THAT
February day, at our provincial town on the outskirts of Manila, I was
waiting for the bus. Very soon the bus came. I climbed aboard, and found
there was a wide vacancy in the back. I took a three-seater for myself. But
then at the next stop several people climbed on and . . . pretty soon . . .
I had a couple of 40-ish ladies beside me, making me move to the window to
make space for them.
The bus window curtains still smelled of the saliva of a previous
passenger, that despite the strong blow of the air conditioning through
holes missing their direction adjusters.
On the expressway
the ladies talked.
Lady 1: “What I
did was I asked everybody in the house to stop using the air con because
even though it cools the house it also burns up our money with the
electricity bills.”
Lady 2: “And what
did Norma say?”
Lady 1: “Norma is
the one to complain. She says anyway I and everybody else use her cell phone
a lot, that eats up a lot on her bills too, so it’s just right I spend for
everybody’s air conditioning for my part. But that phone is always in a
low-battery situation, you can hardly use it.”
Lady 2: “Yeah?”
Lady 1: “Yeah! And
Norma’s husband is always on the prowl looking for games to gamble away
the money from the store, that eats up a lot too.”
Lady 2: “I
thought—”
Lady 1: “She
should have married that Rolando instead, even with his meager job at least
he doesn’t throw away money. When Manny and I were still young we would
sweat our butts off trying to make ends meet and nobody could say one of us
was irresponsible . . .”
In the city I took the Metro Rail to get to the business district. Below I
could see the traffic wasn’t so bad. I could’ve just gotten on another
bus and read the Elias Canetti book in my bag. But here I was on the Metro
now, facing other passengers who either had their eyes closed or were unsure
about whom or where to look at. I saw a new building construction in the
distance, about twenty levels high, a green net covering the process, the
only activity to be seen there from my position in the railway the tiny glow
of welding sparks highlighting the gray color of the day.
When I got to my
station I got down on the highway and walked towards my building, going
around a block occupied by a giant—the Asian Development Bank. I passed a
bus stop’s waiting shed where there was no one waiting, but a woman in
rags who was talking to a baby on a can of milk on one of the back-lighted
plastic advertisement boards, waiting it seemed for the baby to finish
smiling and crawl to her. I turned the corner and walked the length of the
clean sidewalk beside the iron-bars fence of the Asian Development Bank; it
was a clean sidewalk, all right, although at a part of the long fence hidden
to the guards a man slept on the grass outside. I could see steel craters
being unburdened of their cargo by men coming from one of the bank’s
building’s basement exits. The cargo was to go into the basement too.
I reached the end of
the giant block, crossed the Asian Development Bank Avenue (once called
Diamond Avenue) to the parking lot, passed the parking lot’s gate to get
in, passed by the drivers’ makeshift canteen to buy a cigarette. Drivers
and some cleaning and maintenance personnel from the buildings around were
having coffee and milk in glasses, some having a breakfast of rice and
either eggs or sausages.
I exited the parking
lot at its northern toll gate, crossed to the new outlet of the
international conglomerate of Starbucks coffee shops where three men with
ties and a woman in a black corporate dress were having coffee in paper
mugs, and croissants/carrot cakes. I passed by a tea house where I saw
through the glass wall a couple of employees from my building having
strawberry shakes in large plastic tumblers. I waved to the woman. I
didn’t know the man.
I entered the
building, took one of the elevators that served all basements and upper
levels up to the 16th
floor. The one I got into had to go down yet. A girl delivering dull lunches
in styrofoam and cellophane packing to the offices up got in at Basement 1,
and from there it was up all the way. She said hi. I smiled and nodded,
asking “isn't it too early? The lunches will turn cold.”
When I reached the office I greeted the secretaries and the
fresh-from-college managers of our office’s accounts a “Good morning”
each, then I sat down on my copywriter’s desk, checked the electronic
mailbox for friends’ responses and notes from our clients’ advertising
department people. My computer’s speakers then began playing Bob Dylan
singing about silver and gold.
II
VALENTINE'S
Day. I dropped by the Video City shop across the bus stop to return some
tapes and probably rent some. I had a rent-3-take-1 privilege on my new
membership and decided to avail of it, so I had to haul with me to the
office the following tapes: by the blurbs on the jackets, one of the movies
was a working-class American Dream story from inside, and revolving around,
New York’s Studio 54 disco palace in the late ‘70s; one an epic saga
following a prominent family’s turbulent life from the 1920’s through to
the early ‘70’s in Chile; the third about a troubled girl copy editor
who went on a killing spree and came out with a basement sort-of-family
composed of her prize corpses; and the fourth one about a broadcast
corporation-run TV show the star of which didn’t know he was being filmed.
