Diary 23

       I joined millions of Filipinos who migrated to Manila every year fulfilling their dreams, forming waves in the city, redefining a landscape that kept changing in a climate of discord. We were obligated to provide new blood corpuscles to replenish the old and nourish the city's quest for its immortality.

In this atmosphere, migrants like me were accepted, rejected, wanted, used, abused, loved and hated and there was no stopping us. Manila was a machine that manufactured us into new products. We were its raw materials.

There were two divided classes. One was the Provinciano - migrants like me, cornered in some condemned buildings. The other was the Manileno - comfortably nestled in off-limits subdivisions. 

As has been the case in many parts of the world, this class division is what propells urbanization, defining the civilization that reflects the citizens. This was the driving force in the civilization of Manila as I was beginning to realize: The Manileno expected the Provinciano to quickly adjust to Manila ways or he would be driven him back to where he came from.

I was small in the city of Manila. I wasn't even considered a human being in Manila. I felt like dust. Maybe a number. A faceless face. Another mask. This city discriminates. In my town, old women were treated with respect! This morning, there was an old lady who stood in the bus all the way from Quiapo to Quezon City. She sweated. I could not help noticing her arthritic knees. Young men who were seated, who were strong enough to offer their seats to the poor woman as had been the custom in the Philippines, remained indifferent. I was suddenly full of sympathy for the lady. Unable to tolerate it, I stood up to offer my seat to the old woman. One of the men ordered me to get back to my seat. 

"What is wrong with you, boy?" he yelled at me. "Cut this crap. You're too provincial."

"What's wrong in offering my seat to the lady?"

Other men adjusted themselves on their seats, they hooted me, then they sneered at the old lady. 

Their message was clear: There was no place for gallantry in Manila. Was I trying to prove I was more civilized than the rest? I jumped off the next bus stop in disgust. Anyway, the woman refused to take my seat, afraid to foment volatility. I heard an admonition follow me as I stepped out. You take care of your own ass here. If you can't afford your own car, try standing on the aisle of the bus!

A similar incident happened on my way back home. The bus I was riding jerked every time it was put on brakes, causing everyone to bump each other. This time, a pregnant woman who stood behind a male passenger complained. "Please, can you move a little farther from me? I'm carrying a child and you keep bumping me."

"Missis, if you can't tolerate the bumps in a bus, call a taxi."

The pregnant woman ended up crying.

Eventually, I accepted and played the rules of the city. I tolerated for example, the bumper to bumper traffic, and ignored ladies who, because they were fed up with daily humiliation, carried their own protective weapons - bars, knives, umbrellas - ready to hit heartless men who threatened their safety, rights and dignity in buses, parks, public offices, bathrooms.

Like everyone else, I devised my own means of survival.



                                          RAMON MARASIGAN



  Ramon, my roommate whose personal quest was to be included and inducted to the rich Marasigan clan owing to his last name, was the first I considered my mentor. He was a sophomore in the University and was the most familiar of the city life. He wore the best clothes and was the most confident among us. In every pack of wolves there was a leader. The one that commanded respect and the most likely to provide strength. For me, at least in our boarding room, that was Ramon.

On this particular night, he brought down his expensive sunglasses and stared at me intently while I consumed the arrozcaldo that I bought from the food stall behind Central Market.

"You know Robert, if you will just dress up properly and have a haircut, you'll make a lot of money", he said.

That flattered me. After being ignored and outrightly laughed at, this was a real boost to me.

I smiled.

He set his RayBans on the table. "Where I work, good looks can rake you a lot of money."

"Does your work require good looks?" I asked in between munches.

"It is the only requirement," he answered. He stood up and pulled a Marlboro stick from his pocket and lighted it.

"What do you do?"

"I'm a receptionist."

I nodded. A talk like this was what I needed most to hear. After all, my stipends always came late and I barely ate decent food.

Seeing my increased interest, he continued. "Tell me, are you willing to work with me?"

My eyes beamed with the thought of working. To be a "working student" carried nobility in Manila. It connoted independence and responsibility.

"What should I do?" I lost appetite in my excitement.

"Wear your best clothes and I will arrange an interview between you and my manager." He said this as he patted my shoulder. I could not believe it.

I rarely found the time to talk with him. He was always out of the boarding house. "Too busy at work," he often said.

Ramon, my mentor and savior. He was so unlike Jose Felix, who was always borrowing money, and Giorgio, now living in with his girlfriend.

I stopped my meal altogether and started cleaning the dishes. Since I arrived, I never stopped observing Ramon's moves. In his absence, I secretly peered inside his closet and admired his expensive clothes and cologne. During the day, when he was asleep, I could not help but stare at him endlessly. His hair was long and his face belonged to an older tested man. Its countenance was extremely strong and when I got closer, I smelled the musk of perspiration and cigarettes. There was a time I suspected my admiration as homosexuality, it was not. He just reminded me that I would survive.

That Sunday, I wore a Dockers slacks and a brand-new shirt which cost me nearly half of my monthly stipend for the job interview. Soon enough, I found my way to the office which Ramon instructed me to go to.

