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  I was twelve when I noticed hair growing all over me: first above the lips, then below the navel, a dark trail ending on the base of my dick. Then hair began to grow on my armpits, later on my thighs, and then on my legs. Inside me was this sweet intense ache to fit myself—all of myself—into a hole. At that time, I heard the boys in Practical Arts talking about playing with yourself. I saw an advertisement for jockeys with the gorgeous Roel Vergel De Dios as the model. I clipped the ad showing the mestizo features of his face, his well-sculpted body, and the white jockeys trying to hold his dick in. The copy said: “A hard man is good to find.”

  One afternoon, when nobody was around, in my mind Roel and I were cavorting in the sand, the sea a blue canvas behid us, I pulled down my jockeys and began touching my dick with my fingers, then my fingers gripping its length, up and down and up again, faster and faster, and I began to feel my flesh shuddering, the room swirling with waves of heat, and from the tip spurted a viscous white liquid, swiftly arcing into the air, then landing on the wooden floor. Splat! On the altar stood a portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ, looking down at me with eyes full of sorrow. I felt suddenly guilty. (Will hair grow on my palms? Will I become hard of hearing? Will I go blind?) These were supposed to be the tell-tale signs that showed on boys who played with themselves.

  The other boys played with themselves with Trixia Gomez in mind, and still, they would go deaf and blind, and would have hairy palms as well. What about me, who was transported by the hardness of another man’s chest and another man’s dick? That night, I recited the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the rosary. I even cried myself to sleep, promising I would never again defile my body, “the temple of the Holy Spirit,” as Miss Baby Jane Zamora in Catechism class would put it.

  But the next evening, I cavorted with Roel again.

  I was thirteen when Uncle Conrado brought me, along with three other male cousins, for the free circumcision at the V. Luna Military Hospital. My classmates will stop teasing me after this, I thought, as the Volkswagen entered the driveway of the hospital. No longer would this cheese-like thing ring the area under the head of my dick. When my turn came, I stripped and spread my legs apart in both excitement and fear. The young interns began working. The doctors talked of how Didith Romero would caress her body when she sang Araw-araw, Gabi-gabi (Every day, Every night) while the nurses talked of Lloyd Samartino’s astonishing lips. I heard the sound of scissors slicing the air, then splitting my foreskin. The pain was brief but excruciating. But a young, good-looking intern held my hands, and I felt comfort and warmth from his touch. Later, warm liquid trailed down my pelvis and thighs. When it was all over, my cock looked like a mummy. (Mummy dearest …) I saw a bucketful of blood on the plastic sheet, ready to be scooped. I went home, borrowed my mother’s old loose skirt, then walked about the house like a crab. I was boiled alive every time one of the interns (not the cute one, too bad) came to clean our dicks and change the bandages right in my uncle’s house, for I knew my female cousins were also right there, peering from the small holes they had bored on the wooden walls—why, I could even feel their very eyes on my mangled cock, the bitches!

  I was fourteen when I felt I was changing. No, not only the hair growing all over my body and the voice breaking again and again in the most embarrassing moments. I was trapped in my strange, dark moods. Even in the midst of family and friends, I would sometimes stop, gripped by a sadness so sudden yet so strong. I would still remember Luis, his face seared in my memory. At night I would sometimes get my extra pillow and hug it tightly, wishing it were him whom I missed. Sometimes, I would just walk and walk, looking for a crack on the wall, wishing I could hide there forever.

  Outside it was hostile. The President had just proclaimed himself concurrently Prime Minister, following the footsteps of his idol, the Fuëhrer. The First Lady fell on her knees at the Notre Dame in Paris, praying with her diamond rosary. And the Church was telling me that all my pleasures were forbidden. In his mosquito-infested confessional box at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, speaking in his odd English with a heavy Spanish accent, Fr. Artemio Garcia Marquez de Espadoña intoned his warning of brimstone and hellfire if I would continue reading pornography, thinking pornography, and doing pornography to myself. Would he curse me in three languages if I told him there was nothing else in the world I wanted except Roel Vergel De Dios?

