Confessions of a space boy
September 3, 2004 | 12:00am
Ground Control To Major Tom…
"Down in space, it’s always 1982…
Everything moves at its own odd pace, all motion part of a balletic performance that perhaps validates man’s hope that there is order in chaos." These thoughts occur to Major Tom as he gazes out the bubble of his craft, his eyes surveying the stellar playground. There is much to see: the sun shedding photons like an angry rastafarian shaking off dandruff; the junkyard of Venus with all its cosmic detritus which from afar look like arms embracing its seas; and a lone space-suit wheeling towards a black-hole, a death’s head grimace stretched on the face of its occupant. So much to see but his thoughts focus elsewhere…"
"Are you joking?" she said.
"Well, I was just thinking given that you’re, you know, kinda pretty." He bit his tongue at the daftness of the delivery.
"I mean, really, you could do much better than –"
"Are you on something?" She tilts her head and rolls her eyes up with a look that he always found catching.
"No, I can’t help but think that you could go out with someone more attractive like, say, Paul Newman maybe?"
"Are you kidding? He’s old!"
"Aha! So if it were Paul Newman circa Cool Hand Luke you’d –"
"You’re crazy."
"Well, OK. But how about somebody like Robert Trujillo? You always said that you preferred Suicidal Tendencies when he became the bassist and he really –"
"He’s ugly and fat."
"Thanks," snapped the 230-pound boy with severe acne, an atavistically large nose inherited from his forefathers and thick, unkempt hair that was oily to touch. No wonder she liked to call him "my monster."
"No, I like the way you look. I love the way you look. You’re my Swamp Thing!"
"Ha, ha very funny Mrs. Abigail Cable but seriously – since we’ve established you don’t go for looks – would you go with someone like Alan Moore then?"
"He’s not my type."
"How about Lars? You said he looked cute in the credits for The Kingdom and he must have something going for him other than a pretty face."
She sniggers.
"How about the Thom Yorke?"
She dismisses this with a sigh.
Hmmm.
"David Bowie?"
"Hmmm…." She does this with a smile and an expression as if a thought-bubble with a light bulb was hovering beside her pretty head.
I hate you.
The last statement wasn’t part of the conversation.
It was a text message I received from Lizza Nakpil, the legendary manager of popular band Rivermaya and one of the busiest women in Pinoy rock. She’s doing the publicity for an upcoming concert for foreign artist Incubus and she’s assured me of two tickets for the concert. It’s the "gift" we in the media receive for writing about such events and plugging the sponsors. Common practice, I assure you and nothing under-the-table about it. The difference now was that I wasn’t going to need it.
Why was I resisting the temptation to swoon upon seeing that band’s pin-up gorgeous singer screaming their hit Megalomaniac and – given the proximity of my complimentary seats to the stage – be showered in his sweat?
Simple. I was going to Hong Kong instead to watch David Bowie scream "This isn’t rock n’ roll! This is genocide!"; and hopefully be close enough to be covered with stardust by Ziggy himself.
"But I really want you to be there," Lizza pleaded when she called me on my cell phone.
"Well, aside from the fact that I think Bowie is the most important musician working today, I have kind of a hidden agenda," I told her.
And I do. I’m traveling to the former British colony and seeing the concert with my girlfriend of eight years and best friend for more than a decade – a strange one named Yvonne.
I’m also planning to ask her to be my wife.
I’ve done this before, the proposal. I wrote an article in the pages of the daily I worked for about a year ago about a young painter that detailed his heartache of being an artist in the Philippines. The novel idea behind it though was that if you took all the first letters of each paragraph it read: MARRY ME. Of course, in hindsight, it wasn’t as clever as I thought it was. My long-suffering editor was gracious enough to put each first letter in bold-type, probably realizing the quixotic quality of the gesture and to help salvage my chances. Admittedly naive but let’s just put it down to the fact that I was distraught and not thinking straight when the idea occurred to me.
And why shouldn’t I have been at that time?
The love of my life had just broken up with me.
But it only realized it was not of this world when it – in the form of a Filipino boy – hit puberty.
