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It’s an unlikely friendship. Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) is a thief and a conman. Joe Buck (John Voight) is a Texan cowboy fresh off the bus in New York City. One could have been born with hair already greased and teeth rotten. The other is an innocent under the mirage that Upper East Side matrons are generous with their cash for a Southern drawl and a gum-chomping grin. They meet at a bar after Joe experiences his first brush with disenchantment: rather than paying him, a lady who picks him up – she the perfect client with bleached do, leathery tan, and poodle on a leash – breaks into tears, humiliated that he should ask for monetary compensation, and out of pity Joe ends up paying her. Ratso advises the novice to get a pimp, but it will come with a price. So Joe empties his wallet, only for Ratso to lead him to a preacher – a groveling sort bald and fat in a crimson silk robe, more the image of a lecher than an evangelist. The pulpiteer forces Joe to his knees in prayer before a make-shift altar of the Virgin Mary fixed onto a closet door. A good laugh Ratso has, that is until Joe motions to punch the finagler. What holds Joe back is Ratso’s plea that he’s a cripple. Plus, he’s got space to spare in a rat hole of an abode. From fall to spring, the two live together amid broken windows and a rinky-dink gas burner. Not only does Ratso become Joe’s meal ticket and mentor on petty crime, but he is also as much a dreamer as Joe, our stud whose “Midnight Cowboy” (1969) act works, according to Ratso, exclusively on “fags of a certain type.”

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Precisely what feelings Ratso develops for Joe is ambiguous, though one thing is clear – his protégé is more to him than a hustler on the make. Ratso’s paradise is Miami, where he envisions himself dressed in white, surrounded by ladies in bikinis and outrunning Joe on the beach. Yes, Joe is with him in every daydream, waking hour, and nocturnal slumber. Joe needs him just as much. Ratso turns out to be the only soulful fellow in this city of people who touch but never connect, for how lonely indeed are the men who hook up with Joe. A college student, a middle-aged traveling salesman… they both say they’ve got cash, but fail to deliver. What they truly need is love, or the illusion of it, and intimacy as a business transaction plays no part in the illusion.

So many hungry souls populate the world. On certain nights, as we lie in bed while the roar of a car engine outside our window grows ever more faint in the distance, the stillness that surrounds us can invoke all sorts of thoughts. Loneliness is a condition we all share. It’s the basis of many stories, “Midnight Cowboy” being one so poignant that it was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. This brings to mind another tale, one more blatant in its gay theme, David Leavitt’s novella “Saturn Street.” Jerry, a non-profit volunteer, delivers food to AIDS sufferers, and a person consigned to his tending is a man named Phil Featherstone, a former porn star. Jerry never expected this, that a proverbial Greek God, the subject of many of his sexual fantasies, should appear before him alone in a dilapidated apartment: drab furniture, dirty beige carpeting, walls stuccoed as if they’d been slathered with cake frosting. The dwelling might as well be a morgue. In the progression of Phil’s illness, his emaciation and loss of vision, Jerry becomes the lone person Phil counts on for survival. The caregiver provides Phil not only lunch, but also conversation, a human presence, love and friendship.

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We never see the beautiful as desolate and prone to illness. They can have anybody they want. A porn star in particular must have it all, he who is filmed for posterity copulating with guys equally as desirable, while we plain folks are resigned to our lot of wanting; hence, Joe Buck. Some of us want so desperately that we fall to our knees and clasp our hands in supplication. Nobody wants to be in the position to beg. It isn’t respectable. It’s pathetic. “Don’t beg,” I once told someone, “not for anybody, not for me. Nobody is worth it.” He was a heavyset man at a bathhouse in New York, celebrating his birthday. I happened to pass his room when he stopped me. He wasn’t obese in the vein of a sumo wrestler. He was more Kevin James, whom I think is adorable in his clean-cut persona and physical pratfalls. Stoutness notwithstanding, James has got charisma. The dude is sexy. James may be self-deprecating, but never self-derogating. “Please,” the man kept saying. And then, “I’m begging you.”

I meant it when I told the man that I wasn’t worth the begging. I had my own issues of self-image – a scar on my chest, bird legs, a slight physique. Perhaps these flaws existed largely in my head; nevertheless, they existed. We all have our down moments. A situation where we are butt naked for all to appraise our worth based solely on the superficial places us in a vulnerable spot. Although looks aren’t everything, they sure play a large factor in a world that’s visual. Our face and our walk are what of ourselves people first lay eyes upon, and thus on which they form an opinion. That is why we are sensitive about our weight and age and our self-perceived “bad angle,” as movie personalities gripe. (Candid shots of stars without make-up are always a devious delight.)

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Envy those with the capacity to put precedence to the strength of personality. Had I been one to project an ounce of mettle that those who are internally irresistible do, then I wouldn’t be kicking myself to this day over a missed chance that occurred ten years ago. While at the Powerhouse, a bar in San Francisco that caters to the alpha male prototype of leather bikers and lumberjacks, a guy sat beside me on the pool table. He was frat boy handsome and jock built, so much a catch that the bartenders were quenching his thirst with free drinks. An acquaintance had just gone to the restroom. To start conversation, I used the absent company to channel my attraction for the guy. “My friend thinks you’re cute,” I said. “Well, I think you’re cuter than your friend,” said the frat boy. I had not expected his response. I had not expected anything other than a shrug of the shoulder, a thank you at most. “I don’t know what to say to that,” I said. A moment of awkward silence, then he left. He didn’t leave to go cruising for somebody else at the Powerhouse. He left the bar. It seemed I was the only guy he had been interested in. What might have been? I spent the rest of the evening and many evenings after in a “Midnight Cowboy” funk, as bereft as one of Joe Buck’s johns starved for loving.

