My Thelma

I don't know when or how exactly we first met, or, even more importantly, what pivotal moment knitted us together. When I try to think back to those times we hung out in college, what I manage to recollect are scraps of memory in which we were already buddies -- the two of us riding a jeepney to SM North, the two of us driving around the campus in his owner, the two of us waiting for our class to start.

There were a couple of crucial events, I suppose, like that month-long Citizen's Military Training in Fort Bonifacio, which we had to attend at the same time. And later on, those anxiety-ridden days when we were just starting out in UP and had to be observed and evaluated by members of the senior faculty. But I suspect that it's all the other things that we shared implicitly that really brought us together and made us bond. It's the unspoken understanding that we were both square pegs/drama queens/lost souls (even now, in our early thrities), but together we were, well, not so bad after all.

And now, more than ten years since we graduated, our friendship is still going strong, despite his being in Singapore and my being here in dear old 'Pinas. Our cache of memories, both sad and happy, continues to fill up. The time I took him to some dingy basement pool hall in Quiapo less to pocket balls than to observe the skin trade. The afternoon I set him up for some nice little nookie in the kubo with a volleyball buddy of mine. The days spent strolling around in Burnham Park in Baguio and eating pigar-pigar in Pangasinan. The wine and the cheese and the rambling conversations about poetry and boys.

Thelma, there's still so much we have to learn and experience, so many more crimes we have to commit. The road stretches miles before us. I just hope you won't forget where Louise, the baddest chick of all, lives.

Happy birthday. And believe me when I say you are missed.

A Home in the Rain

There's a typhoon today, and so no volleyball, just hour after hour of lying in bed, with the sheets tangled round my feet, and channel-surfing. It's not so bad, actually. I like curling up in bed with a nice book, reading in the weak aquatic light coming from the window. It brings to mind those slow, lazy college days at the boarding house, when I would just press my nose against a newly acquired copy of a Milan Kundera book while listening to Tracy Chapman and the rain. Or walking under the acacia trees along the UP oval, trying with the help of a puny umbrella to reach AS with my clothes dry. It reminds me of a boy I adored, when I was still just a boy, and how one time we made love in my kubo while a storm turned the world upside down outside. Later, when the rain subsided and he'd fallen asleep, I sat by the door just watching the broken twigs and bougainvilla blooms strewn in the yard. That was a strange time, a time of uncertainties and hurts, but also of poetry and song and foolish hope.

Now, so many years later, I'm here in the orange room of my apartment, listening to "Fix You" by Coldplay, which is a perfect bad weather song, if ever there was one. And suspended in the hammock of memory, I feel neither happy nor sad, but at home, which is not a bad place to be.

The Beyonce Box

It's just a plain ice box, something to keep fish in. We bought it at a fish shop in Davao when we decided to bring home some tuna.

I don't know what got to me -- maybe it was because we watched Beyonce's concert on DVD the night before -- but after the box had been sealed and I was given a pen to scribble my name on it, I wrote down "Beyonce." Then I turned to B and told him I'd carry all the bags if he would pick the "Beyonce box" up at the airport.

We had a good laugh waiting for the box to turn up at the airport in Manila. When it did, B plucked it off the baggage carousel immediately, not wanting anyone to see who Beyonce was.

That glittering and glamorous ice box has travelled with us many times since, and of course, each time it's with us, bearing fish, meat, soda or ice, we can't help but hum "To the Left, to the left..."

Kathisophobia

What exactly do they feel
who fear the commonest thing?
In Fear Factor I learn that man
could have a phobia of sitting down,
and I can’t help but snicker
at the thought of someone panicked
at the sight of a chair. Perhaps
he is someone otherwise normal,
a bank executive or lawyer,
who knots his tie the same way
as the next person, relishes chicken
like everyone else. But in malls
he stays clear of the furniture section,
which makes his heart almost jump
with its monstrous sofas and divans.
At weddings he is the one odd guest
who claps for the bride and groom
out by the church door, unable to stand
the wooden pews gathered inside
like a pack of wolves. And when
you visit his house, isn’t it weird
how he will not offer you to have a seat?
How the two of you will stand
in the middle of an empty space,
exchanging stories on your feet?
Oh, the possibilities are endless
when you imagine a life shaped
around one fear! The blind dates
he stands up because he cannot sit,
the movies he watches erect as a stick.
Even the simple act of relieving himself
oh for him cannot possibly be simple.

But then what is it like to finally meet her,
the one woman who loves through
the cramps, who thumbs her nose
at the varicose veins begun to spread
like webs on her legs? She might be
plain as a mop, but for him she is
unimaginably beautiful, standing
before him like a dutiful salesgirl,
offering her love like a box of shoes.
I feel almost envious when I picture them:
two poles, rooted on the ground forever.
When other couples who have slumped through
a hundred candle-lit dinners have divorced
and then remarried, the two of them
go on and on unbending through bad weather.
It doesn’t matter that ivy grows and covers them
from the feet up. Alone in his fear,
they remain the last couple standing

B's Birthday

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, B!

Here are some pics taken during B's birthday. I'm still in the process of resizing all the image files, so they'll be easier to upload. I'll publish the others soon. Promise.

(At Club Manila East)


(We took refuge from the summer heat under this tree.)


(Beer, anyone? Or how about something sweet instead hehe?)


(Just beyond are the waves.)


(Why are you laughing so hard, Arc? Is it because of Kenneth?)


(B, Eric, Larry and some guy -- I don't know who :))


(And -- taraaaan! -- one of the many hot dudes at Club Manila East.)

My Magic Cloak

More than joint aches and a receding hairline, what brings home the fact of old age to me is the death and/or the declining health of a few beloved people. A few months ago, the father of my friend and former piano teacher, Alma, passed away. He was followed, after a long bout with cancer, by the mom of one of my dearest friends, Tess. And just yesterday, the mom of an officemate, one of the few people I trust in our department, passed away as well.

