On the eve of Mother’s Day, I dreamt I was eating huevos rotos.

I’d found myself in the kitchen of my Iberian fantasies: it was a large, earthy space, with legs of ham hanging by the fireplace, and tubs of coffee and spices (saffron, cinnamon, curry and paprika) stacked neatly beside the freezer. Thick slabs of dark chocolate lay on the counter, while five baby lobsters were trying desperately to claw their way out of a pot of boiling water on the stove.

At the dining table were generations of circus people: all of them had hearty appetites, their bodies, strong and sinewy. When they laughed, the sounds they made were like flocks of birds clanging into church bells, wing and peal and ring and bang! They liked quoting Thoreau and the Bible in between mouthfuls of bacon and milk.

The acrobats, a whole family of them, had long, lean limbs, perfect for swinging from the faux canopy of vines above the stage. The elephant lady was a very pretty midget, with eyes the color of dirty sapphires, and red bows were woven through her blonde hair. The ringmaster was a veritable giant, so tall that the top of his head nearly brushed the ceiling, yet when he was offstage he spoke very softly, so you had lean in close to be able to listen to him.

What I am eating in the dream is delicious. The huevos have the perfect consistency, neither too soft or too hard, and the eggs feel light and clean in my mouth. When I wake up, I am pleasantly surprised to find out that it was not all a dream.

In our real-life kitchen, my mother is simmering potatoes in olive oil (I can smell them from here), and she is whipping the eggs with milk and paprika (I can hear the fury of her fork from my room).

It will be breakfast soon.

As Wilma rips the hair off your delicate parts, she will regale you with stories about her interesting life. A single mother (“pero no regrets di vah!“, she’ll chuckle), she is putting her kids through school as a freelance waxer or “bulbolizer” (that’s what she calls herself). She has been doing this since she came back to Manila from Saudi Arabia in 1992.

She learned how to do waxing there, where “husbands will not have sex with their wives if they even have one stray strand of bulbol.” Though Wilma is based in Pampanga, she comes to Manila twice a week to wax her clients, some of whom include Brazilian models, beauty editors, celebrities (Ruffa Guttierez), and the like. Thus, her services are strictly by appointment.

She works very fast: part of the pain of waxing, I’ve learned, is the length of time associated with the process. The faster the waxing, the less the pain. Though she moves (or rips) quickly, she is also very thorough. She will find hair where you thought there was none, then remove it faster than you can blink! She uses wax that she’d made herself, out of all-natural organic ingredients. It smells wonderful, and does not leave a sticky residue on your skin, as other waxes can sometimes do. She was able to wax my legs, my (unmentionables), my upper lip AND thread my brows in less than 30 minutes!

The best part about her are her rates: P800 for EVERYTHING, top to bottom! Brazilian Bare will charge you P2500 just for a Brazilian wax, at wala pang tip yon! Also, she will go to your house, as long as you schedule an appointment with her at least a week in advance.

To book an appointment, text Wilma Cruz at 0917-8059176.

The Good Boy

I’ll never learn how to take off my shoes and let the city

bite my feet

I won’t get drunk under bridges, I won’t make mistakes

of style.

I accept this destiny of ironed shirts,

I get to the movies on time, I give up my seat to old ladies.

Extended derangement of the senses make me sick, I prefer

toothpaste and towels. I have my vaccinations.

Look at this lousy lover, incapable of jumping into a

fountain

to catch you a little red fish

in front of the outraged eyes of cops and nannies.

- Julio Cortázar

Thanks to Butch Pérez for the heads up!

(click on photos to enlarge)

29 March

 

600 pm Derek Soriano @ Silverlens Gallery

630 pm Bencab @ Alliance Française

 

 

Who’s the best (humor) writer of our time? In my opinion, hands down, it’s David Sedaris.

I’ve been a Sedaris fan since 2001, when I first discovered his scathingly funny monologue about his experiences as Crumpet the Elf in Macy’s NY on NPR. Click here to listen to more of his work. Here’s also one of my favorite essays by him, “Rooster At The Hitching Post”.

Sedaris visited Manila around November 2006. I’d come to his very last book signing in Powerbooks Live rather late, so I had to squeeze in behind the throng of fans who’d already taken over half of the bookstore. Like me, most of them were carrying not one, not two, but all five of his books, which they were hoping to have him sign. In the back, I bumped into my friend Owie Badilla, who had come to the event with his colleagues.

“They’ve run out of slots, my dear,” Owie explained, “I have the last number.” He held up the small laminated card that bore the number “250″: it was the very last one they had given out that day.

I knew that Sedaris was scheduled to fly back to his home in France that same night. I’d lost my chance.

Owie must have seen that look on my face. Overcome with pity, he handed me his ticket and said:”here, take it.”

Oh joy! I hugged him, then I hugged my other friend Mimi Tecson, who was then the marketing director of Powerbooks, and David Sedaris’ own personal tour guide while he was in Manila.

Meanwhile, Sedaris was still up on stage, talking about the adventures he’d had here: his time at the sabungan, where he couldn’t quite figure out the mechanics of the game, and how puzzled he was that everyone, everywhere kept calling him Sir – “I’d never been Sir-ed so much in my life before!”

I waited in line for about 3 to 4 hours. During that time, I got to chat up fellow Sedaris fans, all of whom were smart, funny and slightly perverse, in a good way. There was that corporate lawyer who’d also come out with his own book of humorous essays, the marketing director of the Konrad Adenauer Center for Journalism, a stand-up comic, a ventriloquist, an English teacher in Miriam who by night played guitar for a band called Los Chupacabras, and more.

