this is decidedly qrotesque. even by my standards.
barely twelve hours before christmas, and still i am taken up with the death of an actor whose movies i have never grown fond of. there’s no contempt when i say this, but fpj is indeed this year’s grinch.
i was about to finish my i-hate-you-because-you’re-having-so-much-fun-back-home-while-i-am-slaving-here-in-NY calls to my friends in manila, and it just came to me that they, too, (meaning my mostly showbiz apathetic friends) are still obsessed with fpj’s death. haunted, i should say.
friend number 1.
her major gripe this holiday is this. nobody there to help her prepare her grand noche Buena spread.
“but where is manang (meaning their help)?” I asked.
their house help asked for two days off during what could only be considered rightfully as the manila observance of the unofficial fpj burial holiday. manang told her she would probably need two days off: one to attend the burial itself, and the other one to recuperate.
“from what?” I asked again.
“well, to follow fpj’s cortege from sto. domingo church all the way to north cemetery is no mean feat. you probably would need a full day of rest the day after. so I gave her another day off,” friend number 1 answered.
it’s been three days now since the orgy that manila staged in burying fpj, manang has apparently not yet recharged her usually unflagging energizer bunny self.
“well what can i say,” she said in her most resigned voice, “the death of a loved one can be a total bummer.”
friend number 2:
i must have roused him up from a light sleep. his voice reeked of made up dreams.
“why are you asleep at this time?” i asked him. “it’s almost christmas.” he told me he can’t stand his cousins.
“but you adore your cousins,” i told him back.
“not this time,” he said.
this year, he was finally able to wangle some unheard of days off, a feat which he was never able to finagle in the first few years that he worked in this major english broadsheet in manila.
after almost being bumped off from his flight to his northern mindanao city hometown, he was truly salivating at the idea of spending some serious down time in what he still considers his rustic hometown, one that already boasts of an airport and a huge international shipping port.
but the very moment he plunked down into his favorite big ratty chair in their sala, his cousins immediately swamped him with questions ad nauseam about some really arcane details about fpj’s burial.
“was it true that the horse that pulled fpj’s cortege can understand tagalog?” one of his cousins asked him.
in the tv coverage, the two other actors who drew the horse’s reins were seen shamelessly aping robert redford (think horse whisperer) talking to the white steed.
his cousins must have thought that because he worked for a major broadsheet, he must have had access to juicy insider stuff that was not reported in the electronic media, if that was possible at all after the wall to wall tv/radio coverage of the major networks.
so he fled to his room, feigning migraine. which eventually he had.
friend number 3:
two days before fpj’s burial, my friend had to fetch two of his Wisconsin-born-and-bred cousins from the international airport.
their mother, my friend’s aunt, had to dump them to manila as she herself was going to what my friend described as quite a long winter cruise. trust me, it would not have done me any good had I needled my friend more on her aunt’s mysterious cruise. so end of story in what could have been a racier twist in this snippet. but anyway.
so my friend decided to baby sit her two midwestern teen cousins, a no mean task at all for her to undertake being the tendentious will-never-have-kids lesbian that she is. or so she says, for the moment.
on the very day of fpj’s burial, my friend, ever heedless of local news, decided to wow the apparently blasé american raised teens by bringing them to at least two of the gargantuan manila malls. so off they drove in my friend’s beat up third hand corolla.
end of a very long story: they got stuck in traffic for almost six hours. they took a wrong turn near quezon boulevard (where the funeral procession commenced) and got stuck somewhere near what she described as the slum area of roxas district.
my friend was seething when she recounted how she almost screamed at her cousins every time they covered their noses as their car crawled by the hovels and shanties.
“snooty bastards, snooty bastards,” she kept on muttering.
Unknown friend:
my friends and i, we are of a generation that should been intimate with fpj’s filmography. But neither of us could scrape up a measly explanation why we were never into the man, at least the man who the legions of fpj fans thought he was.
one of the now legendary (should i say apocryphal?) stories that has been bandied around during his necrological services is this.
after the recent catastrophic slew of tropical storms in the country, fpj immersed himself like a mad man in relief operations. but unlike most traditional politicians, he insisted on not emblazoning his name on the relief packages that he was about to mete out.
in a way, my friends and i were the recipients of the man’s anonymous largesse. I know most of my friends would balk at this. “largesse, my ass,” i can hear my lesbian friend already.
but in a sense, I suppose, without even knowing it, our film experiences have been greatly enhanced because of this man’s body of work.
and in quite an astoundingly profound way, the way we look at ourselves as a nation, has been, for better or worse, touched in a not-so-anonymous way by the life and passing of fpj.
but just don’t ask me yet how. I suppose, I have a lifetime to figure it how. to figure out how this reticent actor has made us four and millions others feel an inexplicable expansive feeling about ourselves as a people.