a blind girl in a movie house

she was the daughter of the corpulent woman who sold shaved ice outside the only movie house in the island I grew up in.

and she would sit, all the way to the front pew in the orchestra section, through the first three screenings of the day, starting at midday, until all of her mother's murky block of ice was completely shaved away, then topped with homemade molasses, and sold out to sweltering movie goers.

she must have been as old as I was but I never saw her at our government run elementary school. it was only in my freshman year at the non-sectarian high school ran by my mother that a classmate told me she never went to school as she was stone blind.

last night at the oscars, an erstwhile comedian who uncannily portrayed the blind r & b legend ray charles was named best actor. and I thought of her.

one of the first non-news pieces I was asked to write in the first paper I worked for in manila was this silly what-was-the-first-movie-you-ever-remembered-watching sort of assignment. it had to be under 2,000 characters and would be plugged into this gaping column left vacant by the paper's adjunct film reviewer who had a shouting match with the prim culture and lifestyle ed the day before.

i remember writing perfunctorily about those usual cecil b. de mille spectacles. i ended up, however, talking more about this blind girl, this girl who had this eerie air of discernment, this girl who I remembered staring hard at the screen as other patrons, mostly the paunchy fishermen just waiting for nightfall, dozed off behind her.

the culture ed was not too pleased with my fluff piece and she got instead an agence france press release, about johnny depp I believe it was, printed in what could have been my spot.

last year, a cinema in manhattan's upper east side initially offered to its blind patrons the descriptive video service (dvs). it's an audio technology offering a kind of verbal filling-in-the-gap for those pivotal scenes where actions of actors, instead of their dialogues, pushed on the narrative.

coming home for sem break during my second year at the university, I remember seeing the blind girl's mother fanning like crazy under her decrepit push-around kiosk while a group of mostly barefooted island boys sweated under the island sun playing basketball in our then unpaved town plaza. she was not there.

but why would she be there? she would just be a burden to her working mother. i imagined her, instead, staying at home, listening to what's blaring out from a tv now hot to touch as it was turned on since six in the morning.

no one there to tell her how this male noontime tv host was coming on to this dubious starlet trying to sell her soft porn picture as a quality flick. no headset to narrate to her how a cream pie landed smack right into the face of this splayed nosed comedian. no one there to narrate how this game show contestant was close to tears after the chatty host inveigled her to chuck her chance at winning the million peso jackpot for the safer ten thousand pesos giveaway.

but i could see her craning her neck, staring hard at where she thought the tv screen was and smiling, pleased at seeing the world for all it was.

the worst of all evils

i am this close to writing a letter to a former colleague in this broadsheet that was hounded to its extinction by the corrupt and thankfully deposed president joseph estrada.

but first, two things: one, that if I could have somebody tell me her snail mail address and two, that if I could come up with a decent thing to say to her.

in this manila based english daily, I used to scam my way at the central desk while she did odd jobs in office central. I was single and carefree. she was this middle aged, childless wife supporting her maimed husband, crippled inutile by the thugs of the marcos military regime.

for nineteen long years, she, together with close to ten thousand other martial law victims, has pinned her hopes on a US appeals court, the hope of being indemnified for all the indignities, loss of lives and all, they suffered under the brutality of the marcos machinery.

but it all came to naught early this month. a san francisco based federal appeals court ruled that the martial law victims have no legal claim to the close to a billion dollars in marcos laundered assets previously transferred from a swiss bank account to the current philippine government.

just before this weekend, an american bank, riggs, promised to donate close to ten million dollars to another group of human rights victims, those who have suffered under the equally brutal regime of former chilean military ruler augusto pinochet. riggs, after helping pinochet launder his larcenous assets for decades, must have mended its corrupt corporate ways.

but what would I tell this colleague? that there is yet hope? that there is still time for both her and her crippled husband to make their piddling lives more decent, more livable than the hell they have been through?

nietzche, as always, is right. hope is, indeed, the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.

i was just in manila last year. and true to my borderline antisocial personality, I made no extra effort to get in touch with my former paper colleagues.

but then coming back to new york, I was cooped up in the same flight with my former city news editor. thankfully, he was flying coach.

during the limited time we had at the waiting lounge, my city ed was a living rolodex. our ed in chief was now back to her university teaching post. our sports ed, now a girlie skin mag ed. he was now an associate producer in an investigative tv show the name of which never stuck to me.

i was never able to ask him about this colleague. I did not remember her at all during our conversation. nor did my city ed. why would we? she was just another nobody in the scheme of our office world.

the only time I can ever remember talking to this woman was during a particularly lashing storm in my first year at the paper. most of the editorial staff were forced to stay overnight in the office while the storm raged outside.

after putting the final edition to bed, I went to heat my instant noodle in the microwave oven at the staff lounge. she was just done re-heating her ba-on of fried tilapia and stale rice.

trying to make some small talk, I told her, "oh, life is so hard, isn't it?" she laid down her packed dinner on the table for twelve, seated herself on the chair farthest from me and without looking up, she answered "compared to what?"

bronx kung fu

his friends called him kano, the american, because he looked pasty for an islander. and when he got back home from working in saudi arabia, he played his americanness to the hilt by dropping without any provocation at all what could pass for english phrases.

besides his ubiquitous ray ban aviator glasses, kano brought home the first betamax to our our island where tv reception was almost nil. and when kano started playing flicker-free, full-length movies, that was it for us kids in the neighborhood. to us, he became mr. kano.

mr. kano would usually start to feed his clunky betamax machine a fresh tape after the eight o'clock catholic angelus. but our neighborhood posse, around eight of us, would have already milled around their house an hour before that, often watching him and his yet childless and surly wife eat their dinner through their low lying kitchen window.

then when the english movie started, (I never remember any tagalog movie being screened), mr. kano would annotate the screening authoritatively. for us who were still into grade school, his armchair interlinear critical explanations were quite welcome.

one night, when the movie, a spaghetti western, I now realize, went way too long, mother was livid and physically dragged me down from mr. kano's kitchen window ledge where I was perched.

after her unimaginative and rehashed chiding, always about responsibility, mama asked me why mr. kano was so animated during the showing. I told her he was helping us understand the movie better. how, she asked. by interpreting for us since he was the only one who understood english in the crowd having worked abroad, I answered.

mama scoffed at the idea that remeriano, mr. kano's school name, could accurately interpret the english dialogue for us as according to her, he never even went beyond grade two. but he had been to saudi, I shot back. and for me, mr. kano was the man.

after that night, mama officially forbade me ever going back to mr. kano's screenings. but whenever mama received her suitors, I could still slink out of the house and to mr. kano's glorious parlor I went where english was spoken quite pleasingly with a very strong island accent.

this morning, I went to drop my laundry in this wash place predominantly patronized by mexicans. while waiting in line, a hong kong chopsocky movie was being shown on the tv above the counter. the movie was not subtitled or dubbed. pure cantonese mellifluously pouring out of the levitating actors' mouths.

an old man standing by a dryer looked relieved upon seeing me walk into the laundromat. he kept on staring at me while I fidget in the line.

finally, he could not help himself anymore and started speaking to me in spanish. I immediately cut him off, saying I don't speak his language. ay chino, he said exasperatingly as he walked back to the dryer. he obviously mistook me for a chinese.

wheeling my laundry bag home, I thought of going back and dare talk to the man again. with the meager english he knows and I, without knowledge of any chinese dialect, we would have been a pair to listen to. and behold.

like mr. kano, i could have easily made up any story that would fit the action in the movie and the chicano would pretend understanding my heavily accented english.

and after our animated exchange, he would have probably went home grinning, thinking that some crazy, wildly gesticulating chinese guy was the coolest crazy, wildly gesticulating chinese guy he had ever met.

