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”.