So long, St. Nick

When we were kids he used to come around during the holidays and hand us younger ones some bills for aguinaldo and his godson, my elder brother Joey, a special toy and some money too. His voice always went boom booming around the house, all he lacked was the ho-ho-ho and a red suit to be the real St. Nick. His reindeer were the bottles of beer all lined up on the table. "Kumadre, you seem to be gaining weight!" he would tease my mother. Then he and my father, the kumpares, would talk about more serious stuff, and maybe ham would be served. When the kumpares talked they were in a zone, as if they were masons with some secret knowledge.

Once he teased both me and my elder sister Mayi, mistaking us for our older siblings, Joey and Beth, insisting that we were them, and Mayi constantly corrected him. Finally I got tired and told my sister, "C’mon, don’t listen to him, he’s a fool." Years later during the necrological rites for my father at the CCP, where Nick would deliver an address meant to bury his friend not to praise him, and we were waiting for the program to start, he’d remark: "Franz as usual is late again."

My own son found St. Nick a lot of fun and said "baliw yon, a, autistic." But at the same time imitating what Nick said when he did not want F. Sionil Jose to sit near them, among the ranks of great men. "That’s what you deserve!"

He ended his speech by bidding his friend good-bye and saying, "I’ll see you soon."

Thirty years ago in the summer of 1974 my father asked Nick to accompany me to Cubao to have a suit fitted before my trip to the States under a YFU scholarship. The tailor’s shop was Linea Italiana but the proprietor, far from looking Italian, looked more like an Indian. Afterwards Nick asked me what else I wanted to do, so I said maybe take in a movie. When we were kids Nick had at one time accompanied us to a free show of Batman. Since he was a member of the censors board all he had to do was walk us up to the takilyera of a moviehouse on Avenida and they would wave us in. This time though it wasn’t Batman but a far raunchier film, complete with full breast exposures, and Nick would holler in the darkened theater, "Look at those peaches!"

Afterwards it was onto Alibangbang for some real action, and where I believe I first got drunk. Nick himself would recall this and whenever we met among friends, he’d proudly relate that "the first time this guy got drunk was under my auspices." Lord knows how I got home then, but I remember leaving Nick as he was pissing near the tricycle stop outside UP Village. He seemed to take forever unloading his bladder, and before I knew it I rode on the back of a trike to a wrong stop where I might have made a drunken adolescent pass at a female passenger, followed by some hysterics and running blindly under a sudden rain. Indeed I don’t know if that really happened or I am making it up, and a long while after mother refused to talk to Nick, and I mentioned something about being "trapped like a rat." When I returned to Linea Italiana again with Nick the suit seemed a bit undersized. Trapped like a rat, sure, Nick said, more like Alibangbang’s apocalypse.

Then in the UP writers workshop in the mid-’70s Nick’s garrulousness made one young observer cry. Nick was beside himself trying to get Peachy Lontoc to stop crying. Since then he never did attend any more writers workshops, saying, "Nothing ever happens in those things." But maybe the memory of the crying Peachy was as traumatic for him, as it was for Peachy. I remember interviewing Nick for Sunday Inquirer Magazine in the late ’80s when I was trying to scrounge enough funds in preparation for my firstborn. We met at the Calle 5 off Padre Faura, and there we were shouting above the din of the all-female band’s racket of old standards and vintage rock and roll. Wooly-bully, he was with a bosom buddy of his, Elena Roco, and they were enjoying the food and music. He said to me, "What happened to you?! You used to be a beautiful baby… You used to be a beautiful boy." While at the same time flicking a cloth napkin at my face or bopping me on the head. "You were so cute," and he would put his cheek to mine, as if he were dancing with a toddler cheek to cheek. "What happened to you?"

When I asked him what time of day he wrote, he said, "What a stupid question! No, like you I masturbate in the mornings and write at night." When I asked him what books he read, he said: "Sari-sari store!" When I asked him some impertinent question about the relationship between life and literature, he seemed incredulous and shouted "Of course!" while banging his fists on the table.

Beer now won’t taste the same without Nick around. He could now be in heaven, which is why he drank so much of the stuff here. Thanks, St. Nick, and say hello to your kumpare if you run into him. We can never look at our noble and ever loyal city with the same eyes again.