Never before in my life have I had to wear the same thing every day. My uniform is Day-Glo orange, the color of a prisoner. It’s much too big and doesn’t breathe. And so I tried to make do by removing the sleeves, which I did by hand. For removal of the sleeves I was punished. My dinner was withheld. Yes, that is how they’ve punished me. I was refused dinner. But I didn’t care. Dinner is a packet, a ration, which is slid into my cell on a tray. Sometimes with a piece of bread or half a bruised apple.
Also, the extra material I had planned to tie around my ankles to taper these baggy pants was confiscated. However, they allowed me to keep my top. So for the remainder of the week I will be wearing my uniform without sleeves. It is much more breathable that way.
It is nearly August. Almost two months have gone by and still no lawyer. So I had Win read what I’d written so far, because of his interest in the law, etc. When I asked him how it makes me look—“innocent” was the word I was hoping for—he told me he was not allowed to say. But he enjoyed what he read, he said, in so many words. This pleased me, since over the two months I’ve known Win I’ve come to trust him, even though I’ve learned that trust is not something to just fall into with someone. (Cunningham too has grown on me, though his willingness to listen to my stories relies on how many models are involved.) What intrigues me most is that Win has not judged me as the others have. He tries not to call me by my number, though I suspect he’s not permitted to call me by my name either. He doesn’t call me anything. After he finished reading the part about the two suits, he confessed to me that he’d never owned a civilian suit. Earlier in the year at his grandfather’s funeral he wore his military dress uniform.
“You must be proud to wear it,” I said.
“When you’re home it stands out a little. Everybody’s always looking at you, wondering where you’ve been. People thank me for no reason. People come up to me and shake my hand.”
“You’re recognized for your service. What’s so bad about that? I spent my whole life trying to get people to notice me for the same reason. When you go home, all you have to do is put on your uniform.” I suddenly felt the time right to express my appreciation for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I told Win that I respected him and his fellow soldiers for putting themselves in harm’s way. It was true. Years ago I was a touch more ambivalent. Back in 2003 I stood alongside my then girlfriend, Michelle Brewbaker, on First Avenue in protest against the war. But I was more of a tourist than a participant. It was a cloudy, overcast day, and shoulder to shoulder, people took to the streets. I was there with the millions of others because it was an event that I wanted to be a part of, and because Michelle had asked me to be there. I listened to their chants, I joined in, I photographed their homemade signs, but I was still once removed from the cause.
In 2003, Win was only sixteen, a sophomore in high school. He ran track and played junior varsity basketball. Probably around the time I was marching along First Avenue, making my way toward the United Nations with the masses, Win was sitting in a classroom in Fort Worth, copying math equations off a chalkboard, determining the probability of something meaningless. Maybe he felt just as ambivalent about the war as I did, which makes it all the more embarrassing for me, since I was that much closer to Operation Oily Deception.1
Win shrugged off my compliments. That kind of talk seemed to make him uncomfortable. Regarding my written confession, however, we had a meaningful exchange. Perhaps it was because I had shared something personal with him that he felt compelled to tell me his full name.
It’s Winston. Which reminds me of the American cigarettes my Tito Roño, the tailor, used to smoke when I was growing up.
Winston Lights.
Those Winstons turned out to be the only constant in my Tito Roño’s life. He hit a lull in the late eighties, when Cebu’s family-owned shops were overrun by Megamalls, and my uncle’s fitted suits were passed over for cheap quality Polo—clothes made by the Third World, for the Third World. Cheap suits only partially lined, or not lined at all, flooded the streets. Gone were the days of flittering ash and pastel panties. While the acne blossoming on my prepubescent face went unnoticed in my uncle’s shop, he had both his ears pierced and fell into a deep middle-aged depression. He began to resemble a Filipino George Michael circa “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.”
It was my auntie Baby who kept Tito Roño afloat in those years. She was a moneylender, more feared than respected. There was no bureaucracy with her. You didn’t need good credit or proof of employment, because your word alone was enough. And so for a time the system worked, regardless of whether it was illegal or not.2 Her line of street banking may have been unthreatened by the ever-looming financial collapse, but what her occupation lacked was the security of any Third World financial institution: men with guns. In late April 1990 my auntie was followed back to her suite at the Shangri‑la from the Casino Filipino, where she had spent thirty-two hours at the mahjongg tables. She was recently separated from my uncle, although they were still on respectable terms. Housekeeping found her at the foot of the bed, her head covered with a black garbage bag, asphyxiated. She’d expired clutching a thousand-peso note (at the time, approximately twenty dollars U.S.) as if it were her dear life in hand.
I was thirteen when she died. There would be no more summers spent away from my parents helping my Tito Roño.
