If That’s What It Says

Here’s an absurd notion: you’re either an L.A. person or a New York person. At first it doesn’t sound absurd. In fact, the more I hear about it, the more I realize that it’s rather popular.

Well. I haven’t actually been to America. I’ll be the first to admit that I have absolutely no say on the matter. But let me, if you will: when W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, Auden chose to live in New York; Isherwood stayed in Hollywood. Wasn’t that supposed to mean something? And then there’s this Mad Men episode – “The Jet Set” (from the second season) – in which (a very charming, for me, and very serious) Pete Campbell, orangey from an aerospace convention in L.A., says how he didn’t quite like the people in California. Rufus Wainwright, who has lived in both cities, and who now lives in New York (at least as indicated in Twitter), once said in an interview – on BBC One’s Imagine, I think it was – that he, along with fellow librettist Bernadette Colomine, were known in East L.A. as “Euro trash”. Mr. Wainwright said it in jest, of course. We all know he is just the opposite of trash. But still.

It seems as though the world has been drawn in binary fashion. If you belong to one, you must not fit in the other.

Let’s take this to a locale. I had always thought of myself as a Quezon City person. This meant – automatically, I guess – that I disliked Makati City, which I kind of did. Or maybe it was the other way around: I disliked Makati and therefore I was a Quezon City person. (I can get along fine with more than a few Makati persons, though.) Of course, it must be noted that the contrast wasn’t as stark as East and West, as New York and California. But whatever. I was born in Quezon City. St. Luke’s Hospital. Moreover, since college, when I grew old enough to be able to get around Metro Manila, Makati had never appealed to me. Too many rules. Too many cars. Too many businesses and tall boring buildings that loomed over you. Too many collar-popping, coffee-drinking people at too many branches of Starbucks.

And the commute was hard. I had to take a jeep at Mayon Street, and then a Tamaraw FX to Quezon Avenue corner EDSA, and then the train to either Buendia or Ayala Station, and then another jeep to wherever it was I was going: my psychotherapist at Medical Towers on Rufino Street; the Inquirer head office at Pasong Tamo for an extremely brief internship; to my very first job interview (a marketing specialist post for Community Innovations at which I had failed miserably); to reunions with friends from school, which would be held at something like, I don’t know, Oody’s or Tropezz in Greenbelt – reunions at which I, standoffish by default, had also failed miserably.

When I finally found a job as a marketing specialist for Eastwood Cinemas in Libis, Quezon City, I still had to go to Makati and meet with the marketing managers of official film distributors, one of whom once made me wait an hour at reception. This was in the Pacific Star Building. Later, when she finally appeared in a condescending red blazer and led me to her office, I was not even offered an apologetic cup of coffee.

My next job, as a copywriter for a Quezon City-based advertising agency, also involved meeting regularly with Makati-based clients. One such client had an office in the Philamlife Tower. She always wanted to get things like planning public relations strategies and press conferences out of the way – so that she could get on with the rest of her work stuff, I guess – and thus scheduled meetings at nine in the morning, sometimes eight. I am not a morning person. It will shock anyone how much of a morning person I’m not. And getting up at five to eat breakfast at six to catch the company car at seven to beat the traffic along Paseo de Roxas Avenue and make the meeting at eight? That was traumatic. It gave a formidable shock to my system.

So Makati became even less congenial.

But a funny thing happened. A book contract recently fell into my lap. Funny, because I’m sure there’s no other way a book contract would’ve been offered me, not until I can resist overwriting. Even funnier, in a funny and sad sort of way, is the fact that it’s a coffee table book, which is the kind of book that is perhaps never meant to be read. (I wouldn’t call it a many-paged, glorified, super-calendered press release.) A colleague whom I had met while she was working on public relations programs for Intel Philippines – let’s call her Miss T – contacted me for a project with her new employer. Something to do with intellectual property.

Miss T’s office is in Makati, near the corner of Jupiter Street and Makati Avenue. It’s a governmental-looking building, which means that all one would ever remember from it is that it’s colored gray and looks post-constructivist, even Stalinist. When I went inside for the first time, a female security guard/receptionist mispronounced my first name (Juan) as “June” – as in, “So Sir June is meeting Miss T today? You can keep your ID but I’ll have to ask you to log in on this notebook. The time is two-thirty.” I told her she could call me Migs.

During one of the editorial meetings, held at a long governmental-looking conference table, Miss T handed me the contract, which I only pretended to read. Then she asked me to sign my initials above the text that designated me as a “content development expert”.

“My what?” I asked, baffled.

“Your initials.”

“My what?” I asked, baffled.

“Your initials.”

“My what?”

I was new to all this initialism, although of course I should have known better than to not to expect binding legal agreements from an office that was run by a lawyer. I was, after all, the ‘winning’ supplier in a procurement activity, one that would reward me more handsomely than my diary entries ever did. It was a one-month contract, and I was allowed to write everything at the family home, at the apartment I’d been renting, or wherever I wanted, on top of doing all the non-rewarding stuff that had kept me busy. Meetings – for research, proofreading, fact-checking, coordination with the graphic designer – were to be held invariably in the Makati office. Which was all right. I’d have been insincere if I ever complained about anything that had to do with the project.

