Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(33)
Papa never made it to the Middle East. Travel authorities and finances wouldn’t allow it—restrictions that demoted his plans from saving the world to saving our world. He set up a business consultancy at the Quezon City Parks and Wildlife Circle with a folding table and a camping chair, leftover yellow pads from the recruitment agency, a can of pencils as a paperweight, a framed picture of me and Paolo, a typewriter that he typed on with his two index fingers, a stapler, and a sign that said, “Got ideas? I got business plans.” Passersby often ignored him and sometimes hooted. On occasion, tree monkeys visited him, begging for crumbs of his Fita biscuits. Once or twice a week, a pedestrian stopped at his table to pitch an idea: pre-cured and prepackaged alligator meat, cane juice concentrate, foil-wrapped roasted chestnuts, street food carts—businesses for lower-middle- to lower-class entrepreneurs. He collected little to no consulting fees, feeling bad for charging men and women who, like him, scraped to get by.
When he did make a profit, he snuck into my school to give me money. Mama and Norman had forbidden Papa from coming to the mansion or, really, seeing us. Being the naturally congenial person that he was, Papa befriended the security guards at school and told them stories until they finally let him in. Whatever he had he gave to me, sacrificing his own meals for mine. But soon he saw us less frequently because he needed the time to find other sources of income: office work for past business partners, direct selling, cooperative-funded research on fishing technology, and nutritional product demonstrations. Paolo and I stretched the cash Papa sent us as far as we could, buying nearly expired peanut butter and bottom-shelf ramen noodles from the sari-sari, a kiosk selling newspapers, tabloids, and sundries. But it quickly ran out.
“I got this,” Paolo said. “Don’t worry about telling Papa. He doesn’t need to know this—he’s out there trying, too. I got this.”
We thought of ways to make money while not giving away our secret—that we were two hungry kids living in a formerly opulent, now beggarly mansion run by a mother and her lover who sold fake deeds and nonexistent property, and licked the boots of politicians up north and sheriffs down in the capital. While Mama and Norman caroused through the city on their day-to-day gamble, Paolo and I stared at the ceiling, exchanging jokes and smoking invisible cigarettes.
I rolled off the bed and rummaged through Paolo’s trundle drawers, searching for items we could pawn or sell. All that the drawers contained were miscellanies from our nineties childhood: plastic we slapped onto our wrists, plastic that melted into moldable goop, and plastic that grew in the water. I moved on to my bedroom, looking for anything with resale value, or anything that could remind me of an employable skill I possessed, but to no avail. Paolo searched his room as well, looking inside closets and chests.
“I got it!” Paolo said, sprinting from his room to mine. He held an army green G.I. Joe jeep in the hand he had just punched the wall with. “A jeepney!”
“Like the trucks I used to ride with Yaya?” I asked.
“They’re not trucks,” he said, now crouched down and zooming his jeep forward and back on the floor. “They’re jeeps left behind by American soldiers. Filipino drivers painted and decorated them, and turned them into colorful rides.”
“Yeah, but we don’t own a jeep.”
He’d been driving both of us to school since Norman clubbed and fired the last driver. Norman claimed that we were a bunch of worthless, idle Manila brats who could do a thing or two for society. So he sold Papa’s Mitsubishi Lancer and got us a honky-tonk L300 van with a steering wheel wrapped in duct tape.
“But I have a van and I own music,” Paolo said.
I liked the idea. We had all that we needed: Paolo’s driver’s license and my creativity. We dashed to the car lot and washed the van with buckets and rags Maximo had left on the terrace. We beat and rinsed the floor mats, wiped the dashboard, and polished the leather stick shift and knobs.
“I found us a barker,” Paolo said, sliding his car keys across the table.
“A what?” I said, catching the keys and twirling them by the chain around my finger.
“A barker. You know, the person who rallies passengers together before a route,” he said.
“I know what a barker is. I’ve seen them when Papa or Yaya used to take me on joyrides. But what do we need one for?”
“For the plan,” he said. “We’re gonna make us some money, you’ll see.”
That week Paolo introduced me to a senior at his school: Jordan. He was long and thin and talked with the raspy, high-pitched voice of a lady smoker. When he introduced himself to me, he did it with a curtsy and a tip of his baseball cap, his voice scraping out of his throat with a breath of heavy nicotine: “Ahhht hhyourrchh sehhhrrrvice, mahh-dhaam.” Then he held his hand up for a high five and gave me a lollipop. I warmed to him right away, as if I could tell that he liked kids and kids liked him. That, and the fact that he seemed as needy as we were. He looked hungry, too.
“We’re gonna be business partners, us three,” he said, while clearing his throat. “I’ll be the barker, Paolo will be the driver, and most importantly, you’ll be the conductor in charge of collecting fares and keeping order in the van.” He coughed twice.
“Me?” I said in disbelief. “I get to do that?”
Paolo figured out that we weren’t the only starving kids in our elite schools. By observation (a skill he got from Papa) and interrogation (a skill he got from Mama), he sniffed out all the other pretenders at both of our prestigious all-girls and all-boys schools. We negotiated fixed rates and arranged regular routes, making air-conditioning and all-you-want hip-hop radio our selling point. Jordan stressed that our van was cleaner and cheaper than any public or private school bus service in the city, and I pointed out that riding in a gray van with other upper-class kids was much less humiliating than taking the commoner’s colorful jeepney.