Childhood was uneventful enough. He – it – had grown up human and was not cognizant of anything else; by all appearances, he was unremarkable. But for a lost stare and a reticent manner, he gave no indication of his true origin.
His adoptive Earth parents however thought him special and loved him as if he were their own. They encouraged him to be precocious.
His teachers encouraged him in his interest in making things up and writing them down (which he did to avoid talking, the most tricky of all human arts). They never guessed that any of his tall tales about interplanetary travel and weird beings were true. (Too lazy to copy an existing story as jug work for detention, he wrote his own, only to be reprimanded by his teacher for reading such "garbage.")
His friends were few but each one was valued. They never treated him different.
But by high school though, things were changing.
He had not adapted to this world the way he had hoped. Already struggling with the changes in his body, his unease was not helped by the fact that – for the first time since landing on Earth – he suddenly found himself alien to its inhabitants and their language.
Words were becoming tricky. Written down, he could deal with them: he had studied their usage in the books that his Earth father gave him constantly to read. If you didn’t understand something you could reread the line or find help in references. It was when they were spoken that the trouble began. Just as spells only gain potency when uttered by the magus, words achieve a certain power that more often than not were wielded carelessly by its speaker. They could hurt.
Insults once considered silly in childhood became vicious in adolescence. A heightened sensitivity brought about by emergence of his mutant hormones prevented him from simply crying or shrugging it off: once stung it now lingered. In the new social order, talking out of turn meant you were odd, not getting the dirty joke immediately was considered boring and not getting girls to say yes was unforgivable. Kids got away with that stuff. Pimply, insecure 12-year olds did not.
Unable to cope, he froze and his fears kept him in place. In this case, that spot was the second to the last chair of the fourth row of his classroom; if he craned his neck a little to the right he would catch a glimpse of his classmates playing in the soccer-fields. Those times, he wished he’d never landed here.
Noticing the peculiar demeanor not to mention test papers with only a name scribbled repeatedly, his teacher was alarmed enough to contact his Earth-parents. Experts were called in and promptly diagnosed him as being clinically depressed. (In space, they called that melancholy.) They also detected signs that he suffered from a mental condition called "obsessive-compulsive disorder" or OCD for short. It was described by psychiatric journals as a "psychoneurosis characterized by persistent and often unwanted ideas (obsessions) and impulses to carry out compulsions or irrational and ritualistic acts." For him, words again were at fault.
The mere thought of words like "accident" or "failure" would be enough to induce panic in him. If he were performing the simple act of adjusting his watch or getting off the passenger seat of a vehicle, he would have to counter any "negative" terms that would spring unprompted into his head with "positive" ones like "happy" and "healthy." If he couldn’t, he would have to keep doing it until he could. The sight of him trying sitting and standing several times from his chair even during class was not uncommon.
His peers, merely content with bemused stares and whispers before now pounced at him with sharper teeth and whiplash tongues all out to tear him to shreds. He withdrew further, erecting a shell around his mind by making up excuses for their behavior no matter how mad. (Reading about evolution, he would simply conjecture that he was unfortunate enough to have landed in a stock of humanity that was descended from a line from saurischians, evolving from the theropod line thus producing a breed of reptile men.) Reading history, he knew that when words were thrown most likely fists followed.
Preparing himself, he imagined a carapace surfacing to protect his body, a throwback to the defenses he imagined his ancestors needed to survive in hostile environments beyond the stars. The most he ever got was calluses.
He was asked to leave the school the following year. The school authorities, not knowing what to make of him, suggested to his Earth parents that they take him to more "understanding" academic institutions. They found one headed by a self-proclaimed guru who – upon hearing his "delusions" – saw the work of the devil and ordered an exorcism to purge him of the evils of comic books and Roger Corman movies. It took eight hours.
Nothing changed.
From bona fide classics such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather I learned how to make an "offer you can’t refuse" or, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, that strangulation is the most efficient and simple way to kill a person. Even lessons lectured in science class in school about topics like weightlessness in space didn’t hit home until I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Of course, Kubrick also taught me friendly talking computers were ultimately murderous and onanism was quite fun while listening to Beethoven.)
