pissed

waiting for a cab in the corner of 207th and broadway, pissed. steamed at being late for lunch with L. the bus i took earlier just moseyed on, so i got off at this unfamiliar corner. down the block, a pod of healthy lunged kids yawled strange and stabbing cries as they shocked their unshirted bodies with cold water belched by a spritzing water hydrant. a light breeze carried phrases of a pulsing reggaeton track from a lone cracked window of the red tiled building across. como le encanta la gasolina. dame mas gasolina. in my pocket, my phone and some stray quarters burned against my thigh. then, an unleashed pug started sniffing my slippers now slick with sole sweat. the mutt's snout slued through my forefeet like a melting ice cube. seeing its pom-pom shorted owner panting after him, the heavy balled dog dashed on towards the streetside fountain. it summarily displaced the shrieking kids and hogged the sputtering water all by itself. the owner yelled some unintelligible threats at the dog and it reluctantly moved away from this pocket of sweet rain. it then shook off vestiges of its misdemeanor and limped back to its owner. the smile it had, little by little, melted back to a frown.

 

weekend's promise

with a relaxed manner of someone used to having people pay attention to him, a tall, white man wearing a baby pink lacoste tennis shirt slinked inside the number 4 train as it laid over at the 86th station. he dragged this smooth-rolling, grey-spice callaway golf bag and he looked quite perplexed at why nobody was doing this for him. from the bag's uncovered mouth smiled 14 iron molars. after smoothly settling down to an empty seat beside the sliding doors, mr. golf man reluctantly hugged his bag to let this rushing mexican boy - too late, perhaps for his weekend morning shift - scamper off the train, his hair still dripping wet and sleep still in his eyes.

 

things done

the sky already sheened like gun metal when the tardy garbage truck came. it gobbled chop-chop the plump black bags splayed in front of our block's tallest building and worked its manic way down to ours. in a trice, the truck drove away with everything unwanted in its gravid belly.

then on, the air cleared as if electricity had passed through it, allowing things, as if by a miracle, to be accomplished at all in this languid summer's morning.

as in a swift dance, a towing crew hauled away smoothly this long parked, rusting sedan across the italian bakery. the yellow bus came and picked up three moony kids downstairs, too early, perhaps, for their summer day camp upstate. the taciturn couple was back on their lawn chairs, rocking themselves to the beat of their understood silence. somebody generous had already flange-opened the water hydrant catercorner my building, attracting, as of now, a horde of parched pigeons. and my impatient heart exhaled as it heard this beautiful ring from my phone long indolent since midnight.

 

day old

the hunched mexican, on his way to bench more of his produce outside his store, lost his grip on this box of california pomegranates. two purplishly red rined fruits eagerly popped out of the box and bruised their way to the gutter. cursing, the tottering grocer dove after the leaping fruits the way an eager-to-impress, basketball camp teener would after an out-of-bound ball.

still cursing, he got up, dusted the fruits and himself. one of the two he tossed back into the box which he eventually slammed down beside this doddering tower of empty boxes shoehorned on top of each other like sad, unpainted babushka dolls. the other, he started on munching. he spat the seeds with a violence, almost in defiance, at the severe street.

done with the fruit, he started stringing up sallow cavendish bananas from the sagging, striped blue awnings. they drooped like wilted, day-old fiesta buntings.

 

so perfected

as the midday heat bullied the neighborhood, a couple well into their sixties decided enough is enough. without giving so much as a word to each other, they unsheathed two of their blue lawn chairs on their stoop and straddled them--shiny, indigo war steeds. the bermudaed couple, like jaded sentries, never saying anything to each other, just looked and looked at the platoon of pigeons wilting at the eaves of the building across theirs.

then, the woman started reading her fan magazine while the man fanned himself, and at regular intervals her, with this crisp, glazed poster of a spanish soap opera star. the smile of the actress was as cool as a little poem of kindness or a song in praise of a love so perfected it could go on without being uttered or sung.

