Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(34)
“Who would you rather be caught riding in a vehicle with, us or a bunch of janitors and secretaries?” I said.
We became a hit. Sometimes the van overflowed with so many students that we’d have to make two trips before school and two trips after. We charged each kid twenty pesos each way, enough to buy a stick of chicken barbecue—not the feet or a beak, but thighs and a breast—and a cup of rice. The van fit ten people plus us three amigos, making us two hundred yummy, crunchy, oh-so-good pesos each time on the route. We made enough for three meals, a few sticks of menthols, and a fat wad of the sweetest, juiciest, pinkest gum. Sometimes we bought mixtapes, too, to keep up our reputation as the “cool hip-hop van.”
We had all sorts of kids on the van. There was the chubby, sticky goalkeeper who foamed at the mouth, the heartthrob whose parents got divorced and got back together and got divorced again, the math whiz who wanted to run for student body president but couldn’t afford campaign posters, the boy sent from California so he could “learn how people lived in the Third World,” the ex-congressman’s son and daughter who had to hide from the media after their father’s scandal, the only child who had a car but preferred to commute to and from school with company, and the guy who was there “mainly for the music.”
Our second week in business, we baptized one another with new names.
Paolo put the key in the ignition once everyone got situated in the back and turned around from the driver’s seat, held out a stack of mixtapes, and said, “Place your hands on the tapes and repeat after me.”
We all reached forward for the tapes, some of us hunched over the kid in front, and repeated after him. “By the power vested in me by Biggie, I pledge allegiance to the cool hip-hop van. And in the spirit of brotherhood, I swear to keep everyone’s secrets, and I rename the person to my left.”
Paolo turned to Jordan, who was riding shotgun, and said, “Since I’m the captain, I’ll go first. I name you ‘Barker.’” He faked a cough.
We all laughed.
“All right, all right,” Jordan said, holding his index finger against his lips. He pointed the same finger at the goalkeeper. “I name you ‘Frenchie,’ because all you talk about is French-kissing girls.”
Each of us took a turn at being funny and clever, bestowing a nom de guerre on a friend.
Frenchie followed. “I name you ‘Cheat-ah,’ because you cheat on your exams. I’ve seen you roll up pieces of paper with algebra formulas into your pen’s stem. You’re brilliant, man, but you are a cheater.” He high-fived the math whiz, who shook his head while snickering.
“Okay, okay,” Cheat-ah said. “I name this schoolboy right here ‘Westie,’ for his unfailing love for West Coast hip-hop . . . even though we all know that Brooklyn and the Bronx make better music!”
We all ooooooohed.
“Easy now. Have some respect for my San Diego roots,” the boy from California responded. “Now, you, little one. What should we call you?”
“Beaver teeth?” I said, remembering a name I’d been called before because of my protruding front teeth.
“Nah,” he said, taking a pen from his polo shirt’s pocket. He took my Lucky Star hand and doodled on it. “Prinsesa.”
They all oooooohed again, and I blushed.
Paolo saw how embarrassed I was. He interjected, “Okay, kiddos. I think that’s it for today. DJ Paolo has some fresh tunes for us this afternoon.” He pushed the cassette into the deck and pressed “Play,” then adjusted his rearview mirror and made eye contact with me. He smiled at me with his eyes, to which I responded by sticking out my tongue.
The kids in the van sang loud and banged their heads to music our mothers and Catholic schoolteachers would never have approved of. We passed around teen magazines stolen from the coffee shop or library. We took jabs at slam poetry—original tracks that we were convinced Dr. Dre and LL Cool J would be proud of. We took naps and farted on each other, turning the van into a venue for practical jokes. We helped one another with our homework, and talked about the things we loved and loathed, and all the dreams we each had.
“I want to be a writer,” I said each time.
“Then go be a writer, little girl,” they would all say in between puffs of joints or cigarettes. I loved those kids and that van. And the best part was, they loved me back.
Paolo and I cleaned the van with Elma on Sunday afternoons when her mother didn’t ask her to help with laundry. She taught us how to clean the windshield free of streaks and how to beat the car mats with a broken broom. Paolo introduced her to music she liked to call “tunog Amerika.” American sound.
“Like this,” Elma said, showing me how to make figure eights with the swish of a rag. She reminded me of Katring and Loring, and of how much I missed them.
“I’m doing it, look! Kuya, look! I can do the figure eights!” I said.
“Ha, maybe you were born to be a maid, who knows?” Paolo said, jeering.
“Maybe,” I said, slapping my rag over my shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind it at all.”
We washed our joyride with the same kind of delight we got from watching the debutantes dance on the main floor. The van became a new place for us to gather, to sing, to play.
But sometimes the van failed us. When it was too hot, it broke down. When it was too rainy, it wouldn’t start at all. When it was too packed, we would get pulled over for charges of overloading. Then we would have to bribe the cop with our day’s worth of business and go to bed a bit hungrier than the night before. We rarely saw Mama then, but it didn’t matter because we felt like we had become our own people: going to school while making a living, watching out for each other, praying for the good and charging against the bad, never allowing the big, bad mansion to swallow us whole into its darkness—looking at the driveway that Norman had turned into a lot for stolen cars and the main floor he had converted into a copy center for fake deeds.