One day in March

One day in March I was in this IWD rally. I was feeling sick because the marshals (all-male, of course) came at me over the placard the witchie hanging by my side was brandishing. As the megaphone blared I sat in a corner under a shade not quite decided what to do: to leave or to stay. Then out came Nelson smiling a mile high.

Nelson is from those days when to be poor and hard-knocked was a way to live and to steal or damage property, say of a bus company monopolizing the Davao-Cotabato route or a banana plantation not following labor laws, was glorious. It was one of those post-recovery period rallies where a few thousands of people had been collected and hauled aboard Sarao jeeps and garbage trucks to make a show of force, so it was like happy-days-are-here-again! So Nelson he approached and extended one hand to me, and I myself wasn’t scowling exactly, just my old wary and hyperacidic self. I didn’t really mean to join that rally, only to look for Godot or some other being who might bring news big or small that will perhaps turn the tide, so when Nelson asked how I was doing and what exactly am I doing there at the back side when I should be with the crowd or at least up there on the stage with Macariu Tiu and Don Pagusara reading poems for women, I just said that them Gabriela boys probably didn’t think of my poems good enough for women and that Mac and Don were probably the new women poets now, not I. Besides, I said, I was only here in the hope that I would run into somebody who could lend me a few hundreds as I had been on indefinite fast. This embarrassed him he blushed. Then genuine distress took better hold and his hand went looking for some bills in his side pocket. I started talking feminist organizing among street lesbians that his embarrassment soon turned to suspicion, maybe fear: That his otherwise very intelligent and once pretty friend would end up a street loonie. He was also glancing down at the witchie slung around my shoulder with a nylon string.

At my witchie’s broom’s end is a tiny placard saying Legalize abortion! which an hour ago had earned me the kinship of a 37-year old woman from a Muslim village nearby, the indignation rally of a well-heeled host of Mom’s Radio, smiles and looks of recognition from streetside onlookers, and the eight-mile long lecture of the marshal who did not leave my side through the march along the city’s main thoroughfares. Nelson seemed to have seen the resemblance between me and my witchie and he lent me a five.

I promptly left the rally.

Went to an internet café and did printouts of Marge Piercy’s Right to Life, a bullet-size poem telling priests and legislators to fuck off, we’re no corn field, no factory, no uranium mine no cattle for fattening, and a nice poster telling guys to vasectomize if they didn’t like an abortion. I hopped from CR to CR of restos, coffee shops and malls gluing the papers up in front of the urinals. I felt I was doing some high crime, like wiring a bomb onto the bathroom door as I pasted and wiped sticky glue off my hands. Just around the time the rallyists were dispersing the herd at the plaza for home, I was done.

I bumped into Jimmy as I was walking along the dark corridors of San Pedro Street. Jimmy is a guy from a high school I went to some 25 years back, and my, was he darker and handsomer. The first thing he noticed was the placard-carrying crone strung around my shoulder. His nose screwed up at me. Oh I went to a rally for abortion rights, I explained, and No, I have not gotten married yet, I’m a dyke, you see, how are you?

He looked like he didn’t hear a word of what I said, just kept on screwing his nose and looking me in the eye, head shaking like he couldn’t believe the fuck that he was seeing.

“You never changed, didn’t you?” he finally asked, voice low and strangely bereft of vehemence.

I looked away, heart lurching, then looked back up at him.

“I just said I crossed over. You may tell our high school friends in our little town that. I did, I have, for the worse.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

I stopped in my track.

“I mean, when I heard you went with the activists? I thought it was just rebellious youth. I thought you would mellow, get a job, lie low. Just like the rest, you know?” He chuckled, still shaking his head.

“But you haven’t! Tsk. You’re something, Man!…”