a sixty-fiver's tale

MOVING ON

FROM THEN

She was home to me for most of five years in the early sixties. I spent a little part of a couple of summers elsewhere, but most of it was with her when the rest of the students were in the provinces. I ate, slept, and read in one of UERMMMC's side appendages we called the Yellow House. The prospect of seeing her again after thirty years evokes mixed feelings. If my experiences comes true to form, I know that memories of her from thirty years ago would not remain unadulterated. Somehow, my brain's blender cannot keep the memory of the before pure, after exposure to an altered after. But for sentimental reasons I did not want my memories of medical school tampered with.

If you face the main UERMMMC building,, the Yellow House was on the left, behind the Blue House. It was accessible by a small alley that eventually led to the Dario river, ten or so houses down. It was in that June of 1960 when I developed a love-hate relationship with that river. I could not help loving him (rivers are supposed to be females, no?) for the welcome he gave me. As I was to find out, he overflowed his banks often; and for my benefit this time, he flexed his muscles, effortlessly lifting the cadavers in the basement of the main building over which my window leaned. I loved this new experience of a show he put out for me. However, always trying to avoid his mud on my shoes speedily wore out my affections.

Teofing owned the Yellow House. She was probably in her late forties, but she looked older. Her husband had left her and their five year old daughter for a younger woman. She stayed in the ground floor of the house. Some nights we would hear her sobbing like a child. We knew it was not her daughter crying because Teofing's eyes would remain swollen the next day. One day she came in quietly to the small dining room where we Yellow-housers often gathered. I was not aware of her until she was quite close behind me. When I turned around I accidentally elbowed her mons pubis. From that day on she kept recounting to anyone who would care to listen, that among her boarders I was the only one who touched her "bajeena". I guess she wanted to impress everyone that she was inviolate.

I am sure that first year was just as long as any other year, but the hectic pace of learning made it seem so compressed. Making new friends was not difficult because everyone was new and eager to make some kind of connection. High points are still fresh in memory: Nardo got named "Champ" a month into anatomy for his lecture on the recurrence of the recurrent laryngeal nerve; it was rumored that Pons had severed the shaft of his cadaver as a birthday gift for one his girlfriends (that was probably not true because the part became one of the specimens use in our practical); we knew Magdi reached that specimen during the exam because of her delightful shriek; Boy was president of his section when he gave Pepit his class ring to entice her to be his girl, but she returned it with an ego balming letter which started with "Dear Mr. President...."

Joseph was the Yellow-houser I particularly liked because he made me feel like a newly scrubbed bath tub. He never bathe during the entire time I knew him. I always thought that if I wanted to destroy all living things that inhabited the Dario, I would have him bathe there. He managed to hide the odor by smoking a pipe, and he distracted us from the muck in his room by playing the guitar. He played a pretty good "Yellow Bird". Somehow, though, I had this feeling that he would not last long at the Yellow House, because he was always dropping hints about moving to Medics Dorm a few blocks west. He never said he was moving, but he kept mentioning stories about exciting happenings there. Like the one about the Tits versus Dens slugfest: witnesses said it was no slugfest; that before you could say "balut", it was over. Tits supposedly employed a golpe-de-gulat type attack on Dens when his back was turned, and pummeled him down to his bed. And as rapidly as he mounted his Pearl Harbor type attack, he scampered back to his side of the room and declared the war over. Joseph also loved to dessiminate the inside info that he swore was bible-true: a secret pathway from the men's side of the dorm to a peephole on the wall of the ladies bathroom. Tits and Jose T. supposedly discovered that track, and Joseph's eyes never failed to sparkle when he recounted the stories he heard about treasured anatomical data collected thru that hole. I am not sure I can believe the "Coca-cola bottom" size umbilical hernia that Sioni was supposedly blessed with, but I am inclined to believe the tidbit about the time Tits frantically drove everyone away from the hole because it was his girlfriend on the other side.

