Autobiography. Emo mode.XD

My father looked like an actor--dressed, powdered, perfumed--except that his eyes were closed and he was lying in a white casket. A few weeks before he died, his doctor advised him to refrain from drinking liquor. "But you can drink wine," the doctor said to him, and so my father drank wine--by the gallons--and died of multiple internal complications. He had diabetes, tuberculosis, lung disease, liver cirrhosis, and a gamut of other illnesses that just one day climaxed and sucked his breath out of him. They didn't even show; he was calm and quiet at first, then like something out of a silent movie, his eyeballs rolled inwards and his mouth bubbled and frothed with blood.

We walked in a firing squad formation in the funeral procession, my family and I at the front row, and my father's friends, Freemasonry brothers, and drinking buddies behind us. In the province the sky was no more different than it was in Manila, the same pale metal-gray overcast ready to shower needles of raindrops. To my right, my eldest sister was crying; to my left, my mother blew her nose into a white handkerchief. Farther to my right my three other siblings wept, noses red, eyes covered in sunglasses. While I, the youngest, just trudged on impassive, making sense out of this pointless ancient ritual.

My father is just a two-dimensional cartoon character whom I know in just a sketch. His name was Romeo, a Casanova of women, who had six other children from six different women besides my mother. But how could he, he's not even attractive. He had permanently heavy eyelids, red eyes, and flaky skin blemished with blue-gray spots from a lifetime of drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. He was tall and gaunt, back arched into a spineless slouch, his beerbelly suspended over his belt. Because of the chemistry of alcohol, my father farted like an elephant, and he farted every twenty minutes, unapologetically, even with visitors around. And being a chain-smoker, he always coughed like a dog choking on a giant bone just to spit blobs of phlegm. But when all else was deplorable about him, there's one thing that he kept clean and pampered: his nails. Long, filed, and vampiric, his fingernails and toenails were pink with mertiolate and coated with clear polish. He prided himself of having been contaminated with Spanish blood, though everybody claims to be of foreign descent these days. I wouldn't have believed him if it weren't for his thin, pointed nose. Either way, he looked more like a taxi driver than a seducer of womankind.

My eldest sister looks like him, his face and his figure of all bones and skin. More so when she was pregnant, her stomach resembling his beerbelly. My next sibling would have less and less of his features, until it came to me, not having any of it, and rather looking like my mother. It's like a spectrum with my father at the extreme left and my mother at the extreme right, and us five plotted accordingly in between. I find the same pattern with my father's drinking history. My eldest sister Armi never drinks alcohol; my second sister Bernadette drinks rarely; Carol drinks occasionally; Dennis drinks several times a week; while I, well I always have a brandy at my bedside. To punch me to sleep every night, see. At home, it's always books and Grand Matador; outside, it's friends and Red Horse beer. The same thing goes with dad's smoking habits, Armi never smoking up to me smoking like a jeep's exhaust pipe. My father named us alphabetically A to E. (His six bastard kids were also named A to F, the fifth having the same cursed name as I do.) He could've named me Electra, or something else that wasn't named after Sharon Cuneta's screen name in Nakagapos Na Puso, which was aired the same year I was born.

Now I see the semblance. My mother looked like Sharon, her height and figure, the fleshy cheeks and the hair she used to have, shoulder-length with bangs cut right after the browline. The funeral was held at the Funeraria Ortiz for a week, and my mother camped there everyday, snoozed on the benches, prayed with her Jesus' Fan Club to save my father's soul, and went home only to shower and redo her makeup.

In the funeral procession, my lens zoomed in on her black eyebags, the eyes of a she-zombie, her makeup cracking from the heat, her skin pale, and her feet chained to boulders. My siblings looked like zombies themselves, all of them plodding, their feet dragging a metric ton of cement. My lens shifted to my own feet, blurred and focused at the unpainted toenails, and tried to capture the same heaviness my family exuded but failed to.