 

city folks

when a clingy patient finally fell asleep at about 4 a.m., i sneaked out of the ward for a cigarette break at the parking lot. a brass rodent bearing lightning shaped scars on his spine gnawed at something slimy by the lip of the arid water vent right by the shed where the parking valet snored. just then, a new york police chopper roared above, knifing the dark with its search light. the rat, like i did, reared its head, listened, and went back to what it did as soon as the chopper thundered westward away.
 

in the meantime

stuck in a BX55 bus suddenly shorn of ac when it hit third avenue, a hoyden in a boy's tank top a seat away pried open the emergency window. a gentle wind whispered in like a swift, unbidden dream. i leaned back on my cradle seat, its once indigo, thin upholstery now a pale sky blue of a late summer afternoon.

oh, someday, i would buy me a bookstore, close it for an afternoon, and just read until the hired helps clear their throats gratingly, their eyes darting to the time card machine blazing like an untended brazier. someday, i would make my mama proud and mail her a nice little certified check. someday, as a friend has been repeatedly saying these days, i would meet my guardian angel and take him to a fancy dinner, gold rimmed china, stemware that glisters like the milky stars familiar to my guest.

but in the meantime, i wait for your call on this business monday. the one you'd make during your strictly one-hour lunch break, phone in your left paw, your right flipping open your billfold, while standing in line, impatient to take that limp lettuce out of that cold sub.

 

sunday dinner

in the still sunwarmed wooden floor of the living room, the deepening shadows of dusk started to bleed into the callow darkness of the early night. i roused myself from a cobwebby nap to take this chance. to stare at you. you could have easily caught me. but you're this gracious new yorker. ready to avert your eyes when a woman rides the subway with tears rolling down her cheeks. respectful of my nonnative astonishment at this beautiful thing i fell into. so homegrown, so natural. i slinked out of the day bed, tiptoed over the sunday paper scattered on the parquetry and into the kitchen and scoured the fridge ablaze with amazement, with gratitude for something for you to eat.

 

summer window

before the brawny raindrops landed with dusty puffs, a spider slithered down a quivering string strummed by the stern fingers of the summer sun.

 

late moon

in the failing light of a late moon, a stray squad of army recruits in white tees jogged by under my window: a short stream of sugar into the lightening black coffee of day.

 

grotesque

the cafe's bassinets of mixed perennials - pink asters, black eyed susans - obscured me completely from the sidewalk pedestrian traffic. L, as he crossed the street towards the cafe', did not see me beckoning at him from this table drenched in the early afternoon sun.

i looked at this man, slow, catlikely making his way to the the cafe' and i wanted to wave wildly at him, to make him blush at my unrestraint, the way, perhaps, a serviceman surprised at the enthusiasm of his relations welcoming him from a deployment somewhere in the middle east. and yet, something in me didn't want to startle the straight couple at the next table and force them to look up from their menus just to see who i was waving at.

instead, i, cool, aloof, almost contemptuous of the turmoil of my excitement, just stood up from my table and made this movement with my hand at L like i was a traffic cop making a riotous flow of pedestrians stop.

L saw me and gave me this smile, this knowing smile, like saying he knew, he knew we are not in our people's place.

later in our lunch, just before the check came, L tried to reach over the table to touch my left hand. without thinking, i just withdrew my hand from his reach. in this straight cafe', it was the logical thing to do and yet it was also the most grotesque, so unnatural like this one sickly black eyed susan in the bassinet refusing to strain its face toward the sun.


 

morning good-byes

after registering a mail this morning - a late payment for a magazine subscription i believe was long settled - i saw a bridal entourage spill out of the catholic church shoehorned between a store that sells italian soccer shirts and an underutilized side street across the postal office.

the fidgety groom, a squat man with heavy incan features, looked miffed when an older man asked a balding white man toting a clunky camera to take a picture of them: the couple squinting in the morning light, the determined looking older man, and a dumpy woman he just grabbed from out of the gaggle of white garbed women.

suddenly from around the corner, a toddler, a girl squealing on a trainer bike mowed through the hoo-ha at the foot of the church. a lushly sweating woman ran after her, screaming "be careful, jasmine." the little girl's twin pony tails fluttered in the breeze like two little hands waving goodbye.

finally, a younger man with heavily greased hair ushered the bride and groom towards a white town car, its hazard lights unblinking, parked at the mouth of the church. the bride ignored the well wishers as she hurriedly stepped inside the car, her veil waving in the wind.

