Those Carrie Whites

I was ambushed by a sudden rainshower halfway from the office to the nearest train station on my way home from work. I headed to Megamall to kill time and to wait for the rain to subside. I usually loiter around bookstores. Nobody gives a damn whether you’re gonna buy something or not anyway. Unlike clothing shops where they have annoying personnel trailing you as if you’re a parolee up to no good. I was contemplating on opening the SWAMP THING graphic novel I’ve seen during my last visit, when I came upon the Stephen King section of the shop and found an opened copy (the plastic wrapper of the paperback was shoved unceremoniously between The Stand and Insomnia) of his first bestseller Carrie. I haven’t read the book but I saw Brian De Palma’s movie adaptation in Betamax back when I was in third grade.

I rented the video, of all places, in a squalid billiard hall that also moonlighted as a video rental store (carrying mostly x-rated flicks that starred 80s porn stars like Ginger Lynn, Traci Lords, and Seka) found in the center of the local flea market in our town. I just got a hair cut from my barber a few doors down when I passed by the place and saw the hall screening what looked to be a zombie movie (The Return Of The Living Dead, actually.) and found, to an 8-year old’s amusement and delight, the shelves by the TV stacked with hardcore, original copies of Beta and VHS tapes with titles like “Behind The Green Door”, “Oiled For Orgasms”, “The Ballbusters”, “Taboo”, and probably 20 other titles that are way too obvious even to a third grader. 


The clerk, an elderly woman eating a banana-cue regarded me with a menacing stare that is, again, another synopsis in belaboring the obvious. I knew even if I had a million bucks the clerk would even STOP TO THINK about letting me rent those. And I was far from being being a millionaire. I was a snotty-looking kid with only 20 bucks spare for a single video. I liked horror movies---and I still do---so I looked for anything that could fill in for the skin flick that I should’ve rented. It’s a good thing it’s all original copies; bless the seaman who owned the joint, at least you’d get a rudimentary idea on what the movie’s all about by reading the synopsis in the jacket. I saw Carrie. I Saw Sissy Spacek’s blood-soaked image at the back of the tape. I saw the name Stephen King. I forked the twenty and jumped the nearest tricycle back home.

The movie was, for the most part when I was watching it, just okay. But not scary in the “zombie-psycho slasher-aliens from outer space” type of scary. John Travolta was in it, and I hated him then because of his Saturday Night Fever dance number and the film looked outdated and so big a relic of the 70s---a decade that I really loathed---that I was a bit nauseus on some parts. But most of all I hated it because it reminded me so much of a classmate named Rio.

She transferred to our school during first grade (our class was together since kindergarten); and everybody was more than willing to alienate the new girl with a dumb look on her face. Stephen King described it as “bovine-like” and it’s true. Class freaks do have the expression of total submissiveness and apathy akin to that of cows about to be lead to the slaughterhouse. She was not pretty to start with, and kids at this age are brutally frank and cruel in expressing their dislike to a person who’s not likable at all. She was the butt of all jokes, even earned the moniker “Rio Kalbo” courtesy of the meanest duo ever to walk the grounds of WVSU Elementary School SEAFDEC Campus: Peter and Paul---the twin masters of disasters from 1st to 6th grade. The class bullies. Every student has had a taste of the two’s nastiness but Rio got the heaviest blows most of the time. 

And every time everybody’s ganging up on her I participated and razed her with extreme prejudice as well. There was something about her not being pleasant to look at and not acting like a normal girl does that just makes it feel extremely good to hate her---even if she did not do anything to you, much less look at your direction at all. After the heckling stops she’d just go back to her seat and take out a textbook and pretend to read while others resumed their everyday elementary business. That was the only reprieve she had. Once or twice I caught her wiping her eyes like there was some irritant stuck in them and knew she was crying. The entire class and I enjoyed seeing her suffer. This went on for six years. I can only imagine how ecstatic she probably was when we graduated. I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I was too busy with myself to even notice she was there.

I didn’t think about her again until I read the foreword to the book just a few hours ago. It’s about Stephen King’s personal experience with the “Carrie Whites” in his school and I realized how very close they were to my own.

Feeling bad about it won’t change a thing.

I wonder how those twins are holding up?

Ready to crash and burn I never learn

I miss the sound of Guns N Roses. 

Especially hearing it on the radio. Gone were the days when, upon tuning in to NU107, the unmistakable sound of Slash’s leadguitars gliding like high-tension wires over the solid grooves provided by Duff, Izzy, and Steven would flood your room and consciousness like a welcome intruder. I think the factors that contributed to GNR’s success were the very same reasons that actually destroyed the band. 

In my opinion, there are two schools of thought within the confines of rock music: the traditional blues-rooted guitar-hero/virtuoso camp whose biggest disciples and pioneers include Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Black Sabbath, and Clapton; and the concept album/lyrical imagery/experimental camp that boasts the stellar line-up of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, and Bob Dylan (I didn’t include the punk movement, which was all about attitude and not about technical or musical proficiency.). Hendrix et. al. weren’t famous because they wrote lyrics that would rival that of say, TS Eliot's poetry,the same way John Lennon was not famous for his killer guitar histrionics. 

Those who belong to the guitar hero camp were superb and consumate performers who used the guitar as means of letting their most primal andburied passions out. While Hendrix et. al. used the guitar as the main attraction in any performance or song, Lennon et. al. used it as a tool to shade and color a song in sync with the other instruments, rather than let it jump out of the speaker. However, it does not mean that the guitar heroes/visionaries were lesser, in an artistic point of view, to the rock-poets. It simply means that they have their own unique way of expressing themselves: their fingers do the actual talking instead of the words themselves. 

Appetite For Destruction, original Robert Williams cover art

Although this may sound a bit sacriligeous to some, Guns N’ Roses managed to somehow balance the elements of both camps, even including the nastiness of punk. Who other cock-rock-hair band besides GNR would you still listen to nowadays without the fear of being ridiculed? Poison? Warrant? Motley Crue? Axl Rose’s predisposition to being experimental and progressive was somehow balanced by Slash’s more traditional blues and rock n’ roll values. The Use Your Illusion series were, in a way, flavored by Axl’s newfound interest in Trent Reznor’s music. I mean some of the more memorable tracks in those albums were laced with synthesizers and keyboard effects(“November Rain”, “Estranged”, “Don’t Cry”, “Live and Let Die”, etc.,) that, in turn, were matched by Slash’s stellar guitar works like in“November..” and “Estranged.” Add to that unique concoction controversial and provocative song lyrics that were a far-cry to the ridiculousness of the hair-metal era that spawned them, and you have the right ingredient for success. That is why even today, listening to GNR’s albums, they still sound fresh and exciting compared to the one-dimensional scope of rap-metal/punk-pop that seem to have taken over the word “commercialism” without any effort at all. 

As for the band’s demise, fans were already veering toward the likes of Nirvana and the rest of the alternative posse by the time they released that train wreck called The Spaghetti Incident? anyway. The interesting part is that those different points of view that buoyed the band to achieve mainstream success were the very reasons that dragged them down in the end. I always believed Axl Rose was a gifted songwriter, especially when working with his former bandmates, but he tends to overindulge when left alone by himself. And in my opinion, had there been compromises in both camps, the next GNR album would be even bigger than Appetite For Destruction, Lies, or the Illusion albums. Or any other albums.