“Bossing, can you two spare an old timer like me two pesos and fifty cents?”

beggar
dialectics, I gather, must’ve been influenced heavily by some obscure
Confucian philosophy nobody has ever heard of. I mean there must be an
old adage that says ‘he who asks for two pesos and fifty cents is bound to get three pesos’
What other way can you explain the two pesos and fifty cents thing?
Maybe he has five pesos and the jeepney fare to his home costs seven
pesos and fifty cents. But beggars like this one don’t have homes. Fuck, I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.

“My carburetor is hot.” I said. The drunk just stands there with a flabbergasted look on his face.

Very much like women,
when you’re being bothered by a beggar, especially a drunk one, always
say something totally unrelated to what they’re asking from you. Like
when they ask for food, you respond with something along the lines of
‘Dioxyribonucleic Acid is sour or I’m straight and I have syphilis.”
This will seriously throw them off balance and by the time they get
their bearings you’ve already entered the door or half a block away.

I
walk behind Jay through the door; the sound of Rage Against the Machine
suffused with the convulsive conversation of people well on their way
to the wonderful world of intoxication grew louder as we make our way
to the middle of the joint to an empty table.

Roland’s
is a local bar we frequent. We even played sets here during my rock
star glory days. It deviates from the typical bar layout though and
more like some criminal gang’s hideout. The place is a hole in the wall
with a makeshift bar that serves beer and hard liquor on one side. But
what’s up with the people watching television on one corner? The
goth-looking couple making out? The stray cat loitering around looking
for morsels of food?

They
have a Quezon City business permit and a liquor license. They also have one
of those San Miguel Beer sponsored neon signs but that’s as far as any
resemblance to a real bar would go.

It’s
going to be interesting to finally introduce Nisha to Jay whom I
consider in more ways than one to be my best friend. Jay may be an
alcoholic and acts like a total douche bag half of the time but if you
really want to know, it’s all a big image thing. Anybody who really
knows Jay would testify to the guy’s sharpness. He’s a very talented
musician too. I wonder what he’d think of Nixie.

I
didn’t tell Jay that Nixie is my girlfriend; because she’s not. But
Nixie doesn’t need to throw herself all over me for Jay to smell that
something is going on. His sensors will immediately pick up subtle
gestures and he’d skip to drawing up his own conclusions. He has been
very outspoken in the past when it comes to my girlfriends and if I
discount the fact that Jay’s the most promiscuous guy I know, I’d
probably say he’s gay.

He’s
right most of the time though. He hated my last two girlfriends with
intensity and I never could get him to say why. My last girlfriend for
instance, pressured to say what he didn’t like about her, he’d simply
say ‘I don’t know man, there’s just something wrong with her.’ And as
it turns out, he was absolutely correct. Of course it took me a while
to figure that out and the entire relationship turned out to be a big
clusterfuck.