The First Kind

I had never before been aware that there were two kinds of cockroaches in Manila.

Both emerge from a room’s blackest corners, or invisible cavities, when at night you’re lying in bed and globules of sweat begin to find form at the back of your neck, or at your back. They come when there is nothing left to sense but darkness and nothing left to feel but the sweltering effects of our city climate and its dust and doggedness and quiet restlessness. When your cheeks don’t feel the air from the night outside, the air that you hope might penetrate your space through the window screen but which doesn’t anyway, not even scantily – well, that’s when the first and second kinds of cockroaches make their appearance.

Proceeding as stealthily as possible, and concealing, as it were, the location of the rotten little hiding place from where they had come out, these creatures are always irritatingly, senselessly wary of being seen by a human eye; senseless, for what else might their agenda be but be seen by a human eye?

Now I don’t know about other countries and cities. But a cockroach in Manila is the only thing that can positively make me reach the higher octave I’ve otherwise never been capable of since undergoing tonsillectomy. (And how do I know I am Filipino? Always I am equipped with Baygon.) They never fail to surprise inasmuch as, say, stepping on a five-letter animal’s excrement is a surprise.

The first kind –the kind I’ve encountered many times at home– will, after its initial display of bravery, be terrorized by the sight of my size-11 Nike Zoom Generations. Soon as I’ve forgotten my having shrieked like a girl, the second war would be waged, and cockroaches of the first kind shall crawl or fly away, retreat, dash almost funnily in a kind of mad panic to the nearest shadow. Damn it if they even find the time to mourn over a freshly squashed cousin whose innards would serve as Exhibit A on the outsoles of my shoes.

My dreadful discovery of the second kind of cockroaches in Manila took place several days ago during my first night at the new apartment, where I had forgotten to initially bring an electric fan. I found that these crawlers were infinitely creepier and –consumed perhaps by deeply familial ties– downright suicidal. They kept coming and coming, in between chapters of Colm Toibin, the first one taking off from the edge of a splintery closet door and fluttering straight to the wild hairs of my left leg. After getting it off with a violent jerk, I began chasing the cockroach, whereupon its short life came to an end with the vicious smack of a Pony sandal. And yet how many of them had followed!

My mass murdering these devil-may-care insects made me unspeakably queasy, not only because of their inherent anatomical ugliness but also because their kind seemed to find gratification –just immense, even obscene gratification– in infuriating a human being and then dying. Theirs is the kamikaze way.

Neither the subsequent pleasant dream about a dancing Beyonce Knowles nor the arrangement of having my own bathroom could excise the horror of that first night. I didn’t even have coffee the following morning; no, no bitter beverages please. It may be the strange case that I’ve begun to sense, vaguely, a kind of nostalgia about the cockroaches from the L-shaped bedroom in which I had lived for the past twenty-two years – those which prowled the dry floorboards my bare feet now miss, especially the spot with permanent specks of dust underneath the Yamaha piano that father had bought more than a decade ago and which the bared parts of my heart and memory just as badly miss. Now –a nocturnal hour wherein a soap opera on cable TV can be heard from the adjacent room, though only distantly, as though it was being played in another world– now I remember that cockroaches of the first kind would disappear whenever someone would knock on the door but no one knocks anymore.

On Growing

“Don’t care about the awards; the important thing, if you want to write, is to write.” These words of advice, as uttered by highly-respected author Dong de los Reyes when we had been introduced last Friday night at the Hyatt Hotel and Casino, were still slowly being processed by a confused consciousness when I went home and staggered along the garage where I then threw up, like a dam bursting. He, Dong, might have spoken in earnest, or merely as an obliging eccentric with a highly literary moustache, but I was nonetheless giddy for having been taken and treated by the man as a writer: a listening writer, a learning writer, a drunken listener, a lousy learner.

Or was I disillusioned? Hardly anyone is taken on seriously nowadays; I am half-afraid of having fooled myself. I had certainly taken advantage of the abundance of red wine at the hotel; free beer, too, upon using which as a chaser I then reached a state of shameless unrestraint. I almost expelled my frustration to a client whose script revisions had earlier agitated me to no end. And I remember becoming exceedingly friendly to complete strangers at the lobby, losing –albeit temporarily– my signature pessimism, and giving a generous tip to the taxi driver then taking it back. And this was why, the next morning, my brother Josemaria was all too happy to take snapshots of myself sleeping like vegetable oil in an unheated pan – in a pair of basketball shorts, black socks, with my father’s necktie round my neck. My older brother Francis was furious perhaps with seeing dried vomit on his shiny leather shoes, but until now I don’t really know for sure because he might have bought what I had said, a most clumsy lie: “That’s just soap, not rinsed thoroughly by water.”

