Fifteen

Author's note: These chapters are NOT stand-alones...The story starts here.

Tick tock...2

Once you have things in place, time just slides by. How many funerals of expats have I attended recently? I hardly knew most of these guys, but I go, as it is the thing to do.

So much has changed in the past two years. If you looked on any given day, not much has changed. It’s because the change comes creeping in on you. And yet, for me, much has not changed. Where to begin?

OK, well, everyone is still here. In that regard, nothing has changed.

We have one pregnancy to report! Dido is carrying. I am delighted. One day she just let me know that, as she had graduated, it was time and, by God, it was time. She stopped avoiding me during her fertile days. It took a while, but she is clearly with child. Shara is tickled.

With the exception of Lanie and Mica, all my other college kids have graduated. There are seven who now have their degrees.

Jana and Li2x are working with Lyn. Lyn restructured the company so Jana owns part of it, and Li2x will get a piece in a couple of years. Jana manages a large payroll, as Lyn is working as a general contractor as well as a civil engineer. She has two other engineers working for her. At the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Lyn is pulling down a damned fine income. It isn’t huge by standards in the USA but, for here, it is truly impressive. Jana and Li2x are also doing nicely in the mix.

As of now, should I just go broke, we would not be in any real trouble between what those three are pulling down and the income that Lexi has.

Oh, we might have to cut back on a few things, but probably not, as the real estate activity Lyn and I pursue makes up for anything else that might be missing. The economy here is really beginning to take off.

There are far fewer beggars on the streets. While ‘endo’ contracts still exist and the poorer folks really don’t have a way up, just about everyone has rice to eat. There are help wanted signs. That is something I never saw here before.

This year, I will not do the huge fireworks we have done in the past. Let others do it.

It’s hard to explain how these past two years have slid by but, with thirty-one here besides me, (and one in the oven) almost every week there are either birthday parties or parties for holidays. There is the school schedule for the little ones with all the things that entails. It’s a never-ending set of events that run one into the next. It’s a blur.

I have chosen to look at the share price of the stocks I own only once a year. This is a few days after Christmas, 2012, and my Cisco stock is a miserable 19.28. I guess I should have sold all of it years ago. I will just let it be. Maybe it will eventually shrink to zero if I wait long enough!

The Apple stock that I have cussed for so long is now at an amazing 76.02 today! That gives me a book value of over four million dollars.

Between the two stocks, I am still worth over fourteen million dollars, so I am not crying. Considering I started with twenty thousand, I am a very lucky man.

We have been in the house now for over five years. The landscaping was completed long ago and the trees are growing to maturity. The place is amazing. Most of that is thanks to two women who barely had pots to piss in when I met them and were willing to give me their oldest daughters to save some pesos. I truly doubt they will admit the truth of it now. Each has crafted her own origin story to explain why she is here. I just keep my mouth shut and never contradict them.

The gals are landed gentry now. Each has access to a car and her own motorcycle. Each has a full wardrobe of clothing, nice shoes, and a collection of handbags. Each goes to the beauty parlor. Each has money in her purse and no worries. None of them resembles the girls they were once upon a time.

Lyn tells me she meets people who she served drinks to ten years ago at the Sydney Hotel. They were the big hitters and she a lowly barmaid. Now they are supplicants coming to her, and they have no idea they have ever met her before. They ask her where she came from. When she tells them she is from GenSan, they say how can that be? They thought they knew all the good families in GenSan.

And they probably do. Lyn does not explain. She just smiles and takes their money.

Jana is finally happy with work. There is no one above her, and she is absolutely iron-fisted about how the money is handled. Lyn doesn’t get the government jobs because their firm does not offer kickbacks. But they get a fair amount of private business because they don’t inflate bills.

We also have been, more and more, buying properties, developing them and then leasing out space until the surrounding property values make the sale of the property and building advantageous. As Lyn and I have done this, she needs to be out of town less. And, as another plus, our ventures now involve projects which are larger and more profitable.

Things have grown so well that the value of our land holdings now outstrips the money I brought over from the sale of the Cisco stock.

George got wind of some of our holdings from a friend of his who owns a building supply company. The upshot is that, as he and I got together a couple of days ago, he lit into me pretty fiercely about my failure to provide proper security for my family.

These days, Lyn does travel with two bodyguards. One doubles as a driver for her. There are also a couple of guards at their company’s offices. George was not aware of this and was a little relieved when told. My little Vet, May, has a guard at her office and there are guards at the two schools where Lexi and Dido teach. There are guards at the private school which the little ones attend.

