I’m not even building a real house – just enlarging an existing one, which I inherited from its previous tenant – well, okay, enlarging it by four rooms and two toilets and baths, which I guess counts for a little house. It’s not vanity, folks, or any illusion of feudal grandeur; it’s the large extended family, including Chippy the family tabby, who I find myself worrying about more than I do my mom, where appointments are concerned.
I mean, what if Chippy escapes through an open window or a melon-sized hole in the wire-mesh screen, and ventures forth into the cruel world of backwoods Diliman, lorded over by slithering green snakes and snake-savvy feral dogs and tomcats? Who’ll give him his next serving of Friskies? God forbid, he might become some unfinicky epicure’s next serving!… And so on. So I’ve resolved to add a feline-proof peripheral fence to the budget, to turn the house into the Colditz and the Alcatraz of catdom.
Unfortunately I have to worry about the humans and their needs as well, which means that my original budget of, never mind, has now ballooned to, never mind. Suffice it to say that I haven’t been this broke and neck-deep in debt in years, a condition that, I find, leads to all kinds of aches in muscles and joints you didn’t know you had. When my contractor called me one morning a few days ago to say that he needed a prince’s ransom pronto for the ceilings, I nearly hit the roof. "Ceilings!" I sputtered. "Who needs ceilings? They’re just a – a habitat for butiki! How can something like a kisame cost so much?" Of course, I drained my savings account later that day, to keep the house lizards happy.
I’ve also never known so much about things like floor tiles, PVC pipes, and grout. It’s an expensive education, for which I’ll soon get my precious diploma – or a heart attack, whichever comes first.
Put up a few years ago by hopeful body-builder, big-game hunter, and breaststroke champion Fidel Rillo and some enterprising friends, the Blind Tiger might have served in a previous or another life as a laundromat or a chicharon outlet (both of which businesses have sprung up beside it), and made sure if middling money. Instead, Fidel & Co. decided to invest in every homeboy’s dream – a videoke bar, complete, of course, with bargirls. This, in a long street full of videoke bars with bargirls. We despaired for Fidel when we first heard his plan, convinced that he was going to lose his shirt in no time. I even suggested that, if only for commercial reasons, Fidel put up a gay bar instead, and maybe call it the Pink Tiger. But whether out of boldness or cluelessness, Fidel pressed on with his vision that included not only mike-toting GROs but, to meet every possible need of the nocturnal male (and some females) for adventure and refinement, also video sports and an art gallery. Yes, an honest-to-goodness emporium of expressionism in the heart of hedonism.
The crazy thing was, the idea worked, at least for a few years, sustained by a stream of faithful habitués from the partners’ pals among writers, artists, media and government PR guys, and UP professors. We, ahem, managed to steer clear of the ladies, but bought enough beer and tapa and crooned Send in the Clowns often enough to keep the Blind Tiger afloat and even profitable. The rent was low, the place accessible, and the waiters didn’t mind going next door for chicharon when their own pulutan ran out.
It was appropriate albeit ironic that, in its final days, the Blind Tiger finally lived up to its name as a hangout for hardcore sports fans – never mind that the only sport they fancied was horseracing, or, to be slightly more accurate about it, betting on the horses with the day’s hard-earned wages, and maybe tomorrow’s as well.
The ultimate irony, however, is that while I’m at my wit’s end finding a few more pesos to pay for those one-inch nails, Fidel and his wife Mo are busy buying a hillside house in Antipolo. Maybe I’ll open that gay bar, after all – and call it the Purple Beehive, or some such.
Hmmm, I thought – indeed, that’s very true, wanting to add (but didn’t, for fear of spoiling the scholarly seriousness of the discussion) that an obscure but even more radical branch of the Tamil Tigers existed, known to Sri Lankan intelligence as the Extra Hot and Spicy Tamil Tigers.
At that same table was UP Mindanao Chancellor Ricky de Ungria, visiting from Davao, with whom I share many a happy memory of riotous youth, including visits – let’s just call them investigations in aid of literary production – to some of the area’s, uhm, not-so-academically-oriented night spots. We observed how Timog Ave. had changed a lot since those days, with banks, comedy clubs, and restaurants sprouting where beerhouses had once stood – and how we ourselves had changed, as well-scrubbed, middle-aged bureaucrats and members in good standing of the Philippine Association of Reformed Hedonists (PAREH). "This place has gone to the dogs," I wanted to mutter, but they don’t allow that in PAREH, so I bit my tongue and kept my membership.
Hello, Butch,
Just a note to say hello and to thank you for "A Writer in Midlife." As with all your writing – so admirably in multiple genres – I experienced this frisson of recognition; you’re truly the voice of our generation. Your "Writer in Midlife" had real resonance for me: The yearning for the time and creative energy to write That Novel, the multiple claims on one’s time, the diminishing list of "I will, someday..."
At some point, in the midst of writing grants and reports to embassies for the International Writing Program, I too had thoughts of my supposedly "carefully honed" writing tools, and I sometimes feared, resentfully and grandiosely, that the Thoroughbred racehorse of my supposed writing destiny and "breeding" was being harnessed to a dray cart. (The exigencies of scrambling after pence have a salutary way of humbling one’s pretensions, no?)
"Keep writing," I can now assure my writing students, who look fearfully to an unseeable future where their English majors will be used – or not used – on anything but The Great American Novel. Nearly 20 years in writing "fictions of various sorts" — and poetry "on the fly," as it were, sometimes on the backs of inter-campus memos while I waded through yet another meeting – taught me one thing: That writing is honorable, wherever it is put to use... and the oftener and more various, the better.
So here’s a poem, written six, seven years ago in a moment of self-evaluative self-pity, and when I was myself yet a few years from facing the Big Five-Oh. The poem, "To Where," is part of a yet-to-be published book. [What follows is a lovely poem I’ll have to leave till her book comes out to share with you – BD.]
Advance felicitations to you on that brave day, Butch, and many thanks, for this and other affirmations. My daughter Rima, who’s resumed schooling after a hiatus into the working world, is herself juggling the demands of two divergent writing styles (expository and creative); she was slogging through her statistics homework till 2 a.m. last night, and she saw me reading the print-out I’d made of your "Writer in Midlife." I then told Rima of that summer evening nearly two decades ago when, dancing with me under the santol tree at my parents’ house in Piapi, Butch Dalisay said he’d been challenged by something Rima’s Lolo had said, and that Butch decided to leave a lucrative job to go back to school… And now he has a PhD from Wisconsin, teaches at the UP, and attended her Lolo’s funeral within hours of burying his own father... stories told to another generation, from two that survived into midlife!
All the best, and warmest greetings,
Rowena