“Why should he be nice to you?”
“Eh, I noticed he existed, unlike everyone else?”
“But you flush one million easy to mess your brain for one night, and he has to clean your vomit for a whole month and not make as much.”
“You’re right. Are you not seeing your girlfriend this weekend?”
“She’s in Bandung with her parents.” Then: “Talk to the cleaning ladies before you leave. Didn’t you say they like to eat breakfast in the supply closet in the women’s bathroom?”
“Yeah. Around seven usually. Girls are puking their guts out in the sinks and those women just sit there eating coconut rice.”
“Tell them you’re hungry, but don’t want to order food from the club because it’s too expensive. Ask them to buy you coconut rice, give them a large bill, but not too large, tell them to keep the change. Once you have your rice, you’ll have to hide with them in the supply closet, and then you can talk to them.”
“That’s a great idea, Ferdi. Thanks.”
“Sure.” He rests his head on her shoulder. Once, after they kissed a month earlier, Ferdian wondered what it would be like to date Risa. But he could imagine what Risa would say if he asked her out. He knew she knew what she had to do. Out there, there are obligations to meet, family expectations to fulfill.
Out there we live in the hours, rowing our boat on a river of cause and effect that flows mercilessly onward, but in rooms like this we can do what we like with the hours, spray the past into the present, encase the present in a bubble, shove the future out the window and draw the curtains. In rooms like this Ferdian and Risa can hold each other’s hands.
×××
Patar comes out of the bathroom and sits on the sofa next to Yeni. His face is wet. He kisses her hair. Patar doesn’t smoke, so when the smell of nicotine or clove suffocates him, he likes to seek refuge in Yeni’s hair. It smells like a field of strawberries. He whispers, “Baby, we have to go home. It’s almost midnight. Your parents will be worried.”
Yeni circles her arms around his shoulders without opening her eyes.
“It’s OK. Just sleep. I’ll wake you up when we’re close.” He slowly lifts her up in his arms like a bride. “Say bye to Adisti, Ferdian, and Risa.”
Still with her eyes closed Yeni waves her hand. Adisti, Risa, and Ferdian get up and wave back.
The room holds its breath as Patar heads for the door. When it finally closes behind him, the room reanimates. People shout out their joy. They resume dancing, necking, lighting up cigarettes. Adisti, Risa, and Ferdian can finally exhale.
“Well done,” Ferdian says.
“Up?” says Risa.
They cheer with excitement. Ferdian reaches into his pocket and presents three white pills on his palm. Each swallows one and grabs a bottle of water. Holding each other’s hands, the three walk out of the room and take the stairs to the rooftop. They can see flashes of blue from up ahead, the music booms louder and louder, they answer its call faster and faster, with each step up and up, higher and higher.
FOR YOUR MERRY DAYS ARE OVER
MICHAEL AARON GOMEZ
Two men stayed alive, crouched in the vault’s corners, with guns in their hands and prayers on their lips. They were the remaining members of the Kruxial Boize six-man armed robbery group. One was called Jhunel, the other Dodong. This was their first caper. And now it was looking to be their last – expecting the same end as the others, lying there shredded by the full-auto submachine gun fire from the police sent to raid them. Other casualties from the firefight were a couple of bank clerks, customers, and the manager. Any moment now the black-clad SWAT team could burst into the vault and pump them full of holes. No use for all this money now. They had only .38 paltiks against the cops’ H&K MP5s.
It happened so fast and off-script. Four of them were to pose as customers and sit far enough apart from each other to cover more ground. Jhunel and Dodong were to barge in, disarm the guards, and keep everybody else’s heads down. They were to shoot a guard in the leg to hurry things along. Once everybody had been tied up, the rest of the gang would rise up and keep watch – firing warning shots – while Jhunel and Dodong dragged the bank manager by the neck toward the bank vault. An accomplice from Tinago was to wait outside the nearby McDonalds’ in their getaway van, itself stolen. The whole operation was to last for just five minutes. Classic get-in-get-out.
