THE TANDUAY RUM DIARIES #2: THE FIRST CHURCH OF FERNANDO POE JR
…in which your humble narrator, and Dani Palisa, his
tattooed Sancho Panza, are on a Search For Weng Weng shoot in Manila, only to
discover Christ in his Second Coming is to take the shape of their former King
of Action Movies
[Previously published on the Video Zoo blog, September 2011]
Andrew: It’s January 2008, on the fourth trip to Manila for the
yet-to-be-finished Search For Weng Weng documentary, and I take the text
message summons from former SOS Daredevil, Sixties and Seventies action movie
goon and Weng Weng’s co-star Steve Alcarado. I’d stumbled upon Steve quite by
accident on my first shoot in November 2006 while he was drinking coffee with
his fellow out-of-work goons at Quezon
City’s Tropical Hut. I got to know Steve quite well;
he’s a wily goon who’s constantly pitching me projects. One of my proudest
souvenirs from The Trenches is a hand-painted poster for “Tomorrow Is Another
Day” along with a two-page synopsis which features, among other action
essentials, ninjas, samurais, exploding speedboats, and the Pinoy James Bond
himself, Tony Ferrer, in the starring role of the debut from “Leavold
Productions”. Ferrer is now well into his Seventies and has managed to elude my
barrage of requests to interview him. And I’ve been persistent. After all, he
did play Weng Weng’s boss in For Your Height Only, and his Agent Falcon’s
trademark white suit had inspired Double O’s similar if somewhat shrunken
attire.
Steve had cordially invited Dani and I to a company shindig,
with the promise of meeting Tony Ferrer as bait. At the time Steve was one of
several former goons working as sales representatives for an earthmoving
company in Quezon City, its office inside a walled compound on the busiest
stretch of EDSA an empty Tanduay bottle’s throw from the GMA-7 TV building.
Several of the old SOS guys had netted sales this month and are being honoured
with an all-you-can-drink cocktail party and roast pig barbecue at company HQ.
Dani and I figure Agent Falcon is unlikely to make an appearance, but with the
prospect of swimming through free booze with the old stunt guys, the SOS
Daredevil has made an indecent proposal which was impossible to refuse.
At the appointed I leave Dani and Big Jim Gaines, a
six-four, half-African American veteran of action movies, to park Jim’s SUV,
and meet Steve Alcarado (“I’m the Lee Van Cleef of the Philippines!” he told me
at our first meeting, his eyes appropriately narrowed to slits) outside GMA. As
we approach the eight foot gates to the Waco-style compound, Steve says to me,
with all the sincerity he can muster: “My boss wants to give you a book to take
back to Australia.
It’s religious…” He draws a breath “… but not very.”
I say nothing, ignoring all manner of warning bells and
whistles. At this point, the “booze and goons” mantra has completely taken
over.
 |
| In the belly of the Beast |
Steve and I exit EDSA and walk through an eight foot gate
into a carpark the size of a baseball field. HQ is on the left, an enormous man-made
lake has taken over most of the right hand side, and a bamboo hut on stilts is
perched over the grey-green water.
Outside the CEO’s office, I sit on a couch and begin to leaf
through the company’s magazine placed strategically on the coffee table in
front of me. On the cover is the smiling countenance of the Philippines’
greatest ever goon, Fernando Poe Jr (or FPJ), surrounded by a snapshot halo of
the thirteen Filipino presidents including the current Gloria Arroyo.
Underneath are the ominous words: “Divine Government of God.”
To put FPJ in perspective: until his death in 2004 following
a failed bid at the presidency, he represented to his generations of fans a
bizarre, mythic amalgam of John Wayne and the Infant of Prague. Roles in over
250 action films from the mid 50s cast him as a stoic champion of the poor, the
downtrodden, the forgotten Pinoy Everyman. Without exception he’s an honourable
man pushed to the brink by cartoonish screen villains, usually played by Max
Alvarado or Paquito Diaz and their armies of SOS Daredevil goons, until he
snaps and dispenses righteous justice with both fists or his trademark .45s and
Magnum .357s. More than a few of the Philippines’
millions of Catholics are no doubt still holding their collective breaths on
the Vatican
approving FPJ’s sainthood.