I've never met my officemate's mom, but I am lucky to have known papa (Alma's dad) and nanay (Tess' mom) when they were still alive. Papa was a thin, short fellow who carried himself like a soldier. He always stood ramrod straight and spoke in a low, almost stern voice that I would have found intimidating had he not been the incredibly warm and friendly fellow that he was to me. During the time that I was still taking piano lessons from Alma, he and mama would always go out of their way to make me feel not just at home but a real part of the family. They would even serve me snacks -- usually, puto and softdrinks -- even though I was paying Alma less than 200 pesos a month for the lessons.

Tess' mom I had little interaction with, mainly because she was a shy woman who liked to hide in the kitchen. But I remember rare moments when she would burst into laughter while lying on the sofa and watching Eat Bulaga in their cramped living room. At those moments, she looked like a female Buddha, so full of life and guileless joy that nothing, not even a hand-to-mouth existence, seemed capable of dampening her spirit.

I can only imagine the amount of grief that Alma, Tess and my officemate felt over the loss of their parents. To my mind, that loss is like an erasure in an extremely valuable painting, a white scar where Mona Lisa's smile used to be. No matter that everything else in the painting remains the same, the entire painting itself has become so unsettlingly different, that we too, mere museumgoers that we are, find ourselves altered by it.

In my case, the alteration took the form of a realization: I won't be forever twenty-two, which is where I still am now psychologically. Time will come, hopefully not soon, when my mom will not swoop in every time the laundry piles up in the hamper and my dad will not be sitting on his favorite chair on the porch, waiting for me and my sister to entertain him with a little conversation. Time will come when, instead of sweating it out on the court and flirting with other boys, I will be walking arthritically to the grocery or drugstore and brandishing my senior citizen's card at the sales clerk.

I don't mean to make aging sound like such a dreary prospect -- I'd like to think that there are loads of joy waiting for every person at any stage in his life, sort of like a hotdog and Coke stand at every train stop -- but it is true that for many PLUs, especially those who choose to not "go straight" and get married, old age seems like a dark and lonely road. One of the most heartbreaking true stories I've ever heard was about a friend, a gay man in his sixties, who lived alone and decided to go to the drugstore one night because he was feeling a little ill. He'd barely gotten out of the house when he had a mild stroke, lost consciousness and fell on the pavement. Since no one was around at that late hour, he just lay there for what must have been a long time, under the moonlight, surrounded only by his dogs. (The good news is he survived and is more or less back to his normal -- and naughty --self.)

I'm not exhorting anyone to "turn straight" and get married; the same fate does befall lots of married people as well, after all. I am merely trying to illustrate what the death of a parent can make someone feel. On Edsa, there's a billboard that says "Every time a baby is born, a new dad is born too." I think the same applies to the death of parents. Every time a mother or father dies, an orphan is born, who is different from the person he was before if only because he doesn't have that magical protective cloak, which having a parent gives. A cloak that keeps us from going out naked and vulnerable into the world. (Naturally, I don't speak for those who never even saw their parents or whose dad or mom proved to be unspeakably cruel. Perhaps those people had to make do without a cloak all their lives.)

That said, I'd like to believe that, when and if the time comes (knock on wood) my own parents leave this world, I will discover reserves of strength that I didn't even know I possessed. Hopefully, I will be able to use all the things that my parents have taught me to survive and be happy, not simply to get by but to honor their memory. That's what a friend and ex-lover did when his mom died; a happy-go-lucky guy who spent nine years in college, he has since become the family "patriarch" (he has a lover, plus two married siblings with children) and makes surprisingly grown-up decisions about everything from finances to child care. And his success owes a lot to the fact that he does things the way he thinks his mother would have done them.

Which brings me to this furtive, recalcitrant hope: though we can lose our magic cloaks and become vulnerable, we can also learn to find or weave another one. It may not be the exact same thing, but it can help us get through some of our darkest moments.

***

Here's a cloak I want to weave for the future. It's a pretty ambitious one, so I don't know if I'll be able to actually make it.

This cloak is in the form of a house. This house has many rooms. One room has many books, a big window that lets in light and a giant poster of Meryl Streep. It will belong to my friend the Mel Man.

Another room has a small garden. Its bed is a small stage. In this room can stay my friends Darwin and Maeng.

Beside it is another room with a table and playing cards, and a big comfort room with cubicles. Here is where Arc and Winston (yes, they are together) will renew their passion for each other.

Down the hall is a room with lots of pirated DVDs and an extra bed for "guests." This is where Sam will stay.

And there will be more rooms -- for Tess, for Nelson, for Jon (something Tori Amos-inspired, maybe) -- where they can all grow old happily in, always just a few steps away from a loving friend.

And, of course, a room for B and myself, which I'm sure will have nice, flowing curtains and, like Mel's room, lots of books as well. This room will be adjacent to the big living room where we will all gather, to trade stories about past and present "bookings," to play Pinoy Henyo or charades, to sing songs like this (click on it!) those nights we most need to feel warm, loved and safe.

What I'll Remember B for

For me, it's that afternoon three years ago when we went to La Union from San Carlos on a motorbike. Just for the heck of it. I hadn't ridden a motorbike in years, but I knew cute guys on motorbikes made B weak in the knees, so when I saw his brother's motorbike parked outside their house, I thought, There are only two possible endings here. Either I'll look like a complete fool or he'll fall more deeply in love with me.

I took a deep breath and told myself, What the heck.

The truth is, I'm no man's man. I think I'm masculine enough to pass, in certain contexts, for a straight guy, but I'm not above asking B, who's into Project Runway and beauty pageants, to twist the cap off a Coke litro for me. I'm also scared of heights, frogs and speed, which is why I hate ferris wheels, avoid the countryside, and drive like my grandmother. (Of course, a lot of straight guys share those exact same phobias.)

