ed's note: this is the first ten pages of one chapter of a book I'm writing. Please feel free to comment. Will post other pages and chapters later. The book is tentatively titled Correspondent. Please feel free to post comments on the writing and the details. If you were mentioned in the first few pages, that should tell you something about your age :)

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Two hundred years before the Christian Century, the Roman Empire saw the birth of the earlier kind of opiate for the masses. In Rupert Matthew’s book The Age of the Gladiators, Rome’s patriarchs and politicians adopted and modified the Etruscan tradition of sacrificing men to honor their esteemed dead. Thus was born the Roman munus [munera in the plural form], the bloody public fights by gladiators that had started off as “obligations to honor the dead” but soon became instruments to entertain and enrich the living.

The first gladiators were ordinary slaves, thrown into a makeshift arena in the public market with crude but lethal weapons. But much like today’s TV audience, the Roman public soon grew tired of the simple hacking and slashing, and began to demand more, in today’s terms, production value from those who sponsored the games. Realizing that ordinary slaves untrained in the martial arts died too fast to keep the crowds sufficiently entertained, the sponsors of these munera began to stage even more elaborate shows, featuring gladiators trained in special schools, fighting in specially built arenas that featured trapdoors, wild animals, and exotic weapons. Matthew writes that some of these veteran gladiators soon became entertainers as well, spinning and leaping and sometimes juggling their weapons to the delight of the crowds, even though a simple hack and slash would have sufficed.

The rich and powerful who sponsored these games also realized the power they had over the Roman mob. The holding of an extravagant and much celebrated munus would almost guarantee a man’s election to high public office. This was, after all, the era where Rome was defined by two words, and they were not Republic and Empire, but Bread and Circus. It could also guarantee an unpopular Emperor’s hold on power. Soon, rich families were spending fortunes for the smallest excuse to have a munus, no matter that the deceased to be honored probably died several years ago. Several Roman Generals took this route to become dictator of Rome. Roman Emperors emptied the coffers of the treasury to hold fights that lasted for weeks and involved thousands of gladiators. Gaius Julius Ceasar even flooded a portion of Rome and staged naval battles using real, although scaled-down warships.

The rich Roman businessman, patriarch, or politician who sponsored the gladiatorial fight, he who wanted to woo and awe the public with a garish display of blood and gore, was called an editor, from the Latin phrase E DITUS, or to put forward. The editor had yet another power; in the event a gladiator was severely wounded or disarmed in the ring, the editor alone had the power of life and death over the poor fellow. The mob of course needs to make its opinion known – a clenched fist for a missus, or a reprieve and a chance to fight another day, or a stabbing motion with the thumb, to mean no mercy. No thumbs up or thumbs down, as the popular myth went. The editor would invariably follow public opinion, since it was to court public opinion that he spent for the munus in the first place.

Thus, a gladiator’s life or death depended on the whims of one man called the editor, who, depending on his scruples, may choose to challenge the mob’s wisdom, or surrender to its appetite for entertainment.

After two decades in print and television, it all begins to make sense.

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October, 1987

I'm not really sure why I chose to apply with the Manila Chronicle. I could have tried the Inquirer, which had a much bigger circulation. But the Chronicle sounded pretty prestigious, with a nice line under the masthead that read: Number One in Readership Quality. It was also another good way of saying we didn’t have the circulation. It was basically a business-political broadsheet, while the Inquirer was called a tabloid in broadsheet form, even by its own reporters. Of course I could have just been lazy - the editor in chief, the respected Amando Doronila, was a cousin of my mother.

Not that I expected to be allowed to be lazy. I was a correspondent, and correspondents, as I said, were paid 12 pesos per column inch, not for stories that you submit, but for stories that see print. With that kind of a deal, no amount of nepotism would get me a bigger salary. It didn’t even guarantee a fixed salary. It meant hard work, good writing, and a good nose for news.

My first boss was Cris Cerdena, a petite young lady who manhandled all the correspondents. She was the metro editor, which meant that, for all the correspondents, she was either the Virgin Mary or God Almighty. She gave me a cursory exam, stuffed my biodata under a pile of papers, and inflicted me onto the world. She also gave me my first assignment, which was an innocuous feature on the flora being planted on the center islands of Roxas Boulevard that would later come out on the second to the last page of the Chronicle sometime in October 1987. The story struck me as somewhat odd. Why would anyone want to read about flowering plants in the middle of the old Dewey Boulevard, I asked myself as I balanced in the middle of the island while vehicles whizzed by on both sides. At best, I hoped it was a test, to see if I could make an uninteresting topic somewhat vaguely interesting. At worst, it could mean that my editors thought I was as useful to them as a calachuchi was to a truck driver during rush hour.