Happily responsible for the production of this first book, I began to enjoy the jeep rides, the FX rides, the train rides, the solitary lunches at McDonald’s, the taste of non-instant coffee served in the public relations department, the smoking of cigarettes at a balcony that overlooked – it occurred to me fully for the first time – what must surely be the Philippines’ version of New York City. My father used to keep telling me the very same thing about Makati, but I was too young then to appreciate the idea; I was too young to have any feelings about New York.

Or Los Angeles. They were so far away. They’re still so far away.

And besides the idea is so absurd. Popular, yes, but absurd. It’s rarely unedifying to find one’s self in a place where one’s a stranger; on occasion it may even be liberating. So if you ask me now whether I am a Quezon City person or a New York person, I’d tell you I am neither. I’d say I’m a content development expert. That’s what the contract says.

Note to Self

Write here soon! I know this book-writing business has eaten you whole. But still. You ought to never abandon this child. It's weeping! And the worst time to weep is the holidays.

Propriety

A red plastic basket on the table, and in it a flame-grilled burger, threatening in its state of unembarrassed greasiness to go soggy on me in a now-or-never sort of way. I can hear it pleading. Eat me. Eat me along with these thinly sliced, crispy fried potato wedges, and besmear us all with splotches of Tabasco, of Heinz, of sour cream, while you’re at it.

The cheese on the edges of the buns drips, but not with sarcasm. Rather, with a similar desperate urgency, melting, wooing, as though disinterest, or anything else which might cause further delay of its voyage to the inside of me, through my digestive tract and beyond, would spell for the cheese the hellish fate of being haplessly, irredeemably glued to noisy paper wrap.

Outside the diner the sun is a menace, slapping its hard light and hard heat on the hard street of Pearl Drive. It’s no wonder that a glass of lemon iced tea rests too on the table, beside the napkins. The iced tea is described in the menu as ‘bottomless’, an adjective that must have been coined for just this kind of weather, for just these kinds of times, when tree shades become refuge, and armpits seep plaintively, and throats go parched, and traffic inspires bumper flirtation, and tempers rise, and wretched, loud-mouthed college students from what my brother Francis once called “The University of the Affluent and the Privileged” come in through the glass door, in their mint-condition Nikes, in their flannel wardrobe, with their iPhones, in their full one-thousand-peso-daily-school-allowance glory, laughing and talking about LeBron James, computer games, and their coeds as though these are a matter of national security, or the funniest joke ever told. Their noise makes being inside Hotshots kind of like being in a school bus, even though these boys will probably never ride a school bus in their lives.

Take a sip now, will you kindly. Take a sip of my lemony goodness before it condenses to mere beads of dew, which, like moisture above your upper lip, you can only wipe with your hands. Take a sip before these beads trickle funnily down the glass and onto fake mahogany.

This is, of course, a burger joint. Obnoxiousness is slightly less unforgivable. At a place like Katrê, a “Mediterranean fusion” restaurant, which glows despite being tucked in the shadows of an unassuming Quezon City side street, and where you are regaled with the lovely heaviness of earthenware and where waiters wheel the wine trolley next to your table, and where it would be rather nice to talk about things like the intellectual speculations of Montaigne or the insufferable narrow-mindedness of people who are against the proposed reproductive health bill, yes, at a place like that, you might be expected to afford a little bit of propriety. And yet, and yet, as I wait for the arrival of my pork belly, which in the menu is described as “meltingly tender”, I cannot help but notice this, this man to my left. He is wearing a baseball cap, tilted; a basketball armband, unwashed; a pair of baggy jeans, very baggy; and a scowl, the kind that only the truly glamorous can get away with. This man is not truly glamorous, and in fact, while he is tailored to look like Chris Brown with an Asian beard, both his choice of footwear and his table manners render unavoidable my wishing that I was seated elsewhere. Not that I am a snob (not always); but one must care about these things, at the right place and at the right price.

Pita bread – bruised from grilling – is placed on the table, hostaged to a gang of three sexy dips, more than half of them exotic-sounding: hummus-bi-tahini, baba ghanoush, and yogurt and cucumber. These audacious meze dishes make the bread’s beaten pallor even more pathetic; they come in colors that evoke a lot of spring, a bit of autumn, and other shades of loveliness; it is these very colors that make the plate a smorgasbord, a delightful microcosm of all things you want to touch and taste. Go on, they seemed to say. Take your pick. Violate the chastity – the stupid purity – of this bread and smother it with our epicurean boldnesses.

Meanwhile, it is turning out to be quite a beautiful evening. The sky is Facebook blue and riddled with stars, and it’s hard to not officially like the way it appears in the second-storey glass window, which is to say: clearly, and darkly, like a calm moonlit ocean; I just know that if I go down the stairs and step outside I would feel the soft, cooler-than-usual breeze that, for the notoriously eager Manileños, gently marks the official beginning of Christmas; it is the same late November breeze that stirs the leaves on the sidewalk and sweeps the abandoned receipts off the ATM machines. Off they fly and there they go, like feathers from a wing, landing anticlimactically on pavement, on top of bushes, in puddles of sewage water, or in the society of cigarette butts.

