Alex Maskara
Thoughts, Stories, Imagination of Filipino American Alex Maskara
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Diary of A Masquerade
~
Chapter 2
[Antonio describes the first meeting between him and Roberto Policarpio]
I needed to bury the corpse of Roberto Policarpio. If I didn’t, the horror—violent, unrelenting—would keep clawing at my visions, staining every hour I tried to survive. Bury him fast. But how? And where the hell would I find two thousand pesos? I cursed the day I met him. I wished I never had. That night, for the first time in my life, I felt something deeper than fear. Something close to damnation.
I came from barrio Concepcion, a sleepy patch of land in the forgotten town of Bilbao, Pampanga. Three years ago, I left home with two things in my back pocket: a dream of finishing college—no matter the cost—and the desperation to make a living in Manila. I arrived young, broke, and invisible. The city didn't open its arms. It made me drift—first through slums and bus terminals, then through shadows of neon lights until I found myself hustling along Manila Bay. That was my world now. I had no shame, no guilt. As long as I moved through life like a car gliding on a bump-less road, I could pretend I was headed somewhere. Maybe even toward success.
That illusion shattered three weeks ago.
That’s when I met Roberto Policarpio—known in elite circles as *The Faceless Adonis*. From that moment, he changed everything in me: the way I spoke, the ideas I held, my perception of beauty, the texture of my dreams. He crept into my sleep, rearranged the furniture of my mind. Hell. The first mistake was seeing his real face. The second was losing the cardboard box filled with my family’s keepsakes—my last link to who I once was. Since then, I’d been spiraling. Lost.
The horror began like this:
Roberto looked to be in his mid-twenties when I first saw him. He had just stepped out of a taxi and walked toward the seawall like he was gliding through a film. He didn’t even glance down at the slick pavement. Mud clung to his faded denim jeans, and his once-brown moccasins had turned grey with dust and travel. He pulled off his light sweater and crisscrossed it over his chest, revealing a lean, muscular torso that shimmered under the bay mist and the moon’s dim yellow reflection.
And then we met.
“Are you familiar with Tennessee Williams' *A Streetcar Named Desire*?” he asked, his voice polished with a flawless Filipino-English accent.
It caught me off guard. “Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t they show that on TV last month?” I had a knack for sizing people up fast—education, motive, experience, even how much money they might be carrying. It came with the job. From that one sentence, I pegged him: upper class, likely college-educated, probably owned theater season tickets. I instantly classified him as a prime prospect.
At least he wasn’t like the usual creeps—the ones who sauntered up pretending they needed a light, like I ran the BIC factory. Or the pathetic ones who leaned in with sour breath asking, “Got a cigarette?” Do I look like I run Philip Morris? And then the classic idiots with the recycled pick-up lines: “Haven’t we met before?” Sure. Maybe on one of the 7,107 islands in this country. What a joke.
“Can you recall Blanche’s last line?” he asked.
“How should I know?” I snapped. “The only line I’ve memorized is from *Gone with the Wind*—‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’”
He laughed—too loud, too sudden—but his face quickly sobered. “‘Whoever you are,’” he said, locking eyes with mine, “‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’”
I paused. This theater talk was leading nowhere. I had clients to find, not monologues to hear.
“You…” I started, distracted. There was something familiar about his face. I couldn’t quite place it, but I had definitely seen it before. His voice echoed in my ears, and the way he moved—graceful to the point of surreal—he didn’t seem to walk so much as float.
“Are you a playwright or something?” I asked.
He shook his head quickly, eyes scanning the bay. “God forbid.”
His tone put me on guard. I once dreamed of becoming a playwright, back when dreams were still affordable.
“What’s wrong with being a playwright?”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, a little too smooth. “My college course is just far from anything artistic.”
“What course is that?”
“It’s not relevant,” he said curtly, and gestured for me to follow him toward the winding sidewalk of Roxas Boulevard.
I was about to grab my stuff when it hit me.
Three years ago. His face. Flashing across the country on TV. That’s it.
“Wait a minute—weren’t you that model… from that contest… what was it? *Search for the Model Philippines* back in ’89?”
He nodded faintly.
“What happened after that? One minute your face was everywhere, then—poof—you vanished.”
“As you said, I simply vanished.”
“And now you’ve reappeared in Manila Bay, of all places?”
“Is there something wrong with that? Don’t I have the right to be here?”
My stomach dropped. If he was planning to hustle in my territory, I was finished. He was… devastatingly beautiful. The kind of beauty that made people stop breathing. If the Faceless Adonis decided to become a hooker at Manila Bay, it would cause riots. Pandemonium. No one would look at the rest of us again. He was too polished, too elegant, too clean. He didn’t belong in this trashy world.
I looked at him again, hard. Should I warn him? Should I disappear before he took my clients? Something in me stirred—intuition or dread, maybe both. Maybe he wanted something from me. Maybe *Desire* was the clue.
“You’re not… trying to pick me up, are you?”