and I would have went home thinking that for a day I was the man to an english-challenged chicano instead of being just a surly asian man dragging home a creaking, rusty laundry cart.

vin du saison

in a season, well, oscar season, where the vin du mode is pinot noir, it's hard to admit that I may have, at one point in my artless, not to mention pretentious, oenophile education, worshipped merlot.

despite the forecast, some of my work peoples decided yesterday that it was too late to ditch our long-planned farewell dinner for this guy who we were never particularly fond of but who has finally made good on his dare to move on to another hospital. besides, who cares about the expected seven to eight inches of snow heading our way when there was a legitimate excuse to get drunk. on great varietals, I should add, quite belatedly and insincerely.

the dinner would be held in this italian bistro in our area with a horrible reputation for meat entrees but with quite a substantial wine tasting cellar, I heard.

i arrived at the appointed place when snow flurries were just starting to powder everything. two leafless trees, a neat though wispy poplar and a scraggly bigleaf maple, I believe it was, framed the entrance of the bistro's parking lot.

our party had been assigned to this rustic long table down the cellar. an indifferent sommelier was fidgeting against the cold wall while the rest of us could not come to an agreement on which wine to have for our first course.

finally, this guy we were throwing the dinner for finally put his foot down, as if he was footing the bill. but anyway. he demanded that all through dinner, no one should be allowed to order anything remotely merlot. this was maybe when, in my melodramatic mind, the snow outside started to really pour.

the only comedy nominated for best picture in this year's oscar derby, sideways, did not really rake it in in the tills. however, in the cultural zeitgeist, this alexander payne film has inebriated a whole lot of critics and sopped to the core the american wine drinking world.

in the film, Miles, an unrecovered divorce and novelist manqué, in short a sad sack really, played by the insanely underappreciated paul giamatti, gifts his college buddy, Jack, a hollywood has-been, with his idea of a bachelor's party - a traipse through the Santa Barbara wine country.

in the wine friendly movie, the odd couple is superficially contrasted by their wine tastes: Jack, a-okay with cheap Merlot while Miles pines for the perfect pinot. pinot noir, most specifically.

in a scene not so pivotal to the movie's narrative but has sent shivers down spines of wine snobs, miles threatened not to go along with this double date that his oversexed buddy has contrived should any of the girls order merlot. ouch.

not to sound overly defensive, (too late now, I realize) I grant that merlot is overly fruity. but I do enjoy it for its fickleness. and besides, loving this much dissed varietal places me in a comfortable spot in the wine loving world.

there are the snubs, those that could never be caught dead quaffing merlot, and then there is I, together with cheap bar mitzvah hosts and chintzy wedding planners, adoring the merlot.

and I have no qualms with this highly segmented world order. unlike what ivan turgenev said, I do, I really do, understand how others can blow their noses quite differently than I do. and I find it quite charming. the variety of nose blowing in this world, I mean.

but throughout dinner, against my instincts, I was reduced to a sniffling fool, a pretentious wine sniffing fool, trying so hard to be labelled as someone with the nose. oh, this pinot grigio is so crisp, so aromatic and wonderfully complex. true, typical fruity boquet, but surprisingly full bodied on the palate. I did not know I have the capacity to actually loathe myself quite convincingly.

the snow continued to pour as we stumbled out of the restaurant. as I followed our designated driver to the parking lot, I saw the two trees by the entrance now being covered entirely by snow. and in the rage of the storm, the two looked exactly alike, twin sisters dressed up in similarly clean but decidedly ugly white frocks.

warm and humid

they were not the most affectionate of all couples in the neighborhood. but when he died, she surprised everyone by pickling her husband's penis in brine and holy water.

i did not actually see the shriveled penis swimming in a hazy sacred consommé. but manang soling, our washerwoman awash with tales, did. or so she told us.

"what would she do with it?" my mama, overhearing manang soling, interrupted.

"what else?" our laundry lady shot back.

visibly aghast, mama hauled me quickly away from manang soling. I remember, too, mama having suddenly this jones for ice cream that night manang soling told me the story of a flaccid penis that still could.

this, when I was yet growing up in an island where my existence seemed to be mediated by an old, half-crazy woman hoarding fiction obsessively while being recklessly wasteful with what my mama and our neighbors called reality.

today, straphanging across me in the middle of the bus was this diminutive guy in sagging pants. whenever the bus stopped along its designated route, he would unconsciously grab his crotch. without fail.

there is no good thing that may come to admitting this, but sometimes, I am just appalled at myself and the way my so-called memories are triggered back to life.

why couldn't the memory of say, that night i spent with the first person i've ever felt comfortably natural with get priority screening in my mind now over the decidedly unedifying pickled penis story?

i can only take comfort, somehow, in how the dubliner fictionist elizabeth bowen described the charm, no, the genius of memory as choosy, chancy and temperamental.

"it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."

by the stop at arthur avenue, a lone bucket seat was emptied. in a heartbeat, the crotch grabbing guy slinked down to the vacant seat. but not before doing first what he had always been doing while straphanging.

as soon as the bus rolled, my memory, that pickled memory, just fizzed out of the window, the rimy bus window. it will travel, I suppose, on its own back to somewhere warm and humid like the island of my childhood.

new york rude

if there is one myth about new yorkers that won't ever quit, it's this: new yorkers are simply the rudest in the universe.

and I made it my unenviable task, no, crusade, to disprove this to two of my genteel manila friends.

over the weekend, these polite people who have imbibed all the graciousness of heartland illinois (where they now work) flew to my adoptive city to soak some art at the park. you know, the jarring christo installations.

fresh from getting off their hotel elevator, I immediately bombarded them with my diatribe against the so-called purveyors of this bad rap against my foster city. my friends cut me off and told me they needed breakfast.

as we were going out of the lobby, we realized that snow flurries were raging outside. the snow just plopped out of nowhere, totally undetected by glib weathermen.

out of instinct, I immediately hailed a cab. after I told our cabbie to take us to the park, he, without signaling and honking, took a very wide turn toward the next crosstown thoroughfare.

but one of my friends exclaimed we needed to have breakfast first. and that according to their guidebook, there is this quirky soho breakfast joint. and that was where they wanted to go first.

"aw, c'mon, make up your mind," the cabbie hollered through the plexigas partition.

my friends gave each other this knowing look. then, they both stared at me like I was the one being rude. I was fighting a losing battle.

so, soho it was. and I did not even know the beautiful people in soho wake up before noon.

after the perfunctory good mornings, this statuesque waitress herded us to this poorly lit cabana. she left us, telling us nothing. then she trundled back with a pot of anemic coffee and started pouring each of us a cup.

"um, I don't drink coffee," one of my friends told the waitress.

"don't drink coffee? what are you, jehovah's witness or something?" she said.

I told her I will have his cup and that my friend suffers from some sort of, I even forgot now what I told her.

then she asked us what we wanted. I told her my order immediately while my friends tarried in reading the menu. all the while, she tapped not so subtly her pen against the oily sheaf of order slips.

after our so-so breakfast, my friends decided not to leave the waitress any tip. but as we were leaving, I surreptitiously left her a decent one. I could not risk being chased by a beautiful model/actress moonlighting as a server asking, no, haranguing me why was i not satisfied with her service, sort of.

when we went out of the diner, the snowing has ceased. there was decent sticking - on the pavement, on the trees. but the atmosphere was so achingly clear, it would not have occurred to me, had I not known it, that it just snowed ferociously an hour ago.

