REYNARD Marturillas, you are a lucky man.
A feat as smelly as supposedly hiding in a fully loaded garbage truck to slip out of jail deserves page 3 treatment in Superbalita. Buy your copy early because by 8 a.m.
Superbalita is sold out. Superbalita readers don't want to miss their daily dose of loving from Junquera and the tsismis in Laysho.
If the guards' theory about how you escaped is proven, then we at Superbalita would appreciate it very much if you gave us a picture of you already cleaned up. You don't really look like the guy in our sketch of a man hiding in the garbage truck, do you?
The guards at the Cebu City jail say you could have slipped out of your cell while they were busy attending to some concerns except supervising garbage collection. We don't know how garbage collection is done at the jail compound but we're 60 percent sure the next time the garbage team comes, they will be searched, scrutinized and every bit of their garbage inspected for strange items such as an escapee-wannabe.
You could have slipped out by some other means but the guards, stumped on how to explain your disappearance under their noses, came up with a plausible plot about you disguising yourself as garbage and being lifted into the truck.
Lucky you, it wasn't a garbage compactor truck that the collectors used that day otherwise, to use the language of Superbalita, pigsat unta ka. Like a pancake would have been the simile of your state.
Cebu City has been using garbage compactor trucks to reduce the size and volume of trash and increase the payload of the vehicles. These trucks compress the material loaded into them, flattening garbage with hydraulically-powered sliding plates. This is the "pancake" type of compactor. The other is the baling press, where trash turns into a big cube.
Marturillas, you're a lucky man indeed. You slipped out of jail, have eluded jail time at the National Bilibid Prison, and you didn't turn into a pancake or a cube. You have earned the favor of the drunken gods.
What a comedy of errors it would have been, you escaping jail to avoid serving 12-15 years in Muntinlupa for possession of illegal drugs but only to be pressed to your death in the vehicle that you thought could lead you to freedom. Now that would be banner material in Superbalita and news editor Roger Vallena would be scratching his head over how to phrase the headline.
We're stretching our imagination on how you escaped. It was less "Prison Break"-ish actually, if we go by the accounts of the Cebu City jail guards.
They say they didn't find you during the afternoon headcount, which came a few minutes after the garbage collection team had left the compound. They say you might have disguised yourself as an auto mechanic who had to fix one of the vehicles in the jail compound and hitched a ride in the garbage truck on its way out. They say an inmate had last seen you hanging around the garbage area 15 minutes before the garbage truck arrived. This was how they arrived at the conclusion of your escape.
Don't call the guards sloppy just because you got away. For all we know, the gods have sobered up and would have you brought back to jail in a garbage compactor truck. What would it be for you, pancake or cube?