When I came to at around ten that Saturday morning, I quickly wrote up in my journal the many events of the past week. God, I realized how little I had read! Montaigne’s essays are going to seem quite incomprehensible indeed when the reader isn’t sober, or when he is being swarmed by tasks which multiply after every phone call. Have I been both? No one can tell me I wasn’t too busy. No one can tell me I didn’t lose my concentration. What I can tell myself, but don’t really want to, is that losing concentration may have been intentional.

This coming week must be better, eh? I am not going to have another one like the last. Action-packed though it was, there was never a moment during which one would be disposed to remember –happily, which means to truly remember– what was happening. So as I sit here on my bed, steady and still like the unclouded moonlight of September, my clear mind is bearing infant resolutions. Key word is “resolutions”, not “infant”; something like no more excessive drinking; no more waking up past ten in the morning; no more dangerously pining away and howling like an owner-less dog with the damnable romanticism of youth; no more being overwrought and over-thought. Seasons change and people grow; without any excuse they must.

Panic Attacks

Sunday, a week before finally completing the move to the new apartment, and I haven’t started paying attention to the closet. How should I pack my wardrobe? To whom should I donate my high school Physical Education shirts? Should I leave behind my three-year old Bike supporter? God, my baseball caps smell like mothballs. Are these garter briefs or bacon strips?

About the books, though, I am already starting to have panic attacks. I need to shop for another one of those small wooden shelves, plus a nice wine-colored rug to place on top of it, and some kind of dust removal brush, whatever people call it. A Canterbury would be a preposterous extravagance, since I wouldn’t want one that isn’t antique, though I’m going to try and squeeze that into the budget anyway. So many magazines; yet only one thesaurus! A single dictionary! How shall I proceed with cataloguing?

Most of the books are arranged alphabetically according to author. Not all can fit the shelf, so the rest are on a rack on top of my study or being stacked shamelessly on a desk that’s falling to pieces. Inside my shoulder bag are the two I’m presently reading, a Cheever and Montaigne’s collection of essays. Several hardbound novels, having been sent from New York, are kept inside the cardboard box that bears the US Postal Service’s sticker. They still smell like America; you know what the pleasant smell is like when something has come from America?

Sunday, a week before finally completing the move to the new apartment, and I’ve nothing better to do than take pictures of the books. For the record, Sir Wilfredo Pascual has indeed inspired me with his most recent post. I am aware of the many available titles which I haven’t yet read, so many which haven’t escaped the cocoon of the bookstores’ plastic wrap and been liberated, like a butterfly, by my fragmentary blessing. I like to think that I’ll be taking these babies up soon, at a faster pace than before, and that while soon hasn’t arrived, I should be content to think of my compulsive purchases as one man’s wise investments. “Read to achieve,” as a basketball charity program slogan says.

Or maybe I am digging a grave that will literally bury me alive? It’s daunting to aspire to become a writer - fatal to become nothing else but a reader. I don't know the kind of man I am becoming.

Truth, Lies between the Lines

Truths as painful as the fact that I am (still) unfit to write fiction, or consider myself so, cannot be made to suggest that I can only write journalism. Mother says, “I wonder why you never worked for the papers.” I dismiss the probe with a half-truth, that “in this country, there’s hardly any money for the small fish in the industry.” The false part in the response is the unavoidable yet warranted implication that I may have decided to enter public relations and marketing communications to make money. To be honest, I don’t care about the wages, apathetic even perhaps to such a point that, if I am made to explain myself, one should consider my arguments remarkably stupid, un-Filipino, and pompous… For when one is twenty-two going on thirty, and knows he wasn’t born as a trust baby (rather, a low-class snob!), he should at least attempt to understand the rudimentary principles of economics. (“So long as I am in a position where I can have my three meals, my ten cigarettes, and my tall brewed a day,” but I’ll go on saying.)

