Elvis sat in Raymond's,
feeling confused and unsure of himeslf. Pressing his palms on the counter,
the firmness of the wood somehow reassured him. Then, tensing himself, he
tried to think of a way to solve his unique problem. The bodies of people
in his unfocused eyes melted with the air. He went through his usual repertoire
of ideas and hoped this time to discover something new. He searched for
a grand scheme that might with luck and genius strong-arm his failure into
a few dollars he could spend. Normally, he wasn't so foolish. He could recognize
when a brilliant move might be more beer than genius; yet, he insisted on
trying to transform what was obvious into what was impossible. Overhead
the ceiling fans turned in endless circles in the flowery Manila air. Mandi,
the counter boss, started dancing to hip-hop music from the radio. Elvis
stared at his knees. There seemed to be no solution to his problem but to
write. Time and Newsweek had offices in Manila. They paid well. A hundred
dollars in Manila would be enough to show the Berkeley girl a very good
time. No, fifty dollars would do. So, suddenly, it seemed easy. What was
the problem? He laughed at himself. Springing into action, he searched his
pockets for the piece of paper he always carried, but it was gone, lost
somewhere, probably on Roxas Boulevard when he tried begging to get money.
Josie, the countergirl he liked, gave him a napkin to write on. He was careful
to dry the counter before positoning the paper which seemed to glow slightly,
precious and challengingly blank. He touched its surface with a certain
foreboding. Before writing, Elvis, for luck or whatever, stroked the Donald
Duck head of his ballpoint pen. Then he performed his ritual: gritting his
teeth, tensing the muscles in his neck and shoulders (as if the tension
somehow focused his body in space and made him more real), then relaxing,
staring off into space for the idea that could turn itself to gold (Donal
Duck grinned happily). Meanwhile, people left, people entered, sitting at
the counter or at tables against the wall. The billiard players at the back
of the room were t-shirted Filipinos who kept to themselves; possibly, security
guards. Months ago, a grenade got tossed in from a jeepney along del Pilar.
The explosion shattered tables, disemboweled two tourists, tore off the
legs of a shoeshine boy. A section of floor promptly disappeared. When Raymond
rebuilt, it was rumored he plated the bar counter in steel.
Obediently, the sphere of the sun ripened like a fruit casting reddish shadows.
The foreigners making their first unaided appearance of the day quickened
in number. A rough seaman strolled in. Later, a New Zealander with snake
tattooes on his forearms. Before him, a middle-aged Dutch couple, the man
tall and lank, the woman like his twin, in a miniskirt, both of them sporting
deep tans and tired smiles. Mandi slid them beers, saying, "Sexy wife!"
which made her giggle, sucking the bottle up to her lips. The seaman stared
at a Filipina who combed her hair with obsessive repetition. The scent of
her madness made him want to fuck her. He watched her tiny fingers grip
the comb, it plunge and vanish into her black hair, again and again, trembling
out of the coiled blackness. Across the street the neon sign Yellow Butterfly
Bar hummed on zigs and zags of color against the sun's darkening philosophy.
The paper remained blank.
"Hey," the Zamboanga dancer smiled at Elvis.
He looked at her mouth and down to her crossed legs. She coughed to bring
his eyes up to her pouty, full lips. She exuded a smell of bananas.
"You buy me drink."
"I'm writing."
"Rum and coke, okay."
She licked her lips.
"You want blowjob?"
"I have no money."
"Bullshit."
Elvis returned to the paper.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the paper filled with a story that
would be informative and clever, yet touch the heart. From the page he wanted
to get a whiff of singed flesh and be disturbed by the friction of the movement
of what imaginary characters he would create. He struggled to listen to
the beat of hearts that did not yet exist. The promise of his imagination
soared bodilessly. He felt the wetness of tears without the reason for them.
He felt the resonance of a great idea but without the idea itself. He heard
the whirring of the ceiling fans, smiled slightly at the ghostly breeze
that seized his temples, the beads of perspiration that rolled down his
neck. The paper waited for ink. The Zamboanga girl watched him with a mocking
smile. She would rub her knee, glance at him. Suddenly - police sirens.
