I invent a pseudonym for this phase, “Mona Lisa P Cajucom”, whose biography states that she is a “premyadong manunulat at mandudula, sa loob at labas ng bansa. Kamakailan lang, ginawaran si Mona Lisa ng Hansadutta Shankar Award For Outstanding Young Playwrights 2005, para sa kanyang eksperimental na dulang 14.617˙N By 121.0500˙E, na itinanghal noong 2004 sa dating gusali ng COD sa Cubao, na ngayo’y kinatatayuan na ng Puregold Express” and I collect her works, concise life sketches of people living around the same busy Cubao-area street (with drawings of houses and housecats, too, the third-person narrator to be unveiled in one of the last pieces being no one else but one of the neighbourhood cats), and plan to make a book out of it, supposedly released posthumously by the Cajucom Estate with me as editor, called various small faces of smiling grandchildren (Uhaw Na Uhaw, Pagud Na Pagod).
For the book’s introduction, I plan to write about Mona Lisa’s “verve for life”, the book “an account of her Loves, which were Home, and Family, and Cubao”. “I’d like to think that this book is my love letter to that Place, to that Mother/Lover/Sister/Friend who had given me so much, so much”, Cajucom would speak of Cubao in a rare interview, and it is a sentiment tinged with a bittersweet flavour because it is actually Cubao that would later kill her in a street corner mugging gone wrong, because (and it is a fact), as one Atenean girl queried FO (while speaking of UP Diliman, where FO was teaching at the time): “don’t people die there?”.
~
My mother dreams of Uncle Wowie as a small child of (roughly) eleven years. He sits on the side of her bed, running his hand down her hair. They talk about the house, about the maintenance, about the bills. After a while, Uncle Wowie moves to the head of the bed and cups my mother’s (his older (eldest) sister’s) face in his hands, calls her “Lah” (his shorthand for “Delilah”, my mother’s name), and says something important that my mother unfortunately forgets when she wakes up.
I dream about Uncle Wowie as a twenty-five year old. I open the door to the Boy’s Room and he’s there in his collared shirt and Levi’s and cowboy boots, listening to “Backdoor Man” (a Morrison favourite with a chorus he liked to quote), drinking and smoking. His presence is a surprise, because in the dream I know he’s already dead for quite a few years, and I tell him that. He answers “yes, but” and then he reminds me of something I promised to do for him, something I’ve delayed for some years, and the guilt and the grief wakes me up and after a few seconds I notice that I’d been crying in my sleep.
~
I have notes in my computer about a book I’ve been doing research on called a cancer. It’s about a young man diagnosed with colon cancer, and about how his older brother copes with the situation. I plan on telling the story in third-person, through fragments of paragraphs, complete enough to make some semblance of sense, yet incomplete enough to not make any, supposedly to imitate the mental haze of the physical pain of cancer and chemotherapy (also, the mental haze of the treatment to alleviate the physical pain of cancer and chemotherapy).
a cancer is actually two books, the first (first chronologically) book being the one with the fragmented paragraphs revolving around the younger brother’s cancer, mostly around the difficulties of living with it, of coping. The second book, another cancer, is a collection of annotations on a cancer, this time in clear lucid basic prose revolving around the older brother’s ruminations about what his younger brother had been rambling about earlier, after finding out that (and this is where the story twists!) he, the older brother, actually has brain cancer.
A lot of the material written about cancer speaks of it as an invasion of the natural systems and functions of the body, and I convince myself that if I have to write about cancer, I have to echo “cancer” metaphorically as well as formally, and I feel annotating the main text body with footnotes that would figuratively branch the story content out from its initial premise, from what is expected of it and what it is naturally meant to do and say, would be smart and apt and genuine imitation of how cancer affects the body. If I do it like that, I would actually be quite literally giving a cancer another cancer.
~
A year after Uncle Wowie dies of cancer, I graduate from high school. There are a couple of photographs that my older brother took of me with my batchmates in alphabetical order, wet with sweaty anticipation in the seats of the theatre. In the photographs, my hair is buzzcut, cheeks pimpled and thinner, complexion Injun red, and face looking very much like Uncle Wowie’s.
A few months later I tell my older brother about this and he tells me “it’s not such a bad thing, to look like Wowie”.
~
Which is, to say, exactly like cowboy preacher Jesse Custer from the award-winning Garth Ennis - Steve Dillon Nineties comic book horror western serial Preacher, plump lips and strong nose bridge and tired sad eyes.
Near the end pages of a personal favourite issue of Preacher, “When The Story Began” (Preacher no. 9, DC Comics/Vertigo, 1995), Jesse Custer is five years old and his parents wake him up in the middle of the night “an’ told me we were leavin’.” Jesse begins.
(Jesse’s dad, an ex-Marine, walks to his bed and sits by his side)
“‘I need you to be brave for me, son. An’ I need you to know some things, in case we... we don’t get a chance to talk about ‘em later.
(they’ve been held captive for about two years by Jesse’s mother’s sadistic Texas Chainsaw Massacre-type religious zealot family, and are now planning on escaping)
‘I love you, Jesse. You’re my own son an’ I’m proud of you, an’ you brought your mom an’ me more happiness than I ever knew there was. You be good to her, an’ look after her.
‘An’ you be a good guy, Jesse. You gotta be like John Wayne: you don’t take no shit off fools, an’ you judge a person by what’s in ‘em, not how they look.
(and Jesse’s father brings his son close to his chest, as his mother, backlit, looks on from the doorway)
‘An’ you do the right thing. You gotta be one of the good guys, son: ‘cause there’s way too many of the bad.’
“An’ they caught us before we got two miles,” continues Jesse, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, wearing his father’s face, concluding the story: “an’ they shot my daddy in the head.”
~
Early Nineties, in Pasay City, my father starts regularly complaining about inexplicably painful headaches. He finally decides to get a check-up and the doctors find a tumour on the back of his head, roughly the size of a one peso coin, circa Late Eighties-Early Nineties (which had a few centimetres shy of a whole inch for a diameter). He gets the surgery but it’s too expensive for us so we do a benefit concert for him which my mother cheesily dubs “Against All Odds”, with acts like the Breed and Sampaguita and Anak Bayan and Binky Lampano and Father & Son (!) performing back to back. My father started his career in radio when he was seventeen, so by that time he had already accumulated a lot of Friends In The Industry, so people were more than glad to help in any way they could. But even then, the money collected from the benefit concert was only just barely half of what the hospital bill was, but then a few favours were eventually pulled (and promised) and the hospital let my dad go home, the hospital he’d have to regularly come back to to get his chemotherapy.
~
Late 2006, with my Current Girlfriend in tow, I finally visit my father in Novaliches. The last time I had seen him (not counting the documentary that they did about him in 2005) was December 2002, when NU107 gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award of sorts (“Hall Of Fame” is what NU likes to call it). Four years later in Novaliches he is thinner and tired and a lot mellower than before. We sit around a table in front of the TV set and I introduce him to my Current Girlfriend, to whom he is gracious and charming and self-effacing (as always). We talk about music and books and how people are nowadays, and after a while I ask him about his weight loss and he tells us that he has diabetes.
~
I tell this to my older brother the day after the visit and he tells me: “Lagot ka pala, ano? On Mom’s side we have cancer, and on Dad’s side you have diabetes and cancer. You’re a risk for both diseases!”
