When I was 21: A Nowhere Man

A t 21, I discussed poetry with Danny Purple. That seems to be the only significant memory I have of what’s supposed to be a milestone year.

When one becomes too long in the tooth, the memory bites/bytes get pushed back into recessed niches. Somehow, turning 21 doesn’t seem to draw much recall for me now.

Maybe it’s because 1966 produced little music of import other than Ballad of the Green Berets, California Dreamin’, When A Man Loves a Woman, What a Day for a Daydream, I Am a Rock, and The Beatles’ Nowhere Man.

Maybe I was a Nowhere Man that year, since for no lack of trying, I can’t associate it with anything memorable other than having officially turned into a mature citizen. And yes, that literary encounter with a fearsome figure. 

That year appears to have been one of antecedence, when an impending vocation was but on the verge. I was still in college, back at UP Diliman after lackluster sojourns in Ateneo and San Beda. It was my sixth year of a degree chase, and I had only made it a little more than halfway through the tough A.B. Humanities program. This was after stints of majoring in Philosophy thence Linguistics, a semester’s stab at Architecture, and frustration over the absence of the one desired course that was A.B. Philanthropy.

Inspired no doubt by Sonny Alvarez, I was determined to remain a professional student. The resolve waned in my seventh year, so that I finally quit the groves of academe in 1967.

In any case, upon turning 21, I started serving as literary editor of the UP Collegian. Since Kabataang Makabayan was just beginning to mount modest marches around campus, and hardly anyone wrote verses beholden to social protest, I cannily put out translations into Filipino of such modern love sonnets as those of e.e. cummings, and made sure the Valentine’s Day issue carried a black-and-white photograph of a campus muse (taken by this amateur page designer, of course) other than someone named Miriam — she who like Sonny also became a senator.

That seemed to inspire campus poets into turning the Collegian’s literary section into a year-round Valentine’s Day edition. Among the unexpected contributors was Danny Purple, a legendary campus figure, notorious as a wildcat macho, a loner who once launched a one-man attack on the UP Vanguard office with rocks and verbal dares for the ROTC officers to step out. Not one young Ilocano did.

He was a tall, lanky fellow who ambled along with a menacing Ichabod Crane stoop, and a mien of single-minded defiance that only melted at the sight of certain campus muses he stalked and gifted with roses. The fraternity guys left him alone. No one knew if he ever entered a classroom, other than to present a rose to an inspiration. But he lived on campus, where he was a familiar figure, a veritable bogeyman for underclassmen who were alerted by the cognoscenti whenever Danny Purple hove into view.

He personally dropped off his poems at the UP Collegian office, or so I was told one afternoon. Thank the Oblation I wasn’t around to quiver before him when he did. Well, I had the shakes when I opened the letter envelope where he had placed folded sheets bearing a couple of entries.

Of course his love poems saw publication within a week. He came by again and caught me at my desk. Smiling expansively, and with no benefit of a self-introduction, Danny P. thanked me profusely for being the sanest literary editor the Collegian ever had. He was right, of course.

I told him his poems would always be welcome. After all, they had a distinctive tone of voice, and, well, much passion. I guess in those days those were the only criteria I observed in my evaluation of what could be published as poetry.

Danny Purple was enthused. He said he had read my own poems, which he found to be remarkably disciplined. He was unschooled as a poet, he said. He was just trying his hand at it; it was better than getting into scrapes. I swallowed and nodded. Well, I had Franz Arcellana and Virgie Moreno as mentors, I said. And Jun Lansang, Jolico Cuadra, Andy Afable, Erwin Castillo, Willy Pascua Sanchez and Frankie Osorio as idols if not yet peers.

It was his turn to nod, in deferential cognizance of other campus mavericks known to take on entire frats by their lonesome. I guess there was a special bond among such a league of extraordinarily fearless gentlemen.

In any case, Danny P. said he was working on a cycle of love poems, and that he’d like to show me the rest. They were still in various stages of completion, since his muses still had to show up in the flesh. Yes, yes, I said, no need to rush art, one always had to wait for inspiration.

And that was how I discussed poetry with another Nowhere Man in 1966, the antecedent year when I turned 21. It wasn’t till much later, after dropping out of college, earning my first non-Collegian fees as a scriptwriter for the Balintataw literary TV drama series, and gained a fellowship in the Dumaguete writers’ workshop that I found Somewhere after all, and believed I could already say I Am a Rock (if not a rock star).