As Joe and Ratso are about to enter a party, the former notices how drenched in sweat the latter is with hair unkempt and lips livid. Ratso has been suffering from a chronic cough. We sense this is no passing cold. The guy needs a doctor. Pronto. But Ratso refuses. Besides, they can’t afford one. The most Joe can do is comb Ratso’s hair: “Few dozen cooties won’t kill me, don’t guess.” Ratso is at first peeved by the act, and then, in a moment of spontaneity, he falls onto Joe and hugs him. The moment is a singular gesture of love, the kind that transcends a label, be it romantic or fraternal or sexual. These are two human beings who watch over one another, who are so bonded that every decision one makes from a meal to the next destination on a cross country bus ride involves the other. They’ve come to mean that much to each other.

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Love can’t be bought. Neither is love begged for. Love just happens.

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“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) is one of the dearest love stories ever put on camera, a marriage between romance and fashion set in a city mythological in its reputation of limitless possibilities. The imagination gorges on Manhattan’s concurrence of Greenwich Village bohemia with Fifth Avenue affluence. It’s not everywhere that we see ladies who have as their table partner a Saks shopping bag as they masticate on chicken tandoori to the performance of a belly dancer. This is why the place ranks number one as the most filmed metropolis in the world, the birth place of many of cinema’s classics. Of course, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” would not be what it is if not for its star. Only Audrey Hepburn can actualize our daydreams of a kiss on a rainy day while draped in a trench coat priced at a month’s rent, on a pavement the likes of Balanchine, Brando, and Bernstein themselves once trod on. She is an icing of winsomeness on a cake of sophistication – the qualities needed to thrive in this behemoth of an island.

No wonder my sister, Anna Maria, took to New York when she left Manila at 17 to start college at Sarah Lawrence College. The year was 1980. Although that’s two decades after “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” premiered, the hold that New York has on Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) rang true for my sister. The name brand paradise was inevitable. Upon leaving home, my sister was already flowering into the lady my mother had always wished for. Her high school wardrobe consisted of skintight Calvins and Gucci heels paired with a Gucci bag, a far cry from the yellow nurse shoes of her prepubescence. Long hair that she flipped and blow-dried replaced a mullet cut. She walked with the grace of a gazelle, stooped shoulders, like chicken pox, an ailment of the past.

The stunner my sister was evolving into had first been apparent to me the year we lived in Walnut Creek, where she was enrolled at Carondelet, an all-girls high school in which her uniform was a blue plaid mini-skirt. I was in the sixth grade at Bancroft Elementary when she picked me up one day after class. At the homeroom threshold, too shy to step in, she smiled and gestured with a wave of the arm for me to come out, her one knee bent in a Barbie pose. “Rafaelito’s sister is really cute,” I overheard Dan say, the residential Italian-American jock who, with longish black hair and a lean athleticism, could have passed as Scott Baio’s little brother. New York provided the fertile soil for my sister to fully bud. She got offers to model in commercials and hair videos, and on the street, passers-by male and female, young and old, would give her a double take.

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On her first homecoming from Sarah Lawrence that Christmas, my sister buzzed with stories of late nights out, an existence free from the confines of parental control and a curfew. Prettied up in heels and a little red dress, she danced at Xenon and was the toast at Columbia shindigs. Although she had the prerequisite little black dress, red was her color, her way to scream, “I’m here!” She could have been Lula Mae exulting in her persona of Holly Golightly. Like Holly, my sister was also a vanguard on the latest trends. Kulot shorts and espadrilles, knickers and ballet slippers, micro-minis and off-the-shoulder sweatshirts… she had them all, packed in her suitcase for every trip to Manila when school was out.

Excited as we were to have her home, my father would sit her down and say, “Now to discuss your credit card expenses…” As for my mother, she was agog over her daughter’s embrace of femininity, herself a dresser who during her university days was a sorority girl courted by many. My sister’s childhood hobby of assembling 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzles wasn’t anything my mother could relate to (neither could I), but shopping… the two women in my family at last found a common ground thanks to the Shangri-la of America.

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I got to experience Manhattan when my sister transferred to Barnard College/Columbia University her junior year. While she was enrolled in summer classes, I stayed with her during my break from high school. I had never experienced such freedom as I did in those three weeks, an interlude from my reality of a world viewed largely through the scope of a movie on a betamax cassette. My sister had not been exaggerating. New York freedom is one so indelible to the very young that I had to write about it in a novel 30 years later:

June 1983. What a hot summer that had been. The sun made me feel sticky and there was hardly a breeze. Manhattan that summer was dust, hot air blowing out of subway grates, sweat, hot air emanating from yellow cab ignition pipes, soot, hot air gushing into revolving doors. Every New York tourist site – the Statue of Liberty, the MOMA and the Guggenheim, even the Chrysler Building – I have no words for. I didn’t visit any of them nor did I care to. What excited me was the collection of boutiques and outdoor restaurants at Columbus Circle and, in the evenings, Danceteria, a three level nightclub that would be famous for having discovered Madonna. Revelers flaunted spiked Mohawks, breasts through sheer tops, and chains on leather. Even though I was 16, I looked 13, and the club never carded me.

