Postcards from the edge

When I was growing up in the 1980s it was the drag race: young men, boys really, stepping on the gas, hurtling their glossy cars into the darkness. It would be on Ortigas, when Ortigas was still a rectangle of cogon, or on Marcos Avenue, when that border zone between Marikina, Cainta and Antipolo was still rice fields.

Now the arena for young machos has changed. It’s now in any of C super highways, or any other arrow pointing south, to Alabang. Some of them race in their fathers’ convertibles. One boy would be stepping on the gas, all right. Another would be standing not on the backseat (too safe), but on the ledge of the seats.

Standing there, his body slightly hunched, frozen in the pose of the bronzed hunk from California, riding the waves. Or in the pose of the pale young European in his rainbow cardigan, skiing down the Alps. Or in the pose of the defiant American hang gliding in the Himalayas.

His face would be a mask: very tight, hard-set, a face no wind could crumple. A face thrust against fate.

“Lost generation” is the phrase that the great Ernest Hemingway coined for his group of young writers exiled in Paris. There they drank, they swore, they had sex, they wrote. Their arteries almost burst from the vividness of the lives they lived. They were young, they were restless: the old order could go to hell. Hemingway’s book, A Movable Feast, chronicles this passage so well. I once saw a film in Britain about these émigré artists. One scene showed Hemingway moving from table to table, gloriously drunk, as usual, telling everybody the tentative title of his latest book: “Portable Dinner.” The final title, of course, is better because it is more fluid.

The next icon of restless youth was James Dean. This boy with the sad and beautiful face haunts us still. His Rebel without a Cause and East of Eden still keep video-store attendants on their toes. I’m sure James Dean would turn in his grave if he saw his face now reproduced everywhere. The boy from the backwaters of society has joined the mainstream. The other has vaulted into the Center. Aside from the usual T-shirts and notebook covers, we now see his face on lunchboxes, pencil cases, bags, and whatnot. I even sat on his face at the Blue Café in Malate almost two decades ago. Which was not so bad, really, since this café played the coolest reggae (although a bit too loud) and catered to some of the most stylish people around.

And so Ernest Hemingway and James Dean.

Hemingway wrote prose whose sinews were hard. His sentences — nay, his very books — bulged with muscles. His men hunted game and fought wars. His male characters, he said, ate a lot of food, had a lot of sex, and then they died. The Nobel Prize jury praised him for fiction that showed “the hard countenance of the age.” But it was downhill after the brilliant The Old Man and the Sea. He was glad when he won the Pulitzer Prize for this book. But the Nobel Prize came like an electric shock. Suddenly he couldn’t write, and resorted to drink. He wasted away in Havana. Then like the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” one day he just “put a bullet through his head.” But recent scholarship shows that beneath this macho bluster was a painfully insecure man who had a “streak of homosexuality.” He constructed fiction that became a façade for his inner turmoil.

The other icon of rebellion showed us a softer version of masculinity. James Dean was a master at revealing emotions at their rawest, whether rebelling against the Establishment or searching for a mother he had never known. At a young age he became a star, lionized by young people everywhere, who saw in him the embodiment of their angst. But he was never happy. The images I will always remember: James Dean walking in the rain, hands deep in his pockets, collar turned up against the wind. Recent cinematic scholarship has excavated that James Dean must have been bisexual. No big deal, really, but in the 1950s, this was unthinkable.

I’m not saying that both Ernest Hemingway and James Dean were lonely because they were gay. Loneliness is a condition that crosses genders and sexualities.

But like them, the young men of the metro try to go against the grain. Young, restless, with the future inchoate, they live on the edge. The map of their inner world might be full of holes: the parents who aren’t home, the girl friends who always want out, the school that sounds like boresville, the relatives who mistakes meddling for, umm, “concern.” Or simply just the vague yearning for something yet shapeless. Or just the whole world itself becoming a big, black void.

It must be the cliché of the little rich poor boy who struts about in his cool Haan, Guess, and Giordano by day. But he only begins to live — finding beauty in danger, and danger and beauty — when that car zips up the highway, his toes probing for footholds in the air.

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