He burst out laughing, wild and uncontrolled, to the point he couldn’t speak. I flushed with embarrassment. God, I’d misread the moment. In this line of work, you don’t talk bluntly. We had codes, gestures, signs. Scratch your head with one finger—that meant a hundred pesos. Two fingers? Two hundred. Five fingers? Five hundred. No words needed. Just silent negotiation: pesos divided by twenty for dollars, multiplied by twenty for yen.
“Are you a call boy?” he asked.
I liked that term better than “hustler.” Sounded more refined. I didn’t answer.
“That figures,” he said, as if it confirmed something he'd already guessed.
Since the game was up, I leaned in, trying to get the upper hand. “I’m cheap,” I said with a smirk. “Unless you’re planning to get into the business yourself. If so, I can train you. Teach you the tricks. Introduce you to some of my clients.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What kind of clients do you have?”
“Only the big shots,” I lied through my teeth.
Truth was, I took whoever had enough for a night and didn’t stink of beer and regrets. But I'd been around long enough to meet every kind of client—quiet ones, theatrical ones, rich old men, desperate tourists, lonely souls. And I’d become something of a teacher to the new kids—the boys just starting out, eager and scared. They came to me for tips: how to seduce, how to ask without asking, how to make a client fall in love for one night, two nights, enough to keep coming back.
They thought I was some kind of legend. But I was just surviving. Day by day. Peso by peso.
And now, here was Roberto Policarpio—beautiful, broken, mysterious. And maybe more dangerous than I realized.
2025-04-06 13:51:57
masquerade
Boy Luneta
I stepped out of my Manila hotel in the dark and crossed Roxas Boulevard to take a walk alongside the bay, repeating a habit I formed some 40 years ago when I was young and green, full of dare and curiosity. I remember how I took a jeepney ride or walked miles so I could visit the Bay as often as I could then. It was like home to me. It was a pleasant home - I recall standing on the seawall, with nothing in front of me but the breeze and occasional moisture splashing from the waves of the Pacific. The habit disappeared with time, the way time took away my libido and youth and beauty. I stayed abroad for more than 3 decades, killing that habit. But today I returned to see if there was still the sparkle, if Manila Bay could trigger the old memories. I miss the coconut trees, the big rocks lining the wall. In the old days, the bay welcomed everyone through the night: lovers and schemers and the homeless and young dreamers, rich and poor, old men. We fortified the vulnerable Manila as we stood guard in the dark watching and waiting. From afar a ship with bright lights rolled by.
When the moon was full, forty years ago, I conjured up events and scenarios and stories, oh I was fond of stories that I witnessed and heard and read about. I wrote them all piece by piece, on notepads that have now collected dust in my storage. Good thing I converted them to digital decades back and now I can summon them as I approach the twilight of my years. I carry no illusions about my writing as I have no formal training. My language is definitely lacking in impeccable grammar and extensive vocabulary. I won’t worry much about this, I don’t think my intended readers prefer to read English anyway, if they even want to read anything at all. How can writing like this compete with the allure of digital content creations? Nowadays one would rather spend time checking out Facebook, Tik tok, reels, you tube for their quick and simple formats of sharing everything from ideas to philosophy to experiences to stories to entertainment in just a few seconds. Visually in an increasingly visual society! Compare that to this long-winding verbiage, really, it is a no brainer.
Yet I keep posting my long ago stories for whatever reason that I can’t fathom. I always wanted to be a writer as a young man but life’s demands required me to take a different route. There was no money in writing during my youth, especially in the Philippines where people could be limited in their scope of interest. Even today, what takes most attention are politics and scandals. The venerable gods come from show business. I even observed the openness of the society on things kept closeted during my time. It is both progressive and regressive I think. Now we have the LGBTs in the limelight, they command hefty prices for their talents, collect millions of followers on social networks and admirers to the chagrin of the close-minded and religious zealots. Relationships become a part of the daily menu, people stepping over the boundaries of what used to be private and polite to open and aggressive. Think of Trump and other conspiracy-theory driven personalities. I am glad I took the route of healthcare as my profession. It paid well and consistently as opposed to a possible writer’s job. That was the trend in my college years. Working in healthcare, especially abroad, was the main gateway to one’s family’s survival.
---
Boy Luneta
Boy Luneta 3
So we drank another round of San Migs. By this time, Boy Luneta's face was turning red and I was getting hot and horny. He beamed savagely,
- Why do you lookin' at me that way?
-Well I...
-I know, I know, I can read it all over your face. You lookin' at me like I'm pancit and adobo which you prob'ly never tasted for the past ten years.
-I hate you.
-Lemme tell you something' Ramon de Goiti. I may be eating shit like a goddamn native chicken but that has just made me more delicious and tasty.
-Stop!
Drunk, Boy Luneta and I walked out of the bar, the hang-out of Manila low life. I nearly tripped on the sidewalk of Roxas Boulevard, he had to support my balance. I was saddened by the old and tired city of Manila but excited by the prospect of having sex again with a fellow Filipino. I was ashamed of my feelings - two days ago, I was living a pretentious clean life in my citadel of false tranquility in the city of Miami, and today, I was wandering along with a hustler in Manila. I felt the presence of both God and Lucifer within me.
