Case 1: Dick

[Part 1 of the "Fiction Rebel" series]

AT TWO in the afternoon, he is at his watering hole. Three sips after and the beer still tastes nothing magical, nothing exciting. It’s like the usual drink of the pub overlord sitting at the bar, he who is too obese you wish he’s kind enough to donate a plate of his fat to Nicole Richie for the benefit of mankind, the suicidal creep at the corner offering a toast with the perennial hipster whose idea of fashion is wearing a thick jacket whenever the weather is too hot we might as well complain about having a sun in our solar system, the posh Strunks and Whites at the long table who think that grammar is everything and that thinking about it goes well with fancy cookies and fancier coffees and teas that need to be immortalized in pictures because let’s face it people want to let other people know that they are the shit who make other people look like they are in a state of eternal poverty with their Rambbo slippers, they who wear the Grammar Nazi insignia as though Hitler will be smiling from his grave, or whatever you call people who scribble words on just about anything that looks and feels like paper, even on the one they use to wipe their ass with not quite like sandpaper, perhaps the Philippine Daily Inquirer, particularly the obituaries because the dead can kiss my ass and never complain.

He is one of them, the Aryans of the written world. Let’s give him a name. Let’s give him a name because pronouns are gender insensitive and overrated, like religion. Let’s call him Dick. So Dick chugs his beer and strikes a matchstick on a summer day. He believes that the first step to end all of the world’s problems is to light his cigarette. All the rest will simply follow. But the wind is strong. Now if only he could light that fucking cigarette at two in the afternoon in that watering hole.

Dick gets a book from his bag but closes it even before he could finish leafing through the third page. Dick will think. He will think hard, too hard. He will device the postulate of perfection. He starts by striking a pose — chin resting on left hand, his stare lost somewhere in the distance as his head is tilted just a little bit to the left as if someone nudged his nape with a loaf of freshly baked bread — then takes a picture of his gesture and uploads it on mobile Facebook. This becomes his profile picture. He will label it “the postulate of perfection personified” and hit the like button three times to make sure that he gets his point across the internet. A thought comes to his mind: I’m too perfect even my balls dangle at a right angle. He returns to his book.

Dick thinks that the novel is not impressive, not knowing that it was not really made to impress anyone, him most of all, simply because it’s not a novel. It’s a thesaurus, the bible and Achilles’ heel of the inner synonym freaks among the Grammar Nazis who walk the plains of the earth in their hunt for that wild species of beast called the “passivius sentencius,” more commonly known to your average high school student as the passive sentence. It’s too late for Dick to realize this. His thickly framed eyeglasses with no grade offered no succor to his severely deflated ego. He tries to wash away the pain with beer but he only gets to release a shrill burp that rippled across the room as if all his pent-up angst suddenly found the missing hole in his body — his mouth, the other end of that physiological brook that is forever linked with the asshole.

Dick overhears the conversation at the next table. They are talking about his favorite book of all time, Ricky Martin’s Youth, Career, and the Whole Shebang. His thought bubble: finally, vengeance is mine! But Dick starts to lose his patience. It’s not what the book is about, cretins, Dick surmised. He has this delusion that he always knows better, or that he is never wrong. Having read a hundred or so books in a year, his brain already has the weight of an obscure library where obscure writers go in order to write obscure shit nobody really reads, not even obscurely. Still, Dick may have a point: what’s the use of being the postulate of perfection if you can’t even correct strangers within the reach of an uppercut? So our hero decides to straighten their shibboleth, their raucous drivel, by writing them a note.

Dick writes in posthaste, polishes his lead sentence like a shoe that will somehow in some way fit a foot somewhere, and wraps his literary diarrhea with a title that really says what he does not mean. But he stops no sooner than after he began for he knows that even verbosity is always at the mercy of a humble punctuation mark. He stands and makes his exit, each stride as heavy as the mass of Hitler’s mustache set aside throughout his lifetime.





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