You won't learn anything by me

A young writer came up to me today. You write so well, she said. What is your technique?

I felt diluted. Like I really wasn’t the talent I or she thought me to be; just someone picking her way and learned a trick or two along the block.

I said I actually don’t write so well, and I am not a writer. Are you?

But my God, was she tough. She just cast her eyes down and smiled, then knitting her brow as though she was in some harmless guessing game, she again turned her face to me. Wasn’t I glad she isn’t pretty: her cop-out, her get-away. You saying I just wait for the Muse, if she finds me worthy she will find me?

Oh no darling I’m not saying anything!

This is an effort to save that young writer. I am a just a teacher, not a writer, and this is what I have to tell her: Don’t follow me, I have lost my way. As for writing, It cannot be taught. It can only be bought.


When my best friend got married, how my walls went tumbling down. Mimi was my confederate. In life, and in Literature. She drew and wrote poetry and run-on essays, and my, was she good and was getting better and better by the day. So when one day she took the notion of carrying the neighbor’s baby like she wanted to know how it'd feel to play cradle and coo, I just knew she was going to leave me.

Now she’s a doctor in the KSA. I sometimes imagine her going crazy, making doodles inside a stonehouse harangued by an oversized baby. If she ran into a surgeon who told her, You know you’re different, she keeled over. Even of the husband she was rather proud to have procured for herself, she’s run out of things to say. I’m only happy here on payday, she last told me.


Danny was a classmate in college. Quiet but articulate, I once thought he would make a brilliant poet-revolutionary one day. Imagine my dismay when he ended up an officer of a giant pharmaceutical company and stole my pitch in service of corporate money. Charged, he told his girlfriends at FB that he was still going to pay me even if like I said there's no such thing as free lunch in Cuba, but to please please, he loves his wife and family.

And so when it was Karen Kay’s turn to marry and have a baby, I just said Damn. Now there goes another. Into the gully. You cannot marry and be good by me.

I once caught Uma Thurman on telly telling Oprah how women’s lives are interrupted by motherhood. The host cut her. Don’t you ever say that, went Oprah, emotive and sincere-like, hurting in behalf of martyred humanity. You would think Motherhood was Art itself and that great beauties like Uma would do fine serving time in the scullery. Uma, then divorced wife and single mother, blinked and smiled, all artifice. Thankfully it wasn’t her show. She had erroneously used the word “ruined”, too strong too sharp, a taboo for such a dull magazine show.

Are you learning anything? If you are not, then I’m a good teacher, you Go.

I saw you last night

I was at the coffee shops looking for this book I just took back from a friend who refused to read it because I asked her to, and I couldn't find it. Instead, I saw you. You were in a corner table with this nice workaday girl in heels and make-up and it was like a whiff of breeze blew in my face. I saw the You I never knew. You looked all your years, and you looked easy, almost happy: a hair and two loosed about your face and weren't you laughing! I said how good must you be going around these days, surely you didn't miss me, maybe didn't even think of me. Then I started telling myself that that woman you were with isn't half as good as me and can't hurt you as much.

I stood there a good while just staring at you until another customer elbowed me. I picked my way out of the coffee bar.

Back in my room I thought of the last thing you told me. What did you ask? What it is that I wanted? Did I tell you what? I wanted to call. I told myself that when you are so happy like that, surely you wouldn't mind being called, being clawed at, even if I were a crow back from seven hells. I said I will call because you asked me not to bother you anymore and our relationship had always been set that way: you ask me one thing, I give you another thing.

But I was rather tired. I don't even know how to write now without being crazy and unclear. So I didn't do anything. Just set about to packing my things because I was supposed to go to the province, visit my Grandmother's grave. Then when I lay down in bed, I got so irritated with the water stains on the ceiling that I got up and started scraping them off, first with my fingers, then with a knife, until I started thinking about the cost of paint and Vulcasel and nails and everything that will glue things together. Then I thought about the cost of going home and seeing nephews and nieces and relatives who don't really care about grandmothers and one crazy relation.

At the day's end I settled for the cost of paint, because I said right now it's all that I have, this room and roof above my head, for there is nothing to have really, there is no You, there is no Grandmother even, no family, no friends to turn to. I had better keep it, the bed and the roof above my head or I won't feel right about so many things else. So there: I canceled most everything I wanted, kept to the economics of bare living, and now I feel done.

I am ever so done.

So here I am still in my room with the bareness of bare, preserving nothing and telling myself not to waste love, to not exhaust love, since love is done.