Come to think of it, I thought, what have I achieved so far in America? I did good, as far as making it in America is concerned. But what is meant by achieving good in America? Earn enough dollars to have a walk-in closet, a brand new car, a little respect for my service to sick people. Other than that...it’s empty. I did not find a single true love, oh I had faked a lot of love, fooled myself into believing I had found love worth dying for. And I died. I must have faked my death tens of times, because I'm still alive and feeling nothing. In America, I felt like a pancit and adobo, they would always love to taste me, but to consider me as a staple food, forget it. It is so easy to find someone in my bed, someone who in the heat of passion would whisper he loves me dearly, but after that, my bed would be empty again, waiting for another curious lover. Perhaps I could blame my morose empty feeling to my culture. And Americans hate me for saying this all the time. I grew up in the company of my family, my parents and all the parents I knew in my town who have managed to live together forever. Divorce is against the law. So I lived with this expectation that even in my gay world, I will find someone who would stick out with me for better or worse for the rest of my life. One whom I will take care of when he gets sick. One who'd be with me when I get sick. Isn't that the Philippine way? I hoped for someone who would wake up with me in the mornings, retire with me at nights. That's oh so romantic but unreal in my gay world, especially in my American gay world.
So I developed this compensation in relationships. I became the prissy senorita who would stand in a party or a bar in a backoffish manner. Snubbish. Moralistic. Yet shallow because beneath all these, I was extremely sexual. Always leaving me in eternal conflict.
This extreme sexuality became clearer when I found my old fling Boy Luneta. I simply stripped myself of all my inhibitions. Am I crazy or what?
"Where are we now, Boy Luneta?" I asked.
"Oh please...stop these stupid pretensions and hypocrisy Ramon de Goiti. If there is anybody who knows every nook and crook in Luneta, it is you my friend. It's not as if Luneta has changed since you last came here."
I gave out a hearty laugh as we continued walking on the Luneta strip. He was right. It was the same old strip all the way from T. Kalaw to CCP. Except for extra coconut trees and smashed seawall for repair or replacement, nothing was really changed. And to be honest, I was anticipating we would end by one hidden coconut trunk in my secret nook close to the Film Center and make love. Standing. We did that before. By the time we reached my secret coconut tree, I became a one hundred percent slut. I grabbed him by the collar and started kissing his beer tasting mouth. He was caught by surprise and had to push me away.
"What's wrong with you?" he asked.
"Sky's the limit," I reminded him.
"If this is what you learned in America, I pity you." he quipped.
I pulled him back again towards me and began unbuttoning his shirt. Being drunk, he started to give in. Until... "Did you hear that?" he asked. In the heat of passion, all my senses except my lust were oblivious. "No I didn't," I said. I started unbuckling his belt. By the time I was about to unzip his pants, he pushed my hands away. "There it goes again, can you hear it?" he persisted. I raised my sex-starved voice. "No!" obviously pissed.
He raised his voice, "Because you're not listening dammit!"
I stopped momentarily, releasing a deep sigh. Okay, I listened. The sound came as a suppressed cry. It was obviously that of a man's. It came in spurts, sometimes prolonged, but it was meant not to be heard. It sounded creepy. Boy Luneta did not waste time in following the sound. Under the moonless night, beside the dark Film Center, he combed through the overgrown wild weeds and searched through shrubbery. He tapped the corrugated iron fence separating the Center from the Manila Bay shore.
"Hello, is anyone there?" he called.
The voice stopped. And then...not far from the coconut tree where I intended to make love, I saw a silhouette, a sitting figure whose back was leaning against the iron fence. The figure was tall, muscular, I saw its arms move, large hands.
God, this can't be true, I thought. I've been in America too long to know that this broken crying man was Caucasian. Walking closer, my suspicion was verified. There he sat, a man with a crew cut, light hair, probably blond. He was holding his cap in his hands, there was a streak of blood running down his face. This is exactly what I hated to see, another incident that will run across the newspapers in the world, claiming how another foreigner was violated in Manila. Another incident that will add to the so-called notoriety of the Filipino which everyone the world over wants to feast about. Another incident that would scare tourists and investors, another to make Filipinos ashamed, or to the likes of me, become guarded and defensive. My friends would often assure me this happens everywhere in the world. Yeah, tell that to the peace loving Swiss. Tell that to Miami which lost a lot of revenues after a few crimes were committed to its tourists. Tourism is simple hospitality. You don't commit crimes to your guests. Incidences like these don't land you in tourism brochures.
But...was the man a tourist? We approached the leaning figure.
Boy Luneta had other thoughts. He was like any typical Luneta resident who believes every Caucasian is American. To him, this American was not a tourist. American tourists like the Japanese come by bus loads taking pictures, or hopping from bar to bar. A solitary American like this sitting in a dark corner of Film Center is either a service man who refused to leave after the closure of the bases or a Peace Corp volunteer who got lost on his way to the American Embassy or a Mormon Missionary. The Protestants are better prepared and less adventurous, Boy Luneta once claimed. But the Mormons? They think the Philippines is Paradise. But surprisingly though, he continued to claim, he hasn't heard of any violated Mormon in the Philippines. I guess it's something to do with their looks - they suffer enough wearing neckties and long sleeves under the Philippine heat. Actually Filipinos worry more about the Mormons than themselves because these missionaries are barely out of their teens, they don't have cars much less money and they give out Bibles containing the Gospel according to Joseph Smith. No, you don't violate the Mormons, Boy Luneta claimed. They are so dedicated to God that God will kill you if you violate them.
