I.
Angeles is where the alt-right went to die, I’m told.
“I think most of the civ-nats, frog-posters, MAGA-pedes—guys like that—ended up here over the last five years or so. Same kind of kids who have one bad date and listen to Tom Leykis tapes for hours on end. Not really my business, but they’re good optics for the older guys. But now we’ve even got the…Charlottesville bros, the school shooter types. There’s even some wingnut who claims he’s the living reincarnation of some German philosopher named Fichte! The crackpot’s living three doors down from me at the complex.”
The man imparting this wisdom to me is Saul Greenbaum, a late-middle-aged pickup artist who runs seminars for retirees on sex vacations in the Philippines. He’s a native coastal cosmopolitan hailing from San Fran who relocated after ‘Nam. At the moment, he’s driving me to his new condominium in the suburbs of Angeles City from Aquino International Airport. To do this, we must drive through the barrios in his 2013 Dodge Charger, a feat of stupidity that I’d never allow myself to ever commit. Allegedly, I’m interviewing him for Media Matters.
Saul looks every part of the professional pussy-monger. Decked in a half-buttoned Fred Perry Hawaiian shirt, too-tight Bermuda shorts and bright white Keds, his curly ginger chest hair frizzes from his torso in all directions and shouts at you in Yiddish.
“I’m just telling you this because I want you to take care of yourself while you’re here.” He warned in a hushed, gravelly voice, taking his right hand off the steering wheel and tenderly tapping my shoulder. Using his free hand, he thrust the wheel left, turning sharply down a dirt road. I turned my head towards his. He looked at me from under his Ray-Bans while a strand of his slicked-back hair fell and broke our eye contact.
“What are you, some kinda Spaniard?”
I don’t bother proffering a reply.
“They hate that, you know. Africa starts at the Pyrenees as far as they’re concerned.” Even his questions were lectures in miniature.
“I’m from South Jersey. Millville,” I finally corrected.
“No kid, I mean where are you really from? Your parents?”
“Italian-American. The family came through Ellis Island a hundred years ago.”
“Mishegas, really? Wouldn’t have guessed.”
I explained to him in brief that the Spaniards ruled over southern Italy for four hundred years, and some put down roots and assimilated. I was descended from one: a Basque hildago who was chamberlain for the Viceroy, but was otherwise 100 percent pure-blood Sicilian, and was supposed to remind everyone who forgot. This backstory was explained to me by my father in middle school before being instructed not to associate with Latinos of any sort.
Are Filipinos Latino?
“It makes fitting in here easier, I guess. As many Diaz-es in Manila as there are teenies selling cooze,” he offered with a wry smirk, obviously uninterested in expanding on the history lesson. Probably for the best, as that was all I could offer him on my own origins.
A moment later, we stopped in front of what I presumed was his condominium complex. A premium SoFlo style luxury joint, it looked as if it had been lifted straight out of Fort Myers and dropped in the middle of this cesspool of a country. A sign nearby read “Platinum Estates Philippines, Angeles Metro Area,” effectively indicating just how successful this man had been in his pickup-pointer business. A condo might as well be a palace to most of the local people around here.
“Sunk everything I made the past two years into this baby,” he explained, showing off the exterior of his pad with a wave of his arm as he exited the car. The white adobe finish was already getting dusty from all the barren, upturned clay topsoil that surrounded us. This was obviously Chinese construction.
“Nice,” I said without much thought.
“They’re gonna find me dead in here one day,” he noted, “with two little Flips taking turns bouncing on my rigor mortis cock.”
I smiled.
As we walked up pathway along the Martian lawn, Saul seemed to empty out his thoughts.
“I was surprised when they sent you. Wasn’t expecting a goy.”
“I think it’s because I’m the only one at the magazine who speaks Tagalog.”
“Really?”
“Just a little.” I put a bit of air betwixt my index finger and thumb. For the first time, Greenbaum looked genuinely impressed. He stopped just short of his door.
“Pardon my French here kid, but how’d a Jersey wop end up learning Tagalog?
“College girlfriend.”
“No shit, where’d you go?”
“Temple.”
“Ah, plenty of them in Philly. Lots of these girls want to get to the Northeast. They’re going to be in for a rude one when the winter comes.”
“Right.”
