It was a fairly typical Saturday night in March in Barangay Agsungot, Talamban, in that nothing of any real consequence or even minor passing interest to me was happening. March is the beginning of summer in the Philippines when the weather turns from merely searing, laser-beam hot to “Do you smell sulphur? Who’s the guy with the pitchfork?” It was indeed hot that evening, very hot, and humid and breathless, as the usual cooling breezes falling down from the blustery mountain tops, and the neighboring village of Guba, were absent. The newspapers blame El Nino. I blame society. It was about 7:00 pm and a couple of local guys, Bobon and Piping, had come to our new house to fetch me away.

Raxie, my Filipina wife and I were still in the process of building the cinder block and stucco house on the former Barangay outdoor basketball court. A Barangay is similar to a neighborhood association. I know the lot used to be a basketball court because there had been backboards and hoops nailed to trees on two ends. I had recently hired some local loggers to cut the trees down and mill them into lumber for the house project. The court had been anything but level with a surface marked by Caribou grass, potholes, patches of dirt and gravel and a pair of deep tire ruts leading to a 20-foot wide swampy area of soft mud at ‘center court’. There had been a spindly split-bamboo fence along the downhill side to keep the ball from ending up in the creek about 27 miles down the mountain. I had actually seen groups of boys playing ball there, but I was never sure how they managed it. I am thinking it was some kind of local derivative sport, a combination of basketball, golf, snorkeling, and fishing with that quicksand hazard thrown in for good measure. Did I mention that it was hot? OK then.

Raxie had inherited the parcel of land where the court was situated from her deceased mother’s side of the family. It was the only piece of reasonably level ground for miles around. Agsungot is a mountain Barangay in the town of Talamban, about a half-hour north of Cebu City. There are a few paved main highways around, but mostly people travel on narrow, treacherous rock and clay surfaced roads through the steep, heavily vegetated limestone mountains. Our village in Agsungot is about a kilometer off the pavement down a rutted, clay-surfaced nightmare of hazards to safe driving. ‘Guba’ is the Visaya word for ‘landslide’ in this part of the world and, as I mentioned earlier, also the name of the next little village up the main highway from our place. Any questions? Did I say the local terrain was steep? There are places on the roadway to ‘Landslide-Ville’ where the ridge-line the road follows is maybe 9-feet wide but the road is 10-feet wide. Huh? As you sprint across these little hazards to life and limb, you can look down on either side of your vehicle into what appears to be the Grand Canyon of Cebu. Along the six or seven kilometer stretch of ‘road’ from Agsungot Plaza to Guba my current tally is at least two dozen smaller landslides that merely crack the pavement and six major failures that have basically turned the roadway into a muddy, rutted, destruction derby track. There is one stretch of road in particular, on a curve, of course, where my left front tire passes about 1/16th of an inch from the abyss. On the right side of this death trap is a sheer, black limestone rock wall rising up out of sight. Of course every time you try to grind your way up the mountain on this little thrill ride, some kid on a Honda 100 oil burner is trying to pass, on the right, in the dark, with no headlights, of course. TIF (This Is the Filipines).

Most of the local folks live in abject poverty, though they don’t seem to know or acknowledge it. Everyone up here lives in smallish bamboo houses perched on stilts cut from old dead half-rotten tree trunks. When I say ‘smallish’ I mean the houses are the size of the bathrooms in most American homes. Yeah. Anyway, we quite naturally decided to build our house on the quicksand court as it was semi level, semi dry, fairly sizable and most important, we already owned it. By the way, the new basketball court is now situated in the middle of the road leading past our new house. It only has one backboard and hoop now, nailed to a power pole. I have to drive through the middle of the half-court games occasionally on my way home. The looks I get from the players would probably kill a normal white person. Maybe the players are angry with me because they miss the mud oozing between their toes as they drive the lane through the knee-deep mud hazard.

Anyway, on this night we had only been in Cebu for about three months and I was feeling very bored and isolated as usual because I don’t speak the local Visaya dialect of the southern Philippines. Up north and in Manila they speak something called Tagalog. The two dialects are unrelated and nobody locally seems to speak both. Kind of like the way people from Tennessee speak ‘English’. Apparently Bobon and Piping had heard me singing and playing my guitar a couple of nights before and had come to invite me to participate in one of the national pastimes of the Philippines: Karaoke. They had come armed with an inducement in the form of a rather large bottle of Tanduay 5-Year rum, the other national pastime of the Philippines.

In our village, the Videoke system consists of an ancient, pre-digital, CRT type 19-inch color TV set hanging by two pieces of wire from the eaves on the outside of Raxie’s uncle Lario’s bamboo house. I assume there is a CD player somewhere inside the house though I have never actually seen it. The microphone gets passed through the only window. The speakers look like they came from a Grateful Dead concert as they are about 9 feet tall and project a sound wave that would topple buildings in downtown Cebu City. The object of the extreme volume seems to be an attempt to somehow drown out the always out of tune and off beat singing. And I do mean always. There is a bamboo bench just beyond the chain link fence surrounding Uncle Lario’s old house where you have to sit to see the TV. I am thinking that they make the houses in Cebu out of split bamboo slats so the lizards can get in and out quickly with the giant roaches they find inside. (Just a passing architectural observation.)