But less prestigious fare can teach you a few tricks as well. Whereas Ingmar Bergman’s art-house favorite The Seventh Seal imparted that Death liked to play chess it took Peter Hewitt’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey to really convey that he really sucked at it. (He wasn’t too good at Twister either.)
But what I was carrying in my coat pocket was much more valuable – though its value depended on the response of my companion.
When I proposed the year before, she didn’t say no; she just didn’t give an answer. I was put on hold with a beguiling smile that I drew inspiration from as I was trying to woo her back. A year later, I wasn’t so sure if that smile would be enough.
"I’m going to buy one of every item on sale," Yvonne tells me as we approach the merchandising desk, spying the shirts and bags tacked up on the wall of the makeshift booth. My eyes are on the gray Bowie sweatshirts sewn with icons from his latest album Reality. I knew it would be perfect if we had one each, as if it were a uniform – a cloak and badge made official by the Thin White Duke – something that bonded us. And if she would say yes, it would also be a wonderful reminder of the night.
There were no crowds yet. Only two young men were there, setting up the counter. I asked one of them how much the sweatshirts were but he told me that the price-list had yet to be sent. Besides, they only would start selling 30 minutes before the show. Already excited, my girlfriend was already jabbing her finger at each item on display. I’m was anxious as well but I tell her that we best stroll around first and maybe find somewhere to sit.
On the way down though, we both know we were going to hop on the ascending escalator the moment we got off the descending one. We had to have those things.
I had to have those things.
And it cost about HK 500 each for the sweatshirts reckoned the salesperson when badgered to give a figure. "Yeah, the last time we did this, the T-shirts were probably HK200, the caps HK150 but yeah… I think the sweatshirts were about HK500, HK800’s pretty steep," he chuckled, perhaps responding to the bonhomie I mustered to project via the rigid smile on my face.
Needless to say, we didn’t have enough.
(Fade in the opening riff to Bowie’s Rebel Rebel to signify epiphany…)
"Got your mother in a whirl/ She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl…"
Luckily for us, we were both familiar with a romantic-comedy called Reality Bites. In it, the character played by actress Winona Ryder needed quick cash but had only a gas card, a graduation gift from her dad. Ingeniously, she hung out at a gas station and approached its patrons offering to sign for their gas in exchange for cold currency. It was Yvonne who had both the credit card and the idea. Funny, I could swear that I could hear a karaoke rendition of its theme song Stay being played at one of the coffee shops below.
We proceeded to a swanky restaurant a floor down which seemed like the perfect place to ensnare some cash cows. Aside from steaks and burgers, the restaurant specialized in oriental cuisine that was bland enough so as not to offend Western tourists’ taste buds but provided enough of the local flavor to be deemed exotic. The place was empty save for one table where two Chinese women and an American sat.
We did not ask permission from the restaurant staff because that risked the possibility of having them say no – an unacceptable response. It was tricky but we managed to give the waiters the impression that we were a hungry couple salivating over their over-priced dim sum. Ordering Tsing Tao beer, we waited and looked around anxiously. The tactic was thus: Go for a large party rather than just a small group. That way we only needed to hit one table and score the needed amount. The more tables we approached the greater the chance we would be asked to leave: again unacceptable.
Faces, it’s quite a talent to judge them. If we were to chance upon some indignant asshole we would risk a scene that might result in humiliation and, worse, none the richer. We watched the customers and evaluated: his nose is too hooked (probably a corporate pirate); she’s wearing too much makeup (a kept woman); and they’re much too straight-faced (taxmen).
Finally, we caught sight of a company composed of two Western men and some Asian executive-looking types. Aside from the relaxed and still affluent dress sense, the youth was also undimmed in their faces, enough so as to give the faint impression of unblemished altruism. I told Yvonne that I was going to approach them; she nodded reluctant approval. I could tell she was genuinely worried.
One of them was telling a joke when I butted in.
"Hello, sorry to disturb your dinner, but I’m going to the David Bowie concert tonight and if all goes well I plan to propose to that lovely lady seated at the table behind me…"
They all throw bemused stares towards the direction of Yvonne who’s seated far enough so as not to hear what I was saying.
