Babala: Ang susunod na maikling kwento ay isang kathang may konting libog at kabastusan. Pinapayuhan ang mga batang mambabasang gabayan ng kanilang malilibog na magulang. Hindi para sa mga supot at konserbatibong Katoliko ang flash fiction na 'tong bunga lamang ng malikot na isipan. Sa madaling salita, fuck off.
Life is a merry-go-round circus freak.
He didn’t know, much less care, about other people’s perception but for him, there’s something about life’s unending, there-and-back-again litanies that make him puke his guts out. A lot of people are phony and the fact that his life can be phonier than these mindless marionettes just seems to be agitating, like how you secretly watch your first porn encounter at home when the folks are away and you are alone feeling pretty much hornier than your high school voyeur neighbor and you feel like thinking about nothing but sex every gawddamn minute.
Phony is what you call a man living in front of a hollow celluloid of circuits and gigabytes, speaking in some technical gibberish, reluctantly answering phone calls upon fuckin’ phone calls from some gawdforsaken Occidental land just so he could be decent enough to society’s dictum as someone well worth some parents’ dole outs in the past. It’s one of the biggest bull he had to contend with in his pathetic way of living and he didn’t like it. Oh he gawddamn hated every inch of his job’s fake American accent and hell-cursing Johnny Doe customers.
If he had any choice, which is obviously not within his grasp under present circumstances, at least not right now, he’d rather be a normal underpaid nine-to-fiver – never mind if he gets to sit his stationary ass in the most boring swivel chair job this fuckin’ universe has to offer. Or maybe some frackin’ artist weirdo in one of those recluse boondocks up north of Manila, in some remote mountain range where artists birthed with nationalistic names hermit with all that Zen shit and artist mojo.
But life has its own way of dishing out theatrics. Sometimes what you want is given to somebody else, and that somebody else’s dream becomes yours for the taking. There has got to be someone, some people out there who wished they were right in his stinking soles and if he had to call the shots he’d give it to them nonchalantly, as in how a transient soul would drop a dime to a filthy beggar’s rotting hand up on the graffitied overpass, teaching him how to get a fish from others instead of how to catch a fish on his own.
You can only imagine then how going to work had been an affair of reluctantly dragging one’s wrinkled balls every gawddamn day for the man of this story. He abhorred having to adjust his pathetic life cycle of eating, sleeping, waking up, taking a shit every other three weeks or so. Fleeting. Lackluster. Stereotypical. Gawd knows how utterly ruined his circadian rhythm had become, loose springs and all, rusting and callous and every bit ready to snap in a jiffy.
He hated waking up in an impious hour when everyone else is fuckin’ drooling his way off to dreamland, repressing his psycho tendencies to arson the building where he resides just because he thought it was not fair to live when all the others are dead. He detested taking a bath in cold-wicked tap water and scrubbing his naked body to oblivion when just a wall away, his hot coitus goddess of a neighbor’s privates are fondled by some ephemeral beau, her orgiastic moans and sexual sighs reverberating across the thin partition.
Sex.
He smirked while thinking of this much shunned taboo. In a society where Internet porn and secret sexual fantasies and liberal minds abound, he found it odd how some still regard it as something unspeakable and how most are still trapped in their ancient beliefs. The world is growing and there is nowhere to go but up, nothing to do but be part of the inevitable change; else, be forsaken and drifted away to primordial void.
In its present context, sex is a superfluous word often associated with them call center professionals. Call center professionals, he liked the sound of that. The Western people who brought this toast-of-the-decade profession, this saving grace of Third World countries’ reeking under- and unemployment innards, are famous for this kind of sugarcoating things. Calling a matchstick man horizontally-challenged, a house for old people to die home for the aged, a woman suffering from bulimic gluttony someone with mild case of having sweet tooth – what does it make a difference? A spade is a spade and it never changes even if you call it a darn, shitty shovel.
But how he sort of liked his job description being perfumed into call center professionals he cannot say the same about society’s wrong notion of how they’re effin’ worse than the flesh peddlers of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. His friend, one tedious time, told him about how the slut he fucked viewed those nocturnal, American-accented yuppies as worse than them, the original hawkers of the oldest profession in the world. She said nocturnal folks like him are class-A sluts in baggy pants and tight skirts, smoking their sexual urges in Marlboro Reds under an impregnated moon, when the night is as stiff as a throbbing cock and the midnight air as damp as a fingered vagina.
There were stories of sex scandals done in haste inside enclosed elevator doors, of bluetoothed quickies in call center cubicles – he was aware of these exhibitionist acts filmed within the confines of his work place via 3gp-capable cellphones but this, in his opinion, does not suffice to call all of them worse than bitches of the flesh underworld. Perchance some promiscuous call boys and call girls do have such insatiable libidos, and he may justify everyone else does anyway, be it in the open or secretly so, but he thought it was unfair to come up with such hasty generalizations. At the very least, not all of them live and breathe one-night-stands and three-minute quickies. No sirs and madams, he swears by the kinky knot of a necrophile’s pubic hair, not all of them do.
