Wednesday, December 05, 2007 Yap: Extra-Trillanes life By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
IN school, we have time not only for useful knowledge, but we also talk about labyrinths, the complex nature of time and the minotaur we call the postmodern man, and each time I do that, I fear some student will walk out and head to a nearby hotel and declare a coup.
I take the stride before anyone else could, like Trillanes. From school, after dishing out literary gobbets to a perplexed class, I walk to another workplace. I don’t go anywhere close to the likes of Manila Pen. I don’t have Ces Drilon or Pinky Webb. No, I don’t bother people unguarded while they haven’t done their makeup or fixed their do.
Instead, along the way, I see the omnipresent Nick, the snappy barangay tanod, who I call Nick Joaquin for reasons that he shares the late national artist’s haircut and saunters like a legitimate beerman. And each time I call on him, “Nick Joaquin!” he’d give me the look and brandish his night stick.
Don’t get me wrong. We’re friends, but the name I call him makes him doubt that. He thinks it’s a name of a legendary hoodlum from some obscure past. Nick would make it clear enough and point at the big yellow letters on his chest: Police. “Give me five!” I’d say. He’d comply, and that gives my passage some closure.
Who can possibly miss Joe, the neighborhood’s all-around Man Friday slash handyman who has the built of a corrugated tin sheet (or, in haute couture speak, you’d mistake him as catwalker at large) matched with a face flanked with Yoda-like spires. I call him Joe de V.; he doesn’t roll pork barrel, but he rolls barrels and trash bins.
Once, he said no to an errand requiring him to climb all the way up to a flat’s water tank. I told him he was safe. Should he fall, he’d just sway midair gracefully with the lightness of a leaf. He laughed, and I thought it took him all his lungs to heave such laughter. “What do you think of Trillanes?” I threw him the question once. “Ambot lang uroy!” That’s my Joe de V.
I have pretensions to being a social scientist, and I turn to a gossip-monger named Mila, perpetually pregnant all these years. In another dimension, she could be Mila Yovovich. Only that this Mila was conceived by an artisan with a heavy Picasso influence. Still, I call her Mila Yovovich, and she’d turn solemn each time I call her that.
She probably thinks it’s a biblical name. I ask her what her most hated neighbor thinks of Trillanes. “Wa koy labot niya,” she says, her face turning into stone. “Do you have a crush on Trillanes?” I ask her. “Not my type,” she says. “What is your type?” I ask. “Oh, my type? Somebody like you!” Mila, by the way, is married to a retired boxer. As of press time, she has 12 kids with him.
In between these encounters, I wait for Dee’s text message. I wrote of Dee many times in ghost terms in my columns, and some cosmic design leaves me writing her name now. You know what I mean.
“Some funny commentary on Trillanes’ failed coup,” she suggests. It has been a while since I threw in some cents in these pages. I consider myself too inadequate for the job, but I’ll try. Some text joke talks about the lessons learned from Trillanes’ “failed coup.” Two of those: 1) Kulot pala si Ces Drilon pag di nag blower; and 2) Pag-naposasan ang media nakalimutan nila ang pag-aaklas, sarili muna nila ang binabalita.
What do I think of the Manila Pen situation? A situation. And Mila Yovovich doesn’t give a hoot.