I told my friends that maybe we should get on the subway so that they would get a better feel of the city. they looked at me with that knowing look again and I knew I just lost my crusade. but they agreed with the suggestion anyway.

since it was rush hour, the station was jam-packed. it took me a while to explain to my out-of-towner friends the mechanics of getting a fare card from the vending machine. we could hear audibly the grumblings of the people waiting behind us in the line.

and then when the train arrived, well, you know the scene. pushing, shoving. stepping on toes.

I got in the train. my other friend got in. but as the warning buzzer got off, our other friend, the one who doesn't drink coffee, was still fidgeting on the platform outside.

as the overhead announcement went off telling commuters to stand back from the closing doors, my friend who was with me made this ridiculous sign to our other friend outside. you know the one saying just call us. I started to giggle inappropriately.

and then, this surly looking man in camel hair coat by the door, without regard for his safety, stuck out his arms and forced open the now closing doors.

he then grabbed my stunned friend by the arm and hauled him in. just like that.

my friends and i and our hero all got off at 59th. being ever gracious, my fidgety friend walked up to the guy in camel coat and thanked him profusely.

all that the guy said was "nah." then he just walked away as if he could not wait to get back to what's left of his day.

lost man

after it knelt by the stop, the BX 55 bus unfurled its wheelchair lift, a grimy, steel origami.

still looking at a loss with the driving knobs in his shiny motorized wheelchair, he wheeled in short spurts and curt brakes towards the handicapped seating bay. he of the many questions.

he did not look inquisitive this time. with his throwback hood over his new york yankees cap, he looked indifferent. reconciled, I guess, is the word.

he did not see me crouching in my seat all the way to the back of the bus. I was grateful he didn't.

candidly answering questions from someone shot in his spine is itself debilitating. I never had the energy or the courage. not yesterday morning. not even before that.

he was three weeks short of his 23rd birthday when he was admitted to my floor. trauma 1 patient. shot in the back. three bullets strategically buried in various landmark spots in his spine.

trauma doctors said it was gang venganza, south bronx style. a midwesterner resident who seemed at a loss himself at all the trauma cases he had been exposed to in this part of new york told us nurses that some deliberation, some careful thought, went into the shooting. he said this like he was explaining a well memorized arcane patophysiological process that he still could not fully grasp.

three weeks after, that's when the patient became incontinent himself of questions.

will I ever walk again? will I be able to control my pee? can I still get it up? will I be able to do it with my girlfriend again?

from then on, I made myself scarce. foolishly I deemed it was better to be thought of uncaring than to be honest. cripplingly honest.

I was off when he was discharged. I heard that his girlfriend, whose bloodied picture he always insisted on keeping in his hospital gown, did not come to take him home.

the bus lift lowered him off at a busy intersection along grand concourse. the queue of passengers parted quickly like giving way to a speeding stretcher carrying a desperately bleeding patient.

a fully made up young girl in a tight waist length jacket stared hard at him. she pretended to take a call in her mobile when he looked back straight at her.

all throughout his stay with us, an NYPD officer watched over him. the investigators feared that the gang members who shot him would finish him off right in our ward. things like that happen, they said.

i did not think so.

shooting him was not about killing him. it's more unkind.

it's to make him wheel his wounds around so everybody else, especially inquisitive, nubile girls, would know that he has forever lost what made him a man.

righteous

i am not the 46-year-old brooklyn gay man recently diagnosed with a possibly new drug-resistant strain of the HIV virus.

but to my co-workers who know my orientation, he might as well be me.

well, not really. but you know what I mean.

last week, new york's city health commissioner announced in a hastily called press conference the discovery of a multi-drug resistant, much more virulent strain of the HIV virus.

since then, there never was a day that the other nurses I work with in this bronx hospital brimming with aids patients, gay or otherwise, would not, in various semantic guises, take the chance to dole me out patronizing warnings.

I should be careful, extra careful, this time. it's all they say.

ever since the HIV virus was first isolated in the early eighties, the pandemic that ensued has always been considered by most of the straight world a homosexual scourge.

in fact, in late 1981, immunologists use the brutally accusative GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) for the plague. others didn't even bother with the pleasantries. they just called it "it." either, a gay man had it or he didn't.

the poster boy for the renewed gay witch hunt is this 46 year old man from brooklyn. we know nothing else of this man other than he is an admitted abuser of crystal methamphetamine.

back in the days of unmanaged aids care, a heroic gay nurse, bobbi campbell, took pictures of his kaposi sarcoma lesions. he then posted these horrifying pictures behind the display windows of a pharmacy in the gay district of san francisco.

this morning while I was readying to leave work, one of the nurses of the oncoming shift dragged me to the medication room.

placing her right hand over my forehead, she, without asking for my consent, launched into this apocalyptic prayer.

her audacity, well meaninged, I would love to assume, stupefied me. initially, I couldn't understand, hard as I tried, what she seemed to be mumbling. I only caught her last sentences.

"please, lord, send down your spirit to this young man to guide him back to your fold. send him back to the righteous way."

after exclaiming amen, she just left. she did not even look at me, like I was a patient way beyond her help. and I, I just stood there. not a word came to me.

on the bus, I browbeat myself to exhaustion for my inglorious lack of spine. although it was decidedly overcast when I reached home, I still pulled down the shades in my bedroom.

my room, darkened and messy, felt less impervious to the goings on outside. craven, yes. but it felt righteous being here. for now.

clothing optional

as temperature dropped to the teens again, around 30 nudists came for their monthly "clothing optional" buffet dinner in a mid-manhattan bistro just before weekend.

their coats, their skirts, their shirts, and their undergarments all wound up folded in plastic bags by the bar while they dined nude but, I believe, never under accessorized.

i was raised in a fully clothed family. so clothed it was never an option for me to sleep in just my tighty whities. I have to put on pjs, the flannelly ones. and we lived in an island where the ambient temperature never dropped below the eighties. talk about night sweats.

the first time I went to my friend for a sleepover, I'm sorry that never happened. upon seeing my friend, lanky and not so particular with end-of-day hygiene, jump to bed in his striped briefs, the same one he had been sweating in throughout the day, I quickly made up some excuse to go home.

when mother asked why the change in plans, I told her the mosquitoes in my friend's house were particularly feral. I ran back to my room, quickly jumped into my pyjamas and that was the end of it.

then stressful college time. more nerve wracking than the pressure of snagging a membership into the right campus organization was my dorm shower situation. I, the prudish island boy, had the misfortune of being billeted in one that only had communal bathing facilities.

to sidestep potentially mortifying situations, I either hit the showers way too early in the morning when the heater is not yet on or during the lull between morning rush shower traffic and midday siesta. midway into the first term, I had to look for off campus, more private accommodations.

but then, to skinny dip or to skinny dip? this is the question I must say yes to. especially when the asker of this life changing question is no one else but this big man on campus. he was the first guy I have allowed myself to admit I have a crush on.

it was almost end of school year and we were re-evaluating the campaign strategy of our student party for that year. when that was over, he just asked me to go skinny dipping the way he would have told me to buy on my way home more silkscreen paint for our posters.

nudists, at least those registered in organizations, (yes, virginia, a whole lot of them) always make hay about how letting it all hang is the freest form of self expression available there is to the creative person.

it was way past midnight and without compunction, we just burgled into the university pool premises. then without any alarm, I saw this lithe, brown tinder kindle the already smoldering water of the pool.

in march, the manhattan nudists will again congregate for another dinner. it will be their easter bonnet event. this time, every one has to come wearing an easter bonnet and, well, nothing else.

many easters now I've celebrated and yet my old priggish self can never die and be resurrected to this freer, more creative person I've always dreamed to be.

all I have is the memory of that one miraculous march where I just floated in the middle of this deep pool while squinting so hard to take in the view of this beautiful, free man breaking the water without a splash in the leftmost lane of the unilluminated pool.

