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Latrinalia |
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“What you’re holding now is the future of the
Fatherland” “Please stick a pubic hair on this gum, in memory of those
who were here” “The dick of the guy beside you is always a victim of a
vanishing point”
# The word graffiti is
plural of the Italian word graffito, which means incised inscription or design, an ancient
drawing or writing scratched on a wall or other surface. During ancient times, graffiti
had some sort of a venerable reputation, usually a means to convey a story or a piece of
wisdom worth contemplating. The Egyptians, for example, had their hieroglyphs. I’ve always suspected it was just his way of rationalizing
what I thought was a demented form of self-expression, until someone told me that even on
the monuments of ancient Egypt, such graffiti pockmarked the ancient civilized landscape.
It suddenly dawned on me it was the man on the street’s one and only means to be
immortal. I am tempted to imagine an Egyptian Bob, three thousand years
ago, etching his lines of poetry and sarcasm on the side belly of a Sphinx, or on a slab
of the pyramid at Giza. I can see the maddened gleam in his eyes, the drool. I can feel
the catharsis. # I understand why Bob resorts to such a form of self-expression.
He stutters, especially when he’s anxious, or nervous, or excited. He helplessly
speaks the first syllable in a spasmodic manner, and there were times when he gets
misunderstood and people insult him or pick on him. Once, while watching a basketball game
on the bleachers of the Cuneta Astrodome, a group of pranksters had humiliated him so much
that he lunged at them, armed only with a ketchup-laden hotdog sandwich. The pranksters,
naturally, overpowered him, and he ended up with a few missing teeth, a punctured retina,
a few broken ribs and a bleaker, more hopeless worldview. That was probably why, at one point in his life, he decided to
scribble his sentiments on restroom walls. When I tell him that he’s beginning to
take on a patina of the low life, he’d berate me (haltingly) for misunderstanding
him, while declaring (that, too, was done haltingly) that what he’s doing may serve
as an intellectual catalyst. “I-I-I-Imm g-g-g-going to change the who-who-who-whole
landscape,” he declared, in his pure small town Caviteņo drawl. How, I asked of him. Simple, he grunted. He pulled out a
permanent marker pen from his rear pocket in a flourish, standing like Clint Eastwood in
some pathetic Western movie, his “gun” unholstered. Then, for cinematic effect I
think, he scribbled the words “intellectual revolution” on the pristine wall of
my room! Then he continued babbling something about affirming one’s
uniqueness and independence. I just stared at him in disbelief, aghast that he had just
desecrated my own room. He continued gesticulating until I threw him a bottle of alcohol
and left.
# Bob used to court my elder sister. No, I think it was more than
that. If my memory serves right, I think they went “steady” for a few months.
But back then, I wasn’t supposed to know. I was the little kid, the bunso, who
served as the bridge who ate all the chocolates and obligingly giggled at all of his corny
jokes, delivered so awkwardly, while my sister slapped the mosquitoes and stared longingly
out the window. Then my sister left for New York. I remember Bob at the airport
on the day of my sister’s departure, his face pressed hard onto the metal railings,
his stare blank and uncertain. I didn’t mind him, though. I always thought both were
misfits for each other. Bob, the handicapped jologs that he all was, and my sister,
the bitch who loved being dined in fancy restaurants and who wouldn’t bathe without
her beloved bar of French-milled soap, were simply worlds apart. Bob simply had it coming. The poor fellow never sensed it, or simply refused to believe
that it would ever happen. At the airport on the day of her departure, Bob shamelessly
wept like a baby, the sound coming from him was like the guttural mating call of a horny
hippopotamus. And I, the little kid, the bunso, tapped him on the shoulder and
unabashedly told him: “Start growing up, man. Look for someone else who’d really
love you.” Bob never forgave me for that.
# I
also happen to be a visual artist. Call me painter, if you want to insult me. Bob always
calls me in many different names to annoy me. Bob has invented many such names. He calls
me “Van Gogh,” or “Picasso,”—artists I never admired—or
“boat painter.” He would walk in my room while I work, and would belt out a
deconstruction over my shoulder. Then he’d call me boat painter. Boat painter? I had
never even painted any goddamned boat. I specialized in nudes, and I couldn’t imagine
spending lonely hours putting on my canvass all the uninspiring curves of a boat. I think
he was doing that in retaliation. Unrequited love, eh? Now, the poor brother’s gonna
suffer. I wonder, too, why he never left our lives. He kept coming back
even long after my sister had left. I think now he just couldn’t get over it.
He’d appear in our door with a bottle of gin, and would challenge me for a round.
