A memoir about navigating the complex world of being a gay Filipino immigrant in America. It tells the story of how a young boy from the Philippines, who grew up obsessing about Pop Culture, went through a journey of self-discovery, rejection, and acceptance.
At its very core, Kiss My Mike is about navigating sexuality and finding one’s identity, interwoven with the pursuit of the American dream, the pressures of a religious Catholic family, and the ultimate quest for love and long-lasting relationships.
A memoir about navigating the complex world of being a gay Filipino immigrant in America. It tells the story of how a young boy from the Philippines, who grew up obsessing about Pop Culture, went through a journey of self-discovery, rejection, and acceptance.
At its very core, Kiss My Mike is about navigating sexuality and finding one’s identity, interwoven with the pursuit of the American dream, the pressures of a religious Catholic family, and the ultimate quest for love and long-lasting relationships.
My fascination with America started in 1989. I was a skinny ten-year-old kid in the Philippines, sitting on one end of the L-shaped, firm-as-hell sofa in our living room, and flipping through the thick pages of volume nineteen of The New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia series, which my mother bought earlier that year.
Mom was the most important person in my life. She did everything she could to raise me well and had instilled in me the value of hard work, which ultimately paved the way for me to accomplish my dreams of one day moving to the States, or the US, as most Americans refer to it.
Her name was Edna. She was average built but petite, about five feet tall. She worked as an English teacher at a nearby private school called Holy Cross College where I attended as a fourth grader. At school, Mom was the go-to person for anything related to communication activities. Many students went to her for extracurricular grammar lessons, others sought her help with public speaking or for oratorical and declamation contests where students would recite their dramatic pieces on stage and compete with other students across our province of Nueva Ecija.
When not teaching, Mom took on side gigs to make ends meet including working as a part-time sales agent for the provincial branch of Grolier International, a company known for its encyclopedias and other educational books. Through her gig at Grolier, she was able to purchase the twenty1 KISS MY MIKE one-volume New Book of Knowledge using an installment plan that spanned several years and by availing herself of an employee discount. Otherwise, the encyclopedia’s tag price was way beyond our family’s modest means, especially given the low salaries of teachers in the Philippines.
As I closed volume nineteen of The New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia, I looked at the clock, hanging on the wall above our black and white television. It was now thirty minutes past five, and Mom would soon arrive from school. I stood up from the sofa and walked towards the kitchen, the very first room one would see upon entering our house. Mom walked in after a few more minutes, greeting me with a kiss.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked Mom.
“We still have tocino,” she replied, smiling, in an animated and teasing way, as if tocino was the best thing in the world. She was teasing because aside from selling educational books to supplement her full-time work as a teacher, she also sold tocino, a type of frozen meat that tasted like a Philippines version of Texas barbecue.
“Can you help me cook?” she asked.
“Of course, Mom.” I responded with pleasure since cooking was my other passion. I walked towards the refrigerator located across from the front door. When I opened the freezer, I was greeted by a dozen or so square-shaped packets of frozen meat, all wrapped in plastic and stacked on top of each other like a collection of flattened Jenga blocks.
“Mom, can we go to NE mall tomorrow?”
NE was short for Nueva Ecija. Tomorrow was a Saturday too, which meant there was no school. “Sure. Is there anything you want?” she asked. As soon as Mom asked the question, my younger sister Michelle, whose nickname was Mitch, walked into the kitchen. She was six years old and had been taking a nap in one of the two adjacent bedrooms upstairs while I was sitting on the couch and reading a chapter on the United States.
“Oh, I want to come too,” Mitch said in a sweet, almost-begging way while her eyes twinkled.
“Okay, okay,” said Mom, waving her hands up and down and agreeing to our request.
“Is there anything you would like to do at the mall?” Mom asked.
“Well, I wanted to buy some fairy tale books,” I responded.
If there was one other thing I was interested in aside from encyclopedias, it was fairy tale books. I had been saving some of my allowance money from school for over a year now and had been collecting those pocket-sized delights from the publisher of Well-Loved Tales. Aside from the colorful pictures and the magical words inside that took me to imagined places, those books had glossy covers too, and had images in front that were related to the stories themselves. For example, the Rapunzel book had the long-haired princess on the cover of it, The Emperor’s New Clothes had a picture of a semi-naked man who was wearing only a crown on his head, and The Golden Goose had a picture of, well, a golden, almost yellow-colored goose.