I was perplexed when I first saw his office. It didn't look like it. It was called Illusion, a dilapidated third run movie theater hidden behind Quiapo Market. The street leading to it was full of mud under a stagnant flood, left over by the last season's rains. My feet got itchy the moment they got soaked. All my hopes of becoming a male receptionist tumbled when I was asked at the teller window to pay its five peso entrance fee. The theater showed lewd skin flicks. It catered to homosexuals lurking in the dark, searching for sex. The moment I came in, the smell of perspiration and cigarettes which I used to admire in Ramon made me nauseaous. I stayed at the back row. When my eyes got adjusted to the dark, I could not believe what I saw. At the front row, Ramon was leaning back on his chair, a shiny bald head was bobbing up and down over his lap. With all the itching in my legs, I felt like jumping all over him to demand a refund for all the money I spent for my new clothes. When I approached him later, he told me with shameless pride the tricks he and his kind played inside the theater.

"First we lure the fags, negotiate and while in the act, the conniving police will arrest them, threaten to publish their names in the newspapers. All threats will be used until the fag will dish out all his money. That's the scam."

I felt like throwing up. In split seconds I was running away from the place with shattered hopes. He fooled me. I never had any respect left for him. 

The following day, I developed infection in the webs of my toes. 

A day after that, another shock came. Giorgio, the MacDonald's wonder -boy brought home his girlfriend - for good. Now, with a woman added in our cramped apartment, I was unable to move around freely. At nights when they thought the rest were asleep, they made love. Our eyes feasted watching them.

That was the time I got serious about leaving.

Jose Felix left days before. Despite his constant borrowing, he was probably the most intelligent among us, finishing at the top of the best highschool in our province. He rarely spoke; he always read his political science textbooks. Even when the landlord threatened to throw him out, he remained silent, his eyes drooped. He disappeared without warning. Years later, he was found buried in an unmarked grave, suspected as a communist.

Ramon and Giorgio eventually left, joining the majority of failures in Manila colleges. Giorgio had to bring home his new family and Ramon, he was locked up after Illusion was raided by real police. I could still remember his embarrassed face on the newspapers. It created a sensation in the boarding house. When he returned back, he tried to recruit me in a new "entertainment business" somewhere in San Pablo City. I told him to leave me alone.

All my roommates being gone, the boarding house became a heavy burden to me. The rent alone nearly took all my stipend. In my attempt to cope up, I advertized for new roommates but I ended up with applicants who stayed for just a couple of days and were gone later. I never asked for a security deposit or anything like that. I went all over the city in search of part- time jobs to no avail. My grades suffered further. My scholarship was on the brink of cancellation. I found myself at the end of my rope.

Once, I was tempted to forsake all these and join Ramon as a hustler in San Pablo. But I kept my patience and lingered, hoping that I would have my chance, but my luck was running out.



MY UNIVERSITY



Though I was considered good-looking in a cheap kind of way in my apartment complex, nothing would break my self-esteem more than my university.

I could probably take all these if not for my University. It was after all, teeming with rich children that drove fast luxury cars, shopped in Hongkong and New York, toured Disney world and learned languages through hired foreign linguists. Their leisure were exclusively hidden in Makati or Greenhills or Ayala Alabang. They didn't even know a place called Central Market existed.

My schoolmates, though they acknowledged me, considered me an outsider, an intruder. My cheap clothes, social awkwardness and academic struggles seemed to destroy their standards of vanity, which they closely guarded. I was way, way behind them.

My situation became increasingly worse as the days went by. Those who begrudged my appearance increased in number. I kept a low-key, make no mistake, but I eyes kept following me... Was I getting paranoid? I turned into the mirror. I saw my face, it worried me, Why am I having pimples here? I never had pimples. I'd then wash my face almost every hour. Still I attracted attention. Were my bell-bottoms offensive to the stretch pants made by Levis and Calvin Klein? Where I was from, there was only one tailor, his hands were always full with the male population. I could not depend on him for frequent fittings. Where would I get money in first place?

Was my Tagalog accent funny?

Questions. They started rising in my brains. As days turned into weeks and months, I became critical of everything I saw.  

This university was the propagator of all the evils in the city whose name it carried. Its design, its system, its population stood as microcosm of everything outside.

There were only two types of students here- the haves and have- nots. They ran parallel to each other. Resentful, suspicious, fearful, they greeted one another with eyes turned away, beset by preconceived prejudices and stereotype which they learned from their own forefathers and castes.

It had two floors. The ground floor was inhabited by the Manilenos. The second floor by the Provincianos. Those who dared to bridge the two floors were instantly castigated.

There was no truth in the claim that this university was for poor but deserving students as boasted by its American founders. There was nothing poor in thousands of cars - luxury cars - fighting for the limited parking space available. There was nothing poor about the majority of my classmates whose admissions relied heavily upon the clout and wealth of their politician and businessman's forebears. I was a minority admitted on the merit of a scholarship to serve as a cosmetic for its century-old promise: We educate the poor but deserving students.

So what if I was mocked at behind my back, if my clothes provided daily materials for jokes? So what as long as I could lay claim to its prestigious name?

The wealthy gang in the ground-floor was further divided into sub-gangs - all of them claiming as the jet setters of the city - and these were the children of businessmen, of politicians' children, of rich homosexuals, of catholic elites, of protestant elites, of children destined to study abroad, thanks to Mom and Pop.



Alex Maskara