ZEN Bitchin'

(conclusion)

It has been five years since Gracie and I broke up and my mother hadn’t seen any other girl with me since then. I had just celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday and apart from my female college friends, all my well-wishers were men. “I don’t know how to answer your question, Mother,” I said. “If you want to know if I’m having sexual and emotional relations with men, I am. But if you’re asking me if I’m gay, I really don’t know.”

“That’s what I don’t understand, Michael. You’ve been with girls before. What happened?”

Of course, she didn’t know about her dear godson. “Things just happen, Mother.”

“I don’t know if I can accept that explanation,” Mother said sternly, keeping her eyes on the plate. After a moment’s pause she said, “Is Norman your…”

I nodded.

“And how long has this been going on?”

“With Norman, or the whole thing?”

She just stared at me, her lips pursed.

I sighed. “Since after my college graduation. Norman and I have been together for more than a year now.”

“Oh, Michael,” she said finally. It was as if I’d just revealed that I was terminally ill. That moment, for the first time, I felt genuine hatred for my mother.

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(part 3 of 4)

After that, it seemed that the scales of ignorance were removed from my eyes. Everywhere I would go, I would meet and catch the gazes of men who’d look me over like I was some piece of meat for their taking. Inside the jeepney on my way to class, in the review center, in the mall, even at church. Of course, my experience in the theater was followed by many others. I discovered a new community in the theater. Men who posed like peacocks in the wall that separated the balcony and orchestra seats, moving close and far according to their wishes, men who sat in the first three rows, waiting for someone to sit beside them, men who hung around the urinals and cubicles in the toilet, performing the quickest sex possible, and everything and everyone in between.

In the three months before the board exams it seemed that I went into the theater everyday just to have sex. I grew bold with each encounter; time came when I had sex with four to five people in one visit. Sometimes I allowed myself to be taken home or to some other, private place for more sex. On the day before the last day of my exams, I met Victor in the theater. We’d been eyeing each other since I came in and stood by the wall, but he made no move to come to me. I went to the toilet and let myself be blown by a middle-aged man who clutched his briefcase like his life depended on it. When he walked in, the man immediately withdrew, and seeing him just looking at us, stepped out of the toilets quickly. We kind of just looked at each other; he threw a glance at my still exposed cock before walking out. The middle-aged man came back and finished what he started.

When I sat on the third row of seats, two other men sat next to me and walked off after doing their business. Having come three times already, I was ready to go home; I’d just watch the movie in peace. As I was zipping up, he sat beside me. “I’m Victor,” he said, offering his hand. I shook it and said, “Joel.” I wasn’t in the habit of giving my real name to guys I met in the theater. He never let go of my hand, to my disconcertment. He kissed my fingers, sucked lightly on the pinky, tried to kiss my lips but ended up breathing in my ear when I turned my face away. I said no when he asked me if I had seen the movie in its entirety. “Would you like to have coffee with me after this?”

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(part 2 of 4)

I never pursued my feelings for Emily, or the next girl after. Perhaps, to lash out for his apparent possessiveness, I started having sex with others. With the school bus driver, with the janitor and groundskeeper, with a brick layer at work in a building a block from our house, with this laborer’s friends later on, even with the man who delivered our newspapers. These were all grown men, much older than both of us. Some of them were even married. I never got along well with other boys my age. I’m not sure if he knew what I was doing. If he did, he was just perhaps being extremely patient and indulgent.

But when he found out that I had sex with a classmate of his, he got very mad, not at me but at his classmate, whom he considered a friend. It led to a fistfight. I didn’t see it. My mother just told me about it. He never confronted me, by the way. I was thirteen then, growing tall and fleshy every day as I began to shed the excess weight of my childhood. But after that ugly incident with his classmate, I didn’t pursue sex with other people anymore. I didn’t know why exactly. It couldn’t be because I cared for him. I mean, I did care for him, but I did it nevertheless, didn’t I? I didn’t let my feelings for him stop me from doing the things I did.

Two weeks after I graduated from high school, he graduated at the community college in the provincial capital. I was bound to go to the city for college; he found a nice enough job at a government-owned bank in our town. As the day of my departure drew near we spent more time with each other. He said he didn’t want me to go, but he also knew that he can’t do anything about it. “Anyway,” he said, “we could still see each other every weekend.”

But as it turned out, my studies absorbed my time completely. I managed to go to the province once only in the first three months of school. I also began to love living with my grandmother. Then it was decided that my mother should be the one who visited me during weekends instead. She would always say that Dennis kept on asking about me. When I came home during my first semestral break we had an argument. I was so hoping that we’d have sex but we didn’t. In fact, we didn’t speak again until I left for the city.

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(Part 1 of 4)

I don’t remember the exact point in time when I became Mike. I had always preferred to be addressed by my real name. No nickname, no pet name. This was because my whole name was simple as it was: Michael. When I was a boy, my late father liked to call me Kelly, an obvious reference to an advertisement for a brand of gin in the seventies. This particular ad always showed a man dressed for hunting, wandering through a forest, lost, tired, with torn clothes and gashes, as if he’d just fought off the advances of a predator, almost helplessly yelling that name. He would then reach a clearing, or the lip of a river, or the basin of some waterfalls, where a scantily-clad girl is waiting for him with a cuatro cantos bottle of Ginebra San Miguel. I wondered whether Kelly referred to the drink or the girl. When Top Gun was shown in my second year of high school, I was relieved to have outgrown that nickname when I saw that the lead actress’s name was Kelly McGillis. That answered my question. She was a handsome woman, but a woman nonetheless.

Since then, I had adamantly insisted that I be called Michael. Only two syllables, with a little burst of air in the last two vowels, condensed to foreignness, a provincial, hopelessly middle-class boy’s aspiration for a little sophistication. But I am jumping years into my story, this being a conscious decision on my part on how I wish to be called. Like I said, I outgrew my first nickname. This happened months before I turned eleven, when I was circumcised. In our neighborhood, I had the distinction of being one of the first boys to be circumcised by the town doctor, a good friend of my mother. He was in fact, my godfather, who had no son of his own. Before I went under the knife, Mother smiled at me beatifically and said that after the procedure, I would already be a man. She began calling me Michael.

The prospect frightened me, though I tried my best not to show it. Why would I want to be a man, I thought, when almost all the men I grew up with were nothing but frightful and ill-tempered, beer-swigging creatures, who took every chance to make fun of me for being so short and chubby? They liked to ruffle my longish hair and pinch my cheeks and buttocks when they got near and the most humiliating thing of all, they made me feel as if I liked what they were doing to me.

There was no turning back, though. It was done and two weeks later, I was showing my circumcised penis to the sixteen-year old son of my mother’s best friend in our backyard, under a fat moon. Dennis, my mother’s godson, stroked it into erection, knelt in front of me and sucked it, an act which terrified me and gave me a pleasure I hadn’t felt before and made me feel dirty, all at the same time. After coming in his mouth—another terrifying event, since I hadn’t even masturbated before this—he tried to kiss me but I turned away from his advancing face. It’s not that I was repulsed; I just didn’t know what to do or feel or even say.

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Yesterday marked the passing of one of the most prominent Filipinos I’ve known in my lifetime. After more than a year of battling colon cancer, former President Cory Aquino passed away peacefully, amidst the flurry of prayers and support from Filipinos around the world. A healing mass was held here in Phnom Penh last Friday afternoon but I wasn’t able to attend. To show my support to her, I posted yellow ribbons in my Twitter and Facebook pages, and in this blog as well. She means a lot to me, and my generation, I think. And her legacy must never be forgotten.

Woman of the Year

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