“Well, let’s get inside. You must be fucking sweating in that.” He said, pointing at my outfit, a FILA tracksuit. Current season, red and black Roy Wang edition. It’s a complete set, down to the matching socks and shoes: Disruptors. The ensemble is a thousand-dollar, true two-way tracksuit, a complete and perfect melding of function and form, work and leisure. The colorway and pattern was designed by master concept artist Roy Wang (PBUH) and focus-grouped by a double-blind panel of design students in Milan Polytechnic. According to the results, Wang’s vision was so marketable and perfect, it was un-meddled with. Combined with the Italian authenticity of a brand like FILA, founded in 1911 in the Alpine village of Biella, it was nothing short of a chef d’oeuvre. A work on par with the treasures in the Uffizi.
If he insulted it, I probably would’ve necked him right there. In broad daylight, on his front lawn, I wouldn’t have given two fucks.
Fortunately, he didn’t, and I followed him inside.
II.
The aroma that hit me upon entering was an olfactory soup of plaster shavings and marijuana.
“They just finished the ceilings. Wanted the speckle,” he said, thumbing up. I didn’t bother following his motion.
“You can grab a seat in the living room if you want. Get your notes ready and all that shit.”
“I just need this,” I replied, yanking out my phone from my jacket pocket.
“Shit, everybody does everything on those now. That the XS?”
“XR.”
“Lookin’ good, that’s the cheap one, eh?”
I offered nothing further, and so Saul continued in my absence. In the meantime, I found a seat on his leather couch. It looked like one of the IKEA makes, black. Cigarette burns had eaten into the leather. The rest of the living room was filled with the furniture and knick-knacks that I expected a sixty-something to possess. Across from me was a knock-off Eames chair. Fleetwood Mac memorabilia lined the walls, from signed albums to poster prints. His baseball card collection sat on the water-ringed coffee table in a binder. It was as if his mind had effectively frozen itself in 1975, probably his first and last year of service in the Army.
“Mary Jane?”
“Nah.”
“You want some Joe, then? It’s just instant shit, nothing especial.”
“Sure.”
He comes over a moment later with the brown goop masquerading as espresso. I dutifully place my iPhone on the coffee table, with the Voice Memo app open and running.
“We jumping right in?” he asked.
“In a second.” I thrust my index finger up. Then I unzip my track-jacket halfway.
“Yeah, no rush.”
Gathering my thoughts, I begin.
“I’m interviewing you here today because you approached our publication with detailed knowledge about white nationalists operating in the Philippine underworld.”
“Hell yeah, the fucks.”
“Can you start off by naming some of these individuals?” His eyes turn upward in thought.
“Yeah, of course. As far as I know, we’ve got Mike Enoch out in Manila, running some kinda titty bar, Don Camillo in Subic Bay as the curator of a colonial history museum where they give people acid baths in the archives, and the slick Rick himself—“
As he monologues, I reach into my tracksuit and pull out my piece—a Beretta 81—holstered to my armpit. He stops suddenly when he belatedly realizes that I’m pointing it at him.
“—Now look, I ain’t got shit in the bank, but you can have the condo.”
“I’m alright, thanks.”
A look of desperation creeps over his wrinkled face.
“What can I do?”
“Nothing.”
After a moment of dead silence, I point to the phone.
“I’m recording this conversation. It’s going to the person who ordered this. Anything you want to tell him?”
Realizing his fate, his eyes dart down to that magical machine, the legacy of Steve Jobs’ (PBUH) life’s work, and then back up at me.
“That fucking fed motherfucker Dick Spenc—“
He can’t finish his thought because his frontal cortex splatters all over the recliner. Without a second thought, I walk over and reach into his pocket before the blood gets past his collarbone, lifting his car keys. Taking his whip to a chop shop should net me an extra grand. Enough for a new tracksuit.
I exit the house after wiping down the table with a facial tissue. The job was clean. I jog out of the house and into his car.
After starting the whip, I turn on the radio. Greenbaum had it preset to Subic Bay’s oldies station, 104.5 FM, the Mandalay. Irma Thomas is just crescendoing her heartfelt cry in “Time is on my Side.” I leave the door open, radio blasting, and opt to take one more look at my latest masterpiece.
I’m a goddamn Caravaggio.
III.
I only masturbate to trap hentai when I’ve had to whack someone that day. It’s the only way I can unwind. And only specific trap hentai, because I should clarify: I’m not a faggot. I’m Italian-American. It’s quite literally impossible for me to be a faggot.