"Anyway, we flew in from Manila and I want to buy some stuff to remember the whole night by…"
They bought it and agreed to fork over the cash. As I shuffled back to the table, I was shaking with the adrenaline and the buzz from drinking alcohol on an empty stomach.
"How’d it go?" Yvonne asks me as I shuffle back and sit down.
Just like in the movies, I tell her.
One question lingers in my mind though: In romances, do you get down on the left or the right knee when you propose to the dame?
His hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t even entertain himself with a book because he can’t hold it steady long enough. Being taught by his Earth father to read at the age of three he always found comfort in the fictional landscapes of his favorite authors – be it Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic chambers, Emily Bronte’s wild moors or Ray Bradbury’s Mars. He always preferred a bit of the fantastic in his literary diet – a preternatural reminiscence or because it helped him forget the tedium of his current location. (Not surprisingly, science fiction was a favorite: what else would an alien read?)
Already in his twenties, with no prospects save for a few writing jobs for a newspaper (which he only got through the efforts of his Earth parents), his tastes in literature started to turn perverse. Pornography like the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Georges Bataille’ The Story of the Eye were his choices for bedside reading. But now, he couldn’t focus, only remembering snatches of a rude word here and there.
Even masturbation is not a welcome alternative.
The reason for the shakes was the heavy dosage of Lithium and occasionally Prozac his doctors prescribed to sort him out. It’s not working. His rituals were getting so elaborate that he has resorted to carrying a sheaf of papers around just so he could be sure that he’d be able to remember every word.
Someone is sleeping on the couch beside his bed. She’s been here the whole afternoon waiting for him to wake up. It’s past midnight and he has to take her home; his day is only beginning…
It was turmoil when he had to transfer to another high school the following year. Not that he would miss the old place; he was just scared of the new one and finding himself an alien twice over. He braced himself for impact, no doubt a crash landing.
It was not going to be pretty.
To ease his pains, his Earth parents bought him a stereo and gave him money to buy a few tapes. (Initially, they bought him copies of Milli Vanilli, Rick Astley and The Alan Parsons Project: luckily, he retained his extraterrestrial powers to detect crap.) Checking out the bins in the record stores in Greenhills, he unearthed some gems like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Lou Reed’s Transformer, the Pixies’ Doolittle and ABBA’s Greatest Hits – all sounding like they came from another solar system, transmissions from another galaxy. (In ABBA’s case, they actually looked the part.) He was enraptured by the cosmic jive unspooling from the tape, about monkeys going to heaven, satellites of love and great gigs in the sky – sci-fi lullabies that cradled him to solace and offered some moments of escape from where he was. Or what he was – a vagrant entity without a place to go.
The first time he heard David Bowie though, he heard home.
It was a place of wonders and terrors. Machines sang with soul; diamond dogs prowled the oil-slick streets; Lady Stardust sang the blues with makeup barely concealing his stubble; and Elvis still lived. One moment it was teeming with life like an alley in a cyberpunk novel; then become as deserted as a plaza in a de Chirico painting. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. And it rocked.
Changes was its anthem. It always moved him whenever he heard Bowie stutter the title of the song in the chorus. Sure The Who exploited the trick first but he found Pete Townsend’s amphetamine-ramble stunted in aspiration, forever hung up on youthful conceits like hoping to "die before I get old."
As if being young was all that cheery.
On Changes, Bowie sang of flux; his chopped pronunciation like a piece of celluloid caught in the reels of the projector – its images repeating, seemingly ad infinitum, before either juddering forward or corroding into blankness like the middle of a Bergman film he had once seen. But as the song’s following descending bass line imparts, time moves on, its’ seeming awkward redundancies allowing one pause (and a jolt of clarity) to reflect on this bittersweet denouement. Even if the "days still seem the same" they run in circles away from the center like ripples in a "stream of impermanence", growing the further they progress. Much like George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, it imparts a gospel of transformation, of motion, of change. To his credit, though, Bowie never promised that it was going to be better – only that it was going to be different.
That was enough for him. He was a mess all right, constantly shifting moods like the key changes in another Bowie composition, the melodramatic ballad Life On Mars? But being assured that he wasn’t going to be stuck in this rock forever was music that assuaged the beast of emotions in him. (Was he slowly becoming human?)
