this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on July 22, 1999.
My friend Alexis got raped. Or she thinks she was. The trouble is, she cannot tell it to the police, she can’t bring it up with her mom, and she can’t confront her attacker or attackers. She didn’t know who actually raped her. She has some suspects, but she cannot say with a degree of certainty. It is possible that she was gang-raped or she was an unwitting participant in an orgy. She is not sure; she can’t even remember what really happened to her. She was too drunk that night.
She just woke up the next morning with a real bad headache and a painful groin. At first she didn’t know what felt worse, until she realized that she had been abused. Alexis went with her classmates to this (in)famous bar along Pasong Tamo in Makati. (I must have been on Nakpil Street in Manila that night at a rave party for a cellphone company.)
This is Generation X: in every corner, there’s an event. It’s all up to you to draw the line on what you do to have fun. Alas, Alexis was not in a condition to do so. In between sobs, she related how she went out of control. She said some boys passed around bottles and glasses of booze. In that bar, everybody knows everybody, so she felt comfortable drinking. She was overwhelmed by all the attention she was getting. She gyrated to techno music. She laughed out loud. She felt so free. She was having so much fun. She was flying. And then she fell asleep on some soft cushion (was it the notorious sofa in that bar?). She woke up to find herself at the gate to their house. Meaning, she was brought home safe and sound.
By whom, she can only guess. I asked her about what happened to her companions. She said they left the bar earlier with their boyfriends. She stayed because she had never seen so many handsome boys and beautiful people under one roof (and in the parking lot). She even saw her favorite video jockey wearing blue contact lenses and hot pants. It was easy for Alexis to go with the flow and blend with the crowd. She is a darling, a charming mestiza who has the looks of a commercial model. I can imagine the boys and gays present that night panting for her. Anything goes in Dante’s hell, which should be the name of this bar. And Alexis was the wayward muse. Alexis was in Wonderland.
I can only guess that the men, or the vultures among, gave her booze laced with drugs. Or maybe they didn’t have to drug her because she was already dead drunk. Alexis can only consume two or three bottles of ”mule” if she wants to stay sober. When I asked her what she drank that night, she gave virtually the short bar list in that place. Sometime during the evening, she started to dance real wild. When the crowd clamored for more, she took off her shirt.
After that number, she was the star of the night. More glasses were offered and more boys approached her. She told me some names: the boyfriend of a TV host, this hot young star member of a talent center, this commercial model for a soft drink, a group of boys from this school on Taft. I asked her who she ended up with. She could no longer remember. She recalled being carried off that soft cushion and transferred into another. She could hear voices and she knew she was being moved. She thought she was being brought home. She even gave them her address. Then she blacked out.
Being her friend, I sympathized with her and I cried with her. I know it would be easy for others to blame her and her friends and her parents. The owners of the bar would probably just shrug their shoulders to say they had nothing to do with it. Yeah, right. They had nothing to do with it. Alexis went to the wonderland and got lost. It’s her fault. She went over the top and fell. She didn’t know when to stop.
All because she drank too much. All because people drove her to go too far. All because she wanted to have fun and everybody had fun at her expense. She has vowed never to go to that place again. I can hear the boos and hisses of the owners of that bar. ”We don’t care,” they would probably say. Sure, they don’t care. Society does not care even when minors are allowed to drink in different bars in Metro Manila. We don’t care if bars tolerate indecent exposure. We don’t care if people show lots of flesh and do the sex act in public places (we love to ogle, don’t we?). We don’t care if drugs are being passed around in bars and disco joints. Their owners don’t wind if some guests are high on drugs or actually sniff something right in front of them. We don’t care if someone loses control and gets drunk and gets violated.
We hear stories of gang rape, of orgies, but we don’t care. What we care about is getting into the society page. Alexis’ picture actually landed in the lifestyle section of this paper. She would have loved the publicity, but after the tragedy, that was adding insult to injury. Almost all of those who know her called her up because of that exposure. Imagine Alexis was with the city’s hottest party people. That’s the way to go, girl! If they only knew. When I saw that photo I immediately called her up to congratulate her on her instant celebrity. I didn’t know she had a story to tell. And what a story it was.
