Not My Gig

A string of drunken karaoke nights has reinforced my desire to join a rock band. Don’t roll your eyes. Don’t laugh. (Besides, the dreams I am having while asleep are even more absurd: of pterodactyls swooping down from the August sky, gorging itself with flesh ripped from my back; of a mall escalator so steep that it would throw people off; of human eyes in a gumball machine at a hospital; of black leather shoes and my impossible taste for them.)

And don’t think that I am not being serious. During my spare time, whenever I am not watching reruns of Boston Legal or writing crammed copy for offshore business clients in the US (my new sort of freelance job), I catch myself wondering what it would be like –what it would really be like– to have a flourishing musical career.

Not that my life isn’t musical enough, because I think it most unfortunately is. In fact, the people around me, poor souls, are positive that I sing more than I talk; they live in the daily swathe of my squealing Don Henley/Damien Rice imitation. I’ve got a rickety Yamaha C40 classical (reviewed and regarded by everyone as “made for beginners”), a thirty-dollar digital piano (through the speakers of which I accidentally dropped a plastic pick; now every key farts), and a baritonal voice that’s still somewhat strained by a tonsillectomy from a decade ago, and which can’t be strangled for a high note unless motivated by a flying cockroach.

But I’m a greedy person. I want more, like most do. But don’t blame me; unwittingly, I have contracted one of those modern-day social ills that corrupt and disrupt an ordinary man’s criteria for satisfaction: it’s called university education – catalysed of course by Jewish preachers and their Magis perspectives.

So be more understanding if, these days, I am blinded by interminable visions of myself on some sort of stage, seated on some sort of stool with some sort of guitar in my hands, revelling in hot spotlight and wiping beads of sweat off of my forehead before muttering something about what had inspired the next number. (“So there I was, at rock bottom, all around me these breasts heaving on free-flowing draft beer night – when suddenly, an epiphany...”) And I could just as well picture myself in noiseless repose on a bathroom floor, with pen and paper and a clumsy rhyme – you know, the alleged behind-the-scenes stuff that independently made music videos have led us to believe. I do have other rather liquid scenarios in mind, all of them less probable than a forty-five-minute set at an empty Outback Cafe at Ermita’s Swagman Hotel and none more thought-through than my first ever trip to a tattoo parlour (what’s “bust your conk” in Chinese?).

But it’s hard to determine where exactly to start. There must be plenty of unheralded local bands out there waiting for either a break or an intervention. They’re printing just as much announcement fliers for auditions as for their Friday night gigs at a gritty Tomas Morato bistro. These are groups of musicians whose ambitions haven’t yet been thwarted by disappointing MySpace visits but who want more than frat boys and potheads for an audience. Not that they’re untalented, or as instrumentally ill-equipped as I am; if anything they just might be (in the same way that karaoke galvanised me) demanding more for themselves, and thus of themselves. Oh, I am quite certain, there starves today many artists in their mid to late twenties, frustrated by the mediocrity that glares at them from the surface of the sheet on which they write lyrics – about love, beauty, and other such profundities, mediated by a pretty, breathtakingly quiet chord.

Maybe we can help each other, us who want more. And maybe we’re fated to meet each other someday, in a kind of mutual discovery, so that we might lead rock band lives, sing rock band songs, and excuse promiscuity with rock band reasons. Our nights shall no longer be spent on karaoke, or on some other pathetic reverie.

But then again, maybe we are better off ordinary. At least I am.

Submergence

Summer afternoon, the two most beautiful words in the English language, and with it comes the transformation of a lazy July day into night. The sun that, only awhile ago, made the swimming pool glow in the garden of my friend Evelyn’s house is slowly sinking out of sight. It’s five o’clock. I feel like taking a swim, and, even though I don’t really know how –as an eight-year-old, I wasted three whole months on lessons–, even though I know that the cold will be sharp, and the chances of getting a tan dismal, when I soon dip my bare feet into the water, I tell myself that I am onto a luxury, a fine luxury, however masochistic.

The swimming pool is spoilt by a view of the garden that surrounds it, a lovely thicket of mysterious trees and potted plants and orchids in infinite colours, and by a sky across which, once every hour, a plane soars. (Evelyn lives fifteen minutes away from the airport.) On the left side of the pool stands a chalet, the path to which is stone-paved; because I am constantly looking for romance I imagine that this wooden dwelling is where I, if I lived here, would store all the wine, and build the bar, and drink my morning coffee and read my novels, and gather all the pool party guests who didn’t bring their swimming suits and only want to mingle with each other and smoke cigarettes. But there’s nothing in it right now except for old plywood, a dump of torn bed sheets, and a Monobloc chair. Abandoned, like a child with no talent.

