Doing fifty

Never thought I’d get inside a gym. Watching girls —and boys—on their way to the fitness center, with their high-gear suits and designer knapsacks it’s like watching cutouts from Slick magazine, if there’s such a porn mag as that, or maybe, Sex in the City minus Carrie Bradshaw. They may be black belters, can lift tons, are scouring the reefs scaling cliffs and mountain borders or the moon on weekends, but they’re not my heroes. Training in self-defense under the studio lights of some state-of-the-art fitness spa is one thing; growing spine and muscles out of the daily perils of living in the rough tracks and subways is another thing. Listen to those boxing champs, ask them where they first grew their instincts for the kill: if not on the streets it’s right in their backyards, which could be the entire stretch of Boulevard or Bankerohan Underpass. Doesn’t mean got no respect for women who do away with their hairdressers and pick weights instead; where househelps can lift everything up for you, from your comb to your pee pan, and where it’s so much easier to be a cog in the machine than to rage against it, that requires some grit and will power.

Months back, a 58-year old dyke asked me, aghast, that what, dear, you didn’t know any self-defense??? My already brittle sense of self was dashed into pieces. Around that time, I had been mostly in a vegetative state: poor memory, poor body coordinates, poor chemical balance. It was ages since I last went to swim, clambered up a tree, or hiked mountains; in fact, all I counted on was the growing flab in my middle. I suppose I got depressed with the idea that my menstruation stopped rather too early and if I said to a friend I think I'm menopausal, they’d tell me to see an obgyne, might be tumor, remember you’re over 40; and if I told them I think I needed a cancer check, they’d say, it’s just menopause, remember you’re over 40. It was demoralizing, the idea that one’s being 40s is being taken against you every which way, and by Gods, please, I’m not like anyone else okay? I don’t think of aging as an inevitable confrontation with God or reality, I grew up believing that one gets better and better as one gets older, my pitched battles are yet to be fought, shame is to be the young arrival, and now you see me falling face down and getting a black eye just for heaving two bundles of groceries across some rusty stupid gate?

Then Evir G. told me about this gym he frequents for thirty pesos per session down Jacinto Street, ground floor of Dover Lanes.

“Thirty pesos an hour?”
“Thirty pesos per session, my dear, you can live there if you like.”

Well, it isn’t your classy gym steamy with hot legs and men’s mag cover types. In fact it’s so lower-income group, so working class, or maybe just working-hard class, across the board and across borders, that diverse crop whose common denominator is they feel shy or sneer at the idea of going with the yuppies in the fitness clubs uptown at Marco Polo or Torres Street, maybe akin to that section in the sex spas a gay friend in California calls the urinal where the fat unattractive faggots like him are dumped to help themselves to each other or unto themselves, except that in this case, you know that the people who are with you are way over the urinals and are down there mostly for themselves, for the one body they are left with and have to love for the rest of their lives. The equipments are a little run-down with not a timer still working, the locker room not so tidy, the comfort room not so aseptic clean, but about everything you need for your legs, arms, abs, is there.

And it was a gym crowd I could perfectly belong with I almost expected to bump into Amy B there. There’s this fat woman about my age who perfectly fitted into every contraption, could lift tons and knew how to strike the right poses; there’s this 65-year old doing stretches who must have been a yogist or a karate kid in her time, didn’t even deign return my smile, maybe because thanks to the northern light I looked young and stupid by her or I was not doing the arms and the abs right. There’s this other forty something with great long legs and well-muscled arms who spends amounts of time on the bikes and her biceps; then there are young awkward girls, older versions of me, I’d like to think, doing aerobics, trying to learn how to dance or maybe just working some more on their waistline.

My favorite? The little tykes six- and eight-year-old, at the rear of the taekwon-do class, and this young girl in early 20s, a newer version of me, I’d like to think, the lone female in a ring of five not-so-good-looking boys trying to learn kickboxing.

Ma Chatte

A terrible fish rising

Dear Lia.

I didn’t get the job with the natdems. Maybe I will not ever again. Goodbye struggle. Goodbye rebolusyon. Goodbye Mao Zedong, goodbye marx love of my life, long live consumer capitalism. Are you through with me? Then you’re through with me. What could I do. If I didn’t get you right the first time. So here I am. In the garden, growing revolutionary petunias thinking of you and got a black eye instead.

A black eye. It sounds like a pulitzer to me. You get that, normally, for fighting a man. A natdem man maybe. Except that these aren’t normal times for me. I didn’t get into a fight. Not yesterday, not last week or last month, not in the last nine months. And that’s the hard part. That I didn’t get into a fight. That I had not been fighting. It’s depressing demoralizing. Like I’m not myself anymore. Like I’ve turned vegetable. By and by someone will again take pickings of me and steam me, sprinkle with a little salt and vinegar, spice with garlic and onions, and I am done! Deliciously done.