It's maybe because I grew up while my father was imprisoned for murdering a Chinese mafia. Unlike my four siblings who experienced growing up with him around, I grew up virtually fatherless. But unlike other people who wrecked their lives just because their father was an asshole, I grew up normally and happily without a need for one. When he was proven innocent and sent home, he neither had a job nor did he help in the house. He instead mourned all day every day quaffing Fundador or Carlo Rossi. I never approached him or talked to him; he was always wrapped in his own thought bubbles or busy tippling Beer Na Beer with his friends. I tried rummaging through his dressing cabinet once in search for something I didn't know, only to find empty bottles of cheap perfume and scraps of lottery tickets. Most of his clothes were threadbare, worn out, and his socks' and underwears' garters resembled bacon strips. One night, I stealthily opened the fridge and took a shot of his Fundador just to see what it felt like, only to drop asleep five minutes later.

Even now as I filter through his mementos, there isn't much to look at, nothing much to give a concrete, palpable explanation as to who this man really was. I could say he was a minimalist or a pragmatist. My siblings said he gave away everything he didn't need. Even when he was imprisoned, Armi swore she wouldn't bring him any more presents because all the clothes, food, and books she gave him he gave them all to his inmates and the wardens guarding the prison cells. The more I try not to think about it the more I see myself. I always give away stuff I don't need--the burden to keep them and consume space when someone else could have use for them. Turning my head inside my room, there isn't much to look at. A bed, a closet, a study table. All the clothes, shoes, bags, toys, substandard books and other things I didn't need I gave away to whoever wanted them--the housemaids, the neighbors, charity. There's just my collection of Rubik's cubes, wooden puzzle locks, and books, stuff that keep the squirrels in my head running instead of me running like a squirrel myself, dressing myself up, looking good, and trying to please everybody else.

In the procession I was simply dressed in a white shirt, black pants, and a pair of black flipflops, the same clothes you'd see on the mediocre person behind the camera. Our relatives behind us were dressed in heavy black dresses, embroidered and laced, faces melting down their neck and shoulders, all of them soaked and dripping, walking towards a rave party in hell. Cagayan was recorded to have the hottest temperature in the country, reaching up to thirty-six degrees. They walked like slugs, leaving slime on the ground.

My father must've inherited his knack for spreading his genes. He himself had seven brothers, and his mother had twelve siblings. Being the oldest in his family and Lolo dying from alcoholism himself at a young age, my father assumed the responsibility to be the head of the family and sent his younger brothers to school. Maybe that's why he was used to giving things away, like an ingrained trait to keep everybody happy. But I don't think he's given me anything special except for his DNA. No gifts, no hugs, no kisses, no words of wisdom, no support, no happy moments, no hellos and goodbyes. He was imprisoned a long time, besides. My siblings said we used to be rich, and dad brought them to faraway places, to theme parks and picnics, rivers and beaches, and to distant relatives scattered all over Luzon. That is, until he was imprisoned and the courts drained our money away. It took them eight years to figure out it was all but a mistaken identity. I was used to his absence. When he came back, it was just like having an extra breathing body in the house, always farting, reeking of alcohol, shedding dandruff and dead skin cells (he had eczema, and flaked his skin all over the house), and fuming with cigarette smoke. I was twelve then, I didn't understand. All I knew was that he was an asshole, a constant nuisance in the house that made the flowers wilt and the house plants brown. With my mother minding the family business and all my siblings away for college, I was left in the house with my smoke-breathing monster father. My only salvation were books, friends, and alcohol. It wasn't like I had a choice.

Now that he's dead, disinfected, perfumed, it was more bearable to look at him framed in that white casket. With all the people stopping to look and buzz, he was like a hot shot in that shiny funeral car, a big time movie star with us his fans trailing behind. I wanted to cry to look normal, like I was grieving, like I cared, like I loved him just like everybody else around me. But my eyes couldn't spill their tears, not even tears of pretension. The only thing that kept my eyes watery was the pollution from all those vehicles and tricycles stuck on the road fuming, roaring, honking to get it over with and move along. I couldn't say he's in a better place; I didn't, and still don't, believe in the afterlife. I couldn't say he's united with some deity; I don't believe in that either. I didn't need any consolation or sympathy. What happened to him wasn't some supernatural being's plan, for there wasn't anybody else to blame but himself.