As for my receipts, well – I have no interest in leaving trails of my fiscal inferiority, thank you.

At the far end of the restaurant, by the sliding doors that lead to a balcony and the smoking area, is a long dinner table occupied by a group of young men and women, none of them with shirts that have collars. They look Chinese. They drink more than they eat, they talk more than they drink, they shout more than they talk, and they photograph themselves more than they shout. There are flashes of lightning in the room; resounding roars of laughter; the ominous formation of two-fingered peace signs; the varied sounds of siren for phone calls and text messages; and the inappropriately bubblegum mirth of semi-fine diners. I remind myself that I was young once, too, and it is at this instant that I remember how, if I did so much as rest an elbow on the table, my father would let me know.

The meltingly tender pork belly arrives, its braised flesh laying exposed on top of a hill of white rice. It has given up. It has surrendered. And it aches, being seen like this, being surrounded and humiliated like this, in a veritable forest of bay leaves, star anise, garlic strings, and onion. I show no mercy and mutilate the pork belly with my dinner knife, pierce its parts with my dinner fork, and eat it, every fucking bit of it, with what must be fury, or satisfaction, or a dangerous combination of both.

Chris Brown with an Asian beard suddenly rises to his feet and walks across the room. He approaches a waiter who is pouring a glass of water from a stainless steel pitcher. They sort of talk, sort of conspiratorially, and then Mr. Brown inserts his hand into the waiter’s back pocket.

A tip.

Weather Forecast. Pt. II

(Read Pt. I)

Three weeks later and I have not heard from R. This is not to say that I have not heard or read about the man, from other people, about the havoc he has so far (allegedly) wreaked.

Wreaked where? Let’s see. In the office where he works, or used to work. The man is said to have appropriated company funds that add up to a six- or maybe even seven-figure amount. He pocketed fees after falsely billing clients and cashed checks made payable to the company. According to reports, the money was not remitted to accounting. Clients, meanwhile, were not given receipts, the issuance of which R simply stalled. He used friends’ credit cards to pay for, among other things, plane tickets and hotel accommodations in Boracay Island; fifty-six thousand pesos in debt to a colleague remains unpaid. Funds, too, raised from charity events organized by the company and with partnering non-profit organizations had vanished after he collected them.

There is also the story of E, whom R had hired for a job that didn’t exist (and therefore didn’t pay). “I started working January of this year and things were great,” E explains. “Rumors were spreading that R and I were fucking but I just brushed (them) off…. Anyway, eventually it died down and then later on I found out that the rumor (had) started from R himself…. One day at work R came up to me and told me that he wants to give me another job and that we should talk after working hours. We met at my friend’s place and (he) offered me a job paying a little more than what I was getting.” E, who is HIV-positive, accepted the offer. It was after all a home-based job. He used a laptop computer the purchase of which – contrary to what R had led him to believe – was not authorized. One day on his second month into the new job E was owed fifteen thousand pesos. He waited five hours for R at Gateway Mall in Cubao to be paid two thousand five hundred.

Dona Victorina, an online community that denounces “debauchery and corruption in the government, media, and high society”, exposes the thickening paper trail and describes the nature of R’s scam: “His modus operandi was simple enough. He first gets money that isn't his to begin with, then (he) uses that money to pay back money he had taken from someone else. And then (he) repeats the cycle again. It was like a small Ponzi scheme that worked without being detected for months and months.” Interestingly, R had been part of Dona Victorina, where his opinion pieces were read by thousands of people protesting against frauds.

I’m nowhere near the middle of this swirling controversy. But nights of drinking with a person whom one considered a friend costs more than the price of beer. Abundance!, that which R had signed for me, betrays nothing of what allegedly happened during the making of the book: for a contract, he forged the signature of the mother superior who was in charge of the congregation that published his work. R had also given me writing assignments supposedly authorized by his company: one was an interview with former German Playboy cover Tetchie Agbayani; the other was a feature story for an airline magazine. I am almost resigned to the bleak thought of my never getting paid for those jobs. But – and this is where R’s lies affect me most stingingly – I am also supposed to have been indiscreet with him. Alas, I am not into bestiality. I may not be ‘normal’, I may not be very wealthy, but I have good taste and I appreciate only good things.

May Today Be Better Than Good

1.

Mr. Fredericks prepared lovely strawberry ice creams, and had always greeted everyone by saying, “Mate!” It must have been a Kiwi thing. He had always bid goodbyes by saying, “May today be better than good.” He bid a final goodbye a little over twenty-four hours after All Souls Day.

