No Moment of Truth

The video shows our wedding vows back in 2005. She started out strong, no problem making promises to the church and the priest, but started fading right away, and after the priest said, “This is the moment of truth,” she didn’t speak again till the vows were past. So the part of her vows she didn’t say were the vows she was supposed to be making to me, the “for richer and poorer” “in sickness and in health,” etc.

Two or three years later we were arguing about something and she said that she had purposely not said her vows at the wedding because she had tried to back out of the marriage after mailing out the invitations, but her oldest sister Inday Fe browbeat her into going through with it. She told me the names of four people who she had confided in regarding this deception or whatever it was. Besides Inday Fe, the others were a woman named Cielita (?Shellita) who she used to work with, her niece Tata, and another niece Girlie.

I sometimes think this whole thing was actually engineered by Girlie, the oldest of Tampoka’s nieces and nephews and the daughter of Tampoka’s oldest sibling. Girlie herself is married to an American and applied considerable pressure to Tampoka to not give up on finding one to marry. How much influence she has I don’t know but I think it was a lot. Then when I was married and living here, Girlie kept telling her papa to borrow money from me when he asked her for money, and that was the beginning of the end for me here because up to that point, her papa had been my chief confidante, someone who would always talk to me. But that’s another story and I’ll tell it another day.

What is love...? ...depends...

Now that they have their own business and 2 story house and their own CR, Dandy is going to start weaseling DugDug away from me by encouraging him to take baths etc at his house, TV there is unlimited, candy is virtually unlimited, and he will take advantage of these things to make me look like a bad guy. Not that it hasn’t been happening all along but I doubt that the idea of me being his father was ever more than a ruse.

I doubt Rose would try too hard to sneak DugDug away from me because she would then have to take care of him. But at the same time, Rose loves DugDug in a way that Danday could not physically do. Compared to what Rose feels for DuDug, Dandy’s love for him is like testicular cancer or at least testosterone poisoning, just gotta live with the discomfort, blame hormones or fate, and try to work around it. Trying to empathize with this guy is quite a feat of mental acrobatics for me.

I won’t try to say what my love for DugDug constitutes right now except I can say that despite my many intereste, growing things including DugDug has been the only thing that I can safely focus on lately.

A letter to my parents

Somebody (my wife’s niece) showed me a photo of a house today that's for sale in town for P370,000 I think she said. That's about $8600, it looked like a beautiful house from the outside. She thinks I should move to town and it's not a bad idea but I don't know about buying a house. There are also subdivisions outside of town a little ways. The idea of taking DugDug away from Manggahan really feels wrong to me, I don't think it makes children stronger and more adaptive to be uprooted but maybe that's emoting and not thinking. On the other hand, the idea of me continuing to live at Manggahan might be unrealistic. I feel like I am withering inside because of the shunning which has now spread to Dodo and Haiku so I am surrounded on both sides by people who plan to never speak to me again.

The children still have no problem with me. I correct their behavior fairly regularly, and often a lot nicer than how their parents would have done the same thing, and I’m still Buddy.

My wife’s niece, who is the only person in the family who talks to me at length, lives in town with her mother and brother. She also suggested I get some wheels in order to save money in the long run compared to paying per ride for others to drive me.

I also crave the wide open spaces of Manggahan. The neighbors (everyone including Miracleens once I am past Dandy's house) are at least cordial, although things function on the basis of consensus and family loyalty here, not fairness. I am sure that as a sort of car-less goofball who walks around town with a big black bag full of notebooks and reading glasses and stuff gives Haiku the heebie-jeebies as she is ambitious and wants Dodo to be president of the universe although he can't seem to win an election. I am fair game now to be anyone's scapegoat as Dodo plus Dandy equals just plain outnumbered for me. Manong Elzy did not overtly refuse to talk to them but I did not ask him to. In other words I took my problems to his friend Ben and let the request seep down to him, that’s how things work here. Ben promised they would both talk to Dodo and Haiku and when I finally got to Elzy a few days later he'd apparently had time to decide against getting involved any more. I started out to say that people who are seen walking around and don't even have a car are not going to do anything for Dodo and Haiku's social status. I have to wonder what is their real reason for being insulted by my presence as the things she said were absurd, more or less made up, misunderstandings and such all taken out of context, misinterpreted and taken as insults when they weren’t meant that way. It seemed obvious by the way she was screeching and babbling at me the other night that she had been building up a grudge case for a long time while smiling in my face. That sort of thing catches me unawares as I still can't tell the difference between a smile and a smile.

This is not the letter I intended to write, but nothing else is going on and based on how much sleep I'm getting it might be the letter I have to write. I don't need anything from you and there’s nothing you can do. Tampoka threatened me with big butcher knives and said she was going to kill me because when she wouldn't talk to her younger brother Dodo to ask him not to hit me I actually spit in her face, just a little. Not a big loogey, but calling for the police doesn't help and in the context of what was going on, it saved her from being beaten because I was ready to do her in because she as usual took sides with people who threaten me with violence over very small stuff. (I had gone to Haiku’s house to look for my guitar which her son Kent had borrowed a few weeks ago, and Haiku lit into me verbally, I don’t know what all she said.)

A few days later Tampoka was all sweet and stuff and she seemed surprised that I was still spearheading her ambition to get DugDug into private school in town. They don't comprehend moving on and accepting peoples’ differences, they seem to think in terms of revenge, mostly equivalent to "I'm never going to speak to you again,” which to me is infantile because it stifles possibilities, obviously. I never had a close friendship that didn’t have to clear some hurdles, but here they just forget you if you seem to present them with a hurdle. That’s why our house is empty, none of them will attempt the challenge of living with me/us.

I let Tampoka take care of getting the affidavit of consent from Dandy and Rose so we can act as DugDug’s parents in school matters. The short version is that it was illegally notarized before Dandy signed it (which means he can later deny signing it) and what really got to me is that I was referred to as the spouse of (mis-spelled), with no name for me at all. So I went alone to the notary today, she’s known Tampoka for many years and she graciously offered to redo the paper the way I need it done as I am the one who is going to be paying for all this, and if I do buy a set of wheels then I will be driving or more likely paying someone to drive, neither of which I want to do. Well I was very soft-spoken and indirect with the notary and she was more than happy to redo the paper and hold it at her office till Dandy and Rose both show up to sign it in her presence. When I mentioned that I have notarized over 6000 documents she went pale. Of course Tampoka had wheedled P500 out of me to pay for the notarization originally, then wheedled it down to 300 with the attorney and kept the change and lied about it. I am tired of this.

DugDug is still a sparkler and apparently my reason for living, I am too discouraged to care about my hobbies right now but try to twiddle with them a little. I watch a lot of taped reruns and I don’t get enough sleep but last night it didn’t help to turn it off and go to bed as I still couldn’t sleep for a long time.

The night Haiku gave me my supposedly long-needed reaming I saw Kent across the street later as I continued to go house to house looking for my guitar and when I asked him something he ignored me so I flicked his shirt with my finger and said, “Ayaw pagluod sa akoa,” which means don’t ignore me. He went home and told Dodo I had hit him and when I got back to Haiku’s house for more reaming later, Kent started crying and that’s when Dodo came up behind me and slammed me on the arm. He pushed me once and I didn’t react. I just stood there, and told him “Bawal ang pagbunal sa akoa,” it’s forbidden to hit me, and he started shouting at me telling me to go home. Now it’s a circus and the whole neighborhood is gathering to watch so Tampoka jumps between us and starts tearing my clothes and pushing me down in the mud to make it look like I’m doing something, but I’m just standing there and my struggle is now to neither fall down in the mud nor hit my wife because Dodo has gotten himself worked up and made the first move, now if I hit his sister he will beat me to a pulp. I told her to stop pushing me but she wouldn’t.

Finally another Dodo, the son of Manong Elzy, gently put his arm around me and helped me turn toward home. Frontline in the panting party of watchers was Dandy, no doubt disappointed that he didn’t have an excuse to get his licks in. Well I didn’t sleep that night for even 5 minutes, I watched TV for four hours, cleaned up some files, stood in one place for a long time, and wondered what it is going to be like to lose DugDug. Losing DugDug doesn’t have to happen but I can’t imagine volunteering for more of this, and no I don’t feel that I have none of the blame. But the things I have done here that were negative all amounted to complaining, asking people to return things, asking people to pay for things they had borrowed and lost, telling Haiku her son was not telling the truth, refusing to let Haiku’s teenage daughter use my laser printer, etc. On the other side of the scale, the windows in Dodo and Haiku’s house were a gift from me. The springs on his motorcycle were a gift from me. I spent hours just the other day making them DVDs that she had asked me for. And the many times they have borrowed money from me interest free mean nothing to them, because now that they have gone over the line and committed violence of the loud voice and hitting me and pushing me, pride will not let them take it back and because of their status as employer of many people in the neighborhood, they don’t have to.

My wife’s niece says just ignore people like that, and my response is that the only two houses close to mine are now shunning me so that’s a lot of ignoring I am expected to do. Not the kids, Kent and Divine still speak to me (correction later: Divine is now shunning me too) even after I explained to Kent in Visayan the next day (not with his parents there but with an older cousin-in-law there) that his lying to his father and saying I hit him more or less ruined my life. He didn’t add anything to the conversation except to lie some more. But he’s still speaking to me.

I also got reamed by Haiku for asking her the names of the teenage boys who live in her house who have never been introduced to me, I didn’t accuse anyone of anything. As it turned out, Kent or Divine had actually returned the guitar but not upstairs where I keep it, and some other kids used it downstairs, and then one of them or somebody or even Tampoka put it in an unused closet under the stairs that was built around a four-foot-tall termite mound which it is taboo to remove. Dave was the one who turned out to know where the guitar was. I explained to everyone I talked to that it is not about a $30 guitar, it’s about people lying to me and threatening me with violence and worse for my personality defect of sigi yawyaw (always complaining). By worse than violence, I mean that after a certain point the gist of Haiku’s screeching was that she was going to go to the American Embassy and have me thrown out of the country. Well that would ruin my life, if I have one, and she knows that. Threatening me with that was inexcusable, a selfish indulgence on her part. A power tripping act of vengeance for the small insult of not giving them access to my laser printer or whatever compilation of tiny insults has put her over the edge and made me her scapegoat.

Through all of this I didn’t raise my voice, I knew I brought it on myself by not just forgetting about Kent lying and saying he didn’t borrow the guitar. I should have backed off and lost sleep privately because people don’t care about the details and I couldn’t communicate them properly with Haiku hollering at me a mile a minute so I should have left and not come back. It still would have been the end of the friendship but without so many witnesses, and all the witnesses is what made it bad for me because people are going to talk and they aren’t going to take my side, Dodo provides jobs to every family in the neighborhood and that makes him right.

