two spongebob squarepants

granting i attend this saturday’'s birthday party, this for the two year old daughter of someone from work, would be my 5th kiddie birthday bash to be miserable in for this year alone. and it'’s not even summer yet.

a record, by all reckoning, for me. not even in children choked manila did i have this opportunity to go throw away good money for gifts with larcenous prices and a good half a day of my ho hum, unattached life.

and i don'’t know if it'’s just me, but i feel that there is this palpable pressure on the parents not to be outdone by the pizzazz of the previous birthday party they’'ve been to.

the first birthday party i’ve been to this year required the kid guests to wear tuxedos and elegant baby gowns for the theme was a proper english, afternoon tea party complete with miniature fine china.

then, there was that one in jersey which featured, count this, 3 cotton candy machines, 2 ice cream sundae churners, 1 big and greasy corn popper, and 2 spongebob squarepants mascots, each with polar opposite moods.

what’'s up for this saturday? a petting zoo in the backyard even if the temperature has not yet fully turned outdoor party friendly?

hosting the darndest birthday party for one’'s kids, it’'s like the newest competitive sports for parents nowadays. whatever happened to the extra frosted cake topped with waxy but inedible candles? whatever happened to just pinning the tail on the donkey?

this is no armchair psychoanalysis, but this must be one of the reasons why i could never become a parent.

no, not the diaper change. that'’s a piece of sugary birthday cake. it’'s the keeping up, the competing with other type a, can’'t take being second best parents.

my mother couldn’'t, either. for this, my respect for her has yet to wane.

growing up, i remember that having an ice cream cake, plump and emitting radioactivelike vapors, would instantly turn birthday parties awesome in the island i grew up. the way, perhaps, an appearance of r & b star usher today would make the most awesome bat mitzvah party in long island. ever. like really, really ever.

and so on my seventh birthday party, the most important for a boy growing up back home (don’'t ask me why. it just was.) i, in no uncertain terms, told my mother i required a well frozen, turgid, i preferred, ice cream cake, with my name correctly spelled in at least three colors of ice cream frosting on top of it.

i got ice cream, alright. the dirty variety. mother, in all her infinite wisdom and twisted logic, hired the itinerant ice cream vendor and told him to barge in to my birthday party, sweat and all, heaving his dusty pushover ice cream cart. fancy.

ah, mother. she was resolute in her ways. she was a single parent. and she was resolutely singular.

early this year, i spoke lengthily with mom over the phone. this on her birthday. actually, hours after her birthday. again, i miscalculated the transpacific time differences.

and she was, in jest, i hope, tried to finagle from me a relatively big sum of money. what for, i asked. she said she wanted to redo her kitchen.

but you never gave me what i wanted when i was a kid, i countered, why would i be extra generous with you now? somehow, that didn’'t come out quite jokingly as i thought it would.

without any calculated pauses, mother fired back. you got all what you need.

ah, mother. with her resolute ways, she must have had a great deal of trouble raising me and tolerating my peculiar set of ways. but i like to believe she had a blast doing it.

now, about that kitchen, ma…

child of god

you, my friend, are reading a post written by an awed, soon-to-be godfather of a child of god.

two weeks ago, thereabouts, i received a terse but rather hard to download email. this from a lady friend (let's just put it at that) back in humid (sultry, i guess, is the better word) manila.

the email had this clunky attachment, a huge picture of a genial infant, practicing what could be his trademark killer smile later in life.

this is my friend's first born.

i emailed back to ask who's the father. typical, you might say of nosy me. until now, she has yet to respond.

but the no response, i take, doesn't strike me out from the earlier proposed list of her newborn's godparents, absentee or otherwise. i am this sanguine.

not only will this kid be my first godchild, but this one is special. miraculous, even.

you see, my lady friend-how should i put this with great delicacy?-is, well, no spring chicken. now there, i ruined it.

she was already in her mid forties when i left for the states. and she had this air of resignation around her as to finding what the chick lit she was reading at that time called rather irresponsibly as the beloved.

then one day, a day cribbed almost from the annunciation story, another friend of ours read her fortune. i ching, i remember. i did forget the exact hexagram reading. all i remember was that it did forebode well for coupling. heaven and earth in perfect syzygy for our now stirred friend.

i remember her calling me late that day to tell me somehow embarrassingly that she met this youngish man just after we split from our staid fortune telling session. oh, but he’'s an old soul. he’'s as skeptical of this world as i am, she sounded giddy.

then just a week before i had to fly here, she reluctantly introduced me to her new friend. and she was right. this young man was brimming with questions. of this world, and even beyond, wherever that might be. a telling quality, perhaps, of one who aspires to become a priest.

this dominican novitiate and my friend. oh, there was serious spark between the two. thorn birds spark.

i remember having had too much to drink during our introduction dinner. envy, perhaps, for my now immoderately happy friend.

my friend had to let me sleep in her condo that night for fear i might not make it safely home. the novitiate also slept over in her very clammy place.

i remember waking up suddenly at dawn. vaguely, i heard them. but vividly, i can still remember the whipping and snapping of the stiff window curtains just across the couch i was relegated to sleep in.

writing this post now, i am deeply saddened at myself. sad that i only saw before this monumental error, this transgression in their nascent union.

looking at the picture of this-is it?-grinning child, i am sincerely rueful. contrite that i failed to understand the mystery, a genuine holiness, in fact, of their relationship.

in the picture, my friend’'s new born child, my soon-to-be godson, looks noble in this pedestrian blue flannel unitard.

the shot must have been taken in the hospital nursery for he seems to be cradled in a rather sterile bassinet.

i smile while looking at the unpadded rails closest his head. they look like hammered silver halo spokes of ivory images from one of those coral stone churches established by enterprising friars.

ugly family

growing up, it never appeared strange to me why we hardly had photos lying around.

no frames groaning on walls easily sopped by temperamental monsoon rains. no clear plastic albums studiously left open on coffee table tops cloaked with crocheted doilies.

maybe, we were just an ugly family too self conscious to be photographed. maybe, we were just a fidgety family too ill at ease for static poses.

i remember a few. mother, in a traditional terno, doing a stiff jota de manilena sway balance during an all teacher dance presentation in a long forgotten school convocation. there was one with mother and i, both unsmiling, in our sunday’s best, walking a mile a minute away from a blurred building.

and there was that one with me with what could pass for a smile on my face.

oddly, i was still in the center of a lichened rock garden. not running, not restless, but adult still and gazing right back intently at the camera.

the overwhelming presence of my mother behind the instamatic camera is not palpable within the frame of the picture. it only had me, grinning, you could say, at this strange exercise, this unusual-for-our-family enterprise of standing still for a moment and being coerced to come up with strange facial contortions.

yesterday, my mother left a message on my answering machine. her voice still badgering, she asked me why haven'’t i called her for the past two months now.

i don'’t know either. all i seem to know is that it seems unnatural for me to call her and be constrained to talk about things that needed to be said in stillness, in tranquil silence, like touching, tangentially at best, about her troubles with her philandering husband.

in that photo, my knees were scraped although not bleeding. my olive khaki bermudas were frayed at the hems. and i was clutching in my right hand a clump of caramelized corn puffs.

i remember now where that was taken. it was on an abandoned student garden project behind the school where mama taught. for most part of the school year, the deserted rock garden was where young lovers escape to after school hours.

waiting for mama to wind up all her activities every school day afternoons, i used to sneak behind the clapboarded school building and into the garden blossoming with a strange bouquet of kissing and sometimes fighting couples. and i would hide behind a flaming red bush- that is how i remember it - on my knees and trying to suppress my giggles.

mother doesn’'t teach there anymore. and i believe sitting on that patch of land is a covered basketball court with a more knee friendly wooden parquet flooring.

a saner friend of mine once said that my memory always engages in this sophistry, deliberately twisting to my current world views everything that happened to me during my childhood. he could be right.

but memory, at least mine, is never a fence sitter. it always has these final judgments. and it always sees what was before unseen.

i see my mama now taking my picture in the garden, crisp in her pantsuit school uniform, making ends and tails with this shiny sparkling camera, wishing for a kid not easily agitated by the crazy goings on around of love and loss.

cinema glamor

just when i thought i knew my new york like the back of my hands, in came an out of towner with his crazy suggestions of places to go and hang here in the big city. a big slap to my now smug big apple face.

this visitor, a pinoy canadian transplantee, i got acquainted after filling in for someone who rightfully skipped my neighbor's mahjong session on good friday night.

somewhere around losing close to eighty bucks, this pinoy told me that we should go to this quaint movie house in queens. nothing you've ever seen here in new york, he claimed.

now how in the world can i take that gauntlet sitting down, just piling pretty my fake ivory mahjong tiles? and so i, together with another clueless bronx citizen, went with him the next day to this old cinema.

