MIGUEL SYJUCO: PROFILE  

Miguel Syjuco completed his studies in English Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he was awarded the Dean’s Award for the Arts for his work in Creative Writing.  He has been published nationally as well as internationally, and his work has earned him awards and fellowships with the National Writers Workshops in Dumaguete.  He currently does freelance writing as well as edits Localvibe.com, Metro Manila’s first on-line city guide and lifestyle magazine.  

When asked of his influences and favorites, Chuck replies: 

     "I'm addicted to magazines of all sorts (favorite being Esquire).  I read all sorts of comics, from Gaiman to Archie to Marvel to Heavy Metal.  My favorite Filipino authors are Bienvenido Santos and Carlos Bulosan. My favorite international authors are Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Dobyns, Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Irvine Welsh, Charles Baxter, Dostoyevsky, Tolkien, 
Neruda, Rushdie, and Kawabata. 

     "My earlier work was influenced greatly by NVM Gonzales, Carlos Bulosan, and especially Bienvenido Santos.  Later, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs influenced both my fiction and poetry -- enamouring me with the spoken word. 

     "All throughout, my work has been influenced by Hemingway, who I consider 
one of the finest craftsmen of the word. My style changes according to who I am reading at the moment, if I am intrigued and impressed by them.  Lately, Kawabata's Palm of Hand Stories 
have moved my to try my hand at microfiction." 
 

TRIP
 
Driving to Malate on a Saturday Night, Holy-Grailing ADAM. 

     The J is already rolled to be smoked - packed paper tunnel toward Shalhandra, funneling breath through pucker poised lips - tightly filled it is, conical like a dunce's cap, and Rizla pack cardboard folded and tucked-in at the end to later separate our lips from the red-smolder light of our lives.  It appears with a flourish, out from the stash tube, the Magic Bamboo, and, devirginized in the click of a Cricket, becomes our communal sweetheart.  Free love.  Blooming dark neon-orange at oral stimulation, looking like miles-away Mars in the nightsky-black inside of a car that hurtles through dimensions to Malate, 1998.  Cloudier inside the Civic than out, techno-bass from rear speakers navigating the sweet-smoke, we're in Cumulo-Marshmallow Land until we stop at the evening-lipstick traffic light at the corner of Quirino and South Super and crack open the windows like eggs.  Smoke gusts out into night like soul leaving the body, in a hurry like, and the cars to the side must think we're steaming Siopaos.  Hit twice, pass left: Ms. Juana wrapped in a blanket gets shorter like the incredible shrinking woman, melting like youth-popsicles.  First-burn sets in, and Doggie, behind the driver's seat, enters Momoyland -- introspective, lids rolled down, astral traveling the flyways of the spaces between his eyes.  He looks asleep, barely breathing, but the Vibe tells us where he is, and we taste empathy in our lip-corners.  Dream-showers the shape of honey, and the solid embrace of air: Doggie sits in an easy chair, the weed-walkalator rolling through the Las Vegases of his unfolded mind.   

      Dear dear Gabriel, the navigator of the roads of reality, steers the car through the macadam maze of Metro Manila: between trucks and tatter-skinned beggars, past firework neon lights, flying over flyovers like its possible to become ungrounded - (it is, if we turn to the mind).  But Gabriel's the silver umbilical cord to earthen concerns, packaging us in his car to set us down in Nakpil to find some semblance of sane(insane?) living.  He's the captain, clutching the steering wheel like his Archangel wings are threatening to sprout, catch wind, and pull him out the window.    

      In Shotgun, the seat of responsibility, Sadie loads the gun - red-burnished Pied Piper, bowl filled with a salad of gulay and charas and pollen, waiting for the joint to die and be flown out the window to rainwashed shadows of city-streets.  Sadie's gorgeous like Ruby Tuesday, she twists around checking if the joint's down to filter yet, and the intense cherry between the  fingertip-pinch of my hand glows in her Jap Anime-eyes.  I kiss the joint, careful like new-love, and pass to Sadie.  She turns around, kisses as well. 

