Thank you for appearing to me in my dream. You look beautiful! The whole dream was lit in the romance I have come to see in places and people I miss. I am in an old Spanish style house in an unknown Philippine province. I am putting clothes away in a cabinet. The capiz shell windows glow in the sun. It is high noon but cool indoors. I hear a tricycle pull up outside, bags being loaded. I go out and there you are, about to get on that tricycle.
“I’m going back to Manila,” you say. “Come with me.”
I shake my head. “Not right now.”
I really want to, but I decide not to. I still have things to do. I don’t think too hard about it.
So I watch you go off on that tricycle kicking up sepia dust on that bright sunny day. I’m filled with joy having caught a glimpse of your otherworldly beauty. I feel the loss of having chosen to stay behind.
I woke up crying and realizing the impact of another dream I had, about a month before you died. I didn’t give much importance to it at the time. I blogged about it, but didn’t name you, or let you know it was you. I was embarrassed. It revealed more than I was willing to share.
In the dream I was walking along a beach with you. There are two guys with us. I don’t recognize any of them in my lexicon of real life guys, but in this dream world we are hanging out with them. You throw off your clothes and jump in the water. The guys follow quickly. I fumble with the buttons on my white shirt. It is taking me so long to undress. I woke before I am able to join you skinny dipping.
I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t see that dream as a premonition. I felt remorse for being too late, regret for moments I let pass because of some stupid reason or another, a crippling awkwardness about things. A little over a month after my dream, you slipped into a coma and died.
One of these days I will be able to join you in the ocean or ride away on a tricycle. Maybe I’ll catch you the next time you come around. As the sky goes dark tonight, I am reminded that pain is not the enemy. It merely points the way to the wound. Before we tend to it, we have to understand what the injury is. We have to allow ourselves to experience it. Then we can take steps toward healing and transformation.
I suppose a lot of fallen beings now miss The Garden’s heavenly Fruits. And I’ll tell you why:
In that place exists Complete Bliss. A Fruit—any Fruit—plucked from its enchanted trees, and savored garden-fresh is guaranteed to bring you to the Ultimate of your Being—no matter what level of Be-ing you might be at the moment. This is an experience many seek, for both enlightenment and pleasure, and it is because of this service that many bitter beings—those denied access and who sulk salivating hungrily at the Gates—call it The Cosmic Brothel.
Yes, dear friends. In The Garden one could find the Supreme Fuck, and reach the mind-shaking, soul-stirring Orgasm that could fire up your neurons swifter than Hermes on speed and expand your consciousness faster and greater than Zephyrus could ever impress with his smoke-rings.
In The Garden, Orgasms are made into Legends. That rumor about Osiris and Isis making out in The Nile and a crocodile biting off Osiris’ Venerable Dick? It occurred Right Here, when he won Isis (then a plump, ripe, rare Fruit-Woman specimen, in bloom only for every dozen millennia) in a game of dice, and chose to hump his prize in the Stream of Mother’s Milk where a gameful lizard nipped at his member. Strengthened by the milk, Isis was blessed with the awareness to search for the still-throbbing penis while Osiris howled in unholy pain. You all know that the search proved futile, but since then every being was aware of who wore the proverbial pants in the family.
Isis was one of the few fruits to achieve Deity-status, which she probably earned by impressing upon everyone that the heat that possessed her loins equaled only the determination to find her mate’s penis. There’s nothing like a single-minded, driven woman, and she got her due reward! They never found the real organ, but being the cosmic beings they were, they discovered alternative ways to get it on, and always, in the warm creaminess of the Stream, which, in their more affectionate moments, they called their “mother”. It is because of this, perhaps, that some have thought Isis and Osiris sister and brother.
My daddy forbade me to get naked for a college play. He didn’t realize it was not his call to make. I was eighteen. I could make my own decisions about my body.
