Subic Bay
IN JANUARY 1959, I started Navy boot camp in San Diego, and after basic training was transferred a few miles north to hospital corpsman school for six months' medical training at Balboa Hospital. I told myself I wanted to pursue medicine and become a doctor like my father when I was discharged, and figured this could give me a solid foundation before entering pre-med. As a doctor, maybe I could finally establish a relationship with my father, complete a part of myself that had been short-circuited by the trial and divorce.
I knew very little about Father's new life. I knew that while in Hawaii he had studied to become a psychiatrist and had taught at the territorial university, then he had gone on to Manila to a new life with his new wife in the Philippines. Although Mother spent most of her time drunk and bitter, she felt justified in complaining that Dad, who rarely sent any money to support the family, was now rumored to have married a very wealthy woman. 'Her family owns a large sugar plantation,' Mother told us. 'She belongs to a family that is supposedly close to Marcos and the political bigwigs of the Philippines.'
At the end of 1958, Father and his wife were living in Manila and had four children: two sons and two daughters, half-siblings whom I had never met. Mother told us that Father was 'president of a large market research company, and is now very wealthy and living like a raja, emperor, or king.'
To be sure, Mother's descriptions of Father's lifestyle had made me hate him all the more for abandoning us. She had nothing, and he had everything. She lived from week to week in squalor and poverty; he lived in comfort in some great palace with servants and cooks, who, in my mind's eye, sounded great exotic brass gongs at dinnertime. Father had sent almost nothing in the way of money or support as we were growing up. After Mother's third or fourth plea when things were critical, he would occasionally wire some 'emergency funds' to 'tide us over.' But there was nothing on a regular basis, nothing of his own volition, nothing from his heart to her or us. No note that said, 'Here, Dorero, this is for you and the children. Tell them I love them.' There was only the Tinkertoy set when I was sixteen. And now, by way of the U.S. Navy, I was setting out to find him.
My first billet after corpsman school, as I'd hoped and expected the fates would arrange it, was a two-year assignment to a small hospital just outside Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. This posting was not something I had arranged, or would have even been able to arrange, but I had thrown myself into the currents of life, hoping that they would bring me and my father together. Now that it was about to happen, I had mixed emotions. But I told myself that this was nothing I had consciously arranged. I was only a seaman apprentice who wasn't really qualified to ask questions, or, for that matter, to think any thoughts. A sailor's job was to go and do.
Once I was in the Navy and on my own, I soon discovered that if there is a gene predisposing you to boozing, my introduction to life in the military turned it on like a light switch. It took less than a month in the small Navy town of Olongapo, just outside the huge U.S. military installation at Subic Bay, for me to water that gene. Three dollars U.S. bought me twelve scotches, and five dollars U.S. bought me Toni, a nineteen-year-old Filipina beauty. I got drunk and I got laid for cash. The dances with her at the Club Oro to Johnny Mathis's 'Misty' were free.
And now it was time for Dad. He was fifty-two when I first arrived to meet him after so many years. We were strangers and I didn't know how I really felt about my own father. Did I love him or hate him? Both, I guessed. Mother's propaganda over the past ten years had given me mixed messages. She had glorified his intellect and doctoring skills, telling me that few knew his true genius as a doctor, which was as a diagnostician. At the same time she had vilified him for abandoning his children. Our first reunion took place a month after I arrived in the Philippines. It was a Saturday luncheon at the
Army-Navy Club on Manila Bay. I wore my Navy blues, he wore a white sharkskin suit, and while I was wilting in the tropics, he sat there, cool and collected, not a hair on his head out of place. Father's appearance surpassed the legends and visions I had woven around him in my mind. Though at six foot one he was an inch shorter than me, he seemed to tower over me, physically as well as in his demeanor. He was strikingly handsome and as strong as if he were in his twenties, and he behaved as if he wielded the power of the universe with his fingertips. Immaculately dressed, he immediately conveyed to one and all that he was not only a man of wealth, but a commanding presence. But it was more than that: it was the force
Dad's arrogance, I soon came to see, put him at the center of his own universe and demanded his listener's complete attention. Women loved him for that power and presence. Men respected and feared him for it. As for me, I was intimidated but not fearful like the others, whom I watched kowtow to him, no matter how outrageous his demands. My relationship with him was cautious, polite, but not obsequious. In the two years I spent in the Philippines and in my father's presence, I saw how he dismissed most people out of hand with an arrogant 'Leave us.' But he treated me differently. He and I were strangers, but I was blood, and maybe that made the difference.
I also got to meet the children from Dad's new life, my young half-brothers and sisters who at that time were about five, six, seven, and eight years old. All four of them were very beautiful and at the sight of the tall American sailor whom Dad introduced as their brother they laughed and giggled, murmuring in both Tagalog and English.
I also discovered that Dad and his wife, my stepmother,* were living in separate residences. She and the children lived in a large home in a Beverly Hills-type neighborhood in the suburbs of Manila. Dad was living and had his offices at the Admiral Apartments on Manila Bay in an impressive five-room layout that had been General Douglas McArthur's headquarters after his return to the Philippines. If it was good enough for the general it was good enough for the emperor. The operation ran smoothly and efficiently, with the help of an omnipresent 'manager' named Diana, a beautiful Chinese woman who appeared to be in her late twenties and spoke as if she had been educated at one of the Seven Sisters schools.
Throughout my stint at the Navy hospital, Dad remained aloof and private, completely absorbed in his own world. Hortensia, whom I later discovered had originally met my father at a 1948 party at the Franklin House, was ever the gracious hostess, welcoming me into her home as family. During this period, Father spent most of his time building his market research company, traveling throughout Asia and Europe on business, and our brief encounters were perfunctory, emotionally shallow, revealing none of the intimate details about him that I was looking for. Besides having verified through my own personal observation that my father was a successful, wealthy, politically connected, charming, multitalented, charismatic womanizer, who was also an overbearing, arrogant, egotistical control freak, I discovered very little about the inner man. What was truly troubling, however, and most confusing to me, had little to do with his personality, because, whatever his strengths and shortcomings, I could accept them.
It was his internal blindness that troubled me, his obliviousness to the needs and concerns of anyone around him. He was a psychiatrist, trained to probe the needs of his patients. Yet he was emotionally inaccessible to his family, a fortified castle unto himself, with a moat around his heart.
As a young man and his son, I respected his power, his authority, and his accomplishments. I took great pride when I was in his presence, glory by association. But when I wasn't with him, away from his world, I could sense