      Today's like yesterday, only different named.  Now's like kanina, and the summit of Kalhandril is creating a sequel.  Pot-heads; freedom fighters; encapsulated in metal, surrounded by melting smoke, traveling like a cap of E slowly-quickly through arteries to the very fingernails of existence.  Columbus discovered the New World, we must all be Christophers then; and in my head, in the vacancy of my velvet-lined skull, my corrugated-brain, Sharpay-skinned, expands like an accordion.  Tucked in the folds of my mind are butterflies with truths tattooed on their wings, and I shut the body-senses to pursue papillions with my butterfly-net the size of a five peso coin.  They fly through my hair, brush my ears, love-touch my face, and I see the saids of truth pass like the view from a speed-hurled LRT.  I cannot catch the silken creatures -- they move through air like hands clapping, their wings the colour of melted rainbow. 
  
     This moment, I flashback, narcotic induced, to that moment, yesterday -- the night of my first pukret:  Gravity bong pushed milky-air all the way to the suburbs of my lungs, and I coughed, coughed, coughed, until I finally understood with my breath, and I ceased racking my body and let myself float upward-outside like a silver air bubble.  And my friends told me welcome, and there was much celebration, and we all met at a point outside our lead-anchored molded-flesh-vessels between the known dimensions, space-time askew, altered to be finally grasped by minds no longer having to wonder.  We molted our bodies, shrugged off bones and miles of epidermis tape, and attached wings of smoke-feathers to the twin round scars on our backs where shoulder blades can never meet.  And there it was, Tonky's house from above; then La Vista, its streets scatters of birthday ribbons; then Loyola Heights - Ateneo over here, Dilliman over there, mapped out Matchbox play sets; then the Philippines was a smashed plate far beneath our feet; and then, look, the Great Wall of China, the only man-made object visible from space.  But bodies still too heavy, wings tired, gravity raised tentacles to wrap our ankles and pull us down writhing and yelling.  And then the crash, too soon, but worth twisted metal abrasions on our moodscapes.  After, the sky seemed denser-heavier.  I began to food trip, craving for the delicious punditry - wisdom the texture, weight, and flavour of the finest flaky pastry.   

     Pot-time: Now:  Now is happened.  We would have playing with time later: tomorrow and yesterday -- siamese twins; present, the point of conjoinment, which must be surgically snipped by soundless, shapeless scissors.  And time is a glass craftmanshipped clock, which we drop from the penthouse of the Makati Stock Exchange, the slenderest hand ticking the seconds it takes to fall, tocking the moment of impact of flying-time and non-moving sidewalk.  The Nows of what we've known, know, and will know become fragments scattered along the hot cement of Ayala Avenue, run over by slow moving traffic that has the folly of watching their clocks.  Pot-time -- erratic escalator, zipping to a pause, slowing to a flourish of lightning.   
  
     I'm never going back.  I'll forever flash through my own body, intravenously flowing through the tubes within my flesh at the speed of thought; me, the shape of my aura, the size of a bullet of light, will bullet-train through the particle-grid inside myself, finally crashing through my eyes like jumping through a stained-glass window. 

     I come out from behind my eyelids:  Doggie’s in the outskirts of Momoyland, coming off the turnpike to Here; Sadie's lighting up the Pied Piper for one last round; Gabriel looks for parking, a space big enough not to confront us with the horror of physical laws; and my breath expands my upper-body, my shoulder blades separate, and as I inhale a long, serrated breathe, I feel my wings come out tonight like a Phoenix-Lion's.  Now becomes now.  Here becomes here.  Jumped off Kalhandril, landed light-footed at Shalhandra.  I've arrived.   

     I take the pipe for the last hit -- it's a goodbye kiss, lingering-long.  I become the crystal man, see-through, filling with smoke like a black-feathered zeppelin, and I open the door and let the outside rush to my face as I step out, to take two skipping-steps, shrug my wings high above my head, and leap into the light of the young Manila night. 
  