So, there was quite a crowd gathered around Uncle Lario’s outdoor suspended TV protected by chain link when the boys and I arrived on the scene. I discovered that the gatherers were all there to hear the American sing. Ya, well, no pressure there. I was quickly introduced to some of our new neighbors and old relatives: Ko-koi, No-no, Mok-mok, Ti-ti, Dun-dun, Jen-jen, Ju-ju, Ji-ji, and Ta-ta, to name a few. I began to suspect a sort of like, trend, in people’s names here in Cebu, aka Queen City of the South. It was not unlike the names you hear in places like Arkansas and Alabama, also considered to be in the South. You know, names like Billy-Bob, Bobby-Sue, Jackie-John, Pop-pop. I am guessing that it must be a mountain man backwater upcountry southern kind of naming deal. The really amazing thing is that apparently it is an actual international phenomenon. Who knew? You need two names so Billy-Bob in his mullet is not confused with Billy-Sue in her truck-stop ‘do’, or Ji-ji doesn’t end up wearing Ju-ju’s flip flops by mistake. Ad nauseam.

So I was five or six shots of Tanduay and three lines into my fourth song; “Back in the USSR”, when all the two-named observers turned and ran for it like they were in the middle of a buffalo stampede, (only here they call them Caribou.) Nobody had bothered to say a single word to me; they had just hoofed it on out of there in a cloud of El Nino dust. So, naturally, being in a state of instant confusion and growing fears, I carefully tossed the microphone over the chain link and back through the window and began cautiously following after the stampeders. I was somewhat reluctant to follow them at all as I had seen some very large lizards that day and I was in no mood to tangle with one of those brutes. Did I mention that I had also recently seen some of the local basketball snorklers shoot and eat Quaqnet (fruit bats)? While that may sound spooky, fresh Quaqnet are touted by the local sportsmen as tasting like chicken but with a spicy, nutty kind of flavor. I’ll pass.

It was now about 8:00 pm and dark, and spooky, and I had all kinds of visions of somebody having been attacked and partially devoured in an ugly, tragic death-by-bats-and-lizards incident. I was about half way back to my house when somebody shouted to me to hurry up and get my car because Auntie Dita was having her heart attack. I think it was something like; “Bar-Bar, get your car, Dita is sick”. Now, I had to pause for a moment here because I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted as my name had just been added to the International Double-Name directory. Come to think of it, Auntie Dita is the only resident of Agsungot with a non-repeating name which was probably the cause of her illness. Did I mention that it was hot? Ok then.

As I am the owner of the only four-wheeled, non-hoofed mode of transportation in our little village, I am always well thought of in local emergencies. One of those often talked about but seldom understood ‘dubious honors’. So, let’s go ahead and talk about it: My van is a Suzuki Scrum; 750 cc’s of thundering turbo-charged, gasoline-powered mayhem. Small but terrible. NASCAR it ain’t. It is actually a motorcycle with four wheels. It has two front seats, two back seats and a cargo area about 3-feet long in the rear. I use the word ‘seats’ in a loosely defined, airline kind of capacity. It has 12-inch tires designed for camping trailers. The drivers’ manual lists a dry weight of 800 pounds and a cargo capacity of 750 pounds. Most American cars have a spare tire that weighs more than that. I have to use first gear to get up the hills to our house if there are more than two people aboard. I once took 13 kids and adults to the beach on a Sunday afternoon in my Scrum. (Is that short for scrotum?) It felt like Asian Grapes of Wrath. Is Jackie Chan in the back somewhere? Am I on Candid Camera? All I could see in the rear view mirror was arms and elbows and baseball hats and bags of dried fish and fried chicken flapping around. The mud flaps were actually touching the road, making a sound like the brakes were grinding (assuming the brakes will still function).

OK, so we get Dita one-name and her husband Pur-pur loaded up in back seat, Raxie and I in front, and maybe another six or seven would-be ambulance attendants in the cargo area. Nobody wants to miss a thrill ride up to the hospital in Guba, in the dark, on a busy Saturday night with a slightly butt-faced driver who forgot his eyeglasses. Oh Noooooo. I knew it was going to be a first-gear-all-the-way kind of deal with all the human cargo aboard. This was probably a very good thing considering my current level of alcohol poisoning. At a top speed of maybe 6 kph, I had ample time to avoid one or two of the 787 potholes and landslide cracks along the way as we slowly made our way past all six of the major death zones. Dita passed out several times during the drive. I was never sure if it was from her illness or my driving. I was having plenty of trouble concentrating on my driving due to all the hubbub in the cargo hold. I was not the only Tanduay abuser in the vehicle that night. Every time Dita fainted, there was a chorus of shrieks and howling from the crowd of cargo-bay attendants; oohs and aahs, lots of wrist slapping and forehead rubbing for poor Dita, loud exhortations for more speedy progress interspersed with desperate pleas for me to slow down before we were all Guba’d to death. I did my best to keep us on the road and not look too confused, or too drunk. I was having a lot of trouble with double vision: “Raxie, how many goats do you see in the road up there?” Did I mention that I do not possess a Philippine driver’s license?