I thanked my wife’s niece for her advice, even though it all involves spending money to make Tampoka happy and that is hopeless. I’ve spent most of my normally online time lately at her family’s Tailoring Shop in town where she is filling in for her mother who is on vacation, and she has been generous with her time so I try to think of a variety of things to talk about as she can’t be expected to take sides. Her mother is Tampoka’s cousin on Tampoka’s mother’s side. But she has let me tell her what is going on and hasn’t judged me (or pretended not to), so that has sort of kept me halfway sane. I told her I could see me moving to town alone in several months, but I’m not going to put my tail between my legs right at this moment and run away. The little children and most of the neighbors call me Buddy and treat me right, Dede and Neyong are friendly. Bebing is here—she’s always here when people get angry at me—and she’s too clever to give me shunning for more than a few days. Her son is on a field trip in Manila right now and I contributed to the cost of that, only about $12. Noel is still friendly but his wife works for Dodo and I detect a trace of something from her. MayMay, who I helped save from a bout with typhoid a few years ago by contributing $150 to her medicine cost, was a witness of Kent’s flicking so Tampoka went with me to their house a block away and I offloaded my frustrations there to the matriarch of the family, Tampoka’s aunt, and MayMay promised to talk to Dodo and tell him I didn’t hit Kent. Kent later claimed he didn’t tell his father I hit him, and it’s possible that it was Haiku who told Dodo I hit Kent. I think she also told Kent to cry louder, believe it or not. Crying here is often unabashedly done as an act to manipulate the results of a dispute. MayMay didn’t talk to Dodo, I am sure, as her mother works for Dodo and she was probably forbidden to. Yesterday her little brother swore at me at the basketball court when I tried to help him with something.

My brain is fairly empty now and I apologize as usual for telling you things that you can’t do anything about. Most of this sort of thing just goes on my blog at blogspot.com but this time I guess I needed to spell it all out because I’m pretty sure my time at Manggahan is almost up. I need to stay till around Christmas or a little before and then what I told my wife’s niece is that I might rent a place in town and see if it’s possible to live alone. With DugDug at Manggahan I don’t know how that would be possible.

Why it is never safe for me to speak

One of the key social strategies within group-oriented species is pretending to be friendly. The smile or friendly-sounding nickname is a gambit to achieve some personal goal. (Hey Buddy, bring that hammer over here, wouldja?) But the base reality is that this is a predatory universe, a feeding ground. Big eats small, strong eats weak. Those of us who take everything literally, like me, mistake the politics of laughing and smiling and back-slapping for people liking each other, for people dropping their mutual judgments and practicing unconditional acceptance. There are many of us who are so naive, but our numbers don’t help us much, because animal societies, including human, are controlled by concensus routine and groupthink in general. And there are more of them, and unlike us, they are organized. Their game is team sports and ours just gets us close enough to the sidelines to bark our minority rants for our own entertainment. We loners have no social influence and our way of thinking is automatically rejected.

And that’s why we who take everything literally never fail to fool ourselves into thinking that others are going to forgive us for telling the truth. Incident after incident later, 35 jobs later, 55 years later, I still don’t understand why the truth coming out of my mouth should make people treat me with ever-increasing hostility. Nor will I understand it tomorrow. I won’t understand it next time someone raises their fist or knife or chair or machete or flowerpot to threaten me with, and when I am salvage in a ditch by the side of the road with my adam’s apple cut out, I still won’t understand it.

I had some interesting dreams last night. The one I remember was going to an amusement park where there were underground water slides, in tunnels. Sleds were used to slide down the tunnels. When someone gave me my sled it was explained to me that it was not as fast as the others and I accepted that, assuming there must be a reason. Then about 15 feet into the tunnel, my sled stopped. There was no water on the water slide. The place was not actually operational, and I decided that my companions and I must have showed up at an off time. I went to the man at the desk to get my ticket refunded and at first he denied that they were actually closed, but I kept talking and pretty soon he admitted that they really weren’t open for business. I “remembered” that I had guzzled some booze in bed before closing my eyes to sleep, (that’s a dream within a dream) and said to the man, “I screwed up.”

I woke up with this thought already in my mind before I woke up: I am wrong. It is all my fault.

My Aikido teacher, Sensei Smart, once said to the class as a group that, “Everything that happens to you is your own responsibility, and that’s how you have to approach a problem, even if it’s not true.”

I’m not ready to advocate that or any other point of view, as usual I’m just trying to empty my brain.

I had an unusual day the other day when, late in the day, I was verbally assaulted by Haiku and pushed around by her husband Dodo who shouted at me and told me to go home. I was just looking for my guitar.

I had spent the day in town and instead of the usual routine of signing in to my computer at the internet café early and then leaving it on, with the meter running, while I ate lunch and did my shopping, I instead did all my running around and then ate lunch at the mall before going online.

I was feeling downtrodden, temporarily bored with my online hobby or escape mechanism (genealogy and other research) and it was in this frame of mind, walking around at the mall, that I realized that my habit of staring at beautiful women was degrading my self-esteem or personal power or whatever you want to call it. From the bottom of a depression I could see something I’d never seen before in all my decades of girl-watching. It became obvious to me. The first time I see an attractive woman my eyes have to keep moving. The second and third look make a hole in me from which my energy pours out. I do not believe that people can literally steal your energy or that you can literally give your energy away to another being. But it became obvious that I was degrading a part of my energy, I don’t mean getting it dirty, I mean making it unavailable for my own use. According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, what energy you use once is dissipated, de-focused, and relatively unavailable. It’s still energy, you can still write an equation about it, but it isn’t useful.

As I walked around the mall practicing the act of not staring at beautiful girls, my energy level picked up immediately. I realized part of the difference between a man who feels attractive to women and a creep. A creep is a creep because he feels like a creep. He feels like a creep because he is dripping unusable energy from holes in his energy field. With new understanding I observed the other men in the mall who ignored the beautiful women surrounding them on all sides. They probably took their ability for granted, but I could see that they walked with confidence and did not feel like creeps.

I am not pushing this concept as “true”; as usual I’m just trying to empty my brain. But what happened is that I felt relatively strong or powerful. When I got back to the internet I still wasn’t interested in my hobby so I stopped early and went home.

I didn’t realize that I had become totally ungrounded and was more or less a danger to myself. Give a cretin a shovel and he will dig his own grave. Shortly after I got home I heard Haiku’s brother downstairs asking to borrow my guitar, and I headed for Haiku and Dodo’s house to dig my grave with newfound personal power.

As I always say, power is addictive. The smallest taste of it does nothing better than to make you want more. If you don’t know what to do with it, you will destroy yourself trying to get useless little tastes of it.

I’ve already had one run-in with my wife this morning, there was no knife-throwing this time but it almost got physical.

I have decided that my only option is to stop talking. You can’t do that with children and I don’t have a problem with children anyway, and the problems they have with me are forgotten in minutes, hours, or days. The problems I am having with adults are going to get me killed and/or sent out of the country, even if they’re wrong.

If only I could keep silent.

No Friend? No Money!

I’ve talked with Manong Elzy this morning, Tampoka’s oldest brother who speaks English well and has travelled around the world and knows that not all people think like Filipinos. He thought the best way to help me was to inform me that almost all communities in the Philippines work in the way I had just outlined to him (see below). This was no surprise to me and if he was just going to agree with everything I say, then I wouldn’t bother him with my problems. As it is I’d rather not mention these things to him except to make a joke of it and go home without getting to vent properly. Because his health is not that good and I wish I had someone else to talk to instead of him. Several times I have spoken with his friend who lives with him, Manong Ben, who is about 70 years old. Ben used to just take the side of my wife and tell me I had to adjust, but that kind of one-sided approach makes him useless to me and he is smart enough to realize that if he wants to feel useful when the conversation is over, he needs to go deeper than to shrug me off. Even so, two days ago I told him I would go to the mayor about Dodo’s assaulting me and his promise to talk with Dodo and Haiku was just to placate me. I have not gotten any indication that anyone is doing any talking on my account, and there is no doubt they are doing plenty of talking about me, as life would be dull here without the gossip sessions they love, and the limitless antisocial exploits of the Americano are always fodder for a good backbiting session.

Bebing is here as is usually the case when my wife is at her most belligerent. I’ve been married before and this is not the first time that a sister of my wife smiles in my face and whispers in my wife’s ear, always sending my wife home ready to draw my blood. Bebing’s husband once abandoned her for a supposed girlfriend and supposed other family, and she forced him to support her by having him blacklisted by his merchant marine’s union for not paying child support. She is happier than a pig in poop now that she has her own house, her teenage son is in school to become an aircraft technician, she no longer has to work at her occupation (midwife), and best of all she hardly ever sees her husband and when he does stop by in Davao where he built her a house in a squatters’ area, they pretty much ignore each other. When I first moved here, I was shocked by something she did to me which threw me into a state of confusion, and my wife who was right there denies that it even happened. Bebing was supposedly working for the city (which I now doubt was true as she wasn’t doing any such thing a few weeks later), and my wife was a long-term city employee. We were all at the city employees’ Christmas party which was being held in the city gymnasium, a very large building where major singing artists put on concerts.

I was sitting in a chair and Tampoka was standing or sitting close to me and maybe a little behind me. Bebing had just appeared, and she smiled and kneeled down in front of me and put her hands on my thighs. Her fingers moved gently with a subtle femininity that my wife completely lacks, just barely touching me on the inside of the thighs. She looked up at me with her big sad eyes and sultry smile. Then she asked me to dance with her and her companion, a pretty woman much younger than her. The result of this was to make me wonder what the hell was going on, and I am still wondering. Tampoka just laughs and/or denies that it happened whenever I bother to bring it up.

I just took a break (just right now) to have Tampoka pull a couple big butcher knives on me downstairs in the kitchen. She broke the first one slamming it into the concrete floor. She did this because I spat in her face. I did that because she took money out of my bag without permission to pay a teenager to carry water for her. I refused to carry water for her because she doesn’t know how to talk to the person who pays her way in life. She treats her brothers the opposite to the way she treats me, they are perfect gods in her eyes who cannot be criticized no matter what they do to me. I should put her in the mental institution but I don’t know that I want to go to the trouble. I doubt there is any solution to this except for me to get with the program, bow down and always give her everything she demands until I am dead broke and without a pot to piss in, or just plain dead, at which time she can just put me in a hole. For some reason I don’t feel like getting caught up in her program. For some reason I think when someone pulls a knife on me while demanding something from me (always without witnesses, this kind of behavior of hers), I don’t feel encouraged to do what I am told. She certainly knows better than to take anything out of my bag, including 20 pesoes. Small money but she says she’ll do it every day till I do what I am told.

