World peace at our doors

They have time to rack up an incest rape case they once slept with and claim this is the scandal, not peace money. As though there are no sex shows, no boobs shows in peace shows. 

How do they settle sexual harassment cases in Calgary? Like they settle gang rapes in Congo? Elders with slimy hands alhamdulillahing, admonishing the erring girls not to wear this or that, you are peace advocates, not sluts, don’t go motor-riding with Muslim boys,                don’t sit alone with them in a room. 

But this is the 21^st century, and that outside your window is the pavement, that the mall. What idiot can you con with tribal or Islamic law? 

And suppose all a curious lesbian engaged in interfaith dialogue wants to know is if her Muslim friend is circumcised, should she call a party? Should she be raped?

World peace must be at our doors if lawyers and shamans who ordinarily blink at incest in their own houses are now crossing class, culture, and geographical divide to help one party to a post-coital conflict. What I look forward to is for the MILF to get Feminist Solidarity nominations. My own candidate is the rapist’s daughter. 

They sell soaps at the UN, and the consultants are making a killing.

Where have all the flowers gone

Have all the cadres relocated to FB? And what disgusting things everyone is  up to, like selling spiked bead bracelets and fuchsia pink ankle boots, though I recall there was a lot of moonlighting work too even in those days, from lotions and underwears to malongs and Ibaloi bedspreads in between illicit loves and workers strikes and ED sessions on LIC (if your past served you right, you will remember what that acronym stands for).

But now, victory can be counted in 20 likes. Jesus O. Kuraiyzt.

So you report to FB like FB was your regiment, your company, complete with presentation shows and when someone pinches you saying she misses you, you feel like crying, as though you were once trenchmates in WWII and didn’t meet across the toilet of a plush resort. Then one you met in-person during your hardy university days asks you to please remove the piece she wrote ages ago, she doesn’t want her boss to find it, doesn’t want them to find her mind out, she might lose her job keeping accounts for which office you now forgot, and that yesss, she assures you, you will not survive in America, you will not survive here dear.

Now G badgers you, why didn’t you blacken your profile pic there’s an online protest against this Cyber Law, you don’t know? for all the libel that you do? Lord, I wasn’t there most everyday, how am I to know about one cyber law? But abide you did, like there was ever any law that worried you. What annoys you is her turn of words, she could have said, like Schnapps, hating, couldn’t she? or maybe like your exes, she could have asked, cluelesslike and indignant, why are you always insulting? Why do you always write vitriol? Oh did I? I don't remember writing that way, I just don't remember.

Why do cats meow? Why do rains pitter-patter, why do dragons spit fire? why bleed why think ink. Why not be like dogs barking at all the wrong trees arf arf arf! But then what if that's how it reads, angry bitter writing, like you’re some wrinkly squash with a sore stuck butt ---- how right she is, isn't she, unless and until you have set down your opus, everything you do is fart, ineffectual. 

I love Cineuropa. You go out of the moviehouse craning because you were supposed to change the world and you can’t. But why are they making all these movies about massacred anarchists and suicidals and red flags waving marchers singing the Internationale at the height of capitalism’s irreversible triumph across the globe? Is it about the past or the future?

Then at Cybertown another surprise. A daughter reappears after close to twenty years of silence. You admonish her, careful not to show any family emotion at all, because love is a junkie, a hopeless junkie. Mommy! Remember Vigan? Lord, what about Vigan, that day I stole a book from the library? Eee si Mommy nagnakaw, nagnakaw ng book si Mommy! And aboard a kalesa exegeting on the politics of thieving they hush-hushed you. Shhh! Shhhh! Marinig ka ng kutsero! Nakikinig ang kutsero!  

Makoy has a baby now, she tells you, he is well on his way studying bar tending. San Fernando teems with tourists. It could have been worse. Once you thought he will never finish high school. Since the day you last called and turned him down, he never talked to you again. How hurt could a child be? And every time you spell-checked a cad in Jolo, you wondered if your son is any better in the way of the Lord. At least the dykes there long understood what they want to escape. Does he?

