DWU Memories - I

It was another day in the mid 1990s, warm and cloudless. In Janssen Building, the prefect prowled for truants, faculty rushed to their next classes, and students played cat and mouse with the prefect and nuns. Inside this edifice of learning a veil of silence pervaded, broken by the bell calling for recess.

Gangs of boys, neat in their pressed khaki pants and white shirt jacks and hair sleekly styled with gel, bolted from their classrooms, growing more boisterous as they walked farther from their glaring teachers, martinet nuns, and the growling prefect. Their stomachs were rumbling, ordering them to follow the mob to the canteen but they purposely strode toward the Quonset hut, away from the tide of starving students and free from the blackboard and books.

At the hut, they revealed their weapons - guitars glistening with varnish and song hits magazines breaking from a thousand informal gigs. Some thumbed through the paperbacks’ pages, others armed themselves with guitar tabs, a few fidgeted, waiting for the moment. A minute passed with voices rising and falling until a consensus was born. Guitars were readied and vocal cords were flexed. Then, Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” broke from the group. Several times, they sang until the bell called them back. They dispersed and sluggishly walked back to their classrooms, back to their books and pens.

Tomorrow, they would pick Nirvana. Maybe Guns N’ Roses. Perhaps Bon Jovi or even Pearl Jam. Better yet, play “More than Words” or “Hotel California” with no chord bastardized and be crowned as the Guitar Hero

Prospero E. Pulma Jr.