Wife and woman a moribund state

Southbound am I. There's no other way. Incidentally.

***

Chopping heads, making a new tract. My God, how refreshing. My cold blood warms up for the kill.

***

Hey, I’m trying to put it nicely but I don’t know Nice. Will you stop calling me Maam? It makes me feel less than the person I am. The impersonal I-don’t-know-you. The heartless label taped on a cardboard box.

***

Guilt, yes, but mostly anger: that friends and family should hurt by how one lives and defends her one little life over and often against and above their many.

***

To say the right political thing: my God, what am I, a leftist manifesto?

***

In the conventicle of the beleaguered, one sits alone and doesn’t speak up, her comrades of yesterday now her enemies.

***

I know what you think. Devious of me to throw you back to Pre-literate England just when you are conquering Europe with your post-Enlightenment liberalism and all the wares you have purchased by it. Dear T, please don’t get mad, or do get mad, but I’m just trying to understand the world that I want changed that I may fit into it like a T.

***

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, she could not be just talking about the biological sexes male and female. Or when we say the fags are the third sex and lesbians the fourth, there’s nothing biological in the configuration. And, when I say sex as politically re-inventible, that should include gay men recasting themselves as lesbians (as happened in the late 60s in the separatist groups)and friend fD (former Dennis) defying God and the universe remaking herself as authentic glam woman via breast implants. Should this also include those women who are forever casting and recasting themselves: lesbian today, bi tomorrow, dyke next day, wife and mother next?

***

But wife and woman is a moribund state to fall into: not many are lucky enough to survive and make another climb or jump from there. That’s why I much like better the cross-dresser who doesn’t have the hardware to authenticate itself. The struggle, more than the arrival, gives us political and sexual edge.

***

Or what else do we have to make all the difference that we make in the universe?

A head among turnip heads

“This daily news reporting... sometimes I feel like I’d jump on it,” she complains. Perhaps, seeing too that, I, fictionist and sometime essayist, am not overly subjected to the same grind, the same pain. To deal with cold facts day in and day out: the rally at the park, a statement from the Mayor, the Congressman’s privileged speech, the latest resolution from the City Council on the motion for a separate CR for the third sex, the rape victim, the surviving relatives of the Maguindanao Massacre. To hold each in a page and to make it matter: can you do that? I am a fictionist, no deadlines to beat, no gun to my head, no shaking with politicians' greasy hands and no duty to read through dead-in-the marrow manifestos from left and right activists.

I can’t even keep at my once-a-week column. I get blocked. By one thing or another. Or I’m just too lazy for it. I have no stakes in current events: I don’t even watch TV or read the news. And I don’t care, or wish I didn’t. Cabbage journalism I’d like to call it: the poverty of information, the lack of imagination. But isn’t all human affairs like that? Garbage in garbage out, the repetitiousness of it, the so-much talk, the pretense to involvement, the useless comings and goings, the treadmill. Or maybe it’s just the painful consciousness of the audience out there, who, if you run into them while throwing in sardines and noodle packs into your blue grocery basket will ask, What are you doing now? Still that work of yours churning instant propaganda for that tabloid, for that NGO when are you going to write your first novel?

You stare at the words you chomped out of your system, words, always words that often mean nothing to most people, words which you thought stood for your hold of things, your approximation of truths as you grasp them; then the remorse upon seeing them in print, the wrong predicates, the slightest of typos, the imperfect phrasing, the play with words that don’t need playing with. Then you stare at yourself in the mirror: at your own indifference to errors made, to the sloppiness, and your anger and shame for not making every word matter, for not making yourself matter.

Not to think of the pay and the children and young relations who want this and that. The broken radio, the ceiling that needs repainting, the coveted signature dyke shoes, the coveted books. Some days you go to the bank, hand your two-hundred pesos sometimes eight-hundred pehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsos UCPB check in your name to the lady clerk, a former student at ADDU. She smiles up ever so nicely at you as the computer monitor blinks your name reporting you as bad credit agent, an electronic pillory you cannot contest or haul to court or at least banter about at the canteen over coffee and stale white bread.

I am all-sympathy. Yes, Virginia, you should be writing V.S. Naipaul stories, putting out books. Except that she's not Virginia, and Virginia is dead, so is Sylvia. She's just Germelina, she says, and a mother besides.

To live. To write. My God, she’s otherwise awful good, what’s she doing there, a head among turnip heads!