So here’s what’s going on.

I have for many months been waiting for the right time to give her back our savings account which I had taken away from her because she tried to steal it from me. It was to be our account but I found out I couldn’t get my name on it without an alien resident card. We opened the account anyway with some money my mom had given us, and for a while I put 2000 pesoes a month in it when I could, that’s about $50. When I couldn’t put money in it, she would flip out right there in the bank lobby and I would leave since the guards with their big rifles gave me the impression that they’d rather not have couples working out their budget problems in loud voices in the bank lobby. I admit that I made the mistake of starting to call it “her” account but that wasn’t the original intention and it was a matter of manipulation, which she is an expert at, and for a while I considered it an act of placation to try and keep her owing me good behavior. That didn’t work for me and I eventually told her I wanted to close the account and use the money to pay off the credit card which we use every year for my obligatory annual out trip in order to renew my visa for another year. She refused and whenever she sold pigs she also refused to put any money into our debt problem, instead buying very expensive hardwood furniture and then for over a year having to finish paying that off with her allowance. And denying that her being without money in her pocket because of her large monthly obligation had any effect on me, despite the fact that she had to demand money from me for every little thing she wanted to do or eat.

What brought on the decision for me to take the savings account away from her (maybe a year ago) was probably this. She asked if she could use about $200 out of the account to buy herself a dumoy water tank so she could sell drinking water to the neighbors. She said she would put the money back from off the top of the proceeds, and not take anything for herself. Not only was this a lie, but it turned out that her brother Dandy, the one who hates the dirt I walk on and will not speak to me, would be in control of the dumoy water business. This was no big surprise and it makes sense anyway since he has a store which is close to where we had to put the water tank. I’m just reinforcing what is becoming more obvious to me in my naivete, that her brother controls her and takes the cream from whatever extra income she manages to come up with. When she worked for the city, she used to get a huge Christmas bonus every year which she usually used to start a business for Danny, such as the two videoke machines he used to rent out. Since he then failed to provide proper transportation for the machines when people rented them, they were always in bad condition and one had to be gutted to provide spare parts for the other. The remaining one has been limping along off and on with occasional infusions of money from me, from Tampoka, and from Dandy.

Of course she told everyone she knew that I had stolen her savings account and nothing I could say would ever change their mind about automatically taking her side. The reason it even came up—the reason I learned that she had told everybody this—is that the several times she assaulted me ended up getting us into a few attempted moderation sessions with Manong Ben and one with Manong Roger and Fe which ended up with Roger shouting at me completely out of control because I kept accusing my wife of lying about things to make herself look good. Roger’s wife Fe is my wife’s oldest sister, and Roger is as unpopular as I because he’s like me, he can’t keep his opinions to himself so the Miracleens don’t like him thus he has no way to vent. Most Filipinos use backbiting sessions to vent but no one talks to him.

Her lying about whose savings account got taken away from her (ours) was like when she quit her job without notice, just stopped showing up, and then told everyone that I had made her quit because I wanted her at home. I certainly didn’t want her at home all the time, I liked having her gone all day, but I had told her to do whatever she needed to do and instead of dealing with it and working out a reprieve from her job so we could get through Dugdug’s temporary period of fever after fever, she just stopped going to work. When the new mayor went into office she lost her chance of just showing up again as she had done so many times since we got married, always being reinstated as if nothing had happened. She finally stopped begging the new mayor for her job back, and told her family it was my fault she quit.

I just took another break to apply tambal (medicine) and what DugDug calls “band-haids” to a samad (injury) on the little bayut from next door (his parents want him to be a gay) whose real name is Clark, and to another samad on Dave, DugDug’s older cousin. Dave and I have regular disagreements and he always bounces back because he has known me since he was three years old and knows I am not bad, even when I am wrong. Or eventually figures it out. If the adults in this place really were childlike as they sometimes seem to be from an American’s point-of-view…well keep on wishing. They seem to need someone to hold a grudge against, a scapegoat, and preferably for life. Having a seriously detested kalaban (enemy) frees them up to keep smiling for all the other people they secretly don’t like very much. Scapegoat, that’s me. The children continue to cluster around me because they know better.

Back in October I had the idea of giving the savings account back to Tampoka and stopping her allowance in order to force her to contribute to paying off our credit card debt. I would use her monthly allowance, about $100-150 depending on the value of the dollar vs the peso, for about 9 months and she would have the same amount of money but would get it herself by withdrawing it from what would now really be her savings account. But she and DugDug both had birthdays in November, then along comes Christmas, and by the time it was January I still had the plan in the back of my mind but it took me till last month, the month of my own birthday, to go through with it. Knowing that the result would be war. Most of the battles have gotten jumbled up together in a mud of hostility and discouragement but the knife throwings that took place just an hour ago will probably stick in my mind for awhile. If she had thrown the knives at me directly I wouldn’t be typing this now, I would have made yet another trip to one of her elders who have proven to be unwilling and/or unable to get involved. So why bother. This writing is supposed to provide the venting that I can’t get by going to her relatives or mine. I can’t take these problems to them without making them think I’m bastos (evil) by daring to criticize one of theirs.

Naturally when I gave her the bankbook and told her it was to last nine months, she make plans with Dandy to start another of their businesses. She had the tact to ask for my approval before she did it, and I told her it was her money but it would cause me an incidental problem if she spent the money too fast. She bought a new Megavision karaoke machine to put in her and Dandy’s old worn-out jukebox. This took about three days of my life since Dandy had to sit on the sidelines and pretend he wasn’t involved, so when she had problems—the technician she hired couldn’t get it to work—I had to go to Davao with her etc etc till finally the technician got it going. It turned out that the machines are from a pirated design, the name Megavision apparently is local and the design is a clone of some American karaoke machine loaded with the same stuff that was on the less sophisticated Karavision we used to use, and more. I mention this because I made some noise at the place where we bought the Megavision because they lied and said there was no owner’s manual. Finally I realized the reason why the top and bottom of the quick start instruction (just a bad photocopy of it) were cut off was to remove the name of the real company, though the words “owners manual” had not been removed. I feel lucky that I didn’t push any harder or threaten to turn them in or I could end up as salvage on the side of the road with my adam’s apple cut out.

The point being, it is obviously Dandy’s Megavision, it’s in his billiaran, it’s under his control, and the money goes into his pocket. Whatever their agreement for sharing the proceeds is not going to benefit me, the source of the funds that made it possible to buy the machine, and it’s not going back into the savings account. Guess what? I don’t care. I’m 55, I know people are sharks. I’m here for my child. This writing is about what it’s like to be married to for your money. All my life, since I left my parents’ house, I have been dirt poor with few exceptions. Now on a disability check I am raising a child and helping my wife’s family, and treated like a rich person with unlimited resources. Believe it or not, my ad at the website Cherry Blossoms where Tampoka found me six years ago stated exactly this: “I don’t have any money, I am just looking for someone to love.” She didn’t believe me, and she is still trying to pump blood out of a stone.

The day after she spent about $300 on the Megavision and related costs, our electric water pump went out.

That’s how things work. When you splurge and buy a boat, your air conditioner burns up, and when you splurge on a new air conditioner instead of fixing the old one, your kid gets sick. There is no way for poor people with no work (like me) to solve money problems without self-discipline: doing without. Over and over, for an extended period of time. The little exceptions to self-denial pile up until one is surrounded by possessions and wracked with guilt because the debt is never going to go away. I am guilty, and in my circumstances I am going it alone to solve problems while those who should love me and respect me for helping them are slamming doors in my face and threatening me with fists and knives.

Manong Elzy told me this morning that it is very difficult to tell people here that they are wrong and you are right. It is considered normal, apparently, for people to ignore each other permanently instead of working together on a compromise or coming to an understanding.

Electric water pump. I had bought them a new pump before I moved here, a few months after Tampoka and I got married. When I decided to move into this house, which Tampoka said was hers (and it is, but now she denies it and says it’s a “common house”) she hit me up for money to remodel the whole upstairs where we would be living. I was too happy to send her all my extra money and squeak by without it, and ended up borrowing from my inheritance to pay for car repairs, for the marriage, the airplane tickets, and subsequent problems caused by having to leave the Philippines every year. Here I have no car, no motorcycle, no insurance, and no gasoline or repair cost. I escape twice a week on the back of any motorcycle that will take me to town.

That first water pump lasted only two years because Dandy and Noel and their families as well as Dodo and his family next door were all using the water from it. The pump was always running. When it burned up for the last time I bought another one, and it lasted four years since Noel moved out and Dodo put in his own well at his house and bought his own pump. Dandy built his own house within the past year but continued using our water, which just today Tampoka tried to deny. She said he stopped using our water when he built his house, but the fact is that he stopped using our water about a week before the pump went out, because of some angry feeling he had toward me about something I said or did that I don’t remember. He “showed me” by starting to carry his own water whenever I was looking, but when he thought I wasn’t looking he kept taking it. Well I never said he couldn’t use my water. But I have asked Tampoka a few times, over the years, why her brother could never speak to me again while continuing to take water he had never asked for, using the pig house in my garden without asking, dumping the trash from his entertainment establishment and house into the trash hole in my garden…etc, all without asking or saying thanks. But I never pushed it and I never mentioned any of those things to him or Rose, nor did I give them the evil eye. I don’t really care because the electricity usually costs me less than $25 a month. Dandy used to do most of the maintenance on the pump, plumbing, and well, or arrange for getting it done, but in the past few years since I have become the devil in his eye, it’s up to me to get it done or do it myself. Once Rose handed me 100 pesoes and Tampoka informed me that from that point forward they would be helping out with the water. That was the last I heard of it. Our “mineral water” (filtered water which we buy each month) was also shared freely with them while their two children, DugDug’s sibling cousins, were babies. They could have kept taking it, but once again to “show me” they put their nose in the air and stopped taking it. Bebing is the same way, putting her nose up in the air and refusing to be in the same room with me because I dared to flash my temper at somebody, until next time she needs to borrow money for her or her son, then she very smoothly gets it out of me by pretending to like me. It’s like having two wives.

Two months ago the water tank rusted and I was lucky enough to have some extra cash at that time, which should have gone into the credit card but instead most of it had to go for unexpected visa costs and a new stainless tank. My bilas (husband of my sister-in-law) Neyong helped me install the new tank and build a little house around it. We borrowed (took) about one or two buckets of balas (sand & gravel) from Dandy’s pile to make the floor so I got the evil eye for that, and Dandy most certainly continued taking water for some time. So my wife’s assertion today that Dandy started carrying his own water from the manual pump when he built his house is just a lie.

