You are the Son of a Motherfucker

My cousin is gone. He flew back last week. Thank fucken god, more space in the house, one less person to entertain, no cigarette smoke wafting through the front door at 3 in the morning, no more unsaid obligations to get my cousin a lap dance in Hollywood or one of those creepy strip joints off the PCH in the Gatsbian wasteland between Wilmington and Terminal Island. This isn't to say that my cousin wasn't entirely useless, getting my dad in and out of the car, entertaining my dad's endless conversations about putang, he did let me play with the Playstation and Nintendo handheld that he supposedly bought for his 5-year-old son, and my cousin was also unfailingly upbeat if in a happy-go-lucky, entitled kind of way (I was never quite sure what his title as manager of his family's beer and beverage distribution company entailed: most week nights and weekends from what I saw he would stay up late drinking beer, eating pulutan (essentialy anything that goes good with beer), chain-smoking Marlboro lights and shooting the shit with his friends and lackeys—he explained to me once that this was important for any business: self-patronization—I forget the exact term he used— drinking your own beer by the case— Apparently over there, it's not only okay but beneficial to piss where you work, like a budweiser workhorse I guess.) What my cousin lacked in caregiving skills (it was supposed to be my other cousin, the RN, that should have accompanied my dad but couldn't clear a visa) he made up for by acting as a buffer of sorts between me and my brother and my dad: as long as my cousin was there, tempers still flared, but no slamming of doors, nothing broken or thrown, we didn't freely cuss out my dad like we usually do "Fuck you, dad, don't be a jerk"—didn't want to get too ugly for real in front of the houseguest. Growing up, me and my brother were the least respectful, least deferential of all our cousins and friends: never using the honorific kuya or manong for our elders, or saying yes, uncle, or yes, auntie, yes lolo, lola. I'm not sure why. Social awkward, aculturated, painfully shy, snobbery? I admit I was and am a fucken snob, I'm not like any of you, fuck you all.

So my routine for the last 3 weeks has been: getting woken up late in the evening to empty my dad's piss bottle (we could just go to the medical supply store and buy a second 4 dollar container, but I guess everything needs to be difficult so I can feel justifiably put upon) and too early in the morning to make coffee or go buy Jack-in-the-box breakfast croissants (" Come on, anak, go to jack-in-the-box, buy me some coffee and a breakfast croissant—two years I haven't had a breakfast croissant," he said. The other day it was 2 years since he's had a pastrami sandwich, and last week it was steak from Norm's) This morning I woke to him whining about getting him a caregiver for his last two weeks in the states, because I don't do everything he says, and when I do, it's not fast enough "I'm homesick," he told me and my brother one evening, "In the Philippines I have three old lady's, three sisters who take turns taking care of me, but they all smoke tobacco. Also a bakla massages my feet for 250 pesos." "Do you get a blowjob too," I had to ask. "We still have your foot massager in the garage," my brother says.), and then driving to go shopping (If I'm lucky the Walmart or hardware store will have a supply of motorized wheelchair/shopping carts for the elderly and handicapped and I'll spend a half hour wandering the aisles trying to hunt him down. I've been taking him to see his old friends in Downey, his comadre and compadre my dad is godfather to their now 25 year-old daughter, who last time I saw her—since I refused to go to their christmas day lunches—she was barely pubescent and her younger brother was playing peewee hockey. Now they're both artsy 20-something indie rockers. Most nights we pick up food for dinner, more bad filipino food from pinoy/pinay, and when my brother gets home from work, I escape to the gym.

Some days are more trying than others. The other morning was especially trying. I was half awake when my brother reminded me to get one of my dad's bank checks from the safe to pay his credit card bill (This year my dad spent on average 9000 US dollars a month, on what we're still not quite sure.) The safe box was from their old house and required a key and a combination. My brother left me the key and the Jesus refrigerator magnet on the back of which was written the four number combo. I gave my dad one of his checks to fill out and sign, retrieved the box of checks when he was done and put it back in the safe. I looked around for the Jesus picture, but couldn't find it. I asked my dad what happened to the Jesus icon and he said he placed it on top of the box of checks. To my horror I realized I had locked the combination in the safe. I tried to remember the combo but couldn't recall the last 2 numbers. My dad blamed me for not noticing that he had put the Jesus picture "on top of the box," he claimed. Later he remembered that they'd also written the combo on the inside of their old filing cabinet. I told him I thought the cabinet might be in the storage rental in Bell Gardens, but in the back of my mind I thought I remembered donating it to Goodwill or Out of the Closet (2 years ago when my Dad was still in the hospital my brother hurriedly packed up my parent's possessions, trashed or left behind a sizable backyard's worth of junk, and sold the house we grew up in). So we went to the storage and of course the filing cabinet was long gone and my dad blamed me and my brother for throwing away their stuff (My mom's orchids, the gargantuan green and wood-paneled station wagon my dad bought from Auntie Julie for 200 bucks, they were seventh day adventists, so there weren't a lot of miles on it). Later that evening when I told my brother what happened, he lost his shit and called me and my dad idiots. "Are you fucken stupid, you're both fucken idiots" my brother yelled and slammed the bedroom door repeatedly. Turns out all I had to do was call the Manufacturer, which I did the next day when my dad remembered that he had sent it to the manufacturer in case he lost the combo. So I called them up,I gave them the model and serial number which were both written on the safe door, and they gave me the combo without a single question. I opened the safe and found the Jesus icon. I showed my dad how he had buried it in the check box beneath 2 booklets. "Godamn it," he said.