"Hey you, what's wrong man?" Boy Luneta asked the poor leaning Caucasian. I preferred to stand behind to watch the events and conversation about to unfold. The Caucasian did not even budge to raise his head. "Enough," he said faintly. "Beat it."
"Say that again?"
This time, the man stared at us with ferocious eyes. "Don't you understand English? What the fuck am I doing here?" I saw it all right there and then, the poor guy was robbed. And beaten too. I could smell liquor from his breath, he wryly waved us to go away.
Boy Luneta was deeply hurt by this gesture. And no one hurts Boy Luneta. He said once, I may be a hustler, but I've got pride.
I had to intervene."I'm sorry..." I stared at the bruised man and all I saw in his face was anger. An anger that didn't care what happened next. And for a person like me who never encountered any problem in a foreign soil, I just felt this immense obligation to ease the pain of this man. If there was one thing I wanted to do is to give back to foreigners in my soil whatever kindness they offered to me in theirs.
"Son of a bitch. Yes, what the fuck are you doing here?" Boy Luneta hissed. Before he got out of hand, I pushed him away from the Caucasian man.
"Sir," I addressed the man in my best Florida accent, "We just wanna know if you're alright. Do you want us to get you some help?"
The man just stared at me blankly.
"Do you want us to call the police?" Still no response.
"We will leave if you want us to." I was answered by silence.
I immediately grabbed the hand of Boy Luneta, who continued to mumble all the Filipino cuss words he knew, there's a lot of them actually. When we were a few yards away, the man spoke. "Wait."
Boy Luneta stopped cursing. We turned back to look at the man who began crying. This time it was a loud cry. I never saw an American cry this loud except those who were about to die in the hospital where I worked.
He wailed, "Tesang, forgive me. I forgot myself!"
What did he mean by that? He was obviously calling the name of a woman. But then, he was as drunk as I and Boy Luneta. Drunk people are capable of many unrestrained acts and can cry out anything.
"Who did this to you?" Boy Luneta asked. His words came out in a false pretense of concern, unfortunately. The Caucasian whose English and accent obviously were American stared at us with a pained face, first at Boy Luneta, then at me. He kept his eyes at me afterwards. He probably thought I was the lesser of two evils. In between his sniffs and sobs, he said to me, "Your accent is different."
I said, "I just arrived from Florida two days ago. I work there."
In saying this, a ray of hope landed on his face.
Not wanting to be ignored and outdone, with or without accent, Boy Luneta kept his inquiry, which progressively sounded more sincere as he rattled along. "Are you a serviceman?"
"No."
"A Peace Corp volunteer?"
"No."
"A...Mormon?"
"No."
At this point, doubt had cast a dark shadow upon all his American-visiting-the-Philippines stereotypes.
"Are you a...you know...a tourist?"
"You can say that again...Fuck, it's all gone...Shit, I'm bleeding...They kicked me in the face..." the American kept mumbling as he felt his body.
Boy Luneta shouted "Why?" As in "Why are you not in your hotel sleeping the night off with fellow tourists? You should know better than to be alone in this dangerous side of the city at this time of the night." In other words, "Why are you different from all the other tourists I know?"
I tapped Boy Luneta's shoulder. I whispered to him, "Shut up." I looked again at the American. I asked, "Who are you and what happened?"
"My name is Keith Devlon. I used to serve in Clark Air Base. I came back to Manila to look for Tesang, a bar hostess I met a couple of years back. I was promised by her friend Leila some leads to her whereabouts. And then...we ended up in a hotel in Manila...and then...oh fuck...fuck...I remember now... I was duped and beaten and stolen of everything I have. My bag of clothes and my wallet."
A series of slurs came out from the lips of Boy Luneta. "So here you are! Another one of them superior Americans coming here to save the world while enjoying a Filipina! And you thought everyone here would call you a hero? This is your own doing man."
Keith Devlon just stared at him with an open mouth. I knew that Boy Luneta was playing nationalistic, really, but to an American, this American at least, his outbursts made him appear like a specimen of wonder. I tapped Boy Luneta once more and gave him the shut-the-fuck-up look.
"Who is this Tesang you're looking for?" I asked Keith. Keith Devlon shook his head, this time, tears rolled down his face, it took him minutes before he could answer.
"She is the woman I love."
Now, my dear readers, I want you to sit down and rest. Because what I have is another long story to share. This is another one of many long stories that Boy Luneta led me to. A story that happened in four weeks, mere four weeks that I intended to spend as a homecoming visit from America. Against your expectations, this is about a love between a foreign boy and a local girl, as opposed to the love between Boy Luneta and me which more likely will always be between a native chicken and a chicken with no wings.