Nobody, but nobody could equal Joseph in uniqueness - not even Blue House's Bart, who, according to Blue Housers, would spend hours in the shower soaping his scalp using one fingertip to avoid tugging at his rapidly thinning hair; who would each morning gather the few prodigal hairs on his pillow and gently return it to his head, recite a line or two of Hail Mary, and pray for a successful hair auto-transplant.

Romy, another Yellowhouser, did not need a Medic's dorm peephole. He inherited my ruler-size crack on the bathroom wall facing the ladies house just a couple of meters close, down towards Dario. Vicky lived on the second floor of that house, facing the stairs up the microbiology lab. Some evenings, when she was not careful, we would see her changing clothes as we went up for "overtime" micro studies. Romy's favorites were the ladies on the ground floor room facing the bathroom. Unfortunately, because of the size of the crack, it was easy to detect anyone behind the crack. Doubly unfortunate was the location of the door to the bathroom. One had to go out to the open first before coming back in to the Yellow House.It was in one of those moments that I developed a profound respect for Romy's ingenuity. Having noticed that someone was peeping at them behind the crack, the ladies waited patiently for Romy to come out and reveal himself. You could almost hear a collective sigh of disappointment from the ladies when Romy came out with his face covered thickly with soapsuds. They would have been better off trying to identify fish at the bottom of the Dario had Joseph bathe there.

Ding and Cesar were the straight arrows of Yellow House. You could not get them out to get drunk even after exams. It did not matter if the drinking place was far or near. Near was mainly the Santa Mesa Market, a few blocks east of the nun-run ladies dorm (We used to call the dorm Heart-breaker's Lair- for the many residents there who spurned our attentions). The Rainbow restaurant in the market was one of the post-exam beer drinking favorites. C.L. used to close that place in the wee hours after midnight.

The Santa Mesa Market was actually a new addition to the UERM environ, having been built around the time we were in our first year. There used to be a bar called El Pato Cojo across the market, but that later disappeared and was replaced by the Tap Roots Club. It was just out of curiosity that I joined the guys one evening for a beer or two at the Tap. In the dimness I could recognize upper class students mingling with the ladies in the different tables. We occupied a table close to the men's room, and I sat nervously next to a nice lady from Bicol. I felt naked and lost, not knowing the standard Tap Roots etiquette. But thanks to Juli who materialized from somewhere in the half-light and gave me a quick but fumbling lesson on what was expected. He took my right arm and draped it on the shoulder of Miss Bicol, guided my hand to hang limply on her breast. "Cancer detection", he slurred. As the evening wore on it dawned on me that many of the students there had the school's dean's name for their last names.

In April of 1961 the US launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. By the 19th of that month the invasion was declared a failure. Ninety participants on the US side had been killed. On the third quarter of that year, and spilling over into 1962, Pathology and Microbiology started killing us. Except, of course, bright-boy Remeo. He was one Yellowhouser who found everything a breeze. I strongly suspected that he had a thesis to prove when he organized the toro-toro outing one night deep into Pasay. We envied Felipe, the toro, his attributes. Ignacia, his partner, had business on her mind. After collecting the group's fee to ensure their income for their night's performance, Ignacia offered anyone to touch her below for an extra five pesos. We were taken aback by this turn of events. But not Remeo. It was his distinct bacteriological theology that the lowly toilet tissue was an impregnable barrier against bacterial penetration, and he was prepared to prove it because, for without hesitation he extended his well toilet paper-wrapped hands towards her. We went home better educated that night. Evidently some of the members of that group went back soon for more bacteriology review; and around that time Pons, for unclear reasons, started using Lifebuoy Health Soap for his toothpaste.