Yes, I am done. Finished. Hello world. Etes vous fini avec moi? Bien. Merci. Merde. I feel murdered. Am I a murder walking? No. I am ice waking. Waking everyday to everyday everydayness trying to forget it all the lost wars the unfought fights. Who was it who wrote Who will find me buried under the days? Some lesbian poet who ended up marrying a rich man I forgot her name. Maybe she does not want to be remembered the poor thing. I hate days. Their insensateness. The stupid mindless grind. Buy buy buy is all it says. Pay this pay that. The solution to every problem, be it a noisy street , a neighbor’s stinky poultry, or the unbearable heat. Before long you don’t notice anything anymore. Say how bright the light. Because you always stay home these days. And when you go out into the street you always look down, anyway. A way to keep away from trouble. Before long you don’t mind and couldn’t care anymore. How sad the country. Or how fucked up the artists, or how good the food. That’s where I had been to before I got my black eye. My hands heavy with goods. A sackful of fruits and vegetables and mushroom and asparagus and white corn. What could I be thinking? The carbonara you served for dinner? I was thinking maybe of writing about the urge to privatize. Of Tita's advice to aircondition one’s room if you don’t want toxic intrusions into your study and rest; of the rage nowadays to go on a vegie diet if one doesn't want poisoned by canned food. Or it could be that I was thinking of your saying to take care of one's self because no one else will or does. I was also thinking of the backriding eighty year-old woman I met at a durian fruitstand at Toril uplands. Wanted to grow old healthy and strong like her. A racket I know. A stupid lie. A bourgeois lie. As though one could privatize comfort, patent as one’s own the enjoyment of peace, good health, happiness. Was crazy enough to be telling myself and believing me too that one should not miss out on her macro bio diet if she wanted to keep on producing estrogen; couldn’t quite take well to the idea of an early menopause. So it was with a breath of vengeance that I picked up yesterday my weights and began on a regime of muscle-toning exercises. Something I had forgotten to do in the last two three years. I had been all flab. Sags all over. Arms, waistline, stomach. Depression. Maybe a bad diet. Malnutrition. Who cares. Then I said No. Couldn’t live for long disgusted with one’s deteriorating body. Sylvia Plath’s terrible fish rising.

Then that: I hit ground face down on the day I rose from vegetative state and took up my weights in both hands because I decided I was done with sleeping muscles I want my old strength back, defy the years if I must. It’s like being told by a niece I hardly see that You are wrong, Grandma, you’re through! You’re way way down over the hill!

To get a black eye without nobody there out to hurt you, just a day settling into night? How humiliating. To be reprimanded, berated, by no one but a slippery ground and a stupid stone on an unlighted street one evening of coming home to cook one’s dinner? Degrading.

How did that happen?

I got scared, I guess. Got nervous. Confused. So I slipped around. Took the long way through the main gate to the subdivision because I didn’t like walking through the crummy hunger-stricken squatters area weighed down in both arms by bundles of goods. Because the past weeks, I had been quite harassed by people’s niceness in the troughway and I had been wanting to slap Misay. Only twelve year old and already a bit like me: so stupid and shameless around money. "‘Te, ‘Te," the whites of her eyes glued to my grocery bags, like what makes me think I have the right to what I bought? Made the mistake of giving her a twenty, and she didn’t stop collecting twenties from day to day if she could find me. “Work, ‘Te, you have work for me ‘Te?" So last night I took the long way to get away from her and her mother and her grandmother and as I stepped up to the rickety backway gate, my supershoes which never in the past three four years of wear and tear betrayed me, gave me away. I slipped and in a sec my face hit the crumbly edge of the slab of cement that should have been a foothold.

And how's my face now?

About fine. Just a swollen brow and a swollen right eye.
The real hurt is somewhere else deep inside, in a place I still have to find.

colors of my mind

a blind alley cat

Did I tell you I’m done with cats? Yes, I was. Until about two nights ago when, tired from a week-long work and travel between Lanao and Davao, I could not sleep in my bed because some God-damned kitten was meowing from outside my window. It wasn’t raining, so the wayside culvert should be dry, I said. If the little devil would just keep walking, she should soon find ahead of her the uncemented part that offers for her a way up the road or up to our neighbor’s fence. But she seemed such a darn stupid cat to find her way that I gave up and decided to pick her and throw her to the highway in the hope that some fucktruck ferrying illegal sand and gravel would for once put an end to her whining and wailing.

She was a foot down the culvert. Did not hiss or budge a little as I reached down to pick her. I was a little unsure about putting her inside my room as I know that people in the neighborhood, including my landlady, are getting a little sick of cats that keep on multiplying themselves. Way down the alley some houses even took to poisoning them, feeding them with food laced with Baygon. I could smell that in the air now and then as I pick my way through along our streets, and by and by, I would just notice that the population of cats standing by my doorway had drastically gone down, say from five to two. Maybe food is going scarcer hungry humans are at each other’s throats over it all the time; maybe thieving cats are an aggravation.

This one I salvaged is about three months old. Kind of cute, but for her face. I couldn’t place her family line, if she was cat or dog or hare or mouse. Looks like her face underwent several radical surgeries. I understand, of course, that it’s just the skin disease that she got for eating straight from garbage and rusty food cans. At first I thought she was Chinese I even wanted to name her Xu Xien; but closer to truth is she looks mongoloid. Perhaps I had better call her Loida, or maybe just plain Ugly Cattie.

