By Ruben M. Cruz Jr. / Online Editor /
When asked by a couple of common friends if I was intending to write something about Joy De Los Reyes, the editor-in-chief of Malaya Business Insight who recently passed away, I was initially hesitant.
I was thinking any piece I write might not be able to do him justice. Sure, I’ve known Joy since the 90s but some people have known him a lot longer and surely a lot deeper.
I never worked for Joy or with him in the newspaper business. I never shared his hobbies, never spent any time with him on the golf course or on the shooting range. We had almost a two-decade age difference so we certainly were not contemporaries and not friends of longstanding. He was from a different generation altogether.
Most of the time I had spent with Joy, in the over two decades that I’ve known him, was spent sitting on bar stools, talking and laughing into the night, smoking and clinking beer bottles together with other friends inside these eclectic roster of bars along Mabini just a stone’s throw away from Malate Church, which at that time, were the watering holes of activists, artists, journalists, photographers and any foreigner in Malate who wanted that de rigeur experience of knocking a few drinks with the locals without being treated as a foreigner.
Before mobile phones and social networking, we went to those neighbourhood bars when we needed to be found, because sooner or later all our friends turned up there.
The bars themselves are no longer around. Like Joy, Jun Bautista and Alex Fernando, and some of my other journalist friends and fellow barflies who have died, the bars have either closed shop or moved on to other places. Only the memories I have of them remain.
Remembrances and The Hobbit House, owned by former Peace Corps volunteer (first batch in the Philippines) and college professor Jim Turner, closed in 2007 after the property they were renting was taken over by a bank. Turner moved The Hobbit House to Ermita, near another landmark church, and there’s even a Hobbit House now in Boracay where Turner maintains a vacation house.
The Oarhouse, which completed the trio of bars on that strip, all of them having ties back to the 70s and all of them oddly different from the pleasure palaces in Mabini, also closed in 2010. It was reopened by photographer and Oarhouse regular Ben Razon just a few blocks away in Bocobo Street after a year, but its clientele now are mostly college coeds and yuppies.
I know I sound like an old fogey but it was a different time and these bars now, even if they still exist, would be unrecognizable in a before-and-after snapshot of my existence.
I loved drinking with Joy in those bars of my youth that were primordially designed for drinking. Joy was uncursed by snobbery and pretensions, which was uncommon for a journalist and newspaper editor of his stature. He was right at home in those bars because they were much like him. What they lacked in swank, they more than made up for in character.
Joy was smart. He wrote well and perhaps read even better, but he was never one to flaunt it. He was quiet, gentlemanly and shy. He smiled as though he was always getting away with something.
At first glance, he looks somewhat like a college professor with his round glasses and Tom Selleck mustache, which actually served him well a few years ago when he was asked by a friend to teach a few courses in communication in De La Salle University (my alma mater), a short, part-time stint which the UP-educated Joy told me he enjoyed immensely because it provided him a much needed respite from the editorial room.
It’s easy to imagine Joy in a classroom. Even drinking with Joy was more than just drinking. It was an education. We talked about anything and everything you talk about in a bar—music, poetry (he had a lot of lines memorized, a lot), sports, politics, our families, the editorials and other stuff we wrote for our papers, our misspent youth—and each time I came home with something, but also somehow less burdened.
Joy liked music. He had a lot of musician friends, including Noel Cabangon, who he said he knew when the singer-songwriter didn’t know three chords and sang for nothing in a folk house.
Joy studied classical guitar with a tutor at home, so he knew his notes and tabs and chord progressions. But when sufficiently infused with liquid courage (aka beer), he would belt out a capella old Tagalog kundiman songs I don’t know the title of. But there is one song we like singing together, Joey Ayala’s activist love anthem, “Walang Hanggang Paalam.”
By far our favourite topics when drinking were food and religion, not necessarily in that order. Joy was a self-described foodie who made his own sausages and once tried unsuccessfully to run an oyster bar. We would often compare notes on recipes and the latest kitchen gadgets that we either bought or could only salivate to buy. We shared a common fetish for cast iron pots and pans, and Weber smokers and grills.
We’d bring to the bar our favorite pulutan for tasting. He liked my crispy tawilis, which often, for lack of availability, would be replaced by silinyasi, though if he noticed he never said anything. I liked his liver pate. Sometimes we would just sit at the Oarhouse bar and quietly ogle the Food Network on cable TV as if it was porn.
Religion is often a subject that people are uncomfortable talking about in a bar of all places. But with both of us just a few units short of our Masters—he in Philosophy, and I in Theology—we liked talking about various religions and spirituality and life and death and all that, so much indeed that we began jokingly calling each other “monsignor.” We never got to talk about these things anywhere else. People would think it way too kooky.
We often stayed way after the official closing time, which was always negotiable anyway in those bars. We’d often have several “for the road” and another few more “for the gutter” before Joy would say, “Now it is time for serious drinking.” You drink with Joy, you better have an exit strategy. I never had one.
I don’t mean this to sound like a walking advertisement for alcoholism. The truth is, I rarely drink anymore, at least not that way. I even stopped smoking a couple of years ago, when I turned 40. We all change a little bit down the road. But I’d be less than truthful if I didn’t say those were great times and great memories.
I visited Joy several times during his hospital confinement, before he was diagnosed with lung cancer and after, when he was going through his chemo and radiation sessions. Gregarious bar talkers that we were, ironically, those visits were mostly quiet. I just sat with him, much like (the biblical character) Job’s friends who silently sat with him for seven days. There are no words really to capture the enormity and awfulness of cancer. I know. My wife is a colon cancer survivor. Sometimes there is nothing more comforting than to just sit with the person and hold his or her hand.
I realized that those were probably the only times I had spent with Joy outside of a bar and sober, except for that time he and a few friends surprised me on my 40th birthday at home (well, we did get soused on our apartment balcony after my kids went to bed).
I got to drink with Joy one more time though, and yes, inside a bar. He celebrated his 59th birthday in The Hobbit House (the newer one near Ermita church), inside a room where the old Remembrances memorabilia were stashed. So many people came, perhaps silently praying there would be more years to celebrate ahead.
The normal trajectory of cancer—from getting better for a while to getting bad again then getting worse—had clearly taken its toll on Joy. But he was there, having wine, talking it up with old friends, raging against the dying of the light like Dylan Thomas begged.
The bar turned rowdy soon and the crowd spilled outside the ‘Remembrances Room’ where the smokers could light up (there was no smoking inside, though I didn’t think Joy would have minded). The blue haze of cigarette smoke along with the dim yellow-reddish lights somehow made the scene look like a sepia-colored flashback of happier times. Everyone seemed sexy and full-blooded, elegant, but also a little sad.
Joy made his exit shortly after midnight. I bade him goodbye, initially intending to just give him a quick, cursory embrace, but he held me back for a longer, tighter one, not saying anything. It was the last time I saw him.
Not a few would probably say any friendship forged at a bar would not be the best of friendships. That it would merely be a fellowship based on booze, which ends every time you settle your bill. But I think it also has to do with the kind of bar it is and the kind of people who hang out it in it. Sometimes you can make friends at a bar and be genuinely surprised at how that friendship deepens. ###