No one saw it coming. He had felt a sudden sharp pain in his stomach early in the week, as though something inside had burst, and when it had become clear that something was seriously wrong, the mother of Mr. Fredericks’ gorgeous five-year-old boy Josh – Miss Dimaisip – took him to the hospital. Or wherever it was they attended to the sick in the provincial municipality of Matalam, Cotabato, where he lived. I went to Mr. Fredericks’ house earlier this year. The town is rural and simple, and it seemed to be a place where unhappiness did not exist. (There are many such places in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.) I had a delicious Filipino lunch. I admired the vegetable garden. In the front yard, there was a wooden playhouse, and little Josh, who certainly takes after his cheerful father, peered at me doubtfully through its cracks and openings, especially when I gushed, “Aw, how cute. Look at those hazel eyes.”

At the hospital the doctors operated on Mr. Fredericks. Cut him open. The next forty-eight hours saw a somber exchange of phone calls and messages between Miss Dimaisip and Evelyn, who was Mr. Fredericks’ business partner. Her last message read, “Please help me pray for Ian as he travels to the Great Beyond to meet his Creator.” Cause of death was renal failure. He was sixty-three.

2.

What a name: “Pius”. I know him because of his continued service at San Isidro Labrador Chapel. His name may explain why my most vivid recollection of this neighbor is of his performance at my grandmother’s wake, at Saint Peter’s in Quezon City. As if to render unthinkable the kind of rumors that circulated about any middle-aged bachelor who attaches himself to church in these fallen times, Pius played his guitar with an innocence that approached the holy. He’d brought along the usual retinue – Len Len, Jenny, Men Men, Rey Boy, among others – of teenagers who would otherwise have had nothing else to do but whistle the time away on street benches or place their fathers’ bets for the Santa Ana horse race. Led by Pius, and flanking the open casket of my father’s mother, they sang a chorus of church songs. During mass Pius sort of doubled as a lay minister, spreading cloth over a makeshift altar and assembling the chalice and ciborium at a makeshift tabernacle. After mass he put his guitar in a corner and stayed with us, cleaning up cookie crumbs left by family friends whom he had also encouraged to mark their condolences in the guest book.

Pius.

Well, he died, too. He was forty-seven. Diabetes. Recently he’d been covering his neck with a makeshift scarf while walking around the neighborhood; he had this wound on the back of his head, from the nape downwards, this wound that wouldn’t heal and he wouldn’t show and which people who had nevertheless seen it described as being the size of a plate. “That’s impossible,” I thought, when mother announced at the dinner table that Pius had died. She wasn't kidding me. “Maybe the size of a saucer,” I went on thinking, “but not a dinner plate, I shouldn’t think. That’s horrible.”

3.

My mother’s mother is still at the hospital in Tuguegarao, the Cagayan province where my parents grew up and met each other. Lola Auring had fractured her pelvis at the height of super typhoon Pepeng and has since been under the constant watch of nurses, doctors, her children, her children’s children. It has been a month now. At the hospital she suffered a stroke and, on another occasion, stopped breathing for one full minute, provoking a panicked explosion of prayers and petitions from my mother. My sister Lourdes took pictures of Lola when she went there to visit, but I don't want to look at them.

Here in Manila, meanwhile, people are reeling still from the devastation left behind by Pepeng, Ondoy, Ramil, and Santi, these goddamned typhoons the entrances of which we watched on CNN or ANC. That we watched until the power failed. And whenever power fails, when the corporations cite one reason or another for the loss of what is rather impossible to live without, we can only scramble to find something to do, something that would put off ennui, something that would make us happily ignore a gloomy headline, the enveloping dark, the faltering flashlight, the sad news of death and dislocation. I, for one, and despite the circumstances, resume reading a novel. I grab my guitar. These efforts perhaps are successful in the same consoling way that memories of life and light succeed in helping us accept death and darkness, disaster and powerlessness. It’s usually only to an extent; for a time that we will always look at as a long time, absence was the looming presence. But we come to realize that the end of a story heralds the beginning of another, that the fading of one song frees us to sing a new one.

Weather Forecast

The schizophrenic madness of nine-o’clock: was it late or was it early? A coffee-break-long wait at wee hole-in-the-wall PenPen in Quezon City. On the walls – bright and yellow, plus other hearty kindergarten colors – these shiny posters of comfort food. Adobo flakes, crispy liempo, aligue pasta. At the service counter, a young man tickling his guitar, which laughed musically, or should I say chuckled? Chuckled acoustically. Outside the glass door, the quiet pleasant freshness of an October evening, and a walk with Evelyn through Tomas Morato’s beautifully shadowed side streets. (Streetlights come so sporadically this side of the avenue.) It was his birthday. Dinner had been had at Katre on Scout Lazcano; the theme was Mediterranean fusion; he had Navarin of lamb with couscous pilaf and I had spareribs with, among other things, star anise essence. He had just arrived from London but was leaving again the next day. “Happy birthday,” I had said, raising a glass, at the dinner table. “From now on, let’s start counting backwards, for the best way to celebrate is illogically.” Clink.

