Angels in Angeles

She was an angel. Long straight black hair hanging down to her ass, small but beautiful breasts, and legs up to her armpits.

She looked to be only sixteen, but the thin man said she was twenty-two. I wanted to believe him. Who wouldn’t? There was no way I was going to pass up this chance.

I’d left Baguio City up in the northern Luzon mountains yesterday and taken the Rabbit down to Angeles City. What a difference.

Baguio is a pretty town. It’s got a big university full of beautiful young, earnest women all studying hard for whatever degree they are aiming for. They love to party. I had no trouble pulling them. Every night I went up on stage at a few of the local coffee shops and sang oldies. The Philipinos loved the songs, and the Filipinas loved me. I was having a ball.

But all good things come to an end and it was time for me to continue my journey back to the UK. That was the plan. I wasn’t in any hurry to do this. Playing and singing at the coffee shops kept me in just enough money to live reasonably well without dipping into my travel fund. So I had stayed a lot longer in the PI than I had planned. Now it was time to move on.

So, last night I arrived in AC as those in the know call it. To me, it looked like a dump in the drooping hot day. I headed for the bar area first hoping to score a woman. I walked around looking at the crappy bars; small, dingy, with wilting signs and a few colored lights framing them. No need to get too depressed though. I knew that at night all the faults would be covered up and all I would see was the girls.

I found a small hotel nearby, serviceable, but not worth even two stars. The owner was a jovial old man who never stopped talking with a fat belly barely covered by a soiled singlet. Damned if I know what he talked about. Half the time he gibbered on in Tagalog, and the rest of the time in pigeon English. I picked up a few American slang words. He mentioned women, poontang as he called them, a lot. The hard sell was obviously meant to entice me into choosing from his stable of girls. But I checked them out in the dim room just off the reception area. None of them looked worth bothering with.

Picking up my bag and guitar case I trudged up to the third floor and found my room. It was like the rest of the hotel; not worth talking about. A bed with a firm mattress meant I would probably get a good night’s sleep. A fan set into the ceiling creaked as it moved the hot air around the room. I went to the balcony and looked out across the town. Not much to see. Plenty of rusty tin roofs, old cars chugging up and down, carts selling what passes for food in this strange country.

I don’t know what brought me here. Probably I was just bored meeting the same old faces on the famous ‘hippie trail’ between Australian and Europe. No matter where I went the same boring people would turn up eventually. They would read the notice boards at the various boarding houses. The notes pinned up there gave the latest news on the best places to stay, which restaurants served the standard hippie trail trekker fare, and travel information. Didn’t these people crave something new and exciting? Why did they feel they had to follow everyone else?

So I opted out after a few nights in Bangkok and bought a ticket to Manila. That was about six months ago. Two days in Manila was enough to convince me to look for greener pastures. What a dump the city was. Huge, sprawling all over the place, it was a strange mixture of the old, the new, the rich, the poor. The parks were beautiful. The slums were depressing. The Ermita was disappointing. I found a Rabbit Bus leaving town and jumped on. I had no idea where it was going but what the hey, I was on an adventure.

A few hours later we pulled into the bus station in Baguio. I figured why not? So I found a place a little out of town to stay and settled in for a while.

Now it was time to move on. Time to get on the road and head for London where I hoped to recapture my roots. I had no definite plans. Who knew what would happen when I got there…if I got there. There were always tales of travelers falling foul of dangers along the way. One Englishman stuck a needle in his arm in Penang and shot too much good shit into his veins. Ah well, he died happy.

An Australian I had met ran into Charles Sobraj in Bangkok and only just escaped the mad killer. Yet another Australian I knew had gone to Borneo and no one had heard of him again. I had no idea if he made it back alive. I sure hoped he did. He was a good singer.

One day a Canadian and I managed to talk our way onto a Malaysian Air Force plane doing a supply run to the army forts strung along the top of the Cameron Highlands. At one fort, we dropped off an Australian air force chap at the end of a runway to go catching butterflies. When we came back to pick him up in the afternoon he hadn’t emerged from the jungle. We asked the Malayans if they had seen him. They asked us where we had dropped him off.

Down there, we said pointing to the distant end of the runway.

They shook their heads and said maybe he wouldn’t be coming back. There was a man-eating tiger around.

The Aussie got lucky though. He came out of the jungle about ten minutes later. No, he hadn’t seen any tigers. But he got stuck in a small piece of quicksand as he ran to the camp after hearing our plane. That was why he was late. The quicksand wasn’t very deep, but he lost a boot in it.

Now here I was in Angeles, in a house I didn’t know. I’d been brought here by a skinny Philipino with his front teeth missing that I’d met in the bar area. It was still too early for the bars to open but I was horny. He promised me some afternoon delight. All I had to do was follow him to the house. I did.

He showed me into a room and quickly ushered in this beautiful angel before me. He asked me if I wanted anything else.

Yeah, I said, how about some good grass to round off the afternoon?

How much do you want, half or a full kilo?

I’d been thinking an ounce maybe, but I said bring me a half.

He left and I turned my attention to the angel. We started to get to know each other. Five minutes later I was feeling thirsty, so I went to the door to call for a large beer.

The handle turned but the door was locked. There was no key.

Did you lock the door little angel?

She shook her head.

A shiver went down my spine. I remembered stories of other lone travelers who had simply vanished. That could happen to me right here, right now. Or the skinny bastard could come back with the dope and the cops. Who knew what could happen? But I wasn’t going to stick around to find out. Fuck the angel. She could stay if she wanted to. I was getting out of there.

I tried the only window in the room. It was locked, but I managed to move the lock enough to allow me to push the window up. Just as I crawled out and into the back garden I heard the sound of cars screeching to a halt out the front. I crept to the corner of the house and checked what was happening. There were cop cars out there, lots of movement and loud whispers.

I ran for the back fence and scrambled over it. Then I ran through the yard to the front gate and walked out onto the street. Taking my bearings I headed back for my hotel.

I marched up the stairs quickly, threw everything into my bag, grabbed my guitar and legged it out of the hotel as fast as I could. It was almost dark by now so I kept to the shadows and headed north towards the bus station. If I was lucky I could get away before they realized I had gone.

There was a bus pulling out for Manila just as I arrived. I jumped on and threw some notes at the conductor as I moved towards the back of the bus and hunkered down in a seat. They could keep Angeles City. Those angels had some mean, nasty devils looking after them.

© Marc Holt. All rights reserved by the author.