The Ted I Know

Unwittingly, many of us walk through life believing there will always be something more, something better. More than we care to admit, you and I are some of those people. We want to believe that a perfect moment in time will be the beginning of all good things to come. Or, at least, that when we stumble on a puddle we think the day would never come when we fall into quicksand or step on a landmine.

Hope is as powerful an elixir as it is fragile.

Ted Failon Etong was born to a family of meager means. His father was a jeepney driver and his mother sold vegetables in the local market. With four siblings struggling for attention and financial support, Leyte couldn’t hold the young Ted down. He was a problem child to his parents who had neither the knowledge nor the means to understand why their boy was always getting into trouble. Psychologists will say that Ted was no different from countless teenagers who silently — almost painfully — develop and suffer great dreams for themselves not knowing how, what, who or when. He was determined to make life, simply, better. A born self-starter, Ted became a student leader. In one of his campus speeches, he spotted the young, unassuming and captivatingly simple Trina Arteche.

In less than a month, Ted and Trina eloped. As the   12th child in a brood of 16 siblings — legend in Tacloban — the young lovers thought it was the only way to escape disapproval to such a young marriage. Ted would often jokingly tell me that, in the eventual wedding, he was the only one in church smiling that day. “They never believed I would amount to anything much,” he said. “But Trina changed my ways, she gave me direction,” Ted said in my recent interview with him. What Ted meant is that Trina, because of all that she was, inspired Ted to get over his once misguided angst and use his talents to get him to his fated destination.

We joke and laugh about it often in the daily mornings of our DZMM radio program. Ted should be the mascot of been-there-done-that. He worked as a circus barker, a truck and a tricycle driver, a hotel room boy, a waiter, construction worker and, somewhere in between, sold slippers in the public market.

Eventually, he became manager of a Tacloban radio station. Ted recalled that, as his wife Trina was giving birth to their first child, Kaye, he had to leave for a work emergency and could not be beside his wife and daughter. With a child to support he soon knew it had to be out of Tacloban to make it bigger. Not long after, the budding broadcaster with a booming baritone had an offer to work closer to Imperial Manila — in Angeles. There he worked as a disc jockey in a local pub where he probably developed his skills and timing as a musical scorer — the polished product of which our listeners on radio so enjoy and which I do, too, with much amazement. But, again, it was a means to an end — the end being the movie in Ted’s mind that kept doing reruns, and that the only way to escape it was to make it happen in real life.

“Bata pa ako, idol na kita, Korina”, he would joke on-air. Actually, he did watch TV and wish a lot upon a star that he could one day become one of the nationally-known broadcast personalities. As he dreamt on, Ted and Trina and little Kaye slept on a thin mattress with nothing else in a small room for rent in Angeles as he planned on his trip to Manila to apply, take his chances, with ABS-CBN.

It was possibly fated to happen that Ted, that day, as he fought off his insecurities and apprehension looking through ABS-CBN’s metal gates, found Becky Cabral, former TV Patrol producer. “Ano nga ulit ang pangalan mo?” Becky asked. “Teodoro Etong po.” “Etong? Naku, hindi pupwede yan. Yung middle name mo nalang, Failon... Ted Failon, yan nalang ang gamitin mo.”

I’m tempted to abbreviate the story and say that the rest is proverbial history. But let me say that Ted’s ascent in the network ladder and in the consciousness of his public didn’t happen without all the other hidden and not-so-hidden elements that make one’s journey distinct from all the rest. Even when he was already an anchor, he used to sleep with the drivers at motorpool when it was too late to make the trip back to Angeles. Until company owner Gabby Lopez found out and had him called to tell him he could actually take out a soft loan for housing in Manila for his family. Ted sold tocino to augment his start-out salary. He and Trina sold cookware. Ted used to drag me to his demonstrations while he cooked and sold to an audience of matrons. I became Ninang to his second daughter Karishma. By this time, Ted could afford a more lavish party much unlike the parties for Kaye as she was growing up in the young couple’s struggling years. He had come a long way. He even made it to Congress. It was a historic feat beating the long political history of the Romualdezes in Tacloban. Ted annually holds his birthdays every March feeding children in an orphanage, “Papakainin ko pa ba Koring ang mga may pangkain naman?” was the standard line every single year. Hence, his nickname, “kunat” and his response to Happy Birthday, “Lilipas din yan!”

