In seventh pilsen

One Saturday afternoon this past month, I found myself at a coffeeshop in the mall with two old friends from way back–"way back" meaning 20 years ago, when we all had Simba-like shocks of hair and real incisors to tear into the inihaw na liempo and the nilagang baka with.

Back then, we partied nearly every night, staggering home at two or three in the morning. Often as not that would have been from a bettor’s game of pusoy, darts, or billiards, washed down by a tub of beer served by surly waitresses in skimpy dresses; sometimes we dispensed with the gaming altogether, and went straight for the beer, and whatever. In such amber baths were lifelong friendships forged.

I’ve been a happy member of many barkadas in my 47 years: the high-school barkada, the frat, the darts barkada, the Volkswagen barkada, the Macintosh barkada, the newspapermen’s barkada, the writers’ barkada. None of them, I think, would have lasted very long without the mellow ministrations of beer. Granted, they were basically guy groups where, in a strange but surefire feat of biochemistry, the beer metabolized in the belly into testosterone, which bubbled into a seething thirst for more beer. (And the beer was nothing if it couldn’t be counted in empties on the table and in filled-up cases on the floor.)

Funny thing was, I didn’t even drink beer–I didn’t drink, period–until a short stint with the United Nations Development Program where, at age 23, I discovered the cocktail party and, with it, the cocktail. Like most sober people, I disliked the bitterness of beer and the sourish froth that crept up your throat, threatening to spray the Belgian ambassador and his lady, after one too many gulps.

But even the vilest tastes are soon acquired, with adequate incentive. I soon began to enjoy the buzz that comes with your seventh pilsen; the more so when that buzz was accompanied by the sight of luminous bare bellies (no, not the beer bellies we would soon nourish) swaying in the splotchy darkness of what were called, naturally, beerhouses. I had yet to hear what Benjamin Franklin was supposed to have said, that "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy"; I would have raised a freezer-chilled mug in agreement.

Age and some loose change in the pocket soon introduced us to the superior charms of shiraz and pinot noir (or, in Krip Yuson’s case, to single malts). Still later, our sedentary band of barflies and lounge lizards rediscovered coffee and its simple potency (or should that be its potent simplicity?)–nothing like a jolt of caffeine to awaken the system and atrophied parts thereof.

That’s how my two companions ended up at a coffee shop at the mall–as clean and as well-lighted a place as you can find–two decades removed from dubious discos. After the obligatory refill, and after a froggy eyeful of the long-limbed wench at the other table, my partners and I felt the husky old tiger revive somewhere between our crusty navels and our shriveled toes; our throats went dry as sandpaper.

"Let’s go have a beer," said one of my pals.

"Where?" said the other.

"Upstairs."

"They’re all restaurants up there."

"But they serve beer. We went up there once and we had a beer, remember? We had a beer and then we saw Lorna Tolentino."

That got my attention. "Wait," I said. "Let me get this straight. You had just one beer, and then you saw Lorna T?"

"Yes!"

"Goodness," I said. "Imagine what six or seven beers will get you!"

We thought about that for a minute, imagining all manner of Rosannas, Joyces, and Assuntas popping out of the foam, and we laughed like the DOMs–in our dreams, the distinguished, overachieving males–we had become.

And here’s one for the road from Henny Youngman: "When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading!"

* * *

I can’t help but retell this fantastic story I heard last week from an old friend and colleague in the movie business, whom I’ll call Will. Will lives with his family in New York, and was flying home from a film festival in Canada very early in the morning of–you guessed it–September 11. He landed in La Guardia and went home to kill some time and rest his gout-ridden foot before leaving for an appointment with his doctor in New Jersey.

His route would have had him take the Path train to New Jersey from–you guessed it again–the station beneath the World Trade Center, where he would have found himself around 8:30. His sister planned to go to the WTC with him to look into a sale at the Borders bookshop down below. Instead, Will fell asleep on the couch, and the next thing he knew, his sister was rousing him awake in time to catch the collapse of the WTC towers.

Will’s son Paolo, a banker, had been working with Morgan Stanley at the WTC–until July, when he was transferred to the firm’s office in Hong Kong. "Paolo cried over the phone for a week," Will told me. "He lost all his friends."

"You know," I told Will as we pondered the event and its aftermath, "all the movies coming out Hollywood these next few months will be dealing with themes like faith and family."

"Yes, faith and family," Will agreed somberly. We were having juice and coffee at a hotel lobby, mulling over our next project.

"But we, of course, will still be doing sex and violence," I said.

Will laughed. It was a long way from Manhattan.

* * *

Speaking of beer, I’d always wondered exactly where the expression "small beer"–which Nick Joaquin fancies, to the point of using it for a column title somewhere, if I remember right–came from. I knew more or less what it meant: something trivial. But just to be sure, I resorted to that genie I depend on so much these harried days, the Internet search engine Google (www.google.com).

A link led me to another marvelous site: www.diction ary.com, which had featured "small beer" as its "Word (or phrase) for the Day" earlier this year. Its entry for "small beer," reproduced in its entirety below, should show you why you should visit dictionary.com posthaste for its rulings on those pesky words and idioms, and bookmark its URL, as I did:

"Word of the Day for Friday March 23, 2001:

"Small beer, noun: 1. Weak beer. 2. Insignificant matters; something of small importance. adjective: Unimportant; trivial. Small beer is beer of only slight alcoholic strength ("small"); hence it came to signify something of little importance."

I always appreciate dictionary entries with examples of actual usage, and dictionary.com provided these:

"We dined early upon stale bread and old mutton with small beer."

–Ferdinand Mount, Jem (and Sam)

"’I was not born for this kind of small beer," says Joan the wife of the colonial governor, who imagines leading armies or "droves of inflamed poets."

–Nancy Willard, "The Nameless Women of the World," New York Times, December 18, 1988

"Call me a geek, but for biologists, marvels like the parasitic flatworm are on tap every day, making the reveries of Hollywood seem like small beer."

–Jerry A. Coyne, "The Truth Is Way Out There," New York Times, October 10, 1999

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Sent e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com..