Back in Manila to resume school, I was all about New York, amusing (or annoying) friends with tales of dancing till dawn and strolls amid skyscrapers, pretzels sold out of pushcarts and Broadway marquees. I lugged around an issue of Vogue or GQ atop my textbooks for all to see. The glamour poured on their pages was syrup to my fantasies of a life in the city that never sleeps. I wanted to be as gorgeous as Richard Gere in “American Gigolo” (1980), the caress of Giorgio Armani on my back. (http://www.rafsy.com/actors-models-directors/richard-gere-love-is-love-is-love/) Classmates must have thought I was one pretentious schmuck. Forgive me, everyone. I was. Holly makes pizazz seem attainable. Though she isn’t rich, her daily wear is Givenchy, and her flat is no slum. She lives in one of those brownstone houses essential to New York’s mystique. Her upstairs neighbor is a hunk, Paul Varjak (George Peppard), a writer who’s got a closet of blazers courtesy of a Park Avenue matron (Patricia Neal).

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These society dames… you know that if they’re to subsidize a kept man, it would be with a charming dig, the furniture hand picked by Billy Baldwin, interior decorator to the crème de la crème of East Coast dwellers. Yup, I am erudite on Café Society junk. I can also tell you that every New York beauty from Dorian Leigh to Gloria Guinness had claimed to be the paradigm for Holly Golightly. It’s possible. Truman Capote, creator of our heroine, knew them all. Or they could just have been daydreaming because that is what the city does to a person. Model, actor, writer, paid pleasure provider… whoever we may be, the will to make it big in Manhattan affixes us on the Empire State Building like a jewel on a crown.

And so we dive into the vortex below of yellow cabs and plexiglass. Not for everybody, New York. Either we love it or we don’t… the word like doesn’t apply to it… and if we love it as my sister did, then we are never the same person as when we first arrive. My sister had set foot in New York with a purpose – to combine a skill for joining pieces to a jigsaw puzzle with an aesthetic vision so that she could be an architect. Although the prettiness and the modeling were an accident, they contributed to the simultaneous blossoming of body and mind. Today she is a partner to an architecture firm she founded in Manila, her romance with New York having ended years ago. She still goes back to New York, though, and for reasons other than consultation with a business partner who is based in Connecticut. The place will always bear meaning to her; much of the woman she has become started there.

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New York will always have meaning for me, too. Because of the summer of ’83, I chose to go to college in Boston. While not Manhattan, the city on a hill allowed me my chance at independence, to drift as Holly and Paul do on a moon river of dreams: a best-seller, a profile in Vanity Fair, and sunshine through rain clouds in the form of a lover’s kiss.

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Love means never having to say you’re sorry. False. On the contrary, an apology is perhaps the most underrated virtue in the history of humankind. If Republicans and Democrats could be rueful for their obstinate mudslinging, then our country would be less fractured. Donald Trump could redress his atrociousness by retracting his insults at John McCain, Mexican immigrants, and everyone else at whom he wags his finger. All my bed buddy, Joshua, has to do to amend the rift between us that his standing me up last October caused is to ask my forgiveness. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-2000s-present/two-lovers-so-close-and-yet-so-far/) Fat chance of any of this happening. We find it easier to say “I love you” than “I’m sorry,” and as it is, declaring the L word requires more than a modicum of guts. Only a tearjerker such as “Love Story” (1970) can justify the aphorism. It has become such a pop culture catchphrase that we can simply guess at how many relationships that have adhered to it have (or have not) actually avoided breakups.

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Meet our young twosome. Jenny (Ali MacGraw) is a Radcliffe coed of blue-collar, Italian stock who marries Harvard jock, Oliver (Ryan O’Neal), a blue-blooded Bostonian. Other than a difference in class and heritage, which Jenny incessantly reminds us of with her pejorative use of “preppy” on her husband, there’s nothing exceptional about the couple. It’s right that they should be attracted to one another. In addition to blond curls and a face the cinematic version of Michelangelo’s David, Oliver is a nice guy who is hammering away towards a diploma and a subsequent career in law, all under the pressure of severance from the Barrett fortune due to his choice of a wife. Jenny is pretty in a Catholic schoolgirl way, and though insecure of her social standing next to an heir, she is self-assured in where her intelligence can take her, working as a teacher to fund Oliver’s tuition. He lives up to his potential. She tempers her sauciness with sweetness. Even though a doctor informs them that Jenny can’t bear kids, that’s all right because Oliver has got a trip to Paris lined up. The two vanquish every blow that’s hurled their way. Such is the power of love. Indeed, Oliver and Jenny have nothing to be sorry for. And then comes the ultimate blow: cancer.

As Jenny lies dying, she maintains a tough disposition. She upbraids Oliver his helplessness, the regret that shrouds his face over the state she has atrophied to. “It’s not your fault,” she says. Of course, it isn’t. It’s cancer, not syphilis. When outside the hospital Oliver Sr. (Ray Milland) seeks to reconcile with his son via an apology, junior silences the man with that famous line Jenny first utters during a spat one snowy night when they are yet unmarried and confident of a long, rewarding journey ahead. Never having to say you’re sorry could mean that when love is truly present, the remorse we convey through actions should speak louder than words. Still, there’s a reason we humans possess the gift of language, and while a bouquet of roses or the offer to front the medical expense of a sick daughter-in-law could aid to heal a festering wound, the sincerity of the S word is a potent remedy, as my own father has substantiated.