I’d usually relent. By then, I was aware of how his speech handicap was breeding one
social failure after another, culminating in an arpeggio of an interminable loneliness. He told me one night that he was redoing the things he used to do
before he met my sister. “Yeah?” I
said. “Like what?” “P-p-p-poettt-ry,” he said. “Poetry?” “Yi-yi-yeah,” he muttered, downing a half-glass of gin,
its recycled vegetable smell reeking from his mouth. “Y-y-y-you kk-k-now, m-m-m-my
one-liners are k-ki-k-k-kkillers.”
# Quite early in the founding of the first human cities, the need
for a new means of expression, more reliable than the oral form, became apparent. Spoken
tales were no longer the be-all and end-all of human affairs. It had to be written down. Some say the first letter, or symbol, was etched by a Sumerian
tax collector on a piece of clay tablet. Others claim the Egyptians had beaten the
Sumerians to it, the ancient Egyptians being more complex and mysterious than the latter.
In both cases, writing had been apparently invented because of economic necessities. For
example, to record taxes or tithes to a tyrant. Later, it became complex and baffling.
Poetry. Religion. Collective neuroses. The visitation of an alien spacecraft. Things like
that. I decide the inventor is irrelevant. Writing itself is a dynamic,
pulsating organism. It changes, transmutes itself, evolves. Sometimes, like a revolution,
it devours its own children.
# Bob the poet was firmly convinced that he has become a graffiti
guru. The fellow was claiming that doing intellectual scrawls side-by-side with the
mindless ones would counter-defeat the urge to be nasty. The result would be a brave new
world—a world that while largely unacknowledged, was nevertheless existent and
potent, throbbing beneath the visible layer of civilization. He figured it out to be completely dependent on two crucial
factors: time and social exposure. If he’d get his numbers right, he thought, it
would be equivalent to getting published. He would, at last, be a published poet—on a
new medium, of course. It’s like hitting two birds in one stone. But bird or no bird, I extremely doubted the wisdom of it all.
But then again, my whole role in the drama was to nod at seemingly intelligent conjectures
and give him sarcastic grins. I was the kid, remember? “So, are you going to get yourself arrested, what with your
name splashed all over restroom walls across the city?” “I-I-I-I d-d-d-on’t have to do that,” he says,
with his usual cool. “I-I-I-I’m using a pseud-d-d-d-ddonym.” “Pseudo… what?” “A ps-s-s-s-ssseudonym…” He snapped. Bob seemed to
be on the tail-end of a somnambulogue. “H-h-h-h-hhow d-d-do you
like—Z-z-zzz-zoroaster??” # Bob exploded into my room one sweaty afternoon. He was fuming
mad. Apparently, his “experiments” with restroom walls were a bit
“disconcerting.” He scribbled the words “Know thyself,” he said, in the
men’s restroom in a fast food restaurant somewhere. He came back this morning to
check, only to find out someone crossed out the word “know” and replaced it with
“fuck.” “Those p-p-p-ppperverts!” he said, furiously.
“Those mindless, s-s-s-s-sshithouse kids! They d-d-d-d-ddidn’t even realize they
d-d-d-d-dddesecrated a g-g-g-ggolden truth.” “I see you’re quite mad,” I said, feigning
indifference. “Does it indicate surrender?” Bob shook his head defiantly, saying that the incident only gave
him further clues as to how the psyche really runs. How does it run then, I asked of him.
He gave me a mean look, and went off shaking his head. For me, everything about it was all bull. But I kept my mouth
shut and pretended I understood. I often wonder now about Bob’s sanity. Was he really
nuts, and was it just so subtle I didn’t even notice it? # Trust an American essayist named Allan Dundes for coining the
word latrinalia. It simply means shithouse poetry, the purest language of the soul in the
most primal situation. It seems the ecstasy of relieving oneself in the john conjures the
most fundamental and ambivalent thoughts about the common life. No wonder, emotions flow
unbridled, echoing in the walls of any given restroom: hatred, grief, love, lust, hope or
the total absence of it.
