SUZETTE, AS SHE INTRODUCES HERSELF, IS IN A THIN YELLOW BLOUSE and a skirt that ends at mid-thigh. She has the easy, unbuttoned style of a company executive after hours.
A half-hour later, we find ourselves in a bar near her place. There’s no band, only a DJ standing in a booth in one corner, playing dance music.
Her husband comes home on weekends from his cattle farm in Batangas. She’s trying for a baby.
In the foyer of her townhouse a row of cowboy hats, stiff and stained in patches, hangs on the wall. On the tiled floor there are five or six pairs of big cowboy boots, standing straight up, heels and soles caked with dirt, their sharp toes pointed straight at me. She deposits her keys on a small table, where a clutch of pictures is arranged in a tight semicircle. I can make out startling crescents of smiles, the silhouettes of heads and half-bodies against snowy landscapes, white beaches and warmly-lit living rooms.
I follow Suzette up the stairs and into her bedroom’s yellow light. I wake with the sky dangerously bluish and the forbidding smell of morning in the air. I fight the urge to return to sleep, but dawn also brings the smell of sex, the warmth of light and the sound of jazz. Eyes still closed, I play games with the upright bass, the kick drum and the snare, the piano and the muted trumpet, its melody delivered so clearly that I can imagine Miles Davis, the cup fixed to his mouth, live and oblivious, turning each labored breath into music. I fix the chords in my ears as they are played: a minor, an augmented, another augmented, a sustained, and then a ninth, the last chord let ring, riding on a single note from his trumpet, a note that holds, within it, other notes, other music.
Suzette moves slightly in the pause between songs. I force my eyes open and see hers tremble under closed lids. Her eyelids open briefly to scan the light outside the window, and close again. She starts humming the dance melody from the bar of the night before.
“They call it trance music,” I say into her hair.
“It isn’t as bad as the Eurodisco they play in beauty salons,” she says. “Or eighties music.”
“I kind of like eighties music.”
“I love eighties music,” she says, smiling. “I was joking.”
“I had a band in the eighties. You should’ve seen us then.”
I tell her of how my dad bought me a folk guitar when I was in high school and I learned to play it by looking at the chord charts in music magazines. How I formed a band with friends who did nothing but listen to music all the time and who knew some guitar or had some rhythm. How I found a friend who had some guitar schooling, who knew more licks so he played lead and I played rhythm and sang. The story is a multiplatinum hit.
A band’s name is like a ship’s name, a horse’s name. It needs to be seaworthy and trustworthy. It needs to be lucky. We called ourselves The Jones and Smiths. We were listening to a lot of The Smiths then and loved Junjun Jones. We took names from wordplay, or formed them from inside jokes, or picked phrases out of a book. Nine or ten names in all, for five or six bands, across twenty years, with scores of different guys.
“I remember him,” she murmurs. “Junjun Jones. I saw him on the road once, in front of the 70’s Bistro. It was four in the morning. He was carrying his guitar case, waiting for a cab. He looked so old and so sad, still doing the same old rock and roll.”
Suzette reaches for the remote. Her skin is white, whiter than white, and she would’ve stood out then, in the eighties, on any given night, in the campus variety shows and benefit concerts, in the Christmas programs and the New Wave parties. The music stops and there’s a series of soft clicks as the stereo changes CDs.
I look around slowly in the lazy light. This is her husband’s side. On the bedside table there’s a brass lamp, an alarm clock and a pile of books: spy thrillers, handgun catalogs, business manuals.
On Suzette’s table the lamp has been kept lit through the night. There is a chair stacked high with more reading material: a Larousse cookbook, a manual on home repairs, a coffeetable book on “Designing Small Gardens” and an illustrated guide to house plants.
She notices me looking. “I’m hopeless, huh? I’m planning a small garden around the house.”
“You’re pathetic,” I say. I imagine her squatting on the grass, turning up the soil, thinking about her life. A radio is playing top 40 songs, one of those songs we play every night, and she tilts her head from time to time to hear the ringing of the phone above the music. One of those phone calls could be one of those friends I saw the night before, asking her if she wants to watch the showbands.
Suzette has closed her eyes again. I slide out from under the sheets and lift myself out of bed. The stereo is playing Steely Dan’s “Aja”.
I walk the smooth wooden floor lightly and tell her of when I played the rebirth of punk and speed metal ten, fifteen years ago. I had a bottle of Red Horse in one hand and the mic in the other. We had a manager, a sound engineer, a roadie. I’d be waiting in the wings while the band thrashed out the intro. Our manager made sure the stage lit up when I went out. The crowd exploded. There were fistfights and rumbles. They threw chairs at us. They loved us.
The groupies came in early and hung around until after the gig. We’d be too tired but worked up at the same time. There were those who came alone and who always thought you were singing to them when you sang. There was a medical student who hung out at Club Dredd on most school nights. It was a jeepney ride away from the University. Her boyfriend listened to Kenny G and Kool and the Gang. After gigs we spent the nights in motels. Then she stopped going to school and started making me nervous. She threatened to kill herself with a scalpel. I told her to fuck off. She took off with my Stratocaster.
Suzette shifts and sits up in bed, following my movements with her eyes. I look at her, cross my arms and attempt a smile. On the stereo it’s jazz again, a song played by an acoustic trio, dangerously edging close to the chaos of free time, free form.
“‘Green Dolphin Street.’ Bill Evans, Right?”