Allow me, before I philosophize myself into ruin, to put aside for a moment all this talk about not caring for a single centavo. See, what I am driving at is another painful truth: I've always made to think of myself as more adept at writing lies. Some, though not many, say that there is an art to lying – without of course being caught. I may have taken that to heart, mercilessly practicing the finer points, with a pen, and on a paper that has so far never been a manuscript of anything seriously fictitious, but which is often bound anyway to be untrue – or only half-true. I reported getting involved in a fistfight last year with “a man a few years older, wearing a white Hawaiian sando shirt, and seemed the macho type who religiously watched Ultimate Fighting Championship matches.” I deliberately pulled out the most important description. The man was Francis, my older brother.

This is not going to be a confession of the lies I’ve been telling, or writing; only a precaution that in a public journal, never believe everything you read. And always read between the lines. My sheer immodesty in thinking that readers would take my work seriously!

But they do – unsuspectingly, most of the time; but they do. It isn’t perhaps the case with these personal essays (despite fragmented evidence to the contrary), but it surely is with my line of work. There is, perhaps, no greater violence to one’s reportage of the world than that which PR agendas inflict. Are you asking why they don’t have public relations electives in universities? Don’t be stupid. They do. But the classes never teach how the news was won, or bought. They never teach that half the quotes they read in the business and metro and opinion and lifestyle and sports pages are strategically fabricated, and that the voice recorder is now a preferred gadget of the Pollyannaish few. The students are protected from the disastrous knowledge that whenever there’s business, there’s a brand, and whenever there’s a brand there’s a story, and subsequently a kind of heartlessness necessary to sell that story.

Journalism, ideally, should be free of lies. Of an optimist, these are the words. A sophisticated optimist is expected to make further assertions: it is impossible for journalism to be free of lies, but it’s not impossible for journalism to once in awhile take on a literary, or creative, quality, a quality that won't necessarily blur the lies but will at least have the potential to make them either tolerable or irrelevant. But I’m a long, long, long way from being what I aspire to become –that is, a realist fictionist– and I must not lie and say I am even worthy of being called a literary journalist, an altogether different breed, and the idea of which many people are surely and quickly bound to deny anyway. Let’s call myself then a sophisticated pessimist (neither, I hope, pathologically nor intentionally), the one who has more to say than “journalism will never be free of lies,” or “life is shit and then you die.” Yes, life is shit. But look from a different perspective, from the late Albert Ellis’ perspective if you please, and life can be a lotus blossom, too, a veritable beauty, pleasant and naturally constructive, growing fragrantly into a garden of edifying truths, with no bitter, terminal lies.

When you finally recognize this truth yet still cannot save yourself from the depths of pessimism is when you would be disposed to agree that life is shit indeed. Take my case. If my best words are the good lies –that is to say, beautifully concealed– then I’ve nothing to derive from this but the conclusion that I don’t know what I am doing anymore, what the hell I am in my business for, why I am writing, who I am, and who I am turning out to be. The hair-pulling existentialist dilemma!

Hmm, is it possible, still, that this conclusion might also be a mistake – worse, a lie? After all, this is a public journal. And I am a writer who, for lack of a better word, “thrives” in publicity. On the other hand, I just might not be as skilled a liar as I am deceiving myself to be.

Or perhaps what I’ve just written are merely vulgar effects of being “overmedicated”. Painful truth is, and painful to me most of all, I am as yet incapable of fiction, of literary journalism, of many things else – except for lying, its arts and letters.

(If these notes are nonsense, which I am sure they are, do spare me the paralyzing fear of not hearing it from you. You know who you are.)

Manila, Wednesday

A walk along Roxas Boulevard, with only the sedated orange glow from lamp posts lining Luneta Park and the restrained whir of empty taxis for one’s senses to take in, is what made tonight different from the rest of this and the previous week’s beer-aided evenings and dinner meetings. Almost midnight, it was the setting, oh, just the setting, for one to feel young, or younger, then fresh as a cherub, and infinitely foolish for thinking of ever wanting to leave this honest city – Manila.

The day started fabulously, and I will not argue otherwise that the agreeableness took off from there. It started fabulously because it started late. Having watched Conan O’Brien –interspersed with advertisements of wine glasses from Turkey– late last night, I woke up at nine in the morning and was immediately greeted by the news that I’ll be given contributor’s assignments for Adobo, a local advertising and marketing communications magazine. I saw myself in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, too. My face, downsized to about a millimeter (no one would be able to make the recognition unless I told so), was captured in a photograph accompanying a story which ran in the special “Kobe Bryant in Manila” section. I am not yet convinced of having the paper framed; still, one never forgets first times.

