2004 Palanca Awards
He didn’t want to do that anymore.
Someone was still knocking at the door as he induced vomiting with his hand.
It was his Earth mother.
Unlocking the door, he told her to bring him to the hospital.
Bowie is divine: He is a tireless performer. Brimming with the energy of a naïf but tempered with the confidence of debauched royalty, he is the focal point of everyone in the house.
The crowd was on their feet early: the instant the lights go out and the intro to Rebel Rebel blasted from the speakers. Then Sterling Campbell started pounding on the snares, propelling the music and the sanity of every man, woman and child in that hall to the edge of the precipice. By the time the lights came back on to reveal the gaunt but still imposing figure of Bowie at center-stage, everyone was bonkers.
He acknowledged this by opening the show with: "How you doing, Hong Kong? You crazy mother-f*ckers!" (His onstage banter is catty throughout the show; before launching into Cactus he declares that it was "originally done by an American band called The Pixies – it’s mine now!")
At present, however, he’s testing how far people will applaud the curious fact that he’s married. "For my wife," he says for nth time.
The crowd laps it up.
With each mention of the word "wife," I feel it’s ominous, like the ticking of a telltale heart or another brick walling up Fortunato. It’s not exactly fortuitous that I’m alluding to Edgar Allan Poe. He was the topic of my first significant conversation with Yvonne back in 2nd year high school.
The first time I saw her she was late. The first class was well underway; the awkward introductions each transferee had to make were thankfully over when she barged through the door. She was wearing black leggings and an over-sized T-shirt (she’s going to have my head for that) but despite the questionable fashion she stood out like a wild flower. My new school had its share of beauties, quite a few coming from the entertainment industry (the reason I can’t name them is because I’ll probably need to buy the rights to use them). But their charms withered once Yvonne came into the vicinity. I have to admit though she was a bit odd.
On the cover of her notebook – instead of a pin-up of a New Kid on the Block or Jason Priestly – she had a picture of Suicidal Tendencies’ bassist Robert Trujillo (see introduction) bending the E-string so much it looked like it was in pain. She listened to Jane’s Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and had learned how to play Cliff Burton’s bass solo on Metallica’s Anesthesia in one afternoon after hearing the class metal-heads talking how hard it was. Sharing my affinity for Salvador Dali and the Surrealists, she sketched and painted quite a lot as well. Her subjects were the grotesque and the bizarre: faces so stretched into torment (or ecstasy?) that they became bulbous-eyed monsters worthy of the imagination of Clive Barker. Anyone privileged to see these early works would no doubt applaud the immense but without question wayward talent – surely a savant, slack-jawed and permanently confined in an institution, and consign under the heading of Art Brut.
Nothing could be further from the sunshine and lollipops of Yvonne’s appearance.
To elucidate the point: Avant-garde artist and multi-awarded sculptor Gabriel Barredo was once asked by Yvonne’s indomitable mother Lorna to check out her daughter’s works. Seeing Yvonne, he found her cute as kittens and thus expected as much: flowers in vases still lifes of fruits and, maybe, kittens? Being a family friend though, he was mentally preparing the most polite remarks, encouraging enough but not too false to make him sick. What he encountered upon entering Yvonne’s room was no less the work of madman (girl), the Sistine Chapel if it were reinterpreted by the bastard child of Hieronymous Bosch and Robert Crumb. He was – in his own words – "flabbergasted" and quite taken by the prodigy.
Much like Barredo, I was smitten – no, to tell you the truth, I had already fallen… well, let’s just say that I dug her in a major way. And all before I knew all of the above. To be frank, she was just the prettiest face I’d ever seen, with the ability to soothe my nerves and (I admit) fire my loins. And as luck would have it, her designated seat was right behind mine.
I confess I don’t remember either the sequence-of-events or the exact first words. I just remember seeing her jotting in her notebook after the lunch-bell had sounded and not stopping. I think I fell in love right there. She was writing poetry it so happens and, being a very bad poet, I felt it in my authority to comment. They weren’t pretty poems – hence our excursion into the crepuscular domain of Poe – but there were shards of crystalline beauty that stood out from identical and banal sands of adolescent poetry. (Every girl was a poet those days while every guy pretended to be one. I was content to be a critic.) And then she would flash a grin and the shadows would recede. All my fears melted: glaciers of angst were no more than a moraine of petty things.
