In January of 1976, award-winning poet-writer Alfred “Krip” Yuson asked filmmaker Peque Gallaga—a true son of the Negros capital—to pen a particularly personal essay about his hometown for the maiden issue of Ermita magazine. In this exclusive re-print of the contentious piece, the highly-revered director of 1983’s Oro, Plata, Mata yanks out the dirt—at turns droll, wry, and plain side-splitting—about the land he fondly calls Punk Macho, where everyone walks “in a state of permanent erection, ready to compare prick lengths at high noon”

Look, Krip, this is not a lowdown-type article. It may sound and read like one, but I assure you—it’s not.

After going through many false starts, I realize I can’t write this without some kind of explanation. Basically, I feel I have to establish a position (it’s so impossible to write about Negros without rubbing somebody in some wrong way). It’s not because I’m anti or pro anything (mostly, I’m pro Negros), but this is Hunter Thompson hunting grounds and at the same time Edna Ferber country. A very delicate balance must be maintained at all times.
As far as the Edna Ferber part goes, I’ll have to fight the temptation to write big and romantic all the way. Ok, that’s my job, I can hack it. But then, there’s the paranoia and there’s a lot of that around. All kinds, colors, shapes, and sizes. There is definitely an Us and a Them.

Nobody has to be against each other, but there are sides. And these sides don’t remain constant: Us can include laborers, small and/or big planters, Association planters, the Centrals, the Manila Negrense, the golfer, the barangays, the Farmer-as-part-of-the-Nation, the rich, the poor, the hard-working rich/poor, the idle rich/poor, and any combination of the above. At times, any of these can also be a part of Them. Them may also include non-Negrenses, non-sugar farmers, Manila politicos, Alogs (Tagalogs—if you’ve been to Siliman or U.P. Los Baños, you know what I mean), bastard U.S. Senators, nice-guy U.S. Senators, Cubans, fertilizer users, the religious orders, Iloilo cockers, and Manila orchid growers.

Okay, it’s sounding like a lowdown thing already, isn’t it? Relax. I’m just telling you it’s hard to take any kind of position here without aligning yourself with somebody in one paragraph and against him in the next.

The more I get into it, the more I think you’re a perfect bastard to make me write something about something Negros in the first place. It really is hard, guy! And this is my way of padding my elbows a bit, if you get my drift. I’m going to try and tie it all up with Machismo later on, if I get there at all. All I do is keep writing beginnings. Prologues. Prologues to prologues, explanations and introductions. I haven’t even started yet. I’ll have to develop this sometime. If not, all you’re going to get is a lot of personal view. The problem is, whose personal view of what? The author as hardworking rich? As golfer? As amused Cuban? You see! To hell with everything—let’s proceed. I’ve kept the piece as mercifully low on facts and statistics as possible so it won’t be mistaken for a sugar report.

Do I dare go on?

Wow! I swear to God Almighty, the seven holy moons of Astragoth and anything anyone holds sacred that this is the sixth serious start of an article which is supposed to be in your words, “simply a personal view of the place of your birth/choice or avocation.”

And I happen to be your man in Bacolod. God! Please, I like living here and it’s going to be very difficult (six openings of this article already, remember?) to explain why I wouldn’t like to write about it. Your man in Bacolod is a spineless, gutless, quivering agí, for God’s sake.

Balls is what I’m talking about. There’s more balls per hectare in Negros than anywhere else in the country. I could say the whole world, but I’m not that Us yet.

It has nothing to do with being establishment, anti-establishment or whatever. This is Hunter Thompson territory, remember? I’ve got to deliver an article of my “extremely personal view of my temporary spot on earth.” And all I can think of is Sugar! Sugar! All of a sudden, I get this strong compulsion to explain the sugar situation, although I don’t know anything about it.

In other words, it gets down to the fact that you can’t write anything about Negros without writing about sugar. For God’s sake! It’s true. I swear it. I’ll never laugh at the Sugar Series in the Bulletin again.

