If I told you that we once owned a rooster that could play dead, would you believe me? I didn’t think so. But I’ve got the photographs to prove it.
For most of my childhood well into young adulthood, I lived with my family in a small, rented apartment: 62-A West Point Street, in Cubao. Most days, my sister and I could just walk to school two blocks away, but during the worst of the rainy season, we’d have to hop on a tricycle to get there. Our two-story apartment had two bedrooms, a living-dining area, a separate toilet and bath, and a little kitchen. A pocket of empty space in the back served as a laundry area.
The kitchen sweltered in the summer, and my mother, who was both a great cook and an indifferent one, hated cooking in the heat. So if you happened to drop by our home in April or May and opened our fridge door, you would see three colours: red for watermelon, yellow for boiled sweet corn and white for singkamas or turnip. We lived on these for days at a time, when the temperatures soared well beyond my mother’s tolerance for stuffy kitchen and hot stove.
Some summer days, she would send us to the sari-sari store on the corner of West Point and New York Streets to buy Coca-Cola. Or she would press a handful of change into my sister’s palm and tell us both to bring three glasses, and we would walk hand-in-hand to a little halo-halo stand that had been set up outside a house across the street. There, the lady of the house or her helper stood behind a row of jars filled with little bits of shimmering, jewel-colored sweetness: green nata de coco, red kaong, yellow langka, pale orange slivers of rock melon. They would take our glasses, fill the bottom with scant teaspoons of each ingredient and a heaping tablespoon of sugar, then top up each glass with shaved ice and a swirl of evaporated milk. After paying, we walked carefully back to the apartment, selfishly guarding our icy treasures.
Some of our neighbors beyond the wall of our laundry area had rather unusual tastes in music. For many weeks one summer, one neighbor played, ad nauseam, Michael Jackson’s “Happy”. And here is where our pet rooster comes in. We’d adopted Tat-Tat as a baby chick the year before and he quickly grew to a prodigious height. And oh, how he hated Michael Jackson’s pre-adolescent falsetto. Every time the singer hit the high notes on that song, Tat-Tat would scream bloody murder, flapping his wings and pacing around his wooden cage furiously. It got so bad that we seriously considered begging the neighbor to change the music. In later years, the music on perpetual repeat would be the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited”, and then it was our turn to scream bloody murder and pace around the apartment furiously.
The author’s mom, with Tat-Tat, the rooster who could play dead.
Tat-Tat also developed a special talent under our mother’s tutelage: he could convincingly play dead. With a little bit of coaxing, his legs would relax, his head would droop, his large body and creamy white feathers would hang limply from my mother’s hands. But when we lifted the heavy red comb that drooped over one of his eyes, we would see that that eye was wide open, watching us humans with perhaps as much amusement as we were watching him. Soon enough, he was performing this trick, not just for us, but for our neighbors at the apartment block as well.
The Cubao of my childhood was not as seedy, run-down or congested as it would become in the last decade and a half. Some Sundays, after hearing Mass at one of the nearby churches or chapels, my father would take us down to Charlie’s Mami House for bowls of won ton noodles, sprinkled liberally with chopped spring onions and swimming in a clear broth. Other times it was Hong Ning Panciteria for ampalaya con carne and ho to tay, or Ma Mon Luk for their chicken mami and siopao. These eateries had a characteristic aroma that I have smelled in no other restaurant that I have ever been to since: an enticing top note of spring onion and ginger, a middle note of chicken stock and MSG, and a not-so-appetizing base note of human exertion and dirty mop water.
The week’s marketing was usually done on a Saturday morning, at Nepa Q-Mart or Farmers’ Market. If we wanted to go window-shopping, there were lots of choices: ShoeMart or Rustan’s if my parents happened to have a little extra in the bank or the wallet, Rempson’s, Isetan or COD Department Store if not. For school supplies, G Miranda on Aurora Boulevard was just a short walk or tricycle ride away. It could only be Ali Mall, if my sister and I wanted to just go to a big National Bookstore and indulge in one of our favorite pastimes: looking at paper and notebooks. We loved to run our fingers across notepads and stick them inside reams of bond paper, comparing the smoothness and texture of the paper. And when I started learning to play the guitar, my father – himself an avid guitarist – and I would take special trips to JB MusicMart or Salonga’s, to buy guitar strings and test the new guitars that they had on offer.
Cubao was especially memorable at Christmas because all the shops and stores would be brightly-lit and decorated for the holidays. Some Christmas evenings, my father would tell us to get dressed, and we would all stroll down to Aurora Boulevard in the December chill and cross over to the other side to watch the annual Christmas tableau at COD. A small crowd would already have formed at street-level, everyone craning their necks to see the animated display, waiting for the choo-choo train to chug past, for the reindeer to prance, for Santa Claus to laugh and wave at us. I don’t know if it was the Christmas spirit, but it was easy, then, to strike up a conversation with families who had come to see the display as we had, to engage in friendly debate over whether this year’s display was as good as last year’s or the year before that.
We moved to another part of Quezon City in 1992; and in the year 2000, I left the Philippines to work overseas, for what would eventually turn out to be a thirteen-year stretch. So I’ve pretty much lost track of all the changes that have taken place in Cubao. While on a taxi ride through the area just a few weeks ago, I kept pestering my sister with questions: “What happened to Ali Mall? Where is Fiesta Carnival? Where is COD? Is our old address still an apartment block?” The landscape of my childhood had changed so much that I could hardly recognize it any more.
But mostly, I think, it was the people who had changed: everyone I saw seemed to be in a hurry, and I didn’t see anyone who might have gladly stopped to chat about a Christmas display, or the weather. I don’t know. Maybe life in the city has simply gotten tougher. Maybe I’ve just grown old.
OTHER STORIES BY FH BATACAN:
– Our wish list for Janet Napoles
– In this season of storm and scandal, it’s we who are the real calamity
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