During one of my gripe sessions the other day I told Manong Ben that my wife claims that her brothers and sisters don’t talk to me only because they’re afraid of me. Ben told me she was lying, and called it blackmail. So he’s making progress. But he didn’t keep his word, he didn’t talk to my wife, or if he did, neither he nor she mentioned what came of their discussion. Which also wouldn’t surprise me because I am usually excluded from discussions where I would have any chance to stand up for myself.

Lately I’ve been responding to Tampoka’s demands for a new water pump by saying that I bought the last two, Dandy helped wear them out but didn’t pay for any of the electricity or for the last two pumps, and it’s now Dandy’s turn to buy a new pump. He just built his own bathroom and is now carrying lots of water, and who is she kidding, if I buy a new pump he will continue to use it whenever he thinks I’m not looking. Before he started treating me like the enemy, he used to borrow my tools constantly, which I didn’t mind because he used to do the maintenance on the house, but if I ever wanted my tool back, I had to go to Rose and ask her to get his toolbox out from under their bed so I could retrieve my tool, which he apparently intended to keep. I tried asking him to give a tool back once and got such nasty vibes for it that after that, I asked Rose instead. At least she still looks pretty shen she’s pouting. Shortly after the first time he went wild on me he “showed me” by not borrowing my tools anymore. Except when I’m not around. I rescued my hammer from a bucket where he left it sitting in water, just the other day, and it was minutes after that when I learned my guitar had disappeared…see last blog entry.

What I was leading up to is that today Tampoka was demanding that I carry water for her, and her tone was such that I needed to tell her to change her approach, or else do it herself. I almost caved in because I really don’t mind carrying water, but it’s the principle of the damn thing, I was told before I came here to not be a wimp and I think that’s a pretty good policy. Demanding and requesting are two different things and I respond differently to them; I more or less have to or I’m pussywhipped on top of everything else. Well I’m pussywhipped anyway because my wife seems to have a physical need for a scapegoat, but I still have to try to stand up for myself as what’s left of the ground I’m standing on slips away and doesn’t come back.

So she went upstairs and I accidentally walked in on her stealing money out of my bag to pay some boys to carry water for her. I followed her downstairs and told her, with the boy watching, that she is a thief, so he will be less likely to do this for her tomorrow, but she said she’ll pay someone every day out of my money to carry water for her. I had also mentioned that when I asked her to talk to Dodo and Haiku about their attack on me the other day, she met my request with the usual contempt. Well her promise to steal money from me every day got me to spit in her face, more than a drop but less than a loogy, and she started hitting me and I just spun her around using my training in non-violence, but she grabbed a big knife. She couldn’t get herself to charge me with it, instead slamming it into the floor and breaking it. A few seconds later she had another knife in her hand and said she was going to kill me. I just stood there and she threw it against the wall.

What a crock. This isn’t blackmail, it’s extortion and bullying.

My presentation to Manong Elzy this morning was that Danny is an extortionist. He has distanced himself from me (like he used to send Rose to borrow money from me, he never asked me directly) and my wife is his tool when he needs a new toy. The dumoy water tank and the Megavision are tributes to his ability to manipulate her, and her inability to criticize him or say no to him. Her resources are his for the taking. Manong Elzy told me that it is a difficult situation, he was more or less hinting that he would refuse to get involved or talk to anyone for me, because as he said, most communities in the Philippines work this way. In my words, if there is someone with more money, his neighbors and relatives squat on their share of what’s his until it becomes theirs. They are persistent and the sharing ethic added to the taboo on confrontation prevents anyone from telling them to stop taking.

Manong Elzy said he thought the separateness of neighbor from neighbor in the US is “better”, but I think he was hinting around that I should go “home” to the US if I can’t “adjust”. Then some of his clients showed up and we couldn’t finish our conversation. I came home and got myself assaulted instead, for pridefully refusing to get my wife’s water because I didn’t like her tone of voice when she told me to get it.

But I have no “home”, I have already “adjusted” and I don’t think there is any such a thing as “better”.

Assault by Dodo and Haiku

I am not unaware that I am considered hard to get along with. I know that I complain about things that other people just put up with. I know I have problems with people everywhere I go. I am very aware that I could have prevented this incident by saying and doing nothing. The problem is that what I said and did was nothing compared to the response it provoked. The response it provoked was not directly life threatening but in context the threat is to ruin my life and that is the same thing as killing me. The people who are involved know this and they know that their complaint against me is petty while my complaint against them is that they, the dozens or hundreds of them, have once again and more seriously than before, threatened violence against my person for the simple act of my having complained about something that was bothering me. It’s them against me as usual and there is no excuse for this despotic assumption that I must bow under their tyrannical demands. I will not under any circumstances bow down to anybody’s protestations about cultural differences in this matter. I have done nothing to deserve the level of contempt and disregard for my humanity that I am being treated with and I will not tolerate this.

What brought this on, as usual, was petty.

For maybe three years or so I have been the subject of shunning by the Miracleen family, no I’m not changing the names of the guilty anymore, this is real, it’s serious and I hope they all go to jail. Before or after they destroy me, I don’t care. They are going to destroy me because there is only one of me and I have disappointed them by marrying their sister and then not being the deep pocket they had expected. To find me more than an atm machine waiting for the next raping is beyond their ability to tolerate. I need to be gotten out of the way and they won’t quit till they push me onto a one-way trip to the grave or back to the US, whichever they can manage to finagle.

To be the subject of shunning in a foreign place where I barely can communicate is not as easy as it sounds. Most of you have not even been here, partly because it’s not cheap but mostly because you are afraid. I was afraid too, especially when I heard that my intended bride had eight brothers. I don’t particularly like marrying a family; I’ve done it before and would have preferred to marry my girlfriend. It hasn’t worked that way.

This makes my other fiasco marriages look like a children’s tea party.

It’s not that I’m hurt and bleeding. It wasn’t that kind of assault. It’s not that they planned to do the things I mentioned above. I may be angry but I’m not out of touch. But that’s what it will come to and they wish it more strongly than ever, that I will be pushed out of their lives. Never mind what it does to Dugdug to lose his papa, never mind what it does to me to lose my son. No I’m not using fake names anymore, to hell with them. My wife is Tampoka Hortego Miracleen, though our wedding license says her name is Tampoka Miracleen Rubberchin, but what kind of joke is that. Her favorite brother is Dandilow Hortego Miracleen, and the second illegitimate child of Dandy and his girlfriend Rose has been my son Dugdug since eight months before he was born, when I started to pay his way in life. Since then Dandy and Rose have gotten married and also had a third child.

Just to put this in context, every child within a mile of my house calls me Buddy. Only the adults in this family of spoiled, undisciplined, never-been-criticized adults have ever mistaken me for the enemy. The trouble started when their father died and no one was here to take over the leadership of the family. The oldest son, Elzy, is my friend and he speaks English well, but he’s busy running a large environmental action group and he told me that the years he spent in Marcos’ political prison taught him that his father’s lackadaisical approach to letting children be had not prepared him for staying alive. As a result of this perspective he rarely sets foot outside his compound to visit his siblings next door, because he, like their cousins across the street doesn’t see eye to eye with their hang-out lifestyle. He says he doesn’t understand my wife and her business partner, Dandy, so he avoids them. That is the Filipino way. Avoid what you do not understand. That is easy for them to do, all of them can avoid me easily. But I am alone here, I cannot avoid the people around me without avoiding life. I am raising a child here and he freely associates with people who have hated me for a long time. Why do they hate me?

Dandy first threatened me because my wife had let the yaya quit and left her sister Bebing to help me with Dugdug who was walking but still a baby. But Bebing refused to come upstairs to do what the yaya used to do, with the excuse that she was shy of me. So Dugdug fell on his head while I was making his breakfast, because Dugdug’s sister, who lives next door, accidentally knocked him off a chair. It was no one’s fault, but the yaya would have been there and Bebing was supposed to have taken her place. And the sound of Dugdug’s head hitting the floor did something to me that any parent should understand. But since I am an outsider it was not Dandy’s problem to take the trouble to understand why I was upset. I carried Dugdug downstairs screaming in my arms and asked Where is the Yaya! (The Yaya is a babysitter, live-in. Her bedroom had been taken away by Bebing who decided to move in for awhile even though she has her own house in Davao. So my yaya found herself sleeping on a hard wooden bench with no privacy in a house where the husband and wife were bickering, and naturally she said her mama was sick, packed her bags and went home). Dandy followed me upstairs, and with Dugdug in my arms, he put up his dukes and threatened to beat me for being angry at Bebing. I told him he was crazy because my training in non-violence taught me to make noise and most attackers will be frightened away. He flew off the handle and destroyed a plastic shoe rack, and went downstairs. Bebing took Dugdug out of my hands and I headed for Elzy’s place next door. Dandy had to apologize and we shook hands but after that he could never look me in the eye and for his convenience he decided to make that be my fault.

The truth is that Dandy is as unsociable as I am, and only the fact that he has many loyal family members and neighbors that he’s known all his life, and he is a hard worker, disguises the fact that he has no close friends. When you have seven brothers and four sisters, a wife and two or more children, you don’t need friends. Here in the Philippines bad behavior of any and all kinds can hide behind family loyalty, which supercedes any notion of being either objectively or morally correct. Here as in other places, what’s moral is “the way we do things here”, in other words, concensus. And “the Filipino way” is what any Filipino damn well decides it is to put down the outsider’s immoral need to speak his mind.

The next incident was the day after I forked over $150 to contribute to part of the medicine needed by a young teenage girl named MayMay who lives at Tampoka’s aunt’s house down the street. MayMay would have died of typhoid if I and others had not sacrificed our financial well-being for a month to buy her medicine, which cost $30 a day to keep her alive. When I saw her she couldn’t lift her arm. Typhoid is a result of bad water.

The next day, I walked into the kitchen and saw Rose filling plastic baggies with well water, to sell to children as ice water and ice. I told her she could not sell well water for children to drink. Tampoka informed me later that freezing water sterilizes it! Well excuse me for knowing better, but I do! The water that comes out of our well is 30 feet away from our septic tank, the septic tank of the pig house, and surrounded by other houses and their septic tanks on all sides. And it smells like it. No, this is not my imagination, I know when water smells like sewage. Rose of course ignored me and acted snooty, and Dandy was right outside the back door giving me the evil eye. When I looked at him he raised the big machete that he had in his hand. I told him he was crazy and he left muttering.

When Dandy and Rose’s third child was born with his own poop in his lungs, I had forked over money (without being asked) to help them keep him alive. When their first child was a baby, I used to carry her in my arms while we walked to the other property I’d bought for my wife a mile or so away. These children and all their cousins and playmates call me Buddy. Let their clarity judge me. They spend hours with me every day, and this Dandy hasn’t had one conversation with me in six years, and hasn’t spoken to me at all in three years, except once to tell me to get out of his way.