One of the stupidest things I've ever done, in fact, was agree to ride this huge metal contraption called the Whirlwind in Big Bang Alabang back when I was in college. I was then dating a girl named Toni Weinstein, who was pretty and sweet but also quite low on serotonin -- she didn't feel alive unless she was performing some sort of daredevil stunt. So one by one we tried all the rides and stunts, from the giant slide that left me with skinned elbows to the Superman rope, which made me feel like a biologist moving from tree to tree in some rainforest. Everything went well enough until we reached the Whirlwind, which was like a huge ferris wheel, except that the riders didn't sit in some car but got strapped standing up to a piece of metal.

Upon seeing it, all my neurotransmitters went haywire, but I wanted to live up to my macho swagger, so with a confident grin, I bought two tickets for Toni and me, got strapped to a pole, was spun till I lost all notion of south, east, west and north, and died of a heart attack a hundred times in ten minutes. Honestly, why would anyone ride the Whirlwind unless he's preparing for a trip to outer space? Why would anyone in his right mind think that having his internal organs rearranged would be a source of pleasure? After the ride, I told Toni how awesome the whole ride was and then ran to the nearest comfort room to disgorge my dinner.

But that afternoon, as I zoomed down the highway on B's brother's motorbike, B wrapped his arms around my waist and laid his cheek against my neck, giving no heed to the people who might see us, and I felt, suddenly, invincible, as though I could ride that motorbike to the end of the world, as though I could make it fly! So I started going faster and faster, even when it began to rain hard enough that I had to squint to see the road, even when the wind blew the raindrops against my face so hard, they stung.

All that mattered was that moment: the two us tearing down that endless glistening road, the sea to our left, mountains and fields to our right. And B, his arms around my waist, whooping like a child. At that moment, I was the handsomest, tallest, strongest man in the world, and there was absolutely nothing I wouldn't be able to deal with, not even a giant frog with ferris wheel-shaped earrings.

Of course, like everything else in life, the spell of that moment ended. We turned back, drove home, took a long, hot shower. And the next morning -- surprise of surprises -- the strongest man in the world was snivelling. Back, you might say, to the skinny, geeky poet who'd rather read a book than don a leather jacket.

But despite lasting only a few hours, that experience will make me remember and cherish B forever. For as short as that experience was, it gave me a glimpse of what I could do or be, and taught me how deeply I could possibly feel. Besides, the way, ehem, he rode my bike in bed that night was worth the cold I had for days after. :)

Happy birthday, baby. Hope you'll like this birthday gift. (Click on it!)


(Hey friends, in celebration of B's birthday, please share with us your most memorable moment with B in the comments section. Thanks!)

Can Art Stop the Traffic?

Here's an interesting article from the Washington Post about whether art can stop the traffic. Definitely makes one think.

Real, Quezon

Last year, my dad bought a small bungalow in Real, Quezon, which lies near the point where a river meets the sea, and over the last few months he's spent quite a princely sum having it renovated. Although the house isn't finished yet, he is terrifically proud of it, so when he asked the whole family to spend the holy week there, none of us had the heart to say no, even if my sister and I didn't share my dad's passion for the countryside and couldn't imagine life without cable TV.

To make sure the entire vacation wouldn't be dreadfully boring, B and I asked some of our closest buddies to tag along -- Winston, Sam, Darwin and Maeng -- and brought playing cards (for tong its), a volleyball set, a TV, B's laptop, and Sam's playstation. Some of our titas and cousins came as well, and that turned the whole thing into a mini-reunion.

And what a vacation it turned out to be! Although the TV couldn't pick up any station -- not even channel 7 -- we didn't get bored at all, as my sister and I had feared. We had fun playing beach volleyball and laughing at Winston's acrobatic (trans. belly-first) digs, gulping down lambanog with my dad, playing charades, frolicking in the sand, and squealing in our most girlish voices -- ooops, wasn't that just Winston again? -- while getting tossed around by the huge waves. And although the place was no Boracay, it had a certain charm to it, which, city slicker though I am and will always be, will definitely make me come back for more.

Just too bad our other friends -- Arc, Melvs, John V., Nelson, Papat, Richard and EJ -- couldn't come with us. It would have been a blast if they had been around.

Well, maybe next time. :)

(Beach volleyball with the gang, my brother-in-law, Jay, and his cousin, Noel. Unfortunately, Winston, B, Mael and I lost and had to buy Jay and Darwin's team buko pie and Coke.)

(Winston and Maeng after a few shots of lambanog. Hmm, may ahasan bang nagagaganap hehe?)

(Just 10 minutes from the house is this two-level waterfall, which, according to Noel's dad, is also called Taktak, just like the one in Antipolo. A narrow, winding path lined with gorgeous flowering plants leads to the falls. You can jump from the second level into the deep waters below. One cute guy did, much to B's delight.)

(Here are two of the pictures taken by Darwin. Turns out he's not just a terrific singer and landscape architect, he's a pretty good photographer as well. Oh and yes, he can do amazing tricks with a handkerchief too. :))

Pinoy Gay Blogs

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Porn Dreams

I sometimes picture myself in their place,
but the result always comes out funny.
Instead of the beautiful blond pumping away
at his clone, there is me, a bumbling stick figure,
almost comical in the way I grunt and groan,
while the bent-over lover twice my size,
and with hands that can snap my head off easy,
begs for more, yeah baby, give me more.
So with all my strength I pummel him,
but in the end it’s like there’s some mistake,
as if I’m in a puzzle where you try to spot
a table with a missing leg, or an ear
too big to be anywhere near human.
In this one, I am what’s wrong of course,
because even in my imagination I hate to see
myself naked among glorious bodies,
men with arms bulging like sacks full of rice,
men with smiles that put the sun to shame.
So even in my fantasy I adjust myself
the way you’d adjust the color on your t.v. screen.
With every dream I get a little taller, till I can
dunk a basketball without leaving the ground.
With every dream, my body fills out,
my skin gets smoother, my dick grows so big
that no mouth can get around it.
Before you know it, they all fall at my feet,
the Americans with their tree-like torsos,
the Romanians with their lazy smiles,
the Brazilians with their intense eyes,
for I’ve become the perfect brown god,
so beautiful I can almost fall in love with myself.