the movie house, perhaps a holdout from the theater construction boom in the fifties, sits near the end of a nondescript avenue bordering la guardia airport. when a plane lands nearby, one can feel, though imperceptibly most of the times, a pleasant buzz like that from a shoulder massager with feeble batteries.

the stadium seating is still intact although hardly anyone watches the third run movie projected in the decently sized post war screen. the action was in the adjunct rooms with its differently themed screenings. this is a gay movieplex, after all.

there is a straight gay porn room showing mostly down and dirty flicks produced from south of the border. there is also the surprisingly popular she-male room. and of course, those sad little video cubicles with that stinging smell of industrial antiseptic.

oddly, there's a straight porn room, as well. and what do you know, hardly anybody goes there.

but all these, i've seen before. but not the fellinesque parade of decidedly old fairies bedecked in their finest evening wear.

there was one, who looked like zeny zabala of my childhood movies, her foundation caking near her earlobes. the old queen was resplendent in a beaded mauve mid ankle gown. there was another one, latino looking and decidedly younger, wearing pucci inspired hosiery overran with conspicuous runs. and another one, who i believe could now be in his sixties, wearing a sparkling rhinestone tiara.

the relatively younger gowned queens cruised the vast movieplex unremittingly like wired up remaindered barbies. the older ones regally rested their weary asses in the fraying leather couches near the mouth of the theater.

two geriatric queens were filipinos. we overheard their conversation.

bakla, pagod na ako (faggot, i’m beat.), the one in a gold lame number told his seat mate who was in just a shockingly plain chiffon cocktail dress. huwag muna, wiz pa ako pagka finish (we're not going yet. i have yet to hook up.)

amidst my fascination with the royal procession, the pinoy canadian was non stop in his disdain for the old fairies. when this platinum blonde wigged queen passed by, our tour guide openly mocked him, telling him his mascara’ was running. the old queen, mortified, scampered to the nearest toilet.

when he came back, the queen chucked her wig and settled for his thinning brunette hair. without us asking him, he told us he’'s leaving. he's had enough for the night, he added.

he then went to this locker stall to retrieve what looked like an overnight bag. she opened it and reverently, she rested in it his wig that now, from where we were, looked genuinely golden.

then peeking into a squarish hand mirror, she fluttered bristly her eyelids. confident, she strode out of the theater barely looking at us.

as she pushed open the massive swing door, she gave our group a last stare like she was saying, you know what, i wasn't really gorgeous, but i was beautiful then. unlike you, i know i am old now, but you know what, i have had my share of fun. i had boyfriends i truly loved who didn't love me back. i had boyfriends who i didn't give a shit. guess what, i was around, you know? i really was.

sleepless in new york

i used to be always late for school, grade school. this because i always woke up late in the mornings. and tired, too. dead tired.

deeply troubled, my mother, besides badgering our pastor to mention first my name during the roll of special prayer requests in our sunday services, had to drag me to this doctor who was always sweaty and reeked of grilled stingrays. all the doctor gave me were chewable vitamins that came in shapes of pregnant lions and tuskless elephants.

then mama got us this new cleaning lady. she was never asked to but manang gloria took it upon herself to get up as early as four in the morning to start her routine. and then she found out, to my mother's eternal relief, that i was sleepwalking.

this was manang gloria's story: i usually got up at around three in the morning and almost always went to the pantry to scavenge for left over food. as i couldn't find none i then would go into the motion of washing rice in a pot and then boiling it. while waiting for the dream pot to boil, manang gloria claimed i then scrubbed some other imagined pots in the wash tub.

strangely, my badgering mother never dwelt on this. all she did was require me to eat an extra meal, usually with a gooey soup, besides my now heartier dinners, just before i went to bed.

it has been three years now since i started working nights in this hospital. and until now, i have yet to find that rhythm, that flow to get into those sweet daytime sleep hours to compensate for my punishing night hours.

early morning today as i did my rounds i felt so sleep deprived that i thought i saw two of my patients making some kind of a fish head stew in a magical stove top grill by their hospital beds.

i told my fellow nurse this when i went back to the station hoping she would get a kick out of it. instead, she told me to take my break then and there. and so i did.

it was cold in the staff lounge and all i could think of was to have my comforter, unwashed now for two months, to wrap me to sleep. but all i had was a flimsy top sheet emblazoned with the logo of a different hospital, a stray laundry delivery from the industrial washer of both our institutions. as i drifted to sleep, i could still smell the gassy thickness of the aroma of a stew.

once my mother told this story about my sleepwalking to a guest. i believe he was a general science teacher applying for a job in mama's high school.

when he left, my mother mocked the science teacher's explanation. all about some chemical imbalance in the brain. mother would never take any perceived affront remotely questioning her sanity as well as mine. the guy didn't get the job.

as soon as i got off my break, one of the nurse assistants asked me if i had been eating during my break. she said she heard some china clanging and silver falling to the floor. i told her that couldn't be possible.

right, she said. then she went right back to pushing her hygiene care cart down the hallway. on it, was a deep plastic basin half filled with sudsy water. as she pushed on, the water in the basin churned like a thick stew on its sweet way to a roiling boil.

beauty

i don't know with you but i always thought that pain is the stronger impulse to write.

a well meaning friend once described most of my prose as funereal. mortified, he later told me what he meant was elegiac.

at work, a ward clerk, now in her sixties, had a not so good week. early this week, her youngest son figured in a disfiguring car accident. he had been in and out of the operating suite since then.

this wednesday morning, her husband, ten years older than she is, woke her up early, complaining of sharp gas burn. just minutes after getting up, he slumped pulseless into her lap at the foot of their bed.

still clearheaded, she called 911 for help. after she replaced the phone, she got another call. thinking it was the ems guys double checking her address, she yelled her address again over the phone.

a doctor from the hospital where her son was recuperating interrupted her. the doctor, forgetting any niceties, barreled with the news that her son had a massive fatal stroke half an hour ago.

i could have written about this wednesday, the very same day the devastating news was broached to most of us who knew her at work. but somehow, i found other less interesting stuff to write about.

then came this story also from work. a cleaning lady, one who is very close to the bereaved wife and mother, organized her group of friends to attend the necrological services thursday afternoon.

their group was swept in the solemnity of the services just moments after entering the neighborhood catholic church. then hearing the child soprano singing an italian threnody, the group started to bawl.

they didn’t mind the stares of the other attendees. they felt emboldened, righteous, in fact, with their sincere tears.

after sobbing for about an hour, they heard the parish priest gave his final benediction to someone surnamed differently. they then looked up and realized there was only one coffin, instead of two, that the vicar was drizzling with holy water.

they looked at each other and realized they were early, too early, for the funeral services of the husband and son of our co-worker. they couldn’t backtrack now and all they could do was try hard to kill the urge to laugh out loud there and then. this made them cry even more convincingly.

the next morning, everybody started their work late as they gathered around the cleaning lady recount their funeral faux pas. as she told her story, she flitted from bellowing and wiping copious tears from the edges of her eyes.

the cleaning lady, on the portly side, looked so animated in her blue work frock that the normally morose and sleepy surgical residents stopped by to eavesdrop on the gaggle.

as she told her story again, this time for those who missed her initial retelling, her voice began to sound more and more plangent like that of a sinner in a revival meeting now touched by the spirit.

i had to move back a few paces away from her as i reeled from the beauty of her dual edged story, one of hurting, the other of laughing, breaking my heart asunder.

dead christ

it was just a week after my grade three classes were over. i was finally getting cushy into my rote of waking up as late as nine in the mornings, the latest my puritan mama would allow me to during school breaks.

then at six something one morning, my best friend tapped quite briskly on my window. he told me we had to bike to the next barrio immediately. he didn’'t tell me why.

i snuck out of the window as furtively as i could. as I knew mother would be busy reading her bible and her daily meditation guide at that hour, i just left her a note saying i had to finish some boy scout thing we should have accomplished weeks ago.

i remember the wind smelling like a freshly washed beached boat that morning. straddling the back seat of my best friend’'s bike, i remember hearing his tinny grunts as he pedaled furiously, our bike zooming, i thought, as fast as that of the hot bread delivery boy.

after about half an hour of no talking, he yelled at me to hold on to him tightly. quickly thereafter, the road precipitously dipped and off we went yelping like crazed, tick infested dogs.

as we started to get hoarse, the road suddenly turned more gravelly and we couldn’t take the jolting ride anymore. as he dragged his squeaking bike along, i asked him what it was we came here for. he didn'’t say anything.

he didn’t have to. after we navigated the slimmest of the road bends, the gleaming coastline almost blinded us. treed in the maze of the mangrove root forest are three shiny but now waterlogged bodies of dirty blue dolphins.

i was dumbstruck upon seeing the floating dead giants. my best friend just raised both of his hands the way superman did and smiled like our town's idiot.

we were not the only ones milling by the coastline that morning. several fisher folks, most of them with mile long knives, were lolling around, too. after an elderly person shouted something like okay, the horde of knife wielding mob forded the easily agitated swamp water towards the bobbing dead dolphins.