 

90 degrees in the shade

a busboy, a clear thinking one, opened wide the slightly sweltering glass door of the greasy spoon when i was on my way home this morning. i went inside and was immediately funked by the grating gasping of the ac.

coffee, it seemed, was 86'd from the menu today. the counter mushroomed with sweating bottles and tetra paks of cold drinks. so, i asked for a toasted bagel, cream cheese, no jelly, and, instead, a diet peach snapple, the coldest, i told the waitress. she glared at me like i was the most splenetic customer around.

across the diner, a woman wearing a linen skirt that showed most of her prodigiously long legs contemplated crossing the street. it was only eight in the morning, and yet, the woman seemed to flutter in the heat.

before i got to my building, two men, their arm holes choked by irascible sweat rings, were arguing, something about an unpaid gas bill. their exchange quickly escalated to screaming at each other familiar invectives. but somehow their vituperation was as venal as the summer sun. a mother with two drowsy kids, a dirty aproned butcher's assistant and i quickly passed by the two like a plague.

it took me a while to open my building's door as i couldn't find my keys. they were lounging at the cooler bottom of my backpack.

after i closed the door, i could still hear the shouting men. you don't want me to get postal on you, mike. oh yeah? fuck you, too. bring it on. their vitriol bristled in my head like shortwave radio transmissions during a severe solar storm.

 

the bike at the foot of the staircase

someone left his bike at the foot of the staircase in my building for two days now.

it's the sort that label-conscious city spinners would never be caught dead huffing and puffing on it. a souped up, throwback, orange schwinn banana seat bicycle, its once luminous racing striped fenders now flapping like the limp canvas awning of a store that went belly up.

it's as ratty as the one i rode on to ms. mendoza's 1 pm science class. that bike, despite my conscientious oiling, would insist on shrieking once i start pedaling, sending sheik, my flighty, one-balled dog, into apoplexy.

a neighbor, who was collecting his mails the same time i was waiting for my sunday paper delivery, surmised that the bike must be that of the chinese delivery guy. and that a very satisfied customer - his words - must have invited the delivery boy to stay for the night. "a very generous tipper," he said.

today, the bike still loiters there, unmindful of its uselessness in this very harried monday. it stews there, although seemingly never sullen with the world. happy, almost.

happiness and unhappiness, this bike seems to be saying, are as diametrical an experience between that of a frequent flying ceo lying full stretched in a 180 degree lie-flat bed in first class and that of a jumpy immigrant careful enough not to let his knees graze the back of the seat in front of him in coach. both of them, however, are in the same plane.

 

monster's diary

you said you'd meet your dad tonight. and i didn't believe you.

so i stalked you to this steakhouse, decidedly straight, with this gothic bar, and sawdust tufting on the floor.

i saw you and another happy hour habitue' hunkering on the bar like your team just choked on a finals game.

i vanished myself in this ill lit cul-de-sac table and nursed myself to a bitter ale while peanut shells beaded around my shoes like petrified sweat.

and then i saw you kiss on the cheek a tottering man sporting a tam-o'-shanter in this heat. just in time when the waiter asked me if i wanted more of the same drink i haven't touched. i said yes and his smile was, like williams carlos williams' plums from an icebox, so sweet and so cold.

 

happiness epidemic

oscar wilde said in dorian gray that the great sins of the world takes place in the brain. for it is in the brain, he said, that everything takes place.

being happy then should be no brainer. it's all in the mind, as they say. they, being of course, those insufferable ones who have ostensibly found the fount of mirth.

for the seemingly congenital gloomy gus that i am, living is getting to be more and more alienating today amidst what i can only describe as a happiness epidemic. yesterday alone, i chanced upon two new titles, happiness book titles, displayed quite prominently in my local bookstore. happiness (lessons from a new science), making happy people (the nature of happiness and its origins in chidlhood)

inherent, although totally debatable, in today's pop psychology is the assumption that happiness is a trait that can be fostered or suppressed (but who, including me, would want that?) by our mental habits. i must have some really shitty mental architecture. for i am just incapable of being that happy,bonkers-tom-cruise-jump-on-the-couch happy.

recently, too, a study made at a university just across the irish sea from where oscar wilde was born found no association between levels of mental ability and those sunny traits which most of us consider as happiness. what now?

the heart broken oscar may not be the einstein of happiness but he sure had this particular knack for parsing this arcane humana. he said that "some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." if the roots of happiness could be traced to our childhood, as what that other book implies, i don't see myself fitting under either categories of mr. wilde's glib and very procrustean taxonomy.

as a child, i was never the one my friends would first pick up from my home whenever the posse have something fun to go to, say going to a new movie. but they would never have that much fun too without me. they said that, not i.

i guess, i am still the island boy, not sunny enough, although not too doleful, either, but the one who never fails to make snide and bitter jokes the instant the movie lights go out but before the silver screen turns Technicolor.