savarin

there it was. a sad sponge cake baked in a ring mold and relegated to the corner in the window of this mexican bakery under the local train stop nearest my place.

immediately, I remember manong jun and his fishpond of fat milkfish.

manong jun was one of mother's suitors while I was growing up. i remember mother baking this type of sponge cake, what foodies affectively call savarin, over and over when manong jun was still paying visits to our house.

my lanky friend was the one who made me realize this. he told me that he knew my single mother was expecting some suitor that night when the afternoon before he could smell mama's baking all the way to their place, five houses down the gravelly road towards the town plaza.

during what could only be described as a good week for her, that is, at least two suitors visited her on alternate days, mama was this wired, grinny woman exultant of what she claimed as her newly discovered oven recipes. that was her word. not newly learned, but discovered.

the french lawyer and gourmet, brillat-savarin, said that the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.

that was my mom, my then happy mom. now she is married to a certified philanderer, one who has, to the schadenfreude of our neighbors, sired a daughter from another gullible, island-smelling woman.

the thing with manong jun was that he was pathetically mousy. he would come to our house, often bringing some squirmy milkfish, and then just sat there, right on the bench, the rusty bench in our arid garden patio without the slightest intention of touching my mom. I was already in high school then and this baffled me to no end.

the last time I was home, during a lazy afternoon, mother ordered a run-of-the-mill sponge cake from the local bakery for our siesta nosh. I couldn't bring myself to ask her why she's not baking anymore.

we both dug into the ordered cake as soon as it was delivered. and for a commercially baked confection, the texture was very slight, almost melting as soon as it grazed the roof of my mouth. unlike mama's which had assertive hints of rubberiness.

i gushed and gushed. but mama curtly cut me off. "oh please, this is such a lightweight. give me something definite, something pushy."

walking one afternoon towards the fish market, I think I saw manong jun driving home his beat up tricycle, empty fish pails flapping on top of the souped up vehicle. maybe I was just too far from him or the light was already quickly fading because I could hardly see his face, like it was expunged or something.

crack juice

shopping is not my cardio unlike my friend awash in cash who has hooked up with this rich rice queen lover. but I digress, early on.

mine involves feigning exertion in a forgiving elliptical. this is just the neglible 10 percent of the regimen. the rest, as attention deficit sufferer thomas alva edison decreed, involves inspiration. looking at sweaty buffed men inspiration.

creatively juiceless for the past month, I decided it was time to make use of my gym membership only for the second time this year.

fearing I would make a fool of myself again, I decided to load up on what they call in my gym as the crack juice. ten times more kicking than the thai import red bull, this energy drink promises to give gym rats more than wings, whatever that means.

like any barely legal energy drink hawked in fitness gaga america, this juice contains guarana extract, a whole lot of it.

guarana is an indigenous brazilian amazon shrub that bears lasciviously red round berries. as they ripen, the berries split open and disgorge black seeds that look like eyes of an inveterate ogler. you could imagine the legends the native indians would make up about these lewdly looking pips.

huffing on a bench across my machine, an overly tattoed latin playa kept on rearranging his package every time he's done with pressing 210lbs. this while grinning at me. one of his incisors clad in gaudy gold leaf.

at first blush, i thought he was doing it for the viewing pleasure of some bootylicious chula behind me. but then I realized, to my maria clara embarassment, i was the only one in my corner.

besides being an all around tonic, guarana is also reputed to be an aphrodisiac at best or at the very least, a vasodilator. guarana is potent, alright, but mercurially potent. sure it launches you to heights. but then, at moments never to your desire, grounds you down, an octane dry jet.

after doing ten more heaves, my chulo hit the showers.

i only realized it now. this story had nowhere good to go once I started using possessive pronouns indiscriminately.

bravely, I took the stall right across my inked hombre. as the initial cold spurt of the water slapped my back, I almost fainted from knowing I made again a fool of myself.

this is maybe why my friend always beseeched me never to imbibe anything alcoholic or mind altering in a joint where the idea of a dress code is that of tight tank tops and tighter bottoms.

I hurriedly wrapped myself in my suddenly shrunk bath towel and scurried out of the stall.

then I heard my playa, no, this playa, yo-ing me back. I refused to turn around fearing I would see him grinning again under the steaming column of water, his breath condensing like shimmering jet leavings in a clearing sky.

the bloom is gone

she is a respectable shakespeare professor, thick rimmed spectacles, jargon loaded academic publications and all, at fordham university, just three blocks away from where I live. this on days.

but at nights, she goes wild writing romance novels with titles like duchess in love and her latest, much ado about you.

last week prof. mary bly came out clean of her double life. she had a field day fielding questions from her students last week about her romantic writing life doppelganger, the flip your hair because you could, number 38 mac foundationed eloisa james of her steamy romance novels.

when asked how she should be referred to now, prof. mary or eloisa, she burst into giggles and said she always gets this enormous pleasure in maintaining two names, two identities.

enormous pleasure. now there's something I've been found wanting, in a fairly large degree, now that I have come out of my own closet, as well.

now that my proclivities, sexual mostly, are out there in the open I am indeed guilty of breaching this finespun rule by lady bracknell from the importance of being earnest. she held that "ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone."

by now, everyone who's into rap, gangsta rap, especially, knew the highlights of the life story of curtis jackson, better known as the platinum selling rap superstar 50 cent.

under 30, shot nine times-a 9 mm bullet to his face, his hand and the rest to his buffed and cut legs- the hardcore inner city ethos, everything gangsta.

but anyone who bothers to listen closely to some of his tracks could hear another story. in the dr. dre produced track in da club, 50 raps "I'm into havin' sex, ain't no makin' love, so come give me a hug."

a real g talking, no, wanting some hugs.

the bloom is indeed gone for me. in recognition for ignoring lady bracknell's admonition, I get what? a romance that throbs only inside steamy paperbacks? a hug that doesn't stay warm even until three in a mild late winter morning?

computer bug

armed with a well washed spoon and a jar of decent creamy peanut butter, I watched in earnest the wall to wall coverage of the 129th westminster kennel club dog show. this was on the night of february the 14th.

last year's best in show, josh, this 155-pound newfoundland, had his dog day again.

first he was introduced to the crowd of rabid canine lovers most of whom have been dogging the rock star barker since this year's kennel show started monday.

then the black st. bernard dead ringer threw a free stack, a canine handler speak where without poking and prodding by its owners, a dog just stands on its hindquarters for the judges to appreciate.

from there, all bets were off. a lady from the nose bleeder section of the gargantuan madison square garaden could not contain herself and hollered out josh's name.

quickly thereafter, the crowd erupted into rhythmic chanting of josh, josh, josh.

right on cue, josh, barked and bellowed and bawled in sync with the crowd's chanting. everyone there, four legged or otherwise, knew who was the top dog in the house.

this is what my life now seems to be inundated with. sentences ending with dangling prepositions and metaphorical expressions just losing their mojos, one after the other. i mean, top dog, dog day. come on.

in the hospital I work, it looks like it will not take a year before we would admit the broken heart syndrome as an official diagnosis. a week ago, doctors at johns hopkins university confirmed the wisdom of poets by saying that the loss of a loved one can literally cause a broken heart.

my reality now is close to being in say an alejo carpentier story where the once seemingly irrational stuff are slickly accepted as humdrum currency.

this sunday past, I decided to answer my emails away from my mickey mouse apartment. I thought a new writing milieu would make me come across as less crabby in my responses.

the café I chose to kill time in was one of those garden variety anti-starbucks lower east side joints.

after my second bowl of chai, the cd I was playing in my notebook started to hop and skip. I opened the cd drive and what came skittering out was this drab bug that would never make it to any any natural history museum collection.

without skipping a beat, the bug vamoosed to the next table where another notebook was left purring and unattended by its owner. I pretended to hunker back down to my keyboard.

a bug in my computer. it doesn't get more literal than this.