in less than an hour, the fat bodies were quartered to pieces that could easily fit the rattan flat baskets most of them tied around their waists. the black murky water in the swamp turned red quickly from the blood spurting out from the dolphins’ guts.

i remember one of the younger fishermen yelling at us. my friend and i, we were floored that someone friendly could come from a crowd that had been hacking the lifeless creatures relentlessly.

he offered us the snubbed snout of one of the dolphins which we saw he axed in one smooth kung fu motion. my friend told him we didn’'t bring any container to hold it. the fisherman grinned then shrugged his shoulders. he went back to hacking parts from the littlest of the dolphins as if he was clearing a patch of land ran over by wild grass.


the last time i was in our island for holy week was the year i failed to snatch a desk editorial position in a manila broadsheet with the most negligible of circulations.

i watched the baroque carros floated by from the veranda of my best friend'’s house which conveniently was along the procession route.

a childhood favorite since was that of the carro bearing the pieta, a poor, wooden copy of michelangelo’'s legendary work in rome. on the float, an out of proportion, fully-grown jesus was cradled full-length in diminutive mary’'s lap.

despite the not so garish lighting of the carro, i could still see the subtle crucifixion nail marks made by the local sculptor in jesus'’ exposed side. i could also see the imprints of the nails in the dead man'’s feet. splashes of red paint were studiously applied around the gaping holes.

with me by the porch, my best friend was showing his first born child, a sickly daughter, the floats, well lighted like fishing rigs from taiwan. i remember asking him if he still remembered those butchered dolphins we saw one morning when we were still at grade school.

he didn'’t hear me as he was busy cooing some unintelligible phrases to his daughter. i remember him pointing to his daughter something at the passing carro. his daughter started screaming and his wife had to come and get her.

my best friend and i were left alone in the veranda and we kept on staring at the undraped body of the limp jesus. and i didn’t know why but I remember feeling cold suddenly, apprehensive perhaps that a mob would ascend the carro to hack the body of the now dead christ.

scratch n' match

i feel this urgent need to speak to this filipina who only last sunday won $100,000 from a promotional contest of a local daily.

actually, she didn't. she and perhaps a thousand other readers of the new york daily news who thought they had this windfall all in the bag didn't win a dime from the tabloid's scratch n' match game.

the circulation boosting game works like this: its sunday edition carries 8 scratch off cards (2 for sunday, 1 for each other day of the week). hidden under 15 numbered boxes on each card are figures for cash prizes ranging from $25 to $100,000. each day, the tabloid prints the numbers of 10 boxes to be scratched off that day. a lucky reader who scratches off 3 numbers revealing identical cash amounts wins that prize.

after this filipina did scratch 3 identical $100,000 figures on sunday, she reportedly called her aging parents back in malabon. she promised them that as soon as their visas are approved, she would fly them to the big apple pronto.

but then, the paper, upon seeing the flood of irate prize claimants, backtracked and claimed a typo it had committed, turning her and thousands others into chumps. in 1999, the same tabloid ran a similar game and, what do you know, also reneged on its contest promises. that year, the alleged cause of the snafu was eerily the same as this time - a printing error.

i really need to see this pinay. for i know how it is for someone to be screwed big time by a big, fat, lying company.

growing up, the mother of one of my island posse won pepsi cola's promotional contest.

my friend's mother, like several thousand other noveau millionaire manqué throughout the archipelago, was struck dumb upon seeing the numbers 3-4-9 emblazoned under the cap of her soda.

now that she thought she was a bona fide millionairess, she planned on letting go of her not so lucrative fishmonger rounds, the working time of which was ruining her circadian rhythm. what with the 2 am wake up call.

but alas, pepsi philippines, like the new york daily news, dashed quickly the hope it bogusly sold to its loyal patrons.

from then on, my friend's mother, not only began drinking coca cola exclusively, but started having this punishing night prayer sessions.

she hurriedly built this altar near the entrance to their kitchen. on it, she placed a gussied up image of st. jude thaddeus which had this conspicuous nick on its right ear lobe. in front of the image, she always had nine black candles. lying on the feet of the idol was the soda crown with the winning numbers.

my friend's mother would start her prayers just after the 8 pm angelus pealing was heard throughout the island. then while the rest of her family would retire, she would go on with her prayers until it was time for her to go for her fish rounds at 2 in the morning.

despite pleas from her husband, she went on with this grueling routine until one day, she was just found lying by a dirt road, her vatful of now red eyed fish scattered around her like a silvery wreath of flowers. she kept on muttering the st. jude novena while fingering the winning numbers on the dirt.

just a year after she was brought to the asylum at the city, her husband brought home a young girl and started sleeping with her in what was their bedroom.

my friend never spoke about her mother again. well, only this one time.

this when we went to the city to take the state university entrance examinations. in the bus, he asked me if i could accompany him to visit his mother after our exam. he said he wasn't sure if he could stand looking at her that way on his own.

we first saw her mom being sunned in a grassless expanse in front of the asylum together with the other patients. upon seeing him, his mother dashed towards us. while running, she groped for an imaginary purse from the front pocket of her hospital gown.

when finally she got to us, just steps from the gate, she opened her imagined purse and handed him air bills, counting them as loudly as she could.

it took her a very long time to count every imaginary bill she could give to her now quivering son as she made certain not to mention the numbers 3, 4, and 9 in her enumeration.

i need to see this new york pinay. i think it is urgent that i must.

american idols

in what could be the american idol of the operatic world, a makati born pinoy made it to the final four.

last sunday, tenor rodell aure rosel, a ucla alum, together with two sopranos, and a bass of modest range were adjudged winners in this year’'s met national council auditions. they bested close to 1,500 other would be operatic stars.

quite a number of singers who floored the judges in the annual competitions early in their careers have now been regularly performing at the met, the likes of superstar sopranos renee fleming and deborah voigt.

and it could very well be that a filipino tenor would soon be singing regularly at the most spectacular opera house in the world. a filipino musician no longer on the margins of the american, nay, western cultural zeitgeist.

on the other end of the spectrum, a filipino expat filmmaker, lav diaz, has continued to successfully entrench himself at the periphery. this by insisting not to whittle down his 630 minute, humorless film he titled quite melodramatically ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang pilipino (evolution of a filipino family).

not to be facetious about it - but why not?- but just how does one psyche oneself to attend this forbidding event which requires a brave, if not foolhardy, ten and a half hours to waste, i mean, watch? does one take bladder numbing pills? does one bring five packed lunches wrapped in smoked banana leaves?

this morning, flushed from the winning filipino tenor news, i disingenuously steered a breakfast conversation i had with a fellow nurse to opera.

i didn't know you have an operatic tradition in your country? she said. stumped, i told her we don't, then i told her i love her new duty shoes.

just what do you do for fun, anyway? she probed. who do you mean you? i was being testy. your people back home, she answered. uhmm, movies? i blanked out.

primo levi, the italian author, once wrote that the bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.

upon reaching home, i searched in my online music subscription service for the comic jour et nuit aria from offenbach's les contes d'hoffmann. this was one of the two arias that our pinoy singer, who bills himself as a character tenor, sang at the contest.

my service doesn't carry it and it got me thinking would anybody be listening soon to aria screaming rosel back home? well, aside from the less than 300 or so subscbribers of the forever cash strapped philippine philharmonic.

so with lav diaz' film. who would waste half of their working day in manila just to watch a film of mostly actors being followed around walking, muttering to themselves and looking pensive for apparently no reason at all?

i know how men in exile feed on dreams, so said the greek master tragedian aeschylus.

in diaz' film, a motley of characters keep on repeating the line hindi tayo pamilya ng mga baliw (we are not a family of lunatics).

here's hoping we're not.

for what a tragedy it would be if these two pinoy expat artists (lav, since his messy divorce, has since repatriated) would continue to be exiled from the main trough of our people's authentic dreams back in our country of the shmaltziest songs and the sappiest movies.

dwarfs, transvestites, carny folks, mostly freaks

the line, freakishly long. the show, the gratingly worshipful retrospective of the works of revolutionary photographer dianne arbus at the metropolitan museum.

i decided that when the crowds thin out, maybe by june, i would come back to confront the devastating photos themselves. but last weekend, i chose to dwell on the less mobbed biographical materials - hagiographical, i must say - that accompanied this triumphant exhibition.

from her well preserved letters, notebooks, books, keepsakes, dianne arbus, other than the pivotal figure in documentary photography that she was, was revealed to be a heartbreakingly beautiful writer as well. she was not the sister of the poet laureate howard nemerov for nothing.

everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. you see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw, she wrote.

and so she did notice them in monumental dwarfs, meditative transvestites, carny folks, nudists. mostly freaks.

most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. freaks were born with their trauma. they've already passed their test in life. they're aristocrats.