Unmedicated Gargoyle

Writing or not writing, I am all that I am. And yet there’s this, too: that I’m the best thing that ever happened to me, though not to you, sorry.

All contact is harmful. Dennis says so, quoting me. I don’t remember ever saying that. I think I said all contact hurts. But that’s the trouble with quotes. You are bound to be misquoted even by yourself.

***

Brain injury. When I think that I am thousands of brain cells less after that idiot of a guy knocked me down I panic. Then I hurry to pen and paper to put things down at once lest I will lose it, lest tomorrow I will be thousands of brain cells less more if I bang against another damn stupid wall, less sharp and less lethal than when I was last seen.

Oh to be able to inflict harm. Will I come out of it alive?

If we can inflict enough damage, if we can leave enough clue that those who will come after us may pick after us, that should be contribution enough. Oh the future that yearns to be itself. What I wouldn’t give to birth you.

***

You.
And why must I love you. I don’t care about you. I long accepted, first painfully, then bitterly, and finally blissfully, that the two of us can never love the other without making either less than what we each are.

***

Repeat after me: I’m beautiful I’m beautiful damnit
Not quite orginal damnit, Bette Middler said those, not I.
What I want to confess without shame is that
I am so amazed with myself.
I never cease to amaze me.
Even now.
Don’t you think such praise really sounds sincere for once?


***

My darling says I am only my own light. I may be brilliant I may be black, but she wasn’t there when I was trawling my dark, I just made it all up in my head. And neither was I ever there in her jungle of a heart. Love? she asks, askance, putting out her own headlights. What kind of talk is that. I just want a good fuck. How right she is, the friggin dyke.

***

Sometimes it feels like I will not die without seeing the sun. Sometimes it feels like the mid-day sun!

***

If I didn’t wait for my sisters on my way to liberation, they would have tied me. Oh yeah? If they caught up with me I would have not lived.

***

These endless peace conferences. The staunchest of advocates turning their heads away before you could finish like my god oh my god this fuck of a dyke so tiresome will she never finish with her feminism feminism feminism the world has turned several times over and she’s still there in her feminism feminism feminism. ya. the world has turned on its head over and over and now it has its dirty butt up.

***

Dennis is dead. Why is that? Oh to be serviceable. You grow silicon tits. So that you can bake a cake and be praised for it. It doesn’t connect. You cannot be another being for dressing the part: you are just a dress. Putting on new boobs you cannot be less than a pair of boobs, but neither can you go far more than your pair of boobs. I on the other hand want my breasts removed. That’s not mutilation. That’s doing away with unnecessary parts. How nice to be thin like a sliver of light. Tumescence: loss of will to fly and defy. Gravity.

Removing one’s breasts: that will not make me less. Boobs makes me less; a penis lesser so and an ugly freak too. With boobs removed I will be beautiful boy with clits. How perfect. Is that how transsexuals feel after going under the knife? Loren Cameron felt perfect after she removed her breasts, happy as she always was with elongated clits. How about transsexual women who had breast implants, how do they fare? Padded with dead plastic and rubber chips on all the sad watery places. How do lovers make love with silicon breasts? I wish they would tell. But never mind. They probably know I cannot sympathize. I only care about my life.

***

Dear Menses, thank you for visiting me, I had been trying to forget you these last couple of months and just when I thought I had discharged you for good, you suddenly pay me a visit. Please don’t be mysterious: I have no time to play games like that. We are not getting any younger.

They say there are only two sexes: male and female. Then the more you know, the less you know about sexes. Some say it is bio-chemical; some say it’s just genital: you either have gonads or clits. Then others say it’s chromosomal, you are either XY or XXY. And then there’s hormonal: it’s about the amount of estrogens or progesterones in your system that you either have the temper of a man or a woman. I once thought it’s political, and so I liked to tell people my sex is lesbian, dyke, and that’s not female okay? And then these days when my menses just left me or at least took a leave of absence without a by-your-leave by me, I started growing to grow a mustache.

You guys out there, tell me: Is it a triumph of science or of politics?

***

On being fired: What did you hire me for, if you only wanted me to write old platitudes and safe lies?

***

I am not being ironic: I do love the Philippines, country that fucked me crazy. Can you say that of your US of A? the love, I mean; not the fuck.

Footnote to Notre Dame: My foot. They can only pray for themselves and their lives and their future, my life is beyond recall, beyond rewinding and re-recording. It is made without my making it; It just happened by itself!