(I noticed that all of my poems in this blog are so cheerless, so I decided to post this one. Hope it makes you guys smile. :))

Vash

Wasn't able to blog for more than a week. The PC at home was on the blink and there was so much work at the office last week that I couldn't even sneak to the pantry for a quick snack, let alone open my blogspot account. My time was spent training, training, training, which wasn't so bad actually -- my trainees were a fun bunch -- except that my voice got hoarse and I was left with hardly any chance to get my creative (and other) juices flowing.

I hate it because I made a promise to myself that I would blog consistently -- at least once a week -- even if it meant sacrificing some valuable "me" time, i.e. playing volleyball, watching 4400. One good thing though: My friend, the Mel Man, came to Manila for a quick visit (I wonder why) and, because I'm now a blogger, gave me a gift: an Olympus Fe230 with 7.1 megapixels. Not brand new, admittedly, but still quite a generous gift, which is why though I miss him terribly and want him to leave anesthetizing Singapore for good, a part of me is also happy that he decided to become an OFW in the first place. After all, it's his hard-earned Singapore dollars that allow us to have wine and cheese in some of the fancier bistros in the metro whenever he's around. Usually, my other pals and I just have gin guyabano and Tortillos.

Now if only someone would give me a laptop, too!

Speaking of training, I had to break a few hearts yesterday. Hard as they tried, 3 out of the 14 guys in my class just didn't deliver in the final assessment and were thus not admitted into the account. It's always difficult for a trainer to see some of his trainees fail -- I always have to ask one of the account product trainers to break the sad news of their failure to them -- but, as much as I want all of my students to make it, some of them just aren't cut out for the call center industry. I mean, how can they survive on the floor when the only parts of speech they know are nouns and verbs, and only the base forms of verbs to boot?

I was actually rooting for one trainee yesterday -- though I knew the odds were stacked high against him -- if only because his was a different sort of sob story from the ones I usually hear. His name was Vash -- though he pronounced it Bash -- and he came from a public school in Dasmarinas, Cavite. He'd worked before as a sewer in a garment factory, and he obviously yearned to rise above his circumstances. Just like many Filipinos too, he believed that a call center job was the ticket to a better life.

And yes, he was also gay. This actually didn't come home to me until the second half of the first day when we had a storytelling activity. In this activity, everyone had to demonstrate his command of verb tenses by talking about his scariest experience. Naturally, most everyone talked about ghosts and muggings -- what Simon Cowell would call "safe answers" -- but Vash bravely shared a more personal story. According to him, when he was still in high school, he had waist-length hair, which apparently (though I found it hard to imagine) made him look like a girl. One day, coming home from a party, he took a jeepney that, the hour being late, carried no other passengers. Halfway through with the trip, the driver suddenly turned left and drove his jeepney to a dark spot behind some trees. Then he faced the scared Vash and told him -- in Tagalog, I presume, though Vash had to say it in English, after looking at me self-consciously and asking if it was okay for him to go ahead and say it -- "I kill you if you don't BJ me."

Despite having anticipated what he would come out with, I was still shocked by the brutal honesty of that sentence, its unintentional humor, which made the whole class roar in laughter. I must admit, with some shame, that I, too, had to try very hard not to laugh, even though I knew what happened to Vash was terrible. It wasn't just the clunkiness of that sentence, but also the sheer idea of Vash, who wasn't exactly the prettiest gay on the planet, getting sexually assaulted that made that his revelation tickle some cruel funny bone in my and everyone else's body. It's a mean thought, but that sentence probably wouldn't have been half as funny despite its faulty construction if Vash had been the kind of gay who could really pass for a woman and join beauty contests. Unfortunately, he looked like he should be wearing a hardhat. :(

Vash's story, sadly, didn't end there. After the rape, Vash plucked up enough courage to call one of his teachers, who advised him to file a complaint. When he went to the police station however, the policemen just laughed at him and told him to forget about it. "Okay lang yun," they said, probably with a sneer on their faces. "You're gay anyway."

After hearing that story, my heart went out to Vash, and I tried my best to help improve his communication skills in four days. But it was a lost cause. Not only did he have the kind of b and v defect that would make a North American customer quake in anger and demand an English-speaking agent, he also couldn't string three sentences together.

So, yesterday, during the assessment, I tried to nudge him, in as subtle a manner as possible, towards his other passions.

"You like dancing, don't you," I said.
"Yes, I like dancing very much."
"Don't you want to pursue dancing instead? Maybe you can become a DI."
"I think about before but I have no connection."
"Well, maybe you can go to Japan. I know some people who went to Japan and made a lot of money."
"That is my plan before but not anymore."
"Why?"
"Well, I read that Japan is banned, so I change my mind."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, Japan is banned. Entertainers can't go to Japan anymore."

But of course.

To Vash's credit, even though he didn't pass, he texted me the morning after the assessment. It was a short, simple message, which I'll repeat here to show that one doesn't have to speak flawless English to touch someone else's heart.

"Sir gud morning. Tnx po khit papanu nadagadagn ung knowledge ko..Ahhm sir tnx again ur d best.. Vash po 2."

Thank you, too, Vash. Keep on dreaming.

