PHILIPPINES
MAN AT HIS BEST APRIL BEST APRIL 2014
BY LOURD DE VEYRA
BY ELLEN ADARNA
BY CRISTINA PANTOJA-HIDALGO
9 3 5 0 4 8 3 4 2 2 N S S I
7 0 0 5 4 8 3 4 2 2 7 7 9
http://buhaypirata.net
PHILIPPINES
MAN AT HIS BEST APRIL BEST APRIL 2014
BY MANUEL L. QUEZON III
BY ELY BUENDIA
BY LAV DIAZ
EDITED BY SARGE LACUESTA
http://buhaypirata.net
PHILIPPINES
MAN AT HIS BEST APRIL BEST APRIL 2014
BY MANUEL L. QUEZON III
BY ELY BUENDIA
BY LAV DIAZ
EDITED BY SARGE LACUESTA
http://buhaypirata.net
Esquire, everywher everywhere. e.
Man at his best. In print and digital, every month.
CONTENTS APRIL 2014
VOL. 3 N O. 6
36 MAHB: BOOKS
SASHA MARTINEZ goes through 55 works mentioned in David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life, and finds she never liked a book she disagreed with so much.
38 MAHB: EAT LIKE A MAN
MARK HIX divulges two different ways to cook shellfish.
40 MAHB: DRINKING
DAVID WONDRICH gives you an update on modernizing Japanese whiskey culture.
60 GROOMING
They say your eyes are the windows to your soul. If your eyes have it all, they deserve the best pampering.
130 THE RIVER
A run through the thoughts of a woman haunted by the memory of her dead father, and the tension it brings to the uncertainties with her current love. Fiction by REINE ARCACHE MELVIN. Art by NIKKI LUNA.
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CONTENTS APRIL 2014
VOL. 3 N O. 6
65 NOTES & ESSAYS A special edition featuring LOURD DE VEYRA on God, LAV DIAZ on pain—plus a song by ELY BUENDIA on love.
82 COVER STORY SARGE LACUESTA is dying to know who the real Ellen Adarna is—away from the projected throne of her stardom built on the Internet, which all began with a Friendster profile. Photographs by JAKE VERZOSA.
90 THE PROPHET Dr. Eben Alexander becomes brain dead for a week, and then returns with stories of heaven. LUKE DITTRICH investigates a past that his cult following may not know: the man’s trou bled history and possible need for reinvention.
108 GUN NOISES, MADE WITH MOUTH PAOLO ENRICO MELENDEZ grew up with his grandfather in Fort Bonifacio in the 80s and 90s, and recalls memories of guilt, resilience and death. Photographs by TIM SERRANO
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CONTENTS APRIL 2014
VOL. 3 N O. 6
16 EDITOR’S NOTE
22 ESQUIRE CONTRIBUTORS
27 MAN AT HIS BEST
We waited a long time for the Grammy-award winning French band Phoenix to hit Manila. And they did not disappoint.
28 ESQ&A
Quezon City mayor Herbert Bautista talks to ERWIN ROMULO about getting advice from Binay, the first time he met president Aquino, and why he thinks he’s ready to settle down.
34 MAHB: MUSIC
BONES FRANKENSTEIN, frontman of the band Mr. Bones & The Boneyard Circus, shares a list of songs that continue to haunt him, and the memories they conjure.
118 PUTI
Inspired by Mike de Leon’s Itim, a fashion story starring indie actor Alex Medina showcasing a contemporary style essential: the white shirt. Photographs by MAAN PALMIERY.
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CONTENTS APRIL 2014
VOL. 3 N O. 6
96 FINAL DEGUSTATION
If you could choose the last meal you would eat in this life, what would you have? We asked six people for their hypothetical final feasts. Photographs by PAUL DEL ROSARIO.
106 WHAT I’VE LEARNED
Commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Kim Henares, sits down with KARA ORTIGA and says that it’s not like she’s out to be mean, she’s just doing her job.
144 THIS WAY OUT
Previously on Esquire… November 1970. By LUIS KATIGBAK
45 STYLE
There’s a time for everything, and every kind of timepiece to go with that. Photographs by MAAN PALMIERY.
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BEFORE WE BEGIN APRIL 2014
INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINE A NOTE FROM ERWIN ROMULO
PORTRAIT BY JAKE VERZOSA
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ESQUIRE APRIL 2014
A few years ago, I stopped believing in the existence of God. It didn’t happen in an instant—there was no Damascene light, no burning bush nor did a tongue of fire descend upon me to herald that realization. Rather it was nurtured from niggling doubts, intellectual curiosity, and a heavy dose of reality. Raised Roman Catholic and educated at a school run by the Opus Dei, it took a great leap of faith for me to accept a position of disbelief and, though it wasn’t easy, I can’t say that it was all that difficult either. In fact, it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. It occurred quietly over a period of time and without fanfare, but once it had taken hold, I was utterly convinced of its truth. But a funny thing happened. I also realized that as much as I had abandoned believing in the principle of an all-powerful deity, it wasn’t so simple to let go of religion and its practice, most especially the rituals that I had come to appreciate and cherish most deeply. I was also very enamored of, even enchanted by the writings of St. Augustine and other religious thinkers, including a number of priests whom I’m very proud to call my friends, whose words and thoughts still resonate with me. I still regularly went to Holy Mass and recited prayers almost every day, but I was committed if not de vout in my atheism. If I was troubled it was only because I could not reconcile the two in my head as much I could in my heart. If anything, I knew sooner or later I would have to choose between them. Eventually I went back to being a Roman Catholic. I needed it if only to pro vide the structure to make sense of everything in my life. There were too many
things too big for me to grasp, which despite all my efforts to understand I knew would always remain a mystery. Although I haven’t given up trying to understand, I have come to revel in the knowledge that no matter the conclusions I arrive at they will remain incomplete. I’m all right with that. I celebrate it. As we observe Holy Week and bring Lent to a close this month, we thought it would only be appropriate to tackle sub jects that have had a profound effect on the course of our l ives. To name but a few of the authorities we gathered: we asked Manuel L. Quezon III, the President’s chief speechwriter, to muse about power; Lav Diaz, perhaps our most re vered filmmaker in the world today and director of epics like Batang West Side and Norte—Hangganan ng Kasaysayan, to pen a parable about pain; and Lourd de Veyra, the countr y’s most conscientious social critic, to issue an open letter to God. We also a sked Michiko Yamamoto, acclaimed screenwriter of Magnifico and On The Job, for a scene from an as-yet-to-be-produced movie, and Ely Buendia, our most beloved songwriter, to compose a love song especially for the issue. Edited by Esquire editorat-large Sarge Lacuesta, these offerings make compelling reading for the season, whether or not you count yourself as a believer, agnostic, atheist, or any of the more precise distinctions t hat have been used throughout history. This is the gospel according to Esquire—and we are sure you will find much in here that will complement your Bible readings, ma rathon TV viewings or beachside cocktails this Good Fr iday.
BEFORE WE BEGIN APRIL 2014
E D I T O R I N C H I E F
Erw in Romulo A S S O C I A T E E D I T O R
Luis Katigbak MANAGING EDITOR
Jonty Cruz SENIOR FEATUR ES EDITOR
Jerome Gomez F E A T U R E S E D I T O R
Aud rey N. Car pio E D I T O R I A L A S S I S T A N T
Kara Ortiga A R T A R T D I R E C T O R
Ces Olondriz A S S O C I A T E A R T D I R E C T O R
Edric dela Rosa F A S H I O N F A S H I O N D I R E C T O R
Raymond Gutierrez FA S H I O N F E A T U R E S E D I T O R
Clifford Olanday E D I T O R S A T L A R G E F E A T U R E S
Sarge Lacuesta F A S H I O N
Liz Uy WRITERS AT LARGE
Patricia Evangelista, Gang Badoy, Lourd de Veyra, Oliver X. A. Reyes, Philber t Dy, Yvette Tan F O O D A N D D R I N K S B U S I N E S S B O O K S
Erwan Heussaff
Roel Landingin
Sasha Martinez
CONTRIBUTORS A R T WRITERS
Norman Crisologo, Tof Zapanta, Nikki Luna, Robert Langenegger, Mideo Cruz
Mark Hix, Stacey Woods, Luke Dittrich, David Wondrich, Paolo Enrico Melendez, A.R. Samson, Lav
Diaz, Michiko Yamamoto, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, Ely Buendia, Manuel L. Quezon III, Joel Tabora, S .J., Reine Arc ache Melv in P H O T O G R A P H E R S Jake Verzosa, Pia Puno, Paul del Rosar io, Edric Chen, Sonny Thakur, Tim Serrano, Maan Palm iery, Veejay Villafranc a, Geloy Concepcion ILLUSTRATORS
Jo Aguila, Alysse Asilo
H E A R S T M A G A Z I N E S I N T E R N A T I O N A L P R E S I D E N T/ C E O :
Duncan Edwards Senior Vice President, CFO and General Manager Simon Horne
Senior Vice President/ Director of Licensing and Business De velopment Gautam Ranji Senior Vice President/International Publishing Director Jeannette Chang Senior Vice President/Editorial Director Kim St. Clair Bodden Creative Director Peter Yates Exe cut ive Edit or: Tony Gervino Fashi on an d Ent ert ainm ent Dire cto r Kristen Ingersoll Senior International Editions Editor Luis Veronese E S Q U I R E I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D I T I O N S
China Li Xiang Colombia Francisco J. Escobar S Czech Republic Jiri Roth Greece Kostas N. Tsitsas Hong Kon g Cho Man Wai Indonesia Dwi Sutarjantono Kaz akh stan Andrey Zharkov Kore a Heesik Min Lat in A mer ica Manuel Martínez Torres E D I T O R S I N C H I E F
Malaysia Sam Coleman Middle East Jeremy Lawrence Netherlands Arno Kantelberg Phil ippi nes Erwin Romulo Roma nia Radu Coman Rus sia Dmitry Golubovsky Singapore Sam Coleman Spain Andrés Rodriguez Taiwan Steve Chen Thailand Panu Burusratanapant Turkey Okan Can Yantir United Kingdom Alex Bilmes Ukraine Alexey Tarasov Vietnam Nguyen Thanh Nhan United States David Granger
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ESQUIRE APRIL 2014
BEFORE WE BEGIN APRIL 2014
P r e s i d e n t a n d G e n e r a l M a n a g e r
Lisa Y. Gokongwei-Cheng PUBL ISHE R Aurora Mang ubat-Suarez VP FOR OPERATIONS Hansel dela Cruz DEPU TY G ROUP PUBL ISH ER Ichi Apostol-Acosta PUBL ISHI NG A SSIS T. Owen Maddela EDIT ORI AL DIR ECT OR Jo-Ann Maglipon, Myrza Sison Admi n. SERV ICE S MA NAGER Whilma M. Lopez SR. ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT Michiel Lumabi, Marlyn Miguel ADM INI STR ATI VE ASS ISTA NT Lalaine Bernardo A D V E R T I S I N G
Group Advertising Director Florence Bienvenido Advert ising D irector- Key Acc ounts G roup Regie Uy Key Acco unts Sp eciali st Joey Anciano, Joyce Argana, Cha Clarino, Junn De Las Alas, Alex Revela r, Ann ie Sant os, Su zette To lentin o Advert ising G roup Mana ger Torto Canga Sr. Account Manager Jerry Cabauatan, AR Kuo, Andi Trinidad
Jr. Account Ma nager Rissa Mesina, Aizza Tajonera Advert ising A ssistant Kimberley Dula Advert ising T raff ic Super visor Eliziel del Rio Advert ising T raff ic Assist ant Art hur C. Vil laf lor P R O D U C T I O N
Prod uct ion Mana ger Eliz Rellis Assi stan t Pro duc tio n Man age r Jane Puno Prod uct ion Coo rdin ator Bong Carolino Cover Artist Art hur As turi ano MEDIA RELATIONS AND PROMOTIONS
Jr. Mar ket ing Asso ciat e Mary Princess Derit Media Relations Head Claire Algarme Media Relations Associate Jieneb Jamin Kho, Nikka Peralta Data bas e As soc iate Joyce Tamayo E V E N T S
Marketing Director Ramon Manzano III Ass ista nt M arke tin g Man age r Roberlin Rubina Proj ect Of fic er Eduardo Almeda, Patricia Cordero, Joey Negrete Sr. Marketing Associate Ana B arret to, Ca rl Brion , Rica Lozada, Siena Mirano, A ngela Padua Jr. Mar ket ing Ass oc. Carol Cruz, Alvin Paronda, Kath Vanguardia TRADE MARKETING
Trade Marketing Associate Jamie Jean Islo, Daryl Lincod, Joyce Anne Ramos Trade Marketing Assistant Hannah Roque, Laline Taguiam Proj ect Coo rdin ator Mark Munoz, Rachelle Losenada Visual Merchandiser Elmon Villena CREATIVE SERVICES
Edit or In Chie f Dondi Limgenco Creative Director Noel Azcueta Assi stan t Cr eat ive D irec tor Iza Santos Managing Editor Denise Mallabo, Katrina Vinluan Asst . Man agi ng E dito r Janis Gopez, Pia Angelica Suiza, Diona Valdez Copy Writer Ann e Kry stle M alin is Art Dire ctor Ben Arnold, Cleone Baradas, Consuelo Cabrera, Jane Kristine Cruz, Cindy Dy, Alona Francisco, Dino de Ocampo Ass oc. Art Dire cto r Jay Dimayuga
Graphic Artist Clare Felise Magno, Anisa Privado CIRCULATION
Circulation Manager Alm a M. Ma delo Dep uty Nati ona l Ci rcul atio n Man age r Glenda Gil Circulation Manager - GMA Alaine Mae Lozada Prov inci al S ale s Man age r Alexis Martinez International Distribution Sales Specialist Ulyssis Javier Dist ribu tio n Gr oup Head - GM A Malou Rubinos Key Acco unt s - G roup Head Noreen Peligro, Vivian Manahan Subscription Group Head Hanna Montecer Circulation Supervisor Mary Fatima Flores Newsstand Supervisor Joel Valdez Systems Administrator - Interactive Edit ons Rico B. Cruz Key Acco unt s Charlotte Barlis, Jinky Rose Calugtong, Edward Caringal, Arnaldo Lopez, Hazel Mardo, Jennifer Tolentino Jr. Sa les Repr ese ntat ives - GM A John Lakhi Celso, Anjelyn Carino, Ruby Frias, Edilen Tomas Dis tri but ion Spe cial ist Gilbert Caballero, Eric Ferdinand Gasatan, Ricarte Emmanuel Lorejo, Francis Daryl Molo, Gian Carlo Peralta, Roberto Revilla, Mark Elliott Villola Sales Representative Anjelyn Carino, Ed Caringal, John Celso Subscription Coordinator Joyce Ramos, Reigine Casido, Annalyn Armbulo Log ist ics Mana ger Norman Campo Dis tri but ion A cco unt Ana lyst May Ann Ayuste Exp ort Sale s As sist ant Legui Brylle Gonzales For GMA dealership/distributorship inquiries, contact Malou Rubinos at 451-8888 Local 1094. For Provincial dealership/ distributorship inquiries, contact Glenda Gil at 451-8888 Local 8878. For International Distribution and Digital Edition inquiries, contact Legui Brylle P. Gonzales and Ulyssis Javier at 451-8888 Local 1092 or Direct Line (+632) 398-80-37. For back issues, contact Visual Mix (632) 824-09-47, Booksale (632) 824-09-59, and Filbars (632) 584-27-84 Under no circumstances shall ESQUIRE PHILIPPINES content be copied or reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. ESQUIRE PHILIPPINES editors and publishers shall not be held liable for unsolicited materials. All prices and speci�ications published in this magazine are subject to change by manufacturers and retailers. Printed in the Philippines.
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CONTRIBUTORS APRIL 2014
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LAV DIAZ is the director of Norte, Hang-
ganan ng Kasaysayan, which was considered one of the best films of 2013 by the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound . Apart from creating epic visual narratives, Lav is also an accomplished writer, having won Palanca prizes for his literary pieces. He shares an original story in this month’s Notes & Essays.
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LOURD DE VEYRA is a novelist, poet,
musician, TV personality, radio show host, and writer-at-large for Esquire. His books include Super Panalo Sounds, Insectissimo, and the anthology of his essays for Spot.ph called This is A Crazy Planets (which released its second installment last year). He is the host and producer of History with Lourd on TV5.
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ELY BUENDIA is best known as the lead
MICHIKO YAMAMOTO is known to possess a
vocalist of the rock band Eraserheads. His music and compositions have not only gained critical acclaim, but have been able to shape the culture of a generation. Currently, he is the frontman and principal songwriter for the bands Pupil and The Oktaves.
special gift for screen narratives about children ( Magnifico, Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros ) for which she’s won numerous awards. Last year, however, she showed her versatility via the action drama On The Job, which she co-wrote with director Erik Matti. Michiko is also part of Origin8Media, producer of the surprise indie hit Zombadings.
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MANUEL L. QUEZON III is the chief speechwriter of President Aquino and is editorin-chief of the Official Gazette (www. gov.ph). He continues t o blog and write for publications from time to time to keep from getting rusty. 4
CONTRIBUTORS APRIL 2014 6
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CRISTINA PANTOJA HIDALGO is an award-
PAOLO ENRICO MELENDEZ is helping NGOs
winning fictionist, critic, and pioneering writer of creative nonfiction. She is currently Professor Emeritus of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and Director of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies.
win grants when he isn’t writing for magazines and anthologies. In his free time, he plays right wing back for a former company’s football club. Eric will one day adopt a Schnauzer.
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NIKKI LUNA is a celebrated artist liv-
ing in Manila. Her works often delve into themes of the female in transit. She attained a Masters Degree in Women and Development Studies from the University of the Philippines, and attended the Cooper Union Art Residency in New York in 2008. She is founder of startARTproject, a non-profit organization aimed at making art accessible to women and youth victims of armed conflict and human rights violations.
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7
TIM SERRANO is a young fine art pho-
tographer drawn to seeing the drama and mystery in city- and naturescapes. He first worked with Esquire last December, for our story on the fake NGOs involved in the pork barrel scam, and he’s back this month to illustrate Paolo Enrico Melendez’s remem brances of days with his grandfather.
JAKE VERZOSA ’s portraits of the last tattooed women of Kalinga were exhibited in the Niepce Museum’s collection in France. He’s been shooting photographs for 10 years, and his work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Singapore, Cambodia, Japan, Denmark, and most recently Korea. 5
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ANGELO COMSTI has had his finger in
too many pies. He is a food writer and stylist. On occasion, he develops recipes for clients as well as holds cooking demonstrations. He also has a regular radio spot called Radio Brunch on Manila’s Wave 89.1, and co-authored the book Home-made for the Holidays.
PROMOTION
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TRULY GREAT BRITAIN In October of last year, the British Embassy launched This Is GREAT Britain—a campaign that culminated last March 7 to 9 at Bonifacio High Street with a grand British festival. Of its many attractions were various facets of British culture, business, education, and fashion. It only made sense that Lee Cooper, one of Europe’s foremost denim brands, would participate in the event. The best and latest from the brand’s denim collection were displayed in a UK-inspired booth designed with British imagery: a brick wall background, the London Tower, a park bench beside a red telephone booth, and real-life Royal Guards. The entire installation was brimming with the spirit of British culture, invoking rock and roll and showcasing Lee Cooper’s British Carnival and British Seaside collection in a fashion show. Inspiration from Brighton's festivals and architecture was also apparent throughout the event. With Lee Cooper continuing on its active rise in the local scene, lovers of British culture and fashion will never be without something to look forward to from this truly great brand of �ine British denim.
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1 Mr. Joseph Tan, General Manager, and Mr. Andrew So,
President with Royal Guards 2 Barbo Martinez, designer of the Lee Cooper booth, was among the crowd 3 British history was captured in the festival, down to the costumes. 4 The Lee Cooper Mall Tour set-up at SM Aura 5 Passersby took the opportunity to get their photos snapped in the telephone booth. 6 The British �lag was emblazoned on clothes in the fashion show. 7 H.E. Asif Anwar Ahmad, British Ambassador to the Philippines with Royal Guards 8 Mr. Joseph Tan, General Manager, Mr. Bernie Reyes, Brand Manager, and Ms. Vivian Caparas, Marketing Manager with Ambassador Ahmad
A MUST IN EVERY HOME Knowledge of proper wound care management in the Philippines is still at its infancy stage compared to the western world. This is according to the Philippine Wound Care Society (PWCS), an organization composed of physicians and professionals that specialize in wound care. Their current mandate is to educate people about wound care and elevate the practice at the same time. The recently-held Wound Care Primer is but one of the many ways they have reached out to the public for wound care education. One of PWCS’s primary tenets is that wound care management entails preparedness at the household level: Always be ready. In turn, the makers of Betadine have made it their own advocacy to ensure that each household is adequately prepared for emergency incidents that may occur at home. Widely used in hospitals worldwide as an important �irst line of defense against topical infection, Betadine is used as �irst aid to kill germs and help prevent contamination of minor cuts, scrapes and burns. It is a trusted antiseptic agent that helps in the healthy healing of wounds. It does not only kill bacteria, viruses and fungi but also keeps wounds infection-free thereby helping facilitate healthy healing—making it a vital household necessity. Treating wounds and being prepared for emergencies both require simple steps, and Betadine makes it easier for Filipino families to do so.
APRIL2014
TONIGHT EVERYTHING EVER YTHING IS OVER We were a throng of sweaty bodies clinging to Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars as he made his way through the crowd. Screeching fans shoved their cell phones a few inches away from his face when he towed through the mob to say hello to the people in the back row. Everyone expected that the French band would put on a good show; that the eclectic, addictive mix of rock and dance-pop would reverberate and create a moment of heightened energy. It did. But they surprised Manila with a night that would be remembered in stories, forever documented in the multitude of cameras ever active that night. We waited a long time for this Grammy-award winning band to hit Manila, and they did not disappoint. — KARA ORTIGA
REDFERNS VIA GETTY IMAGES
APRIL 2014 ESQUIRE
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M A N A T H I S B E S T
ESQ+A
HERBERT BAUTISTA THE QUEZON CITY MAYOR TALKS TO ERWIN ROMULO ABOUT MARCOS’ PREDICTION, HIS SIMILARITIES WITH BINAY, AND MAYOR DATING PROBLEMS. ESQUIRE: Do people still call you Bistek?
ESQ: 2016 is coming up, I know you have
HERBERT BAUTISTA: Marami. And they
one more term as mayor. But are you thinking of higher office? HB: I’ve been inquiring, you know, I talked to Vice President Binay at the Edsa Revolution anniversary. He asked me, “ Ano plano mo? Tapusin mo na ‘yang last term mo.” I got to talk to former President Erap also. I asked him, if an
call me by different names. For senior citizens they still call me Reneboy, my character in a soap opera in the ‘80s. Bistek for my contemporaries. But for the young ones, they call me mayor. And to think akala ko wala nang nakakakilala sa’kin eh.
