Bim and I were flipping pictures today. Shots
from this year’s writers’ workshop in Silliman University we happened by on Sawi’s Facebook wall. We got to talking about poets we admire and don’t admire, writers we know and don’t care to know, until we got to Viktor, who we both happened to know and admire, and somehow still root for, just for the raw talent and, particularly for me, for the crow madness of him and for going the other way, no matter how badly he might be doing right now healthwise. So what if he didn’t win any Palanca, Bim said. He is one who’s got depth of character.
Oh wow and alright. And who cares if Eskinol and Clear do not make any revenues by him, he is not running for President, is he not.
The first time I laid eyes on Viktor was at the Silliman Weekly. Sawi, the school’s Poet Emeritus, dragged him there one late night in December that we were doing the proofs for Sands & Coral. Another guy was with them, Gerard Pareja, introduced to us by Sawi as a poet from Cebu. They looked blasted before anything could hit them, didn’t even mumble a hello, just looked at their sides and down and grinned liked hyenas, if I ever saw hyenas grinning.
Whether they were just acting themselves up, or that was the way the were, I have no idea. But the two of them distinguished themselves from all the others who sauntered by because… well, they had no social skills. A bit like me, in other words, and they were worse: They looked liked a couple of catatonics straight from the urinal. All the time that Sawi was going high holding center stage telling his regrets to one and all what a sorry thing he did not use the body as a sex machine it was meant to be when he had it young and strong, the two of them just sat there in a grin and looking every inch like deactivated chimpanzees.
I would not recognize Gerard now if I run into him in the street, but I got to read his first rather thin volume of prose and poetry which Viktor said saved his ass: it opened for him the ounce of an opportunity that he needed to teach in a university. Viktor gave me a copy of Gerard’s book and asked, “Sheil, why did Marge call it sexist?” He seemed to think that because the persona there was a limp dick before the female sex, it could not be possibly sexist.
There was this poem about a girl standing before a mirror with nothing on but a bath towel she unwraps around her body while her water carrier of a writer friend (Viktor, for whom the poem was written) looks in from outside the window, and beneath them both, in the store downstairs, the boyfriend waits for the girl to come down. Then there’s this short poem about a girl who the speaker in the poem claims to have taught to swim in a pool but who left him for the sea, a line I later sneaked into one of my stories which an online literary magazine published sans the credit to Gerard P (for which I thank him, the literary ed, not GP, for encouraging me early on in my career as poet-thief). The last pages were about this guy who’d never been with a woman and had the misfortune of going with pals who liked to make him slobber dry, even not washing the hands they dipped into their girlfriends thighs just for him to smell. He got so obsessed with the vagina that as though to exorcise it, he screamed up vaginavaginavaginavaginavagina ad infinitum ad nauseum through the story’s end.
Are these sexist? Viktor ribbed. I must have sidled down to his side then because Marge was not looking, but ten years later, one otherwise uneventful day in Davao, Viktor’s question hit me between the eyes. I was with a crowd of pedestrians at the intersection of Quirino and Magallanes, mostly women over forty, all of us waiting for the traffic light to turn green, and each poised to cross the street, all sticky with exhaust fumes, and all grimacing under the mid-day sun. This cigarette vendor who was snaking in between running jeepneys made his way through us and drummed his finger on his cigarette box just at the precise moment that the traffic light said Go and blared behind us eight-decibels high, Mga bilat naglaray!!! Some of us tripped on our feet, as we rushed to the other side of the street. As for me, I was so caught by the arresting image that my reflexes froze for a moment and was not able to scream my thanks.
But I did remember Gerard and his case about screaming vagina right then and there in the thick of that mid-day traffic and all I could think of was, Lord, how vivid!
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