It was my first byline. I think my mom even clipped the boxed article, although I’ve since lost it. No big deal really, except that the next time I was peeing in the john, the old man Doronila would unzip at the urinal beside me, and let fly more than just his afternoon coffee. Good feature, Doro said, except that there was a complaint. Complaint? Controversy over calachuchis along Roxas boulevard? What gives?

Your plants, Doro said. A plant expert called to say that the plants on the accompanying picture were not calachuchis. I zipped up as calmly as I could and told him that the people who planted them said they were calachuchis, although frankly I wouldn't know the difference between a tossed salad and a venus flytrap. Besides, I didn’t pick the photo that came out with the story. The accompanying photo may really have been wrong. But the point was made - you never believe everything they tell you.

Chris stuck me in the Western Police District, which was a relatively good beat for a police reporter. My partner was Vincent Atos, a young correspondent/photog who often gets mistaken for a Japanese journalist because of his chinky eyes, round face, and his helpless stutter. In the beginning I felt like Vincent resented my intrusion into his territory. Correspondents can be very territorial, especially since they only get paid per column inch and every story they file counts. Vincent would eventually warm up, and we would get along with the rest of the gang just fine. Later, it turned out that Vincent was simply quiet and taciturn towards everybody, at least until you get him laughing, after which his stuttering would be overtaken by his helpless giggling.

I said the WPD was a pretty good beat because it’s the anchor of Metro Manila police reporting. On a given night, Manilenos seem to like giving their police force the greatest number of beatings and stabbings than the rest of the other districts combined. Proof of this was the fact that Manila had an entire police district all to itself, while other police districts like, for example, the Northern Police District, had jurisdication over three or four towns. There was a major hitch though - I got the late afternoon and night shift. What this meant, in an era that preceded the pagers and the cellphones, was that I would only get published if my story was big enough to rouse the night editor from his drunken stupor to "remat" or change the front page. In other words, it’s either a breaking story big enough for the front page, or it wasn’t big enough to see print at all. At that time, the front page closed much earlier, and changing the front page was a mighty affair that took a great deal of arguing, cajoling, and threatening. This was before it was a fad to have a computer in the newsroom; everyday, the clackety clack of dozens of typewriters was the music of the newsroom, and it was a point of pride for a correspondent to have a new ribbon or a fresh scroll of newsprint in his old typewriter.

What this meant was that, on a normal day, I would almost certainly not get printed. Vincent would get the day stories that would make the first edition. In addition, stories that happened the night before that were not big enough to tickle the night editor’s fancy were written and re-angled by Vincent for the first edition. Working the night shift was really a losing proposition for a broadsheet correspondent, although it meant big bucks for correspondents of the evening tabloids. The trick, I learned, was to churn out features and stories behind the headlines, which they lapped up. After a while, they started giving me the anchor of the front page, the bottom part of the page that usually had a news feature.

I was also lucky because these were extremely interesting times. Gringo Honasan had just tried to kick Cory Aquino out of Malacanang, and the hunt was on for the poster boy of RAM. So “happily”, once in a while, a bomb would go off at night, a cache of weapons would be discovered during a late night raid. These events kept me alive, and kept the night editor grumbling. The Chronicle also had a concession to the poor correspondents that would often be helpful. Many times, a story would be bylined by several names: staffmembers who are senior reporters who get a regular monthly pay, and correspondents who live on the column inch. The paper's policy went like this - with stories that are jointly bylined by a correspondent and a staffmember, the correspondent gets paid for the entire length of the story regardless of how much he contributed to it. For example, if the editors wrap two paragraphs from me with a 20-paragraph story from staffmember Patrick Paez, I get paid for the entire 22 paragraphs. On a busy month, I could squeeze into the headlines almost every other day.

