footloosing downtown

Niño surprised the entire faculty by beating the earliest birds in arriving at school. Morning classes start at 7, and the guard pointed out that he signed in at 5:12 AM. Niño revealed that a petty quarrel with his antagonistic brother drove Katherine from Hacienda Amadesto the night before, and he found himself in the most unusual company of a burger girl at an unholy hour near the obscure college.
This prompted him to ask me and RR to accompany him in searching for a place to rent in Manila area. Teasing colleagues accused us that we are just using the house hunt as an alibi for an actual visit at third-run movie houses in Recto. They went on to tell that a surveillance team from XXX is out to stalk on us while we are engaged in some sticky business with bakal boys or pamintang buo. We could just laugh.
Our first stop was at the optical media pirates opposite the Quiapo Church to swap the defective man-to-man VCD’s I had bought earlier. We were set to leave after having fulfilled our purpose when I noticed the cute straight pirate manning the adjacent porn videos stall. I urged RR to buy a DVD from him and actually started flirting with Israel the savior when his devil’s advocate of a sister joked that we didn’t even buy from her. Our apocalypse became complete when their mother meted out an end-of-the-world verdict addressed to her daughter: “Wala kang lawit kaya huwag ka nang pumalag!” The three of us gays dashed off like we were being chased away by a storm of stinging scorpions, leaving the tisoy pirate chuckling boyishly.
We scoured the backstreets of The Royal and Pontifical Catholic University of Santo Tomas and Morayta area trying to find a decent place for Niño, but we only ended up boyswatching throughout the whole period. The universities are disgorging their gorgeous students, and at least one house resembled a massage parlor where the male residents traipsed around topless. RR and I agreed that Niño will have a field day lusting over the boylets of Manila.
From the University Belt, we decided to walk all the way to Chinatown to find a McDonald’s restaurant. I encouraged my colleagues to perform our racial duty by patronizing our homegrown fastfood Jollibee, but they gave me the sole option of eating at a seedy Chinese joint. The brief power outage in the area made the travel difficult what with the danger of skidding, getting held up or being gang-raped, but my boylet friend whom we saw along the Isetann corridor gave my Filipino major friends a “luwal sa pighati.” The Avenida trip seemed a breeze, and the dinner at McDonald’s Binondo was so much lighter than I imagined. If the downtown boys are the reason, then they should be awarded for contributing to the beautification of Manila.