Volume 1
Ramon de Goiti
---
2024-05-05 01:16:43
masquerade
Diary of a Masquerade 2
Chapter 2
[Antonio describes the first meeting between him and Roberto Policarpio]
I needed to bury the corpse of Roberto Policarpio. If I didn’t, the horror—violent, unrelenting—would keep clawing at my visions, staining every hour I tried to survive. Bury him fast. But how? And where the hell would I find two thousand pesos? I cursed the day I met him. I wished I never had. That night, for the first time in my life, I felt something deeper than fear. Something close to damnation.
I came from barrio Concepcion, a sleepy patch of land in the forgotten town of Bilbao, Pampanga. Three years ago, I left home with two things in my back pocket: a dream of finishing college—no matter the cost—and the desperation to make a living in Manila. I arrived young, broke, and invisible. The city didn't open its arms. It made me drift—first through slums and bus terminals, then through shadows of neon lights until I found myself hustling along Manila Bay. That was my world now. I had no shame, no guilt. As long as I moved through life like a car gliding on a bump-less road, I could pretend I was headed somewhere. Maybe even toward success.
That illusion shattered three weeks ago.
That’s when I met Roberto Policarpio—known in elite circles as *The Faceless Adonis*. From that moment, he changed everything in me: the way I spoke, the ideas I held, my perception of beauty, the texture of my dreams. He crept into my sleep, rearranged the furniture of my mind. Hell. The first mistake was seeing his real face. The second was losing the cardboard box filled with my family’s keepsakes—my last link to who I once was. Since then, I’d been spiraling. Lost.
The horror began like this:
Roberto looked to be in his mid-twenties when I first saw him. He had just stepped out of a taxi and walked toward the seawall like he was gliding through a film. He didn’t even glance down at the slick pavement. Mud clung to his faded denim jeans, and his once-brown moccasins had turned grey with dust and travel. He pulled off his light sweater and crisscrossed it over his chest, revealing a lean, muscular torso that shimmered under the bay mist and the moon’s dim yellow reflection.
And then we met.
“Are you familiar with Tennessee Williams' *A Streetcar Named Desire*?” he asked, his voice polished with a flawless Filipino-English accent.
It caught me off guard. “Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t they show that on TV last month?” I had a knack for sizing people up fast—education, motive, experience, even how much money they might be carrying. It came with the job. From that one sentence, I pegged him: upper class, likely college-educated, probably owned theater season tickets. I instantly classified him as a prime prospect.
At least he wasn’t like the usual creeps—the ones who sauntered up pretending they needed a light, like I ran the BIC factory. Or the pathetic ones who leaned in with sour breath asking, “Got a cigarette?” Do I look like I run Philip Morris? And then the classic idiots with the recycled pick-up lines: “Haven’t we met before?” Sure. Maybe on one of the 7,107 islands in this country. What a joke.
“Can you recall Blanche’s last line?” he asked.
“How should I know?” I snapped. “The only line I’ve memorized is from *Gone with the Wind*—‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’”
He laughed—too loud, too sudden—but his face quickly sobered. “‘Whoever you are,’” he said, locking eyes with mine, “‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’”
I paused. This theater talk was leading nowhere. I had clients to find, not monologues to hear.
“You…” I started, distracted. There was something familiar about his face. I couldn’t quite place it, but I had definitely seen it before. His voice echoed in my ears, and the way he moved—graceful to the point of surreal—he didn’t seem to walk so much as float.
“Are you a playwright or something?” I asked.
He shook his head quickly, eyes scanning the bay. “God forbid.”
His tone put me on guard. I once dreamed of becoming a playwright, back when dreams were still affordable.
“What’s wrong with being a playwright?”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, a little too smooth. “My college course is just far from anything artistic.”
“What course is that?”
“It’s not relevant,” he said curtly, and gestured for me to follow him toward the winding sidewalk of Roxas Boulevard.
I was about to grab my stuff when it hit me.
Three years ago. His face. Flashing across the country on TV. That’s it.
“Wait a minute—weren’t you that model… from that contest… what was it? *Search for the Model Philippines* back in ’89?”
He nodded faintly.
“What happened after that? One minute your face was everywhere, then—poof—you vanished.”
“As you said, I simply vanished.”
“And now you’ve reappeared in Manila Bay, of all places?”
“Is there something wrong with that? Don’t I have the right to be here?”
My stomach dropped. If he was planning to hustle in my territory, I was finished. He was… devastatingly beautiful. The kind of beauty that made people stop breathing. If the Faceless Adonis decided to become a hooker at Manila Bay, it would cause riots. Pandemonium. No one would look at the rest of us again. He was too polished, too elegant, too clean. He didn’t belong in this trashy world.
I looked at him again, hard. Should I warn him? Should I disappear before he took my clients? Something in me stirred—intuition or dread, maybe both. Maybe he wanted something from me. Maybe *Desire* was the clue.
“You’re not… trying to pick me up, are you?”
He burst out laughing, wild and uncontrolled, to the point he couldn’t speak. I flushed with embarrassment. God, I’d misread the moment. In this line of work, you don’t talk bluntly. We had codes, gestures, signs. Scratch your head with one finger—that meant a hundred pesos. Two fingers? Two hundred. Five fingers? Five hundred. No words needed. Just silent negotiation: pesos divided by twenty for dollars, multiplied by twenty for yen.