 

deepest valley

when mastering the multiplication table was yet of the most significant import in ms. causing's grade 111 math class, i used to wake up in the mornings to this man talking, just talking, on the radio.

my room's window faced the backyard of a preternaturally early riser neighbor, manong kaling. and at five or thereabouts in the mornings, he would start his day grooming his not-so-pedigreed fighting cocks, listening to this man droning on the radio.

i must have tinkered with my alarm clock in my sleep for i woke up to an avuncular voice of a courtly man - a rarity in american radio -babbling about everything: the lying karl rove, the metropolitan museum's new $50 million painting acquisition, the provenance of brad pitt's viral meningitis.

how many years have i been in this strange city? and yet, i still grope my way around. but sometimes, just like today, something out of thin air mantles me with a mastery of things. (or is it just the comfort of the familiar?)

instead of rushing to work, i allowed myself to laze just a tad longer in my bed, listening, just listening to this man on the airwaves. and i was comforted by the thought that somewhere in this city impossible to be fully mastered, someone else still trying to get his coordinates right was also listening to this man talking, just talking into the smoggy air punctured by prickly tall buildings, his voice bouncing against the gleaming glass windows of skyscrapers, echoing like the sweet remembered sounds in the deepest valley of my heart.


 

almost like a ruse

the surgical resident who failed to make it to his friday on call rounds in our hospital, as well as on saturday, and sunday, and monday, the police found him dead, all by his lonesome in his bed yesterday.

balding although barely into his thirties, not one, not even members of his surgical team, knew much about him. his immediate superior, a highly voluble man, was painfully disinclined to talk to anyone yesterday, much like the wont of the dead resident when he used to skulk around during his early morning patient rounds.

except perhaps the slight buildup at the cross bronx expressway, it had been a lovely morning yesterday. almost like a ruse.

when i got to the parking lot, the sun was beating on the roofs of the cars just washed clean by a midnight rain. there was a steady flickering, as if from candles, in the softly scented summer air.

a nurse acquaintance, rushing in late for work, yelled at me as soon as she found a spot, "you knew, right?" heard of the news, i did. knew that he would kill himself, should i have?

i must be really this ancient. i've done this thing, this witnessing of things, an inordinate number of times. i trundled on to my bus stop under a seemingly cloud-choked sky. i shouldn't have been, and yet i found myself stunned moments after, standing under a dome, unmottled by billowing clouds and unspeakably blue.

 

koi pond

smothered by unrelenting blather at a party last night, i fled to the hosts' koi pond in their backyard. the pond, i first thought, lacked charm as beside it sat prettily the canary and indigo fisher price play house of the couple's daughter.

as the japanese carps sensed me shuffling by the pond's bank, they surfaced. the once sorry green pond, now a whirlpool of white, red, and yellow gold.

"like tapestry weaving itself," L said to me as soon as he found me considering the kois. then i thought, beauty is so unconscious of its craft, and so self-sustaining.

i promised L i'd be right back as soon as i was done with my now watered down drink. the carps, unmoved by my fawning, went on with their wet dance.

 

last stop, bronx zoo park

the sun had too much fun yet. though not for long. it was almost nine in the evening.

my bus exhaled showily as it coasted to its last stop, behind the bronx zoo park, beside a susurrating man made cataract.

park barbecuers still have their braziers brisk like the sun. their grills, giant glow worms grazing in the grass.

i got it all wrong. how could i be going home already? life must be stoked until the irrevocable darkness makes only possible the listening to the whisperings of some irrelevant water falling, flowing somewhere.

 

date

the worst part is always the very early breakfast at this diner.

i, taking my bitter time going through the encyclopedic menu to order what i already want; you, just stewing there, stirring your unsugared coffee noiselessly.

the hiss of bacon curdling in the grill, the grumbling of the giant, stainless steel coffee percolator, the shameless sigh of steam rising from my cup of tea.




