Smoke signals

He waited half a cigarette. The Sailor knew how to wait... — William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

One of our STAR columnists, Jim Paredes, recently wrote about the unique way Filipinos communicate, switching from Tagalog to English at will. He noted that language for Filipinos often has connotations beyond its literal meaning, and that “to many rural Filipinos, time and space are not always linear but experiential.”

“Filipinos understand perfectly,” he writes in “The Gift of  (Foreign) Gab,” “when someone says the distance between two towns is ‘one sigarilyo,’ that they’re not speaking of actual length of the cigarette stick, but measuring time.”

This is an interesting notion — telling time through cigarettes — and it got me thinking of other people I’ve met here who use the cigarette as a unit of measurement.

Another STAR writer I asked says she throws away each cigarette by the time it’s half finished;  the theory is, if each cigarette shortens your life by five minutes, well, then she’s actually adding 2.5 minutes to hers by tossing away half the stick.

“It’s a smoker’s thing,” she explained, and I realized then this wasn’t confined to the provinces. “It’s like any habit or routine. You know how long something will take. Kinda like you know how long sex will take.” I didn’t pursue the comparison any further.

Not just time is measured in cigarettes here. It’s also a convenient foreign exchange system. One Filipino dude I know, when on a foreign trip, converts most purchases abroad into its equivalent cost in cigarettes back home. When bargain hunting at a market, he calculates how many pesos each item will cost him — by imagining how many cigarettes the amount would buy. “That pair of shoes costs about three packs,” or “I could get 10 sticks for each of those necklaces…” The cigarette has been instantly, ingeniously adopted as his private exchange rate. This is fascinating, even if it does have disturbing implications for his health.

It says something, perhaps, about how ingrained our daily habits can be. And smoking is one habit that can inhabit the whole body, just as surely as nicotine works on the brain.

No, this is not an anti-smoking diatribe; I just find it interesting, the way Filipinos can adopt an arbitrary totem — in this case, the cigarette stick — as a unit of value. Filipinos, of course, are well known for purchasing cigarettes “by the stick.” The budget-conscious think of these items as temporary diversions, markers to get them from moment to moment, hour to hour, in the course of a day — one stick at a time. The choice of the unit depends on the size of the user’s wallet. And this also somehow shapes his or her notion of time.

Another guy I know here, a rocker, was asked by someone who was admiring the dragon tattoo decorating his leg: “How long did that take to have done?” The rocker pondered the question, taking a long drag on his ever-present Marlboro: “About one pack of cigarettes.” Here, not just money, but time is reckoned and easily converted into sigarilyo units.

This habit is not peculiar to the Philippines, by the way. And it’s nothing new. Writer William Burroughs, writing somewhere in Tangier around 1959, has one of his characters “waiting half a cigarette” in Naked Lunch. And David Bowie, in his 1972 song Rock and Roll Suicide, makes Time a character who turns us all into chain smokers: “Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth/ You pull on a finger, then another finger/ Then a cigarette…”

Every developing country probably finds it convenient to use a cheap and handy measuring stick (in this case a cigarette stick) to go about its business. For the mass of people who can’t afford a wristwatch, a two-peso cigarette tells time just fine.

You will see them everywhere on Manila’s streets: vendors peddling cigarettes by the stick. Imported brands, local brands. A cheap plastic lighter dangles from a string attached to their wooden boxes — makeshift crates holding candy, bottled water, cigarettes. They offer a convenient light to the traffic-stranded motorists who beckon them over. I doubt the motorists tell time by cigarettes, though I often wonder if their arms, forced to hang outside open windows, the lit cigarette dangling from loose fingers, ever feel the effects of time, holding the stick in this manner.

I have my own markers, other than cigarettes. I measure distances in terms of gasoline — how many kilometers my full tank will travel, how many pesos this or that trip will cost. We look for familiar patterns of spending in our lives, just as economists and marketing people look for such patterns in the marketplace. The cigarette is perhaps one of the tiniest units, though the more familiar economic indicator may be the cost of a single pan de sol: if this amount gets too high, economists warn, the people are grumbling and unhappy. Nobody ever complains about the high costs of cigarettes, though.

Of course, unusual standards of measurement are not so strange for Filipinos, who view inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records as some kind of eternally graspable Holy Grail. It’s a world where greatness is measured in chart-topping hairdos, record lengths of bunting, and barangay-long longganisa. Those who can consume the most hot sili peppers in one go, or press the most red-hot pairs of lips together at one moment, are marked for greatness. Clearly, greatness — in whatever form or unit — is still a marker that means a lot to Filipinos.