40 Days

When I heard “Don’t Make It My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle blaring from the living room, I knew it was 6 p.m., and my dad’s day was about to end. 

The 1977 hit single is one of the many songs in my dad’s playlist, which I had collated on a USB. In the final years of his life, as his body got weaker every minute, his scant energy was spent listening to music. He pressed the play button at exactly 8 a.m. and didn’t press stop until evening crept in. 

The effect became a lesson in harmony and timing: Every minute and every hour had a dedicated soundtrack. Each song and time of day were so in sync that wall clocks became useless fixtures. 

The mornings were animated by Air Supply classics like “Even The Nights Are Better,” “Every Woman In The World,” and “Here I Am.” When Don McLean’s fragile vocals come in, followed by Loggins & Messina’s hearty country ballads, dishes and utensils started clinking for lunch. Later in the afternoon, as the living room turned into a sauna, The Beatles kept our cool. I made sure I was near the speakers when “With a Little Help from My Friends” played. “And I Love Her,” my dad’s song for my mom, was sometimes played thrice in a row.

Forty days without my dad, when “Reminiscing” by Little River Band comes on, I see him in my mind’s eye eating dinner and drinking milk. His favorite vegetable was okra. Instead of the recommended three scoops of powdered milk, I added two more because he likes it very dense and creamy. 

The sound and silence corresponded to his presence and absence. When the music blasted from the speakers, we knew he was in his wooden chair, bobbing his head to the rhythms of The Beatles. Sometimes he sang along with his gravelly voice. When the music was reduced to a gentle hum, we knew the wooden chair was empty, and my dad was either taking his afternoon nap in the room nearby or taking a bath.

Since my dad passed, sometimes the music is on, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I turn the volume up because the silence is too tough to bear. Sometimes I turn it off to confront it. I do not want to debase grief. I know that the sound of the future will be eternal hollow echoes and occasional chirping from lost birds in the living room. Music and silence in the living room will only mean life and departure. If I see someone sitting on the wooden chair, I know it isn’t my old man.

Is there a manual for mourning? The grieving process involves friends and family, but once the bottles are empty and the stories end, I’m all alone in my room, doused in deep melancholy and regret, praying that I see him in my dreams. 

It’s the only opportunity I have to talk to him again. Our last extended conversation was about a 100-year-old man who is still alive and kicking. My dad was amazed at the man’s diet while I sarcastically told him I’d be happy to die at 60.

I wish we talked about something else. Like his crooked teenage adventures in Caloocan. Or his random tips about exercise and fitness. Maybe we didn’t have to talk at all and watched Godfather 2 for the umpteenth time and simultaneously leaned toward the screen as John Cazale’s genius with a reclining chair unraveled.

I miss him every day. I fill the torpor of listless Saturdays with our photo albums to reminisce on the days that were. It’s difficult to find a solo photo of him. He was always surrounded by friends and relatives or lugging a baby. 

The photos featuring him diminished as the years passed, both in our photo albums and digital archives. I became less involved in his life and vice versa. Is this part of growing up or just mere recklessness? Why do we blame childishness and puberty for taking people for granted? 

Every night, as tears blur my eyes, I am paraphrasing wishes in my head. I wish I did this. I wish I did that. I wish there were more days we were together than we were apart. I wish that when he heard “Don’t Make It My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle for the final time, I was there, humming along with him.

Three weeks without my father

It’s been three weeks since my dad passed. I think about him often; when I wake up and realize there’s no music playing in the living room, the minute moments of inactivity in afternoons, and those long sleepless nights.

The other night, I was revising the story I told friends and family who attended the wake, which contains the cause of my dad’s death, his declining health, his final years, the last time I saw him alive, and my final lengthy conversation with him. 

In my head, I was reordering the sequence of events, choosing the right words, and debating if it was right to add bits of humor to the ‘script.’ For friends and family who met and knew him, I was refreshing their memory of my late father. For those who never met him, it was like telling the tale of the greatest man I’ve ever known.

It’s been tough seeing an empty seat in the living room. I feel like I’m enduring the first four stages of grieving (denial, anger, bargaining, depression) all at once. I’ve never experienced this kind of pain. Weekly and daily spooks such as opening my work e-mail, the countdown to big meetings, and night drives along dark and seedy streets have suddenly become trivial matters. I feel like nothing can ever hurt or scare me again.

