manhangad, part three

Islaw was a proud and self-proclaimed voyeur who talked about his exploits like they were part of his curriculum vitae. His notoriety was such that newbies groveled before him for tips on where and when to go, what to do and wear.

Islaw’s shrine was Endong’s house. What made this bungalow a natural magnet for perverts were Endong’s three pretty daughters and a secret slit in the toilet. Secret because Endong and his family didn’t know about it!

Among Endong’s daughters, it was the middle that Islaw lusted after the most because she had a skin like a debarked cassava, a tone she got from her father. The eldest and youngest, while lovelier, had the morena skin of their mother. More than chicos, Islaw liked singkamas!

The secret slit in Endong’s toilet was angled in such a way that a peeper could see nothing of the face or the head of his victims, only a portion of their back and a full leg as they sat on the bowl. But when these targets stood up, that was the time a voyeur could get a glimpse at their buttocks. But since all perverts have fertile imagination, it was all the peeper needed to shoot his sexual rocket to orbit and go big bang!

For the longest time Islaw had been wishing for that rare moment with Endong’s elder daughter. Though he had tried many times, he never got lucky. Still he kept on coming back, knowing that peeping is like fishing: you need to be in the right place at the right time!

It’s all about timing, he kept reminding himself. Then one night, the King of Peep finally smiled at him.

The mere sight of a glowing thigh and leg made Islaw weak in the knees. But knowing the moment to be fleeting, he got down to work pronto, summoning all mental images of her while letting his right hand acquire a life of its own.

After a while his quarry moved and rose.

Islaw stood transfixed, his eyes glued to the pleasing sight before him. And knowing the end of the show was near, his right hand went berserk. But then the body turned sideways---toward Islaw’s line of vision---and stooped to get the dipper.

Islaw exploded. Even if his eyes were glued to the scrotum of Endong!


to be continued...

manhangad, part two

Stories about manhangad abound: Someone---a policeman---almost got shot and had to leave Tago in shame; another got blind after he pressed an eye against a peephole and the girl he had hoped to lay lascivious eyes on poked him with a pointed object; still another broke a bone when he fell off a tree. The story went that he was masturbating while ogling a girl when a mosquito bit him in the cheek. Apparently the mosquito sucked hard that he couldn’t ignore it. But he couldn’t stop either!

“Whew, pressure!” he must have said to himself. But pleasure overruled pain, and with the hand that he unclasped from a branch, he whacked the pesky insect!


Orlan was a seasoned voyeur whose favorite quarry was the band majorette of a rival school. This pretty young thing was assigned by her mother to wash the dishes at night just as her elder sister was tasked to prepare supper.

The majorette’s house had singbit walls---nipa fronds clipped together by sticks---and bamboo floor. Because they were not nailed entirely on the wooden brace, some bamboo slats rose when somebody stepped on their opposite end, creating concave gaps underneath the floor.

To get under his prey's house surreptitiously, Orlan had to crouch low. From his vantage point, he had a worm's eye view of the girl standing, wearing under her skirt candy-colored panties stitched with days of the week. But it aroused him more when she wore "Friday" and "Tuesday" on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

There were times that she seemed to notice his presence, but like a chameleon, Orlan would turn into a pig, a dog, or a cat. One night, Orlan was sitting on his heels and fondling himself while looking up. For balance, he placed his left hand under the concave gap on the floor, gripping the wooden brace. He was so into it that the next thing he knew, the sharp edges of the bamboo floor were digging into his knuckles. And that was when he noticed another skirt, a much bigger skirt above him: It was the majorette’s heavyweight mother!

He pulled his hand---the other hand---away, but it felt like a bulldozer was pressing it. As blood dripped from his knuckles, he bit his lower lip to silence a scream.

The pain pierced him so bad he couldn’t understand what the majorette and her mother were saying. He closed his eyes, willing the corpulent woman to go away. But instead he felt the pressure tighten on his hand. When he looked up, he saw a General Milling panty being pulled down by jumbo hands with chorizo fingers.

Orlan dodged noiselessly, but there was no escaping the onrush of the fat woman's pee. As the salty water trickled down his face, Orlan could only wish he had sore eyes!

to be continued......

manhangad

Back in the 70s when cyber porn was still unheard of, the favorite game of pubescent males was “manhangad”. This “spectator sport" is in pursuit of prurient interest and requires daring and the ability to fade in the dark like a shadow.

Literally “manhangad” is a Tagon-on verb that means “to look up”, but colloquially it connotes engaging in Tom’s favorite pastime---peeping! As action word, “manhangad” has become archaic and its contemporary equivalent is “mamaklad”.

As a nocturnal sport, manhangad’s golden era was in the 70s, when Tago had yet no electricity, and most houses were built high from the ground. Because the floors of these houses were made of wooden planks or bamboo slats nailed not close to each other, there were gaps galore. The better for Tom to peep!

Also during this time, most toilets were nothing but a hole in the floor affair, and to relieve themselves Tagon-ons had to squat. While at it, they did anything like reading Bisaya or Liwayway, gazing at the contour of their genitals and combing their pubic hairs for nits and lice, or watching pigs down below looking up, waiting for manna to fall. For Tagon-ons doing it in outhouses built above sea water, things were no different except that it was some fish that snatched everything that came splashing.