“Are you a call boy?” he asked.
I liked that term better than “hustler.” Sounded more refined. I didn’t answer.
“That figures,” he said, as if it confirmed something he'd already guessed.
Since the game was up, I leaned in, trying to get the upper hand. “I’m cheap,” I said with a smirk. “Unless you’re planning to get into the business yourself. If so, I can train you. Teach you the tricks. Introduce you to some of my clients.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What kind of clients do you have?”
“Only the big shots,” I lied through my teeth.
Truth was, I took whoever had enough for a night and didn’t stink of beer and regrets. But I'd been around long enough to meet every kind of client—quiet ones, theatrical ones, rich old men, desperate tourists, lonely souls. And I’d become something of a teacher to the new kids—the boys just starting out, eager and scared. They came to me for tips: how to seduce, how to ask without asking, how to make a client fall in love for one night, two nights, enough to keep coming back.
They thought I was some kind of legend. But I was just surviving. Day by day. Peso by peso.
And now, here was Roberto Policarpio—beautiful, broken, mysterious. And maybe more dangerous than I realized.
2025-04-06 13:51:57
masquerade
Boy Luneta
Boy Luneta
I stepped out of my Manila hotel in the dark and crossed Roxas Boulevard to take a walk alongside the bay, repeating a habit I formed some 40 years ago when I was young and green, full of dare and curiosity. I remember how I took a jeepney ride or walked miles so I could visit the Bay as often as I could then. It was like home to me. It was a pleasant home - I recall standing on the seawall, with nothing in front of me but the breeze and occasional moisture splashing from the waves of the Pacific. The habit disappeared with time, the way time took away my libido and youth and beauty. I stayed abroad for more than 3 decades, killing that habit. But today I returned to see if there was still the sparkle, if Manila Bay could trigger the old memories. I miss the coconut trees, the big rocks lining the wall. In the old days, the bay welcomed everyone through the night: lovers and schemers and the homeless and young dreamers, rich and poor, old men. We fortified the vulnerable Manila as we stood guard in the dark watching and waiting. From afar a ship with bright lights rolled by.
When the moon was full, forty years ago, I conjured up events and scenarios and stories, oh I was fond of stories that I witnessed and heard and read about. I wrote them all piece by piece, on notepads that have now collected dust in my storage. Good thing I converted them to digital decades back and now I can summon them as I approach the twilight of my years. I carry no illusions about my writing as I have no formal training. My language is definitely lacking in impeccable grammar and extensive vocabulary. I won’t worry much about this, I don’t think my intended readers prefer to read English anyway, if they even want to read anything at all. How can writing like this compete with the allure of digital content creations? Nowadays one would rather spend time checking out Facebook, Tik tok, reels, you tube for their quick and simple formats of sharing everything from ideas to philosophy to experiences to stories to entertainment in just a few seconds. Visually in an increasingly visual society! Compare that to this long-winding verbiage, really, it is a no brainer.
Yet I keep posting my long ago stories for whatever reason that I can’t fathom. I always wanted to be a writer as a young man but life’s demands required me to take a different route. There was no money in writing during my youth, especially in the Philippines where people could be limited in their scope of interest. Even today, what takes most attention are politics and scandals. The venerable gods come from show business. I even observed the openness of the society on things kept closeted during my time. It is both progressive and regressive I think. Now we have the LGBTs in the limelight, they command hefty prices for their talents, collect millions of followers on social networks and admirers to the chagrin of the close-minded and religious zealots. Relationships become a part of the daily menu, people stepping over the boundaries of what used to be private and polite to open and aggressive. Think of Trump and other conspiracy-theory driven personalities. I am glad I took the route of healthcare as my profession. It paid well and consistently as opposed to a possible writer’s job. That was the trend in my college years. Working in healthcare, especially abroad, was the main gateway to one’s family’s survival.
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Boy Luneta
Boy Luneta 3
So we drank another round of San Migs. By this time, Boy Luneta's face was turning red and I was getting hot and horny. He beamed savagely,
- Why do you lookin' at me that way?
-Well I...
-I know, I know, I can read it all over your face. You lookin' at me like I'm pancit and adobo which you prob'ly never tasted for the past ten years.
-I hate you.
-Lemme tell you something' Ramon de Goiti. I may be eating shit like a goddamn native chicken but that has just made me more delicious and tasty.
-Stop!
Drunk, Boy Luneta and I walked out of the bar, the hang-out of Manila low life. I nearly tripped on the sidewalk of Roxas Boulevard, he had to support my balance. I was saddened by the old and tired city of Manila but excited by the prospect of having sex again with a fellow Filipino. I was ashamed of my feelings - two days ago, I was living a pretentious clean life in my citadel of false tranquility in the city of Miami, and today, I was wandering along with a hustler in Manila. I felt the presence of both God and Lucifer within me.