But last night, what happened unexpectedly last night, seemed to have mocked his fervent idea of his profession’s uprightness. Perhaps there is some truth to judgmental society’s dictum after all. Perhaps, like the rest of the nocturnal urban yadda yadda blatherskites, as the slut his friend fucked for half a thousand grand professed, he’s just one slutty piece of fake American-accented crotch.
Last night he celebrated his 30th birthday swigging the night away in some random bar with a select number of friends, the slut-fucking friend included, and he surprisingly got a good head as an unexpected birthday present. Thirty, for crying out loud. Thirty! You know how much some people loathed, nay, dreaded, getting past the calendar mark? He was one of them age-conscious freaks, paranoid over finally reaching the end of the line, or at the very least the last line of a typical calendar anyway, having gone through innumerable depressions and rejections and quarter-life crises and all that sentemotional clusterfuck.
For most people, reaching this age means officially belonging to the serious, bill-laden adults club who are better off preoccupied creating house expense pie charts rather than breathing the obnoxious AC blast of thriving malls and spotting scrumptious behinds in string-thin T-backs to combat Manila’s delirious heat. Gawd how he wished to be eternally twenty. If he had to throw a coin at a wishing well where the hellish Japanese freak in ghastly white robe might have crawled out, he’d ask to be twenty once again, living out the Hakuna Matata way of adolescent living, gulping a shitty atmosphere of raves and rants and digressions, just being the twenty-year-old bastard that he once was.
But thirty he was last night and at the very least, he got a delightful, under-the-table blow job as a consolation. There was this young girl, by his gauge around 17 or 18, who very much looked like that Meteor Garden doll and he never thought she was up to the job, never thought she was one wicked cock connoisseur. She almost looked like someone who just had her first bouts of menstrual flow to tell you the truth and her reticent smile exuded that child-like naiveté, like a young girl whose young mind knows nothing about penis size and condom flavors and Catholic-banned sex education particulars. But looks, as the cliché goes, can be quite deceiving and last night, oh yes last fuckin’ night, he had to surrender to the deception of this ambidextrous girl’s shaft expertise.
The place was a haze of second-hand smokes and beer bottles gone dry, a swirl of lips smack of malice and lies and bodies agonizing for friction of the flesh. The night had become inebriated and it was a convenient way for her to chameleon a sleep on his lap, pretending her intoxication was getting the better of her for she had one too many drinks already. His band of brothers didn’t mind as all of them fuckin’ sex bastards were pretty much busy caressing taut tits and waterfall pussies hidden beneath thin blouses and scrimpy skirts. Inebriation had sunk in and manners had to be shoved aside for bastardly barbarism.
She unzipped his fly and he cupped the startled penis inside the boxer shorts, alternating between her left and right hand, proving right there and then how one bloody gifted ambidextrous she was. She ran her fingers along the above-average length of his shaft and he let out an uncalled wince for the unexpected gesture, like how a slight tap of a mallet propels the knee to jerk in reaction. But she knew better, of course. She reassured him with tender kisses at the base, caressing the bare terrain of clean-shaven pubic hair, and stranger he was no more.
On the table everything seemed to be quite as what you expect a table in a bar of cheap thrills on a Saturday night ought to be – cold beer bottles swaying like mad, their thirsty orifices locking the lips of some hungry young urban professionals from Third World hell. Under it there was a familiar ritual of primitive past, of Strength and Beauty sweating it out within the claustrophobic confines of a bamboo pole until it cracks out of their sheer intensity, conveniently hiding the actors away from the reproachful eyes of sinners and pseudo-saints. It would have been better if they did it within the walls of some cheap motels promoting the glory of fornication but he would have had it no other way; he liked the building suspense, the probability of unleashing his inner beast. The thrill of being caught in such a promiscuous act all the more ignited the passion of orgasmic emotions.
Each throb of his penis was reciprocated by her tongue’s warm licking; each twitch compensated by her deep throat swallows. She bobbed up and down, up and down like how a San Fernando Valley blonde and blue-eyed bitch titillated you with her masterly lollipop licking in those syndicated porn videos your dad or uncle kept hidden in some faraway cabinet but still reached your hand in some future time anyway, as in some cheap porn you watched while home alone, every now and then ejecting and then pushing the tape back to the player, the sole witness of your mischief as a young man, for fear of whispered footsteps in the front door and a curious boy's naked body in front of the TV set the fateful subject of your mom and dad’s shock bordering to revulsion.
Up and down her skillful tongue slid until he could no longer contain the boiling climax. He arched his back with beer bottle in one hand and a tight grip on the slit-eyed cock sucker’s head in the other, jerking forward and back with the slightest trace of carnal movement, moans unceremoniously suppressed in the hope that his friends, circumstance demanding them full attention to fondling some bitches’ bodies themselves, won’t find them in such lewd sexual position.
And then, as if the mythical Armageddon had dawned on the bar dwellers, all hell broke loose. Some seconds of drowning in coitus nirvana. Ecstasy. Eternal bliss. Delirium. And he could no longer contain it. He spurted spoonfuls of point-of-no-return semen, gawddamn cummed like one of those pathetic reality TV sluts of sick three-minute scandals and she swallowed all of it, not wanting to spill any minute drop. For a short moment, he felt the world shaking at his feet, stars in the galaxies bursting in defiance, the Final Reckoning blanketing his gaze. And then he was back to his old self, back to the company of his breast-fondling friends, back to the maelstrom of nicotine sticks haze and laboring beer bottles on some dingy bar table.
