DESERT PATROL V: MANILA III
BY GUIDO FRANCO

Presented here is the fifth part of Desert Patrol (une aventure sous les tropiques), a travel memoir by French Swiss photographer Guido Franco published in 1980 and introduced here. It concerns what Franco saw of the pederastic scene involving local boys and foreigners when he visited Manila for the third time in early 1979. The illustrations are all from the original book.

We found Noel again,^[1] he had come back from San Miguel and needed his things. He took a shower, changed, and then went off to Harrison^[2] to find Belle, his girlfriend who takes drugs at the Rugby.

Dany-boy too was waiting for us. He doesn’t seem to have many customers, and I wonder whether this is because of his broken teeth.

I saw him the other evening in Rizal Park, pursuing a tourist.

“Hello Sir, can I come with you?” 

The fellow didn’t look very certain. They went across Roxas Boulevard, talking quietly. I don’t know how that went.

I look at my Lapu-Lapu, all clean, with his curly hair, “Apple” style, his clothes, his bracelet bought in Baguio, and at Dany-boy with his jeans that he never washes.

“Aren’t you a crazy little bastard?” he says with a Marseilles accent.

It is understood that Dany-boy may sleep in the bed at San Carlos^[3] when neither Noel or the Chinese is there.

The Chinese comes less often now, because we don’t open the door to him. In general Noel sleeps on the balcony settee, or outside with his girlfriend Belle.

Image 100h below to the left with caption “His friends hadn’t seen the Martians, but he had seen them”

When he came this evening he was very frightened, at the news that a flying saucer had landed at Cultural, and Martians wanted to take him to another world. Noel had suggested that the Martians might take his friend, but it was he they wanted!

“If you don’t snort so much at Rugby with your girlfriend, the Martians will certainly leave you in peace,” we tried.

But he stuck to his guns. His friends hadn’t seen the Martians, but he had seen them.

The best thing seemed to be to send him on a bus to his mother at San Miguel Bulacan. We gave him cash, and his things, and Lapu-Lapu got ready to go with him.

But five minutes later, they were back. It seemed that the “cops” pinched their money. They stop boys coming out of the San Carlos, and go through their pockets.

*       *       *

Lapu-Lapu has been missing for two days. We went to find his father at Padre Faura. He looks even more put out than we are.

“Yes, it makes you sick,” he said. “And yet, I assure you that at one time he was a good boy. All this is the fault of his friend Joseph, you know. ‘Visaya’.”

We are sitting with a cup of coffee opposite the Hilton, and the waiters who have heard the whole story without being put out are there to laugh.

“Yes,” I say, “every evening your kid goes to ‘Velvet Slum’,^[4] and he doesn’t want to take me, so I confess I’ve been brusque, I’ve locked him out, I’ve said ‘we’re going to speak to your father’, and he pretended to follow me up the staircases seeing that the lifts were not working, and then, no surprise, he buzzed off.

That didn’t appear to astonish his father at all, but he tried to be a little scandalized, from politeness and a sense of his responsibilities.

*       *       *

This evening, he brought him back, with a fever.

“He is sorry ...”

You bet.

He found him at Harrison Plaza.

“A very bad place. I told him. But he doesn’t want to listen to me. He only listens to his friends.”

Now he’s in bed, with some comic books. Dany-boy prepares his squashed mangoes for him, goes to get his chicken at Savoury, and does the washing up.

“My God, can you tell me why it’s always Dany-boy who has to do the washing up? and not you ...”

“Dany-boy is my slave,” says Lapu-Lapu. “Because he loves me….”

*       *       *

Noel is back from San Miguel, I saw him at the street corner with a client. He came to visit Lapu-Lapu in his room, they were bawling a few songs in tagalog, and then Noel borrowed some clothes to go to Harrison and look for Belle.

“She doesn’t like me any more,” he moans. “She has two other friends. Yes. She told me to get lost!” 

Before leaving, we need to get Dany-boy’s teeth fixed. I sent him with a note to a dentist in Remedios whom his mother knew (too hot for me to go there myself), and he came back with the diagnosis: three teeth to remove, one prosthesis, 250 pesos. A denture at the age of fifteen ... In Europe we do it differently, but in Europe we have the cash. Not here ...

I look at Dany-boy. He’s not handsome with his three rotten teeth, right in front. If he doesn’t find customers he will become even thinner, and then ...

Dany-boy has come back in a daze, through forty in the shade, his mouth bleeding. We laid him on the bed and he’s gone to sleep.

I feel that I’m going to leave, the heat is stronger still. I still don’t know whether I’m going to take Lapu-Lapu with me.

At Harrison I met Eddie, and he came to San Carlos; in the evening I wanted to go out with him, to take him to a restaurant in Makati, and perhaps to Velvet, when Lapu came back with Joseph “Visaya” and made a scene with me; he didn’t want me to go out with Eddie, he even followed me into the street, he clung to the windows of the red Cortina, he shouted, I couldn’t take him in the street like that, with the security-guards and passers-by, he told me that he wanted to go to the restaurant and Velvet with us, but I was fed up with Lapu-Lapu and his carryings-on

“Who is this fellow?” he shouted. “We don’t know him!”

