Cracked

There’s a Cebuano word used to describe something that has split or cracked open: kang-a. In my hometown Surigao City, where Cebuano is commonly spoken besides the local dialect, kang-a has taken on a new meaning. It now describes the drug addict who has shown signs of mental abnormalities. Indeed, similar to the English slang, it applies to someone who has “cracked.”

The last time I was there, which was to vote for the elections, I asked my brother how our childhood friends were. “Kang-a na,” he said. Almost all of them are getting crazy, destroyed by longtime addiction to drugs, he explained.

It’s the first time, I heard kang-a being used in this sense. And I was told that the word is becoming very popular in Surigao. People seemed to be looking for a word that is not too harsh but also strikingly witty to describe their friends who are literally losing their minds to drugs.

And there’s a lot of them now. It got worse when politicians linked to national drug cartels got elected in our place, as people were lured to selling their votes for money that came from the drug trade. The whole network of local narco-politics just expanded. It infected the police, the local courts and other key branches of the bureaucracy.

As more and more people were hooked, crime also became widespread in Surigao City. Theft, robbery, rape and other crimes increased at alarming rates. Some big fires were even traced to accidents during pot sessions.

My brother lost his mountain bike to a thief, who he suspected is a kang-a who just lived near his house. His frustration and anger over the inability of authorities to stop drug-related crime inspired him to write a poem about it in Surigaonon. And to entice his kang-a friends, he wrote it in the form of rap music.

Our community in Surigao City is notorious for being one of the local sources of drugs. Growing up there, my siblings and I have seen how it got worse and worse every year. In fact, during high school, we sometimes hang out with the local tambays who were our childhood friends. It reached a point when selling drugs was done openly. Yet no one would dare report it to the police, who were themselves known as protectors.

It used to be just weed, glue, or some cough medicines that our poor friends got hooked on. It used to be more drinking than pot sessions as drugs were harder to find back then. But things changed after we left our place to study for college. Shabu became more and more widespread. Our friends were not just getting high, they were going mad. More and more deranged taong grasa roamed the streets of the city.

I began to avoid our friends, especially when they start asking us to buy them a bottle of rum or beer whenever they saw that we’re home. They looked up to us with a bit of self-pity since they all dropped out and remained jobless. So, perhaps they felt that we should at least help them by buying them some drinks. And all the better if we could join the tagay.

It might sound like my friends feel entitled. But, the truth is, it is I who feel more indebted to them. Many years ago, when I was still about five or six years old, our tambay friends saved me and my younger brother from drowning in the river near our house. My older brother who first saw us already drowning asked their help and they all swam to rescue us.

I lost consciousness but woke up lying down at the river bank and saw my older brother and friends trying to revive me and my younger brother by making us vomit all the water that we had drank. They just laughed and made fun of us seemingly unmindful that we could actually have died if they had not come in time to rescue us. My friends did not grow up to be nice people but I know I owe my life to them and I remain always grateful for that.

My younger brother feels the same, too. In fact, whenever he came home from Manila, where he works as a lawyer, he hangs out with some of them and buys them drinks. This was before some of them got murdered for whatever reasons, died of sickness (expectedly due to abuse of alcohol and drugs), or lost their minds. Now, you don’t see them very often in our neighborhood, which made me ask my brother as to their whereabouts.

So, when the news that some 500 drug addicts and pushers recently surrendered to authorities as part of the Tokhang campaign in Surigao, I wondered if some of them were my friends.

Whenever I hear about suspects being killed in the recent campaign against criminality, I think of my childhood friends. They may have committed the worst crimes but I still believe that, like all other suspects, they still deserve to live or have a second chance. They did that to me and my brother when we were small kids.