Skinning Me Alive

Where were you in 1994-1995?

I was in law school. But my mind was always somewhere else. I despised the rigidity and conformity of Malcolm Hall, and badly needed a respite after reading and digesting Javellana vs. Executive Secretary (it takes up more than 400 pages of Volume 50 of Supreme Court Reports Annotated).

Luckily, I hooked up with a group of writers and entrepreneurs who were putting up KAMPUS, a small, magazine-type publication. It was printed in newsprint paper, was black and white, and was blessed with the simplest of layouts and graphics. A pure labor or love. That little experiment lasted about two years. Students from UP, Ateneo and Miriam and readers in the Katipunan area got their free monthly copies of KAMPUS.

The articles were crisp and short, with human and emotional flair. Legal writing on the other hand, the type I was exposed to everyday in the classroom, was cold, verbose and impersonal. Something a robot or a computer program that knew how to piece words together in a passably grammatical manner would have produced.

Here's one of the weirder and more self-indulgent pieces I wrote during my KAMPUS stint. Same title as this entry:

I was eleven when I went through my rite of passage that dreary summer afternoon. I had already imagined myself sitting on a wooden stool in some barrio herbolario's hut, chewing a handful of leaves while the instru­ment that would liberate me from my innocence rested between my legs.

It didn't happen. My parents were too sophisticat­ed for that gig. I got cut in a squeaky clean hospital room, with about two or so nurses assisting the female physician. Somehow the reality of exposing myself to these total strangers terrified me, but by then the anesthesia was already working its effects. Before I passed out, a nun managed to enter the operating room. I wasn't certain if she was able to pray for my poor soul. I wasn't able to verify why she went there in the first place.

Mother of raving God! I let out a yelp the first time I fully examined this bandaged demon that was attached to my lower torso. I was home then, squirming in anguish, wearing one of the oversized skirts that my mother had sewn for me. If anyone would have committed the sorry mistake of saying anything about my seeming androgyny, I was thinking of beating the bastard like a gong. Yet the truth was I was help­less. My younger sisters would giggle relentlessly as I emerged each morning from my room, walking like a poor imita­tion of a sedated jewel thief minutes away from a big heist.

I would understand many years later, thanks partly to John Updike, Philip Roth, and other writers, how this forlorn mass connects to my virility and my sense of being and belonging in this world. But all I knew in those skirt days was the overwhelm­ing pain this traitor caused me when I saw kissing scenes on television.

Yes, this traitor. How many times has this double-cross­ing freak betrayed his master in those unguarded moments in swimming pools, in those embar­rassing flashes of swelling trou­ser-zipper areas during conversa­tions? I always hated its arro­gant noncha­lance, its obscure trait of having a mind of its own.

Looking back, I recall with a trace of amusement how I marveled at my male friends who never stopped devising new names for this thing. Their number, arguably, was more than the epi­thets David Mamet could pass on as variations of the ubiquitous f-word. There was Pedro, Pepito, Manoy, Barok. Some were just so insanely funny that we'd laugh the whole time while intently discussing these matters.

I would comprehend the full shock value of those names many, many years later in, of all places, a fancy restaurant with a girl in white turtle­neck shirt while Thai rice was inadvertently flying off my mouth. But that's another story altogether. That humiliat­ing scene wouldn't have happened had I not instantly remembered that summer they literally skinned me alive.