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  “That Ricky,” said Luis, jerking his thumb backward, “leads the rites.”

  The next morning, Mr. Baltazar looked wilted in his chair. “I’m disappointed,” he said, raising the test papers. The class began to buzz.

  “Ferdie, what happened to you?” the teacher asked, rising from his chair. “You were the grade-school valedictorian of Don Bosco, but you only got an 85.”

  I shifted uneasily in my seat.

  “Danilo Cruz,” the teacher said, casting a glance across the room.

  “Yes, sir?” I said, raising my hand.

  “You got 90, the highest. Did you graduate from Sacred Heart Academy?”

  I rose from my chair to get back my paper. As I did so, I took in a gulp of air. From up close, Mr. Baltazar looked so vulnerable. I could not help it, and so I said, “No, sir. I came from Basa Central Elementary School. It is a public school.”

  My teacher was a good actor and his face did not betray any emotion, but as I walked back to my seat, I knew he was irritated.

  The twelve o’clock bell rang, a shrill sound that cut the heat into fragments.

  Ahead of our classmates, Luis and I had gone to the cafeteria. Housemaids in their white, stiffly-starched uniforms and drivers in their visors wandered about, bringing the lunch of Pampanga’s Little Lord Fauntleroys. One of my classmates, Van Go, had several watches, and I asked him why. He looked at me and snapped, “Danny, there are seven days in a week!” This was also the boy who, when asked to write a theme paper called “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” wrote on how he got lost in London’s Knightsbridge, because the housemaid took a long time in the loo, and he began to walk aimlessly around the borough. I wished he were never found.

  I sat down on a chair beside a screened window. Luis put down his things on a chair and bought our bottles of Coke.

  Below the cafeteria stretched the glassy blueness of the swimming pool. Suddenly I wished I could take a dip because the noon heat was unbearable. But the sign said that only the Salesian Brothers and Physical Education students could use the pool.

  Luis returned with one soda that was almost chilled (his) and another that was not even cold (mine). My mother had prepared for me my favorite: chicken tocino and big, ripe tomatoes, with soft fragrant rice. Even if we had a housemaid, my mother would wake up at four o’clock in the morning and prepare my lunch for me, from Monday to Friday. I was about to have lunch when Luis leaned closer.

  “Do you know what happens in the initiation?” he asked.

  “Oh, no, not again,” I said. “Who’s been telling you this gossip?”

  “Elmer, the sophomore who lives near my house. He said it’s usually done behind the gym.”

  I remembered I had been there once—a wooded area where the leaves virtually shut out the sun. The Brothers had told us not to go behind the gym because snakes had been seen there.

  The voice of Luis broke into my thoughts. “And there are different ways of going about it.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, deciding to get into what I had dismissed as a game.

  “One is they ask you to buy a pack of Marlboro. Then they’ll order you to smoke the whole pack, alone, in an hour. Just to prove to them you’re already a man.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “Well, if you can’t, they’ll light the remaining sticks and stub them all out. On your thighs and buttocks, where nobody can see them. Elmer showed me his burnt scars. Very black, even after a year. Of course, there are other ways—”

  The food began to feel like stones in my throat.

  A Burning in the Air

  THAT AFTERNOON, THE school bus left without Ricky. His friend Eddie told the driver that Ricky had already gone home ahead of us.

  Ay, the stories of Luis, I thought as I lifted the windows and set the side locks in place. I hope he’s just pulling one of his tricks again. I had a low threshold for pain. All my life I would always carry a small plastic bag full of medicines—Tylenol and Imodium, Bonamine and Alaxan, Band-Aid and Amoxicillin—afraid of dying of one ailment or another.

  I recalled I was five years old then. My parents had just arrived from work. I was sitting with my grandmother on the cemented stairs, waiting for them. The moment I saw them enter the gate, I left my grandmother and ran down the stairs. But I tripped on the last step and fell. My parents and grandmother were all over me. The skin on my knees was scraped. Blood flowed. Merthiolate dabbed on the raw wound, bandages smothering me, even in my sleep. Pain like no other, or so I thought.