When Rose was pregnant with Dugdug, and it became known that he was going to be given to me and Tampoka as our child, Dandy’s sister-in-law Bebe accused him of selling his child, and he got angry and threw his drinking glass down on the cement floor. Rose and Bebe by that point had not spoken to each other, despite living in the same house, since before I arrived. Bebe was there first but Rose was not going to let someone else be queen of the house. Bebe and Noel were the first to build their own house and move out, then more recently Dandy and Rose moved out and now live in a new house next door, a few feet away, next to the billiaran. My wife blames me for the fact that we now live alone in a big two-story house that was built for a big family. They all moved out instead of solving their problems and dealing with me as adults, and that is supposed to be my fault.

The next incident of threatened violence was when Dugdug was eating solid food and his aunts and uncles started slamming him with candy and junk food non-stop. It became obvious to me that I was not respected as his father, because they all knew what I thought of feeding that garbage to children and especially to babies, but the problem wasn’t mainly the lack of respect, it was my child’s health. He is now 4-1/2 and his upper teeth are all black stubs, not teeth at all, and he is going to endure many toothaches between now and the time he has his adult teeth. This is not my fault but who’s going to pay with time, patience, heartache, and if Dugdug will allow it, dentist bills.

I was in the tindahan, that’s Dandy’s store which is attached to his billiaran (billiard hall and general hang-out area, just a big nipa hut), because my wife insisted as usual in escaping me so she could feed Dugdug without me around. I disapprove of this but she still does it; we rarely eat together as a family and I am often expected to eat alone, which anyone who knows anything about Filipinos knows is an insult. I followed her down to the tindahan because I sensed a loss of control over the child that was supposedly mine. When Dugdug was six months old and started eating solid food I made that solid food myself, every day, from fresh vegetables and oatmeal which I cooked everyday and pushed through a screen. He grew strong and healthy while Rose was feeding her children sugar powder with dried vegetable powder in it, garbage sold by Nestles to uneducated Filipinos who believe what they hear on TV.

While my wife was trying to feed Dugdug his breakfast, Dandy kept offering candy to Dugdug, knowing I would get angry. I said, OK give me three pieces of candy. Dandy gave me three pieces of candy and I threw them out in the yard. Dandy picked up two empty liter sized beer bottles and threatened to hit me, while I had Dugdug in my arms. Rose told him to sit down. Later I saw him over at his brother Dodo’s house bragging about his bravery and went over there and confronted him in front of Dodo and all his friends, employees and “standby’s”. Dandy picked up a chair and threatened to hit me.

When Dugdug was very small Dandy rented a Megavision jukebox for his entertainment facility. Megavision is karaoke with music videos as additional selections instead of just pure karaoke. Some of the music videos are vile, purposely disturbing, supposed music with wealthy pop stars screaming abusive lyrics, pretending to be street punks. This sort of thing is no problem to me, as long as someone doesn’t play it at my home. All day and night. Without my permission. I do live here. It’s amazing what these peaceful Filipinos do to vent all the hostility they bottle up. One afternoon while such a song was screaming I picked Dugdug up and carried him down to the billiaran and went up to the three or four young men sitting in there, not knowing which of them had paid two pesos to entertain me in my home in this way. I stopped in front of each one of them in turn, and said to each one, “Your music is very beautiful.” They each tried to bore a hole through me with the evil eye.

The curfew on the Megavision was 10:00 pm, there was a sign on it saying so. Every night it was going on till after midnight, and Tampoka told me to stop complaining and ignore it. But both Dugdug and his sister SaySay had fevers and were not getting better because they could not sleep. Dugdug was thrashing around in his bed, and SaySay was wandering like a zombie with a bottle hanging out of her mouth, from our house to the billiaran, back and forth. I went down to the billiaran and told one of the guys there that I didn’t care who got angry, I was going to put a stop to the noise. I told Dandy what time it was and told him to keep in mind that his child and my child both had fevers and could not sleep. He told me to wait till the selections already on the machine were played out and I left, but they laughed at me while I walked away and plugged more pesos into the machine.

About a half hour later I was beside myself, Dugdug was getting worse, and I guzzled three beers to make me brave. It normally takes me three days to drink three beers unless I’m in a good mood. I shouted out the window and told everybody to go home. I told them my child had a fever, and they laughed at me. I shouted and told them to stop laughing at me. I was ready to stop shouting then; the music was off and people were starting to wander away. At 1:00 a.m. maybe their wives and children hoped they were planning to come home sometime. Then someone threw a rock at me and it landed on the tin roof. At first I was going to shrug it off, then realized that sort of thing also had to be challenged. I started screaming, you can’t throw rocks at me, and here comes Elzy with his rifle over his shoulder. He avoids our place, as I mentioned. He is in poor health, a diabetic cigarette smoker, but here he was in the middle of the night, hollering, Who threw that stone. Everybody left quickly, Dandy disappeared, and Haiku stood there talking with Manong Elzy. Haiku is Dandy’s sister-in-law, Dodo’s wife.

When most of the people were gone, I went downstairs and talked to Elzy and Haiku. Elzy went home and Haiku stayed about an hour and talked to me. She has the ability to speak English since she is from Davao and is better educated than most of the Miracleens. She said over and over that she got angry at her husband for shouting. I have never known whether he was shouting at me or at Dandy, but what I do know is that she was trying to tell me she was angry at me for shouting.

The next morning we packed up Dugdug and moved him to the hospital for three days. His fever was not getting better.

The result of all this friction between my wife’s favorite brother and I is that he has shunned me for so long that the damage to the relationship is irreversible. From time to time I say good morning or whatever and he grunts, there is no meeting in the middle. He intends to never speak to me again, which is, where I come from, a childish game like crapping in your bed.

After Dandy stopped threatening me, my wife Tampoka took over assaulting me and from time to time would threaten to take Dugdug away or give him back to Dandy and Rose if I ever disagreed with her about anything or criticized anyone in her family. She has hit me with chairs, tried to push me down the stairs, and once she threw her washing machine at my dog. All this with Dugdug right there, but she never does this with any other witnesses around. As far as her siblings are concerned, the shouting they hear from me is the only thing that is going on. Their sister is obviously without blame, because after all, she is their sister. Last time she assaulted me it was with her fists, and I shielded myself with my arms and let Dugdug see that you can wait craziness out and not meet it with more violence. If he has to witness this garbage, then at least one of his parents should not lose it completely. When I finally got out of the corner she had me backed into, I opened doors and windows and shouted Police! Police! Police! out of all four sides of the house. All around I heard doors and windows slamming shut. No one came to help me until finally Elzy and his wife showed up, sat down with us in the house and talked to her, I don’t know what they said. Elzy’s wife has shown distaste for me ever since, maybe I was supposed to let my wife beat me and keep it to myself. I don’t really know what else to do but shout because I am not going to be a silent victim and I’m not going to hit back, and I’m not going to lie in bed unable to sleep because of not venting when I need to. Tampoka finally stopped hitting me, but then she launched into the “You have a girlfriend,” phase of our so-called relationship. That is still going on, and let me assure you that if my wife ever wants someone to make love to her again, she’s going to have to go somewhere else for it. She grosses me out. I have been so angry so many times that we are all lucky to be alive. I don’t know how I have managed to contain myself.

They don’t know what it’s like to be all alone 9000 miles from home with no one to talk to. As a matter of fact, they don’t know what it’s like to be all alone. They don’t know what it’s like to be away from home. And they don’t know what it’s like to have no one to talk to. So their judgement of me is an unfitting slime that I have to wipe off of my face throughout each and every day in order to keep functioning, because the shunning goes on and on; when I walk into a room they leave, the house we live in, where Tampoka and Dodo and Dandy and Noel were born and raised, is deserted and now Dandy’s new house is where my wife spends all her time. Jealousy is not my thing, it’s Dandy’s thing, but what gets to me is that in order to spend time with my son I often have to follow him into a place where people refuse to say hello. A few months ago I went to Dandy and told him that he had shunned me long enough, the argument was over, and he should greet me when I go to his house. He grunted and nothing changed.

Remember what I did to deserve this: I got mad because Dugdug fell on his head, I got mad because Rose was selling sewer water for children to drink, and I got mad because they gave Dugdug candy while he was eating breakfast. I got mad because my wife only hits me when no one is watching. From my point of view, I am not being allowed to think my own thoughts, speak my mind, or raise my own child. From their point of view, I am always mad, period. Well I’m not always mad, I have written three books since I came here. I am now teaching myself calculus. My wife sort of realizes this but none of it means anything to her. She doesn’t know what I have done in my 55 years on earth, and doesn’t ask. Who I am means nothing to her. Filipinos are not individuals; they are Filipinos.

I got mad because me wife forced a toothbrush into Dugdug’s mouth and made him cry. I was assaulted for criticizing her. OK I admit it, I pretended I was going to force a toothbrush into her mouth to see how she’d like it, and that’s when she assaulted me. But lately the assault has been, “How is your girlfriend, pregnant?” or “Show me what is in your bag,” when I go to town. Last time I took her out to eat she cried in her noodles and made a big scene because it all became so clear to her, this girlfriend thing. The latest development is she has “high blood” and I am no longer allowed to say anything that makes her angry because I will force her to have a stroke or a heart attack. So what else is new? Everything I say makes her angry. And yet talking is her thing, sitting and talking is the Miracleen life. But if I walk into a room and sit down with others, count to 60 and I will be sitting alone.

The first time I was in the Philippines, to marry this stranger who I had never met, I bought a guitar to woo her with, and when I went back to the US I left it behind as a share-share guitar. It was passed around from nephew to nephew and from time to time I collect it, change the strings, glue it back together, strum a few chords, and then someone else borrows it. It’s a cheap guitar and I don’t try to control it. I have long known that if someone borrows something, they are not going to bring it back about 80% of the time, and I will have to go collect it before it becomes theirs. Lately Haiku and Dodo’s teenage daughter has been borrowing the guitar from time to time, and usually I will go to their house to play and then leave it there so she can use it if she wants. Sometimes when I have it, she will send her little brother Kent upstairs to get it for her.