They had moved on, the children. Their days sunny, their bones young. You haven’t. Cannot leave, cannot disengage, Peripatetic Thou, forever trawling your dark! Arkkk akkkk.

And this blog, fuckingdamnshittingshit of a blog forever detaining me. Why do I have to report here each time? A way to say hey look, they haven’t cut my cabbage head off yet, have they?

I'm Nobody

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Happiness is a warm gun

I'm on a plane don't complain

Desires what of that. Those are for ordinary mortals. They eat they fornicate they use themselves up and then they die.  I’m no ordinary monster. No ordinary glutton, no ordinary fornicator. I don’t believe in death. That’s for my foes and friends to wish for me, for my own sake. I reject that.

What is your psychosis? Moira asks. Each ought to have one or one will not survive. Hers was supposed to be catatonia. That’s what kept her in the odd jobs that she seasonally took on in the US of A. Yes, you will never survive here, you will never, she tells me, after taking my foot size for a pair of sneakers she hopes to ship to my address, from which I got evicted, a couple of weeks after we chatted, then she logs out. 

I’m on the plane on our way to Coron in Palawan to attend a wedding, a good old friend texts. I message back. Hey wrong send. She said she and her expat husband are sometimes afraid their daughter will go hungry, like me, she is so idealistic. Couldn’t tell her that’s too much to ask of their daughter.

ROADKILL! (The Seven Brothers)

III


The Seven Brothers, according to Mhang, is a religious group, some kind of a cult composed of men ages between 30s and 60s. People go to them for help, as when an injustice has been done to the family; as when a daughter disappears. They are armed with kalis, a bolo meant to cut off heads.

"I see. Are they the ones that perform the parrangsabil?"

"Yes."

Yess my ass. And God help me, help me to be afraid of people, not of rapists and revolutionists with heads to crop.

It was the Seven Brothers that went looking around Takut-Takut and went looking for Tumba Lata, Mhang explains, because they wanted Ferhayda and Ridz. They each was carrying a kalis.

"They came to Tumba Lata all seven of them and they each was carrying a kalis?"
"Some stayed right outside at the gate to Takut-Takut."
"You saw them yourself? All seven of them?"

"The people in the neighborhood saw them. There were four of them, two waited outside."

I wanted to cuss. If I could just make a joke out of it all.

Maybe they were just on their way to chop woods?

ROADKILL! (Or The truth about Mary)

II

A week back also, I was told of another series of roadkills. One was that Mary is pregnant, that is why she is leaving Jolo for Manila. Two, that her cousin, another devil-rider of a street tomboy, and whom I would now call Magdalene, has given birth to a baby, which they now gave to the rapist (they don’t use rapist there, though; they refer to him as the father); and that three, at Takut-Takut, another tomboy is going around with a bloated belly, courtesy of a pedicab driver who was forced by his elders to marry her and then left her for garbage a day after. 

So now, the dopeheads at Takut-Takut are talking. They say, Amun president niyu ha Tumba Lata yadtu? Hahaha. 

I told Karen it could be that some joke must have passed at the men’s lair; they must have wagered on the street dykes' pussies, or how come the serial kill. 

Karen was appalled. “That’s infuriating."

Yes, I assured Karen. Mary and her cousin Magdalene are the toughest in the gang, so they beat them first.

What I really thought was slander. And told Mhang, Tumba Lata’s resident reporter and information comptroller, You don’t believe men when they talk about women. Here that’s how the drug pushers get to marry the Muslim girls they want, by telling the entire barangay that she had had been had, she is no longer a virgin!

She carried on like I have not spoken. “Men could tell if a girl is pregnant.”

“They couldn’t!”

“They say Mary’s tummy is big."
"She drinks beer and slumps a lot."
 "And that she has the looks of someone having her morning sickness." 
"Whoaa."
"It must be Joseph, the guy who supplies him with shabu. Or that boy with a motorcycle, the one Mary borrows all the time, and the one who helps him with the laptop.”

“Who?”