But first thing is her survival, or she won’t have a chance at her famed nine lives. There was no food in my room, so I had her put down in the yard so that I could go out to buy from the store, but no sooner had I gotten out of the gate than she got to running and meowing after me. She would stop every a couple of yards, turning her head this way and that, like she was trying to trace which way my scent went. I hurried some more. A bit of me was hoping that by the time I came back some jealous owner had already picked her up. But it was almost eleven and the barbecue stands and roadside stores had all closed down. I returned without food and the damn kitten was still there, running to me as soon as she picked my smell.

I put her inside my room. Her eyes wouldn’t glow into my flashlight, and it looked like she was dying from malnutrition. She could hardly open her eyes, like they sunk beneath layers of dried pus, and she kept on jerking and choking on water like the feel of liquid in her mouth hurt. She had nothing but water that night, but as soon as she found a rag, she slept and never woke me until early the next morning.

I still have to find a vet to properly appraise me, if she was born blind or kids in the neighborhood had fun gouging her eyes out. They do that all the time: clip their tails; sew their limbs with wire; throw them into the canal, wrap their heads with cellophanes, prick their eyes with banana cue sticks. They’re so creative, so naturally ingenious in the fun art of torture I am all admiration for them. And I haven’t asked around as yet who could have played with this one so that I can properly thank them.

But it feels nice, annoyingly so, to have some cute thing playing around one’s feet again, at the time when you thought you are through with cute things; at the time when you thought you’re past caring about pets.

Corners in my room

on my side of the street

I live on a street which has no name. My landlady calls it the shortcut street to Ma-a highway, which I didn’t know existed until a few days after I had settled in a room she let me for a song. I thought it was one of those blind streets you see a lot in the city’s more crowded pavements downtown where you are stopped in your tracks by some sorry boarding house or a junkyard strewn with garbage and corrugated iron. Barely finished when they started letting the rooms, the floor was unpolished, the locker unpainted the day that I looked in. I had the honor of doing the painting and the polishing myself, so of course I chose tile red for the floor and mahogany for the closet, and they do well by the white water-stained walls. I have five windows, or two pairs on the side that looks into the shortcut street, and an unpaired one on the room’s front side.

There are two sides to where I live. On the “back side” is the shortcut street, littered on both sides with makeshift shanties attached to or hanging by the back fence of a private elementary school or a big house. A morning trip to buy a packet of shampoo at the corner store is a sightful of life’s sundry details: you walk right into a family breakfasting around a small table right by a fireside with a black kettle still boiling water, half-naked men scrubbing their thighs by the wayside tap while their wives scrubbed laundry over wooden washboards, little children being dragged towards washbasins, old men squatting with cups of coffee between their knees.

The “front side” is the middle-class neighborhood of First Street whose faces you seldom see as they hardly go out of their gates on foot. Most of the houses are built tall, shaded with big trees, climate change sensitized, sotospeak, but for the controversy over the hillside development way up, not to mention the diggings for gold and lime here and there, which threatens to bury the housing subdivision in a landslide one fine day, oldtimers in the NGO circuits say. I worry, of course, mostly for the nice houses who may not outlive the trees. But I reckon that by then I’d be in Ireland making my own diggings at William Butler Yeats library, or in nearby Ho Chi Minh City, consorting with holdover commies.

By then, if my landlady’s own modest projections hold true, they would have made a two-story or three-story building in place of our humble hovel. There will be three or four rooms to a row, all bachelor’s pads, said she, which she will let at 3k apiece, twice dearer than what I pay her presently. Strange that well-married people always prefer bachelor boarders for co-occupants in the vicinity, couldn’t stand to see more of themselves, but I didn’t tell her that. What I wanted to say to her was, I reckon I can afford to rent three rooms by then, if I could still enjoy visiting rights to the country.

Projecting on you again? Please to excuse me, just my own little take at macho swagger. Did you know that in pre-Christian Beowulf hubris is amply rewarded, not severely punished? But in Catholic Ireland Yeats wrote a prayer for her daughter saying may she grow up without an opinion. I don’t know why he prayed that, maybe he wanted his daughter to be good and stupid, that she may marry properly and not be one of them disgraced divorcees. I wish Catholic men shut their big mouths up and stop bothering God and women, how thoroughly ignorant they could be. And by the way, the opposite of hubris is not humility, but grief, which according to Sappho has no place in a house with a resident poet (namely Herself). Humility is post-Christian acquisition, like wedding ring is post-marital clamp on one dirty finger. But I’ve gone a little way off your turnip heads must be going in a spin following me. I am making soup as I write this and outside it rains and children from the shortcut street are running and shouting. I stay inside, held in by the waiting for the roof to start dripping.

Yes sirs, there’s a leak in the ceiling that once every so often drips water onto my red tile floor. One fine day I will fix it, it’s just Vulcaseal or the gutter clogged with mango leaves, and will grill the windows as well. Right now I don’t want to outstyle my landlady as yet. Already she is distressed with the pots I planted with green veggies right outside my door. Not her idea of ornamental gardening, I reckon, and on days that I am gone and it doesn’t rain, I come home finding the plants drying at the roots.