FUBARgenre: The Genre of Fubar

The following short story was a requirement for my Creative Writing: Fiction class in UP Dil. I’m posting the original draft, plus one of the subsequent revisions (also required). Take your pick (I actually like the first one better). Mia, by the way, is a character based on the real Mia. The voice, on the other hand, is pure fiction.

Okay then, juvenile writing follows…

Hot, Colored Tongues
draft 1
circa 1997

There was cleavage all around me. Flesh jiggled from necklines as low as my belt, and ample mounds were practically bursting out of tight blouses. Blinking lights flirted with the full amount of exposed skin on the dance floor, their neon beams sliding down various shades of flesh like hot colored tongues.

I smiled. Hot colored tongues? That is not an image that normally flashes through the mind of a mother of three. But then again, I reminded myself, I was not a mother of three that night. That night, I would simply be an old roommate from the frenzied days of passion and ardor.

I sat sipping my Four Seasons at a tiny table in the corner—intentionally away from the blasted amplifiers screaming some repulsive techno beat—and squinted into the darkness for signs of um, what exactly was I expecting? An elegant woman in business suit, toting a briefcase in one hand and a cellphone in the other? After all, she had mentioned during that brief phone conversation that she would be coming from a business meeting.

“Oh God, I have a deal to close tonight. I wish I can tell you the details, but everything’s so hushed up. Hey wait, damn, my delegation’s here. I can’t talk. Meet me tonight at that bar in Midtown hotel…oh deng, what’s its name again? Oh yeah, H2O. I’ll see you there. Kiss Eric for me, will you? Bye, Luv…muah, muah, muah.”

And she was gone, flitting into the wind like the bubbles my 2-year-old is fond of blowing from his plastic bubble-maker. Ten years of silence, and suddenly this. A harried call one typical afternoon of cooking meals and hanging the wash. I had no idea she even knew my number here in Cebu. Soon after the wedding, there was a fury of e-mail exchanges, but even that soon became a task. There were more important things to take care of—the first pregnancy, the big move to Cebu, and infinite others. I was too busy being a wife and a mother. While she, well, she was too busy living her dream.

She finally emerged from the haze of cigarette smoke, swaggering with the trademark Mia confidence. She did not disappoint me. Expensive business suit, check. Leather briefcase, check. And oh yeah, there’s the cellphone. I should have known. A brand new Infiniti is probably parked beside my `96 Toyota outside.

“Oh darling,” she exclaimed when she finally found her way to my table. “Muah.” She always punctuates her kisses with that word, heaven knows why. Trés chic, she used to call it, and probably still does.

I hugged her with all the longing of ten years.

I once wondered, as we parted after four years of sharing a studio-type apartment some five minutes away from campus, how I would get through life without Mia. She won my heart the moment she opened the door of her pad to me, a freshman from out of town, in nothing more than a strapless bra and high-cut panties. She pattered around the place, opening cupboards and closets, fussing over the gore in the bathroom, and shrugging at the general chaos of the kitchen.

“I had guests,” she said without apologizing.

I moved in the next day, leaving behind all traces of repression. For once in seventeen years, there was no Mom to rant about being a “proper young lady”, no Mom to yell at me if I didn’t act “refined” enough. There, in that tiny pad in Loyola Heights, I could finally be who and what I was. I knew without a doubt that I could behave like an animal, and Mia couldn’t care less. When it was time to say goodbye—time to face the world with shadows so like my Mom’s lurking in every corner—it was more than difficult to let go. But it had been ten years since, and I seem to have survived on my own.

“Oh, Mia! You look utterly lovely.” There was no way to describe the sheer elegance of the woman before me. Light, subdued make-up. Hair pulled back in a casual, carefree twist. Designer clothes that clung to her svelte figure. Hmmm, subtle, very subtle. Her style, which used to range from the flamboyant to the outrageous, had obviously mellowed. Was this the same woman who couldn’t go out of the house without baring some thighs and a lot of chest?