  But now, only this wind. I looked at Luis, sitting calmly beside me. He seemed to be changing, stepping into the body of a young man: the hint of hair above the lips, the voice that was beginning to crack, the eyes now both familiar and strange. I loved the warmth when my elbow came close to his elbow, my hand beside his hand. And his lips, how would it feel to kiss those lips?

  The wind rose, bearing with it the scent of rice saplings standing above the muddy fields. I wondered how deep the saplings’ roots were, how they went about groping for direction, for certainty, in the moist darkness of the earth.

  Our school bus slowed down when we reached the rotunda in the Guagua plaza. Once more, the fire-blackened ruins of an old school rose before us. The bus stopped in front of a restaurant whose walls screamed with neon green gashes and violet polka dots. The young soldier who drove the bus got off to buy food, while Sergeant Molina told everybody he would just get his laundry from his sister’s house on the next street.

  I would have taken a quick nap but for the sight of Ricky cutting across the plaza. The black ruins of the school framed him. It must have been caused by the sun, I thought, when I noticed the flush on Ricky’s face.

  The door of the school bus flew open and Ricky shouted, “Who told you to leave without me?”

  Someone in front volunteered the name. In a flash, Ricky stood before Eddie and hit him hard on the face. Blood came from a cut on Eddie’s lips. In turn, he punched Ricky in the stomach. Ricky fell. The other upperclassmen tried to stop Eddie from lunging at Ricky, who was trying to rise. I stood up and cheered silently for Eddie.

  The moment Ricky was on his feet, he shouted: “Puta! Your horny father houses his mistress in Porac!”

  Eddie’s eyes narrowed. Quivering with rage, he said, “And you, you’re like your mother who sleeps with her doctor. Why did you sleep with my girlfriend?”

  “She seduced me, kid,” Ricky sneered, and then his face twisted into a leer. “She said she’s hot but you haven’t even touched her. She even thinks you’re a fag, ha-ha-ha!”

  Eddie broke free from the hands that restrained him. He surprised Ricky with another jab. Finally, upon noticing the commotion, the young soldier with the solid neck and the muscled body ran out of the restaurant, leapt into the bus and tried to break up the fight. But the friends of both Ricky and Eddie had already joined the melee. A free-for-all erupted.

  From the street corner, I saw Sergeant Molina, who dropped his laundry the moment he saw the fight. He ran inside the bus and shouted, but nobody listened to him. Finally he thrust his Armalite out of the window, and the sound of firing ripped through the darkening afternoon.

  It was a cool day. I went back to the bus parked under a canopy of trees to get my assignment in Social Studies—the list of 120 Presidents and Prime Ministers of the world—which I had forgotten in the morning rush to class.

  The bus was empty. While I was looking for my papers in my long brown envelope, I heard the sound of twigs snapping underfoot. I looked out of the window. The young soldier was walking toward the bus. Tall, a sensuous spring in his limbs. His skin dark as Cadbury, which I had begun to buy in the cafeteria. Strong, aquiline nose. Bee-stung lips. He continued walking. I thought he would enter the bus. But instead he stopped on the side of the bus. He unbuckled his belt, pulled his zipper down, and began to pee on the side of the bus. A crisp stripe of hair ran down his smooth, flat belly. The leaves and the light cast a cool shadow on his navel.
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br />   The air began to burn.

  The Rites

  ONE SATURDAY, our homeroom adviser required us to come to school to practice for our number in the opening of the sports intramurals.

  Since Luis had diarrhea, I took the jeepney all by myself until I reached our school. Our class number took the form of acrostics, with a student holding a letter and reciting a verse starting with the letter. Our section was tasked to spell out several qualities of sportsmanship, among them F-A-I-R-N-E-S-S. Since I was the only one in class who did not mistake his p for his f, I got to deliver the verse for the first letter.

  Fairness is what we need

  When we play out in the field.

  In this way we can have fun

  As we frolic under the sun.

  I quickly memorized that doggerel, er, verse, and was greatly relieved when we were allowed to go home before noon. After taking my lunch in the cafeteria, I decided to walk around the campus I would soon leave. I visited the small, black turtle in its pond beside the principal’s office. It looked back at me with its sad, lidless eyes, and I apologized to it for comparing it earlier to Mr. Baltazar. I stopped in the middle of the basketball court, remembering that only yesterday, I stood transfixed as my classmate Randy took off his sweat-soaked shirt, his muscular chest blinding like a shield.

