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?"

Kwangingak

The bird. Somethingto be sad about. Where will you be by then? he asked. In my goddamn life, I said. Gift-giving, self-giving, the bastard son of a gun. Mad with an inner hunger and there is no one else to know. The bird bitten by the dog, the forest guard put it to my care. Who does he think he is, Tom Hanks of the Green Mile?

Count me dead, Grandmother said. She was negotiating for her life’s barest needs.Take me with you. Couldn't tell her I have no house I have no money and there is no man.

Is this the way to look for love? Stalking the gasoline station, lugging your white shirts under an arm? Like I was your Filipino housemaid. He looks happy the ease of one who never runs out of things coming his way. So much Literature and so little life, we know so much and understand so little we cannot grow cannot move beyond the walls of our self-imposed silences. Amazing that the scraps survived him survived me. Kwangingak.

Old friends old sores

Old and new, new and old, intones one poet, in a poem about gifts of love and friendship. Which brings to mind a gay critic-friend’s more cynical take of it: “My lovers are disposable, though reusable and recyclable, but my friends are not.”

Thankfully, my own swivel door hasn’t been that busy gorging and disgorging people, and this year had been astonishingly good for me. Made more enemies out of old ones, found some new ones, mostly incorporeal, like minds I met over at FB. Then the old friends lost suddenly materialized: Sheilfa! It’s been ages! You still remember me??? Some bringing good news, others their old sores; some as old suitors wearing new suits; most went worse, dumbed down by the years of car shopping. A few got sharper, and colder.

We somehow crossed path again, strangely, amazingly, and we’re still making it up. Talisa forgives: the lover, the fat around her belly, the oncoming winter; calls it ladder of years. Lia checks in, bearing all her 56 years, a gift of an herb garden growing out of the slime you both once stood in. Mimi looks on; today is her 44th birthday and she snaps, eyes bloodshot, wielding a knife her old self with those old words, always wary wary of me, I may fall, I may self-destruct again, love should be easy, not hard.

I wave back. I’m in Jolo, she is not, among the ruins of unfought wars picking up what I must. This is my foreign country, my exile, my found place. I love. And won't be lost again.

Growing up

Growing up in Doruelo country is a bad preparation for a study in Marawi, though I recall no such apprehensions when I was first presented the opportunity. It was April or May of 1980 and I was on my first job right after high school as a salesgirl at a tiny bazaar in the Supermarket area in Cotabato City, selling fake Levi pants and RTWs, and here came my sister Sheila with a thick wad of paper postmarked Mindanao State University, Marawi City. I was sixteen and my world was my Grandmother’s house in the barrio and the rice fields in another barrio where I would sometimes go with my mother and an aunt, to weed a neighbor’s farm or join a harvest team. Marawi, then as now, did not sound like big beautiful city, but for a confined, provincial girl, it boded well, like a promise of a new horizon. I recall my Lola’s tears, my elders’ fears: Kamusliman, they kept on saying, which meant Moros-infested, a country of traitors: it was no safe place for me. My mother was standing by the window, not saying anything to discourage me, while my cousins surrounded me, proffering all kinds of warnings and good advice; if she had her way, I knew she would send me to the best school: all her life all she wanted was an education for herself, which Grandmother denied her, she said, and so she got stuck with the six of us and a husband who was a philanderer until he was gunned down, yes, by a Muslim he made a score with, and yes, on his way to see his woman, while walking along Magallanes Street down across Dawn's Hotel.

The wad of papers said partial scholarship, and stipulated free tuition, free lodgings in the college dormitory, book allowance and a monthly stipend of two hundred compared to the full scholar’s three hundred which, considering the impecunious poverty we were used to, was generous enough. I could hear my mother’s heartbeat going for it: Get it! Get out of here! Get away!
 