Lunch was, though not unpleasantly, just as usual. You see, I’ve been patronizing this new Persian cuisine restaurant, about a hundred steps down from the office in Tomas Morato, called Grilled Tomatoes. I love – well, needless to say, I love their grilled tomatoes, just as much as the fact that there’s a stack of travel, health and adventure lifestyle magazines which the managers have made available to the customers. (But they do need to put something –anything!– on the white walls.)

In the afternoon, on a trip to another evening engagement but in no hurry, I strolled the galleries in Ortigas Center’s SM Megamall, where I viewed “Self-Portraits”, an exhibition of English artist (and retired journalist) Peter Sutcliffe’s recent works in oil, watercolor, graphics, and print. Mr. Sutcliffe, who has seemingly made the Laguna fisherman’s hat the new bowler and is not the infamous Yorkshire Ripper, was present to accommodate the guests – meaning the three or four people who, like myself, dropped in out of sheer curiosity. Okay - the dilettantes, if you will.

I thus introduced myself as a writer (“not an art critic, sir”) who was immediately struck by the apparent influence of Sargent in his portraiture – Sargent, that is to say, with the distinction of having Filipina subjects painted in some beautiful, sun-lit parlors of opulent Spanish tradition houses in Tagaytay. (I was pleased that Mr. Sutcliffe positively acknowledged my observation, with a reasonable display of sincerity, as though I were to be regarded as someone who actually knew something. Although to be honest, I don’t.) I saw that he had also worked on landscapes of San Marco and the Piazzetta, but there was also a series of water-colored paintings, and better ones, of farms in Lipa and a rainy day on Laguna de Bay.

The evening set-up at SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City, the real work, was meaningless but necessary. I simply had to. What I did not have to do was buy another book. I was about to escape from National Bookstore empty-handed when I caught a glimpse of an Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited, which I didn’t yet have, and which, according to myself, I would not have been able to find elsewhere and therefore cannot not purchase. I lost two hundred pesos; another one hundred and fifty when the mall’s only cigar stall had run out of stock of forty-peso Marlboro Reds and forced me to buy instead a pack of Mediums.

How I ended up in Roxas Boulevard was a result of two taxi rides, the first of which I had hitched with a colleague to keep my fare to a minimum. The night was cold but not empty. There passed a horse carriage, or a kalesa. I smoked one of the above-mentioned expensive cigarettes to pass the time, for anyway I was walking in an area that can most certainly be taken as a sort of taxi convent; ask for a Sister Mary and a hundred heads will turn to look at you. The taxis can wait, as can work and time and responsibility and thoughts overwrought. A youth can’t.



Mr. Scutliffe.


At the exhibition.


"Self-portraits".

Kobe Rage (Get It? "Kobe Rage - Coverage")

All photos by Nykko Santos.

It was Wednesday morning, about 8:30, when the sun rose to a most oppressive height and gave off what can best be – or can only be – described as asphalt-melting heat. I hadn’t slept a wink, though it wasn’t to perk myself up that I had foolishly ordered a tall, scalding cup of brewed coffee, sugarless as usual, to begin the day. I was simply out of my senses, scandalously excited, in a state of agitation and a delirium of sorts.

I was going to see Kobe Bryant. The Black Mamba himself – in the flesh.

I hitched a ride with co-writer Kirby Garlitos and photographer Nykko Santos on the way to Makati Shangri-La Hotel for the press conference. Naturally, we cursed the EDSA traffic along the way, rolled down the windows to catch some air, too, and smoke some cigarettes. “It’s not going to start on time,” Kirby assured us, but Nykko had already started pulling out his armory of lenses to set his camera up. Meanwhile, I’d prepared my Lakers cap, my green Nike t-shirt, my exclusive Kobe Bryant magazine, plus the latest issue of Action & Fitness – idiotically certain that Black Mamba would request for a complimentary copy once he had laid his eyes on the magazine we were representing.

Finally reaching the hotel's Quezon Ballroom a quarter before noon, I quickly saw that the scene resembled more a media stampede on a wet market than a press conference – cameras everywhere, flashing and snapping, journalists pushing and shoving for that elusive press pass, media men ignoring the extravagant buffet by the entrance to secure a spot near the stage where Kobe was to make his appearance before the Manila public. When he finally entered (more than an hour late), I had to stand on my upholstered seat just to get a glimpse of about a quarter of his 6’7” frame. Yes; mathematically speaking, it was tricky trying to get a view.

