This is the last month in a thousand years, and there’s four more days before the new millennia. I haven’t caught the infection of that “millennium fever,” of which people had made a big ballyhoo about. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always thought of time as irrelevant, and I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I am alive. Even more, I know that one day, I will just die and people will keep on awaiting balls of fire to fall from the sky and the seven angels to blow the trumpets of the apocalypse – wasting their time instead of living. A few days back, some high school friends and I traveled to Pampanga to visit another friend, his kid and his wife. We decided that because the night before, we chanced upon talking about him in between beer and a bottle of Lambanog. Seeing him with a three week old baby cradled in his arms, we received a lucid indication that we all were less younger. There’s no longer anything flabbergasting about it. He asked us if we wanted to go fishing or if we wanted to see the sunset. This made us all laugh because fishing and watching the sunset was apart from ordinary human affairs as we know it. But after shoveling wet clods for worms, we found ourselves fishing. We caught nothing but he made us take home what caretakers of the pond just caught. We went to D.N.’s home at Alabang to have them grilled in the lawn. Each of us must have drank eight to ten bottles of beer. The moon which bathe us that night was the first full moon in a winter solstice for one hundred years. It was almost something like a ritual, in the company of my most wonderful friends, with another friend having us fancied as, “mandirigma.”
Malate, My Malate. For the past year or two, Malate’s popularity increased and spread like an electric jolt. It moves so fast, even strangely, like an organic movement, that something else seems to decay or completely disappear. There are new bars popping up like mushrooms. The lines at convenience stores selling beer getting longer in every street and the price is beginning to hit the ceiling. Something seems to be lost every time an old house is transformed into an establishment. No one is there to live and breathe and appreciate the life of the place during the day. I just don’t want the place to become to a completely commercial area. That would kill the real thrill, the identity of the place before it’s completely lost. It is still the place for my long late afternoon walks, along arched trees and houses, falling leaves, tall lamp posts, their orange lamps, the last embers of sunlight and the first moon beams.
The last time I was in Malate, with Malate as the gimmick venue - the crowd was unbelievably thick. There’s a street party at every street. This meant live bands playing the conventional nauseating repertoire and charging three hundred bucks per head for entrance. Somewhere along Mabini, there’s another fashion show starring homosexuals, sponsored by some cigarette or beer brand. There is a reigning perception that the homosexuals in Malate is a featured attraction, and I’m not sure whether that would contribute anything to the gay movement or if this is what they really want. Also along Mabini, there’s a foreign DJ spining jungle, acid and house music. On the other side of street, there’s another beauty pageant. Finally, in another corner is a strip of decent restaurants where there’s good food, well-thought-of bar concepts with a crowd mainly composed of couples in their post-dinner dates playing cat and mouse, determining blindly, and asking meandering versions of whether they are having sex or not. The only common denominator of all the streets is how difficult it is to find a parking space. The real jewels of these streets though – are places where they perform live jazz of the Davis/Coltrane persuasion, ska and reggae. The bonus is when you get free cigarettes from the mini-skirted Mild Seven promo girls.
Near the circle, in front of the church, youngish looking prostitutes are for pick-up. Art galleries and bars frequented by artists are another area of interest. Malate is also supposed to be a bastion for artists. I hope, no matter how pretentious some of them are, that Malate stays as this bastion. Tonight, there’s an ongoing art performance. There was a blend of international and local artists. Most of the performances provided decipherable metaphors, delving into sexuality, the collapse of humanity, imperialism and what seems like this never-ending psuedo-intellectualism. In one of the performances, I was a participant. A Japanese young female artist performs. She’s charming in a long, black chiffon dress. Her eyes are almond, her skin porcelain, her lips red as cherries. We saw her eating cherries in a previous performance. In her performance art, she raises a box to a pole. The box would reveal an infant with a penis and pubic hair. She takes out a sign, “Can anybody kiss me?” The girl approaches the spot where we stand and my brother, my cousin E, and my friend O. gives me a nudge. The girl offers her hand to me and I go up to the stage. In front of an estimated crowd of 100 as an audience, the Japanese girl and I make out to the “Unchained Melody” which was playing on the background. It was the first time I kissed a foreigner. I’m touching the breasts of a person who probably doesn’t speak a language we’d both understand. That fascinated me, how we were both complete strangers and we delivered a message: how stereotypical and libidinal the male specie is: perhaps how they even exploit and wrong women, and how they should be hanged for it. At the same time, the performance shows how easily men succumb to women: to the lure of this kiss in particular. Tonight, I happen to be an object for Feminst Criticism. I look back to that kiss and it’s not something lurid, and all of it is not just some parody. Anyone can argue with that, but
I could always assert that this is a simple, public kiss to a beautiful Japanese girl. Hopefully, she’d say a similar thing.
The next morning I attend Literary Criticism class, Feminist Criticism serving as topic, Ichampion the cause of Feminism.
Before I completely go off-tangent, I go back to Nakpil. I guess we’ll always go back to where the beer is cheap, and where grilled tuna belly is delicious. It’s this company, this shared experience, this belongingness and sense of home. It makes Malate our bastion and no one else’s. It’s the reason why you never shy away from a drink.
Every night is young and seductive.