On Page Ten is a story on how the Pope is the Antichrist,
how Arroyo is the Satanic Pope’s emissary in the Philippines, and how Poland is
the centre of apostasy – why I couldn’t fathom, other than the previous pope
was born there, the evil fucker. Central to this bizarre cosmography is the
belief that Arroyo had stolen the president’s chair at Malacanang Palace from
FPJ during the 2003 elections, a notion proving more believable with each
passing year of Arroyo’s rotten, corrupt, stinking-of-traded-horsemeat
presidency.
Dani: After dropping Andrew off, me and Jim cruise around
the seedy backstreets surrounding EDSA before being given the all-clear to park
within the compound itself. Greeted by a guard with a semi-automatic rifle and
a grin full of jackal-like, albeit rotten teeth, we’re escorted in. This place
immediately strikes me as strange. Looking at a man-made pontoon shack in the
middle of a man-made lake at the centre, while within the shack, people ran
around furiously preparing a pig on a spit.
 |
| Dai and Steve Alcarado |
As we got out of the car, Steve Alcarado leans out of the
glass monolith opposite the man-made lake/pontoon and beckons us over. “Andrew
is inside.”
We are led up a giant staircase to a sweaty, wide-eyed
Andrew, about four shades paler than usual. As Steve scuttles off and heads
downstairs, myself and Big Jim corner the terrified looking Andrew and ask him
what’s wrong.
In a hushed tone, he eyeballs us and whispers urgently,
“We’re in a cult!”
Big Jim furrows his brow. “What in Hell are you talking about?”
…this was the last thing I was expecting…
Andrew: I spit out the next few words in a ludicrous stage
whisper with all the gravity I could muster. “We’re in the First Church of
FPJ!”
Jim looks a little concerned. “Oh wow,” he finally says.
“Dude, do you want me to bust us out of here?”
“No!” I hiss. “Let’s see how weird this gets!”
Jim leads us past the earthmoving equipment parked in a
Panzer formation and over the bamboo drawbridge into the party hut. “Ok man,
but I got us covered, ok?”
He then spies FPJ’s half-brother Conrad Poe sitting on the
deck with a table full of SOS Daredevils cronies. I remember Conrad from our
interview the previous year – a thick silver-backed gorilla of a guy, he’d
unsuccessfully made the transition from goon in FPJ’s films to leading man in
his own right. Still, he has a powerful presence onscreen and off, an aura of
power emanating from his position in FPJ’s filmic Royal Family.
“Hey, it’s cool! Conrad’s here!” Jim announces. He then hisses to Conrad, “You’re not the
High Priest of this goddamned cockamamie FPJ cult, are you?”
“Nah!” says Conrad, dismissing him with a wave over an
enormous two litre flagon of brandy. “It’s just business. The CEO’s given me
[an undisclosed amount of] pesos to use my name.” He takes a swig from a tall
glass of neat brandy. “I’m using the money to finance my next film!”
Conrad then eyeballs me and recognizes me from the interview
last visit. “I need a white face to play an American soldier during the
American-Filipino war. You interested?”
“Sure!” I offer, hoping to see the colour of another plane
fare.
“But first…” He takes another bolt of brandy. “…We go to my
place on the coast. THREE DAYS DRINKING!”
Seriously, it would have been rude – nay, DANGEROUS – to
refuse. At Conrad’s table the brandy flowed freely; inside the hut, the roast
pig was in the process of having its face removed with a meat cleaver. It’s a
not-subtle reminder of how difficult it is to remain vegetarian in the Philippines. I
remember trying to explain my dietary limitations to a crestfallen host.
“Sorry, I can’t eat beef. No chicken, no fish.” With doe eyes that looked ready
to burst into tears at any moment, they asked, “Not even pork?”
Dani: The initial thought of being strung up in the middle
of the First Church of FPJ starts to ease off as the brandy flagons are poured
down my throat. I guess they dodn’t notice “Lamarcadeldiablo” plastered across
my chest.. .the last thing you want people to notice at these kinds of
shindigs.