Both lives had come to tragic crossroads—one in a sorry, sulking state, the other in a brutal murder. But compared to my boring parents, the two doctors, my uncle and auntie had cultivated an element of risk. They had secrets and affairs and lived out of hotels and gambled and got offed. Eyewitness testimony said that my auntie’s final hours at Casino Filipino might have very well been her finest. She was seen making bets as high as five thousand P (approximately one hundred dollars U.S.), laughing with friends, guzzling G and Ts, tipping waiters ten P (approximately twenty cents U.S.). I wanted a similar lifestyle for myself.
The thirst for novelty only increased when I returned to school in Manila that fall. Girls began appearing out of nowhere in a new, more developed light. I’d always known they existed, but not in this capacity. I’d been more concerned with myself, and with keeping that self entertained and distracted with whatever forms of American media I could lay my hands on. VHS tapes of blockbuster movies like Batman and Superman and American comics like, well, Batman and Superman. Not that these pursuits were themselves a waste of time. In retrospect it’s clear comic books were what first introduced me to the proportions of the body. The robust pecs of a man, the hourglass figure of a woman. Although exaggerated, these images sparked an early interest in silhouette and form, in how clothes could be used to allure. I remember I liked the look of a superhero’s leather cape, how it was always depicted in a gusty wind—a garment in action. Then there were the tight leotards that both the men and women donned, accentuating Catwoman’s nipples and Nightwing’s bulge. Much the opposite of the style I would later develop with women’s clothing. My hobbies, as I thought of them then, had made me a loner of sorts. Before eighth grade I’d been much more inclined to sketch cartoonish bodies than hang out with real ones after school.
But then I discovered them. The girls in their plaid skirts, the uniform of a nymphet and that of our Santo Niño Prep. I began to notice how each girl’s hips had started to widen, how their chests began to swell past those nubile bumps, and how their legs, hidden beneath white tights, promised something carnal.
Love first came to me in the form of Marianna DeSantos, a beautiful fourteen-year-old four months my senior. She was in my religion class. During chapel, with boys on one side, girls on the other, she caught me staring at her from across the aisle when we were on our knees saying the act of contrition.
We had our first date at the Megamall in Makati, where we went ice skating and took a long, romantic walk across Megawing 1 to Megawing 4. Marianna had her own personal driver, Romey, who chaperoned.
We found ourselves entranced, eye to eye, as we wandered into an arcade. There I explained to her the many intricacies of Mortal Kombat II.
“Left, Right, Up, Up, High Punch,” I instructed. “See? See how I just ripped your head off.” I was lost. I didn’t know how to impress a girl, especially one of Marianna’s magnitude, with her own chauffeur and everything. But then, I didn’t really have to try, did I? Because as soon as my character went cannibal and bit the face off that decapitated head, Marianna went for my hand, placing it within hers.
“You’re so smart,” she said. Blood seemed to splatter down all around us. She gripped my hand tighter. Then she took her index finger and sensually tickled the inside of my palm. I learned much later in fashion school that this tickling of the palm was a signal for gay sex. But at the time we were both so innocent. What did I know?
“Do you wanna go with me?” Marianna said. She was very direct.
“What about him?” I indicated her driver. He was standing a few machines away, scratching himself.
“Who, Romey? Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s cool.”
I looked at Romey, and he nodded over to us. It was as if he was giving me permission to go with her, right there in front of him, while he watched. He was cool.
“Should we go somewhere else?” I asked. I was extremely nervous.
“Why?” she said. “Where would we go?”
“You know, somewhere private.”
“Look, we don’t have a lot of time, Boy. I have to be home by four thirty. I have violin.” And then she let go of my hand. It was the end of her seductive tickling.
Marianna was right. There wasn’t a lot of time for us. I didn’t know it then, but our love would last only that one weekday afternoon and the coming Saturday.
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re so smart.” I placed her delicate hand in mine. I was using what I had learned from her a moment ago. This was a skill that would come in handy much later as an immigrant in America.
My touch was all it took. Marianna rebooted her libido and forced herself upon me. We kissed. She sucked my lips, and I felt her teeth brace mine. She slid her tongue in my mouth as far as it could go. She kissed as if she knew our love would last only half a week. I reciprocated, battling her tongue, twirling figure eights in her mouth, all the while watching Romey, her driver, out of the corner of my eye.
We left the arcade holding hands. Everywhere I turned it seemed like other people were holding hands too, gazing into each other’s eyes, tickling each other’s palms, secretly transmitting their carnal desires to do it, right now, right away, right there in Megawing 4.