# According
to Bob’s projections, we would be able to influence the human psyche by carefully
manipulating the course of graffiti in the most popular restrooms—by this we mean the
toilets of places most frequented by people, such as universities, fast food restaurants,
cinemas, malls, etc. He was dreaming of elevating reality as we knew it into a level more
appreciated by the intellect. I knew the dream was demented, but I didn’t rend him. I
was quite contented in being an accomplice to the whole crime, furtively tailing Bob as we
hopped from one restroom to another. I’ve even begun to appreciate the always-present
stench, and the thrill that spiked my nerves. # The felt-tipped permanent marker pen, made in Japan,
claimed to write on practically any surface, and would last longer than necessary. I
brought one for this sortie, slipping it into my jeans’ rear pocket. I had
particularly chosen to wear an oversized shirt to conceal the pen’s protruding end,
to avoid detection from any over-zealous guard. Bob, on the other hand, brought two—the other one as back-up
just in case the other untimely conked out. We were going to a newly opened Chinese
restaurant down town, its toilet walls presumably so pristine and white Bob’s just so
eager to “devirginize” them. Bob’s enthusiasm was understandable. We were just fresh from
a supposed victory. He had scribbled the words “Kurt Cobain is dead” on a toilet
wall of the psychology department at the university I attend to. A day later, we came back
only to see “Kurt Cobain” crossed out and replaced by the word
“everyone.” I thought he’d explode again right then and there, but instead
he smiled, pulled out his marker, and quietly wrote “little by little, everyday”
just beneath the statement. Now, the whole statement read “Everyone is dead, little
by little, everyday.” Four weeks passed, but it remained the same. No one, so far,
has dared to mangle even a single letter. Bob theorized we perhaps were running along the
path of the human psyche. We’ve struck a chord, a truth everyone perhaps understands. The guard at the newly opened Chinese restaurant was
extraordinarily polite. He would even volunteer to mop the floor when no one’s coming
in. I was about to point that out when I noticed Bob’s quite jumpy and restless. He commented about the kind of people coming in and glanced in
the direction of the narrow corridor that presumably led to the restrooms. “A continuous stream of people,” I observed, “a
constant danger of being caught.” Bob grunted, and reassured me that it was all right—as
though his stutter ever reassured me. # What we wrote on the Chinese restaurant’s restroom wall was
this stanza from Jonathan Swift: “Remove me from this land of slaves Where all are fools, and all are knaves, Where every knave and fool is bought, Yet kindly sells himself for nought” But this morning, when Bob dropped by, his face was beet red in
anger. “S-s-s-s-ssssomeonnne used ch-ch-ch-charcc-coal!” “A what?” “Ch-ch-charc-c-coal!,” he gestured. Frustrated at my
inability to comprehend, he walked to my sketch board and wrote, “Someone, an
ultimately good for nothing yahoo, used charcoal to obliterate our stanza!” “You mean, Swift’s verse?” He nodded, still dark-faced. He wrote again, “Hard shit. But
we should come and stand watch so that we’d know who that nincompoop is.” “No,” I said, “I think we should stop this.” “We cannot surrender to the follies of this
generation,” he wrote again, his frenzied scribbles sending motes of chalk dust in
our midst. “This is just one little shit.” “No,” I said. And when I still didn’t move, he
tramped out of the room, stuttering expletives under his breath. # In the days that followed, he would come to me in a foul mood.
Apparently, he came back to that place, and scribbled fresh verse in the same restroom.
And when he came back the next morning, whatever he had written would be rendered
illegible by abstract shapes drawn in charcoal. It happened another couple of times, his
efforts thwarted probably by the same unknown adversary. Finally, at one point, I suggested that could it be that someone
out there was also doing the same thing: an unknown artist trying to send a message
through graffiti, using charcoal and his own arsenal of abstract images? I told him that I
also often visit the Chinese restaurant, the place being a short walk from the university
where I take my art classes; that art students, who most probably used charcoal in their
classes, also frequented the place. He cast me a look of suspicion. “C-c-c-c-cccould it
b-b-b-b-b-bbbe you?” “Don’t be ridiculous.” He paced the room restlessly, his gaze fixed to the floor. I
continued mixing paint on my palette, feigning indifference. He later sat on my
futon’s edge and stared at me as I dabbed an odd mixture of gray paint on the
canvass. “P-p-p-p-pplllease help me.” “I won’t,” I said. “P-p-p-pplease.” “You’re getting too unreasonable. This thing’s
starting to eat you, Bob.” “I just w-w-w-wwant to know who that s-s-s-s-sshhit
is.” “Then what? Do you think your universe will prop itself back
upon learning the truth?” “I-I-I-I-I j-j-j-jjust want t-t-t-to know.” I sighed, like I never sighed before. I looked at him and saw the
face of interminable sadness and permanent defeat. When you looked at him—his hair
stiff with styling gel and his face clean and blemish-free from his constant attempts to
look good, his gaze fixed, his manner of smiling deliberate to make him look
intelligent—he seemed a normal guy, until he spoke. At the first spoken word,
everything you thought about him would crumble; whatever admiration you had would secretly
get soaked with embarrassment. I never told Bob the things my sister said about him behind
his back; how she’d roll her eyes in exaggerated disgust. If it’s any
consolation, my sister never mortified him in his face; when he was around, she always
tried to smile, always said polite things, always took care not to knowingly hurt him.
