From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel (2 page)

From the arrival terminal at JFK I directed my cabbie to drive me to the foot of Manhattan, Battery Park. I had studied my maps! I had always dreamed of seeing the Statue of Liberty on my first day in America, no matter how impractical it was from my point of arrival. I wanted it to be a part of my first memory. Just like in the immigrant narratives I had read as a teenager. Oscar de la Renta, Diane von Furstenberg, etc. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” I was being sentimental, I know. But what rebirth is complete without a proper baptism? Seeking out Lady Liberty was my way of christening myself an American, and a New Yorker to boot.

We hit the Van Wyck (pronounced “Wike,” said my guidebook), which took us through an unsavory part of Queens. Now, from what I saw of it, Queens was a desolate place, much unlike what I would come to know as the city proper. Panel homes gave way to industrial factories; on‑ramp gave way to on‑ramp. It wasn’t until we rolled along the BQE, passing a massive cemetery with thousands of ornate tombstones, that I realized Queens too had its own filthy beauty. As my taxi approached a little bridge I couldn’t pronounce, there it was on my left:
³
Manhattan. The skyline I had glimpsed from the plane when the captain tipped his wing. The skyline I had seen all my life on television and in films. A skyline that was as much a symbol of my dreams in fashion as it was a symbol of America and its financial prowess. A skyline that called out to me, “Come and get it, sucka!”

My driver took me in. The city beckoned me at every pothole struck. I traced a finger along my map as we went over the Williamsburg Bridge. And then…“Delancey Street,” called my driver, “where one comes to pick up drunk young fare.” He was a knowing guide, pointing out the neighborhoods as we went. Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, City Hall. “First time in the city, I take it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I was giddy.

“Just keep your head up and your eyes open,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

We were downtown, cruising along Broadway, entering the north tip of the financial district. Fulton, Church Street, Maiden Lane. Buildings surrounded me on all sides. I could no longer see the sky. Instead of out, the city just went up and up.

To my surprise, Battery Park was not shaped like an alkaline Duracell. All those things I saw in the movies regarding New York’s hard edge, like the winos, the drugs, the graffiti, the muggings and murders, the racial strife—these weren’t anywhere to be found. I did see my first New York bum sprawled out on a park bench. But he was not begging. He was listening to his own portable radio, propped up on a pushcart full of bottles and cans. There were office mates on lunch—men and women flirting with each other behind sunglasses. There were black women cradling white babies and white women cradling Asian babies and Asian women cradling Eurasian babies. Every diverse American and his mother! I hurried past with my luggage to the water’s edge. New York Harbor.
Breathe.
The river was a blue-green bayou. I watched a water taxi play chicken with a tugboat, while the Staten Island ferry—the
John F. Kennedy
—came from behind and threatened to crush them both. I leaned my torso over the railing so I could see Lady Liberty. She was in mourning. A black veil covered her face.
⁴
Yet she held her torch high, uncovered, as if leading a fleet of ships into battle away from industrial New Jersey. I closed my eyes and listened to the choppy water. I leaned out until my feet were lifted off the ground, and I held my balance over the guard railing by my hands and waist alone, floating, surrendering to the harbor. A foghorn blew in the distance where there was only clear sky.

I listened.

For description’s sake—to paint a picture of your fashion terrorist as he was in his twenty-fifth year—I am a modestly proportioned man of five foot one. At the time I was in peak physical condition. I was progressing in my yoga practice. I could stand on my head for fifteen-minute intervals, do twenty sun salutations, and still balance myself in
Virabhadrasana
one.
⁵

This is the man I
was
.

I kept my hair shortly cropped and would shave a faux part down the left side of my scalp and through the corresponding eyebrow, classically fashioned after the major hip-hop artists of the 1980s. My Nike high-tops added an extra inch or two to my stature, but let’s skip all pretensions and just stick to the bare facts. I’m a small man! I’m even small for a Filipino, a people notorious for being slight of frame. Myself, I have often been confused for an overgrown, mustachioed child.