The conference, however, didn’t last long. Some ten or twelve questions later, we were hastily off to the Nike Park store at the “highly-societal” Bonifacio High Street, where an even more significant crowd had gathered under the 2 p.m. sun, thus rendering useless the power of the Media ID worn obediently around my sweat-drenched neck. Everyone was looking at Kobe as though he were a celebrated extraterrestrial specimen (which, for all intents and purposes, he probably was). Even the employees from neighboring Krispy Kreme had stood still and temporarily stopped serving sugar-glazed doughnuts to comment on “how muscular Kobe looked!”

In a sort of gift-exchange tradition slash usual, feel-good PR stunt, Kobe donated two signed backboards to the wide-eyed students of Pampanga’s lahar-buried Eliseo-Belen Elementary School, while receiving from the children a framed artwork that was inspired, no doubt, by an 8-color set of crayons and by the prospect of being patted on the back by an NBA superstar. (It was at this time that I had fantasized about my elementary school being molten away by lava from Mount Pinatubo, too.) Kobe then threw signed Nike basketballs in all directions. I swore that at one point, I was his target; he just overshot and hit the stage lights instead (no one ran for cover, unsurprisingly).

The itinerary pointed to Philippine Sports Arena, Pasig City as the third and final stop of the tour. Still reeling from the frenzying effects of the afternoon, we jumped again into Kirby’s car, with hazard lights turned on and our Media IDs dangling from the rearview mirror. The police and the traffic aides and the motorists all miraculously gave way, and we reached the gym just in time for the “Blackout”, Kobe’s famous workout regimen. He was conducting a clinic for a selection of Filipino players from the Nike Elite camp, and, watching him chastise Ateneo de Manila University’s Kirk Long for cramping after a five-minute defensive squat (“Don’t cheat yourself, man!”), I wondered how diabolically sadistic a trainer Kobe could have been. But then again, this was precisely what made him the most amazing basketball player in the world.

Owing to the athletic ineptitude of the Nike Elite camp players (can’t any of them make a five-foot bank shot?), the clinic turned out to be an embarrassingly public affair; I was certainly not the only one who had cringed. After the two-and-a-half-hour session, the adoring crowd breathed a collective sigh of relief and started again to chant Kobe’s name. Everyone rose and cheered and Kobe began to circle the sidelines to slap high-fives with fans, during which time I blissfully made contact with his pinky. He then relented to our loud pleas for a dunk exhibition. I took out my phone, with its pathetic 1.3 megapixel camera, and deliriously documented Kobe doing 360s, windmills (he missed two attempts), and a very sick one-handed slam jumping over two kids.

Just like that, Kobe’s tour in Manila was over. Brief though it was, the experience somehow made me indefatigable. That evening, I played two hours of inspired hoops at the Valle Verde courts in a borrowed pair of neon orange swimming shorts and soccer shoes. Downing three large Cokes from McDonald’s afterwards, I gleamed with satisfaction over the once-in-a-lifetime coverage while wistfully wishing that next time, it’d be the royal pinky of LeBron James I get to touch.

Book Fair

It was afternoon. The World Trade Center was teeming with life, with magic, with the enchanting power of words. But from all this I anyhow felt removed, and from the bustle, left out – neither by choice nor chance but rather because it was seemingly supposed to be so, or I am not making any sense. Most people, with perfect civility on their faces, talked quite agreeably to each other, and presumably about literature, sharing their own thoughts on I don’t know what title, or which booth, or what kind of stuff they liked reading. Others were seated in coffee tables, talking, too. Or they exchanged cards. Most of the young ones in groups, why don’t I just say the students, were apparently awfully thrilled, and they went about taking snapshots of uh – well, of the crowds I guess, or of themselves, or perhaps of a seven-year-old little girl unsuspecting and unconscious of how adorable she looked holding up her copy of the latest (and very thick) Harry Potter novel. Gliding along the measured meters of exhibit areas, I caught a familiar face on which I couldn’t put a name. Who was she again? There scoured many foreigners, too. I overheard one made fun of a travel guide.

Now, books, naturally, were everywhere. Racks, shelves, boxes of them, each waiting to be sold in between one’s bargaining and one’s moving on to the next booth; praying lifelessly under the white lights for its pages to be read and to be spared the fairly widespread misfortune of being forgotten. Everything was colorfully advertised to be on sale, but I didn’t buy anything and I am speaking an unembarrassed truth. Oh! Only slightly less obscure than their space at the Silahis shop in Intramuros stood the Tradewinds’ booth, which I didn’t bother coming to. I wager that they were still selling rare Filipinianas at a price so low to the point of being offensive to, say, Maximo D. Ramos. Or maybe –is he still alive?– Maximo D. Ramos stopped caring long ago.

