The Last Time I Rode the Roadmaster
6:27 AM the clock said. While brushing my teeth I looked at myself at the mirror. My hair was still wet and uncombed. A ten-wheeler truck’s glaring “poot poot!” ripped through the early morning’s silence as a sound of a vehicle’s engine approached from a distance. Hastily, I spitted a white bubbly spatter; grabbed my school bag, reached for a comb, and ran outside the house. As I came out of the gate, the engine’s deep chugging got nearer and halted outside our house with a steady hum. There parked just outside of our street was our school jeep. This had been my morning routine since first year in high school.
A thin cloud of dust rose from the ground as the jeep parked. I was greeted by the same familiar dark blue paint that coated the entire jeep. A picture of an orange crab in a rectangle frame decorated both sides of the jeep with a caption in bold letters that read: CANCER. The back-ride rubber mud guard below the entry step read: ROADMASTER. This jeep had been our regular service vehicle since first year.
Mang Kasyo, the “kunduktor”, got off the entrance step, let me in, announced my entrance “O, nakasakay na si Sharon” (He called all girls Sharons and boys Gabbys. I didn’t know why.), got into the entrance step again, tap the jeep’s roof to signal the driver that we were good to go. As usual, the jeep was already half-filled with familiar faces of my classmates. As I found my usual seat at the back of the driver, most of them, droopy-eyed, sleeping on each others’ shoulders with slimy liquid dripping down their open mouths, would glimpse at me as a good morning then dropped back to sleep. This had been a regular morning scene inside the jeep since first year.
During the afternoons however, we would race to the Roadmaster to get the best seat (i.e. the front seat or the seat by the jeep’s entrance). Inside this jeep we argued over who was better between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Within this jeep we sang the Moffats, the Hansons, Backstreet Boys, Greenday, Linkin Park, Siakol, Parokya ni Edgar, Rivermaya and Eraserheads. In that jeep we formed cliques, pulled each other hairs, moped over unthwart-able pimple breakouts, and whispered gossips. We had ridden on this jeep during San Juan festivals throwing water balls onto the other students’ service jeeps shrieking and cursing at each other for getting wet. Everyone was giggling. Going home on this jeep for four years felt more of a daily picnic chatter.
In this jeep I learned that life is hard. But even if life is hard, people can and will get what they want if they work harder. One can betray one’s friend to be “in”. One can do the stupidest of all acts just to prove one’s own worth. Other people can scratch your back if you scratch theirs. And it pays to have something to give – a talent to flaunt, a skill to teach, a gossip to tell. It is not that people are evil, or stupid, or users. It’s just that in this world, you work hard to get something. There is no such thing as free lunch.
People never really outgrow themselves. Riding the Ikot jeep now, people still talk about the latest in pop culture – the latest TV series from the US, the number one song on the hit charts, the latest movie showing at SM. Relationship became more complicated as crushes and secret loves now turn into talks of girls stalking boys, boys breaking up with girlfriends, or students hooking up with their teachers. The gossip is still the same; it only grew mature in content.
Before, exams, projects, crushes, allowances, and pimples were the biggest problems on earth. The Roadmaster had witnessed a lot of tears spilled and passionate students consoling and counseling each other over these big problems. Today, with all the educational budget cuts, tutorial opportunities, terror profs, and long registration lines, those big problems in high school, make me wonder why I almost killed myself thinking about such petty things!
Among the dozen of students who rode the Roadmaster for four years, I only had two friends – Rhea and Rod. They stuck with me until today. I learned that in this world, not all friendly people want to be friends with you. Most of them only wanted to be civil. People would be friends with you if you have some use for them but true friends stick because they actually like you and all that crap that goes with you, period.
We never had a contract with that Roadmaster’s driver, owner, or even Mang Kasyo but it took us to and from school for four years. It is all thanks to Mang Kasyo’s toothy grin, kind greetings, and funny jokes. Roadmaster had been our service vehicle to class excursions and school competitions. In this jeep we sat in silence during exam days holding on to our dear reviewers reading as fast as we could. Just like the last time I rode Roadmaster.
It was the week before the last week of school. Like a regular exam week we were all silent inside the jeep. Everyone was working hard to be on the list of graduates for the week to come. The week after that were the rehearsals for graduation. No one, even I, ever minded how the next week’s mornings will be.
That week I graduated from high school and left my small island of Mindoro for college in UP. Everyday, I commuted my way from boarding house to school and back along the traffic-plagued streets of Espana and Quezon Avenue to UP Diliman. Silently and transparently I look through the person in front of me or shift my position to avoid the rancid smell from my seatmate’s armpits. In the city, it is all about the start and the end, never the journey. No one knows and cares about the person getting in and out of the jeep. Everyone comes and goes. Everything is impersonal and robotic except for the days when I have classmates riding with me. But then, we were too tired to talk and care – unlike the days in Roadmaster.
Here, there was no Mang Kasyo to cheer me up every morning and no high school classmate who lives in the next block drooling on my shoulder while travelling – no one that familiar. Still, the experience was all too mundane as if nothing has changed. Or did it?
Perhaps the fact that I still remember Mang Kasyo’s not-his-real-name, the faces of my jeepney-mates, the face of the driver whom I never knew, the jeepney’s bus-horn and name – all point to something special. And I never realized it until that fateful March day.
I guess the all-too-familiar things in life are always taken for granted. We think that they are always there to be looked at, be felt, be shooed away, and fetch us from home. And when they’re gone, we move on and forget about them – until the moment when we look back when the things that we have always looked at are no longer staring back; when the things that we feel are far away; the things that we shoo away no longer annoy us; when the people that fetch us no longer look chubby, curly-haired, always smiling, good natured, and don’t call us “Sharon.”
I envy the kids that go through Roadmaster’s door right now. I can imagine how irritated they must be feeling hearing its loud honking when they’re in the middle of brushing their teeth and how they would immediately beam when they see Mang Kasyo’s toothy grin. I know they must be feeling what I felt all those years riding that jeep. I just wish that it would not take them this long to appreciate it.
