Gang of Three

4th Cycle: 1982 to 1989, Rue de Paree, New Valley

IN 1982 at age 14, I was finally expelled from high school—along with Danny D and Richard R, my best buddies back then—after a series of warnings and suspension for a string of misdemeanors ranging from stealing, vandalism, cutting classes, affiliating to a fraternity, juvenile brawls and attempted arson. Our school was a former seminary ran by some Dutch clergy. The least my forlorn dad could do was to walk me over at the door of the missionary house where the Prefect of Studies handed down the verdict to the Gang of Three.

Although anticipated, I still had a stinging dressing down at home from my sister and school benefactor Josephine—she and my other sister Trinidad sent us five boys to high school and college—while I continuously sobbed realizing that the world had stopped revolving and I was slowly melting from her scorching admonition. Yes, I was a nuisance, yet at hindsight, I have to admit high school excitement was worth remembering more than the hours spent learning the basics of Philo, Algebra and Physics combined.

Goodbye to Golf

I WAS still in high school when Dad’s farm equipment business finally closed shop. I saw how broke he was, in kind and in spirit, whenever I looked at him. He was almost always at home insipidly tending plants and boringly feeding the pets as diversion to his misfortune. He sold his car, jewelries, golf set and practically every valuable possession he once had just to augment mom’s budget for food and bills. Once he brought me with him to sell our old Underwood typewriter—the gadget where I learned to type—for a measly three dollars.

Evidently old but still strong-minded, he later on partly managed a molasses farm for racehorses. Dad brought me once to this farm and introduced me to his friend and farm owner, an aging but still burly American war veteran named Sprout, who had a prosthetic arm in lieu of the one that got blown away during the Iwo Jima offensive.

Tool Keeper

WITH dad’s prodding, I continued my studies by going to night classes in another school. Dad had me hired by a family friend who owns a huge vehicle repair shop near the former Fort Stotsenburg as a tool keeper and earned a measly seventy dollars a month.

In my new school, I had to put up three more years with either hopelessly dim-witted or excessively over-aged classmates who were all duped into believing that earning a high school diploma would deliver them from the rut they were all in. I easily topped my junior and senior class (except in PE and military training) even if most of what I did during those years was to party, smoke pot, get drunk and get laid.

Exodus of the TV, Toaster and Turntable

AS A teen, I knew our family was in dire financial straits judging from mom’s dwindling food stock and the exodus of our appliances to the buy-and-sell shop downtown. Even the well-loved and memorable swinging bench in Swing, Memory Swing (see February 2004 Archive) had to go.

As if things weren’t bad enough, my twenty-one year old eldest brother ran off with her girlfriend who was heavy with their first baby while another brother who wasn’t satisfied with the weed got high with another substance and got low with demeanor. Later on, even my little brother Mano—the family’s cute little Bunikol—got hooked with drugs even while still in high school.

Dogma and Thai Astrology

I GRADUATED in 1985 and enrolled at an architectural college, and later on for an engineering degree, but after having failed miserably on all subjects related to numbers, formulas and equations, I dropped out without batting an eyelash. I decided to take up political science instead. I attended night classes and usually impressed the faculty and won debates on dogmatic political doctrines. But I was usually a loser when it comes to pocket money so I thought of getting a daytime job and asked help from, who else, Dad.

Dad’s one-armed Yankee friend, Sprout, who loved horses, also loved Thai women and I learned that his Thai wife owned a small restaurant and an astrology reading shop near the century-old parish church downtown. The Yankee hired me for a daytime job to help his wife manage a Thai eatery that I—and any guzzler would do—eventually turned into a trendy Thai-inspired waterhole. The astrology-reading wife, perhaps guided by the stars, regarded me as heaven-sent because I bring some of my cute girlfriends to the Thai bar after school and, in turn, these girls also bring along their boozer friends and make the cash register incessantly ring and the astrologer’s stars blink with delight.

Hammer and Sickle for Beginners

AT home looking for a stick of Marlboro, my curiosity one day was roused when I entered the room of my elder brother Eric and saw instead a stack of documents in his closet and papers cluttered on the bedside table. I snooped closely and noticed the reading materials were mostly typed-written mimeographed papers with stylus-drawn hammer-and-sickle insignia with banners calling for the overthrow of this and that system or with illustrations of people with headbands, clenched fists and howling postures.

The year was 1983, I was in high school, and I knew from the news on TV and from some papers that there were demonstrations at the capital city opposing the more than ten years of military rule of the president. So I figured kuya must be one of those demonstrators who want to overthrow the president or he must have written those rebellious documents.

I learned later that Eric was neither a demonstrator nor a subversive writer. He was a youth organizer working incognito for a local underground Maoist group.

"Toka Atam Gawuh!!! Akab Ikam!!!" (foto lifted from philrevocouncil.org)

I eventually joined their secret society, marched countless demonstrations, chanted slogans and read voluminous literatures of Mao, Fidel, Lenin and Marx. Subsequently, my behavior, insight and beliefs were altered while my ways of mischief—especially drinking binges—were drastically cut down because of the group’s stern orders. (Funny however, after clandestine drinking sprees inside a similarly clandestine boarding house for activists, we kept empty Red Horse bottles safe and unseen inside the cabinet.)

