Lust Among the Ruins
/Just so I won’t give sex a bad name, I will include the categories surrounding it, like love, lust, romance, betrayals, and heartbreaks. (There are some of these in my two books Seasons By the Bay and Full Deck, but many more are not there. They would be the ones for storytelling, like this one).
Part of the Alaskero’s lore is getting a nickname, or at least being known as having a nickname. Even objects and things get a nickname. The “Iron Chink” was/is named for the butchering machines that cut the salmon to feed the cannery. They took the place of erstwhile Chinese workers. Most names were given to you. A few, if considered bad enough, gave themselves their own names, like Boy Sige-Sige and James Bond. But first, we come to Johnny Mamayamaya na.
As some of you may know, there was a practice, not uncommon in those days, maybe still true, of going to the Philippines after the season, as one of the rewards Alaskeros would give themselves. There would be many reasons for them to visit their homeland. But one was to seek a bride. And for old timers, that find would usually be a young bride.
Such was the case with Mang Johnny, a story of passion and patience, with a dash of irony, and paradox. Right after the season, he had gone to the Philippines, Mang Johnny. This story came from two or three different sources and, including mine, you are now getting an amalgamation of all those.
There were many May/December marriages between Alaskeros and their mates.. Such was the case with Johnny Alejandro, aka Johnny Mamayamaya na. (Illustration by Tony Remington)
Johnny indeed had met some young lass in the Philippines and had brought her back to the States. He was forewarned of the insatiable energy of youth, should he land an impassioned partner, and end up like Mayor Lacson dying of a heart attack with Charito Solis by his side…or on top, or bottom, who knows? But surprisingly, it was the old man, in a reversal of expected sexual roles, who was the more energetic. And his bride, well, acted like the sweet young thing that she was, discreet and virginal.
It was Mang Johnny who wanted it all the time and the young bride somehow in her coyness, kept refusing. It was said that they did not have sex on the boat all the way across the Pacific, for almost a month. There were speculations why this was so, but none was ever confirmed. It would not be rumor anymore if confirmed, would it? She was constantly repulsing him with excuses. What does she think, he thought, that the marriage won’t be consummated? She’s crazy! But it was not till they were back in the States that he finally worked it in the conversation.
They were just getting up in the morning.
“Haneh, O, ngayon na.” He tugged a bit at the side of her duster dress. They were both still lying down. “Let’s do it now.”
“Ano? Teka. Magluluto pa ko, e. Saka na. Hold on a second; I still gotta cook. A little later. Mamayamaya na.”
Then, a little after breakfast,
“Ngayon na? Now already?”
“Mamayamaya na. Hugas muna ko ng pinggan, ha. A little later; let me wash the dishes first, okay?”
Around lunch, she noticed him approaching her with some urgency. “Now, na.”
Again, she answered, “Lots of errands, you know that. Cook again for lunch, laundry later, then hang up the clothes, lots of errands, so later na, ok? Mamayamaya na.”
Frustrated and at the end of his libido’s rope, he pulled her to his side, and blurted, “I said ngayon na!...At mamayamaya pa! Now already!…and then again later!” And that’s how Johnny got his name.
Bad First Impressions
In our cannery of South Naknek, there was a shack that housed all the fishing gear to dry: nets, skeins, tools, ropes, everything. It inspired a scene from “May I Dancing with You” in Seasons by the Bay. It was a good place for a conversation as a prelude to courting since that place had the least smell of salmon because of its open windows that welcomed the fresh Alaskan air. It was also convenient because there were many places in that shack for comfort, cover, and concupiscence. It was here that Miss Hollywood (I can’t say her name; she might still be around and if she found this out, she would hunt me down), beauty that she was, displayed her fishing prowess and the now famous “skein (sky) hook.” This was where Sky King ridiculed himself trying to impress her. Without asking her, he tried to help her by lifting a fishing net (skein) on a pile to dry. He couldn’t budge the thing. She stepped across him, picked up the pile with two hands, bent her beautiful knees outlined in that tight jeans, and released the net casting it simultaneously over the beam above with one hand following through, like a Kareem Abdul-Jabar sky hook shot. “You had the wrong footwork from the start,” she said. He sure did, he thought.