  My father in Saudi Arabia wrote interminable letters and sent me many voice tapes. He said it was so hot in Riyadh that his nose would oftentimes bleed when the temperature shot past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That he would just stay there for two years and come home immediately, to start a small grocery of his own. That he was surrounded by so many Filipinos—engineers and nurses and hairdressers and janitors—the babble of Tagalog could be heard competing with the call of the muezzin. He always reminded me to shape up for the Business Management course I would take up in college. My mother wanted me to fold my blanket and fix my bed sheet every morning and never leave my dirty clothes lying around, like the flaked-off skin of a molting snake. Together, they both told me to avoid parties, because 1) I would learn to smoke dope there, and the government mantra of the season was No Hope in Dope; 2) my friends would tell me to have sex with my girlfriend (my girlfriend?), and what if I make her pregnant?; and 3) later, on the way home, I might meet an accident (or be stabbed, or held up, times are truly dangerous).

  My Literature teacher, Miss Kring Kring Caticlan, wanted me to parrot her exact words, flunking me in tests, or giving me her famous dagger look, when I disregarded the “moral lessons” she always pinned on every poem and story we discussed, like butterflies pinned to the wall. Once, she asked us to report on a poem by a contemporary Filipino writer. So I reported on “Erotique,” a poem by Federico Licsi Espino. Listen:

  Lust is rearing up and neighing and kicks

  at the soul.

  Freedom, freedom is all that it wants.

  It rises, it rises on its hind legs when you

  rein it in.

  O how difficult to master it even with

  a whiplash in hand.

  I said in my report that the poem was about unbridled lust, which the persona compared to a horse (apt metaphor, that), but Miss Caticlan cut me short. My teacher—who had an M.A. in Family Life and Child Development from the University of Gumamugam—insisted that the poem is simply about freedom, as shown by two things: by the word “freedom” being mentioned in the poem and the horse that is used in battles.

  I was fourteen when I decided to plug the crack on the wall: I fell in love with a beautiful girl named Melissa. I did not know how it happened, just the days clicking into place, her large, limpid eyes haunting me in my dreams. The boys in my fantasy world seemed to have vanished. Now there was a woman who would be my anchor, so I would never again wander. I followed her around on campus and inserted perfumed love letters between the pages of her Biology textbook written by Dr. Dolores Hernandez. I took a bath twice a day and brushed my teeth five times a day and put on my father’s Jovan on the back of my ears, as Teen Magazine said I should do. I spent endless hours before the oval mirror in my parents’ room, practicing my smile, making sure I could flash that dazzling smile in the best angle imaginable the moment she passed by.

  Life was air and water, earth and fire.

  One day, after our Biology class, I went to her and asked her if we could talk. “Yes, on my way home,” she said, without smiling. Her lips were like a stiff line. I knew then that the whole class knew we would walk home together. I heard one of the boys say, “Not really a faggot, I told you so,” while the girls giggled, because they all read the letters that I had given to her.

  In the insane heat of March I walked Melissa to her jeepney stop and I told her I loved her. Just like that. “I don’t know why. You are beautiful and you are kind,” I said, looking down at the dusty ground.

  She was quiet for a while. Then she said: “You are very nice. You are good-looking and you’re very bright.�
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  And then I knew it would come, the sudden blast on the face, the stormy weather in the heart that began with three letters. “But can we be just friends?”

  Mayday, Mayday, I wanted to say, but Melissa had already patted my arm and taken a jeepney bound for Murphy.

  The street had become a desert, and the sun seared me so. I went home in a daze. I saw my whole life crumble before me. At home, Ludy was cooking my favorite chicken tinola, the fragrance of ginger and pepper leaves floating in the air. My mother was still in school. I went to my room, locked the door, and drew the curtains over the window. Then I rested my tired body on the bed. I tried to sleep. But a tear seeped from my left eye, slipped down my cheek, then lodged itself in my ear. Soon, there was a torrent of tears, and in the violence of falling waters, I wished I would just sleep now and forever and never wake up.