This afternoon Haiku’s teenage brother was visiting from Davao and dropped by to borrow the guitar, and I told him the guitar was already at his house. I’d been meaning to go get it because I had put new strings on it and wanted to play it before they were solid rust. He came back and said that the guitar was not there. I went over there and told Haiku that Kent had borrowed the guitar about 10 days or two weeks ago, for his sister to use. Kent denied it so I canvassed the neighborhood and no one knew where the guitar was. I went back and asked Haiku, in Visayan, “Unsa may akong buhaton?” (What am I supposed to do?) She started ranting at me, talking loud and fast and saying Kent wasn’t a liar. I asked her the names of the teenage boys that live with her and are always lounging around her house watching TV, and she started shouting at me. Everything I said was construed as a direct accusation, and it didn’t do me any good to speak softly because she was ranting non-stop and if I didn’t speak up there was no chance she would hear me. I told her to relax and not get angry and she upped the volume. So I left, and made the rounds again, this time stopping across the street at a little barbecue stand at Tampoka’s cousin’s house. I was trying to explain what was going on because I needed to talk to someone who was not going to shout at me, when I noticed that Kent was there. I spoke to him and he ignored me, and I said, “Ayaw pagluod sa akoa,” (Don’t ignore me) and flicked him on the arm with my finger. Any of his aunts or uncles is qualified to flick him on the arm with their finger for being disrespectful, but I don’t qualify because my name’s not Miracleen.

I returned to Haiku’s house and Kent had already reported me for supposedly hitting him, and he was crying. He’s 12 years old, I had flicked him with my finger. On his shirt. Dodo came up behind me without warning and hit me on the arm and started shouting at me, something about hitting his boy. I told him he was not allowed to hit me, then Tampoka showed up and stood between us and started pushing me and shouting at me. Outwardly it was supposed to look like she was keeping me from starting a fight, but I was just standing there, I had to try hard to keep from falling down in the mud as she was pushing me and tearing my shirt. Haiku and Dodo were both shouting at me. Dodo among other things was telling me to go home, and Haiku was telling me she was going to report me to the US Embassy.

Dodo is one of those silent types who everyone likes because he is feared but if he likes you he will let you in his inner circle and you can sit around smoking cigarettes with him and work in his banana packing business. He idolizes his oldest brother Elzy and wants to be a beloved leader like Elzy is. He has run for Barangay Captain twice and lost, and when we had the city mayor election recently he invested a lot of time and money in campaigning against the mayor who was already in power. When the mayor won the re-election he fired Haiku from her job with the city, and he fired Dodo’s youngest brother Noel, who had been a security guard for the city for 11 years. Last year at the fiesta in our neighborhood, Dodo got drunk and started a fight about basketball. Later that night, a 21-year-old boy who lives next door who was drunk had a fight with his wife and she got scared and went home to her mother. The boy hung himself, his mother found him in a tree when she heard about the fight and came to investigate. The fiesta is coming again in a few weeks and I would go somewhere else for the day, except for the usual two reasons: I have a child here to protect, provide good company for, nurture, teach, and enjoy. It is that, and that alone, that makes this my home.

Here in my home I have been threatened with pushing, hitting, and reports to the embassy which would get me thrown out of the country or get my next visa denied. Here in my home there are so many people that treat me with contempt that I fear for the sanity of my child, never mind my own, there’s little left of that to be concerned about. Everywhere I look there are things to see that I have done for these people: the windows in Dodo and Haiku’s house, I paid for those. The springs on Dodo’s motorcycle, I paid for those. The water that Rose and Dandy and family have been bathing and washing with for the past four years since I separated our electric bills, that I pay for even though Dandy doesn’t speak to me and doesn’t share the cost. I won’t get started on the list, it’s 3:30 in the morning and there will be more of this tomorrow. I might not be there, since no one is going to translate for me there will be no reason for me to attend. Elzy will be there and MayMay will be there. Remember MayMay? I helped save her life with my money, when her parents had despaired I went all the way to Davao, my idea, and walked into the hospital and found her and her mother camped out in the hallway because they had no money for a room, and I showed them that people wanted to help. I put money in her hand. A day or two later MayMay’s father came to me and asked for more so I gave him $150. When MayMay got out of the hospital she hobbled up the stairs to my place, the place my wife doesn’t clean anymore, and tried to repay me with fruit and money. I took the fruit and made her keep the money.

Tonight when I flicked Kent on the shoulder with my finger MayMay was there. When I went back to Tampoka’s cousin’s place to vent and tell them Dodo had hit me and pushed me, they refused to be my witness, claiming they had seen nothing. I couldn’t figure out how to tell them there was nothing to see, that was the whole point, I had done nothing to Kent. Finally they reminded me MayMay had been there. I think it is common knowledge that MayMay thinks I am OK.

So I grabbed a flashlight, refused to eat my dinner and told Tampoka I was going to her aunt’s house to find MayMay and enlist her as a witness. We did this and when her grandmother asked her what happened, without any prompting from me she said, “He just flicked Kent on the arm, nothing more. And tried to make him talk.” Then Bebing showed up with Dugdug and his little brother and said Manong Ben, Elzy’s friend who lives with him, was waiting at home to talk to me, so we went home and ate, then I went downstairs and let Ben start on his speechifying. He always goes into verbose overeducated poetizing and pontificating, but at least his English is perfect and he will understand everything I say to him. I let him go on for awhile about some point of Latin law which I didn’t understand any part of, and then the guitar came up.

This is not about a guitar, I ranted. The guitar is barato kaayo (very cheap), bahala sa guitar (to hell with the guitar), I will burn that guitar in five seconds. This is about drawing a line in the sand. I am Dodo’s older brother, Haiku’s older brother, I am a Manong in this place. Only Elzy is older than me, and only by three years. Dandy and company don’t have to like me, they don’t have to be my friend, but they have to show a little respect from time to time. They don’t have to kiss my hand but they have to say hello and goodbye, not every time we pass in the hall, but it is wrong to take my money and accept my favors and then treat me as if I have to be perfect, and do what is expected, or suffer threats and assaults on my body and my status. Just this past week my scheduled activities were pre-empted because Haiku wanted me to make a DVD of Kent’s graduation for her, and the Christmas party. Two DVDs later and she’s going to turn me into the embassy, have my visa revoked, take my child away from me, ruin what’s left of my life, because I criticized her child for saying he didn’t borrow my guitar. Because I asked her to introduce her live-in help to me so I would know who lives next door to me. Because I flicked her child on the arm she is going to kill my world.

I don’t know what else to say.

Letter to my Papa who is 84 years old

Dear Papa Irving,

...If my 800 per month was supporting 2 people in 2006, then the 25% drop in the value of the dollar vs the peso that has taken place since then means that I am now supporting 3 people on 600 per month, in relative terms. Not only that but I had to stop selling discs because ...sold several in February but then my visa came through and the tank on the water pump sprung a leak and...Medical costs have been high lately.

"Tampoka's" savings account is actually our savings account which she tried to say was hers. I couldn't get my name on it when we opened it because I didn't have the resident alien card, that's what I'm waiting for now but had to do the visa process first. I took the bankbook away because she decided the money was hers just because my name wasn't on the account. Also she took 200 from it and lied to me saying she was buying herself a dumoy water tank business, to sell drinking water to neighbors. She said the money would be replenished back to the bank account first before anything else. It was all a big ploy to buy her brother a water tank, the tank is really his and she gets a commission which she spends in his store on snacks that I disapprove of her giving to DugDug all day. Meanwhile her brother uses the water I pump out of the ground and doesn't pay for it and hasn't spoken to me in three years.

I am now using her allowance to make larger payments on the credit card, and gave her back the bank account, which is now hers and is the equivalent of 9 months allowance. She thinks that she gets an allowance or salary no matter what and that it is a set amount. As far as I know, marriage doesn't work that way. Nobody gets money in their pocket till the bills are paid. "For richer or poorer," doesn't apply to her. Last night her pig had 9 babies. When she sells those pigs, the money will not go toward paying bills, none of it. She has acquired about 1000$ worth of furniture from selling pigs in the past few years while I and I alone have tried to get the bills paid. It's not a partnership. I am not allowed to bring it up. She hasn't sat down with a calculator and worked through the details of our budget. Before when I was putting 50 a month in the savings account, if something came up and I couldn't do it, she would throw a tantrum right in the bank lobby right next to two armed guards. Not pistols in holsters, big rifles in hand. The next stop was the meat and vegetable market right next to the church, but if she's angry then she refuses to do the shopping and the church yard is the scene of another tantrum. This happened just this month, we spent hours in the church yard with her threatening to give DugDug back to her brother Dandy, I can't remember what happened, this is all too commonplace. DugDug put his hands over his ears and went la-la-la, which is maybe what you should do. I tried to stop sharing all this garbage with you because I thought you would rather not know. I took her to lunch at her favorite fast food restaurant the other day and she cried in her noodles and asked if my girlfriend is pregnant. Well if girlfriends are anything like wives I am glad I don't have one, I sure can't afford one. I also can't afford to put my wife in a mental institution.

The private school for DugDug isn't necessary but if I say no to that, I might as well move to town before I get thrown out. Now she is training DugDug to tell me not to argue with his Mama because she is "sick". I can't speak anymore because she might have a heart attack? Well she's 46 and I thought I was going to die any minute when I was 46, maybe she's feeling her age and that has something to do with it. The worst thing she can do to a child is make him a part of her marital ploys to get what she wants. The accusations about having a girlfriend continue, she is depressed and feeling sorry for herself all the time. She has the freedom to do this because as soon as she leaves my presence and gets with someone she's related to, she is her normal happy-go-lucky self and besides that she has me to gossip about. Who am I supposed to talk to? Don't tell me to seek counseling. I am learning calculus, after that I will write another book. That is how I deal with not being able to change other people. I focus my energy on trying to change the world instead. Not likely to succeed but not much can stop me either. That's my "hobby". The intensity of it smooths out the other intensity.

Oh I just remembered why she refused to go into the palengke to buy the meat and vegetables for April. I said we were going to do it in two stages instead of buying a month's supply of vegetables at the first of April and having vegetables rot in the refrigerator. Also she pads her budget by saying she'll save some of it for later, and relies on my bad memory to forget that she is supposed to go back halfway through the month to buy more food. So I handed her 1000 pesoes or 1500 or something instead of the 2000 she expected, and said I was going with her to watch what she got and what it cost her. For that I spent the next three hours in the church yard trying to explain to her that her little boy was in emotional agony because she was sitting in one place refusing to speak or move. Only because it started to rain did she finally stand up and go home with me. The next day I was finished trying to control her skimming, I gave her the 2000 and she went shopping alone.

Don't know what you mean about political costs unless you mean helping her family, that's pretty much slowed down as people do talk and are aware that I am not keeping my head above water, she complains about me all the time. My resident card should be ready soon so after that I can get a bank account and a local atm card. In the past year or so the atm fee here on a foreign card like the card I use went from zero to 150 pesos, then to 200 pesos. That's five dollars every time I use the atm, plus 1% for my bank. So when I can change to an automatic deposit in a local bank, that will be like getting a nice raise. DugDug's school will be about 20 per month plus the cost of transportation. I have told Tampoka that daily trips to school in town will not include daily trips to the mall and for me it will not include daily trips to the email, I'll just bring a book to read and wait the three hours for him to get out. I guess we'll take turns going with him, because I am a "rich American" there is a risk of his being kidnapped so we have to be vigilant. Ironic, huh. Well a large proportion of people here are raising a large family on less than what I make.

