Burgers We Will Never Know
Medium - Sep 9, 2015
A short fling with fame ended Philander Rodman’s burger joint in the outskirts of Angeles City’s bustling red light district.
A dusty corner of the internet promised burgers and fries swirling in a rastafari dream of red, green and yellow — anything but rice — but it shared a stronger resemblance with the one-time hairdo of Philander’s estranged son, Dennis Rodman.
The retired power forward is a household name for any basketball-loving family in the Philippines, so it’s no surprise residents of the Balibago district smirked at the mention of Rodman. Basketball is the national pastime after all despite an average height of 5’4” for Filipino men.
The site where Rodman’s Rainbow Obama
was supposed to be, but it’s long gone.
That didn’t solve the worrying sight of an empty parking lot before us along Sarmiento Street. Was the two hour drive from Manila for nothing? Apparently not. The residents didn’t reject a chance to help out finding their local fixture.
A lanky television engineer-turned-fixer for the occasion helped us question an array of characters in the country’s most populous dialect of Tagalog.
A lounging tricycle driver pointed us three blocks south where we then found shade dwellers sitting in what can only be described as a Filipino stoop.
I couldn’t help but notice scrawled graffiti next to their shack that said “Fuck relationships.”
They were under the impression Philander returned to the United States last year and had not come back. They sent us forward with directions to Philander’s wife that led nowhere.
We returned to the former restaurant for a disappointing consolation prize of a photo only for our guide to channel his inner journalist and shamelessly knock on doors.
Our translator speaks to a woman who lives next
to where Philander Rodman’s restaurant used to be.
A woman living next to the restaurant’s former site emerged from the darkness of her doorway and while clutching the door’s gate, she directed us to our final destination — a watering hole frequented by a small minority of retired service members.
“There will be blacks,” the neighbor told us.
“He will entertain you,” she added in English.
We really had no idea what that last comment meant.
A pit stop at a nearby mall filled our empty stomachs with thin-crust pizza with sausage, peppers and onions from Shakey’s, a Filipino chain. Note to New Yorkers: It was terrible pizza, but you already knew that.
The red light district is a collage of sun-bleached advertisements for bikini-clad women, idling tricycles and middle-aged white men bumbling along the streets in tennis shoes and white socks stretched to their calves.
A veer to the left at a fork in the road took us to the unmistakable sight of Philander sitting
at a bar wearing a customized hat that would throw Donald Trump into a fit of jealousy.
It was the answer to the question: “Yes, Dennis Rodman is my ‘son.”
The aging Vietnam veteran was in the middle of lunch — slurping up instant noodles with the help of his lady love.
“We came all this way for a burger. What happened,” I asked.
His five-time NBA champion of a son happened.
A man snoozed on the sidewalk beside me as I sat listening to Philander recall the fall of Rainbow Obama Burger while sipping a San Miguel Pilsner.
A simple Google search failed to reveal the restaurant’s closure in 2012 or early 2013 when Philander fell victim to his city’s bureaucracy. A flurry of international press shined a spotlight on his NBA ties and small business. Philander speculates it was a shake down for any extra cash he could muster believing a fateful reunion between his millionaire son in 2012 had been proved profitable.
“They thought he had given me some money. They wanted some of that money,” Philander said.
The licensing ordeal ran Philander into retirement — an existence defined as a life floating between home and his dive without a single care in the world alongside his wife.
He won’t forge another business, but he’ll soon order up a new hat bragging of his genetic diversity in the United States, Philippines and Vietnam: “Yes, Dennis Rodman is one of my 23 children from three different women in three different countries.”
He wasn’t sure why his current hat had quotations around the word “son,” but he assured us that yes, Dennis Rodman is his son.
None of his other children have ever met their famous half-sibling.
Despite decades of limited contact and half a world between them, Philander keeps tabs on Rodman through news clippings.
He is under the theory that Rodman can “go where he wants” even if it means teaching basketball in North Korea and humoring Kim Jong-un. He can endorse whomever he wants as well even if it’s a “rich white man” like Donald Trump.
Anticipating a long drive back to Manila and its stampede of traffic, we finished our beers and said goodbye.
My only regret: Eating Shakey’s pizza instead of those burgers.
Note (Jan. 25, 2017):
The fixer in this story, Eufronio Yango, died on Jan. 21. He was 54.
Sep 3, 2015
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