Yes, it was. “I wish I can say the same for you, dear. But Gawd, whatever happened to your waist? And your chin, where on earth did it go?” Still as tactful as ever. I thought then that beneath the sophisticated clothes and impeccable make-up, she was still the same Mia. Mia who once taught me to discern between knights and empty armors—between reality and illusion—was now doing the same thing.

“Indeed, where on earth did your chin go?” she repeated for emphasis.

I had no answer to that. My husband dared to ask me one such question one morning, and I retaliated by eating more and growing even fatter. As a result, I had long since avoided mirrors, but Mia—oh-so-tactful Mia—was now pushing one to my face. Oh how I must look to her now, an aging overweight thirty-two year old in a long plain-cut beige dress. If she was Cleopatra, I was her asp. A fat, ugly asp.

“I assume, of course, despite your weight gain, that the sex is as good as it was ten years ago?” That one, I had an answer to, but it wasn’t something I was ready to share.

Oh, where would I begin, anyway? The cold, desolate nights in my bed, waiting for Eric to come home from the office? Or the colder and more desolate nights with him beside me, as he snored after one or two fierce thrusts? How will she react to this, I wondered. She who once listened night after night as I recounted, in full detail, infinite rendezvous in the backseats of cars, on top of coffee tables, on couches in some guy’s living room, behind the bushes lining the track oval at school, and countless other insanities. Would she even believe that I’m now married to a cold fish?

I smiled in response and gulped down the last of my Four Seasons.

“What? No Alcohol?” Thank God she had the attention span of a gnat. While she was ordering a bottle of tequila and a plate of Calamares, I wondered if I should tell her I’m two weeks late and probably expecting. But a shot of Jose Cuervo was already before me, its tantalizing aroma wafting to my nose, begging me to ignore reason, and I told myself it’s false alarm anyway.

“You, my dear, taught me to love tequila. Gawd, Lainne, you have the tongue of a serpent. Every guy who saw you lick salt, gulp down a shot, and suck lemon absolutely fell in love with you.”

Hot colored tongues. So that’s where the analogy came from–shot after shot beneath the kaleidoscope of lights of whatever bar I happened to find myself in, and then, the onslaught of tongue on my already haywire senses. My tequila-drinking days have long been buried in the far recesses of my memory. Forcibly pushed into the background with all those long-forgotten scenes of drunken stupor and wanton abandon.

I gulped down my fifth shot as I listened to Mia’s endless babble about her career. I was too fixated on hot colored tongues—Paulo’s, Mike’s, Don’s, Mark’s, and nameless other men’s—to stay focused on the conversation.

Through the haze, I caught occasional phrases. New house in La Vista. Trip to Europe last month. New gorgeous boyfriend from showbiz. But hot colored tongues were all I cared to talk about.

“Darling, know what, I haven’t had a sip of this since the first pregnancy…heck, way before that, even. Eric has this thing against women and drinking, you see. Ha-ha-ha.” Seventh shot now. Yum, where was the friggin’ lemon? “God, Mia, I really missed you.” I felt the warmth of seven shots course through my body. It was exactly the kind of warmth that had long been denied to my body—the enveloping warmth after that one, crucial surge of heat. “Gimme one of those,” I said as I took one Marlboro from her pack. “Haven’t had one of these in a while, too. My husband will freak out if he sees me now. Ha-ha-ha.”

Mia took one puff of her cigarette before answering. “Oh well, he’s not here now.” Her smile was one I had never seen before, a forced twitch of the lips that somehow seemed to yearn for understanding. She was never one to resort to hidden meanings. When Mia wanted to say something, she usually comes right out with it, even if it means hurling the truth to your face.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me why I married Eric?”

Her open-mouthed gape told me I was dead drunk. Nothing ever shocks Mia. This woman who was staring at me with such transparent agitation was a delusion.