Mitch told us that she wanted to buy some fudge brownies, her favorite dessert.
“Oh, I think I have something else in my bag,” my Mom quickly exclaimed as she remembered a gift from one of her co-teachers.
Mom opened her bag, which was sitting on one of the four dining chairs in the kitchen and then revealed a package of cheesy ensaymadas.
“Oh, I want one. I want one!” Mitch exclaimed, almost impatiently.
Her brownie cravings had now shifted to the delicious, round, soft bread that looked like a regular roll with a butter cream spread and grated cheese topping.
“You will, but we have to eat dinner first,” Mom replied.
As Mitch sat on one of the chairs in the kitchen, she inspected the ensaymadas and looked to see whether there were other surprises in Mom’s bag. Mitch then found a few peso bills, several pens, the keys to our house, a rosary, a prayer booklet, another small booklet for seemingly random notes including a list of people who had bought frozen meat from my mother and who hadn’t paid yet, some loose change, and several receipts from various places. Once Mitch had scoured through all the things inside Mom’s purse, she quietly returned everything back inside, parking the ensaymadas on top of the dining table.
I started placing a few slices of the tocino on the hot sizzling pan, and as I cooked the meat, I found myself humming some sounds, “Hmm mmmm mmm mmmm mmm mmm,” and then singing the words to Whitney Houston’s hit “Greatest Love of All.”
The song had been playing over and over on our relatives’ radio next door and the lyrics were stuck in my head. I kept singing and singing while cooking the rest of the tocino and using the spatula as my mic. Mitch watched me in delight and seemed enthused like a true fanatic at a Whitney Houston concert.
When all the meat was cooked, I served it on a plate, placing it on the table next to the ensaymadas. Mom picked a small piece of the cooked tocino from the plate, tasting it.
“Are we going to wait for Melissa?” I asked Mom.
Melissa was my oldest sister. I was the second child, followed by Mitch, and then my youngest sister Melai, who was still a baby. We all had “M” as the first letter of our names and we were the 4M’s of the family.
“Melissa will be late tonight because of a dance practice at school,” Mom replied.
After we finished eating dinner, we sat on the sofa in the living room and played a quiz game, naming the capitals of different countries. Mom asked the questions and mostly I had the answers while Mitch participated as an observer, occasionally repeating either Mom’s questions or my answers, but without fully understanding much of what was being said.
While I spent most of my afternoons reading cerebral delights such as The New Book of Knowledge or fairy tale books which made me feel warm and fuzzy, my thirteen-year-old sister, Melissa, spent most of her afternoons and often evenings and weekends, either practicing a dance routine with her classmates or preparing for an inter-school quiz bee. She was studying at Holy Cross as well and was a freshman in High School. She was consistently top of her class from the moment she started kindergarten until she finished elementary school. She and her classmates had been practicing a pop dance routine to the song “Name Game” by Laura Branigan for an upcoming school activity.
It was half past eight when Melissa arrived in the house that night. She threw her bag on the floor in front of the tall bookshelf where the rest of the New Book of Knowledge encyclopedias were stored. Immediately, she blurted out how tired she was from all the dancing she had been doing that day.
Melissa squeezed herself in, gently pushing me and Mitch to the side so that she could sit closer to Mom to tell her all the dance practice drama involving one of her classmates who kept insisting on changing the dance steps. She was being dramatic in a teenager way, flipping her hair and rolling her eyes for added effects.
“Is there any food left?” she asked, although to no one in particular.
Mom stood up from the sofa and walked towards the kitchen. She reheated the food by refrying the tocino in a pan and brought it back to the living room, serving it to Melissa.
“Do we have any Coke?” Melissa asked.
At that point, Mom turned her head towards me and asked if I could go to the sari-sari store located several steps away from our house, to buy a bottle of soft drink since there wasn’t any in the refrigerator.
“Ugh, I am so tired,” I replied, showing my hesitation to do anything.
“It’s already too late,” I added, emphasizing that it was almost nine in the evening and that I did not want to go anywhere at that time.
“Um, I am SOOO tired from the dance practice and I really want a Coke!”
Melissa exclaimed, emphasizing that her tiredness was more important than mine or anyone else’s for that matter. Her voice, this time, was louder and had a frustrated tone. She also seemed genuinely confused, wondering why I was not fulfilling her wish immediately, considering how tired she was.