A superb feast, and the best part about it was that it was moveable. And so to PenPen we had walked to wait for my friend R, who’d gladly accepted an invite to join us for drinks elsewhere. R worked at a nearby office – a minute near, actually – and had assured us that he’d very soon call it a day, five minutes and I’m there, and will Evelyn be the kind host? Yes. “Thanks,” he had said in a text message. “You see, right now I have no cash on me.” He did have a pink shirt, in fabric perfect for summer evenings, but October was not summer. Faded cuffed jeans, too, and a pair of black leather boots, and in these he jumped out of the company car, sashaying across the street to shake Evelyn’s hand and mine. “You could have walked,” I said. “How are you?”

I will not bore you with a transcription of gushing pleasantries. The three of us marched four or five blocks to Scout Rallos Street and into Isla del something something (I forget what it was called), a bar which was, if I remember correctly, lit lazily by lanterns and had a bohemian Caribbean sort of feel and where one hunkered down on floor cushions to eat a little, drink a lot. We killed hours drinking a lot; once or twice R asked the waiter if he could please turn the trance music down; the night wore on, an increasing number of San Miguel caps littering the low table; clink clink clink; soon after I pasted my back on the wall – no thanks to such ergonomically bad seating – Evelyn picked up a cushion and put it on top of another and sat taller than everybody else. The conversations were just as skewed; they were about the recent typhoons, Mongolia, old British actors, Shakespeare, Hardy, pineapple and coffee plantations in Bukidnon, and Mad Men, among other things, and occasionally through the haze of cigarette smoke I saw R smile a tense smile, the kind that hid larger feelings. Or, possibly, grim agendas. It occurred to me – while getting lost in talks on what Flying Circus was – that I did not know this man, R, well enough; I only knew that he lived by jumping from one pension house or budget hotel to another (“…so they cannot trace my IP address...”) and that his previous line of work was political profiling; that he was reliably prone to karaoke and to nights of drinking out alone; that he had recently begun taking violin lessons in Kamuning Avenue, how esoteric that was, one was not aided by frets; and that he had written three books, one of which was for the Dominican Sisters of Regina Rosarii, it was entitled Abundance!, a copy of which was given to me with a message that read, “Migs, may the stories here convince you that healing is a gift for those who believe.” He had a good grasp of English, but I knew I did not like his choice of metaphors.

By the time we left Isla del something something – about two in the morning – my head was spinning. “We’ll walk you back to your office,” Evelyn told R, “and then we’re both going to pass out.” At Scout Castor back to where PenPen stood R turned to us and said, “You know what? I can take it from here. Look: go get that taxi.” He wished Evelyn a happy birthday and said goodbye.

(Cont'd here)

Dysentery, Ha!

NaNoWriMo. I wonder who comes up with such ridiculous things. And whoever it is that comes up with such ridiculous things, I wonder why it has to be November. “The National Novel Writing Month: Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!” As though I had been churning out my own crap without abandon. Not once, I hasten to say, a novel; but short stories. Of fecal quality. Six months a year I celebrate ShoStoWriMo. You get the drift.

It’s about this guy, this American guy, and this girl in Manila. She has a younger brother. I don’t know his name yet. He’s supposed to be a sort of chaperone. They’re walking along the dirty and unfriendly streets of Ermita. The three of them. After that? Who knows. That’s why they call it ‘abandon’; you’re not supposed to have certainty. It’s supposed to be very funny, but I am still dealing with this verisimilitude quandary, and the covering of holes in characterization, the prevention of dangling modifiers, and the subscription to hot trends in fiction today. We have got to be ‘current’, haven’t we, be modern and write with a swarming consciousness of the times and its signs. Oh my. To write about something as scorching as interracial relationships is quite new-fashioned, don’t you think? For what else should be the matter but race; race and love actually, race and love are the matter. You will, of course, deduce from this that we here in the Philippines have outgrown wearing foliage. Enough of folkloristics. Enough of catholic notions, and of Spaniards. Race and love: we’re onto something political here. How delightful should it be to readers – and publishers – yes, publishers – that they will soon have in their hands a month’s work of generously spirited crap rich with startling political insights on the color of one’s skin and the variations of one’s heart.

God, I write a lot of nonsense – by meaninglessness of effort and by sheer word count. Let’s focus on the ‘meaninglessness’ part. Too much affectation? I certainly won’t disagree. Too little experience? Maybe. Too much Hemingway? I daresay nothing good happens without reading Papa. Too irresolute? Several months ago – it was last April, I think – I was in Davao, a city in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao; I flew in to attend a writers workshop, most of which I eventually missed due to a nasty case of dysentery (is there any other kind?). It was there that I submitted my first entry to the Palanca Awards, and on the last day people could do it, too. I envisioned a podium. In the ballroom of a charmingly rococo hotel. Champagne. Bouts of only the most agreeable laughter with the fellows and writer chaps. My name on paper. A check payable to my name. My name on Wikipedia. Book deals even. The beginning of helpless brilliance and chronic success. Of course, let us not ignore the fact that the essay, which I had called “The Year of Other Things” (does that not sound so literarily stylish? In vogue? I stole it from a friend), was not at all worthy of being submitted, much less read. In fact, I would not even begin to think of publishing the fecal document here, on an online journal.