While I was going through the tapes on the shelves a man came in and
started to talk to the young male cashier. He said something like “oh you
don’t know me,” and the cashier said something like “I’m actually
just a trainee here.” Soon the man would be using the shop’s phone
supposedly to call the license bureau, saying to the phone, “I just wanted
to check if the building permit for this new shop has been okayed already.
And the permit to operate? Okay, okay, I’m here at Bulacan province,”
and by that it was obvious the dude was just trying to harass the poor
counter clerk into giving him free rental, because if he was really from the
government he would know that the building permit and the mayor’s permit
were given by separate government offices, and that all Bulacan province
businesses were processed by none other but Bulacan government offices.
“I’m here at Bulacan province,” that gave him away. But of course I
was done, and took my bag from the security guard, so even though he
pretended to get money from his wallet, asking the cashier again how much
for the membership, it was obvious he was not interested in getting an
application form and all that. There was a possibility he was a town
councilor, of course, but in all likelihood he was a barangay (town
district) government officer or simply a cop. I went out of the shop and saw
a bus coming. I crossed the street.
You’d see them on sidewalks walking in the same direction as the car
you’re driving on the road, these beautiful women who look pretty with
their long mane (or necks) and their arm flesh coming out of sleeves or
sheer sleevelessness. That Valentine’s Day, on my way to the office, I
wasn’t on a car. I had none. I got on a full bus and stood on the aisle at
the back and watched beautiful women—these who looked pretty with their
long mane (or necks) and their arm flesh coming out of sleeves or sheer
sleevelessness. Whenever they’d look out the window or at a laughing group
at the back, I would see they were prettier looking towards the driver,
their faces hidden. But that is not to say that that morning felt ugly.
Soon we were in the
metropolis and were instantly stopped by a bunch of cops for one reason or
another. One of the cops got in and stood beside the driver. The bus moved
on, with the cop aboard, and I thought maybe the bus is going to be
impounded after the passengers are all dropped off at the Cubao bus station.
The aisle was
already without much standing passengers when I walked over to the door
where the cop and conductor were standing and told the driver I’ll get off
at the Metro Rail station. When the door opened the cop was still talking
bullshit crap or whatever in the name of extortion and was blocking the
aisle leading to the doorway. I and another passenger were to squeeze
through the passageway to get off, and that was another moment among
millions of moments when I felt convinced cops were probably only 40% a help
to the nation and 60% a headache. It seemed to me at such moments that many
cops were at war with the rest of society whom they thought were doing
better than them financially.
I got into the MRT
train and traveled above the city trembling with hate towards what this
country had become. Probably because I have a tendency to regard moments
like that earlier cop-standing-in-the-way-of-passengers-getting-off-the-bus
as signs of a larger problem. My teachers in college have always said I
always bloat little events into global proportions.
The Metro Rail
Transit ride wasn’t so great that day, Valentine’s Day, even though I
was wearing a peace-loving pale-pink shirt (pink used to be a Socialist
color, I believe, pretty corporate nowadays). Across the aisle sat a couple
of 50-ish men that looked like executives in their barongs. One
closed his eyes to avoid eye contact with the passengers across, inclusive
of me, while the other sat a bit sideways to look outside the window,
straining his neck. One of the two young men in tennis shirts beside me was
telling his friend, “This is better than a subway ride. You don’t get a
view on the subway.” This kid has either been to New York or Paris or
Tokyo or had absorbed these cities’ shapes through television and the
cinema. I was of the latter type, I mean the one who had absorbed the shapes
of cities with subways through the movies and TV. I’ve been Americanized
since kindergarten, in fact.
I put on my Walkman,
but the train’s noise was louder that day, a pink-shirt day for me, and I
could barely hear the lyrics of the songs. I might have done better with a
book of poems, but then I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, apart from
being bothered by my awareness of the fact that people sitting beside me
will consider me weird holding a poems book they can’t understand.
I believe what environmentalists say about styrofoam. A single speck can
kill a thousand fishes, because that single speck if swallowed by a fish
won’t decompose. When the fish’s flesh rots away, the styrofoam dot will
float on the water and will get eaten by another fish who’ll get choked in
his turn. The speck goes on and on, undiminished.
III
ON
another February morning I took a kind of motorpool van to the metropolis.