  But of course, I did wake up, after two hours, my stomach growling with hunger, and then had a lovely dinner of hot chicken tinola, the pepper leaves and the ginger and the aroma of it all! In front of me hung the tapestry of The Last Supper, the colors deeper and darker than before. Jesus Christ surrounded by his disciples: one like a rock, the other a traitor signaled by the crowing of a cock. I stood up, walked past the piano covered with a crocheted white top, past the photograph of my then-young father posing in front of his military dormitory during a winter in Colorado, his knee-high boots buried in the snow.

  Then I took a long walk outside. No wind whistled among the leaves. And when I looked up there were no stars, just shards of glass scarring the sky …

  For days on end, I tried to forget her. I faced the daily rigors of life as normally as possible. Graduation time came, and I was awarded First Honors again. My mother was filled with such joy that she bought me a pair of blue Dockers. My father sent me another watch, a Seiko. Melissa came and congratulated me. I just looked at her vacantly. I knew I would always be sad. I was again missing Luis. Then, during one long night of wakefulness, I stood up from my bed, walked over to the half-opened window, and rested my forehead on the pane.

  Outside, there was nothing, only a field of darkness and wind that was cold and almost wet. Then it came to me, dimly at first, then later, in gathering whorls of light until it was fierce with clarity: the slippery image of a Navy frogman in the darkness of the lake, begging the nymph to let go of Felix.

  She did let go, in the end.

  But for a long time after that, I thought that the skin of the world was broken and gray all over, like the body of Felix, who had died when we were all lost, and fourteen.

  Yes, the Miss Universe!

  MARGARITA MON AMOR was chosen Miss Philippines in 1973. Many people thought the judges should have chosen somebody fairer, with a more aquiline nose, to represent the country in the Miss Universe contest held in Athens. They said Margarita won only because she graduated cum laude from an exclusive girls’ school and had a grandfather who was a Justice in the Supreme Court.

  But Margarita—with her wide forehead, her big and intelligent eyes, her full, sensuous lips—won in Athens. Even before the coronation night, the Greek press was already gushing about the “honey-skinned beauty from the Philippines who walked regally like a queen.” “Like Helen,” another paper gushed, “who could launch a thousand wars, er, ships.” And so on coronation night itself, Margarita Mon Amor went to the Parthenon in a simple silk gown the color of mother-of-pearl shell, her blue-black hair in a bun. She played a haunting kundiman on the bamboo nose flute before the stunned audience, and went through the Q & A.

  Bob Barker: “Miss Philippines, what is the square root of 11,250 divided by 40 and then multiplied by 99?

  Margarita Mon Amor: “How much time do I have?”

  And now she was here, walking on the stage of the Folk Arts Theater, while the wind from the sea fanned the audience crowded in the First Lady’s latest project. Manila being Manila—this mad, maternal city of our myths and memories—everybody was jumping at the prospect of the city hosting Miss Universe that year. The machos were especially ecstatic, as day by day the tabloids splashed photos of their favorite candidates in their skimpiest bathing suits, getting their lovely tan from the Philippine sun.

  So on this night of nights, the candidates flounced onstage, speaking in various tongues, a Babel of greetings that were beamed worldwide. Miss Brazil came in a dress whose colors could make the parakeets in her country blush. Miss United States of America came from Texas and wore the tightest cowgirl jeans Manila had ever seen. Miss Philippines was Guadalajara de Abanico, a mestiza who had the habit of turning her finely-chiseled nose up at every social function and who, Manila’s reporters’ complained, always arrived late. “I’m sure there’s a friar somewhere in the family line,” snapped Istariray X., mother hen of Manila’s society columnists, in her bitchy column called W.O.W. (“Woman of the World”).