 

summer and afternoon

the two most beautiful words in the english language, henry james wrote, are summer and afternoon. summer afternoon.

somebody flippant, or so i thought, told me once that life is simple. always want what is beautiful. ah, but is is not two.

i want to be with you, beautiful you, now on this beautiful summer afternoon. and yet i tarry in my place, for i want you, all on your own, in your still winter curtained apartment, your radio heaving next to you, as i call the smooth r & b dj and dedicate a luther vandross song to you.

this summer afternoon, i can't wait to be with you in the great lawn of central park and try, in our heat addled minds, to outrun the lazy summer clouds.

and yet, i also want you to stand me up, just nap like a lost bear in your centrally cooled apartment, and dream caveful of beautiful dreams, dreams that when i come later, still cling to you like the sore of your left arm, the one you've been holding out throughout your siesta thinking i was sleeping on it.

 

a sudden summer rain

stepping out of the muggy, half enclosed bus stop, into the cool manhattan evening after a sudden summer rain, i tried hard to shake off old but yet unforgotten songs rising out of my heart - of fishwives, anxious of their day old stock, their eyes now reddening, of old drunk geezers, congregating around a fast emptying gallon of extra tart, month-old coconut wine, of strapping young fisher boys, rolling carefully their just mended nets, like meshy bridal gowns, into their tightly water sealed boats, of my mother, rushing out of the house, brandishing a towel, half shrieking, por dios, anak, as soon as she saw me running from school, soaked in the rain, clumsily unhinging open our bamboo gate, her scolding as stern and warm as a vesper plainsong.

 

to R, who lives 2 hours away from london and collects hard rock cafe' t-shirts

you just emailed me: thanks for thinking of me. i'm well. and no, i'm not panicking. you know that i work in britain now and it's always unseemly around here to show anything short of any true emotion.

i'm glad that you are safe. and i don't know why but i just thought immediately of your hard rock cafe' t-shirts. those i derided every contemptible chance i got. you have that one from doha, qatar, the one you and your boyfriend bought on one long weekend furlough you had when both of you still busted your asses in dubai. and that eric clapton signed one you forced me to buy from my hometown franchise. i should have charged you ten times the price of that shirt just for asking me to step foot in that ghastly bar. and of course, the silky one from thailand and the ratty dozen you got from manila when you last went home.

i've been meaninged, long time, actually, to needle you on why you hoard these inane stuff. is it because you believe in their corporate legerdemain of a logo "save the planet?" i don't think so, or you would have stopped using cfc-choked hairspray long time ago. is it because back in provincial manila, the idea of a night out in an american franchise bar smacks (albeit declasse') of finally having arrived, of being there? i don't think so, because you've been everywhere, baby.

you ended your email saying: plus, this doesn't happen in my neck of the woods. for this, i believe, you meant these parlous circumstances that attend to our living in the centers of western hegemony.

i'm sorry, but this time, i can't wait for a long time, the way i did with my t-shirt question, to ask you which neck of the woods is that? isn't your neck of the woods just one block down from my bronx tenement? don't we all live in one planet that needs to be saved? you, you hard rock cafe' t-shirt wearing you, of all people, should know that.


 

csi:bronx

just before a sudden rain came down this morning, two boys, unhurried by no school, were chalking - like tv homicide detectives - the outlines of each other's bodies in the curbside in front of my building.

first, the chubby one sprawled himself prone while the chicken-legged, one with a concentration as severe as his buzz cut, traced his friend's acreage. the dead friend's mensuration, when it was done, looked like that of a flailing, beached baby whale.

a friend from work was telling me while we await the next shift people that i seemed to look paler than ever before. he seemed to be genuinely worried about my losing color. and this is how he said it. "be careful now, you could lose yourself soon." i told him i could just use more sun this summer or some iron supplements, whichever is easier on my pocketbook.

i was still thinking of my friend's observation when i saw these tyro crime scene investigators. my friend's suggestion was spectral, implying that without my color, i am absent, a discrete and unrelated entity, from the life i had so far. that none of the stuff i have been doing, the work i have, the boys i slept with, and some of those i fell in love with, these are nothing, devoid of any recognizable meaning, without the darkness of my skin.

the rain came suddenly like a swift justice. the chalk outlines bled into the blandness of the pavement. and despite dashing towards my building as fast as i could, i still managed to get soaked. after i peeled off everything i wore, a dark purplish band showed up under the elastic band of my boxers. i couldn't bring myself to rub it off.