I was nineteen when I started buying cigarettes by the pack and smoke on a regular basis, before that I smoked intermittently since I was fourteen. Contrary to popular belief I was not sucked into the habit by sinister subliminal print ads nor by juvenile peer pressure. Smoking requires deliberate decisions. Nobody gets hooked on their first cigarette. I bet most smokers didn't enjoy their first cigarette. It probably made them cough and retch followed by clammy dizziness and nausea. A smoker only got hooked because he stuck long enough, in spite of these initial drawbacks, to get addicted. That, I submit, is a deliberate act. Personally, I got into smoking because I enjoyed it. After smoking a few sticks of cigarette, the initiate must make a choice-- which requires an even more purposeful deliberation: menthol or regular? And lastly, the smoker decides on a brand. Finding a brand is like choosing a gang or a second religion, it defines you.
Me? I was born to be a Marlboro Man.
In the old days, Marlboro comes only in one unadulterated dose:-- full strength. There were as yet no anemic Lights, sissy Mediums nor heretical Greens-- which, I think, only gave false hopes to smokers who fear death from smoking by being led to believe that they are smoking less lethal versions of the poison. I preferred the full on Reds particularly the more lethal Military or Reynold's. They were so intense my forefinger and middle finger would turn yellow orange from smoke exposure; and Marlboro comes only in two sizes: “Filter Kings”-- the regular sized cigarettes and in “student” size. The "shorties" was pure genius. Marlboro wouldn’t admit it but it was really meant for teenagers. Shorties comes in flip top packs which are no more than two inches in an almost square configuration that could easily be hidden by tucking it in your socks or rolling it in your T-shirt sleeve.
Back in the days of yore, one could light up anywhere— like you could be a doctor examining an asthmatic child or a priest administering Extreme Unction, and you could go ahead and light up. Nobody would mind. Smoking back then was a personal thing that was tolerated much like farting is in public rest rooms. You could smoke even if you're riding in public transport. You could get a stick of cigarette from your trusty “Ta-Ka-Tak” boy, light up and blow smoke on the face of the person sitting next to you. It was an accepted inconvenience in public transportation, nobody complained about secondhand smoke or any of those lame issues wing nuts dreamed up.
And because smokers can light up anywhere, anytime, I didn’t much notice my fellow smokers until we began to be cordoned off from the rest of humanity sometime in the 90s. It was still possible to smoke though. Not as easy as it had been in the 70s or 80s, but most places still tolerated it, there was always a “Smoking Section”-- separate sections in restaurants and hotels, or a “Smoking Lounge”— a cordoned off area with carpeting and upholstered divans.
Then suddenly schools, government buildings and hospitals became “Smoke Free Zones”. Then not just buildings, but entire cities have since banned smoking in public. In order to have a cigarette in airports, I had to drag my tired ass and huff and puff back to the main entrance. Pass through at least three security checks then walk about fifty meters away from the main gate to a place where other losers hang out, I usually find a bunch huddled around a trash can. Only then am I allowed to smoke, but even then I still have to endure the killer stares of passing self-righteous cranks who looked at me as if I'm defecating in public.
While most pl
aces still provided a place for smokers, it had become shabbier through the years. Now, instead of a “Smoking Section”, smokers are directed to the “Smoking Area”, which is usually a designated place in a back alley alongside stinking garbage cans and toxic trash trolleys; a miniature pocket of slum where twisted butts and yellow-green spit decorated the ground around a caramel stained ash tray-- disguised as a garbage can, that nobody bothered to empty. You’ll know it’s the place because it smells of neglect, a dreary communal pyre where smokers gather to sacrifice their lungs to an unsmiling god. A place where the fellowship of the smoke rings still holds its regular meetings and where adepts exchange secret messages by sending out smoke signals to each other. Passing prigs would often stop by, cover their snotty noses, give you their best death-stare, point and say a bad word or two.
It has come to this.
The world has become inhospitable to smokers. It pains me to see hard-cores hot-boxing three quarters of their cigarettes then quickly walking away from these gatherings. They probably could not stand how things have become. Personally, I never liked the imposition nor the insult. I'm old school, a firm believer that a smoker should be able to light up wherever, whenever.