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“Maybe one day, I will be able to tell her I’m sorry,” my father said to his brood over  Christmas dinner a few years ago about an incident from his boyhood. He was 11 when it happened, and over 70 years later it continues to tug at him for the lone reason that he never apologized to his mother. Grandma Antonia sewed him a shirt, a rarity of a gift since he came from a poor background. His own father died when he was five, leaving him to assist in providing for the family, first as an aid to fishermen (his payment was a fish) and then as a newspaper and cigarette vendor. In school, during his first outing in the shirt, my father tore off the buttons. “I don’t know why I did that,” he said to us. “Maybe I didn’t like the way the shirt fit or the color of it. Anyway…” My grandmother was crushed. Upon his return home, she grieved for the shirt, having toiled over it day and night so that he’d have something nice to wear to school. “Hijo, pinaghirapan ko iyan, umaga at gabi, para lang mayroon kang makakasuot na maganda sa escuela. Bakit?” Why, she asked, and she proceeded to mend the buttons back on. My father has never forgotten the look on her face, this injury to the heart, and all because of him. Grandma Antonia has been dead for over a decade. She died in a fog of dementia, the incident obliterated from her memory. Perhaps it had never left an impact on her. Regardless, it has on my father so that in the winter of his years, he still believes she will pardon him. “When we meet in heaven,” he said.

Now trust me on this one: when you are the recipient of an apology, it’s a gift, one that validates not only your beauty as a human being, but also that of the giver. Over lunch a few years ago, my brother expressed his pride for his children, four sons who then ranged in age from three to 18. “Sometimes, though, they can pick on each other and say stupid things, just like the stupid things I used to say to you.” I looked at him questioningly. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We were kids.” He said, “I know. Still, I’m sorry if I hurt you.” My brother used to malign me my effeminate mannerisms, sometimes underscored with a fist, and although his words could be wounding, they never traumatized. Punches and revilements notwithstanding, we’ve always been a close family, so even as a boy and through my teens, I was already aware that the differences between my brother and me would come to pass. However, I neither willed for nor anticipated an apology. That my brother brought it upon himself to give me one when bygones had already been bygones long ago elevated, in my eyes, his status as a man. He could not have apologized had he never endured his own measure of failures and heartaches. In this single moment, he revealed himself to be humbled by life.

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Of course, I’ve got my own compunctions. Here’s one the arrogance of youth incurred. I told a grocery owner when I was a student in Paris that his existence was pathetic. This because he gestured with a finger to his head to a woman in line behind me that I was a dodo brain. Scrounging for coins in my pocket to buy bananas, I continuously miscounted the amount. After finally paying, I left the grocery in a huff, but I was so incensed that I returned to tell him off. He motioned with his hand for me to calm down. We should forget the ordeal, he said in French. He had a daughter and a son, both no older than eight, watching us through a window to a back room. The man was Middle Eastern of slight build and with a white beard that gave the impression he was older than he was, certainly older than a typical father of kids that age. In the modesty of the grocery – the shelves barely stacked with products and the drab walls – it was evident that he put his entire livelihood into the place, that here… in this small business barren of the stocks and bonds that characterize a major venture, in a country where Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front who was campaigning for a France free of immigrants… was where he set his hopes for his family’s future. Never mind his entreaty for peace or the witness of his children. I was determined. “Votre vie est pathetique,” I said, once, twice, thrice. He shooed me away. No problem because I had vented my anger. All these years later, I wonder if it was worth it, this gloating sensation for having gotten even. I can only wish that his progenies are thriving.

It’s admirable that Oliver and Jenny in “Love Story” are able to move past disagreements both big and small without having to say sorry. Hard feelings should never brew, for we human beings are flawed animals. Pardons should be granted with generosity. But if given the opportunity, it does no harm to utter the word. It’s only two syllables, and when enunciated with hand on heart, we could make the world one united family.

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Every neighborhood has a haunted house. When I was a kid, the spooky spot in my neighborhood of Dasmariñas Village – an enclave in Manila of gated abodes and wide streets – was a miniature villa with plaster pillars, arches, and grime-layered windows. The only abandoned address in the compound, with signs of fire having gutted its interior, it was a sight to provoke the imagination. No other dwelling existed within 500 paces of its radius. I don’t know why the rumor that the house was haunted. I never heard any accounts of spirits having been spotted. Neither was I told tales of sinister dealings or violent deaths that had led to its condition. Its bleakness, like Dracula’s castle, was enough for the driver to whisper as our car happened to pass by in the evenings that ghosts inhabited its rooms. I was six years old, and the concept of a ghost was new to me. Whatever I imagined, the dread with which the driver spoke of them implied that to stumble upon one would be a terror a like no other.

This was the birth of my fascination with elements of the dark. In the 1970s, a TV program on paranormal activities called the “The Sixth Sense” was obligatory viewing along with “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” a detective series that involves scenarios a hybrid between the supernatural and sci-fi, and “In Search of,” a weekly documentary on such phenomena as the Loch Ness monster, aliens, and the Bermuda Triangle. “The Amityville Horror” (1979) gave me roller coaster thrills, even though I neither read the book the movie is based upon nor saw the movie itself, and to this day, when I gaze in the mirror in my foyer as I turn off the lights, a shiver runs through me at the mere thought of the urban legend that should I chant “bloody Mary, bloody Mary, bloody Mary,” a hag with bloodshot eyes would stare back at me.

