The Kano

Jacques, my Dutch friend, gave me a bit of a distraction, a pleasant one though, over the weekend. Late Saturday afternoon, he dropped by so we could have some vodka – The Bar, orange-flavored – at my landlord’s store out front.

Between the two of us, we ended up putting away three bottles – much of it vanishing down his substantial gullet. He’s a big guy, a six-footer, which is why I’m a bit wary about drinking with him. If he gets drunk I’m going to have a hard time lugging him around, with my 5-5 sedentary writer’s frame.

Anyway, the next afternoon he was back and that was another three-bottle night. He got dizzy towards the end, and my bigger neighbors had to help me haul him into a taxi – for the two-minute trip to his apartment.

We had the usual chat about a wide range of topics, but as usual he’d talk about my late father, who became his friend and drinking buddy.

I first met Jacques at Easy Street, the bar I used to hang out in. He was having a beer alone, and as I had seen him around the neighborhood with some of the older people I knew, I introduced myself and he said: “Your father is the Kano, right?”

He put the stress on Kano – short for amerikano – on the first syllable, not the second as we Pinoys do it, with a glottal stop on the O. He has lived in the Philippines since the 1970s and has picked up some of the local slang, though he still prefers to talk in English with that Dutch accent of his.

Anyway, I said my father was as Tagalog as anyone from Laguna could get (and that’s Laguna in the Southern Tagalog Region, not California). So we had a few more beers.

When he met my father, they hit it off right away. In the meantime, I found a regular job and lost touch with him for a few years, until recently, when I went freelance.

As it usually happens with white foreigners, Jacques became known to most people in the neighborhood as The Kano.

“Hey, I saw your friend, The Kano, last night,” the guy at the burger-and-hotdog stand told me the other night. “I think he was already drunk. He was swaying as he walked.”

Yes, that’s him all right.

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