There was much to be grateful for. He would often notice how tired I am in the mornings in our show and he would cut me the slack, “Partner, I’ve found my point of contentment. May kaunting ipon ako, nakapundar na ako ng bahay, graduate na si Kaye at Karishma, kaunti nalang graduate na rin ako. Kahit pa-radyo-radyo nalang ako. Okay na ako.” He ends the show every day, “God is good, God is great, God is Almighty.” And for all of his detractors, those whose point of his commentaries would, imaginably, wish only the worst for him (arrows and bullets which, by the way, I most possibly share with him) he would say, “Lord, kayo na po ang bahala sa kanila.”

The next time I saw the Etongs as a family was at the DZMM anniversary special — a live stage presentation at the Araneta Coliseum. Ted and I were main vocalists in a rock medley complete with dance and costume. Ted told me his kids were watching. Towards the exit after the performance Ted beamed with pride as he held on to his two kids and wife saying goodbye to us — his thought bubble being, “Look at how far we’ve come. This is my family. They are my trophy.” That image has stayed with me. Ted and I aren’t that far from each other in age. I thought the image stuck because I wondered how life would be for me had I married and had kids as young as when Ted did. I wish it were now possible that the snapshot in my mind could be downloaded.

Between partners in a daily show for 20 years now, Ted and I have grown together much like a husband and wife would, I guess — only that we’re together only two hours a day except weekends. We’ve both learned to avoid sweating the small stuff. Many things between us are known, felt, but often left unsaid.

The tragedy that befell the Etongs in April is unspeakable. It is almost unfathomable. In the story of The God of Small Things it was reviewed, “Things can change in a day. Lives can twist into new, ugly shapes — even cease forever.” You hear it happen to others. You never think of it happening to someone close to you. Yet it has shattered a deliberate silence that was for a long time meant to protect. Today, as I write this, I see that what has forced Ted into a life chapter he never imagined was written for him has also forced him into himself, looking into all of what life is meant to be, customized for his own, personal journey. 

Ted’s eulogy might have been a revelation to even the roomful of handpicked attendees at Trina’s cremation — had they heard beyond what may have sounded like some formulaic, predictable narration of how he met the love of his life, how they charted their travel and traveled their journey. What was before mostly unspoken but known between Ted and those close to him, I was hearing from him straight. In an hour-long interview I had with him, it was the only point where he choked on his words then couldn’t speak with tears flooding his eyes, “She raised my children, she stood by me. Siya yung naroon para sa akin, mula sa simula, noong panahong walang-wala...” He requested that moment of bare vulnerability edited out of the final product.

Earlier at the funeral parlor, during a lighter moment with close friends and colleagues I told him I was just as busy as he was scrolling through 500 unread messages from people sending support and condolences to him through me. I said, “Maybe they should just send cash.”   At that moment when I cracked a joke at a time when even a longtime friend of more than 20 years wouldn’t know what to say, much more, if a joke were even remotely appropriate at an unbelievably difficult time, Ted chuckled. It was almost like how he would laugh when I let something out whenever he gives me an opening in our radio show. All I could think of going home was that Ted didn’t even have to smile. He has all the right to grieve the way he wants. Yet, something about that tells me that, while Ted sorts through mixed emotions of disappointment, anger, confusion, sorrow and grief, there remains in him the much stronger and more resilient hope — a new kind, that would be the gift of Trina’s departure. It is a gift that awaits its unwrapping when the family is ready. Ted will pull through. It’s the Ted I know.