Smiles
My jeans are down around my ankles and a woman’s head bobs in my lap. I can’t recall ever having seen her face, but it doesn’t matter. From this angle, they all look the same. And none of them use their real names. Since the first time I stepped onto Philippine soil, these women, these girls, have been nothing but interchangeable receptacles. Little brown fuck machines. Or, as is the case with a game of Smiles, such as this, nothing more than oral apparatus—their mouths nothing but cum gutters.
Smitty sits across from me at the table, also with his pants around his ankles, also with the head of an interchangeable little brown fuck machine bobbing in his lap. And, like me, he’s trying not to smile, because that means losing the game and having to pay for the winner, too.
We each have a bottle of beer in front of us, but neither drinks.
The bar is no different than any of the others along that shit street, Mag Sai Sai. Like many of the bars there, this one looks like a warehouse from the outside, but inside it has a couple bars and stages offering liquid as well as female intoxicants. The stages are more accurately described as pedestals at each corner of each bar, where identical girls in bikinis gyrate—advertising themselves, auditioning for someone to love “long time.” There are no windows in the place so it’s easy to forget that noon isn’t midnight, and vice versa. This place has the reputation for the most talented Smiles girls.
I’d made the mistake of mentioning that to Smitty ten days out of port. This was before I knew what kind of asshole he was. And since then, this bar was all he could talk about. “You’ve got to take me there,” he’d say. Or, “We’ve totally got to do that.”
I’ve lost at this game twice, but that was a couple years ago on my first WestPac. I damn sure wasn’t going to lose to a first-timer, much less this son of a bitch.
Smitty is no friend. He’s a new guy stationed aboard my ship. My replacement. I’m due to receive my honorable discharge when we get back to San Diego, and this pasty motherfucker is taking over the engine room that I’d spent the past three years turning from a slipshod operation that barely got the job done into a squared away model of Naval power and efficiency. My upcoming discharge removes me a few weeks before the ship goes through the Battle “E” qualifications. Instead of me, this motherfucker getting blown across the table from me will waltz right in and get both a ribbon for his uniform and all the accolades from the chief engineer and the captain. If, on the other hand, he fucks up the qualifications process, he will simply throw my name around and I’ll become the sacrificial goat. He’ll say he didn’t have enough time to improve the conditions he’d inherited and all that kind of bullshit. But the equipment is ready. The men are trained. He could sleep through the qualifications and things would pretty much run like clockwork. It has to be somebody, I know.
At the table with the girl between my legs, my face feels like it might cave in. All the energy in my body has rushed to my unit and I have to clench my pelvic muscles. In the game of Smiles, the first one to smile has to pay for everybody, no matter how long it takes them to finish. At ten dollars per song, per person, I want this game to cost the motherfucker some cash. There’s nothing better than revenge—and, of course, free blowjobs.
The band jams like a record deal is on the line. They’re like all the bands in these bars on the strip. Locals or carpetbaggers from Manila who play Skynyrd and U2 so well you’d swear it was the original artists up there on stage, except these musicians all have dark hair and none of them stands over five-foot-seven. These guys sing and play every note and word of classic songs with expert mimicry, but they can’t form a sentence in English.
Two more songs and he’ll be out another twenty bucks. I want to keep the meter running to rack up that fucker’s bill, but my girl is skilled. Some mysterious foam fills my head, like I were a soda bottle that had been shaken. I have to distract myself.
I check on Smitty, hoping to catch him smiling. The singer pleads, “…three steps, gimme three steps,” but the chick blowing me can’t see from under the table. She can’t sing along because her mouth is full. I could tap out the rhythm on the tabletop or on the back of her head. Instead, I focus on lasting and not cracking a smile. Which is tough, because this girl is really working me over. Her mouth never goes sticky like my wife, Lizbeth’s. This chick has a mouth like a jar of Vaseline. On the few occasions that Lisbeth indulges me, she’ll break every minute or two to take a pull from her Seven and Seven. If only she puffed on my tool the way she drew from that cocktail straw she wouldn’t need to re-lube.
This gets me to thinking of home—the place I’ll buy in North Carolina—which is enough to keep me distracted so I won’t pop before Smitty.
I usually think about baseball, but I haven’t seen any games lately and home is on my mind a lot these days since I’ll be a civilian when we get back to port. A homeowner. The place I’ll get is on a dozen acres in a valley. Nothing fancy, a white clapboard farmhouse, maybe five rooms. That’s all we need. We’ll spend most of the time outdoors, tending a few horses, skipping stones on the pond and planting our own Christmas trees. Lizbeth wants to spend a chunk of the money we’ve saved on a trip to Greece, but that would take away from the down payment.
Lizbeth. She’s nothing like these Filipino women. She has a big nose and frizzy hair, but her body is pasty and soft. She’s the kind of girl who does secret acts with produce so no one will find a vibrator in her nightstand if she dies in a car accident. She’s a great mother, and the girls are great. Mostly. One is a little pudgy, but they’re both in soccer. I hate the game. It’s so un-American. But it makes the girls smile ear to ear no matter which teeth have yet to grow in.