Dad’s steps

Boys in the blue

“Now run, run away from the boys in the blue
Oh, my car smells like chocolate”
—The 1975

I didn’t have a lot of chances to say ‘no’ growing up. When my dad told me to take a nap every summer afternoon, I closed my eyes and pretended to snore. When I didn’t want to memorize the multiplication table, my mom enumerated the beauties of precision, putting me in a hypnotic trance. When I begged that I didn’t want to go to school, I cried and cried en route to campus and then sang the Philippine National Anthem with swollen eyes. 

Now you would think that because I developed into some sort of sycophant or yes man but fortunately, no. I’m a generally gracious individual, but I know when to put my foot down when I need to, amid the discomfort of others. Today’s topic involves such a scenario, though both parties walked off happy, albeit with beads of sweat on their foreheads.

If you drive or have ridden a car with a scofflaw in front of the steering wheel, you’ve probably encountered ticket booklet-wielding men dressed in blue. They’re sneaky. They hide in the bushes, behind pillars, and loiter under stoplights. When they make eye contact, your heart stops beating for a moment.

Instinct tells me to pull my window down, then put my guard up. The demon inside me tempts me to push the gas pedal, but alas, Manila traffic slaps these nasty intentions away. I already know how these encounters go and end, having been flagged multiple times. Yet the feeling of dread and insecurity rolls through my body like a cold shower.

I’ve been caught several times due to a suite of violations, including beating the red light, counterflowing along a one-way street, and turning left onto a no-left turn street, among others. The latest was for violating The Anti-Distracted Driving Act while I was crawling through EDSA’s infernal traffic.

My mom was calling, and like I’ve done in previous instances (even when cruising 80–100 kph along expressways), I grabbed my phone and we conversed. When mom calls, you answer. Those are the rules. It was one of the reasons I offered to the enforcer. To be honest, I admitted outright that I did violate the law, but I was hoping that he, who I assumed had a loving relationship with his mother, would let me off the hook.

Instead, I had to pick up my jaw off the floor when he told me my violation had a corresponding P5,000 fine. And amid a rapidly evolving world with tech developments left and right meant to streamline our daily lives, I, for reasons he mumbled through his teeth, cannot settle the payment online. He told me that I’d have to go to a center somewhere in Makati and hand over 5,000 bucks.

The enforcer noticed my jaw was already precariously hanging from my face, so he “lowered” my infraction. “Let’s change it to the violation of the seatbelt act,” he said and noted it had a corresponding fine of P1,000. That was already a win for me. He knows of the budget struggles of working stiffs like me. But then he reiterated that I must go to the depths of Makati to settle the fine—a major inconvenience for me, who lives (and will probably die) in Quezon City. 

I was already calm at this point – relaxed enough to access my memory bank filled with my *ahem* few encounters with the law. I had laid out my reasons and admitted I was wrong. But history tells me that these encounters can be settled once and for all with a clincher “Is it possible to settle the payment here?”

And off I went and dashed—I mean, dragged—my car to the sunset with my driver’s license tucked inside my leather wallet that’s now a few bills thinner. After about a two-kilometer crawl, traffic almost came to a complete halt several meters from an establishment proudly displaying a Philippine flag. I wanted to record a video of how the flag flitted in the wind like a free spirit. But I couldn’t decide what filter to use. Besides, I only had 50 bucks then. 

Instead, just like the old days, I hummed the Philippine National Anthem with bloodshot and watery eyes. I love the Philippines.

P.S.

The only time my driver’s license was confiscated was on a one-way street in Makati. It was my first time driving along the city for my first-ever job interview. Navigation systems like Waze or Google Maps already existed then, but Caveman Me stepped into combat without a sharpened tool. The enforcer was stone-faced throughout the negotiation. He didn’t give a fuck about my big day or my mother. He didn’t flinch even after I unloaded the clincher.

Sparring

Loneliness is that driblet that seeps through
Your neurons after you touch gloves.

In the next 180 ticks, there is no escape
From the man whom you barely know,

Yet is fuelled by the same obsessions
And devious intent. Fate’s precision waits

For you to reach the peak of your consciousness
Because lessons are best learned when

Volatile. Karma is sweetest when you
Expect it. The first blow to your head

Will not sting. It will be just like a pillow
Fight with cushions loaded with hollow blocks.