More than a decade later, he couldn’t hear any of those reassuring notes when he tried to take his own life.
I have trouble recalling her smile anytime during that period.
Tonight, though, as we enter the concert hall half an hour before the concert, I notice an unusual skip in her step (I’m not exaggerating) and she’s bopping along as I hum a few bars from Bowie’s latest single New Killer Star an optimistic, jaunty tune about coming Armageddon. She’s doing the backing vocals, singing, with confident swagger: I’ve got a better way! If it weren’t for the loud music on the P.A. our voices would be audible to a far wider audience than we intend.
But on second thought, she’s beaming with as much excitement as I am that should some mischievous tech stop the music, catching us both unaware like children in a game of musical chairs, it wouldn’t matter that much. Who knows, maybe Bowie might be listening?
In the absence of a burning bush he settled for the vandalism inside a cubicle in the comfort room of his new high school. With an hour before the bell, it was like the scripture of some deity with a bad case of LBM. Amidst the giggles of boys as they fixed the architecture of their hair, the idle banter and the aroma of nicotine from clandestine smokers, he studied and copied the best scribbles and drawings in his notebook, finding much power in their lines. Most were obscene ("Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but you’re holding your dick while you’re reading this.") while others were just strange ("Mukha kang halaman!). All were noted with a diligence of William Burroughs spy.
At that time, he came to understand a few things about his human body and those of others, specifically the opposite sex. Girls sprouted boobs; he wanted to touch them (although the thought at the same time repelled him); and that they would never let him. Already finding it difficult to communicate with the male species he shuddered to think that he could actually have a conversation with any female. Too bad his new high school was coed.
The bell rang and he felt faint at the prospect of facing the masses of breasts walking around. Standing up from the toilet, he persuaded himself that he would be all right as long as he stuck to the other losers in this jail: the pot-heads, the criminals and other archetypes scrapped from the John Hughes teenage hell. Putting down the seat, he noticed that something was written on its lid. On it, he read the words, "Walk on the wild side!" scrawled in red marker. It was the title from a favorite Lou Reed track. Produced by Bowie, it was a song about outcasts and the nonchalance they adopted to get away with it. It rang true like a mantra – much like Reed’s other favorite phrase, "all right." Whatever the problem, it would always turn out for the better, just like Jenny in The Velvet Underground’s Rock and Roll who "despite the amputations" and "computations" was – once the radio started rockin’ – was "all right."
It was a sign.
That was the day he first met the princess from Mars.
Curiously, that happened to be Space Oddity, Bowie’s first ever hit; it was floating in my head when I awoke from a dream of Major Tom surveying the cosmic debris. Good choice, I felt before quickly remembering from the Internet that Bowie doesn’t care to perform that tune anymore…
"I know this," the princess said without looking up. She was reading a story he had written called "Major Tom’s Last Flight." "This is the one his space-ship goes berserk and he goes drifting into space and the astronaut just wants his wife to know he loves her, right?"
He did not admit that it was a prose adaptation of the Bowie song. That would be conceding defeat in their ongoing competition of who could come up with the weirder story for the day. Her entry that time was about orphan girl obsessed with mermaids. To convince the other kids of their existence, she lured them one by one to a nearby cliff and pushed them into the sea. In the end, she jumps in herself.
"Should we call it even," she offered.
He nodded.
"Ground control to Major Tom," she started singing.
"Nothing, I’m just worried about something."
She smiles to assure me everything’s fine, that I should lighten up.
If only I could.
On the P.A., they’re playing Radiohead’s Subterranean Homesick Alien from their critically lauded "O.K. Computer," one of Yvonne’s favorites. It’s basically about finding yourself stranger than the fictions that dominate the landscape around you. I could never really work out if that was a positive thing or not. However, given Yorke’s penchant for Philip K. Dick paranoia – indeed the singer sure looked the part of one of the author’s anti-heroes – it was probably a dystopian picture he was painting.
I feel the ring in my coat-pocket; my hands are sweaty.