Malate Street  

     Malate comes alive. Ant-hill busy-bodies.  The lightning playing in the sky – never touching ground, like flashing neon exclamations.  The lights hum the street side as the old houses shuffle toward dawn.  

      The car womb.  It’s familiar haze and cushy seats abandoned for flight into Malate night.  I bring baon = warmth of potted flannel-mind.   

     We move like wolves (minded out on kind-bud) amongst sold out-Makati money mongers.  They’re so out of their water they’re pale like dying drying fish.   

      ADAM waits like playful lovers hide and seeking.  He hides in Dylan’s tamborine man’s stash pocket darkness.   

     We play Where Is Waldo from outside the bar beside Insomnia Café. Clinking cubes of ice in booze-solutions, beers gasping open, frisk cornacopiaed ears.   

     The lady with the snake named Sky (10 month old python, still cute like a new belt), sails by, galleonesque.  Her passing calls me like beauty to follow.  I wonder if she has any Ecky.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m happy looking at her.  

     E.  In Verve perhaps, second story windows O’ing like passionate mouths, window panes betraying darknesses beyond.  Inside, streams of glow-stick paths as hands manipulate them like a mind. 

     The silversky is hours far, and we move again, holding out unpacked minds like anting-antings against the whine of colegialas and the jitterjargon of corporate whores.   

      We make our way across Nakpil, broad like the Pasig, to the upward piano-key steps to the Drum and Bass beat of the Verve Room.   
  

We’re Columbuses 

     Discovery.  Yeah, man.  She discovered it. Sadie discovers it.   She slicked up to a man with a crush on her and scored hits like bull’s eyes, slipping him cash wadded up like a roll of miniature toilet paper while he slips her a handful of pills like a fistful of gold coins.  Precious.   

      She hands them out to us, and Snap, we Pop, then half an hour later we begin to Crackle.  By that time we’re in the car, flying on wings of tubular rubber towards the buildings of Makati, looming larger every second.  Soon we’ll be in ABG’s. 

      Gabriel, at the wheel once again, makes his way to the club, while simulataneously we’re each making our way to the New World.  We’re passing around bumps of Ketamine – mounds of crystalized horse tranquilizer piled on the end of a key, snorted into nostrils, sinused into the brain.  And by the time the K begins to distort the city around us, we’ve arrived at our destination.   

      We claim this land for K, and for each other, and for the DJ, and for the night that still lies before us!  We claim it for our youth, God damn it! We claim it for tomorrow and its responsibilities that we don’t give a fuck about tonight, because tonight we claim for ourselves.  God damn it.  We claim tonight for ourselves. 

Popping and Peaking 

     We popped the E’s in Verve like they’re candy slipping down throats lubricated with a pair of gulps of cold orange juice and hot excitement, and the rush will come soon – we wait; it’s worth the wait.   

     In the club the bass beat burns over us like waves of dry air, like the air of May Manila, hot and solid, and we sway a little to the music, techno, no techno like this anywhere, breaking over us like we are rocks and it’s the sea, breakneck beats spinning into the curls of our ears, flushed  into our minds like the brilliant blue of water.  Music is spun from the DJ’s spider fingers on the turningturningturning turntable, drawing us vortex-like into the brightest-blackest hole to escape from the pretentious unreality of daily Metro maniacal Manila.  Tonight we fly like the wings of bats.  Tonight the moon envies us.   

     Think back to your first kiss – the thrill climbing your vertabrae like they were steps, the thrill filling the cavity of your chest like warm sweet water, your lips trembling with the first feel of love’s tongue.  Think back to graduation – a shower of square caps with tassels falling around friends embracing, promising forever-friendships and futures as long as the rest of their lives.  This is it –  packaged bliss, chemically emodied in pills = no worry, no addictive elements, no problem.  The Ecstatic journey begins.  Your nerves stand on end, sensuality is foremost -- it feels good to wiggle your toes, it feels good to hug your friends, it feels good to breathe, it feels so good to be alive.  You never thought you could feel this good. 