In 1963 JFK was assassinated, and Sidney Poitier won an Oscar for his role in Lillies of the Field. A number of upperclassmen celebrated by playing basketball at night in the rain. I guess this would have been acceptable behavior had it not been for the minor detail that they were all playing basketball naked. The student nurses residing above the quadrangle were, of course, delighted. But not the Dean - at least not outwardly. To this day Del denies that he was a part of that group, though a couple of those student nurses swears that he was an active participant since they voted him MVP - most voluptuous posterior.

That year was also a hormonal watershed year for Roger. He fell madly in love. She stole his heart and brought it with her when she had to leave nursing school because of kleptomania.

Pons and the other musketeers, Bayaw and Polding, made 1964 a memorable year by starting the pen pal craze right out of the Yellow House. Pons assured me that we could get our names into the Pen pal Wanted pages of Kislap Graphics because Totoy's mother was an important writer there. We identified ourselves by aliases, and made sure we mentioned that we were medical students. Before you could say "bulaga" we were inundated with mail. We compared our best prospects and shared the replies that we wrote. To liven the milieu, I decided to be a secret Pons pen pal. Soon he was receiving romantic letters from me, Sasha, an European-Filipino hybrid with hazel-green eyes that cried for rescue from a restrictive father. Pon's reply letters probably ended in some garbage pile of the new residents of my old rented Malate home that I used for return address. Since we shared what we wrote, it was easy for me to write back love letters to him that carried a coherent thread. In no time Pons was deeply in love. He rejected money offers from Romy and Boy to buy the rights to be Pons. I have not stopped regretting my actions to this day for I saw the pain in his eyes when he received my last letter asking him to meet me at Santa Mesa. As he stroke his balding head, I could see the predicament in his face, for I wrote that I envisioned him to be tall, dark, with thick bushy hair. I debated on how to resolve the charade, but that was done for me by Polding who borrowed my book of poems and found my old Malate address in the back of the front cover. The connection was made and the impostor exposed. I know that in one of these national reunions I shall formally apologize to Pons.

That year I also spent a few weeks rehearsing the proper phrase "Pakibukas ang Puerta, Mrs" in preparation for Obstetrics and Gynecology. But in the panic of first delivery at Labor Hospital it was easy to reflexly revert back to my visayan ancestry. I only wished none of my group mates heard me. They baptized me the "Paki Abri ang Kiki, Mrs" kid after that. Oh well, since Aguinaldo died that year I guess I did not do so badly. I'm still around.

Internship in 1965 brought only two prominent priorities: hours of sleep and a bed to sleep on. Bed in our home base UERM intern's quarters was almost a rare commodity. It took a couple of false overhead pages before Ruben Rullan realized that Joe Salamance was having him paged to the hospital so he could appropriate his bunk. Away at Labor Hospital, the lone on-call bed must have suffered a lot under the weight of two interns sharing sleep deprivation after 48 to 72 hours of almost non-stop baby catching. Neneng can supposedly attest to the fact that a bed-sharing, sleep-deprived Ruben cannot mount an involuntary muscle twitch. I sometimes wondered if I had Ruben's talent for control... Nah, none whatsoever if its was with Neneng!

The thought of not knowing how to find my way around Manila and Aurora Boulevard thirty years later intimidates me, but the pull is strong to see the structures of my past. I often wonder if I would still be able to find the place in Santa Mesa Market where I met the Tangerine Lady one Sunday, during the heyday of the pen pal craze. Roger hovered close by to catch a glimpse of my priceless pen pal. She told me I would recognize her by her tangerine colored dress. When I realized that she seemed fresh out of Subic Bay, I pulled a Ruben on her and better: not a single voluntary and involuntary muscle twitch. When she swooped by and asked me for the time I gave her the time. When she swooped by the second time and asked me if I was me, I told her no, "my name is Crisanto Perucho". Emphatically. Not long after that I left for the province  with my diploma and did not look back for a long time. I was now a real physician at last - I think.

( Disclaimer: Most of the names have been disguised to protect the guilty. Any resemblance to anyone's piety is not necessarily coincidental).