She Just Told It Like It Wuz
One night way back in 1961 there were four couples of us sitting around a table in a night club in Manila. There was a married NCO and his wife, the new First Sgt and his wife, my buddy O’Reily with his Filipino girl friend and me with the Filipino girl that I had been shacked up with for a few months.
We were drinking of course and the conversation was in English when all of a sudden the two Filipino girls started speaking in Tagalog, a Filipino language ( one of over a hundred dialects ). I didn’t understand a lot of Tagalog at the time but did understand something about a dog and thought they were talking about the new first shirts wife-she had been acting prudish and bitchy.
I grabbed the hand of my girlfriend and headed for the dance floor and whispered in her ear that it wasn’t polite to speak in Tagalog when the other two women couldn’t understand what they were saying. She answered just as the music stopped and it was one of those quiet moments when all was silent and her clear voice rang out in her broken English,
” She just tell me that Reilly puck her like a dog.”
It was another one of those times when I should have just kept my mouth shut.
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