“We started at three in the afternoon today and I have not eaten any food since then!” Melissa added, providing an explanation as to why I should buy her a bottle of Coke in that very instant.
“Okay, fine,” I said.
I left the living room irritated and stomped my feet as I walked towards the kitchen and out of the house. In terms of family dynamics, I felt like Melissa was always the center of attention while I was second place.
“KEL. Don’t stomp your feet,” replied Mom.
KEL was short for Michael, my Mom’s occasional nickname for me. I went to the store that night thinking I had no choice. That I had to do what I was told.
But it was not the only time I had to do things for Melissa. There were a couple of times when Melissa had asked me to wash the dishes. I was okay washing the dishes. I have done it a million times. I just hated being told to do so immediately. And since we did not have a dishwasher, I had to wash all the plates, utensils, pans, spatulas, and many other kitchen items, all with my bare hands.
One fight over the dishwashing started one weekend when I ignored her command to wash the dishes. I pretended not to hear her. Afterwards, I went to one of the bedrooms upstairs and locked the door. Within minutes, Melissa was banging the door. Soon, loud noise could be heard from the entire house and possibly even from outside, all while she was screaming and demanding me to open the door at that very instant. Nobody was at home that morning except for Melissa and me.
After a few minutes, I still did not respond to her screaming. The banging on the door kept getting intensely louder. Then, her banging stopped. I overheard some scratching noises from the adjacent bedroom, next to where I had locked myself in to escape Melissa’s wrath. Finally, the knob on the door in the room where I was staying started rotating sideways. Melissa seemed to have found the key and it seemed too, that she was going to succeed in confronting my disobedience to her. She stormed the room, carrying a broom in her hand, and proceeded towards the bed where I was sitting. When she was just a hair away from me, she aimed the broom at me, gesturing as if she was going to hit my face with it.
“Stop!” I begged.
She did not hit me, but her gesture was enough for me to feel scared for my life.
“Are you not going to follow me?” she asked, angrily, while grinding her teeth.
I pushed her away, stood up quickly, and ran as fast as I could. Melissa was mean to me, but she wasn’t always like that. Sometimes, she was sweet. Other times, she ignored me.
There were a few times when she wanted things in the house to be done like dishes cleaned or any of the chores completed, so I knew she meant well. As the oldest among her siblings, she felt responsible for ensuring there was order in the house and that she was in control.
Despite Melissa’s occasional mean streaks and controlling nature, I looked up to her as a role model. I admired her achievements in school as she’d always finished on top of the honors list by the end of the school year while also being able to fit a lot of extracurricular activities in between. Plus, she had a lot of friends, so her weekends were always busy with social activities.
My weekends seemed dull and ordinary in comparison, at least I thought so at the time. Except that weekend, when Mom decided to take Mitch, Melai, and me, or three of the “4Ms” to NE mall for a much-anticipated family time.
Later that night, my father, Bonifacio, arrived from Manila. He was about six feet tall, slender, and had a moderate-sized belly. His hair was long, dark, and had a few streaks of gray in it. He had been working in the city for a few years now, ever since he’d left his teaching job at Holy Cross in 1985. He chose to live and work in Manila, about five hours away from our house in Nueva Ecija, because the pay was much higher and there was not a lot of high-income work in our province.
My father worked in sales. He worked for a company owned by his younger sister, Aunt Jade, and her husband, Uncle Fred. He drove a medium-sized truck that looked like a regular U-Haul truck in the US, but his truck was loaded with boxes of household consumer products including shampoos, conditioners, body lotion, and others from Johnson & Johnson.
Dad worked long hours, sometimes including weekends, but he would come home to see us in the province every other weekend, usually bringing with him various pasalubong gifts of Filipino food varieties such as chicharron (fried pork belly), pastillas sweets, or roasted chicken from Andoks, a local chain that specializes in rotisserie meats.
It was almost midnight when Dad arrived that Saturday night. Melissa and Melai were already asleep, but Mom, Mitch, and I waited up for him to arrive. When I heard a screeching bus engine sound from outside, I knew it was him. I quickly opened the front door while Mom started heating some food. Mom knew that Dad was going to be hungry.
“I am here now!” Dad announced as he stepped inside our house.
His voice was low and had a soothing and calm tone. I instantly hugged his waist area, which was all I could reach due to his towering appearance. Dad kissed Mom on the cheeks and lips and then handed her a plastic bag containing the chicken from Andoks while asking her to fix dinner. Melissa had woken up too and proceeded to greet Dad, while Melai was left sleeping in a crib in one of our bedrooms. Soon, Dad picked Mitch up and carried her on his right arm.
