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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,
"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
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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.
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 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 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.
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.
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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