There were only a handful of women, mostly natives, in the canneries before 1975. They knew the odds (about 30 to one), and some played what the odds dictated. A woman of child-bearing age is always a candidate for Miss Hollywood of Bristol Bay. (Illustration by Tony Remington)
I too had made the wrong move or uttered the wrong thing trying to impress Miss Hollywood, the beautiful, feisty, and mysterious one. She had a page boy cut hair and walked quickly, with her arms hardly swaying, and her hands hardly visible under the overlong sleeves of her jacket.
Up the hill from the cannery, there was one multi-purpose building and that was Johnson’s bar. Sunday’s it was a church, weekends, a dance hall, and weekdays, a bar. On a rare moonlit night, at a dance at Johnson’s bar, I was sitting alone, and I said “Hi” to Miss Hollywood and her two friends as they made their rounds. I sat on a bench, pretty much not moving at all. I noticed her and her friends pass in front of me a couple of more times, and I greeted them as they passed. I saw the Wolfman dancing away in the middle of the crowd being cheered by the natives and the white guys. “Go Wolfman, go!” Meanwhile, the Wolfman was shouting in Filipino “This is how the white boys dance”, mimicking and flying into contortions of ridiculously awkward positions, to the Pinoys’ amazement and amusement.
Miss Hollywood and her posse passed by me again and this time she said, “Why aren’t you dancing?”
Trying to be flippant and cool-like, I answered, “No one ever asked me.” I could not read her reaction, but it was not one that I liked or expected.
“Well, you’re gonna sit there all night,” she said. And I did.
Outside the dance hall is a cliff overlooking the Naknek river, and at night little nooks would have lovers’ and lusters’ footprints, empty half-pint whisky bottles, and other remnants or evidence of their trysts with mosquitos as eager participants.
Cherchez la Femme
It was before coming to Alaska that I had worked in the orchards around Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, where I picked my first fruits of North America. It was partly because of a girl, the sister of the friend I was supposed to visit in Penticton. It was really her I wanted to see. From Vancouver to Penticton, at 15 years old, I and another boy had bought a car for $50, and traveled more than a thousand miles on four bald tires. This inspired my short story: “Baptism: A Parable of Summer” in Seasons by the Bay.
Some ten years later, in a room at the Reynold’s Hotel at the International District of Seattle, James Bond would tell me that he walked the whole city of Anchorage end to end, downtown to Elmendorf Air Force base, in tight jeans and leather shoes, just to see someone’s smile. It was still worth it in those days, he said. There was still room for fools and foolhardiness. I know of what he speaks. From South Naknek in the boondocks to other boondock towns whose names I’ve now forgotten, I took two bush planes and landed at two makeshift airports in the middle of Lake Iliamna in the Kenai Peninsula, to visit my friend Craig in Nondalton; but it was really to see his cousin, who served as the inspiration for the character of Katherine in “The Visitor.”
“Him-la!!!” was one of Eng the Chinaman’s few choice utterances. It meant someone got “him’d,” (pronoun used as a verb). Back in the day, the old timers used to tell me with malicious delight the origin of this nuanced term. If you were reported to have slept with a native woman, the whole village would know and soon the troopers would know. If you thought you would get away Scott-free, think again. Many were halted at the South Naknek “International” Airport by authorities, (bosses or troopers). The woman would be brought as the workers boarded their bush planes for King Salmon, with transfer to Anchorage. She would point the accusing finger at the luckless Pinoy waiting in line to board, and say “Him!” Patay. Dead ball. He then would have to stay the winter and, if a baby was born, before they let him go, he had to make amends by arranging finances for the kid in case he didn’t intend to stay longer. Where is the Wolfman this year? Not here. He got “him’d” last season. I guess folks thought the practice was an incentive for self-control. It did not work too well with the Alaskero’s libido. All the Pinoys reported to have been “him’d” willingly stayed, however. To a man, they wanted to see their kid, and not staying was not an option.
