There was a boy in school who had the same birthday as me, and every time we ran into each other on campus, in a silly habit only kids our age could have, we greeted each other a “Happy birthday.”
His name was Vincent. Not only were we born on the same day, but his father, who ran one of the bigger hospitals in Legazpi City at the time, was the one who delivered me on the night of April 22, 1972. Vince had been born the morning of that day—I never found out if his father was the one who delivered him.
Dr. T. would become one of my baptismal ninongs, which made Vincent and me kinakapatid. Sure enough, for a time, we ran around together like brothers.
We were part of the same group in school, but also on weekends, my parents had me dropped off at their house, which wasn’t a real, freestanding house but rather the top floor of the hospital that his dad ran. That was another thing that Vince and I shared. Neither of us lived in a house, but rather in a building were the family business was headquartered. My father was the head of an export firm and we lived on the two top floors of a four-story building where during the day people milled about in offices and production rooms.
I ate meals at Vince’s house and often saw his mom, who was also a doctor at the hospital. Vince and I often went around the neighborhood on his BMX bike—he pedaled while I got behind him on “step-nuts”—two bolts screwed onto the rear wheel’s axle for a passenger to step on.
One time we came by a chicharon factory, where raw fish crackers were being dried, unguarded, on wooden boards under the sun. Vince stopped all of a sudden and told me to grab some. Not thinking whether I should or shouldn’t, I stepped off the bike and did exactly as I was told, scooping up a few handfuls of the things and dumping them in the bottom of my T-shirt which I had quickly folded to form a sack.
Back at Vince’s place, we had the household help fry them and they came out nice and golden. With some suka we gobbled them up. It was pretty good chicharon.
We all had BMX’s in those days. In fact, one time, in the empty lot beside the house of one of our friends, Ricky G., we spent a whole day building a BMX motocross track—with dips and humps and jumps and “crocodiles.”
When it was done we came back to it weekend after weekend, some of us more than the others, and we got cuts, bruises and sprains. But we were boys and healed quickly so we didn’t mind. We were indestructible.
There was a man—I think he worked for Ricky’s mom—who helped us build the track. Under a tree, where we had all gathered to take a break from the work, he asked each of us—as seem to be the habit of the older folks in my hometown—which families we came from, who were our parents, where did we live, and so forth. When he got to me, he also asked who my grandparents were. I told him. Seeing that my grandparents were who he thought they were, he told me that my grandfather had once killed a man.
I must have been 10 or 11 at the time and didn’t know what to make of that revelation. It was a shock, to be sure, but the full story wouldn’t be known to me for the next decade or so. All my friends stared back at me, but what could I say? So we all left it at that.
There was the track to build. It took a whole day and when finally it was done, everybody got on their bikes and rode it. And boy did we ride it. We rode it every chance we got. On weekends, after school activities, we walked over to Ricky’s house, which was just a few blocks from the school, said hello to his mom and sisters, and promptly got on Ricky’s bike. Some who lived nearby went home and came back on their BMX, while the rest of us, who lived too far for us to get ours, had to wait till someone got tired and lent his bike.
We went to St. Agnes Academy, or SAA, as it was known around town back in those days. It was a Scholastican school. Not only was it a Catholic school, it was run by nuns.
There were, looking back, only a handful of them, the nuns—but it seemed that they had a hand in every aspect of the school’s affairs. During recess, when we lined up to get food at the cafeteria, there was always one of them keeping the lines straight or swatting flies. There was another nun in charge in the administration building. When we went there to pay our tuition fees, she hovered over the cashier and the other employees. The principal was also a nun. There was also a German nun we saw in the garden, whom we never heard from or see much of at school activities. But all the kids talked about her when they saw her, as if she was an apparition.
There was Sister Melanie, Sr. Genevieve, Sr. Concepcion. I forget the names of the others. But the one name that we learned to fear throughout grade school was Sr. Concepcion, the principal. Stories of misdeed being punished by her went around the school all the time. So-and-so was made to pick up trash in the soccer field or stand up in the principal’s office the whole afternoon.
The only time I ever got it from her was the time when my friends and I all brought switchblades to school.
I don’t know who came up with the idea to bring them to school. I know why we were fascinated by them, though. Switchblades were for us a symbol of manhood. The only other time we heard of them were when they were involved in a killing or some other crime, which we often heard about on the AM radio or from neighborhood tambays. To have one, in other words, was to declare oneself a man. That they were forbidden in school, of course, complemented that feeling of being grown up and above the rest.
It was the same reason why we were fascinated by guns and bullets. In those heady, carefree grade school days of ours, someone was always bringing bullets (swiped from his father’s gun cabinet, of course) to school just to show them off, and a privileged few of us got a good look and got to hold them in our hands. One time someone brought a fat, red shotgun shell. That was a climax of sorts. Nobody ever brought a gun, though, as far as I know.