In one of the function rooms reserved for the Manila International Book Fair, professors seated on a stage gave tribute to National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo and launched into a discussion about the significance of her work. Perhaps like the rest of the audience, I sat in but hardly listened. My mother’s name, I thought fleetingly, is Edith, too. Anyway I had seen from the event schedule that Alfred Yuson, a sort of literary idol, was scheduled to give a talk in the same room, so I planned to wait and shake his hand and remember to introduce myself and tell him to never stop writing.

But my sister Lourdes, whom I had invited to come along, was already waiting near the room’s entrance way before Mr. Yuson was set to make his appearance. So I up and left and saw that she had bought a cookbook and a Dan Brown novel (using, of course, and as she told me afterwards, her plastic money, successfully prompting me to ask which one). I called our driver and waited outside, at the designated loading/ unloading area, from where I chose to wear my dark glasses instead of look at the Sunday sky, at the sun’s brutal, blatant glare. Strangely, I felt a repulsive kind of weariness, seeing all the people come and go, scan and buy, with myself just another indistinguishable part of this seemingly endless continuum, of which the finality one was only left to contemplate.

I bought a tee shirt by the way. On it was printed, “Read or die.” Tough choices, for maybe both are valid.

Revisiting Something More

Never indeed have I ever been this busy.

To the two or three people in the world who read what I write, irregularly, in this public journal, pardon the recent prolonged absence. The biggest news is that I’ve been commissioned to write –and market– a book, something that hasn’t happened before. And though this means that for more hours I’ll be “working” in the most stressful sense of the world, I nonetheless welcome such development and welcome it more as a personal achievement than a professional one; for, you see, it is about my second most abnormal love, right after books: basketball.

I have not played in awhile. I would want to, at least for show when Kobe Bryant arrives here in Manila this September 5, but like to a ball in chains, I’ve been tied by the most energy-consuming affairs: work at the PR firm, late dinner meetings, coverage assignments for a sports magazine and a regional tourism bureau, the organization of a youth camp, tasks for a basketball management agency (a player is flying here third week of September to try out for one of the commercial leagues), visits to the doctor, readings of (and who else should it be when I say energy-consuming!) Dostoevsky and James, and attempts at writing fiction, not to mention the maddening business of moving to the new apartment. I may create an impression here of bragging about my goings on, and I won't blame anyone if he or she thinks so, but remember that I am a man, first and foremost, who is more comfortable being preoccupied rather than occupied. I am not used to actually doing something; a significant part of me thus intends to keep it that way.

And what is up with all these big events in Manila? The months leading to December should be slow months! Instead we have (right after Quentin Tarantino) Kobe flying in, as are crooner Elliott Yamin and author Neil Gaiman. And of course one needs to go to the Manila International Book Fair! Ah - Francis, Eugene, and mother's birthdays are all coming up, too.

Everything seems to be running so fast that the best action to take is stop. Yes, stop.

In the spirit of basketball and writing, please allow me the indulgence of revisiting a place and a state of mind some three or four years ago, when I was courageous enough to write such an embarrassing treatise, quite Agatha Runcible “shy-making” really, on my life as a basketball player, from which I am perhaps now divorced, though without of course discounting all or any of divorce's implications and possibilities. I had submitted this piece to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and I believe “Something More and Nothing Less” is my first-ever published work. Don't laugh at me now.

***

It was Tuesday when the fire was extinguished.

As I heaved basketballs from beyond the three-point arc, Coach Gabby summoned me to the scorer’s table. He wished to talk to me in private – well, at least where none of my teammates would be able to eavesdrop (not that anyone would want to). A few had left for class; others remained horsing around, while others still did push-ups.

Although I hurriedly ran up to him, I was far from eager. Had I heeded what my muted inner voice was saying, I would’ve taken baby steps, very slow, on my way to him, for I knew what was coming. But then in practice, it was modus operandi to move from one spot to another as quickly as possible, so I ran, almost as if to overtake my hesitation.

He had that solemn frown on his face, much like that of a businessman after a meeting gone awry, a look which I quickly copied. No time for post-practice banter now.

