Jim Turner had gotten used to being called “Kanô,” a derisive reference to his being an American and one that eventually became his friends’ term of endearment for him.
In his now-shuttered bar, Remember When, first-time patrons learned lessons in being rude by initially being so toward Kanô.
“What is this SOB doing here?” a journalist said one night many years ago, making sure it was said in Filipino and within Jim’s hearing. It was a time when the dust of upheaval was starting to settle, just months after the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family fled Malacañang.
Remember When had become the habitué of leftist labor leaders, communist guerrillas just freed from prison, and journalists who found it to be like a cork-lined recording studio where they could let loose with the biases they kept in check in their jobs. Anti-American sentiments were as part of the ambience as the framed, yellowed newspaper pages that hung on the wall.
“Hijo de p*ta,” Jim, sitting on a stool in the dim bar, exclaimed in reply to the rude remark directed at him.
The first-time patrons looked at each other, eyes wide in amazement. “Did he understand us?” one asked the bartender. With a nod and an impish smile, the bartender gave away what Jim delighted in keeping a secret: making fools out of trash-talking patrons who viewed foreigners as objects of ridicule, specially in that part of Malate in Manila, where a white man often takes the form of an aging Caucasian, usually intoxicated, cavorting with bar hostesses.
Jim owns the place, the bartender told the first-time patrons with amusement in his voice and a smile firmly planted on his face.
Kanô also owned The Hobbit House, a pub next door to Remember When that offers live music, alcohol, some Irish food, and service by real-life hobbits—men and women who found work other than being circus acts because of him.
Jim Turner first set foot on Philippine soil as a Peace Corps volunteer. He served in places where he soon learned to speak the country’s various languages. He often said the Philippines was a far better place to live in than the United States. He grew up in Iowa, where the vast cornfields and subzero winters turned the farms’ sea of yellow into a white, frozen landscape.
On a typical night in Remember When, Jim would be barking out orders in Filipino to his bar staff, trailed by a black Labrador named Tim. The dog, who slept in Jim’s bed, got him in trouble with the owner of a fighting cock that Tim, true to his breed, chased one day in the street. The cock ended up in Tim’s jaws and, in Jim’s words, died of a heart attack.
It was one of Tim’s misdeeds that Jim laughed loudly about, an anecdote he loved to narrate repeatedly and made his blue eyes tear up in delight.
But the nights that put Jim in his element were those that he spent discussing with friends one of the subjects he loved most: politics, whether in the Philippines or the United States. His keen interest in Philippine politics and government affairs earned him friends and followers who sometimes teased him as a brain-picker but nonetheless spent hours in discussions with him.
It also stirred suspicion that Jim had turned Remember When into a listening post for the CIA, which he would scoff at with his favorite cuss words—hijo de p*ta.
Though largely met with a shrug by those who knew him well, this suspicion of his connection with the CIA opened the door to more teasing from his good friends, among them the late broadcast journalist Jun Bautista, who added “Hey Joe” to the terms of endearment for him.
Jim simply laughed these off. But at one time, he was unable to hide how he felt about being viewed as a foreign intruder. “They call me Kanô,” he said, his blue eyes darkening. “But I am more Filipino than some of you are.”
Looking back at how Jim lived his life in the Philippines for more than 50 years, raging at the social ills that beset his adopted land, he was so right.
Farewell, Kanô.
Tony S. Bergonia does contractual work for the Inquirer’s Regions.