I had just finished a run of my first professional theatre gig. “By George!” was a musical revue of George Gershwin starring Dulce and directed by Behn Cervantes. I was a wispy little chorus girl, but I had a solo part after Michelle Gallaga in the song, “I Got Rhythm.” It was a showstopper!
Throughout the run and for weeks after it, I hung out with Dulaang UP kids. Even though I went to Ateneo, I auditioned for a part in the play “Fili,” adapted by Floy Quintos from Jose Rizal’s “El Filibusterismo.” Director Tony Mabesa must have been amused by my novelty because he cast me in a big part, the role of Kontessa, the Kapitan-Heneral’s whore.
Sisa was Eugene Domingo, who had briefly changed her name to Geena Domingo to assume a more dramatic persona. She was a student then, not the big comedy star she is now. Dolly de Leon, who later in life got a plum part in the international movie Triangle of Sadness, was her alternate for the role. But this was long before they became superstars. Back then, the big star of the show was film director Mario O’Hara as the protagonist Simoun.
Rehearsals were exciting. I was getting a master class in theatre performance from the best in the Philippines. I tried my best to keep up when we read through the entire script. I was in one big scene with chunky monologues and several lines back and forth with the Kapitan-Heneral. I was off-book and ready when it was time to get the scene up on its feet.
Sir Tony had me enter with a lit candelabra in each hand. I recited my lines, projected my voice as big as I could make it. My scene partner, the Kapitan-Heneral, was played by a flamboyant opera singer. I couldn’t let my voice drown alongside his. At center stage I was directed to hand the candelabras to the Kapitan-Heneral, kneel in front of him with my back to the audience, and undress.
Undress?
Sir Tony was serious. I would be getting naked onstage.
My heart raced. My face heated up. I felt small. Literally. I had no tits. I was very self-conscious about it. We weren’t even onstage at the time. We were in a rehearsal room with unforgiving flat fluorescent lighting. I sheepishly removed my street clothes and returned to my spot center stage. The Kapitan-Heneral looked down at me. He was enormous.
“Drip wax on her,” Sir Tony directed from behind a desk. The stage manager sat next to him coldly taking notes on her script.
I continued my lines, gasping every time hot wax hit my bare skin. I felt all eyes on me. Cast and crew held their collective breath as a virgin had her first taste of Dominance and submission. Public humiliation. I didn’t know any of them and none of them knew me. I was an outsider. Just a doe-eyed girl from Ateneo who thought she could run with the cool kids at UP. I felt so alone.
As the scene drew to a climactic end, Sir Tony said, “This is where you have an orgasm.”
“What’s an orgasm?” I asked.
Sir Tony laughed a big booming laugh that echoed throughout the rehearsal hall and in the back of my head for years to come.
“You poor girl.”
Sir Tony took out a cigarette and stood up. The stage manager called a break.
We worked the scene in the succeeding rehearsals. I grew in confidence each time we ran it. I was determined to conquer this role. Eventually, though, Sir Tony decided to get someone else to play Kontessa, a woman named Grace, who rumor had it was a Muslim princess. She was a grown woman with full breasts and dark hair down to her ankles. She fit the part more than I did. She knew how to have an orgasm.
I’m trying to imagine my 18-year-old self as the Kontessa. Not yet five feet tall, a tit-less waif. I would have been the child prostitute version, which is not without a visceral power of its own.
I was demoted to the part of a common whore. I wore a blonde wig and a big poofy dress. I had a couple of lines and got to kiss Sir Mario O’Hara at the beginning of the play.
I got asked out on dates a lot during the run of the play. Maybe I was fresh meat from Ateneo. Maybe it was the challenge of giving me my first orgasm. Maybe that very first wax dripping scene rehearsal played in their imaginations more often than they could bear it. More than my naked body on display, I like to think it was my innocence, vulnerability, and courage that captivated them that day.
This is an excerpt from the memoir I am currently writing. I am so proud that I got to work with Sir Tony Mabesa, who recently won the MMFF award for Best Supporting Actor in the movie Rainbow’s Sunset.
