stuck in an argument with a drug seeking patient last night, i sighed and thought of you and a song popular when i was quite young celebrating you. "you of the city of flying jeepneys," it went something like this, "i am forever trying to settle back in your arms."
often when faced with rude patients' bunkum, i smoothly remember your snarly morning hour gridlock along espana avenue after a flash flood, after a mere sprinkling of tenuous may showers. bloated plastic bags stuck like heaving snot in the barely breathing hoods of cars. bald cat sized rats paddling along. belatedly dismissed school children holding aloft their school bags and the hems of their drenched plaid skirts, giggling flotsam in this sewer brown rivered street.
i always say i love you more than the island i grew up in. because i always thought you were more forthright than my childhood town flooded with evasion and ambiguities. i thought of you and the business suited forgers, pleased and proud, setting up shops along recto, the pickpockets plying earnestly their trade along the elevated railways. i missed suddenly the nags of your street children, insisting you buy their corded sampaguita buds, suggesting, without blushing, you can have them, too, just a night, though, for double the price of their leis.
and then i snapped back from all this reverie to tell this patient. "no, sir, i just gave you your morphine half an hour ago. your next dose would be four and a half fours from now." he screamed back at me, "you good for nothing chink, give me my morphine now. hell, i am paying for your salary."
my eyes glazed over again at this homeless junkie as he flailed his hairy arms in front of me, his armpits-hair caked with grease, lint and sweat-snarling like bullying bearded giants at me. then my mind snapped back to my manila. and i thought i caught the muggy whiff of day old sweat of a jeepney driver, his left arm gripping the steering wheel, his right outstretched behind to receive a fare from a lady all dolled up for the early evening mass. oh god, how i miss the smell of honest sweat.