An armored truck escorted by jeepfulls of men holding shotguns manuevered
past on del Pilar, towards the bank on the corner of Padre Faura and Mabini.
Filled with pesos, sacks of coins and checks, possibly gold and silver,
Elvis, like a derelict Superman, saw through the steel and guns and the
money, and saw himself rich in the Plaza Hotel by Manila Bay, standing by
the swimming pool. He kissed his ex-girlfriend from Berkeley (who took his
wealth for granted) and the sun set as in a postcard. The fading of the
sirens brought him back to earth. MH del Pilar went straight through the
old district of Malate, where colonial houses still remained, their yards
odorous under great mango trees, with years piled on the ground like the
dark, decaying leaves.
"Repent! Repent! The Lord saith unto the whoremongers and misers
for Judgement Day cometh and the Kingdom of God is near!" shouted the Preacher
on the sidewalk, shaking a Bible over his bald head.
"Westerners come to Manila to drink and fuck. I do not mince words for God
knows all words and he knows what fuck means, fucking out of marriage, fucking
for the lust of flesh. Without the sanctity of God's blessing. You fuck
now and you will burn in Hell! Fuck and burn! Burn like chickens, burn like
pigs! Burn with syphillis and gonorrhea! And aids! Fuck and pus will come
out of your penises and vaginas! You fuckers repent!"
"Fuck!" someone answered.
"Let's fuck!" the seaman shouted.
"I fuck you!" shouted the Zamboanga dancer, "Cheap!"
"Fuck!" Elvis shouted.
"Fuck you!" the Dutch woman shouted.
"Fuck!"
It was an opera of obsenities. Even the deaf and mute girls who sat
around waiting to polish fingernails for a small fee made gasping noises
with their tongues, and one pumped her fingers like masturbation.
"Okay, that was the wrong thing to say," the preacher said, "Shit."
Looking defeated, he walked into Raymond's, tossed the Bible on the counter.
He closed his eyes. But he could still hear the laughter and across the
lids of his eyes sense the never ending confusion of the street. Glaring
bulbs, night smells, faces frozen in perspiration, and somewhere among them
he hoped was a man, or a woman, who had not laughed at him. He fancied himself
as a kind of artist who sought to paint his detergent visions over an existing
canvas of sins, again and again he painted on the street corners, the bars
and whorehouses, the hypocritical living rooms of the world, his visions
of harmony and gentle things, but the paint wouldn't stick, soon it would
peel and the perversions beneath appeared and it was the sin that stole
again, always, the prize. His work of art, revolutionary in a fresh soul,
could not be understood with addicted eyes. Instead, people recognized in
the yellow vomit and the buttocks of the canvas he sought to cover with
love and goodness the easy brilliance of old sins. Soon he ordered a San
Miquel.
"Once upon a time ...," Elvis began. Dot dot dot.
The tables along the wall got occupied. And then two German hippies left
with Maricar, a child prostitute. The street got noisier with more hawkers
going after the tourists. A diesel truck rumbled past streaming water from
a huge load of sand. Then a moment of quiet, when the street seemed to be
empty, the people frozen, only a white moth alive floating into the dumpyard.
| |
Elvis
was in the toilet beside the backdoor that led into the alley.
From a go-go bar came ancient rock-&-roll. The toilet was dark
and smelled of urine and ammonia. Water ran continuously from a garden
hose coiled on a broken faucet. Elvis aimed his flow of piss at a
piece of crumpled newspaper in the trough. As steam rose up, he sensed
a certain sweetness in the air. It was probably from the magnolia
tree at the corner nearby, the flowers caught in a breeze.He turned
to look at the door, as if he might see the sweetness entering, but
there was nothing there, and he faced again the blank wall and the
hissing of the urine rising against it and the magnolias and inhaled
with rapture some visions of other nights when magic stole the hours.
|
~~~
Elvis found the stool next to his occupied by a fat European man whose
body exuded a faint odor like ripe green pepppers. Their elbows touched
briefly. The fat man moved his arm away to his stomach. His eyes
skipped among the bodies drinking along the counter across from him.
