I’d expected something odd like this to happen – strangely enough, I also completely missed out on my birthday almost a year ago by flying home from the Macworld Expo in San Francisco via Honolulu the night before and landing in Manila on the morning of the day after. I don’t mind losing important dates to flying – I’m a sucker for travel, especially if someone else is paying for my ticket – but perhaps I was expecting fireworks on board, or some Homeland Security-approved version of it, or at least some free champagne, or bonus mileage credits, or a box of sweets – something, anything to compensate us for the foregone holiday, but I suppose the airline read the boy in me and figured that any day I’m flying is a holiday, is holiday enough for me.
Given all the dates on the calendar, why am I traveling on New Year’s Day, anyway? I remember calling my travel agent to rebook my ticket just so this would happen, because of, uhm, a legal emergency. Originally I should’ve been back home a couple of days ago, but an interesting complication came up – I’ll spare you the nasty details, which you can pick up on my blog – creating the possibility, however unlikely, of my being arrested upon arrival at the airport for having failed to post bail in that case that I shall, for the time being, willfully ignore.
It’ll all be history (or, to put it more modestly and more accurately, a footnote in six-point Times Roman – heck, I’m no Ninoy, like I told my friends) by the time you read this, but it seemed ridiculously dramatic when I first heard about it (or again, more accurately, read about it online, just before giving my final exam in the American Short Story to my students in Wisconsin). Even online it was just a passing mention, but having made the news without having won the lottery, I of course let my Walter-Mittyish imagination parlay that tidbit into a headline screaming, in 72 points, all caps: PENMAN DUCKS BAIL, DRAGGED OFF TO JAIL. Or some such rhyme, never mind the reason.
A flurry of online and phone consultations with legal-minded friends established that I most likely wasn’t going to be arrested or murdered at the airport – trust the Pinoy’s partying mood to divert everyone’s attention to more pressing matters, like the doggie roasting on an open fire – but it was still possible to be served the warrant by a rogue cop (or worse, by a truly conscientious one) before I even got to baggage claim, and so therefore the more prudent thing to do – short of vanishing into the Black Hills of South Dakota – was to arrive just as soon as I could post bail after the holidays and not any sooner, or risk being detained a few days until the judicial system recovered from its gin-bulag hangover. Since I prefer to spend the New Year in the air, 36,000 feet above the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (not to mention the Batang City Jail), here I am, tapping away on a keyboard in semi-darkness above blue-veined tracts of polar ice. I do not know what fate awaits me, as Tex Ritter put it so tremulously in High Noon, but I’m enjoying the pretzels and the Christmas jazz music on my earphones (Frosty the Snowman in bebop, no less).
Maybe I’m in denial, but it’s not like I don’t know what prison is; and maybe that’s why I’m in denial, if I am. On another January morning – lemme see now, 34 years ago – I was picked up by the military and "detained" for seven months, having gone home for the holidays like a good Catholic boy and having chatted up a neighbor who turned out to be a snitch. But that’s another story – in fact, it’s a novel, so you can read about it there; of course I wrote it up to make it sometimes sound like I was clapped in irons on Devil’s Island, but while it was never that bad for me, it most certainly was for many others, and I can attest to the fact that prison, in general, may be an edifying but never a pleasant experience for anyone. Been there, done that, don’t care much for seconds, thank you very much, even if it’s only for a night at the precinct station.
I spent my last few dollars in Detroit on some magazines, among them a copy of the latest Details; it’s a mag meant, as the advertising spreads make it abundantly clear, for younger and more raffish men, who can wear a Hugo Boss suit with an open shirt and a lantern jaw, three days unshaven – in other words, the kind of guy we potbellied profs wish we were, or yet could be. I was attracted by the titles on its cover, which to my mind beats anything written by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville in buy-me-and-read-me points: "The Return of the Yuppie: How Gen X Became What It Hated Most"; "The Computer Geek Who Broke into the Pentagon"; "Why the Sexual Fantasy Has Been Ruined by Internet Porn"; and "The Ultimate Guide to Black-Tie Dressing." These guys know guys; maybe they missed out on mentioning cars on the cover, but I noted with approval that it carried an ad for the Land Rover (one of my dream drives, alongside the Mini Cooper) and a feature on the 2007 Ford Shelby GT inside.
In his "Letter from the Editor," Details bossman Daniel Peres bemoans how "If my 20-year-old self could see me now at 35, he’d want to kick my ass." He goes on to chronicle a typical day when "Dressed in Levi’s, a white Turnbull & Asser button-down, and a YSL navy blazer (circa Tom Ford), I climb into my black BMW SUV and head off for the first meeting of the day…. 3 p.m. Back at the house, I change into a pair of James Perse drawstring pants, Tod’s moccasins, and a Ralph Lauren cashmere V-neck and sit down in the office to write my ‘Letter from the Editor’ on a wafer-thin laptop."
Hey, I thought – how self-obsessively familiar. Of course Peres is being playfully parodic – it’s almost all we can do these days, isn’t it? – but it strikes a chord in me. I can’t say that I had the same sneering dismissiveness for what would have been our yuppies during the First Quarter Storm; I got sidetracked for a while and favored Ho Chi Minh rubber-tire sandals over Hush Puppies, but I caught on quickly after my release from martial-law prison and was sporting Polaroid sunglasses, four-inch-wide neckties, Tar-Gard cigarette holders, waffle-pattern double-knits, and the obligatory attaché case and clutch bag by the mid-‘70s.
Some days I might wish I were 35 and not the 53 I’m going to be pretty soon, but I’m certainly happy, at least sartorially speaking, to no longer be 23. I can dress sedately and sensibly (read: in the corniest clothes money can buy). I’ve thought about that on this trip home, of course; if I was going to be arrested at the airport, then I was going to be arrested in style – in a navy linen blazer (didn’t I just read that in the magazine?), gray button-down pinpoint oxford shirt, cuffed khaki slacks, and boat shoes, toting an Eddie Bauer messenger bag. Taking things more seriously as mothers always do, my mom gave me new pajamas for Christmas, to wear at the precinct station, or wherever I was going to be detained. I feel like I’m going to a country club.
The story gets a little longer (and, so far, funnier), but something tells me I better shut up and save my reportage for later, when I can chuckle in the safety of proven innocence. In the meanwhile, for the record, I’m biting my vagrant tongue, and I humbly submit myself to the kindness of the court and the majesty of the law. Affiant further sayeth none, so help me God!