We became best friends in no time, having conversations that lasted for several hours – much to the chagrin of our teachers. It ranged anywhere from phobias (she had quite a considerable list as well) to dreams (flying or drowning?) to the absurd (don’t ask). She allowed me to become the closest I’ve ever been to actually seeing myself. With Yvonne, I was able find my reflection. Blinded by the sight, I did not care about the opinions of anyone else in the world for the first time in my life. Unfortunately, she did.
It seems that the envious among our classmates started doing what their feeble heads do best: spread malicious talk and tease the hell out of a good thing. Having three very protective brothers in the same school put a lot of pressure on her and she decided to cut off our blossoming friendship. We didn’t speak to each other for the next two years.
This is about the time I started writing this, burning its pages after every session to the tune of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. (Shamefully, I tried the ceremony once while listening to Sting’s Mad About You but it didn’t work; surprisingly, Depeche Mode fared better.) It was something I had to do, to keep whatever we experienced together alive. I was fixated on her much like the public official in Virginia Woolf’s short story "Solid Objects" wherein he digs up a lump of glass on a beach:
John turned it in his hands; he held it to the light; he held it so that its irregular mass blotted out the body and extended right arm of his friend…It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore…
Nothing was as important as Yvonne was to me at that period: she was the only desire I had. All my joys and hopes were embodied in her person. Yvonne was able to reach a place inside of me that neither family nor the several psychologists and psychiatrists they employed could ever reach. For the first time in my life, I was comfortable in my own skin. I felt human.
When she stopped talking to me, it was as if a trapdoor opened underneath and swallowed me up. I crawled out and kept vigil: she found new friends, I watched; she saw other guys, I watched; she went to the prom with someone else, I watched… and got hideously drunk.
One night towards the end of our senior year, we both found ourselves in a smoky bar in Makati called Kalye. Upon seeing my improvised Jim Morrison T-shirt, she decided to say hello. The rock band Razorback was playing and above the din I couldn’t tell if she really directed the greeting at me. But she had reached out and touched my back; it was unmistakable. I still wasn’t sure though but it was enough impetus to take a risk. Bracing myself for possible rejection, I responded. Then she said another thing and I laughed. I guess I said the right words again because we decided to continue the exchange outside.
We talked until the bar closed and her companions wanted to leave. She promised me she would teach me how to play Eric Avery’s’ poignant bass line on my favorite Jane’s Addiction song, Then She Did, and maybe the Chili Pepper’s Knock Me Down. It was as if no time had elapsed since our last conversation, no rupture in the line of our correspondence.
Love followed but it was no whirlwind romance. It would be another two years before we shared a kiss – while watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
(We kissed a second time while watching Vertigo – I’ve been able to watch the film uninterrupted since: it’s quite good.)
"For my wife!"
The claps are fewer now but Bowie seems nonplussed. He shakes it off and receives something from one of his roadies. At this point in the concert, he’s sung quite a few of his golden oldies including a good portion from the Ziggy Stardust album and other hits like All The Young Dudes. He’s already started to sing newer stuff like the genuinely affecting 5:15 The Angels Have Gone and Slip Away from 2002’s "Heathen." The chance of Bowie deciding to reach into his back catalog and dig out what many pundits consider a novelty hit and lightweight fare is decidedly slim. Besides, he’d already buried Major Tom more than two decades ago in the weird pop-funk, Ken Kesey damnation of Ashes to Ashes, a casualty of Bowie’s drug-hazed 1970s. No sense of bringing out the dead, right?
Bowie is clasping something: I can’t really see what it is.
"Hong Kong is the perfect place to be discussing this," he says, raising the object. "It’s a stylophone; well, it isn’t really. I saw it in a shop the other day while I was in Pepper Street. There was a sign that said: ‘Stylophones — Cheap.’"
He pauses.
"I used one of the genuine articles back in the ‘60s when I wrote this song. It went sort of like this…"
He played C Major. My heart leapt.
Long and drawn out, the chord then shifted to E minor with the seismic effect of rearranging my insides. The melody was wafting in the air: all Bowie should do was to snatch it up and sing the bejeezus out of it. In my script for my film, I described the aftermath of the first kiss between my two leads as thus: "An eternity and a second passed."