But you know what I did? I bought those requisite brown envelopes from the supply store in Victoria Plaza. Printed copies of the piece from Evelyn’s old laptop computer. Using wrong-sized paper. I had to use scissors and concentrate. Printed official entry forms and authorization forms from Evelyn’s old laptop computer. Again using wrong-sized paper. Again I had to use scissors and concentrate. By noon, I almost lost heart. What in perdition did they mean? “Notarize your entry.” What in perdition did they mean? And what a silly thing to be requiring of participants! Our language, I thought, will not be all the richer for this kind of paperwork. But go I did. Ran around the whole city, calling people I knew who knew attorneys. Well, of course I had to stop by a computer shop on Bolton Street and have the damned entries and forms scanned and sent in digital format. The incorruptible lady at the desk – who was about as helpful as a back pocket on a shirt – ignored my flirtatious glances and then my furious glances. She kept paying attention to those gamers! After three hundred years, I was out of the computer shop with my thumb drive. Walked, perspired, got roasted by the early afternoon sun in my search for law offices. It must have been one of those days that Davao was hotter than Manila. By four o’clock I almost lost heart. My thirst for champagne was not to be quenched after all. However. However! Stopping for a cigarette at San Pedro Street in front of the Davao City Hall, I saw a sign for a certain Tolentino Law Office. Babao Building. I went up two flights of stairs and met a secretary who told me to go up another flight of stairs. I went up another flight of stairs, whereupon an angel disguised as a lawyer officially notarized my crap for a fee of a hundred and fifty pesos. (Come to think of it, I still haven’t gotten round to thanking Mrs. Marie Dinah Tolentino-Fuentes.) I was delirious when I finally mailed the envelope to Manila.

Of course I didn’t win. I might have even placed last. As far as this writing thing is concerned, I can produce only nonsense. November, December, it doesn’t matter what month. But you know what? At least I can finally say I am serious about it. Rather.

Vagina

Nothing seems to be going right. The pictures on television say so. Super typhoon Parma – locally codenamed “Pepeng”, which also roughly translates to ‘vagina’ – was at least as vicious, if not more vicious, to the northern regions of the Philippines as the recent tropical storm Ketsana was to Manila. Dozens of live reports on the local news each day. Hundreds dead: the disaster council says a total of seven hundred and twelve from the back-to-back blows, but that’s only unofficially. Houses buried under water, or under mud. Billions of pesos lost; we Filipinos wonder, where shall our rice come from now? It’s just been horrible. My grandmother, Lola Auring, slipped and fell twice on a wet floor when Parma made its landfall in Cagayan. She fractured her pelvis. She was rushed to the hospital, where she then suffered a stroke. Mother and Aunt Josie went for the bladder-challenging twelve-hour bus ride to Tuguegarao, Cagayan to look after her. She came round two days into hospitalization, but mother has sent me messages devoid, uncharacteristically, of hope. “Your Lola keeps on singing what she’s seeing in her visions,” goes one of the reports. “If she’s not doing that she just stares at the ceiling – into space.”

Lola Auring doesn’t hear much anymore; she’s practically been deaf since last year. She does, however, hear what cannot usually be heard: for example, the songs of angels, or the voice of grandfather. What do you know! Mother says that, at the hospital, the nurses have had to sedate Lola, who, the last time she vacationed in Manila, looked well enough to not need any sedatives. We took to writing huge blocks of letters and words on a whiteboard then. We watched her read them, and we anticipated her reaction. Sometimes it made me feel silly – squiggling a chunky I LOVE YOU for an old woman who held a plastic tray into which she spat out phlegm – but most of the time it made me feel sad.

How much sadder, then, I am now – or we are now. Things have happened to Samoa, too, and to Indonesia and Vietnam and to other places which, thanks to a barrage of somber weather reports, I can now point at on a map. Awful things. The best of Filipino chauvinism, perfect for harrowing times – “I have had some before, but this is the ‘Pepeng’ that I definitely must refuse” –, makes me smile, but there is a disquieting feeling, a vague, eerie presentiment that all this is only the beginning, that after one funeral shall come another, that we ought not take lightly the caprice of nature, that even if others not from this country can now suddenly point at my parents’ hometown on a map, or at Dagupan where Uncle Fred’s fishpond once was, or at Baguio or La Union, quiet little towns and provinces and cities that ran smoothly enough on the faulty machinery of a third-world country, it won’t make a difference. We aren’t all the better for others’ geographical enlightenment, or for our own distracting puns. Lola certainly isn’t.

For most, so far, of October, I have stayed sheltered in a rented eighth-floor room in an apartment building, one with a sweeping view of Quezon City. Roofs, rusty billboards, limp telegraph wires, the chartreuse spires of an Iglesia ni Cristo, concrete monstrosities still under construction, the bulky blocks of suburbia: they seem to me, as I step out onto the balcony, all mine, all within my grasp; and yet they seem to me all wretched and ugly and grey. I came here to write, to read, to work, but in the mornings a powerful lethargy comes over me. Or a remarkable form of denial. No one wants to wake up to this – knowing the world isn’t fair, and that nothing at all is going right.

