From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel Read online

  FROM THE MEMOIRS

  OF A NON-ENEMY

  COMBATANT

  Alex Gilvarry

  VIKING

  I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Hunter College and the generous Hertog Fellowship, and to the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. My sincerest thanks to Seth Fishman, my agent, for his smarts and dedication, and to Liz Van Hoose, my editor, a protector of words. Thank you to my friends and colleagues for their tireless support, to Dr. Juan and Selfa Peralta, and to Ashley Mears.

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Alex Gilvarry, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Gilvarry, Alex.

  From the memoirs of a non-enemy combatant : a novel / Alex Gilvarry.

  p. cm.

  EISBN 978-1-1015-5431-9

  1. Fashion designers—Fiction. 2. False arrest—Fiction.

  3. Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.I4558F76 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011032993

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Bodoni Book Designed by Francesca Belanger

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For Peter and Vilma Gilvarry

  and for

  Gloria Reyes

  Table of Contents

  Editor’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  New York City, 2002–2006

  You Made Me

  Apropos of No Man’s Land

  The Canadian

  On Memory

  Modus Operandi

  The Two Suits

  My Life in Fashion

  Love in a Time of War

  Bronxville Revisited

  Two Whole Minutes

  Philip Tang 2.0

  The Story of My Bathing Partner

  My Name Is (B)oy

  The Enemy at Home

  THE FALL OF (B)OY

  News to Me…

  No Man’s Land

  Boyet R. Hernandez, Plaintiff

  Camp Delta Blues

  Apropos of the Fertilizer

  The Overwhelming Event

  War Crimes

  On the Tarmac

  Honor Bound

  Afterword

  FROM THE MEMOIRS

  OF A NON-ENEMY

  COMBATANT

  With Footnotes and an Afterword

  by Gil Johannessen

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  With the exception of footnote annotations, the author’s acknowledgments, the editor’s afterword, and a supplemental article included with permission, all material herein has been reprinted verbatim from the confession of Boyet R. Hernandez, composed from June through November 2006.

  Since everything is in our heads, we had better

  not lose them.

  –Coco Chanel

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The patsy of this wrenching tale would like to extend his thanks to several people without whom I would cease to exist.

  To my editor, my dear, dear friend in exile, esteemed fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily, my Virgil, my gondolier, my guide through a hell unimaginable—Gil Johannessen, salamat.

  To Philip Tang, Rudy Cohn, and Vivienne Cho, oh those wild rooftop parties at the Gansevoort. To John Galliano and Rei Kawakubo for their whisperings in my ear. To Catherine Malandrino, you gave me color, you gave me life! To Coco, Yves, Karl, for their invention and their reinvention—the wheel on the bus was never the same again, yet round and round it goes.

  I would be remiss if I did not mention my attorney, Ted Catallano, of Catallano & Catallano & Associates. (If it were not for Ted, where would I be today? Not in the figurative sense, but where would I be, physically? Perhaps in some black site in Egypt being waterboarded naked or slapped with menstrual blood while my interrogator takes a dump on a copy of the Qur’an. If my imagination seems a little graphic, for heaven’s sake, do pardon me, for I have been through a great ordeal.)

  Before I lay into every U.S. government agency that has defiled me (DoD, DHS, ICE, INS, CIA, FBI) let me give a big salamat to the New York Police Department, those strapping boys in blue, the true heroes. Never once did they cause me any grief.

  For Abu Omar, Shafiq Raza, Moazzam Mu’allim, Hassan Khaliq, Dick Levine. Riad Sadat, for translating his poetry into English so that my heart could palpitate outside of Camp Delta. They took our imagination, but they couldn’t take our words.

  For all at OhCmonMove.org.

  To Lieutenant Richard Flowers, who I only met once, but whose small bungle set the world off its axis.

  I would like to acknowledge playwright Michelle Brewbaker’s The Enemy at Home or, How I Fell for a Terrorist, to which this memoir is neither dedicated nor immune. Three acts of didactic rumor and defamation, soon to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux—shame on you.

  For Olya, Anya, Dasha, Kasha, Masha, Vajda, Marijka, Irina, Katrina, etc.—the maddening dream of your bare white asses kept me alive.

  To Ben Laden (no relation), my publicist, old Irish gelding in arms.

  To the only people who will still have me! My purgatory and homeland—the Republic of the Philippines, where I was spat into this world, eight pounds two ounces, January 11, 1977, under martial law, the little dark bomb of Boyet Ruben Hernandez.

