(Being another pointless tale about hanging out with friends and doing nothing.)
Juan invited us to lunch in Tagaytay, Cavite. “Saturday in the country!” I said, and immediately accepted.
“We’ll pick you up at 10:30 a.m., ha-ha,” said Ricky, who is unfamiliar with the concept of Jessica conscious before noon.
“I’ll have you know that my inner clock got reset on my last trip, and I’m now awake by 10 a.m.”
“You can be ready in 30 minutes?” he said.
“Do I look like I take more than 15 minutes?”
Between the traffic on the highway, the profusion of billboards featuring celebrities airbrushed to plasticity, the construction sites and new subdivisions, the country looked pretty much like the city, only less grimy and decrepit. I didn’t see much greenery until we got to Highlands, which has jungle-y areas, ravines, airy villas, Swiss chalets, and a bunch of new buildings that look like pieces in a board game.
We had lunch in a log cabin. Juan said it had been brought in as a construction kit and assembled on the hilltop. Ricky and Juan had the Cornish game hen, Carlo had the fish, and I had a slab of prime rib, medium rare. What can I say, I’m a guy.
“Did that come with the kit?” Carlo asked, pointing to a chandelier made of deer antlers.
“It probably did,” I said. “That’s Bambi, Bambi’s mother, and that head mounted over the fireplace is Bambi’s boyfriend.”
Ricky was unusually non-verbal because his quadriceps hurt from an S routine disguised as a gym workout.
“This is like that scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding,” Carlo noted. “I think we should sing I Say A Little Prayer.”
Now that’s too woopsy, even for me. However, we did prevail on Ricky to do his rendition of Shirley Bassey singing Michael Jackson’s She’s Out Of My Life.
Juan took us around the place, which is the size of a city. We rode the cable car over a ravine. I love cable cars and rollercoasters in general. My idea of a great rollercoaster ride is one that causes me to projectile-vomit. As we waited our turn, we discussed theme park rides we had been on.
“I hope it gets really windy so the cars rock wildly,” I said. I did not notice that Ricky and Carlo had gotten very quiet as we took our seats.
“It’s not very high up,” Juan pointed out in a comforting manner, “but if you fall you’ll still get smashed to bits.”
Ricky looked around the car with a strange expression. “How do we breathe?” he asked. “Oh. There’s a window.” He recalled the first time he ever rode a Ferris wheel, at age four. “When we got to the top of the wheel and I could see our house, I hugged my aunt and cried, Mamamatay ako! Mamamatay ako!” (I’m going to die!)
As the cable car started moving forward at a stunning velocity of 0.5 kilometers per hour, it was Carlo’s turn to be nervous. “I think I may have acrophobia. It started with my accident. I was riding on top of a jeep in Palawan when I fell. My skull was fractured and my ear was torn off.”
“Really? Let me see. They reattached it?” I’m always interested in stories of gore and maiming.
“I thought that was an urban legend about you,” Ricky said.
I was about to launch into the story of how I fractured my skull at age eight and had to endure 32 needles in my head for an ancient electroencephalograph when Carlo exclaimed, “This is even scarier than unsafe sex!”
The cable car zoomed on at 0.5 kph.
By the time Juan had taken us to see the gym and sports facilities, the various restaurants, the golf course, camping grounds, and movie theater, we had a good idea of how vast the place is. We drove back to the city at half past four, and despite a wrong turn we were home by six.
The minute my head touched the pillow I fell into a deep sleep for nine hours straight. I think my systems are not used to ingesting so much fresh air, and they had to shut down to figure out how to process all that oxygen.