My daily cost online for two trips per week is 2.50 for transportation, 4.00 for the internet use, 2.00 for food. Times two for two trips a week and add little toys for DugDug or an occasional movie ($1 each) for me, and it's about 80-100 a month for me to escape twice a week to correspond with my previous life and engage in my hobby. That's a big chunk but I can't imagine not leaving the house twice a week. I have no car payments, no car insurance, no gas to buy, no repairs. My dog eats only bones and garbage and is thrilled, his fleas are as healthy as he is. No vet costs, when he's gone another dog is standing in line to take his place. My life is nothing like it was in the US either when I was making it financially or like when I wasn't. I am "happy", that is, nothing needs to change. I'm not the first person in the world who ever lived in the prison of a bad marriage with not enough money to keep the little woman from being a continuous pest. Now she thinks she's going to die any day. DugDug is growing up in an imperfect environment, so what else is new.

Well that's a summary, I guess you wanted to know some of that stuff but maybe not. These are the things I think about all the time.

I really don't think there's anything you can do to make my life perfect, this is the human condition. But thanks anyway for your concern.

How I Lost Two Pillows

15 August 2009

How I lost two new pillows

Every year I have to exit the Philippines and re-enter in order to renew my visa for another year. For the third year in a row we went to Singapore, because it’s close, it’s easy, it’s super safe, and I wasn’t in the mood for any excitement. We can’t take DugDug out of the country even with Rose’s permission until he’s seven, so we made it a short trip. We left in the evening with DugDug crying in Dandy’s arms where I placed him against his will when we had to say goodbye at the airport. We slept in the Manila airport the first night and took the first flight to Singapore in the morning.

We had been thinking about going to the Singapore zoo, but it has become a tradition to say we’re going to and then not bother. I had talked Tampoka into my mindset—we’re not looking for excitement, but just a visa renewal and a return home as quickly and cheaply as possible. In that vein I was able to talk her into just hanging out around the hotel, watching TV and eating a lot. The hotel where we always stay is in the nightlife district, aka red light district (licensed and legal) where people stay up all night sitting in outdoor cafes eating and talking and smoking. I had never really noticed the prostitutes on the sidewalk before, naïve as I am, but I was walking ten feet behind Tampoka once and suddenly I was being offered “massage, hallo hallo massage” by lady after lady. Well so it took me three trips to Singapore to realize why all these young women were hanging around by themselves on the sidewalk.

Singapore is a great place to eat if you like to eat, as there is authentic Chinese food, authentic Indian food and I don’t know what else. There are four official languages. One year we had eaten in a Thai restaurant in a mall that was about the best food I ever tasted but last year we couldn’t find it again, and anyway it was expensive. These little outdoor cafes are cheap and casual, and all over the place in the area where we stay. The Chinese food is good but my favorite is the heavy egg hotcakes, like thick crepes, which you dip in a variety of curry sauces. I made sure Tampoka wouldn’t get in a weird mood by assuring her that if she ordered something she didn’t like I would eat it and she could just get something else. She loves to eat but like most Filipinos she doesn’t crave the unfamiliar. She can eat chicken heads and feet and fish heads and pig intestines but don’t be putting oregano in her spaghetti sauce.

Since all we have to do in order to renew my annual visa is leave and come back, we only spent one night, with chocolate and one exquisitely non-Filipino beer back in the room, the TV put us to sleep and we left in the morning to catch a mid-morning flight back home. As far as I can remember there was no unwanted excitement on the trip except that I forgot to bring our marriage contract, and the free one-year visa depends on my entering the country with my Filipina WIFE. So we made a point of handing our passports to the immigration agent in Manila at the same time with our left hands so he would see our matching rings. There was no trouble and I got my free visa for another year, so after holding my breath for about two weeks I felt again the cloud of anxiety drop away.

The week preceding the “out trip” had been complicated by a sore throat three days before we had to leave, which could have been a big problem since there is a virus or flu scare of some kind and traveling sick is more or less forbidden. So I had horrible visions of the worst possible thing happening—being torn away from my little boy and sent back to the US or rotting in an Asian prison hospital for trying to exit the country with sniffles. If it had been any worse I’d have rescheduled the trip but everyone wants to gouge the living daylights out of you for that so I took my chances and went to the doctor for some strong antibiotics, two kinds of cough suppressant pills, sore throat lozenges, and a nyquil-like substance so that I would sleep well in those two days I had to get over my cold. It usually takes two weeks.

The other thing I did was to sit in the sun reading for most of those two days. Usually I sit inside molding in front of my computer but I was so anxious about things not going right—considering the consequences if they didn’t, something I don’t want to name because it would be so bad: losing my status as papa of DugDug by being sent away—but I couldn’t concentrate on my work what with being sick and worried to death so I sat in the sun trying to roast the bugs out of my system. I think it helped, and sunburning my rib cage was worth it.

And the other thing I did was to never run out of drinking water during the trip; they couldn’t see me gagging and choking and coughing. Of course the first thing that happened upon our entering the airport to leave Davao was one of those coughing fits that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t exactly the wrong time and place, but I stifled it and went into a snack and trinket stall to buy the first of many bottles of water that I would buy on this trip even if it meant having to give it up at the next security station. I could barely choke out the words “mineral water” and was afraid that the clerk in the stall would run to the Quarantine agent to turn me in but as the trip went along I realized things have softened up since the Bush boys have been sent home, and airport security was not what I have gotten used to since 9-11. So up to the point of returning to the Philippines and getting my visa, I have nothing more exciting to report than the fear of spewing phlegm on a security guard.

We had been transported to Davao for our departure by Dodo in his multi-cab, that’s a minivan in front and pickup in back and it fits about 20 Filipinos so quite a few people came along to see us off. DugDug had been warned that he would have to say goodbye to us for a little but of course when it came time to do it we knew he would be unwilling, so we’d agreed to keep it short and just leave him in capable hands and just get into the airport. The weather cooperated; it was raining like crazy and everyone except DugDug wanted us to leave quickly so they could get back under their tarp in the back of the multicab.

Dodo hauled Dandy and Rose and their two kids over to Bebing’s house where she lives with her son Jayruse, who is in school to learn aircraft drafting. DugDug loves to stay at Bebing’s house and we thought it would be nice if he could stay with her since she lives in Davao, then they could meet us at the airport when we returned in only two days. We had plans to go shopping in Davao when we came back instead of blowing a lot of money in Singapore without him. I wanted to find him one of those hot wheels tricycles that was popular in the US a while back, I don’t know if they still make them, but the cheap claptrap they have here is so poorly made that I thought it would be nice to find him one of those one-piece plastic tricycles, low to the ground with a big wheel in front. I also wanted to find some new pillows for our bed and a new microphone for my karaoke habit. And get my bogus “out ticket” refunded at the mall. I have to carry a one way ticket for later on in the year, for any destination leaving the Philippines, in case someone asks to see it and they usually don’t. No one wants to get stuck with a stray American, so if you want them to let you into their country you have to show that you will be allowed in by the next country you are going to after theirs, and they might worry that the next country won’t let you in unless you can prove that you have a way out of there too. That’s an “out ticket”. The cost of doing business, the budget airline makes a mint off these tickets since the penalty for refunding a ticket is over half the price of the dang thing.

So DugDug got dropped off with Dandy, Rose, SaySay and Sayruse at Bebing’s cave in the squatter’s area in Davao. Not my favorite part of the setup, where Bebing lives. But from her viewpoint, it’s walking distance to Jayruse’s tech school and it’s not with her in-laws, where she could have built her house, and I think she likes more independence than most Filipinas care about.

Bebing’s husband Ruben had kind of left her for many years while Tampoka raised Jayruse till he was about 11 and Bebing lived in Manila and worked as a midwife. When I came here for the first time to get married, Ruben had just been gotten back by hook and by crook; they don’t have divorce here and Bebing had him blacklisted at the organization where his work assignments originate, for not paying child support. So he had no choice but to ask for her family’s forgiveness and start sending her money to take care of her and Jayruse’s needs. He could go back to work and Bebing could get out of Manila.

Bypassing the offer of a bit of land to build a house on at Ruben’s family’s property here in Panabo, Ruben took over the shell of a small two-story cinder block building in a squatters’ area in Davao and while between ships he and some friends worked 20 hours a day to put the house back together, ending up with a windowless two-story boarding house for Bebing and Jayruse to live in and rent out bedspace in several bunks upstairs. Don’t ask me how you go about getting utility accounts in a squatters’ area but she has running water and electricity and even managed to wangle a used computer and some sort of internet for Jayruse. So other than putting it in a squatters’ area and not putting any windows in it, I guess Ruben is to be commended for his effort.

Returning from Singapore we stayed at Bebing’s house and I was happy to take my medicine again as I hadn’t taken any pills with me on the trip in case they searched my bags and figured out I had a cold. Being in a windowless, brand new cement box has its advantages: fewer bugs. (The worst bug experience I’ve had in the Phils was sleeping by an open window in a middle-class home and waking to find myself being walked on by multiple cockroaches. It must have been a sudden invasion as Tampoka and I woke simultaneously and both starting flipping roaches across the room at the same time. We closed the window for the rest of the night. Another reason to live in the country; I would never live in town unless it was in an air-conditioned place so I could close the windows at night. The open sewers of town don’t exist at Manggahan; we have septic tanks here, and from time to time someone burns the trash pit which helps a lot. In town everything is someone else’s problem.)

The next day we carried out the planned shopping trip with Bebing along for fun and Jayruse at school. I couldn’t find the simple hot wheels thing so I had to settle for a pedal-go-kart which is a lot heavier than I wanted and comes unassembled in a big cardboard box. At the last minute I decided I better get Cyrus a little plastic tricycle too, never mind that it wouldn’t last long, but I knew DugDug wouldn’t share his new “bike” for at least a few days once we got it home. We didn’t have time to get my bogus out ticket refunded so I suggested we stay one more night at Bebing’s and everyone thought that was a good idea except DugDug who wanted to rush home and put his bike together right now.