“Joseph. A very ugly fellow, let me tell you. Dark-skinned, thin like a skeleton, a pedicab driver. They say that even when you were here, Mary was doing shabu every night.”

“Please, don’t believe them.”

"That’s why he was up all night." 
"Mhang, you're the only one who sleeps at eight and wakes at six."
“"One of the policemen was even saying that he has shagged Mary.”

"You’ve told me that already.”

“Once an addict, always an addict. Even when you were here? He was on shabu. It was his dinner, you don't know.”

Now I know that that statement was more for me and not about Mary. They tell me that all the time. You don’t know this and you don’t know that. You can’t do this and you can do that.  You don’t go out into the street without us, you don’t hang around with lesbians at the docks, you don’t jog, you don’t set up a program, you don't organize lesbians, you don't know Tausugs, you don't and you don't.

Well I don't. So I asked Mary. Are you pregnant?   Don’t lie. If it could happen to Magdalene, it could happen to you. In fact, it could happen to me. I didn’t tell him I have been getting an inordinate amount of propositions in my mobile lately.

Of course Mary got angry. And of course she covered up for his cousin Magdalene. "I will smash their teeth for spreading that kind of shit. I even went to see Magdalene to find out and it is not true!”

“I am not asking to accuse you. I want to know that I may know.”

“Don’t believe anything they tell you!”

That was the second time he said that to me in days. Don’t believe them; don’t believe the  Seven Brothers. They just want to scare you, so you won't go back there.  Huwag kang maniwala sa kanila, nananakot lang yan sila para hindi ka na bumalik doon. Huwag kang matakot, bumalik ka doon.  

You always root for that about Mary. He always was The Opposition. Everybody scampering for safety and he will go the other way. 

ROADKILL! (Or Confessions of a Window Cleaner)

I

Six months ago, I was asked to write a summing-up of a program now 17 years on the run. Compared to other NGOs that I know and have served at one time or another, this one is relatively cleaner in that they don’t duplicate receipts or buy them at the BIR or bribe gasoline stations and hotel desks into issuing bloated counterfeit bills. At report presentation, I was told, you don’t write political history; you focus on the program implementation, leave the social movements alone, use the evaluation reports. Or at least that’s one attorney-at-law who sits on Board said, to which most of the other board members agreed. Among other fears was, that the FA might think this NGO has some dubious association with groups out to destabilize government in its past or present or that whatever program it is pursuing might still be directly or indirectly supporting militants by virtue of this program’s early origins and still nurture agenda that are beyond project parameters. I almost packed up never to be seen again, had the Program Director, herself on her way out, took time to see me and made a confession.

But like it or not, that’s how we survive nowadays. Of course we have been co-opted, Shei. Even these projects we are running now, at the top of the heap of these little funding agencies is the World Bank.

I almost felt sorry I turned down a WB menial’s job a couple of months back so that I could go to Jolo and write their program report in between. I also felt envious: they have good governance and good funding on their side; I don’t.

Why am I suddenly filing this complaint?

On June 20, 2012 in Jolo, a lesbian was shot by a live-in partner's nephew. The partner's family is Tausug and religious and the father had early on asked this tomboy to keep away from the daughter for a little while because she is now a hajji (went on a pilgrimage to Mecca) as he is a hajji himself. The tomboy refused to budge. Then one day in July that a nephew had an emergency (a son or daughter taken to the hospital) he tried to borrow money from the couple and was refused, and so he went home to get a gun and came back to shoot her. She was taken to the hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival.

On July 18, 2012, another lesbian was shot dead while queuing to register with the Comelec.  The information that got to me was that 1) she eloped with a girl reported missing by the parents; but later, there was another version, that 2) she had been mistaken as the tomboy who pimped for a bunch of soldiers who raped and killed the woman she brought to them. The latest version (as of August 02, 2012) is that she was mistaken for the lesbian who eloped with the missing girl.