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opportunity is there for me to run for higher public office, ano po ang advice niyo sa’kin? Sabi niya, “ Pasurvey ka. Kelangan scientific ang decision mo diyan. Now dahil may isang term ka pa, I would advice tapusin mo yung third term mo, and then pagtakbo mo may model ka pa rin. So make sure you do good in QC.” ESQ: You’ve been so focused on QC, it might be hard for you to let the city go just like that. HB: What’s really stopping me from not running for the senate is, personally, I still have several programs or projects that I have to launch first. And I’d like to see them fulfilled in my third term. These are all long-term projects or programs that one way or another would be contro versial along the way. Like in the case of the environment, we are working closely with a private company on a feasibility study on waste-to-energy. Currently we have a waste-to-energy program in QC, in Payatas, extracting methane and producing electricity for surrounding communities. But it’s not enough. What we’re looking for is a 54-megawatt power plant for QC. Maraming masosolve yun. For example instead of building or coming up with new landfills, wala nang magtata pon sa landfills. I remember one of the documents that I was reading during my school days, there was a part about “en vironment is local.” Because of that, no local authority will allow people outside of his area to be thrown garbage. In the initial study made, QC is generating about 2,400 metric tons of waste per day, which can generate about 50-52 megawatts. Today, QC government spends about a billion pesos just to collect our garbage and manage it. ESQ: And you’re finding resistance to this? HB: Siyempre incineration yun eh. But the Supreme Court said that incineration is not bad. That you reach a certain burning, basta point zero zero something. Pero ang point ko naman, the law was made in the year 2000 or 1999. Its 2014, CONT’D ang cellphone, dati analogue
PHOTOGRAPHS PIA PUNO
BAUTISTA CONTINUED
lang nung araw. Ngayon digital na. And every six months nagbabago yung technology. Baka ganun din naman yung incineration. Baka yung technology nung araw ay iba na ngayon. A plant in Japan can prove that type of burning, wala nang usok and malinis na yung particles. ESQ: Who’s going to oppose this initiative of yours? HB: I think Greenpeace would definitely oppose. I can see that already. ESQ: How do you deal with people you can’t negotiate with? HB: Siguro yung unang training na maganda, I listen. Tapos explain your points. But if you really don’t reach a particular agreement, kahit prinsipyo man lang , eh di okey lang . Ganun talaga eh. You cannot really convince everyone. But as far as I’m concerned, it solves a lot of things. And that’s just simple waste management. If you produce electricity, you gain something from it. Yung mase-save mong 200 million pwede ka magtayo ng eskwelahan for K-12. Daming magagawa dun. But there will always be some opposition. Pag dumating yung point na yun, wala na talaga akong magagawa. ESQ: You’ve been a public servant for how many years now? HB: Since ’85. I’m 45 now. More than my teenage life. Another exciting thing is the 75th anniversary of QC. I’m gaga over it, tuwang tuwa ako diyan. It’s a milestone of course and I’m very thankful that it’s happening in my incumbent year as mayor of QC. There have been 10 mayors in QC and I’m the tenth. ESQ: Do you have a favorite former mayor of QC? HB: I got in the QC government in 1985. I took some good points from the different mayors that I worked with. Like the only lady is Adelina Rodriguez. She’s the mother type, she’s more social, meaning cultural, pagtulong sa kababaihan, kabataan, I got some points there. Jun Simon was more, “ano gusto niyo?”, more people-centered type of government. I got that also, which I’m still doing. And then the late Mel Mathay, astute politician. But also a good administrator. It just so happened sa time niya, the first 10 years of the local government code, iniimplement pa lang , so yung mga best practices—hindi pa lumalabas yun. What I got from Speaker Sonny Belmonte was really how to administer local government just like a corporation. ESQ: Is it difficult being a mayor and a
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HB: Very
“BASTA SINABI NI MARCOS SAKIN, “WAG KA MAG-ALALA BALANG ARAW MAGIGING PRESIDENTE KA RIN.” career politician? Sometimes you might do something good for your political career, but it would be bad for your— HB: That’s Public Administration 101. The dichotomy of a public administrator slash politician. Mahirap siya kasi babalansehin mo. ESQ: How long have you been in the Liberal Party? HB: Only when I transferred in 2010. So that’s about four years. ESQ: Are you already planning ahead? Of course in 2016 the race is already on. Do you know already whom you will be carrying? Will you tow the party line? HB: I think the party really is democratic enough to choose who they want. ESQ: Yeah but it’s been said that it’s already going to be Mar Roxas. HB: Hindi pa sinabi siya di ba? ESQ: Well sabi ni Senate President Drilon. HB: Yeah, sabi niya. But remember for the longest time it used to be Mar until P-Noy came along. So baka may mga ganun pa rin, di natin alam. ESQ: But the frontrunner is of course the vice president. HB: Yeah, of course. ESQ: And you’ve known him for a long time. HB: Yeah, I worked with him when I was vice mayor. I’m working closely with him because of the housing projects. ESQ: How would you describe the vice president?
soft-spoken person. We belong to the same school, the National Defense College, and UP. ESQ: Would you describe him as an astute politician? HB: I think he is an astute politician. But I think he’s also an astute administrator because of what happened in Makati. Of course in Makati, very strong ang private sector. But if you do not have a good relationship with the private sector, it also reflects on your output as the administrator or mayor of that particular city. Funny guy, ibang klase mag-punchline. Tsaka may haplos, in all levels of society. Ia-aside ka niya, magbibilin. Ibang klase siya. ESQ: Are those characteristics you share with him? HB: Di ko alam. ESQ: Yeah, sense of humor, soft spoken… you are soft spoken. HB: Medyo may konting pasaway din. Sa bagay pasaway din siya nung paalisin siya as mayor, nag -Rambo costume siya. ESQ: You mentioned Mayor Erap. My own opinion was that he was never comfortable in the senate. I think he was bored. HB: Oo nga. He’s not a legislator. He’s actually an executive. ESQ: After one term he wanted to go for vice president already. HB: Kasi mas gusto niya mag -execute. ESQ: So let’s say if you do seek the senate, or perhaps higher… HB: Well sanay na ko sa legislation. And now this is my fourth year as an executive, you’re the chief executive of the legislative department, which is like what the senate president is or the speaker. If I run for higher office like the senate, I’ll be comfortable because I was trained in school to do research. I was trained also to deliver speeches backed up by statistics. I can do that and I can actually legislate. ESQ: And of course maybe the best would be building consensus. HB: Oo naman, I was also trained that way. Just like in League of Cities of the Philippines you cannot decide without getting the consensus of all the other mayors. Mga mayors matitigas ulo ng mga yun. (Laughs.) ESQ: How do you achieve a consensus? HB: Kwentuhan lang siyempre. ESQ: It doesn’t happen on the floor? HB: No, you build on it. Unang-una is relationship. Second, pick each other’s brains out. Kung ano view niya C O N T ’ D
BAUTISTA CONTINUED
sa ganitong —And makikita mo yan sa kwentuhan, not on the floor. Not on committees, sa kwentuhan talaga. ESQ: Have you ever fired anyone? HB: No, as much as possible, medyo malambot puso ko eh. As much as possible hinihintay ko na lang sila magretire. ESQ: It seems that as a politician you have the ability to communicate especially with everyone. HB: Maybe it’s because of the entertainment industry. You’re exposed to a lot of people. Sabi nila nakakatawa nga eh, “ Naku showbiz lang yan! Parang teka muna, ang hirap sa entertainment industry kasi ang nakikita lang ng tao eh yung glamour niya. Yung pinanood mo sa sine, wow ganda niya, gwapo niya. Pero yung technical nun ang hirap ah. It’s a highly technical thing. And as an actor, you have to understand the technicalities of doing a film. ESQ: Were you part of KBL? HB: Not KBL, I belong to Kabataan Barangay, the youth movement of the Marcos regime. ESQ: So you did support Marcos. HB: Yes, and I remember this incident, sa Aristocrat restaurant along Quezon Boulevard. Kumain kami dun, and then dumating sila P-Noy, puro nakadilaw naman, kami naka Marcos Forever. Ako naman as the president of Metro Manila, what I did was lumapit ako kay P-Noy tapos sabi ko, “ Ser kain lang muna po
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kami dito ah.” That was the first time I met P-Noy. ESQ: Did you meet the former president Marcos? HB: I was 10 years old. I remember I was tasked to ask the question, “mahirap ba maging presidente ng Pilipinas?” I can’t remember his answer. Basta sinabi niya, “wag ka mag alala balang araw magiging presidente ka rin.” ESQ: How old are you, Mayor? HB: I’m turning 46 this May. ESQ: And you have two children? HB: I have four children. Two by two different women. ESQ: Are you in good terms with their mothers? HB: Yes I am. I am very thankful that they raised our children quite well. I respect them as individuals kahit di kami nagkatuluyan. ESQ: But of course a politician, they say, needs a wife. HB: Kelangan nga ng wife. ESQ: So wala bang first lady of QC? Of course your predecessor didn’t have one. HB: Well, the president has no wife. ESQ: Yes, but he is dating. Are you? HB: No, I’m not seeing anyone at this point. ESQ: When was your last relationship? HB: 2003. ESQ: Well, being a politician’s wife or at least a girlfriend is never a happy job. HB: Para sa akin, kelangan yung tao may
sarili siyang ginagawa. Di siya pwedeng walang ginagawa. ESQ: So that’s what you’ll look for when you meet someone? HB: Yeah that she’s independent enough. Matibay din. In fact dapat mas matibay siya kesa sa’kin. Siya magsasabi na, “mali yan.” Or “go for it.” Masarap din kausap. Maganda yung pagkagising mo sa umaga may kausap ka. Pag uwi mo, may kausap ka rin. Yung nagsasabi sa’yo ng totoo, alam mo yun. Those are the ideals but I don’t know if there’s an ideal out there. ESQ: Of course you have to say that it’s also difficult to date a mayor. HB: Hindi naman. Panahon lang talaga problema diyan. Timing lang . But if both of you are willing to give each other enough time to be together or to understand each other at the end of the day, walang problema yan. ESQ: Do you want to get married? HB: Oo, ayaw nila maniwala that I’m the marrying type eh. ESQ: Since you mentioned it, President Marcos told you you’d be president one day. Do you want to be president one day? HB: No, I don’t think so. I thought of it in 1998. It was in my mind that I wanted to become the president then I lost the mayorship. ESQ: Because they say all politicians want to be president. HB: Yeah, that’s true. But in 1998 when I ran and lost to the late mayor Mathay, I realized na hindi pwede eh, kahit anong plano mo gawin sa buhay na gusto mo marating yun, madadapa ka. Tapos babangon ka ulit, pero pagbangon mo, di mo na siya pwedeng planuhin na makakarating ka dun. ESQ: But you did run for mayor again and you won. HB: Yes, I did. But becoming the mayor for the second time or third time, does not mean you eventually make you a senator, the vice president or the president. ESQ: But of course you could contend that you are more of a national figure than a local figure. HB: Yes, may nagpapapicture pa pala sa’kin sa cellphone. ESQ: But a national position—maybe president at the moment, no. But a national position perhaps? HB: Yes, could be, it’s an option going into my third term running for the vice pres—senate. ESQ: Did you just slip there, Mayor? HB: (Laughs) Hindi no.
“CRADLE TO THE GRAVE” BY FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH
This song really resembles what I’m facing now with other listeners/critics. The lyric: “I’ve been called a monster, called a demon, called a fake…” Touching and true. Heard the song live when I went to Singapore for the rock festival, and became an even grander fan. I relate to it more because of the challenges we face from not being mainstream and typical (middle finger!).
M A N A T H I S B E S T
MUSIC
“RANDY DANDY OH” FROM THE ORIGINAL SOUND� TRACK OF ASSASSINS CREED: THE BLACK FLAG
I’m a sucker when it comes to shanties, FULL STOP. Every time I hear this song I feel like an air pirate and it helps. This shanty is actually helping me write the third album, which I’m working on right now. So heave ho, heave ho… Enjoy… That’s my gamer side. “DEVIL’S BACKBONE” BY THE CIVIL WARS
From a guy’s perspective all I can say is I was a devil on her backbone. Feeling, seeking, loving and torn down. Begging to change; the future’s bright. I married her… “CLOWN” BY KORN
“ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES” BY ROBERT JOHNSON
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO THE MR. BONES & THE BONEYARD CIRCUS FRONTMAN SHARES THE SONGS THAT HAVE BEEN HAUNTING HIM BY BONES FRANKENSTEIN
Songs I’m listening to at the
moment? Here we go…
it from me. Damn you Tea Party! Joke. I’ve been looking up to these guys for ages and it’s because of them that I see colors in music. And yes, I had a clear head listening to them. “MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME” BY THREE DOG NIGHT
“MANTRA” BY THE TEA PARTY
Melodies to rhymes, and a mantra when combined. Something I wish I would have written, but they stole
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I’m not a drunk, I’m not an addict and I don’t fry my brain, but this song definitely does all of that. It takes me back to days gone by. And, no, I am not a vampire, either. You’ve got to know this song, as it is my anthem. No need to explain, FULL STOP.
They say selling your soul to the devil gets you big and out there with the music, but that’s a lie. I look up to Robert Johnson; Black Cat Bone, God bless his soul. That track gets me up every morning and it’s the one to jam to. It shines my pitchfork. HAIL JOHNSON.
This was the soundtrack of my childhood, with my two brothers. This pushed me forward to just work more on my studies because I had no friends anyway; a freak I was, in their eyes. I was ten years old when I heard this on my Walkman. Yup I’m still a kiddo, and of course I still listen to it right now.
“THIS IS HALLOWEEN” BY DANNY ELFMAN, A COVER BY CAIT LIN
One of the greatest electric violinists I listen to. Her renditions are extravagant. And yes, I do want to meet her and it would be absolutely breathtaking to be able to work with her in the future. “RAMONA” BY LOUIS ARMSTRONG
The title alone says it all. My twin, my sweet, my love. Ramona! She is my ship, my wife and my cradle. Hearing her name in a song just pushes me and carves a smile on my face. I do have a hopelessly romantic side…
“LOVE IS STRANGE” BY MICKEY A ND SYLVIA
My year was 1959...I am an old soul. And I love my mother to bits. This brings me close to family, and also, this song is true to its title/ message. I love dancing with my mother… The Great Fall Onto Madness, the long-awaited second album by Mr. Bones & The Boneyard Circus, is out now.
PHOTOGRAPH DORLING KINDERSLEY
B E S T T H I S M A N A
K S B O O
LITERATURE WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE RABBLE�ROUSING, INSIGHTS AND EARNESTNESS, FROM THE NOTORIOUS DAVID SHIELDS BY SASHA MARTINEZ
A
bout three-quarters
through How Literature Saved My Life— the follow-up to the 2010 controversy-baiting Reality Hunger: A Manifesto—David Shields lists 55 works of literature that he “swears by.” No abstract, no criteria, no disclaimers, no frills. Just an enumeration of 55 works, each followed by a description or a comment—which could be as short as a threeword phrase or as rambling as a paragraph spanning pages. Of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, he writes: “It’s one book I’ve read so many times
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that I feel, absurdly, as if I’d written it;” of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, it’s a pithy “Aphorisms attached to a suicide pact.” He quotes the much-cited last line of Gilbert Sorrentino’s short story, “The Moon in Its Flight”—that “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.”— and argues, “I thought art was the only twin life had.” Of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Shields comments more q uietly, “The book keeps getting larger and larger until it winds up being about nothing less than the melancholy of the human animal. Why are we so sad? How do we deal with loss? How do we deal with the ultimate loss?”
Most of the descriptions try to reach for brusqueness; not a few evade straightforward contemplation and simply choose incidental ties to the work cited (e.g. “I met the author once,” etc.); a mere handful admit to earnestness—but it’s the entries that manage a bit of all three that surprise (and fulfill the reader) the most. For Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries, for example, Shields offers a tidy summary of what the collection of journals contains, and an equally concise comment on Gray’s use of metaphor. And then—“Having read the diaries, I feel less lonely.” And then it was on to the next item of the list, and then the one after that. It’s those 17 pages—of 207—that hold the heart of Shields’ book. Those 17 pages are precisely what Shields wants to tell you—that here are the books that dared not try to save his life, only understood that his life needed saving—and it’s nestled amid all the land mines expected of him at this point in his career. It’s where Shields sounds truer; most of the book could only be admired for its bluster. There’s the exasperated justification of why he wrote a book that trumpeted “artistic plagiarism;” there, too, is the t oken rabble-rousing—the novel, for him, very much remains the obsolete form he first claimed it was four years ago: “The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.” Thankfully, beyond the 17-page enumeration, Shields allows for simpler, truer, more universal insights—the kinds of insights that an antiquarian like me (like most of us readers, I’ll wager) latches onto. Shields muses on detachment and having literature as the sole ent hrallment: “I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this—which is what makes it essential.” At his most charged, he releases a rallying cry: “I don’t want to read out of duty. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. I’m trying to stay awake and not b ored and not rote. I’m trying to save my life.” When Shields allows himself to tone down the belligerence, there’s a more weary tone to his narrative—but a keener one. It’s not unlike a mask slipping off every time—and witnessing that, alone, is worth the reading. I never liked a book I disagreed with so much, so much.
ILLUSTRATION TOF ZAPANTA
H I S B E S T M A N A T
TWO WAYS WITH SHELLFISH
I K E E A T L N A M A
MAN FOOD WITH MARK HIX
W
e have some of the world’s best shell-
fish in the UK, but we tend not to cook much of it at home. Whether that’s due to the fact that we don’t know what to do with it or that shellfish is generally seen as a pain to prepare, is open to debate. If we were in France, Spain or Portugal, we’d regularly be hitting local fish markets to fill our boots with a variety of molluscs and crustaceans. I reckon it’s about time we changed our shopping habits. As a country, we produce so much fantastic seafood that it seems a waste to see it all exported to Europe. Here, to help you get started, I’ve pulled together two recipes featuring shellfish you may never even have considered cooking with. Always buy your shellfish alive and from a trusted source. Closed shells are essential—avoid buying anything with open shells as your fishmonger shouldn’t be selling it in the first place. Oh, and crabs and lobsters should most certainly be crawling—unless of course they’ve already been cooked.
COCKLES, CHILLI AND GARLIC WITH SPAGHETTI SERVES 4
British cockles can be as rewarding as clams, and cost only a fraction of the price. I’m talking fresh cockles in the shell here, not the gritty ones you can buy off seafood stands. Most good fishmongers will stock live cockles or be able to get hold of them. Cockles need to be well rinsed under running cold water for a while and agitated using your hands every so often to remove any grit from their grooved shells. INGREDIENTS
SCRUMPY DEEP�FRIED OYSTERS W ITH WASABI MAYONNAISE SERVES 4
I often find these deep-fried beauties will lure those who think they don’t like oysters. Don’t be tempted to use native oysters for this as it’s a complete waste of good shellfish. Small to medium rock oysters are perfect. If you are not experienced at opening them, then just ask your fishmonger to shuck them for you—but keep the cupped half shells.
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INGREDIENTS
FOR THE MAYONAISSE
PHOTOGRAPHYY JASON LOWE
DIRECTIONS 1
2
3
4
DIRECTIONS 1
2
3
4
5
6
2
4
MAN AT HIS BEST
DRINKING
5
1
3
MAKE IT SUNTORY TIME. ALSO NIKKA AND CHICHIBU TIME. AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON JAPANESE WHISKY BY DAVID WONDRICH
I
n any well-stocked modern
liquor store, you’ll find a shelf near the Scotches holding an odd assortment of malt whiskies in the Scotch style, but made everywhere from Austria to Australia, India to Indiana. “World whiskies,” they’re called: whiskies distilled (for the most part) from 100 percent malted barley in old-fashioned pot stills, just like they make in the Scottish Highlands. That’s no coincidence: The vast majority of them are from distilleries whose construction was inspired by the single-malt boom of the 1980s and 1990s. (Before that, almost all Scottish malt whisky was used in blends.) There is, however, one clutch of bottles whose roots are much deeper. At the
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beginning of the last century, Japan was rapidly modernizing itself, following the model of another island nation of polite tea drinkers: the United Kingdom. The process encompassed everything from heavy industry to architecture to fashion and culture. It even affected drinks: In 1918, Masataka Taketsuru, the scion of an old sake-brewing family, went to Scotland to learn how to make real whisky. When he returned, he set up a malt-whisky distillery at Yamazaki, in Osaka, for Suntory (which, by the way, just bought Jim Beam). That was in 1923, and it’s still running, making Japanese malt in a still room that could be in Speyside if not for the bamboo forest outside the door. Until the 1990s, pretty much all the malt Japan made was used in blends,
just as in Scotland. The rise of Scottish malts changed that, albe it slowly. The first Japanese malt available in America, fittingly from Yamazaki, came out only in 2007. Until a little more than a year ago, that and a few other bottlings from Suntory were it for Japanese whisky here. Fortunately, now we also have a range from Nikka (the company Taketsuru founded when he left Suntory) and the beginnings of one from Chichibu, a new distillery built from the ashes, figuratively speaking, of an old one that fel l to development. One peculiarity of Japanese whisky is that distillers there don’t sell barrels to one another like they do in Scotland. That means if you’re making a blend, you’ve got to make all the components yourself: the rich malt, the smooth malt, the peaty malt, the grain whisky (the lighter, cheaper stuff used in blends to stretch out the malts). Thus, a single malt like the [1] YAMAZAKI 12 YEAR OLD can nonetheless be comprised of a variety of whiskies. (By using a range of still shapes, peat levels, and b arrel types, the distillery makes nearly 100 different types of malt.) You wouldn’t know it from the whisky, which is clean and harmonious but has an intriguing whiff of incense that you won’t find in Scottish whiskies. Suntory’s other malt distillery, Hakushu, gives us the [2] HAKUSHU HEAVILY PEAT� ED, a fine example of something that usually would be blended with other malts: smoky as all hell, to be sure, but also light on the tongue and intensely spicy. Even spicier is the [3] NIKKA COFFEY GRAIN WHISKY. Yes, they know how to spell: The name comes from the columnstyle Coffey still in which it’s made. Most grain whisky is pretty mild stuff. Not this: There’s so much oak spice in the finish that you could use it in place of Fireball. That same spice crops up in [4] NIKKA’S TAKETSURU 17 YEAR OLD , a mix of whiskies from the company’s Yoichi and Miyagikyo distilleries. Here, though, it’s cushioned by sweet grain and a little peaty smoke. The lovely, rich [5] MIYAGIKYO 12 YEAR OLD is similar but without the smoke. That characteristic spice comes from aging in wood in a warm cli mate. You can taste it even in a young whisky, such as the �6� CHICHIBU ICHIRO’S MALT: THE FIRST, clean and straightforward but with a zip to it you wouldn’t find in a Scotch of the same age—which is why we like world whiskies in the first place. Same process, different results.
I DON’T WANT TO INVEST IN A MOVIE UNLESS I KNOW IT’S GOOD. ARE THERE RELIABLE PORNOGRAPHY REVIEWS?
B E S T T H I S M A N A
S E X
BY STACEY WOODS
Not really. With recent cut backs, most major media outlets have had to lay off their porn bureau entirely, so I’m afraid that the golden age of Gene Fistkel and Rogered Ebert is long gone. Which is too bad, because we’ve never needed it more. You see, it’s easy to judge the quality of a mainstream movie: The stars pose for pictures with foreign journalists, the film wins awards, and then we know the film is good. But with pornography, other influences—sometimes even unscrupulous ones—can come into play. “The majority of pornreview Web sites out there appear to be funded, directly or indirectly, by porn companies,” says Lynsey G., who covers porn for McSweeney’s. Your best bet, she says, is to crank up your computer and visit the Web sites Fleshbot and Xbiz, “particularly if you are interested in feature films and porn parodies.” (Because we all know that it’s the porn that gets you, but the parody that keeps you coming back.) Then you can start to get a free feel for the kind of porn you think you’d like to invest in and explore your many options for targeted porn solutions. “Subscription Web sites are the best way to go,” says G., and she’s probably right. Your monthly gift of just pennies a day goes toward financing new Swarovski crystal
factories all over the world, and it will save you from the indignity of having to take Blacks on Blondes 6 back to the store. SO, I’M LOOKING FOR A PO� LITE WAY TO REFER TO HAV� ING SEX WITH A WOMAN’S BREASTS.
I think you just said it: “Sex with a woman’s breasts” is pretty good. It’s perfectly appropriate when testifying before Congress and can even be added to your résumé if you have no other skills. The clinical term, if you’re interested, is “intermammary intercourse.” “Intermamma-
ry,” says Susan Quilliam, relationship psychologist and author of The New Joy of Sex, “as the act is performed between the breasts, not into them.” (That would be intramammary, which is rarely practiced outside of killers’ basements and some disreputable cosmetic-surgery centers.) Of course, there are other ways in which people refer to the act, but I don’t recommend them. Jesse Sheidlower, president of the American Dialect Society and author of The F-Word , speaks of a “Hawaiian muscle fuck,” which seems a bit ambiguous, since I’m sure Dog and Beth Chap-
man aren’t the only ones who do it. Additionally, James Joyce said something about “rosy-tipped bubbies” in a letter to his wife once, but I don’t think he’d want the whole quote repeated here, since it’s hardly his best effort. It’s no “heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” or anything. All things considered, you might just say “titty fucking,” like all well-adjusted people do, particularly if you’re engaged in it and most definitely if you paid for them. Got a sex question of your own? E-mail it to us at
[email protected].
TUTANKHAMEN, EXERCISE, AND BURIED PENIS A study in Advanced Male Urethral and Genital Reconstructive Surgery found that rising obesity has led to an increas ed number European Journal of Health Law revealed that Danish sperm banks h ave such high supply, ied with an erect penis to encourage the belief that he was the god Osiris.
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ILLUSTRATION
MR. BINGO
ADVERTISINGFEATURE
S T Y L E
A G E N D A
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SKY HIGH The skyline of Ortigas will be forever transformed by Marco Polo Ortigas Manila, the �irst purpose-built �ive-star Marco Polo hotel in the country offering 316 spacious and well-designed rooms and suites and two Continental Club �loors. Marco Polo is the �irst sky hotel in the country, with �loors and a sky lobby accessible via high-speed elevators. It also houses four signature dining destinations: Café Pronto, Cucina, Lung Hin, and their sky bar, Vu’s. A ballroom, large function rooms, a gallery and business lounge, a �itness center, a spa, and an in�inity pool ensure only the most luxurious experience for its guests. Visit facebook.com/MarcoPoloOrtigasManila, follow @MarcoPoloManila on Twitter and Instagram, or experience MPMDining.com. For more information contact (632) 720 7777, book online at www.marcopolohotels.com or email:
[email protected].
EAST MEETS WEST Now in its fourth season, the Onitsuka Tiger x Andrea Pompilio collection is a perfect partnership between the true sportswear spirit of the Japanese brand and the cool and international style of Italian fashion designer Andrea Pompilio. The collection continues to showcase the designer’s a�inity for prints while simultaneously chanelling the gritty urban aesthetic of downtown Los Angeles. A truly eclectic, yet harmonious mix of in�luences converge at this collaboration, making something fresh and avant garde out of a brand with an established heritage in understated sportswear. Visit www.onitsukatiger.com for more information.
A VISIONARY EVENTS CENTER Following the heritage of Astoria’s successful resorts across the country is Chardonnay — an impressive events space located in a prime area off Capitol Commons in Ortigas. Chardonnay is designed like a modern art gallery and equipped with state-of-the-art audio, video, and lighting systems, as well as designer furniture and décor. With room for 500 plus two smaller function rooms, Chardonnay by Astoria is the ultimate space for any grand event. For inquiries and reservations please contact 687-1111 local 8011/8111, or email jameiah.
[email protected]. Visit www.astoriahotelsandresorts.com to get a 360 degree virtual tour of Chardonnay by Astoria.
A P R I L 2 0 1 4
AT EASE
There’s a time for everything. Time to whip out the big guns, tha t elegant ticker from your da ddy’s daddy, for dinners at the Pen or parties with your boss. And time to put on something less precious, more laid back. This timepiece from Tsovet sets the pace for diversions that, well, make you forget about the ti me. In place of the 10 marker, there is a zero, a minimalist �lourish that softens the stress of the passing of a second (late for work), a minute (gone over a deadline), or an hour (missed your �ligh t). That unhurried attitude can be attributed to Tsovet’s geography. Born in California, smack-dab in the middle of the aerospace industry, the watchmaker fuses the spirit of sunshine (a camel leath er band) with avionic details (a gunmetal case that recalls a cockpit gauge) to create what feels like a worn-in favorite piece. Wear this on the weekend or, really, anytime you w ish to untether yourself from the rigors of the clock. Watch (P17,500) by Tsovet at Rustan’s, shirt and black and brown bracelets, both by H.E. by Mango, and bag (P45,000) by Tumi.
