Crossdressing Robbery Crossdressing Thief Found Under Couple’s Bed in Subic Philippines
Story by Pia Dysangco Villamor
99% of the time, my life in Subic is pretty suburban and idyllic. This tranquil environment is one of the reasons why I love it here. BUT there are still incidents that make up the remaining 1%.
It’s funny how things here can get rather extreme. When it’s peaceful, it’s eerily peaceful. Think Brady Bunch meets Stepford wives (the part before it was revealed that they were maniacal robots). Husband comes home from work, we feast on the hearty meal I prepared for us, we have pleasant, after-dinner conversation and we’re in bed by 8, 9 at the latest.
Once in a while however, we go through crazy, surreal stuff that I don’t think anyone I know has ever experienced.
Among all the weird stuff, I think there is one in particular that takes the cake. Whenever we recount the story, people have no idea whether they should laugh at us or be horrified for us. I was reminded of this incident again, when I had to narrate it blow by blow, to a fresh set ears (my aunts) last weekend. I’ve decided to write about this in my blog, because not only am I getting a bit tired from repeating the story, (at least when it’s written down I can just give my blog url and say, “Here! Read about it”), I’m also afraid it will get turned into a sitcom without us getting royalties. 😛
Anyway, around June or July of last year, a couple thieves broke into our house. But they weren’t your ordinary, run-in-the -mill kind of thieves (Given our telenovela story, that’s just too much to ask for from the universe).
They were cross-dressing thieves.
Fully made up.
In hot pink (and bright blue respectively), tight pants and wedges.
And here’s the clincher: We found one of them under our bed.
(I apologize to friends and family who have heard this story over and over. You can go ahead and stop reading now).
THE INCIDENT:
So here’s what happened: Around 9 pm, my husband and I go up to our bedroom. Since it was a Friday, we decided to go crazy and stay up until around 12-1 am watching TV (Yes, we’re living on the edge. Sadly, this is now our idea of the concept YOLO).
Around 4 am, my husband wakes me up, and asks if I went to the bathroom. I groggily answer “no”, slightly annoyed that he was waking me up for such a trivial matter.
Then he goes and says, “Minumulto ata tayo”. (Highly likely since we did have a phantom girl singing “A Pocketful of Sunshine” in the other house weeks before, more on that next time).
So I wake up with a jolt to find our bedroom door slightly ajar. The light from the hallway was streaming inside the room and we could hear the exhaust fan in the bathroom humming steadily, breaking the dead silence that usually pervades the house at that hour.
It’s funny how being befuddled can mix up our personalities. While my usually logical husband thinks ghosts, the first thing that goes through my usually more right-brained mind was, “baka nanakawan tayo.” Take note, past tense. It did not occur to me that the robbers were still there. I verbalize this thought to my husband and he goes out of the room to investigate.
He finds my oversized zebra bag that I usually keep in the spare room near the top of the stairs (I HAVE to mention my zebra bag, because out of all the bags kept in that room—my husband’s black nondescript luggage, my canvass and overnight bags and my other purse – the cross-dressing robbers were only interested in my animal print tote. That, and my black patent Kate Spade clutch). My husband then opens the bedroom lights and decides to look for his phone, which he usually leaves on his bedside table. He couldn’t find it. So he looks under the bed.
My zebra tote and black patent clutch, the only bags that were given the cross-dressing-theft seal of approval
For as long as I live, I will never forget the words that came out of his mouth.
“Holy mother of Christ, there’s a guy under our bed.” He says this in a tone that was completely deadpan so it took me a while to understand what he was trying to say.
“What?” I dumbly ask, completely confused.
In an effort to get through to me, he explains further in the same expressionless tone, “There is a gay guy under our bed”.
I have no idea what happened next, whether my husband shouted at the guy to come out (will refer to him as “intruder no. 1” or “the guy” alternately from now on), or whether he just scrambled out from under the bed. It’s also debatable who between my husband and I, had the more frightening experience– My husband, who had the first look and probably the shock of his life, when he found a tiny man in girl’s clothes under the bed, lying on his back with his arms forming an ex across his chest— or me who, after half peering down, saw the guy up close, with his pale foundation- caked face and wide mascara-streaked eyes staring at me as he tried to squeeze his way out from MY side of the bed.
