THE playlists of country buses I usually ride in the wee hours of the morning include Scorpions’s “I’m Still Loving You”, which drives my musings into the red-light recesses of my brain and gives me homosexual thoughts.
I would think of this guy, Wilbur I’d call him, who once talked me into seeing a performance in a male strip club somewhere in the nether regions of Manila. Wilbur being a poet, a professor and a published writer, I chose not to be a cynic and looked forward to some high-brow conversation. I also felt giddy about what I took to mean as merely an immersive gathering of strangers somewhat becoming friends—an overture of the man whom I categorically didn’t strike as gay. And then he began to get clingy while buck-naked performers gracefully slithered and sashayed to “I’m Still Loving You”, an apparent bar staple that otherwise suggested something was about to happen; a main event, if you will, the part old gay patrons hooted for and hankered to see. The Scorpions single was passionate and, under typical circumstances, brought to mind teens canoodling and twisted on the floor, possessed by premature desires and raging hormones. But, here, replete with graceful—morose—macho dancing, it otherwise reeked of frustration. The song demanded the listener to wax poetic about some lost love and lost years, existential loneliness and fear.
I felt something ache as Wilbur’s hand inched to places just a kiss shy of my delicate parts. And as I briskly brushed it away, he pleaded if it could remain there. I didn’t refuse nor agree. But what could I do, really, in a situation where it felt as if the body was devoid of all of its power?
Perhaps, it would be easier to just let it remain, in a way I would stay if someone asked me to stay, a gesture I took to be almost similar to something you give to someone who is crying: an emphatic sadness, perhaps, or a comforting touch. I let his hand stay there for hours on end, and the next thing I know he was holding my hand as we sat next to each other on a bus on the leg back. Wilbur was shivering from cold, perhaps, heat, while I acted oblivious about it and looked out of the window. His hands were uneasy, and fidgeted with the arm rest as he made a proposal. He would be home alone that night and he was wondering if maybe he could invite me to sleep in his home. I flexed off my seat and briskly alighted short of my stop.
It was amorphous what relationship I had with Wilbur in the first place, but it is apparent we now regard each other the way we regard estranged friends: what used to be longish conversations now reduced to little pleasantries and affectations. Whether he still goes to seedy places and rides buses holding hands with a male companion is out of anyone’s business. But, to me, he now exists from one bus ride to the next, out of thin air, where Scorpions’s opus about frustration and heartache is blaring from the stereo, and induces a thought for the homosexual.
