FOR a few hours on Thursday, the social ills of the past week were set aside to celebrate the confessional anthology of poet, columnist, firewater guru and friend, Krip Yuson. Lush Life, a selection of previously published personal essays by Yuson from 2001 to 2010, is a bravura disclosure of a life, of lives, unfolding and daring, yet honest and generous to allow us a front seat in this exposé.

Launching the Lush in the lush settings of the Champagne Room was perhaps too grandiose for fellow lushes, but writers aren’t choosy.  A book and a drink in hand in any free space is always the perfect setting.  Throw in a little food, a couple of readings, and songs and you have a veritable writers’ fete.

And so we were feted, by readings from the Syjuco family and traveling poet-friends of the author; with songs by friends Tata Poblador, Gou de Jesus, Girlie Valencia, Sandra Lim-Viray, Charlson Ong, Mike Coroza and the present president of the Manila Hotel, Joey Lina; and by the genius of Pete Canzon on sax and Ferdie Borja on the piano. There were many more but I had already turned into a semi-lush by mid-evening to recall them all.

I imagine that perhaps the grand celeb was Krip’s way of preparing us readers for the rainstorm of Lush Life, reminding us to remember that this is just a point in time, a minor footnote to what has gone and what still has to be lived.

The last time a book was launched at the same venue was in 1993. The book was Pasquinades by Adrian Cristobal. The Champagne Room was smaller then, but the company and the inebriation was no less than Krip’s. Memorable that night were the introductory “homage” by Teddyboy Locsin and the retort of the author.  They traded derogatory quips of each other’s person:  Teddyboy assailing the audience that if they had missed Adrian’s column, here was another opportunity to do the same, and Adrian hitting back that he was glad that he didn’t ask Teddyboy to write the introduction. However, both revealed that they made a pact not to publish their columns for, as Adrian wrote, “I believe that a collection of newspaper columns in book form is sheer vanity: what is perishable…should be allowed to perish without benefit of clergy.” Thankfully, he allowed these “perishables” to be published for they were more fanciful, whimsical and were written with pleasure.

Nick Joaquin “pshawed” the divide between journalism and creative writing. There is no hack-writing, only hack-writers, he said. There are gems to be mined in the thousands of columns that have been written for more than half a century, and Krip’s Lush Life holds enough to be fitted for a crown.

Yuson sections his essays according to mind—sloshed, sober, excited, tranquil, in rage, in sorrow. No, that’s not accurate; Yuson distributes them according to interests and topics. But reading them is like going through a jungle, marking places that draw various emotions, the least of them is safety, the best of them is surprise.

Sampling Krip’s birthday offering of chicharon bituka to my mother, I braced myself for an afternoon of Krip’s discourses and read with equivalent expressions of intoxication, sobriety, excitement, oh, I forgot—shock, rage and sorrow.

My favorite surprises are the sections “Lush Life Manila” and “Memorabilia”—where he writes vividly of legendary places and people, a few of which, and whom, I have had a brush with during their meteoric falls. On several occasions, I discovered that Krip and I were somehow 10 feet apart, always to the left and out of sight.

Perhaps, when I was around five years old, while peering through the wooden balusters of the second floor mezzanine of the Indios Bravos, where my father had deposited me while he regaled his fellow writers on the ground floor, Krip and friends were there, “as peripheral company ogling Jose Garcia Villa, Joaquin, Moreno, Cristobal, Kit Tatad and the enfant terrible Florentino Dauz.”

Or while looking across our lawn from the window of our small house on a hill, to the blinking lights of a gothic-like establishment, Krip was there, stomping “on the dance floor of the Black Angel Discotheque, at 17, with no less than my UP Diliman Humanities professor at the time, the Aling Barang… iconic poet-muse Virgie Moreno.”

But Lush Life goes beyond memories and commentary. The pieces in “Lush Life Manila,” however nonchalantly (read honest and naughty) he recounts his excursions with grog and women—a perilous path in an age of anti-sexism—are poignant between the lines. Yuson paints remarkable portraits of people, defiant yet lonely, debauched yet principled, resigned yet hopeful.

Yuson’s confession goes on, unabashedly baring his evolution from semistreet urchin to state scholar to dropout to comfortable success, in spirit, as well as in body. Who cares? he seems to say. He’s been through many-a-grind and is tired of labels. In Yuson’s words, “either we celebrate the self and/or the family, or we toast the universe.”

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