What I Have Become...

I think most of us made a promise once in our lives when we were young that we will never be like our parents. Maybe we made it out of sheer frustration since we were grounded, they won’t give us allowance or worst, they didn’t approve of our lives. Well, I am just turning out to be both like my mother and father. From my mother, I got the virtue of sentimentality and being so patient, bordering on martyrdom. From my dad, I got my entire body structure, from my countenance up to body type, plus his penchants for multiple partners and vagabond ways. Yes, I am my parents’ offspring. I rarely throw stuff and get to raid other people’s hand-me-downs in the trash or thrift stores, a trait that my mother perfectly embodies. My room has been a space devoid of any order, it has what they call “organized chaos”. My place has been a trove of memories, some of them sad and some of them happy. I have shirts that date back to college years, and I still wear them. Imagine, a 17 year old shirt, isn’t that old enough to be my next boy toy? Last week, even against my wishes, I gave away a Lacoste messenger bag that was with me for 16 years, and I cried. It was a break up with a long relationship, even if I knew it was not working, what was important that it was there, ready for a reconciliation. In life, my friendships are also like that, I give value to them, even if they are not working. After my sad break up with a BF of 4 years, I was able to get hold of his new number thru a team mate in basketball. Guess what he said, that I stop texting him and why I just move on? Ouch! That’s is another trait I got from my mom, persistence. Even if my dad left her 10 years ago for another family, she treats him still like they were newly-married. She allows him to still stay in the house, although in a separate room, and still hopes for a reconciliation, isn’t that so heartbreaking? Once, she went all the way to the north to see my Dad’s other family, to tell the mistress that she is the legal wife, that they are still legally married? I threw a fit because of that when I found out about it, I told her that maybe it is time for her to move on. Now, I am just like her, clinging to someone who is no longer there, someone who has just moved on. Yes, it is a bitter sweet realization that I am no longer needed by someone, that I am already done in his life, a finished chapter that has been closed already for the next. Those are two deplorable traits I got from my mother, and what I got from my father are far more worse. I started having sex when I was seven, and I became a bedhopper once I had turn 15. I slept around, a lot. My father’s a woman’s man, they go after him because far from a looker, he was someone that was in demand, a married man who can’t keep himself to his wife. Once, I remembered, he even let me sleep in the mistress’ house and play with the mistress’ kids. He even had the balls to bring the mistress to my mother’s house and introduced her as a cousin, and my gullible mother just smiled and let the woman sleep for the night. The woman slept in our room, and when midnight came, my father walked in and made love to her. I guess those images leave someone twisted, so when I grew up, I said I will never be like my father. And I made good of that promise, I never had sex with girls, period. Instead, I had lots of sex with men, Filipino, American, British, Welsh, Chinese, and black. I became a nympho, when the sky has turned from the orange dusk to pitch black, the itch to get laid with a guy has become a norm. I did not become a serial monogamist, instead, a became a serious polygamist. Even if I am in a relationship, I still have sex with other guys. I do it wherever, whenever, in the public park, in the Cineplex, in the mall’s restroom, by the road, I think the only place I haven’t done it was on the plane’s stall, because I did it already in front of the church. That is me, a sex addict that sleeps with anything that moves, as long as they are of a two-legged male species and not four legged ones. Name it, I had it, construction workers, security guards, taxi drivers, messengers, bank tellers, school registrar, doctors, actors, basketball players, soccer players, volleyball players. My friend even encouraged me to jot it all down, and write about a book about it. He said I have become a “modern day cassanova”, albeit with a twist, a homosexual cassanova. My conquest has been a legend, friends are amazed how I could get easily flirt with anyone, never mind if they are straight. A girlfriend was even amazed and envious that I got more goodlooking men than hers. It was both a gift and a curse I hate and love. I have became just exactly like my father, maybe I was his curse for being a womanizer, the gods in heavens decided to give him a son who will sleep around with other men, instead of a daughter that will sleep around with men, that was an unexplainable poetic justice for him. Aside from this trait, I got another one from my father. The unexplainable urge to be somewhere else, a vagabond, a person that can’t stay at home. When I was in high school, my sister died from complications arising from broncopneumonia. My father was not around since he left a week earlier, and we tried in vain to look for him, made pleas on the radio and on TV to go home since we were in mourning for the untimely demise of his daughter. We buried my sister without him around, and after three hours of interment, he came home and found out what happened, he kept crying for losing his daughter. I hate him for being not there, and the next day, I found out where he came from. His back was sunburned, so I guess he was doing what he enjoyed best, out-of-town hunting, both the flying types and the low-flying ones ( in vernacular, “mga babaeng mababa ang lipad”, girls with loose morals). He loves hunting, to a hilt, I grew up watching his rifle collections accumulate, as well as the things he hunts, our house hosted a menagarie of exotic animals. Once, he brought home a civet cat, a “musang”, which is not really an endangered species but yet a popular one due to its prowess and it was really hard to catch it alive. He has told me of exotic places he has been, since he was also doing work for a popular brand of cola, thus, he got to visit its numerous plants around the country. The places he has been became places for me to visit when I grew up, I have been to Ilocos, La Union, Cebu, Bicol, Iloilo, Bacolod, Davao, Marawi, Zamboanga, and places that most of Filipinos won’t pay attention to. I have logged local travel miles that will put a homebody to shame, whether by land, air, or sea. I guess the only place I haven’t been in the Philippines is Batanes, Palawan, Leyte and Samar, they are next on the list. In the places I have been, more hunting of the different kind takes place, I have been a complete slut, a vessel of sperm, a repository of sex borne out of the unspeakable, if we use the term used in mediaval times. I have become a walking timebomb, ready to explode with a single smile from a total stranger. In the time of AIDS, friends are just waiting for that to strike me, and I am fortunate enough that the most I got from casual sex was a strepcocci infection. I have adopted a mantra that to stay HIV-negative, think positive. I have been playing a game of russsian roullete, hoping from on man to the next, or sometimes engaging in a smorgasbord, an eat-all-you-can buffet of men. That, my dear blog readers, is how I became what I dreaded most, being exactly like my parents.