Maybe it's our country's fucked up judicial system that's to blame. Either way, I didn't understand politics and the government back then. Even now, I only have a vague idea what those concepts really mean; all I know is that they're fucked up royally and are screwing the country on a jurassic level. He was already dead--more than dead even--when he was acquitted and sent home. All those years in between his emancipation and his death appears to be a stretched farewell party with him celebrating life with alcohol and always fucking other women. What's left is this big black hole of nothingness and pointlessness and a string of meaningless information--his phantom farts and fumes, cigarette ashes and dead skin cells.

Perhaps the only memories he left me are his fondness for Jueteng, exotic food, and crosswords. He'd spend days and weeks on a table of Jueteng numbers divided in grids and filled with intricate geometric patterns of colored Bingo balls. He believed there's a grand design behind Jueteng, that all numbers are in one way or another connected to each other, which would predict the next Jueteng number the following day. He would live in abject poverty during those days, alongside taking swigs of Ginebra Gin, and celebrate in riotous revelry every time he won. He told me I inherited his knack for numbers, and boasted this to his friends every time I appeared in his peripheral vision.

In high school when I'd tiptoe out of the house for another binge with my drunken friends, he'd blow his whistle right before I'd step out of the door. He'd ask me to sit on his lap right before zombified people with bloodshot eyes, and say, "Etong si bunso lalabas nanaman." He'd say this in slow motion, with hiccups in between. "Mana to sakin, kala niyo." His friends would grunt and chuckle, picking on their pulutan of adobong aso. "Eto ang pinakamagaling sa batch nila sa Math!" His spittle would spray on the table and spread his disease on their pulutan and shot glasses. I'd wince away in embarrassment. "Pambato to sa mga contest sa Math si iba't ibang iskul!" His friends would feign awe and amusement, then I'd slink away flushing and run toward the door. At the last minute I'd remember, "Daddy, pengeng pera." He'd whip out his cracking leather wallet and hand me his crispiest twenty-peso bill.

As with exotic food he'd make us eat alligators, venison, boa constrictors, eels, horse meat, asimawa, dagang bukid, palakang bukid, and all other animals from the bukid. This too I acquired as my favorites include balut, isaw, and stir fried slugs. (It's gross, I know, but I can't help it.) With crosswords, he'd spend most of his constipated morning ritual on the throne answering crossword puzzles from the entertainment section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer while chain-smoking cigarettes. "Dapat sumasagot ka ng mga ganere," he told me once in his Central Tagalog accent. "Pampataba to ng utak." He was a newspaperworm and a magazineworm, and would even pore through back issues from the previous decade--filling his head with all the stuff he missed in prison. His favorites were Reader's Digest, Entrepreneur, and various sorts of agriculture magazines.

Reliving these little bits and pieces now is like redoing the funeral all over again. This must be an attempt to fill in the cavernous void and reels of blank film wedged in between me and my father, of forcing myself to grieve and feel something tug in there. Even if there's no lump in my throat, no tear welling up at the corner of my eye, I have words to capture my sense of loss by rewriting my father's death.

The lens zoomed out, hovering right beneath a thick layer of smog. Cagayan was also recorded to have the most number of tricycles in the country, hence, the air pollution. I never imagined the funeral procession would take that long. It's so long it's caused a grid lock in that small town for almost two hours, even if the cemetery was only about five blocks away. Every street only had four lanes, swelling with vehicles that even motorcycles couldn't squeeze through. The horses that drew carriages crapped and pissed right there, their stink intermingling with smoke exhaust and the smell of sweaty bodies. Far behind us were more people, our business's employees and their families (dad paired our employees up years back, and now they have big families of their own), my mother's Christian groupie, my father's Freemasonry groupie, my ninongs and ninangs, my high school friends, my siblings' friends, my brother's airsoft army, our relatives from the barrios who came for the free food, other faces I had never seen before. People, and more people marching, collective tramping of feet on the ground, stirring clouds of dust.