There I was, leaning out over the railing with my eyes closed.
I can still hear the breeze off the harbor, the children’s voices echoing from a nearby playground, the rustling in the trees a mere decibel above the city’s bustle. I dreamed of the splash I would make during one of New York’s upcoming seasons with a collection of my own. The ripples would travel around the world to London and Paris and Milan. People would know my name. Back in Manila I had already shown one collection of knitwear during Philippine Fashion Week. A few pieces even got picked up in boutiques around Makati and Cubao, but I wasn’t all that well-known. Back home you did runway with designers who were former beauty queens and minor celebrities—Miss Mindanao ’95 and contestants fresh off
Pinoy Big Brother
⁶
—and the buyers tended to stick to celebrity branding. One needed to be in New York in order to be taken seriously. And now that I had reached my destination my mind was swooning with possibilities. It took the wail of a street musician’s tenor sax to bring me back down to earth.

I hailed another taxi and headed for the apartment of Dasha Portnick, an old friend I knew from Manila, where she’d modeled my first show. She was letting me use her place while she was away in Thailand doing a skin-whitening campaign for Oil of Olay. Dasha was a stunning, dark beauty, but at twenty-six she was already considered too old for the New York market. So whenever fashion week came around, she purposely booked a high-profile job abroad. Since there was an unquenchable thirst for dark-haired white girls in Southeast Asia, it was there that Dasha made
her living. In fact, before I left Manila, her face had been plastered on billboards along the South Super Highway for some new cosmetic band-aid that wrapped over one’s nose.

I had Dasha’s address written down on the back of her modeling card, right next to her hips, waist, and bust. The cab let me out in front of her building on Ludlow Street, one of those glossy high-rise structures that loudly pronounced itself against the old-world tenements of the Lower East Side.

The doorman greeted me as I stepped into the lobby, my luggage in tow. He was a friendly Hispanic who kept a nice trim mustache. I introduced myself as Dasha’s friend, and he in turn handed me a spare set of keys. “Wait a sec,” he said at once, “I almost fuhgot.” He produced a folded note from under his station and gave me a little wink, as if something had been understood. “Have a good night, guy,” he said.

“Thanks, guy,” I said, repeating him. Both cabbies had also called me “guy.” I was quickly learning how to converse with New York’s working class.

This was the first I’d heard of Olya. But I wasn’t at all bothered. Only when I was working did I demand complete solitude.

On the tenth floor at the end of a long carpeted hallway, I knocked on the apartment door and waited. When there was no answer, I let myself in. All the lights were off and the blinds were drawn. I left my things in the kitchen and went to the bedroom, where I found Olya, topless, wearing nothing but her panties. She was fast asleep on her back with her legs in a side twist. Olya had a fantastic blond bob, though her body was rather pale and hollow and lacked the healthy luster of her hair. Her breasts were small and anticlimactic. In the corner of the bedroom was the ficus, sprouting from a pot of muddy water.

I thought about covering her, but she had the sheets and comforter lodged between her legs. If she woke up with a complete stranger hovering over her, who knew how she would react? I reasoned the best course of action would be to reenact my entrance and make a lot of noise. This would surely rouse her, I thought.

Silly, I know, but I went through the motions once again. For the second time I knocked on the door. When I felt certain she wasn’t getting up, I inserted the key into the lock, jiggled the door handle, dropped my suitcase in the kitchen, and slammed the door behind me. I called out, “Hello?” Still, there was no answer. “Hello?” I said again, much louder.

“Who’s there?” said Olya. She had a calm, throaty voice.

“I’m Boy. Dasha’s friend. You must be Olya?” I called into the room.

“One minute, baby.” She began to cough, then hack a little. Waiting in the kitchen, I was greeted with the pleasant smell of a cigarette being smoked in bed.

Olya came out in a red oriental robe, pinning her hair up with bobby pins.

“You’re her friend from Asia?” she asked.

“The Philippines.”

“That’s the one I always forget.”

Olya opened the fridge, removed a bottle of San Pellegrino, and guzzled.

“She mentioned me?” I asked.

Olya belched. “’Scuse. She said something. You’re staying a few days, yes?”

“About a week.”

“Eh? A week?”

“Is something burning?”

“Then we’ll have to share the bed. That’s what Dasha and I do. Only don’t get the wrong idea about it. We’re not lezzies.”

“Oh, I didn’t think that. It’s just that Dasha never mentioned she had a roommate. You can imagine my surprise, meeting you here under these circumstances.”

“Typical Dasha. We have an arrangement, you know. I sublet from her whenever I’m in town.”