“I bet you assumed I was pregnant, huh?” The thought seemed unbelievably funny, and I bawled over with laughter. “Me, pregnant? Oh darling, I thought you knew me enough to know that I’m an expert in birth control. Had I gotten pregnant with the wrong man, I would have been hell bent on having an abortion.” That sounded even funnier, and I laughed even louder.

“So Eric is the right guy, huh?” Gone was the delusion. A composed, self-contained Mia sat before me.

One more shot, please. I concentrated on licking the salt and gulping down my nth shot. “We didn’t even sleep together till after the wedding. Eric was always adamant about tradition. He had to marry a virgin. Ha-ha-ha. And my, he married a virgin. Thank God he took that crap I gave him about doing a lot of biking. That stuff I told you? Those long passionate gropes in the dark? Those weren’t Eric’ hands I was talking about. There were always men eager to please me, Mia. The guy in the next apartment, my Philosophy teacher, your brother.” Ha-ha-ha. “Yes, your brother. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“Oh come on, of course I knew. I saw him sprawled on your bed one morning. I didn’t say anything ‘cause I thought you were just having a little fun before you got hitched.” Mia was smiling the old Mia smile now—all teeth, all lips, all snicker. “After all, I’d do exactly the same.”

Oh yes, FUN. An alien word to me now. Much like tequila and hot colored tongues.

“You see, darling, that was the trouble. I was having too much fun. It had become an addiction—the sex, I mean. There were too many men. Pleasure had too many faces.” Mia must have ordered another Jose Cuervo, for a full bottle was now on the table, just an arm’s reach away.

“I can live with that,” she grinned.

Oh, I thought I could, too. But I had spent too many nights in the bathroom, showering till the wee hours of morning, rubbing the dirt off my skin till I turned red, and never once feeling clean. I wasn’t laughing anymore. “I heard her voice reverberate across the tiles, you know. Her fury blaring in the bathroom. And I kept on washing myself, hoping the dirt will somehow come off. But it never did.” I looked at her, and I knew she understood. “I needed someone to make me feel clean again, Mia.”

Some of the smoke from the cigarette I was holding somehow got to my eyes. And irritated, allergic to the smoke, they began to water.

She might have hugged me, but I wasn’t sure. I only knew I was babbling some inane things about my life. I watched myself crying, half-sprawled on the table like some hysterical widow on the coffin of her dead husband. But there was no dead husband to mourn, only perhaps, lost innocence? But even that had long been lost. So why exactly was I grieving?

“And you got want you want, darling. You needed someone to tame you, and you got Eric, plus three adorable sons. Of course I haven’t met them, but I’m sure they’re adorable.” But I noticed that already, her attention was elsewhere. She was blowing smoke in the general direction of the guys in the next table.

“I’m a wonderful Mom, dammit. And an obedient wife at that. I’m a candidate for woman of the month, for Christ’s sake.” The crying had stopped. My eyes must have adjusted to the aggravation of cigarette smoke. “Oh yes, Mia, I got all I ever wanted.”

“I know.” But the odd smile was back again. The slight twitching of the lips.

I went back to watching all the cleavage in full display. Neon lights continued to slide down extensive amounts of exposed flesh. Hot colored tongues sliding down the length of curves and mounds. I closed my eyes and for a moment, felt those same hot colored tongues on my body.

Later, as Mia drove me home from the bar, I felt neither grief nor loss. I knew I won’t be seeing her for probably ten more years, but this one, brief night could make up for twenty more…

******

Eric was snoring in his boxers when I entered our room. I sat watching him from my dresser chair, feeding on a luscious piece of fresh banana.

Hot, Colored Tongues
draft 2
circa 1997

There was cleavage all around me. Flesh melded with fabric and fabric melded with flesh. Blinking lights flirted with the full amount of exposed skin on the dance floor, their neon beams sliding down various shades of flesh.

Located in the outskirts of the city, Payag was one of those hot spots that continued to attract the young and enrage the old. Churchgoers have picketed on the techno-decorated façade, chanting themes of Divine wrath and Supreme persecution.