With nothing to do but wait, Yvonne picks up the thread of the tune reverberating on the walls of the concert hall and tries to sing along with a smile on her face.
Happily, she’s out of tune.
He felt no pain: the wounds on his wrists were already clotting while the borrowed blade was lying derelict on the bathroom floor. He let the cold water run on his hands. He wanted to feel numb.
He hasn’t looked at himself in the mirror; he hadn’t done so in the last five months or so. He can barely leave the room nowadays, watching TV – sitcoms and static – all the time. He had nowhere to go.
The door is locked: someone was knocking.
Probably it’s the princess calling from her adoptive Earth parents’ home province of Cebu. Their family moved back there a couple of months ago. He hadn’t spoken to her in much too long a time, too afraid to talk on the telephone.
He’s hurt her too much already.
He doesn’t want to lose her completely but he’s in no condition to talk.
It’s too late; he’s lost it.
Near the sink is a bottle of Sulfur Resorcin lotion that his Earth mother purchased for him from a dermatologist. He applies it twice a day for skin problems, his flesh being affected by all the dust and the dirt in this planet’s air. It doesn’t seem to be working. Besides, he really doesn’t care anymore.
Shake well before using.
It was conceived in a spate of lucidity from the torpor of my listless days and "lost weekends" after graduating from college, loafing around in a luftmensch existence. Written under the influence of Sugar Hiccup’s album Womb, Gregorio C. Brillantes’ book The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories (photocopied from the U.P library in Diliman), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels and – of course – Bowie, it turned out, to my surprise, to be a love story.
It was a struggle to make. From writing and getting a grant proposal for the National Commission for Culture and the Arts to finally getting a team to help me shoot the damn thing was more than a year in the making. It seemed like forever.
At the time, I was watching the rest of my fellow graduates from the College of Fine Arts zoom up the corporate ladder by lying to the general public and selling them detergent. Even to someone with a questionable mental condition, that seemed too crazy. Seeing a film by Werner Herzog about a man hauling a huge steamboat over a mountain ridge to finance his dreams of bringing opera to Peru, I decided to write a screenplay. I even ceased my day job of writing music reviews for the dailies to work on it. My life was missing its deadlines: Making a film seemed to make sense.
The whole ordeal lasted about two years. I became whatever the film called me to be. From sycophant to tyrant, beggar to benefactor, priest to politician, I played all the parts. No sooner had I took off the costume of one disguise; I had to assume another. Being a creature of strident habit, this wrecked havoc on my schedules, further eroding any sense of security and straining all my personal relations. I felt low, and I eventually became "Low."
The latter was Bowie’s landmark album: it was recorded in a divided Germany and a stone’s throw away from the Berlin Wall. When it was released on vinyl, the first half was composed of angular funk and quirky, infectious pop. On the second the tunes were completely drained away, leaving behind only aural landscapes of concrete and steel.
During the making of the film, one side of me was a burst of agitated energy and uneasy rhythms, always ready with anecdotes about Kubrick, Ozu and De Leon and the power of cinema. The other was a brooding wall always in danger of tumbling to pieces under the weight of it own ambition and indulgence. I teetered from one end to the other, feeling a great burden that was only momentarily eased by sleep and the constant love of Yvonne throughout the frenzy of those days. (While I slept in the production van, after a long day of shooting, she stayed awake shooing the mosquitoes from my face.)
Making the film was like being the driver of crazed trip worthy of Hunter S. Thompson that had quickly devolved into banal conversation and the oppressive monotony of the highway stretching endlessly ahead. Everything went wrong from defective cameras to actresses who once the cameras were working couldn’t act. Already road-weary, I always found myself the next morning "crashing in the same car" and disappointed that I wasn’t dead.
I took out my unhappiness on my crew and actors; I started to act as if I was actually paying them. (I’m almost sure some of them have a restraining order against me.) Yvonne was in charge of costume, a job I forced on her with emotional blackmail. When a shirt went missing just before it supposed to be shot for a scene, I went into a rage, chastising her in front of everyone. The fury quickly abated, but it was too late.
She was in tears.Still stubborn, I did nothing to comfort her.
(To be concluded)
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