Then, Krip, I thought: “That’s shit, because I’m a creative person, and I think I can write about Negros without having to write about Sugar or the Sugar Situation. Or the Sugar Bloc or any sugar whatever with a capital S in it. Because, in the first place, I don’t want to. And like I said, I don’t know anything about it really—no false modesty or anything like that. (I just learned what PTC is the other day.) Also because you specifically don’t want any “lowdown-type articles.” Well, primo, I’m sorry. For the record, please let me list down exactly what I was going to write about:

1. The Great Scuba Debate. Nobody just dives. Eveyrbody must be affiliated to an Australian-Hongkong, Hongkong-affiliated-to-England kind of affiliation. If you’re not affiliated, you’re nobody, you’re just a punk taking up ocean space. I got cued into this in Iloilo so you can imagine how widespread this thing really is. If this report doesn’t get too long, I’d like to tell you later about my friend Louie and his closet of Nikonos (what’s the plural of Nikonos, Nikoneses?). Well, anyway, I could flesh this thing out into one whole article for later, so never mind for now.

Besides, I couldn’t go into this harmless piece of tomfoolery because, migs, people might think I’m hitting the Bacolod idle rich. If such an animal exists. (See how paranoid it can get?) So, no Scuba Diving antics. We move to

2. Island powers and elementals. Spirits, tamawos, and bagats. Nothing corny, either. This is actual first person shit. I mean I’ve cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die actually seen a bagat. I’ve seen and talked (as much as I could; he talked in Cebuano and I in very bad Ilonggo) with a tamawo. I mean this was going to be article No. 2, man. Fantastic stuff. No scholarly research junk on how many kinds of creatures of Lower Philippine Mythology there are in the forests of Kanlaon alone. And the characteristics of each. And how to fight them. (Remember “may asin diri” and that protects you for a while.) No. This thing was going to be an account of a mano-a-mano encounter with an honest-to-God tamawo. (I spotted him immediately. Both his middle fingers were shorter than all his other fingers. And they were complete. The middle fingers weren’t just cut off either. I mean, they had fingernails on plus the fact that you couldn’t see your image in his pupils. And here we are on this beach with my friend Jeff who’s been slashed across the chest by a Portugese Man O’War tentacle. (This has nothing, by the way, to do with the Scuba Diving report.) Jeffrey was cameraman for a picture we were shooting in this island about this galactic fight between a watch-your-car boy and a Namor/Submariner merman who emerges from the deep to keep a village lass pure. But that’s another story. Anyway, here’s Jeffrey Valdez with these vivid angry welts all over his chest and stomach and this tamawo (I forget his name now, but he was an asshole) simply strokes Jeffrey’s welts and they disappear. He even comes out in the film although his scene comes out pretty dark (it was artistically shot at sunset).

You lose the prick-length contest right there and then. You can scream and rave and vent your insane anger on the nearest telephone pole, but you’ve lost.

He’s sitting there, talking with Marlon. Marlon’s a very subtle actor who’s playing the role of a fisherman who is looking for advice form the Wise Man of the Sea, played by this tamawo. So he sits there with him at low tide. Very Kurosawa. No, more like the Knight-and-Death chess encounter of Bergman. They’re squatting there with the sun setting behind and all the wet sand reflecting cinematically around them. He talks to him and draws it out of him, you know, and it’s all on film. But of course, as in all the flying saucer and the Virgin Mary appearance photos, it’s a little on the dark side. (The mano-a-mano was fought later. I won the battle but lost the war, to coin a phrase.) Now, I was going to write this as it happens but I won’t pretend that the last paragraph is coming on very heavy as it is. (And I’m not even beginning to talk about the giant snake in Fabrica with a diamond on his head and the Book of Knowledge and Power that he guards in this tree.) All of a sudden, I get very restless about my reporting Negros as Freaktown so we move on to No. 3 which is about Prince Namor and the Portuguese Man O’War which isn’t exactly going to bring hordes of tourists into this province. So, it’s back to:

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