DON Angel Pantaleon de Miranda, in his storied goodness, had only supremely sublime ends in founding Kuliat.
Conversely – more aptly, perversely – Angeles, the city that rose out of Kuliat, was conceived in and birthed from the loins of an occupying army. How the Don must have convulsed in his grave! The epithetical “Sodom of the Pacific” summed up the city’s not so distant American past, and impacted in its present as well (Or as badly?).
Sin City has been so etched in the national psyche as an Angeles legacy that it simply cannot be buried in oblivion, not even by the thousand tons of Mt. Pinatubo ash and lahar that devastated the city. Or, if one may, phoenix-like it formed, flew and flourished from that very volcanic ash. Whichever, Sin City is there as ever in all its shameful – or should it be shameless? – ignominy. An unwanted but indefeasible heritage.
So we wrote in a piece titled Heritage of sin in the Feb. 2-8, 2006 issue of the long-defunct Pampanga News and reprinted here more than once, the last time just last September. Dusted off the files then in juxtaposition to Mayor Edgardo D. Pamintuan’s relentless pursuit of the renaissance of his city, actually its return to old, virtuous Angeles.
Aye, to that the very vision of Don Angel Pantaleon, which EdPam, in all fairness, is accomplishing. Retrieved anew, this time, in reference to some gruesome crime in Hong Kong that found resonance in Angeles. No thanks to the dogged enterprise of the wire services. ABS-CBN took it from there and bannered “PH sin city was magnet for Briton charged in HK murders” datelined Angeles City and went:
A wealthy British banker charged over grisly twin murders in Hong Kong was a regular in a shabby red-light district of the Philippines where he liked to flash his cash and was treated like a king.
The women in skimpy outfits working the short stretch of go-go and hostess bars of Angeles City remember Rurik Jutting fondly. At the cramped Del Rio bar, workers said he would swig bottles of a local low-calorie beer while handing out cash, buying everyone rounds of drinks and keeping an eye on one of the dancers, who would become his girlfriend.
Women would rush to the door when they saw Jutting arrive and lead him to his favorite spot, a moldy fake-leather couch that they covered with a pink blanket so he would not get rashes on his legs, said 26-year-old hostess Joy Reyes.
“He’s a big spender. Everyone would welcome him whenever he’s here. It also doesn’t hurt that he is handsome,” she said. Our esteemed friend and former fellow deadline-beater Consul Elmer Cato, first secretary at the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC and a true blue Angeleno, lamented: “Angeles is nothing compared to Thailand and other destinations.
What we need to do is to project the other side of the city. There is more to Angeles than just Fields Avenue.” Very right. But sadly, it is Fields Avenue that has always provided the face of Angeles City to the world. In that article Heritage of sin, thus: Fields Avenue has an international reputation, being the point of convergence of foreigners, no, make that a miniature United Nations in the city, with its share of just about every nationality: American, Australian, British, Belgian, Swiss, German, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, whatever. To some others though, Fields Avenue could make the Interpol’s rogues’ gallery on the profiles of some of its habitués.
Yet another international factor for Fields Avenue is its having more hits in the Internet than the Angeles City and Pampanga websites combined. Then there was that spread – publicity, good or bad is still publicity – in the glossy GQ magazine late last year, indeed a crowning achievement for Angeles City’s famed avenue of the senses.”
EdPam rued the “abuses by foreigners themselves when they published in European magazines photos of our ladies in skimpy bikinis” greatly contributing to an image of decadence for the city. It is more than pictures of go-go girls.
And it’s been happening for sooo looong a time now, Sir. Here’s from another piece, from another paper and another time – Sin City in my Golpe de Sulat column in the Sun-Star Clark issue of January 27, 1997. THAT ANGELES City is the main course in the international sex menu is no shocking matter anymore. It has always been. It shall always be.
So, one Big Apple Oriental Tours in New York advertised “12-night stay in the Philippines for any American male and select your companion upon arrival in Angeles City for $2,195.” So the ad even had a built-in warranty: the pimp to check the morning after if the client had a good night, if the girl “performed satisfactorily.” So? So.
I remember sometime in the ‘80s, a tour operator in one village in the Australian Outback advertised in a pamphlet “Come to Angeles City. The girls are cheap. 100 pesos only.” I remember too reading in one local Outback shit of a sheet an article saying, “Filipino men are willing to sell their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers for a few dollars.”
EdPam’s resigned lamentation over the current issue: “I guess we have to live with this kind of news till we finally decide to totally close all the clubs and bars in Balibago and Malabañas like what Mayor [Alfredo] Lim did to Ermita in Manila more than two decades ago.”
Being hizzoner at that time, EdPam knows whereof he speaks. As we wrote in that Sin City piece too: When Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim cleaned Malate and cleansed Ermita of the flesh traders and sex enslavers, there was wide applause in Angeles. Not in oneness with the mayor’s righteous outrage. But for the opportunity the banishment shall offer Angeles.
True enough, Angeles welcomed them all – the white devils from Down Under and from everywhere – with open hearts, hugging arms and scissoring legs, to fill the void left by the departed Gringos on Fields Avenue, First Street, and BJ Alley.
And EdPam knows full well the dislocation, if not total devastation, a de-barred Fields Avenue would impact on the local economy. Cognizant of what the city everyman sees, as articulated in our Sin City story in 1997 yet, thus:
Despite its pretensions to high commerce and rising industry, Angeles City shall always have a service-based economy, founded principally on the overwhelming supply of sexuality. Look at its present. GROs in karaokes.
Stripteasers and go-go dancers in clubs and lounges. Table-girls even in barbeque plazas. Masahistas. The girls of the casas. Pick-up ladies from the settlements. Caddy girls for evening holes-in-one. The Area.
Study its past. The banana and hot dog cutters of Red Baron. The dog-and-girl act of what is now Exotic 2000. The beer-for-BJ of Studio 1 or something. The shower scenes in just about every other club. The girls near Amagi. The Area.
So what do we expect of a city primarily built to satisfy the loins of a conquering imperialist army? Life is sex. Sex is life. So it was with Sodom. So it was with Gomorrah. So it is with Angeles. SO, AS IT was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Segue now to the ending of the first article cited: Sin City forever. A fitting heritage for Angeles.
Pronounce that the American way – ein-jeh-less, as in angel-less. Meaning, without angels, as in where there is sin there are no angels. Yeah, there are some things we just have to live with, no matter how seemingly shameful.
As there are things we just have to keep on doing with pride. Like being one with EdPam in persistently pursuing Don Angel Pantaleon’s dream.