This is my imaginary excuse for someone questioning my off hours, a line of reasoning I repeat to myself as I sit, back slumped in a post-ejaculatory haze, my computer screen bearing the banner of my stimulation. If someone told my eighteen year old-self, freshly admitted into Temple—and rushing for frats—that I’d be spending my late twenties in a dank apartment in the Philippines getting myself off to niche Japanese porn cartoons, I’d probably have popped them.
But here we are; here I am. Thug-rich in Asia with a cock that only gets hard to Kaname, a porn manga about an effeminate male high school student who dresses up as a girl and lets his best friend fuck him in the ass.
I should clarify that the story is quite riveting: there’s a redemption arc, and the title character is able to overcome a series of physical and emotional trials that are associated with his burgeoning sexuality. I also deeply identify with the title character’s love interest, who isn’t a faggot either. He just likes fucking girls and boys who look like girls. I don’t see him as gay, or myself as a homo for self-inserting a little bit. He likes Kaname because he looks like a girl, gets his ass pounded like a girl, but thinks and speaks like a guy.
I could theoretically just immerse myself into some Filipina five-oh, hot piece of tits and ass. I’m relatively young, in tight shape, and pull in about $4,000 a month, which is a king’s ransom here. But where is the agape? The sort of Neoclassical romance between trap and boy that Kaname depicts? It’s pointless, and so I remain here, waiting for the next phone call from Club Valhalla, the Subic-Bay-Manila-Galleon Museum, or the distribution office of Radix Philippines.
I guess I’m a hitman for the white nationalist mob in Luzon.
IV.
Club Valhalla is the only girly bar in Angeles with a monitor that streams Red Ice TV broadcasts. Today’s headline is “Niggermania 2024,” and it serves as an openly hostile contemplation on the current election. From what I can gather, the RNC, now openly run by Israeli media moguls, has just declared Kanye West (PBUH) as President Trump’s (PBUH) successor, followed by a condemnation of black Republicans by opponent Kamala Harris (PBUH). Henrik Palmgren, the erstwhile host of the show, then goes on to explain that any self-respecting white nationalist should relocate to Manila, where the nucleus of an ethnostate is being formed, and that it goes without saying that America is already lost.
I’m inclined to agree, for different reasons. America feels very remote, very meaningless here. I realize that this entire country is propped up by the CIA and that every individual here follows U.S. news religiously, but after four years of exile, America is more of a concept to me than an actual country. A plane of existence made up entirely of elderly whites and young mulattos, where AARP and La Raza duel each other on the airwaves.
I’m always amused at the bar girls, who actually will watch Red Ice as if it were mainstream news. Most of them are fresh off the farms, so I understand that they obviously don’t know any better. That being said, though, I genuinely believe that inside the heart of every Filipina is a nascent white nationalist, and inside this barely-concealed brothel, my own views are cemented each time I visit. We are gods here, and I never forget it.
The booth I’m sitting in is immediately pounced on by what must be two of the new hires. The old girls haven’t had time to warn them yet, I take it.
The first slides right up next to me in the booth, drawing her tiny body close to mine. The second makes her way into the couch across and undresses me with fierce eye contact. They’re quite a pair.
“You look great today, Daddy.” The first one seemed real confident in her English, justifiably so. It usually takes these girls a few months before they get comfortable using the language to really seduce, but she’s a natural. It helps that she’s a spry young thing who is probably jailbait.
The second girl, a bit chunky, didn’t quite have it, but gave it a college try regardless.
“Mikey E say no fee!”
I turn to the first girl and place a fatherly hand around her shoulders.
“Huwag mo akong pakialamanan.”
She furrows her brow at the rejection, turns to her compatriot who obviously understood, and returns to the bar with her wing-woman to be laughed at by the older hookers.
Eventually I get a tap on the shoulder from one of the bouncers. I give him a nod. Mike is ready to talk now; that’s what this means. I stand up and take one last look around the bar. A dozen young hookers, ten TVs, and six Filipino cops drinking piss beer in the corner. A real sight, especially if it’s going to be my last, because you never know in this line of work.
I’m ushered through the backroom offices and into the ersatz meeting room that I’ve been reporting to for the better part of a year now. It’s nothing special: a large storage room converted into a man-cave, with a billiards table, mini-bar, and two flat-screen TVs on the wall. Hung across the wall above the screens is an “UNPLUG THE NFL” banner with an anti-Semitic rendering of Roger Goodell and the lynched cartoon corpse of Colin Kaepernick.
