There Are Songs About All Of Them* (Part 1)
Another head hangs lowly/ Child is slowly taken/And the violence causes silence/ Who are we mistaking?
The year was 1994. I was a scrawly kid with pudgy cheeks and a shapeless body underneath my black shoes, box-pleated skirts, Catholic School girl white blouse, and the huge navy blue bow on my collar. I sported my unruly hair in a ponytail, put up multi-colored ribbons that cost P2.50/meter in my ponytail and never went to the bathroom unless in groups.
I hanged-out with the popular girls in class, the Glittergirls, who were either rich, smart or athletic. (Yabang ko ba? Highschool pa ito!) As most girls my age, I was emotionally messed up due to the teenage hormones, always seeking the approval of my friends, constantly rebelling against my very supportive parents and thinking that crushing on Bad Boys were cool.
My Bad Boy’s name was TheOriginalRockstar or TOR, for short.
Can’t you see/ It’s not me/ It’s not my family/ In your head/ In your head/ They are fighting
TOR was one of the popular guys. As a member of the last batch of all-male graduates, he ran with a fairly loud and rough crowd, the school rockers, the Bad Boys, the boys who frequently got into trouble for being caught bringing porn to school, peeping the underwear of young female teachers, making them cry, fooling around during school programs and causing general ruckus. He was a non-conformist who wore tight boot-legged jeans, sported punk-like hairdos, painted grungy art, recited poetry and wrote songs about angst, like a local Kurt Cobain in the making.
I was majorly in-crush with him.
With their tanks and their bombs/And their hands and their guns/In your head/In your head/They are crying
Since I wasn’t one of those highschool girls who frequently get noticed, I was contented watching him from afar and gushing about him to my friends who started calling me this mixed up name composed of the first few letters of my name and the last few letters of his (like Mis-OR) while I doodled “I Love You, TOR” on the corners of my notebooks. Until the day a friend and classmate of his tells me that he and his band were looking for a female student to sing “Zombie” with their band.
Now, I have a fairly good singing voice, kind of husky and somewhat bedroom voice-ish. I can’t do a great Celine Dion but I can do a mean Dolores O’ Riordan or Evanescence if I wanted to. So, one time, when TOR and his friends were hanging out a couple of feet away from where my friends and I were sitting, one of them asked me to make them notice me by singing “Zombie.”
And so I did. And I sang that song like my life depended on it.
In your head/ In your head/ Zombie/ Zombie/ What’s in your head/ In your head/ Zombie/ Zombie
Of course, I was noticed. By mid-afternoon, I got an office call which turned out to be his band’s lead vocalist asking me to join them for practice. I was shy, pretended to be uncertain about joining them but I said yes. In reality, I was ecstatic and was making high jumps of success in my mind. I couldn’t wait for the day to end so that I can finally join them for practice. At last, a chance to be with TOR and hopefully get him to notice me.
Like any other highschool girl with a crush, I had a delusion that once I started hanging out with him and his band, he will fall inlove with me and my voice, and he will court me, and I’ll say yes, and he’ll give me my first kiss and we’ll be together, and I’ll support him as he works his way to stardom as a musician while I climb up the corporate ladder as a professional writer for some corporation until finally at the age of 25, he’ll ask me to marry him, and then we’ll have sex and make babies until I finally reach menopause and then we’ll grow old together as we watched over our brood of six children and 12 or more grandchildren.
But of course, that didn’t happen.
What happened is that when I started hanging out with him and his band, he still barely said a word a to me. I ended up being fantastic during practice but botching up my singing debut infront of the whole highschool community by having an unfortunate incident with a non-functioning microphone, causing me to be unaware that my audience couldn’t hear my voice as I sung the first half of “Zombie.” It took the highschool principal flailing around as he waved both of his hands infront of me to signal that he couldn’t hear me over the sound of all the other instruments. They did get me a new microphone by the second half and I managed to perform the whole song again along with “Dreams” during another school-organized event but still, I think it was safe to say that most people had already labeled me as “The Girl Who Sang Zombie With The Band And Was Completely Unaware That Noone Can Hear Her Until Halfway Through The Song” after that.
Despite having had the chance to hang-out with TOR and his band and sharing that unfortunate incident with him, nothing significant happened between him and me. To make things worse, he ended up dating my cousin (who I can’t really blame because she’s great and I love her despite the fact that I’m jealous over her Iya Villania looks). To make things even worse, my parents knew about my obsession with him and they frequently used to tease me about him, considering that he ended up working under my mom’s supervision at her office for some time.
Of course, at that point, I was already sooo over him.
And the only thing that comes across my mind, everytime our paths would cross nowadays was, Why, [mistress], why? What the hell were you thinking back in highschool?
WHY?!!!
Suffice it to say, my tastes have far improved since back then.
Zombie/ Oh/ Oh/ Oh/ Oh/ Oh/ Oh/ Oh/ Eyyyy/ Hay/ Yeah/ Yeah
* Inspired by Charming, but Single’s There Are Songs About All Of Them series