  To you, dear reader, my life is in your hands.

  To my enemies: It ends now.

  —B. R. H.

  New York City, 2002–2006

  Every man needs aesthe
tic phantoms

  in order to exist.

  —Yves Saint Laurent

  You Made Me

  I would not, could not, nor did I ever raise a hand in anger against America. I love America, the golden bastard. It’s where I was born again: propelled through the duct of JFK International, out the rotating doors, push, push, dripping a post—U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens, breathe. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, BQE, Brooklyn Bridge, Soho, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive—these are a few of my favorite things!

  My story is one of unrequited love. Love for a country so great that it has me welling up inside knowing it could never love me back. And even after the torment they’ve put me through—tossing me into this little cell in No Man’s Land—would you believe that I still hold America close to my heart? Stupid me, Boy Hernandez. Filipino by birth, fashion designer by trade, and terrorist by association.

  So here I wait for my combatant status review. Not a college literary journal like the one my ex, Michelle, used to publish her poems in, but a real-life tribunal starring me…on trial for war crimes.

  It’s true that I knew some very bad people. Though it is my opinion that everything must be digested in context. If I am to be released, as I have so often demanded, then hard facts contrary to my accuser’s egregious mistake must be presented in a clear and chronological fashion. And so my special agent here has given me the chance to write out my true confession (to be used as formal evidence in my tribunal). A pen and legal pad have been provided to me. “Spare no detail. Leave nothing out” were my special agent’s instructions. “You can start with your arrival in America.”

  According to the New York Post, where I once graced the columns of Page Six—my name in bold, next to Zac Posen and Stella McCartney—I’m the “fashion terrorist.” An émigré candy ass turned hater of Americans and financier of terror. (My special agent has shown me select headlines from the moment I was extraordinarily rendered here. The papers really think I’m their man.) I was a fiction from the beginning. We see only what we want to see, do we not? And when what we want to see isn’t there, we create it. Tah-dah! If I could somehow put all the pieces of my “secret life” together according to what’s been said about me in the tabloids, it would go something like this:

  Fed up with being the immigrant turd that gets flushed over and over and won’t go down, Boy Hernandez finally worked up the nerve to take aim at America. Be it the White House, the Empire State Building, or a Boeing 747 out of Newark bound for Tallapoosa, Missouri.1

  Big-ass, bald-faced, barbed-wire lies.

  My first day in America, September 13, 2002, was the most eye-opening day of my life. I never had any foul intentions, especially toward the city that took me into her unbiased arms, wrapped me up in her warm September skin, and gave me a big maternal smooch. Mwah!

  New York City was a utopia.

  By contrast there was Manila, my hometown. I grew up on the north end in a wealthy suburb. Tobacco Gardens, corner of Marlboro and Kools (no kidding). Though I didn’t come from tobacco money. My parents had a private practice, which made us middle-class at best. Hernandez y Hernandez, Ear, Nose, and Throat. I left the suburbs at seventeen to attend fashion school at FIM.2 It was there that I began to choke on my own city’s mistakes—the crowded motorways, barrios, dirt, and smog gave me a bad case of acne and an all-consuming desire to get the hell out of there. And Manila was no place for a serious designer of women’s wear. One had to go to New York or London. After graduation, I couldn’t imagine staying put. What is it that they say? Home is where you hang yourself.

  From the arrival terminal at JFK I directed my cabbie to drive me to the foot of Manhattan, Battery Park. I had studied my maps! I had always dreamed of seeing the Statue of Liberty on my first day in America, no matter how impractical it was from my point of arrival. I wanted it to be a part of my first memory. Just like in the immigrant narratives I had read as a teenager. Oscar de la Renta, Diane von Furstenberg, etc. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” I was being sentimental, I know. But what rebirth is complete without a proper baptism? Seeking out Lady Liberty was my way of christening myself an American, and a New Yorker to boot.

  We hit the Van Wyck (pronounced “Wike,” said my guidebook), which took us through an unsavory part of Queens. Now, from what I saw of it, Queens was a desolate place, much unlike what I would come to know as the city proper. Panel homes gave way to industrial factories; on‑ramp gave way to on‑ramp. It wasn’t until we rolled along the BQE, passing a massive cemetery with thousands of ornate tombstones, that I realized Queens too had its own filthy beauty. As my taxi approached a little bridge I couldn’t pronounce, there it was on my left:3 Manhattan. The skyline I had glimpsed from the plane when the captain tipped his wing. The skyline I had seen all my life on television and in films. A skyline that was as much a symbol of my dreams in fashion as it was a symbol of America and its financial prowess. A skyline that called out to me, “Come and get it, sucka!”