Payag was nowhere near the strip clubs that adorned the capital, Manila, nor did it resemble the underground bars with scantily clad women who served drinks and a little live action. It was, in fact, a decent little place that served local beer, played rave music, and perhaps encouraged a slightly intoxicated version of the hip grind. But this was Cebu, the oldest city of the biggest Catholic country in Asia, and anything that served alcohol and promoted loud music was a temple of evil.

Always a century behind in lifestyle, my 80-year-old mother was convinced that the city was the center of goodness and the hub of virtues in the entire Philippines. I wondered then how her aging mind would accept the reality that the Western-influenced “clubbing culture” had conquered the city, corrupted young minds, enflamed the hormone-infested generation, and robbed young girls of their virginity?

Had she seen me that night, watching the wanton display of hips grinding and tongues roaming, she would have fainted. And my father, once the most powerful man in the city, but now humbled to a wheelchair by Polio, would panic and shout at the maid and call me a disgrace and even threaten to kill me. Countless times this had happened; and countless times I fled to my life of redemption, my semblance of normalcy, my solace—the three kids and the husband who consider me a saint.

But I was no saint that night. It was a night where I would allow the picture of housewife perfection to vanish into the hazy smoke of Payag. It was a night where I was neither mother nor wife. It was a night where I would simply be an old roommate from the frenzied days of passion and ardor.

I sat sipping my Four Seasons at a tiny table in the corner and squinted into the darkness for signs of um, what exactly was I expecting? An elegant woman in business suit, a briefcase in one hand and a cellphone in the other? She had mentioned during that brief phone conversation that she would be coming from a business meeting.

Eric was getting ready for a conference when I got the call. Her voice floated through my quiet afternoon. “Yes, yes, I’m here. Yeah, some mundane business affair as usual. I wish I can tell you the details, but everything’s so hushed up. Hey wait, damn, my associate’s here. I can’t talk. Meet me tonight at that bar in Miranda Plaza… Payag or something. I’ll see you there. Kiss Eric for me, will you? Bye, honey. Be there.”

I couldn’t say no to that voice. And it was while Eric was nodding goodbye that the lie slipped out of my mouth. “I will go visit mother tonight, dear. Don’t wait up for me.”

I had not intended to lie. But what would I tell him? That I have this best friend from college and I sort of forgot to tell him about her? That I wish I said something earlier, but heck, she’s not that important anyway? That I couldn’t bring her to our house because she would laugh at the quaint world I’ve built for myself?

I could not, I could never, tell my husband why I was so reluctant to talk about her.

It was always like Mia to stir things up just when everything was falling into place. Ten years of silence, and suddenly this. A harried call one typical afternoon of cooking meals and hanging the wash. I had no idea she even knew my number in Cebu.

After graduation, I moved back to my hometown at my mother’s insistence. There was a fury of e-mail exchanges for a few months, but even that soon became a task. There were more important things to take care of—the wedding, the first pregnancy, and infinite others. I was too busy being a wife and a mother. While she, well, she was too busy living her dream.

She finally emerged from the haze of cigarette smoke, swaggering with the trademark Mia confidence. She did not disappoint me. She was the very picture of elegance. Success did her well—she was clad in subtle sophistication.

“Oh darling,” she exclaimed when she finally found her way to my table. “It’s good to see you.”

I hugged her with all the longing of ten years.

I once wondered, as we parted after four years of sharing a studio-type apartment some five minutes away from campus, how I would get through life without Mia. She won my heart the moment she opened the door of her pad to me, an awkward freshman, in nothing more than a strapless bra and high-cut panties. She pattered around the place, opening cupboards and closets, fussing over the gore in the bathroom, and shrugging at the general chaos of the kitchen.

“I had guests,” she said without apologizing.

I moved in the next day, leaving behind a world of turtleneck sweaters and long skirts, of daily prayers in church, of weekly confessions, of an irrational fear of men, of a perpetual self-hate and repression. I moved in, and for the first time in my life, saw the world from outside my mother’s eyes.

