Fear and loathing in Marikina City

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Marikina City, it’s that unless there’s a cop watching, no one ever follows the pedestrian signals. Crossing the street at the four-way intersection in front of Meralco’s Marikina office is all about guts and smarts: Is there a jeep coming? Cross. Is it moving fast enough to be a danger to you? Cross faster. Besides, I was late and I crossed with an old lady. If anyone hit me, they’d hit the old lady as well, and that’s one news story surely no one wants to be part of. Pedestrian signals are more like suggestions, really.

I met a friend of mine at a kwek-kwek stall nearby. He was busy with half a cigarette and a fried egg when I got to him. “Hey,” I said while ordering some kwek-kwek, delicious, artery-clogging goodness, for myself. “Hey,” he said, tapping his cigarette and causing some of the ash to drift into the air and into his bowl. There’s an old saying that it’s the vehicles’ emissions that make street food taste good. I don’t know if that also applies to cigarette smoke, but he didn’t seem to notice.

We were meeting to discuss some ideas for a comic book that I was writing. Set in Marikina, it was about a magician meeting a dying old man, who was really the personification of the city’s spirit, and easing his passage from this world as his successor took his place. Deep, ambitious stuff, made really difficult because I honestly had no idea what Marikina was like.

A sheltered childhood in a gated community gets in the way when you’re trying to write about the weirdness of real life. The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in the subdivision was two kids walking their pet dog themselves rather than having the help do it. Shocking, right? I’ll give you some time to pick up and wipe the dirt off your dropped monocles.

So that’s what my trip to the kwek-kwek stall was for: information. I took some time off after class to go around Marikina, combing the streets and waiting for something weird or messed up to occur. More often than not, the stuff that I walked into or experienced for myself was kind of tame, nothing special, really, more like funny curiosities that break the monotony of our daily routines. And I thought that maybe talking to some of my friends from Marikina, those whose muscles aren’t atrophied or their skin paled by the lack of sunlight caused by months locked up in their rooms playing video games, could enlighten me.

“There was this time that I walked in on two guys placing their fingers on each other’s nipples and one of them said, ‘Pucha, mukha tayong bading, ah!’” said my friend with the ash-flavored kwek-kwek. “There was also this other time at the palengke… I saw a hard piece of plaster break off from the ceiling and hit a guy on the head. It was funny how he started swearing really loudly.”

“That’s funny, but anything weirder?” I said. “Anything darker, or maybe something more Hollywood-ish?”

I bought the two of us some gulaman and by then he was smoking his third stick, still oblivious to where his ash drifted. “Besides that one time they filmed ‘Bourne Legacy’ in the palengke? Nope, nothing really comes to mind. What about you?”

I pointed to the busy four-way on which I had just so skillfully cheated death not a quarter-hour earlier. “Well,” I began, “I once saw a crazy, half-naked woman running through the intersection over there. And there was that one time that I saw two guys fighting right outside a 7-11 without anyone so much as batting an eyelash.”

“What were they fighting over, bulalo kapnudels?” he asked, barely concealing a snicker.

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Maybe that’s it,” I continued. “Maybe Marikina is really apathetic? Crime is up now, and around 50 percent of it is related to drugs or something.”

“I don’t think so,” my friend said. “Marikina doesn’t look like a scene for gang violence or anything. It’s more like the setting of a coming-of-age drama than a dirty, kung-fu-cop-thriller. Either way, you can talk about either of them, depending on what you prefer or need.”

“How can I talk about either?” I said. “One has to be the right one, the other the wrong one, right? Unless you’re saying I should focus on my own perspective and what we perceive is our own truth, right? You mean something like that? Subjective writing?”

“Sure, let’s go with that.”

The comic book, like most of my other works, is now collecting dust somewhere in the chaos that is my bedroom. I think the script may be under the pile of poli sci readings next to my monitor, or under my mattress next to an FHM given as a gag gift by my block mate. I don’t really know, and I can’t be bothered to go check, honestly.

While the comic book may have ended up as another idle, long-forgotten work, the ideas I got while getting lost in the city were things that stuck. At the risk of getting taken away by Mayor Del’s secret police (I know they exist, I just know it), I admit that I used to think Marikina was kind of messed up, but that was only because I was looking for it. You get what you look for. In my quest to find the “edgy, dark-realist fantasy-fiction” side of Marikina, I found it, but unknowingly, through the lens of my own bias that caused me to forget about all the nice stuff, the other 90 percent of the city that is full of positives and fluffy rainbows.

Or maybe it really is a dangerous place and I’ve just been brainwashed to believe in the validity of subjective beauty. I don’t know, but I suddenly have the urge to praise my lord and master Del de Guzman.

Carlo Yu, 18, is a political science major at Ateneo de Manila University with, he says, “an unhealthy interest in comic books and Gonzo writings.”