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Although I have never seen a specter, I have friends who have. Chris claims that on the night his grandmother passed away in the Philippines, she rang his doorbell in San Francisco and was standing on his doorstep. Pablo encountered an old man sitting at his kitchen table, whom he described as a transparent figure made of prisms of light. Mark woke one morning to find a priest kneeling in prayer at the foot of his bed, only for the priest to disappear after Mark shut and opened his eyes once more. “Were you scared?” I asked. “No,” he said. “I felt… at peace.” Then there’s Doug, who sees dead people, exactly as Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) in the film “The Sixth Sense” (1999) does. Doug confirmed Pablo’s impression of a phantom as diaphanous, Mark’s experience that a visitation need to not be frightful, and Cole’s avowal that in a haunting, the temperature grows cold.

If ghosts are supposed to be friendly, then why our fear of them and what do they want from us? In “The Sixth Sense,” they are not particularly spine-chilling. It’s the kid, Cole, who’s the creepy one. He’s cute but unnerving with his dour expression as if he were an old man who has seen too much of a bad thing. They are everywhere around Cole, the deceased, inescapable and terrifying, a presence that devitalizes like a cancer. Among the things he sees are bodies in Colonial period garb hanging from their necks in the school hallway and a cyclist, just killed in an accident, peering at him through his car window. His ability to discern and communicate with habitats of the netherworld renders him socially gauche. His mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), doesn’t know what the deal is with her ten-year-old and here enters child psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis). Like any parent, she wants her boy to be normal.

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Normal. So Cole wants to be like the rest of us. It certainly is a bizarre ability to see folks who are no longer with us, but there’s something about Cole that we can sympathize with. We all have our quirks and talents. Some of us have a talent so disproportionate in amount from others that as children, we’re called prodigies. While it is remarkable to be in the presence of a Picasso, who by the age of 15 was creating paintings that exhibited sophisticated depth of perspective, being special can be anathema. Parents and the public harbor ambitions for a prodigy at the expense of weekend sleepovers and afterschool excursions to the mall. With neither a childhood nor the option to choose one’s own future and with expectations exorbitant, the wunderkind could be at risk of being a lost soul, the luster tarnished. Andrew Halliburton is a mathematics genius who, today at 22, wipes tables at McDonald’s. Megan Ward at ten designed and manufactured a key chain that contains a device to assist people to quit smoking, but at the age of 15 struggles with reading and writing. At six, Michael Kearney graduated from high school; at eight, finished junior college with an Associate of Science in Geology; and at ten, earned a B.S. in Anthropology. At 31, he hasn’t decided yet what to do with his life and has proclaimed that he simply wants to be “normal.”

A large factor to success is failure. With failure, we learn from our errors and therefore exert ourselves to excel at the next round. Often, prodigies are ignorant of the rewards of perseverance because they are praised for their skills rather than for their efforts, and their skills are as second nature to them as eating ice cream. Absent is the motivation to push oneself to the next level. When the motivation is there, however, that is when the world is enriched with the likes of Picasso, Mozart, and that gymnastics rarity, Nadia Comaneci. Although Cole Sear in “The Sixth Sense” isn’t a genius, he is gifted with a precociousness on account of an uncanny skill that separates him from his peers. The only people who want to befriend him are dead. How to explain this to mom, Dr. Crowe, and classmates? It’s freaky.

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For Cole’s benefit, lonely lad that Cole is, Dr. Crowe believes him. He is also counseling Cole for a reason. Here we learn why sometimes the departed cannot be silenced and why our reaction to them: they have unfinished business on earth, be it a final bid of farewell or a declaration of love – acts we take for granted but realize are precious only when we are confronted with death. As such, their restlessness in purgatory gives us goose bumps. The psychologist thus advises the boy to use his talent to his advantage. Rather than allowing his sixth sense to restrain him, Cole should allow it to liberate him.

To reconcile the living with the dead is no small responsibility. That this comforts both parties is more a blessing than a curse. We all have a knack for something, and perhaps this is why ghosts intrigue me. When I die, I do hope my soul travels on to heaven, my tenure on earth complete. Should I wish to speak from beyond the grave, then I shall do so through some of the best parts of myself I leave behind – through the love that colors the air within the walls of places that have provided me the richness of food and family, a coconut pie, and the shear force of written expression.

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Adolescence is the least favorite phase in life. At that age, our body does things we’re helpless against, and they put a damper on our relationship with the people around us. I was a fat kid. My stomach was so protuberant that I couldn’t see my feet, and rolls of lard bulged out between my shirt buttons. Initially, my heftiness had not been an issue in the Philippines. I didn’t care that my brother called me biik (piglet) and that my cousins teased me with baboy (pig). I loved to eat – pork skin roasted to the crisp, toast coated with butter and melted sugar, and chocolates, lots of chocolates. Being fat didn’t get in the way of fun weekends at the carnival or splashing around in our swimming pool.