Objects and Fathers

Pictures snapped at sun-
Bright moments, your old
Fuzzy sweater with its
Faded yellows, the music
Box that sang your small
Heartaches away, shoe
With broken heel, doll
With arm missing – I’m
Building some kind of chapel,
A place to remember you by,
To body forth from
A set of random objects –
Almost nothing – something alive.
It is here I will gaze up at you,
Wherever you are, half-
Praying the picture with your
Lovely grin, the shoes that
Like my hands have cupped
Your feet, the doll whose hair
You braided
In my tantalized presence,
Will return you to me
In whatever kind of reincarnation.
I know none of these things
Can bring just that kind of miracle,
But it is myself I have faith in,
My need for you I trust
To see these objects
Work their god-like magic.
For isn’t that what love is
All about? Letting
The grieving heart see
A gleam in objects that cannot
Now or ever smile or glow
Or sing again, then
Letting these objects
Take all credit for their
Gleaming, happy enough
That we have love, happy
In the pure bright act of believing.

Little Mr. Songbird

It's really embarrassing, but when I was a kid, I honestly believed I was a good singer. And I don't just mean I-can-carry-a-tune-kind-of-good either, but Bagong kampeon good, which probably says a lot about the degree of my childhood delusions.

Such was my confidence in my singing ability, in fact, that one time, when I was around eight years old, I joined a singing contest in our baranggay. It wasn't really a big contest, certainly not as big as those we usually had during town fiestas. There was just a small, makeshift stage -- a table covered with a red cloth -- and a lone guitarist to accompany the contestants. No crinkly Japanese-paper flowers thumbtacked to the wall, no letters cut out of a cartolina and sprinkled with glitters. One of the three judges was my aunt; another was the local hilot.

It was our neighbor Tess who nudged me in the rib and told me "Uy, sali ka. Mananalo ka dyan." We were standing among the crowd that had gathered around the stage that time, waiting for the contest to start. "Ayoko nga," I said, but without conviction, for deep inside I agreed with her: I could win this thing.

Needless to say, after a few more pokes, I allowed myself to be persuaded, and before I knew it I was up on the stage, in my shorts and t-shirt, with a microphone being thrust into my hands. This was in the early eighties and Menudo was the big thing in music, so naturally I sang one of their hits: If You're Not Here.

I don't have a good memory, but strangely enough I still remember that moment with the vividness of a Van Gogh painting, the sky shining blueblack, the lamppost spilling yellow light on the asphalt, my wounded, eight-year-old voice cutting through the night with all the longing and sadness I could muster.

Then suddenly -- I don't know why -- I realized that something wasn't right. My singing wasn't right. I was too young and too stupid then to know anything about pitch or slipped notes, but I understood, maybe from the faces of the people in the audience, that this wasn't the Bagong Kampeon moment I'd dreamed about many times. Quite the opposite. This was like the moment I pretended I'd done my homework and my teacher, Mrs. Carigma, whacked my butt with a ruler in front of the class.

When it was over, I slipped surreptitiously to our house and locked myself up in my room. After a while, my sister knocked and told me, in an attempt to make me feel better, that I'd won but the prize was awarded to someone else because it wouldn't look right for me to win with my aunt as one of the judges. Instead of being happy, I felt even worse because that meant someone had told her I'd made a total fool of myself.

I didn't go out of the house for several days after that. When I did, it was as though the contest never happened. Well, one kid teased me by mimicking the way I sang If You're Not Here. I think I hurled an empty Alaska can at him.

I'm happy though that that delusion ended early rather than late; otherwise I might have ended up one of those William Hungs and Reynaldo Lapuzes who brazenly display their utter lack of talent on the world stage. I admit I still sing from time to time, in the shower or in the car, or in front of a videoke machine, when I've downed enough glasses of gin guyabano to have an excuse afterwards. My friends, some of whom are terrific singers (like my buddy, Darwin, whose picture appears below), don't seem to mind. If they do, I applaud them for being such wonderful actors.

And thankfully I've discovered where my true gifts lie. I'm not going to tell you what they are lest I come across as a windbag, but one thing's for sure, they don't require exercising one's vocal chords.

Seduction of the Innocent

When I was in high school, a woman came to our house every week to do some gardening. With her came her assistant, a tall, swarthy fellow in his early twenties who often squatted shirtless among my mother's roses while pruning away dead twigs.

I don't remember his name anymore, but I know he had longish hair that covered his ears and a lazy grin.

Whenever he was around, I'd usually station myself in the kubo's terrace, my nose pressed against a book, and steal glances at the sweaty, brown V of his back. Some days, I even got a glimpse of his white briefs.

As it turned out, my stolen glances didn't go unnoticed. One afternoon, secretly watching him from the terrace as usual, I saw him get up, turn towards me, and wink. Then, biting his lower lip, he slipped his right hand inside his pants, adjusted something inside, and made his eyebrows bob up and down once in a kind of nod. Immediately I panicked and hid, pretending I didn't see anything.

From then on, I avoided him as much as I could. Funny. I'd wasted so many hours just waiting for his briefs to show from underneath his pants, but when he finally made what I thought (and still think) was a sexual invitation, not only did I run away, my desire was replaced by fear and loathing.

For the truth is, I started to hate him. Every time I bumped into him in our compound (I could only avoid him so much), I'd smirk and walk away, looking digusted. He, however, must have seen through me, for he just laughed a teasing laugh every time I snubbed him, and one time, when no one was looking, even grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch. Of course, I bolted.

I guess I wasn't ready then to confront my desire's implications. I guess I was too scared by the thought that somebody knew I was one.

