Brett Battles - The Pull of Gravity

The music was grooving and the girls seemed to be having a good time. Laughter broke out occasionally from where some girls were doing a little one-on-one entertaining with the customers. No sex, not in the club. If you wanted sex at a bar, you needed to go to one of the twenty-four-hour places on Santos Street where the girls would offer a blow job before you even sat down. The bars on Fields weren’t like that. We considered ourselves to be on a higher level and the girls felt the same way. There was a definite social structure. If a customer did visit a bar on Blow Row, he would do well not to mention it to any girl on Fields. The entertaining in our place took the form of tickling, joking, talking and possibly, if things were going well, a little kissing.

It was an average night-my favorite kind. And I was doing my favorite activities: sitting on my stool, drinking a beer or the occasional bottle of water, and scanning the room to make sure everyone was having fun. I didn’t notice Larry approaching until he was already starting to sit in the chair next to me.

I smiled and nodded at him. “Evening.” I was, after all, the consummate host.

“So this is where the Cannonball King hangs out,” he replied.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, a funny little smile on his face. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

My immediate thought was that he was one of the many Angeles regulars who came at least once a year. I considered faking it and saying, sure, I remembered him. But I’d been burnt doing that once so, instead, I shook my head. “Nope. I don’t.”

He let out a hearty laugh. “Monday, I think,” he said. “In the afternoon. The Pit Stop pool?”

I still wasn’t following him, so I shook my head again.

“Me reading a book, you deciding to displace as much water as you could in my direction.”

That, I did remember. Vaguely, anyway. It had happened several days earlier, and by this point in my Angeles adventure I had become an expert at the short-term memory purge. “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. I guess I owe you a beer.”

He laughed again. “You already bought me a beer. But I guess another one wouldn’t hurt.”

Cathy, who had wandered in our direction, took the cue and got him a San Miguel.

“Larry,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “Larry Adams.”

We shook. “I’m Jay,” I said.

“This your place?” he asked.

“What? The Lounge?” It was my turn to laugh. “No. I just work here.”

“Not a bad place to work.”

“It has its upside.” I finished off the last of my water. “Hey, Cathy.” When she looked up, I said, “I’ll take a beer now.”

“Here you go, Doc,” she said as she set the bottle in front of me.

“Doc?” Larry asked.

“Not officially,” I said. “This your first trip to Angeles?”

“Yeah,” he said. “First time.”

“So, what do you think?”

He watched the dancers for a moment before answering. When he did, the tone of his voice had gone all serious. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“No shit,” I said, then started laughing louder than I had in weeks.

The rest of the evening we spent talking about things like deep-sea fishing, laptop computers, and the exchange rate of the peso to the dollar. I found out he was from San Francisco, California. I’m not sure if we got into what he did for a living, but later I knew. He owned, in his words, a modest same-day delivery service based in the Bay Area. He was thirty-seven and had never been married.

It wasn’t until well after midnight, when we were both a little drunk, that the subject of the girls finally came up. Sure, that was surprising, but Larry wasn’t your typical tourist. For that matter, I wasn’t your average papasan.

I had just returned from a run to the CR-comfort room, what they called the toilet in the Philippines-and found him eyeing one of the dancers. She was a tiny girl, not even five feet tall, with long black hair that reached the top of her ass, and breasts only slightly larger than expected on her thin frame. There was a whole set of categories-the spinner, the stunner, the runner, just to name a few-and she was a spinner, a small, light girl you could just pick up and spin around anyway you wanted.

“That’s Nelly,” I said.

Nelly had noticed Larry looking at her, and had moved into full-on flirt mode.

“What?”

I nodded toward her. “Your new friend.”

“She is cute,” he said as if he hadn’t expected to find anyone like her.

“You want me to call her over?”

I could see him struggling with it for a moment, then he shook his head. “That’s okay. I was just enjoying the moment.”

I took a sip from my sixth (or was it seventh?) beer of the evening. “You got a girlfriend already?”

“You mean here?” he asked.

I nodded.

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“No problem. I’m just…” he paused. “Not ready, I guess.”

I could almost hear the click in my beer-dulled mind telling me I’d just heard an important piece of information. But it was a few more seconds before I realized what it was.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you tell me you’ve been here something like four days already?”

“Five,” he corrected me.

“Okay, five. Maybe I’m just hearing things, but I think you just said you haven’t been with anyone yet.”

Larry glanced away for a moment. When he looked back, he had a small, sheepish grin on his face. “That’s about right.”

I stared at him. “Is there something wrong with you?”

He shook his head. “And before you ask, I’m not gay, either.”

“What am I missing? Are you scared?” There’d been guys, first-timers like Larry, who got petrified once they were faced with the abundance Angeles had to offer, but they usually got over it after a night or two.

“Not scared. It just hasn’t seemed right yet.”

Over my time working at The Lounge, I’d seen all sorts of guys, all of them, at the very least, looking for that one-night girlfriend. The later it got, the less choosy they became. But here, sitting next to me at the bar, was a first.

“What the hell are we doing drinking beer? Cathy,” I called, “bring the Cuervo over. The 1800. Double shots for both of us. Hell, one for you, too. And when we’re done, another round.”

By the time I closed the place, Larry was all but passed out on the bar. I still had some of my senses with me-a product of drinking every night, I guess-so I made sure I got him back to his hotel room without incident.

I also made him promise that if he hadn’t hooked up with anyone before his last night in Angeles, he’d come back by The Lounge and I’d set him up with Nelly.

So I guess you could say it was all my fault.

Boracay again. In that later time, when Larry was dead and Isabel-a harder Isabel, but not hardened all the way through just yet-was asleep on the spare bed in my hotel room. My own sleep had been uneven, and I’d woken early and hungry.

The day before, I’d been informed by the concierge that a tropical storm was going to be passing nearby, and when I pulled back the curtain for a quick peek outside, I wasn’t surprised to find the sky covered in a blanket of gray clouds. The ground was still dry, but it didn’t look like it would stay that way for long. I’d seen the sky like that before. We could be in for a steady soak.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slipped on my sneakers and grabbed my cell phone. Isabel was still breathing deeply and wasn’t likely to wake up anytime soon, so I quietly let myself out.

The morning air was already warm, and before I’d even taken ten steps from the door, I could feel sweat beginning to bead on my brow. In the Philippines, there was a hot season and a rainy season, and most times it was both.