So OK, I admit that I probably need a guard and driver for Mel when she takes and picks the kids up, and I can use the same guards at other times in the day when I go out of the lot. When I am here and they are not driving Mel, they can hang out at the guardhouse.

I surrender to George and he is a happy man. It has taken years, but he has won.

As 2013 rolls around, there are two new guards here and Mel is complaining. They don’t let her drive.

For two months, Mel’s complaining continues nonstop. I call George and warn him that I am going to backtrack on my promise as I am just tired of hearing the bitching. He asks if Ara can talk to Mel. I don’t see why not, and send Mel over to his place, driven by her driver and with her other bodyguard.

I don’t see her for the rest of the day, and am wondering where the hell she got to, when she finally gets here late in the afternoon, walks in the front door, sits down and starts crying.

I wait. I figure, whatever she is crying about will be explained in due time. And, in that, I am right.

OK, I am wrong. The bodyguards stay. We need them.

What happened?

Ara bring me to meet a man. His wife kidnapped. He not have enough money. He go to his family, his friends to borrow the money. He pay, but it too late, his wife, they kill her. This real. He say his wife like me. She say she not need guards. He say he plead with her, every day he pleads. ‘Please, my love, please allow this,’ but she not allow it. And now she dead, he broke and alone. He look at me and say, ‘Don’t be difficult. Listen to your man. He want to protect you. Why you so stupid? You lucky to have protection.’

I see. So no more arguments?

No more, my love. No more. I don’t want to be stupid and difficult.

And that was the message she got… not that her life was really of any importance. Only that she was being stupid and difficult. Something that I bet Lexi used to say to her for years before she came to me.

The guy hit the right buttons, but only by accident.

I have been updating this every two years, because there is little to tell. I have my life. It is a stable one and I am surrounded by more love than any man has a right to have. All fifteen girls are still here and, as far as I can see, they will be here until I die, which with any luck won’t be for a while yet. It is June 2014 right now and shorter than my normal two year update. I am writing now about something that just happened that I am having a hard time wrapping my head around.

Apple has just done a 7:1 stock split a few days ago. I now have over thirty-five million dollars of Apple stock, while my Cisco has finally crept back up closer to where it was seven years ago and is now valued at a little over twelve million. On paper I am worth over forty-seven million fucking dollars. Plus what we have here. I am wondering if I should cash out.

I mean, who needs more than that? Of course, if I let it ride, maybe it will lose value… and then I just have to laugh. What do I care? I don’t need it. We are fine. What I don’t need is the stress of dealing with the brokerage. I have no idea who has my account these days.

I swear, I am not lazy.

There just isn’t any reason to update this much these days. I mean, nothing has really changed. I have let all this slide for two and a half years.

It’s four days after Christmas 2017.

Outside this house and in my world a huge amount has been changing. It’s been a little like being the frog in a pot of water that started cool and slowly heated up. We really didn’t notice it all that much.

The beggars are all but gone.

Oh, there are a few, but it’s not like the old days. There are help wanted signs all over the place. You can’t go anywhere without seeing signs saying that they are hiring. Wages for labor have doubled, and trebled in some cases related to skilled labor.

I have heard from others that they can’t find maids. Getting a maid used to be as easy as waving a dirty wash cloth out in the street. Girls would run to you begging for the job. The wages for maids were no more than one thousand five hundred pesos a month (or about $35/mo.) plus room and board in 2004, from what I remember. Now?

If you can find a maid, she may well cost you five thousand pesos a month plus room and board, if you can even keep her. But she may well quit if she thinks the job is too hard. That never happened before.

Construction projects are chock-a-block. Every able-bodied construction worker has his pick of places to work.

Property values have gone through the roof. I am now concerned that we might be experiencing a real estate and construction bubble.

It has gotten me concerned enough that I have been leaning on Lyn pretty hard to reduce the amount of property we are sitting on and get more liquidity on the balance sheet. Lyn has been arguing that I am tying her hands.

Maybe I am, but I am not saying, don’t buy properties, just don’t hang on to them. In this conflict, I have a supporter in that Jana is feeling concerned too. We know that the current president here, Duterte, is pumping money into Mindanao. And that has inflated prices. We don’t touch the government projects because they are so laden with corruption. But that activity is affecting everything else.