     It begins.    

     Oh my God, it begins. 

     Nerve cells do the wave – it feels like the wings that I lost when I fell to earth have been uncurled, stretching out behind me in a spectrum of all aura’s colours.  I can flap them after all.  Gravity isn’t all they said it was.   

     The Adam induces Entactogenesis, touching within, nirvana’s highest feeling of utter peace, beauty becomes near-unbearable, too beautiful to be percieved.  Then, Empathogenesis, social barriers carried away with the bliss-flood like bamboo poles in monsoon season’s persuasive waters – and everyone becomes your friend, prejudice has no meaning tonight.  

     The little club is moving up and down like everyone is jumping on a big bed, the way we used to when we were kids at sleep-overs and we’d jump on the queen sized beds our parents, sending up a mess of bed sheets and blankets and pillows.   

     We’re there.  We’re here.  Finally, we are here. 
  

Ecstatic Love in ABG’s 

     There are two moons tonight for me.   
  
     And dawn is nearly days away, and the crowd is good tonight; The music comes pounding along, pure energy, like the club and its sounds and its lights are all responsible for the brownouts of all the years gone by -- energy sucked up from the rest of the city, grid-section by grid-section, grinding the Metropolis that sleeps to the lullaby of air-conditioners and Hanabishi Electric Fans to an irritated, stirring wakefulness -- sleepy mutters in humid rooms, whirring of warm mosquitos near ears, and, gradually, the rumblings of lumbering generators pulled to life.  That's how strong the bass is, like waves of the South China Sea, the electronica highs tweeking into ears like dragonflies, the sirens and the ambient sounds like EDSA during rush hour -- but all melodic, madly perhaps, but orchestrated by the DJ playing Dictador in the corner, his shaved head and his black plastic eyeglass-frames glinting blue, then red, then yellow in the flashing lights, blue, then red, then yellow -- his head cocked seriously, his eyes intent on the task at hand; like a politician he plays the crowd, he keeps his ear to the rhythm of the populace, he taxes us with ascending techno.  

      And this is the city.  This is the metro, sans esteros and streetchildren; this is the fabled Philippines 2000.   

     And it's a secret.  Hush.  It's a secret, despite all its clamour, despite the lights flashing like the constellations of Pre-hispanic skies.  The secret lies, pandora's-boxed, within four walls, under a flat roof, behind windows like the glass in aquariums.  It is a yellow secret, an orange trust -- the ability to stray your hand from your wallet-pocket and dance carefree, reaching for the gods of music and night and peace and love and dancing and dancing.   This is the secret of ABG's. 

     And the dancefloor is a collision of bodies, huggies with the two gracious hosts, cheers with the diva standing statuesque on the table in the corner, surreal like fog in your home, like fireworks in your living room.  It's all here -- if only we could package the love and the good vibes in this household, we could sell it on the street, on the blackmarket, in Duty Free shops, in public auctions, Shoe Marts and 7-Elevens; The world would be a better place.  And the crowd is up in arms, hands raised heavenward to the Makati Skyline, unsmogged and sparkling in our minds like a diamond Utopia.  It's a chorus of commonality.  A nightlong medly of remembering innocence and wonder and friendship unrestrained. 
  
     But there are two moons for me tonight, and one eclipses the other.  The grounded one, the brightest one, the earthbound moon, shining full like her lips and curvey like the rounds of a comet’s silver silhouette -- and tonight I am blinded by her.  I am high on her, fantastically high, flying like Ben Franklin's electrified kite.  I skate the rim of the hole dug by mounds of Special K, and I hold on to dear life to her.  I hold on to dear love to her.  I hold on lest I fall, falling, falling for her and her silveriness, her mooniness, her addictiveness.   