Elvis felt for the piece of paper in his pocket. It was still blank.
Incidentally, he touched the Donald Duck ballpoint pen. But for the
moment he felt good, he didn't give a shit. A blank page or a page full
of great stuff. He couldn't feel any better. It was wonderful not to
care about anything but the beer he was drinking and the sourishly nostalgic
scent of magnolia he seemed to recall from somewhere that somehow escaped
him. He felt at peace and the most interesting thing in the world was
what was in front of his eyes and what his ears heard and the beating
of his heart like a sweet and dew drenched peach throbbing under a favorite
sun.
A girl-face in the crowd riveted the fat man. She towered over
the seated drinkers, aiming her eyes everywhere. Her thin, starved lips
seemed chiseled into her face. She had a cruel, hopeless look that might
have been beautiful on a devil aspiring to become an angel, a look of
transformation frozen against a surface of impossibility. She laughed
for some certainly worthless reason, stoping by two men at the counter
and wriggling her shoulders, bare, brown, glistening through smoke,
the noise of the crowd. Her arm flew up, like an arrow that punctured
all the balloons of small talk around her.
"Hoy, darling, one magnolia orange juice, please," she called to a countergirl,
"I need more vitamins tonight!" She blew kisses at that man and him
and the other one. Then her eyes picked at the two Australian men in
front of her. She glanced at their broad backs and their white necks
and ears and blondish/redish hair.
"Hello, hello!" she said, bending closer.
They didn't hear.
"Hello!" a little louder, and, as they turned, "Oh, do you boys want
something? Talaga naman, how bold so quickly!"
"What's your name, sweetheart?" the redhead said.
"Ah, my name? Only my name, really?"
"Well - ."
"You guess."
"Haven't the slightest," the blondhead said.
"Ruth. See, naman, how easy."
"Well, Ruth, what do you do? You're a beautiful girl. Are you a college
student, a nuclear physicist, a dancer - ?"
"You've got a beautiful mouth, luv."
"Beautiful? Really?"
She savored the meaning of the word. Whether true or not, it was hurled
her way. So it belonged to her. Truth didn't matter. The sound itself
was a stirring magic that smoothened her cheeks, made her eyes glitter,
and relax her cruel lips. She looked almost friendly, and then, almost
normal, a girl fresh from the province as once she might have been.
Except for a tinsel star by the corner of her eye. She glanced at her
beautification in the mirror held by a nail to the post by the cash
register. And sucked the tip of her finger as her reflection excited
her.
"Johnnnny!" she called suddenly, "Hello, Johnnny!"
"You know that guy?"
"He's a bloody religious fanatic."
"Bloody drunk too, eh?"
Bending, she whispered into the ear of the redhead. His friend noticed
her hard, muscular shoulder.
"Ohh, jeezzz," he said, "You're a fuckin' boy."
Elvis, however, barely noticed the above as he concentrated on the sheet
of paper in front of him. It lay on the counter - wrinkled, textured
complexly now from being crumpled, slapped, jabbed with the ballpoint,
soiled with peanut skins, spit, sweat from his finger, and the footprints
of an ant following a circle of obsessive scent. On the upper right
corner he (not the ant) had drawn a pair of panties. He shifted restlessly.
He pulled the hair behind his ear. He closed his eyes. But where was
the story to burn starfire-ish to the page to the wood of the counter
to the floor to the white bones of the dinosaurs long great beneath
in the sterile earth past where the earthworms feasted? The desire to
create resonated in his body in the form of an almost unbearable tension,
yet he responded with a desire to escape, as though it must be in a
continuing disease that his true happiness lay. He recognized the perversity,
yet smiled. It was his true self that he thus displayed, and indifference
felt with almost carnal intensity he enjoyed immensely. Not to care.
Not to give a god-damned shit. Let the world burn. Let the flowers of
paradise incinerate and their ashes mudden the sky over his amused,
imperial eyes. Another beer would do. It was icy cold and foam sparkling
with crystals bubbled down the bottle. He drank like a wounded animal.
The cavity in a back tooth, requiring a filling of gold, screamed with
pain, just a moment.
 |
|
