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.

Happiness is a warm gun

I sometimes wish there was more to Mary.

I was sitting with Berkis, on the checkered blue linoleum mat that, had my wishes been granted, should have no business being laid there. But I wasn’t there when someone went shopping. What I hate about giving people purchasing power no matter how little: they will buy what they want for you and not what you want for the world of them. Two hand-woven mats, I had insisted, twice or thrice over, no plastic mats, no plastic chairs, and no plastic tables. Mhang was at the other end of the line; I had a full half-hour lecture, both our bills charged to office expense, a conversation which I now recall, she kept on interrupting, or not interrupting, but kept on talking into, because, each time that she broke in she was really on another planet on another tropics, like the fish that flew in from the window and the cat that caught it and released it into the sea, like there was sea under the house, and the sepsis existed only inside my head. Wheredoyouthrow the old linoleum but into the window the garbage is piling up under the houses the heaps of plastics upon heaps of plastics clogging the waterways itwasdifferentdecades agobefore the onslaught of the cellophane when everything you deposit intothesea gets eaten bythesea doesn’tkillthesea--

But tonight was no night to be doing lectures. I had lost the verve, and the nerve; all the misunderstandings, the misapprehensions of the past week, maybe of months upon months, and now here was Berkis lounging, making little commentaries about the repairs the purchases while Mary sat by, playing card games in the computer. 

“The linoleum is nice, Shei.”

“Plastic.”

“It’s nice.”

“We had a fight over it.”

“Who?”

“Mhang and I. Siyasammal niyu in dagat, you choke the sea.”

Berkis fell silent, then blurted an alibi. Mary’s eyes went up, stared at me, three, four seconds maybe, then went back to the game at the computer.

For of course it was seawater under the house, not septic tank like I thought it was, and you never know what fattened the fish, but when someone says it’s a miracle that brought the fish flying in through the window over the roof of a neighbour’s house and that it portends good luck, then you have to believe in good luck. And I do. Like I believe everything I see in Jolo. All the magic and all the reality to it. Like all of Mary’s stories.

About how his father razed their house down, for instance, just because he wanted to, on a spur of a moment. He had it poured with gasoline, the day he got drunk and his wife Mary’s mother wouldn’t stop yakking even as he was beating her. If you don’t stop I will burn this house down, he had warned, and off he went to get a liter of gasoline, and Mary, he jumped out of the window into the sea. 

Like the night they were arrested for disorderly behaviour and were threatened with jail, the three other dykes, Sara and Thads and El, promising the cops that yes yes maybe they will start behaving now, huun huun maraih mahinang na kami babai, we will conduct ourselves like girls now, just so the cops would let them go home and not be dumped among the inmates. But when they turned to Mary all Mary said was, Nah dih, bihaini na aku, no, I’m already like this, can’t be a sissy now, and the cops, apparently impressed, told him to choose a cell he could fit into and sure enough he chose one he thought he could inhabit, yari na in kaku, this one, this one will do for me. 

Most days, I have no arguments against their lives. I just miss my deck back in Davao, the air-conditioned offices, the clean air, except that the new room I very recently moved into now also hangs right above a roadside canal, a detail I missed when looking, and it stinks in the evening, so that now it’s like I have not really left Jolo. In Davao of course there are no fishes flying in through the window, no Marys, no magics, no much reality either. I keep on telling myself just to not think and to not argue against anyone or anything I know, that I only have poetic license, they have shaman powers. The crazy old chick Mhang, for instance, no matter how badly she spells. Bottle women for battered women, Jesus Try for Jesus O. Christ, can one have magic power when one doesn’t have word power? How does she conjure the spirits, do they answer to wrong spellings wrong pronunciations wrong names wrong calls?

I have my fits of jealousy, of course. Like that day I commandeered Mary to write a letter, and the net wouldn’t connect, I almost bashed Mary’s numb skull with the red netbook. Of course, you don’t call Mary numbskull to his face, she will smash your face and break your skull. I was so annoyed because he was not even reading the letter in his mailbox, he had his right hand on the keyboard and his left hand on the phone texting all his girlfriends announcing that he was at Pluto Restaurant trying to get a connection to email a letter to a Melikan in Canada who wanted very much to see him and he cannot get through because of poor internet connection in the fucking island. I had hissed at his face. What-are-you-a-robot-you-want-me-to-dictate-to-you-word-for- word-what-you-are-to-write-what-am-I-your-babysitter-your-secretary-your-doting-mother? He blanked out, then logged out on me. Pulled Mhang’s chair close to his side like Mhang was his favourite girlfriend favourite nanny favourite auntie favourite English teacher. We walked home divided, the mails all unsent, he and Mhang arms intertwined, I tarrying behind, thinking of taking the boat to Zamboanga, if only there was money. In the evening I had smashed Mhang’s phone against the floor. 