Years later, after I'd finally come out to my parents, after he had long stopped coming to our house, I sometimes wondered about him, and in my naughtier moments even imagined myself paying him a visit. Of course, by then, he was probably already in his thirties, with a wife and kids in some hovel, and a beer tummy. But in my fantasies, he remained the slim-waisted gardener who'd winked at me from the rosebushes and made me touch his thing. It was I who'd changed, having become braver, bolder, ready to bob my eyebrows in agreement.

But like many things in life, those naughty moments passed pretty quickly. And, anyway, it would have been too embarrassing to fish for his address.

(Wag nang mahiya. Share din kayo ng seduction experiences nyo in the comments section. :))

My Juday

I never thought I would ever do something like it, but thanks (or no thanks) to B, I did. I went in line, in Gateway, just so I could watch a Judy Ann Santos movie.

I know, I know. I sound like one of those insufferably cono kids in UP who says things like "Let's make tusok tusok those fishballs" or "Manong driver, pa-pull over na lang po sa tabi." Ang sarap batukan. However, pretentious though I can also sometimes be, my dislike for Judy Ann's films has nothing to do with putting on airs. Or even with Judy Ann herself. I just can't stand soppy, corny films.

But what could I do? When I signed up for this relationship with B, I knew it meant learning to live with those aspects of his life that didn't exactly ring my bell, like his pig-about-to-be-slaughtered snores or his addiction to beauty pageants. I mean, it has to be tit for tat, doesn't it? He accepts my laziness; I accept his Juday worship.

I do understand why he adores Juday. Like Clara -- or is it Mara? -- he endured a lot as a child. His parents split up when he was still very young. And because his father had no job, his mother went to Italy to work as a nanny, leaving all four children with their grandparents, in a house that was already crawling with bawling, runty cousins, plus a few wicked aunts and uncles thrown in for good measure. You can imagine how that can be a recipe for disaster -- or, at least, a real-life soap opera. With no parents to defend them, they were treated no better then the househelp, the money sent home by their mother used to buy toys and clothes for their cousins.

His Juday worship, in other words, is a form of identification. He sees himself in her. And as silly and melodramatic as her movies are, he finds in them some degree of comfort, as though they symbolize the promise of a much longed-for happy ending. (Even now, when, arguably, he's reached a happy ending of his own --two cars, a managerial position in one of the country's top corporations, and, of course, a dashing prince charming with a big...sword. :))

It doesn't stop with Juday either. He also roots for all the reality TV underdogs you can name. Carrie Underwood (a guileless farm girl before she became a bestselling artist and Grammy winner), Elliot Yamin (the unprepossessing, sickly boy with the golden voice who happens to be deaf in one ear), Heather (the incredibly photogenic America's Next Top Model contestant who suffers from a form of autism), and so on and so forth, a whole slew of men and women who, like his favorite lunchtime soap heroine, found a way to rise above their sad and humble beginnings.

In this, though I'm no fan of Juday, we're the same. After all, I, too, cheer wildly every time I watch my favorite Cuban volleyball player, Taimarys Aguero, spike over veritable giants. For at 5'10, she's nowhere close in the height department to her Russian and Brazilian opponents. The tallest among these, the Russian Ekaterina Gamova, wouldn't even fit inside a telephone booth.

Now that I think about it, it occurs to me that maybe he fell for me because the time we met, three years ago, I was every inch (no pun intended) a wet bird. I don't want to go into details, but the truth is, that first meeting in, uh, Starbucks, I cut one very sorry figure, having been recently dumped by my lover for some straight dude.

Well, maybe that and my irresistible good looks. :) In any case, I have to thank Juday for being a good role model because, all the difficulties he's had to face in life notwithstanding, B turned out to be one incredibly kind, if overdramatic, soul, the sort who buys sampaguita garlands from streetkids even while lecturing them to tell their parents to go get some work. And obviously he's been more than kind to me -- the biggest baby of all. Except for that one time when he nearly hit me with a chair (don't ask why), he has loved me, for more than three years now, despite my constant transformations from prince to warty toad.

I just hope, sometime soon, I'll be Ryan enough for him. For now though, I'll square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and brace myself for the next Judy Ann film. If this isn't love, baby I don't know what is.

The No-face Man

The time we saw the No-Face Man
in an episode of Ripley’s,
our hearts wanted to scream No.
This was too much, too horrible.
Not at all like the two-legged dog
prancing on the lawn towards its master,
still happy for all its strangeness,
or the tiger man covered in tattoos
from his eyelids down to his penis.
The No-Face Man lacked bone, lips.
On his face, just a dark
hairy bowl of emptiness
you’d mistake for eviscerated
coconut shell, the meat
all gone, only the husk
left for what? For a corner in a
museum? That night we lay in bed
holding on to each other, silent but
thinking of the No-Face Man together.
Could he still eat? How did he breathe?
If he had no mouth, where did his
wife kiss him? Was it true you could put a fist
in the hole in his face? And, of course,
hovering above us both: Why
did he choose to live?
That’s the part we couldn’t quite believe.
For if bread mold ate our faces
like it did his, no doubt
we would readily choose death,
forget that each of us had the other
than live knowing we had no eyes,
no nose to smell or sneeze with,
no tongue to register bitterness or sweetness,
like those clusters of Guess-Who puzzles
in celebrity magazines,
head figures with question marks on their faces
waiting to be filled.
Die than live looking like a monster,
for, if truth be told, he looked like a monster,
though we didn’t want to call him that,
though we preferred to think of him
as an unfinished drawing,
already imagining
ourselves in his place.
The next day we didn’t eat bread,
fearing disease.
But I bought you a shirt for no clear reason,
and you got me the book I’d always wanted,
each one buying love for that human wonder,
the No-Face Man
who already haunted our lives and grinned
his non-existent grin in our mirrors.

Bicycle

I was eight when you came home one August
and told me to look inside your car’s trunk:
a bicycle was there,
a shimmering, splendid BMX for which you’d
shelled out five hundred bucks.
Not bad for a middlebrow, suburban lawyer, eh?
You said, and I knew for the first time
how truly you loved me.