Come to think of it, I thought, what have I achieved so far in America? I did good, as far as making it in America is concerned. But what is meant by achieving good in America? Earn enough dollars to have a walk-in closet, a brand new car, a little respect for my service to sick people. Other than that...it’s empty. I did not find a single true love, oh I had faked a lot of love, fooled myself into believing I had found love worth dying for. And I died. I must have faked my death tens of times, because I'm still alive and feeling nothing. In America, I felt like a pancit and adobo, they would always love to taste me, but to consider me as a staple food, forget it. It is so easy to find someone in my bed, someone who in the heat of passion would whisper he loves me dearly, but after that, my bed would be empty again, waiting for another curious lover. Perhaps I could blame my morose empty feeling to my culture. And Americans hate me for saying this all the time. I grew up in the company of my family, my parents and all the parents I knew in my town who have managed to live together forever. Divorce is against the law. So I lived with this expectation that even in my gay world, I will find someone who would stick out with me for better or worse for the rest of my life. One whom I will take care of when he gets sick. One who'd be with me when I get sick. Isn't that the Philippine way? I hoped for someone who would wake up with me in the mornings, retire with me at nights. That's oh so romantic but unreal in my gay world, especially in my American gay world.
So I developed this compensation in relationships. I became the prissy senorita who would stand in a party or a bar in a backoffish manner. Snubbish. Moralistic. Yet shallow because beneath all these, I was extremely sexual. Always leaving me in eternal conflict.
This extreme sexuality became clearer when I found my old fling Boy Luneta. I simply stripped myself of all my inhibitions. Am I crazy or what?
"Where are we now, Boy Luneta?" I asked.
"Oh please...stop these stupid pretensions and hypocrisy Ramon de Goiti. If there is anybody who knows every nook and crook in Luneta, it is you my friend. It's not as if Luneta has changed since you last came here."
I gave out a hearty laugh as we continued walking on the Luneta strip. He was right. It was the same old strip all the way from T. Kalaw to CCP. Except for extra coconut trees and smashed seawall for repair or replacement, nothing was really changed. And to be honest, I was anticipating we would end by one hidden coconut trunk in my secret nook close to the Film Center and make love. Standing. We did that before. By the time we reached my secret coconut tree, I became a one hundred percent slut. I grabbed him by the collar and started kissing his beer tasting mouth. He was caught by surprise and had to push me away.
"What's wrong with you?" he asked.
"Sky's the limit," I reminded him.
"If this is what you learned in America, I pity you." he quipped.
I pulled him back again towards me and began unbuttoning his shirt. Being drunk, he started to give in. Until... "Did you hear that?" he asked. In the heat of passion, all my senses except my lust were oblivious. "No I didn't," I said. I started unbuckling his belt. By the time I was about to unzip his pants, he pushed my hands away. "There it goes again, can you hear it?" he persisted. I raised my sex-starved voice. "No!" obviously pissed.
He raised his voice, "Because you're not listening dammit!"
I stopped momentarily, releasing a deep sigh. Okay, I listened. The sound came as a suppressed cry. It was obviously that of a man's. It came in spurts, sometimes prolonged, but it was meant not to be heard. It sounded creepy. Boy Luneta did not waste time in following the sound. Under the moonless night, beside the dark Film Center, he combed through the overgrown wild weeds and searched through shrubbery. He tapped the corrugated iron fence separating the Center from the Manila Bay shore.
"Hello, is anyone there?" he called.
The voice stopped. And then...not far from the coconut tree where I intended to make love, I saw a silhouette, a sitting figure whose back was leaning against the iron fence. The figure was tall, muscular, I saw its arms move, large hands.
God, this can't be true, I thought. I've been in America too long to know that this broken crying man was Caucasian. Walking closer, my suspicion was verified. There he sat, a man with a crew cut, light hair, probably blond. He was holding his cap in his hands, there was a streak of blood running down his face. This is exactly what I hated to see, another incident that will run across the newspapers in the world, claiming how another foreigner was violated in Manila. Another incident that will add to the so-called notoriety of the Filipino which everyone the world over wants to feast about. Another incident that would scare tourists and investors, another to make Filipinos ashamed, or to the likes of me, become guarded and defensive. My friends would often assure me this happens everywhere in the world. Yeah, tell that to the peace loving Swiss. Tell that to Miami which lost a lot of revenues after a few crimes were committed to its tourists. Tourism is simple hospitality. You don't commit crimes to your guests. Incidences like these don't land you in tourism brochures.
But...was the man a tourist? We approached the leaning figure.
Boy Luneta had other thoughts. He was like any typical Luneta resident who believes every Caucasian is American. To him, this American was not a tourist. American tourists like the Japanese come by bus loads taking pictures, or hopping from bar to bar. A solitary American like this sitting in a dark corner of Film Center is either a service man who refused to leave after the closure of the bases or a Peace Corp volunteer who got lost on his way to the American Embassy or a Mormon Missionary. The Protestants are better prepared and less adventurous, Boy Luneta once claimed. But the Mormons? They think the Philippines is Paradise. But surprisingly though, he continued to claim, he hasn't heard of any violated Mormon in the Philippines. I guess it's something to do with their looks - they suffer enough wearing neckties and long sleeves under the Philippine heat. Actually Filipinos worry more about the Mormons than themselves because these missionaries are barely out of their teens, they don't have cars much less money and they give out Bibles containing the Gospel according to Joseph Smith. No, you don't violate the Mormons, Boy Luneta claimed. They are so dedicated to God that God will kill you if you violate them.