And so one fine day— one very ordinary day, I simply stopped. There was no plan. No preparation. I’ve even just bought a can of lighter fluid and a pack of flints for my Zippo lighter; and on the day I stopped, a half empty pack of Marlboro lay beside my Zippo on the table. It was as if I’ve been allotted a certain number of cigarettes and I’ve smoked them all and now I’m done.
After more than three months I guess it’s official: My thirty year affair with tobacco had ended. They say it takes sixty days to break a habit and forty-five days to break an addiction, I guess whatever you may want to call my relationship with nicotine; it’s over.
I sometimes walk over to the “Smoking Area” of a mall I frequent to check out on the fellowship. They are still sending out smoke signals but its gibberish to me now. When I turn to walk away, I feel their stares burning a hole at the back of my skull. I have betrayed the fellowship and now I have abandoned them. I now live in constant fear that the fellowship will one day gather around my house and throw their lighted cigarettes on my roof and watch as my house burns down.
Chapter 3: Ang Mananambal
"Ano ba talaga ang kailangan mo sa akin?"
I asked the question again, though I was no longer sure I was prepared to hear the answer to it. It's way passed midnight, I could tell from the color of the sky, it's now tinge with gray and blue. Like the first time I was with him, time seemed to have warped. When I looked back at him, his itak is already up in the air, and in the next moment he had thrust it down in a smooth sweeping motion as if to strike at something, though I didn't see anything there; Clank! It struck metal. Suddenly, the airship became less translucent, like a projected image coming into focus. He stepped into it with his head bent; apparently, to clear a low doorway; he disappeared into the blurriness. After a moment, an arm came into focus again and motioned me to follow.
When I watch horror flicks, I rail at characters who put themselves in situations where it is obvious that they would likely be chopped, burned or eaten alive. Idiots, I'd say to them, you deserve your fate. If this is such a movie, this is the best time to walk away. I could almost hear the audience-- Stupid, get out of there! Now, I'm not fearless and I'm not stupid either. I am standing on what seems to be a doorway. Either I walk away right now or I jumped right in. Still contemplating my options, I extended my hand beyond the surface of what could be a door. Immediately, my hand blurred out of focus. I could now only perceive the vaguest impression of my hand beyond the doorway, my wrist ending as abruptly as that of an amputee. I felt no pain though. That's good. I pulled back my hand, it came back into focus. That's good, too.
What the heck, I stepped in.
I stepped into a vacuum-- a vortex of silence that sucked all the sounds from my ears. All the sounds of the night dissolved.
He was already sitting on a wire frame chair in front of what looked like a cockpit full of mechanical dials and levers. He had put on an ornate barbute with a retractable visor that when extended gave him the profile of a horse. Again he raised his itak and thrust it unto a slot; then he pulled at it like a lever and the whole airship shook as if being unhinged from a clamp. Then he tossed what looked like glowing embers unto a metal cylinder that dominated the center of the airship. He closed the lid. Then, he flicked a switch to activate a mechanism that whined like a fan. He sat, his back turned on me, with a beam of light shining upon the golden spine on his nape. I inched forward to take a closer look until he is within arm's reach, I reached out. The skin on the tip of my forefinger felt separately alive as I did so, and my skin tingled. I couldn't understand it, but it was how I felt. Just then the airship shuddered and threw me off balanced. I fell back. We're floating up. I grabbed on to a hand rail. Small green leaves hang down from above, it smelt reminiscent of spicy mint, but not quite that, with a hint suggestive of a heady mix of freshly mowed grass after a drizzle of rain and a trace of coconut oil, but not quite any of those things, either.
Then I noticed that the wall is actually a woody-stemmed series of branches, a living vine-- probably some kind of orchid, trailing on the metal frame of the airship like a trellis of bamboo and wire Dada used to guide the growth of a row of Ampalaya plants we used to have back in Frisco. A bunch of fireflies flew in through the gaps between the branches and the titanium mesh. Then a head of a tuko came out, its mouth half open, a firefly's wing hanging out from it; the wing disappeared after a quick jerk of the tuko's head, the tuko blinked its eyes, licked its chops then withdrew into the cover of the leaves. The airship is a living and breathing ecosystem!