But back to the switchblades. Somehow we all knew where to get one. So one day we agreed to bring them to school. At lunchtime we ran out to the field and showed them off, compared notes.
Some brought big ones, some small. Some brought more than one. I saw my first beinte-uno that day, I think. I forget where I got mine. I think I was lent one by Gilbert E., who was one of those kids who, even among us, really did seem to be ahead for his age. He was the guy who told us about girlie magazines. He’d witnessed real fistfights in his neighborhood. His father let him drink beer. He had more than one switchblade.
The nuns wouldn’t have caught us if one of us didn’t think about sticking up some girls for their food. I should note here, though, that the latter was done playfully.
What happened in the soccer field that day was a group of girls happened to wander to where we were. Spontaneously, and as a joke, we surrounded them—but the girls got scared. Then we all saw they had food—potato chips and soft drinks or something like that. Then Irmino R. got his knife out, flashed it, and told the girls to give up their food.
We boys laughed because we all thought it was funny. But the girls didn’t find it funny. That afternoon, one by one, those of us feeling all “grownup” were plucked from our classrooms and brought to the principal’s office, where we spent the rest of the day knelt on the floor.
I don’t remember much of the scolding that we surely must have gotten from Sr. Concepcion and the other school officials. I only remember that it was dark in the office and there was more than one nun in the room and we were all lined up facing them like we were about to be executed by firing squad. Our knives were confiscated, needless to say.
None of us were allowed to leave until our parents, who were all summoned, of course, came to get us. I got off easy from my parents—I told them I was just dragged into the whole mess, I didn’t even have my own knife.
The next day it was the talk of the school. Kids asked us, “Why did you do it?” as if we’d committed a crime. Because we hadn’t really thought of that, we had no answer. We just shrugged and let it be, though secretly we all felt proud. But we didn’t do anything like that ever again.
Except for the fighting behind the school gym, that is.
Yes, the fights behind the gym. There were a few of those. At SAA, if the boys had a score to settle, they took it to the dank and smelly area behind the gym. Though grassy, the place had the claustrophobic feel of a dungeon, with the high wall of the gym on one side and the concrete fence on the other.
There were broken bottles on the grass, old pieces of lumber and cat, dog and cow feces. It also smelled of urine because when we boys were out on the field playing or working in the garden plots for Work Education and we had to go to the bathroom, we didn’t go to the restrooms because they were too far. We relieved ourselves in the back of the gym.
It really was just the right place for the school’s misfits.
Just behind the fence were the houses of some kids who went to SAA. In fact, one of them, Isidro M., who was in our batch, when he went to school, just had to clamber over it using a ladder. We’d all been to his house and back a number of times the same way. His neighbor, one of the boys in the higher batches, wouldn’t do it, but always went around the long way, out of their compound onto the sidewalk and through the school gates. That wasn’t cool, we thought.
Anyway, the fights.
There was a fight, it seemed, every few weeks or so. Word traveled fast when there was to be one. I myself saw maybe two or three of them, and got there late for a couple of others.
Everyone who came to watch gathered in a circle to form a makeshift “ring.” The two parties then stared each other down in the middle. Then someone egged them, pushed them toward each other until they got around to actually exchanging blows.
The fights were over quickly—just a quick flurry of haphazard punches to the face and the chest and then the two started to wrestle and that was that. Someone usually stepped in to break them up and declared, “OK, that’s enough. This all ends here. No one should mention this to anyone.”
And the two parties shook hands and we all went back to our classrooms. Recess or lunch, as the case may be, was over anyway. Back on the main school grounds, we talked about what we’d just seen to anyone who asked.
I was in a fight once. But, strictly speaking, it wasn’t really a fight.
What happened was Isidro, the kid who lived just beyond the fence, and I had gotten into one of those arguments (about what, I don’t remember) that turned into personal attacks and taunting. Then someone in the room mentioned “the back of the gym.” It might have been me or Isidro or someone else around us who said it—it didn’t matter who. The idea was presented and Isidro and I fell headlong into the possibility that we were going to fight.
Isidro said I was all talk and that when it was time to go to the back of the gym, I got quiet.
That was, of course, all I needed to hear. Within seconds we were headed to the gym, followed by a small retinue of our respective pals.
It was a no-contest. Isidro, who happened to be an older and much stronger guy, quickly pinned me to the ground and I struggled for a little bit and quickly gave up. Isidro did a little shuffle like a boxer and struck some kung fu poses to be funny, and it was over. I didn’t hurt anything except my pride.
Then there were boys who didn’t bother going to the back of the gym to fight. When I think about the bullies in our school, two names often come up: Ivan R. and Emmanuel P. Even among us kids, those two were known troublemakers. I mean they were up to no good at all. They skipped class, bullied the smaller ones among us, just got in trouble with the school authorities all the time.