I spent the rest of my time in the café writing long hand while running the virus scan in my laptop. all the time, I was secretly hoping my notebook would detect a real virus, one that I prayed would corrupt the prosiness of my letters.

minsan may isang gamu-gamu

hankering for greasy galunggong, I went to this pinoy deli whose shopkeeper also moonlights as a livery cab driver and filipino cable tv installer. while restraining myself from chucking the consumptive looking fish for this immoral crispy pata, someone tapped my shoulder from behind. it was this guy who I ran into quite frequently in manila's civil society circle.

he was this bayan organizer and he had this command of street rhetoric that soared gloriously higher than most of what the so called university poets inflicted on us in those insufferable poetry readings.

I remembered him as decidedly gaunt but now he lugged a few more pounds. oh, he's married now to this nurse manager and they have this house in a good neighborhood uptown and they now have these three kids, one of whom is a star pupil in this magnet catholic parish school. I lost him somewhere around the talk of his kids.

my attention was only riveted back when I noticed that he was returning a vhs copy of nora aunor's classic minsan may isang gamu-gamu (once, a firefly). not that I am a nora fan, but that was it for me. I did not even remember bidding him goodbye. all I knew was I went home with this certainly pirated vhs copy, dismally labelled, and I'm not sure either whether I had the pedestrian fish or the more glorious pork with me.

one of the gems from the so-called golden age of philippine cinema (was there ever?), minsan (1977 famas best picture) featured nora as a nurse who had this dream of working in the US (how cliched) only to chuck it after her brother (played by La Aunor's real life younger brother) was shot by an american serviceman (this was when the american bases were still there. like they ever left. whatever.) who mistook him for a wild boar.

"my brother is not a pig." this is the classic la aunor retort (oft parodied in manila gay cabarets) to the us servicemen who came to her brother's wake and offered the official but obviously insincere condolences.

this movie was a miracle. it was staunchly anti-US bases and yet it squeaked through the censors, then a major apparatchik in the marcos-military superstructure.

defying logic, nora's character (corazon) then embarked on a hopeless course of action. hopeless in that the wimpy philippine government had no jurisidiction over the more supreme white race.

in the court, a fellow filipino, the lawyer of the accused american sergeant, offered corazon an envelope stuffed with green bucks. corazon asked him the current exchange rate then searingly socked the clincher to him. "how much is a man per kilo?"

in arthur miller's (the great american playwright died just last week.) play death of a salesman, willy loman bellowed after realizing that he, the hotshot salesman that he is, or so he thought, was now being fired. "you can't eat the orange and throw the peel away. a man is not a piece of fruit."

later in the play, berating her indifferent kids, willy's careworn wife spoke for the heroism of her husband's seemingly pedestrian life. "attention must be paid." this must be one of the most stirring refutations in literature of the cruelties of america's capitalist culture.

early this morning while doing rounds in my ward, I still could not shake off the curve ball question nora's grandfather threw her way.

it was from this scene. corazon's family members, all looking glum, gathered around dinner, ignoring the live tv broadcast of the landmark apollo mission to the moon. the camera panned to an empty seat, that of corazon's murdered brother.

then corazon's lolo (grandfather), who apparently was transfixed by the telecast, called out: "corazon, kanila na rin ba ang buwan?" (corazon, do they now own the moon, as well.)

unlike corazon, I made it here without so much a tragedy. but not quite. not quite.

as bad as, like, whatever

metaphors, mostly the reprehensible ones, stalk the single person. I mean, this single person. on valentines day. more than any other day of the year.

this was this morning. i walked by the neighborhood flower stand and a flighty betweener in short plaid skirt and thick hosiery was delirious. "oh look at these roses," her voice peaked to a near shriek. "they're as red as a rose-red crayola crayon."

I fled only to bump into one of the white-aproned husky assistants of the italian pork store at the produce market. "hey, you blind?" his voice, a paltry imitation of brando's in the original godfather. "remember," he broke into what I liked to believe as an intended impish grin although it came to me like a mean mafia lour, "only love is blind."

this could be apocryphal but milan kundera was supposed to have said that metaphors are quite dangerous since love begins with a metaphor. us lovelorn then are safe.

I continue to flee the scatty schoolgirl and the schmuck of a butcher. but then a tiger spooked me.

the carpet store by the bus stop had dressed their window over the weekend. instead of that faux karakul shag thrown haphazardly, a silk rug machine-printed with a dappled image of a siberian tiger now hanged in display. with the store grille still down, the tiger, though, looked half as menacing.

waiting for my bus, I remember vaguely this yehuda amichai poem a friend had me read. this when I broke up with a great love, or so I thought.

the poet, quite melodramatically, claimed that his great love had severed him in two. one of the chopped parts went on squirming to some hospitable place like an axed (was it) snake (or axolotl) livid still with the will to regenerate.

it's been years since that severing. for me. and no tetchiness here, no rancor anymore whenever this day comes. only a discomfiture. a gnawing one.

the rug tiger as crutch, I tried to come up with metaphors. for my loveless self. the most egregious of them was this. I am that tiger. that love-to-wade-again-in-the-dating-muck tiger. and I am just slyly waiting for the storekeeper to raise open the grille. then I leap. I leap into the giddy embrace of what? of whom? of the bronx morning gridlock? of the scoping new york police armed with stun guns?

clearly my vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. I can't take credit for this really immoral simile much as I would like to. must have been written by the same author who joyed in telling about this auditory pleasing love story. "he was deeply in love. when she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up."

what I would give to back up to my old, featherbrained self. that easy-to-believe self. that quick-to-hear-those bells self. to be welcomed again into this cabal of people who traffic in metaphors, snarled-up or otherwise.

oh, what I would give to be free from the mereness of that rug tiger.

clothesline of giants

a thesaurus. one should lug this along when viewing the just unveiled installation art in central park by the conceptual artists couple Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude.

what it is basically are 7,500 of 16 foot tall gates meandering through the venerable communal lawn of new york. from each of these gates, a saffron pleated nylon swath bob and billow in the winter breeze.

from the M5 bus I was riding, the flume of skirted gates looked like a rabid tongue of kaingin brush fire licking raw the sparse winter undergrowth of the park.

surreal, dreamlike, fabulous. easily, these are the top modifiers that most of the park's weekend pedestrian traffic were jabbering about this surreal, dreamlike, fabulous art project.

insane and unnecessary, as well. I heard an incredulous matron exclaimed from behind me "why would anyone spend money on these?" some $20 million of insane and unnecessary money.

but as the new york times art critic michael kimmelman argues "we didn't need the gates. art is never necessary. it is merely indispensable."

can this type of indulgence (for lack of a better word and a substantive thesaurus) be conscionable back in cosmopolitan manila or much more in my tiny island, the last time I heard still floats quite well on typhoon prone cebu sea?

cut to scene. these saffron gates are magically teleported to thickety quezon city memorial circle. pan the camera to my peoples just flummoxed at these, these what? these improbably hard to reach laundry lines?

oh, but I could hear already the soaring adjectives, the substantives, heavy and grounded but never losing their droll character, that they would hang on to this putative post post-modern art installation.

sampayan ng mga higante (clothesline of giants), bimpo na trapal pa (face towel and tent all rolled into one), pamahid ng libag (dirt wiper) o panguhit ng arirat (toenail grit remover), pangkayod ng kukaribaku (sraper of grime that has since lichened under the breasts of a slob).

deathbed wish

yesterday, chacho, this dominican barber who I've come to tolerate, was not only there at my barbershop straddled between a serbian bakery and a car wash, but it also appeared that he wouldn't be coming back. ever.

wasn't it mark twain, the great wit that he was, who conceded that "all things change except barbers, the ways of barbers, and the surroundings of barbers?"

well, enough of this dependency on rigid interpretation of dead men's epigrams and undocumented hair clippers.

so I settled with manuel, the resident phat guy, the one who can be relied on to bring bootleg cd's to keep on thumping without glitches the shop's audio ambience.