Every gear and mechanical device is multi-functional; streams of pinhole sized blue light streaked across and around me, flooding the capsule with an unnatural luminance. I looked around, there's barely enough room for two normal sized people.
"... pero saan ka natutulog dito?"
"Hindi ko kailangang matulog."
"... 'di ka natutulog? Kahit kailan...?"
"Hindi."
Vials with vari-colored liquids in them lined the wall, farther back is a ledge that served as a desk, rolls of parchment paper and a stack of books-- dog-eared ancient books, were scattered on it. One book particularly caught my attention, it's bound in leather with what appear as Arabic script printed on its cover. He said it's the only existing copy of the "Book of Ingenious Devices"; a book commissioned by the Abassid Caliph of Baghdad, Abu Jafar al-Ma'mun ibn Harun, credited as a work of the Banu Musa brothers and first published in 850 A.D. He said most of the automatas illustrated on the book were invented by them when they still freely roamed the Earth, stolen by Greek scholars, and from whom the Banu Musa brothers merely copied from. He said they destroyed all the other copies because it contained, among others, a blueprint of the airship.
My eyes were then drawn to an intricate gold locket that hung on a makeshift altar, I opened it and inside was a faded photograph of a woman, a very plain-featured kayumanggi, with nothing in her looks that would merit a second look, her long black slightly wavy hair brushed back from her plain face more as a practical convenience rather than for style.
He swung around to face me.
"Kilala ko ang lolo ng lola mo. Isa siyang Mananambal sa Isla del Fuego."
You knew Dada's grandfather? I vaguely knew Dada was a Bisaya, but I did not know that she hailed from the Visayan island of Siquijor. I realized then that I knew very little about Dada.
More dials are turned, a lever or two pulled here and there, then a tug on a chain attached to a pulley, magically the floor and walls of the airship expanded to double its breadth-- the airship is a huge Hoberman sphere, a hybrid geodesic dome that could be expanded and folded down to a fraction of its size by the scissor-like action of its joints. The gaps on the mesh have become bigger, too; I could now see the steeple of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral and the dark gray dome of the Araneta Coliseum on the horizon, I figured we are about two hundred feet up in the air. I've read somewhere that the horizon, as seen by a five foot tall man standing at sea level on a clear day, is four kilometers away. From this height, I could probably see as far away as ninety kilometers all around me. I've never been on a mountain or on a plane before, never as high up as this; the sight is simply overwhelming. The headlights on Highway 54 twinkled like stars, tree tops gently swayed with the wind as if they are dancing in the moonlight. I felt insignificant compared to the rest of the universe.
He stood up and tore off the armor plates-- the bejewelled spaulders on his broad and sinewy shoulders and equally bejewelled rerebraces on his upper arms, and showed me a deep nasty scar that ran from his right arm to his upper chest, the healed flesh a grim testimony to old violence. He had survived a mortal wound only because my great grandfather attended to him. In gratitude, he shared his own pharmacopoeia and taught my great grandfather the ancient knowledge of concocting medicine from plants, rare herbs, minerals and animal parts that were then abundant in the islands. Not long after that, he said my great grandfather became a well known and sought after mananambal. He reminisced that as he convalesce from his wound, he and my great grandfather went for long walks in search of materials and ingredients in the woods and mountains of Siquijor; and since some of the plants they needed were not endemic to the islands, they secretly planted, and farmed, these exotic plants in hidden nooks and crannies that they only knew. Most of these plants only sprout or blossom or bear fruit only once a year-- exactly seven Fridays after Ash Wednesday. And thus the quest for ingredients coincides with the Cuaresma and culminates on the eve of their Summer Equinox Gathering when the ingredients are then subjected to pangangadlip or pagpapagong and made into minasa-- a yearly quest for ingredients that was eventually ritualized by second and third generation mananambals and other followers and is now known in Siquijor as Pangangalap.