Before returning to mainland USA (“down below”, “lower 48”), the Pinoys would file to board the bush plane that would carry them to King Salmon, then transfer to Anchorage. Authorities and sometimes Troopers would be there checking the workers for unpaid bills, stolen goods, etc. This was the time a girl would be pointing out a slippery lover who would, according to folklore, have to stay the coming winter. (Illustration by Tony Remington)
Looking back on things, I would sometimes realize that I, like William Faulkner, was looking back into the past as a rider on a moving train, with my back to the front, seeing the vista of the past widening but getting further and further away. In hindsight, I was always looking at things disappearing or fading away (e.g. the Alaskero lifestyle, Manilatown in San Francisco) and some things being born in the dying (e.g. Ethnic Studies, the Financial District’s Manhattanization of San Francisco), but of course, I was young and I was taken by the lure and romance of adventure, and something more than that, something I did not yet know. I was there for camaraderie, but something deeper loomed larger. Though, because of my youth, I didn’t notice the full impact of events at the time, I felt a witness to something passing and something coming up on the horizon, a big, brown rolling wonder. I felt the stars starting to align, like Napoleon must have, when he felt the pulse of destiny in his veins.
The Balcutha, now enshrined in San Francisco's Maritime Building on Fisherman' Wharf, used to be the flagship for decades of the Alaska Cannery Association traversing waters routinely from San Francisco to Alaska.
Location, Location, Location
Canneries, no matter how big or small, will have a fish house, a cannery, and a warehouse. Then there would be lodgings for the workers, separated racially, ethnically, and class-wise.
Here were some likely places to have sex:
The dump yards, where one could watch bears eat at midnight, was the number one date spot for lovers, would-be lovers, or one night stands. You must hijack a truck or vehicle to do this.
The docked fishing boats were good places to start the party. Or end it. But privacy is rare.
Then, there was the warehouse itself, with makeshift, flattened, cardboard boxes thrown on the cold floor, between hot cans of salmon cooling off. In ideal times, one could have a warm and cozy little corner. One could even have music playing from a portable machine brought from the bunkhouse. However, coitus interruptus was always looming near.
Women mostly of college age, relatives of white administrators and of cannery workers, also started coming in significant numbers around 1975, when the male college age white workers started working what were many Filipino cannery positions. The sex and romance changed too, in leaps and bounds, like the Internet.
James Bond was by far the most romantic dreamer in the cannery. He was already a veteran of many canneries in Alaska when I got there, and he was not much older than I was. Eleven out of 12 months -- cannery folks spoke of his stay in Alaska. It was said that his wife “down below the lower forty-eight” greeted him at the door with a newly packed suitcase for the next 11 months. He was the one who named me “Shane.” Because I always came back, he said. Kids around the village used to follow me around and sometimes I would promise to be back with some smuggled food or soda pop from the cannery. Funny, salmon was what brought us all together--characters from around the world—yet, among the children of the village, salmon was never sought or even mentioned when looking for something to eat.
One windy night, we had some free time. Chavacan the Mexican, my bunk mate, opened the door and there was James Bond with a guitar slung over his shoulder, a red silk scarf around his neck, and a vest, with no shirt on.
“Come on, Shane. Come with me.”
“Where the hell are you going?”
“Come on, Shane. You know where. C’mon.”
“Hey, there’s gonna be lots of fish tomorrow; we better get some shut-eye.”
“C’mon, Shane. Nobody knows how many fish is coming tomorrow. And so what? Let ‘em all come. We’ll handle them all. Let’s go watch the bears in the dumps. Twyla is going to be there.”
Ah, Twyla, the half-Russian Indian. I figured something like that.
“I’m gonna serenade the hell out of her, Shane. I’m gonna harana her like nobody’s business. I’m gonna sing to her till she says yes! I’m gonna sing to her till I become the song itself! Here have a shot.” And he pulled out a Seagram 7 out of his back pocket. “C’mon, Shane, let’s go.”
What could one do? Would you refuse a legend? But then, later, I found out, everybody was a legend in Alaska.
Workers who worked with the author, some from San Francisco, whom the author rarely saw when in San Francisco.
The Crow’s Nest Challenge.
High above the cannery, atop the company office, sat the Crow’s Nest. Supposedly, the Penthouse of the Cannery. Only whites, of course, though there’d be no signs saying so. Sometimes I got a strange notion, a sinister one, an irreverent urge to have sex there just to give a collective “Fuck you” to the Mormons and other white evangelicals of the world whom, I see even in the streets of Manila and the country roads of Leyte. But I never got close to that Crow’s Nest. Nor to procuring a partner for the daring deed.