The gang had planned this for a month, even rehearsed it. They had scoped out and memorized the interior of the BPI Perdices branch. Tripped alarms posed no problem either, for they had bet they’d be able to escape before the cops came. Tagalog action movies had taught them that the police are always late for everything.
But Michael accidentally dropped his gun on the floor before Jhunel and Dodong even got out of the van, inciting chaos and screaming, which provoked Junmar and Edwin and Jhon Mark to shoot the two guards dead, forcing the other two gangsters to hurry into the bank alarm bells ringing in their skulls, all six of them working on the fly like headless chickens, looking for the bank manager. Everything was fucked.
By Jhunel’s estimate they’d been in there for ten minutes too long. Even if the cops were always late, he hadn’t counted on them being that late. And still no sign of the bank manager. If they had just learned how to make bombs they’d have had no need of him. But there was nobody to teach them – there were no Muslim terrorist cells in Dumaguete City. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes had gone by before they found the guy. He’d been cowering in the stall in the toilet, his feet up on the throne. Jhunel held him at gunpoint to lead them to the bank vault. Just when the manager had opened the vault doors they heard sirens, megaphone-yells and crunching boots, and Michael felt something warm streaming down his leg.
Jhunel put a bullet in the manager’s head and they rushed to shovel as much cash as they could into their flour sacks. Up on the toilet’s ceiling was a vent they could use to escape, but no one knew where it led, plus the crawl space seemed too small for a person – even those as spectral as the Kruxial Boize – too small and too narrow for a person carrying sacks of cash. The only windows were in the bank manager’s office, but they opened out to the streets now filled with cops. A SWAT van was parked on the sidewalk. Now the six men’s legs were soaked. No choice. They had to fight their way out, and take hostages. Michael led the way. He used a yelling old woman as a human shield. He made his demands with warning shots, which the police answered with a hail of hot lead. He fell and stopped his demands.
When Junmar, Edwin, and Jhon Mark blew their shields’ heads off and decided to meet their fates on the bank steps, like brave cowboys, Jhunel and Dodong knew it was all over. They lugged two sacks of cash each and fled to the vault. None of them had imagined making their last stand on their first operation. The plan was foolproof − they just had shitty execution and wasted too much time. They had no contingency plans for accidents – Dodong wanted to blame Michael for dropping the fucking gun, but Jhunel shushed him. “It wasn’t his fault. We just panicked out there.”
Dodong burst into tears while Jhunel fought back his. They had seen their four friends ripped apart by unfeeling SMGs.
The SWAT team searched the bank for them, releasing the bank customers.
Jhunel imagined the SWAT team’s arsenal – he had seen enough police movies to have his own set of stock images – and considered their chances. He could see their shining M-16s, thick body armor, grenades, and a battering ram, the small kind. He wondered if the battering ram could actually smash through the vault’s reinforced steel door. Maybe they’d use grenades or maybe they had like, tiny bombs for times like this.
“We should have borrowed one,” Jhunel snickered.
Dodong looked at him funny and asked what was up. Jhunel said it was nothing. “I’m just scared.”
“Me too,” said Dodong.
They checked their ammo. Jhunel wondered if he could aim for the policemen’s heads when they finally blew that door open. He probably cou
ld, but he’d most likely be dead before he could even lift his .38. It felt like hell inside the vault. There were no windows, only steel. The two remaining Kruxial Boize fanned themselves with the bills from their sacks. Jhunel and Dodong had never felt more tired in their lives, even more than after their most strenuous, full-blooded rehearsals.
Dance rehearsals, that is.
×××
The Kruxial Boize had been a dance group.
It was Jhunel who’d assembled them three years earlier, when the TV variety show Showtime had called for dance groups nationwide to battle it out over a period of months, for the grand prize of three million pesos. He called his mates Dodong and Michael from the barangay, Edwin from college, and Junmar and Jhon Mark from high school.