  My driver took me in. The city beckoned me at every pothole struck. I traced a finger along my map as we went over the Williamsburg Bridge. And then…“Delancey Street,” called my driver, “where one comes to pick up drunk young fare.” He was a knowing guide, pointing out the neighborhoods as we went. Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, City Hall. “First time in the city, I take it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I was giddy.

  “Just keep your head up and your eyes open,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

  We were downtown, cruising along Broadway, entering the north tip of the financial district. Fulton, Church Street, Maiden Lane. Buildings surrounded me on all sides. I could no longer see the sky. Instead of out, the city just went up and up.

  To my surprise, Battery Park was not shaped like an alkaline Duracell. All those things I saw in the movies regarding New York’s hard edge, like the winos, the drugs, the graffiti, the muggings and murders, the racial strife—these weren’t anywhere to be found. I did see my first New York bum sprawled out on a park bench. But he was not begging. He was listening to his own portable radio, propped up on a pushcart full of bottles and cans. There were office mates on lunch—men and women flirting with each other behind sunglasses. There were black women cradling white babies and white women cradling Asian babies and Asian women cradling Eurasian babies. Every diverse American and his mother! I hurried past with my luggage to the water’s edge. New York Harbor. Breathe. The river was a blue-green bayou. I watched a water taxi play chicken with a tugboat, while the Staten Island ferry—the John F. Kennedy—came from behind and threatened to crush them both. I leaned my torso over the railing so I could see Lady Liberty. She was in mourning. A black veil covered her face.4 Yet she held her torch high, uncovered, as if leading a fleet of ships into battle away from industrial New Jersey. I closed my eyes and listened to the choppy water. I leaned out until my feet were lifted off the ground, and I held my balance over the guard railing by my hands and waist alone, floating, surrendering to the harbor. A foghorn blew in the distance where there was only clear sky.

  I listened.

  For description’s sake—to paint a picture of your fashion terrorist as he was in his twenty-fifth year—I am a modestly proportioned man of five foot one. At the time I was in peak physical condition. I was progressing in my yoga practice. I could stand on my head for fifteen-minute intervals, do twenty sun salutations, and still balance myself in Virabhadrasana one.5

  This is the man I was.

  I kept my hair shortly cropped and would shave a faux part down the left side of my scalp and through the corresponding eyebrow, classically fashioned after the major hip-hop artists of the 1980s. My Nike high-tops added an extra inch or two to my stature, but let’s skip all pretensions and just stick to the bare facts. I’m a small man! I’m even small for a Filipino, a people notorious for being slight of frame. Myself, I have
often been confused for an overgrown, mustachioed child.

  There I was, leaning out over the railing with my eyes closed. I can still hear the breeze off the harbor, the children’s voices echoing from a nearby playground, the rustling in the trees a mere decibel above the city’s bustle. I dreamed of the splash I would make during one of New York’s upcoming seasons with a collection of my own. The ripples would travel around the world to London and Paris and Milan. People would know my name. Back in Manila I had already shown one collection of knitwear during Philippine Fashion Week. A few pieces even got picked up in boutiques around Makati and Cubao, but I wasn’t all that well-known. Back home you did runway with designers who were former beauty queens and minor celebrities—Miss Mindanao ’95 and contestants fresh off Pinoy Big Brother6 —and the buyers tended to stick to celebrity branding. One needed to be in New York in order to be taken seriously. And now that I had reached my destination my mind was swooning with possibilities. It took the wail of a street musician’s tenor sax to bring me back down to earth.

  I hailed another taxi and headed for the apartment of Dasha Portnick, an old friend I knew from Manila, where she’d modeled my first show. She was letting me use her place while she was away in Thailand doing a skin-whitening campaign for Oil of Olay. Dasha was a stunning, dark beauty, but at twenty-six she was already considered too old for the New York market. So whenever fashion week came around, she purposely booked a high-profile job abroad. Since there was an unquenchable thirst for dark-haired white girls in Southeast Asia, it was there that Dasha made her living. In fact, before I left Manila, her face had been plastered on billboards along the South Super Highway for some new cosmetic band-aid that wrapped over one’s nose.

  I had Dasha’s address written down on the back of her modeling card, right next to her hips, waist, and bust. The cab let me out in front of her building on Ludlow Street, one of those glossy high-rise structures that loudly pronounced itself against the old-world tenements of the Lower East Side.