Jana and I just don’t see where the money will be to sustain the ever-rising price of property, and labor costs. People are going to take losses. We are too. I just want to have Lyn limit our exposure. I want her to stay focused on fewer projects, push them through, sell them, get the cash, and move on to the next. At all times, rather than leverage what we have, I want a large liquid reserve.

Lyn tells me Jana and I are too conservative. That makes me smile as I look out the window at more than a dozen of my own children kicking balls around on the grass.

In my life there have been no more children since Dido’s boy, Jason. Everyone is still here. Every blessed one of them. Li2x, who was thirteen when I met her is twenty-eight now! Lyn is a stunning thirty-three.

Yes, here nothing has changed… but I am looking out at those kids outside, and you know what I see?

Oscar is thirteen, as are Mia, Sisa, Nita, Mi2x and Mel’s boy, Hector. Before school is out for summer break, in March, those kids will be fourteen. The fact that four of them are girls should be of no more importance to me than any previous birthday. Except… Yes, except for my girls’ growing insistence of a ‘family tradition.’ A tradition that has nothing to do with my family and which I do not want to have now … to have me father children from my own daughters.

Now, you and I know that no teenage girl in the USA would ever consider having kids with her own father. Right? And, as these kids have grown up as wealthy scions of mine, even here, you would expect the same thing.

Plus, as I walk through the city these days, there are foreigners all over. Girls, who all seem to have mastered some English, go looking via the websites, if they start soon enough, and I am told even if they don’t, are snaring men as husbands with surprising regularity. These girls are, for the most part, not into sharing their men with other women. I hear that, if a guy suggests it, these girls are walking away and looking for a better prospect.

The world here in GenSan has changed a great deal!

So why does any girl of mine think her daughter wants to be in my bed?

I had no clue until the day after Christmas, when Nita sits down with me.

Father? You have time, now, maybe?

Sure, sweetheart, what’s up?

Well, you know my birthday is in three months, the week before school ends. Father, I will not show if I pregnant this school year. Mother say I can home study next year.

I really am not thinking about me, when I ask, Don’t you think I should meet the boy first? And sweetheart, I think fourteen is a little too soon? How old is this guy?

Daaad! There no boy!

Well, it’s hard to get pregnant without one, last I checked!

Duh! You know what I mean.

No… Oh noooo. Nita who told you this is required?

I had not given this any thought for a decade or more. I honestly thought it was just an idle curiosity that would, over the years, become a quaint artifact of the lives they lived before they came to me.

Clearly, there was a time when even having enough pesos for rice on any given night was an issue. That was even true for Lyn once she left what amounted to her family. Both her mother and father were already dead.

For Jana, though her family was truly poor, they had enough for rice; but she, too, left home in search of work, and the issue of money for rice became a real concern. Still, both of these girls had rice as children; they were not as desperate in that way as the others.

I guess I can understand Lyn’s position about this ‘family tradition’. To say it is always wrong is to call her own existence into question.

Maybe Jana is looking at her best friend, her business partner, and is thinking, OK, this is how the world needs to turn.

I can see why May feels the way she does. It’s pretty much the same as Lyn.

But why would my own children, who clearly have not grown up in desperate circumstances, think this is the right thing to do? This is the world of YouTube. This is the world of Fiber Optic connections. We got our 100Mbps connection last year and yes, the buried conduit I put in years ago is now in use!

These days, girls are exposed to so much ‘female empowerment’ stuff over the net that I can’t conceive of why fathering kids with their own father makes any damned sense to a single one of them.

Who told you this?

Huh?

Nita, where did you get this idea?

Nita is looking out of the window wall in my study.

Dad, come, look at this.

I walk over to my daughter, put a fatherly arm over a shoulder and say, OK, what am I supposed to see?

Out there in the fence. What do you call that?

She’s pointing to the gate from the look of it. I play along.

The gate?

Next to it?

The guards’ building?

Between!

Oh, OK, the manhole.

Yes, right. Who owns the manhole?

Us?

No! You! You make all this happen! We are here because of you!

OK, so I own the manhole. What’s your point?

Between my legs, you know what we call that?

No… your urethra, your vagina?

No! It’s your manhole. We all have your manhole. You made this. You made us. No one allowed in our manhole, except you!

Who told you this?

All.

All? Who?

Mother, Jana, May, Li2x… all!

Sweetheart, if I tell you that I give my permission for you to not have my child, will that matter to you?

Why would I want that?

Jesus… OK. So… are all my daughters told this?

Of course! It’s a family tradition!

§ § §

Tick tock...3