PHOTOGRAPH MAAN PALMIERY STYLING CLIFFORD OLANDAY AND ANTON MIRANDA ART DIRECTION EDRIC DELA ROSA LOCATION PHAT PHO, SERENDRA, TAGUIG CITY, +632 804 16 46
APRIL 2014 ESQUIRE
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U R O H S , H E O R T F V O F L A N D G I N A L L S , A . S S N N N S P A S I T I O I O E E R T T H O M P O I N A C R O M B P O C
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HARD�EDGED HARDWARE AND A RUBBER STRAP TOUGHEN UP THE GLINT OF GOLD. Watch
by Savoy, sport jacket (P6,450) by Perry Ellis, and shirt, chinos, and tie, all by H.E. by Mango.
PHOTOGRAPHS MAAN PALMIERY STYLING CLIFFORD OLANDAY AND ANTON MIRANDA ART DIRECTION EDRIC DELA ROSA LOCATION PHAT PHO, SERENDRA, TAGUIG CITY, +632 804 16 46
APRIL 2014 ESQUIRE
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MILITARY STYLE IS RECREATED WITH THE PAIRING OF BLACK AND TAN AND THE ANTIQUE FINISHING OF CASE AND BAND.
Watch by Bell & Ross at Lucerne and shirt (P2,850) by Perry Ellis.
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LAYERS OF BLACK GIVE WEIGHT TO THE SMALLER FOOTPRINT OF THIS WATCH. Watch
by Hublot at Lucerne, jacket and bracelet, both by H.E. by Mango, shirt (P2,850) by Perry Ellis, and sunglasses by Lacoste at Ideal Vision.
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4 1 0 2 . 4 0 E L Y T S E R I U Q S E
THE ONLY TIME WHEN BEING BLUE IN THE FACE IS A GOOD THING IS WHEN IT LIGHTS UP YOUR WRIST. Watch
(P9,500) by Swatch, shirt (P2,950) by Perry Ellis, and trousers by H.E. by Mango.
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4 1 0 2 . 4 0 E L Y T S E R I U Q S E
VIEWED FROM A ROBUST SCREEN, THE UNDISGUISED MOVEMENTS OF DISCS, DIALS, AND HANDS MAKE READING TIME A SPECTATOR SPORT. Watch by
Sevenfriday and shirt by H.E. by Mango.
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FIG. 2. TRETORN NYLITE C ANVAS A century’s-worth of Swedish and Scandinavian heritage courses through Tretorn, as seen in its understated design. The all-white Nylite Canvas is a classic, a favorite of people of all ages, not only for that delicate aesthetic but also for its durable construction.
FIELD NOTES THIS MONTH IN ACCESSORIES.
FIG. 1. HERMÈS C APE COD TONNEAU GM SILVER The latest version retains its curves and lugs, but comes with a refreshed dial, nine interchangeable straps, and a case made of special silver alloy, a composition exclusive to Hermès. And don't be afraid of that wrap-around strap. Think of it as a leather band that adds casual elegance.
FIG. 3. COLE H AAN LUNAR GRAND C AMO WINGTIPS The hybrid footwear that combines the form of a dress shoe with the comfort of a sneaker (Nike's Lunarlon technology) releases a slew of new models, including this suede wingtip in—yes!— forest-green camo.
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ILLUSTRATIONS ALYSSE ASILO
D AUPHINE-SHAPED PULSOMETER SCALE
HOUR - AND MINUTE-HANDS
MONOPUSHER CHRONOGRAPH BUTTON
GOLD-PLATED R OMAN NUMERALS
MINERVA M ANUFACTURE ARROWHEAD
BLUED STEEL ELAPSED -TIME HANDS
FIG. 4. MONTBLANC MEISTERSTÜCK HERITAGE PULSOGRAPH 18-KARAT ROSE GOLD CASE
The 90-year-old heritage of the legendary writing instrument is translated into an equally stately timepiece.
FIG. 6. TUMI B ASHFORD DUFFEL
This duffel from the 2014 Santa Monica Collection exudes the easiness of Southern California: a relaxed shape, a roomy interior, and clean detailing, including that distinctive X on its exterior and a tan accent on the handle. Your weekend companion is made from supple vachetta and glazed leathers.
FIG. 5. TOD'S LEATHER LOAFER
It's all in the details. A leather loafer in stringent black is made special with hand-done finishing (skins are tanned and polished to give its surface variances of light and dark), a side buckle in nickel-plated metal, and exposed stitching. The hotstamped monogram is also a nice t ouch. Wear everywhere.
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4 1 0 2 . 4 0 E L Y T S E R I U Q S E
ASK NICK
THE ESQUIRE FASHION DIRECTOR W ILL NOW TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS
My husband very much wants a Rolex. Dude’s earned it, so I’m happy to oblige. This weekend, he became hot on the idea of buying a “vintage” Rolex—one manufactured in ’68, the year he was born—and he’s found one on eBay. Is this a bad idea?
fig. 1
AM Y JO HN SO N M I L A N , I T A LY
Buying online can produce some interesting bargains, and I’ve found some great pieces in my time. But with big-brand wristwatches, it is also fraught with risks. With a name as sought after as Rolex [Fig. 1, Vintage Oyster Perpetual Sea-Dweller] , there can be
all sorts of dodginess: What looks like a real vintage Rolex case or dial may have a fake Rolex movement or a cheap mechanical one. Although there are plenty of reputable watch dealers on eBay, you have no way of knowing until you do business with them which is which. My recommendation: Find a vintage dealer with a brick-and-mortar operation in your neck of the woods. You might pay more than you would online, but consider it a down payment on peace of mind. What’s the secret to a smoothlooking dress shirt, like Kevin Spacey’s in House of Cards? Is it the material, cut, or quality of the undershirt?
keep things nice and even— as do more body-conscious cuts. They’re becoming increasingly common as men embrace a) fitness and b) the clothes to show off the fruits of said fitness. I can’t help wondering if it’s not also a state-of-mind thing. Spacey [Fig. 2] (or at least his character) cares about what his shirt is doing, and it shows.
fi g. 2
I’m seeking to improve my personal look and have decided on a monocl e [Fig. 3]. They’re stylish, classy, and, I feel, offer an air of dignity. Two questions: Where can I �ind one, and . . .
The three-day beard growth looks virile and rakish on a young man, but if your beard is graying, don’t you just look like a wino after a three-day bender?
DON VAUGHAN RALEIGH, N. C.
JAN KIT CHE L PORTLAND, OREG.
I’m going to stop you right there, Don. Don. Don. Don. Don’t. I have some old Canali suits that are in great shape but have pleats. Some even have double pleats. Can a tailor effectively remove the pleats to create �lat-front trousers?
tailor, is no simple matter, since he’ll have to find a way to remove this excess cloth somewhere at the sides. It’s doable but can be time-consuming and costly, especially if it messes up the side pockets. Ultimately, only you can say if it’s worth it. Since the jacket will conceal the pleats most of the ti me, I’d file it under “life’s too short.” You can always go flat-front next time.
fi g. 3
MICHAEL KOTLER NEW YORK, N. Y.
STEVE D. ARL INGT ON, VA.
Happens to the best of us. I currently have much more than a three-day stubble going on, and it is gray, certainly grayer than the hair on my head. Occasionally it bothers me. I even went to the lengths of buying a packet of Just for Men recently. I couldn’t go through with it in the end, but I am considering a boob job.
Pleated-front pants [Fig. It’s a combination of all the things you mention. Undershirts can have a useful smoothing effect—presumably the friction between shirt and undershirt helps
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4, suit by Canali] are intend-
ed to give more volume in the thigh . Which is handy if you need it, but also means there is more cloth. Reworking them, even for a competent
fig . 4
GOT A QUESTION FOR NICK SULLIVAN? E�MAIL HIM AT ESQSTYLE�HEARST.COM.
A P R I L 2 0 1 4
E Y E S
THE EYES HAVE IT 60
You’re busy. Too busy to walk your dog, pick up the cake, go on a date. And certainly too busy to a dd another step in your grooming routine. Reconsider. Even if your face can bounce back from a night of little sleep, the less resilient skin around your eyes give away the real story. You’re dead tired. A squeeze of eye cream softens the telltale signs of fatigue, dark rings and puffy pouches that make you look like a ghoul. This one, from Lab Series, takes the skin-saving �ight on two fronts. A blend of 10 antioxidants neutralizes the damage caused by free radicals, the stuff that breaks down skin, while peptides help the production of collagen, the stuff that repairs it. It’s a high-tech salve that helps you appear more awake or in peak condition— even if you’re not. And that’s worth the extra step. Age Rescue Eye Ther apy (P1,995) by Lab Serie s and sunglasse s by Carrera at Ideal Vision.
ESQUIRE APRIL 2014
PHOTOGRAPHS PAUL DEL ROSARIO
STYLING CLIFFORD
OLANDAY ART
DIRECTION EDRIC DELA ROSA
1
2
4
3
THE SQUEEZE
E Y E S
HOW YOU PUT IT O N IS AS IMPO RTANT AS WHAT’S IN IT.
1 The Body Shop Moisture White Brightening Eye Cream Use the �lat-head applicator to massage the cream into your skin. The action also stimulates circulation, which helps reduce the look of fatigue. Shisho extract is the magic ingredient that lightens dark rings. 2 L’Oreal Paris Men Expert Hydra Energetic Ice Cold Eye Roller The heavy-handed bene�its from its hands-free application. A roller ball delivers the Vitamin C-and-ca�iene-infused serum with light strokes. 3 Shiseido Men Total Revitalizer Eye A classic point end dispenses the precise amount, a tiny dot. This reinforces �irmness through the production of hyaluronic acid (the stuff that increases volume). The formula is also thick. When applied, it’s as if it holds everything up. 4 Kiehl’s Facial Fuel Eye De-Puffer The easiest to use. No dragging or pulling. One sweep of the stick covers the entire under-eye area. And that solid form is actually soft, almost creamy, when applied. The cooling effect is also refreshing.
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4 1 0 2 . 4 0 G N I M O O R G E R I U Q S E
E Y E S
THE NEXT STEP WHEN CREAMS AREN’T CUTTING IT, CONSIDER NEEDLE WORK. Dark circles are shadows cast by a web of
blood vessels. And they’re visible because the skin under your eyes is notoriously thin. As you grow older, that skin gets �iner, the rings more prominent. You can’t stop aging, but you can control it. Speed it up with lack of sleep and lots of stress, which, in turn, make the skin more translucent, or slow it down with the help of your dermatologist. Dr. Paulo Asuncion of Vietura recommends four rounds of Platelet Rich Plasma, a treatment that softens the shadows by regenerating skin cells. The procedure is non-surgical, but it does involve needles, �irst to extract 20 milliliters of blood, the source of the platelets, and then to deliver the plasma. It doesn’t hurt. After 45 minutes with topical anesthesia slathered all over your face, you hardly feel the needle breaking into your skin. The doctor does his work with a sure hand, injecting the plasma into depressed areas—worry furrows, marionette lines, the hollows underneath your eyes. What you will feel is this: the liquid tracing a squiggly line as it goes in, and, seconds after, the injected area becoming hot and heavy. It’s as if the solution is working already, stimulating the production of collagen, which provides that lift, that buffer that minimizes the darkness. Of course, it takes more time than that. A week after one session sees a subtle change. The circles appear less aggressive. You look a little better. No one may notice yet (three more rounds achieve maximal effect), but that’s the point. You don’t want to appear as if you’ve had something done. You want to look like you’ve been taking it easy, eschewing all stress. —CO SOFITEL PHILIPPINE PLAZA MANILA, CCP COMPLEX, ROXAS BOULEVARD, PASAY CITY. +632 551 55 55 EXTE N� SION 5000 AND 5098.
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Sunglasses by Carrera at Ideal Vision.
SUMMERTIME A RA RE F RUI T C REAT ES A N EV ERG REE N SC ENT.
o doubt about it, summer is in full swing. And just as you’ve traded your chunky sweater for a linen shirt, swap out that complex musk for something pure, something green. At first whiff, L’Eau d’Issey pour Homme Yuzu reminds you of the gooey insides of a young stalk snapped in two. But what feels like green things is actually yuzu, a Japanese citrus that is like the love child of a lemon and a mandarin. Fans of the 1994 original, from which this limited edition iteration is based on, will recognize it. They’ll also notice that the rare fruit has been turned up throughout—amplified over nutmeg, cedar, and vetiver—to add an edge of exuberance. The rest of the composition smooths out, soft and sweet, like the close of a song
N
PHOTOGRAPH PAUL DEL ROSARIO STYLING CLIFFORD OLANDAY ART DIRECTION EDRIC DELA ROSA
A P R I L 2 0 1 4 E S Q U I R E 63
NOTES & ESSAYS A.R. SAMSON ON MONEY MICHIKO YAMAMOTO ON DEBT LOURD DE VEYRA ON GOD JOEL TABORA, S.J. ON FAITH CRISTINA P. HIDALGO ON DEATH ELY BUENDIA ON LOVE LAV DIAZ ON PAIN MANUEL L. QUEZON III ON POWER EDITED BY SARGE LACUESTA E R E H
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GELOY CONCEPCION AND VEEJAY VILLAFRANCA ARTWORKS BY ROBERT LANGENEGGER AND MIDEO
CRUZ
O G S T I D E R C
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Taxing Religion in the House of Zaccheus, Robert Langenegger, 2008
NOTES & ESSAYS
S Y A S S E &
I MONEY IN THE POCKET WALLET BEHAVIOR IS A SUB-SECTOR
S E T O N
OF MALE ANTHROPOLOGY
A. R. SA MS ON
Money is not always the generic item it is assumed to be. There is the assumption that money can’t buy happiness or makes the world go round. But the first thing to ask is what money one is talking about. There is future money, which we spend now using a plastic card against future payments from salaries not yet received or donations from kindly benefactors in exchange for services like landscape gardening, the second oldest profession, or prizes from an afternoon game show. Even farther out in terms of availability are such monies (yes, it has a plural form) as expected shares in inheritances, not always a sure amount, profits from the sale of a painting or condo, or a windfall from some investment where one is only an arranger or intermediary and maybe a future whistle blower. Money then can be a hazy abstraction. So when somebody is selling something to another and wondering if the prospective buyer has money, he has to figure out what money he is looking at
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and what the buyer is laying claim to as if he can afford the price being quoted for the object of desire. Just in terms of time and availability, one can see the money that one has or can make a claim to varies in amounts and dependability. The only sure money which personal financial consultants want you to count on is present money, which is not the same as the present value of money—an economic concept which is also hypothetical and can’t buy you a Gucci bag here and now. The present value of money is a construct where future revenue streams from different investment options are brought to the present using a putative interest rate so that revenue streams of varying schedules and time frames can be compared, apples to apples. See, I told you it was an abstraction. Present money then is cash in the pocket, bank accounts (not set aside for amortizations for cars or houses), and maybe mutual funds, and stocks that are traded daily. Stocks too fluctuate in value and become cash only when sold, but not always for the same amount spent in acquiring them…and not always for a higher number. For shopping and paying of unplanned activities like pruning the bushes, we have to limit money to the one in the pocket and the unassigned bank accounts. The conservative person especially seduced by impulse buying will only treat as money what is in the wallet. Of course, that amount also includes the plastic cards that take a dip of future
money but limits this to what is expected in the next sixty days. Even with the credit card’s seduction for you to spen d more by stretching out the payment into “minimum amounts” to be paid every billing period, the spending of future money needs to be reined in. Here we come to the crux of the matter. What is pocket money? This classification already implies a budgeted amount for discretionary spending. It has removed the monthly obligations like rent, amortizations, booked vacations, and tuition fees for those with such commitments. To understand the dynamics of money in the pocket, let’s limit our search to an ordinary man’s pocket. The wallet is the repository of money in the topmost level of discretionary spending. It is in fact meant to be spent, though one should not let slip the thought that it needs to also be replenished for the following day. Still, the wallet in the pocket defines the person and his habits which can be projected to his spending pattern and future solvency. While the description that follows may be misconstrued as autobiographical, even narcissistic, somewhat like a financial “selfie,” it is enough of a representative composite that others can perhaps relate to it. Or maybe they can’t. Life is full of surprises. Wallet behavior is a sub- sector of male anthropology. It is the financial equivalent of Margaret Mead’s “Growing up in Samoa,” a work too that had later been found as unscientific and unsupported
by actual practices in that tribe. Still, financial behavior can be indexed to how the wallet functions in the life of a male. Or it may not. So what? A right-handed man usually carries his wallet in the right back pocket of his pants where constant wear (including sitting on it and bumping doors open with it) bends it to the curve of that posterior cheek. Medical problems can arise from this habit. Intrusion of an unusually thick wad in the back pouch while driving can restrict blood circulation. It can put a tilt to one side that affects the steering wheel turn. A friend discovered this effect after complaining of shooting pains in his hip. A number of doctors he saw could not figure out the ailment. The last one asked to see his wallet and immediately knew what was wrong. The portable bible heft of the wallet caused the hip aches and the patient was asked to either switch to a thinner wallet or move its location to the front pocket. He did both and permanently rid himself of his pain. Forgetting one’s wallet at home, or worse, losing it or leaving it in some inconvenient location, makes one aware of the ties to that personal accessory which holds more than pocket money. Here is a partial table of contents equivalent to present money. Assorted plastic gives the wallet its heft. The small plastic rectangles include credit, discount , VIP, ATM cards, driver’s license, and memberships in clubs. While wallets provide slots for plastic cards, these become quickly inadequate as more and more are wedged into the limited space. The wallet also serves as photo album. It’s not enough to allow for ID photos. An accordion plastic case accommodates photos of travels (The fuzzy photo is my secretary taking dictation), miniaturization of citations and plaques. What about calling cards? A bunch is always on hand for giving out to old classmates (What are you doing nowadays?) and business associates. These cards include those received and not yet filed away…in the circular cabinet. Folded pieces of paper include to-do lists, other people’s cards, Comelec registration, credit card receipts, newspaper clippings, and a recipe for chili con carne. Let’s not forget the original purpose as receptacle for money of both paper and coin specimens. From this inventory, one can see how a lost wallet can cause anxiety attacks,
not just from required cancellation notices for credit cards but all the irreplaceable items tucked in there, not everything readily accounted for. The ideal wallet size is small, maybe 20 percent bigger than a calling card, thickness limited to 2 cm. The narrow space this affords requires selectivity, reducing, if not totally eliminating, photos which can be transferred to the smart phone. It means trimming down credit cards, carrying only those to be used for the day. Coins need to be ditched altogether. Frequent removal and replacement can result in confusion, eventually misplacing items. This is solved by having two wallets, one to carry around, and the other for filing items not used regularly, like international credit cards and resort club memberships. A third wallet is necessary to foil muggers. This one is readily given up at the slightest threat, containing as it does small bills, senior citizen’s card and expired credit cards to call attention to the thief and cause him problems at the store. A thick wallet doesn’t necessarily have more money. Its owner just carries a lot more things with him and is likely to also own a Swiss knife that has a foldable shovel for an instant latrine in the wilds and a solar operated flashlight. You can tell the character of a person by the things he puts in his wallet. A thick wallet points to the insecurity of a partygoer who loads up on his buffet plate fearful of running out if he has to come back. This just-in-case mentality loads up inventory in the wallet. Truly rich and powerful people don’t even carry wallets, as these spoil the lines of their suits. They are accompanied by others with thick pouches that have wallets along with night-scopes and heavy artillery. Many get attached to their wallets, even if these are battered, falling apart and no longer closing flat like crocodile jaws. It is a momentous day indeed when one changes wallets and tries to squeeze the old stuff into the new and sleeker model designed for the simple purpose of carrying Euros. What happened to the money? It’s still what’s in the wallet. There should be more of it than the other stuff. Wealth then is a balance between money and the other stuff that can’t get you a new wallet. A.R. SAMSON
Essayist, fictionist and columnist
II AN EXCE RPT FROM AN UNPRODUCED SCREENPLAY MICHIKO YAMAMOTO
INT. TONY’S RESIDENCE. NIGHT.
Amidst all the coins and paper bills being counted, Edgar tries to stay calm as he finishes relating everything to Tony. OBET Kinuwento mo na ba ‘to sa mga pulis? EDGAR Wala ho silang maitutulong sa ‘kin. TONY Hindi mo na kailangang hingin sa amin Edgar. We will pray for you and your family every day— EDGAR Hindi dasal ang kailangan ko, Bishop. Kailangan ko ng pambayad sa kanila.
& S E T O N
Tony shifts in his seat. TONY So what are you asking from us? EDGAR Nakakahiya man pero kung puwede ho sanang maibalik sa ‘min yung donasyon ni tatay. Yung isang milyon.
Tony tries not to look shocked at the request. Edgar reads his expression, but he pushes himself to continue, swallowing his pride. EDGAR Yung iba, uutangin ko ho sana sa sim bahan. Bigyan niyo lang ako ng dalawang buwan. Magbabayad ho ako. TONY Edgar— EDGAR Kahit magdagdag ho ako ng interes. Hindi ko kayo tatakasan. Pag sinabi ko, sinabi ko.
In desperation, Edgar kneels in front of the Bishop.
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EDGAR Wala na ho talaga ‘kong ibang malalapitan. Parang awa ni’yo na Bishop.
Tony touches Edgar’s shoulder. Itatayo siya. TONY Get up son. Get up.
wife and their daughter too.
Tony gestures for Obet to lead Edgar out of the office. Obet looks surprised that it’s over. But he complies. OBET Edgar, halika na—
Edgar refuses to go and faces Tony. TONY (to staff ) Linda, kumuha ka nga ng tubig.
Mauupo naman si Edgar. Hiyang-hiya siya na yuyuko para sapuhin ang ulo. Linda hands him a glass of water. Edgar takes it but doesn’t drink it.
EDGAR Hindi ho ako nanghihingi Bishop. Nangungutang ako. Hindi para ipambili ng bahay o ipangsugal. Para lang mabuhay ang pamilya ko.
mess. Drawers are open. Kaye’s jewelry box is emptied. He enters the bathroom to see Kaye seated on the toilet bowl and crying. Her hair is disheveled. She has scratches on her arms. She’s holding a small blade in front of her wrist. Trembling. It’s obvious she cannot do it. EDGAR Ano’ng gagawin mo?! KAYE (babbling) Ed, s orry. Hindi ko alam na. Anong gagawin natin? Natatakot ako— EDGAR Akin na yan!
Tony stands up to face Edgar calmly. Edgar sees Tony shedding some tears. He’s shaking his head in sadness .
S Y A S S E
TONY Our enemy is at work here. Wag kang patalo sa kanya Edgar. The devil is trying to weaken you and take you away from Yeshua.
TONY Edgar, I would give you the money if it were mine. Pero lahat ng ‘to pagaari ng simbahan. Hindi kami puwedeng magbigay na lang ng financial help sa bawat taong lumapit sa amin. Kahit utang pa—
Tony lays his hand over Edgar’s head. Obet does the same.
EDGAR Papatayin nila kami!
TONY He will not abandon you my son. Yeshua is alive! He shares your pain! He shares your sufferings! Almighty Yeshua, give your humble son strength to overcome the devil! Release your son from doubt and give him faith! That serpent will not defeat us ! No Yeshua! Nata ipo victi santi loro! Soto la da ba ka lesti! Praise Yeshua the most powerful!
& S E T O N
OBET Hallelujah! Praise you Yeshua!
Tony looks exhausted and flops down on his seat. He sees Edgar looking at him expectantly. TONY Buksan mo lang ang isip at puso mo, Edgar. Yeshua will show you the way. Ipapakita niya sa ‘yo ang solusyon sa problemang ‘to. Magtiwala ka lang sa kanya.
Edgar cannot believe his ears. TONY Obet, ihatid mo s iya sa bahay. Use the service van. Pray over his
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E S Q U I R E AP R I L 2 0 14
Tony continues as if not hearing Edgar. TONY —kahit ga’no pa kaimportante. Because we are a church. Hindi tayo bangko o kooperatiba but a church! All we c an offer you is our prayer and our support— EDGAR (interrupts him) Hindi namin kailangan ang dasal n’yo!
Edgar turns to leave but Tony stops and holds his arm. TONY Edgar, kung manini wala ka lang sa kapangyarihan ni Yeshua, wala kang kakatakutang kahit ano—
He approaches and takes the blade from her angrily. Kaye doesn’t fight. Edgar nicks himself in the process but doesn’t mind the cut. EDGAR Isipin mo yung anak mo! Ano sa palagay mo pakiramdam niya ngayon ha?! Tumayo ka diyan! Ayusin mo sarili mo!
Edgar walks out angrily. Parang nabuhusan ng tubig si Kaye. It is the first time she sees Edgar like this. INT. EDGAR’S HOUSE. SAME NIGHT.
Edgar rushes into his house. They’re wet from the light rain outside. Manny is behind him. EDGAR Kaye! Angel!
Then he almost slips. When he looks, he sees a small pool of blood on the floor and a hand. Manny also sees it. Manang and Angel come out of their hiding place. Manny sees them in time. MANNY Diyan lang kayo! ANGEL Ma! Nasa’n si mama?
Sa sobrang galit, aambahan ni Edgar si Tony. He almost punches Tony, who looks scared and immediately covers his face. Obet stops Edgar in time.