Soon after this series of incidents the guys in Jolo have been texting me. They are afraid, they are afraid to go out, they might get shot at next, because at one time or another, and to some not just once but seasonally, they got into a live-in arrangement or had eloped with a girlfriend. Some went back home in time; some of the girlfriends were fetched by their parents; and some were mauled by brothers or relatives; but none so far had been shot. This is the first time that they kill lesbians for the crime of our sex. (Note: I don’t use the word sexual orientation; I say their sex, our sex.)

I am therefore impressed.

The first casualty was an aunt to Susan, a Tumba Lata officer. It appears that her real crime was for being pagood-good, which in Pinoy slang means scoring pogi points. The first time I heard about this dead tomboy, she was still living. I was showing the guys pictures of New York gay marriages and Susan mentioned this tomboy to me. I told Susan and the few other guys sitting around that I myself is not really keen on gay marriage; but it serves well those who have properties to leave behind to their partners who might automatically forfeit such right to inheritance just because their union is not legal. Susan said, right. There’s this lesbian in the neighborhood, and she was pointing right at the window, like she was just nearby (she was), and if she dies the surviving partners will surely quarrel over her property. At the time she didn’t say the lesbian was an aunt; I only got to know that after the accident, when Mhang told me. I imagined then that she was some generic tomboy with a penis hanging on her forehead to have the nerve to take on two “wives” with whom she was not legally married. But that was Takut-Takut, slum enclave where anything goes; nothing that spells survival is not allowed, including drug pushing, theft and prostitution.

Now Mhang tells me that no quarrel over property happened. In the first place, much of the property belonged to the Tausug partner; the other partner, a Sama woman, did not bother to make any claims; she just went back home to her family, also just in the neighborhood. The Sama partner had been telling the tomboy lover to keep away from the other woman; they are Sama, not Tausug, meaning, to love above one’s class invites punishment and so on, but the dyke wanted to keep them both and especially the more well-off Tausug partner. So there. She was shot down, as promised.

A couple of months back, boarding at our modest headquarters at Takut-Takut, girls would be by. They wanted to join Tumba Lata, they said. Why so? we asked. They just want to; can’t we call them Tumba Lata Girls, they said? Then gradeschool gays would join a spelling test and ask can’t we organize them as well? They will call their group Batu Lakit (hard rock) and they were bright and talented, too. We were pleased, of course. I say, how nice. If that happens I would be able to bring my seven-year old nephew here and he can join your group, where he is now no gay life thrives. It turned out that was not a good thing to say and they asked, Is he talented?   

One girl said that his own father asked her to join Tumba Lata, because he wants for her to be a tomboy while she is still finishing high school. He didn’t want me to be a girl, because girls mix with boys and get pregnant before they could do anything good in life.

Smart dad she’s got, I wanted to commend her for her luck. What does he take us for, a freezer?

Angry bird visits Rapunzel

 

 

 

She is the one I come here for, and every time, I see her shrinking smaller and smaller into her lost self. I sometimes suspect she has disappeared in their sight and they don’t know it.

Twelve noon and I haven’t taken my first glass of water. Ramadan is ten days away, but hunger is not how I feel. Thirst is not how I feel. Just a pain in my spine for sitting way too long in this plastic chair in front of this low table my brother made for his teenage daughter whom I exiled from her room from her bed that I may occupy it myself.

So I can write, I have a bed in Takurong.

Which is cheesy. The wooden chair I brought all the way to here, years back when I discarded all my furniture save that one because it was made of good wood from Bukidnon bought by a friend on her way home, my sister in-law folded and dumped in the kitchen. Because it scratches against their glossy red tiles. Or their linoleum floor. Contempt is what I otherwise have for all these petty bourgeois strivings. But right now I have no time. Just a vague anxiety that I haven’t put in a little money as yet to pay for my one-week rent.

I could feel her hatred. It is polite and crisp. I am immune to it. But not the children. The children relay it to me. I blink.

