The video dating service had given him his first glimpse of Pinky. She was young. He feared older women. He mocked the idea of marrying a woman his own age, the way they walked, the way they looked. "Imagine me with a sixty-six-year-old woman!" Yet I felt such a woman would be just the sensible and kindly person he needed. But, "I want a doll," he said.
He wanted someone who had not yet begun to live, who had never left her island, much less left the Philippines. He wanted an entirely innocent girl, whom he intended to teach.
"All I want to do is fuck her and feed her fish heads."
Of the five other girls, he talked with three of them. Two were obviously unsuitable — they had children — and one was too old, at forty. The two remaining women he slept with. One said, "I am a nurse. I can help you." He was tempted by this, but she was rather plain. The other one bit him and scratched him when he made love to her. He objected. She said, "Men always like it." He wondered about her saying this and also thought she might be crazy.
Pinky showed up at his Manila hotel with her uncle and aunt. Uncle Tony ceremoniously unpinned her Trainee badge. "You won't need this, Pinky," he said. Auntie Marie! ostentatiously plumped Buddy's pillows. They said they would sleep on the floor of Buddy's hotel room, and after chatting for a while they actually bunked down, using sofa cushions. At midnight Pinky asked Buddy for some pesos. She gave her uncle and aunt the money.
"I tell them go buy Coca-Cola."
She made love shyly, but it was clear that she knew how to give pleasure. Afterward she said she'd had lovers before. But that was not so strange. Buddy did not expect miracles.
In the morning she sat up naked, so near him her nipples grazed his skin. She said, "When you are leaving Manila?"
"Thursday."
"Please marry me before you go, Buddy."
He brayed loudly at the recklessness of her bold demand. Then he watched this young naked girl get out of bed and go to the bathroom. He heard water music. She returned to bed, a small, thin sprite moving across the room like a bird flying to a nest, not going directly but at first obliquely, to a nearby branch, as though to distract attention, and only then flitting to the nest. She went to the window and looked out — daylight on her body. She had a bird's twitch and instincts, habit and caution. She moved sideways.
"Now I gotta go."
In the bathroom mirror Buddy examined his face and saw the whole of his life, a dog's life.
Back in bed he said, "Okay, it's a deal," and they kissed. She climbed on him and hugged him with all her bones, clinging like a little gecko on a big crumbling tree trunk.
When her uncle and aunt returned later that morning to resume chaperoning her, she gabbled in her own language, Visayan, and they hugged him, and laughed. Buddy knew he had done a good thing.
Pinky's aunt said that she could arrange everything, but because it was such short notice she would need some money, and she specified two thousand dollars.
"Let's see what one thousand will get us," Buddy said, squinting defiantly at the woman.
The wedding was held in the Hello Hospitality Suite on the fourth floor of the Hotel Rizal. The elevators were out of order. Exhausted by the stairs and half drunk, Buddy could scarcely speak. The ceremony was conducted by a little old man wearing judge's robes, except the robes were bright blue. Pinky wore a frilly white dress. Uncle Tony, in a crunchy Filipino shirt, gave her away. He sobbed, and so did Aunt Mariel. The fifty or so relatives and friends seemed shy until the food was served. Buddy just watched, thinking that it was like one of those dreams when you feel like a stranger. "Or else are hog-whimpering drunk."
35 Story Time
"I want to read you something I wrote," Buddy said when Pinky and Uncle Tony and Aunt Mariel were back in his room. "So you know who I am."
One day he had shown up at the Hotel Honolulu with an urgent request. He wanted to dictate a story to me. "You know what I mean — hey, you wrote a book!" Of course I agreed to write it down and do some light editing. He saw the story as a chapter of his autobiography, which he imagined would be a long, fascinating book about the colorful American he believed himself to be. Whenever he reflected on his life, the episode that came first to his mind, the most telling, was his experience with his neighbor's dog, Fritzie, the summer Buddy was twelve.
"It's a dog story," he said. "Filipinos like dogs, right? Yum yum!"
His new wife and her uncle and aunt sat stunned and damp after the wedding reception. They had been exuberant at the reception, but their bewilderment in Buddy's room made them anxious, and attentive in a fearful way. He was not dismayed that no one laughed. He took the papers out of his briefcase, opened a can of San Miguel beer, took a sip, and began.
"Growing up in Sweetwater, Nevada, in the late thirties and early forties was, at best, an enigma," he read, rattling the papers. "A high- desert town of some five thousand people, it sat at an altitude of fifty-one hundred feet and was surrounded by snowcapped mountains. Sweetwater was the last of the shit-stomping western cowboy towns. The final Indian war in the U.S. was fought but a few short miles from the city limits. Tumbleweed, jackrabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and scorpions abounded, along with several legal whorehouses, plus some twenty-odd wide-open gambling casinos, whose crap, roulette, and card tables ran around the clock.
"We catered to a diverse group of profligates. We had Utah Mormons, who had absolutely no qualms about hauling their ashes in our infamous bawdyhouses and trying their luck on our crap tables. We had for-real cowboys, Basque sheepherders, hardrock miners, Shoshoni and Paiute Indians, wild-game hunters from all over the world, various and sundry railroad workers, and tourists passing through on U.S. 40, the main highway bisecting the nation at that time.
"There was one theater. My grandfather owned it. This automatically put me in the driver's seat with my buddies, who were always trying to cockroach free tickets from me. For amusement, we had our weekend movies and, a couple of miles out of town, a natural hot springs swimming pool that was fed by a volcanic hot hole. Aside from swimming there, we also had our introductory lessons in the female anatomy via a few small holes drilled into the side of the building housing the girls' dressing rooms. It must have been an inspiring sight — us frantically fighting over who got the best hole and then three or four of us lined up, loping our mules.
"Some of my greatest childhood memories were of my family gathering around the radio and listening to Jack Benny and The Great Gildersleeve. The kids also got their shot at the airwaves with Little Orphan Annie and The Lone Ranger.
"When Orson Welles did his War of the Worlds our whole family sat riveted to the radio. My mother and grandmother were wringing their hands and having the 'vapors' while my grandfather was figuring what supplies we could throw into the car and escape with up into the Ruby Mountains. They were all so sure that the alien invaders were interested in Sweetwater, Nevada, that if anyone had rung our doorbell at that moment I'm sure the whole bunch of us would have shit our pants on the spot.
"I shouldn't forget the Humboldt River, the world's most crooked waterway, where a gang of us would play Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn along its willow-covered banks on many a hot summer day. We were given.2.2-caliber rifles at a young age and turned loose in the desert that surrounded the town. I cringe today when I think of the wanton slaughter we shamelessly perpetrated on the desert wildlife. There was such a plethora of game, though, that the reckless abandon by the town's youths never seemed to dent it. No matter how many coyotes or jackrabbits we massacred, their numbers got bigger.
"It was on one of these Saturday forays that I learned one of life's most valuable lessons. Our hunting safari consisted of Stinky Davis, his poi dog Fritzie, Freddy Woods, my best buddy, and Jerry, my weird cousin. It was a calm, hot desert day with nary a breath of air blowing on the