Then the Speech starts, and all of a sudden I begin to get
the same feeling of impending doom creep back up as the tiny moustached messiah
speaks and Jim begins to translate his rantings, and the words on my t-shirt
are the least of my worries…
Andrew: “The Speech” is a forty minute sermon mainly in
Tagalog, but we do recognize the words “Antichrist” and “Poland”.
Suddenly Dani feels marked by his t-shirt, his Polish lineage and his
Catholicism. We turn towards the lake to stop smirking; every now and then Dani
actually feels for his people: first the Germans had screwed them, then the
Russians, and now the Filipino fundamentalists. The SOS guys are enthralled. Is
the CEO a messiah figure to them, or merely the guy whose paychecks keep them
dancing like poodles on a hotplate? I’ll probably never know. But their
reverential silence only amplifies the sounds of grins cracking across our
incredulous faces.
Eventually the sermon grinds to a halt. There’s rapturous
applause, and the CEO beams beatifically at his payrolled flock. “And now…” he
waves his arm past Dani and I, “karaoke!”
 |
| "And now...karaoke!" |
As if by magic, two young hostesses appeared from a changing room at the back of the hut, grabbed the
microphones, fired up their infernal music machine, and started cranking out
100% Hits circa 1985, one after the other. The hired Bikini Goons of the Manila
Karaoke Mafia really seem to have caught the CEO’s full attention, as he sits
glued to a plastic lawn chair in front of them and slaps his thigh in
appreciation at the end of each warble.
Dani and I looked at each other with dinner plate eyes. “We’re
drunk and we’re locked in a compound with religious lunatics,” Dani points out
with remarkable calm. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
I read Dani’s mind loud and clear. “Let’s do it.”
As our tuneless whistling introduces Scorpions’ “Wind Of Change”,
I jump on top of a plastic lawn chair, and Dani takes lead melody, long hair
flying at tattoos on display. “Taaaaa-ake me, to the magic of the moment….”
Power fists follow one another. “”…on a gloooo-ory night…” I venture a few
windmills with my free arm and start my pelvis gyrating in the direction of the
CEO seated less than three feet away. “….where the children of tomorrow dream
away..” “Dream away!” “…on the Wind of Change..” “The fuckin’ Wind of Change!”
Brandy is a terrible drug, I should mention at this point,
and karaoke etiquette deemed appropriate at RGs in the Valley on a Wednesday
crawl may not pass muster at the First Church of FPJ. Shit. This could go
horribly one way or the other. The CEO starts slapping his thigh again, and
we’re not sure if this is a good thing, or if he’s allowing his circulation to
improve before leading our death march up Calvary.
Then as the tuneless whistling outro fades, a miracle happens: he screams “YES!
There WILL be a wind of change!” He’s evidently decided we’re the two Albino
Apostles who have blown off EDSA to carry the Word of FPJ back to the Antipodes. As the Bikini Mafia resume their Gloria
Estefan quota, the CEO plies us with copies of his self published hardcover,
The Sound Of The Seventh Trumpet. Having a quick flip past hand drawn pictures
of Angels and the usual Book of Revelation stuff with his terrifyingly Pinoy
slant, I fix him with a brandy clouded, pie-eyed stare. “We’ll take them,” I
offer, “…but only if you autograph them.” “YES! YES!” He grabs a presentation
pen. “To Andrew,” he scrawls, “GOD BLESS 1.25.08”.
 |
| Andrew with poster artist Manny |
Dani: I feel left out, so I sheepishly ask if he’d sign mine
also. “Of course!” he bellows, practically snatching the book out of my sweaty
palms. “To…Dani…God Bless!” This was the seventh circle of weirdness, and we
manage to escape unconverted, but more importantly, my Eastern Block ass didn’t
get shot and left at the bottom of their man-made lake. The night gets lost in
a Brandy fog, I’m sure there’s dancing and creative ways to avoid eating the
pig I saw get its face chopped in half with a hatchet…all I remember is
laughing our asses off all the way back to the relative safety of Metro Manila,
signed propaganda in hand.
Andrew: Amen to that, Brother.
POSTSCRIPT: I learned several months too late that Conrad
Poe passed away from a heart attack in mid-2010. We never did have that three
day drinking session – and considering his heart condition it’s probably just
as well – and his American-Filipino war film, with yours truly as White Goon
#3, remains unmade.
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