"Hey you, what's wrong man?" Boy Luneta asked the poor leaning Caucasian. I preferred to stand behind to watch the events and conversation about to unfold. The Caucasian did not even budge to raise his head. "Enough," he said faintly. "Beat it."
"Say that again?"
This time, the man stared at us with ferocious eyes. "Don't you understand English? What the fuck am I doing here?" I saw it all right there and then, the poor guy was robbed. And beaten too. I could smell liquor from his breath, he wryly waved us to go away.
Boy Luneta was deeply hurt by this gesture. And no one hurts Boy Luneta. He said once, I may be a hustler, but I've got pride.
I had to intervene."I'm sorry..." I stared at the bruised man and all I saw in his face was anger. An anger that didn't care what happened next. And for a person like me who never encountered any problem in a foreign soil, I just felt this immense obligation to ease the pain of this man. If there was one thing I wanted to do is to give back to foreigners in my soil whatever kindness they offered to me in theirs.
"Son of a bitch. Yes, what the fuck are you doing here?" Boy Luneta hissed. Before he got out of hand, I pushed him away from the Caucasian man.
"Sir," I addressed the man in my best Florida accent, "We just wanna know if you're alright. Do you want us to get you some help?"
The man just stared at me blankly.
"Do you want us to call the police?" Still no response.
"We will leave if you want us to." I was answered by silence.
I immediately grabbed the hand of Boy Luneta, who continued to mumble all the Filipino cuss words he knew, there's a lot of them actually. When we were a few yards away, the man spoke. "Wait."
Boy Luneta stopped cursing. We turned back to look at the man who began crying. This time it was a loud cry. I never saw an American cry this loud except those who were about to die in the hospital where I worked.
He wailed, "Tesang, forgive me. I forgot myself!"
What did he mean by that? He was obviously calling the name of a woman. But then, he was as drunk as I and Boy Luneta. Drunk people are capable of many unrestrained acts and can cry out anything.
"Who did this to you?" Boy Luneta asked. His words came out in a false pretense of concern, unfortunately. The Caucasian whose English and accent obviously were American stared at us with a pained face, first at Boy Luneta, then at me. He kept his eyes at me afterwards. He probably thought I was the lesser of two evils. In between his sniffs and sobs, he said to me, "Your accent is different."
I said, "I just arrived from Florida two days ago. I work there."
In saying this, a ray of hope landed on his face.
Not wanting to be ignored and outdone, with or without accent, Boy Luneta kept his inquiry, which progressively sounded more sincere as he rattled along. "Are you a serviceman?"
"No."
"A Peace Corp volunteer?"
"No."
"A...Mormon?"
"No."
At this point, doubt had cast a dark shadow upon all his American-visiting-the-Philippines stereotypes.
"Are you a...you know...a tourist?"
"You can say that again...Fuck, it's all gone...Shit, I'm bleeding...They kicked me in the face..." the American kept mumbling as he felt his body.
Boy Luneta shouted "Why?" As in "Why are you not in your hotel sleeping the night off with fellow tourists? You should know better than to be alone in this dangerous side of the city at this time of the night." In other words, "Why are you different from all the other tourists I know?"
I tapped Boy Luneta's shoulder. I whispered to him, "Shut up." I looked again at the American. I asked, "Who are you and what happened?"
"My name is Keith Devlon. I used to serve in Clark Air Base. I came back to Manila to look for Tesang, a bar hostess I met a couple of years back. I was promised by her friend Leila some leads to her whereabouts. And then...we ended up in a hotel in Manila...and then...oh fuck...fuck...I remember now... I was duped and beaten and stolen of everything I have. My bag of clothes and my wallet."
A series of slurs came out from the lips of Boy Luneta. "So here you are! Another one of them superior Americans coming here to save the world while enjoying a Filipina! And you thought everyone here would call you a hero? This is your own doing man."
Keith Devlon just stared at him with an open mouth. I knew that Boy Luneta was playing nationalistic, really, but to an American, this American at least, his outbursts made him appear like a specimen of wonder. I tapped Boy Luneta once more and gave him the shut-the-fuck-up look.
"Who is this Tesang you're looking for?" I asked Keith. Keith Devlon shook his head, this time, tears rolled down his face, it took him minutes before he could answer.
"She is the woman I love."
Now, my dear readers, I want you to sit down and rest. Because what I have is another long story to share. This is another one of many long stories that Boy Luneta led me to. A story that happened in four weeks, mere four weeks that I intended to spend as a homecoming visit from America. Against your expectations, this is about a love between a foreign boy and a local girl, as opposed to the love between Boy Luneta and me which more likely will always be between a native chicken and a chicken with no wings.
Volume 1
Ramon de Goiti
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2024-05-05 01:16:43
masquerade