Here’s a good example – my first real story for the national page. Since I covered Manila, I also covered the Red Cross, whose offices were along Bonifacio Drive. Less than a week after getting “hired” by the Chronicle, Cris told me that a landslide had occurred in Kalinga Apayao. Now, I had no idea where Kalinga Apayao was, or whether it was part of the Philippines. But the instructions were simple enough – call up the Red Cross, and see what details they have. So I picked up the phone and did just that. A few details here and there, and I got my first banner story without even leaving the office

LANDSLIDE
KILLS 40 IN
KALINGA

By Ed Lingao
Correspondent
The Manila Chronicle Oct. 28 1987

Forty people were buried alive in a landslide in Kalinga Apayao, triggered by the heavy rains of typhoon “Pepang,” the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC) reported yesterday.

Evelyn Litap, Kalinga Apayao Red Cross administrator, said the landslide hit Barangay Macarian Balatoc in Pasil, near Tinglayan, forcing at least 12,812 inhabitants to flee.

Tinglayan was rocked by earthquakes last June.

Litap added that 58 families were rendered homeless by the typhoon in Tabuk, the capital town, and are now staying in a schoolbuilding.

The story went on for some eight more inches, much of it details from other staffmembers. I don’t even remember how much of the words were mine, and how much were the editor’s. I was so happy to get a banner story that I didn’t care that I never heard of Kalinga, and would never imagine sticking my nose there. Five years later, I would finally visit Kalinga Apayao, and come home with my tail between my legs.

Before the 15th or the 30th of the month, the correspondents would start collecting their published stories and pasting them on sheets of bond paper to submit to the library. The librarians would then take out their rulers and measure the column inches, for payment by the cashier. It should be a pretty honest arrangement, except that editors sometimes neglect to put the byline.
In cases like that, the librarians just take your word that it’s your unbylined story, or they ask the editor. Once in a while, some correspondents would use this system to pad their earnings; its not hard to blame them, since the paper requires them to work seven days a week with no allowances or guarantees that their work would be used. Things came to a head when the editors caught a correspondent with a heavily padded submission. Apparently, this particular police correspondent wasn't a very good cheater - some of the articles he submitted to the library were clipped from the foreign news section.

The Chronicle newsroom was a large, old fashioned affair, with the news editor Rolly Fernandez seated in the middle and everything else radiating outwards like spokes on a wheel. Well, that was the general idea. Honestly, the physical newsroom arrangement looked more like domino tiles run amuck. Rolly was a salt and pepper type of a guy. We didn’t really get to talk to him as much, us being lowly correspondents and bottom feeders. But we build myths and legends around people we see often but seldom get to talk to. Like we do with the Pope, I guess. In our minds, we painted Rolly as a gentle, fatherly guy, who strokes his mustache as he ponders on the wonders of the universe or figures out which correspondent to send to the morgue, literally or figuratively. He was probably sports minded in a couch-potato way, quiet and reserved until liberated by alcohol, with an occasional crack of wit. On the surface, and this is where our imaginations really flourished [we are, after all, supposed to be writers], he looked so much like the basketball player Mon Fernandez that we decided he was probably a brother of the cager. Decades later, with Rolly manning the Inquirer Baguio bureau and the rest of us dispersed elsewhere, we realized that most of our guesses were correct. Except for the last guess – no one bothered to confirm it, as if afraid to destroy the myth.

Characters were legion in the newsroom. There was Cris, my boss. In the pecking order of things in the newsroom, she was still somewhere in the bottom rung, handling the Metro section. Which is to say, most of the editors probably picked on her. So logically, she picked on us. Her pen was eloquent, her appetite overwhelming, and her mood swings legendary. Woe to any reporter who gets her goat when she’s just hit a bump with her boyfriend-photog, a ladies man named Gino.

Then there was Rusty, a gentle man with a jagged name but a smooth literary and journalistic style. Rusty is the quintessential deskman, the type you would cast in a 50s movie as a newspaper editor with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth. In fact, with his salt and pepper flattop, he could pass off as Peter Parker’s mean-spirited newspaper editor in the Spiderman movie series, if he just adopts a mean disposition and puts on a lot more weight and height. He just looked so… newsy in an editor kind of way. When I came into the Chronicle, he must have been in his fifties already, although it’s really hard to tell. He was, and two decades later, still is, single but married to his journalism. He was, and maybe still is, in his fifties, a never aging icon in a newsroom. During the day, he would consume vast amounts of copy with the intensity of a brain surgeon, proving himself to be one of the best wordsmiths this side of the south harbor. At night, after the newspaper has been put to bed [yes, that’s the term we use, no malice there], he would graduate with the rest of the desk, Cris included, to a Malate bar to consume vast amounts of alcohol, still with the intensity of a brain surgeon. Rusty apparently believes in doing everything with passion.