Coach had settled down and the bouncing basketballs were but faint noise in the background. I dutifully sat on the table, drenched with sweat, fidgeting nervously, biting the nails (and skin) off my fingertips. It seemed obvious that he wasn’t about to teach me the proper mechanics on my jump shot, or new pointers on how to run that screen-and-roll. We were to talk about ‘personnel movement’.

For many desperate nights I had braced myself for the devastating news, though as I realized that Coach was a few minutes away from actually delivering it, I feared the next moment. My heart pounded, and had it done so any louder, I swore he would have heard it. If only it was possible that he just made a hand signal or a certain look that could say it all, I would have preferred it so – curt yet courteous.

“Migs…” he said, and for a second I thought his voice was trailing off. (Was he acting?) “I want you to know that I appreciate the hard work you’ve put in the past several days, and that you had really impressed me during the tryouts. You’re extremely coachable and you’ve got the best mid-range game on this team.”

As he said these words, I knew they were but cushions to soften the blow, compliments to accompany the disappointment. They were praises thrown in to glorify an ungraceful exit, and vainly I might add, for as soon as the conversation shifted to the next stage – the excuses stage, the “You’re just too small to be a two guard” and “We’ve got to give way for the freshmen” stage – I had to swallow hard just to keep the tears from falling. One minute I was crippled with fear, and the next minute I was overwhelmed with sadness. The reality, which before had been imminent, was now irrevocable. One spot to another indeed, just like our on-the-court protocol: as quickly as possible and as swiftly as one could shred a heart.

I was off the team.

From the gym I had gone straight to the cafeteria to attend a thesis meeting. I didn’t remember much else, or perhaps it was just that I chose to forget. Commuting home was a blur, much like those moving images that haunt people in their nightmares: vehicles and pedestrians sped past me like wandering bullets. As soon as I arrived at the house, I locked myself up in my room and wept.

I was off the team. I was off the team. I was off the team.

Many months have passed. A once fiery passion has waned and a beer belly has started to bulge. Vices have been picked up from where ambitions have been dismissed. It seems that I haven’t realized the full irony of having switched from one leading cause of heart disease (shattered dreams) to another (smoking).

The most recent I’ve come to being back on the court is playing against modest talent in friendly pick-up games with neighbors, about once a week or only when I felt like it. Friends have chided how outrageous it is that I've let days –nay, even weeks!- pass by without touching a basketball, for the Migs they knew was the Migs that played to his heart’s content. Oftentimes, I simply say with a shrug, “I guess the fire is no longer there.”

And so my lame excuse goes: from a crackling flame to a faint flicker, and finally to ashes of nothingness swept under the rug of what-I-used-to-love.

I had read from a friend’s journal, “Love something more, for that something will never leave you.” Where can I find something that will never leave me? I was asking myself that one morning as I sat on my crumpled bed, which, despite its infinitesimal size, seemed way too big for me – especially since I had been soaking in self-pity. From across the room, just under the window panes, I looked at a gold-plated trophy: a little dusty, yes, but which still glistened immaculately under the restrained sunlight. At the base, it read: Miguel Bassig, Most Valuable Player, Streetball Challenge.

It hit me then; it hit me hard enough to make me realize how stupid I had been: I was the one who turned my back after all. The game of basketball never left me.

I was so easily disenchanted by failure that I lost sight of how much I loved the game – minus the politics of recruitment, the strain of competition, and the pressure of drawing boards – and how sheer and pure the pleasure was with simply a crisp pass or a two-handed dunk. While I drifted away looking to love something else, something different, it hadn’t occurred to me that basketball couldn’t have offered me anything more. Having been cut from the team, I found it rather silly and tragic that an inflated orange ball made me believe that humans can really fly, that nothing was insurmountable, that dreams can come true, that I can be whatever I wished to be, even that which I had confided only to a childhood diary: “the greatest Filipino basketball player ever”.

It was the very thing that made me believe in myself. And I didn’t believe that.

Sure enough, and fortunately too, it never left me, never left my side. It has, like the sight of home sweet home to a prodigal son, become increasingly clear that when it comes to basketball, there isn’t much else I love more, and not much else which gives me joy in doing so. Across all days and amidst all doubts, I started again to believe that. I am eternally thankful for the memory I have of an early summer morning when I first bounced a basketball on an asphalt ground. Now, as I shall from hereon keep in mind, what I share with the game is nothing less than love.