The long journey from Roces Avenue to Powell Street

San Francisco-based journalist Benjamin Pimentel came home to the Philippines for less than a week in November for the launch of his first novel, Mga Gerilya sa Powell Street (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007), realizing a dream he’s had since he was eight years old.

“I always wanted to write a novel,” Pimentel, now 43, said during the launch at the Ateneo campus late afternoon of a Monday.

On hand were members of his family – parents and elder sister – as well as a few old colleagues in the alternative press before he left for the United States in 1990.

How times have changed since the heady days of the post-people power 1, when Pimentel was a staff writer of the left of center, virtually underground Midweek magazine, which at one point or another had in its roster as editorial offices moved from Timog to Old Sta. Mesa and finally to Roces Avenue, Quezon City, the two Petes Lacaba and Daroy, Greg Brillantes, Luis Teodoro, Eric Gamalinda, Paulynn Sicam, Jose Tence Ruiz, Danilo Dalena, Tezza Parel, Benjie Lontok and Jomar Kho Indanan.

We have it on good authority that the magazine’s very first subscriber was Wilson Lee Flores.

It was a good place to learn the ropes of journalism, especially with Lacaba and Brillantes, stalwarts of the pre-martial law Free Press and Asia Philippines Leader. Not least among the young upstarts was Boying Pimentel, fresh from his political science course at the University of the Philippines where he also served as Collegian editor.

Back then Boying was already writing fiction in Tagalog, and was a fellow of the 1985 UP writers workshop, along with his batchmates Melanie Manlogon who later also became a Midweek staffer, Jessica Zafra, Connie Jan Maraan.

Names, places, faces and what a long road it’s been, including the theft of the magazine’s printing machine that led to our taking impromptu computer lessons at Boying’s place on Detroit Street in Cubao, and also in Pete Lacaba’s place on Mother Ignacia, to sort of fight back the odds stacked against us.

It was classic you and me against the world, and among Boying’s unforgettable pieces were those on the sparrow urban units and the life of a UG, which may have provided the backbone of research for the book he was quietly working on at the time, a biography on the middle class revolutionary Ed Jopson. It was clear Boying was taken up on social issues from the get-go.

Then sometime in 1990 Pete and a clutch of staffers transferred to Graphic, while Boying stayed on for a while at Midweek before making his great escape to the United States and the proverbial greener pastures.

He hardly had time to miss the sizzling sisig and charcoal broiled squid at Davao Inihaw as he quickly entered into a Bay Area state of mind, becoming a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1993, a job he would hold for the next 14 years, covering the general beats as well as environment and silicon valley and, because his Bart stop was on Powell Street on the way to the Chronicle offices, stories on the Filipino veterans gathered on Powell waiting for the equity bill to be passed.

So what began as reportage would provide the meat for his first novel, written auspiciously enough in Filipino.

He also returned to fiction writing, this time in English with a short story entitled “Waiting on Powell Street,” which won an award in the Bienvenido Santos short story writing contest.

He at first tried to write the novel in English, but it seemed to him that this wouldn’t cut it. He felt as if he were putting words into the mouths of old men, and he knew as well as they did that they didn’t speak that way.

When he decided to shift to Tagalog, that was when the work flowed. He was quick to remind those present at the launch, though, that this was fiction, suffice it to say that he got close to the subject matter at hand, even teaming up with photographer Totoy Rocamora to document the veterans’ lives in the literal twilight zone, from their cramped, musty, unheated quarters to their forays on the cold streets of San Francisco.

In 2005 Boying entered Mga Gerilya in the Palanca novel contest, the grand prize category that is open only every three years. It however lost to the novel written by the widow of Roger Sicat, the Tagalog writer of the Agos sa Desierto group who was one of Boying’s teachers at UP Diliman.

The manuscript might just as easily have been forgotten in the hard drive of a computer, another footnote to the contest, until a friend and fellow writer, Roland Tolentino, convinced Boying last year to send a copy to the Ateneo de Manila University Press’ director Maricor Baytion.

It turned out that one of the readers assigned to the manuscript, then UP Press director Laura Samson, was also in the panel of judges in the Palanca novel contest 2005, but who now wholeheartedly recommended the book for publication at the same time recalling the heated debates the previous year.

Samson was one of the speakers at the launch of Boying’s novel, which was like a homecoming of sorts because the writer took high school at the Ateneo. Baytion noted this, and said that some of Boying’s teachers were in fact still teaching at the department.

Also present at the launch was theater actor and cultural worker Nanding Josef, who read some excerpts from the novel in vintage style, following a slide show of Rocamora’s photographs of the Filipino veterans abroad.

What a whirlwind week it was then for Boying, who dropped by the wake of Edjop’s mom on his first night here, followed by the launch, a pilseners night out at Penguin Malate, a reunion with his staff at the Collegian, then on his last night, reminiscing with old Midweek colleagues at Newsdesk in Quezon City.

Then it was on to the long flight back to the Bay Area, where a fairly new job was waiting, as technology reporter for the online Market Watch of Dow Jones.

Boying said actual publications and hard copy broadsheets are on the decline in the US, getting thinner and the size getting smaller, as even the Chronicle has downsized considerably over the past years from some 500 to 300 employees.

Most Americans simply prefer to read their news online, trends indicate.

Before Market Watch where he has been employed in little over a month, Boying spent some months as PR of Stanford University, which was not bad – nice campus and all and he believed in the product, not to mention educational benefits for his kids – but he says like teaching, PR requires a certain temperament.

In the States, he says, when one goes into public relations, the idiom for it is that–“it is like going to the dark side.”

So it was journalism again for him, even if wholly online, doing the morning shift from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. to adjust with the bourse in New York and equities far removed from what the veterans he hung out with are fighting for.