The following Saturday, Marianna DeSantos invited me over in the late afternoon for merienda, or snack hour halfway between lunch and dinner. I hadn’t been invited to a proper meal, and so my feelings were a little hurt, but still I thought, this was it, no more waiting. I was going to lose my virginity during merienda.
Our family driver, who was actually my cousin twice removed, dropped me off around four. Marianna lived in a gated fort in Pasay City by the American Memorial Cemetery. Her home was a mansion plus detached servant’s quarters. A ten-foot concrete wall laced with barbed wire surrounded the property. Romey stood guard at the front gate with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. All of this high-end security made me jealous. Why didn’t our driver have a firearm? My family should at least have pretended like we had old money that needed to be protected, even if our five-bedroom in Tobacco Gardens and the Mazda MPV I was driven up in screamed middle-class.
Once in the house I was instructed by one of several maids to go straight up. I took off my shoes by my foot heels and ran up the marble staircase that spiraled around the foyer in a great display of wealth. Then I burned carpet toward Marianna’s bedroom, where I imagined her sprawled out on all fours across a daybed, waiting for me. She wasn’t. She was on the carpet, lying on her stomach with her legs in the air. But what legs, kicking back and forth like some lazy Pilates trainer. I noticed something was different in her voice when she told me to close the door. She seemed preoccupied. In front of her, spread out like giant trading cards, were the glossy publications that would become my life. Thick and thin, text-light and image-heavy: Elle, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Jalouse, I.D. If memory serves me correctly, Marianna was flipping through the September issue of American Vogue, a five-hundred-page extravaganza. I remember the breadth of it, the weight. It looked almost biblical in its heft. She flipped through the pages at an incredible speed, skimming text and absorbing labels. And when a dress caught her eye she would slow down, hold the page still, and take a moment to consider why it spoke to her, a moment that transcended price and brand and the particular waif who wore it. It was between the individual and the clothes. All else meant nothing. This moment of catharsis is what we in the industry refer to as “in the zone.”3 It’s when a designer takes it to the next level to create something fresh and hot and unforgettable. This may sound very subjective, but there’s a definite logic to it. In fashion one gets that je ne sais quoi feeling.
“Pop a squat,” she said.
I put down my tote bag and sat Indian style at the bank of the great pool of fashion magazines, next to my Marianna. She continued to flip through Vogue, basically ignoring me. The overwhelming number of heels and Gucci handbags in front of her had somehow sedated her libido. And this was fine by me, because I was excited to dig in myself. I chose an issue of W—what looked to me like an oversized comic—and sat there, reading.
Oh, dear fashion, if I could only remember exactly what I was feeling at that precise moment and re‑create it here for the reader. But I can’t, technically.4 It was like a perfect dive, where the swimmer’s focus is precise, his mind clear, his body controlled, the wind right, and so quickly he becomes one with the pool! That kind of Olympic utopia was a bug that hid deep in between the lines of W, and I caught it. There wasn’t one designer or dress that turned me on. It was the whole, not the individual parts. It was the highbrow celebrity culture interspersed among endless pages of ads for Givenchy and Dolce & Gabbana that appeared to be selling sex with androgynous models—the occasional nipple, the see-through underwear, the beauty of young life that seemed so unattainable yet so close, because you could reach out and touch it, it was right there! How could a young boy look at women’s fashion magazines, you ask? How could he not? There was desire and fulfillment on every page. Action reaction. I don’t know what I want; it tells me what I want. In that magazine alone were eighty pages of images—photos of beauty—broken by the occasional celeb profile, short and brief, followed by more beauty.
Fashion is not only a job, or a pretty face, or a dress that’s so next level. It is a lifestyle. It is the only art form that we wear, head to toe, and the only one that automatically projects an image of the self, true or false—who’s to say? It is how people see us. It is how we want to be seen. And in the end it is how we will be remembered; otherwise we’d be buried naked rather than in our best suit. “Look at him. He was an asshole, but what a dresser.”
I devoured each magazine with a feverish hunger, and Marianna suddenly became concerned. “Are you okay? You’re sweating,” she said.
“Sorry, I get hot easily.” I quickly changed the subject. “These magazines are great. Where did you get all of them?”
“They’re fashion magazines. Duh? I got them at the fashion store.” Even though Marianna had been born in Manila, she spoke English with the same California rise I had picked up from television.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
She looked at me like I was contagious.
“Boy, you’re an idiot. There’s no such thing as the fashion store. I made it up. Duh? I was testing to see how stupid you were. FYI, you passed. Stoo-pid.” She rolled on her back with the weighty Vogue, the bible, the one I wanted, and she continued to ignore me. It was strange to see her this way, very unlike the Marianna I knew from school and from our first date, when she had slipped me tongue in the arcade. What had I done to deserve this?