     And we dance, and the smoke machine screams its smoke out silently behind the two of us, and I’m not sure if there is even a machine, because maybe she's smoking, maybe the air is coming off of her skin in steam and filling the dancefloor and catching the light.  She's a smoke machine, maybe, bombastic in her init, like the steaming of a stainless steel kettle right before it screams it's ecstatic readiness and begins to boil away into heaven, or into unreality, or into immortality.  I’m not sure anymore, I’m not sure of the music even anymore -- it's mainlined into my mind, beating out the tempo of my crescendoing heart on amphatamines and dopamine and rivers of raging seratonin -- but I’m sure of her, I’m sure of her tonight, and I’m sure that she feels good – I’ve never been more sure in my entire life.   

     And in the blur of familiar faces, the smear of names and eyes mixing into one another, I focus, zooming into one -- her's -- only her's, and only her's and only her's; until I close my eyes and am washed away in the Mitsubishi tides, undercurrents of ADAM and swells of speed and damo and the tranquilizer-of-cats-and-horses; the three diamonds of the tab spinning into a flower of chemical humanity, a river swollen with every human's basic desire for love and trust and the remembering of wonder. 

      And in her arms I peak again, and peak again, and peak again, and peak, for what seems like the shortest eternity I’ve ever thought of knowing, for one of the rare periods of timelessnes and immortality that I will ever know in this lifetime.  This is love, induced, perhaps by the night, by the amphetamine of touch, by the Ecstasy and the music and the people and the lights and the fog and the rapid-eye- movements fluttering the room into my mind.  This is love, perhaps induced by the drugs, perhaps induced by the night.  This is love, induced by whatever.  It doesn’t matter a damn.  Not a fucking damn.  Because tonight it’s real.  Tonight it’s real.  Tonight, it is really for real. 

Home Time 

     The half-moon slants in the sky like a drunk – tipped-goblet spilling light into the horizon to drown the city below in luminescent silver champagne.  The stars crack the sky.  The eastern morning shatters the vault’s pretend darkness.   

     Mary-J’s first burn hit me good tonight, uppercutting my salience:  Left kif right kif to the face. 

     And again, Sadie passes a small J to me, a New Yorker, an anorexic joint.  I light, and drag.   The smoke fills my vacant body, body-vessel containing warm inhalation.  It’s not smoke, it doesn’t feel like it.  I think it’s fire.  Fire in the throat.  Fire in the lungs.  Fire exploring like drambuie all the way to my toe-tips.  Fired-smoke from the smithy of a smolder-red cherry. 

     The colours change.  All colours change.  My tongue becomes heavy.  I cannot speak. 
  
     I think my exclamations  and send them to the world – love letters like balloons in every colour. 

     There is little like the motion of going somewhere in the back seat of a car with its speakers vomiting out the bass rhythms of ambient music trips.  The sounds move like the car moves, but ungrounded, a stranger to vertigo.   I tell Gabriel to turn the volume way up, wanting the music to bypass the curls of my ears into the direct line in my head.  He puts up the volume and the music sounds in my head like conscience.  I hear tracers that sound like light, the bass permeates my body like osmosis.  As the pot-smoke settles in my head and body, I begin to dissolve.   

     Malate’s a vague memory somewhere in time, closer in proximity than yesterday, but already tossed into the memory-bin.  I can feel sleep creep.  It creeps like the night-light of dawn.  I’m coming down from Ecstasy mountain.  Nirvana’s lost.  ABG’s was given up when sleepiness began to win, when the body metabolized the E and the K and the grass, and the cocks heralded the passing of the night. 

     Soon we’ll be passing morning joggers, people on their way to early mass, people walking their dogs in the morning grey of dew.  The good-bye J is gone, up in smoke, Gabriel opens his window to smoke a cigarette and the wind of the morning is as cold as the air-conned air inside the car.   

     The gunmetal-air is fresh and solid.  It cuts like the reality of the day, like the pain of a night dreamt away, pinched awake by the coming of the sun.   

 
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