That next day and the day after next Mary did not appear for work. And Mhang informed me. “He said to me that I should not be afraid of you, that why, am I afraid of you? I shouldn’t be.” 

“Ya. Like all you have to do is ask him and he would shoot me.”

“We wouldn’t do that.”

“You never know what anyone can do around here. That wasn’t the first time he wanted me mauled.”

But Mary he does know how to make it up and now, three times a week he files a complaint to Mhang, Mapasu tuud in u, tiluun kita patandawan hambuuk adlaw ini. So hot-tempered indeed she’s gonna throw me into the window one of these days.

I had cut him and flung his hand away for daring to dislodge my Bob Dylan tape, which I was playing in the cassette, the morning I got mad at Aisa for misconstructing me. Dih kami magsulut ha hangka bay magpatay kami. We cannot live under one roof we will end up killing each other.

I was to accompany Aisa to school having convinced her she should get more of high school, but before we left the house she had said something that sent me bonkers. “Kah Sherfa, please be kind to my teacher.”

It was ten o’ clock and there was no water I hadn’t even bathed and Mary was still sleeping sprawled like a royal rug on the linoleum upstairs sans pillow sans blanket. I left Aisa at the doorway and went up stomping, raising hell for all the world to hear. 

“So I was unkind to your teacher what did I do what??? The only unkind thing I did at your rotten school was to ask you to pick up the plastic trash you dropped at our feet and I would have picked it up myself had you let me and now I am unkind to your teacher even before I could meet her because some educated jerk there looked at me and I didn’t smile up to thank him??? Why, should I have kissed his ass unzipped his pants???? Should I have made him coffee and talked about the goddamn rascals infesting his classroom lining up the hallway whatwhatwhat????!!!"

She went home stricken, the five hundred enrollment money stuck inside her pocket, strips of bandaids patching her forehead. Just days back she was mauled by a gang of lesbians, a fag and a boy. None of her friends helped, they just looked on, she reported. And Mary, when told, just shrugged. “We get mauled all the time. What did she do? Must have provoked it.” And as though that wasn’t enough he blamed Aisa, too, for provoking me. “Dupang kaw isab, if you weren’t stupid, why did you have to tell Kah Sherfa how she should conduct herself? Why didn’t you just go to school with her straight!?!"

“Like it was Aisa’s fault.”

“So it was my fault, Mhang?”

Mhang has a way of demolishing your one-year lecture on lesbianism with a prayer or an analysis, her own take at conflict mediation. “Hatia niyu na ba. Maas budjang ba. Maraih simud ha u niya in saytan piyaig ku ha u hi Mherz.” Be patient with her, old maid, you know. Maybe the devil I exorcised from Mary's head moved residence into her head.” 

They didn’t bother to get lesbian labor to do the roof, could not bother themselves with it now that the money has been sent. A month back the house was given up for condemned, decrepit, the roof leaked nobody was renting it. Now the owner her sister was screaming like it was prize property. “I will not have those tomboys doing the roof!!! If you want to practice carpentry do it somewhere else not on my property!!!” They readied the camera, just the same, and took some shots of Ridz holding the hammer. For funding agency purposes. I was furious. “The fucking FA does not give a fuck about that!!! You just fucking grow some spine around here and fucking do something without the damn camera and without those damn FAs congratulating you, you fucking understand that???!!!” 

They dispersed confused. Someone was squealing, reporting to Kah Sherfa every move every thought they make. At the end of the day the carpenter got the pay, and Mary, for hauling the five sheets of galvanized iron on his head from the roadside to the house and frightened Ridz with his panting Ridz thought he was going to have an asthma attack, was not paid. 

Now that's lesbian labor I say. But nobody takes heed about what crazy old tomboys say about Mary. 

So one sunny day before departure time, after Aisa had been enrolled and after the letter had been abandoned for unsent, Mary squatted by askance, while Bob Dylan ripped the air yelling and howling about being stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.

Well, Shakespeare, he's in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells,
Speaking to this French girl,
Who says she knows me well

“Favourite song mo?"