***
The band jams away, and for a minute I think AC/DC is up there. My head is still foaming, but hotter now. The smell of perfume and beer and puke is everywhere. The swirling lights cast the hanging cigarette smoke in swirls of blue and yellow until they make green, and then red and blue makes purple, but I sip my beer and continue to stare at Smitty. Who’s looking down at his girl.
Smitty pounds on the table and yells, “All the way down. All the way.”
“Hey, don’t do that,” I say with my head back, my eyes on him. “That’s disrespectful.” The impulse is foreign to me. I’ve never felt protective of these girls before.
Without looking up, Smitty says, “Give me a fucking break.”
“I’m serious, asshole. Do it again and I’ll break your fucking hand.”
“You can’t pull that shit in a whorehouse.”
“It’s a bar.”
“Tell that to the wench shining my knob as we speak.”
Another song starts up. Another ten bucks he’s in the hole.
Just then, Smitty finally grins. It looks like a melon after a machete hacked into it. A few seconds later, he lets loose a string of giggles and a final, “Woo! Goddamn!”
He loses.
I don’t say a word.
When Smitty looks at me, he says, “Well goddamn, ol’ salt. I guess there ain’t no losers in this game. Shit,” he said, slapping the table top twice with his palm. “That was the best knob shine in the history of the fucking world. Woo! Goddamn! I can’t believe that shit. Man, oh, man. Totally worth the price of admission. You go ahead now.”
“I hope you brought a lot of cash,” I say. “’Cause I’m pretty good at this.”
Before Smitty can reply, the girl between his legs yells and unfolds herself from beneath the table. She stands and points and yells, “He wipe dick with hair.” She was staring straight at me with the soggy end of her long oil-slick-black hair in her hand. If Smitty were anybody else, that would have been funny as hell. Instead, I look at him and say, “Not cool, asshole.”
“She’s a whore. What do you expect me to do? Buy her flowers?” he says, leaning his hands on the table.
I don’t move, and the girl between my legs keeps at it. “You can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats working girls,” I say.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t like what you’re made of.”
“You’ve got no idea what I’m made of,” he says, straightening upright.
“I know enough.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you, Smith. No one in the shop will ever respect a douche bag like you.”
“Respect? Who gives a fuck about that? What they’ll do is like me. You know? You ever thought about being liked? I guess not.”
“You don’t get it, Smith,” I say without moving. “Men need to be worked. It’s necessary and natural for them to rail against the whip, but they need it like a horse needs it—to know when to run fastest. And they’re all in peak shape. Because of them, you’ll get the Battle ‘E.’ It will look good in your service jacket. It’s just like me bringing you here to this perfect place. You don’t deserve to be here. Now get the fuck out.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I kind of like it here.” He fumbles with cash in both hands. “What’s the damage?”
“Just leave what you’ve got I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Totally worth it, man. I’d gladly pay twice the price.” Smitty drops forty bucks on the table and bumps into a busboy, whose rack of empty beer bottles clangs as he rights the stack. As Smitty walks toward the door, other girls in bikinis swarm him, obviously hoping he has more money to throw around.
Smitty’s girl lifts a twenty from the stack and storms off, but mine is still at it. I won, but missing is the electric charge of victory. Instead, my mind grows clear. I’ve never realized it before, but for a mere instance of circumstance and geography, my daughters could have been born to grow up like this. But in a sense, I guess they are. This is just the way the world is. My daughters are no different than the girls in bikinis shaking their asses up on these stages. Bar girls bought and sold if not by sailors or Marines, then by boyfriends and husbands who will rake their dicks across their teeth.
My erection loses pressure. The woman redoubles her efforts to revive it. She’s either humming or mumbling shit to me because I feel the vibrations in her throat. Assholes like Smitty have to fuck up every good thing. After a few more minutes, I tap my girl on the side of the head. Looking at her face for the first time, I’m struck by how young she looks.
She speaks up to me from her knees. “But we not finish.” I feel her breath on my abdomen. Her teeth gleam up at me while her face is in shadow down there. “I do for free. You good man.”
Who was I to argue with a professional?
***
The explosion leaves me breathless, but I don’t recall ever feeling the tingle of release. I don’t know if I actually smiled, but it doesn’t matter. After I zip up, I take out my wallet.
The girl slithers out from beneath the table. “No money.” She smiles at me. “You come back tomorrow. I love you long time.”
“What’s wrong with now?”
“I go take care of mother. She sick.”
I drain my beer, which is completely tasteless. “I’ll be gone tomorrow,” I say, staring at my wallet, picturing the seven short days at sea before returning to San Diego and then North Carolina.
“You have more left in you. Needs to come out. Maybe another girl?”
I hand the girl a hundred-dollar bill. She blinks and then looks at me with those dark eyes of hers. When she smiles, it looks genuine, not like the typical proposition Smiles girls like her have.
After she scurries off, I pick up Smitty’s abandoned beer, but it’s like water, too. I drink it anyway and look around the room, check out the bikini dancers. The tallest of them isn’t chin-high on me. Some dance as if they have music in their blood. Others move with stiff knees and hips too shy or scared to sway. Through the lights and the smoke and the piss-hot stench of beer and vomit, these women dance to entice, as if they are sandwiches in a vending machine.