in Honolulu, where he pulled her hair and bit her until she cried. She reminded herself that she was in America, but it seemed no different from Guam. One night in the Rat Room, a man at the edge of the stage shouted "Watch this!" to his friends. He waved a fivedollar bill at Pinky, she spread her legs for him, and he stared intently between her legs like a man absorbed in contemplating a small shy animal. He tucked the money between the animal's pink lips. His friends cheered, "Tuna!"

It was Buddy. He never saw Pinky's face, nor did Pinky see his, but when he did that, she wanted to cry. Though the thought did not come to her in an arrangement of words, she felt humiliation and fear and hatred, like a sickness that would never leave her body. But she was smiling. When she went to another man, Buddy hurried away.