I went to an all-girls nun-run Catholic high school in the Philippines, very strict and narrow-minded. I was a good student but something as trivial as my asymmetric hairstyle got their nunnery panties in a bunch. What made high school life worth living was Gina. She and I connected on an artistic and literary level. She was a huge The Cure fan, so I drew her a portrait of Robert Smith. She wrote me a fantasy article for Town & Country magazine, in which I am a fabulous art curator and married to Johnny Depp. We talked endlessly about ideas for stories we wanted to write someday and we talked about sex. Sure, we had no experience whatsoever, but we were teenagers. Sex was an obsession.
In college she went to UP and I went to Ateneo. She partied hard with her sorority sisters. I got sucked into music and theatre. She invited me to an Upsilon event once. I felt out of place. Our paths divided for the time being.
She tracked me down in the mid-90s when I was in New York. I was performing Off and Off-Off-Broadway. She was a young single mom, making it as a writer and editor in Manila. She found out I made my own body products so she asked me to write an article for her fledgling magazine, Earthian. It was granola and green long before it was a thing. I accepted. It was my first published piece.
In the mid-2000s she discovered an obscure anonymous blog I was writing about my pregnancy and home birth. She asked if she could publish it on Working Mom magazine. How could I say no to celebrating my infant’s birth on the pages of a glossy magazine? Gina made me feel like a celebrity.
When she found out about my porn, she stayed on my side all the way. She defended me against attacks behind my back from people we went to high school with and if you knew her, you’d know she unleashed a fury on anyone who crossed her or her loved ones. I flew to San Diego to catch up with her when she visited in 2010. We were regulars at her pub, Fred’s Revolucion in Cubao X in 2012. A few years later, she and her family were guests in our old farmhouse in Maine. We shared stories, beer, and laughter indoors while our kids ages 11 and 12 built a bonfire in the backyard because that’s the kind of parents we were and that’s the kind of kickass kids we raised.
She roped me in to write for Agam, the book of photos by her husband, photojournalist Jose Enrique Soriano. As executive editor, she included me among 24 contributing writers – accomplished poets, journalists, anthropologists, scientists, and artists from the Philippines. I felt like the black sheep among those luminaries, but Gina was my champion. She believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. She autographed my copy of the book: Will always be your friend, fan, and supporter – living vicariously through your groundbreaking work. Love you.
Tuesday night I got a message from her husband. Gina was in a coma in St. Luke’s ER. No one saw it coming. He asked for prayers. When an atheist asks an agnostic to pray for a Catholic, you know it’s serious. I prayed. I used all my mental energy to summon her back. “Come back, Gina,” I commented on a recent Facebook post in which she had tagged me. Come back, Gina, I thought constantly day and night. Come back to us. Thursday around 5 in the morning I woke up with a cramp in my chest. It pinched everytime I breathed. My heart literally hurt. I messaged her husband, “Tell me something, anything.”
She’s gone.
“She loved you and we were looking forward to visiting again.”
I had a difficult loud ugly cry by myself until Jay came out of his studio and held me and we cried together. I am so glad he got to know her. I’m glad I have somebody to grieve with and celebrate her life with.
Gina recently posted a fabulous profile picture across all her social media channels and even more fabulous photos of her and her kids at a kiki ball. Just last weekend her kids thanked her for giving them “a rich uncommon childhood.” She said she won the “lotto of life.” Her latest piece, my favorite yet, the crass and soulful Patricio, was published online on Esquire posthumously. I joked to Jay that it was a memorial-worthy social media presence, one to aspire to. He asked me not to die until my profile pictures got really old and ugly.
I got out a bottle of beer from the fridge, spilled some in her honor, and drank to my friend. Gina had a sharp wit and a fiery nature. She was a fierce mother and a fierce friend. She burned brilliantly, my friend for life. Gina burned fast, but she burned exceptionally bright.