Edgar’s phone rings. He answers it.
Edgar looks furious but doesn’t say anything. He pushes Obet out of the way and angrily storms out.
BOOMBOOM (V.O.) Buhay pa asawa mo. Hindi na nga lang siya kumpleto.
INT. EDGAR’S HOUSE.
EDGAR Putangina ka. Nakiusap ako sa ‘yo ng maayos.
BEDROOM. SAME NIGHT.
Edgar enters the bedroom and sees the
Kulo, detail, Mideo Cruz, 2011
Boomboom sounds crazy and out of control. BOOMBOOM (V.O.) Fuck you man! You made me do this! Fuck! Kasalanan n i’yo ‘to! Now, you’ll either give us the money tomorrow or you’ll find your dead wife’s bloated body floating in the Pasig-fucking-polluted-river!
Edgar looks more determined than ever. EDGAR Darating ako. MICHIKO YAMAMOTO
Screenwriter
III DEAR GOD LIKE IT OR NOT MY CONCEPT OF GOD LOOKS LIKE THE DUDE IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
LOURD DE VEYRA
Sorry to disturb you, but allow me to introduce myself. Wait, this is absurd. You know me, definitely. You being
all-powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, and all that—Creator of everything and I’d like to think that “everything” includes myself and even Justin Bieber. You know what I do, what I just ate, the color of my underwear on the first day of sixth grade and what I’m going to do at exactly 3:30 a.m. later. You know exactly the number of strands of hair desperately clinging on my tragic follicles, or the Venn diagram of acne on my face. Oh, and about that thing with you-knowwho last week, well, I was hungover. You do understand, right? I have, after all, been taught all my life about your boundless compassion. As you may very well know, I have not been attending mass since, well, I’ve lost track. It’s been decades, and those last few years it’s always been about making Mother happy (that’s actually more for her succor than my personal sense of piety. She can get more furious than Moses about the state of my soul’s salvation). But, dear God, I hope that those years of intense prayer from grade school to high school would have more than made up for it. Remember? I used to look more solemn than Gloria Arroyo receiving communion from a Pajero bishop. Personally I find the Latin mass much more engaging—the silence, the atmosphere of pure ritual, the mystery of an alien language. I agree with Joseph Campbell that Vatican II has robbed the mass of its solemnity—now it’s like
That’s Entertainment, with bad jean la bels, sandos, noisy brats, and mini-skirts. I disdain sermons—especially those that stretch on for infinity. I find absurd the notion that a human being can rant on for 30 minutes presuming to know what God thinks. I’m writing because those heathens at Esquire Philippines have asked me to write an essay on God, which is to say, you, or depending on whose stylebook, You. I must say it would be quite a task, considering my day job requires me to present the weather and insult people (by the way, I’m not complaining. I have the best job in the world. And thanks for not making me work for Globe customer service). That, plus the fact that engagement in social media has vastly diminished my capacity for profound reflection. I have decided to become eight years old once again and just fire off a letter. I’m not really sure—this is like shadowboxing, or those Buddhist faithful who launch prayer lanterns off to the sky. Does the fact that this letter takes on the second person confirm my belief in your existence? Twenty-five years ago I would have unequivocally s aid, “yes.” I couldn’t just shake off eight years of Dominican education. Although there was one point in high school life when the seeds of doubt were planted by that XTC song from which this letter pilfers its title. Where I came from, that seemed like dangerously excommunicable shit.
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S Y A S S E & S E T O N
Remember: I grew up in households adorned with huge wooden rosaries, crucifixes, Santo Niños, and Virgin Marys. When the clock struck 6 pm we switched on the light above a glassencased Jesus that looked extra creepy when a red bulb was used to light it. I have a mother who still raises her hand above my head à la Jimmy Swaggart every time I nurse a fever. Thomistic philosophy has its virtues— how beautifully simple, especially the theory of the First Cause (and while we’re on the subject of St. Thomas, is it really true that you made his manuscript on the Trinity float from the Notre Dame altar as a gesture of critical approval?). But then again, it would seem like a dead-end notion—the impossibility of demonstrating the existence of God, except as an article of faith. That was freshman theology. Every-
thing changed afterwards. The UST Central Library was a goldmine of the non-Catholic, of books once considered heretical (by the way, are those heathens still burning in hellfire?). I started reading up on Zen, theosophy. Interest in the Beats led to dabbling in Eastern mysticism and a brief fascination for Tibetan Buddhist aesthetics after attempting to read—on pot—The Tibetan Book of the Dead . It was, ironically, in that school where I first came across the Existentialists (by the way, dear God, who occupies a lower circle of hell: Sartre or Camus?). All these, plus Slayer albums and a bunch of death metal records, perhaps changed my perception of a Higher Being. But some scars are permanent. If there’s one image that graphically illustrates my view of God, it’s a cartoon from a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet I saw as a kid in Tacloban: a guy whose fa-
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cial expression suggests masturbation or something equally selfish and pleasurable. And little does he know that God is watching—although I am not sure if God was depicted here with an angry beard. You can imagine the damage this image has done to my psyche—up to now, whenever I engage in activities that are selfish and, uhm, pleasurable, this image haunts me. You wouldn’t happen to be like that, would you? Because if yes, the notion of a bearded guy watching over our entire secret nocturnal liaisons, like a perpetual CCTV, strikes me as absolutely sick. But being raised Roman Catholic, I find it tough to wash away the stains of fear and guilt. It doesn’t help that every Sunday that bloody carcass is the cynosure of all eyes inside the church. You won’t take it personally, I’d like to believe. What I can’t understand is if you’re the embodiment of perfection, why the need for adulations and praise, for words and gestures of undying fealty? We assume that “perfection” precludes insecurity and pettiness. Voltaire once said that if you did not exist, it would be necessary to invent you—and that includes everything, like the concept of a Great Afterlife and the system of reward-and-punishment. Somebody had to invent the concept of an afterlife—because if this is as good as it gets, we’re fucked. What about the criminal who got rich, lived happily, and died comfortably? As opposed to the pious man who had lived a life of absolute poverty and sacrifice. The absence of an afterlife? It’s enough to drive a man insane. But the questions remain: Why do you allow fanatics to blow up school buses and buildings in your name? Not only that: why place those idiots in high-ranking places of religious power? Like those who insinuated that Yolanda happened because the RH Bill was passed. Sorry, dear God, but I will punch the next person who says, “We can’t presume to know the mysterious ways of God.” You mean, t here’s an actual explanation for a storm taking the lives of six thousand people? No sane god would justify such tragedies—unless he acts like Charlton Heston. That’s the damage popular culture has inflicted on my psyche. Like it or not my concept of God looks like the dude in The Ten Commandments. Another equally horrible phrase is “It’s God’s will.” How the hell do you know?
Black Nazarene series, Veejay Villafranca, 2011
God’s will. How horrifyingly presumptuous. Like those who shout your greatness every time a rocket-propelled grenade hits a bus full of innocent children. It just makes me wonder how those nice people at the CBCP become privy to your displeasure over condoms and family planning. Please explain to me why there are people and faiths that disdain the notion of sex and flesh for the reward of an afterlife of complete debauchery resembling the finer points of such spiritual cinema as Barely Legal, Fresh Meat, and The Young and the Breastless. Explain to me those faiths that kill in the name of so-called morality, those religions t hat turn hysterical over certain livestock, shellfish, intoxicants, and all other things. There are faiths that would choose murder rather than allow the showing of a woman’s ankle. Sorry, but I admit to finding comfort in the term “godless” society. The Middle East has God and look how that turned out. Do I believe in you? I think all great Art—and I capitalize, of course—makes us feel the presence of God. You are in the unhinged solos of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman, in the overlapping harmonies of Ravi Shankar’s sitar, in the cathedral-like mysteries of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, in the sonorous wonder of Beethoven’s Ninth, or the lingering monotony of a Messiaen overtone. I imagine your presence in the vast expanses of silence as visualized by Tarkovsky or Bergman, or an extreme close-up of a priest’s eyes in a Bresson film. You inhabit the feedback of Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster, or in the trajectory of Michael Jordan’s levitations. In the drunken swirls of Jackson Pollock’s brushstrokes, in the curves of Chagall’s lovers in flight, and even in the abandoned temples of Angkor, you are there. Even in the ingeniously simple design of the iPhone or the Technics SL-1200, which allows for the fulfillment of dazzling ambitions. That is the kind of God I would want to believe in—and not the one who allows the slaughter of children, or worse, the perpetuation of mediocrity. For me, dear God, the highest morality happens when we do good not out of a middling sense of reward or retribution but out of sheer concern for our fellow human being. That we make sure he or she is perennially safe from harm not because we’ll be receiving brownie points in some cloudy afterlife. That
we do not harm our brothers and sister not because of the threats of eternal hellfire—but simply because. In short, pure love. Beautiful, simple. The mostgodlike situation occurs only when we act virtuous even without your presence. But seriously: Please make it better down here. Sorry to disturb you, Lourd de Veyra P.S. Why’d you have to kill Christopher Hitchens? P.S.S. Are all the members of Slayer going to hell? P.S.S.S. What about that silly proposal to install wi-fi in churches? It’s just begging for punchlines like, “Finally, an invisible power that actually works.” P.S.S.S.S. About the prayer thing…I’m pretty happy with Google. LOURD DE VEYRA
Songwriter, musician, novelist, poet
IV WHAT IS FAITH? IT’S PROBABLY EASIER TO PUT ONE’S FAITH IN HEDGE FUNDS, STOCKS, SWISS BANKS, AND JE JOMAR BINAY THAN IN JESUS CHRIST.
FR. JOEL TABORA, S.J.
What is faith? Life’s not possible without faith. If you fly Philippine Airlines, you have to have faith. If you fly Cebu Pacific, well, you have to have more faith! If you travel by air, you have faith. You may not think much about it. But when you pay your hard-earned money for your Manila-Davao ticket, you have faith that that huge hunk of metal sitting ponderously on the Manila runway will not only get you up, up and away more than 30,000 feet into the sky, but will wing you from Luzon to Mindanao, and actually get you onto the ground again in Davao. If you ask me, that takes a lot of faith. It is faith in what people have invented, faith in how creative ideas have become jet planes, faith in people who maintain them, fly them, land them, patronize them, faith in how people n ormally deliver, no matter the infrequent accidents,
the rare skidding off the runway, the matchless mess ups, the shocking news of mid-air mishaps that leave no passengers alive. It is in fact the aberrant events which underscore that faith is at play here, and not just knowledge. Life is not possible without faith. When you cross the street for the first time in front of Rome’s Coliseum, you sweat in fear for your life. But you learn eventually to put faith in the Roman driver. When you drink of the bottle marked Remy Martin XO, you have faith that you will be pleased, not sickened, by what you swallow. When you entrust your child to the hands of a surgeon, you have faith that his scalpel will heal, not injure. When you order sashimi at Inagiku, you have faith that you will be nourished in style, not poisoned. Faith is certitude, despite incertitude. It is knowledge, despite ignorance. It is trust, despite ample warrant to doubt. It is learned, but also gifted. It is what people in their communities have, without which they do not live well. Faith is one’s source of meaning. No human is without faith. Faith is what centers and integrates one’s life, no matter how shallow or sublime. Faith defines life, until life redefines faith. One’s faith may be money, as is the effective faith of many, the “fetish of the commodity;” one’s faith may be pleasure, or the accumulation of power. Or, one’s faith may be self-centered, focused on the freedom or creativity of one’s being, or more other-centered, altruistic, transcendent, sublime. In the aloneness of one’s faith, one may find the human other, or the totally other, God. Faith pertains profoundly to the person. It comes alive less in manipulat-
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ing the immutable law of the thing, and more in exploring the infinite possi bilities of the person. Faith is dramatic, empowering, encouraging when its object is not an “it” but a “you.” When one says, “I have faith in you,” one is not only speaking a word of recognition, one is speaking a word of empowerment. My faith in you does not cause you to do what you do, but occasions you to do freely what you can do, encourages you, and loves you in doing just that. When I tell my scholar, “I have faith in you,” I recognize her considerable intellectual abilities, I encourage her eros for truth, and I may even love her as she goes be yond herself to excel in her academics. Of course, there is the possibility that my faith may be misplaced and that I be disappointed. Life teaches that faith always risks disappointment. Despite this, I continue to have faith. Love requires faith. On the one hand, love without faith is impersonal uni versal gibberish like, “I love humanity, it’s just my neighbor I can’t stand.” Or: “All men are created equal, but not my servants, and especially not my wife.” On the other hand, love without faith is carnal heat, sheer lust, genital titillation, which for all of today’s chic, cosmetics and body sculpting recognizes ego but no other human face. When one ceases to have faith in one’s friends, one ceases to respect them; one begins to take advantage of them and manipulate them. When one ceases to have faith in one’s spouse, one ceases to recognize a human face, one begins to relate with a distant body, maintained, managed and kept, but not loved. When one who is in love says, “I believe in you,” it is not only a manifestation of admiration, “ Bilib talaga ako sa iyo! ” It is also a manifestation of expectation: “Because you are who you are, my love is well placed in you. My love will not be betrayed in you. My faith in you is faithful to you, and so calls forth your fidelity to me.” In love which respects no limit, my faith in you insist s on ultimate fidelity. My faith in you rejects any finality of your dying, and insists on the validity of our love that is stronger than death. Your faith in me insists on the same. Jesus insisted on faith. This was not an insistence on a creed nor an ethical system. It was an insistence on a shared relationship, wherein one clearly says, “I have faith in you, Jesus” ultimately because Jesus first said, “ Bilib ako sa iyo . You, you I love.” Jesus risks faith in us,
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empowering us, so long as we risk belief in him, to do the extraordinary. Nowhere is this more beautifully described than when Peter challenged Jesus to command him to walk on the water: “Peter said to him, ‘Lord if it is you, order me to come to you on the water.’ So he said, ‘Come!’ Peter got out of the boat, walked on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the strong wind he became afraid. And starting to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Immediately, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ When they went into the boat, the wind ceased. Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly, you are the Son of God’” For as long as Peter kept his faith in Jesus, he walked on the water. But when his fear of the wind and waves took his
gaze away from Jesus, he began to sink. That is the moment of cramped hardness, of inability to move beyond the jaded and the boring, of stubborn cynicism that prefers despair to faith. Saving him, Jesus says, “You of litt le faith, why did you doubt?” The good news here is that as imperfect as Peter’s faith was, it was well placed in Jesus. Jesus kept the faith, and saved Peter—undoubtedly with a chuckle and a twinkle in his eye. Nowhere is Jesus’ faith in us and fidelity to us more clearly manifested than on his Cross. It was an act of redemption, an act of compassion, an act of love for those in whom he believed. “...though he existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped at, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature. He humbled himself by becom-
Bohol, after the earthquake, Geloy Concepcion, 2013
deal with an unlikely Lord who from his cross says, “I have faith in you. Love one another as I have loved you.” But if you are to take the testimony of Pope Francis seriously, there is more joy in the Gospel. In the faith encounter with Jesus Christ, the impossible becomes possible. More joy? You gotta have faith! Pope Francis says so. This Pope rocks. FR. JOEL TABORA, S.J.
President, Ateneo de Davao University
V BANGKOK NOVEMBER DIDN’T I WANT TO REVISIT OLD HAUNTS, THEY ASKED. DID I?
CRISTINA PANTOJA HIDALGO
ing obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross!” His passion in oneness with the Compassion of his Father is an act of faith in us, refusing to turn away from us, refusing to give up on us, despite our drunkenness and stupidity. It is not written, but it is clear. From the Cross, Jesus says, “I have faith in you. I keep my faith in you. I love you.” We are asked to respond in faith. If we dare tell this wormlike figure on the Cross, the self-proclaimed Way, Life and Truth, “Yeah, ultimately I have faith in you,” it requires much, much more than the faith you need to fly Cebu Pacific or to drink of the liquid in the Remy Martin XO bottle. Faith is not a ride for the reckless nor a picnic for the intoxicated. It requires you to regard those lowly lackeys of yours differently, and those beggars outside your car window with more kindness. James says,
“If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm and eat well,’ but you do not give them what the body needs, what good is it? So also faith, if it does not have works of itself, is dead.” John says, “If anyone says, ‘I love God’ yet hates his fellow Christians, he is a liar...” “Whatever you have done or not done to one of these the least of my sisters and brother that you have done or not done to me” It’s probably easier to put one’s faith in hedge funds, stocks, Swiss banks, and Jejomar Binay than in Jesus Christ. Here, no need to worry about the poor. No need to weigh the demands of pri vate good against the demands of the common good. No need to break one’s head over wealth creation and equitable distribution. No need to slave for one’s family and be moral to boot. No need to
For a long time, whenever someone asked me what my favorite city in all the world was, I would reply, without missing a heartbeat: “Next to Manila, Bangkok.” It was my husband Tony’s first posting as a UNICEF official. He had just turned 32; I was not yet 31. We lived in Bangkok from 1975 to 1977. We both knew next to nothing about Thailand, or about Southeast Asia, for that matter. Before ASEAN, our country’s main link with its neighbors had been SEATO, established in 1954 mainly to fight Communism. ASEAN was set up in 1967. But before it could become part of our communal imagination, Marcos declared martial law and the travel ban was imposed. Globalization was a long way away, and the terms “expat” and “OFW” had not yet been coined. So Bangkok was a first for us in more ways than one. It was a doorway to a whole new world, to many different worlds. It was the beginning of a totally different lifestyle. I remember the feeling of apprehension, a faint murmur at the back of my mind. But it was engulfed by more heady emotions: excitement, elation, exhilaration. I should have been more attentive. Only much later would I realize that it was a dangerous time to be starting out on such a journey. We had just lived through a period of great upheaval—the First Quarter Storm followed by the
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early years of martial law—which had profoundly affected us personally. Losing our jobs (four jobs between us), having doors, which had previously stood wide open, shut in our faces. Of course this was nothing compared to what others went through, who lost loved ones, who were jailed and tortured. Nonetheless, it had destabilized us emotionally. We acted rashly, at times irrationally. We caused each other, and others, unnecessary pain. And now, we were striking out again, this time without any familiar signposts to steer by. But risk is itself intoxicating. So we embarked on the journey with chins held high. Later, looking back on that season, we would envy that young man and that young woman their aplomb, their innocence. And Bangkok would become a place we would return to again and again, content to allow the city to work a new enchantment as the moment collided with the memory. After Tony left the U.N. in 1990, we did not revisit Bangkok, though we often talked of it. It was a favorite dream—retracing our steps to all the places where we had lived during those 15 years as expats—a dream that ended abruptly when Tony died in 2011. And then—one of those little ironic jokes that life likes to play on us—before two years were over, I was invited to a conference in Bangkok by an international organization of writers. I wasn’t planning on going. I had this persistent dry cough; and felt disinclined to go wandering off again so soon after returning from a trip. This, it seems, was part of grieving: so many of the things one had previously taken much pleasure in had ceased to be even remotely appealing. Two friends—UP colleagues—urged me to change my mind. Isabel had never been to Bangkok and was looking forward to a bit of sightseeing and a lot of shopping before the conference. Lily, an old hand, would be in charge. Didn’t I want to revisit old haunts, they asked. Did I? What would the old haunts be like without my partner in those old adventures? In the end, I allowed myself to be persuaded. And, after just one day of shopping at MBK, with a lunch of chicken rice and a dinner of hot soup with noodles and fish balls thrown in, my cough was gone. The next day, I decided to take the city tour with Lily and Isabel. Before leaving
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my room, I glanced in t he mirror, and recognized the scowl. Afraid of being assaulted by memories, I had put up my defenses. Scowling beat weeping, didn’t it? I attempted a smile and managed a rueful grin. From the bus I tried to catch sight of familiar places—Lumpini Park perhaps, or the Erawan Hotel with its shrine draped in clouds of incense. But the tour did not include them. I caught brief glimpses of Siam Square, which seemed dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers and overpasses. We passed the Democracy Monument, and I looked for the little sidewalk restaurants where Tony and I would sometimes stop for a quick lunch. But the bus had picked up speed. We went to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, to the Temple of the Great Relic, to the Marble Temple (though not, unfortunately to the incomparable Temple of the Dawn). The Marble Temple was as lovely and serene as I remembered. The little stone bridge was still there, and the klong down which the noodle boats used to float, and the pigeons waiting to be fed. But the little birds in tiny bamboo cages, that were set free by people wishing to make merit, were gone. The expected assault didn’t happen. This was like seeing old friends from whom one had drifted away over the years. There was nostalgia, but also detachment. Lily’s friend, Kumaporn, drove us to Khanom Shin for lunch. I had kwi teow, tom yam goong, a glass of nam som, and began to feel more at home. Then she took us to a wholesaler’s market in Pratunam, and I recalled that the Indra Hotel was in the area. I used to go to its shopping arcade on some weekends —with Tony, or with Tatti Licuanan, Syl via Guerrero and Thelma Kintanar—to visit Rudee, the pretty little jeweler who was the suki of the Pin oy community. Would I find her again if I tried? Ins tead, I chose to buy more silk shawls and Indian cotton skirts, and batik purses to give away as pasalubong . Our conference was hosted by Chulalongkorn University, and one of the official dinners was held at the Princess Hotel, which was close by. I did not recognize the name, so it probably didn’t exist in the ‘70s. After dinner, there were the usual speeches, the poetry readings. Then a band played a kind of fusion music: rock, salsa, rap, but with echoes of traditional Thai music, using a couple
of traditional musical instruments. I listened, bemused by the thought of how strange this would have seemed in the Bangkok of old. Another evening, we were taken to the Oriental Hotel in the older part of town, driving through streets that I did recognize—Sri Phraya; Suriwongse, the chic shopping area; Silom, where the magazine I worked for—Living Magazine—had moved to, from Rama IV Road, when the Bangkok Post sold it to J.S. Uberoi; Soi Mahesak where a bunch of us discovered a cozy little pub called The Wall, which became one of our favorite places, (Steve, Kalayanee, Naphalai, Chalee and me); and the fabled Oriental itself, its tall rooms filled with palms and ferns and flowers, its
Old woman, Geloy Concepcion, 2011
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library walls lined with photographs of its famous visitors: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Maugham, Stein, Colette, Wharton. But now it is called the Mandarin Oriental. And it was crowded with tourists having “high tea.” Had I only imagined its elegance to have been more discreet in the old days? Intermittently I would tell myself that I could just get into a cab and go off by myself, to do that tour that Tony and I had planned on doing so many years ago. I would easily find our wooden house with the tall French windows opening into the garden, on Sukhumvit Soi 23… the market on Soi 21 where I used to buy flowers by the armloads, orchids of all colors, long-stemmed roses, lilies… the small bars a little farther down, which
sponsored the bowling teams (one of them a Pinoy team, to which belonged Jun, Ed, James, Bert and Tony) that played at Asoke Bowl… Asia Bookstore on the corner of Soi 15, where I found all of Doris Lessing, Han Suyin, Olivia Manning, Margaret Drabble, the Dusit Thani’s coffee shop… Thai Daimaru and Central Dept. Store, where we spent Sunday afternoons with our little daughters; the UNICEF office, facing the Chao Phya on Phra Atit Road… But I kept putting it off, until there was no time left, for the c onference was over. Mai pen rai, I said to myself. Never mind. What would be the point? He is not there. He is not here. Our last night in Bangkok, a group of us Pinoys decided to return to MK in
Chamchuri Square, where Kumaporn had taken us when I had asked to be led to the terrific roast duck, whose fla vors accompany many of my m emories of Bangkok. And there, s uddenly, just as I was just biting into the first morsel, I sensed him. He was beside me, smiling—laughing, actually—enjoying the roast duck, or maybe enjoying my enjoyment of it, for we had both so liked roast duck. And I paus ed, chopst icks in mid-air, the breath catching in my throat, half believing, wanting to believe.. . Tony, is that you? But, of course, it was not. CRISTINA PANTOJA HIDALGO
Novelist, essayist, educator
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VI CARELESS LOVE CHORDS: DM - GM - A7 ELY BUENDIA (TRANSCRIBED BY JUNJI LERMA)
Now
Well the
day is gone
And you're lying
Your
S Y A S S E &
Got you
S E T O N
And it
How can I
Give me
by my
full of
If
side
pride
�its you like a
And your Daddy ran a-
loving you
un-
careless love ba-
by
no cause for
Love may come for
till the holy cows come home
free
But we're gonna have to
It's a
It's a
buy the farm
careless love
careless love
careless love
the one I've been dreaming of
Songwriter, musician, writer
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I'm all alone
alarm
ELY BUENDIA
76
til
loving you
But there's
The one I've been dreaming of
way
love-
Put me out to pasture
Gimme
Made your Mama cry
bove
and me—
I'll be
careless love
careless love
is a God a-
careless
I'll be
live with regret
careless love
there
Out of
glove
you wanna put on your resume
I tell you this
He made you
under my skin
When you give me
Gimme
But
suitcase is empty
But your heart is
that's not something
Residence inside the North Cemetery, Geloy Concepcion, 2011
S Y A S S E &
VII
tect me, man. You good people, man. Thank you.
SNOWSTORM SA FRANKFURT NASA ISANG BAR KAMI SA L OOB NG FRANKFURT AIRPORT
LAV DIAZ
Film eh. Like Hollywood? Action? Karate? Horror? Drama? I like Jackie Chan man. Funny man. I like Bruce Lee. Philosophical man. I like Clint Eastwood. Sad, man. Pain, man. Painful. You seen Unforgiven, man? What movies you make, man?