“No,” she says. “Chick Corea.”
“Well, he’s doing Evans,” I say.
She arches her eyebrows. “Whatever.”
The song is in the middle of an ostinato. I’m sure I’ve heard this before. I’m a little confused because I’ve never heard it so bright, so close, so clear.
Suzette gets out of bed and closes all the curtains, one by one. The curtains are white, but thin enough to blunt our shapes into gauzy shadows to prying eyes. Her hair is all over her face and her breasts have suddenly become her eyes, full and clear, with brown nipples for pupils.
The big black remote control has materialized in her hand. The music fades out, retreating into the corners of the room, where I notice, for the first time, thin speakers covered in honeycomb steel, edged in black lacquer, powered by cables thick as a finger.
She slips into the bathroom and I listen to the sound of her pee and remember what’s in it: three glasses of red wine, a Margarita and a redbull vodka, maybe more. I hear her flush everything down. She hums to herself but I can’t pick up the melody. The door opens, and she is in a striped silk robe, but still naked underneath. I approach her and grasp her hips. Her half open mouth smells of toothpaste. She throws a squinty-eyed look at the clock on her husband’s table.
“Good morning,” she says. I take it to mean goodbye, and hurry. She walks to her bedside table, opens a drawer and picks up a jar of cold cream.
“What’s your day like?” I ask.
“Busy. Oh you mean today? Busy. Lots to do, lots to think about. Worry about is more like it.”
“Husband trouble,” I offer.
“No, just trouble. My husband doesn’t give me much trouble nowadays. He’s no trouble at all. Which is how we like it. He spends time on his farm.”
“Cow trouble.”
“Cattle trouble,” she says.
I don’t even know if they still ride horses on farms, like real cowboys. I think they mostly ride 4x4s now, brand new and pumped up on fat black tires, but always streaked with the kind of dirt you never find in the city, the clean and pure kind. It’s dirt from farm, dirt from the homeland. His name recalls that action film star who rode horses, wielded a bullwhip and used twin revolvers on enemies a hundred yards away.
She presses buttons on the remote. The machine clicks obediently. New music comes on, the stuff they call downbeat, anonymous and sophisticated, the kind they play in cafes and designer boutiques.
Our biggest break was Japan, or almost. Someone was opening a new club and they wanted a Filipino band to play. They held the audition at a KTV joint in Malate. It was deserted. It smelled of shit and there were rats in the seat cushions. Our manager made us rehearse a new repertoire that included pop and slow rock. I felt uneasy learning licks and lyrics from Scorpion and Journey and Toto, but we’d heard the older sessionists talk about life on the road, life with the band, playing clubs on Boat Quay, or in Lan Kwai Fong, or even in the half-empty lobby lounges in Bangkok hotels. I wanted to hear my voice, my sound, spilling out across the world, never mind that I’d be singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” or Toto’s “Africa” night after night to a small crowd that, they said, mostly thinned into a handful of homesick Pinoys. Better that way, they told me, or else I’d be playing all night to some strangers and then I’d be the one sick of loneliness.
We played our hearts out, played all night, but the club manager ended up picking a female vocal trio who wore cocktail dresses and sang Bananarama songs through headset mics. After that we split up for a while, then found a new name, new management, and a new life playing nightclubs, karaoke joints, parks and pizza parlors. By that time The Smiths had split up. The Dawn were gone. Color It Red had changed vocalists and The Youth just disappeared. I made connections with jinglemakers and advertising producers, finding among them old bandmates, old hangers-on, and new opportunities to get by.
By day I sell life insurance and real estate, calling old friends, looking up old acquaintances, recruiting them for my sales network, arranging to meet them at malls or coffee shops. Occasionally I play rhythm guitar for a friend who does karaoke versions of hit songs that are identical note-for-note, or sing for jingles and radio stingers adapted from the first few bars of pop songs.
When I return to the bedroom, the light has brightened and stretched itself out fully.
“Gotta go,” I announce. “Got work to do. Lots of people to call.”
Downstairs, in the morning light, everything looks fresh and peaceful. There are flowers in a vase. Beside the ashtray is a notepad with quickly written things. I cannot resist looking: the writing is almost illegible and I don’t recognize the names or the numbers.
When I had the old band we had a formula: three songs, then a short spiel, another four or five numbers, then another spiel to introduce the last three numbers. Ten songs made a forty-five minute set. Three sets gave us gate receipts for the night, money enough to eat and drink some more and take a cab home, with some left over.
There were times I’d see them connect, swaying and mouthing the words. I’d be untouchable and unreachable. Our music broke into a wail, soaring and diving all at once. On a good night there’d be spontaneous applause. Then I’d strum the opening riffs to the one song I’d written—“Untitled.”
By the end of the set there’d be four or five empty bottles on the stage. The last bottle I would shake over the audience’s heads. I’d seen Sid Vicious do that in a film they’d made of him. At the end of the film he had gotten so drunk and so stoned that he set fire to himself and his girlfriend while they were in bed.
I exit the living room without touching anything, without trying out the keys on the upright piano, without even looking at the pictures of strangers on the table. I hear the music turn louder in the bedroom upstairs.
On my way out I see the cowboy boots and the row of cowboy hats above it. I take the newest-looking hat and put it on my head. The fit is snug and ready. I walk out and the light is strong and bright. I head straight toward the sound of the highway and disappear into the horizon. •