The next morning I was very antsy to get home but had to keep quiet and try to flow with the relaxed pace of my wife who doesn’t like to hurry unless it’s her idea, and anyway she always enjoys visiting with any of her siblings. Finally I started whining about 10 a.m. and wanted to know if Bebing was coming along, bugging Tampoka about details and trying to get her interested in the mall where we needed to go. We had lots of “cellophane”—five bags full of small stuff collected in the previous day’s marathon mall-to-mall shopping trip, as well as two new pillows, a little plastic tricycle, and a big box with go-kart, so the plan was to send a text to Dodo and offer him the P500 we’d have to pay a too-small taxi to take us to Panabo. At least in Dodo’s multicab our stuff would ride comfortably.

Finally I could see the light at the end of Bebing’s cave: there was some supportable evidence that we would be out of there and on our way to one last mall in five minutes or less, or at least less than 45 minutes. The whole neighborhood, not just the house, gives me claustrophobia. It’s next to a smelly beach, inadequate sanitation as in God knows what they do for sewers in a squatters’ area, and access is one single-lane road with an opening at each end to roads that lead out of “the tunnel” as I think of it since it’s lined on both sides with shacks made of just about anything, practically holding each other up. Bebing’s cement box is quite a nice house for the area and I felt pretty weird driving in there the night before with a taxi full of new pillows, bikes, and groceries. The ten dollars I spent on one of those pillows would have fed one of those families for a few weeks, unfortunately. I wanted to go home real bad.

As is necessary and correct in a neighborhood like that, Bebing has an open-door policy and without windows you better bet the front door is open till bedtime. People started running in the door to say there was a big fire.

My first reaction to something like that is to wish real hard that I was dreaming. I hate emergencies where hundreds of people are running back and forth screaming. As a matter of fact, I avoid them as much as possible.

In mere seconds I snapped out of it as did the others, and I “calmly” went outside to see the fire while Tampoka and Bebing flew into a panic. It occurred to me that they were right to panic, being as how we were trapped in a cave in a tunnel and there might be trouble if there really were a big fire in the area. Out in the street I saw that a house, about a short block away, was indeed sky high in flames and to tell you the truth the next few minutes are hard to remember in exact order. I went inside to find DugDug and leave, remembering my training and vowing to leave empty-handed with only DugDug and the others, happy to survive.

It wasn’t so simple to the others. Tampoka screamed at Bebing to turn off the gas tank and the electricity and Bebing screamed that she already had. Bebing was on her knees in the totally dark bedroom trying to get the computer unplugged so it could be saved. Tampoka was running back and forth shouting, and I got the sinking feeling that if I grabbed DugDug and left, we would be alone. Not a happy thought. I already had most of our stuff packed and the cell phone was in my pocket so I shouted at Tampoka and told her we were leaving, Right Now! but it wasn’t that simple to her. She wanted to help her sister. I saw her gathering our cellophanes together, and Bebing still in the dark room…It occurred to me that caving in to the many conflicting feelings I was having was a bad idea, and I decided I had to be decisive or maybe suffer grave consequences. Our three small traveling bags had straps so I put them all on and picked up all five of our cellophanes. Never mind the two bikes. I looked at Tampoka and what was she carrying? DugDug? No, the bikes. OK forget the cellophane, I put it all down and said goodbye to it, grabbed DugDug, and walked out the door, shouting to Tampoka that she was going to come with me. Too bad for Bebing, if she wouldn’t leave I couldn’t help her. Her stuff would all be lost and she could do nothing about it. If only she hadn’t turned out the lights…but it was too late for me to help. My mind was jumping in every direction and I could only walk, I couldn’t try to help her with her stuff.

So here we are hurrying away through a seething mass of humanity, Tampoka dragging a huge cardboard box full of go kart in one hand and the little plastic trike in the other, me with DugDug and our three cloth bags, DugDug crying, Tampoka pretty hysterical. People running both directions, crying and screaming and carrying TVs, clothes wrapped up in blankets, people with nothing to save helping the others. The fire was getting closer and fast, there was no excuse for Bebing not to leave. (I’m not being melodramatic on purpose—I’ll say now that she did get out and wasn’t hurt).

I couldn’t bear to see Tampoka dragging the big box through the mud so I carried DugDug in one arm and picked up the back end of the box in the other. I didn’t look anyone in the eye, I was embarrassed to be seen saving rich people’s junk while people on all sides of me were in real trouble. But as far as I was concerned, I could easily die that day. (Five people did. The two children who started it, the old grandpa they were trying to cook for, and the baby who was sleeping unsupervised in their landlady’s place downstairs.) I was very worried about a stampede. With the fire in the middle of the squatters’ blocks, there was one way in and out of this place.

We stopped in front of a little store and stood in the shade shouting at each other. She wanted to leave me and DugDug there and go back and help Bebing. I told her the whole neighborhood was going to go up in flames all at once and we would all be killed in a stampede and she dithered noisily for a while, then made up her mind to go back. I told her to hurry and never mind Bebing if she refused to come. What made up her mind was when I mentioned my new microphone. She had just realized that I left all our cellophanes. I felt irresponsible waiting there for her but couldn’t make myself leave without her. I knew she’d be OK but I was worried about me and DugDug.

DugDug was amazingly brave at this point. I expected pure hysteria from him when Tampoka left. Surprisingly, he was OK as long as I stood in the shade near the store, but when I tried to walk into the street to see the fire he screamed, Dagan, dagan! Sunog, sunog! (Run, there’s a fire!) He was the smartest of the bunch, he didn’t give a fig about his bike at that point. My arms were shaking from adrenalin poisoning and the fatigue of holding him, not for an instant did I consider putting him down in that mess. The man who lived there offered me a chair but I couldn’t sit when my very smart little boy was telling me to run. The least I could do was stand ready, not that it would do any good if there was an explosion or any other excuse for everybody to try and leave the area at once.

After an eternity Tampoka finally made it back with our cellophanes and a big flat plastic washtub carrying Bebing’s computer. Tampoka had hired some little boys to carry all that stuff for her. She was beside herself and ready to collapse, I said we can go now but she couldn’t yet. We argued for a while and finally she got someone with one of those motorcycle sidecars that fits 20 Filipinos to load all our stuff on it. I held DugDug and stood there watching him load up our stuff; he had doubts too, I could tell he was afraid and thought better of being there at all, especially when Tampoka left. Tampoka had gone back to try and make Bebing leave, but came back not able to say where Bebing was; the house was already burning. Our driver had the presence of mind to get the man who lived there to give us some “tie-back” or plastic twine, as the load was precarious, and I walked along behind, feeling like maybe we were going to survive after all, but wondering if Bebing might have gotten trapped in the house. When we got to the pavement they made me get in and ride, as DugDug was sitting next to her screaming because he thought I was being left behind.

We offloaded everything on the main road, where there was no sign that there was a big emergency only a few blocks away. I was amazed that the people weren’t thronging out of there and occupying the general vicinity; apparently those who didn’t leave right away were still in there watching it burn and carrying loads of stuff to the beach, hoping for the best. Other than firetrucks going by, there was no indication, where we were, that anything was going wrong about five blocks away.

Since we weren’t thinking clearly we were going to go ahead and take a taxi to the mall and get my ticket refunded, but then I realized the agenda had changed and decided we’d grab a taxi and go home to Panabo right now. I know that Tampoka was beyond beyond, as she was agreeing with each of my new plans as I made them. Finally I realized we had to offload the stuff and sit tight and try to help Bebing somehow, since we were already safe. We also remembered the rest of the family and I gave the cellphone to Tampoka so she could get Dodo there with his multicab. She sent some text messages and it turned out that Dede was also in town so pretty soon after a long wait she showed up with her son YanYan who is also in school in Davao. Dodo was on his way, we were holed up with our stuff in a little carendaria (small eating place) and Tampoka was back in form conducting things by way of her cell phone.

Not much more to tell I suppose. Every details sticks in my mind but not in the right order. Dodo showed up with Haiku and naturally the back of the multicab was full of the people from home, now where are we gonna put all our awesome new mall stuff? Well it wouldn’t go in no taxi anyway, the taxis here are pretty small. Naturally since this is the Philippines everybody sat down and ate first and drank lots of Coke, before it was decided that we would all pile into the multicab and go back in.

I couldn’t think of a worse thing to do, and said so, but I stifled it and went along for the ride. The worst was over, the fire was out and about one or two hundred shacks were levelled. We stopped at the beach when the guy I’ll call Dodong waved us over and told us Bebing was OK. Jayruse had heard there was a fire and ran back home from school. Finally Bebing showed up, she was near her house. Jayruse was crying because his new boots got stolen by looters, and I guess that’s where she kept her money, in the boots. She hadn’t thought to rescue the money first, including the money I had paid her to keep DugDug for two days. I paid her again, and today when she and Jayruse went back to see if they could resurrect the place, I paid her again. So she got paid three times to watch DugDug. Well he’s worth it.

Later Jayruse confided to his cousins that the real reason he had been crying was that he had no clean underwear. Not just his boots got burned up, but everything he wasn’t wearing. Bebing had gotten a blanket filled with clothes and dragged it to the door but never got it out the door.

Oddly enough, it was Bebing’s house that stopped the fire. Being solid cement over cinder block it wasn’t easy to burn up, but the inside was gutted. Except for the upstairs where the boarders lived. The lack of windows might have saved the upstairs, as well as the cement ceiling/floor lined with roofing sheet on the bottom side. An ugly ceiling but the upstairs didn’t burn. And the fire stopped there, the houses on both sides of the street past hers were untouched. On the other side, steaming moonscape. A pile of twisted old roofing sheets, levelled to the ground, black and smelly.

I went in her house, I know, it’s stupid, but at least I didn’t go upstairs like Romche. One staircase was ash and the other wasn’t touched. Every other piece of wood and furniture downstairs was ash. I didn’t recognize the place. I couldn’t remember which room was the bedroom and which was the living room. The cement wall was almost too hot to touch and the floor was inches deep in water. Romche pointed, telling me to watch my head, which was about to touch—I looked: a big cockroach on a melted light switch. Survivor.

It took a while, but we eventually got the refrigerator and TV and two bicycles that she’d managed to save by staying behind loaded up, along with all our stuff and all those people. Dede went home the same way she’d gotten there, on the back of Neyong’s motorcycle, and Tampoka, DugDug, Bebing, Jayruse and I got a ride in Dodong’s “tricycle” (bike-powered sidecar) to the place where we could catch a bus. Dodong, a young man with hollow cheeks, asked Tampoka what he could do for his one-month old baby who had a fever. I could only suggest that his wife take some paracetemol, and paid him extra, gave up all the big coins I’d collected in my mall quest. He lost his house that day but it was a pretty normal day for him, by the look of it. At least he hadn’t lost his way of earning money.

At some point last night when we got home, after I had bought numerous liters of Coke for everybody from Dandy’s store, it suddenly hit me: those pillows! We forgot the new pillows. Tampoka said Dodong had seen someone steal them after we left, before the fire got to the house.