(to be continued...)

skimboarding in tago

Tago faces the Pacific Ocean whose wide variety of waves breaks into the shore of fine, slate gray sand. This setting is perfect for high performance surfing except for one thing: it's deadly!

We call our shore baybay and to it we attach the term ayuan, which means it begs relentlessly until it gets what it wants. So when we say that our baybay is ayuan, we mean this: it takes souls by force!

Every Tagon-on with the gall to go swimming at baybay knows that he has to watch out for higit, which happens when waves recede from the shore, dragging bathers to death with bizarre, brute force. Oscar Duque and Policarpo Medrano were two of the casualties. Poly, like Oscar years earlier, was already heading for home after swimming with a friend when he soiled his feet. He ran back to wash, never to be seen again.

And so it is with a sense of danger that Tago’s youngblood flirt with higit as they engage in their new sport--- skimboarding!

It has already come to my attention that boys go skimboarding in baybay, but it was only last summer that I saw two of them clutching an attractively painted board. Knowing that skimboarding or skimming is as alien to Tagon-ons as text messaging is to fish, I was intrigued: How do they do it? Who taught them?

My bestfriend Wiki told me that skimboarding is a boardsport in which a skimboard (a smaller counterpart to a surfboard) is used to glide across the water's surface. Unlike surfing, skimboarding begins on the beach, it starts with the dropping of the board onto the thin wash of previous waves. The players may use their momentum to 'skim' out to breaking waves, which they then catch back into shore in a manner similar to surfing.

Wow, just about perfect for Tago!



Last week, we went to baybay to know the extent of damage wrought by the recent flood. And we chanced upon a group of half-naked boys building sand castles. About them were five or six skimboards scattered like they were tossed by waves. Not far from them, perched on a stump, were upturned glasses and a plastic pitcher whose residue gave us a hint of its previous content.

Then a chubby boy picked up his board that carried an eagle, threw and ran onto it while it was gliding across a thin layer of water. But he fell even before I could blink. Then another rider glided over a layer of water towards a wave and when he reached it, he shifted his weight and wrapped around it, spreading his hands as the wash of waves propelled him back to shore.

I found myself clapping!



I borrowed the skimboard of one rider and inspected it. While professionals use a skimboard in “composite” construction of fiberglass, carbon or kevlar, this rider used a ply board that he salvaged from a bunkhouse of the contractor of Tago-Lapaz bridge. I ran my hand throughout its length to see if it had a nose lift or a rocker, a curve from nose to tail known for better control of bigger waves. I found none; what it had were dents.

Wiki said that riders generally favor a board made of length reaching about their mid-chest height when stood on end and with a thickness that ranges from 3/8 inch to 1 inch, this rider’s board however was nowhere near these specs.

I returned the board to the rider and asked him for a shot.



Seconds after we walked away, I looked back and wondered if their parents had told and warned them about the lore of our baybay. But as they glided across a thin layer of water with their skimboards, I saw not fear but a carefree spirit being unleashed.

The gods be damned!

2011's first flood

Flooding, although it usually carries a negative connotation, is quite a natural process and is simply the response of a natural system---a river system---to the presence of too much water during an interval of time. When excess discharge is present in a river or stream, at first the water moves more quickly and perhaps some erosion of the channel takes place. If discharge increases too rapidly, however, water must move out of the channel and out onto the surrounding area, known as the floodplain. (Science.jrank.org)

Tago is a floodplain, and so the recent flood was par for the course!



Living alongside Tago River sharpens my survival instinct. And thanks to the conventional wisdom of my neighbors, I’ve learned to befriend the water, know its motion and meaning, and tame its denizens including the much-feared tangkig or sea snake.

When floodwaters came rampaging in the afternoon of January 3, 2011, I was not bothered that much, after all, we grew up seeing the river swell to irregular proportion usually at the end or start of the year. Tuig, my neighbors would say, referring to the time of the year when a change in the lunar phase pushes the water to its highest level. However, when the water invaded our sala---a first for all of us in the house---and rose knee-high, that was when I began to feel worried.

What if the rains won’t stop, I remember thinking to myself.

When the water entered our garage and started licking the tires of my Jazz, I drove it to the jeepney terminal. Meanwhile, in another garage, my other car was already given a half-bath by the flood. I would later transfer the Jazz to a higher ground where its roof got beaten by unremitting rains the whole night through.

After we had secured everything---or so we thought---I went out to check my neighbors. Living near the dike that was already invisible, some stayed on top of their dining table that they nailed hastily to the floor. Others made their sink their sanctuary.

It was a tableau of utter helplessness!

When I insisted on having them evacuated to our home, they declined, preferring to wait it out even if the table top and the sink were a fraction of an inch from the fast-moving water.

I went around Tago, and everywhere there was water as though all the angels in heaven were shedding tears all at once. And drenched Tagon-ons were all over the place: some were pushing their vehicles, others were paddling to the main streets their boats filled with children, pets, and belongings.

By midnight, I had a sense that the worst was over, and so I decided to call it a night.

But what a night!

Then suddenly I saw in a corner, near the sungkaan table, a black box: my attaché case that contained important papers like my car mortgage and passport, a digicam, the external memory of my netbook, $200, and my jewelry. In the frenzy of securing more valuable things, I forgot that it was hidden behind a cabinet.

Well, we gotta give something to Poseidon!


**************


right in the middle of our sala!



at the kitchen where i had late dinner while the flood gave me a foot spa


my floating bed