The
Brady Archive
My
Part in the Downfall of Ferdinand Marcos
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
45)
Tabasco sauce?
Great topping for ice cream. Jalapeños? Mild, mouth-refreshing
chewing gum. I'd had those long red peppers and those long green peppers,
I'd had straight red pepper relish in red pepper juice with my huevos
rancheros in Mexico City and sweated it out no-o-o-o problem. I'd graduated,
man. Nothing could touch me now. So when in beautiful Baguio in the
Philippines in a cute little sidewalk cafe I ordered an appetizing rice
dish from a friendly waiter and the sun was shining and the birds were
winging and singing and it was a wonderful world and people smiling
and I on my vacation and my meal came looking sooo good and on top were
these three cute little green peppers, the cutest trio of pale green
tiny-teeny peppers, miniatures of the real thing, right out of Peter
Rabbit or a little doll house, like mini-toys so tiny and cutely cultural,
kind of cuddly, I ate all three of them in my first spoonful of rice
and my life changed and I became a herd of flaming wild horses stampeding
in a desert of blast furnaces beneath a sky full of screaming meteors,
with blowtorches for ears and lasers for eyes and then I went blind
and then I went deaf and then my skin vaporized and I became the great
tree of fire that burns for all eternity and then my bones became charcoal
and I had no identity and knowledge went away from me and there was
nothingness filled to overflowing with the absence of the passage of
time and then there was a spinning with a shrill keening like a white-hot
nervous system imploding in razor-sharp fragments toward a naked point
of light that had unbearable sounds coming from it and I was whirled
through a pinhole of illumination and sizzled molten into a raw body
brokenly sprawled in a chair in another world before a plate of rice
on a table and the body was going guhhhh....., guhhhhh...., and a waiter
was bending over it going Are you all right sir? What happened? And
a woman there, who I later learned was my wife, said He ate three of
those cute little green peppers at once, could that have something to
do with it, and the restaurant fell silent, and the waiter said THREE?
He ate THREE? At ONCE? Are you sure? And everyone in the restaurant
came over to look, saying THREE? He ate THREE? At ONCE?? Are you sure?
Oh my god did you hear that, this guy ate THREE at once babble babble
and he's still ALIVE babble babble and they watched to see if I stayed
alive and could talk and everything, and I said my name, and the year,
and how many fingers they held up, and how much was two plus two, and
people came crowding in from the street and the neighborhoods around
and mobs came in from the countryside saying where's the guy that ate
three at once, did it really happen, and I was identified and they asked
me all sorts of questions and the crowd started chanting that someone
like me should be leading the country, not Marcos, and that Marcos should
step aside but I just said get me to the airport quick and got a plane
out of there to someplace cool and not long after that Marcos did too.
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