This was a lot longer.
Did he have another song with the same signature chords? Did I miss something here? What was wrong?
And then he sang:
"Ground control to Major Tom…"
He didn’t sing the whole song but it was enough. I had my sign.
The princess had just told him via the phone that their relationship wasn’t healthy anymore and that they should stay away from each other. Prior to the suicide attempt, he was already spending hours repeating actions like switching on and off the light-switches, never making a sound when a phone was around (lest he be heard) and babbled incantations whose only power was in his head. He wasn’t an alien, she insisted before she left. She told him to stop trying to act like one: he was human. The wounds on his wrists were proof enough of that. The strain was already too much: trying to kill himself was the breaking point.
It was over.
Not surprisingly, he could relate.
He read once that "The only true alien planet is Earth." It would take a suicide attempt and a broken heart to convince him of the validity of the statement. We are all transients, he realized, and that most of our actions were driven by a desire to get out, hop on to the next comet and ride off into the Milky Way. The more we wanted to leave a place, the more likely it is that we belonged there. "We’re absolute beginners with nothing much at stake," Bowie once sang: does it take much for us to be happy where we are?
Besides, he had already found a home.
He didn’t have to think hard for a name.
Yet I was worried as well. Years of practice taught me always to expect the worst, constantly reminding me that although the skies were clear the threat of rain was always near. God had given his sign, no less than a miracle: if only my nerves were convinced of the fact…
There was so much to think about including memories of all the months I spent wooing back Yvonne to my side: the daily letters I sent, the novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus and St. Lorenzo Ruiz, the astronomical phone charges. It all came down to this moment. The timing had to be perfect and, of course, the nagging question of which knee to get down upon. (I’d seen it done in countless films but couldn’t for the life of me remember that one detail.) Then perspiration oozed from my pores as the thought occurred to me: what if the existentialist knew the truth? That all my notions of divine providence and fate were only shadows projected through celluloid, dots and lines on paper and an octave change from capable pop singers. Bowie sang of love: was it just another mask he was affecting?
I reached out my damp hand and held Yvonne’s. Despite having an allergy to sweat, she held it nonetheless. Despite lacking the charm and ingenuity of a Holden Caulfield, I understood the sympathy of the gesture and felt genuine warmth envelop my being. This was true: this was real.
"We’re gonna do a couple of numbers from an album I did in the 1970s," introduced Bowie.
I embraced Yvonne not because of the cold: I wanted her near me, to make her hear the rhythms of my body singing its music…
"This one’s called Be My Wife," he announced.
As the band kicked in, Bowie sang with such power that left no room for any doubt.
I got down on one knee (I can’t remember which, I still hadn’t figured that one out yet!)
For effect, it would be appropriate to tell you that all sound just dropped away like in your usual popcorn romance and that the "love theme" would fade in with the pertinent dialogue. But that wouldn’t be true. I proposed three times before Yvonne bent down, saw the ring and realized what I was saying. Bowie and his band were making such a racket.
No matter, the answer was yes.
I cut short my well-worn observations without Yvonne telling me to stop. Without words, I know that she knows it’s all bullshit and I’m just trying to make conversation. Her face is radiating with a glow more eloquent than words: they weren’t needed, held no power at this moment. The right ones had already been said without being clever or right in my mind. They only had to be honest.
Retiring to separate rooms later that evening, I find that I am unable to sleep, my body up to my eyeballs in adrenaline. Apart from wondering if Yvonne is as awake as I am (not the case, she tells me later: she was out the moment her head hit the pillow), my thoughts are trying to rearrange themselves into sentences that form a cohesive whole about the whole Bowie experience. I can’t even bring myself to write the things that would make the sponsors of this trip happy: I keep telling my story instead of giving a brief history, recording every minute detail down to Bowie’s socks and using phrases like "He brought the house down!" (Exclamation point needed.)
I know it sounds pretentious but my attention was wandering heavenward, the terminal flight of Major Tom. Despite the stellar display before him, he could only think of his wife and the fact that she had to know that he loved her.
If I’m able to do as much every day of Yvonne’s life, my mission is accomplished.