What you do, man? I’m a...filmmaker. Binitin ko ang huling salita, may buntunghininga pa at sampung pakiusap sa aking nagkukunwaring ego bago ko nasabi. Filmmaker? Sakit sa ulo, bulong ko sa sarili ko. How about you? Sailor, man. Just like many of your folks. You Filipino, right? Me, from Jamaica. Very poor Jamaican man. Hardworking, man, you Filipinos. I salute, I salute you good people. I want to go to your country. You good people, man. Generous, man. I get sick in the sea, they care of me, man. I’m hungry, they give food, man. If the Greek man maltreats me, they pro-
Filipino movies, man. About us, turo ko sa sarili ko. About her, turo ko sa katabi ko, si Manang Mameng. About them, turo ko sa napakaraming Pinoy na nag-uumpukan, mga seaman at ilang kababaihan. Ya, man. They my friends, Filipino sailors. Hardworking. They love the reggae man, Marley man. Hey, Francing! Junmari! Pipoy! Bingbong Man! Come, come, man! Ipinakilala niya sa akin at kay Aling Mameng ang mga nakapormang mga kababayan. Bagong relos, bagong leather jacket, bagong Ray-Ban, bagong gintong
kwintas, dalawang malalaking singsing, bagong gitara, bagong boots, bagong umaalingasaw na pabango. Nasa isang bar kami sa loob ng Frankfurt Airport. Baka abutin ng dalawang araw na walang lipad ng mga eroplano dahil sa snowstorm. Ang dami nang galit, ang daming lasing, ang daming nagkakasakit, ang daming lakad lang nang lakad. May sumusumpa na darating siya sa kanilang kasal. Fuck, I’m losing millions, sabi ng isang Amerikano. Maya-maya’y tulog na si Jamaica man. Nakalimang Heineken siya, dalawang shots ng Tequila at isang daang libong man. Reklamo ni Manang Mameng, Napagod ako sa dami ng man niya, Dong uy. Rapido siyang magsalita uy. Wala akong maintindihan. Mas sanay ako sa German.
— Nasa setenta anyos na si Manang Mameng. Isang buwan matapos niyang isilang ang bunso niyang anak na si Loloy, noong 1973, pumunta na siya sa
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Germany. Thirty five years na siyang hindi nakakauwi. Ngayon lang siya uuwi. Wow, Manang, kako, thirty five years? Heto ang picture ni Loloy ko, Dong o. Litrato ng isang napakalusog na baby ang inilabas niya sa kanyang bag. At ito na siya ngayon. Ipinakita naman niya ang isang binatang nakatayo sa isang beach, kumakaway, parang siya ang kinakawayan. Nakangiti. Pero parang malungkot.
Lounge, this young man arrived and opened his bag right in the middle of the dining area. The place is a full house. At first, it seemed like he was just looking for something. But after a while, you realize that he was just rearranging and rearranging his things. And it just goes on and on and on and t hen, a middle aged lady, the mother, comes screaming, ‘Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance! Help me, please!’ What’s going on, Gary?
Nalinis na ang tarmac, tapos na ang snowstorm. Hinatid ko sa kanyang gate si Manang Mameng. O, Dong, twenty Euros pangkape mo. Grabe kang mag-espresso ha. Sa dalawang araw natin dito, puro ka kape. Puro kape. Kape na yang dugo mo. Ayaw ko man, nailagay na niya sa bulsa ko ang pera. Dong, dumalaw ka sa Cebu ha.
Ang guwapo ni Loloy ko, Dong no? Opo, kako. Saan pong beach yan? Ay, sa Bantayan. Nindot nga beach. Maganda no?
It’s alright, Nina. The kid is sick, that’s all. Tumayo si Gary at niyakap si Nina. Say, we take some shots? Join us, Sir? I’m okay, sabi ko. Thank you. I’ll catch your next film in Toronto.
Opo. Niyakap niya ako saka sinabing, “Si Loloy, Dong ba, ang aking bunso. Sa Martes ang libing niya. Wala na ang bunso ko, Dong.”
Oo nga po.
— Pag dumalaw ka sa Cebu. Dalhin ka namin sa Bantayan. Paboritong beach ni Loloy ko.
— S Y A S S E & S E T O N
Delay is a validation of our existence. It qualifies human nature. Let’s be calm about this. It’s nature’s way. And this is no sandstorm. It’s a snowstorm. There’s a hell of a difference between solid and liquid. Mahinahong sabi sa akin ni Gary habang natatanaw namin ang mga Arabong nagmumura sa isang counter. Isang trentahing puting Philosophy professor si Gary. Pauwi siya ng Canada. Your mother is asleep. Gusto kong sabihing hindi ko nanay si Manang Mameng. Tumango na lang ako. Kipkip ni Aling Mameng ang kanyang handbag at supot na puno ng tsokolate at nabili niyang mga laruan para sa kan yang mga apo. Sobra ang kapit niya sa handbag at supot. Ayaw niyang mawala. What’s going on? Tanong ni Gary sa kararating niyang girlfriend.
Noong 1973, wala naman akong planong mag-abroad, Dong. Anim na ang anak ko noon ba. Kapapanganak ko sa buns o ko, si Loloy nga. Mahirap ang buhay namin. Kargador ang asawa ko. Ako, kahit ano lang. Labada. Janitor. Nakikiani. Nakikitanim. Kargador din minsan sa pier kasama ng asawa ko. Tapos, yun kasing kaibigan ko, nagtrabaho sa isang pamilya na German. Ang mga German na ito, nagtrabaho sa German Embassy sa Manila. Nagkasakit ng kanser yung misis na German at kailangan na nilang umuwi sa Germany. Hindi pwedeng sumama yung kaibigan ko. Nirekomenda niya ako. Biglang swerte siyempre. Germany. Malaki ang sweldo. Sumama na ako. Thirty five years na nga na di ako nakauwi. Kasi, pagkamatay nung misis, nagkasakit naman ng kanser yung lalaki. Ang tagal kong inalagaan. Ako na ang naging nanay ng mga anak nila. Hindi ko naman pinabayaan ang pamilya ko sa Cebu. Nakapag-aral sila lahat. Ako ang nagkapital sa mga negosyo nila. Ayaw naman nilang pumunta dito sa Germany kasi lahat may mga pamilya na at maayos ang buhay nila. Ako na lang ang uuwi.
Let’s get out of here, Gary. Hindi na ho kayo babalik dito? It’s safer here, Nina. That’s precisely my point. This place is hell. Nagising na si Manang Mameng. Punta lang ako sa kasilyas, Dong ha? While I was eating at the Emirates
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Hindi na, Dong. Nagpaalam na ako sa pamilya kong German. Lisod kaayo ba. Ang hirap talaga, ang lungkot. Dadalaw daw sila sa akin sa Cebu.
— Inanunsyo na simula na ng liparan.
Nagmamadali na siyang pumasok sa gate. LAV DIAZ
Filmmaker
VIII THE LITTLE BLUE PILL OF THE MIND HERE LIES A GREAT PROBLEM WHEN DEALING WITH POWER: IT IS NOT TRUE THAT HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS, THOUGH SO MANY HAVE TRIED. MANUEL L. QUEZON III
Addressing his colleagues before the war, Manuel L. Quezon confessed, “To tell the truth, gentlemen, I should like being President of the Philippines if I were sure I would live 100 years. Have you ever known anyone who has voluntarily renounced power unless it was for a lady that, in his opinion was more important than power itself, or because of the threatening attitude of the people? Everybody likes power. It is the greatest
urge of human nature. I like to exercise power.” There is more to this statement than the quip repeatedly made by Mel Brooks as the lecherous Louis XVI in the comedy, History of the World Part I (“It’s good to be the king!”) or even the very real pettiness of the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I, whose only c oherent expression in between bouts of epilepsy throughout his entire reign was reported to be, “I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings!” The thing about power is, however gained, and assiduously maintained, it is always lost in the end. Here lies our fascination with power: it is, as Henry Kissinger famously put it, the great aphrodisiac—it turns everyone on, from the one who has it, to the one who wants a piece of it, to the many more who get a kick of watching it on display. And where power is, the moralists can’t be far behind. This has been the case since the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whose writers have made a cottage industry—really, that great genre of literature known as History (which
sometimes masquerades as science)—out of the telling of instructive tales of the moral virtues and failures of great men. There is a scene in the novel Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in which at the conclusion of a speech by Stalin, the audience of party functionaries leaped to their feet and began to vigorously applaud: minute after agonizing minute, as no one in the cowed, terrified audience dared to take the risk of being the first one to stop—until, after eleven minutes, someone did; at which point the applause stopped abruptly as the audience sat down in unison (that night, a factory director, the one who had been the first to stop clapping, was arrested). Marcos, rather surprised that martial law succeeded, gloated in his diary, “There is nothing as successful as success!” Thus, power as perpetual motion machine; should it stall, it s wiftly becomes a wreck. Whatever the source of power—secret police, bureaucratic intrigue, a mandate freely obtained and conferred at the polls—the moment when it is lost is both one of terror—for the holder of it—and astonishment—for everyone else in the thrall of it. Never has the precise moment of a dictator’s end been recorded for posterity like the video in which Nicolai Ceauescu used to terrorized obedience, suddenly got hooted. The confusion on his face at that moment is unique in being recorded for posterity on film; as for the rest, we must rely on the accounts of reporters or former retainers—that instance of The Fall when one massacre too many, one survey too negative in its findings, or a plot too dependent on a bungling subordinate unravels. But in all cases, we see the contrasts: abundance then absence, but too little of power itself, much less of the actual change in the person who had it all and then has none. For another truism is that no one who has actually wielded power can afford to share its secrets. As Madame Cornuel (though the diarist Madame de Sevigné often gets the credit) in 18th century France tartly observed, “No man is a hero to his valet,” while in 19th Century America Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” The powerful are not like you or me, in as much as any member of the public assumes that there is commonality in community: precisely because the powerful would lose power were they to reveal themselves as they really are. F. Sionil Jose once tartly observed that
Enrile, Ramos, et al, lead supporters to cross EDSA from the PNP Headquarters to Camp Aguinaldo, photo by Alex Bowie, 1986
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Priest Calms Crowd, Alex Bowie, 1986
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among the greatest lovers of freedom— in the national, or political sense—could be found some of the truly great domestic tyrants or individuals frankly contemptuous of their own countrymen he had ever encountered. Here lies a great problem when dealing with power: it is not true that history is written by the victors, though so many have tried; it is, that the majority of writers—and readers—are people who view themselves as powerless, and who therefore glory so thoroughly in the inevitable fall for all who possess power. Subject, as most people are, to the ups and downs of the powerful, there is a certain comfort— and protection from risk—to be derived from the observation of Lord Acton that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” The greater the power, the greater the probability, once that power is gone, for all who have tasted power, however vicariously, to seek their own. Sooner or later the writer—who, after all, however participant in the life of someone powerful will always be, at the end, an observer—will fall prey to the temptation to “speak truth to power,” which is a writer’s way of say-
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ing that in the end their compulsion to cultivate their own power—gained solely through that thing known as The Audience—is absolute. Which is why the only thing that irritates the powerful more than The People (however defined), is The Writer. They are the worst of all possible creatures—necessary servants, but with a notorious tendency to bite the hand that either feeds it, or wants to feed it. Mao Zedong wrote that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun; but were that true neither his party nor the many others who have wielded political power would have wasted time on endless parades, and speeches, or cultivating tools for psychological and not just physical control. The statement in itself says much more in what it publicly sets aside. There must be a certain amount of mystery, whether maintained by stagecraft—Mussolini and Marcos both perched their desks on platforms, all the better to look down at their visitors, while Hitler had his Chancellery paved with acres of slippery marble all the better to make visiting diplomats nervous as they slithered through the corridors to his office—or rumor (the leader with
a reputation as a Casanova is thus potent in every sense of the word). Leon Ma. Guerrero, a writer who certainly saw power up close, once wrote that there is “a heart, a secret heart, of the nation.” And that it could be found “in a servant’s sense of honor, in the dance hall girl going on her knees in the crowded aisle to kiss the feet of the Nazarene and pray for better trade, in the venal politician dreaming of a seat in the Senate, as Sancho Panza dreamed of the governorship of Barataria, and in the honest public servant who, like Don Quixote, sees a princess in every maid.” In other words, in the restless, at times reckless, search for power, whether over the class divisions of society, or simply over what often seems to be the futility of life: “a primitive instinctive piety that sustains us in misfortune; a sense of personal dignity, the amor propio that drives us to do things which are sometimes comic and sometimes tragic; an avid and restless amorousness which contrives to combine the idolatry of woman with a selfish and boastful carnality; an understanding of death, death as the final sanction of life…” If all seek power, though few attain it in any significant proportion, still, power is built on this shared attraction—and shared experience. It is only possible to write on power if one constantly recognizes the best that can be done, is to ponder power as it is reflected in the thoughts and reactions of those who ultimately do not possess it, or, more accurately, who think they do not possess it. To attempt to understand power requires the kind of self-doubt and humility—how to know what one will never have, for if one had i t, one would not bother writing about i t?—that renders one unfit for the task. Or, which, if attempted, would then threaten to make the exploration of power for the only purpose considered worthy since ancient times—moral illumination and improvement—an exercise in selfdestruction. Friedrich Nietzsche, who went mad, put it this way: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” MANUEL L. QUEZON III
Undersecretary of Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning and Editor-in-Chief of the Official Gazette
H T Y M
. L S F Y A E E L E A E L I S E D R , H S F R L B E N . F A O E O A T H D N A O O R I E H C S T N N E T H P I I I O I R R A T R D L E T H T E U P E A U E X H E C D T R M T M S O B E A A C O S R E N S N J N E R I O K O O N R N F D O E R E C W N F S E N E S P L O E E E S R E N H L A S I E A T M E S R O R E P H F T I E R R O O R H O A T T N I N U H F D I E Q O N H S W A P E
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“
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et’s make it all up!”
the girl suggests, as we discuss interview dates. OK. Let’s say she’s just put on a sheer flesh-colored singlet over short shorts and you don’t really need to stare hard to imagine what she looked like moments before. By imagine, I mean fantasize. And by fantasize, I mean I walked in on the shoot to find my byline scrawled in kohl on her bikini line. She didn’t give a fuck about being completely naked. She didn’t give a fuck what that name was and who I was, either. Neither did I. Who am I? In this fantasy world, many years ago, a girl took a photo of herself for her Friendster account with one of those early digital cameras. The image was appropriated by hundreds of girls and boys for their personal profiles, and the Internet was mined for more. Even h er name—“Ellen Adarna,” a remarkable composition of downhome femininity and mythical flight of fancy—was pirated and duplicated. She quickly became search engine candy and social media mystery, and a life was put together for her from anonymous uploads and forum chatter. The story came about that she was born rich and without care—a “motel heiress.” That was another useful compound term that made it all easier. It relieved men of the guilt of exploitation and gave her instant power. It added one more layer of unattainability to the already unattainable images on the screen. It created loneliness and indignation. How could those boys in the photos have her so easily? Exactly what sort of magic happens in the bars and living rooms? It also created a measure of hatred. Women disliked her to the point of asking
me why I wanted to interview her. At the interview, held at a dimly lit bar, Ellen confirms some of the fantasies. In her hometown she ran with a gang she calls the Wild Five. There are stories of benders and binges that put the Manila scene to shame. She talks about getting shit-faced, getting called names. There’s proof enough of t his. There were headlines in the local papers, reporting chaos and drunken disorder at 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. Apart from her teenage selfies there are stolen shots of her getting playful at house parties and beach blowouts. There are shots of her underwater, shots of her curling her tongue, and all manner of hugging, mugging and slumming. In each one she is perpetrator and victim, causing things to happen and allowing the camera to capture the happening. There is nothing wrong, of course, with doing a little damage and getting a little bent, as long as there’s room and time enough to straighten yourself out. There is nothing wrong, either, with nudity and exposure and candor. This is a girl who has gone places on the basis of a profile picture. For all its teenage tartness, the envelope of anonymity in which it was delivered, along with its backdrop of money, implied that she was never really that desperate for anything, even for attention. The photos may be old but the effect seems to be timeless. Ellen talks of jealous women who tell or tweet her to stop texting their boyfriends, who are by default infatuated by her. “In their head they think I fuck everyone,” she says. This conjoined reaction of glorification and disgust has been going on since her teens. I imagine that it works in favor of all parties involved. If there is anything that works so hard and so
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well for the Internet, it’s the image of the sacred and the profane, folded over and over itself, across multiple viewings and millions of viewers, secretly clicking, scrolling and swiping in their beds and bathrooms at 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. In those early photos Ellen Adarna is pale and a little plump and cute as a button, full of unguardedness and disregard. In her wan, epicanthic gaze there is boredom and the tender abandon of the wealthy. It is a gaze reserved for boyfriends, for cousins, for equally privileged friends, for the lucky bum behind the camera—everyone but the online lurker, avid and unfulfilled in the darkness. Today she is 25. “I know all my angles,” the subject boasts. She has also been telling me how vain she is. I readily make the excuses for her. After all, it’s been six or seven years. In recent syndicated photos she is a body in full, sharpened, shaped, heavy-titted. She has squirmed and blossomed out of the given fantasy. Awkward innocence has turned into inexperience. Callowness has become vapid candor. She laughs off a particularly awkward turn in social media where an interview made her look like a boba—a boob—by telling herself “bad publicity is good publicity.” The trite statement is chased by another: “I just want to make money.” But it is clear she is also learning to take advantage and take control of a mass fantasy, and how many of us can do that? She confesses that she is living independently. After resigning from her family business, she lives in estrangement from her family, in a tender form of exile that allows measures of freedom and security. She alternately lives in a house at one of their family-owned compounds and with her boyfriend. She has a driver and a compact car at her disposal. She has a manager and a handler. It’s her own money now. Manila is her town now. It’s a place for grown-ups. Everything is un der scrutiny, in high-resolution, in slow-motion. “An ex-boyfriend called me a potato,” she explains. She took it as a challenge, the way reality game show contestants take on challenges. A boxing workout video that is part of her official portfolio of work lasts all of thirty-seven seconds. It’s not even a complete song. But it’s in HD. There’s a version of it that stretches it out, through freeze frames, strobe effects, artificial zooms and slo -mos, to a full five minutes. The footage has thrived on the Internet—her home, too, after all. She has embraced the real world n ow, attending acting workshops, playing second lead in teleseryes, negotiating endorsement deals, doing the rounds of magazine covers and media interviews. It is her turn to indulge in the fantasy: she turns down advances from movie stars and hangs out with the faces we only see on billboards and the backs of buses. She confirms rumors of the guessed-at things that happen behind the scenes. She reveals many things off-the-record and between-us only.
“When I’m done, I thin k I’ll go back,” she says, to mean back to her family and their business affairs, and most probably the small-town notoriety she enjoyed in her youth. The drinks come hard and fast, in double shots, and in the light that blurs and gathers, the present-day Ellen Adarna looks almost sculptural—bright, slight, and self-contained. There’s a tough, pointed tilt to her nose that was never there before, but it goes well with the new eyebrows, plucked to look like they are always raised. It’s an even, polished look that contrasts her teenage photos. To her Internet audience, this is good news. There is now more of her than ever to look at, to click and fold over and over again. And for those who wish to know beyond what can be seen, there’s no cosplay at work behind the image, none of the jailbait coyness of Lolita, and none of the contrived chumminess that usually comes with showbiz interviews. We must be thankful for this, and as much as we permanently hold, image by image, Ellen’s youth in a spray of freckles, jpeg artifacts and lowres softness, we must also recognize her present poise and her shimmer as things every woman deserves to aspire to as they grow out of their clumsy years. “I look like a lot of people,” she says, mentioning personages as varied as Solenn Heussaff and Regine Velasquez. This is the way she attempts to explain away her dark popularity. I suppose it makes some sense after either the sub ject or the observer has had too much to drink. But really, I instantly attribute it to false modesty. Because it hardly makes sense when you recall there was a time when many people looked at her photo—one among millions—and stopped and wondered who she really was, and if she really was any one of those people who had pretended to be her. We had no friends who behaved like her. We knew no one who kn ew her. I am reminded of the one thing every celebrity inter view is really about: Who are you? I find myself blurting the question out loud, in mid-contemplation: “Who are you?” That question is turned on millions of ardent and solitary viewers, whose identities remain hidden behind forum handles and fake profiles. After all, in the online world, it is also the viewer who is singled out, identified and questioned: his type, his personality, his perverse predilections, his useless intentions, as he sits in the shadows, waiting for something— not an answer, but another image, another mystery, another fantasy to return him to his familiar self. It is the real girl who has appeared before me tonight, her origins in Internet fantasy sloughed off and replaced by this shimmering starlet of truth. Ellen Adarna hears my question and brushes against me as she opens her bag. She reaches into the dark, takes out her passport, unfolds it to show me her real name, and I turn away.
She became search engine candy and social media mystery, and a life was put together for her from anonymous uploads and forum chatter.
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A S O R A L E D C I R D E T N A T S I S S A N O I T C U D O R P
S C I L O H A L I A N S L I A N
S ’ L H E I K R O F L E Y A R E I G O R I A H
A W A N U K A B E N O Y A M P U E K A M
D E N I A T N O C F L E S D N A , T H G I L S , T H G I R B
N E L L E Y A D T N E S E R P E H T
— L A R U T P L U C S T S O M L A S K O O L
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CREDITS CREDITS
BEFORE PROOF OF HEAVEN MADE DR. EBEN ALE XANDER RICH AND FAMOUS AS A “MAN OF SCIE NCE” WHO’D EXPERIENCED THE AFTERLIFE, HE WAS SOMETHING ELSE: A NEUROSURGEON WI TH A TROUBLED HISTORY AND A MAN IN NEED OF REINVENTION BY LUKE DITTRICH
ON DECEMBER 18, 2012, the set of Fox & Friends was both festive and somber. Festive because it was the Christmas season. The three hosts, two men in dark suits flanking a woman in a blue dress, sat on a mustard-colored couch in front of a cheery seasonal backdrop: a lit-up tree, silver-painted twigs, mounds of tinsel, blue and red swatches of fabric, and, here and there, multicolored towers of blown glass with tapering points that made them look surprisingly like minarets. Somber because a terrible thing had happened just four days earlier, in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. All three hosts looked sad, but the woman, Gretchen Carlson, looked the saddest. PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN FINKE
he shot of the three hosts occupied most of the right three quarters of the screen. A guest was joining them by satellite from another location, and a shot of his head and shoulders occupied most of the rest of the screen. This was his third appearance on the program in the last few months. He wore a dark blazer and a button-down shirt with blue stripes. He was middle-aged and handsome in an oldfashioned way, with tanned skin and thick hair parted on the right. The banner below the video feeds read, HOPE IS NOT LOST: NEUROSURGEON SAYS HEAVEN IS REAL.
“Dr. Alexander,” Carlson said, “if people don’t know your story, you, you were ill, you were in a coma, you left this earth for a week, you were in heaven, and then you wrote about your experiences there, and you were told that you were supposed to come back to the earth.” She paused. She looked into the camera and then looked up toward the studio ceiling and rocked slightly forward. “As people are grappling with the horrible nature of this tragedy,” she said, her voice cracking, her lower lip trembling, “will these children forget, when t hey are in heaven, what happened to them?” It was, let’s be clear, an unusual question. One imagines the host of a national n ews program would feel comfortable posing this question to only a very few guests. A priest? A bis hop? The pope? But let ’s be clear about something else: Dr. Eben Alexander was presented as more qualified to answer thi s question than all of them. His authority on heaven hadn’t come from prayer or contemplation or a vote taken at some conclave. He had been there. And although a lot of people might make similar claims concerning visits to heaven and the receipt of personal revelations from God and be roundly dismissed, Dr. Alexander was different. He was, as the Fox News Web site declared, a “renowned neurosurgeon.” A man of science at the summit of the secular world. And when he answered the unusual question, he did so without hesitation, without hedgin g, and with the same fluency and authority he might exhibit when comforting a patient about an upcoming operation. “Well, they will know what happened,” Alexander said, and a hint of sadness swirled in his own eyes for a moment. “But they will not feel the pain.” His voice was southern and smooth, soft and warm. The shots of the studio and of the satellite feed faded away, and a heartbreaking tableau faded in, a grid of photographs. Fourteen children, each just six or s even years old, each smiling, each now, the viewer knew, dead. Alexander’s voice, soothing, heartfelt, poured on. “They will feel the love and cherishing of their being back there. And they will know that they have changed this world.” Now the views of the studio and of Dr. Alexander faded back in, and the host to the left of Carlson, Brian Kilmeade, a compact and gruff guy with a sheaf of papers stacked on the table in front of him like a prosecuting attorney, asked a question. It was another unusual question and perhaps that’s why Kilmeade prefaced it with a reiteration of what made their guest uniquely qualified to answer it. “So Dr. Alexander,” he said, “your book, your book—and you’re a neurosurgeon, you never believed in this until it happened to you, and you were brain- dead for a week, and your
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friends who work in your busines s say that there’s no way you could have possibly come back, there was no activity there. Where is the shooter?” Alexander nodded along as the man posed the question and again answered without pausing. “The shooter is in a place of reviewing his own life,” he said while the camera showed Gretchen Carlson wiping the tears from her eyes. “It’s a very real phenomenon, of reliving all of the events of one’s life and reliving the pain and suffering that we’ve handed out to others. But from their point of view.” This is a story about points of view.
e meets me at the door of his home and invites me in. He and his wife purchased the house in 2006, and it sits on a half acre of land in Lynchburg, Virginia, near a hospital where he used to work. Its exterior is red brick, and t here are eleven windows along the front, each with white trim and black shutters, making the house look sort of Jeffersonian, sort of Monticelloesque, though i t’s actually only forty-nine years old, which makes it ten years younger than Alexander himself. He’s wearing jeans and a button-down shirt and a sweater vest, and he leads me through a wood-paneled study to the kitchen, where he asks if I’d like a cup of coffee. While the coffee brews, he explains how caffeine works. “It kin d of affects the second transmitter system, part of the fight-or-flight mode. And it gets you more into kind of an active state. It bypasses some of the primary transmitters there, kind of activates the whole system, so i t revs you up. It works very effectively. So, you do not take sugar?” Once the coffee’s ready, we return to the study. The room is homey and filled with family pictures and some paintings by friends of his wife, Holley, who’s an artist and art teacher. Alexander met her in college when she was datin g his roommate, and now they have two sons. She comes into the study and sets a plate of cookies and apple slices down on a coffee table for us to pick at. “I’m starting to get a little more practice with these inter views,” Alexander says. “It might not show, but I should be learning from it all. It’s been quite a journ ey.” We talk for hours. We talk about his past life and his present one, and about the strange voyage that divided the two. We talk about some of the stories he tells in Proof of Heaven, which has sold nearly two million copies and remains near the top of the New York Times best-seller list nearly a year after its release. We also talk about some of the stories you won’t find in the book, stories I’ve heard from current and former friends and colleagues, and stories I’ve pulled from court documents and medical-board complaints, stories that in some cases give an entirely new context to the stories in the book, and in other cases simply contradict them. From one point of view, the point of view that Fox & Friends and Newsweek and Oprah and Dr. Oz and Larry King and all of his other gentle interrogators have helped perpetuate, Dr. Eben Alexander is a living miracle, literalWhen Alexander ly heaven sent, a man capable of finally bridggot sick in late ing the chasm between the world of spiritual- 2008, he hadn’t practiced surity and the world of science. From this point gery in a year and of view, he is, let’s not mince words, a prophet, faced a $3 million malpractice because after all, what else do you call a man lawsuit. He now has a best-selling who comes bearing fresh revelations from book and a movGod? This point of view has been massively ie deal.