moving against the curatorially engineered flow of the crush at the exhibition, it came to me that i could have been a very good subject for her had i been around in new york before she committed suicide in 1971.

i've always carried this nauseatingly melodramatic cognition that i was born hurt, injured from something not of my own doing. and the original hurt continues to gnaw everyday in motley pains and moans.

the only photo in the exhibit i had the fortune to gaze at quite sufficiently was that of the naked man being a woman. stained curtains flank him. his penis hidden between his legs. his body traumatized by the marks from his brassiere and panties which he has just taken off.

i don't know how to see this picture. i don't even know what to think or feel about it. dianne said that a photograph is a secret about a secret. the more it tells you the less you know.

once outside the museum, everything seemed so commonplace, so hackneyed, so uniform. i felt no need to observe, to look, to watch. and i realize why people like her are great artists and people like i am can't even make a good shot at being a charlatan.

her pictures are calls, pleas, almost, to learn from this world of amazing, beautiful things. that if only our eyes are ready to recognize them, trauma, flaws, and all.

in a magazine article just months before her suicide, she wrote once i dreamed i was on a gorgeous ocean liner...…rococo as a wedding cake. there was smoke in the air. people were drinking and gambling. i know the ship was on fire and we were sinking slowly. they know it, too. but they were very gay. dancing and singing and kissing. a little delirious. there was no hope. i was terribly elated. i could photograph anything i wanted to.

and so she did.

washer woman scheherazade

the driest spot in continental united states, where temperature could reach as high as 130 degrees, has been for this year not that dry at all.

because of the record rain in california this season, some three feet of relentless rain, death valley has been transformed into a showcase of life, vibrant, colorful and pollen heavy.

and in the bottom of the valley, below sea level, an ancient lake, lake manley, that has disappeared for ten thousand years has reconstituted and reappeared, a fully realized mirage of shimmering lake in the middle of what should have been a parched desert.

manang soling, the washer woman scheherazade of my island childhood, first introduced me to the giddy world of stories. as she told me, stories, if only i have the devotion to them, would unceasingly fall down from the skies, like monsoon rain. and all i needed to do to hear them was walk under the pouring rain like a pure hearted penitent.

growing up, i remember telling my friends with conviction tales of visitations, night visitations, of winged men and horses with blonde maned human heads. then a friend told his mother that i told them these strange tales. worried, his mother rushed to mama to tell her i must be delusional.

from then on, with manang soling forced to make a disgraceful exit from our household, i was reduced to memorizing multiplication tables, a necessary skill in helping mama tend our little store in our island’'s chaotic market.

i have been so dry since then that when i first read gabriel garcia marquez in college, i literally cried.

it rained for four years, eleven months, and two days...…the sky crumbled into a set of destructive storm and out of the north came hurricanes that scattered roofs about and knocked down walls and uprooted every last plant of the banana grooves. this from gabo'’s tale of the buendia family of macondo.

and i remember reading cien anos de soledad in a graffiti pockmarked cubicle in the university’'s cavernous library, skipping my afternoon calculus class, just to hear manang soling once again tell me this sweeping story allegedly written by one colombian writer named gabriel garcia marquez.

and since then, my only benchmark for a good read is when i hear manang soling again every time i decide to give the whizzing world the dirty finger and just curl up with a book.

this week, thinking of putting my hour'’s break at work to more productive use, i have began listening to one of my downloaded audiobooks, an audible potboiler. potboiler, because i thought this would keep me up at two or three in the morning.

this about a promising melange of a murder in an ivy league school, a mysterious - what else? - coded manuscript, and the secrets of a renaissance prince. but alas, I could not seem to last more than five minutes per seating. i ended up twiddling instead the radio attachment of my ipod.

scanning the airwaves last night, i got hooked to this quirky college radio station devoting almost an hour’'s worth of ad-free air time to the current miracle at death valley.

contoured badlands, splintery rock towers. now festooned with bright yellow, pink, white and deep purple blossoms. scruffy mountains, buckled earth. now a strange world of wildflowers, reflecting pools.

and then i hear manang soling, wash tub on her head, thrashing in the knee deep water. then, plonking down the corrugated iron vat, she uncoiled her bun of graying hair and started washing it in the murky water, the basin of soiled clothes drifting ever so slowly towards the psychedelic horizon.

papal sanctioned bacchanalia

until now, despite all the puerto rican pernil, the jamaican jerked pork i have enjoyed here in the bronx, nothing could still out flavor the sapid spit roasted pigs served during the holy weeks of my childhood.

while the rest of catholic philippines fast and abnegate from the divine delights of meat, the folks from our island jump into a papal sanctioned bacchanalia from tip top palm sunday ending in hang over easter.

this could be apocryphal, but my island is probably the only parish in the philippines today that boasts of an indult. in our case, it is a special ecclesiastical dispensation exempting the parishioners from the edicts of fasting and abstinence during holy week.

this indult was allegedly obtained in 1840 by the local vicar from the ne plus ultra of orthodoxy, spain's office of the holy inquisition. the indult was believed to have been granted to the island folks who feared that fishing during semana santa would only net them tragedy. in return for the hiatus from the treacherous sea labor, the fisher folks promised to join the terrestrial processions.

and then there were the processions, a two day theatrical extravaganza of close to 20 carros bearing life sized recreations of the stations of the cross, the series of tableaux representing gory scenes in the passion of christ.

under the guise of extreme devotion, buena familias in the island outfox each other in coming up with the most garish of these rolling ecclesiastical floats. rococo is the name of the game.

in our baroque loving island, i was raised most spartanly in a poor family, a poor non catholic family. but i was an extremely social climbing kid.

my best friend during these weeks was the bastard son of the only scion of the family that sponsored the carro bearing the image of the crucified christ speared by a grinning roman soldier in a peek-a-boo, skimpy, leather skirt.

i couldn't do the procession route for fear that my conservative protestant mother would catch me taking part in this heathen activity (her word) nor could my friend walk along with the legit family of his dad behind their heirloom carro.

so we waited for the entourage to wind up back in the ancestral stone house of my friend's dad near the water's edge while the household help were in a frenzy preparing the after procession spread.

hills of pale noodles (mostly for the hands who pushed the carro on), vats of blood pudding (for the now drunk relatives) and half a dozen lechon(initially for the family members), their perfectly roasted skin reflecting the sickly yellow light of the incandescent bulbs hastily strung across the yard.

today at lunch, my trusty dominican restaurant did not carry any meat dishes. i settled for a salty, really pedestrian baccalao.

i realized i forgot to tip the waitress only after i passed by the curbside kiosk of decorated palm fronds tended by a squat, mexican looking woman, her hair bunned severely.

speaking in rapid spanish, she offered me one of her beribboned, origamied palm fronds. i shook my head and walked on. about ten paces away, i looked back at the vaguely familiar woman.

waving her wares at the passersby, she had this look of determination, not unlike that of the helpers in the household of my friend's absentee dad, shooing away the pagan island flies swarming over the divine spit roasted pigs.

on the down low

a fellow worker, a fiftyish, heavy set, african-american woman, has been reading this book for about a week now during her breaks.

the book is j.l. king's on the down low, a look at the closeted sub culture of so called straight black men, most of them in heterosexual relationships, getting it on with other men.

what? you're worried now? i asked her one night. she has been married for about three decades now to this same slightly stooping man, a deacon in their church, who always drives her to work at night.

you'll never know, she answered. and that was that.

two nights ago, we had, among others, an admission that piqued her attention. a good looking brother, buffed and all. he was admitted for the very banal complaint of loose bowel movement for the past three days.

you see, she confided to me after getting the vital signs of the new admission, this brother is on the dl, too. for real.

why? i asked her. have you seen his bag? it's got more goodies there than what i have in my dresser. she was talking about the guy's sufficiently stocked shaving and grooming kit.

ever since the book's author went on a required pilgrimage to oprah (subsequently his book topped the national bookseller’s list), most of my sister friends have been reduced to bumbling dl detectives.

but i can’t blame why she’'s paranoid about this just-talked-about-in-the-open phenomenon. new aids cases among black women are 20 times more than that of their white counterparts. and aids is one of the top three killers among black women nowadays. and the thesis of the book, despite the absence of a well documented study, is that the dl phenomenon is behind the deadly rise of the infection in their community.

in what could be the most read chapter of the book, signs, the author claimed that what a sister has in her arsenal that is most powerful to protect herself from subterfuge savvy brothers is her intuition, her sixth sense, that according to the author is never wrong. no proof, just a hunch.

before i came out, i used to have girlfriends, as in girlfriends not girl friends. and so far as my experience would bear me out, a woman's intuition is never the sonar sexuality detector that it is vaunted to be. i told her this but she would have none of it.

she told me that in the book, a wife, apparently with a nettlesome sixth sense, asked her gay male friend to hit on her husband. if i got her story right, the target husband took the bait and bam, he was outed right there and then.

isn't that an inspiring story, after all? i asked her. where's the inspiration? she said.