I found out later that Olya paid Dasha rent for half the queen-size mattress. During fashion week there was a room shortage in modeling agency apartments, so many girls had to double up. The price of glamour comes at an encroaching cost, as Dior once said.
⁷

“I swear I smell something burning.”

“Oh fuck,” said Olya. She ran into the bedroom, taking the bottle of San Pellegrino with her. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” From the
doorway I watched her sprinkle the soda water onto the bed, extinguishing whatever small flame she had ignited with her cigarette.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

She reemerged from the room and closed the door behind her. “I burned another hole in Dasha’s sheets. She’ll kill me.”

“Is the fire out?”

“
Of course
. I can’t believe this. I’m so stupid.”

“Don’t say that. They’re just sheets. We’ll replace them.”

“Fuck her.”

Olya was a Pole by origin, just fifteen when she was first scouted in her small town of Kozalin by a German who took her to Milan, Tokyo, Paris. He showed her the world, and she fell in love with him. But once they got to New York, with Olya set up at Ford Models, he left her and eventually made his way back to Berlin to pursue a career as a drum-and-bass DJ. “I see him at parties,” she said. “He’s a dick now. But he got me out of Kozalin, so I suppose I owe him something.”

She knew all the major cities and was a tremendous help to me as I navigated my way. She marked in my guidebook how to get to Ground Zero, how to get to Saks from Barneys, then to Bryant Park from Times Square. She enlightened me about the monthly metropass, scams by persuasive men at the turnstiles—“Don’t ever pay them for swipe”—and where the closest subway station was. “Far,” said Olya. “If you have casting, you have to leave like forty-five minutes early to get anywhere.”

And so I spent the rest of my first day getting lost, making transfers, missing connections, falling in love. New York’s subway system is a rubber band of sexual tension, stretched and twined around the boroughs, ready to snap. I frolicked in this salacious
underground, where every motion had meaning—every leg crossed, every glance up from a paperback, every brush of a shoulder or rump was a kiss blown in my direction. The porcelain Chinese beauties on and off at Canal; the thoroughbred Eastern European models of Prince, castings a‑go‑go; the NYU coeds of Eighth Street, plump and studious. Oh, and the sexpot hipsters at Fourteenth, right off the L, like cattle, their eyes drowned in eye shadow, looking as if they had never missed a party, nor would they.

My first meal I ate at an establishment called Steak Chicken Pizza Grill, Forty-second Street. Its sign was lit up like a carnival and called out to me, American food eaten here. I was aware of the tackiness of the eatery upon entering. Its sign, menu, and patrons were a testament to a class of people I wanted nothing to do with. But let me tell you, it was the best meal I had ever tasted. The blackened burger, thick tomato, crisp iceberg, and lone fry, which somehow snuck its way under the bun, each lent a delight to the other. And the slice of authentic New York pizza, reheated by a Mexican, handled from oven to tray by a Pole, and rung up by an Italian—“Here you go, boss”—complemented the burger beyond my wildest dreams. I consumed more than my small body could digest. And what a feeling! Like I’d just fueled up on unleaded and had gasoline pumping through my small intestine.

The city could be hard on its own. It took everyone in as orphans, but if you didn’t pull your own weight, you could be squashed. I learned this after that most memorable dinner, as I was standing outside Steak Chicken Pizza Grill, studying the foldout map of my guidebook. I was to go east on Forty-second to get to Bryant Park, the site of New York’s fashion week. Twice a year it became the beating heart of the industry, and I wanted to walk
its grounds in order to feel it pulsing beneath me. When I looked up to get my bearings, I saw a man about my age, a South Asian. Our resemblance was remarkable. Like me he was five foot one, nearly a foot below the average New Yorker. He seemed to share my same build, though one couldn’t really tell because he wore a giant menu over his torso. He was an advertisement for the Sovereign Diner. I began my approach in order to get a better look at his face. His eyebrows were overgrown and had formed a prominent unibrow, whereas I plucked mine daily. He had my mustache, a neatly trimmed whisper, just the right dash of masculinity. But it was looking down the length of the cardboard menu—2 EGGS, HAM, SAUSAGE, OR BACON $2.95—that I saw the biggest tell of all, the trait which bound us together as brothers of this world.