Kamay Kamay

My uncle Ninong, who became a Mormon not because he believed the indians were a lost tribe of Israel, but because of his Poligamist sympathies, used to give me violin lessons when I was 10 or 11. He loved slight of hand tricks and was the person that first took us to the magic shop in Hollywood—is this shop some kind of venerable institution among slight of hand artists, I don't know, didn't recognize any of the photos they had on display, No Penn and Teller, No Blane, no Ricky Jay. I don't really know why my Uncle Joseph wanted a deck of marked cards, or why his son bought a dvd to learn misdirection and palming techniques with nerf balls. I can only imagine that it's something to amuse their kids and buddies back home, drinking with their barcada, they can't be talking about chix all the time, and everybody has the same 3-minute bluetooth porn that they trade around like scabies ("scandals" they call them, soon to be if not already the rage in the states along with wireless-machineless karaoke), so maybe every once in a while someone breaks out with some cheeseball trick, pulling red felt balls out of his compadre's pants pocket. "I've got your balls!" Maybe Filipino boys grow up learning different bare-handed skills: eating rice without utensils, uncapping beer bottles with other beer bottles, and then there's the ubiquitous overgrown thumbnail that many a Filipino man's man/street tough seems to cultivate, and use like an all purpose decal scratcher, pimple popper or letter opener or what have you. And of course there's that other league entirely of slight of hand artists who palm pig hearts and goats intestines, as seen on that's incredible and RIpley's Believe it or not:
" One of the most dramatic forms of faith healing that has attracted significant international attention is "psychic surgery." "It involves the painless insertion of the healer's fingers into the individual's body, re moval of tissues, tumors, growths, or foreign matter, and closing the incision without a scar" (Harper & Fullerton, 1994, p. 62). Numerous Western scientists have investigated tales of "miracle cures" produced by psychic surgeons and found evidence of fakery; however, they also have reportedly witnessed incredible feats of healing (Harper & Fuller ton, 1994)"— http://www.livinginthephilippines.com/philculture/practices.html
Why magic tricks? Maybe it's one of the few ways boys can show such delicate manual dexterity and gesticulate so elegantly and still be manly. Maybe it's just more stupid shit, to kill time, and if you say so then you're just a killjoy. I dunno but it makes for a lovely trope, don't it, the whole thing with presentation and misdirection. Can't deonstruct everything all the time. It's okay to be a fool for magic.

Knock Knock Knockin on Heaven's Door

It's only been 2 weeks that my dad and cousin have been staying with me and my brother in his 2 bedroom house, but it feels much much longer. My cousin most nights (when he hasn't fallen asleep flopped on the love seat, having been texting his paramours in the Philippines into the early AM) sleeps in my bedroom, and I camp out in the living room on an inflatable mattress ten feet away from my dad his semi-liquid bullk perched on a leather sofa looking like he could easily roll over in his sleep and crash to the floor. It took me a week to get used to his frequent and persistent moaning ("Apo, Apo" invoking the god of pain and old age) Last week I drove my dad to go to the doctor (who I found out is Taiwanese and if not quite the quack I made him out to be is prescription happy, always plying my dad with samples for asthma inhalers, blood-sugar stabilizers, and viagra.) Other days I took him shopping, to visit old friends unannounced, or to eat bad filipino food for lunch in Carson or Norwalk. On Thursday I ended up driving my cousin and my dad to one of the last remaining seedy blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, where they went to a magic store (buying some 80 dollars worth of trick cards, a chinese wand, vanishing foam balls, and a functioning pen that can puncture holes through dollar bills without a tear.) Three doors down they made their way to a sex shoppe to look for dildos and aphrodisiacs. I did not accompany them into the sex shoppe, but instead shoved my dad on his wheelchair through the open doorway, beckoning my cousin to take over, and parked my ass on a bus bench to read the LA weekly. After 15 minutes, I went in to check on them and found my dad sizing up a rack of pornstar dildos ("do these vibrate?" he asked me). My cousin purchased some kind of "Spanish fly" in powder form ("I can put this in their salads" he told me later in the car, pulling out a baggy with what looked like ground cumin). Later that evening at a Denny's in downtown Long Beach (At my dad's insistence on T-bone steaks for dinner), my cousin complained how hard it's been to go without fucking for the last week. "I want to go home," he said, "back home I can't go 2 days without..." and then he gestured by rapping his knuckles on the table.