THIS SUBDIVISION has so many humps!? That was the thought when I hit my head on the roof of the car.
It was the first time Jon Santos invited us to his house in Ayala Alabang, sometime during our early days of acquaintance at UP Diliman, in the (age alert!) mid-?80s.
Jon?s Alabang was unlike the streets of my childhood. In Sampaloc, a sudden bump under your wheels only meant you ran over a kid.
Our apartment was the color of attempted Provence terra-cotta that ended up the exact shade of Quiapo bagoong (fish sauce). The area was so ridiculously notorious that the police installed a regular undercover agent to spy on druggies. The problem was that his ?cover? of a mamang sorbetero (ice cream man) was costume-and-prop only: He did not stock up on ice cream, and had to shoo away kids attempting to buy. Hence, everyone was in on the disguise, except him.
Jon took to Sampaloc like it was a theme park. We would peek at the sorbetero-agent from our rusty gate, and giggle. Since Sampaloc houses sit cheek-by-jowl with a la sardine-packed dorms, we had our first reality show through our windows: warring dorm mates in undies, teen lovers? trysts on rooftop clotheslines, the occasional scent of cannabis wafting. ?Pinoy Big Brother? didn?t stand a chance. Jon loved every inch of it.
Approaching Jon?s own cushy territory in Alabang, he crumbles into a heap of anxiety. I psychoanalyze Jon: a sheltered kid (figuratively and literally since he was so pale), the son of a soldier, resident of a premiere gated community where even sidewalks are ergonomically designed. Is he apologetic that he is better-off than the rest of us?
?Our sala is a little nouveau ha. Ignore the chipped Lladro ha.?
I had to laugh; the dcor in my house were chipped, too, and they were SM Cubao plaster of Paris. Then Jon would continue with apologies: ?And, sorry, there are Sirocco resin dcor from Clark secondhand stores.?
Sirocco, hmm, now that was nouveau. Jon?s quick comeback: ?Oh, our cockroaches are small beige ones, though. You know, the American ones.?
Bizarre pambawi. I had never met someone who propped his flagging self-esteem with cockroach nationality. But no matter.
Our friendship, it turned out, would develop more humps than the road to that subdivision. Like our first out-of-town trip to Baguio, with the mission of writing Jon?s UP launch: ?Jon of Arte? (a sophomoric pun on Joan of Arc, with Jon in the poster as a medieval Xena; I didn?t know how we got away with that corn).
To rush the script, we lodged in something that sounded like Belfrankt Hotel, facing the Baguio Market. In comedy-writing, we were fencing partners; punch lines clanged like sword upon sword. But in between, he would tearfully offer me money to buy out the producers, retrieve all the tickets, and cancel the show! Of course, the answer would be: ?No, Jon, you will kick ass onstage! (Belfrankt would later crumble in the earthquake, the market would burn down, but Jon?s career would still kick ass on its 24th year).
Purveyor
On the road, Jon was a purveyor of stunts. Once, we plotted to trick our friends into thinking I could not make it to a Portugal trip with them. Only Jon knew I would be in another flight. Imagine their jaws dropping, when sipping sidewalk coffee in Lisbon, they saw me at the other table! Our friend Joel thought I was one of those ghosts of living people astrally projecting.
One time, Jon brought our employees to tour his new house, so we conspired to fool them that the subdivision clubhouse was his new house. ?Wow, Sir Jon, this is enormous! You have an Olympic-size pool! Your sala is almost a ballroom! But... why does your house have a community bulletin board??
The punk lasted 15 minutes, but we had our kick.
Some of our stunts required preparation. We once secretly took French lessons, so that upon landing in Paris, we would again shock our friends because we conversed in French the moment we landed!
In Florence, while gawking at the Statue of David, we chanced upon fellow Filipino domestics on a day-off. Pinoys would be Pinoys; they fell off the long David queue, and created a ruckus to have their photos taken with Jon! The museum guards scratched their heads, asking: Why did those people go for this pale Asian, instead of David? ?Well, these ladies prefer circumcised men,? we sniffed.
On trips, the real Jon is just as eccentric as any of his characters. The moment we enter our hotel room, he renovates. He makes a mini-house in his half of the room. He then beats us to the hotel bathrobe, walks around pretending it?s a Furstenberg wraparound, and sleeps in a small, catlike curl.
The next day, he would be first to the hotel free breakfast, so he could wrap muffins in paper napkins, and save his lunch/snack money for the rest of the day. Since bags get crushed in tour buses and crowds, that muffin ended up a pancake by noon. This frugality from the guy who just paid for our whole barkada trip!
Obsession
Jon always gets trapped in one shopping obsession every trip, crowding out all sights and sounds of the place. One time, we searched furiously for that perfect ?murse.? (We argued, because why rename it a murse, when it looks like a clutch bag?) One time, it was bone mules. (Again, an argument: ?You mean light-brown tsinelas [slippers], Jon??) Another time, it was a peacoat (?And mind you, guys, I need a pea coat, not a baby trench. They?re different.?)
The worst had to be when we had our houses built, coincidentally at the same time. We went around Europe in backpacks ? foolishly buying faucets, door knocks and fancy stone crafts, then realizing we would go overweight many hundred times over our economy-fare baggage-weight allowance.
Jon packed our loot in our carry-on luggage, and insisted we swing (not just lift, but swing) our rock-heavy carry-ons nonchalantly as we passed each bag checkpoint, so the airport officials would not suspect those innocent satchels weighed more than the airport officials themselves. Incredibly, Jon got us through, with a hell of an arm cramp, though.
The flip side of this unnerving travel companion is his disarming thoughtfulness. Jon always conducts the pre-departure check: ?Guys, all passports, please flash them to me. All tickets please! All wallets now! Any underwear left hanging in the bathroom??
This, at every stop, be it plane, taxi, train, hotel or restaurant. And as expected, he would be the one to leave behind a wallet or card.
In later trips, when Jon noticed my propensity to go overweight on luggage, he would secretly reduce his own luggage weight by a couple of kilos (buying less, leaving toiletries behind), so that he could volunteer to ?cover? some of my extra weight.
On a trip to Seattle, Jon fell quiet after entering the hotel. Upon prodding, he explained that the Filipino doorman used to be a famous singer. ?Now, living a quiet life of anonymity. Sometimes, it makes me sad, seeing that fame is a vapor. And I?m not even famous enough to worry about that. Yet, the doorman seemed happy, content to have his own family in a job that didn?t require him to wear false eyelashes and skirts. There is indeed no formula for happiness, ?no??
In Vietnam, Jon befriended our old alcoholic fogie of a tour driver, whose name (was it Bim?) meant ?dirt? in Vietnamese, whose wife had left him recently, and who mistakenly filled our rented van with gasoline instead of diesel, and thus stranded us in the middle of the remote Vietnam Highway going to the Da Lat Mountains. Asked why he bonded with Mr. Bim, Jon mused: ?We shared something in common ? we are both misfits.?
Jon, so uncomfortable with himself that he escapes into other characters, has to be the most successful person who made his misfit-ness a career. He did find his quiet life with his spouse. West, an environmental heavyweight (and an uncanonized saint), agreed to Jon?s compromise of a 50-50 arrangement between onstage life, and a plain house-spouse role in either of their homes in Palm Springs or Phuket.
A poet once said, the only real journeys we make are the ones into our hearts. Jon and our little tropa did more; we made quirky journeys into each other?s hearts. Those are really the only places we ever went to, in our lifetime of travels with the neurotic-genius-in-drag that is Jon Santos.