ILLUSTRATIONS
JOE McKENDRY
ILLUSTRATIONS JOE McKENDRY
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profitable for Dr. Eben Alexander, has headache. November 10, THE DALA I LAM A WAG S A spawned not just a book sold in thir2008. FING ER AT ALEXANDER. ty-five countries around the globe but He has a headache. WHEN A MAN MAKES EXTRAa whole cascade of ancillary products, Not a bad one at first, but including a forthcoming major motion it gets st eadily, rapidORDI NARY CLAI MS , HE SAYS, A picture from Universal. ly worse. He tells Holley “ T H O R O U G H I N V E S T I G A T I O N ” But there is another point of view. that he just needs to rest, And from this point of view, Dr. Eben that he’ll be fine. IS RE QUIRED, TO ENSURE Alexander looks less like a messenger Escherichia coli bacteria have inTHAT PERS O N IS “RELI ABLE ,” from heaven and more like a true son sinuated themselves into the lining of of America, a country where men have his central nervous system, the memHAS “N O REAS O N TO LIE .” always found ways to escape the rub branes that protect his brain and spi ble of their old lives through audacious nal cord, he writes in Proof of Heavacts of reinvention. en. It is unclear how they got there. By the end of our interview, there’s Spontaneous cases of bacterial mena note of unease in Alexander’s voice. ingitis are rare but not unheard of, He pulls out his iPhone and puts on the and the transmission vectors are the voice recorder. He tells me he is consame as those of other common incerned that some of the stories I’ve fectious diseases: tainted water sup brought up could be taken the wrong plies, poor hygiene, dirty cookway by readers. ing conditions. Regardless of where “People could definitely go way off the deep end about irrelethese particular E. coli came from, now that they’re here, they vant stuff as opposed to focusing on what matters,” he says. proliferate. E. coli populations are incredibly fertile, and under ideal circumstances will grow exponentially, doubling in size every twenty minutes. Theoretically, given limitless food and zero resistance, a single 0.000000000000665-gram E. coli bacefore he was Eben, he was, briefly, Richard. His biological parents, young, unready, created terium could in nineteen hours spawn a megacolony weighing as much as a man. But our bodies are not defenseless. Alexanhim, named him, and then gave him away. The Alexander family of Winston-Salem, North Carolider’s immune response kicks in immediately, deploying fleets of white blood cells to kill the invaders. His cerebrospinal fluna, adopted him and gifted him with a new name, one with an illustrious pedigree. The first Eben Alid, the fluid that supports his brain in every sense, buoying it and nourishing it, becomes a terrifying battlefield. While the exander, his great-grandfather, was the U. S. am bassador to Greece in the 1890s, helped create the modern invaders consume his CSF’s brain-sustaining sugars, the defensive onslaught of white blood cells causes the volume of fluid to Olympic Games, carried on an occasional correspondence with Mark Twain. His father, Eben Alexander Jr., a great neurosurswell, raising the pressure inside his skull. By the time the EMTs wheel him into the ER at Lynchburg geon, was permanent president of his class at Harvard Medical School. General Hospital, his besieged brain, choked and starving, is se verely dysfunctional. He is raving, thrashing, incoherent. Eben Alexander III attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he read lots of science fiction, grew a shaggy mop of hair, learned Then he slips into a coma. how to pole-vault—he loved the feeling of propelling himself skyward with physics and muscle. While his high school classmates saved up for cars, he bought himself sailplane lessons. is path seemed set. He went to college at the University of North Carolina at He finished his neurosurgical residency and, in 1988, Chapel Hill. He studied chemistry. He contemplated astrophyswas hired at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the ics. He joined the Sport Parachute Club and spent his weekends country, Brigham and Women’s, in Boston. While pracflying to great heights in perfectly good Cessna 185’s and jumpticing there, he taught at his father’s alma mater, Harvard Meding out of them. He felt drawn to medicine but worried that if ical School. The prestige of these institutions gave him access he became a doctor, he’d never escape his father’s shadow. He to some of the most remarkable new medical technology in the agonized. world. He became an expert at something called s tereotactic He graduated from UNC in 1975 and enrolled in Duke mediradiosurgery, a type of treatment that burned away the probcal school. He was still worried about not living up to the stanlems inside a patient’s brain, cauterizing aneurysms, cooking dards set by his father. Even after he began his neurosurgery tumors, without the skull even needing to be opened. residency, he almost jumped ship, changed careers. He sent He was on the rise. His father’s shadow no longer seemed so in a job application to NASA. He dreamt of flying on the space long. And he was charming. Larger than li fe, that’s how his resshuttle, of helping to build the International Space Station. But idents viewed him. A charismatic b arrel of energy, with an enwhen he told his father, his father convinced him to withdraw dearing habit of always wearing a bow tie. He would play rock the application. Wait till you’ve finished your residency, he told music in the operating room: classics like Jimi Hendrix, Led him. Then, if you’re still interested in the whole NASA thing, by Zeppelin, and the Doors, newer s tuff like Massive Attack, Five all means. By the time he’d finished his residency, the Challengfor Fighting, Goo Goo Dolls. And no, he’d never quite gotten over his obsession with space, with flight. Sometimes, when he er had exploded and the shut tle program was on hold. He chose not to reapply. wasn’t around, the residents would even c rack that he would His path seemed set. have made a better astronaut than a brain surgeon. They’d no-
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ticed that some of the attending surgeons could completely lose themselves in an operation, standing there for hours, peering into a tiny little hole and meticulously extracting bits of tumor. But Dr. Alexander wasn’t like that. He’d come rushing into the OR, talking to the nurses and the residents and anyone else who’d listen, rambling about near-earth asteroids or dark matter or whatever other topic in astrophysics he’d been reading about in his spare time. It would take him a while to get down to business, to focus on the matter at hand. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. Four different former residents of Alexander’s use the word brilliant to describe him. But he often just seemed to be somewhere else.
e is somewhere else. Where, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, really, anything. Not where he is, not even who or what he is. He is pure awareness, pure present, no past, no future. Just this little speck of consciousness adrift in a vast and mysterious place. It is an unpleasant place, brown and rank and suffocating, but he doesn’t even know enough to define a term as advanced as “unpleasant.” And then he sees the light. A bright light, swirling above him, accompanied by the most beautiful music. He is rising up toward it. Upthrough it. The unpleasant place is gone, somewhere below him, and now he is in a place that even if he had the power of vocabulary, of words, he would find almost indescribably beautiful. It is a green and verdant place. A green, idyllic place filled but not crowded with men and women in peasant garb. Here and there a dog cavorts among them. And he, he is flying ! He is on the wing of a butterfly. Perhaps it is an enormous butterfly or perhaps he is really tiny, but size and scale don’t really mean anything. There are other butterflies all around him, millions of them, perhaps an infinite number of them, colorful and iridescent, all flying in loose formation over this impossibly beautiful place. And he is not alone. Beside him on the butterfly, a beautiful girl! Like the green countryside, her beauty i s so intense, so overpowering, that the word beauty itself seems insufficient. He becomes aware that she is speaking to him, saying something, though she doesn’t even need to move her lips to speak. You are loved and cherished, she tells him. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.
e didn’t do anything wrong. He destroyed the woman’s acoustic neuroma, a benign brain tumor, burned it to oblivion with focused beams of radiation. That’s what he set out to do, and that’s what he did. And yes, there had been postoperative inflammation, and yes, the surgery had left the woman with permanent paralysis on the left side of her face, but remember we’re talking about brain surgery here, not splinter removal. Bad things can happen that are completely out of your control.
The woman’s lawsuit, however, didn’t accuse him of doing something he shouldn’t have done. It accused him instead of not doing something he should have done. Specifically, it accused him of not informing the woman that permanent facial paralysis might result from the operation. And so, because exactly what he had told her prior to the operation was at the heart of the case, that’s what the lawyers asked her about during the deposition a few years later. She was an elderly woman from Arizona. She had i nitially consulted with Dr. Alexander by telephone after seeing an episode of a PBS television program called Scientific American Frontiers that was narrated by Alan Alda and had highlighted Dr. Alexander and his remarkable stereotactic radiosurgery operations. She sent him her medical records, scheduled a time for the operation, and then flew with her husband and her son to Boston. Patient: I was in a wheelchair, and we went down to this room and waited. At 8:30, approximately four or five men came into the room, and they didn’t say not one word to me. They just came over and started sticking me with a needle for anesthesia. And then they started screwing this thing in my head. And I was bleeding and I was scared and I was shaking. I went into shock, and no body said one word. . . . Lawyer: What happened next? A: Then they put that bell on my—they tried to, and it was— they had to get a different one, because the one they had went clear down on my shoulder. I have a very short neck and they— maybe they had it with them. I don’t know. I don’t remember that. All I remember is the excruciating pain when they started screwing that into my head. I had four screws, two in the back and two in the front. Q: Okay. A: And I suppose it was an aide came in, and she knew that I was in shock, evidently, because she got a blanket and wrapped it around me, and she kind of held me. I was still in the wheelchair. . . . Q: During that whole time, none of these four or five men said anything to you, is that right? A: Yes. When they started putting the novocaine or whatever it was in my head, I said, “Is one of you Dr. Alexander?” and this voice in back of me said, “Yes, I am.” And I said, “Please come around so I can see you. I would like to see what you look like.” And so he did. And we might have shaken hands. I don’t remember that. And then he went back to doing whatever they were doing, screwing this thing into my head. But none of this, again, is an indication of wrongdoing. A cold or distracted bedside Sitting across manner is not criminal. The question was Oprah Winfrey, basking in the whether he had ever warned her about the glow of his prophet image. possible complications. When the woman’s lawyer asked to see the two-page informed-consent form that laid out the risks, Alexander could find only the first page, the page without the woman’s signature. And that page, as the lawyer noted, had “multiple punch holes and fray marks, indicating that it had been filed in [the patient’s] chart, extracted from the file, and later refiled.” Further, he said, additional documents also had gone missing, [continued on page 138]
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FINAL DESGUSTATION IF YOU COULD CH OOSE THE LAST MEAL YOU WOULD EVER EAT IN THIS LI FE, WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE? WE ASKED SIX PEOP LE FOR THEIR HYPOTHETICAL FINAL FEASTS, AND GOT DESCRIPTIONS OF REPASTS OPULENT AND INTIMATE, CALORIE-LADEN, AND LACED WITH NOSTALGIA. PHOTOGRAPHY BY
ART DIRECTION BY
PAUL DEL ROSARIO
EDRIC DELA ROSA
FOOD STYLING BY
PRODUCED BY
ANGELO COMSTI
KARA ORTIGA
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Margarita Fores CHEF “A Bistecca Fiorentina from Ch ianina beef with a good béarnaise sauce and sale di Cervia; fresh handmade Artusi style egg taglierini from organic eggs; the purest taba ng talangka from Alaminos, Pangasinan on top of buttered Milagrosa rice using Italian sea salt and butter from Normandy; a bottle of Sassicaia 1985; and a cold Sarsi.”
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Hubert Webb Webb FREE MAN, ACQUITTED IN 2010 100
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“Lamb, to be eaten on top of a mountain.”
Sonny Angara SENATOR “Steak, pizza, unagi sushi, ramen, a cold beer and chocolate mousse”
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Pauline Pauli ne Prieto MODEL
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“A batch of my boyfriend’s homemade cookies. He makes them crunchy and chewy at the same time! Also, coconut shavings and chocolate chips equal perfection.”
Cecile Zamora Van Straten CHUVANESS “Sinigang na Bulalo with lots of bone marrow, rice and Coke.”
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Erik Matti FILM DIRECTOR “Perfect everyday mushy scrambled eggs, butter and pan de sal, tru�lecrusted lechon, uni on pasta, and Paris-brest for dessert. And before my last breath, a really good cup of coffee and a long, loud a nd resounding burp please.”
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WHAT I’VE LEARNED
COMMISSIONER OF THE BUREAU OF INTERNAL REVENUE INTERVIEWED BY
KARA ORTIGA PHOTOGRAPHED BY
EDRIC CHEN
KIM HENARES
Maybe I’m just strict. because that’s the way you put people in the straight and narrow line. > I never thought of myself in government. > I was attending a wedding reception, chaperoning my fatherin-law, and at the same table, Commissioner Parayno, who was then the commissioner of BIR was seated there. We got to talk and he was trying to implement VAT on financial institutions. Then he found out that I used to work for a bank. So he invited me to come here for lunch. When I was here he said, “Are you doing anything?” and I said, “Not really.” And he said, “Maybe you can help us. There is a cubicle.” And basically I got stuck. > Collecting taxes is a difficult task. > The President knows that I’m serious with my job, and that I was able to convey the message that I’m just here to help him, and to help the country. > I implement the laws strict ly. I try as much as possible not to give to much digression. That’s why the tax code is there. Everyone can read it, and I interpret it in a very strict sense. So everyone in my office can actually make a decision, and it should come out the same. A taxpayer, or their lawyer, or their accountant, when they read it, they should be able to come out with the same decision. > I’m focusing on tax evaders. Whether they are large or small, it doesn’t matter. As long as I have evidence, then I go after them. The large taxpayers, we’re always focused on them. It’s not that we’re targeting the small players; it’s just that we’ve always been very focused on the large, so now we’re going down. > If you are rational, you would realize we created a lot of benefit for the country. If it were not for the improved tax collection, you would not have a credit upgrade. We have a ten-credit upgrade, and one of the reasons is the tax collection performance. Without that, you won’t be enjoying this low tax rate. People, especially the middle class would not be able to buy houses and borrow money at a lower interest. At the end of the day, people should realize that we’re just doing this for the country. > I think the ad we just released was a very successful ad. One of the things that triggers change is for people to know what’s happening, whether good or bad. If it’s bad, and people be> I’m not ruthless!
> Strictness should always be there
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come aware, then it should trigger some action. > Anyone who is in their professional life should be able to differentiate what is personal and what is professional to be successful. > There is always basic right and basic wrong. You can never go wrong if you try to follow that track. > The worst thing is to not decide. You have to make a decision whether it’s based on how you perceive the facts, what the laws are, and the circumstances—you have to make the best decision you can. Now if it’s wrong, you have to go back. Admit it. > My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong. > Mom and dad were very conservative. Disciplinarians. Even when we were old, as long as you live in their house, you have to ask permission. Of course there are times when you don’t follow the rules. Like when I married my husband. > If there’s a rule, you have to follow it, especially in this job. If you feel that the rule is wrong, then you propose an amendment. In my professional job, there’s no room for not following. > I want to leave a legacy of service excellence for the BIR. I keep on telling people, what I want is to make this institution credible, very professional, and basically people respect it, because a lot of things hinge on us. > A country cannot operate without taxes. Taxes support the less fortunate members of our society. When people think of me, I hope they see that I have been able to do something for my country. > The only reason you regulate a lot is because a lot of people are not following. My example is always the family. If you have a child that’s very studious, mabait, you don’t monitor them. You basically don’t ask them to call home, or report where they are. But if you have another child who is bulakbol , doesn’t follow you, your monitoring becomes stricter, every hour you require them to call you. Now it’s the same thing if people become more compliant [with taxes], regulation will slacken off. > To be pro�icient in anything, you have to keep practicing. > Taxation is a controversial subject. I think it just comes with the job. I would be happy if nobody asked me any questions and I can concentrate on doing my job.
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MEMORY, GU ILT, RES ILIENCE , A ND DEATH: A WALK THROUGH FO RT BONIFACIO, THEN AND NOW WORDS BY PAOLO ENRICO M ELENDEZ
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM SERRANO
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Melendez was my grandfather. He raised me in the Fort Bonifacio of the ‘80s and ‘90s, then a semi-urban military foxhole in the middle of swank, swarming Makati. He fought in the war and was as quiet as dusk. He built our house with his own hands, kept an elaborate garden, maintained an Opel so rickety I could hear it approach from a block away. He fell gravely ill, and in more ways than one, my family left him to die. This is his eulogy and parade. My apology and shameless exploitation of a personal tragedy. Many years late, in the form of a walking tour of my childhood stomping ground as it stands now. Present-day Bonifacio is neither better nor worse. But without Sixto it is certainly different. The area where the Serendra roundabout now stands was the approach to our old neighborhood. Electricity in old Fort Bonifacio was spotty. Phone numbers had too many zeros—a social death sentence in an era of rotary phones. The opera-
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tors sounded like they were in various stages of shell shock. Military bureaucracy led to jeep franchises that had passengers switching rides to cross one block. And proximity to the Philippine Army HQ during a time of unstable politics meant getting front-seat, late-night views of coup d’etats, with Sixto annotating the exchange of gunfire, or expounding on the virtue of keeping the houselights out so you didn’t get shot as you rubbernecked with a bottle of Rodeo sarsaparilla. But it was a swell place to grow up in, too. Old world military discipline prevailed, so cars kept to their lanes and pedestrians to theirs. There was none of the inflation you would expect among businesses within an enclosed community. It was safe enough that anyone could leave a bike unlocked in any random place and come back for it hours later. And one household helped look after the next. One time I watched an entire block’s worth of kids chase a skinny man out the camp perimeter. He had stolen pandesal. Our house with Sixto was the first in a five-block row of residences in an area otherwise zoned for enterprise. A few businesses lent some legitimacy to the zoning. A veterans bank and the Army commissary. Three barbershops. Four tailors with
olive drab uniforms hanging in their shopfront windows like defeated grunts. Two dives muggy with stale beer and loud with songs one conjured for 25 cents from garish jukeboxes, because videoke wasn’t a thing yet then. A printing press that filled our house with the rhythmic booming that would prime my ears for a lifelong obsession with loud music. Near the end of the avenue stood the Philippine Army General Hospital, in which my grandfather was frequently confined for short spells. He was later moved to the larger if not better equipped V. Luna Hospital. Both were to my younger self studies in state institutions, in that to call something serbisyong gobyerno was to define it as respectful of circumstance but efficient as a gun with the muzzle sticking out of the stock. Before we move on, allow me to in terrupt myself with a note on the rigid cross-referencing conducted to make sure that the locations shown in the photos match my anecdotes about Sixto: there was none. For starters, militaries the world over are notoriously iffy about handing out detailed maps, however outdated. And picking at emotional scabs is tough enough work. So I chose Google Maps as my starting point and memory as my final arbiter. If accuracy colder than a dildo
on a shop shelf is your kind of thing, feel free to go read a list article on movie plotholes in a comedy website instead. THE MULLET AS A MODEL FOR ZONING FRAUD
To skirt the business-only zoning, residences like ours put up fronts more obvious and just as successful as a moneylaundering music festival. The seamstress one block down had all of two pin cushions. Another house ran a single-unit pay phone business, which I had funded with endless three-peso phone calls because I knew nothing about talking to girls and took forever to get to the point. Sixto’s own strategy was just as casual: put up a mini-mart in place of the household receiving room. To an extent, we did move retail. Sunday mornings and we’d get mobbed by ROTC cadets buying Coke to cool off after marching drills under the sun. But otherwise, our dusty counters held nothing but one or two bottles of soy s auce, a jar of ketchup, maybe a bag of white beans. None of it was for sale. The party happened out back. Our space was a good 300 square meters, most of it yard, the entire area ringed by Marsden matting reclaimed from Clark Airbase up north. A squat
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duplex sat left off center, my family occupying one side and my grandparents, the other. In the yard was a large dirty kitchen . Sixto would spend entire afternoons in there, pounding rice for kare-kare, or roasting cashews on his honest-to-goodness cement block stove, or rinsing blackberries from a tree he had planted just outside one Marsden panel. That was where I bugged him most. I would stand in a corner and yammer in my chubby voice about some kiddie action movie I’d seen or some imaginary army I had vanquished with a wooden shotgun that Sixto, incidentally, had crafted himself. I would punctuate my stories with gun noises made with mouth. He would grunt. In hindsight, I think I may have made a retiree’s quiet years quite noisesome. And it is a testament to the old man’s patience that he didn’t strangle me there and then, thus preventing you from suffering the adult equivalent of my insane backyard ramblings. WEIGHED AND FOUND FLABBY
Sixto’s mestizo features fed the family lore that his own parents had been the product of a fraile who’d been a little too zealous with the dispensation of brotherly love. He
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spoke in a peculiar baritone: cello notes and sand aggregate. Sixto smoked two packs a day and certainly smelled like it. He would take me on weekend walks inside t he American Cemetery, walks that would stretch on until the shadows of the trees were cast sidelong and black against the lush turf of the park. Now, at the t ime, I was cocky knowing I would stand near the end of any by-height schoolyard line. But on my walks with Sixto, my arm almost at full stretch just to clasp his calloused hand, I knew I would be hard put to measure up, even as an adult. A case in point: Once, inside one neighborhood barbershop, a corporal under the command of my father—who was in the service himself—recognized me and offered to let me skip the queue. My grandfather firmly refused. These days I would gladly skip any line regardless of context, especially if it meant getting back on Reddit sooner. Every pension payday, Sixto would buy my sister and me treats from Burger Machine. Afterwards, he would wipe the ketchup from our lips to make sure our grandmother never found out: In today ’s terms, the average old Bonifacio retiree or dependent earned just enough pension money to buy five
pairs of jeans or a single fancy flipboard clock in some High Street shop, and we all know that pants and ornamental appliances make for an unpalatable lunch. Those burgers, to my mind, were Sixt o’s only impracticality. He used the same set of worn shirts from my childhood, up until my family moved out of Bonifacio. Whenever he got sick, he would self-medicate with jars of water “cured” under Ernieform pyramids he had bought in Guadalupe: aluminum
frames peddled by weatherman Ernie Baron to channel positive cosmic energy into consumables and the occasional head of very reluctant exam reviewee. The singular trait of our house was a poured cement vault, repurposed into family bodega. Sixto had built the house himself, you see, on a loan he had taken out when he had no business taking out loans, being retired and all. The plot of land Sixto had selected had been the site of an American bank, and the pragmatic man built the house around the vault instead of trying to demolish it. In the vault, Sixto kept his most treasured possessions: hacksaws and chisels, a single-bit felling ax, a mattock and a claw hammer, hand planes and screws of various sizes. These tools he stored in worn wooden crates or olive drab canisters still stenciled PA or USAFE, ready to be fetched upon the easiest house or yard project. Sixto once nearly cut his own toe off with a spud bar. I watched him empty a packet of what was surely expired sulfa powder over the wound, bind his foot with gauze, and go back to digging his ditch. Some months later I chipped two teeth after taking a football tackle. I swallowed my teeth so I could
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keep playing. That was the closest I’ve ever come to any sort of resilience. OVER AND OUT
Alright, let’s get the downer part out of the way. Sixto died bloated and gasping on a late July night, less than a month after he was admitted int o V. Luna, with n either morphine nor chemotherapy. We simply didn’t have the money to even make his death comfortable. Catholic icons huddled impotently in a corner of the common ward. My father was out somewhere trying to find a chaplain to give Last Rites. I was left with Sixto’s hand in mine, just as things were when I was a kid. I could think of nothing to do but dab moist cotton on his flaking lips, like a vain first-responder with some very messed up priorities. His tongue bobbed inside his mouth like an amphibian struggling in thick mud. The sound he made as he died stuck to the seams of my shirt worse than even the smell of the ward, which was of stale sweat and whatever it is that seeps from our pores upon death. I would tell you about the wake and burial, but the freaky
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part is I can’t remember more than a couple of details from both. I’ve been trying for almost a week, and it has been very much like trying to get at a leaking pipe through a concrete wall with a silicon spatula. I remember a groggy last night of the wake at St. Michael’s church, now a vacant lot in the unde veloped side of Global City. I remember the Libingan ng mga
Bayani, green and white tarpaulin hanging over our small family, the marble cross already stenciled with Sixto’s birth and death dates, rubber mallet lying beside it for the undertaker to use. I remember “Taps” being played by the Army band, which sounded to me as though it was a full two beats too fast. And that’s about it: shards of memory like the bits of red and yellow glass on the floor after you drunkenly back into your garage wall one late night. DIRECTIONS TO A PLACE NO LONGER THERE
My family moved out of Fort Bonifacio shortly before it was reclaimed by the Bases Conversion Development Authority. We settled in Project 4, where I stayed until two years ago. I have since moved back to Taguig, a frantic fun run away from Global City. Obliterated have been the traces of my childhood space, the intersections of my youth and Sixto’s last years. The roads are now wider, the old tungsten lights replaced with LEDs more energy efficient and still way too harsh. The place is now business hub, tax haven, leisure nerve center, however the hell shambling marketers are calling it, plus holding freezer for
a couple thousand working stiffs tagged with the lanyards of industry, if I may add. I was one of those stiffs, at the time I resolved to finally write about my grandfather. Something I’ve been wanting to do since I was a kid in college. Guilt after all is a bu lky, chafing thing to keep in one’s pocket. My hair is now graying. My knees form rusty U-joints you couldn’t support cupcakes with when bent. Just a couple of months ago I went through my first serious series of medical tests, to rule out a congenital heart valve defect. That, and the cancer that killed both Sixto and my father, are the only two scenarios in my exit strategy, as it were. A final anecdote, on this, our last stop: Sixto and I were almost run over by a jeep, on our way back from a walk, somewhere near today’s BGC Turf. We were leaving another veteran’s house. I stepped out the door and bolted for the road. He snatched me midway. I felt more than saw the jeep s peed past. He didn’t say a word. It was nothing dramatic in fact. But in memory it is as mystical as a childhood space long since decamped, as large as any stoic defiance of death, and certainly worthy of appreciative crowd noises made with mouth.