Rather than act out, I withdrew in kindness. Her treating me like shit gave me the urge to please her even more. How could I help myself? I loved these fabulous creatures! Girls gave me a sense of purpose.
“What are you looking at?” she said. She could feel me staring at her.
“I’m just looking at how beautiful you are?” I turned it into a question right at the end by adding the California intonation, unsure of myself.
“Really? You don’t sound so sure, stupid. Are you sure? Or are you just being stupid?”
“I’m being sure.”
“Of what? And how can you be so sure of it?”
“You’re beautiful. It doesn’t take a genius. Duh?”
This spoke to her. She put down the copy of Vogue and rolled over on her elbow to face me. “You’re sweet. Want to make out?”
And like that I was on top of her, just like I had seen in the movies. Marianna was receptive to my moves. We kissed with the same intensity we had established in the arcade. Only now she placed my hand over her chest and added a sensuous thrusting. For the next fifteen minutes we dry-humped our way out of adolescence.
We never had our snack that night, and we never would. Something had transpired between us that broke us for good. Maybe it was that we had gotten too close too fast, but by Monday I was like a stranger to Marianna. She told me at lunch that she couldn’t see me anymore; her mother wouldn’t allow it. I asked her to run away with me to Cebu, where we could start anew living with my uncle. We could transfer schools, finish our studies, and still get into a good university. At this suggestion she told me, quite frankly, to stop being stupid.
By the time Marianna dumped me, my uncle had shut the doors to his shop in Cebu. He’d inherited all of my auntie’s debt, and with no one to collect for her, Tito Roño was forced to give his business over to one Ninoy Sarmiento, a ruthless collector who’d floated my auntie whenever she needed the capital. I found out later that he had been one of my uncle’s clients. I’d even held the ashtray for him on more than one occasion. Crime has no compassion, not even for the dead. What ruined my uncle completely, though, was the fact that he blamed himself for his wife’s death.
I, on the other hand, turned what had befallen me into a minor victory.
That same week that Marianna broke it off, I begged my parents to subscribe to as many fashion magazines as possible. They
looked at me like I was nuts, like I had spent one too many summers with Tito Roño, but they were accustomed to giving me whatever I wanted. W, American Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, I.D.—these would now be mine for the perusing. Whatever I couldn’t get—Women’s Wear Daily and a few other publications—I had to settle for their Asian counterparts. Soon I was rolling on my bedroom floor in my own pool of glossy high fashion: establishment icons Chanel, Dior, Karl Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, Prada, Valentino, Versace, Givenchy; the new stars, like John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen; and the Japanese avant-garde, like Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake. It was like teaching myself a new language. I began sketching simpler silhouettes and bodies, much less detailed than my earlier comic book endeavors. I gave up supermen for supermodels. I sketched Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell. This was the nineties, remember, the heyday of the supermodel. Soon my room became a shrine to high fashion. Every nook and crevice was covered with my sketches and spreads of fashion editorials hurriedly torn from magazines. I had pictures of the designers in action. Diane von Furstenberg dressing little Kate Moss. Karl Lagerfeld at work in his atelier. I remember very clearly one photo of John Galliano in a cerulean pirate’s outfit. His heroic twirled mustache danced with the large feather in his cap as he stood arm in arm with five or six seminude models in a Vegas chorus line. Their breasts were covered with sequin pasties. Whorish black eyeliner masked their eyes. This was an extravagance beyond my wildest dreams! It spoke to me. It said, There are no limits to what Man can accomplish. (And I use “Man” in that all-encompassing sense.)
I remember the first look I put together. It was for my mother, who was a wonderful dresser with an impeccable sense of style. She was never afraid to wear color, and the palette of her closet was my introduction to bright, lush, crisp garments. I took a sleeveless dress and paired it with a lavender summer scarf—both of which she already owned. To this I added an accessory for her. It was a white hat, a beach hat made of straw paper with a wide, floppy brim—an ordinary style that could be found anywhere in the Philippines. But when I saw a similar hat on Christy Turlington on the cover of Vogue in 1992, I copied it. I tied a deep purple ribbon around the top, inserted a long white feather, a swan’s feather, which I had dyed pink with a highlighter, and I manipulated the brim to take the same shape Christy wore on the cover of Vogue. I was able to create an exact replica of Christy Turlington’s hat, and it was this hat that I paired with my mother’s outfit. My mother, of course, was rather pleased with what I had done. As I said, she was unafraid to take chances. She wore this look to mass on Easter Sunday. And what did she get but compliments tall and large from all of her friends in the congregation.
It was by imitation that I was able to uncover my passion. And it was a constant desire to please others, to win them over, to woo, which drove me.