i would have launched on to my explanation but another patient rang the call bell for a pain medication. i left her to read her book again in peace.

after i administered the pain shot, i heard my new admission from across the other room talking to the phone, apparently to her worried girlfriend. i heard him saying it's nothing really.

but for a worried sister, nothing these days is everything. the diarrhea that could be fulminating aids. the well groomed man who could be a flaming bisexual.

i walked back to the station and ratcheting in my mind was my explanation of the inspiring story of the outed husband.

look, i was planning to say to my colleague, that truly was an inspiring story. not only was the wife ushered finally into the light but most importantly, the self denying husband himself.

i came back only to find a note from her that said she went for her break in the staff lounge. she left the book on top of the sheaf of papers i was working on. the book's mostly white, glossy cover shone faintly like an examining penlight against a patient's dim eyes.

jealous man's chastity belt

explodes, literally. this is what happens to a male honey bee after copulating successfully with the singular fat bitch of the colony.

it all starts with the on air scramble. about 25,000 of these drones would scamper after the queen bee. and if one of them succeeds - what are the odds? - in seeding the queen, then in a blaze of glory, the lucky male honey bee just explodes, no metaphors here, its disintegrated body parts literally falling down to earth.

but not its penis, though. as a last attempt to seal its dubious accomplishment, the sated but dead drone plugs behind its buzzing phallus inside the queen bee's vagina, a sort of jealous man's, or rather, a jealous drone's chastity belt.

today, with the air in my apartment still reeking of burnt electrical circuitry like a gnawing conscience, i decided to come clean with my girl friend from work.

i told her i was in love, too, with her boo to be. well, not in such a fashion, really. i just told her the pinoy hunk she was hankering for is aight. aight as in not just alright but supah fine.

she took one look at me and said sista, back off. you don't want me to go ghetto on you.

then we laughed so hard, snorting out chunks of hormone altered beef we were scarfing down in the burger king joint nearest her place.

today, too, i saw my first spring bee. well, a mini swarm of them really, droning over a leaking trash bag in front of an italian bakery two buildings down mine.

as spring nears, i am becoming grateful again that i am human as opposed to say apian, perhaps. i mean, i do have my mating problems, to say the least. but the odds of me getting it on with somebody are more sanguine than the poor drone. a quarter of a hundred thousand to one. it's like hitting the power ball.

on the other hand, the lazy bum never does a thing in the hive except obsess with porking the fat bitch. well, win some, lose some.

so after i had this horrible secret excavated out of my chest, my girl friend matter of factly told me she just lost the jones for the pinoy hunk. talk about a real, flaky bitch.

why? my voice dripping with optimism. like i have a chance with that guy. she told me that a day after the party fiasco, the guy called her up.

and you did not tell me this? i asked, feeling very proprietary of my people, my gorgeous people.

without any joy in her voice, she then confided that, without any ruses this time, she invited over the pinoy hottie. then, everything she planned happened in no time at all. about 20 minutes of no time, including the 18 minutes of foreplay.

oh, i said, in my lame attempt at genuine commiseration. for my girl friend needed that. nothing brings down a girl than the rude realization that the man she's been aching for doesn't have what it takes to bring on the pain, the sweetest of pains.

at least, he's gorgeous, i told her. she looked at me without saying anything. i know, baby, you can't go to bed with gorgeous, I told her.

in the end, when straits are dire in the hive, them lazy ass drones can just be driven out, just like that.

going home, i walked with trepidation as i passed by the building where the pinoy hunk lives.

of all the things i needed to see today, the sight of someone incinerated, its important appendage hacked, could drive me to foreswear the natural world, vital, teeming with life, leaving me stuck in my autistic hive cramped with artifices of desiccated and inelegant tropes.

tripe

as the only surviving hominids in this planet, we humans are the only species capable of producing garbage.

besides our voracious appetites for anything at all, we also have this mindless preoccupation to produce trash unlike say canines or the wooly mammoths before the ice age chilled them to oblivion. (or maybe because of our wolfish cravings that we have no recourse but to chug out trash, i should say.)

going home this morning, a snarl held our bus for almost a quarter of an hour as ems and csi vans hogged the four lanes in the claremont section of morris avenue.

watching the local news later, i learned that a naked body of an unidentified black woman was found in a dumpster somewhere there. her head, her torso, stuffed in one industrial strength trash bag; the lower limbs, in another.

look, not that i am squeamish about this. for god sake, i used to live in a metropolis where the most watched tv show is this primetime newscast that devotes exclusively the first half of its 30-minute run to showing unsolarized, unpixalated clips of decapitated corpses and sloughing off bloated bodies floating like lazy manatees along garbage choked pasig river.

and besides, i am of a people that has contributed several new entries to the ever expanding english language lexicon, the most noble specimen of it all being salvage. salvage, as in to summarily execute someone and not to save the poor soul from ruin, destruction or eternal damnation.

it's not the universality of life horrible - from poverty ravaged manila to ground zero of this century's scourge otherwise known as big ass obesity - that saddens me. i knew that early on. most of us did. the others who didn't are probably in the asylums or better yet, the graveyards.

in the novel for young readers the princess bride, farm boy westley said life is pain, princess. . . anyone who says differently is selling something.

in the news clip, a man on the street interview was slickly inserted by the producers hoping for that ratings uptick. the interviewee, another black woman, was saying that even if she did not know the murdered lady, she was certain that she must have been a good person, her own words.

i flipped off to another channel thereafter. i knew where it was going from there. this facile and sham look at life.

gruesome as it was, i do prefer the evening news of my manila. oh, but it's so sensationalized, so callous, you'd say.

callous, unfeeling. that is when one flinches away from this princess bride truth. and sugarcoating life as something else is nothing but pure trash that only humans have somehow the thinking minds to conjure.

i remember a dog i once had. an eight wheeler coca cola delivery van struck him one afternoon and maimed his right front paw forever. healed of his wounds, my dog now walked with this cringe inducing hop-skip gait.

and strangers, everytime they see him limping, would commiserate. oh, you poor thing, a stranger would almost always say while patting my dog. and my dog, wagging his tail expectantly, would warm up to the stranger, not knowing he was just tossed some human tripe.

crazy woman

manila summer was just weeks away and i remember the equatorial sun brooding at its closest it had ever been over the city.

this when i was yet a student nurse in a 75-bed hospital beside the fetid monumento market.

and i do remember his text message entreating me to skip my afternoon duty. he talked about being in the real classroom and not being cooped up in some dank, windowless ward.

i told my clinical instructor i had a family emergency. somehow, i knew then i would never become the ideal nurse.

he illegally parked his souped up fx tamaraw at a no-standing zone in front of the hospital. upon emerging from the hospital entrance, i remember seeing his smile, crooked, almost that of a hump, as refracted by the bouncing heat wave.

i asked him if something was wrong. nothing, he said. i just want to spend the perfect day with you. from then on, everything he did and said was immaculate.

i do not remember us being stuck in gridlock along northern luzon expressway. i remember eating the most scrumptious sisig topped with the most complex pig's brain sauce in dau market. i remember the softest pillows, the most responsive mattress in this peanut brittle smelling day inn along session road in baguio.

yesterday, when the temperature dipped again to below what's seasonably tolerable, i took the number two train home. home after spending a good part of the day just rummaging at strand bookstore for a densely written book by annie dillard i first read when i was in sophomore college.

i just thought it would be healthy for me to read it again now that i have grown older. i did not find any copy there and riding on the train home made me realize what folly it was. i mean, re-reading a book that i had a hard time finishing anyway.

on the train, i sat across a poorly groomed woman who kept on muttering unintelligible phrases throughout the ride. at the same time, she kept combing her greasy hair with her fingers.

aside from her purse, she brought two plastic bags with her: a black one filled with scraps of newspaper clippings and the white one had a packed chinese lunch.

when she got off at tremont avenue, she intentionally left the white one. the asian looking boy beside her called her attention. she told him she didn't need it. then she ambled towards the exit clutching her purse and the black plastic bag filled with paper scraps.

my wonderful boyfriend, the one i've been telling you about, well, if my best friend in manila would read this entry, he would go apoplectic. what wonderful? i can hear him now.

this boyfriend who yanked me out of my nursing rounds to drive me all the way to baguio one almost summer day, well, he was the first, and i think, the last boyfriend i will ever have, who hit me. he would just lose it then and bam.

but crazy co-dependent me, i hardly dwell on that part of our tortured relationship. as always, just as i do now, i remember that immaculate afternoon, conveniently forgetting the lurid, painful other days.

my memory is indeed a crazy woman hoarding scraps of useless paper and throwing away food.

drenched in the marvelous

a girl friend from work and i, we have become jules et jim. we are infatuated with the same guy. she will never know it, of course. so will he.

for over a week now, my girl friend had been pestering me to be her wing queen. the date: sunday night party at her drafty apartment. the objective: to pork this gorgeous man.