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Gray V-neck sweater (P3,950), white button-down (P4,650), and khaki pants (P5,950), all by Massimo Dutti.
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STYLE
THE ACTOR ALEX MEDIN A IS NO STRANG ER TO DARK CHARACTERS A ND MYSTICAL P LACES. IN THI S STORY, HE PLAYS A PHOTOGRAPHER UNRAVELIN G A SECRET IN A WORLD INSPIRE D BY MIKE DE LEON’S ITIM , WEARI NG THIS MONT H’S SACRED ESSENTIAL : THE WHITE S HIRT.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAAN PALMIERY STYLING BY CLIFFORD OLANDAY AND ANTON MIRANDA ART DIRECTION BY EDRIC DELA ROSA PRODUCED BY JEROME GOMEZ
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White button-down (P10,498) by Aspesi at Univers and taupe shorts (P5,650) by Tommy Hilfiger.
STYLE
White button-down with wide placket (P29,998) by Jil Sander at Univers and white chinos (P11,000) by Ralph Lauren. Opposite: White button-down (P27,798) by D ior Homme at Univers.
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STYLE
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White button-down with club collar (P3,950) by Jaspal Man at Adora.
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White henley (P795) by Zara Man, cream henley pullover (P11,000) by Ralph Lauren, and white pants (P3,950) by Massimo Dutti.
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STYLE
White linen henley (P2,595) by Zara Man.
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Khaki blazer (P19,500) by Faconnable at Rustan’s, white button-down (P3,450) by Jaspal Man at Adora, and gray pants (P5,950) by Massimo Dutti. Grooming by Muriel Vega Perez for PAC Cosmetics. Special thanks to Maribel Corpus for the saints, and to Gregory Dorris.
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STORY BY REINE ARCACHE MELVIN ART BY NIKKI LUNA
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perhaps other women. None of them had mattered. She tried. Movements, sounds, reactions. She feigned pleasure even as she panicked. He didn’t open his eyes. When he started to come, she stopped trying and watched him.
LATER SHE LAY ON HER SIDE, facing him. He
NEAR THE HOUSE WERE WATCHTOWERS, which her great-grandparents and their servants climbed twice a year to watch the galleons sail in from Acapulco. When Lala was a child, her mother said: Never go up there, even seeing the ocean is dangerous— pirate winds carry Moros from the South, they never became Christian. Bad people, bad ghosts, they were all around her. And still she played in the towers, secretly, when her mother was away. She invented songs about typhoon winds, trade winds, eclipse winds, pirate winds. She imagined living in a time of gold and galleons and pirates. She pretended she looked like the portrait of her Chinese-Spanish great grandmother, with her slanted eyes and long neck, her white gloves and black lace fan. Mexican trade had made her family wealthy. Not Spanish, they said – Mexican. Later they told her: we were the colony of a colony. Not even Spanish, we said we were Spanish but no one was Spanish. When we went to Madrid, no one could understand what we were saying. And they warned her again: crazy women, vampires, dead Japanese prisoners from the war still dragging their chains, and the warnings filled her songs.
THROUGH A GAP IN T HE CURTAINS, in the room of Arturo’s childhood, a ray of moonlight sliced the darkness. Lala turned her back to him, pulled off her white satin nightgown. From behind, he
would see only a woman’s body, curved and wanting. No trace of the pregnancy that had disfigured her. She lay down beside him. He closed his eyes and ran his fingers over her thighs. A hollowing in the room, in her chest. There was a distance in his touch, a coldness, that she had never felt before. She became very still, aware of his hand on her skin, her skin under his hand, alert to the slightest shifts in pressure, to changes in his breathing, even to the vibrations in the air between them. Eyes shut, he stroked her, his gestures mechanical. She looked at the face that didn’t see her, and feared for herself. Her freedom, her safety, depended on his wanting her. She guided his hand to her belly, then to her breasts. Perhaps it was the pregnancy. Some men couldn’t deal with it. And Arturo liked thin women. Maybe he was just imagining she was someone else, pretending he had never touched her before. She sat up and lifted his hands over his head, crossed them at the wrist, rested them on the pillow. She began to caress him, in ways she knew he liked, in ways he had taught her at the beginning and now rarely dared to ask. And all the time her thoughts rushed backward and forward, skipping between images and phrases, trying to understand. It’s nothing, she told herself. It’s probably nothing. She knew he loved her. He had had flirtations,
was on his back, breath still ragged, one arm folded over his head. Except for the chest and belly, he looked so much like her. Narrow hips and long legs, high cheekbones, wide-set eyes. They looked so much alike that people often thought they were brother and sister, and at times she wondered whether he had married her so he could imagine making love to himself. She wanted to say something, but no words came. Maybe this was just a mood. He so rarely had moods. Arturo’s amiability was one of the things she liked best and understood least about him. He walked into a party and seemed delighted to see everybody there. One or two nights a week, he came to this house, where he had grown up and his mother still lived, because he missed the people in the household, the cook and maids and drivers who had taken care of him for years. He sat with them in the kitchen, ate with his hands, teased them about their love lives. All the servants, even the taciturn old gardener, brightened when they saw him. It will pass, she t old herself. Leave him alone. Instead she edged toward him, close enough to smell his skin. A trace of lavender soap, deodorant, and those other odors, musky and male, that she recognized but couldn’t name. Then the faint smells of the river came to her, too, the iodine and salt and sewage, slipping through the cracks in the walls and window frames of the large colonial house that had belonged to his family for generations. She and Arturo had grown up along the banks of this river, in different parts of Manila, at a time when the river was clean. That was a resemblance, too, as striking to her as that of their bodies, and for some reason this reassured her—the river, their appearance, these accidents of resemblance. She lowered her head to the pillow and shut her eyes, imagining the South China Sea flowing into Manila’s harbor and narrowing into this river, and sea water moving sluggishly past shantytowns and the presidential palace and Spanish-era
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mansions, gathering the city’s waste as it made its way to an inland lake so vast young children thought it was the sea.
PEOPLE FROM THE SAME SIDE of the river should never marry, her father had told her. She had been a child then, sitting with him by the banks of the river. She watched a dark shape, almost as wide as the river, shifting beneath the surface of the water. The people who lived here, her father said, were called t he Taga-Ilogs—those who live by the river. At the time, he told her, and in different places, the river was aquamarine, blue and yellow, and in the shallows almost transparent. Papa, she replied, trying not to blink because she knew the shadow would
away the worst of what had happened to her, the way tides erode the sharp contours of a rock, and her life would one day appear simple, too. But her father wouldn’t leave her in peace. She tried not to think of him. He’s dead, she told herself, each time an image or memory or that un speakable pain surfaced. She couldn’t imagine him on that sidewalk, after the shooting. She hadn’t sensed the danger, and she was supposed to know better than everyone else. At night he came back to her, in her dreams, a bloodied face, and at times, and this was worse, no face at all, no body, just a sense of him, a darkness, in distress. He was dead. And she hadn’t saved him. How could she have saved him? He hadn’t wanted to save himself. And the more the baby grew inside her,
IT WILL PASS, SHE TOLD HERS ELF. LEAVE HIM ALONE. INSTEAD SHE EDG ED TOWARD HIM, CLOSE ENOUGH TO SMELL HIS SKIN. A TRACE OF L AVENDER SOAP, DEODORANT, AND THOSE OTHER ODORS, MUS KY AND MALE, THAT SHE RECOGNIZED BUT COULDN’T NAME.
disappear if she closed her eyes. There’s an enormous fish there, at the bottom of the river. I see it every day when I come here. Can you see it? No one, her father said soothingly, has ever seen a monster fish in this river.
NOW SHE HELD HER BREATH as she lay next to Arturo and knew that most of her life she had been seeking someone just like him, like herself, a lover from her side of the river. She had loved her father but hated the life he had imposed on her, the exile and dissidents and poverty, the long years of political struggle that had taught her not idealism but distrust, convinced her that almost no one and nothing were what they seemed, that her safety depended on an ability to detect the lies, secrets and capacity for betrayal that hid behind words and smiles. Her family’s safety, too, depended on her. None of them could sens e the danger in other people. Arturo wasn’t dangerous. And he wanted things to be simple. In time, she believed, a life with him would wash 134
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taking up space in her belly, the more her father filled her dreams. He’s dead, she told herself, often in anger. She was alive. But sometimes when the dreams became too much, when she woke up with her chest so tight and painful she felt she couldn’t breathe—she had never realized a heart really could ache, that the pain was physical and not figurative—when this happened, she slipped away from the house and drove to the old cathedral he had visited for novenas and penitence. She walked toward the statue of t he Virgin Mary, with her slanted eyes and long neck and white hands like the portrait of Lala’s greatgrandmother. Surrounded by the smells of mildew and dank wood and human bodies, Lala knelt at a wooden pew and prayed to her father, to the saints, to whoever might be out there listening to the people on th eir knees around her, to whoever or whatever could h ear her. She prayed for him to leave her alone.
ON THE PILLOWCASE, the odor of peachscented detergent displaced the smells
of the river. The room carried little trace of the boy who had lived there. Framed on the wall was a child’s copy of a Picasso painting, a blue-toned old man curled around a guitar, which Arturo had painted in a remarkably sure hand when he was seven. Near the bed, a glass case displayed one of his early model ships. A galleon, with full sails, about two feet long and two feet high—she couldn’t tell whether it was Spanish or French, although Arturo had tried to explain the differences. He still constructed one or t wo galleons every year, spending months on each one, hunched over the materials on his work table— planks of teak or rosewood, light canvas for the sails, silk flags, metal canons and anchors, miniscule nails, spools of thread, containers of beeswax. He s ewed the sails and nailed the planks with a delicacy and deftness that surprised her, and some evenings she sat beside him to watch those strong fingers handling the tiny pieces. Now she pressed her forehead against his shoulder, her eyes so close to his skin that she could no longer see him. He nudged her away. The baby, she thought. Whatever’s happening, if something is happening, he won’t hurt the baby. He switched on the lamp, as he always did at night before going to sleep. She sat up and pinched her nipples. A drop of yellow liquid pearled over each tip. He tucked his hands under his head, elbows pointing toward the walls. “I had a dream the other n ight,” he said pleasantly. The tone in his voice, its very pleasantness, seemed a massive wall, blocking access to whatever was happening inside him. She licked the liquid from her fingertips, trying to remember the last time he had really spoken to her. After a moment, she s aid: “Tell me about it.” “It was a silly dream, a dream of vampires. They were all around me, in your sister’s hous e.” Her back straightened. He smiled. He had good teeth, even and white. “It was just a dream, La.” He twisted his head t o look at her, the smile shifting into that reckless, bad-boy grin she still found irresistible. “They were crawling in through the window. Beautiful. And these horrible red and black robes. Probably polyester. It looked like polyester. But the women were gorgeous, bending over me, all white skin, and breasts spilling
out. They were about to bite off my feet when I woke up.” She gazed at him with attention and a wary tenderness. The expensive haircut, the body pummeled into shape by weights and sports, the high-bridged nose. Arturo always looked as if he had just stepped out of the shower, even after a night of hard partying or hours of sex. For years, no matter the strains and irritations that surfaced between them, his skin and smell had brought her back to him. She had loved what he felt like. Memories came to her, from the beginning, the way he turned to kiss her in the cinema whenever on-screen lovers began to kiss or make love, the way he combed her hair after a s hower, patted the strands dry, rubbed them between his fingers. The way he slept with his arms and legs around hers, seeking her even in sleep. Each time she had been surprised and moved, but she had never told him, never wanted him to know how much he meant to her. Not a bad man. That was what she told her parents, when she started dating him in San Francisco. Despite everything, a good heart. Good hearts turn up in the most unlikely places, her father responded drily. But Gregorio had never tried to stop her. She knew what people said. A smart marriage. A brilliant move. But how could she live with it, how could she betray her father’s memory this way? “What’s the matter?” Arturo asked. “You don’t like vampires?” No one, not even her father, understood this: the real betrayal wasn’t marrying Arturo, but loving him. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “It was only a dream.” She knew these sons of privilege. Men like him needed distractions, novelty, excitement. She decided to act playful. “I used to see things, too,” she said. “Vampires?” “No. Of course not. A fish. And it wasn’t a dream—I really saw it.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “You saw a fish?” “Don’t make fun of me. An en ormous black one, at the bottom of the Pasig. Next to the house we lived in when I was small. Every time I looked at it, it got bigger, and I was sure that one day it would be too big for the river. I was sure that one day, when the floods came, it would swim out of the river and break into our house, and then it would swim up the stairs and eat me.”
He rubbed his thumb against her wrist, as he used to do, years ago, whenever she became upset. She leaned back against the pillows, disturbed by the memory of how much he had loved her. “What do you do with dreams like that?” he asked. Maybe she was mistaken—maybe nothing was wrong. Or maybe everything was, and he was trying only to keep the surfaces smooth, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She wanted to say: Tell me how the dream ended. Tell me whom you were thinking about when we made love. Tell me what she looks like, how you imagined her moving when you were inside me.
Instead she said: “One night, it was raining so hard, I was sure the fish was there, waiting for me to s leep. I saw its black tail banging against the window. Bigger than t he window, really, but my father said it was just the giant leaves of the banana tree, hitting the glass.” “I don’t want our b aby to dream like that,” he said. “It wasn’t a dream.” On that night, in her childhood, rain had been pounding the roof, water dripping through the holes that Japanese bullets had pierced during the war. Her grandfather had never repaired the holes—he said the family should never forget what the Japanese did to them. On nights like that, the river was black
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and rising, spilling over the banks and flooding the garden. She had cried into the darkness for her father. Only he could hear her at night. She called and called, but no one came. She crept out of bed and found Gregorio hunched over his books and papers, his glasses slipping down his nose, a bottle of whisky beside him. His eyes softened when he saw her, and he smiled at her with such affection that she lowered her head in shame. Even as a child she knew how hard she could be, how unlike her father, mother, sister and everyone else, and she was afraid that if he saw into her heart he would never love her again. Her father scraped his chair away from the desk and carried her back to bed. He tucked her in, lowered the temperature of the air-conditioner and told her to pray out loud. Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee, she whispered, but nothing happened. The fish was still there, outside t he window. He kissed her forehead. “Is it gone now?” Violet-red veins criss-crossed his eyes. “Lala?” She shook her head. He glanced at his watch. “What do you think we should do now, hija?” “I think we should eat it,” she said. He raised an eyebrow. She jumped from bed and gathered her red plastic tea set, then made her father sit on the floor beside her. Hurriedly she arranged the small plastic saucers, forks and knives in front of them. “We have to eat it quickly, before it kills us,” she told him solemnly. With a knife and fork she cut the in visible fish into many pieces and spread them across her tea set. Then they ate every morsel, even the eyes, which were bigger than her head, and when they finished eating, he asked her wearily: “Is it gone now? Have we killed that fish?” And she knew they had. She never saw it again, and the shadow disappeared from the bottom of t he river. But now Arturo turned to her in bed and said: “He was always a little strange, wasn’t he, your father? Even before the politics, all those t hings he was doing.” “He was just t rying to make money, like everyone else. Is that strange? I think it’s the world that’s strange. And he wasn’t very good at it.” She hesitated. Nothing she said could make him see the father she had loved. Her father’s self-doubt and idealism had no resonance in Arturo’s universe, where power
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“THEY WERE CRAWLING IN TH ROUGH THE WINDOW. BEAUTIFUL. AND THES E HORRIBLE RED AND BLACK ROBES. PRO BABLY POLYESTER. IT LOOKED LIKE PO LYESTER. BUT T HE WOMEN WERE GORGEOUS, BENDING OVER ME, ALL WHITE SKIN, AN D BREASTS SPILL ING OUT. THEY WERE ABOUT TO B ITE OFF MY FEET WH EN I WOKE UP.”
and privilege were all that mattered. She began speaking rapidly, as though words could displace his misgivings, as though convincing him to admire her father would make him want her again. “He had this project—he worked on it, off and on, for years—to build a cement road through a jungle, in the south. But he couldn’t do it. Life there was too strong, he told us. Every time they poured the cement, he would go down to inspect, and he said things kept breaking through it—trees, flowers, plants, just pushing up from under and ripping the cement apart. Once, when he arrived, he saw a two-hundred-foot mango tree in the middle of the road, with dozens of red and green parrots in its branches. The workers said it just came up that way, practically overnight.” A sly smile. “Maybe the workers had too much sun?” “My mother said it wasn’t that life was so strong—she was sure he was building the road over the homes of duende, and they were getting angry.” “Okay, La.” She didn’t tell him: As a child, she had mimicked her mother’s impatience with her father. Gregorio wasn’t practical, couldn’t make money, didn’t know how to build a life. But in her heart she knew it didn’t matter what her mother said—her father saw how big the world was, how full of creatures and colors and magic. She rolled her eyes like her mother, but she was thrilled by her father’s stories, the red and green parrots, and the people who lived on the banks of aquamarine, blue and yellow rivers. Now, when she could and when
she forgot to stop herself, she sought out the colors he had taught her to see. She served yellow and pink and blue food at parties, arranged red and green sachets of potpourri in her closets, tucked colored buttons into the bottom of her handbags. He’s dead, she told herself. I have to stop thinking of him. But she found herself gathering colors for him, mementoes of the worlds he had opened for her. A trade, she told him. I’ll gather tokens of you, and they’ll be my talismans against you. I’ll carry parts of you wherever I go, and you’ll leave me alone. A fluttering inside her, as light and agitated as a bird’s heartbeat. She pressed Arturo’s hand against her stomach, where the baby was kicking. He kissed her on the cheek, his eyes already distracted, withdrawing. Her chest tightened. Her inner sense, the barometer that had guided her through years of intrigue and exile, was broken. It had failed her with her father, and it was failing her now. Two fingertips touched the hollow of her cheek. He smiled again, tentatively, and a moment later she mirrored his smile. He said, seemingly at a loss for anything else: “Your face is getting so thin.” Perhaps everyone needs a surface life, to stay intact, she told herself. Maybe that’s all it is. Not someone else. He kissed her briefly on her lips and on her belly, as he did every night, and turned to his side, facing the lamplight. She grasped his shoulder, as she did every night, holding him until his breathing steadied and her touch eased him into sleep.
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the ageless muck where his journey began.
[continued from page 95]
So he settled that suit. But these things happen. You’re trying to fix people who would otherwise be hopelessly broken, and sometimes you don’t succeed, or things just go a little awry. And too often there are lawyers waiting in the wings. It didn’t really affect him. He was still teaching at Harvard, still practicing at the Brigham. He was still on the rise. There were some tensions at work, though. He and the man he worked for, Dr. Peter Black, the Brigham’s chair of neurosurgery, weren’t getting along. Why that is depends on whom you ask. Alexander thinks it’s because Black had assigned him to head up the hospital’s stereotactic-radiosurgery program, and initially that technology was used only to treat aneurysms. The technology had developed quickly, though, and soon Alexander was using it on t umors, too. He’d also begun using the hospital’s new intraoperative MRI machine to do tumor work. Problem was, Black was known worldwide as the tumor guy. For instance, when Ringo Starr’s daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor, her doctors sent her across the Atlantic, because only Black would do. Alexander thought Black was maybe worried that Alexander was encroaching on his turf, and this was straining their relationship. Black, for his part, has no comment. But all in all, more than a decade into his career at the Brigham, things were looking great. He coauthored a lot of journal articles and two academic textbooks, one about stereotactic radiosurgery and the other focusing on the intraoperative MRI machine. And then, in 2000, he served as the inspiration for a best-selling novel. His friend wrote it. The Patient, by Michael Palmer. A medical thriller, the kind travelers snatch up in airports and devour on airplanes. A French terrorist dying from a brain tumor takes a prestigious Boston hospital hostage in order to force the staff to save his life. Initially, the terrorist wants the operation performed by the chief of the neurosurgery department, Carl Gilbride, but Gilbride soon reveals himself to be a venal and incompetent blowhard whose “true forte was self-promotion.” The real star of the neurosurgery department, the terrorist deduces, is a young firebrand named Jessie Copeland, who is everything a patient could hope for: brilliant, selfless, compassionate, fiercely devoted to her charges, and a wizard with a scalpel. When t he terrorist chooses Copeland to perform his operation, it rankles Gilbride so much that he be-
including a letter that the patient ’s primary neurosurgeon had sent to Alexander, notifying him of her postoperative facial paralysis. The woman’s attorney argued that “it is reasonable to infer that this pattern of disappearance of probative evidence was not coincidental, but was in fact deliberate.” The attorney was arguing, in othe r words, that when Alexander found things that didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell, he changed them, or made them disappear altogether. Alexander settled. He soars on the butter�ly’s wing for who knows how long. Time is different. Space, time, self, everything: different. Above the butterflies, sentient orbs of light float. Angels? Who knows. But eventually he rises, even higher. Or deeper. Further. He enters a new realm, one of infinite depth and infinite blackness. And at the center of it all, a light. Bright, pulsating, warm, loving, wise. The embodiment, the definition, the source of all of those things and everything else. The all-knowing and all-loving creator at the center of all existence. He approaches God. God approaches him. God is everywhere. Above. Below. Beside. Inside. He and God are One. And although he still doesn’t know who he is or where he is, though he still has no concept of language itself, of present, of past, none of that matters. He knows. He knows . . . everything . He knows the unknowable, the great mysteries, the answers to the ultimate whys and wheres and whats. Why are we here? Where did we come from? What do we do now? He knows it all. And then he falls away. Down through the valley of swirling butte rflies. Back into
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gins trying to thwart and sabotage her at every turn. Palmer had learned everything he could about neurosurgery from Alexander and channeled it into the book, into Copeland. Alexander had even passed along to Palmer the idea for ARTIE, the robotic assistant that could crawl straight up someone’s nose and into their brain and, when com bined with an intraoperative MRI machine, resect even the most stubbornly embedded tumors. When folks at the Brigham read The Patient, it took them about a half second to realize that Copeland was a standin for Eben Alexander (albeit under the diaphanous disguise of a sex change). And it didn’t take much longer than that for them to realize that the vile, venal chief of neurosurgery, the fictional Carl Gilbride, was supposed to be th e Brigham’s real-life chair of neurosurgery, Eben Alexander’s boss, Peter Black. As one former resident of Alexander’s puts it, the “animosity and dynamic is ee rily identical.” Alexander, he says, “poured all his frustration in there through Palmer,” though he cautions the resulting portraits of Alexander and Black are “open to interpretation and tinted with jealousy.” In the fictional world of the book, Carl Gilbride gets what’s coming to him. He is pistol-whipped and roundly humiliated, and by the end is so entirely emasculated and subservient to Copeland that he seeks praise from her “like a four-year-old announcing he had picked up all his toys.” In the real world, things turned out differently. On April 13, 2001, almost exactly a year after the publication of The Patient, Dr. Eben Alexander’s employment as a surgeon at the Brigham was terminated. Rumors flooded the hospital hallways and break areas—a problem with a patient? simply too much ego in one place?—but none were ever substantiated. The administrators, as is their bureaucratic wont, stayed silent. Only one fact was indisputable: Dr. Eben Alexander III was moving on. He falls and rises and falls and rises. Back in the muck and murk of the realm below the verdant place, below God, he eventually, after seconds or hours or days or years or millennia, discovers that he is in control. That he can ascend again. All he needs to do is summon the melody, the one that accompanied the initial portal, and then he’ll float up and through it and be back on the butterfly again, with the beautiful girl, ready for another encounter with God. He repeats the pattern, falling down, rising up, countless times.