Consequently, Bob always thought my sister was the apotheosis of beauty, the sort who
probably never farted and who never said ugly things or entertained ugly thoughts. It
acutely struck me that I was probably the only one whom he regarded as someone he could
depend on, someone who, in facial tissue commercials, was regarded as a
“friend”—whose shoulder one could cry on and who would not hesitate to
share generous wads of tissue paper for one’s tears. I turned back to the canvass and made tentative brush strokes. I
had been trying to create a chiaroscuro study, and had been struggling to apply a more
surreal effect on the subtle shifts from light to shade to utterly dark, set against
splotches of images done in sepia. But when Bob barged in, I lost my train of thoughts,
suddenly alienating me from my work; now, the image on the canvass seemed done by someone
else, someone who must have been very uninspired and was trying to paint with his nostrils
holding the brush. “Okay,” I finally said, still not looking at him.
“But promise me you’d never do anything foolish.” I was sure he nodded. “We’d just go there to see who’s messing your
work. And that’s it. No confrontation, okay?” He stood up and tapped me gratefully on the shoulder and left,
fortunately, without a word. # I remember Belshazzar, the last king of Babylon before the city
fell to the Persians. He holds a great feast, but a mysterious hand-writing on a wall
appears, written in Aramaic: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” It baffles and disturbs the king. The Greek historian Xenophon
would later relate that a mysterious man, an alleged prophet, trudges in and offers to
interpret the scrawls. The king, in desperation, grudgingly agrees to the terms. # Sipping iced tea and eating thin, amber-colored slivers of a
century egg, we occupied a table next to a Buddha from whose mouth trickled a stream of
water. It was a little over the lunch hour, and the crowd was thinning out. Bob fidgeted
in his seat, threw furtive glances to anyone that came in, sat on a table or went directly
to the restroom. I noticed a bulge in his waist, covered by his shirt. “What is that?” He hesitated; he looked around first then shifted in his seat. I
caught a glimpse of what seemed to be the handle of an old-fashioned switchblade. He
quickly explained that he didn’t want to be overpowered again—remember the
Astrodome incident—and if things get worse, he’d just use it to intimidate them.
“I think you shouldn’t have brought it.” He said nothing. He handed me the felt-tipped marker he’d
been carrying, and told me to shut up. He was eyeing someone who had just entered; a man
with a knapsack slung on his shoulder, wearing faded jeans and white t-shirt. The man was
stroking his little goatee as he was apparently looking for an empty table. Then as if he
just changed his mind, he went straight to the corridor—to the restroom. Bob told me he felt something about that man; a suspicion, a
sudden hunch. I shrugged. “So what do you do?” He shook his head and stood up. He’s going to check, he
said. “Don’t do anything stupid,” I reminded him. He
smiled and reassured me with a wink. He went for the restroom. Meanwhile, I sat uneasily in my chair.
The seconds seemed hours, seemed forever. I was poking at what remained of the century egg
when I noticed people where gathering by the restroom’s door. Some of them seemed
aghast, as though they were seeing something revolting. I was suddenly struck by an ugly
thought. # “Numbered, weighed, divided,” interprets the prophet.
“Your days are numbered, you’ve been weighed and found wanting, your kingdom
will be divided.” Belshazzar doesn’t get it. The interpretation annoys him.
Who is this fool, he must have thought, who thinks he’s worthy enough to measure me? The king paces about the hall thinking more about getting rid of
this prophet, than about the interpretation itself. In the night, he sleeps his one last
peaceful sleep. In the morning, his kingdom crumbles. # I rushed to their direction. Bob suddenly slipped out the
restroom’s door, his hands bloodied, his face contorted in mortal fear. He ran past
me as though he didn’t see me. Inside the restroom, by the urinals, I saw a body
sprawled on the floor, swimming in blood, Bob’s switchblade protruding from the back
of his neck. I saw something written on the wall, in Bob’s handwriting,
half of it rendered almost illegible by bold charcoal strokes: “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting
through the wall? Sometimes I think there’s nothing beyond.” The angry crowd caught Bob even before he reached the front door.
Almost simultaneously, they were cursing him, pummeling him, sending a knee up his ribs,
slugging him in the head with a beer bottle. I stood by the Buddha’s statue, frozen
in my own fear, clutching Bob’s felt-tipped marker absently. Bob’s eyes met mine
in a brief moment, half of his face covered in blood, and I saw he was as confused as I,
as everyone else. He seemed to be asking why. Why? Then he finally disappeared under the
maddened mob. Women were screaming at the sight of blood, which crawled on the marble
floor, as though having a mind of its own, like a scarlet phantom seeking for prey. It
took me a moment before I realized it was Bob’s blood. I dashed to the front door and
ran outside, afraid of my own shadow, of the little demons we ourselves had created. I
shouldered my way, not looking back, through the choking streets, my eyes almost half-shut
from sweat and tears, Bob’s felt-tipped marker bleeding in my hand. -
END –
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