Adventures in Alco-Ingestion: What's your pretense?

I guess when you grow up tethered to a nanny, you’re bound to get creative — which may explain all the pretend play I did as a kid. In the old house I spent my childhood in, a grand room with myriad shelves provided many a hiding place to act out, whether it was as a creeping assassin or hunted-down mutant harnessing his superpowers.

The make-believe would continue trailing me through my teen years, I would realize. At 15, the nanny long gone, my dad taught me what the word “pretentious” meant. At the international school I attended, our eighth grade class’s most physically and socially developed had planned an excursion out of the city as a sort of familiarization trip for adult-accessible hedonism. After my family’s owning a beach resort two hours away had come to be known, we tore through three days like junior master debauchees. In our heads, we were in extended rap videos, making sure our excesses were atrocious enough to become amusing.

My dad didn’t know about the strip poker inspired by hotel glasses — not shots — of Jose Cuervo; he didn’t know about the jet ski my friends had driven drunkenly and almost crashed; nor did he know about the two Olongapo prostitutes we’d brought into a room and regarded as pets we could request tricks from, a couple of the guys getting handjobs and the rest of us just making fun of the accents they tried to put on upon encountering the Cali inflection in ours.

High school cafeteria-like Manila nightlife makes doing a Heather pretty tempting.

My dad, however, had gotten word of the post-midnight orders of rib-eye steaks some of the other guys had made. Lobster dinner or banana split, I’d met whatever indulgent bidding these friends of mine had with the nonchalance I’d assimilated from watching Macaulay Culkin’s Richie Rich as a kid. Spike that with the aristo-cretinous cool I wanted to imbibe from a fictional scallywag like Sebastian Valmont. Among the types of high school untouchable, the one I deluded myself into thinking I was was the spoiled SOB: a beach house Peter Pan to my group of lost rich kids — Subic Bay’s prince of f*cking tides. This is the identity I assumed when I oozed disinterestedly through the resort with my friends, casting a nervous smile whenever I crossed paths with my dad, because he knew me better than that. And that’s how I learned of the word “pretentious”: my grotesque self-aggrandizing being addressed during a solemn dinner a few days after that trip.  

Still, I didn’t know the word would make such an impact on my life since then. In fact, it single-handedly represents a world I know too damn well, it being the easiest word to drop in said world.

I remember some friends and acquaintances, for example, describing a place like The Collective as pretentious. With shops and eateries mimicking DIY U.S.A., a former auto-parts hub of someone’s rich daddy has made possible this dream of liberty from selling out (or having to sell enough). If you want evidence of a bubble —the mythologized kind that many have accused ISM students or Alabang kids of living in — this trustafarian outpost may just provide it: independent businesses housed — coddled, even — under one roof and partially existing ‘cause of a skillfully maneuvered dependence. 

Photo by Bia Catbagan

  A few weeks ago, my sitting at square’s center of The Collective allowed me to take in the entirety of its spirit. Fold-away wooden seating had been set up around the cement courtyard for what a friend had described to me as the weekly “anything-goes” event every Wednesday that was organized by resident bar B-Side. That evening, a large Plexiglas cross had been erected at the side, illuminated from within by taro-purple lights and a DJ booth wrapped in weirdly-patterned tablecloth stood at the posterior, a former MTV VJ-turned-film blogger at its helm. Later, “strippers” (as a friend classified them, even though they didn’t actually strip) likely pulled from nearby nightclubs would be summoned to pull guys from the crowd and give them public lap dances. As this hoedown from hell went on, another friend shared his disgust for the Makati hipster scene — how store-bought and half-hearted their social deviancy was. I was just wondering to myself how the go-go dancers could gyrate so harmoniously with the experimental aural squiggles spliced with old-timey vocal jazz that was being played.

Maybe it was the scattering of kids decked out in the SSI digs they’d bought with their extension cards that repulsed my friend. They were simply bystanders to the stripper spectacle, unenthusiastically content with being a part of the cooked-up absurdity. When they’d had enough, they probably just told their drivers to bring them to, say, a luxe mega-club like Republiq.

 Incidentally, you’d imagine a B-Side staple to go on a beer-fisting rant about how a place like Republiq is so f*cking pretentious. Anyone who’s seen the queues at the club’s entrance that separate paying from VIP-privileged would also come to that conclusion. This is, after all, where one curates his raised, reserved booth with beautiful works of genetics who in turn decorate their conversations by dropping names and their misadventures of gratification.

But exhibition isn’t limited to those who revel in capitalism and the consumption of subculture. Amid the cramped gallery spaces and offbeat boutiques of Cubao X, the pavement begs flaunting all the same — the rallying of nonconformity and starving artistry almost as severe as Republiqans’ waving whatever associations with the Kanye-esque “good life” in the air.

Surveying the local nightlife for a while now, I feel like the nocturnal come-on of “What’s your poison?” should instead be “What’s your pretense?” No one’s the winner, really. Not when youth — more so privileged youth — is always in need of an identity to brandish.