My friend thinks he’s Tyler Durden. I, on the other hand, think I’m Jack. We walk around the alleys and byways of Makati one night to look for Marla Singer.
Marla Singer. The faker, the tourist, the festering sore on the roof of your mouth that never heals. She’s the one the real Tyler Durden humps at the house on Paper Street, the girl who commits suicide everyday and screams about how bored she is out of her skull and how she has become this monster who deserves to die, die, die. She fascinates us so much that we set out one night to look for somebody just like her and maybe, thanks to the basic goodness of our hearts, hump her out of her boredom.
My friend, who knows by heart every Tyler Durden line, says Makati is crawling with Marla Singers, and we must “save” all of them. He says “All of them” in the same dead serious tone Oskar Schindler used when he talked about saving a thousand Jews and when he realized his accountant was gay. He says we must bang on every door, ask for the once-innocent little girl who now embraces her own festering corruption, take her to the nearest hotel, and screw the beejesus out of her. You’ll know the type, he says. She paints her nails black, chain-smokes, and knows by heart all the subtle nuances of the different flavors of instant cup noodles and instant coffee.
I tell him “There is no Marla Singer in Makati.” I tell him Manoling Morato and Etta Mendez still scour the streets at night in their Speedo wiener pants and eat every speck of immorality with the gusto of swallowing endless batches of bratwurst [In 2008, Etta Mendez and Manoling Morato would be replaced with Loren Legarda and that buffoon who's suing local men's magazines for "obscenity" -- JB
]. I tell him we should not be so very verbose so that I can cut my essay for the Festering Isolation down to a length someone with a job, a life, and a modern vocabulary would actually read. But my friend says, “it’s impossible that Marla Singer doesn’t exist; Chaos Theory predicts that the universe must prolifically breed such twisted souls every millisecond.”
And, he says, screw the reader; wordiness is King, verbosity is the New Black.
So we wait outside RCBC TOWER for our first Marla Singer. A gazillion girls from those dozens of call centers emerge like ants from a, well, anthill, chain-smoking out their pent-up angst and boredom, and we look at their faces one by one for the telltale signs: the bored gaze that stabs through human pretense, the greasy raven hair, the bloodless lips. But there is none: they’re all good Catholic girls somebody with a 9-to-5 job will wanna make into his wife.
I tell my friend the sad news: The world has moved on. Adventure is dead. Free love is a fairy tale.
We end up at this sleazy Boni joint talking dirty instead with Jackie Brown. Each time we’re frustrated, we lower our standards even more. By 4 am, we are talking about Pasay at the other end of EDSA and the girls at the entrance of Hiyas Royal Inn [In 2008, Hiyas Royal Inn would be closed down, but you can still check out its empty shell in Baclaran -- JB ] whom anybody with a prick can have for something like P300 pesos. They’re no Marla Singers, my friend assures me, but they’re good just the same. Just think of it as our own way of helping them have food on their tables by tomorrow.
I stop and ponder what he’s saying. It’s called transvaluation—making something generally regarded as bad into something positive—and it’s a process so subtle that when you do it correctly, your mother may even have tears of joy even if you’re actually telling her you have screwed the eye of syphilis itself.
Faith, hope, and charity. Those are what we’re giving these hookers whenever we are their patrons, says my friend. We give them faith and hope in their own ideas of self-worth. And it’s a charitable act to actually “commission their services.” Heck, I don’t enjoy paying for sex, but if it’s the only way to “help” these girls, then let’s go, motherfuckers!
We laugh. We laugh like Adolf Hitler would laugh on the balcony of his Berchtesgaden mansion. We laugh like mutant pitbulls. You are brilliant, I tell my friend. Joseph Estrada should hire you.
Plying Coastal Road at 5 am, our eyes heavy with frustration and lack of sleep, my friend shakes his head. It’s one sad night for altruism, my friend chuckles. So sad, so sad. But in one corner of Bacoor and Zapote, a girl flags us down: greasy raven hair, fake smile, bored eyes. My friend snickers and says, “God works in mysterious ways.” Show me, I say. Show me. My friend lowers the window, looks up at the girl’s face, and begins telling her the unbearable, indescribable lightness of our being, and how in a dark crumbling room, men like Tyler Durden humped the Marla Singers of the world—completely free of charge.
[Originally posted somewhere else three years ago. Just so you know, Tyler Durden, Marla Singer, and Jack are characters from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Fight Club
, which David Fincher turned into an awesome movie in 1999]
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