  I kept on walking until I just found myself near the gym. Prodded by something I could never understand, I walked all the way to the back of the gym.

  The sudden coolness came from the shadows cast by the giant apitong and narra trees. Shrubs and bushes rose around me. Deeper and deeper into the woodland I walked, until I heard familiar voices.

  I hid behind a big narra tree.

  Ricky was there, looming tall in white shirt and white pants, with five other sons of the military officers. There were four freshmen students in front of them, who also took the bus with me every morning. Suddenly, Ricky kicked the freshmen one by one, until they fell to the ground. Then his four companions made the freshmen stand again. Ricky then punched them in the face twice, until their lips bled. I was trying to breathe as slowly, as inaudibly, as possible.

  “What is the golden rule, ha? Do you remember?” Ricky asked.

  “Do not do … unto others what you do not want … others to do … unto you,” stammered Noel, the tallest among the freshmen.

  I crouched behind the bushes.

  “Good. In short, we must love one another.” He fished for something in his shirt pocket. Four candies. “Before you think we are cruel, we can have a break.” His companions unwrapped the candies, asked the freshmen to open their mouths, and put the candies in the mouths.

  “Suck them, and suck them well. Mentholated candies kill the germs in your saliva.” And like canned laughter, Ricky’s four companions laughed dutifully.

  “And now, since it’s very hot, take off your shirt, guys.” The four did as told. “And now, drop your pants.” The four did not do as told. “Do you want a kick in the groin?” The four did as told.

  Noel had white cotton jockeys, while the three others wore nylon jockeys colored blue and yellow and brown. Whereas the Nylon Boys’ dicks seemed to have shrunk from fear, Noel’s was still there, holding forth with pride and dignity.

  “Since we all must love one another,” Rocky said in deep, cathedral tones, “you will exchange candies with one another.”

  The four did not do as told. “Or do you want me to order you to do something else?” The four did as told.

  “And now, since you’ve exchanged candies, you might as well exchange salivas, too. You must French-kiss each other!”

  The four protested noisily. “Okay, you failed this initiation rite. Therefore, no leakages during exams, no pre-written term papers for you, no Betamax tapes, no lending of Playboys, no invitation to parties, no freebies, no friends, nothing!”

  “But, Sir,” Noel spoke up, “could we just do something else?”

  “Now, that’s an idea. Do you want to kiss each other’s dicks?”

  The four freshmen looked at each other, and then the three looked at Noel.

  Noel said, “Ay, Sir, ummm … we’ll just, ah, kiss each other on the lips. But is this really the last—”

  “Yes, yes,” Ricky said, immaculate in white. “But I want you to close your eyes when you kiss each other. And I want to see tongues. This isn’t called French-kiss for nothing. And don’t stop until I tell you to!”

  And so the two pairs faced each other. On my haunches I watched them move their faces close to each other. They opened their lips, drew out their tongues, and kissed clumsily. In the maddening heat of noon, the three nylon boys showed more dignity. But Noel, his stick of sugarcane became a tube, and as he kissed his partner, it grew bigger and bigger by the second …

  A Season in Hell

  IN THE SUMMER of my twelfth year I began reading pornography.

  It was so hot—a season in hell, Rimbaud was right—so I always wore my short shorts. I went to the neighbor’s house to borrow a copy of Expressweek magazine. It was the only magazine allowed by the dictatorship, since it is published by the President’s brother-in-law. Every week it featured, in full color, the updated lives of saints. Updated, because after these saints had lived and died and had been canonized by the Vatican, and after their statues done in plaster of Paris had been distributed throughout the archipelago, they would still perform miracles to outclass those they did when they were still alive.