I reckon, should I come to tolerate his tonsorial skills as well, that since he is puerto rican then surely he shouldn't have any problems with immigration. and therefore, no more surprises for my very easily frazzled hair.

as he was doing me, another of chacho's loyal patron came and inquired about his whereabouts. manuel told the guy in xxxl shirt and way out there loose denims that our favorite barber had to fly back to santo domingo because his mother died.

after the guy left, manuel, almost in glee, explained that chacho, since he came in illegally in the first place, would find it hard getting back, if at all.

the ever pragmatist (cold hearted bitch, if you insist) that I am asked him why didn't just chacho wire money back home so he can stay and continue his gainful employment here in the land of leche y miel.

manuel just stopped snipping, his face turned ashen. then in a conspiratorial whisper he told me that chacho's mother spouted this deathbed wish that her barber son should braid her hair so she would look decent in her coffin that chacho had already paid for two years ago.

"well, if he has to go, then he has to go," the cleaning lady, another dominicana, blurted from the other side of the barbershop. talk about a real callous bitch.

I left the barbershop fiercely debating still whether to live with manuel's haphazard blade skills as well as the relative folly of chacho's decision to obey unquestioningly his mama's dying wish.

as I put on my cap, I saw the serbian bakery's chimney coughing up a frizzy column of white smoke. smoke, so thick and nappy, it sure looked like it could use some serious professional plaiting.

new york fashion week

nothing announces fashion week in new york more meretreciously than a surfeit of model sightings around town. especially in the subway.

i had one yesterday. most likely a second or third tier girl in a non primetime showcase of an up and coming parson design grad or she would have been chauffeured already to the big tent at bryant park. this as I jostled for a seat in the D train on my way to my tax preparer.

of course, her build was improbably tenuous and her legs just sprouted from under her boobs and jetted all the way down to this mortal earth.

although she wasn't made up yet, her tresses still wrapped up shabbily in a silk logo scarf, the rest of the jaded morning commuters in my car couldn't keep their eyes off of her, to say the least. models are new yorkers' hollywood stars.

maybe this is what they teach ravishing girls in the pulchritude academy. whenever you expect to be stuck in peoply places, be sure to lug along a weighty book. a shakespeare is best.

as the rest of us mortals were ogling her, our divinity was deep into a folger paperback edition of hamlet. something indeed smells rotten in the state of new york when the most beautiful creatures in the world assembled for this week long saturnalia are also the most literary.

my model, as expected, got off at 42nd-bryant park. as she gathered all her other stuff, an unopened one liter pellegrino bottle, a crisp burberry plaid trench, her head scarf unlaced and her luminous face was revealed to us. the puerto rican guy in front of her wearing a tatty sean john hoodie could not help himself but exclaimed "dang!"

indeed, "the chariest maid is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon."

it was only when the train pushed on that all of us left realized our model left her hamlet behind. no one dared to scoop the book out of the still glowing chair.

I got off herald square and walked towards empire state building where my tax preparer holds office.

a navajo song counsels everyone to just "walk on a rainbow trail, walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. there is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail."

the predicted morning showers was now underway. I opened my umbrella only to notice two spokes were broken.

as I waddled on, a gash in the clouds allowed some light to pour through. light just enough to skim the crinkles in the now plumping water puddles along the sidewalks.

no fireworks

in the first day of the lunar new year there were no fireworks and no dragon dances in the only chinese take out in my street.

ling, the reed thin order taker, was also not around. I never recalled her calling in sick ever.

in her place, a stocky, ill-humored woman took my order. she grunted when jokingly I asked her about the missing pyrotechnics in this important day.

despite her initial display of poor customer relations skills, I couldn't resist needling her where ling was.

in mandarin, she asked the other girl lolling by the steaming rice cooker. the other girl wearing a red apron with starchy stains told me ling got married two days ago.

"this year, bad luck," she volunteered, "for weddings." she looked earnest and sheepish at the same time.

"why?" I asked.

the girl, fumbling for words, shouted through the order window and into the kitchen.

the cook's voice came out screechy. "this year, no first day of spring. brides, widows soon."

"so this year is not a good year?" I asked the girl by the rice cooker again.

vehemently, she shook her head. "no, no, no. only weddings, bad luck. but food still good."

then the cantankerous substitute order taker interjected "we celebrate new year right." she pointed at the ajar swing door towards the buzzing kitchen.

from where I was, I could see the cook unhook from the pot rack overhead a shiny wok, freshly hammered and not yet tempered. when he slammed it against the burner, the blue gas flame made its bottom spark.

effortlessly

waking up in someone else's bed this morning, it felt comfortably grown up.

it all began in this not so well lighted place in overhyped meat packing district. he was not particularly my type. hopelessly white and precariously getting to be there, paunchy and ring the death knell middle aged.

but then, he started whispering stuff to my besotted ears that sounded like lines from a haruki murakami novel and suddenly i remembered how necessary this was. the touching, this equally oversold event of putting two things, two kinetic forces, together with no space in between. not that I'm saying the sex was mind blowing.

he woke me up when he was already bundled in a substantial camel hair knee long coat. he mumbled indistinctly, saying something like don't hurry, stay, there are stuff in the fridge. then he left after trying to kiss me in my mouth, morning breath and all.

after I heard the door slammed shut, I realized I forgot to ask him how to get to the nearest subway station from his place. I turned on his plasma tv after I tried in vain to call my friend. the bitch's mobile was unattended.

after the local weather update, the news anchor, showing no attempt to suppress his smile, then chuckle, reported that a 4 year old boy in was it michigan or minnesota drove his mom's car in the middle of the night to a video store. and back.

although the tyke was unable to reach the accelerator, he apparently managed to put the car in gear while the idling engine provided enough power to take him slowly to the store, a quarter-mile away.

charlotte of sex and the city had this nifty mathematical solution to solve a particularly adult problem. she claimed it takes half the total time you went out with someone to get over them.

I went out with this balding guy, my last (what's the word?) meaningful (damn, am I forever chained to this word?) relationship for about a year. I should have gone back dating full throttle in say two years after him, right? but that was almost five years ago. and in the most stirring words of my neighbor's middle schooler son, no shame in my shit here.

just as soon as I slipped out as inconspicuously as I could, I hope, from my host's building, I could see even without the aid of my dorky glasses the dingy sign of the D train station just a block away.

as I fumbled for my fare card in my jacket, I felt something crisp and cardy. I tossed the guy's business card into the soggy trash bin in front of the station. the man's name and number quickly bled.

asked by reporters how her toddler could have managed to do this feat, the mother explained she taught him how to drive by letting him sit on her lap and steer at times. the traffic cop who intercepted the kid driver claimed that the wunderkind effortlessly knew how to go from reverse to forward.

at the train station, it took me four times swiping my fare card before the creaky turnstile allowed me in. the train was stuffed and the only seat empty was this strangely high bucket that faced backwards.

i took it and as the train chugged forward, my feet, barely grazing the floor, felt like being left behind while my head, my shoulders, the rest of my body aching for a warm shower were already miles ahead.

beatless

beside worldwide nuclear proliferation, what scares the bejesus out of me these days is this not so funky feeling that I might be growing old grooveless. not the angela bassett/how stella got her groove back groove but my island groove.

this morning, my normally forgiving spinning class instructor stopped our session way into the quarter of the hour mark just to tell me, me, the island boy, this boy who grew up snoring to the cadence of the south china sea waves, that I was not into the rhythm, the palmy rhythm of her stationary biking class.

adding insult to this hard to pooh pooh injury, all she asked us to pedal along were classic island reggae tracks, not fancy mixed in some edgy south london studio bjork tracks, but can't go wrong downbeat bob marley and the wailers tracks.

you're gonna lively up yourself and don't be no drag. you lively up yourself, oh reggae is another bag.

since when did I become a drag, anyway? not that kind of drag, you dirty little bastards. I live in hip hop nation now and I am a walking, er, biking, beatless dog? fate worse than death.

it's not that I never had it. sure I had it. growing up, mama, who was the choir mistress in our little island church, was never into my voice, I could give you that. "if you could only shave that tremolo," she would tell me. but my rhythm was quite impeccable or she would not have entrusted me with the maracas.

but then I had to go to the city and of all the concrete jungles in the world, I had to end up in new all the noise in the world you cant hear yourself york.

