Never in his life had travel humor writer Bob Payne been so frightened by someone trying to please him as he was by the saleswoman in the men’s clothing department of a crowded store in Cebu City, on the island of Cebu, in the Philippines.
Payne was trying on a pair of blue jeans, which he needed because he’d somehow neglected to bring any from home for a journey that virtually required them.
The Philippines is a nation of some 7,100 islands, of which the two largest, Luzon, where Manila is located, in the north, and Mindanao, the Muslim stronghold, in the south, account for 65 percent of the land mass and 60 percent of the population. But Payne was planning to ignore these two and instead focus his visit on the Visayas, the centrally-located myriad of palm fringed, mountainous islands and islets connected by a network of passenger vessels that promised, as one guidebook put it, to “suit only those prepared to rough it.”
To help in Payne’s preparations for roughing it, the smiling saleswoman had suggested a locally made brand of jeans called Canadian Club. Payne was trying them on in one of the store’s curtained cubicles, and they fit fine, except for one small problem.
The hole for the button that allowed one to button one’s fly was sewn shut. Payne tried to explain this to the saleswoman, who had followed him to the cubicle and was standing outside repeating “You like? You like? You buy? OK?” But Payne’s explanation didn’t seem to be getting through. So, perhaps sensing from his tone of voice that a sale was possibly slipping away, the woman ripped open the curtain to see for herself what the matter was.
“Oh, OK. No problem. I fix,” she said, her smile becoming even broader. And with that she whipped a razor blade out of a side pocket of her blouse, went down on her knees, and grabbed hold of Payne’s pants just above the missing fly hole. Payne, it is important to note, was still wearing the pants.
“No, no,” Payne yelled, and was immediately sorry he had. Among the people who came running toward the agitated foreigner with a Filipina woman down on her knees in front of him was a store guard fumbling with a pump-action shotgun.
Luckily, the guard, perhaps sensitive to the criticism leveled against one of his counterparts for annihilating a shoplifter a few days previously, did not shoot. In fact, once the situation had been explained, he was in the forefront of people rummaging through the stack of Canadian Club jeans looking for a pair in Payne’s size that didn’t have the fly sewn shut. And he was pleased mightily when it was he who discovered one.
This first appeared, in a slightly altered form, as the introduction to “Where the smiles are magic,” in the November/December 1996 issue of Islands magazine. Although he has always kept an eye out, travel humor writer Bob Payne has never again seen a pair of Canadian Club jeans.
BigStock photo.