There, in that tiny pad in Manila, I could finally be who and what I was. Finally, I could dream those secret dreams in the dark without being terrified of eternal doom. I could do everything my heated body yearned to do, and nobody could care less. It was there, under Mia’s watchful eyes, that I became a rabid animal.

When it was time to say goodbye—time to face the world I thought I left behind—it was more than difficult to let go. But it had been ten years since, and I seem to have survived on my own.

“Oh, Mia! You look utterly lovely.” There was no way to describe the sheer elegance of the woman before me. Light, subdued make-up. Hair pulled back in a casual, carefree twist. Designer clothes that clung to her svelte figure. Her style, which used to range from the flamboyant to the outrageous, had obviously mellowed. Was this the same woman who couldn’t go out of the house without baring some thighs and a lot of chest?

Yes, it was. “I wish I can say the same for you, dear. But God, whatever happened to your waist? And your chin, where on earth did it go?” I thought then that beneath the sophisticated clothes and impeccable make-up, she was still the same Mia. Mia who once taught me to discern between knights and empty armors—between reality and illusion—was now doing the same thing.

“Indeed, where on earth did your chin go?” she repeated for emphasis.

I had no answer to that. My husband dared to ask me one such question one morning, and I retaliated by eating more and growing even fatter. As a result, I had long since avoided mirrors, but Mia—oh-so-tactful Mia—was now pushing one to my face. Oh how I must look to her now, an aging overweight thirty-two year old in a long plain-cut beige dress.

“I assume, of course, despite your weight gain, that the sex is as good as it was ten years ago?” That one, I had an answer to, but it wasn’t something I was ready to share.

Oh, where would I begin, anyway? The cold, desolate nights in my bed, waiting for Eric to come home from the office? Or the colder and more desolate nights with him beside me, as he snored after one or two fierce thrusts? How will she react to this, I wondered. She who once listened night after night as I recounted, in full detail, infinite rendezvous in the backseats of cars, on top of coffee tables, on couches in some guy’s living room, behind the bushes lining the track oval at school, and countless other insanities. Would she even believe that I’m now married to a cold fish?

I smiled in response and gulped down the last of my Four Seasons.

“What? No Alcohol?” She insisted on buying tequila while I pretended to protest. But she was persistent, and my mind was already screaming for oblivion. I wondered if I should tell her I’m two weeks late and probably expecting.

But a bottle of tequila was already before me, its tantalizing aroma wafting to my nose, begging me to ignore reason, and I told myself it’s just one shot.

“You, my dear, taught me to love tequila. God, Lainne, you have the tongue of a serpent. Every guy who saw you lick salt, gulp down a shot, and suck lemon absolutely fell in love with you.”

Tongues. The images rushed back like lightning in a cloudless sky. I saw shot after shot under the kaleidoscope of lights in some bar in Manila, and then, the onslaught of tongue on my already haywire senses. My tequila-drinking days have long been buried in the far recesses of my memory. Forcibly pushed into the background with all those long-forgotten scenes of drunken stupor and wanton abandon.

I gulped down my fifth shot as I listened to Mia’s endless babble about her career. But I was too fixated on tongues—Paulo’s, Mike’s, Don’s, Mark’s, and nameless other men’s—to stay focused on the conversation.

Through the haze, I caught occasional phrases. New house in La Vista. Trip to Europe last month. New gorgeous lover; heck, you gotta try him. But tongues were all I cared to talk about.

“Darling, know what, I haven’t had a sip of this since the first pregnancy…heck, way before that, even. Eric has this thing against women and drinking, you see.”

Seventh shot now. Yum, where was the friggin’ lemon?

“God, Mia, I really missed you.” I felt the warmth of seven shots course through my body. It was exactly the kind of warmth that had long been denied to my body—the enveloping warmth after that one, crucial surge of heat.