in truffaut's seminal film, two heterosexual european men, one french, another austrian, share a not so tenuous friendship between them and their equally viscous love for the same girl, catherine, played with most exquisite camp by the immortal jeanne moreau.

our catherine is this six footer, generation 1 ½ pinoy hunk. born in manila and raised in the bronx, our pinoy catherine is currently finishing his art studies at new school u. i'm not sure now whether he is into art history or he is actually enrolled in the visual arts dept. but do we care?

my girl friend doesn't need me to get him. she's a fine sister, she can get it anytime.

but then again, like every other ghetto girl nowadays, what with all this shit about boys on the dl, she is afflicted with this neurosis. she is none too sure whether the boy is straight, straight girl ass lover.

and since the boy is, as she tells me, my peoples, then i was in the picture. i am her pinoy gaydar. not that i'm complaining though. the boy, unlike most of my peoples here in east coast, is straight out tight. tight, i can hardly breathe.

in her party, oh my girl friend concocted many ruses just to get closer to the boy. she forced us to play these lame parlor games replete with toys r us props. but nothing seemed to work. the boy was still with his posse.

finally, she delivered an ultimatum to me - why me? - to drag the boy to within her grabbing radius. armed with all my worldly fwisdom, i brought this unopened tequila anejo bottle to the boy's group huddled near the kitchen radiator. quickly following me, my girl friend brought along a bowl of thick slivers of lime.

half an hour later, my trick seemed to work. the boy was warming up to us.

but instead of dismissing all the other unnecessary characters in the play at this crucial act, my girl friend who was into gorgeous men and new age yada yada started instead a round of proust questionnaire. a proust questionnaire in a central bronx party. how phat is that?

strangely, the now inebriated boy was into it. our college pinoy hunk was apparently into verbal tussle. this was where i first thought of poisoning my girl friend and taking home, instead, my gorgeous people back to my sufficiently heated apartment.

what is your greatest fear? loss of psychological independence, his answer. greatest extravagance? classic chuck taylors. when and where were you happiest? quite a pause, then, in the company of my thoughts. if you were to die and come back as another person, who do you think it would be? no pause here. jean-michel basquiat without his demons.

we, my girl friend and i, stared at each other and just sighed. beauty, indeed, is everywhere a welcome guest.

after his stellar turn at the round table questionnaire, our pinoy hunk excused himself. being the hostess, my girl friend had no choice but to continue the game. she, most lacklusterly, began quizzing the boy in corn rows to the right of our honored guest.

but after an eternity, our special guest did not return to the table yet. my girl friend kicked my shin from under and i had to scout for him. he was not in my friend's bedroom - she wished - or in her pink bathroom. so i took my coat and went out of the apartment.

as i made it to the second flight down, i saw our pinoy hunk peeing by the end of the hallway. panting, i tiptoed back to the apartment.

the party didn't end up well. two cops came up apparently at the behest of some of my friend's wet blanket neighbors.

our juiced up hunk had to be driven home by one of his homies despite the not so subtle protestations of my girl friend. and in no mood for commiseration, my friend threw me out as quickly of her apartment.

the french decadent poet charles baudelaire once lamented that we are enveloped and drenched in the marvelous, but we do not see.

navigating down the steep staircase of my girlfriend's building, i could still figure out the wan yellow hint of the pee of our pinoy hunk down the end of the hallway. from where i stood, it looked liked a mound of zest shaved from a juicy and piquant lime.

my early monday mornings

lauren bacall, in her republished memoir, claims that good things happen to her only on tuesdays and wednesdays.

the superstitious mother lily of regal films back in manila never opens a film on tuesdays (or was it thursdays now?). apparently, there is something in those days that start with a t that is conducive to the failure of her films at the tills.

mine is mondays, early monday mornings. most of my break-ups, at least those i'm still smarting from, happened on early monday mornings. today, too, a fire broke out in the apartment directly below my unit in our pre-war building.

after being ungratefully kicked out from a party somewhere in tremont (sure, i'm 'a talk about it tomorrow), i walked up into my building choked in smoke. the other residents seemed not to mind this at all.

two things i did immediately upon reaching my unit: i called 911 and then groped around for my camera. after taking several shots of the now animated smoke, i then decided to wait outside my building until the firemen came.

growing up, there was only one major conflagaration in our island. the only gasoline station in our town owned by this chinese comprador blew up into one dirty orange tongue of fidgety flame one saturday afternoon and quickly thereafter razed down all the uninsured stalls in the nearby public market.

as my mother mobilized the entire household for our evacuation plan, i took out the framed picture of our dog sheik hanging by the wall in front of my bed. clutching the frame against my chest, i then waited outside the house, sat on top of our bundled clothes and mattresses and was clearly fascinated by the gaggle of our distraught neighbors.

the still controversial english naturalist charles darwin claimed that it's not the strongest or the most intelligent of the species that survives but rather it's the most adaptable to change that prevails.

ever since i was a kid, i've always thought of myself as being too set on my ways. i moved in to this apartment two years ago and yet up to now, i still have to get a renter's insurance. with the scent of burnt tv and electrical wires still wafting in the air, i still have not scampered to an insurance agent. instead, i find myself writing this fluff piece.

it's not recklessness, i believe, although that's what it looks like, even to me at times. early on, i think i just got it - that any thought, any action that presupposes an assured future for me is basically crapshoot.

so, i cling on to what is not a mad gamble for me. i latch on to what is true and beautiful and good for me.

shots of spirals of smoke that look like gaunt ghosts of brave revolutionary soldiers. the picture of my sheik, his sleek tan pelt iridescent under the island sun, his eyes looking straight at the camera signifying nothing else but undeserved friendship, loyalty not merited.

maybe, i'm just a damaged old soul thrust back again to this dispensation to make amends. but alas. still adamantine in my ways, still crazy, as paul simon croons, all these years.

and as they say, damaged people are dangerous. they know they can survive.

the language of my pains

the first boy I made love to was the most reticent of the five sons of the sternest fisherman in our village. and he blabbered every time he came.

in the lagoon, one early evening in may just two years after I have fully mastered the multiplication table, he eased his member into my slick palm. and the warm foam scoured me to my red, honest core. there wasn't any truth more honorable than what I told and asked him.

lami-a nimo dong, uy. asa man ka nakat-on ani?
you are so good, boy. where did you learn this?

in the first time that my warmth came to know of a boy's love, he would slide into me like he would fillet handily a big, silvery aguma-a in only three counts.

he loved me, he whispered back. this was all the truth i needed to know to let him know me honestly, without a jolt, not a jar.

i was young then, too young I realize now, and i believed him. i am older now yet i still sometimes find myself looking for reasons to believe him again.

there were other men since, and some of them, like jojo, made me an extremely honest and fumbling boy again. for most of them, i could not be.

nasarapan ka rin ba?
was it good for you as well?

lamely, i would oblige with a yes in a language that could never say my truths.

i remember staring at the contorted face of jojo, trying to say the ineffable in his kapampangan, while sweating over me. and i remember getting giddy, then falling, hurtling into a void familiar. then I started to be truthful with him.

lami-a nimo dong, uy. uli ta sa amo, pa-ila ila ta ka kang mama.
you're so great, boy. i'll take you home and i'll introduce you to my mother.

then he stopped being in rhythm with me and he unwrapped her arms around my wet back. with his wetness, he wiggled free, away from my shadow and started to grope for his underwear rumpled with the bed sheet that littered the floor of my city room. clenching his shrivelled briefs in his right hand, he jumped out of bed and gave me that stare.

huwag mo nga akong bisayain pag nag-do tayo. nakakaturn-off ka, e.
don't you ever speak bisaya to me while we're doing it. you turn me off.

over beer or just plain moping from losing someone i have decided to be with forever, only the brusqueness of my bisaya, the language i revel in, the language, too, of my pains, would tell me the cruel honesty of such loss.

honesty of my dreams

today, i woke up with this weary feeling that somehow i have been drifting more and more away from my core.

a draft i could feel coming from my kitchen window. i got out of bed and could smell the air blowing from outside with the sugary scent of a threatening snow.

as i shut the sash window tighter, i remembered i had dreamed last night in english, broken, heavily accented. some immemorial dream about a beautiful man and mousy me. this only happened rarely, i mean, this dreaming in english.

for i dream, most of the time, in the language that my mother's comadrona cursed her when she gave birth to me - bellicose and scathingly honest bisaya.

bilat siyang ina. wa man niy pulos imong anak, moning.
cunt of your mother. you bore a useless child, moning.

i had flat feet, my knees twisted to waddle my gait. my limbs were lanky, very ungainly, never the stocky ones prized among sons born in our fishing village.

i, too, remember how my mother smirked at my undeveloped crotch every time she bathed me. and I thought that every word that manang buraska, mama's midwife, chomped out of her betel-nut-stained mouth were more than the truths of my present then. they were cruel oracles of my tomorrows.