It was already in the metropolis, already near my drop-off destination, when
I got to tell the old driver, who seemed to me to be the spectacles-wearing
father of what looked like students sitting beside him, he had to drop me
off at the MRT station. I was sitting at the back. I saw the man sitting in
front of me to the right window quickly look towards me after I said what I
said, looked at me along with the girl sitting behind the two students with
the driver-father. A female doctor in white right in front of me to the
left, sitting beside the man to the window who looked back towards me, did
not look back, simply moved her head a centimeter to the right and took it
back at once.
The father said, looking in the rearview mirror, “I already asked
if someone’s getting off at the MRT station and nobody answered!” That
was the reason why eyes looked my way, because he had asked if someone was
getting off and nobody answered, and because we were already in the middle
lane of the avenue. It wasn’t that difficult to change lanes, though. But
I was admittedly wrong, I should’ve turned off my Walkman when we were
already at least a kilometer near the station.
I started to get off
the van. Almost whispering I said, “Yeah. So hang me, fuckhead.” The
doctor and the man to the window should have heard me say it, I doubt the
rest of them heard the words within the murmur. I got off, swung the door
shut, looked at the avenue behind the van with a tigerish
the-first-bus-I-see-I’ll-fucking-eat kind of look. A bus went ahead of the
van and suddenly stopped to spit out passengers, almost hit by the van I
took which was now trying to move away from the sidewalk. I offered the
bus’ windows a share of my tiger fucking-stupid-bus-people! leer. I
climbed the stairs to the MRT card booth, still angry at the
driver-father’s anger, but now wishing I had a more peaceful morning so I
could listen to my Walkman, specifically the lyrics.
I knew the
driver-father and the sons beside him and the girl behind the sons and maybe
everybody else were frightened of me, as if I could have anytime taken out a
coin and scratched the fucking van door and fucking walk away with a
motherfuckin’ pout over sunken cheeks. But none of that happened, although
I hoped I could really do such a thing instead of just frighten people with
the thought that someone who looks like me has the tendency to do that.
Fifty percent of me hoped I didn’t frighten people at all. Thinking all
the while one maybe just needs to look fuckin’ tough to get respect in
this city. I knew I frightened the father with my slow getting-off and a
god-dam-you-man-you-treat-me-like-I-just-fucked-your-daughter kind of
low mumbling and my slow closing of the scratchable door, looking away while
closing the goddam scratchable fucking nice door of a van that belonged to
someone with a fucking van.
I was still angry
while waiting for the train, turning the volume of my Walkman music up till
I couldn’t take the level. On the train, I was glad to see a middle-aged
woman hop in at the first station stop, looking around, then holding on to
the iron bars. I took the opportunity to be good, and stood. Fucking stood
up, man. And so what. Instead of listening on to my Walkman music with the
vague lyrics under scratching loud guitars, I opened my Canetti book. But I
couldn’t concentrate on the professor story although I kept reading.
There’s an
appropriate book for each moment. Would a Christian read have calmed me
quick? Or would that have just burned my cynical flames and led me further
to war?
I’ve always
believed the word “fuck” helps us a lot on the streets though it may
hurt some people’s feelings. It had become for my generation the
cellophane that stifles the toxicity of the anger everyone’s impatience
generates.
IV
HE
got off the van without taking his earphones off his ears and Walkman, ran
to catch the elevator going up to the Metro Rail, passed the people lining
up (by not at all lining up) in front of the lift after deciding to take the
stairs, intermittently ran, got to the third level where the booths were
(the second level was the bridge to the avenue’s other side). Upstairs,
there were no more lines at the ticket booths, being beyond the rush hour
now. He was late for work, so he ran to one of the booths, got his card, ran
to the turnstiles, ran to the still open doors of the waiting MRT train.
Bad luck. While still in the van he forgot to zip close the pocket
where his Walkman hid itself. So that when he ran to the door of the nearest
train car, the rebellious Walkman started to look out of the pocket to see
what the hurry was all for. When he reached the train door, the Walkman
suddenly popped out, hitting the train’s wall—Walkmans are not, are
they, trained to keep their excitement at bay, and should be thought stupid
on this subject. When it hit the train’s side it opened to let the
cassette inside it escape its grasp. Both Walkman and cassette dropped into
the gap between train and platform. When he put his head near the train’s
side to get a good look at the bottom of the darkness in the gap, there was
a whistle from the guard on the platform.
Someone, an MRT
staff waiting for a late companion, waiting before boarding a train to get
him and his companion to their station duty, called out, “Hey, man, just
wait for the train to go, then we can maybe get your Walkman out of there,
Walkman is it?” The train ran along, they saw the cassette but couldn’t
locate the player. The MRT man said, “oh wow, I hope it didn’t get into
the hole that goes to the avenue below.”