There were plenty of other quirky characters that we bottom feeders got to observe from a distance, Doro being the least of them with his big pipe and an aussie drawl so hard to understand that you simply nod and say yes sir to whatever he says and hope that he wasn’t asking for your name. Alan Robles with his sharp wit that would leave us in stitches; The golden girls [no reference to age here] Malou and Sheila who were high up in the pedestal for us along with the Dalai Lama. Then there were the disciples, also known as staffmembers – Patrick Paez, who was later to transfer to television; Lito Zulueta, or Lito Zu, perpetually wagging his finger skyward and pontificating endlessly on religion, morals, or literature, a quirk we quickly attributed to his apparent lack of a sex life.

And there was Manny Mogato. Ahhhh who could forget Manny Mogs, a bear of a defense reporter who would fall asleep while seated in the front row during a high level press conference and proceed to snore like a rusty sawmill. Fellow reporters like to recall an incident where Manny fell asleep during a press conference of President Fidel Ramos. Naturally, Manny chose to sit at the front row. Naturally, too, Manny began to snore. Loud. With a grating crashing scraping sound that reverberates from the bottom of Manny’s generous belly before bubbling out of his equally generous lips; it’s a sound that would send war veterans running for cover. It was so loud that even the President was for a moment unsure what to do - ignore the incessant rumbling that was loud enough to make NORAD raise the alert to DEFCON 4, or call a cease-fire and declare an impromptu siesta? In the end, FVR, ever the suave media manager, and having endured Manny’s quirks when he was still Secretary of National Defense, simply smiled at the embarrassed reporters and quipped that Manny appears to have fallen asleep while the President of the nation was holding court.

And here is where Manny works his magic. Manny immediately jolts awake, raises his hand, and asks a smart follow-up to a question that had been asked while he appeared to be fast asleep. It’s something he does often. Apparently, Manny has mastered the art of listening and absorbing data even during deep sleep. Minus the snoring, it’s a talent every reporter wishes he had.

There was one more character in the Chronicle story, although he was never in the newsroom, at least while I was there. There was a homeless vagrant who inhabited the small crowded parking lot of the Chronicle offices. He had long dirty matted hair, and his face and rail-thin body were long stained with grease and dirt that no amount of rainfall could wash away. He was there, rain or shine, night of day. At times I would catch him shivering in the rain, curled up under a tree. Everytime I was in the Chronicle, he was there in the parking lot, an unofficial parking attendant of sorts who was tolerated by the Chronicle guards. The Chronicle staff had named him Rambo, for no apparent reason other than he probably looked as bad as Rambo after a torture session. His vocabulary also appeared to be as rich as Rambo’s. On occasion, he would be helpful, guiding cars that were backing up inside the crowded parking lot. Once, I learned too late that he had just learned the gestures of a parking attendant without necessarily understanding them. One time I brought my dad’s car to the office, I followed his hand gestures and promptly backed into a tree. I leaned out the window to chastise him, only to see that he was still gesturing to me to back up even though my bumper had already acquainted itself with the tree.

The scuttlebutt was that Rambo used to be a deskman for the Chronicle. Of course that wasn’t really likely, and Geny Lopez probably wouldn’t have liked the idea of one of his wordsmiths sleeping on the pavement. Not good for morale. Still, it was the popular myth that went the rounds, and terrified the young employees of the newsroom. Here, in the parking lot, was proof positive that journalism was for saints and/or madmen, and a reminder that you often can’t really tell the difference between the two, not even with their clothes or their smell. But if it was terrifying for young reporters, imagine the impact of this message on the older deskmen like Rusty - Rambo the deskman was driven mad by bad copy. Beware, the wrongly used word is really mightier than the sword.