When my family moved to Walnut Creek, just outside of San Francisco, it became a different matter. I was 12 years old. A burgeoning consciousness of judgment based on appearance coupled with hormonal urges shaded what I saw in the mirror. Plus, I was effete and inept in sports. Some classmates called me Buddha or fag. Other’s downright ignored me. So I starved myself. To my uninformed mind, dieting entailed skipping breakfast, food so parceled out that little did I realize I was depriving myself of nutrients, and hunger nausea. My weight loss was so drastic that at 13, with the family moving back to Manila, the outline of my ribs was visible. While I held myself accountable for my new body, other issues surfaced over which I had no control, mainly acne and a lack in height. Dermatologists and stretching exercises notwithstanding, the only thing I could do was to wait until I was an adult. These curses would cease to be, I believed, so that glaring lights in crowded rooms would no longer be a phobia, and girls who spoke of cute boys would include me in their roster.

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This is how it is. Every girls needs to be pretty. Every boy needs to be cute. A first kiss wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Even simply holding somebody’s hand would be a challenge. Essentially, affection is what largely matters, whether we’re a teen or an adult, the euphoria of having a person we gush over gush at us in reciprocation. Such is the bind young Josh (David Moscow) in the film “Big” (1988) is stuck in. He’s handsome enough, charming even. The problem is that the girl he’s infatuated with is every other boy’s eye candy. She’s sunshine blonde Cynthia (Kimberlee M. Davis), stunning in pink, five inches taller than he, and on a date at a fair with a high schooler who has a driver’s license as his chick bait. Josh doesn’t even fit the height criteria for a roller coaster ride. Dejected, he makes a wish with a fortuneteller machine, and that wish is to be big. Zoltar may be manufactured, but his sorcerer’s turban and fiery eyes are creepy. The thing could have been made in Satan’s workshop, especially since it functions while unplugged and dispenses a card stating that Josh’s wish has been granted. The next morning, Josh awakens a 30-year-old man in the body of Tom Hanks.

With any ‘80s flick that stars Tom Hanks, we’re in for a raucous ride. The first thing a grown man does is he finds employment. No better dream job is there for those of us who are a child at heart than in a toy company. Josh proves himself a master in determining what makes play things click with youngsters. Success catapults him to the top of the world. He wears fancy threads. He lives in a luxurious loft. He gets pretty but hardened executive Susan (Elizabeth Perkins) to soften to his innocence and joie de vivre.

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It’s incredible to be a grown up. Then again, this is Tom Hanks in a romantic comedy. The truth is that the insecurities that plague us when we’re in our teens don’t all disappear. A few years ago, I attended a high school reunion. A man was present whom I didn’t recognize, Mr. Clean bald and built. He approached me as I stood with some people at the buffet dinner, complimented me on my own fit physique, and then I saw his name tag. Though the guy had left upon finishing middle school, a friend he kept in touch with over the years had invited him. Robert used to be as monstrous as a fat orangutan and mean. “I don’t recognize you,” he said. “I recognize almost everybody here, but you.” All I said in return was that I remembered him. He used to hiss “gay boy” and “faggot” at me whenever I walked past him in the corridors. After leaving the Philippines, Robert returned to the States, where he was originally from, took martial arts, developed muscles, and worked as a cop. At the time of the reunion, he was an officer at a correctional facility. “So you beat up guys,” I said. Robert laughed. “I’ve been known to do that.” All the while, the shriveling at the pit of my stomach 30 years earlier as he would hurl those nasty words at me, the incapacitating nervousness, came back to me as if I were a fat, effeminate boy once more. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-2000s-present/moonlight-the-birth-of-a-new-dawn/)

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Even the gay community, despite its allegiance to equality, can aggravate self-doubt on account of a high school cliquishness. I recently saw a documentary on AIDS survivors who move to Palm Springs in order to escape the lifestyle demands of such urban centers as Los Angeles and Miami. The documentary covers the stories of 13 men, and it is striking that the muscular Caucasian homosexuals have established their own tribe within a tribe. They dine together, work out together, and are in unison over the fruits and frustrations of dating a guy 35 years their junior. Those in the documentary who don’t fit the image are an entity unto oneself.

In “Big,” Josh as a man finds a sense of belonging with Susan. Susan discovers through Josh that love is not about favors or self-advancement or money; love is the trust that comforts one, as it does a child, when in the presence of goodness. However, the absence of adolescence forms a void in Josh that needs to be filled only by returning to where he came from, for as painful as adolescence is, we must experience it because it’s on these very pains that we build our strengths.

I myself survived the harassment, though I am not so egotistical as to believe that I am unique in this. We all go through some form of hell at that age. Whatever the trials, they push us in the years that ensue to be the best that we can be. I wouldn’t be writing this had adolescence never been. That I am here a middle-aged man to share this with you is an achievement. And when I remember my teens, it isn’t the bad skin or the negative self-image that comes to mind, neither the bullying nor the impatience to grow up. It’s the summers abroad spent with relatives I only got to see once a year and the Christmases that brought my sister home from college in New York, homework in my parents’ room to the sun shining through the window and my brother’s untangling a tape of Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb stuck in a cassette player.

I remember the love of family.

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For young Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita (Salvatore Cascio), the defining moment comes when he peeks into the town theater and beholds the illusion of larger than life folks in faraway lands projected onto a blank screen. His expression is of such reverence – eyes wide open, dropped jaw, and mouth formed into an O – that he might as well be witnessing Christ’s resurrection. In a way, this is a birth for the six-year-old. Crayons and coloring books cease to be a catharsis; they’re child stuff. Before him – in the hush of the audience and in their laughter, in the drama and the comedy that unfold upon the flash of light against images on a reel – is his future. The projectionist, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), sees in the boy a hunger to learn the tricks of the trade so that he takes on Toto as his assistant. Giancaldo is a backwater place, the kind where dreams of fame and fortune, if anybody dares to have them at all, remain just that. A movie is a major event, and in the amazement a screening elicits, Toto discovers his power over an audience. He learns fast that a keen eye for editing celluloid frames and maneuvering the projector at the right pace are a form of wizardry. Cinema becomes the love of his life. The theater is his paradise. And so we have “Cinema Paradiso” (1988).