The TVs aren’t playing any programming: instead, they appear to be mirroring a computer screen. The Garageband app is open, and WAV files cover the screen. Podcasts, the true bread of the alt-right mob, are being baked in this kitchen, and this one is probably The Daily Shoah, if I had to guess. The man doing the editing is also the man I was contracted by as an associate of the Angeles crew: Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich.
“Hey, uh, thanks for taking care of that,” he says distractedly as he cuts out the strained soprano of a Kevin B. MacDonald (PBUH) snort. He makes no effort to even look at me.
“No problem,” I say, eyes fixed toward the screen.
Mike maybe turns to face me at that moment, but I don’t notice. I’m staring at his bookshelf. The large Cambridge Goethe Companion that he kept as a bookend has departed from its prominent place. I wonder why?
“I’ve got one more job for you.”
V.
I wait for the bar to die down before I pull up a seat. All the Filipino cops, save one, have just paired off with the hookers. The only one left in the first floor is a stout old man, who scopes out the bar much the same way I did. He must be the designated driver.
It only takes me a moment to make eye contact with the bartender. She’s my ex-girlfriend, Marina. We broke up because I’m emotionally distant and was uninterested in meeting her family. Marina’s thirty now, too old to be a full-time whore. Much to her credit, she actually went to a bartending school, got a provincial license, and can make a fine Long Island, which I order. We’re on decent terms now, I think. It’s been a year.
“That’s new, right?” she asked, pointing to my tracksuit.
“2019 Roy Wang collab.”
“Ah.”
The Long Island teases me into taking a long swig. There’s extra triple-sec, so it goes down like cough medicine. She remembers how I like it. Marina’s the closest thing to a mommy GF you can get in this backwater.
“Did you send those two girls over earlier?” I ask with a forced smirk.
“Which ones?” Marina replied, thoughtfully.
“The new ones.”
“Celeste and Lani?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I warned them.”
“Right.”
I should’ve expected that of Marina. A long silence pervades, interrupted only by the clanking of my glass on the barwood.
“Hey…” I begin, unsure how to ask what I’m about to ask.
“I’m off in twenty minutes, yeah?” She jumps ahead of my thoughts, as usual.
“You want to?” I’m a bit surprised, to be frank.
“I need to.”
Twenty minutes later, we relocate upstairs. The bar, like most of the titty bars around this town, has private lodging upstairs for “short time” stays: two hours at most. Enough time to get your rocks off, shower, and then grab a quick nap on a cum-stained comforter.
Marina’s miniskirt came off shortly after we entered. Right now, she’s pleasuring herself in front of me on the dirty mattress, spread eagle. Maybe she’s hoping it’ll get me aroused. I don’t really know what she thinking anymore. If you asked me to name a moment in the relationship in which I found myself genuinely emotionally close to her, I couldn’t. I’ve long since forgotten.
After some time in sober contemplation, I climb on top of her, fully clothed. I go in for a long kiss, but it feels gross and foreign to me. Locking our lips gives me just enough time to stick the stiletto in her torso.
The blade, with a quick twist of my hand, severs her descending aorta. She has another twenty seconds of life in her.
“B-baby…” She lets out with a pained squeal.
“Saul Greenbaum?”
“I-I need to g-get ou…” I’m losing her.
“How much?” I attempt to shake her awake.
“Nick…”
“How much?”
I don’t bother asking thrice. She’ll be giving head to Death a minute.
Rising from her increasingly lifeless body, I light up a cigarette—a soft pack Chunghwa—appreciating my most recent work. Where my last piece was evocative and very Neapolitan-baroque, this was a bit more Venetian. Marina had a very Mannerist cunt. The fact that she had pissed herself as she passed away and left a golden halo around her pale womanhood seemed to punch the point home. It was a kind of urine chiaroscuro.
I take a picture on my phone and send it to Mike over QQ, a government-owned Chinese messaging service. Filename: “Done.”
I think now of only Kaname.
***
For all installments of “City of Angels,” click here.
Ryan is a dashing Iberian-American and expatriate academic. He is currently a visiting lecturer in English Literature and Rhetoric at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian (formerly Port Arthur), Liaoning, China. His fiction has also been featured in Fluland, Soft Cartel, and Argonautica. You can slide into his DMs here. Please ensure all communiques are sent in a Staten Island accent.