intawon ang bebe, unsa-on man nimo pagkakita ug asawa?
pity you, my baby, how would you find yourself a wife?

manang buraska, she seemed the seer, the cynical one, whose only failing was to under embellish her visions too much. she only saw the frailty of my limbs and she seemed only to feel ominous vibes when staring at my puny crotch.

she glossed over the plethora of moles strewn over my then bald pate', like bands of kelp, beached, cringing under the sun yet still dreaming for that next big surf to rake them back to the sea.

in our island teeming with puff fish and superstitions, a kid endowed with a constellation of moles in his head was never expected to become anybody. just a ne'r do well, a dreamer, at best.

when my mother could still dupe me into wearing gabardine shorts while the rest of my boy classmates were already strutting around in bang-bang denims, there was no big eyed octopus too slippery for my spindly hands nor a curse too harsh for my tinny voice. at least in my dreams.

in my dreams, I could beat the airhead son of the richest family in our island in a boat race at dusk, across the lagoon, towards panangatan island of the sweetest coconuts.

he, limping among the waves, in their family's evinrude-motorized boat, i, surfing, no, hovering above the crests in our outriggered banca painted pale red, pink. mama had only enough money to afford the one dear can of the reddest of paints and three of the cheaper stucco.

lolo nimo, carding. usapa na. puro lang ka hangin da.
carding, you go masturbate. chew this. you're all air.

i was not only a delusional kid but i, too, was sincerely foul mouthed. again, only in the honesty of my dreams.

there was dreaming, even then, that seduced me like sin. all that would make me slip into dreaming was that stillness, that lull in the hum in any of my childhood afternoons and i would hear the swoosh of my dreams flowing, rushing out of my head. and how i would hear them crackle like the midday riptide pummeling the gnarly island reef.

where is that?

i vaguely remembered reading incredulously this email three years ago. this before i finally decided to immigrate to the states.

last week, i received this email again, or some syntactically challenged permutation of it. true to form, a friend back in manila who gets livid quite easily over these alleged slights against our pristine and immaculate national character, sent this email to me, high priority.

he was also the one who broached me the heartbreaking news decades ago that our camp goddess then, the fashion challenged mariah carey, spewed some anti-filipino venom herself.

the email, long authenticated to be a hoax, was purportedly from a quaint figure in the raucous american radio talk show scene, art bell. in the so called letter, mr. bell, who, i believe is married to a pinay, allegedly wrote, among others, that in the past few decades, filipinos have begun to infest the united states like some sort of disease.... nothing respectable has ever been created by the filipino people.... in their minds, they somehow believe they are asian.... nothing in filipino culture can be seen as asian.

with nothing but love on my mind, i quickly forwarded this email, complete with sarcastic asides, to a co-worker--a freshly sworn in (barely a year) naturalized american citizen-who has stopped showing up in gatherings exclusively attended by kababayans. too stifling, so the faggot said.

a quick reply got to my mailbox. an invitation, a sunday brunch. for what?, i emailed back. a gathering for (sic) minds that thinks (sic) alike, his email said. plus, he's buying. so, what to lose?

the empire's neo-citizen was very agreeable with me during brunch and very solicitous to his boyfriend, a reticent, white guy with a fast receding hairline.

the table talk centered obviously around the letter. this even after i made the disclaimer that the email was long revealed to be a hoax. it was just too good a meal time conversation fodder to forego.

of course, i never think of myself as asian, the former pinoy said. they can have all that to themselves, he added as he leaned against his white boyfriend, his brown skin assuming a darker tone not unlike that of the dominican waiter.

of course not, said his boyfriend. you see why i love this guy? the bukidnon born and bred american citizen giggled as he rubbed his right hand against the hairy forearm of his boyfriend.

why would i? said the american citizen, the japanese, the koreans, the chinese, hell, they can't even speak a decent sentence of english. he sought the eyes of his boyfriend after saying this.

but you're different, dear. you are american already. as soon as the boyfriend said this, a beatific smile was plastered across the american citizen's face. nothing could erase this from his face even after he saw the check.

after brunch, the couple extended their graciousness by inviting me to go with them to watch the latest vin diesel movie. i told them i have to catch this carolina ditsi documentary at lincoln center.

carolina, who? the citizen asked. a pinay feature documentary filmmaker, i said. you're in america now and you still insist in watching these elementary (sic) pinoy melodramas? pwede ba? this was the only time he spoke filipino during our midday soiree.

i told him this was not a commercial film but a documentary, mostly in bisaya, about 3 school age kids incarcerated with other adult criminals. worse, he snapped back.

after thanking them, i went to the nearest m5 bus stop while they hailed the first cab downtown.

in the bus stop, a silver haired lady with a tatty four legged walker kept staring at me. i averted my gaze from her. but when the bus came, i was forced to help her climb up the rather steep stairwell.

as soon as she was settled in a seat across me, she thanked me quite profusely. then she asked me if i was japanese. i shook my head. korean? she persisted. i said no.

i'm filipino, i told her. she looked puzzled. where is that? I smiled and said i'm asian. sweetly, she smiled and thanked me again.

clarity

a lunch, a 12-course chinese lauriat right in chinatown, i was supposed to attend yesterday. a birthday bash, the big five o, for one of my co-workers i couldn't say no.

but what do i know, i got lost somewhere in the incestuous boundary between little italy and chinatown. and i conveniently forgot my mobile, too.

i ended up eating alone in this greasy buffet along lafayette. i sat across a young mother feeding her infant with morsels from her own adult tray. the kid, with teeny sparkly stud earings, lapped everything her mother chopsticked her.

as i was about to clean up my chinese styro bento box, i noticed the little kid was wearing a relatively huge gold pendant shaped like a ram. i wanted to ask the mother what it was for, you know, like was it an amulet against something malevolent. but i reckoned she would not understand me or worse, she might just scoff at me for looking asian but not being able to speak any chinese, at all.

accomplishing nothing, i decided it was apt to reward myself with another long stretch of sleep again. without any iota of compunction as to missing an appointment, i took the local train back home. but not before buying the times for me to scan through the ride.

inside the station, a busker was playing the erhu, the chinese two stringed bow instrument, by the turnstiles. the station agent shushed him before he announced that there was going to be major delays with the train arrivals for the hour.

buried in page a3 of the times was a picture of three gaunt kids from bohol who didn't die, unlike 28 of their schoolmates, after eating fried caramelized cassava fritters the day before yesterday.

after a tune that somehow mimicked bird chirrups, the busker launched into a melancholic passage. midway to his new tune, the train unexpectedly came on time.

i didn't bother to look for the account accompanying the photo of the poisoned kids. it felt like i've pored over that account before. i just couldn't place when.

all i could think of was whether my kababayan lunching at this opulent chinese mess hall knew about this news already.

but even if they did, i was not certain this would dampen their will to celebrate. not that i think of them as callous. hell, i don't even know now what to think of them, of us, people from a country where such grisly news is no longer news.

as i was nearing my stop, i couldn't help but imagine what was on the mind of a mother of a dead child. or whether she was still even thinking.

for how can a bereaved mother really think these days? just early that day, she rummaged for the last bill in her purse to give to her kid as lunch money, the one she planned on setting aside so she could buy at the end of the month what her child had long been dreaming of - a new pair of flashy sneakers.

then later that day, someone brought her home the limp body of her child still wearing those ratty sneakers he had on when he left her smiling this morning, clutching proudly his lunch money in his twitchy, sweaty hands.

i was the only one who got off at my stop. no hangers on, as well, in the station. but I swear, i could hear an erhu played with so much pluck, phrasing with a clarity things i could never make sense of.

elephants in spring

hoping to do something light on my night off, i called fun ricky, a casual acquaintance from my pinoy mahjong circle, early yesterday afternoon.

his first name isn't fun, much more than his last name is ricky. but when I spoke to him, he sounded drab.

you sound like you're in the woods, I told him. i am in the woods. i am in new fucking jersey, he answered. i am babysitting the brats.

fun ricky has a sister who raises two toddler scallywags on her own in rutherford. and fun ricky, god bless his soul, volunteers to watch over the little imps on some of his day offs.

suddenly, a high pitched voice interrupted our prattle. justin, give me back the phone, fun ricky, no longer fun, barked at his nephew. allo, allo, allo, said the voice. hellow, i answered back.

i saw the elephants today, justin said. what elephants?, i asked. he was not able to answer me as fun ricky successfully yanked the receiver from him.

i asked him, instead, what elephants. he said, he brought the kids to the town center earlier to watch the parade of the animals from the ringling brothers /barnum and bailey circus.

nothing announces the arrival of march, of spring, in the tri state more garishly than the parade of circus animals through town. this year, the big circus makes it first stop in new jersey before it moves to madison in mid-manhattan later this month.

then, fun ricky had to put me on hold as his other nephew was about to fall from the couch. as I waited, justin began talking to me again.

i asked him about the elephants again. he said he didn't like them. why? i asked. they stink, and, and they, and, and they peed a lot in the snow, he said. and then fun ricky grabbed the phone from him again.