Oh to be quoted rather than just to quote and quote. And thank you Moira for the quote about the quote.

Outrageous sellouts and atrocious notes

Letters of Leonard Woolf being sold at P375 at NCCC Mall Booksale. In another booksale (at Victoria Plaza) I found Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at P45. Publisher’s or book seller’s revenge?

NCCC Booksale also very recently disposed of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch at P65; Susan Faludi’s Backlash (my third copy) at P15.75 and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! at P35. Early on, I found Kate Millet’s The Sexual Politics at P95, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will Men, Women and Rape (my third or fourth) at P65 and This Bridge Called My Back Writing by Radical Women of Color at P85.

The sad fact about life (mine) is that I would have not gotten these life-changing books if they didn’t first go out of print decades ago that they may be retailed today at sidewalk vendors’ prices. So don’t blame me, dear reader, if the feminist revolution took very long in coming or never happened in the Philippines. Blame ABS-CBN, the chatbox, and cybersex.

Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News I bought at Gaisano South (then JS Gaisano at Ilustre) at P65; then very recently, it was being auctioned at Victoria Plaza Ground Floor for P35. I also found there Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster’s Place, Fannie Flag’s Fried Green Tomatoes, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, along with her The Hundred Secret Senses and The Kitchen God's Wife, all sold at P35 apiece. I don’t have my copy of these treasure books anymore, but I didn’t buy them, just prayed over them that may others who deserve them as I once deserved them would find them. I bought other unread ones instead, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at P15 and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God at P35 and other books of plays (Alan Bennet, August Wilson, Willis Hall) and one on Sanford Meisner, plus a novel by David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, priced at P10 to P65.

Back at NCCC, I found Marge Piercy’s He She It, a book I would recommend as a bible to anyone who thinks about how may revolutions happen in the future. My own copy is with a gay friend-enemy who first refused to read it, then later, refused to return it (after I refused to return her – right, her, not his – treasured Camille Paglia bomber The Sexual Personae Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson unvandalized and unmolested.

I am almost happy with what I’ve got, though I still think a lot of those I lost and rather miss: Nadine Gordimer’s Sport of Nature, Arundhati Roy’s The Gods of Small Things and its Filipino translation deftly done by that UP FQS rad Monico Atienza, now dead.

I also rather miss Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I especially miss her Mrs Dalloway; too bad I lost it before I could even read it (at the time I thought of VW as a little way inaccessible for my rather rough-straits education) and too sad that the literary wanna-be who took off with it did not do better by it or by me.

The Atienza translation was a case of double tragedy and double injury: I lent it to a street dyke who was pretending to go through my books when in fact she was only looking for paper bills I have the habit of using as page markers (it was one of the three four or five paperbacks I had then in the collection that was written in Filipino, the others being Lualhati Bautista Palanca-winning novels Bata, Bata Pa'no Ka Ginawa, Gapo, Dekada 70, and Eleyna S. Mabanglo’s also Palanca-winning poetry book Kung Ibig Mo). This my semi-illiterate dyke friend would tell me later that it was taken by the storm that flattened the shoreline community where she lived. At the time the typhoon struck (it must be that deadly destroyer Ruping), the author-translator was dying of cancer on top of his house getting burned for which he didn’t get sympathy (read as donations) because he didn’t pretend to the humilities that he didn’t feel in the least towards the UP literary and academic community. Bakit nung si Jun Cruz-Reyes ang nasunugan ng bahay, nag-donate sila lahat? he said, as he was autographing the The Communist Manifesto poster that I untacked from his office wall while he wasn't looking. (When I informed him about my theft all he said was that it belonged to a fellow faculty member occupying the other table and that he will autograph it anyway.) I did not inform him that I had also untacked another thing from the board as he was doing the autograph, a news item and a picture of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and novelist. My guess was, the Jelinek piece was done by the lone female occupant of that faculty room, who would surely miss it, and take to task the two other guys, Who ripped down the news cutout off this wall!!!???!!! Did you?!? Did you!?! Earlier, a little orgasmic over his ouvre, Atienza had bragged: Sa kanila na iyong one million centennial novel award nila, they can have all the Palancas they like, basta ako nasalin ko sa Filipino ang nobela ni Arundhati Roy. I imagine Karen's ex Duke Sumthin', an Atienza follower, nodding: Olrayt. Saludos, maestro.

