the gay-bedeviled evil cop (a nightmare before christmas)

having had less than forty winks the night before, i warned blueseraph that i'd just sleep inside megamall’s cinema 2, letting him watch the sequel of “shaolin vs. evil dead.” we caught the unweaving plot in medias res, so when i rose back to life, i told blueseraph that we should start the chinese action movie all over again. knowing that it's not mean feat to earn enough pesos to pay for a movie pass, i decided to plod on through the film, especially when the appearance of swords and dreams seemed to me a borgesque device (i love the argentinian writer's idea of absurdity).
fate would have it that blueseraph and i won't be able to sit through the rest of the screening for the man in the lower row, claiming he and his wife were disturbed by our constant leg shifts, hissed that “…’wag n’yong ugain ang silya, nababangga ng mga paa n’yo. naiistorbo kami ng misis ko. kung ayaw n’yo magkagulo rito…kahit malaki kayong dalawa sa akin, kaya ko kayo. gusto n’yo patayin ko kayo ngayon? isang baril ko lang kayong dalawa,” and, turning to me, rather dreadfully, “lalo ka na. matuto kayong gumalang sa pulis kung gusto n’yo pang mabuhay!”
threatened that the seeming intoxicated guy (his belch—besides his body odor—stank) would produce whatever weapon he has being out of wits, i was quick to make amends even as it dawned on me never to do so if he were less unreasonable. the wife, meanwhile, planted her humongous rear on her comfortable seat five chairs away, oblivious to the scene being created by her husband. it might be that the foul-smelling husband would gun our brains out, the crowd would disperse panicking, and she would be content sitting pretty, glued at watching her vampire relatives onscreen.
being too stunned to leave the balcony at once, we transferred several rows away. i lost my interest in the movie, so i begged to blueseraph for us to sneak out of the cinema. if the situation were less tense, i would have laughed when i saw the fat “policeman” haul an usherette upstairs, presumably milking sympathy that he and his partner were being bedeviled by two men holding hands in the dark. i slipped out quietly and waited for my companion to do the same.
we gathered later on that the complaining “cop” boasted to the usherette that he’s a colonel. that was too much power-tripping, so when blueseraph decided to seek administrative mediation, i acquiesced, provided that we won’t give out our names for security reasons. after being passed on interminably from office to office, a mall officer heard us out. and his reaction? “ako na po ang humihingi ng paumanhin sa inyo kung anuman ang nangyari.” yeah right, thanks a lot that this mall occasionally gets targeted by bombers, which explains why only when there are casualties that the administration is roused to action. the officer went on to assure us that the fat movie patron’s claim that he’s a colonel could be a figment of a distant wish, for no high-ranking defense official would risk his confidential status if only to act like a king. if the claim would be taken seriously, the guy could be at least a policeman whose identification card and license have merited him to bring his gun in tow in case of public emergency. i argued that given the lack of depositing stations inside the malls, some members who had the gall to taint the already deteriorating reputation of the police authority would wield their gun as their ultimate symbol of power (not to mention macho-associated phallus). as for public emergency, the fat patron was a fine example of a “cop” who would salvage (pun intended) the public at any cost.
it’s already repulsive that this world custom-built for heterosauruses should designate people like us to the dim peripheries. gays-catering cinema raids and late-night arrests using vagrancy as pretext have often assaulted the darkness we inhabit. the cinema incident blueseraph and i figured in is a relatively new story of how much hate is sowed against the tremendously discriminated gays that we are.
the irony notwithstanding, merry christmas to all of us.