Penman for Monday, April 3, 2006




I WAS DOWN in Quiapo the other day, on my way to a meeting in the Luneta area, when I passed by Raon—one of those sidestreets on your right that cuts a narrow path between Quiapo Boulevard and Rizal Avenue. Most urbanites these days—especially those below 50—won’t even know it’s there or know its name; and even if you did, you’d have to ask yourself “So what? Tell me one good reason why I should go to Raon rather than, say, Greenbelt or Rockwell?” 

And of course I can’t, beyond saying that back in the ‘60s, this was our Greenbelt, our Rockwell—Raon, Avenida, Sta. Cruz, Recto (then Azcarraga), and the whole downtown district. It was raucous and in parts smelly even then, with vendors of every stripe and calling hawking all kinds of plastic utensils and amusements, from pails, fly swatters, funnels, and tablecloths to squirt-guns, baby rattles, swords, and dolls. (In some corners of Plaza Sta. Cruz, stranger implements were on sale, featuring goat’s hair and some Spanish alchemist’s concoction.) 

How did a 14-year-old who went to high school in Diliman and lived in Pasig find himself in Quiapo? Simple: we chose to take the long route home, my friends and I. I could’ve taken a jeep to Crossing via Cubao and then another one to Pasig, but it made for a more interesting ride to take the JD or Halili Transit bus to Quiapo and then the Mandbusco to Pasig, or else that other liner that made an even longer detour through Sta. Ana.

It wasn’t that I hated home, or was looking for excuses to stay out as late as I could. I loved Pasig and the vast ricefield in our backyard that turned into a coffee-colored ocean in the typhoon season; I looked forward to 15-centavo halo-halo in the summer afternoons, to English-language twinbills in Leleng Theater behind the public market, to the latest issue of Boy’s Life in the public library. I enjoyed dinner with my folks and siblings after Oras ng Ligaya, even if the only thing to go with rice was pinangat na sapsap or that quintessential Pasig tandem, tulya and biya.

But going downtown was something else. My parents, to my eternal gratitude, trusted me with my time and money, and while I can’t say I spent them too wisely, I didn’t waste them in the sticks, either. We literally went to town, for the big fat burgers at the Goodwill bookshop and the chicken sotanghon soup at Good Earth Emporium (everything in this neighborhood seemed to be “good”). We scoured the bargain bins at Alemars and National Bookstore on Avenida for my first copies of John Updike, W. Somerset Maugham, and Ian Fleming and, less loftily, the nondescript bookshops along Recto for racier reading fare, which we promptly covered in kraft paper: Fanny Hill, Candy, anything by Henry Miller, and such other truly educational references. We took in The Graduate at Maxim’s Theater (thank God I looked bigger than my 16 years) and Woodstock at the Galaxy. 

Downtown wasn’t always a safe place to be, which was, I suppose, part of the excitement. When we took to smoking (don’t do it, boys and girls) and moved up from Monopols and Ronsons to cheap butane lighters—which quickly conked out—we got them fixed by some sidewalk whiz, who invariably turned his back to you just as you leaned over to see what the trick was; it only took a second for him to work ten-peso wonders, but you paid up, no questions asked.

In those pre-credit-card, pre-Internet days, the shopper’s nemesis was the pickpocket and the snatcher, and a trip to Quiapo wasn’t complete without the shrill blast of a patrolman’s whistle announcing yet another fruitless chase across the cut flowers and the vegetables and the Golden Delicious apples on the open street. In her lifelong quest of scandalously great bargains, my mother routinely came home with a slashed bag and another woeful tale of delight and distraction. Sometimes I fared worse. Quiapo and Avenida also being shoe country, I went on a hunt for loafers once, all by my groovy lonesome, and ended up being cornered by two burly men into buying a pair of clunkers with cardboard soles for the princely sum of P80. Welcome to the City.

Raon was a special corner even in this cornucopia. It was Music Street, with store after store selling guitars, harmonicas, records, transistor radios, “songhits”, chord books, and sheet music. Back in the ‘60s, mind you, any self-respecting teenager knew how to play the guitar, and a Lumanog (or, God willing, a Guitarmasters) piece was de rigueur. I had one of these Lumanogs, whose soundboard I promptly painted over with psychedelic whorls a la Peter Maxx. But as smart as it looked to strum a samba or the latest Monkees tune within ten feet of a pretty girl, it was just as much fun to listen to my little orange plastic AM-only radio, yes, the one with the orange plastic wrist strap and the pull-out antenna and the mono earphone that looked as large as an acorn. The transistor radio’s screech often felt like fingernails on a blackboard, but it was the iPod of our age, matched in coolness only by an Instamatic camera, with which we faithfully recorded our lakwatsas to the Luneta on 3R glossies.

I’m no audiophile—I can’t tell a woofer from a Dalmatian—but these days I can afford something more pleasant in my ears, and almost as soon as I got an iPod I also splurged on a pair of high-end earphones (Shure e3c’s is what they’re called); they produce sound so pure that you remember life before them as walking in a myopic haze and then suddenly wearing prescription glasses for the first time. Every chord of Earl Klugh’s guitar sounds golden, every whiffle of Toots Thielemans’ harmonica, every quiver of Barbra Streisand’s nose. Every now and then, as I jog around the UP oval, I scroll down to my “classic pop” playlist to something like “Satisfaction” by the Stones or “Bad to Me” by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas or “Downtown” by Petula Clark, and I tell myself that the ‘60s never sounded so good.

I wonder, though, if some visual equivalent of these Shures, even if they existed, would be as kind to Quiapo and to my memories of it. Perhaps it’s just as well that my car sped past Raon that afternoon, straight into the inscrutable future.


Copied with permission, Pinoy Penman

http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanApril06.html