When it was my turn to have my copies signed, I saw how tired David looked. Behind his glasses, his eyes were watery, and his brow was knotted over with sweat. Nevertheless, David smiled at me and asked me what I did for a living.

“I write,” I said.

He winked and replied, “You and I both know that’s not a real job.”

We laughed. In my copy of his fourth book, Naked, he drew a pair of shorts on the title page, and an arrow pointing to it, above which he wrote “To Ginny, my shorts.”

His autographs in my other books read:

Any friend of Mimi’s is a friend of mine!

Masaya ako.

And finally:

To Ginny, I look forward to reading your book.

Photo by Robert Banks.

The syrup caramelizing in my
mother’s pan,
as she made leche flan
for my brother’s baptism.

It burned,
the boiling sugar turning the bottom black,
so we had to go to Aling Nena’s bakery
on the corner street
To buy cake,
that no one would eat anyway,
because during the mass,
one of my uncles collapsed in church,
clutching at his heart,
as Faith by George Michael blared
on the radio

He would die,
Ugly, wretched,
And fat.

And so

My brother grew up wild
He never learned how to speak
The doctors called him abnormal
And told us to be gone with him.

But we could not.

He threw fits,
At the drop of a key –
Shuddering,
whenever wind blew into his room.
He feared strangers,
Recoiling from human touch.

My mother would not show us her tears.

All will be well, she’d say,
Her nails digging into her palm
As she explained to
Her high society friends
Whose diamonds dripped from their ears

What exactly was wrong with
Her son.

They nodded politely,
Their eyes looking above our heads
Into the distance
That they could not reach

That few people were ever meant to

Yet

One thing could calm my brother:
My mother’s thick, milky leche flan,
When she would do it right,
When it wouldn’t burn,
But instead come out bright and golden
Like Manna from heaven,
Bubbling over the pot,
Filling our kitchen
With the scent of sweet sugar and honey -

And my brother,
For a quarter of a second
Between one breath and the next,
Enough time for God to create
The Universe –
Would be Happy.

January 29 2007

# 1

She is feeding him chocolate cake.

It is warm and creamy, the cake, but the boy is not very far off himself. Very soon, she will have to wake up. 6 o’ clock is the hour at which she will haul her tired body out of bed, to begin another day, hacking away at her soul. There is work to be done in every corner of her world.

She brushes the thought away – reality can be so dreary – and burrows her feet deep into dream mud.

I’ll disappear soon.

Don’t. Stay.

It’s thirty minutes to six.

Lean closer.

As she moves to obey him, her arms tilt the table, and all their cutlery falls to the floor. Miraculously, the cake is able to float, plate-free, above the forks. She takes the chocolate in her mouth – it is almost liquid sex, this cake – and kisses the boy. Her tongue has become the spoon. Even as she opens her eyes to leave the dream, she keeps giving him cake, over and over again.

“It was hot in the middle of the jungle,” 19-year-old H.M. laughs.

When he was in Grade 5, his family was forced to flee their home in Basilan. For the nth time, Abu Sayaff troops and military men had overrun their village. His mother, shoving aside men in fatigues and their armalites, shouted at H.M. to “go upstairs to fetch (her) make-up kit.” For him, that time of his life, even with all that war and chaos, was “fun”. His family was whole, and they were content.

At 13, he was sent to study high school in Ateneo de Zamboanga, where he says he “grew to love the Jesuits, and appreciate their way of thinking.” There, away from his family and everything he knew, he had to learn how to fend for himself.

The boy had always known he was different, but with the uneasy stirrings of adolescence, he felt even more estranged from the rest of his small, insular, fiercely conservative hometown.

It was with a Jesuit priest that he found his true self. For the young, sensitive H.M. who had never been particularly close to his father, the priest became his foster parent in Zamboanga. After school and between breaks, H.M. would often come to talk with him and seek his advice.

H.M. had always struggled with his identity: he could not understand why he had always been attracted to boys instead of girls. In rural Mindanao, such feelings were considered taboo, forbidden, unheard-of, unmentionable, Not-Good. He tried to date girls, most of whom flocked to him anyway because of his good looks and easy charm. Try as he might, he could only bring himself to feel friendship and brotherly affection for them.

The priest helped him process his feelings, enabling H.M. to come out about his sexuality to his family. “(He) helped me accept who I was as a person,” H.M. explains, “I could not have done this without him.” Grateful to the Ateneo and the Jesuits, H.M. decided to take up Information Design in the Ateneo de Manila University.

While H.M. was in the second semester of his freshman year, bad news arrived from home: their family business, a small ice plant long patronized by the fishermen on their island, was failing. Earlier that year, a Taiwanese investor had come to Basilan to put up his own ice plant. There, thanks to its more efficient machinery, ice was sold in larger quantities at a cheaper cost. Unable to compete, H.M.’s family inevitably lost many of their most valuable patrons.

H.M.’s family now owes more than 5 million pesos to relatives, friends, banks and creditors. It seems uncertain that H.M. will be able to continue his studies in the Ateneo.

Shortly thereafter, H.M. sank into deep depression. His parents fought constantly over money: another kind of war invaded their home, the specter of ruin hung over everything, so that even the smallest disagreements over lunch menus and gas money nearly came to blows.

To get by, H.M. had to sell his laptop in order to pay his tuition fees last semester. As a freelance graphic designer, he is slowly earning more money on his own. Though he is only 19 years old, he has already been able to successfully design print campaigns for several restaurants in Greenbelt and three new clothing brands.

Also, eventually, through therapy at the Center for Family Ministries, H.M. was able to recover. His parents, however, have not been able to weather the storm: they are now separated.

His mother chose to leave for New Jersey to work as a nurse for newborns. H.M. and his brothers do not know when or if she will ever be able to come home.