His voice then went down to a whisper-- as if wary that somebody else might hear, and said that he also taught my great grandfather the secret science of extracting esoteric ores from the deepest bowels of the Earth. He said that my great grandfather further improved on the metallurgical processes that were taught him and it wasn't long before my great grandfather was able to extract the elemental essences of these metals and minerals with the use of crucibles; and developing alternative ways to further purify these extracts.
"... iyon ang dahilan kaya ako nandito."
itutuloy...
In 2000, I learned to fly model airplanes. Scale model aviation is not something you pick up and go. There are a million and one things to learn. And until the late 90s, the costs of the hobby soared higher than the planes. Thanks to Chinese bootleggers-- exploiting its bloated, cheap labor force to mass produce knock-offs of well established brands, the hobby became accessible to ordinary mortals like me.
My first basher plane was a "Swallow". My first attempt at remote controlled flight was a disaster; the second was no better; and after about thirty or so more crashes, I got the hang of it and eventually earned my wings. Three months into the hobby, I thought it was time to move up. No more overgrown dragonflies. I want to fly a model plane that actually looked like a plane. And so I got myself a Tiger Moth kit: semi-scale pre-painted foam ARF of the 1931 classic British double-winged two-seater Havilland trainer.
While I have experience as a static scale modeler, it was my first build for an model plane. It took me the better part of two weeks-- working nights, mostly figuring out a work around. For one, the glue that came with the kit wasn't good enough; I experimented and came up with a home brew of Epoxy mixed with ethyl alcohol and baking soda (-- the baking soda made the mix bubble up, making it lighter and was a good filler, too). For another, the parts did not mate true to specs; some even a bit twisted. Another hurdle was keeping the dihedral of the upper wing within recommended specs; it was a challenge by itself. But, overall it looked promising. With all the parts glued together, it began to look like a decent model plane. From there, it was just a matter of putting in the two mini servos and a 2Amp ESC, and the Moth will be ready for flight.
I chose a calm late afternoon for its maiden flight. I drove out to the Global City where High Street is now. The Moth is classed as a ITF Park Flier which meant it had a small motor; flies only at slow speed and is better off flown indoors. I chose to R.O.G the Moth for its maiden flight, it veered to the right then lifted three feet off the ground. I put in too much up elevator and it lost its lift. It stalled and crashed on some thicket, damaging its flimsy landing gear. I trimmed the rudder by dialing an offset to the left. Throwing caution to the wind, I revved up the motor and hand launched the Moth; it flew straight; then it lifted. I pulled in too much elevator again, the plane started to go on a stall again. But, before it did, I pushed the elevator down a bit. It recovered. It twitched to the right. I let go of the sticks. The wing dihedral did it job and the plane corrected. I pulled in a bit more up elevator. Slowly it climbed up to about 20 feet cruising majestically at less than 8 kph.
The damn bitch was flying!
It was a great day. It was followed by more glorious days.
RC flight offered an escape from my demons. Maybe, I think, if I can focus on controlling a model plane, I’d have respite from the things that went wrong with my life. Besides, it seemed to be a great idea having control for once… of course, I was wrong (again). You don’t. You listen and feel model planes. You adjust to its mood and idiosyncrasies; and the will of the wind-- much like this wretched life; and beg the mercy of wind gods for gentler gusts, minimum down draft, less rain, more sunlight; more clouds and a forgiving sun so you could have a second more of that magical moment… nay a communion, with the Big Guy up there who is truly in full control.
I’m still here, you bastards…
-- Papillon, the movie; Steve McQueen as Henri Charrière
aces still provided a place for smokers, it had become shabbier through the years. Now, instead of a “Smoking Section”, smokers are directed to the “Smoking Area”, which is usually a designated place in a back alley alongside stinking garbage cans and toxic trash trolleys; a miniature pocket of slum where twisted butts and yellow-green spit decorated the ground around a caramel stained ash tray-- disguised as a garbage can, that nobody bothered to empty. You’ll know it’s the place because it smells of neglect, a dreary communal pyre where smokers gather to sacrifice their lungs to an unsmiling god. A place where the fellowship of the smoke rings still holds its regular meetings and where adepts exchange secret messages by sending out smoke signals to each other. Passing prigs would often stop by, cover their snotty noses, give you their best death-stare, point and say a bad word or two.