Not bad, I said, and mounted it at once
to pedal past your big hands.
The first few forward moves were shaky but
I finally managed a trajectory
controlled by me alone
powered by my hands and legs
along my own chosen road.

You never let on if you had been afraid for me,
and right there and then
I realized our secret deal
that was to go on long after I had outgrown this bike:
that it was my duty to be brave for you,
and it was yours to never ask me if I was scared.

At eighteen I am having troubles
enough to scare
a battalion of men:
cars, credit cards, concert tickets,
coming out.
Sometimes I get so scared I think of
pushing a bullet through my brain,
a Smith & Wesson at my temple, a swift,
categorical pain. Nothing to it
but blood to be mopped the next day.

But everytime I see you, I’m reminded
of the deal we have made, of the bike
and the secret words: Be brave.

You have earned your keep so far and stayed
silent. You never asked me if I was scared.

How I wish you could read me well and see
beneath the brave young boy
who knew his spin turns and speed,
there is a shivering child
aching to give up his balance,
aching to be asked, Are you scared?
Would you like to tilt and fall down now?
And I would nod,
and cry,
fall,
trusting you would catch me, hug me,
and tell me that same joke about
the middlebrow, suburban lawyer
not being bad.

Walls

Thank God we don’t live in a house like that,
you say as we drive past the squatters.
Imagine what we have to do just to make love,

there being no room, no walls
dividing people. And hearing you,
I picture us poor, horny, pressed together

by a baby and perhaps a sick father,
our house nothing but a small cube
with very little room for lust or affection.

Perhaps it is night and the two of us
itch to get going under the blanket, you lifting
my skirt, me feeling in the dark for your belt.

Perhaps it is night and we can do it
on the floor, careful not to set the house on fire
as if we were two sticks rubbing together.

We can probably hide behind a hanging blanket,
you will probably drink the sound of my voice
with your kisses. Like prey, we have

to learn to be invisible, blending in
with the color of cabinets and boxes,
hoping the baby will not cry as we go at it,

hoping your father will go on
coughing his way across dreams.
This is probably how we will make love

in a house like that – pretending the world
has closed its eyes on us
as we open ourselves to each other.

Yes, thank God, our house has space enough
to get lost in. Why, even birds will drop
flying the gaping distance between our rooms.

Me, Picasso?

My first love was drawing.

When I was about nine or ten years old, I'd often lie on my stomach on the floor of our living room, a pencil in hand, and draw people. Mostly, it's women with big dark eyes and long hair, the kind you'd see in a Japanese animated movie.

I think I was pretty good, too. I won a couple of prizes both in grade school and high school, and whenever my classmates needed someone to make them a "love painting" (basically a 12 x 8 cardboard on which has been written, in ornate letters and beside a drawing of a love-struck couple, the lyrics of their favorite song), I was one of the two guys they approached. It seems unbelievably cheesy now, but back then it made for some really good business.

Recognizing that I had a gift, my parents got me an art tutor, a Filipino-Chinese painter named George Ng, who came to our house every Saturday and taught me all about foregrounding, balance, perspective. My dad even had a small studio built for me just beside the labahan. Its walls were made of colorful corrugated iron, making it look like a candy store, and it had waist-to-ceiling windows on all sides, so neighbors could peer in and admire my paintings.

I enjoyed the classes -- though honestly I would've enjoyed them more if they hadn't coincided with my favorite TV show that time, Roller Superstars, where two competing teams of rollerskaters raced and knocked each other out of a big circular skating rink. What I liked best about these art classes was looking at Mr. Ng's art books, which contained pictures of centuries' worth of masterpieces. I remember poring over the works of Rembrandt, Degas, Vermeer and -- Mr. Ng's favorite -- Velasquez, and wondering how I could achieve that intense shade of yellow, that subtle watery blue.

I was learning quite a lot, too. In just a couple of weeks, I'd managed to graduate from color pastels to oil, and before long I'd produced my first oil masterpiece, good enough to be framed: a very lifelike portrait of Matet de Leon, copied from some showbiz magazine. This was hung at the center of my studio, on the wall right across from the door, so everyone walking by could see how accurately I was able to capture the star of Halimaw Sa Banga.

Happy and proud though my parents were, they were bothered by one thing -- that I kept on drawing all these beautiful women. And not just ordinary beautiful women either, but women in the most exquisite evening gowns, each one with a sash saying Ms. USA or Ms. Japan. "P__," I can imagine my dad saying, "Mukhang magiging fashion designer, di painter, and anak mo ah."

And I think, without anything being said about it, that I understood that my parents were alarmed. For after a while I started hiding these drawings, as though in making them I was commiting a sin.

To my parents' credit, they didn't scold or confront me about it -- we're just not that kind of family. Instead, they tried "positive reinforcement." Seeing that I was getting to be really good at drawing female figures, my dad encouraged me to paint the almost-naked women on his beer calendars. These women weren't half as interesting as the ones in the billowing, sparkling evening gowns of my other works, but, being a compliant boy, I went and copied them, and soon I had a bunch of open-mouthed, bare-breasted women staring longingly from their wooden frames in my studio, much to the delight of the greasy talyer boys in the auto shop next to our house.

The art classes lasted only a year, eventually superseded by tae kwon do and swimming, in both of which I hopelessly floundered. But I kept on drawing and joining art competitions. The highlight of this episode of my life was winning first place in a district-level on-the-spot poster-making competition, judged by a local celebrity painter named Inday Cadapan. The theme was family solidarity and I drew a father, a mother and a son in such a way that they formed a subtle triangle on the cartolina. Triangles were supposed to symbolize solidity -- I learned that from Mr. Ng.