As for the correspondents, we had our own little corner by the entrance of the newsroom, where the ricketiest and most obsolete typewriters were set up. It was always a mess, and no one owned any particular table or typewriter. In fact, correspondents had no right to own anything, least of all their time. The first thing any correspondent does when he gets to the newsroom is to locate a free roll of newsprint and scroll it into a free typewriter. In those days, we didn’t type on bond paper – that’s too expensive for the type of copy we churned out. Our typing paper came in rolls from the press downstairs, in brown newsprint with the regular width of 8 inches, ending in a hard cardboard roll. It sort of reminds one of toilet paper, which in itself may be a hidden message, since we use it for our copy. It was actually a practical way of doing things, since correspondents tended to have great difficulty choosing a way to start their stories with. It is not unusual to hear a load groan, and a tearing sound as a correspondent ripped off the first two inches of his roll. Later, after the copy is submitted to Chris, we would hear, from her side of the newsroom, an even louder groan, with sounds much similar to the ripping of hair and gnashing of teeth.

This was when correspondents [and reporters] would still come to the office to file their stories. Since correspondents never seem to earn enough, they usually don’t have the money to commute to the Manila newsroom from Malabon or Pasig just to type out a story that may or may not be used anyway. A lot of copy was turned in through phoners. This was way before the age of the fax machine, and eons from the internet age. Eventually, deskmen tended to develop that funny crick or angle in their necks from cradling the phone and shouting at correspondents over scratchy phone lines. They also sometimes develop a tendency to talk out of the corner of their mouths, a result of doing much of their business over the phone.

We lowly correspondents often kept to ourselves, murmuring and whispering in the corner behind the hulking typewriters, dreaming of a day when we would be regularized, or at least, get a new typewriter ribbon. For many of us, many typewriter ribbons would pass us by, but the day of regularization would never come. Once in a while, an odd staffmember or two would grace us with their presence, and we would stare wide-eyed and gape in wonder at these mythical beings who received regular paychecks.

This was our newsroom, circa 1987. Computers were still far in the future; computers were for launching ICBMs and solving the mysteries of the universe. Typewriters were for writing. Liquid paper worked too slowly. And given the vast amounts of corrections necessary, you may as well use a paintbrush. The trashcan was much more efficient. You literally tore out whole paragraphs, cut and pasted lines, and if really unlucky, the copy editor would summon you, and in front of all your peers, ask you in a voice dripping with sarcasm to sit beside her and just tell her the whole story from the start so she can write it from scratch.

It was difficult adjusting from the colorful adventures of college to the dark seedy life in the night shift. College, after all, clothed us with that feeling of invulnerability and omnipotence, as if we could change the world a different way each day. But reality was different; it was here where I learned that the police beat would change a small part of you each day, in ways you would never have imagined or noticed. During the daytime, the press office was peopled with colorful, cussing, belching and farting police reporters of all size and shapes, and smells. Once in a while, a reporter would throw his gun on the table, use language so colorful that you don't have to know the dialect to get the message, and hit another guy on the head. This was on a good day. On a bad day, there weren't any people around at all, which meant that everyone was out, and that you were getting scooped.

The Manila Press Office was a hole in the wall just behind the front desk of the Manila Police headquarters along UN Avenue. A swinging glass door would bring you to a small narrow room dominated by a wooden table topped with fake wood, with benches on both sides. A television set sits on a shelf above an annex room, that holds several small wooden lockers. Sometimes, a group of reporters would shut the door to the annex so they can make their deals in private; other times, a reporter would bring a lady in and shut the door. On the other side of the main room is an anteroom with a cement toilet. Although the toilet was the smallest part of the press office, the whole place reeked of stale urine and sweat. Despite the smell, some reporters would conduct their secret business here, away from prying eyes.

The favorite pastime then was the game of dominoes. For some reason, cards never seemed to have caught on. One would almost assume that rough and tumble veterans of the police beat would play poker every night in a haze of cigarette smoke. But no. WPD’s press corps preferred arranging and rearranging small black wooden tiles and putting white dots end to end. Perhaps it had to do with the solid feel of the wooden tiles, which you could slam on the wooden table with a hard satisfying clack during a particularly heated bout. Somehow, slamming cards on the table didn’t seem intimidating enough.

