One can never guess

Who you meet could serve you a true story, which you had thought was but a tall tale. The setting: Broadway in New York’s Upper Westside, where you either flow with or against an incessant stream of people, scissoring the tunneled breeze, or sigh in relief from the oppressive heat into your window seat on the bus, on a midday sparse summer commute.

Scanning for familiar faces? In a city of millions, even if Filipinos do turn up as if on a sleight of hand, finding one right now, might yield none. Still, you try to guess—the thirty-something guy from across diagonally, close-guarding between his legs a black scuffed luggage, could be a kababayan. Myrna disagrees, “Chicano, ‘yan,” adding, he could be on his way to a carpentry job, “tools ang laman ng maleta niyan.”

Not quite the spot to argue, and how could I, an itinerant visitor, versus her, who has lived here for 40 years? And so I stick by her side. We aim at getting to a friend’s apartment, who hoped we’d toss in an opinion on her renovation “design”; still quite early, Myrna tugs my hand, signaling we get off at Amir’s, a falafel place six blocks to our intended stop.

She’s curious. Her friend has talked so awed about this carpenter-painter-plumber-electrician she had hired for two apartments; Pearly works with a real-estate agent, also a Filipino, in a network among kababayans wanting to sell or buy a place in NY, where a must-renovation—even if costly—has caused constant hair tangles, until a friend of a friend sent Badong.

Myrna notes with care though: “cosmetic jobs only, daw, that do not require permits, like transfoming your kitchen with antique-looking cabinets, your bathroom with slate tiling and matching vanity, custom shelves that ‘breathe’ to hide century-old radiators, shoe racks in your walk-in closet from retazos (to your delight), like magic in two days, and at such affordable cost.

No, he doesn’t create the cabinets—Badong first trawls the city, mostly in Queens, and when ready, takes you through a vortex in Flushing, where you make choices. Once delivered, so timed on a weekend or holiday to work for you, hence, not absent from his job, he belongs to you.

Any job, in fact—a laundrymat’s delivery boy, a maintenance man in a bar, finally, after an almost desperate jobless period, with a cabinet maker. While at the laundry, whose owner served a physician, Pearly, who knew a friend of a friend in need of repairs, met Badong. The link has extended since, collecting for him a portfolio in his cellphone.

Badong remains nameless and even faceless, except to those he trusts, bowed in a crowd, and says only what he needs to. Apparently, Myrna through Pearly, among the seeming select, knows—his family back in Tarlac centers on a daughter, whose schooling he financed through remittances, just ended in late teen pregnancy; the budget bigger now with a grandchild, the baby on his phone’s screen.

It’s been seven years since. Recruited from Clark, he had left for a job in Cuba, ending in two years. How tempting to say, he “jumped plane,” Myrna says—he had walked out of the airport on the first leg of his return trip, took a bus to New York, and stayed; still, with no hope of going home. I ask a stupid, “Bakit?” Myrna glares at me.

Pearly greets us, past glass and wrought iron doors, echoing a hundred years. On a crisp turn of her steel door handle, we’ve stepped into her hallway. Here, we’re stalled, scanning a frenzy of white dust puffing up to the high ceiling, a jigsaw of wood pieces on the wooden floor, the scream of a hand saw bouncing on the beveled windows—hunched in the midst, the magician at work. I notice the scuffed luggage of the man on the bus.

Note: A true story, hence, the names of some people and some places have been changed.