But I stopped painting and drawing eventually, because of an instance that looks like a bad, random scene in an otherwise logical plot.

One day, when I was about fifteen, my nanay examined the framed works hanging in my studio and said, out of nowhere, that I had no real talent and should concentrate on other things instead. She added that I couldn't even make a single decent painting without Mr. Ng's help.

I was shocked, and angry. But instead of trying to prove her wrong -- and this, I think reveals my character -- I just gave up on painting altogether. I put away my staedler and brushes and didn't touch them again.

Looking back on that day now, searching for reasons why my mom said what she said, it occurs to me that it wasn't -- couldn't have been -- the senseless cruelty that I imagined it that time. Without her explaining things to me, I have come to understand and accept that she didn't want me to be a starving artist -- which to her was what I was bound to become -- but a lawyer like my dad. And to protect me from my own surely destructive passion, she had to break my heart.

Or maybe, just maybe, she'd found -- the same way she'd find out my other secrets later on -- my hidden stash of women in their irreproachable, shining gowns. And she must have known that to save me, she'd have to look bad in my eyes.

Davao

Tito Monster

A month ago, I attended a seminar called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of the things I had to do there was make a list of the most important roles I play in life. Naturally, I put in English Specialist (my job title at the call center), athlete (my aspiration), son, brother and lover.

But there was one other role which, surprisingly, I found myself writing down: uncle.

Unlike my lover, I have never really been into kids, especially the pesky sort, and can stand them only in small doses. In fact, silly as it may sound, I often quarrel with the three-year-old kid who lives next door to us, a good-looking, adorable boy named Jacko who unfortunately likes hanging out in our apartment and climbing all over the furniture, in the process reducing the number of drinking glasses in our house (which came in a set of six) to three. When such quarrels erupt, my lover, who spoils him like a son, often finds himself caught in the middle, unwilling referee in a potentially apocalyptic battle between Zaido Blue and the Ultimate Warrior.

I guess I'm just not the kind of person who finds poetry in baby talk and bliss in the smell of pee. I have nothing but respect for those pre-school teachers who have this uncanny ability to herd young kids around like sheep and recite ABC a hundred times in ten minutes, but God forbid that the time should come when I should find myself in their shoes.

A friend of mine once told me that this allergic reaction to kids may have something to do with my own unhappy childhood. For the truth is, as a child, I didn't have many friends, was often teased and bullied, and was always treated unfairly, even by adults. One memory that sticks is the time one of my aunts on my mother's side of the family came home from the states with her husband, and our family joined our relatives in Taytay to get our pasalubong. All my cousins were there and we formed a circle around our tita who stood beside a sack full of toys and chocolates. I was eight or nine years old. I'd requested a viewmaster, nothing fancy, and I felt a delicious thrill just thinking of all those pictures -- the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls -- that I'd get to see with just one click. However, as the sack started to empty and one by one my cousins got their giant cars and laser guns, I realized, with a sudden sureness, that I wasn't going to get my viewmaster after all. And true enough, when my tita finished reading the list of nephews and nieces to be given toys, my name and my name alone wasn't called.

What I felt that time -- I remember it clearly -- wasn't sadness but embarrassment and panic that someone would notice I got nothing at all. I wanted to disappear so I could avoid my cousins' pitying stare, my mother's worried look. But, of course, someone said: "Oy, what about Puroy?" And my tita just laughed and said, "Oh I'm sorry, we forgot it."

Without doubt there are other people (my baby is a perfect example, his being a classic Judy Ann Santos childhood) who suffered more than I did as a kid but who ended up adoring kids all the more, perhaps because they knew what it was like to have their hearts broken at such a young age. But my experiences as a kid made me want to grow up too fast, made me cope by trying to skip childhood altogether. And this -- though it sounds like such a lame excuse -- is probably why I can't stand kids now.

Overwhelmingly out of character and against my nature then is this -- what else to call it? -- incredible affection I feel for my nephew and my niece. Call it familial bond, but for them I sometimes find myself doing things I wouldn't normally do, or I would do but only grudgingly. Like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, I have discovered in myself, through them, a certain measure of kindness, generosity and patience I never thought I was capable of.

No, I haven't bought my nephew a PS4 yet or chipped in for my niece's tuition fee (roughly equivalent to my two-months' salary), but it is with a genuine smile that I occasionally take out my wallet and buy my niece a piece of chocolate when she asks me to. And every time I visit Booksale, I rummage through the children's books section to see if there's anything about dragons and aliens for my boy genius of a nephew. I don't mean to make it sound as though I should get a Best Uncle Award for such paltry gifts, but coming from a Scrooge like me, hey, they represent an unexpected, altruistic gesture.

Funny thing is, I didn't always feel this way about them. I mean I've always loved them -- especially my nephew, Galo, whom I was able to babysit when he was just a year old -- but I didn't feel very, well, attached to them. They were just these funny little creatures with big heads who had some really charming antics (Uyen thinks of herself as a boy and does push-ups to prove she's one), and while I enjoyed watching them make fools of themselves once in a while, I really preferred reading a book than listening to them sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or chatting with them about Dragonball.

I don't know exactly when my paradigm shifted. But when Galo was hospitalized because of dengue, my heart broke every time he cried and begged the doctor not to give him an injection anymore. And that's when it dawned on me: I loved this chubby, smart-alecky boy like nothing else in the world. Nothing else, except maybe his little sister.

I'm grateful to these two kids for teaching me how to be a kid again, to reclaim that part of my life that I renounced out of bitterness and anger. This is not to say I have now turned into Brooke White, the coolest, singing nanny in the whole wide world. But just the other day, I played Touch the Color and Find the Shape with Jacko and Uyen for two hours in my apartment, and though I can't say I had a blast, I sat there with them and let them run around and clamber all over me and the furniture.