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Dominador pushing a yellow-and-red Jet Ski off the truck. Its engine roars like a grizzly and Dominador speeds away, weaving through the stranded cars and jeepneys. Antonio spotsa second Jet Ski on the truck. He swims toward it. Bullets zip by. They make popping sounds into the water. Antonio pulls himself onto the truck. In a single motion he pushes the Jet Ski off and starts it. He speeds over the flood-water, the wind fresh on his face. Through foggy shop windows, panicked people watch the commotion. As Antonio blurs past, he gives them his most winning smile.
    —from
Manila Noir
(page 53), by Crispin Salvador
    *
    E-mail from me to Crispin: Gee whiz, Mr. Wilson! I can’t help but think Madison could’ve paid me half what she paid her therapists to diagnose her borderline personality disorder. It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness. My lolo was recently diagnosed with Freudian narcissism. He then had his secretary do research on the Net. Instead of finding all the bad in it, of course he saw only the good. “All great leaders are narcissists,” he exclaimed to my grandmother. So rather than buy all the books about how the disorder can be overcome, and how they hurt the people around them, he bought
The Victorious Narcissist
—a book about the triumphant qualities of Nero, Napoleon, Hitler, Saddam, etc. Hell, Grapes even bought a copy to give to President Estregan as a Christmas gift. LOL! Wonder how he’ll take it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry with my grandfather. To be angry implies you care. I just feel sorry for him. Anyway, I’ll be late for our bacon-cheeseburger date. You’ll have to tell me the gory details of your trip home and that speech at the CCP. I’m dying of curiosity.
    *
    “Fittingly, my father’s name was Narciso,” Salvador wrote in
Autoplagiarist
. “At one time, somewhere in the lineage before him, the name possessed the tragedy of the myth and the irony that such a name could be possessed by such a man so distinctly unnarcissistic. Upon my father, however, all such nuance had been lost: it was as if to him the name was bespoke, and the very act of christening him ‘Narciso’ authored a parody of a sacred sacrament, wherein one is named for his essence, for that worst characteristic by which he would be forever remembered. In fact, he is belittled further as ‘Junior,’in that unabashed, and strangely Filipino, habit of giving ignominious nicknames. A self-fulfilling prophecy: try as he did, he was damned forever to be the tiny narcissus.”
    —from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco
    *
    “You’re the most handsome of all my grandchildren,” Grapes would often tell me. I never knew how to reply, so I smiled the smile of a shy child basking in attention. I of course didn’t believe him. I was afraid to.
    “You are the most handsome because you’re the one who looks most like me,” he’d say. Then: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
    “The sergeant of the army.”
    Grapes laughed, amused to no end. “Not the president of the Philippines?”
    “Whichever is higher.”
    “I’ll be president,” he’d say, “and you can be the sergeant of the army.”
    He would pick me up with an exaggerated grunt and carry me to my own bed. He smelled of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, which, I realize now, are more of those comforting clichés. But that’s really what he smelled like.
    “All right, Sarge,” he would say, tucking me in. It became his pet name for me. We all had them, his private names that made us each his unique grandchild. Jesu was “Groovy.” Claire was “Reina.” Mario was “Smiley.” Charlotte was “Princessa.” Jerald was “The Plum.” I was Sarge. Maybe it’s not “was” but “is.” I don’t know.
    A lifetime later, Madison would call me “Beauty.” She’d look at me in bed, touch my face with her fingertips, as if afraid of breaking it,