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Sunday, May 23, 2004
Obenieta: Driving us crazy
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
Head flung back. Jaw slack with the shape of a scream from what seemed a voiceless abyss of a bad dream. But the taxi driver, catnapping inside his cab parked in front of a convenience store uptown, could have thanked me if the thump of my knucklebone on the glass window nudged him awake in the nick of time before nightmare gripped him helpless.
We have miles to go before we sleep. Or so I could have summoned the ghost words of a dead poet when the coffee-deficient cabby asked me: “Asa ta, boss?” Now, that’s one inquiry enough to sober up a gin-woozy good-timer still savoring the delinquent air in the ungodly hours past midnight.
Where are we going? Telling him the way home, I must have also cued him to the uphill slopes paved by that plain yet open-ended question. Or into the blind curve of consciousness more far-out and precarious than our certainties. What if the Sphinx suddenly loomed ahead and stumped both the cabby and me with this riddle whose answer would be right only if it resounded from the depths of our longing: Where the hell is our nation going?
“Sakit gyud ang ulo sa presidente,” chattered the cabby in the light of the emergency signals flashed from the front page and the primetime broadcast. While the malcontents of the May 10 polls have been seething with allegations of election fraud, acrid blows the air with smoke of rumors—all that sound and fury can only signify an anarchist’s anthem. It’s all part of a plot to destabilize the government, stressed the spooked Malacañang spokesman as he explained why a phalanx of riot police and heavily armed commandos are surrounding the presidential palace.
Whoever gets declared as president is in for a bumpy ride, believed the cabby who can give any radio commentator a run, if not a rain, for his spit.
He sputtered on, as if the political discord and its breakneck velocity were not enough for him to grip the steering wheel tighter, his throat almost choked when he segued into the impending increase of transportation fees.
“Sus, boss, dili lang kamong pasahero mao’y alaut simbako duna’y umento sa plete,” he averred, “lisud pud ming mga taxi drivers.” Chances are, as borne out of his experience as a cabby for almost 30 years now, the taxi operators would also raise the rental fee for the cabs. Good, he groaned, if we would have passengers in droves. But what if they, wary of a P40 flog-down rate, would avoid him like the plague? “Posible gyud nga ang mga pasahero mag-antos na lang gyud og huwat sa jeep,” he sighed. And are we not dreaming if we deem there would be no upsurge of blood pressure consequent to the mounting cost of basic commodities after the raise-the-roof rate of oil and transportation?
When the going gets tough, reckoned the cabby, it’s an open season as well for cutthroats to play it rough. Dire straits, it goes both ways. Isn’t the high cost of living just as dizzying as the rate of dying?
There would be more blood in the streets, I told the cabby.
There would be more news of taxi drivers being shot or knifed dead, he added.
Home at last, I reeled when I got off his cab. What I heard from him was more than enough to know how it would feel to get stabbed.
(May 23, 2004 issue)
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