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For me, my own love of cinema began somewhere at about Toto’s age. I’m a child of the ‘70s, and like any boy of that decade, disaster flicks were my genre. To this day, the triangle of Remy (Ava Gardner), Graff (Charlton Heston), and Denise (Genevieve Bujold) in “Earthquake” (1974) is as vivid as a mural on my bedroom wall. Remy is in a white dress suit, and Denise is in a pink leisure suit – middle-aged elegance versus youthful sportiness. The climactic end when Graff is on a ladder, on his way to ground level safety from a maze of underground tunnels, is pure celluloid drama. Denise, his mistress, extends her hand to him. All he has to do is to grab it. But Remy is screaming below, swept away in a flood of bursting water pipes. Throughout the film, Graff and Remy present the portrait of a marriage in disintegration. She’s a drunkard. He’s exasperated and wants out. Despite everything, he chooses her over Denise… to the death. Then there’s “Airport 1975” (1974). A Boeing 747 collides with a private plane, creating a gigantic hole in the cockpit through which stewardess, Nancy (Karen Black), unleashes a scream that only Fay Wray could match as a rescuer snaps loose from a safety cord and falls to his demise. “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) features hell in the form of a cruise turned upside down and engulfed in conflagration, while “The Towering Inferno” (1974) boasts movie stars galore that include Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway trapped in a burning skyscraper.

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Although none of these films are meant to conjure dreams, dream I did. I wasted pads of paper with drawings of explosions shattering windows to a building and a woman in a triangular skirt (Jennifer Jones) plunging to her death from an outdoor glass lift. I recounted to cousins and house help alike scenes of Remy in deathly situations. Ava Gardner was perhaps the first old Hollywood actress who caught my fancy as a result. My narrations, with voice a pitch higher from excitement, always went along the lines of: “Ava Gardner hid underneath a car… Ava Gardner waved her arms in the air like this…” I never used her character’s name. So lost was I in the throes of adventure that no distinction existed between fact and fiction. And I pronounced her name Ah-va. Even though she was a good 20 years older than Bujold, with the signs of alcohol already having taken a toll on her beauty, I was drawn to her. It could have been star power or it could have been the camera’s uncanny method of conveying turmoil inherent in an actor. The woman was a drunk in real life. Amid crumbling cardboard buildings, and in her pleas to be loved and rescued, she truly does cut the image of a sorry figure that knew better days.

Perhaps this is what Toto in “Cinema Paradiso” sees from childhood to adolescence every night from the projection booth, this understanding that it is the fragility of life that gives birth to the preservation of dreams. Ava Gardner and Charlton Heston are dead. Genevieve Bujold is today 74. Regardless, they have bestowed on us a repertoire of films in which they are young and beautiful – two hours of a world where we can experience to the fullest glory love and hate, life and death, in every pore of our skin – and in this they will forevermore provide escape from our everyday worries. Alfredo gives an 18-year-old Toto (Marco Leonardi) advice that will mark him as a man – to get out of Giancaldo, to never look back. The past can be an obstacle. Big dreamers belong in a big place, and often we need to sacrifice the things and people that we hold most sacred in order to surge forward. The train ride where Toto – leading man handsome, dark hair and brows in the style of Tyrone Power – gazes at Alfedo as the mentor recedes into the distance is a universal goodbye.

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I knew when I left Manila at 18 that I would not be going back. My sister had planted the seed of migration four years earlier, when she had been the first to leave the family for college in New York. Life was comfortable in the Philippines – weekends at the Manila Polo Club,betamax, and air-conditioned rooms – yet my sister’s accounts of a city Woody Allen has been mystifying for the past 40 years beckoned me to move West. (http://www.rafsy.com/actors-models-directors/woody-allen-the-unlikely-romantic) Hollywood at that point had become an integral part of my daily existence. From the films of John Hughes to the Indiana Jones trilogy, from Gene Kelly’s tap dancing in the rain to his balletic homage to Paris… it was possible, I discovered through my sister, that these distant domains need not be distant anymore. The first day of freshman year in high school, my main thought as I walked down the corridors was this: In four years, I’ll be in the States. Come senior year, I was so resolute to attend college in Manhattan that I listed among my school choices Yeshiva University, at which my guidance counselor said in consternation, “You’re not Jewish.” I shrugged my shoulders. “So what? It’s New York.”

A line to a song about this famous city goes “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The line applies to the United States as a whole, most notably in conjunction with a literary career. Although storytelling is a global tradition, it’s a mega business in the U.S. This holds true for film, as well. In the case of Toto, the mega business is in Rome. True to Alfredo’s instinct, the boy reaches the summit of his calling, having dedicated all of himself to ambition. An adult Toto (Jacques Perrin) is Giancaldo’s golden boy, the embodiment of pertinacity and success. However, the honor comes with a price.

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Herein is Alfredo’s final lesson, that even though a big dream can lead to splendid things, it usually involves one.