'cause life, sweet life, must be somewhere to be found, yeah. instead of a concrete jungle where the livin' is hardest.

eking out an ethnic existence in a smothering white society, one of the very few convincing justifications I gave myself just to get me up on a cold morning and plod on, just plod on through the day, is that i have this special connection, this exclusive access to a channel, to this beat that only i, a dark skinned outsider, can hear and dance to in perfect timing. or so I thought.

there's a natural mystic blowing through the air. if you listen carefully now you will hear.

i used to take care of this reedy white boy patient who broke his left heel while training for an ironman competition. and all through his confinement in our ward, all he told me over and over, as if waiting for me to contradict him, was he would never recover his pace, his championship running rhythm. and all that I could falsely assure him was to tell him "it will come back to you when you're ready, when you are ready."

when the race gets hard to run, it means you just can't take the pace when it's time to have your fun.

after shower, I decided that I would have to enlist in another cardio class more suitable to my newly revealed out of tempo status. kwando class? nah, that still involved counting and music. how about do it alone in some dank corner of the gym stair master routine? sounds about the only option left for me.

on my way home, this suspiciously near empty bus I was riding in just whizzed through the traffic, not stopping at any of the unpeopled stops along the way. I missed the ping of the stop request and moments later the shriek of the bus pneumatic breaks. I felt so disoriented that I missed my stop by a good ten blocks.

as I walked on home, the fraying polyester handle of my gym bag kept on chafing against my leather jacketed shoulder making an indistinct screechy sound. it was only when I could see the damp red bricks of my building that I realized that the screech only came after my left foot overtook my right. right, left, screech. right, left, screech. right, left, screech.

feel it in the one drop and we'll still find time to rap…so feel this drum beat as it beats within.

right, left, screech. right, left, screech. right, left, screech.

i walked, no, jiggied, back to my apartment and all I could think of doing as soon as I am there was to call my spinning class instructor to tell her, "i am ready, i am ready."

flight feathers

after telling him of the story about our phlegmatic neighbor who decided to pickle her husband's penis in brine and holy water after he died, my friend gave me that stare, that plausive stare he has which he, nowadays, reserve for american idol contestants he is rooting for, and said in the most humdrum of manners, "your mom must have been a regular aesop."

despite having drunk about four and a half tall tumblers of very lush margarita at this point, his rush armchair psychoanalysis of the genesis of my inclination to tell stories sobered me up.

"au contraire," I insisted. "in fact, my mother never had any affection for what she derisively called made up stories."

not grimm's fairy tales but the only bed time stories I remember mama read me were the sunday school approved bible tales complete with hokey visual aids. but then again, my fundamentalist mother always maintain, even now, that these stories, stories of seas parted, of toads raining down on the heathen, of burning bushes, as incontestably true.

our saturday soiree degenerated after my quitely crisp protestation and after one more round of margarita that tasted flat this time.

upon entering union square metro station at about three in the morning, a coven of still zippy doves was happily trapped inside and they were feasting on a semi frozen baguette near the turnstiles.

it was only when the number 5 train went earnest with its express run that I regretted not telling my friend about manang soling. she was our washer woman who reeked of bleach and betel nut. this was when my mother dragged me to that yellow house under two adolescent camachile trees.

I remember being impatient with my mother, this was on schooldays, for not leaving early enough to that non sectarian high school she used to teach. for it was only when she left that manang soling, squatting like a town fair fortune teller in front of a foam crested corrugated iron laundry vat, could begin, without trepidation of mama's disapproving stares, to cast her spell on me with her magical-there is just no other word for it-tales in between beating our soileds with her ratty laving paddle and spitting out overchewed betel nut.

oh the stories she told me. but being the ever selfish me, I am not about to just share them with you, just like that.

but manang soling, this before mama finally had enough of her so-called made up stories and dismissed her just three days before christmas of my seventh year, would tell me all she knew. everything bewitching she knew, she would regurgitate from her prodigal heart, spit it out from her betel bleeding mouth and in sweet morsels feed it to me like a fledgling impatient to acquire my flight feathers.

piddling

this was when the coral stone catholic church in the island I grew up in was only four hundred and three years old.

from its campanile, three unburnished but massive bells lolled, punctuating without irony, perhaps a bit too earnestly, the highlights, if you could call them that, of our niggling island lives. the end of the morning mass, the wedding of this poor fisher folk couple from the islet across the sea grass green lagoon, the burial of the hated tax assessor, the end of day angelus.

but for my mother, a second generation dyed in the wool protestant, who was trying quite punishingly to raise me outside the orthodoxy of the catholic church, the sonorous clanging of these bells amounted to clarion calls to proselytize me even harder in the fallibility of the representatives of the holy see in our island.

strangely enough, I, during what must have been the nascent stages of my teen rebellion, grew very fond of these bells, affectionate enough to christen each three of them.

mr. bombast, the slut and the raspy one. mr. bombast was the biggest of the three bourdons and usually started the day while the slutty one was the one whose peals lingered for a tad too long. my favorite though was the throaty one.

he would start quite confidently but towards the tail of his arias, he would just crackle and fade, like he just had some throat infection. oh but the splash he made, it had promise like annunciating a very sunny day only to find it wet and smotheringly humid later.

the bell ringers must have abhorred him because they hardly gave him any solo part. his knells only came out quite clearly, plaintive and doleful, during the ten o'clock pealing at nights which my friend said was dedicated to those dead people who still have not realized they are already of the incorporeal world.

coming out from the grocery earlier today, I was accosted by a jehovah's witness street evangelizer. she must have been trying to talk to me for quite some time now but with my ipod blaring, I only heard her, gnarly and surprisingly snarky for an evangelist, in between tracks and she was saying something like end, near, ready.

every first friday of the month during elementary, a volunteer catechist would barge into our classrooms and ramble on anything roman catholic.

I remember this very earnest pimply seminarian making attempts at poetry. he told our class, quite impatient for the midday recess to be called, that the crown of the bell symbolized the celestial sphere and the round ball, the orb bell clapper stood for our world. it was only when heaven and earth met- should it rather be collided, clashed, struck each other?-that the voice of god is heard.

I had two messages in my answering machine when I got back to my apartment. I was certain, now that he is gone, they were all from telemarketers or nettlesome relatives of the previous owners of this phone number.

arranging the milk, the soda, the juice inside the fridge, I could still hear the faint beep, beep of the answering machine, a good ten paces away from the other side of my apartment. I decided to get out again.