It was an eight-hour boat ride aboard M/L Farida from the docks of Cotabato to the docks of Pagadian, and another seven hours across a rough road between Pagadian and Iligan. I was with three or four other kababayans, Engineering students in the higher year of the school I was going to. I remember them distinctly well, mainly because they were provincial like me, they all came from Libungan, a sleepy town next to ours slinking along rice paddies, Rolly, Elma, Rita, Virgie.  I don’t know what became of them now, except for Elma who was to be shot on the same or maybe another Pagadian-bound boat we had no choice but board, M/L Aida, by a boyfriend from the Army, many years later, for breaking it up with him.  Rolly was a friend, helpful during that first trip I made, telling me about the sights I would see, the things I would find, like it was a good beautiful place I was going to with them. Virgie sat by, and would tell me later that Rolly got a little crush on me. Rolly never had the courage to proposition me, probably thought I would marry into wealth and prosperity and wouldn’t do to suffer him or anyone else; it was Virgie who would proposition me, later, way way down the years, after one marriage and one miscarriage and a couple of live-in arrangements with girls she got to know abroad, in the Middle East and Malaysia before jail and deportment. In the dorm on campus she used to play bodyguard to me, shooing away the Maranao tomboys who couldnt wait to shag me.  

At dumalaw pa kayo

Imagine entering a Muslim household in the month of the Ramadhan and before you could make a customary greeting the host greets you with Putangina! As in Putangina, kung hindi pa kayo dumalaw dito hindi ko pa mapapaayos ang CR ko!

self-portraits

hitting ground head first

We all need a jumpstart in life and if I had a springboard, from where I made a first plunge, head first, before I got to other depths, MSU Marawi would be it.

June 1980, Princess Lawanen Hall. At the receiving hall while waiting for the dorm manager to have myself registered, I was introduced to a bubbly senior girl who was there for a visit and how she talked non-stop about MSU’s glory days. I got to asking about student activism on campus, because a teacher back in Notre Dame high school, who used to catch me at the school lib reading Wakasan Komiks hidden under cover of a newspaper, and who took my defense for insubordination when I talked back to my adviser his wife, had me properly forewarned: Maraming aktibista doon. Baka hindi ka na mag-aral doon, ha. And this senior girl she yapped on about MSU’s activist days until she got to the plane hijackers whom she knew by their first names.

They were their kuyas, she said, they used to serenade her, and yes, those were the days when scholars were truly brilliant, truly good, and these kuyas of hers, oh they just wanted to get to communist China, who was then enforcing a closed-door policy to protect its economy, and so in March of 1971, the six of them took this flight and announced a hijack, two at the pilot’s cabin ordering at gunpoint the captain to land in Canton, while the others did some singing and guitar playing to allay the fears of the shocked passengers. The plane did land in Canton, southern China, of course, and the Chinese authorities let the students stay in the country, and let the plane fly back to the Philippines, and no one got hurt, except perhaps the Marcos government.

That was the first time I heard of that hijack story because in the 70s you really did not know a lot about high-noon leftist adventurism, all your cousins ever cared about was Elvis Presley and the Beatles and that was enough to glue you to their sides. You only realized something was wrong when people started whispering about curfew and Martial Law and your neighbors the policemen came with the Army and made your Grandfather surrender the Carbine and the paltik pistol he took time and trouble to wrap in plastics and bury six feet under because these Marcos guys standing in his backyard were said to have this metal detector and knew there was a gun in the vicinity. So as you listened to this Ate praising her long-gone aktibis kuyas, you remember distinctly that day the Army disarmed your Lolo and somehow you wanted to get hold of something lethal which was nowhere to find as yet on campus. Nine years later, when you would be volunteering for a human rights work seeking the ouster of Marcos, you would tell your senior office manager and political mentor who also happened to be your one-time Political Science teacher on campus about this hijack and because she was from UP, she just dismissed it as one of those tricks the Young Turks pulled up in their time, like in UP, she said, they had these so-called Dilliman Commune. She was oh so austere for those not-so-austere times.