HOLDING HANDS

Cover of the book
Published by
Gig and The Amazing Sampaguita Foundation, Inc.
2010

I am tickled pink.
I am holding in front of me the printed copy of a children's book I illustrated after a long absence in the illustrious and illuminating world of illustrating. (Talk about being redundant in words, no?) The last time I made illustrations for a book was more than eight years ago.

I am posting here some of the illustrations I did for the book. The others are in my facebook account.

If you'd like to get the book, just send an email to the publisher.

WHAT SEX DOES

"The Sum of All My Desires"
pen and ink on paper
15"x15"

“If I have a daughter of my own, I’d allow her to have sex when she’s already 40,” I firmly announced to my two drinking buddies after one of them announced that he just found out his 17-year old is pregnant. “Wouldn’t she be too old by then?” the guy across us and asked. “Oh, it’s alright. At least at that age, she won’t have all those issues young women have these days – teenage pregnancy, venereal diseases, abortions etc. She’ll be old enough to know all those issues and avoid having them,” I trumpeted. “Yeah, either that or she’ll be a half-crazed virgin,” he responded.

Humans are sexual animals. We all know that. Even if we get into trouble or know that we will if we go into it unprepared, we still desire it – sex. It’s part of what makes us who we are. I have had my own share, and my adventures with it have stretched from being melodramatic to the comical to the bizarre. Sometime in early 1997, after a night time tryst, I had to jump from a second floor window, was chased by a big black dog, clamber up an ivy-covered concrete wall, be whistled at and chased again by neighborhood watchmen and luckily, escape by jumping quickly into a passing, rickety, open ancient bus… all that because of a one-time, one-night ‘engagement’ with someone that I doubt if I’d ever recognize if we’d meet again.

Or that time I received a phone call in the middle of the night from someone shouting invectives at me. Dazed from being waken up from a deep slumber, it took me some time before I recognized who it was and in a voice trying to sound awake, I tried to calm the person down. “No, but I thought you cared for me! I thought you love me! I will kill myself because you broke my heart...!”and the tirade went on and on and I actually fell asleep in the middle of it. I can’t remember how the conversation (if it can be called that) ended, but that sudden midnight call was the beginning of two months of stalking in 2001 from a half-crazed nut. It only stopped when I managed to get the police involved. All of that happened because of one night when I said ‘I like you’ at the peak of a rapturous moment with that person.

“You know what the problem is. It’s her boyfriend. He just couldn’t keep it inside his pants. Guys at that age should be kept on a tight leash,” he added. “At 20, he’s got raging hormones all over the place. He thinks he’s like Superman but with a squirt gun,” he thumped his forefinger on the table and laughed. “Yeah, speaking from experience huh?” I asked. “Exactly! I knew how it was at that age. Heck, I had my eldest when I was 19,” and laughed some more. I thought to myself, “Yeah, have a son at a young age, add four more before he turned 25, and start to look like 50 when you’re only 36… great,” and I smiled with a twitch on my upper lip close to a sneer as I raised my last beer bottle.

‘I love you’, now that phrase isn’t exactly what you want to hear when you’re in bed with someone. If one had several (okay, I lied) or many proclivities such as I’ve had, that would be the last thing one wants to hear. Especially, if you don’t even know the last name of the person you’re sharing your sheets with.

“I could see the kid, maybe, really loves her. At least he had the balls to face me with his parents,” the 17-year old’s father said. “They were there the other night. His parents and I talked about what we should do,” he added as he rubbed his thumb on the loosening sticker of the beer bottle. “Tangna. I haven’t hit 40 and I’m going to be a grandfather. My youngest hasn’t turned 5 yet and she’s already an aunt.”

All that because we're just too sexual a creature.

THEY WERE ONCE THIN

I was cleaning my second floor of unnecessary junk, debris and fossilized memories when I opened a dusty box of old books. Sitting silently between the pages of a yellow book about male beauty pageants (I can't remember how I came into possession of this volume) was this drawing.

Now here's proof that I once drew my figures not so robustly.