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“The Bad Sleep Well” (1960) has the components of a Filipino melodrama but with the extravagance of emotions whittled off. Japanese in its simplicity, it is nonetheless one of the Akira Kurosawa films that I most relate to because of a love story that infuses the themes of greed and corporate cronyism. Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) is a promising executive at a high-powered company run by a figurehead known only as Vice President Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori). He has so won Iwabuchi’s favor that Iwabuchi welcomes him into the family as a son-in-law. Ambition is not Nishi’s motive, however. Unbeknownst to Iwabuchi, Nishi is the son of a former employee who jumped to his death from the window of the company headquarters. Corruption is rampant among the superiors, and rather than exposing deeds of crookedness, an employee… bound by loyalty… either is murdered or commits suicide. Nishi is on a mission to destroy Iwabuchi. His means of doing so is through the man’s daughter, Yoshiko (Kyoko Kagawa).

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Yoshiko is a reticent woman, not because she is docile but because she is broken. A limp since birth has afforded her a life of loneliness, the only two people affectionate towards her being her father and brother, Tatsuo (Tatsuya Mihashi). The film begins with the wedding between her and Nishi, and we would think she would be smiling, happy at last; Nishi, with all his chicanery for deceit, must have fooled her into believing he loves her. Maybe he has, but that doesn’t stop the guests from gossiping about a possible ulterior motive. As Yoshiko overhears a guest comment, “Beautiful, until she walks.”

Those of us who are engrossed by a juicy romance could not ask for a better start. A handsome groom in the arms of a bride as luminescent as Venus yet as lugubrious as a weeping willow promises to tug at our heart strings. Kurosawa doesn’t stop with the teasing there. In their matrimonial chamber, Nishi rejects Yoshiko. He steps into an adjacent room, and as he shuts a screen that separates the two, she looks into the camera as if it were his eyes, her own eyes glazed with such need that it seems she is beseeching us to enter her life.

And we do. Kurosawa made “The Bad Sleep Well” as an indictment of power abuse and corporate crime. While all that is prime material for newspaper headlines, it’s the tension between Nishi and Yoshiko that serves as the movie’s magnet. It’s curious as to why Kurosawa made Yoshiko handicapped. Perhaps had she been flawless, she would have been a confident beauty with suitors by the hoard; hence, limiting Nishi’s chances as well as our sympathy. Instead, the director gives us a damsel onto whom we can project our own distress. Although I myself don’t have a physical deformity, I do have insecurities that can be crippling. They cut through two major elements of my existence: the creative and the romantic.

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I have literary aspirations. Allow me to say first that I am thankful for the rejections to my writing I have received over the years. If success were to come easily, then I would never discover the assets that I bear with pride, that I am persevering, resilient, and passionate. Alison Lurie, a Pulitzer winning author who provided me with ample encouragement during my stint at the Cornell writing program, corroborated her support in an e-mail when I had moved back to San Francisco:

Please don’t give up. You are a gifted writer, and have important things to say. Remember that many, even famous writers, were rejected many times by stupid editors.

On the other hand, it’s been 15 years since I left Cornell. Granted I came out since then with a small novel, “Potato Queen,” which proved to be an enriching experience – talks in schools, reading tours, a contract with a book club – I have other manuscripts that I would like to share with the world.(http://www.rafsy.com/art-of-storytelling/the-reward-of-being-an-author-it-isnt-money/) It isn’t just on account of my own vanity that I desire recognition. People I love are also involved, those who have believed in me, who have given me the wealth of wisdom that has shaped me into the person I have become. Words are elemental to my identity. If rejections continue to prohibit me from declaring far and wide my tribute to those who have made me that which I am – a voice that can roar with the veracity of the best stories humankind has spun – then I ask what my purpose on earth is.

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I ask where Akira Kurosawa himself got his sense of purpose, who were those that fueled his inspiration. He frequently referenced Shakespeare, but who else? What of his childhood? His personal conquests and defeats? Whatever the answers, the auteur knew the intricacies of love. We are all aware of how failure affects our self-perception in the dating pool. This is what makes Yoshiko a heroine. Comely as she is, she’s got a physical defect that everybody who surrounds her focuses on, and it renders her a disappointment… until Nishi comes along. The guy can’t help it. Hell bent he may be on hating Iwabuchi, the villain’s daughter is so alone yet self-pitiless, so vulnerable yet stoic, that he comes to see all that is gorgeous in her. When his cover is unmasked, Yoshiko puts her faith in him, the ills of her father too blatant to ignore. The result is a scene that in a Filipino movie would have been acted with maximum embellishment. Under Kurosawa’s vision, emotions have been buried for nearly two and a half hours beneath a heap of lies and revenge so that the tears and hugs are earned.

I have imagined love for me to happen as it does for Nishi and Yoshiko, two distant souls together at last in a union of thunder and lightning. In my daydreams, this would occur once I’ve earned a reputation as an author, for success would be my mating call. But this is not a healthy notion. It undermines the person I am, one who possesses the drive to parallel his aspirations, who can endear himself to an audience through the art of elocution, and a romantic who every now and then craves his fix of a bodice-ripping tearjerker. Until somebody does come along, though, films will have to suffice. This is what film is for, after all – to edify, to be sure, but also to console. Notice how the most compelling cinema involves love, even a story about a subject as dry as corporate corruption.

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Trust Akira Kurosawa to develop “The Bad Sleep Well” into a heartfelt tale with a message that spans the ages: in a world damaged by evil, love is the one human element that redeems us.