The Pull of Gravity

I thought she would start crying then. I know I wanted to. But her eyes remained dry. Even with just a handful of months in Angeles, she’d learned how to control her emotions, a fact that in the long run probably disturbed me more than the news of the dead girl.

The girls weren’t the only ones affected that night. About an hour before I closed, Dominick Valenti and Josh Harris stopped in for a drink. Both were ex-pats who lived in Angeles.

“No dates tonight?” I asked.

Neither had come in with a girl on his arm. I couldn’t remember the last time that happened.

“Shit, man, everyone’s freaked out over the thing at Las Palmas,” Josh said. He had been an aircraft machinist at Boeing in Seattle who’d retired early at fifty-five. “Last thing I want is some chick whining all night about some dead girl she never knew.”

I tried to smile sympathetically, but I wasn’t sure I pulled it off.

“Heard she was from Slo Joe’s,” Dominick-Nicky to most of us-said. He was a career Navy man who’d gotten a taste of the beautiful brown girls when he’d been a young sailor like me, only ten years earlier in the seventies. Now all that was left of his service days was a blurry blue tattoo on his left bicep and a perpetual crew cut. He was one of Angeles’ truly big boys, his gut taking up more than half his lap.

“I’d heard The Lynx,” I told him.

“God, I hope not,” Josh said. “I’ve got friends at The Lynx.”

“You got friends everywhere,” Nicky said.

We all laughed, but there was an undercurrent of tension. I could tell what they were thinking. They wanted to know if they knew the girl, and if they did, they wanted to know how well.

“Let me buy you both a drink,” I said.

When the beers arrived, San Migs for Nicky and me and a Heineken for Josh, Nicky held up his bottle and offered a toast. “To the dead girl,” he said. “May she find peace.”

Like most things on Fields, the truth was slow in emerging. It was over two months later before I had the full story.

The girl’s name had been Rosella Ramos. At the bars, she went by the name Vivian. She had been working at Jammers, not The Lynx, and had only been on the job for about four months. Somebody showed me a picture of her, but I didn’t recognize her.

Her papers said she was eighteen. Apparently the guy whose room she was in, an American from North Carolina named Steve or Stan-that was one thing I could never get cleared up-had met her on a previous trip. They’d kept in contact when he went home, and he even sent her money every month. She was new to the scene so to her this meant he loved her. And, who knows, maybe he did. But not enough, apparently.

When he came back, she latched on to him right away. Unfortunately, he probably hadn’t planned on spending his whole vacation with just one girl. Why he didn’t spend a few days in Manila first, sampling the offerings there before coming up to Angeles, I could never figure out. He had to know she was waiting for him.

Anyway, about halfway through the trip, he got the itch to try someone new. Only he couldn’t shake his honey ko-his girlfriend. He started going out in the afternoons, saying he wanted to spend a few hours with his buddies drinking and playing pool. He’d leave her in the room with the TV and tell her he’d be back in the afternoon.

Of course he was lying.

There were two levels of bar fines: long time and short time. Long time meant an overnight stay sometimes lasting until the next evening. Short time was exactly what it sounded like: a few hours of fun then everyone back to the bars. What this guy did was rent a room at another hotel, then take a girl at one of the early-opening bars out for short time so he could get in his extra-curricular activities that way. What he didn’t count on was his honey ko following him the third day he used this scheme. Once she realized what he was doing, she played it cool, and returned to the room without him knowing.

The next day, when he went to leave for his afternoon “with the boys,” she had a fit. She said she knew he was cheating on her. She said she didn’t want him to go. He told her she was crazy, that this was his vacation and he was going out. Before he reached the door, she told him she would kill herself if he left. Apparently he laughed, and walked out the door without saying anything. The truth is, any veteran of Fields would have done the same thing. Several girls threatened to kill themselves on a regular basis. It was drama designed to let them sink their nails a little deeper into their targets. They thought if they could get a strong enough hold, they might be able to shake a little more cash loose, or, better yet, bewitch the men to the point they’d marry them and take them away.

So the guy left Rosella alone in his room while he went out for a little stress relief. From this point, I could only guess at what happened next. As I saw it, there were really only two possibilities. One: Rosella was truly crushed to the point she didn’t want to live anymore and decided to end it all, then and there. But given the fact she’d been in the business for only a few months, I couldn’t believe she could have sunk so low so fast.

Option two seemed more likely. She knew from the previous days that her boyfriend returned around two p.m. each day. She planned it so that when he came back she wouldn’t be dead yet, but close. The signs of her faux suicide attempt would be on the nightstand, giving him little chance to misunderstand what was happening. He’d then call a doctor and save her life. This was her way of showing him how much she loved him, and how she would rather be dead if she couldn’t have him.

What she didn’t count on was that after their fight that afternoon, he decided to enjoy his new friend for an extra hour, and didn’t return until almost three p.m., a good half hour after Rosella took her last breath.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sometimes you would meet a guy who came to Angeles, and wonder what the hell he was doing there. These were the guys who seemed to have everything going for them: a good job, decent looks, an amiable personality. The kind of guy you’d think didn’t have any problem getting girls back home, a guy who was desired. That’s why the majority of the guys came to Fields-to be wanted. It wasn’t the sex. Well, not completely anyway. Because in Angeles, even the ugliest and oldest members of the Fat Guys Association, and the most socially awkward of the Dweebs ’r ’ Us Club could feel desired. Girls-young, sexy, beautiful girls-looked at these guys as if they had never met a more handsome, charming man.

Sure it was a game, and ninety-nine-point-seven percent of the time, it wasn’t true. Everyone knew it-the girls, the guys. But what you knew logically didn’t always translate emotionally. So when one of the girls gave you those big eyes, you felt it. Maybe not in the knees, but in the gut and sometimes even in the heart. And part of you, for a little while anyway, believed. That was the illusion of Angeles. That was the fantasy world you entered when you stepped onto Fields Avenue. That’s why you came.

Without the illusion, no one would ever have come within fifty miles of Angeles. Instead of being hypnotized by the parties and the girls and the perpetual buzz and flashing neon, they’d see the dirt and the beggars and gray, ugly buildings and brown, run-down shacks. They’d notice that some of the girls were just going through the motions and others tackled their “job” like trained professionals. They’d realize that, given the choice, most of the girls would have never come to Angeles, but because of the money, there was nowhere else the girls wanted to be. The men would see the tricks the girls used to get by, the ploys they’d learned to get more money out of their customers, the shabu-shabu-what they called the Filipino version of meth-some abused to make it through endless nights of drinking or just to forget about things, the prejudices they’d built up after months and years in the bars so they could still stand a chance of picking up a date.

It wasn’t just the guys who were blind. The girls, too, had their own sense of tunnel vision-eye always on the game, with the easy prize being the peso, or, better yet, the almighty dollar, pound or euro.

Others eyed the ultimate achievement, the grand prize: escape. So much so that many times they would end up giving themselves away for free to a man who promised much but had no intention of ever delivering anything except his own orgasm.

And like the guys, the girls, too, found themselves getting wrapped up in the atmosphere of Angeles. The life