I decided to plug a stopper into it.
It was midnight and driven by an insatiable craving, I drove out of the village to get myself that one thing that always kept me company every time the party music had gone mute. When all the booze my body could ever take had turned my fingers into jello, and thus presented itself as an important landmark as I traversed through Inebriationland …
* * *
During the dark days, you know when getting wild and wasted was a regular part of my routine, I would always stop at the Burger Machine along Katipunan Extension. (I know how this sounds like. Burger Machine is so 1990’s and you must be thinking that I am talking about a foolish prepubescent habit. This chapter in the Carl Clemente Chronicles is pretty recent shit. It constitutes the unwritten gap in this blog and perhaps a flashback merits its own entry. So let’s go back to BM, shall we?)
Anyway, there was this Burger Machine station along Katipunan Avenue extension. It was on the side going towards Ateneo if you were coming from White Plains. And every time I came home, it would always be there with its aging sign spending all wattage it got in order to keep up with all the other lights that had sprung around it. Burger Machine.
Behind the counter was a girl with dusky complexion named Sel. Too skinny for her own good, she would always be armed with her thongs and the biggest smile in Inebriationland. She could have easily put Wilma Doesnt's set of party-size teeth to shame. In lieu of the usual hairnet that other less-fashionable BM burger-turners would wear, she sported a bandana. She was Erika Badu, she was Lauren Hill, except that more than just my soul, she fed my stomach.
Given this, plus the fact that there was a construction site behind the food station, I always felt like I was grabbing a burger in the ghetto. This totally felt cool every time. I was never really able to shake off that slightly terrified feeling that someone was gonna mug me. There I was, this tipsy piece of middle class trash in the middle of a dark corner in the freakin dead of the night asking for a burger. And I wouldn't always be alone. I had shared that stainless-steel booth with a few of her regulars-turned-friends. Some construction workers, plain wanderers, a few paupers. She’d introduced me to them and I ended up talking to these people in the same way I would turn pages of a riveting novel. Sometimes, I’d also encounter people who're not unlike me – fellow gypsies who’d just abandoned-club searching for buzz killers. More often than not, we’d leave the other to his business, as cultured brats were wont to do.
Being used to flame-grilled designer burgers (Bite Club is actually just across the street), we all know how flimsy BM patties are. In fact, back in high school, my friends and I had this running joke about how eating Burger Machine was the way to go during Fridays of Lent - it’s completely made up of extenders anyway. To circumvent this, I would always ask Sel to make me my usual sandwich: two jumbo patties between a single bun. I would toss in two orders of bacon and sometimes some coleslaw, and when I feel like it, an egg. Considering all of BM's buy-one-take-one promos, my bill never ever went beyond fifty pesos. (It took some time to convince her to do this; apparently combining the fillings of two kinds of burgers wasn’t allowed. But eventually, she started helping me to come up with mean Burger Machine custom creations that never hit the said price ceiling.)
And I would voraciously munch on the sandwich as we talked about life – mine and even at times, hers. Her boyfriend didn’t like the fact that she was working the night shift, her godfather was offering to get her into a call center and so on…
It didn't matter how humid or chilly the early morning air was. I would park Montgomery just a feet or two from her booth and she would always excitedly call out my name. And I loved that. I may had been out all the rest of the night drowning my juvenile issues in bottles of beer and glasses of vodka, I may had tried my best to tire my soul by dancing with bodies who’d forget about my touch the next morning, but there was this young lady in a bandana who would call out my name, somewhat having been expecting me. She was part of my routine and I was the highlight of her work shift. You see, when the world says “You don’t deserve to have the one thing you really want,” you start to lose self-respect. That’s when you start to look for affirmation from anywhere you may possibly find it.
One early morning, I drove down from my usual night of debauchery and found that the Burger Machine was gone.
***
That was approximately a year ago. Now, I still do my usual clubbing but my partying no longer carries the weight of it being a form of escape. Typically, I would say that I have forgotten about the person who had caused me ache, or that the feelings I had for him had already died. But in reality, I think, I had simply remembered that I was living for myself and not for him, or that my feeling for my own self had decided to live on. Mushy much? Maybe. But thing is, as I have said in the beginning, all those flowery words don’t necessarily mean that I’m happy. This is simply me now, no longer emo over a crazy love problem. No longer bothered by the world’s imposed orders. This is me as me. This is me bored. So I decided to drive to Burger Machine Capitol Hills and found out that the ones that Sel used to sell at The Katipunan Extension branch were far tastier.