But eventually the melody stops working. Eventually the melody no longer summons the glowing gateway. It doesn’t bother him, really. Even there, in the writhing brown and grime, he knows that he is loved, eternally, that he can do nothing wrong, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to him. Secure in this knowledge, and in all his other newfound wisdom as well, he slowly becomes aware of another realm. Faces emerge from the murk and present the mselves to him, and although he doesn’t recognize them, although he doesn’t know who they are, he senses their concern for him. Their love. They come from where he comes from. He begins to wake up. It’s time to go back. It was time to go back, to head back home to the South. New England hadn’t quite worked out. After the Brigham, he’d taken a job at the UMass Memorial Medical Center, in Worcester, thirty-five miles west of Boston. He’d run its deep-brain-stimulation program, implanting electrodes into patients, helping alleviat e their Parkinsonian tremors by means of corrective shocks. But there had been more lawsuits— in one case, a bit of plastic was le ft behind in a woman’s neck—and there had been another boss he didn’t get along with. In August 2003, UMass Memorial suspended Alexander’s surgical privileges “on the basis or allegation of improper performance of surgery.” (The specifics of the case leading to the suspension are confidential, though Alexander claims it resulted from “a very complex repeat operation I did around the brain stem of a patient in which the patient had more difficulty recovering after the operation I would say than I anticipated and than I led them to believe.”) His suspension technically ended in November of that same year, but he never went back to work at UMass Memorial. He resigned. The following year he did a little freelance consulting for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a company that matches corporations with experts in various fields, and also filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, claiming it improperly withheld more than $400,000 of his retirement and deferred-compensation plans. He had been more or less out of work for fifteen months when, in March 2005, he received a letter from the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine asking him to respond to a complaint form they’d received from a former patient who was upset that Alexander had stopped responding to phone calls. Al-
exander wrote a letter back, explaining that the complaint was invalid because he was no longer practicing and that, furthermore, he would soon be leaving the state altogether. “I wanted to stay in Massachusetts, but [the UMass chair of surgery’s] campaign against me has made that impossible,” he wrote. He added that he was a very good neurosurgeon, and that “Massachusetts would be most fortunate to have the benefit of my skills as a physician and surgeon over the next fifteen years, but they won’t have it, because I am leaving this state for a more hospitable and welcoming environment. It will be nice to be appreciated for all that I have to offer.” The board ultimately took no disciplinary action. Still, one year later, he moved his family back south, into a big redbrick colonial house in Lynchburg, Virginia, not far from where he grew up, and Lynchburg General Hospital hired him as a staff neurosurgeon. He got back to work. When he comes back, when he opens his eyes, when the new-old realm with all its fresh-familiar sensations comes washing over him, he is at first very confused. For the better part of the next week, he experiences what is known as ICU psychosis. He hallucinates. Some of the hallucinations are very strange. At one point he believes he is running through a cancer clinic in south Florida, being pursued by his wife, a pair of policemen, and two Asian ninja photographers. His vocabulary is incomplete. Parts of his brain are still dysfunctional. But slowly his brain comes back online. Reality imposes itself. He becomes aware of who the people around him are. His family, his friends. He becomes aware of exactly where he is. He remembers this place. The sorts of operations Alexander performed at Lynchburg General Hospital were old-fashioned, as far as neurosurgery goes. But that doesn’t mean they were unimportant. For example, on March 1, 2007, a fiftyfour-year-old tobacco farmer from a small town outside of Lynchburg visited Dr. Alexander, complaining of pain in his neck and trapezius and upper arm. Alexander conducted a physical examination and inspected some MRI imagery and told the patient that he recommended a spinal decompression surgery that would involve fusing his fifth and sixth vertebrae. The patient agreed to the surgery, and several months later, on June 27, 2007, Alexander p erformed it. He did something wrong. Instead of fus-
ing the farmer’s fifth and sixth vertebrae, he fused his fourth and fifth. He did not realize his mistake at first. When he dictated the operative report, he recorded that the “MRI scan showed significant disk bulge and disk osteophyte complex compression at C5-6 mainly the left side,” and then described an operation on those vertebrae, instead of the vertebrae he had actually operated on. On July 12, he had his first follow-up appointment with the farmer. He reviewed the postoperative X-rays. He noticed his mistake. He didn’t tell his patient. Instead, after his patient went home, he pulled the operative report up on his computer and edited it. Now the report read that the MRI scan had showed disk bulge at both C4-5 and C5-6, and that “we had discussed possible C5-6 as well as C4-5 decompression, finally deciding on C4-5 decompression.” Then he simply found every subsequent reference in the report to C5-6 and changed it to C4-5. After he finished editing the report, it read as though he hadn’t done anything wrong at all. During a third follow-up meeting, in October, Alexander finally confessed, and told the patient that if he wanted another operation he could have it for free. It is unclear exactly when Lynchburg General Hospital learned of Alexander’s mistake, but by the end of October he no longer had surgical privileges at the hospital. On August 6, 2008, the patient filed a $3 million lawsuit against Alexander, accusing him of negligence, battery, spoliation, and fraud. The purported cover-up, the changes Alexander had made to the surgical report, was a major aspect of the suit. Once again, a lawyer was accusing Alexander of altering the historical record when the historical record didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell. By the time the lawsuit was filed, Alexander had found another job, with a nonprofit called the Focused Ultrasound Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, an hour-anda-half drive from Lynchburg. His new job did not involve the practice of neurosurgery. His boss, the neurosurgeon D r. Neal Kassell, who was also a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Virginia medical school, had known Alexander for many years. He had high respect for Alexander’s intelligence—like Alexander’s former residents, he described Alexander as brilliant. He had less esteem for Alexander’s surgical abilities. “Neurosurgery requires the ability to intensely concentrate on one thing for a long period of time,” he says. “And that’s
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not Eben’s MO.” The tobacco farmer’s lawsuit was still in its preliminary stages, hanging over Alexander’s head like a $3 million hammer, when the E. coli started their terrible multiplication. He goes home from the hospital just before Thanksgiving. He is sixteen pounds lighter and still foggy, but getting stronger and sharper every day. He had been scheduled to give a deposition in the case of the tobacco farmer in December, but the court allows it to be pushed back. He keeps himself busy. He writes thank-you postcards to some of the medical staff that took care of him. He takes notes about his memories of his strange comatose journey, the murky place and the butterflies and the countryside and the dazzling epiphanic light at the center of it all. He imagines there is probably a neurological explanation for what he experienced. Eventually he starts going back to work at the Focused Ultrasound Foundation. On March 18, 2009, Alexander gives his deposition in the tobacco-farmer case. He testifies that when he learned of his e rror, he “felt like [he’d] been hit by a truck,” but that he refrained from telling the patient because he was intrigued by postoperative improvements he claims the patient had made despite the botched operation. “I thought that I would end up telling him about it,” he says, “and I think my overwhelming curiosity about why he had gotten better—I wanted to see if his symptoms came back quickly because people sometimes will have a placebo effect to surgery.” Soon after his deposition, A lexander’s lawyers urge him to settle, and he does. They also urge him to settle another case, stemming from an operation he performed only two weeks after the farmer’s, when he again operated on the wrong vertebra of a patient. He settles that case, too. The Virginia Board of Medicine allows him to keep his license, but levies a modest fine and orders him to take continuing education classes in ethics and professionalism. By the time all his pending cases are resolved, Alexander will have settled five malpractice cases in the last ten years. Only one other Virginia-licensed neurosurgeon has settled as many cases in that time period, and none have settled more. But really, in the wake of his coma, his perspective on his legal troubles has shifted. He’s just lucky to be alive. The mere fact of it, the mere fact that his brain survived that vicious bacterial assault, well . . . some might even call it a miracle. He starts read-
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ing a lot about near-death experiences, books li ke Life After Death , by Dinesh D’Souza; Embraced by the Light, by Betty J. Eadie; and Evidence of the Afterlife , by Jeffrey Long. These books all argue that experiences such as the one he had were not hallucinatory quirks of a brain under siege. They were real. One morning, maybe four months after his coma, he’s in his bedroom reading one of these books, called On Life After Death, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. He comes to a story about a little girl who has a near-death experience during which she meets a deceased brother she had never known. Alexander, who had recently received a photo of a deceased daughter of his birth parents, a sister he had never known, puts the book down and lets his eyes wander to the photo. And then, suddenly, he recognizes her. The girl on the butterfly wing. He can’t sleep. For days and weeks and months in a row, he wakes at two in the morning and can’t fall back asleep, so he goes to the den long before he needs to start his long commute to work, and he writes and reads and thinks. He knows he has a story to tell, but the question is how to tell it. He eventually decides to start with the story of his first near-death experience. It’s a story from his skydiving days back in college. He logged more than three hundred jumps during his college career, and most of them were thrilling but otherwise uneventful. On one autumn day in 1975, however, something went wrong. On that particular day, he was the last of a group of six jumpers to exit the airplane. The group had intended to form a six-man star formation, but one flew in too fast and knocked the formation apart before Alexander could come in to complete it. After recovering their bearings, the briefly discombobulated jumpers tracked away from one another, preparing to deploy their chutes. Alexander did the same, rocketing off to stake out his own untrammeled patch of sky. He was about to pull his rip cord when he noticed with a start that a jumper named Chuck had tracked to a spot directly below him. He describes the moment: He must not see me. The thought barely had time to go through my head before Chuck’s colorful pilot chute blossomed out of his backpack. His pilot chute caught the 120-mph breeze coming around him and shot straight toward me, pulling his main parachute in its sleeve right behind it. From the instant I saw Chuck’s pilot chute
emerge, I had a fraction of a second to react. For it would take less than a second to tumble through his deploying main parachute, and—quite likely—right into Chuck himself. At that speed, if I hit his arm or his leg I would take it right off, dealing myself a fatal blow in the process. If I hit him directly, both our bodies would essentially explode. Instead, Alexander managed to react in the most perfect way possible to the scenario, instantaneously and without conscious effort angling his body so that it rocketed away from Chuck, avoiding disaster by microseconds. At the time, he mar veled at what he believed must have been his brain’s untapped capacity for preternaturally quick thinking. Now he interprets this incident differently. This book is about the events that changed my mind on the matter. They convinced me that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain is, it was not my brain that saved my l ife that day at all. What sprang into action the second Chuck’s chute started to open was another, much deeper part of me. A part that could move so fast because it was not stuck in time at all, the way the brain and body are. He has his beginning. There was a man named Chuck in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sport Parachute Club. He won’t return phone calls. But his sister-in-law does. She’s read Proof of Heaven. She immediately thought to herself that the Chuck in the book must have been her brother-inlaw. She sends Chuck a few e-mails. Finally he responds. He remembers Alexander. He says he doesn’t remember anything like the incident Alexander describes. Alexander can understand the confusion. “It’s not Chuck,” he says today. “I proba bly should have put a disclaimer in the front of the book saying that Chuck is not Chuck. It is actually somebody not named Chuck. Because I cannot give the name of the person it was. Because the attorneys at Simon & Schuster would be mad at me. Because potentially they did something wrong. Potentially they were liable for causing trou ble, etc., etc. So I am under very strict ad vice from the Simon & Schuster attorneys not to divulge who that was.” But if the man who’d opened the chute below him had done something wrong, it was something wrong that hadn’t caused any personal injury. There wouldn’t have been any legal liability there, right? “Right,” he says. “Well, that was my argument, but these attorneys, it was kind of surprising to me, that was one of the few things they focused on. They said, ‘Do not,
under any circumstances, divulge who that was!’ ” So he had changed the character’s name to Chuck, which happened to be the real name of someone he did skydive with? “It’s not Chuck,” he repeats. “It’s not Chuck.” Is he still in touch with Chuck? “No.” And fake Chuck? “No, I don’t know what happened to fake Chuck.” Is there anyone else who was part of the jump that day who might be able to verify his story? “You know, there’s not. Because I can’t tell you exactly which day it was. And my logbook—those pages in my logbook I don’t have right now.” The book progresses. He starts to hone his argument and to shape its presentation. He is, he writes, “a practicing neurosurgeon” and is familiar with “the most advanced concepts in brain science and consciousness studies.” His “decades of research and hands-on work in the operating room” put him “in a better-than-average position to judge not only the reality but also the implications of what happened to me.” He introduces his central thesis. “During my coma,” he writes, “my brain wasn’t working improperly—it wasn’t working at all.” This is the key. His brain wasn’t working, and yet he had these vivid memories of voyaging through these other realms: the murky dark, the butterflies, the vast darkness, and the luminous, all-knowing creator. How could he have memories from a time when his brain wasn’t working at all? From a time when, as he writes, “my mind, my spirit—whatever you may choose to call the central, human part of me—was gone.” The answer is simple and logical. It is also, he writes, “of stunning importance. Not just to me, but to all of us.” Alexander writes, “The place I went was real, real in a way that makes the life we’re living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.” As he nears the end of his tale, every part of his story seems to be connected to every other part in mysterious ways. For instance, his coma began on Monday, November 10, and by Saturday, “it had been raining for five days straight, ever since the afternoon of my entrance into the ICU.” Then, on Sunday, after six days of torrents, just before he woke up, the rain stopped: To the east, the sun was shooting its rays
through a chink in the cloud cover, lighting up the lovely ancient mountains to the west and the layer of cloud above as well, giving the gray clouds a golden tinge. Then, looking toward the distant peaks, opposite to where the mid-November sun was starting its ascent, there it was. A perfect rainbow. It was as though heaven itself was cheering Alexander’s return. Dave Wert, meteorologist in charge at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office that encompasses Lynch burg, reviews the weather records for the week of November 10 through 16. “There was nothing on the tenth,” he says. “Nothing on the eleventh . . . two hundredths of an inch on the twelfth.” The next three days, he says, were rainy and miserable. Then the storm appeared to break on the evening of the fifteenth. The sixteenth was another clear day. Could there have been a rainbow on the morning of the sixteenth? “No,” he says. Unlike weather records, Alexander’s medical records are all confidential. Alexander does not plan to make them public, though he did offer to allow three of the doctors who treated him to speak about his case. Two of them declined the opportunity. The other, Dr. Laura Potter, was on duty in the ER of Lynchburg General Hospital on the morning of November 10, 2008, when the EMTs brought him in. Both Alexander in his book and Potter in her recollections describe Alexander arriving in the ER groaning and flailing and raving and having to be physically restrained. In Proof of Heaven, Alexander describes Dr. Potter then administering him “sedatives” to calm him down. Here’s how Dr. Potter remembers it: “We couldn’t work with Eben at all, we couldn’t get vital signs, he just was not able to comply. So I had to make the decision to just place him in a chemically induced coma. Really for his own safety, until we could treat him. And so I did. . . . I put him to slee p, if you will, and put him on life support.” After Alexander was taken from the ER to the ICU, Potter says, the doctors there administered anesthetics that kept him in the coma. The next day, she went to visit him. “And of course he was sti ll in an induced coma,” she says. “On ventilator support. They tried to let him wake up and see what he would do, but he was in exactly the same agitated state. Even if they tried to ease up, a little bit even, on the sedation. In fact, for
days, every time they would try to wean his sedation—just thrashing, trying to scream, and grabbing at his tube.” In Proof of Heaven, Alexander writes that he spent seven days in “a coma caused by a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis.” There is no indication in the book that it was Laura Potter, and not bacterial meningitis, that induced his coma, or that the physicians in the ICU maintained his coma in the days that followed through the use of anesthetics. Alexander also writes that during his week in the ICU he was present “in body alone,” that the bacterial assault had left him with an “all-but-destroyed brain.” He notes that by conventional scientific understanding, “if you don’t have a working brain, you can’t be conscious,” and a key point of his argument for the reality of the realms he claims to have visited is that his memories could not have been hallucinations, since he didn’t possess a brain capa ble of creating even a hallucinatory conscious experience. I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated state that Alexander exhibited whenever they weaned him off his anesthetics during his first days of coma would meet her definition of conscious. “Yes,” she says. “Conscious but delirious.” Potter hasn’t read Proof of Heaven, although she did get an advance look at a few passages. About a year after his recovery, Alexander approached Potter at a track meet that both of their sons were competing in and told her that he’d started writing a book, and that he wanted her to take a look at some parts in which he described her thought processes in t he emergency room. He wanted, he said, to “make sure that you’re okay with what I’ve done.” He later e-mailed the passages to her, and when she read them, she found that they were “sort of what a doctor would think, but not exactly what was going through my head.” She told him so, and according to Potter he responded that it was a matter of “artistic license,” and that aspects of his book were “dramatized, so it may not be exactly how it went, but it’s supposed to be interesting for readers.” One of the book’s most dramatic scenes takes place just before she sends him from the ER to the ICU: In the final moments before leaving the emergency room, and after two straight hours of guttural animal wails and groaning, I became quiet. Then, out of nowhere, I shouted three words. They were crystal clear, and heard by all the doctors and nurses present, as well as by Holley, who stood a few paces away, just on the other side of the curtain.
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“God, help me!” Everyone rushed over to the stretcher stretcher.. By the time they got to me, I was completely unresponsive. Potter has no recollection of this incident, or of that shouted plea. What she does remember is that she had intubated Alexander more than an hour prior to his departure from the emergency room, snaking a plastic tube down his throat, through his vocal cords, cords, and into his trachea. Could Could she imagine her intubated patient being able to speak at all, let alone in a crystal-clear way? “No,” she says. He �inds an agent, and the agent shops his book proposal around, and soon Simon & Schuster offers him a book deal. They put it on the fast track for publishing, want to get it out that same year. A writer named Ptolemy Tompkins, who has written other books about near-death experiences, is brought in to help chop down the manuscript by more than half. Alexander meets in New York with the publishers and his editor, but once the deal is struck, the gears of the publishing world grind on even when he’s back down south. The title of the book, according to Alexander,, is generated during a meeting he exander doesn’t attend, a meeting between executives at Simon & Schuster and, according to him, executives at various ABC tele vision programs, programs, including including Good Morning America, 20/20, and Nightline. During the meeting, the Simon & Schuster executives, who are trying to line up coverage for the book, are making their pitch—this renowned neurosurgeon visits the afterlife, comes back with wondrous stories to tell— and toward the end of the meeting an ABC executive asks if the Simon & Schuster execs can summarize what makes the book important. Heaven!” someone blurts. “It’s Proof of Heaven In his study, toward the end of our con versation, Alexander Alexander distances distances himself from the title. “When they first came to me with that title I didn’t like it at all,” he says. “Because I knew from my journey that it was very clear to me that no human brain or mind, no kind of scientific philosophical entity will ever be able to know enough to say yes or no to the existence of that realm or deity, because it’s so far beyond our human understanding.” It is, he says, “laughable” and “the highest form of folly, of hubris” to think t hat anyone could ever “prove” heaven. “I knew,” knew ,” he says, “that proof in a scientific sense was ridiculous. I mean, no one could
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have that.” We talk �ive weeks later by later by Skype. Skype. He’s He’s in a hotel in Vancouver ancouver,, at the beginning of a one-and-a-half-week stint of speaking engagements and book signings. He looks relaxed, serene, wearing another buttondown shirt, smiling into the Internet. He’s excited to be on the road, he says, eager to spread his message of hope. He hasn’t had surgical privileges since October 2007, 2007, but he still views hi mself as a healer. I remind him of what he said about his book’s title during our previous meeting, and ask whether there were any parts of the book’s contents he would concede concede are similarly hyperbolic. He says no, there are not. And he now says that not even the title is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It just doesn’t go far enough. “This is so much more than a Proof of Heaven Heaven,” he says. “ Proof of Heaven Heaven is kind of a minuscule little claim compared to what is really there.” We talk about rainstorms and intubations and chemically induced comas, and I can see it in his face, the moment he knows for sure that the story I’ve been working on is not the one he wanted me to tell. “What I’m worried about,” he says, “is that you’re going to be so busy trying to smash out these little tiny fires that you’re going to miss the big point of the book. book.”” I ask whether an account of his professional struggles should have been included in a book that rests its authority on his professional credentials. He says no, because medical boards in various states investigated the malpractice allegations and concluded he could retain his license. And besides, that ’s all in the past. “The fact of the matter,” matter,” he says of the suits, “is they don’t matter at all to me. . . . You You cannot imagine how minuscule they appear in comparison to what I saw, where I went, and the message that I bring back.”” back. His survival is a miracle, he says. His doctors told him that he is alive when he should be dead, and he believes intensely that he is alive for a reason, to spread the word about the love awaiting us all in heaven. To heal. By focusing on the inconsistencies in his story,, on recollections that don’t seem to story add up, on a court-documented history of revising facts, on the distinctions between natural and medically induced comas, he says, is to miss the forest for the trees. That’s all misleading stuff, irrelevant to his journey and story story.. Toward Tow ard the end, there’s a note of pleading in his voice.
“I just think that you’re doing a grave disservice to your readers to lead them down a pathway of thinking that any of that is, is relevant. And I just, I really ask, as a friend, don’t . . .” The walls are light blue at the bottom and darker blue toward the top, like the May sky. There are flowers everywhere, purple and pink and white, sprouting from pots and floating in clear glass bowls. On a bright orange orange altar at the rear of the room, multiple swatches of cloth, yellow and red and green, hang from a life-sized golden statue of Buddha. The Dalai Lama reclines in a cushioned throne in front of the altar, under the Buddha. He’s wearing a red robe with a yellow shoulder band that loops around and drapes over one of his arms, leaving the other arm, which is as smooth and hairless as a child’s, exposed. Alexander is wearing a robe, too, but it ’s a standard black convocation convocation robe. robe. He’s He’s sitting a few feet to the left of the Dalai Lama, in a smaller chair. Both are here to speak at the graduation ceremony of Maitripa College, a Buddhist college in Portland, Oregon. AlexAlexander is slated to speak first, and when he begins, the Dalai Lama cocks his head in a quizzical way and peers at him through his thick glasses. Alexander tells his story like he’s told it so many times before, in his soft, southern, confident burr. He He tells the audience about the wondrous realm he visited, about the all-powerful and all-loving God he e ncountered there, and about some of the lessons he’s brought back to earth. He says that among those lessons is the fact that reincarnation is real, and that knowing death is only ever temporary has helped him understand how a loving God can permit so many “tragedies and hardships and hurdles in the physical realm.” As he did a few months ago, when Gretchen Carlson asked him whether the de ad schoolchildren from Newtown remembered their slaughter, he offers comfort and hope. “I came to see all of those hardships as gifts, gifts,”” he says, “as beautiful opportunities for growth. growth.”” The Dalai Lama is not a native English speaker,, and when it ’s his turn to speak, he speaker does so much less smoothly than Alexander, sometimes stopping and snapping his fingers when a word escapes him, or t urning to his interpreter for help when he’s really stuck. He is not using notes, and the impression he gives is that of a man speaking off the cuff. He opens with a brief discourse about the parallels between the Buddhist and Shinto conceptions of the afterlife, and then, after glancing over at Alexan-
der, changes the subject. He explains that Buddhists categorize phenomena in three ways. The first category are “evident phenomena,”” which can be observed and meanomena, sured empirically and directly. The second category are “hidden phenomena, phenomena,”” such as gravity,, phenomena that can’t be seen or gravity touched but can be inferred to exist on the basis of the first category of phenomena. The third category, he says, are “extremely hidden phenomena,” which cannot be measured at all, directly or indirectly. The only access we can ever have to that third category of phenomena is through our own first-person experience, or through the first-person testimony of others. “Now, for example,” the Dalai Lama says, “his sort of experience.” He points at Alexander. “For him, it’s something reality reality.. Real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of . . .” He taps his fingers against the side of his head. “Different!” he says, and laughs a belly laugh, his robes shaking. The audience laughs with him. Alexander smiles a tight smile. “For that also, we must investigate, investigate,”” the Dalai Lama says. “Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable.” He wags a finger in Alexander’s direction. When a man makes extraordinary claims, a “thorough investigation” is required, to ensure “that person reliable, never telling lie,” and has “no reason to lie. lie.”” Then he changes the subject, starts talking about a massive project to translate ancient Tibetan texts. Alexander listens quietly, quietly, occasionaloccasionally fidgeting with the program in his hands. He’s a long way from home, and even further from the man he once was. It’s been a dizzying journey, but his path forward seems set. He’s told people that God granted him so much knowledge, so much wisdom, so many secrets, that he will have to spend his entire life unpacking it all, doling it out bit by bit. He’s already working on the Heaven. In the meanfollow-up to Proof of Heaven time, anyone can pay sixty dollars to access his webinar guided meditation series, “DisHeaven,” and he’s cover Your Own Proof of Heaven been consulting consulting with a pair of experts in “archaeoacoustics” to re-create some of the music that he heard while on his journey. You Y ou can even pay to join him on a “healing journey” through Greece. In his past life, Alexander went through some hard times, but those hard times are far behind him now. He is in a better place.
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PREVIOUSLYY ON ESQUIRE... PREVIOUSL
NOVEMBER 1970 BY LUIS KATIGBAK
S
horn of history and context, this Esquire cover
from 1970 still unsettles: Perhaps it’s something to do with the contrast between the big American smile of the soldier and the expressions of the Vietnamese children, which run from blank to slightly less blank. The reality, of course, is more disturbing than one could have guessed. For this is Lt. William Calley, Calley, who was tried and convicted for the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians in the infamous My Lai massacre in 1968. (The total number of civilians killed during that single operation was estimated at 500.) During the trial, Calley stated that “I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children.” Esquire started running a series of articles— The Confes-
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sions of Lt. Calley—before the trial began. They were written by John Sack, Sack, who was given exclusive and and extensive access to Calley, and who came to befriend the vilified young soldier. While Sack was not unsympathetic to Calley’s situ ation, George Lois—a war veteran himself, and tasked with coming up with a cover for that issue—was not going to let anyone off the hook: not Lt. Calley Calley,, not his superiors, not the readers. “To me the cover expressed—and decimates—Calley’s view of himself as a nice guy; he is oblivious to any connection between the kids he murdered and the ones he posed posed with.” Though he viewed such nice-guy delusions with contempt, Lois went on to say that soldiers like Calley were “fall guys, scapegoats of an atrocious war.” war.” This cover—one of the most controversial in Esquire’s history—horrifyingly underscored what editor Harold Hayes called the “stupid innocence shared by us all.” all.”
