Room 1404, 13th Floor
The circus is rampaging inside my head. The elephants are tap dancing and the acrobats are flying, and Bayani Fernando is singing the opera in a tutu while dancing the cancan. I am pressed to a corner of my overcrowded skull, standing quietly on the off chance the circus won’t know I’m in town. Then the doorbell rings, the fireworks explode behind my eyes, and I stagger to the door and politely tell housekeeping to go away.
I’ll tell you where I am. I am sitting on a yellow brocade chair, in a white room with white walls and a white bed 13 floors above Shaw Boulevard. Outside the window is a checkerboard of rusting red and green roofs, a row of skinny plants in vomit-green pots marching down the center of the highway, and what appears to be a middle-aged couple engaging in enthusiastic sex in an empty parking garage
. My interest is naturally purely journalistic — although 13 floors do make it difficult to confirm if the gentleman in blue is wearing a murder weapon on his little friend.
I have been in hiding for the last seven days, attempting to write a book and trying to make sense of the half-dozen scrawled beginnings of unrelated sentences and the mad paragraphs that end in semi-colons. The vodka doesn’t kill the headache, the Ibuprofen refuses to kill the hangover, Bayani Fernando is now swinging a pink hula hoop, and there is the knocking and banging of someone building the Taj Mahal in Room 1505. I sit, my back to the window, my face to the wall, attempting to produce a thousand five hundred grammatically-arranged words. Today, it is the arrangement that matters. Content is negotiable. Relevance is subjective. In the absence of the message, I will give you a happy medium.
At nine in the morning last Saturday, I went on self-imposed leave. Turned off my mobile phone. Packed sweatpants and socks and intelligent books written by intelligent people. Warned all and sundry that I intend to vacate the planet. Tossed what was left of my savings into a stay at a random hotel.
This week, my soul is my own, my bladder not at the mercy of commercial spots, and I will finally be able to write. I decided the world was at fault for my inability to string sentences together. For the first time since the months I’ve been producing for television, I will finally go through a day without the persistent fear that my director will decide he must go haring off to Sulu to shoot the vegetation. It is a week without dealing with pompous government bureaucrats and the pompous secretaries of pompous bureaucrats; a week without egos to massage, foreheads to mop, and the heart-wrenching nightmare of a half-second’s half-second of pixelized screen.
The day I checked in, I spent the afternoon buying stacks of yellow pad, spent the second day — and most of the yellow paper — making to-do lists, cross-referencing with other, more specific lists (book the clowns, call Bern for updates, edit essay number 24). The next day I went out to buy adhesive tape to tack the lists to the hotel walls.
My walls are now beautifully papered with various lists, the sum of three days’ intense work…
There is a strange virus that comes over anyone who lives in a hotel. Understand, I live by myself in 36 square meters of mess along Panay Avenue. I wash dishes bi-monthly; I use towels I’ve had since elementary. I haven’t made my bed in the last four years. But after one day in a hotel, the minutiae are suddenly of paramount importance. I want dishes washed, water hot, towels fresh and white and fanned out over the comforter. I am offended when housekeeping knocks when they are not wanted, offended more when they are two minutes late. I dial 5 for the front desk and think evil thoughts when the phone keeps ringing. I want doors opened for me. I know the local numbers of engineering and housekeeping and the coffee house by heart. I order tomato soup and crème brûlée at midnight…
I write a little, read a little, find myself turning on my phone to check if anyone needed me urgently, and am terribly insulted by the fact that no one does. I call the one man in the world that is always happy to hear my voice, but even my own father asks if I’m done talking. I look at the lists on my walls, take a shower, look at my walls, take another shower, run a bubble bath then take another shower.
It’s only when I find myself on the floor, alternately staring at my toes and counting the lines on the faux wood tiles that I give up and go off to find my production crew, themselves going haywire shooting the movie my director had suddenly decided to shoot. An hour later I’m in the middle of the sound and fury of a crowded movie set in Cainta, perfectly happy to sit quietly with a notebook on top of coils of wire, ogling beautifully-muscled actors and being stepped on by lightsmen and cameramen and the random half-naked crew member, while 40 people work hours to shoot a 10-second sequence.
Then I go back to my white room, sit down in front of the white walls, and decide that if I’m going to be broke, I might as well have something to sell. I have been writing for 28 hours, have deleted more than I have written, have slept very little, and am living on cans of Coke and not much else. There is a headache blooming at the corner of my skull, but if I write long enough and hard enough, I can manufacture enough hot air to send the circus packing and blow the pink-cheeked opera singer out of my ear.
Let me tell you where I am. I am sitting on a yellow brocade chair by a hotel window, a few hours from checkout, looking down at the madding crowd while the sun shoots lightning off the windshields of hundreds of honking trucks and swerving jeeps. Later, I will go home to my apartment, open my own door, and walk past the dishes sitting in the sink. Then I will sit in front of my dirt-stained window, very much in debt, with little to show for it other than a few pages of double-spaced manuscript, a one-thousand-one-hundred-word column, a pile of dirty laundry, and a powerful urge to shoot vegetation in Sulu.