The transformation proved to be precursors of the tedious process I would undertake to become—picture this—one grim, disciplined, non-drinking and devoted militant, a revolutionary unfettered by worldly desires to liberate the poor and put to death all money-making capitalist exploiters and oppressors in this unjust God-forsaken world.

Malicious Mischief

IN FEBRUARY 1985 at around two o’clock in the morning, I painted—along with five fellow Maoist fanatics and devoted liberators of the earth—political graffiti using cellophane covered rubber foam and crimson-colored latex on a concrete wall of a huge downtown building of the city’s power company. Whether our look-out was overwhelmed by panic or just plain stupid for not signaling us of an oncoming jeepload of para-military men in uniform, we never knew. We stopped dead on our tracks like deer to oncoming headlights and were arrested in flagrante delicto.

At every summer's turn, our elders—youthful adventurers—hike and spend the night at the peak of this majestic mountain.

The six of us were booked and charged with inciting to sedition and detained, manhandled and badgered overnight inside the city’s police command camp. The balding police chief met us armed with a wide grin showing his nicotine-stained dentures. Ironically, we found out later that he, too, was a former Maoist revolutionary but turned into a rabid anti-communist after a friend of his was killed by the guerillas.

Inciting to sedition in this country is a capital offense and, juvenile or not, our entrails shook with the thought that we would soon rot in prison. Luckily enough, a lawyer-politician who was a fellow activist—and later on in the 90s became prominent for figuring in a video sex scandal—came just on time, bailed us out and was completely elated by the fact that we vandalized a property owned by his business nemesis. He further reduced the felony to, what else—malicious mischief.

Seeing Red

A YEAR after, the dictator and puppet Ferdinand Marcos and his equally spiteful family flew to Hawaii—still under the auspices of Uncle Sam—to escape the fury of throngs of people who stormed the Palace. In lieu of the puppet, we had a charismatic leader as president but who only perpetuated a system of oligarchy where the rich robs and kicks the poor in the face and the poor gladly obliges.

We were nonconformist, obnoxious fleas then weakening an enormous, cruel beast. (foto lifted from philrevcouncil.org)

Because of this rotten system and military abuses, the communist ideals lived on. Surprisingly enough, some of us remained anti-establishment even without the revolutionary fugitive and icon Dante to inspire. (Dante resurfaced after the regime change, joined the new government and was given a multi-million farm business to manage). My morale went to greater depths after several of my close friends—among the few of the funniest and brilliant minds—and fellow members of the secret society were jailed, tortured or summarily executed while some who became guerillas died in clashes with government troops.

Seeing Redg

THE hostilities reached our city in 1989. For several months, Maoist partisanos assassinated military agents in broad daylight while para-military vigilantes retaliated by executing just about anyone who quacks like a communist at a ghastly average of one victim per week.

During the same year, I completely disregarded paranoia and suppressed terror from the bloodbath and fell madly in love instead to a pretty lady named Regina, with emphasis on mad.

Regina was a lovely twenty year-old single mom who wrote for the Literary Section of the university paper I edited. We were both in our sophomore year. She came from a middle class Catholic family and schooled by Benedictine nuns. She was the stunningly petite, bubbly business management student who loved parties while I was the hungry, penniless, handsome pretentious writer trying very hard to look like a serious Marxist revolutionary.

Her story was the familiar unwanted pregnancy and teenage parenthood doomed for failure. After dumping her inconsiderate partner, she continued to pursue college while raising her two-year old daughter—Angelica—with the help of her mom. Regina and I were caught in youthful ecstasy and the proverbial seventh heaven affair. In June of the same year, we tied the knot in austere rites and a month later, our union bore a child we named Julio.

Safe in my arms, I carried two year-old Julio while we both viewing this furious 600 year-old dormant volcano start to throw up just kilometers away from our backyard.

Walking Away

IT wasn't difficult to see the world of difference between my home and the secret society as a second family. I had a temperamental father, an emotionally weak mother and an aloof kin. Most especially, my brothers and I had to endure dad’s insensitivity and petulance, his ostentatious guidance and loathing of the miserable life without the comforts of wealth or power or influence.

Once, I displeased dad over an argument of some insignificant subject. He went ballistic and tore down my prized posters of Che Guevara and tortured prisoners pasted on the bedroom wall and smashed my guitar into several jagged pieces. After the incident, I just sulked and left the house thinking that Dr. Spock—with all his reputed expertise of child-parent harmony—failed to diagnose that a defiant teenager and an edgy father in mid-life crisis were indeed an explosive combination.

So to diffuse the ticking family bomb, I rarely went home and stayed instead at Regina’s place or at our society’s clandestine house and scrimped on simple amenities.

Home

I KNOW the worn-out phrase “a sense of belonging” is a cliché. But at hindsight, I truly felt I belonged to the secret society and with Regina’s circle. My fondness with her small family and my convergence with a rebellious group probably filled the void that dysfunctional families inadvertently create.

"He who fails at home, fails in life."

Although I peculiarly felt at home in the company of our secret society, I abandoned it later on when I found another home where my better half and I would try to build a world for our children with less juvenile delinquents, soldiers of war, temperamental fathers, emotionally-abused mothers, capitalist exploiters and Maoist rebels as well.