Dumpling Drama

You can find me inside a hole in the wall, sweat
Molding from my brows, the way kitchen grease
Loiters in the air like a sleazy proposition
I’m resting on a wobbly stool, leaning on
A warm window, waiting for grace

Flies fatter than raisins relish the appetite
Did a roach just crawl up my leg? Or was it a rat,
Stretching its fangs?
Only the stomach squeals. It is mad but it is
Composed. I know this world. Galaxies away from
Bland prime ribs and fake American accents

Growing behind fortified gates has
Not disintegrated my soul into
Soft gold. Milk and honey, wine for water?
How about Chinoy chicken and crispy
Fried dumplings doused
In MSG, crystalline as shabu?

Paint this perfect picture of
Acrid mami, enveloped in steam. How I let it
Settle on the surface of my
Tongue and allow its miasmic
Charge to disarm my sense of lucidity
Paos as white as snow, soft
As heaven, stuffed with asado
Shreds, served by a waitress blasting Visayan-tinged
Curses at her colleague is my
Vision of loveliness

This is not a hypnosis exhibition. I am most
Conscious when hakaw, bathing in a sinister
Black sauce, is dissolving in my mouth.
Understand this predilection for perfect symmetry and
For Hong Kong Milk Tea

Sales spiels are dead
Echoes inside a hollow stomach.
Like a languid dream, I walked into
This ramshackle, inhaled the
Smoke like a fiend to reach illumination

Food and fornication on old glossy
zines are sickly cliches. Why compare the
Gastronomical affair with sex when
There’s no chewing and
And hardly any swallowing?

Death is more apt. It is precise, unrelenting, the way
Hot yellow lava pao invokes patience. Allow my
Heartbeat to flatline, allow me to lay on this
Mud-streaked floor as I atone for my
Gluttonous traumas with my belly up, facing
the Chinese masters and daemons

On Brendan Fraser and Hollywood’s addiction to immediacy

So Brendan Fraser won best actor at the 2023 Oscars for his role in “The Whale.” This was the grand conclusion of the clichéd narrative that Fraser was exiled from Hollywood after The Mummy fame due to some off screen controversies. My awareness is only limited to what happens on the silver screen, particularly Fraser’s nuanced portrait of Alden Pyle — the principal character in the second film iteration of “The Quiet American” — whom the seminal novelist Graham Greene crafted as a “face with no history.”

His recognition in Darren Aronofsky’s film, as merited as it is, feels like a consolation to his performance in Philip Noyce’s 2002 film. He got snubbed in the political drama due the award ceremonies’ addiction to immediacy, which is not how art operates. Some great works need time to ripen. Multiple viewings need to be sandwiched between bottles of beer, sticks of nicotine, and a sack of life struggles before they sink deeply into our consciousness.

I re-watched the film earlier this afternoon, and I’m still in awe at how he transforms from an American douchebag to an ordinary human craving for and lost in love. Is it his perfectly round eyes, which illuminate like a robust moon amid a black sky? Is he a plyometric sage that’s why he’s able to utilize his hefty build to render emotions without words in wide angles? His understated performance is as captivating, mysterious, and arresting as the acts of Robert de Niro in “Jackie Brown,” Rachel McAdams in “Spotlight” and the million roles of Tom Hardy. 

There’s no room for subtlety in Hollywood. You have to “disappear into your role” or seamlessly emulate the voice, mannerisms, and intonations of a cultural icon in a biopic to be heralded as a major thespian (That’s why Adam Sandler only got his respect after PTA’s “Punch Drunk Love”). Of course, being at one with the zeitgeist also helps. This makes the Oscars a pliable signpost of specific milieus, not a celebration of the frenzied world of film. 

As for the audience, what does this reveal about them and their predilection for such “transformative” performances? Is great acting really wearing a fat suit or starving yourself until your shoulder blades protrude from the flesh? Have we lost the talent for decrypting human behavior? Do we need to turn red before we’re handed a chill pill? Do tears need to flow from our eyes before a warm embrace? Do we need to see blood and guts before we extend a helping hand?

