Little Baritan

Baritan, Baritan, Baritan… A community in Malabon that defeated the Huns with spears dipped in fish sauce, and whose people discovered goto in 1702. Wait… A little background is in order.

There is a show on Star World every Sunday at 10 p.m. called Little Britain featuring David Walliams and Matt Lucas. It begins with a surreal voiceover by Tom Baker (one example is: “Britain, Britain, Britain… Land of technological achievement. We’ve had running water for over 10 years, an underground tunnel that links us to Peru, and we invented the cat.”) This Brit-com – which I believe is in the same stratosphere as Monty Python, Mr. Bean and Black Books – is inhabited by a posse of grotesque yet loveable characters (played by Walliams and Lucas; in drag, usually) armed with unforgettable catchphrases.

Vicky Pollard is a shoplifting “chav” from Darkly Noone who trades her newborn baby for a Westlife CD. Wearing a jumpsuit and with her blonde hair tied with a scrunchie, Vicky mouths indecipherable sentences starting with “Yeah… but… no, but what happened was…”

Harvey Pincher is an upper-class twit who oddly still sucks milk from his mother’s nipple. The adult breastfeeding sessions usually begin with Harvey’s requests for “Bitty!” One episode shows Harvey jonesing for breast milk in the middle of his wedding.

Daffyd Thomas is “the only gay in the village.” Has a severe persecution complex about his homosexuality, although no one gives a rat’s ass anyway about it in a Welsh town called Llandewi Breffi. Wears tight, red leather outfits. In one episode, he wears a snazzy navy uniform and orders his favorite drink – Bacardi and Coke. (“Hello, sailors!”) He auditions for the role of Hamlet by dancing to It’s Raining Men, Hallelujah.

Emily Howard is the transvestite who walks the streets in a Victorian dress while spouting the words, “I’m a laaaydeee…” She presses flowers and strokes kittens and swims in rivers, “wearing dresses and hats.”

Marjorie Dawes is the nasty facilitator of a weight-loss group called Fat Fighters. She tells her “fatties” these immortal words: “Dust is actually very low in fat, so you can eat as much dust as you like.”

There is novelist Dame Sally Markham who is usually seen dictating her memoirs to her secretary. She tells her assistant to pad her book-in-progress with the whole of the Bible. Sally even dictates lines from Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. Immortal words: “Chapter one… The end!”

One of my favorites is Ray McCooney, who runs a hotel in Scotland called Ye Olde Hotel and who waxes theatrical with his flute and midget sidekicks. He tries having his window repaired by a TV repairman because “by day it’s bright, but by night it’s as black as a black man’s cape!”; pays tax collectors with “magic beans”; and gives directions to the hotel to someone on the phone: “If you get to the Hanging Tree, turn right… Uh… Yes… It’s right across Ikea.”

And then there are Lou and Andy (originally Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in Rock Profiles, also by the same Little Britain duo): “Yeah, I know…”

Little Britain reminds me of the laughable and loveable goofs that I met years ago when I was still living in Malabon. During my freshman year in UST, every afternoon after class, I’d go straight to my high school classmate’s house in Baritan and hang out with my friends. The community teemed with quirky characters – from the neighbors to the marauding invaders from other neighborhoods who wanted to beat us up. No, they are not wrinkled sacks of oddity and dark humor just like the characters in Little Britain, but they are as memorably screwed-up.

There was the transvestite who looked like a cross between Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. The tranny carried a mysterious black bag. We’ve always wondered what was in the bag. Money? Makeup? Monay? A severed head? Kryptonite? A post-it with the secret name of God written on it? Elaborate conspiracy theories were concocted over beer-gin. One day, Joe Tyler approached my sister Pura and tried selling her items from her bag, which turned out to be lotions that were so ancient Delilah probably used them to seduce Samson. We never saw him after that. Hmm…

My classmate’s cousin was a fearless joker. He would make fun of anyone, anytime. When he heard someone fart inside a jeepney, he nonchalantly said, “I can name that tune in one note…”

The neighborhood plumber wore dentures fit for a horse. One day, he went to my classmate’s house to repair a clogged toilet and accidentally dropped his false teeth into the bowl. He wore them the next day.

A neighbor wore the same pair of blue jogging pants for two years. He had this paranoid delusion his pants would run away from him if they were put in the washer.

Another neighbor had bizarre scars on her legs. She celebrated her birthday in a resort and wore a two-piece bikini paired with black stockings.

My classmate’s older brother Peewee loved spaghetti. His mother once admonished him for his sloppy eating. “Pahiran mo nga ’yang sauce sa gilid ng nguso mo,” she told him. He got a piece of bread, wiped the sauce with it, and then promptly ate the bread.

One day, the two of us went to a video shop to rent a movie. When we got there, Peewee stared intently at a VHS tape of Beauty and the Beast. I asked him what was bugging him. “Kapag asawa mo cartoons, paano kayo magse-sex?”

My friends and I went with Peewee to a Halloween party. We sat down on a corner littered with plastic Jack O’ Lanterns, drank watery punch, and were sickened by songs like Supersonic and other schmaltzy dance tracks from the C&C Music Factory, MC Hammer, and Tone Loc. Peewee bullied the DJ into playing his “And Justice For All” tape. We heard the strains of Metallica’s The Shortest Straw, yelped and invaded the dance floor, slamdancing, shouting, ruining the night of the living preppies. The hosts booted us out of the party. Before leaving, Peewee set fire to “The Mummy” (actually, it was a mannequin with rolls of white tissue paper wrapped around it). Never have I heard so much screaming in my life. Peewee was all smiles: “Bilis masunog ng tissue ’no?”

My schoolmate’s dad waged a war against cockroaches. Determined to outwit those blasted insects, he put insecticide inside an eye-drop dispenser in order to reach narrow crevices used as headquarters by those scourges with wings. One day, he woke up with his eyes itching, reached for the eye drops, and…

There was a cowherd who “parked” his cows in one corner, went on drinking binges in a sari-sari store, and delivered a dramatic monologue about God, cows, and the meaning of life. He was the oddest little Baritan resident of all time.

Even the transvestite with prehistoric lotions avoided him.

Even the cows found him baffling.