And word had it that they were bona fide members of street gangs.
Gangs were largely kept off campus by the nuns. But we knew they existed beyond the school walls, of course. We were always hearing about their “rumbles” from grownups and the radio and kids like Gilbert, who always seemed to be in the know when it came to these things.
Ivan and Emmanuel were rumored to be part of these groups. On Mondays we all looked at them for signs of a weekend fight or riot. Emmanuel, in particular, always seemed to have a bruise or a cut on his hands and arms. If he wasn’t part of a gang, as we believed, with his scars, disheveled hair and ill-fitting school uniform, he certainly looked like he did. I think this is where another rumor about him came from—that he was a boxer.
A few close friends and I actually, for a time, ran around with Emmanuel. Or more precisely, he recruited us into his group. It wasn’t a really a gang. We had no name and we didn’t get into fights or things like that. We just hung out together after dismissal time to look at “diamonds.” Let me explain.
At SAA, right in the middle of campus, there was an invisible line that separated the elementary school grounds and the high school grounds. Rarely was that line ever crossed by either group.
I think the only times we grade-schoolers ever made it to the high school area was when we used their audio-visual room to watch a movie, which wasn’t very often (maybe once a year, if that) and to go to the chapel, which was a lot more frequent, about once a month. Incidentally, that would give you an idea about the kind of education we got: We went to chapel more than watch educational movies. But that was SAA.
Anyway, walking silently in a single file through the administration building and then up the stairs to the second floor, we sometimes caught a glimpse of the high-schoolers, whom we all looked up to because they all seemed grown up.
In other words, the high school area was to us a far-off, restricted area, which if you made it there, made you different, special.
Well, it turned out Emmanuel was regularly crossing that line and hanging out where the high schoolers were. One day he brought a bunch of us along and we found out it wasn’t such a big deal. No one bothered us. We walked up to the science laboratory on the second floor, took a peek inside and saw some really cool-looking things—test tubes and frog specimens and the like.
But what Emmanuel pointed out to us was the scientific scale in a glass cabinet. He somehow convinced us that the brass weights lined up right next to the scale were actually diamonds. And he told us he was going to give us one each “at the right time.” In the meantime, he said, he needed money so he could keep an eye on them. That was his shtick, in other words, to make us give him money. So we gave him a peso here and two pesos there for a good while until we got wise to the drill.
Emmanuel had many run-ins with the school authorities. It wasn’t long before everyone started seeing him as a nutcase, which, looking back, I think he really was.
It all finally came to a head one day. I was in fifth grade, I think, when in the middle of a lecture our teacher closed the door of the classroom. All the teachers did the same thing in all the grades, we found out later.
It turned out Emmanuel had gotten on the ledge on the third floor and was threatening to jump. There was a tense standoff as some teachers tried to talk him out of it. Somehow they succeeded. Emmanuel didn’t jump off the ledge. But that was the last straw. His parents must’ve pulled him out of the school or he was kicked out because we never saw him again after that.
We lived for recess in those days. We quickly emptied our lunchboxes and got on to the serious business of play. There was siyato—a game played with sticks and a hole dug in the ground—saralguhan (or patintero), dyolens (marbles), sipa, Chinese garter (for the girls), and a form of soccer-baseball.
At any one time during recess or lunchtime, there would be several of these games being played on the main square—except for soccer-baseball, only one of which could be played at once because it required a big space.
In the morning when we lined up for flag ceremony, you could see all the holes in the ground dug for siyato and dyolens. And you could see the bases used for soccer-baseball. In the back lay the ruins of the old canteen where the floor, still intact, made for a good place to play saralguhan and Chinese garter.
Dyolens, or marbles, was the game for preschoolers and the kids in the lower grades. Then everyone moved on to siyato. Then everyone kind of went through a saralguhan phase. Sipa and Chinese garter, on the other hand, were more popular with the girls, although looking back there were some boys who excelled in sipa, which was played by kicking (hence the name of the game) a contraption made of a heavy lead “washer” used by carpenters wrapped with a candy wrapper so that it had a “tail” to make it easier keep it steady in the air. That was the object of the game—to keep it in the air, often by kicking it with the insole of your foot, for as long as you can. The first one to reach 50, 100 or 200, as the case may be, wins.
Well, Mark R., who was also good in basketball but distinguished himself playing sipa, once kept the thing in the air 100 times. When he did it, we were all awed. Most of us couldn’t do it 20 times. He kept it going a hundred times.
The game for the big boys was soccer-baseball.
We first learned how the game worked when we were, I think, in Grade 5 and watching the sixth-graders play it.
