The Maginhawa St. State of Mind
Below is a piece I wrote for the Nostalgia issue of the Maginhawa Street Journal. The artwork above was by Amado Bajarias Jr., one of the journal’s co-founders and its designer.
(Names and details have been changed to protect the guilty, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut)
The first time I tried to move into Maginhawa Street was in the late nineties, when Yahoo! Groups was all the rage, the Nokia cellphone was the handheld of choice, and the then-Philippine president — an actor — was not known for killing people in real life.
At that time, I had a job so cushy — pounding the candy beat for a business newspaper — that an international bank issued me a credit card.
Never would have I imagined that covering the occasional bikini contest (which was a thing in those days) would eventually lead to an upgrade in my financial standing.
Deliberately or not, I had taken the first step in what appeared to be upward social mobility: I was young, had a career, and enjoyed front-row access to events, some of which were attended by slender females in swimsuits.
As expected, not everyone was impressed by my — how do I put this? — profession.
Among them included a group of writers and artists* who lived together in harmony in a Maginhawa Street apartment.
At the last moment, this cheesy bunch changed their minds and said they weren't ready for me yet.
Which was fine.
Then and now, I knew I was something of an acquired taste — like alcohol-free beer, virgin coconut oil, and Sarsi with egg.
Except that my would-be roommates should have expressed their reservations months ago, not a day before I planned to move in.
This had me completely floored.
After all, I had just come through with my part of the deal. I had scrounged enough money to cover my share of the rent and the deposit. I even bought new furniture to mark the occasion, using my newly-issued credit card.
But I was shown the door twenty-four hours before the Big Move.
With roommates like these, who needs frenemies?
That incident killed my dream of ever living on Maginhawa Street.
Years later, I received information that some of them were forced to blackball me because of the needling they got from Francis, a moody artist who neither drank, smoked, nor, for that matter, laughed. (He would later move abroad where he raised a family, manage to retire rich, fly back home, and live happily ever after in an address fancier than Maginhawa Street.)
Since then, Francis and I have met several times by accident but no one so far had enough sense of humor to suggest a reunion.
A month or so after that aborted move, I managed to bunk in with an up and coming poet who, at that time, was teaching at the University of the Philippines.
We were accompanied by his ward, a first year college student at the same university. The ward occupied the only room of our unit in the Katipunan Avenue district. (Joe and I slept on bunk beds in the living area.)
The unit had all the trappings of a torture chamber. It was long, narrow, dark, and musty.
Down at the end was the bathroom. Its amenities included a rusty drainpipe that stuck out from the wall where a sink was installed previously.
One night, while taking a shower, I took the wrong step and then slipped all the way to the door.
The drainpipe broke my fall but tore open a new asshole on my left cheek. It was a big bad bowl of butthurt.
But I still had reasons to be grateful.
Had I been facing the wrong way, the slip could have permanently damaged my goods.
Thankfully, the wound left only a keloid in its wake.
Nowadays, when it gets itchy down there (and it does, during the summer months), I am prompted to remember Katipunan with a special fondness reserved for frenemies.
About a semester later, as I was becoming used to living in a dungeon, my friend's ward decided to go back home for good. He was unable to adjust to university life and, with that, our tour of duty in Katipunan began to end.
But it marked the beginning of another complicated, long-winded, yet successful attempt on my part to live on Maginhawa Street.
Soon enough, I found someone whom I could share a place with. It was a close friend who just moved in with his girlfriend. They were looking to split the rent and related expenses of a two-bedroom apartment along Tandang Sora Avenue, also in Quezon City.
My friend and I then met over drinks where we talked about living arrangements.
When I got the impression that the bathroom contained no sharp objects, I sealed the deal immediately.
I moved to Tandang Sora as quickly as I could, if only to escape the drainpipe of death.
As soon as I settled in my own room, I put up what I had envisioned as the bare bones, bachelor version of the home office.
A few feet away from the foot of my bed was my desk which was occupied by my second-hand, seven-year-old PowerBook Duo 230. The Apple laptop had a greyscale screen and a built-in dial-up modem to which a phone cable was plugged in. That same phone cable ran the length of the ceiling in my room, through the door, down the stairs, to the living area where the connection was shared by a phone/fax machine.
To transmit the stuff I wrote for work, I used Eudora, an email software application, or connected remotely to the office network using ZTerm, a shareware terminal emulator for the Macintosh OS. The latter allowed me to send a text file that would be received by and directly saved on an office computer. Since that office computer — an Apple desktop — was linked to several other Apple desktops, my file could be copied directly onto my editor's computer where it could be edited and laid out. (This was high-tech at that time, since not every newspaper had its own computer network, or, for that matter, its own website. The newspaper I worked had both — it was one of the very first newspapers in the world to go online.)
My crib at Tandang Sora — and of course, my job — made it possible for me to live and work in what arguably looked like the future.
During the late 1990s, I was already working from home (at least on certain days of the week), more than two decades before the pandemic made it mainstream.
With convenient arrangements that suited lazy-ass bachelors (which I was back then and which I still am now, save for an episode of being married), Maginhawa Street was as far from my mind as the office.
But my stay at Tandang Sora, however sweet, was all too short.
One late afternoon, as I was preparing to email a draft, my friend's girlfriend marched up the stairs and stormed into my room.
"Your friend and I just broke up," she declared. "Now both of you will have one week to move out."
Upon hearing her announcement, I just continued to sit there, quiet and stiff. I felt like a piece of abandoned meat stuck at the bottom of the chest freezer of life. No one seemed to be particularly interested in the fact that I was forced to move again for the third time that year.
When I came to my senses, I went back to work, logged on to the Internet, and sent my draft. It might have been the last email message I would ever transmit from Tandang Sora.
This is because, luckily enough, the newly-minted single guy and the would-be homeless bum found an apartment on Maginhawa Street in less than a week.
Old and rickety, the place provided us with shelter, warmth, and tons of memories — it was the default venue of drinking sessions and parties. Once, it even became the meeting place of a now-defunct group of supposedly idealistic media workers called Journalists Anonymous (which started off, by the way, as a Yahoo! Groups mailing list).
The two-storey apartment was also a witness to other adventures: providing rest to friends after the front wheel of someone's car caved in while descending Kennon Road in Baguio City and giving temporary refuge to those discreet enough for a shake in the sheets.
Around that time, some people including myself also happened to think about launching a magazine whose name is similar but not related to that other journal on Wall Street.
It may have taken decades before the concept ever took off.
But then again, now that some of us are on the cusp of middle age, we regularly remind ourselves that easy always does it — which is the way things have always been done on the street where we lived.
* This group is different from the Maginhawa Collective, an older group of writers, economists, computer experts, and activists who also shared an apartment on the same street in the early nineties.