I cannot get mad here. Not here where they long ago gave me up for sick. A 48-year old unmarried aunt posing as a tomboy to do away with things she didn’t get being such a bad lay. So they don’t talk to me. I had long stopped talking to them, had long stopped seeing them. I blanch each time the brother their father approaches like he could still talk to me like we were friends. No acting familiar. I will hiss. I will claw. Draw blood. 

They have a son who takes to me. I am a curiosity, a wonder. I’m gay but not lonely about being gay like she is. I am full of stories about a world she does not know the beginning and end of. Of girls braver than boys, of houses being razed to the ground, of blasts and gunshots in the neighborhood.

"Is Mherz your boyfriend?"
"No."
"Your best friend?"
"No."
"Coms?"
"Coms is a sister, like you are sister to Coleen."
"Like Father is sister to you?
"Oh your father is no relation to me in the same way that this plastic chair I sit in is a relation to me. We are estranged."
"Strange?"
"No. Estranged. E-s-t-r-a-n-g-e-d. That means no connect, no signal."
"Ah hahaha."

She is the one I come here for, and every time, I see her shrinking smaller and smaller into her lost self. I sometimes suspect she has disappeared in their sight and they don’t know it. She has stopped making detailed sketches of Rapunzel’s hair, the comb of the brush Cinderella used to scrub the floor of the queen’s house. Faggot faggot, the older brother taunts him day in and day out. "He is a boy, we are a boy aren’t we, love?" the mother coos every night at bed time. Great formula to grow another psychotic.

She comes to the room, and gets called out seconds after. "What are you doing there? Come out here." Last night she worked quietly on my bed while the mother busied herself in the kitchen washing the dishes the pots and pans the sink and the muddied floor. A moment of world peace we both had inside. I was at my computer playing Solitaire.  The mother has raised housekeeping to the level of art. The pots’ butts glossy silver, the shirts swaying in the wind blazing like headless limbless scarecrows hung under the desert sun. I have stopped putting time in to be useful anywhere in the house. After each meal everyone escapes, leaves her to wash the dishes and wipe the table right, as she wished. The slippers are always on the rack, you soil your feet but not the floor, Royalty would wince. I pump pails and pails of water into the filter jar until the containers are full, and get back in to my occupied territory.  The room's owner, the 14-year old daughter, keeps away, scowls and turns her back when shot at, afraid that I would sell her pictures to the pervs in Jolo. She would not enter if I am inside and sitting. With my back turned and sleeping, she tiptoes in and out. It is the 7-year old son that keeps on hanging on to my side, forces the door open if I shut it and lock up. The day I was to leave, she did not leave for school, told her mother they have no class; ran in and out of the house to peep in, like I would disappear in the morning mist if she didn't check another time. Gave me an illustrated version of the story I once told her, how Rapunzel was saved by Angry Bird, not by the Prince. The prince kidnapped Rapunzel while her Auntie and she were picking lice at the stairway of their thatch house. He lifted her by her hair and his horse went galloping before the aunt could jump at them. It was a rough ride full of skids and stops because Rapunzel kept on falling off the horse's back, her hair kept on tangling with the branches on the roadside. When they got to the tower, she was all bruises and there were splinters on her hair and face. She braided her hair while the Prince went looking for gauze and Mediplast. When he came back she greeted him with a whip. He yelped. She whipped and whipped him with her hair until he bled. That’s when the Prince found out Rapunzel was a tomboy. He cursed and called for his father and his boyfriends his father’s men for advice, but they were all out having fun without him. He fell on his knees on the marble floor and wept. Up at the tower, Rapunzel went into the bathroom and shampooed her hair.

How she giggled at that part. "She shampooed her long hair? Hihihihihi! She must be gay!"
"Yes she is gay, she’s a tomboy, remember?"

And while drying her hair at the tower’s balcony, Angry Bird came by and Rapunzel whistled summoning her, and my, was Angry Bird big! Rapunzel rode up Angry Bird and they sailed away until she got back to the village where Rapunzel’s friends the street tomboys and her tomboy aunt were gathered in the kitchen around a lamplight plotting an adventure to rescue her, and when they saw her gliding in with Angry Bird, they lived happily ever after.