“How’s my little girl?” Dad asked, enthusiastically and with a bursting smile on his face.
Although Dad never admitted it out loud, Mitch was his favorite among the four of us.
“Fine,” Mitch replied sleepily yet in a sweet voice, and while rubbing her eyes with her hands.
“I brought chicken and chicharron for you,” Dad said.
Chicharon was yet another snack she liked, aside from the brownies, ensaymadas, and many others. As Dad gently placed Mitch back on the floor, he also dropped his navycolored travel bag, which was resting on his shoulder while he had Mitch on his arm. I strode towards his travel bag, picked it up, and then sat on the floor, next to the L-shaped sofa in our living room.
“Dad, Dad. Do you have a lot of coins?” I asked enthusiastically while opening the zippers on his square bag.
Dad always had loose coins in his bag every time he came home to the province. Those were pocket changes from his work, such as when he’d paid tolls on the highways or when he’d stopped for a lunch or snack break. Mitch and I loved counting those coins. We would first search through his bag to fish them all out, placing all of them on the floor, and then we would start stacking them up based on the same denominations. All the fifty cent coins were stacked together, next to the one-peso-coin stack and the hexagonshaped two-peso-coin pile. My favorite was the five-peso-coin stack because of its higher value. If I collected only ten of five-peso coins, I would end up with fifty pesos, and that would be enough to buy many fairy tale books.
The next morning, we were all awoken by a loud banging on our front door. It was our grandmother, whom we often called Mama Julie. She lived next door with her older sister whom we called Tiyang, a Filipino word for Auntie. Mama Julie was not really our direct grandmother, lineage-wise. She was my dad’s aunt. She took care of my dad and his three siblings when they were young. Both dad’s parents died when he was just eight or nine, so Mama Julie and Tiyang had raised Dad and his three sisters.
Mama Julie was single and a devout Catholic. She had been banging on our door since six in the morning to make sure we were not late for the mass service which would start at seven thirty. Since there were six of us in our family and we only had one bathroom in the house, it took us a long time to get ready for church which resulted in us being late. When we finally got to church, we stood in the back section directly behind the last wooden bench and close to the entrance door.
The mass service took about an hour, and as soon as we were back home, Dad had started a grill in the back of our house. He cooked a few pieces of tilapia, his favorite type of fish, serving it with a soy sauce dip and drizzled with a squeeze of the citrus fruit calamansi. These tilapia pieces were cooked with their skins on, and their round black eyes still intact, almost staring at us, screaming “don’t eat me” as each one of us started to devour their soft, juicy flesh.
After we ate, we parked ourselves in the living room to watch TV. It was a simple weekend get-together, but it was truly a meaningful family affair.
Mike Talplacido writes his memoir in a casual manner that, at times, can be distracting. The cultural terms that are second nature to Talplacido are confusing to a layperson with no knowledge of the Philippines and its culture. It might take the reader an extra few minutes to find the meaning of a few of these words, but the terminology does not take away from the bigger meaning.
Talplacido carries us through his life and family in the Philippines until, eventually, his American Dream comes true. He says:
"And then it happened. Sometime in the middle of January the following year, 2000, the moment I had been waiting for finally came. It was the day of my flight from Manila to Chicago’s O’Hare airport."
The author describes his time in Chicago with amusement and distaste for the contrast in the weather. He then continues to Los Angeles, and the difference between "American Filipinos" and himself is prevalent. Eventually, Talpacido's journey takes him to New Jersey, where relationship issues come into play.
Talplacido has a revelation about his sexuality:
"When I first moved to America, I was convinced that I was bisexual. However, given everything else that had transpired, including my relationship and eventual break-up with Scotty, the many crazy sexual endeavors in between, and now meeting Sergey, I felt that the silver lining was finally knowing and accepting who I really was .
I’m GAY. One hundred percent homosexual."
Kiss My Mike is a tale about immigration, cultural difference, and burgeoning sexuality. The author honestly explains his sexual exploits and accepts the messiness of love and relationships. His love of pop culture is endearing and will help connect to the readers in a fun way. There were some areas in which the story dragged on a little too long. However, Kiss My Mike is a refreshing take on an expedition into the unknown and a brave introspection. Anyone looking for a story about self-discovering and a love for life will enjoy this memoir.