Our arrival at the ‘hospital’ in Guba found us in front a door marked; “Emergency Room”. It was locked. It was dark. The real ambulance was parked nearby in the dark in a really spooky side lot. No doubt the real ambulance drivers were in the local karaoke bar down the road in the next village. Somebody from cargo-bay one finally found an open door so we crab-walked poor Dita down there hoping for the best. We found ourselves in a very large nearly empty reception area that looked suspiciously like an old basketball court. Hmmm. There were a couple of bamboo benches on the left wall, a large mouldy looking wooden desk to the right. The big desk was manned, or womaned if you will, by an equally large Filipina wearing a much-too-tight, white nurse’s uniform and black horn-rimmed glasses. She had a row of little round brass pins over her left breast. I could swear one of the pins said ‘Guantanamo’ on it. Hmmm. Straight ahead was one of those Ben Casey type, white-glass,and double hospital doorways blocked by a gray steel desk. Probably the locker room. The walls were painted Battleship gray and had big blotches of dark blue paint about every six feet smeared into big fat X’s as if they were covering up a bunch of graffiti. The floor was classic black and white checkered linoleum tiles, randomly worn through to the concrete in many places. The high, used-to-be white ceiling had all these little holes with dusty, greasy cut off electrical wires twisting out. There were a couple of yellowed and speckled and rusted neon light tubes flickering and one rusty, mouldy-looking ceiling fan slowly, painfully turning. I had the urge to start counting the many various-colored lizards I could see scuttling across the walls and ceiling, but as I pointed to one of the really big ones, Raxie grabbed my arm and jabbed me in the ribs. Maybe another time. I also had that sudden, déjà vu feeling of being in an old Alfred Hitchcock movie. Maybe I was.

They sat one-name Dita down next to Nurse Waterboard and said that no doctor was available at the moment. Well now, I thought, there’s a big surprise, these guys have apparently learned a lot from all those American medical TV shows about doctors hooked on pain pills. I knew we were going to be waiting a long time for some intern or medical student to eventually show his three-day peach fuzz, so I headed back outside. I could not bear to watch another minute of poor old Auntie Dita’s head bobbing up and down as her eyelids fluttered open and closed. Worse than that, the mixed odors of mould, rotten wood, bleach and floor wax in that desolate place were nearly too much for my poor Tanduay-abused stomach and my current state of disorientation: Those damn lizards were making me dizzy. I remember wondering what happened to the rest of that big bottle of 5-Year we left back at Uncle Lario’s?

The hospital was kind of on the edge of town, or village, or landslide, so I flip-flopped off down the roadside, crunching on the gravel, walking toward the lights. The very first place I came to was a street food vendor apparently getting ready for the Sunday Mass crowd the next day. His rickety little wooden stall with the blue plastic roof tarp was directly under a street light emitting a pale yellow, foggy ring of half light that made it look like it was raining. There was this huge dead pig splayed out on a long, weathered old wooden table right next to the stall. The pig’s head was still on, his mouth gaping open like he was choking on the apple. He kind of looked like he was trying to say hello as I bobbed and weaved my way up for a closer look at him. I got close enough to see the dark pupils in the bright whites of those bloodless little piggy eyes that stared back at me without blinking. The pink-white skin of master pig seemed to have an ethereal kind of fluorescent glow from that strange overhead light. I reached out to touch his snout, but thought better of it. The vendor was frying what I assumed were the pig’s intestines over a wood fire in a wok the size of an oil drum right there in the street. Surprisingly, it smelled pretty good. The vendor guy looked over at me like he expected me to say something as he stirred his sizzling piggy guts with this giant wooden paddle. How do you say: ‘Lost your canoe?’ in Visaya? Cars and motorcycles had to veer into the left lane as they passed the flames and through the thick, swirling wood smoke. I turned around to look at the dark hospital building again, then back at the dead pig. I couldn’t help but think; ‘Sorry pig-dude, I guess you didn’t make it. Your ambulance driver was probably drunk.’

I heard the gravel crunch behind me and up walked my little Raxie girl, looking kind of concerned. “Are you alright?” she asked. Well, for someone a half-million miles from home, looking at dead animals trying to talk, with my head swimming the backstroke in a glass of Tanduay and seeing visions of dancing pigs in miniskirts a la Walt Disney, I guessed I was nearly OK. Raxie said the doctor had looked at Dita one-name, pronounced her living, and sent her home via the four-wheeled goat-dodger.

By the time Raxie and I walked back to our van, everyone was there waiting to go back home to Agsungot. The drive home was less fun-filled as I could just put it in neutral and coast most of the way. Pot holes in reverse. Dita seemed to be OK and slept most of the way home. The riotous cargo bay Tanduay party became a quiet little slumber party. We pulled into our driveway and unloaded our crew of merry pranksters in under an hour. I decided to walk down and see what became of that big bottle of 5-Year: MIA. The karaoke TV was as cold and dead as that fluorescent pig. The night finished as it began, dull, quiet, nothing of any real consequence was happening……”déjà vu” all over again.

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