the zeppelin of burning dreams

And that probably set the trend. This morning, just like every other morning, I woke up to the sound of my mom quarreling with the next door neighbor about something, probably her chickens again. She always quarreled with anybody whenever her chickens were compromised, my mom. Hilarious, the damned things never fed us. In her mind, mom was this master cockfight gambler and, paradoxically, cock-owner. All her fowl play ever did was it drained the household income away, along with the carcasses of her chickens whilst she ended up quarreling with the neighbors – how’s that for community living? But those dead birds were delicious, so I never complained.

 So I guess they did feed us once in a while, I mused while I took a bath.

“Kulas!” This while I was dressing up, one leg nearly into my pants, hair all tousled up and fresh from a cold shower. The timing of gods was what she had. 

I struggled into my pants, and then into an orange shirt. “Coming mom,” I called out as I stumbled down the staircase. She was at the dinner table, standing in her flower print duster with a cleaver in her left hand – mom was a lefty – and a dead chicken in the other. “You lost another one last night?” I asked.

“Hay, wouldn’t you know it. I swear, these city chickens must be mutated somewhat.” She hammered the cleaver clean through the middle of the chicken, washed out the innards under the tap. “Actually, it could be my chickens too. I’m worried that the feed I’ve been giving them lately isn’t exactly what they need. It could be making them soft.”

I didn’t reply, and lawnmowered my breakfast of fried rice and tuyo instead. “I’ve a band rehearsal in an hour,” I said between mouthfuls. “I won’t be having lunch here.”

She shrugged, and got back to her chicken. “Please tell dad to keep out of my room. I didn’t leave any money there.” Not that he’d listen. My dad made it his business to nose about in other peoples’ private stuff. Thankfully, he didn’t include gossip in his to-do list, or else we’ll have two people in the household quarrelling with the neighbors. He was ornery, not insufferable, and may he stay that way forever, if just for my peace of mind.

“Your dad will do whatever he pleases, knowing him. Don’t you have school this morning?” The chicken was propped upside-down on two chopping boards that formed a nearly perfect right angle, to help facilitate blood flow when the neck was severed. She didn’t really care if I went to school or not, but she tried, once in a while.

I shrugged, finished my food, and scrambled out of the house, grabbing the gig bag my beautiful ’87 Gibson-Les Paul slept in along the way.

My neighborhood was full of physical and legendary cracks; walls were cracked, streets were cracked, even the sidewalks were cracked, and you prayed you didn’t meet any of the resident kantoboys who were cracked all the way to kingdome come, or else. My mom cracked chicken bones, my dad cracked knuckles. I nearly ran over a dilapidated dog that had four cracked ribs jutting out from under its onion skin. Now if I could find something worth cracking up about, the community’d be complete. The baranggay of crack, we’d call it, metaphors aside.

            I listened to, and played music that was fast becoming a relic. Back in the roaring twenties, they called it low-scale acid jazz, while black men from the USA backwaters called it the blues. Whichever it was, the music unquestionably evolved from rock n’ roll; Bill Haley and Buddy Holly, The King, even the Everly Brothers, used the pentatonic that was so essential to the basic melody of my kind of music. Pepe the Hepe summed it up best; “Rakenrowl,” said, with the devil horn salute. 

Rakenrowl, I echo. I say it now as I walked through the seemingly war-torn metropolitan streets, although it was really the aftermath of too many drinking sessions held in the span of one night. It was my life-blood, this rakenrowl. Every staggering, gut-wrenching note spoke to me, telling me that there was something more to this void when everything was coming apart at the seams. 

Somebody snagged on my guitar case while I was getting on a jeep. It wasn’t easy to pick the person out, since main thoroughfares were always full of people, and this was a major jeepney stop besides. Too many people, I told myself. I sighed, and went into the vehicle. I refused to linger over anything. “Time’s a-wasting,” my psychiatrist once told me. He was this barkeep at a dumpy pub in an equally dumpy hotel, and I recognized his words as wise since it took a whole lot of wisdom to talk sense to drunks while sober. Didn’t matter that his next words were shoo, get away, we’re closing in five minutes. In the blur of events, those two words were what I dragged home with me, hardly conscious except for the ringing in my ears. Time was a-wasting.

What was I doing in a pub, getting plastered? Simply put, I was washing my frustrations down with magical nectar. Back in college, people would drink themselves senseless for a variety of reasons, but I stuck to the group that drowned their sorrows in the belief that some advanced program of the kidney was to soak up all the troubles in life, spewing it afterwards in piss and crap; alcohol was this function’s agent, just as ascorbic acid was what fought colds. Sadly, for both operations, the perfect results haven’t been achieved yet.

“Maybe that’s why piss is so perfectly amber, after a night of heavy drinking,” I told my bassist once. I think I was pretty drunk that time as well.

            On the jeep, I thought about this morning. My mom bugged me about school all the time, not that she was interested, but rather because she needed to talk when she gutted her chickens. Violence put on war paint and camouflage fatigues when it got down to doing the dirty work. If I ever have to beat someone up, I’d love to talk while I pounded his teeth down his throat. It was easier to digest that way, or at least that was what dad said whenever he excused himself from one of such conversations during mom’s pregnancy with me.

            Yeah, my molecular memory extended as far back as to my foetal development. I’d asked my bassist once about that. “Do you think we’ve descended from a single human genotype? Think we share a universal memory?”

“I’m not sure about the memory bit, but the single human thing, yeah. I’m Jehova’s witness.  I believe in the tale of Adonis.”

“Adam.”

“Whichever. And that points out a really interesting natural screw-up of life as we all know it; if we descended from singular parents, then what we’re really doing as we fertilize and multiply is screwing our own kin.” He licked his chops as he said this. “I could be doing my own cousin when I doggy-style my mistress from Iloilo; this incest, I like. But then again, that could mean that I was also screwing somebody related to you, let’s say. And that, I don’t like; I hate it when I’m compromised by a net of relationships.”

“I wasn’t exactly thinking of anything that convoluted. If we descended from one parent, then it could be safe to say that some of the memories in their genes were handed down equilaterally to individuals. Or that all the memory is in there, but it takes certain individuals to bring out certain characteristics.”

“You’re saying Adam and Eve were the perfect humans.”

“Nope; they did nothing but rest and frolick in the first part of their lives, then plowed the fields – both arable and adorable – in the second. But the memory was there since they both ate from the tree of eternal knowledge; they just didn’t have the tools to bring the inspiration out. When the piano was invented, Beethoven came about, deaf as a doorknob as he was. And now here I am, with my lovely Les Paul.”

“Kulas, if you’re saying that Beethoven’s genius is flowing through your gene pool, I’m going to start thinking that maybe you need a good stiffy on you, to be rubbed lovingly with Vaseline and rosemary oil.”

I kept silent. 

“Anyway,” he added a moment later, “Malmsteen’d be a better bet.”

He’d had a point there, and I stopped talking, concentrating on the table dance instead. This was two years after I graduated from college, thus proving that my mother was one screwed up son of a bat. I laughed out loud in the jeepney.