Panic and get smashed

From punch combos, the coach has introduced a new move into the training program. A move that I have to polish or have my nose flattened like pizza dough. It’s called the weave. The right weave comes after the jab-straight combo, while the left weave comes after the jab-straight-hook combo. After sketching the Nike swoosh with my body, he asks me to follow it up with a mighty right cross or a left hook. 

A minor trouble is that after I weave, my feet are too parallel, which undercuts my balance and therefore, lessens my counterpunching power significantly. It took a few tweaks and repetitions before I became comfortable with it. I need a few more drills before I can rely on it for survival. The blow after the weave had so much leverage that I felt like I smashed the boxing pad into smithereens. Its sweet echo reverberated all over the hollow gym, overriding the thunderous bass kicks of the hip-hop track playing in the background. I felt like a king, the boss of all bosses. Up until the coach mixed it all up.

There was a drill where we semi-simulated a real bout. After the usual punching one-offs or combinations, he would tell me to weave and evade the incoming punches – at the very last millisecond. I didn’t know if I was weaving or running away for dear life. The mitts would graze the tufts of my damp hair. Some blows, if they had an additional modicum of force, would’ve snipped off my skull. I was no longer aware of form or fundamentals. I was backing into the wall and punching bags around us. My feet were all tangled up, and I felt like my shoes were untied. The counterpunches after the weaves hit the mitt right in the middle but did not yield the shotgun blast that I covet. Only the bitter sounds of defeat: a cotton wisp free-falling to a pillow and the coach’s disparaging sneer.

Sweat on my brows

For the past two months or so, I’ve been working out twice a week (boxing and running). It’s the first time since college that I’ve been regularly sweating it out, working my muscles, huffing and puffing, tiring myself out until I have to bend forward to my knees – using my feeble arms for support. I love how the sweat on my forehead trickles down to my eyes, temporarily blinding me. I don’t wipe it off with my hand or glove. I wait for it to drip down further, or run faster or punch harder until they wiggle off my face and dissolve into the wind.

I’m more conscious of my body this time around. I’m at odds with how my lungs are holding up through 5-7 kilometers, though my legs tighten up as soon as I start running. I run with a different array of people in comfort. Some are old, some young, some riding in a wheelchair, some wearing running shoes, and some wearing basketball shoes.

There’s also a handful of runners who are vastly different from us. It looks like they’ve spent considerable time under the sun. They are incredibly light on their feet like clouds around a moon glow, their calves are as thin as my forearm, and have two water bottles tucked in their running pouches. There’s this fantasy to look exactly like them: skin, feet, and equipment.

In boxing, there’s a mounting obsession to master the fundamentals. In a jab-straight-hook combo, I keep reminding myself that after delivering the straight with my right, my left hand should remain at eye level in preparation for the hook. The essence of every punch lies in twisting the hips. I’m getting better at generating power in my straights, whether in one-offs or in combos. With the hook, I don’t feel I’m twisting my legs and hips with precision, especially in jab-straight-hook combinations.

I thought I would be intimidated by the other people in the gym whose straights on the pads sound like gunshots. On the punching bags, their hooks sound like a human chest getting bludgeoned by a sledgehammer. I could feel their beady eyes staring at me while I clumsily worked on the speedbag. But when I turned around, they were minding their business, working on their forms, making sure they were twisting their hips with every blow. We’re more similar than different. There’s a desire for perfection, the acknowledgment and acceptance of our own weaknesses. We all know nothing. And that’s okay.

Pain and the macabre

A relative of mine died a few days ago. His body was found at the back of his car which was parked along a main provincial road. I was told he was stabbed to death. Some idiot uploaded a photo of his corpse. The upper half of his face was swollen. His eyes seem like they endured some blunt trauma. 

It’s like a grisly scene from the movies. But unlike films where its rapid pace or controlled release of information mask or suspend the pain, this one lingered. I was in a daze for a few minutes. I put on Jeffy Buckley’s “Last Goodbye” – the song I want to be played while my corpse is being cremated. There was nothing on my mind as Buckley keened like a delicate banshee. When the song ended, my scant memories of him slowly mushroomed. I didn’t shed tears. But I was in so much pain. 

Perhaps the pain was rooted in my curiosity about his lifestyle. Apart from his gregarious personality and his profession, I didn’t know much about him. Was he affiliated with shady figures? Did he engage in some nefarious activity? The answers will come in the next few days. Hopefully, his truth won’t as complicated as most truths.