Blame it on the impressive cock sucking of that San Chai clone or perhaps he just had one too many bottles swigged last night but earlier today, he felt like banging his head on the wall for suffering a skull-splitting hangover. He knew it’s not going to be a gawddamn good day but to hell with it; since when exactly did he wake up on the right side of the bed anyway, like some much-hyped boy wizard having a taste of Felix Felicis to make things right? SSDD, his friend would surely tell him. Same shit, different day.
Indeed, not a good day it was for calls upon calls, at the call center production floor, he had to breathe in and breathe out for a couple of seconds just to get his sanity intact. The phone line was queuing and he had to fuckin’ deal with it. Deal with some phony Western customers on the other side of the globe who had nothing better to do than bitch about their gawddamn boring lives. It didn’t help that he wrongly chose a work station situated between one loud piece of headset whose mouth reeked of the most unbearable halitosis ever recorded in the call center history and another agent whose feet stank of fermented jock socks and ogre soles.
“Thank you for calling Technical Support. My name is Jay, how can I help you today?” He was tired from blabbering nonstop technical diatribe but he still tried to sound professional enough.
“I can’t connect to the Internet!” A voice in that distinguishable twang hollered on the other line. Whatever she was calling about, she was serious about it. And by the looks of it, how irately so.
She was firing a verbal barrage of complaints upon fucked up complaints, about how the Internet service sucked and how the company promised it would give her high-speed Internet service but only ending up in contention with the slowest dial up connection in her area. In times like these, he knew the only way to pacify such type of customers is to have them vent out their frustrations over the service. He let the woman on the other line rant until she seemed to have lost her supply of saliva.
“We do apologize for the inconvenience ma’am but don’t worry, I can definitely assist…”
“Yeah, yeah…Yeah right. Cut the crap, will you?”
“Ma’am, I…”
“Oh sure, you’re sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s the same lousy excuse I’ve fuckin’ heard from you, useless tech support people.”
“Ma’am, if you could just…”
“You’re not from one of those stupid off-shore Indian call centers, are you?”
“I’m from the Philippines, ma’am. Manila, Philippines.”
“Oh motherfuckin’ gawd!”
“If you’d just let me help you, I assure you I’m as capable as the on-shore…”
“Well lemme tell you something. Your fuckin’ assurance does little to get me comforted. Mean what you say and get me fuckin’ connected, brown monkey!”
Things were getting out of hand now. He was sincere about helping her, despite the weariness and exhaustion the queue had given him, but such crabbiness was a bit toeing off the line. What did she know about the fatigue brought about by twenty fuckin’ seven calls and counting that’s draining the life in him? People have limits and it does not do well to stretch one’s patience to the limit. Keeping his cool is too much to ask under such circumstances, especially when an unfair berserk customer hurls seemingly limitless cuss words and R18 invectives upon his already sullied person.
He was shaking with anger.
The profanity continued.
An uncontrollable headache began to mound on his head.
The bitching was unrelenting.
A spark building up from within.
Rant.
Rant.
Rant.
A twitch inside his head.
Yadda.
Yadda.
Yadda.
“Die, you bitch!”
Suddenly, a choking on the other line. The bitch’s ranting ebbed, only to be replaced by a gagging sound. A gagging sound as if someone was being strangled to death. A series of chokes. Some stifled coughing. Fading. Fading away. Gone.
And then the bitch was heard no more.
He spoke.
Not in the manner that he professionally delivered his greeting awhile ago but in a way of fright and trepidation. He called the woman’s attention on the other line. Twice. Three times. The line was not dead but there was no response. He stood up, eyes wide open, the veins on his ball sockets throbbing fast and abnormally. Could it be?
Terror gripped him like a vulture. Irrational comprehension dawning on him. Goose bumps on his flesh. Eyes wide open, still in contention with Ripley’s biggest ball sockets. Body as limp as a flaccid penis. Skin as pale as that sissy Twilight bloodsucker.
He walked out.
He walked away past the lifeless shells of RAMs and circuits, past the work stations of beeping AVAYA phones and nonstop murmurs from call center drones, past the sickening yadda yadda production floor. He took the stupid malfunctioning lift and after reaching the first floor, he walked past the scrutiny of the inutile guards, them fuckin’ A-holes, who are apparently paid by the company only to watch Internet porn at the lobby; past the nicotine addicts loitered in front of the call center building whiling away their fifteen-minute breaks, probably never getting fucked by the time they reach 60 because by the time they reach 60 they’re dead coffins consumed; past the beggar of brittle bones and tattered clothes curled like an ugly maggot beneath the neon street light, this one never ever going to be fucked because sluts can be choosers; past the eerie, hollow breadth of the urban street he had long since been used to, engulfing him in the fuckin’ shadows of the unknown.
Life is a merry-go-round circus freak and its people fuck-me-Freddy whores.