__________________________________________________


three months now since the intellectual giant susan sontag died. but to this day, some new york gay activists are still fuming over perceived bias by the new york times.

it all stemmed from the 3,200 word obit the paper wrote about ms. sontag's life which conveniently glossed over the mention of her alleged lesbian relationship with uber-photographer annie leibovitz. previous to the claimed relationship, ms. sontag was in an 8-year marriage.

the activists allege that not mentioning leibovitz in sontag's obit manifested a patent prejudice of the paper against homosexual relationships.

the paper countered by asking the activists that since there wasn't a marriage certificate on record between the two women, how would it assess the relationship for a fact.

_________________________________________________

last year, i went home just in time for the round robin eliminations of the second tier professional basketball league in manila.

surely enough, i bought me a ring side ticket to a do or die game between the powerhouse and the underdog team where my ex-boyfriend plays.

my ex used to play for a top seeded uaap team when he and i first hooked up. but since he made a conscious decision not to come out then, and now more than ever that he is making a decent name in this league, i, without histrionics, was reduced to cheering him on from my seat.

i don't remember now, but i guess he was fouled out in the tail end of that game or he was just not producing enough, but his coach retired him unceremoniously with still five minutes remaining.

as he ambled back towards the bench, he passed by the seats where i and another closet case friend were sitting. upon seeing me, my ex, who still made me catch my breath, made this smooth, almost thuggish nod at me, never breaking his stride.

my friend asked me if I knew him. my show off gay personality wanted to scream in my companion's face yes, I know him. he was my boyfriend. top that, bitch!

but even if i did, my companion would not believe me. what proof would i give him, anyway? a monogrammed underwear? a yellowing soft porn picture?

ultimately, the team of my ex was eliminated. before we could troop out of the arena, my friend and I could see him and his teammates, sweating, hulking, lumbering towards their dugout like tired circus animals.

one out, one in

more and more these days, i find myself simply coasting along.

path of least resistance. until our lease is renewed no more. what my friend said to me just weeks before he ironically enlisted with the army at seventeen years old.

i mean, what's the point in resisting, anyway? no denying the fatuity of thrashing like crazy in a world committed to drowning what's left decent of me.

and then there are days like yesterday. days when it felt sane again to just beat on, to whore a nick carraway line, against the relentless current of an otherwise emasculating existence. no drama here.

2 am, my break, last night. mild weather and all, i headed for the morgue exit by the east wing of the hospital to smoke.

a doleful entourage of what I assumed was a mother and her two daughters was leaving the morgue. i later recognized the older woman as the wife of an intubated patient in the ward opposite ours.

earlier that night, that ward called for a team, a hospitalese for ritualized advanced cpr and other life resuscitating protocols.

the mother looked logy. one of her daughters, the one in ill fitting purple velour track suit, was inconsolable.

she could not stop bawling, punctuating her wailing with muted screams of daddy, daddy, daddy.

as they were about to be ushered by a morgue technician out of the electronically locked doors, the security guard manning the nearby post just screamed into his two way it's a boy, nigga. a boy.

lost, the lugubrious women stared at each other. then as if on cue, the sobbing daughter just stopped. then each one of them spontaneously offered her congratulations to the new dad.

the mother even managed to ask the security guard-dad who was there with her? i faintly heard the guard, his west indies accent distinct, saying it was unexpected, man. unexpected.

under an overhang overlooking the morgue parking lot, i took out my now crushed pack of lights. as i lighted a bent camel, i saw the women took their respective seats in a truck, the sides of which was emblazoned with the sign castro construction contractors.

just before the car's interior light was turned off, i saw the other daughter and the mother in the front seats looking still exhausted to engage in any kind of talk.

as the daughter started the engine, i saw the mother stare straight ahead, a hint of smile on her face she did not suppress.

just as soon as their truck went out of the hospital premises, another car, an indistinct family sedan, entered the parking lot and took their spot.

dear you

i have been meaninged to tell you this for quite some time now. yes, you. you who never believed me when i say I am doomed, for it seems like forever now, to always be drawn towards the freaks.

there. into first paragraph yet and i already ruined the tone of this letter.

this is why I have been procrastinating for too long now. i just can't read my compass to get on with this story with generosity. with enough affection, in fact.

it looks like i am bound to ruin it anyhow with just a slipshod drop of an ill thought of word. you know, like freaks.

remember, i spoke to you before last year ended about this one harrowing weekend? nasty cold spell? grievous saturday night where even bad tv i couldn't get?

actually, I had sumthing, sumthing with someone who looked like you-know-who. the caramel complexion. hell, even the artsy glass frames.

i first saw him while plodding through murakami's latest in the great reading room of the main library at 42nd. he was poring over the recently published selected prose of the famously difficult poet john ashberry.

it was eerily easy. no little deaths before we got it on. from the library, we were off to this coffee place by bryant park that, surprise, served decent reds. then, a painless train ride to his digs at williamsburg. just like that.

first, he wanted us to shower together. cool. so he dug for an extra towel and robe in his sparse closet.

on the top rack, where a lady a century ago might have reserved for her millinery, were two stark black lacquered boxes.

i asked him if they were japanese. i thought being asian gave me the prerogative to go there.

he said no, while handing me a dark blue towel, a store label still wrapped around one of its selvages.

then as he dropped his denims slightly fraying at the seat, his crisp boxers, he told me they were urns of his parents.

i first didn't get him. urns for like what? i sort of got him while asking him this. then after telling me to undress myself, he told me his family, well, they don't inter, rather they cremate.

i begged off from showering. he went in alone. whistling the william tell overture, he rubbed himself so hard after the bath that red splotches bloomed all over his pliant torso.

when he came on to me on the bed, i first thought of asking him to close his closet. but i thought that would be too inapt. i just shut my eyes tightly. that, not enough, i turned my face away from the gaping closet doors.

and his cold hands touched me where i always desired to be touched. then his warm breaths came where there was cold before.

then he started to moan. his butch groans felt like they ricocheted against the severe headboard of his bed and found resonance against the clangy sides of his parents' urns.

normally frisky, i just found myself rooted to the damp mattress, all the time waiting for that long coming wetness in both our groins like warm tears.

if her slip showed

immediately after she endorsed her patients to the next shift nurse this morning, my co-worker immediately called home her only child, a daughter now in middle school.

she sounded stern. wake up, wake up. we'll be late for church. on the speaker phone, a wooly voice came on. but it's too cold, mom. could we skip church today?

taken aback and discomfited, my colleague scrambled to turn off the speaker phone and began talking to her daughter in whispers. she sounded more stern.

mama always spoke sternly to me growing up, like i was a hardcore parolee who could never be trusted. and most of the time, i never did anything to change mama's perception of me.

mama once caught me filching loose change from her threadbare red coin purse. rightfully, she whipped me with a rusty umbrella after that felony.

but i did not cry after that bludgeoning. i hardly did growing up. i could still recall the very few times i did like after the last sunday school i attended under the tutelage of this fresh bible school graduate assigned to our island church.

our novice teacher had the longest straight black hair i have seen a woman wore not in chignon. she let down her hair, a sheaf of unbraided black, dry tresses, down to her buttocks, and every time she flicked her head, her hair chopped the air like bone dry bamboo spurs rattled by an errant squall.

she spoke in uninterrupted sentences punctuated only by her cough gurgling not unlike the farting of our piebald dog.

when she started telling us the story of the messy love triangle of abraham, sarah, and hagar, i realized her unibrow grew to the thickness of a mature trellis of bitter melon.

and when she told my wide eyed classmates that sarah was the evil woman, i suddenly forgot her name and stood up without asking first for her permission.

sarah had cooked up this entire scheme, i must have told my classmates. i mean, this muss involving her patriarch-husband's siring a child with another woman, and of all the fecund women in the village, from her loyal handmaid, hagar.

the response was swift as an old testament dealing of divine justice. our sunday school teacher harangued me immediately for telling my now confused classmates that abraham's wife was, indeed, the meaner woman. for according to my exegesis, she chased hagar, toting her bastard child ishmael, from her household to almost die in the desert of hunger, dehydration and the shame of raising a kid all on her own without the help of the man of the house.

the sunday school teacher's voice must have been so loud, wafting beyond the makeshift partition between our class and mama's adult sunday school session.

my husbandless mama appeared suddenly and, without asking permission from my teacher, yanked me out from her class. she didn't tweak my ears as she was wont to. there wasn't any need for me to cry at that point.

i only cried when i caught my single mother stealing glances at me while we walked away from the church. she was not even glowering at me.

mama decided thereafter we would not have to attend sunday school in that church while that mean teacher was still around telling partial stories.

my mama never said a word to me while we walked home that sunday. she only pointed at her hemline behind as if asking me if her slip showed.