I remember Teddy Laway and Teddy Junior, the father-son tandem of the Journal group. Teddy Laway got his nickname from his propensity for showering everyone within a three feet radius with a healthy splatter of saliva and digestive juices. And that’s when he's not yet excited. He looked like he was born here in the Manila police press office, and grew old here; most of the police characters from both sides of the fence seemed to know him. He’s been in the police beat so long that some of the veteran policemen probably learned the ropes from him. It didn't matter that he didn't seem to care much about writing his stories. Often, I would hear him dictate his facts to his editor over the telephone. Clearly, his desk editors did the writing for him. A lot of reporters during that time didn't know a verb if it tried to hit them in the face. There were plenty of reporters who were former photographers, who, before that, were former drivers. That’s because some editors didn't mind asking the driver to take a photo when the photographer was absent; and when the reporter was absent, editors didn’t mind asking the temporarily promoted photog to get details and ask questions as well. Blink long enough, and your driver could end up with a byline. Naturally, the quality of reportage suffers. Still, many editors would rather rewrite a badly written story than deal with a cub reporter who can't get the story at all. It’s not to say that the college grads were better journalists, or more morally discriminating. There were some reporters from prestigious Catholic universities who reinforced the idea that a good education won’t necessarily make you a better person; it could, given the right circumstances, however, make you a better crook.

His son, of course, was Teddy Junior, also known as Bong and it seemed that his father made sure he was born here as well. Father and son would work together, copying stories from each other and from other reporters. Often, they didn’t act like father-son at all. I would hear them curse or shout at each other like decent competitors would. And there was Angel from the Manila Bulletin. If people named their babies based on first impressions, Angel's parents must have had a healthy dose of irony. The guy was big, black, and scary looking in all senses of the word, with eyes that glared at you even when he smiled. He seemed to prefer sitting at the end of the table, although it may have been because his large size wouldn’t let him squeeze onto the benches on either side. He was gentle to cubs like myself, but otherwise he could practically threaten to sit on anyone who dared cross swords or words with him.

And there were Edong Reyes and Edd Reyes, both veteran photogs for the Journal group. It was confusing to get their names right at first, until we got to calling Edd Reyes "Edd Baba", for reasons I no longer have to expound on. Edong Reyes was a class act on his own. He was as rough as the roughest could get, and he could cuss like Donald Duck on steroids. Rumor had it that he lost a testicle when a grenade exploded near him during coverage of a rally in Mendiola, although I don't recall anyone ever mustering the courage to ask him if it was true. Long after I left the police beat, I was somewhat flattered to learn that he still remembers my name. He would greet me whenever I dropped by the press office. It was only later I realized that it shouldn’t have been too hard, since we had the same first names.

There was also Macon. How can I forget Macon. A small, fragile-looking girl reporter for one of Manila’s tabloids, she was crippled by polio at a young age. Yet she had a character and stamina that were hard as nails. Every day, well into the night, she would do the rounds of the WPD, scrabbling around with a crab-like walk that would have shamed the lazier reporters into doing some real legwork. She didn’t just limp; her polio was far too advanced for a mere limp. One of her legs was so badly deformed that you had to give her a little more space whenever she passed by. Yet she would cover just like anyone else, run after stories with the fastest reporters in the press corps, and not expect any special treatment from her colleagues at all. Whenever fellow reporters would whimper about how bad they had it, or how hard their jobs were, or complain about the hand that life dealt them, all I had to do was remember Macon and feel ashamed for myself. Many times I wondered why she didn’t get a job that required less time on her feet. She showed an amazing determination to get her job done, decently, in as dignified a manner as her disease allowed her. Long after I left the police beat, I would still bump into her, older and wiser, with a child of her own, still racing after the sensational stories to make her front page, never realizing that hers was the best story of all.

There was Ka Ruping, or Rufino Miranda of the Ang Pilipino Star Ngayon tabloid. I think he was really named Ka Rufing, after his first name Rufino, but you know how it is when men try to take on a tougher edge so as not to be labeled sissies. Holed up in the press office where everyone tried to show that they sweat testosterone, we tended to drawl a bit more, cuss a little louder, scratch our balls in public, swagger with a lazier step, all because we thought this was what our environment called for. It was basically idiotic, and a glaring sign of immaturity, of course, but when you’re alone at night and trying carefully to make friends with police characters, impressions seem to matter a lot. Thus, Ka Rufing easily evolved into Ka Ruping, all because you don’t want to use the letter F too much. But I digress.

Ka Ruping lived on a world all his own, and would have little to do with the other mortals in the press office. He was always muttering about outscooping the mediocre reporters from the other tabloids. For someone who worked for a political newspaper, I had some difficulty relating to the sense of scoops of the tabloid reporters. But Ka Ruping was definitely one of the more enterprising ones. While the rest would move in a dense noisy pack, Ka Ruping would only move alone, haunting the halls of the WPD and the NBI like a shadow, pressing flesh with confidential agents and cops. Of course, Ka Ruping had his own quirks. He was one of the older reporters in the police beat, having pushed past fifty several centuries ago. But be careful if he offers to shake hands; he has a viselike grip that he liked to show to unsuspecting new guys. Those who know better than to shake hands with him aren’t spared either. He may just reach down and grab a chunk of muscle from your thigh, and yank it up with such force that the muscle contracts and spasms up and down your leg like a mouse trapped under your skin.