I promised him that I would come back that evening, but clearly there was no question of that, no question of going back to San Carlos with Eddie, Lapu-Lapu and his pal Visaya.

“Why do you trouble with a fellow like that,” Eddie said. “You should give him the push.”

*       *       *

This Eddie is certainly right, that’s what I told myself the whole evening. At the Sheraton they gave us number 1117, a uniformed guard came to the room with us and switched on the colour telly.

It was Marcos,^[5] speaking to the Cebu lawyers congress.

“It is truly a very great honour for me,” said Marcos, “not to say a sacred mission, to come here and address this illustrious College of colleagues, which I say seeing that I am a lawyer, I don’t know whether you have understood me.” 

The camera doesn’t leave Marcos, but for Eddie it’s the gangster film that he wants to see, there’s a chap who gets his head put into jam.

From the room-service, Eddie orders a banana-split. He is fifteen years old, and I think he does the job as an amateur during weekends.

Next year, I decide, I will take him on a tour of the Islands.

The next day, Lapu-Lapu complains.

“You think I don’t have feelings, that I’m an animal, or what?? ... If it had at least been one of my friends . . . you could have taken Dany-boy or Rodel ...”

“And why not that one?”

“That one, we don’t know him,” Lapu-Lapu explained, “he’s not in our gang. You think he’s a good boy, but in the night when you’re sleeping, perhaps he will get up ... his legs will take him and his hand will go into your bags ... and then you’ll be missing some things ...”

*       *       *

Yesterday Dany-boy’s teeth were done. At the moment he has difficulty speaking. Lapu-Lapu doesn’t mind making fun of him.

“So try to say ‘British Airways’,” he teases, walking along Roxas Boulevard. “Say ‘Cathay Pacific’.”

Dany-boy takes out his teeth and looks at them. They come from Italy, it seems. An import.

“So come on, Dany-boy, say ‘British Airways’.”

“Something wrong with your head, little prick?” he protests with a sad look.

Then he takes out his teeth and acts as a vampire.

He slept at San Carlos for several nights, but we are going to leave soon. This evening I wanted to accompany him “back home”. But finally I understood that in fact Dany-boy doesn’t have a home at Pasay City. His mother sells cigarettes in a brothel at Remedios. And when the customers have left, around four in the morning, she is allowed to sleep in the corridor….

*       *       *

Bill, the Yank in room 605, has knocked on my door to complain about Dany-boy. He was very worked up. According to him, my boy (I tell you again that he’s not “my” boy) hit his boy Nelson in the face, for no reason, and if that happens again he wouldn’t hesitate to give “my” boy (I tell you again ...) a clout in return, even if it means breaking his new teeth.

“Shit,” I tell him, “calm down. Surely that wasn’t Dany-boy, I don’t see why ... your boy Nelson, you tell me ...”

In short, then, when Dany-boy appears just before dinner time, I take him to 605 (listen, you will see). The fellow answers the door in a dressing gown, his little Nelson there in the doorway, looking uncomfortable, a white towel around his hips. A real little cherub.

“So,” I ask Dany-boy, “is it true that you gave this little poppet a slap. and for no good reason?”

Dany-boy looks disgusted.

“I didn’t even come to San Carlos to-day,” he tells me, “how do you think I could have slapped this little queer?”

“So?” I say to Bill.

The fellow gives his little Nelson a hard look.

“What, could you have lied to me, you whom I trust more than my own mother?”

Nelson doesn’t look at all bothered.

“It wasn’t him, it was Rodel.”

“Well you can see now that it wasn’t ‘my’ boy,” I tell Bill the old poof, giving him a straight look.

“Er, yes ...”

I really think he should apologize, but I’d be waiting for ever.

Continue to Desert Patrol VI: Mount Lavinia (one year later)

^[1] “We” apparently refers to the author, his son, Raphael, aged 11 or 12, and his friend Lapu-Lapu, a Manilan boy aged 13 met a little earlier whom he was intending to take to Europe. The three of them had just returned to Manila from Baguio. Noel Lavalle, 14, was a half-Filipino, half-French boy whom Franco had also met a little earlier in Manila and had also been travelling with Franco. [Website note]

^[2] Harrison Plaza was Manila’s first shopping-mall. Opened in 1976, it quickly became a popular place for city kids to hang out and a popular place for foreign boysexuals to meet interested local boys. [Website note]

^[3] The San Carlos Apartment Hotel, 777 San Carlos Street, was the Manila hotel Franco had apparently always stayed in there. [Website note]

^[4] Velvet Slum was described earlier as “the disco for drag queens and drug addicts.” [Website note]

^[5] Ferdinand Marcos had been President since 1965 and ruled through martial law. [Website note]