Friday, July 06, 2007 Yap: Eww, dating in Fuente? By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
WE have a scattering of nostalgic sectors whipping up fashionable dreams about “reviving” Colon Street’s former glory. A groping reporter years ago, I was whisked off by fate to a press conference where a bunch of aunts with elaborate hair-dos sat on the presidential table explaining their grand plan.
The details I can’t recall, but they left me the impression they’d facelift the oldest street into some fancy brick road. The criminal daydreamer that I was, it swung me back to The Beatles and Nick Joaquin’s “May Day Eve”: “Ala doce han dadooo!” Not the aunthood’s fault, of course.
There were not a few shots into the moon after that. Year after year, and what remains is the oldest street with the oldest problems. With the bigger malls strewn hereabouts and rising to the challenge of a burgeoning metro, Colon peels off from the idea of chic, fashionable, and convenient. Its singular attraction is synonymous with contraband. “Yuuck,” a student once joked, “where is that?” I thought I was in Mars.
Oh, but the Plaza Independencia, too. Last year, my good friend Baloy dragged the boys into going to the good ‘ol plaza.
Something about Manhattan made him desperate for chorizo and Plaza Independencia. And, like the way your friends from the quarters does it in their day-off outing, gave the camera their best pose beside the rusting mortar. At the background, of course, we beheld shy lovers playing cat in the vines. “Eww,” said the preppy colegiala next door. “You’re so lu-od jud!” The boys joined her in laughing about the snapshots.
Then right on the navel of Osmena Blvd. is Fuente Osmena. Oh, how lovers love the adventure. Clutching each other’s hands, they swirl into the euphoric rhapsody of weaving through cars crisscrossing like extraterrestrial traffic.
It’s so devastatingly romantic you just have to breathe in entire clouds of carbon monoxide. You kiss your lover’s cheek and discover the taste of Cebu in powder form. “Eww,” says one student, “you did that, sir?” Darling, this is Creative Writing.
But we go there, of course. Say, for instance, when the senators couldn’t find it in themselves to open the last envelope some years ago. The crowd, technically called civil society, bloated like a grotesque Tranformer and scared the hell out of politicians with humongous bellies and severe arthritis.
When the cheering fell into sober praying, I managed to hold the hand of a pretty girl in a Gabriela shirt. “I strongly believe in feminism,” I told her. She looked at me for a second and bowed her head, “…deliver us from every evil…”
That was the closest I could ever get to having a date in Fuente Osmeña.
Thoroughly a jilted clown, looks like the only way for me to enjoy the oval is a free concert with Parokya or, if lucky, a Wolfgang reincarnate. Schedule U2, and I’ll be dying for a desperate land swap with its rightful owner. The park is mine, that’ll be my universal declaration.
But “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans…” once sang John Lennon. Too many plans, but the City never really cared much to manicure the park—a symbol of power, history and pride—with some real class.
Because that’s what it is now when politics hoisted it into the limelight: a symbol. It throws you back to a history that gives our leaders a kind of validation and a sense of stronghold. To surrender is to detonate one’s pride into pieces. That’s too elementary to comprehend.
Meanwhile, there are a few guitar tricks I’m learning to do. Someday, I’ll go live in Fuente with Bono.