It was nuts!
Anyway, I screamed. And intruder no 1 tried to explain himself. (How he thought he could get out of a situation such as this I have no idea). My husband and I were both panicking and listening to him at the same time. So there was a lot of incomprehensible yelling and pleading.
The thing was, our maid had a friend who lived a few houses away from us. He’s also gay, and although we’ve never seen him, our maid would fondly describe how he also occasionally wore clothes for women.
Apparently my husband and I were both thinking the same thing while we were listening to this guy stammer out his excuses: Could this potential intruder be our maid’s friend? Maybe he got drunk, wandered into the house in his dazed state and found his way to our bedroom by mistake. This sounds terribly dumb and sexist, I know. But when you find a transvestite under your bed at the crack of dawn, you try your best to grasp for a logical explanation.
It did not help that he was screaming “Ate!” half of the time. We thought he was screaming for our maid (later on, we find out that he was screaming for the other dude).
Anyway, the rest of the stuff happened in a blur. The next thing I know, my husband was chasing him down the stairs.
THE CHASE
This part I gathered from my husband’s version of the incident. Intruder no. 1 runs out from our room down the stairs. There is a moment where the guy almost trips and my husband thought of pushing him down. But because Moe is a lawyer not a fighter, all the criminal cases (describing how home owners were charged with homicide after accidentally killing their robbers) came rushing back at him. So instead of pushing him down, he actually pulls intruder no .1 back up and they continue chasing each other down the stairs to the empty room on the first floor.
My husband also wasn’t sure if intruder no 1 had any weapons on him so he keeps his distance. After a while, he corners the guy near one of the windows and was able to shove him up the wall.
Then remembers his missing phone. And because he had all his important information in that cellphone, he wanted to secure it first. (Sidenote: Moe has a love affair with his phone, I swear. In their law school Blue Roast, his classmates wanted to nominate him and his then-phone in the “sweetest couple” category.)
“San na telepono ko?” he demands from intruder no. 1.
The guy gives him the phone and takes advantage of the distraction to run out of the house. (He was pretty limber for someone wearing wedge slip-ons. He did lose one trying to get away though).
My husband thought of chasing after him. Then he remembered I was still upstairs. He immediately panicked and thought, what if there was another intruder inside the house? So he rushes up, only to find me gone. He went through a crazy, melodramatic moment, thinking I was kidnapped. So he was freaking out and shouting my name as he searched for me the second floor.
SO WHERE WAS I?
I’m tempted to make you all believe that I was
the highly logical and capable woman who sprung into action in the midst of the chaos. But the truth was, I was in shock. I probably spent a good few minutes just staring into space trying to assimilate what was happening. When I finally came to my senses, my husband and the guy were well -immersed in the action.
I mentally go through the stuff in the bedroom trying to find a weapon or some magical concoction I could put together to help the situation a la Mac Gyver. The thing was, I’m not very agile and have the dexterity of a toddler, so physically helping quickly became a non-option. Neither am I a science whiz, so I could not come up with something that I could make explode (Why is it that when MacGyver gets trapped in a situation there’s always baking soda??? Mental note: Must keep baking soda in every room of the house from now on). Then it suddenly dawned on me that there was a police precinct two houses from our place.
I rush down the stairs to head to the police station (was berating myself for not bothering to keep their number on my cellphone to begin with). I could hear my husband chasing intruder no 1 in the spare room. I hurriedly shout where I was heading and leave (I guess Moe was too preoccupied to hear me).
I bump into our maid outside. She was awakened by the commotion and was coming to investigate (her room is outside the house and has a separate entrance) so we rush to the station together.
By the time we got back with a couple of policemen in tow, intruder no 1 had already escaped.
READ THE AFTERMATH ON THE NEXT PAGE