“There’s a hole?
Oh fuck, there. I can see it.”
It was one of those
gaps. He could imagine his Walkman dropping and hitting a passing bus. Then
he thought maybe the gap was too small for the Walkman. He looked sadly at
his earphones still tucked inside his bag’s pocket, did he tuck the set
there, was it hanging from his ears a while ago? Then he remembered grabbing
the earphone’s main wire at that moment the Walkman hit the train’s
side.
People were starting
to gather for the next train. Every time he bent to look into the rails, a
guard farther down the platform would whistle at the kid, and some people
looked at this kid. The gathering crowd stupidly looked at him either
because they didn’t know what he and the MRT man—and another MRT man who
promised to take care of things later—were looking for/at, or they were
thinking he was the stupid one to be putting his head beyond the yellow
line.
“C’mon,” said
the second MRT man, “back off now. We’ll look for it later. Let’s wait
for the next train to go.”
The guard had walked
over to the three and now he said, “Yeah, just wait till this other train
go,” and then walked back to where he had been standing, about 10 meters
down.
“It’s hard to
get down now, we could get electrocuted,” said the first MRT man.
The second MRT man
went into the office booth, and later, on the PA system, the whole station
heard the clearest lady’s-voice on earth announcing, “To all passengers,
for your safety please stay away (sic) from the yellow lane.” The
announcement was repeated.
The first MRT man
sat on a bench and said, “You got to wait for this next train to go, then
it’ll be taken care of. You have to get it, you must get it, it would be a
waste,” the MRT man said, sensing the kid was ready to give it up for
lost, ready to get into the next train.
“You could get
electrocuted, even without touching the railway?” the kid asked.
“It’s 750 volts,
the whole area, when there’s a train,” the MRT man said. “Without a
train, there’s no electricity, but I think we have to let this waiting
train go.”
“How many meters
from the train has electricity, then?” the kid asked, showing he wasn’t
stupid, although now he was feeling stupid for listening to songs critical
of society and then here bungling with his bag pockets, dropping a musical
friend of a machine into the electric railway, it could have been his kid if
he were goddam married, fuck!
“Thirty meters at
least,” was the MRT man’s quick answer to his question.
“Yeah?”
“Positive below,
negative above,” the MRT man explained, seeming happy to be of help to an
intelligent-looking yuppie with an apparently better-paying job that could
get one an expensive-looking Walkman.
“Jesus,” the kid
said.
The train went. The
second MRT man came out from the office and called to a third MRT man, a new
man who suddenly appeared on the scene. The second MRT man said, “go and
radio the new train, we’ll just pick up the cassette and the player.”
The new MRT man
mumbled something into his radio.
“Want me to go
down?” said the second MRT man.
“No, no, it’s
okay, I’ll go down,” said the new boy.
“I can do it,”
the kid said, but nobody paid attention to him.
The new boy went
down, the second MRT man pointing to the player and the cassette, then the
new boy quickly got back onto the platform, giving the rescued sets to the
kid and picking up his own radio. The kid said “thank you, man” but
nobody was paying attention to him, and the second MRT man had already gone
back to the office booth.
The kid went over to
the first MRT man on the bench.
“It’s good it
didn’t break,” the MRT man said.
“No. This is kind
of cool. It’s a realization. This Sony is good!” the kid said, although
it seemed the MRT man didn’t understand him.
The next train came,
the kid tapped the MRT man on the shoulders with another “thanks, man.”
The MRT man saying “no problem” in the middle of a sentence he was
delivering to another MRT staff that just arrived, the personnel he had been
waiting for, a girl! The girl looked at the yuppie kid, and the MRT man
explained to her what just transpired.
The kid went in the
train and examined his Walkman closely. He was surprised to see himself
trembling a bit from the whole experience—after all, it wasn’t everyday
that he got embarrassed big-time. The MRT man later went in with the female
MRT personnel. The kid walked to another car, avoiding having to look at the
couple. To say “thank you” again to the MRT man would be another
embarrassing thing to do.
But he felt good,
too, not only because the Walkman was fine (except for an opened-up gap in
the unit’s seams which he was able to press back into position), but also
because sometimes people aren’t that helpful without being condescending
or leery of your stupidity—many people, at the SSS for instance, take
pleasure in being more knowledgeable about certain things over other
citizens.
Today,
he was assured plastic people have not necessarily ruled the planet. When he
arrived at the office, he told his story to friends, embellishing it to form
a new plastic reality.
[S]
