Tuesday, October 30, 2007 Niñal: Jailhouse rock By Lorenzo P. Niñal Insoymada
LAST Wednesday, my band played at the Bagong Buhay Rehabilitation Center. If it were some town celebrating its fiesta, I wouldn’t have agreed to go, because when you’re in a band for years already, you grow tired of playing before the same type of crowd over and over and again, and the crowd grows tired of you too.
And you’ve had enough of barangay officials asking you to play Dancing Queen.
But it’s the Cebu City Jail. It’s not every day that a band gets the rare opportunity to play in a place known to house Cebu’s toughest inmates. It’s the most wretched of all our jails here. I know this from years of covering the police beat. You want proof? Read the news. At the city jail, you can’t train inmates to do the Thriller. They make it to the bloody front pages by simply being city jail inmates. They are “zombies” enough to do the job.
The jail facility sits atop a hill in Barangay Kalunasan. It is adjacent to the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, the “better off” jail that recently discovered algorithm march as the most effective way to reform offenders. I heard they are building a pool there for synchronized swimming.
Watching the imposing buildings together, you can actually hear the two groups of inmates hurl verbal insults at each other. “We’re on Youtube, you undisciplined brutes!” one shouts. “Sissies!” the other shouts back, and throws shit wrapped in plastic bags across the fence.
Because BBRC is a wretched place to be, it never fails to evoke in me romantic images of human suffering, images poetic enough to merit writing about, and dangerous enough to make me agree to go there and rock out.
But rocking out at the city jail was farthest from the minds of my band mates whose exposure to reality in jail didn’t go beyond the Prison Break series and Robin Padilla flicks. It’s a jailhouse, for God’s sake. People kill each other there, like in the movies. And like in the movies, once you’re inside a jail, you’ll never get out without being raped by an inmate as mean looking as T-Bag, or Max Alvarado. You’ve got tight ass? Watch out, baby.
So my band mates exchanged worried text messages about the band’s safety.
Was it worth all the risk? Was it going to be our best career move? Will it promote the use of the Cebuano language in rock music? The jail officials’ vague assurances weren’t of any help: “Whatever happens, you will make it out alive.”
Finally, we agreed that should a riot break out in the middle of the concert, we would go down in history as the band that successfully proved to the world that Bisrock was truly the work of the devil and its artists should be burned at the stake. And so we rocked out.
Of course, we overestimated ourselves. We realized that a rock band faces a more serious risk of getting hit by lightning while playing in Ermita than of being attacked by a group of toughies in jail. You wish!
As we were leaving the place, I took a last look at the hundreds of inmates now drenched after an hour of head banging in the rain, now crowding the narrow corridors on their way back to their cells, their emaciated frames sticking out against the backdrop of the freshly-painted walls. And we, with our reckless rock n roll lifestyles, felt guilty.