Evelyn should hire someone to take care of these things, maintain them. There is one gardener, a long-haired Visayan in an invariable wardrobe of basketball jerseys and denim shorts, who does all the watering and pruning and raking, but he doesn’t do much else after work, just swings in the hammock as a brown-skinned pendulum and reads the tabloids. No one comes in to keep the chalet. No one comes in to clean the swimming pool.

So I tread the water with my head above the surface, my mouth shut tight to prevent any kind of swallowing. The pool must be one of the dirtiest –and oldest– I’ve ever been in. Dark green corners hint at algae growth. Cracks on the wall reveal something brown, earthy and inappropriate. The ancient floor tiles, once white, have been evidently jaundiced by the apathetic passing of time. Buds, windblown leaves, petals, black ants, fallen dragonflies, dead beetles that are as big as a fingernail: they float around me, gently, almost lovingly, as though to parody a Valentine’s Day advertisement of a spa. Once, I made the mistake of submerging myself completely under the water, and from that my skin developed a rash that only copious amounts of Efficascent Oil could heal. This is why I won’t do laps.

For now. Not that I will never; a devoted pool man can ease my squeamishness. And maybe Evelyn can even throw in a carpenter to refurbish the chalet.

A Correspondence with Colm

"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 Tóibín, 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!"

I wrote the above paragraph ten months ago, and the reference to a certain novelist from Enniscorthy, Ireland has, ten months later, provoked a response from a most unlikely reader. Of course I cannot not boast about our correspondence, even though I probably will never forgive myself (or be forgiven by people who matter) for hereby telling the rest of the world. Here's a bit of what is supposed to be private stuff between me and, ahem, Colm:

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Dear Migs,

On the subject of cockroaches, if I can do anything to help, let me know.

All the best,
Colm
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Dear Mr. Toibin,

You are not really Colm Toibin, are you? (Besides, it's Tóibín.) If you are then you have a lot of explaining to do. More than exterminating the cockroaches, convince me that this E-mail address is not illegitimate. Tell me that you had indeed written that little note from Spain (as was traced by the IP address). And ask me which I liked better: The Master or The Blackwater Lightship?

I could ask for more proof of your identity, and then tell you the story of my life so you could make it into a novel (Why not? Filipinos can be cardinally, creepily Catholic, too), but it's morning in Manila as I write this, and I'm still feeling the bitter effects of a whiskey-aided reunion with my cousin Johnny from L.A. It was the first time I ever tasted liqueur slapped with a Green Label; not that I care very particularly for it; I ruined my drink by pouring half a can of Coke and then, on my second glass, half a can of tonic.

Well, there you are. (A phrase from Flanner.) Colm. If you're not Colm then have the decency at least to tell me so.

Love from Manila,
Migs
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Dear Migs,

Yeah, it’s me. I am in the Pyrenees trying to finish a novel, nearly there and so fed up having to work flat out every day that I search myself online (sic) which I know is a very bad sign. I hope your hangover is better and I need to warn you that hangovers, in my experiences, seem to attract even larger cockroaches and make them feel brave. It is a cool idea that someone in Manila where I have never been is reading one (or maybe two) of my books. Which do you like better?

Colm
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Dear Colm,

I hate to disturb your novel-writing process but you are not Colm Tóibín! What are you doing reading my blog?

If you really are Colm, then let me make this known: I've read all of your books. Unfortunately, a TV producer friend of mine from New York borrowed my copy of Mothers and Sons and never returned it. (I have his Hollinghurst, but that's no replacement. Ooh!) I already love you, without having yet heard your accent. Why you never gave Mr. Henry James a shag in The Master escapes me - but maybe you're just understated like that, the power of what you write lies in between the lines, and behind what's not being said or done.

The hangover is gone, replaced by an intoxicating disbelief. Please tell me you're not Colm Tóibín.

Love,
Migs
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Dear Migs,

Here is what I did. I went to Google, and then to Blog Search, and then I keyed in my own name. Your blog had appeared just four minutes earlier and, because it had my name in passing on it, it came up so I was tempted to write to you and I gave in to the temptation (I usually, being a good Catholic, do not). I have to confess that I keyed in myself again this morning and to my horror a whole long lecture and reading I gave in Boston in March came up. So there.

Colm

P.S.: Sorry about Henry James. It just couldn’t be done.
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Ohmigod Colm,

Being a good Catholic myself, I am tempted to believe your story. (Agnosticism won't bring me anywhere.) Besides, anyone who readily admits having searched his own name on Google deserves to be trusted, not least if it's an author whom I so admire, and after whose prose I try to pattern mine, however vainly.

But I don't want to praise you too much and scare you away. Good luck with the new novel; I hope it's not as swaggeringly heterosexual as The Heather Blazing.

Love,
Migs
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Dear Migs,

I have bad news for you. While there is a small (and unresolved) lesbian scene in this book, it is even more swaggering.

Colm