  The favorites of the Manila press included Miss Wales, Helen Morgan, because she had big breasts; Miss Spain, Amparo Muñoz, the 20-year-old señorita from Barcelona who looked like the Blessed Virgin Mary; and Miss Finland, Johanna Raunio, because she looked like the girl in the milk commercial. The country exploded with joy when the three were called as finalists, along with Miss Aruba, Maureen Ava Viera, whom the Manila press called “Black Beauty” even if she were brown, and the señorita from Colombia, Ella Cecilia Escandon, who had the face of an angel.

  The judges, please:

  Gloria Diaz who won the Miss Universe in 1969, just when the Americans were landing on the moon. Like Margarita Mon Amor, she was not your typical Filipina beauty queen, for she was short, sassy, and smart. After she won, she was asked if she had a message for the three American astronauts. She said: “The United States has conquered the moon. But the Philippines has conquered the universe.”

  Zenaida Carajo, who smiled through her tenth face-lifting and had difficulty walking, because on her neck, arms and fingers glittered the country’s second-heaviest diamonds (after the First Lady’s). She also wore makeup so thick that people called her Kabuki Lady behind her back. Or even espasol, the rice dessert from the south smothered in layers of flour.

  Joseph Carajo, Baby’s cousin, who taxed the country’s seven million farmers with a levy ostensibly to fund the planting of mahogany trees to produce “modern antique furniture,” but the funds have allegedly been siphoned off to places as far as the Netherlands Antilles.

  Richard Head, the American Ambassador, called Dick Head by two camps: the grim-and-determined Marxists and the applicants denied visas by His Honor’s consuls.

  Bernardo Tulingan, who called himself the country’s finest painter, with his works hanging like chopping boards in Manila’s seafood restaurants.

  Zosimo Zaymo, a successful talent manager famous for pimping his female models in Brunei and fondling the male ones before hidden cameras.

  The young Emmanuel, bright and beady-eyed, opinion columnist par excellence, thinking how soon he could bed as many contestants as possible, especially those Latinas.

  Mother China, the country’s number-one movie producer, who loved to have zombies in her movies.

  And of course, the First Lady herself, the Chair of the Board of Judges, Her Majesty Infinitely Brighter than the Blaze of Ten Thousand Suns.

  One by one the winners were called, to thunderous applause: Miss Aruba, third runner-up; Miss Colombia, second runner-up; and Miss Finland, first runner-up. And then, only Miss Wales and Spain were left. Both held hands and braced themselves for the announcement, their eyes closed, chins quivering.

  Between Big Boobs and the Blessed Virgin Mary, of course the latter would win in this Catholic country. After she was called as the newest Miss Universe, Amparo Muñoz gave the crowd a beatific smile, tears running down her face, ruining her makeup. But never mind, for here was Margarita Mon Amor, gliding on the stage, relinquishing cape, crown and scepter, and then the señorita walked around the stage, the flashbulbs popping forever.

  Miss Universe would constantly visit Ma
nila as part of the First Lady’s entourage of royalty and celebs, who would be flown to the city to inaugurate a massive new building (part of what critics called the First Lady’s Edifice Complex), or just have a party aboard the presidential yacht RPS Ang Pangulo on Manila Bay. Later, Amparo Muñoz would star in porn movies in her country, precious copies of which were smuggled into Manila and shown at the parties of the rich and the brain-dead, for they married within the family to keep their fabulous, feudal wealth intact.

  Helen Morgan would bare her big breasts in a Filipino movie called Nagalit ang Umaga Dahil sa Sobrang Haba ng Gabi, then returned to her cold, gray island after the movie flopped.

  Johanna Raunio joined the Miss International contest in Tokyo and won. Ella Cecilia Escandon became a writer of Latin American telenovelas, the most popular of which—Mari Mar, Ay!—was shown in an obscure Philippine station, promptly became number one, and wiped the smug grins off the faces of the smart suits running the number-one network. And Maureen Ava Viera married a wealthy Filipino, divorced him, then returned to the Caribbean, to run as governor of Aruba. She won.

  Poinsettias

  UNDER THE PINE trees, three girls were walking to the Session Hall in Teachers’ Camp, their light-brown uniforms blending with the softy-falling dusk.