They had been rejected from the city’s other, bigger dance groups, also vying for a spot on Manila’s Showtime. ‘Not really what we’re looking for,’ the refrain went. The six men had all been amateur dancers in some capacity. All of them had performed in school programs, barangay contests, city fiestas, intermission numbers in minor beauty pageants, backup dancing in talent shows, and political rallies. People liked them well enough – save for Dumaguete’s star dancers. Jhunel once hit one of them in the face, a gay dancer named Dondie, the go-to trainer of high schools preparing for Founder’s Day events, notorious for his pink fan and his foul temper, which Jhunel tasted for the whole night of practice for a minor contest at university.
“You don’t know how to dance, you stupid,” the homo would insult him. “Why don’t you just go home and stop wasting my time, why do you even call yourself a dancer?”
Jhunel said it was the fan that made him snap. “I can dance,” he told Dondie. “Fucking faggot, I know how to.”
Post-practice, Dondie had made him stay behind for more humiliation. The homo kept hitting Jhunel with the fan and yelling at him until he stood up and knocked Dondie on his ass with a hook to the jaw. He pummeled the trainer, who in short order began yelping for help. Like a scalded dog, he thought as he gave Dondie the beatdown of his life. Soon the police came and arrested Jhunel. They had him apologize to Dondie at the station, where he kept screaming for Jhunel to be thrown in jail. The cops just snickered at him. Jhunel said sorry, smiling at Dondie’s grape-colored face.
It turned out that the world of dancers was smaller than he thought: Dondie tattled to the other star dancers (most of them gay) and they blacklisted Jhunel, plus everybody else who might be related to him, however distantly. They were to be treated like lepers. Dodong and the rest knew what Jhunel had done, why they’d been rejected, but they remained loyal to their friend.
“That’s what you get,” they said. “Fuck you. We’ll win the grand prize on our own, we’ll show all you fucking homos, suck our dicks.”
Thus, did the Kruxial Boize come into being.
Jhunel had thought up the name: he didn’t know what it meant, he just liked how it looked on paper, and how it sounded. Their only problem was that they were strapped for cash. They couldn’t afford the trip to Cebu for the Showtime auditions, scheduled three months hence. Don’t even think about costumes. Not one of them was employed, half were students. Dodong, Michael and Jhunel relied on intermittent rackets – beauty pageants and talent shows for money. The other three couldn’t rely on extra cash, since their parents didn’t think much of dancing and would have refused them outright had they revealed the Kruxial Boize and their plans.
Infuriating them further were Dondie and the rest rubbing their faces in it: Dondie’s group, named Primal Objectz, was already preparing for their Cebu trip, posting photos of their costumes (silvery shining ensembles) on Facebook and Instagram, with captions reading, ‘Showtime hir we cum!!!!’. Jhunel wanted to wring the homo’s neck, show him which of them really couldn’t dance. Didn’t even know how to name a group properly. The rest of the group grew angry, then despondent, and then dispirited. Their self-appointed leader had to do something.
Good thing he lived in Tinago.
He had contacts with people in the “hood” – at least those with toes dipped in the underworld, anyway – and he asked for connections, an “in” to the city’s shabu trade, whose routes originated from Cebu and snaked through the rest of Central Visayas. Asked what the hell he needed the money for, Jhunel said it was for his sick grandmother. His drug-dealing friends laughed at him. He admitted everything. They laughed at him some more but introduced him to their supplier – an obese Chinaman who had gold teeth, and who also laughed at him, but agreed to supply him with a half-kilo of shabu every two weeks, their cuts 60/40.
And so Jhunel began his life as a businessman. He sold drugs to government workers, to office employees, to rich college kids, and soon his business pleased the Chinaman enough to raise his product to a kilo per week. Their cuts became 70/30, but it still left Jhunel with enough breathing room. He had enough sense not to flaunt his money. It didn’t take long before Jhunel earned enough to have costumes sewn. Again he oversaw the design: a complete outfit, comprising red sleeveless shirts studded with shiny pinheads and glittering black pants – yellow thunderbolts streaked across the shirtfronts and along the pants’ legs. He spent three nights drawing up the designs.
The Kruxial Boize wore these costumes during the robbery.
