Al Robles ... RIP

It was with a heavy, heavy heart that I typed the title of this post. Al Robles is gone. Al Robles — the quintessential talk-story poet of Filipino America, the pioneer champion and everyday helper of the old manongs, those immigrant Filipinos who started coming to the US in the early twentieth century. For all of us Filipino American poets, Al Robles was our manong. Our shaman, our preacher, our Moses climbing Ifugao Mountain to seek the commandments and then finding them in the old manongs' daily fishhead soup, in their bagoong and rice. Amen to that, brother. I dedicate the poem below to Manong Al Robles, who was there, at the center of the maelstrom, when the whole I-Hotel thing was going down. Madarika —  Since the 1920s, the International Hotel, on the edge of San Francisco's Chinatown, had housed the manongs — the pioneer Filipino immigrants to America. In 1977, young Filipino Americans fought the eviction of these "old-timers" and the demolition of the "I-Hotel" by linking arms against the wrecking ball — for many of them, the event was an emblem of their awakening into Filipino American history, culture, and activism. —  Madarika, in Tagalog, means "homeless wanderer." You ask me my name? They got lotsa names for me — Frankie, Manong Chito, Old-Timer — you walk into a Chinese restaurant with me, you see they call me "Amigo." Lotsa names. But I'm just a Pinoy, you know? Pinoy, that's a password. You see a stranger across the street, his hair shiny with Brilliantine, just like a rooster's dark-blue feathers after the owner spits down the neck and head at a cockfight. So you yell out, "Hey, Pinoy?" If the answer come back, "Hoy, Kababayan," then you know that stranger's a friend: he'll stand at your back in a knife fight. Anyway, my name is Francisco X. Velarde. X for Xavier. So you see I got a powerful patron saint. I was born in Ilocos Norte in 1906. I still remember the sunrise back home. I was the youngest of seven boys and it was my job to take our kalabaw to the field in the morning. I remember lying on his broad back, gray like an elephant. The sun climbing between his horns as he walked, first the pink spreading across the sky like flowers. Only another place I see something like that was Alaska where I ended up at a cannery in '24. It never got dark, you know, but when the sun would sink below the horizon, the sky would light up in purple and pink just before sunrise. All day we slave on the line. My job is cutting off fish heads. One time, my kumpadre Paulino cuts his finger right off but we never find it. You young Pinoys, you never know how hard we worked at that cannery, and it was dangerous, too. But every night we were our own boss, and we played baseball — fast-pitch, slow-pitch — in the midnight sun. I worked lotsa jobs. Barber, farm worker, dishwasher, houseboy, janitor: you name it, I done it. Every place I been — in Alaska, in Seattle, in Stockton cutting asparagus — they got these dance halls. A dime for a dance. These days, a dime don't seem like much to you, but you know it was a lot in the 30s. Very dear. Mahal. But we didn't mind. Blondies. Susmariosep! We were crazy for those blondies. Ay, naku! "No money, no honey," they used to say. After the war, one time, I was going out with a blondie. She had a white fur coat down to her feet: maganda. Turned out she was some kinda Russian spy, no kidding. The FBI haul me away and this puti — blond hair, blue eyes — he comes into the room and says, "Kumusta kayo?" Just like he's from Manila, and his accent's better than mine! That time, I was working the Presidio, folding whites in the Army hospital. They let me go 'cause I got no top secret to give away, you see? Believe it or not — FBI agent talking Tagalog! Well, I been here at the International since long time before that blondie. I have this room over twenty years. This same bed, squeak squeak every night till I think the mice are talking back. That same desk where I used to sit and write letters back home but I got no one there now. Same old view — Kearny Street still the same, twenty, thirty years. This room's all the home I got. They kick us out, I have just one regret: all the lotsa names I got, no one ever called me Lolo. Those years playing with blondies, I never had no kids. And so now I can't have no grandson. All I got is you — you college boys ask these questions like you're doing homework. Look around you. This is all there is. Remember everything about this room: the smell of old linoleum, the faded curtains, the bugs. And when your grandkids ask about the O.T.'s, the original manongs, you tell them how we talked today. Tell them Francisco Velarde was here. Lolo Panchito was here. —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian American Anthology (1991). Reprinted in The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993). In deference to the memory of Al Robles, no discussion of poetics today. That's exactly how Al would have wanted it. He didn't worry about rhyme and meter, etc. Al just wrote things out, breaking his lines when it felt right. When it fit the cadences of his soul, that consummate storyteller that lived in his heart. When I was a young Filipino American poet — young in poet years, not person years — I made a pilgrimage, of sorts, to San Francisco to meet with the master. I really treasure that memory: having dim sum with Al on a lazy Sunday morning in some Chinese restaurant on Clement Street. Then he wandered outside at just the right time, watching the people walking by, thereby leaving me with the check. That was Al, right there. Teaching the young apprentice a lesson about props, about who was to pay for what. But Al's sage wisdom, the song of the ten thousand carabaos in his soul, that was all for free. That was to be shared not just with a young poet but with everyone and anyone around him. That song was emblematic of Al's generosity of heart, mind, and soul. The generosity of his work: the poems on the page, the talk-stories in our memories, and Al's community-based caretaking of the manongs. That work will live forever in all our hearts. Manong Al Robles . . . may you rest in peace. Amen. Many thanks to Barbara Jane Reyes, who took the picture of Al Robles above. To read a longer account of my "pilgrimage" to meet with Al, check out my article "Moments in the Wilderness: Becoming a Filipino American Writer" in the journal MELUS (2004). Added 5 May 2009:     Al Robles Tribute     (a video by xpo147) http://www.youtube.com/v/qGzYn9P2_Bc