Me and Iago and Manila after daylight

 

PHOTO COURTESY OF ORLEE NINON

PART I

I am standing under a street post that says Recto and Rizal Avenue. A few minutes ago I was in a jeepney bound to nowhere. I paid my fare for which I really don't know the exact price. I just gave the driver a ten peso coin and he gave me a couple of coins for change. I really didn't know where I was going. It was a Friday night and I was bored out of my wits. I have been in the Philippines for a couple of weeks now and I am already thinking of going back. Back to where? Somewhere. I'm not really sure. 
 

I light up my cigarette and chewed on the menthol candy that just I bought from the guy selling smokes and candies under the street sign. I started walking. It was 9 pm. The place was just waking up. I could feel it under my skin. My senses were on an overload. I could smell the odor of days old urine fermenting on walls with chapped paint and old campaign posters and signages. I am semi blinded by the neon lights from the hotels, strip joints, beer gardens and old movie houses that are mushroomed all over the place. Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. More red. They dance like they were supposed to dance, like in a trance. The noise. The hustle and bustle of jeepneys, buses, taxis, cars, people and tacky electronic music are all rolled into one cacophony of blissful sound that is Avenida and Recto. A blind man would have an orgasm in minutes just listening to this. The whole place is in a coordinated chaos. Everywhere you look there is trash. They are all quietly placed where they're supposed to be, which is everywhere. Plastic bags are floating all over the place, dancing in mid air as the wind, gravity and the passing jeepneys keep them in a rapture like suspension while they try to outdo each other as the most beautiful thing in the world. The scum placidly gathering themselves in the gutters that they look like kryptonite or some sort of vitriol that denounces everything that this place hold dear. Sin City. Manila. Urbania. If Manila was Sodom and Gomorrah, Avenida and Recto would have been her major life veins.

Yes, the place is slowly rising from its slumber. Quietly, I might add. There is a sense of quietude in all this chaos that only a child of the night, a sinner like me could understand. Peacefully, Manila is waking up and I'm here to witness it in its very heart. All the filth, the vileness and all the damnation of the capital coalesce and beats at this very junction.

I am not supposed to be here. Yet I am. 
 

How long has it been? I was in college. That was more than a decade ago. I frequented this place to look for answers. Back then, there were no chat rooms or online forums or online social networking. If you're gay and you're nineteen in the late nineties you look for it yourself. You scour for answers in parks, in the dark corners of the moldy cinemas and in the men's room of shady establishments. It's a jungle of parks, cinemas and men's rooms and you adapt to the environment. Strangers become your confidantes, your best friends, your confessors, your therapist, your thirty-minute lovers. You develop an excellent memory. You memorize faces and telephone numbers. Your peripheral vision heightens. You can distinguish that odd, lingering stare from a few meters in the darkness. Ah, the darkness. It becomes your ally, your brother, your friend, your lover, your father, your mother. You become its child. Back then, even if it wasn't that long ago, it was not easy to get answers when one is asking. You only find the answers in the dark. I did. But even in darkness, where I have become accustomed to move and breathe, it's still not easy to get the answers. 
 

The young ones today are lucky. These days, you just Google the shit. That or you just join a social network. You click, you browse, you copy-paste, you bookmark, you add them, you text them, you meet up, you sleep together, you fall in love, you break up, you move on and you do it all over again with the same fervor and purpose like it was your first online encounter. Some do it in a span of one week. Encounters have become so easy, so instant that having an online persona is second skin. The tenacity of the online soul, its resoluteness and its desire for an encounter, a moment with another person online can probably be likened to the tenacity and resoluteness of the human soul. Being gay in the late nineties I barely knew how to email or IM. Today, most encounters, if not all are all online. Parks, old and dingy cinemas, the men's room are multiplied to the thousands and easily accessible with one's cursor and browser. When one asks a question and is given plethora of answers in an instant, one loses consciousness of the question. Technology has made the questioning so easy that it has lost its sacredness for me. It is the question that really matters in the end, not the answers. I have done my share online. I liked it but it got old too quickly. It no longer holds any mystery for me. 

 

Perhaps that is the reason why I am walking along these streets. Perhaps there was a purpose in being here after all. Perhaps it wasn't by accident. As I walk along Recto Avenue, I try to ask myself the reasons why I am here. To get laid? Perhaps. To be a voyeur as I often ended up being years before? Perhaps. To pass time? Perhaps. I was bored. Or perhaps I was here because I just needed to be here. Perhaps I just miss the place, the walking, the strangers and the shadows. Perhaps I needed to revisit, to be nostalgic. Perhaps I needed to get reacquainted with Manila after dark. Perhaps. Questions. Tonight is not about answers. Tonight is about me, my mind in total conjunction with my limbs and my senses and the pavement and the shadows and the darkness. Tonight is about me and Urbania. And in the middle of this chaos, I hear her calling my name. I look around and see a familiar face. She beckons by the corner under a flickering lamppost. She is happy to see me again. 

TO BE CONTINUED...