-=(Sagien)=-

Cancerous

Found while cleaning: The number of packs smoked in a span of two weeks. I really have to invest in this newfangled "trashcan" invention...

This is to illustrate how clean my kitchen has gotten. Isn't it great?

Oh yeah.. check out the hat. You wish you had one.

Ahem

Let's not dwell on my not posting in almost a month. Let's just get down to business. I do love stories. =) Especially ones from the old country...

barkada (bar-ka-da)

n. gang

It really is a shame that the ilonggo dictionary has only that as a translation for the word. Ilonggo is the dialect that I spoke when I lived in the old country.

The true meaning of the word would be a set a friends that one hangs out with on a regular basis. Minus the weaponized bottle cap flingers, we were hardly a gang. I'd describe it more as a crew. Yes. A crew. And I was their fearless leader:

Bon-bon as mentioned in one of my earlier stories this kid is the son of a driver. His father drove the cars of his boss who lived next door to me.

Bon-bon was the closest to what I would consider a best friend. He mostly wore hand me down clothing acquired from what the natives called relief. Relief were supplies provided by wealthier nations and individuals. Kind of like the Salvation Army. It may be trendy here, but it was a way of life there.

He was never going to amount to anything, that kid. My last sighting of him is up for review. I wasn't really sure if it was him or not, but it definately resembled him.

It was during my trip to the homeland a couple of years ago. I was visiting my childhood apartment and at the street corner was a man roughly my age with a brown bag which, I can only assume, hid a bottle of alcohol. I wanted to say hello to him.. but thought better of it.

Norman was mentioned in the above story as well. He was very feminine in his ways, which was understandable. He didn't really live in what normal humans would call an apartment. His home was the back room of a tailorshop/wig store/watch repair shop/beauty salon/dentist office.

The store wasn't very big. It was about half the size of a small Radio Shack store. At any given moment, there would be several colorful individuals in the store.

His father was the tailor. My parents went there a lot to get their clothing resized.

The wig store/beauty salon was run by a gaggle of cross dressing fags. They were so good at their craft that they actually looked like women. These men were the source of Norman's feminine ways. It wouldn't surprise me if he was a crossdressing piece of faggot himself these days.

I hated Norman. I hated him because I thought he was gay. I punched him several times in the stomach.

JR, pronounced Jay Ar, was really gay. He lived in yet another backroom of a shop ran by his parents. It was a restaurant/video game setup.

His parents were one of those people who tried desperately to look like they have money. The fact of the matter was, the restaurant didn't do too well. They served food that literally looked like shit.

One time, I was looking at their display window, and on a plate was something that resembled something that came out of a human anus. It was shaped like a banana and it was brown. I have no clue as to what it was, but I would never eat there.

I came to the conclusion that JR was really gay when, at the tender age of 10, I was hanging out with him in his bedroom. He dropped his pants and tried to jump on me on the bed. I pushed him off of me and ran out of there. It was scary.

One time, during the month of December, we were out in the courtyard of the storage place next door to me. We had just put together a homemade firecracker, pieced together from parts of other homemade firecrackers. We did that because we thought it'd make a bigger bang.

I really should've figured out how fuses worked before lighing the sucker... The "fuse" burned into the bomb and after holding our breaths awaiting the expected destruction, our creation did nothing.

JR walked up to the firecracker and picked it up.

And then it exploded.

He stared at his hand for what seemed like an eternity. I counted his fingers and saw that they were still all there. He then et out the most high pitched scream I ever heard and he started running.

Norman, Bon-bon, Jose and I all ran after him. He made a beeline straight into his parent's store and jumped on his father's lap, screaming.

Ah, memories.

There were others in my sordid cast of poverty stricken friends, but those are the three main players.

There you have it. Now I can start telling more stories without introducing them every time. Stay tuned.

Posted by sagien at April 18, 2006 03:04 AM