Uncorrected

Will you kindly get me a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? I’d be ever so glad. That’s a classic book; my friends tell me so. If you could just visit a bookshop while you’re there, ask the lady at the counter for the title, which, in case you forget it, I wrote on the back of a business card that you will find tucked in your wallet. I also wrote ‘horseradish’, which tastes very nice and which I have come to like almost as much as I do wasabi.

One thing I did not tell you: there’s a paperback copy of the Franzen at the impressive four-storey, energy-efficient, budget-breaking Fully Booked in highly societal Bonifacio High Street. We went there last August, and thus began my dilettantish search. On the first floor I found it, held it, opened and closed and reopened it, almost performed on it my fetishistic sniffing of the page; poor thing, I should have rescued it too and dug it out from the Fiction shelves, which was packed full with books crowded tightly together in alphabetical order and pressed hard one upon the other, each of them looking so very helpless and lonely. A most awful burial, since there wasn’t any room for breathing. I thought at the time, but you’re going back to London, I might as well send you on a fun assignment, which I hasten to remind you cannot be carried out online. (If I should watch Dr. Who and The West Wing with you, then so should you appreciate the curious, fanciful, uncertain, and, most important of all, deeply personal experience of wandering through bookstore aisles.) I also thought, while then contemplating a purchase, what the heck; waiting a few weeks will not matter much in terms of having an effect on my already direly outdated literary sensibilities, which – okay, I know this for a fact – bores you utterly and stupidly whenever I begin to talk about it.

You are none the less missed. I could not help it when, a few days ago, I replayed a video from that night when I introduced you to my friend Rain in a karaoke joint in Malate, and you sang “Delilah”. Lord Almighty. And such a firm grip on the microphone, too, as though you were the sole custodian of ancient, ready-to-be-bastardized music. I had laughed then, laughed and cheered, but I smiled – smiled true – while I was watching the footage, the reddish light and the fluid dark shadows of the room trembling according to the heady irregular movements of my hand, the audio sharp and loud, almost piercing, and your cradling – your rocking gently along to the song – suggestive of something milder and kinder. Forgive me: more than once I had barked, “How embarrassing!”; of course, it was in jest; it must have been the alcohol, it must have been the cozy, ethereal sight and scent of smoke coming out of the nostrils of the people in the bar, it must have been the knowledge, the desperation, the urgent joy of spending those beloved moments with someone who will be gone for awhile.

In the meantime, enjoy your stay there. You wouldn’t want to be here in Manila, not at this moment. Villages and barangays are still trying to recover from the wrath of tropical storm Ondoy, which left the streets flooded like you wouldn’t believe. Where there’s little flood left, lots of literal muckraking (not the Mitford kind). Gunshots at night in unsecured neighborhoods. Politicians are plastering their names on food packs. There’s looting among the homeless, too. The pictures are depressing, even apocalyptic; nothing feels normal. I thank the heavens for having spared my family from the indiscriminate disaster. Still, it’s like everyone has changed after this rather historic experience, and yet we – well, at least me – I have to go on with life as I know it, back to work, write for clients, earn, eat, read, sleep, constantly with a terrible new unease caused by the knowledge that carrying on such business is nothing close to heroic, and can be considered putridly apathetic in light of people I know spending hours packing canned goods or deploying their vehicles for relief operations or using personal funds to finance volunteer efforts, all jolted after the calamity by conscience and community. “Where I came from,” a volunteer campaign poster reads, “everyone’s a hero.” But I’d done very little to help, I am sorry to say. I had done very little, period, except for miss and love and demand and disappoint, and write this letter that asks, will you be kind enough to get me the Franzen.

Horseradish.

Ondoy: Across Manila and Into Our Stories

(To donate or volunteer, visit the Google page for Help for Ondoy Victims.)

Last Saturday, a tropical storm struck Metro Manila. Its name was Ketsana, locally known as Ondoy. Its effect was less cute – much. The morning of that day, I looked out at our garage, flooded over a foot high with rainwater. We were in darkness; there was no power. Candles were lit. Appliances were unplugged. The dogs – Brutus, Martin, and Nole – swam for their lives and climbed the wooden bench near the washing machine. Mitzie lay on a floor rug inside the house. While I prepared instant Pancit Canton and romanticized the idea of a candle-lit eighteen-peso breakfast, the radio crackled news of what was happening out there. You know the works: statistics, traffic reports, news from affected neighboring provinces, forecasts, commentaries, statements from officials, number of families displaced, number of people missing, number of people dead. I finished a Hemingway – one of his worst, but his worst is still better than most others’ bad novels – while waiting for the rain to subside, and for electricity. Hours passed. More candles were lit. A magnificent boredom ensued. When night came, the dark grew more treacherous. You opened your eyes and you saw the same thing as when your eyes had been closed: blackness, with tiny, almost imperceptible moving grains, like people in a rally.

