The trouble with camote

Couldn’t you hold it in?” she remembered her father telling her three nights ago. And now, as she looked at the rich faces and plastic smiles around her, Brenda realized he didn’t know what he was talking about. She noticed how people were always oblique and cheerful in manner when they interacted with others who lived “outside the box.”

“Wow,” she said aloud during my going-away party in film school. “Never thought I’d see such an elemental side to humans.” I guess she, too, believed we all adapted to certain things we never thought possible; and in the process amaze ourselves at the transformation. The difference was she laid out her views for all the world to see while I, smartly, chose to keep them private.

Some of the guests, well aware she was having a go at them (and no doubt induced by the amount of alcohol they’d already consumed), started giving her dirty looks. “What??” she cried out with arms flinging about, like a saint suddenly accused of breaking the Fifth Commandment. “It’s true, right!? So why don’t y’all shove your stupid drinks back down your filthy chops and mind your own business! Pretentious bastards!”

“Why don’t you take a chill pill!” someone in the bathroom queue yelled out. “And it’s ‘businesses’, ya self-righteous slut!” There were now a few scattered laughs around as Brenda gnashed her teeth and quickly grabbed hold of a metal ashtray. She didn’t smoke, so it really didn’t take much of a guess to see what she was up to. Her stares already revealed her calculating the distance between herself and the guy’s head.

Now as a rule, I never interfered in fights, much less petty ones, but, instantly aware that the party would turn into an all-out brawl that would mess up the apartment, I reluctantly brought to a close a chat I was having with a pretty schoolmate (pity too, for she was drunk and, more importantly, was the only girl who showed any sort of interest towards me) as I walked right over to Brenda.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I whispered irritably as I grabbed her by the elbow and whisked her off to the quietest part of the room. “Do you have a death wish? Half the people here are ready to kill you… Now gimme that ashtray!”

Brenda, I heard, short as she was, often had a tall, sarcastic comeback for any impertinence towards her. But this time, astonishingly, brilliantly, she abruptly fell silent and instead looked at me with those sad, droopy eyes — the epitome of a helpless female seeking justice from the cruelties of the general public.

“I-I’m sorry, Matthew…” she said softly, her head bowed like a puppy punished for disobeying an order from its master. “Didn’t mean to ruin your party… Promise, hindi.”

 And suddenly, I, too, felt bad, as if an avalanche of snow crashed on my large potty head during a ski trip. I didn’t know her very well, yet she had a way of getting through to me. “It’s okay,” I snapped. “Maybe you’ve just had enough mojitos for the night.”

“Oh, Matt…” Her smile slowly returned to her lips. “You know I don’t drink.”

“Then what’s the matter? You’ve always been the prim and proper type as far as I can tell.”

“Exactly.”

To be fair, I’ve always had a soft spot for Brenda Susano. Although several years younger than me, I always thought her more mature and delightfully incorrigible than most of the girls I knew — not a putdown of the opposite sex, of course, although I must admit a good number of them were more inclined to accept “flattery shit” which benefited them rather than accurate descriptions of their characters as a whole.

She was also, as I’ve said, usually well-mannered and would rather die than do anything uncouth in the open. So if Brenda had the gall to condemn people for acting happy in public and risk jail time to break a guy’s head with an ashtray, something must really have bothered her.

“Why don’t you tell me about it? Maybe I can help,” I said and gave her my best smile. I was pretty sure she would see through the charade just like all my ex-girlfriends, but for some reason she bought it.

“I doubt that, but yeah, okay. Maybe it is better to unload it off on someone like you, I mean, someone who doesn’t know me all that well. It’s been eating me up inside for the past three days…” She was calm now, and I intended to keep it that way. So I sat her down on a chair and gave her my undivided attention. “Promise mo muna hindi ka tatawa and that you’ll keep this to yourself.”

“I promise,” and drew a cross on my chest with my finger. “I won’t even smile.”

“Well,” she began, “I always had a passion for camote chunks. As in talaga. Y’know, I’d slice ‘em, dice ‘em and fry ‘em till their golden to the touch and soft on the inside. I’d gobble it all up and still go ‘gimme, gimme, gimme.’ I was insane about them. Unfortunately, they, uh, always had a very embarrassing and not-nice-smelling effect on me, if you know what I mean…”

I stared at her with my mouth agape for what seemed like an hour, until I understood: “Flatulence?”

“To say the least. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I met this guy and we fell in love.” Her eyes started to water around the edges. “I mean he’s a promdi and he’s just the sweetest, most adorable and conservative person I’ve ever met. And I knew in my heart he wouldn’t be able to accept my, um, ‘trouble.’ So I made the supreme sacrifice and gave up those damn camote chunks.”

“O-kay,” I said with narrowed eyebrows. “I hope you’re going somewhere with this.”

“Three days ago was our three-month anniversary as a couple. I was hurrying home from film school because he said he had a surprise for me. Now as fate would have it, my blasted scrap of a car broke down in the middle of nowhere and I eventually had to abandon it and walk home. So I called my boyfriend up and said I’d be late.”

“Ah, it doesn’t sound so bad… Is that the end of it?”

She shook her head long and slow as a tear trickled down her cheek. “On my way home I passed a small roadside eatery and again, by fate, they were serving fried camote chunks. The smell of it made me go nuts. And since I still had a couple more miles to go, I figured I could walk off any side effects by the time I reached home. So I stopped and by the time I knew it, I had already eaten three platefuls of the darn camote chunks.”

“Wow. Three platefuls. Must have been really good, huh?” I said and placed a hand over her shoulder in a brotherly way. I tried not to face her and was doing all I could not to crack.

“All the way home I putt-putt-putted. I swear I sounded like a motorbike’s engine. When I finally got home I felt quite sure I could control it na. My boyfriend, the lovely guy, was so excited to see me. He said: ‘Honey, hope you’re ready for your anniversary surprise.’ He then blindfolded me with a bandana and made me sit at the dining room table. He was just about to remove the blindfold when our phone rang. He made me promise not to peek until he returned. So off he went to answer the phone. Oh, Matt, I should have just taken the blindfold off!” she sobbed.

“So… what happened next?”

“Well,” she sniffed. “It turns out the camote chunks I consumed were still affecting me and the pressure was becoming unbearable. So since my boyfriend was out of the room I took advantage of it, shifted my weight to one leg and let it go. My God. Not only was it loud, it smelled like a garbage truck running over a skunk in front of a fertilizer farm. I searched for the napkin on the table with my hands and fanned the air vigorously around me. I then shifted to the other cheek and ripped three more, which reminded me of rotten eggs. Making sure my boyfriend was still on the phone, I went on like this for another 10 minutes.”

“Nice. Very detailed. Too detailed I think, but…”

“W-when I finally heard him coming back,” she sighed, “I fanned the air a few more times with the napkin, then placed it on my lap and folded my hands on it, smiling contentedly to myself. Oh, Matt, I tell you, I was the portrait of innocence when my boyfriend returned. He apologized for taking so long, and asked me if I peeked. I assured him I hadn’t. At this point he removed the blindfold and what a surprise indeed! In front of me were 12 other dinner guests in-in-including my parents!”

“OMG!” I said, pinching myself on the arm to keep from howling.

“And that’s when my father, who was seated next to me, and who probably endured most of the smell, said: “Jesus, Brenda, couldn’t you hold it in?”

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E-mail: estabillo_rt @yahoo.com.