ETHER DIARIES

“Will you pay for the breakfast and coffee of a poor fellow like me?” he asked, giving me his most shameless puppy-dog eyes. I rolled my eyes and said, “Fine.” Normally, I would have resisted on principle, but this was Apple Pay’s first day in the Philippines, and as the tech-obsessed boy that I am, I saw an opportunity. I sprang from my seat, followed him to the cashier, and hovered my Apple Watch over the terminal like I was casting a spell. I did this purely to impress the crowd, who, for reasons still unknown to me, had failed to notice that Apple Pay had already arrived in our goddamn country.

The poor fellow in question is my gay bestie, currently doing his fellowship in the hospital where I work. He has made it his personal mission to convince everyone that his fellowship stipend has reduced him to destitution. This would be easier to believe if he were not also a product of Southridge, living in a condominium paid for by his doctor father, with a family home tucked safely inside Ayala Alabang.

That is what makes him so fascinating to me. He is privileged enough to look like a medical heir, yet broke enough to treat every free meal as divine intervention. His entire personality seems to live inside that contradiction.

After that breakfast incident, I became strategic. The next time I asked him out for coffee, I rushed to the café ahead of him so I could pay for my own drink before he had the chance to ask me to cover his. I hurried there like Paris Hilton wobbling around in heels. When I arrived, a woman ahead of me was taking an eternity to order. I waited tensely, glancing at the entrance every few seconds to see whether my beloved cheapskate had appeared. In my head, I wanted to shake her by the arms and plead, “For the love of God, make up your mind!” At last, she finished. I gave my order as quickly as possible and lifted my watch toward the terminal. Then, from behind me, came a whisper: “Oh, I’m just in time.” Of course he was. This cheapskate had the timing of a Swiss watch and the morals of a parking meter.

That is the kind of person he is: always scanning a room for the nearest free object, service, meal, or institutional loophole. Sometimes, when I asked where he was, he would say he was attending a roundtable discussion sponsored by a medical representative. He could never resist an invitation like that, especially when it included free food and a hotel stay. More importantly, the hotel room came with access to a breakfast buffet. For him, this was not a professional event. It was a pilgrimage. The holy site was the buffet table, and the patron saint was bacon.

As a Filipino, I regard his next flaw with deep disappointment: he does not like Jollibee. He once explained that this began with a “traumatic” childhood experience. Their driver had picked them up from school and passed by a Jollibee. Maybe it was motion sickness. Maybe it was fate. But while eating a Yumburger, he suddenly threw up. From that moment on, he permanently associated Jollibee with nausea. Now, whenever I suggest eating there, he looks at me as if I have proposed dining in a sewer.

Then BBM visited the hospital for his birthday and handed out free Jollibee food packs to the employees. And, lo and behold, guess who appeared in line. My supposedly Jollibee-hating friend proudly took a photo of his food stub and sent it to me. I asked, “I thought you loathed Jollibee?”

“Relax,” he replied. “It’s Chickenjoy, not a Yumburger.”

That same day, the president gave every employee present at the celebration a free 10-kilogram sack of rice. Naturally, the word “free” acted on him like a homing signal. He joined the long line without hesitation, because apparently no amount of waiting is too much when the prize is something he does not have to pay for. Since he lives just a block from the hospital, he carried the sack all the way to his condominium while dressed in a crisp, neatly tucked-in long-sleeved shirt and chinos. He looked delighted and triumphant, as if he had personally negotiated the rice deal himself. The best part was that the rice had been given by a president we both despised and did not vote for. I asked him why he even took it, since I doubted he knew how to cook rice and his family behind the gates of Ayala Alabang was not exactly desperate for a single grain. He simply said, “Because it’s free.”

In the medical world, we have our own version of nepo babies: the children of successful boomer doctors. To be fair, their parents did not necessarily acquire wealth through anything illegal. Many simply specialized in fields that were rare at the time, so patients flocked to them for highly specialized care. That success allowed them to send their children to exclusive schools, then to our version of the Ivy League, and eventually to medical school. And when a student does not have to worry about tuition, rent, groceries, or whether lunch will destroy the week’s budget, it becomes much easier to excel. For first-generation medical students, or the commoners, as I call them, this world is easy to recognize. Power. Influence. Money. A surname that opens doors before anyone has even knocked.

Then there is alumni privilege. In some medical schools, a small portion of admitted students are children of alumni, and for those who are not exactly stellar, this can be the side door into very good institutions. Their parents are the celebrities of the medical world, and the glow transfers neatly to them: “’Yan yung anak ni Dr. X.” Often, that privilege follows them after medical school into the prestigious hospitals where their parents trained. Most of the time, they enter the same specialties, apply to the same competitive programs, and somehow find themselves within reach of highly coveted residency slots. So, to avoid confusing them with ordinary nepo babies, I shall use the proper medical term: Anak ng Dios.

So, yes, my gay bestie is technically an Anak ng Dios. But why would an Anak ng Dios line up for a free 10-kilogram sack of rice from a president he despises? This is why I call him a half-baked one. He is the son of a successful boomer doctor, yes, but his father belongs to that rare species of rich parent who believes his children should choose their own path and survive on their own merits. No power. No influence. And in his case, absolutely no extra money. His dad pays the rent, but everything else, including electricity, internet, phone bill, food, and transportation, is on him.

This is where the rice sack stops being merely funny and starts making sense. During the hot summer months of April, he once complained about how unbearable his condominium had become. I simply said, “Girl, just turn on the AC.” He would not. He has to pay the electric bill himself.

It also took me by surprise when he told me he had taken a motorcycle ride-hailing app to a bear party. I asked why. Of course, because it was cheaper than taking a car.

Ever since the baffling open-close-open drama of the Strait of Hormuz and the energy crisis that followed, his father stopped sending the family driver to fetch him from Ermita and deliver him back to their kingdom in Ayala Alabang. So every Friday, my friend takes the train, transfers to a P2P bus bound for the south, and goes home to spend the weekend in his mansion like a commuting aristocrat in exile. He packs a week’s worth of laundry into a giant giveaway tote bag from a medical representative, squeezes himself into the train, survives the pedestrian bridges of Makati, and drags his entire domestic burden toward the bus terminal. I once asked him why he did not just take Grab. He looked at me, offended by the extravagance, and said, “It’s expensive. My dad won’t pay for it.”

I once asked him why he drinks hot coffee, because in our corner of the gay community, ordering anything other than iced coffee borders on apostasy. His answer was pure austerity economics: ice takes up space, which means less coffee. Hot coffee, therefore, offers a better liquid return on investment. Even his beverage temperature has to pass a cost-benefit analysis.

This is why, between the two of us, I am usually in the better position to pay for lunch or dinner. Otherwise, he would simply sit across from me, watch me eat, and perform starvation with the quiet dignity of a deposed monarch. Still, I sometimes question his claim of poverty when roughly seventy percent of his budget goes to what I can only describe as essential gay infrastructure: a gym membership, whey protein, poppers, and savings for an upcoming cruise with his hot-bear situationship. Everything else, including the basic necessities of living, must apparently become a struggle.

And yet, whether his priorities are questionable or merely theatrical, I have to admit that there is something admirable about it. He will sacrifice a meal for poppers, beg his bestie to cover lunch, and reorganize his entire budget around a cruise that may or may not determine the future of his hot-bear situationship. But the larger point remains: whatever he is now, wherever he is in training, his father’s influence had nothing to do with it. He may be an Anak ng Dios by birth, but in practice, he is trying very hard to live like a commoner, only with a protein shaker in hand, worse financial judgment, and the survival instincts of a cockroach inside a five-star hotel buffet.