“Give me one of those,” I said as I took one Marlboro from her pack. “Haven’t had one of these in a while, too. My husband will freak out if he sees me now.”

Mia took one puff of her cigarette before answering. “Oh well, he’s not here now.” Her smile was one I had never seen before, a forced twitch of the lips that somehow seemed to yearn for understanding. She was never one to resort to hidden meanings. When Mia wanted to say something, she usually comes right out with it, even if it means hurling the truth to your face.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me why I married Eric?”

Her open-mouthed gape told me I was dead drunk. Nothing ever shocks Mia. This woman who was staring at me with such transparent agitation was a delusion.

“I bet you assumed I was pregnant, huh?” The thought seemed unbelievably funny, and I bawled over with laughter. “Me, pregnant? Oh darling, I thought you knew I’m an expert in birth control. Had I gotten pregnant with the wrong man, I would have been hell bent on having an abortion.” That sounded even funnier, and I laughed even louder.

“So Eric is the right guy, huh?” Gone was the delusion. A composed, self-contained Mia sat before me.

One more shot, please. I concentrated on licking the salt and gulping down another shot. “We didn’t even sleep together until after the wedding. Eric was always adamant about tradition. He had to marry a virgin. And my, he married a virgin. Thank God he took that crap I gave him about doing a lot of biking. That stuff I told you? Those long passionate gropes in the dark? Those weren’t Eric’ hands I was talking about. There were always men eager to please me, Mia. The guy in the next apartment, my Philosophy teacher, your brother. Yes, your brother. I bet you didn’t know that.”

She didn’t answer, so I went on.

“I had become a monster, Mia. And I couldn’t stop. It had become an addiction—the sex, I mean. There were too many men. Pleasure had too many faces.” Mia must have ordered another Jose Cuervo, for a full bottle was now on the table, just an arm’s reach away.

“I began to spend too many nights in the bathroom, showering till morning, rubbing the dirt off my skin till I turned red, and never once feeling clean.” I wasn’t laughing anymore.

“I heard my mother’s voice reverberate across the tiles, you know. Her fury blaring in the bathroom. And I kept on washing myself, hoping the dirt will somehow come off. But it never did.”

I looked at her, and I knew she understood. “I needed someone to make me feel clean again, Mia.”

Some of the smoke from the cigarette I was holding somehow got to my eyes. And irritated, allergic to the smoke, they began to water.

She might have hugged me, but I wasn’t sure. I only knew I was babbling some inane things about my life. I watched myself crying, half-sprawled on the table like some hysterical widow on the coffin of her dead husband. But there was no dead husband to mourn, only perhaps, lost innocence? But even that had long been lost. So why exactly was I grieving?

“And you got want you want, darling. You needed someone to tame you, and you got Eric, plus three adorable sons. Of course I haven’t met them, but I’m sure they’re adorable.” But I noticed that already, her attention was elsewhere. She was blowing smoke in the general direction of the guys in the next table.

“Do you know that I’m a wonderful Mom? An obedient wife? The ideal suburban woman?” The crying had stopped. My eyes must have adjusted to the aggravation of cigarette smoke. “Oh yes, Mia, I got all I ever wanted.”

“I know.” But the odd smile was back again. The slight twitching of the lips.

I went back to watching all the cleavage in full display. Neon lights continued to slide down extensive amounts of exposed flesh. Tongues sliding down the length of curves and mounds. I closed my eyes and for a moment, felt those same tongues on my body.

Later, as Mia drove me home from the bar, I felt neither grief nor loss. I knew I won’t be seeing her for probably ten more years, but that night, it didn’t seem to matter. Tomorrow, she would go back to living her dream…and I would go back to living my life.

******

Eric was snoring in his boxers when I entered our room. I sat watching him from my dresser chair, feeding on a luscious piece of fresh banana.

Parting shots: I have always meant to tweak this one. Perhaps merge both versions into a cohesive whole. But I never found the time, nor the inclination. Perhaps someone would like to take a hand at this? I’d love to read a couple of versions.