I woke up Sunday morning still not knowing how lucky we were. Heavy rain still beat the crap out of our area. At eleven in the morning, still without electricity, my cousins, siblings, and I all decided to troop to a friend’s house in Barangay White Plains at the east side of Quezon City. We needed to charge our mobile phones; we were also to meet another cousin, Johnny, who was visiting from Los Angeles. The taxi ride on the way there made my knees weak. We passed through Quezon Avenue, Araneta, New Manila, Greenhills, Santolan Avenue, EDSA, and Katipunan. There was always mud; it was either black or brown. At E. Rodriguez Avenue, there was an ongoing operation; it seemed that the floods had displaced the community of squatters who used to live by the creek below. My brother Josemaria took pictures: debris litter everywhere, plastics, fallen trees, car parts, piles and scraps of wood and iron sheets from houses ravaged by the storm, men carrying things, trying to sort out what looked to be a hopeless disorder, women weeping, waiting. Again on the radio, something was said about a month’s worth of rainfall having poured down on Manila in six hours; something about Ondoy leaving eighty percent of the city under water; something about Cristine Reyes, the actress who had posed for FHM and whom I had previously not heard of, seeking refuge and waiting to be rescued from the top of her roof in Marikina City, an eastern Manila suburb, while cars were swept away and commuters waded through flood waters or hung calamitously onto car tires and telegraph wires and feeble branches of trees.

“The traffic yesterday was unbelievable,” Lourdes, my sister, said. She had earlier that morning come home from her office in EDSA Central Station – how exactly, I didn’t know – in time to join us. “EDSA Santolan was an ocean. Even Arroyo was forced to take the MRT to Camp Aguinaldo, or so I heard. The trains were packed. Infinitely worse than Spanish sardines in a can.” Eugene, my cousin who works in Cavite, a province just thirty kilometers outside of Manila, knew perhaps just how unbelievable and infinitely worse it had been. It took twelve hours to get from his office to our house in Quezon City. “From one in the afternoon to one in the morning,” he said. “The bus didn’t go for stopovers, man. No food, no drinks, nothing. Twelve hours! Shit, I could have gone to Tuguegarao to see grandma.” We did not hasten to correct Eugene that Manila to Cagayan took thirteen hours by bus, because that ride would have had three stopovers.

At White Plains, more stories were told. A taxi driver’s brother had no way to get home and so he walked from Ayala Avenue to Monumento – the equivalent of eleven MRT stations and about fifteen kilometers. A treadmill floated its way to a cousin’s friend’s house in Fairview; this same cousin's friend's new Nissan Pajero floated out. The elegant two-storey home of the Ortiz family – friends of father – in Santa Mesa Heights, and where I used to spend Sunday afternoons drinking coffee and writing and reading, was submerged in water; Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz are in Australia; their driver and his family, who had all looked after the house, managed to swim their way to safety. Once my mobile phone was charged, a message came in. It was from my friend Pong who was making sure my family was all right. Heroes Hills, the Quezon City subdivision where he lives, I heard wasn’t spared, either. When I began asking other friends and relatives where and how they were, Teresa, a colleague of mine, told me that she was accepting donations for a new house and a new car. Kirby, meanwhile, a writer friend based in New Manila, contemplated making use of his inflatable raft. “Sister’s in New York. Brother and mother are on their way to Prague. Father is going to Hong Kong. Me? Stuck at home, writing about cars and watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother… In-fucking-sane… Flood has subsided somewhat, though, and I don’t see rats floating around anymore.”

At the absurdity of it all, my cousins and siblings and I, we sometimes laughed; inside, we wept. Not because we were lower- to middle-class, but because our tragedy was our privilege, our unscathed survival, our presences at a place where we were blessed with an occasion to grow even closer to people who were already as fundamentally close to us as people can get close to people. How can one worry about the scars of romantic infidelities when someone out there was clinging to a nylon frigging cord for his life? How awful was it to attend to business backlog and unread E-mail while bodies were drifting away from loved ones and towards mere statistical existence? And how shy-making to be given chocolates from America when these should stain the sweet teeth as brown as the city streets have been rendered by the bitter sludge. Love is love and fun is fun, but we mourn quietly when our people die. I, for one, reconfigured my brain and jettisoned all literary reflections on why E.B. White would do such a thing as to viciously parody Across the River and Into the Trees.

As of this writing, a total of two hundred forty people have been confirmed dead. Half a million had been displaced; close to three hundred seventy-five thousand have been relocated to over two hundred evacuation centers and makeshift shelters. Twenty-five provinces have officially been declared as being under a state of calamity. Two more tropical depressions are threatening to hit the country. And, according to government audits, the entire national emergencies fund of 800 million pesos – plus a preposterous augmentation worth 120 million pesos – has been exhausted on Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s frequent trips abroad, a ‘miscellaneous’ item from which includes the alleged Imeldific $20,000 dinner at Le Cirque in New York.

Let us not wait on the Philippine government. To all those who wish to donate or volunteer, I direct you to this Google page for Help for Ondoy Victims, where you will find an aggregated list of news resources, information on rescue operations, and verified online and bank accounts accepting monetary and in-kind donations for disaster relief efforts. I also implore you to give my mother your happiest birthday greetings, under the circumstances. Mrs. Maria Editha Bassig is now fifty-nine, and I love her very much indeed.