The game followed the rules and principles of baseball but instead of batting a baseball, a “batter” kicked a rubber ball thrown at him by a “pitcher.” It was a very entertaining game because some of the boys could kick the ball really hard and you never knew where it was going to go. Sometimes it went into the library, which was right off the main square, and whoever went in there to get it took a little while. That often meant a homerun, of course. Sometimes the ball went up into the second or third floor.
And then once in a while, one of the boys would kick the ball so hard it went over the three-story school building. I’m not kidding. There were a few boys who were known for that. And then whoever was the unfortunate soul who had to get the ball had to go around the building and find it in the open field there.
Needless to say, we all learned to look up to the boys who could do that. They became our first heroes.
In our batch, there were two boys who could also send the ball over the building.
There was Renato M., a naturally athletic guy who, many years later, would go on to play basketball professionally, first in the MBA and then the PBA—the only one from SAA to do so, as far as I know. (“Bogs Adornado” was also in our class but not the real Bogs Adornado, who played for Crispa in the PBA, but rather his nephew, Lorenzo Adornado, whom we all called Bogs after his uncle.)
And then there was Isidro, who really could play any sport, but was particularly good in soccer. He sent the ball over the building a few times.
In fact, for precisely that reason, the sixth-graders often got Isidro and Renato to play with them. Those two were the big boys in our batch.
When we moved up to sixth grade, we got first dibs on the soccer-baseball field and played it regularly. It was our turn to be the object of attention of the lower graders.
The girls, in the meantime, played “Jackstone” and Chinese garter. The latter required the girls to jump over an outstretched garter held up by two other girls. The object of the game was to clear the garter each time as it went higher and higher. And higher and higher it went until, to clear it, the girls, instead of jumping, started to do cartwheels, hooking the garter with a foot on the way down.
Because of that the game gave us boys our first glimpses of a panty under a skirt. In fact, I think that was why we watched that game. We didn’t play it, but somehow we were drawn to it. Perhaps unconsciously we wanted to see what was hidden under the girls’ uniforms.
“Pula,” one of us would say if the panty in question happened to be red. “Puti.” “Blue.”
Yes, the girls. I got an early start when it came to flirting with girls—earlier than anyone else I know either at SAA or anywhere. I think that was my secret talent in grade school.
I distinctly remember in kinder grade, for example, having “feelings” for Teresa, whom I remember to be a morena girl with brown wavy hair. We sat at the same table and I remember just staring at her, overwhelmed by her beauty and her air of “otherworldliness.” I don’t know how else to describe it.
She seemed different from all the other girls. I guess it was because she spoke Tagalog rather than Bikol, and Tagalog for me then was a language spoken in wondrous faraway places (namely the TV shows I watched, and Cavite and Batangas, where my parents’ families were from, and where I loved going).
And so seeing a girl in school who was able to speak it aroused in me feelings that had not been aroused by any person before. I suspect that’s what happened with Teresa.
It really seems funny now but I felt jealous whenever she turned to Eugene O., who sat next to her, to talk to him or borrow crayons. I kept asking myself, how come she never borrowed crayons from me?
That was it, my first crush. I was all of 5 years old.
In Grade 1, there was C.B., my pursuit of whom I would say was more proper for a young boy. That is, I followed her around school—at recess, at lunchtime, after class. I also, I think, dreamed of her. That is, literally dreamed of her at night, which only intensified my feelings when I saw her the next day.
One time she accosted me in the hallway and told me she knew I was following her, adding I shouldn’t think that she didn’t know. I don’t remember saying anything in response. I mean, what could you say to something like that when you didn’t even know what you were doing following a girl in the first place? In Grade 1. And what was I going to do once I caught up with her? Kiss her? Hug her? I don’t think I was even aware I could do that.
In Grade 4, a bunch of us—notably Vince, the guy who shared the same birthday with me, Ricky and myself—all fell for the same girl, C.R., who was not only very pretty but one of the brightest in class.
We weren’t really rivals for her because no one, as far as I knew, was actively working to make C. his girlfriend. We were too young for that, although not too young to have crushes. We all just teased one another for liking her.
Besides, I don’t think C. would’ve cared to mess with any of us, anyway. She was all about books and tests and grades. No wonder she became a school principal.
There was one another girl I liked in elementary school, who to some extent I did try to make my girlfriend. But it’s a complicated story because it involved my best friend at the time, Warren B., who also liked her.
We had a rivalry but it was a rivalry not only between best friends but between young gentlemen. We agreed early on that we were not going to fight over D.C. but instead let her decide whom she wanted. “May the best man win,” Warren and I told each other.
But the thing is, we never reached that point because D., who was a year ahead of us, graduated soon after and moved to AUL-SOHS, where I would also go a year later, although that wouldn’t bring us any closer, while Warren stayed behind at SAA.