  St. Peter who had a large key in one of his hands and his cock, er, rooster, in the other, had become the patron saint of cockfighting aficionados. One of them, a burly man by the name of Pedro Pintakasi, kneeled before the statue of Saint Peter in his small house in Antipolo, jumped aboard a jeepney with his prized rooster, blowing rings of cigarette smoke on the rooster to prime it up. That rooster had won all its fights, its strong wings a dazzle of red feathers, the steel spur on its left leg glinting, that soon, Pedro Pintakasi had joined the major league, the 10-cock grand derby at the Araneta Coliseum, the largest domed coliseum in the world.

  His throat turning dry, Pedro betted everything he had won in the minor leagues—all fifty thousand pesos of it—on his rooster. Before he set it down on the ring, the whole coliseum was in pandemonium, placing their bets in a roar, the Kristo memorizing who had betted how much with whom (if he made a mistake he would pay up, suffering miserably). Pedro looked at his rooster nervously, talked to it, telling it to go for it, or else, it would end up as fragrant chicken tinola on the winner’s dinner table.

  Pedro Pintakasi did win, and his lucky streak seemed to go on and on that one day, Tesoro Barbaro, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, assigned his cub writer Mozart Pastrami to do a “write-up” of Pedro and his marvelous cock.

  And so every Saturday afternoon, I visited the neighbor’s house to borrow their Expressweek magazine, But on that day, Ate Lina was not there. I walked around the living room and did not see Expressweek but another magazine. Glossier cover, with the photo of a woman with breasts that Tarzan could hang on to for dear life.

  I looked around—left, right, in front of me, back—but nobody was around. So I sat on the sofa, flipped the pages. More photos of women spilling all of themselves on the pages. I tried to read the stories. “Virgin Boy” was one of them, about this housewife left at home, alone, with a hot pussy. (I still did not know then what that word meant.)

  Then one day, she looked out of the window and saw their neighbour, a young man of seventeen, sunning himself in the garden. She grabbed a bottle of wine, asked him to help her unscrew the cork, and when he came to her house she seduced him.

  I felt myself getting a hard-on when she began describing his body: young and smooth skin, slim waist, a muscular chest beaded with sweat. She even described his dick as “stiff and still hairless,” (at seventeen?) the balls moving in their sac when she began to touch him.

  I was having a hard-on just reading how she got on with him that I did not notice Kuya Alex, Ate Lina’s soldier-hu
sband, who was already standing behind me. In a flash he was already sitting beside me, and then he asked me what I was doing. I immediately shut the pages of the magazine.

  “Hmmm, reading my copy of Playboy, eh?” he said, his left hand swiftly on my knee, his fingers like spider legs on my thigh. I was beginning to be tickled. I felt my bulge coming back. I was excited, but I was also afraid. So before he could go any higher I had stood up, stammered something about my siesta, and walked out of the living room.

  But before I went away, I looked at him when I was near the door (he kept on shaking his head, perhaps afraid I would report him to my burly father) before I strode into the mad heat of summer.

  Farewell, My Lovely

  I SAT AGAIN on the concrete bench near the acacia, sipping my warm Coke and munching hopia munggo. A familiar bicycle—a tall one I used to call a baker’s bicycle—came closer. It was Luis, in khaki shorts and white T-shirt, which I immediately recognized as our uniform in our elementary school. Hair was beginning to grow on his legs. My dearest Luis.

  “So you’re leaving tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sheathe my sadness. Then I smiled and said, “Let me buy you something first.” We went inside the commissary and then came out with a chilled bottle of Coke and Skyflakes crackers. We sat on the benches. The floor was again carpeted with the acacia’s pink flowers. Brown acacia pods littered the ground, some of them already squelched into sticky paste.

  I suddenly remembered the cool grotto in Don Bosco, which was also shrouded by tall, ancient acacias. This elevated grotto stood near the wall of the school, over which you could see the big buses passing by, all bound for either Pasay or Cubao. When my whole family left for Project 4, Quezon City the month before, I was left to stay with Ludy until our lease in the apartment ran out. So for a whole month, I did not listen to the teacher, but rather drew a rough map of Project 4, Quezon City, marking with orange the new street where we lived. I would have no friends there; my cousins were quite aloof, but my father said everything would be all right. Still, I felt something, perhaps like a rice sapling being pulled from its seedbed, as I ran down the grotto and returned to the school in the dark afternoon.