Also, I have never seen the man without his baseball cap, proudly embroidered with the name of his publication. This man really believed in having pride in his work, and wore it on his head day or night. Really, until now I have no idea if Ka Ruping was curly or straight-haired. He also complained loudly and openly of corruption among police reporters, especially the cartel that controlled the press office and basically held police officials and precinct commanders by their balls. No one had any illusions that he was clean as a whistle, although, true to character, Ka Ruping appears to hate corruption all the more when it’s done as a pack.

One particularly slow night in the press office sometime in 1988, Ka Rufing barged in and started cussing at all Christians in general. Apparently, the guy had suddenly gotten an epiphany of sorts, although it was not clear if this religious experience was in any way assisted by spirits of the physical or ethereal kind.

You Christians got it all wrong, he raged. All of us were lapsed Catholics, but it was a really slow night, so we decided to bite.

Ok Ka Ruping, what did we do this time?
Fools, he thundered! Don’t you know that the man on the cross you worship is not even Christ?

Whoa, stop the presses. This was getting deep, even for Ka Ruping. And Holy Week was still way off the calendar.

So who’s the unlucky guy, then?

Read your Bible, Ka Ruping snorted. Carefully. Christ fell three times while carrying the cross to calvary. On the third time, the centurions ordered Simeon, a poor fellow who just happened to be passing through, to carry the cross the rest of the way.

That is in the Bible, he said. But did the Bible say that Simeon gave the cross back to Jesus? No! The Holy Book says the man carrying the cross was crucified on Golgotha. Therefore…

Now, we were no experts in Biblical verses, but we still had much difficulty grasping Ruping’s radical logic. Nevertheless, Ka Ruping would not be put off. Proof! I have proof, he said.

What were the seven last words? My God, forgive them, for they do not know what they do. Clearly, these words do not number seven. Perhaps in ancient Armaic, the numbers would fall into place?

There was a moment of silence as everyone digested the import of Ka Ruping’s revelation. Someone had made a mistake, and the poor fellow on the cross was spelling it out for everyone, yet for two centuries, we who claim to know the Good Book have ignored the obvious and the literal in place of more spiritual explanations?

Yet more proof! Ka Ruping was definitely on a roll.

The man who was nailed to the cross looked down at Mary and another man weeping at his foot, and said:
“Woman, behold thy son. Son, behold thy mother.”

By that time, the logic had gotten much clearer, although epiphany was still to descend upon us. Was the man on the cross trying to tell the whole world that mother and son were at the foot of the cross, and an unlucky stranger had been nailed in the son’s place?

We looked desperately for any sign that Ka Ruping was joking. No such luck, although we snickered behind his back the rest of the night. Many times, the mad would have a logic more sensible than that of the sane, and in hindsight, Ka Ruping made a lot of sense in a lot of things, much more than a lot of people I knew then, as now.

And then there was the bunch I hung out with. Gerry Lirio, AKA Gerry Libog, AKA Gerryli, was the closest I had to a mentor, demented as he was. He was the Manila police reporter of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, who, with his partner Omar Acosta, took me under his wing. It’s not like they had any choice. In college, our teachers required us to log several hours of internship in a media organization. I ended up in the Inquirer, with Gerry and Omar as my trainers. Of course, there was no formal training to speak of. That simply wasn't their style.

It was Gerry and Omar who made life somewhat bearable for Vincent and me. They hung around the station during the day, and prodded us along and in more or less the right direction. Gerry had that devil-may-care attitude, and giggled so adorably that the hospitality girls of Happy Sauna loved having him around so much they started giving him discounts. That’s not to say that Gerry didn’t have a serious side; he’s won several awards for the Inquirer for writing several investigative pieces, although personally I think he’s spent a little too much time trying to investigate Manila’s nightlife. He’s also the type of guy whose age is difficult to define. Twenty years ago, he looked like he was in his late twenties or early thirties. Last time I saw him, he still looked and laughed the same.