Everybody knew my father here. Without work, my father's main hobby was househopping and extending his network connections through drinking sessions with all sorts of people from different classes. It was ironic that he spent hundreds of hours with these strangers that he'd forgotten he had children to attend to. As my sister Carol said, he was the man of the masses. He could win the favor of anybody, but it's us he couldn't. It wasn't until I was born that our father ruined his life through gambling, alcoholism, drug trafficking, and lechery. But before I was born, my father was a successful businessman who was ahead of everybody. He established a tailoring shop with thirty-four tailors when all his competitors were home-based. Riffling through old photographs, I found a polaroid of him when he still possessed that perfect posture and was lustworthy for being called a Casanova of women. In the photograph, he and my mother stand with the backdrop of our tailoring shop Body Boutique, clutching a banner that says, "Perma Press! First in town!" According to my sister Armi, dad took all risks when it came to business that we even had businesses that sold watermelons, mangoes, bathroom loofah, chickens, pigs, animal feeds, Lotto, and what he was best at, weed and speed. He was a person bursting with ideas, my sister tells me. But that was all he was good at; somebody else had to implement them, in most cases, my mother.

My mother is everything I am not. All the bad incidents in my life--my secret alcoholism, which triggered my neuroses and psychoses, which drove me into stabbing and burning myself, my mountain bike accident which required metal plates to be screwed in my skull, my juvenile kleptomania, my tattoos and rebelliousness, my aimless college life, of ruining my Ateneo scholarship and my future to become an entrepreneur like my parents, my running away every now and then and not being found, my denial of Jesus Christ and Santa Claus--she thinks I'm some work of the devil. "Dadalhin kita sa pari," she once told me. "Meron yatang demonyo sa tabi mo." "Pero mommy," I whined, "hindi naman ako naniniwala sa pari eh." "Diyan ka magaling eh," she said, "akala mo alam mo ang lahat." She told me I was my father's resurrection in the flesh, brought back to haunt her and wreck her life the second time around. My mother is patient, sympathetic, and religious. She owns books of Bo Sanchez and other spiritual gurus who reduced life into unquestionable simplified tenets. She was my father's puppet, do this do that, and she was quick to shuffle on her feet. "Parehong pareho kayo ng daddy mo. Ayaw mong pinagsasabihan ka," she told me, reminding me I'm less of her and more of dad.

We took a left turn, a block away from the Sanctuary of Peace where the interment would take place. The Sharon Cuneta in my mother was perfect for a Best Actress Award. She had a vacant blank stare, tears drying on her cheeks and leaving lines of washed out face powder. There were no more vehicles in that two-lane one-way street. We only had bare walls of cement from each side, closing in and making us packed tighter. The stench of body odor was beginning to evaporate, bodies cooling down. Far behind us, the tricycles ignited into life and inched roaring forward, moving on. The show was over. The movie star was brought backstage to prepare for his last appearance. My mother lifted her Sharon Cuneta face and saw the cemetery's golden gate gleaming from the afternoon's sunlight.

My mother said dad used to work hard and figured how to work smart instead by delegating all the work to her. "Ang hirap ng buhay na dinaanan ng daddy mo," she told me through a phone call. "Working student siya nung college para mapag-aral niya sarili niya at si Tito Edong at Tito Mario mo." "Working student ng ano?" "Alam mo na, yung mga trabaho noon pag estudyante ka." My mother was fond of vague statements like this. I pressed on, "Tulad ng ano? Kusinero, labandero, ano?" "Tagalinis siya ng mga classroom, nagwawalis, nagma-mop, tagalinis ng blackboard pagkatapos ng klase. Tapos tagapunas din siya ng mga teybol sa mga kainan pag gabi. Nagtatahi din siya dati kay Lolo Ato mo diyan sa Kamias." Lolo Ato was my father's uncle.

