The Dandy Security Guard

Everybody first saw him roughly two months ago, exactly a day after a robber—armed with a gun and sheer chutzpah—walked into busy Cafe Noriter in the early evening and held up a young girl and her mother, hauling away a laptop, some money, and a cellphone. I had been sitting in that same table five minutes previously, and if I hadn’t left, that gunman’s victim would have been me. Such are the tiny fates we brush with in our daily lives.

The very next day, the Korean owners of the new cafe hired this young man to guard the doors. I noticed him, not so immediately, the very next day, when I came in to have my frappuccino and wifi fix. He looked intimidated, the poor boy: he was eternally gawking at the laptop crowd before him who were drinking things with funny Italian names he didn’t know existed.

He seemed too young, too thin, and too shy to fend off the random dangers from the street. But he had his blue uniform on, and what looked like a pistol in a holster—standard issue, I suppose—and that seemed enough to spell security for the little place. But the cafe’s laptop crowd must have gotten to him.

Soon, he was putting pomade in his hair. Soon, he was sporting a spiffy-looking pair of sunglasses. Soon, he was walking across the cafe with a strut, to the counter to get himself a glass of water, and then back to his post outside, where he positions himself against a parked motorcycle like Adonis waiting to be claimed by the gods. Everyone has dreams. This boy is probably living it.

The Vampish Typist

She spends most of her days in this hole-in-the-wall right between a second-tier department store named Nijosa and what used to be Dell Photoshop, before photoshops went the way of dinosaurs in the age of digital cameras. (Now, what used to be Dell is a print shop that specializes in making tarpaulins.) Our woman—she must be past 50, pushing 60—comes from the analog age, too.

 The hole-in-the-wall, only six feet wide but stretches inside to a length of a few rooms, is a shop where you go to have your documents typewritten, and it must have enjoyed its heyday in our little university town where thousands of term papers and feasibility studies needed to get reproduced, carbon copy upon carbon copy, before computers became too much a fixture of our everyday lives.

I remember our woman from my earliest days, and she was already there, right near the entrance, in front of her typewriter, tapping out document after document, day after day after day. But it is not her perseverance at a fragile profession that makes her stand out for many of us. It is the way our woman goes to work everyday, always in a sexy dress with thin straps, always in something silky or flowered, always in black or red stilettos. She wears her hair (dyed black) in a buoyant Farrah Fawcett fly-away cut, the tresses all perfectly in place, and her make-up is severe in the way that she puts them on uncompromisingly thick and glorious.

When she goes on her break, she simply leaves her typewriter, a page sticking out like a white tongue, and goes to the nearest bakery, near the corner. There she eats, then smokes, and then comes back to her spot, and begins typing again. I have never seen our woman smile. But it has been a while since I’ve seen her. Is she still typing, somewhere? Or have our computers and our printers completely obliterated the way she has lived for so many years? But how we miss her sexy dress, her sexy walk, her sexy shoes—and how she seemed to dare the passing years and their threats of obsolescence with every pore of her existence.

She will lose, of course, but she will live on as a distinct mark in an Old Dumaguete that is dying every single day to new malls, new cars, new people, new noises...

The Old White Man on a Bicycle

Nobody—except probably the family he belongs to—knows where he comes from. Is he Australian? Swiss? French? Belgian? German? British? There are so many of them here, expatriates all, most of them of a certain age that marks a settled life away from the cold hemispheres, but now blissfully transplanted in Negros’s sun and eternal surf. M

ost of them while the days away in their seaside cafes—Happy Fred’s, Why Not, CocoAmigos among them—with their talks of home, their long-haired brown women, their beer and their whisky. This one is certainly not American. He bellows in English, but always in a European accent. He is an old white man. His hair is white. His skin is red from the sun. He wears a pair of shorts and, always, a sleeveless white tee. He looks poor. Or maybe nobody looks after him, which might explain everything.

We know him as the Bicycle Man. And he drives all over town—from the airport to the seaside boulevard to the main strip of town. And we know him well because, wherever he goes on his bicycle, he bellows to everybody by the roadside anywhere, “Hallloooo yooooouuuu!” Hello. You. Hello you. A stretched out greeting that rings out and means so many things.

Sometimes we holler back a hello. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we glare back at him because he has startled us from our deep concentration while walking down the road. Sometimes we ask: Who is he? Where does he come from? When will he go home? Is he mad? Most times, we just feel sad for this old white man on a bicycle. So far away from home.

Perhaps he only feels lonely, and thus endlessly greets everybody a grand hello, hoping, perhaps, that one friendly hello back will bring for him saner days, more beautiful days, where a strange land becomes a little bit more like home.