Jhunel didn’t flaunt his money, but he wasn’t greedy either. He gave extra cash to the other members, bought shoes and other things they needed, and each time they met there was always top-notch food and mid-shelf drinks. When Dodong asked him about his sudden wealth Jhunel just smiled and squeezed Dodong’s shoulder and said he found himself a job. Dodong knew better than to ask more questions, but it was fishy: Jhunel had stopped smoking Fortune Reds/Mighty Reds and switched to Marlboros and Lucky Strikes. And the kicker was, he bought them in packs.
×××
In the vault Dodong asked if Jhunel really sold shabu. Through the steel walls they could hear faint human noises. The leader was staring at his gun, and he looked at his friend and said he won the Suertres lotto game ten times. That is why he got so rich. And then he laughed. Dodong kept looking at him funny. He told Jhunel there was nothing wrong with selling drugs. Really nothing. They made it to Cebu, didn’t they? What else could you have done?
Jhunel said maybe this was all payback from God.
He certainly didn’t believe in one during his drug-dealing days. God never gave him money, no matter how many times he prayed. So then he had no problem letting Junmar and Jhon Mark in on his business. When they’d asked him where he was getting his money, he’d told them straight up he was a drug pusher – he’d hoped he’d sounded too incredible for them.
But they didn’t laugh at him. The duo wanted in, too. They’d never seen so much cash in their lives. And plus, they were too embarrassed to ask Jhunel for more money. After all he was still their leader, so they figured they might as well start hustling too. They could buy clothes every week, and brand new cell phones. They could finally play DOTA as long as they wanted. The Chinaman scoffed at Jhunel when he asked him to up his supply of shabu to two kilos a week.
“One and a half,” the Chinaman said.
Jhunel accepted and the three of them divvied up the product, each of them receiving equal cuts from the sales. That was how much Jhunel loved his Kruxial Boize.
His only instruction was: “Never get high on your own supply.”
Which they promptly did. They started skipping meetings and practices, and when they did show up they were clearly in no shape to even dance a two-step. The other Kruxial Boize wanted them out, Jhunel did too, but he was scared they might not make it to Cebu, much less Showtime, if they were incomplete. It was some kind of superstition to him. But he had no choice – the three million pesos was more important. He regretted letting Junmar and Jhon Mark in on the racket, but he thought them weaklings for succumbing to the drug, too gutless to keep the millions in view. Jhunel and the rest gave the two offenders beatdowns and then sent them on their way. They hadn’t even receive
d their costumes.
There was silence for half a year until they returned from Cebu, and found Junmar and Jhon Mark asleep on the streets, all strung-out and ghostly, their addictions having finally devoured them. Their parents had disowned them, kicked them out of their houses. Now they lived under the yellow lampposts of the Boulevard, begging everything that moved for cash and scraps. The two still wore the same shirts they’d worn the last time the Kruxial Boize had met complete.
Jhunel took pity on them and let them shack up with him at Tinago. He took care of them while they detoxed, saw demons, and formicated. He fed them and supported them until they were as close as possible to normal. During recovery he apologized to them for fucking them up.
“You won’t see drugs here,” he told them. “I’m not a pusher anymore.”
It was during this time that Jhunel toyed with the idea of reforming the Kruxial Boize – this time as a criminal group. Sort of like gangsters, he thought. First he thought about becoming carnappers, but realized he didn’t know what to do with the cars they’d steal. And then he thought about becoming burglars, but he figured preparations would waste too much time. He’d had enough of waste. Just thinking about it made him want to hurt someone. Dondie’s mocking face popped up in his dreams and he imagined ramming a boiling hot steel rod up his ass. Finally he decided they would become bank robbers.
×××
The noises outside the vault grew louder. Jhunel and Dodong gripped their guns, holding their cash-sacks against their chests, sweating blood and piss. Combat boots thudded on the floor and in their heads. The last members of the Kruxial Boize waited for the inevitable. They both knew they were going to hell, and they didn’t want to go there alone. But the noises peaked and then passed. The two men didn’t know whether to be relieved. Just get this whole thing over with. Jhunel checked and rechecked his ammo, spinning the .38’s cylinder so fast it looked ready to fly off. Dodong wiped his sweat on his shirtfront. The room stank of piss.
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