Then she told me all the warts of her suffering, of being alone to manage the business, of putting the five of us to school alongside fighting against the injustice of the system, that dad could've grown old and died in prison had it not been for her. I cut her digression and asked what was dad like before they got married. She told me dad was an activist leader back in Araneta University and the Martial Law drove him to hide in the farthest northern region of the country, way back when it was filled with trees and wild animals. "Pinaghahabol nga siya noon kasi parang student leader yata siya, parang ganon. Tapos yung mga sinulat niya sa school publication--" "Ano, nagsusulat siya noon?" I cut her. "Bat di mo sinabi sakin dati?" "Ano ka ba, ilang beses ko na yun nakwento sayo pero hindi ka nakikinig." "Eh bakit wala akong maalala?" She snapped and continued, "Sabi ko nga, parang editor siya noon. Tapos yung si Marcos pinapahuli niya lahat yung mga nagsusulat ng mga anti-Martial Law na publication. Idedetain dapat si--" "Di nga?" I cut her again, "Nagsusulat si daddy noon?" I just couldn't move on. My father was a writer? "Nakikinig ka ba sakin?" she barked. I zapped out and said, "Meron ka pa ba nung mga sinulat niya?" "Si Lola Sineda mo nilagay niya sa isang album lahat--" "Ano? Sigurado ka? Bat ngayon mo lang sinabi?"

My thoughts raced with the speed of amphetamines while punching Lola Sineda's number. What the freak, my father was a writer? Ring. How come I never knew all these years? Ring. How did he write? In what syntax and tone? Ring. What's his favorite phrase? What did he write about exactly? Who is this man? Ring. Lola Sineda picked up and croaked, "Hello?" Frantically I introduced myself--remember that snotty girl, Romeo's youngest daughter?--and demanded my father's manuscripts. "Ay nako, wala na yon. Matagal ko nang hindi nakita yon. Aba'y mahigit thirty years na eh. Natapon na ata nung naglipat kami." My heart sank. It didn't just sink; it stopped palpitating and bore a black hole in the center and sucked the surrounding heart flesh and sucked my lungs and intestines, sucked my ribs and kidneys and spleen, my head, my arms, the whole length of my legs to the tip of my toenails. In a moment I was gone. "Hello?" Lola Sineda's voice echoed from the long black tunnel. I was vomited in another dimension. Everything was pink, for some reason. "Hello?"

When I think about all those crossword puzzles folded in the bathroom sink, the smell of bad digestion mixed with cigarette smoke, and the cigarette ashes sprinkled around the drain, I wonder how could I have overlooked such little details every morning for all those years. He loved words as much as I do now. But he never knew I wanted to become a writer. For all he knew, I was going to graduate from Ateneo and become a successful mathematician or entrepreneur, still, like him. But he didn't know, he didn't know. I was like him in little ways.

Maybe all this time I was looking for my father and I didn't know it. Maybe if I have a time machine and whizzed back in the past and met him in his greasy college uniform, his pants peppered with chalk dust, we could've bee conspiring for a round of beers together. But all that is a dream away, another script to be written and filmed in the Martial Law Regime. When I meet him in that story, I'll never introduce myself as someone from the future. I'll never tell him about his little bit and pieces, or the girl he's going to meet and marry in Cagayan. Instead, we'll start all over again, share the same aspirations and ideas over perspiring bottles of ice cold beer. It will take only one night, then he’d forget about me and move along with his life with a little change he couldn't put his finger on.

The reel of film was almost over. We reached the cemetery and hoisted my father's casket beside the dug out burial site. The star of the movie had arrived. The spectators who had spared themselves the long walk tranced out loafing around and gathered themselves on an arc before my father's last full show. My brother spotted two of dad's mistresses, one thin and young, the other middle-aged, carrying his bastard child. All around me were people wearing black and white, crying, punch-eyed, mourning, and I, mourning along with them. I didn't have tears wetting my eyes, or a jawbreaker choking down my throat. But I was sad, and that was what the film captured; the girl with bereft eyes that looked like she was robbed of something important.

The priest walked beside the casket, clipped a little black book in his left thumb, raised his right palm and began, "Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of Thy servant Romeo." My mother sniffed nasally and audibly long, then burst into a paroxysm of violent wails. The priest continued, "From every bond of sin," her shoulders chugged and shuddered, "that being raised in the glory of the resurrection," she gasped, mouth quivering and wet, "he may be refreshed among the Saints and Elect. Through Christ our Lord. Amen." Then she cried her loudest, piercing and stabbing through every ear. A humming machinery lowered my father's casket and my mother attempted to step down with him for added effect. But nobody dared stop her, so she cried all the more while walking back to her place.

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