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.