Fresh Beginnings
You can reinvent yourself in Alaska. That’s what one Romeo Vasquez did. Because of personal and legal troubles at home in the Philippines, the screen idol found himself working on the sliming tables of the Red Salmon Company across the river from its rival, the Alaska Packers Association Cannery of South Naknek, where I worked. I was an innocent witness to the age- old triangle of betrayal among a threesome. I guess I would make it a foursome, though I was a non-participant in the arrangement. I included this piece into another story of mine. “A Mechanic for the Second Season,” I think. Or was it in “Pieces of the (Midnight) Sun”?
In the warehouse where we worked as the Lye Wash Crew, Chavacan The Mexican, spotting a young couple, whispered to me, in Spanish and gestures, “There they are, the skin-and-bones lovers. I don’t know but they don’t need much room. They can do it practically anywhere, just a little nook is all they need; they are so thin.” He smiled. “They are so skinny I bet you when they make love, they make fire!” and he rubbed his two index fingers like two sticks together.
The two lean lovebirds were Nick, the foreman’s son, and his white girlfriend whose name I have forgotten. She had freckles. They had a spot in the warehouse that I always noticed when used because we, the lye wash crew, were the ones to leave work last of any crew member. We have to wait for the last cans to be cooked, and that took 90 minutes. Even the butchers in the fish house who were responsible for cleaning their machines before quitting had already gone home by then. That Nick could sing the blues like nobody’s business. When we had leisure time, it was good to hear and see him do his thing. He would really get into it. Just one of the unappreciated, unheard of talents of an Alaskero. One summer, he did not show up. They had found him dead floating on the river in Delano one spring, and the foreman grieved for that only son of his, and we felt it all throughout that season.
“The dump yards, where one could watch bears eat at midnight, was the number one date spot for lovers, would-be lovers, or one night stands. You must hijack a truck or vehicle to do this.”
The Nurse
One year we had a company nurse surprisingly come in during the height of the fishing catch. She was a slender middle- aged black woman, very gracious and motherly. Lo and behold, everybody, including me, got mysteriously sick that season, at least once. Just the touch of a woman’s soft and tender hand on our bodies was heaven and pleasure enough to warrant a visit to the Nurse. Their tough Alaskero machismo veneer melted like ice still clinging to the banks of the Naknek River in summer, that was used for drinks every end-of-the-season party.
The Wages of Sin
The foreman, when he saw youngbloods half-conked out, still groggy from the good times the night before or early morning, would gesture for me to come, and whisper in my ear quite loudly: “The wages of sin. Hehehe. The wages of sin. They were so lively last night at the bar, but look at them now. Sleeping like babies during their 15-minute break. Not even bothering with a snack. Shit! Plastado lahat. Sonamabit! That one still have food on his lips; that one his coffee still steaming, untouched; the third one, his working gloves still half on, half off. Sonamabit! Someone take a picture.”
I saw one condom during all the 15 consecutive summers I spent there. It was lying on a windy-edged beach near the water below Johnson’s Bar. When I got to my room in the bunkhouse I quickly scratched out a poem “Looking for Berries” that I like until now. The poem, not the condom.
Many Alaskeros’ real love and sex lives were most likely in ruin. Betrayals. Best friends cheating with their wives while they were following the seasons to the tune of “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” were old stories. Many, of course, were already not getting along; relationships were on the rocks even without a stint in Alaska as an excuse. An affair here and there, someone’s wife running off with a white pimp, leaving the Alaskero with two small kids, not knowing what became of her or when she would be back. Scattered around were ruined Manongs, ruined cannery buildings, ruined machines, ruined lives, with old men and the boys of summer working and playing among them.
Oscar Peñaranda
Oscar Peñaranda is an educator, writer, and culture-bearer for and from both shores of the Pacific, and is a recipient of the prestigious Gawad Alagad ni Balagtas for lifetime achievement for his writings and endeavors. He currently sits on the board for the San Francisco Filipino Cultural Center.
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