Games in the House of Horus

Psychiatrist Eric Berne, MD, published in 1964 a book titled Games People Play, subtitled The Psychology of Human Relationships. In it, Berne introduces a method called transactional analysis which helps interpret and categorizes functional and dysfunctional social interactions.

Berne takes off from Freud’s psychodynamic model, particularly the “ego states” (Freud’s terms: the it, the I, and the above-I, translated as id, ego, and superego) and transcribed the same into three roles—the Child, the Parent and the Adult. This theory influenced fellow psychiatrist James Redfield’s entertaining and highly successful self-published book Celestine Prophecy, elevating the states into the metaphysical realm.

No longer tasked with ensuring the Earth’s fertility, the contemporary daughters of the House of Horus have basic roles to play, primarily initiated in the islands’ watering holes but accessible through other service venues such as barbershops and beauty parlors, hotel lobbies and parking lots, poker rooms and Internet arcades, music rooms and karaoke bars, even parish Masses and fiestas.

Sociologists have long noted the Victorian aversion to pleasure and often make the distinction between the American bar and the Canadian pub. Ale is served in both but where the watering holes south of the 49th parallel are often shrouded in the shadows and low lights, the pubs across the border are well lit and are often the site of rowdy crowds gathering in a community node specially after a curling match in the winter.

Similarly, the games local people play on Saipan are in the dark rooms of poker parlors and cubicle’d karaoke bars. The adrenaline high yearned for by many in the poker room where the religious still rely on miracles though the odds with the one-arm bandits is stacked against the player, the addiction adhered to is on the elusive hope, leaving the rationality of statistical expectations to the sane who does not bother to cross the threshold. Besides, if one already sold one’s soul to the food stamp store, one pleasures one’s longing in the electronic box that glitters with false promises while one’s laundry spins in the washer and dryer next door.

The enterprising lady of the night often has contact inside the poker room should anyone hit a jackpot and decide to spend the winnings on a quickie before heading home.

Among the menfolk, especially those born from the ’60s onward, when groin-centered lifestyles rose, and if Clinton, Jackson and Spitzer are any indication, became normative, and the sex manual on the book shelves became as ubiquitous as the cookbook, the pleasure of the crotch commercially followed the roller coaster ride of supply and demand.

The CNMI boom of the ’80s and the early ’90s attracted working girls from Mabini in Manila, Olongapo of the Navy yards and Angeles of the Air Fields, to Saipan. Saigon and Seoul were not far behind, and the tentacles of both the Yakuza of Ginza and the Fujian Tongs of Xiamen reached far and wide. Sisterhood from Kowloon and Taipei chimed into the flesh trade and the foreign-flavored spiced meat offering of Garapan was born. Certain games are for sale for those who wish to play.

Contact point for the current human meat market remains that of the watering holes. Buy the lady a drink and graduate smoothly into logistics’ negotiations. Enterprising ladies walk the streets around the DFS Galleria, the two-block environs of the Paseo, and the side streets of the area where the appropriately named streets Dama de Noche and Flores Rosa mirror the jaded flowers plying their trade on its corners and sidewalks. The higher end demand is accessible through hotel lobby personnel and security guards, with the low end tourists often the object of the tsunami-like phenomenon of three cars unloading be-decked and perfumed ladies into a restaurant for the client’s visual picking.

The increase of neophytes into the profession in the last eight years brought about by the demise of the garment industry increased possible STD spread through a training gap of newcomers. Mama-sans often just hand out a copy of a porn DVD to an aspiring recruit, with instructions to imitate what is visually portrayed in the medium. Non-prophylactic-protected incidences have made the practitioner and recipient susceptible to STD transmittal. Accurate numbers on AIDS/HIV occurrences are hard to come by, so one can only air a word of caution on those who can influence this particular behavior. I would imagine that DoD, MVA, DoH, and the ethnic newspapers could very well publicize practices of “safe sex” to their constituent audiences, and impose their own accountability measures.

The other health issue that has emerged among the Chinese ladies is the widely practiced drug-induced abortion with dire consequences on the lady’s health and well-being. There is a substantial portion of the client population that demands unprotected sex, and are willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, the cost is often higher than the temporary high.

“Hooker” is not a labor category that is licensed so practitioners are often ID’d as commercial cleaners, waitresses, masseuse, house workers, and lately, students. For the moment, we also have a lot of hangers-on of people with unresolved labor cases who are available service providers for the trade, stay in legal hiatus until they see how the federal takeover influences their status. Sadly, the widespread proliferation of inaccurate information is reportedly abetted by well-intentioned spouses of highly-placed government personnel.

The process of decriminalizing previously condemned practices like the use of cannabis is a character of our times, even as Nevada pioneered “cowtown” bordellos within its boundaries. Why not extend the same to Ma Lee of Mariana, and get a flourishing and critical component of our visitors’ industry into the realm of intentionality, regulations, and management under the rational light of day? Let’s get some sane Dicks in the House!