Books I still treasure for one reason or another? Sydney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels and Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tide. Then all of Kate Millet, of course: (TSP, Flying, The Loony Bin Trip), Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, James Francis Warren’s The Sulu Zone, Cesar Ruiz-Aquino’s Word Without End and his prose collection Chronicles of Suspicion, Lia Lopez-Chua’s The Fate of All Progeny, Merlie Alunan's Hearthstone, Sacred Tree, Dolores Feria’s Project Sea Hawk The Barbed Wire Journal and her other book The Long Stag Party. I still hurt for losing the latter, and would be happy if I’d get Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There Notebook on Poetry and Politics back.

Books I haven’t got around to seeing as yet? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Mary Wollestonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Somehow I never got to read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in its entirety while it was within the vicinity and also Vladimir Lenin’s The National Question. I also don’t have any of Gertrude Stein, want to get hold of Agnes Smedley's China's Red Army Marches and couldn’t wait to read Zadie Smith, Jelinek Elfriede and all of Jean Genet (who I only happened to know through Kate Millet and Marge Piercy, though God knows every little theft I make, I do in tribute to his life and art). I think Rushdie a goner now, and that Satanic Verse not as good a book as The Gods of Small Things, Haroun and the Sea of Stories knots behind Lewis Carroll's Alice, but I still want to read Midnight Children which, at the time it was making the rounds of activist circles, was a sure miss. Other misses I’ve made: Nabokov’s Lolita, Doris Lessing’s Ben in the World, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Dee Brown’s no never mind that.

Finally I propose that a better tract be written to improve on or replace Philippine Society and Revolution, thank you.

Women Who Drink to Forget

photo: Marc Calumpang





story by Paul Brinkley-Rogers


I asked the young woman from Venezuela if I could buy her a drink.
She told me it was her 21st Birthday.

I am a woman, not a girl, she said with a flutter of her eyelashes…..Can you imagine what that means?

I only drink Amaretto with a mix of Grenadine and lime over ice, she told me. And it has to have two cherries on the top.

Oh, I said. That is your own special drink?

No, she said. It is the drink of my family in Caracas.

The women in my family started drinking when Hugo Chavez became President, and they haven’t stopped.

Dios mio, I said. He has been President for 8 years. The women in your family have been doing a lot of drinking.

Yes, she said, as she studied the Amaretto being poured into a glass by the bartender. It had a copper tone to it, exactly like her skin.

And now it is my turn to drink, she said. I am a woman, I can do that.

You mean you had to wait until you were 21, I asked.

Oh yes, she said. Those are the rules. You have to be old enough to know why you are drinking this particular drink. We call it the “Alo Presidente” (Hello Mr. President). It is a very strong drink. You drink to forget. My mother told me that.

You mean you and your family do not like Hugo Chavez, I asked.

Ambar gulped and upended the glass. She slammed it down on the bar and waved her hands over her head. She looked as if she was about to deliver a speech, maybe a long one, like Mr. President.

No. I do not like him, she said indignantly. He is a dictator. My family has horses. We play polo. Hugo Chavez is trying to take our land. I can’t wait to get back to Caracas so I can be with the women in my family. They gather in the sala (living room): my mother, my two grandmothers, my seven aunts, my great aunts, my cousins and my three sisters. And then they drink.

I had a vision of Ambar (that is Spanish for Amber – I was named for the stone, she explained) and all the other women in the Monroy family upending their Alo Presidentes in unison, as if the act of drinking was an act of exorcism.

A gathering of witches, I thought….No. No. If they looked like Ambar they were much too good looking to be witches. Although, on the other hand, some women I have known have been bewitching.

She ordered another Alo Presidente. The bartender, who had just checked her ID to be sure about her age, looked concerned. Are you going to be ok, he asked her.

Look, she said, forcefully. This is the drink of the women in my family. It is traditional. We know what we are doing. We drink to forget.

I wondered what the men in her family were doing while their women were drinking. I asked Ambar about that.

They know better than to hang around, she said. We don’t even have to tell them to get lost.

What's wrong with Venezuela, she demanded. What's wrong with our men? Why don't they do something....about Hugo Chavez?

I thought about asking if the women drink because they are disappointed in their men. Or if they drink to rob Hugo Chavez of the opportunity to bombard them with his rhetoric. Or both.

But I did not.

I was relieved when Ambar’s friends materialized to join her birthday celebration. They were all from Venezuela. They were talking very very fast. They were very very loud. They did not caution her about drinking.

You were privileged, her friend Adriana whispered to me. You were there when she became a woman. Don't forget that.