The Truth

(A drunk sits next to you in a bar, thinks you are his or her close friend and starts confessing “the truth.”  Write about what “the truth” is in at least 200 words.)  

 

The bartender scoops up some ice into a tall highball glass. He pours some Bacardi into the glass and fills it to the rim with Coke. A garnish of sliced lemon follows. After a few stirs, he hands the cocktail to me. He wipes his hands on his apron and walks over a few stools away to the next customer, a fortyish man with a graying buzz cut.

 

I take a sip of my drink and mull over why a Cuba Libre tastes better when mixed with Bacardi. An expert bartender with a few thousand mixes in his resume might get away with using cheap white Tanduay rum, but an amateur almost always messes things up. Might as well use the real thing than risk earning the ire of a dissatisfied customer.

 

Halfway through my third Rum Coke, buzz cut approaches with a shot of Smirnoff in hand. He sits beside me and sets down his drink.

 

“Haven’t seen you for a while,” His voice sounds like he’s been soused up since noon. “How’s the wife?”

 

Staring into my drink, I don’t bother looking at him. “Excuse me?” I manage to blurt out, still toying with a couple of ice cubes with my stirrer.

 

“I’m asking about your wife, Rick. How is she?”

 

I look to the bartender for help. He gives me a shrug and proceeds to wipe some glasses, as if to say “It’s your problem, dude. You’re on your own.”

 

A sigh of resignation escapes me. Maybe it’s just better to play along. “She’s fine.”

 

Buzz cut clucks his tongue. “Fine,” The word escapes his lips with a tinge of sarcasm. “That’s what they all say. If everything were fine, you wouldn’t be here, would you, Rick?” He punctuates his statement with bitter, cracking laughter.

 

I pretend not to hear him, but I change my mind at the last minute. I turn to stare at him and ask: “How about you? How’s the wife?”

 

He matches my gaze and pierces me with cold, black eyes. “I really don’t know, Rick. Haven’t seen her for a while. Maybe she’s dead, but why do I care? Maybe I even killed her.”

 

Silence, as we both sip our drinks. The bartender sets down a small plateful of peanuts. I scoop up a handful and pop a couple into my mouth. Buzz cut helps himself and chews noisily. He washes down the mouthful of nuts with more vodka.

 

I wonder if he was telling the truth. A morbid truth.

 

“Hey Rick, wanna hear a joke?”

 

“Sure,” I say.

 

“A woman walks into a bar and settles into a stool. The bartender comes up to her. ‘What will it be?’ he asks.

 

‘I’ll have a beer please,” The woman says.

 

‘Anheuser-Busch?” The bartender asks.

 

‘Fine,” The woman says, visibly irritated. ‘And how’s your cock?!’”

 

The bar is suddenly filled with roaring laughter. Buzz cut’s body is convulsing, in synch with his cackling. The bartender’s face is red and he is clutching his sides. After three drinks, it is the first time I hear the bartender’s voice and unluckily for me, it comes out as boisterous laughter. The other customers aside from buzz cut and myself– an elderly couple having dinner at a booth in the far corner, and a heavyset woman several stools away with a mug of beer in hand – are all chuckling.

 

“Get it Rick? And how’s your bush? And how’s your cock? Hahaha!”

 

I finish the rest of my drink, fish out three hundred pesos from my wallet, and place the bills down on the bar. I was heading toward the door when I heard buzz cut call out to me.

 

“Hey Ricky! Where are you going? I haven’t finished the joke. The woman ended up shooting the bartender between the eyes!” More laughter.

 

I exit the bar and walk out into the night. I could still hear faint laughter from within even as the door closes behind me.

 

And I wonder if the bartender is still laughing.

Charlie Chaplin Movies

(Instructions from Jovir:

Writing in Persona

Another exercise to stir your imagination. Put yourself in the persona of either a: Deaf, Mute, Deaf-mute, Cripple, or Blind person. Write a poem or prose about a great experience in your life and how you went through that experience under the disability you’ve chosen.  Fire away, 200 words minimum…)    

An opening scene shows several soldiers standing at attention, firearms in tow. A company commander belts out a command and the soldiers lay down their arms. The shortest soldier—bowlegged and sporting a toothbrush mustache not unlike Hitler’s– has problems handling his firearm, causing him to slam down the butt of his rifle on the foot of the soldier to his left. The latter grimaces, and grabs his foot in agony. At once the audience in the theater erupts in laughter.

Silent laughter.

 

This is a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms. Chaplin, who was famously known for his most memorable on-screen character The Tramp, was a master at using exaggerated gestures and slapstick comedy to wow his audience.  He could give any competent mime or clown that’s worth his salt a run for his money.

 

I have watched all of Chaplin’s movies and they have never failed to elicit laughter from me.

 

I prefer silent films– like Chaplin’s –to talkies. Of course in my case, all films, even talkies—are silent films. Exaggeration and slapstick evoke a lot more emotion from me.

 

An exception would be films with subtitles: foreign flicks in English subtitles or DVD movies (both pirated and not). Never mind the grammatically inferior captions.

 

Books and comics can also do the trick.

 

But give me Charlie Chaplin movies anytime.

 

Just expect a lot of silent laughter.

Alternate Ending

For today’s writing exercise, I made my colleagues read Neil Gaiman’s short story, Babycakes (http://ljconstantine.com/babycakes/ ) and asked them to write an alternate ending. Here’s mine: 

And everything went back to normal. 

Only… 

One scientist subjected several babies to an experiment. This experiment made the babies smarter, just like humans. A lot of people protested this. You can’t kill, eat, and “use” something as smart as humans.  

The smart babies learned how to make the dumb babies smart. Soon all the babies were as smart as humans.  

At first we didn’t want to harm the new, smarter babies anymore. But we needed to eat to survive. We needed a living creature other than humans to test our products and make leather with. We needed something to replace the animals.  

We didn’t have a choice. 

The babies denounced the killings, of course. They took their protest to the streets. They went on TV and demanded fair treatment. They read books and formulated theories to justify their clamor in putting an end to the slaughter.  

But this was impossible. Humans are more important than babies.  

I don’t know if the babies will ever stop their struggle to have a better life for themselves. All I know is that we won’t stop thinking about our own welfare first. After all, we’re humans. I want to tell the babies to just embrace their fate. That they are meant to be what they are. 

They don’t have a choice.

The Last Outrage

Back cover of the New York Times’ bestseller, The Last Outrage:

Passionate and full of energy, The Last Outrage narrates the rise and fall of Filipino game show host, singer, and comedian Willie Revillame.  Boy Abunda chronicles Revillame’s career, from the time he rose to fame in the early ‘90s as sidekick to big-named movie stars to the Ultra Stampede tragedy that claimed 71 lives. Central to the story, as vividly recounted by Abunda, is the Wowowee Willyonaryo Scandal, which triggered public outrage and resulted in a verbal tussle between Revillame and fellow comedian, singer/songwriter, and host of Eat Bulaga, Joey de Leon.  

The book that “catapulted” Abunda to the bottom of the New York Times’ bestseller list, The Last Outrage is an influential work of modern prose, an outstanding blend of gossip, hearsay, and terrible, overtly sentimental writing.    

Praise for The Last Outrage: 

“All hype, no substance.” – Stephen King 

“Good morning!” – Guy Goma, Internet Expert

“Explain before you complain.” – Joey de Leon 

“[An] ingenious new literary mystery… sparkling with erudition… Oh wait, this isn’t for the Da Vinci Code?” – The Wall Street Journal