I had no idea where to go to. the groceries for the week were already bought, the laundry was already dropped off in the laundromat. but I kept on walking until I saw the street evangelizer again. I decided to cross the street to avoid her. and then I heard, like a discordant riff over this rap track I was digging, the shrill of a car honk, raspy, grating and quite livid.

unperturbed, I gave the smoldering cabbie hardly a glance as I continued to navigate toward the other side of the street. I walked on and on, the heels of my snow boots beating against the icy pavement, each time making piddling, ungodly squeaks.

witch candies

manang goring

growing up, one of my playmates stunned us with his boast that his grandfather flew on a winged water buffalo from the mainland to our island to start their clan.

this was the same friend who, after school, always took the road home with me by the raucous duck farm in the mangrove swamp past the thatched hut of manang goring.manang goring sold the sweetest brown taffy of caramelized molasses and desiccated coconut.

the rest of our classmates took the long way home by way of the lighted road toward the stone church, lichened on one side, crumbling on the other, via the town hall, glossy, freshly painted, passing by the picture house showing old movies to a full house of bench mites and then toward the town plaza of ancient pitogo trees.

we always bought manang goring's candies and took them to school the next day. then we belly laughed ourselves silly when our girl classmates would shriek and this portly girl faint when they saw us sucking on what they called witch candies.

a little braver

I think it was on my birthday, i'm not certain now, but that was the day we got a little braver. he talked me into stalking manang goring's thickly vegetated backyard.

he had this silvery flashlight, made in china, and he beamed it against the thatched walls of the hut. we did not see any sorceress dolls, their torsos pricked by rusty needles, hanging inside manang goring's house. we only saw a big black cauldron in her backyard bubbling with a brownish-black concoction.

I stood transfixed outside the dark violet hedge bordering her yard while my friend I could hear yelling "come here, you yellow."

the roiling of the boil of manang goring's cauldron drowned every sound I could perfectly hear before including the thumping in my chest.

decapitated head

then out of the darkness, manang goring emerged. from each of her skinny arms dangled shriveled coconuts like decapitated head trophies of some feral tribes.

my friend immediately jumped over the shrub and sped past me, toward the stone pathway, toward home.

I just stood there rooted as the cauldron acquired a crown of white sinister smoke.

as manang goring walked toward me, I could feel her bloodshot eyes piercing through my chest and I thought that if I could just turn around I would see behind me, instead of my quivering shadow, the blazing beams of her gaze.

the moment I resigned to the fact that she easily could and would tear my limbs out, my friend scampered back, panting wildly, and grabbed my arms off my shoulders.

we flew toward the stone pathway, never stopping to breathe or to curse the star apple's branches lashing our faces.

late

that night, after the little party mama threw me, I had to kneel over a mat of salt to say my prayer loudly, a punishment for my wicked behavior, mama's words.

mama would interrupt my memorized prayers, telling me over and over that there were no witches, no reclusive women who could fly, nor vengeful women tormenting men with needles.

then the kerosene lamp in my room started to falter. she told me to go back to bed immediately while she tried to outpace the flickering light and headed back to her room.

but she was late. I heard mama in the darkness groping her way back, groaning mutedly one time when she bumped against the unplaned wooden stool outside my room.

that night, I remember praying for witches as kinsfolks. then mama could have had blazing eyes, effulgent and piercing, training a light ahead of her to guide her back to her dark and cold room.

wider

the fenced in vacant lot adjacent to the community parking square is still blanketed with snow, two week old snow, unlike everywhere else, that is not mucky or slimy.

at the end of the lot is a single storey shack that is inhabited, according to one of the nosier parking attendants, by a recluse retired racing car mechanic.

a single set of footsteps, a streamlet of deep imprints, from the door of the shack to the crudely improvised gate at the other end of the interlink fence, sullied the immaculate spread of the snow. this was days ago.

today, two markedly different sets of footfalls, one familiarly heavy, the other, fresh and decidedly delicate, bloomed in the snow like paw prints left by mating mountain cougars.

today, too, on the bus, a gruff bear of a man in linty pea coat deliberately rubbed his right leg against my left. appalled at his audacity, I just froze. he rewarded my submission with his smile, lips puckered, his stubbles bristled under his chin.

there's a henry mancini song that mama used to play over and over whenever any of her past boyfriends did her wrong. and she, a sixteen year old girl all over again, sat by the record player, rapt, as if listening to a spiritual ready to revive her flagging faith.

there are times I do worry about myself, still unlettered in the necessity of proximity.

moon river, wider than a mile. I'm crossing you in style, someday.

mama did. and so did the recluse, apparently. while I, still drifting off to see this gelid world alone and never waiting round the bend for someone ready to rub me the right way.

knotty

on my way to work, I found, under the heft of the tree by the bus stop,a polaroid, waterlogged and torn in half, of a girl, her face enshrouded by an opaque, inscrutable cloud (faulty flash? slow shutter speed setting?).

an arm, glistening with sweat, of an eerily disembodied brawny man clasped her by her svelte waist.

the girl was faceless, alright, but she, her aura, feels familiar -- fellow bus rider, grocery bagger, daughter, young, virgin mother.

after work, suffused with a pilgrim's will, I went back to the tree hoping to witness again the transfixing image by the curbside but all that was waiting for me were two soggy white castle soda tumblers and a crushed empty pack of marlboro lights.

a block down, a letter carrier left unattended his tri-wheeled postal bag by the curbside. a shaggy white dog walked by a heavily coated lady could not stop sniffing at the bag.

after yanking the dog's collar several times, the old lady tottering in her clunky orthopedic shoes finally convinced her mutt to go her way, back, perhaps, to their confining apartment.

it wasn't five yet but the tree, its bare arms runneling towards the damp roadside, hulked over me like a giant filigreed cathedral about to close its doors after hosting the last mass of the day.

from where I was, i could still see the dog yapping happily towards home, his snubbed tail waggling fitfully from side to side like a whiteboard eraser expunging all interest he had before for the untold goodies in the neglected postal bag.

sometimes, I just pray for a leash, short and severe, to rein me in at times when untold stories-stray pictures, mails not for me- ensnarl me, beguile me, like an ecclesiastical icon, its true meaning, the fable, the fiction behind it, byzantine, too tortuous to tell.

crabby

on the bus, from work, I dreamt I went back to cooking again, breaking out free finally from my ignominious two year take out dependence.

feting myself, I origamied my take out menus to lissome swans, hanged them over my boiling pots. the warm air, droplet by humid droplet, impregnated the lithe birds, leaving them corpulent and contented.

in my dream, mama suddenly invaded my kitchen. without being asked to, she pelted my heavily soy sauced roast pork with more rock salt. then, wiping her now sweating armpits with her sauce soggied hemline, she admonished me, her voice way out of sync with her lips, to measure out my life in coffee spoons.

the overstuffed backpack of a man wearing an army camouflage jacket grazed my shoulder and woke me out of my fantasy kitchen. as the bus lumbered through the morning crush, I labored to remember who actually said what my mother told me in my dream.

t.s. eliot's name only came to me the moment I started navigating through the frozen snow puddles from the bus stop toward my building. prufrock, yes, peach loving prufrock. the name, I mumbled to myself repeatedly, was like a perky sorbet, clearing up my mind after some serious entrée.

I stopped by the diner and ordered out a sesame bagel with cream cheese and jelly and a tall cup of colombian coffee, no milk, only two sugars. then without warning, the cash counter lady, certifiably crabby, just slayed me when she flashed a smile as she handed me my change.

as I walked on home, I clutched my take out breakfast bag against my chest, the warmth of the coffee and the toasted bagel washed over me. envying the doves by the curbside bathing under the temperamental winter sun, I just let go and basked under the glow, the lambent flush from a smile hard to anticipate even in a dream.