A letter from Milwaukee

As I mentioned last week, I usually work with the TV on, and I was flipping through channels and half-listening again a few days ago when I spotted something that made me look up — the pleasant face and voice of Helen Gamboa, not singing but acting in an old Tagalog movie whose lines sounded more than vaguely familiar… because I wrote them.

The movie, produced in 1989, was one of about 14 I scripted for the late Lino Brocka. Its title still makes me wince to this day — Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan? (“When Will the Sin Be Cleansed?”) — which was typical of the kind of money-making melodrama Lino had to cook up for his producers so they would let him do something socially significant (read: box-office disaster) now and then. As I watched the movie, the story slowly came back to me, and for a while I missed those days when Lino and I slapped these tearjerkers together — Ina Ka ng Anak Mo, Ano ang Kulay ng Mukha ng Diyos? — laughing at our own absurdities, although we tried to do as decent a job as we could with every movie, commercial or otherwise.

I’ll talk more about those moviemaking days (and why I put them behind me) another time; what struck me at that moment was how I’d almost completely forgotten about what I’d written almost 20 years ago — an anxiety not helped by a quick visit to Google, where I found the film credited to somebody else (someone else did write the basic story as a komiks serial; I wrote the screenplay — or so I thought).

Looking for confirmation, I scanned my hard drive for anything with “mahuhugasan” in it — one of the great things about the Mac is that it has an “internal Google” called Spotlight that archives everything on your disk and retrieve the files in seconds — and while I didn’t turn up the script itself (I have to admit to not losing or misplacing the scripts of most of my early movies, especially those from pre-computer days), I did find, of all things, a letter I wrote my parents from cold Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I wrote the screenplay long-distance in between papers for my Ph.D.

Beng had joined me then; I wasn’t clearing much as a teaching assistant so Beng worked as a deli clerk and sold her watercolors on the street while I figured out new ways to make Filipinos weep in their theater seats; Demi was back in Manila, midway through high school, on which I missed out completely.

With your indulgence, here’s a portion of that letter, which I’m sharing because it captures a certain moment in this writer’s life, a time when I had begun work on my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (written entirely in America as part of my dissertation project) while remaining tethered to the popular movies that paid the bills back home and the airline tickets. I must’ve typed this out, pre-Mac, on WordPerfect 4.2 and printed it out to mail home; it tells you what a pack rat I am to have saved these digital files from 1989, moving them from floppies and then from one computer to the next over 19 years:

Oct. 19/89 7:52 pm

It’s been a long time since I got to write you last, and it’s really just the usual load of schoolwork and writing (for a living) that’s been keeping me very busy.... Well, it’s finally started snowing; we got six inches of snowfall today (a record for October), and it’s still at that stage where it looks pretty, but very soon it’ll simply be cold, muddy and wet, and I’ll have to march around again under six layers of clothing. I spent some money this week provisioning myself for the winter — I bought a new (used but clean) goosedown comforter for $25 at the resale (used-goods) store, and it was a bargain because these things normally cost $100+; also some sweaters and woolen socks....

My finances are running low again, but I’m not too worried because the good news is that I have a couple of scripting jobs lined up, thanks to Lino and Charo. Lino was here in New York last week but I didn’t get a chance to see him, although we talked on the phone; there’s a possibility that I might do an American-Filipino project for him next year in San Francisco (or maybe Los Angeles, now that the earthquake’s been through SF); I wrote a storyline for that, and there’s no rush, because this will be for 1990; the producer is an Italian who has his office in Paris, and who worked with Lino in Ora Pro Nobis (which Lino says the Philippine government is doing all it can to ban, here in the US and probably in the Philippines as well).... More immediately, I’ll be doing a script for Viva (a love story between a young man and a much older woman — Raymart Santiago and Gloria Diaz; I don’t even know these young stars anymore; plus Janice de Belen’s younger sister); I’ve also sent a sequence treatment to Charo for a father-son movie entitled Talikuran Ka Man ng Langit, starring Christopher de Leon.... My other Viva movie, Biktima, will be shot much later; Lino has about three or four movies on his hands — naglalagare, as they say; it’s really thoughtful of him to arrange all these things for me....

The fact is, given my schoolwork and teaching load and other writing commitments (like the full-length CCP play due in December), I don’t have the time to write even just one more script, but my problem is that I can’t say no, I think I can pull off another miracle; this is when I miss my old reliable secretary (Jo Elaine Dalisay), and a hot bowl of Royco soup.... I’ve been talking to Beng, by the way, about selling the Modesta house, and I know you probably won’t like the idea, but I had been thinking about this for a long time. It’s not that I or we want to move away from you; it’s just that I do think a place closer to UP and to wherever Demi will be going for college (UP, I hope) will ultimately be better as far as time and money goes. I’m planning to pay off whatever I still owe the GSIS with what I might make on these scripts, get the title, then sell the house.

I hope Rowie and Demi had a fun birthday celebration; I miss these get-togethers a lot — especially the food — hipon, lapu-lapu, inihaw na baboy — although I don’t even want to imagine what these things cost nowadays. One thing I’m sure of is that I’m fairly sick of American food. It was really a great thing for Beng and myself to have discovered, over the summer, Jun Capati’s “Asian Food Mart” here in downtown Milwaukee, where I can get anything from tuyo to calamansi to puso ng saging; but he has everything a Filipino wants, and lots of it, too — and not too expensively; a fresh, luscious bola-bola siopao costs only 60 cents, and I usually have one of these for a snack (at half the price of a lousy hamburger); medyo malayo nga lang sa bahay, so I usually go to his place around once a week; then I stock up on Ligo, Knorr, etc.... He also has tapes for rent, and I was so lucky and happy to find Miguelito and Maging Akin Ka Lamang.... I hope he gets a copy of Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan soon.... Demi tells me that she will be going for the editorship of her school paper next year; I urged her to do so, and reminded her that she will be following a family tradition if she does that; I also hear she’s getting something that suspiciously sounds like a boyfriend soon; well, what can I say? Aba, kilatisin muna; I’ll have to get approval ratings from the mother, the grandparents, and the titas and titos, siyempre. As long as she doesn’t flip over completely, and as long as she handles the situation responsibly (Beng, Elaine and Rowie can tell her what that means), I guess it’ll happen sooner or later. 

It’s just mindboggling to realize that (unless Beng has anything to do with it; she wants Demi to marry late!) I can be a grandfather in my early 40s; it doesn’t seem too long ago that I was a kid, playing in the back lots of Pasig.... Time sure flies. This is a difficult time for me, having been away for so long; but things will get better and brighter — and I’ll come home and collect on that lapu-lapu. I hope all of you continue to be in good health. Belated happy birthday, Rowie! Write me when you can, and regards to my nephews and nieces.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.