There’s this very special place I always take my kids to whenever I go back home, a “when-I-was-young-my-dad-used-to- take-me-there” kind of place.  It’s called Ruins, a burned-down warehouse straddling the gates of BF Homes in Parañaque that now houses hundreds of stalls that sell everything counterfeit: Blu-Ray discs, DVDs, Playstation games, MP3s, trading cards, action figures.  Anything but the original.

It is open only at night, as it was intended to be a night market – it’s formal name is the Good Shepherd Bazaar, but only mapmakers and guys at the Yellow Pages call it that nowadays.   It’s not a very comfortable place.  It’s very hot and humid, even when it’s raining, in which case, it is also flooded. Still, people flock to it like bees to honey.

Ruins wasn’t meant to be the south’s equivalent of Quiapo as a pirate’s mecca, but then God works in mysterious ways.  It is popular and has been very successful because it fills up a need, a deep longing, in us. In this case, the need to be evil.

Face it. We all have this little voice inside our heads telling us as we browse through the boutique section of a shopping mall: Go ahead. Swipe  that bottle of perfume. It’s just a teeny-weeny bottle anyway.  Stash it inside your bag. Come on.  You can get away with it. No one’s going to find out. You know you want it.  It’s cool. You’re not hurting anyone. The price is a rip-off anyway.

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When I was in third grade – an ancient time when a “multiplayer game” was a game of piko or patintero with the pretty kapitbahay and her obnoxious, little brother on a hot pavement under the afternoon sun – my kalaro and I would run off to this pinball arcade after school where we’d blow all our leftover change from recess.

The pinball machine had a metal slider with a hole in the middle. The way it worked was that you inserted a coin into the hole and shot the slider into the machine. The coin would trip a mechanism, fall off the hole and into a pouch somewhere inside the machine, and the balls would tumble down from their perch, allowing the game to begin.

One way to cheat the machine was to wedge the coin into the hole with a piece of paper. The coin would still trip the mechanism, but it would be stuck in the hole so that it would remain there when the slider was pulled out.

I really didn’t have to cheat. I always had more than enough coins that they’d often rip the inside of my pockets. The  thrill, however, of doing something bad and risqué and getting away with it was seductive. I got away with it twice or thrice, I think, but the arcade’s owner soon got wind of the scam.

One time, when I had the slider already jammed into the machine, I noticed the owner – a burly old man with a very mean constitution and the hard countenance of a bulldog – standing right behind me.  I could either keep the slider jammed and then make a run for it or pull it out and suffer the consequences. I suffered the consequences. I got a hefty knocking on the head and my Catholic school a big serving of abuse, as I was then in my school uniform.

I had since tried my best to stay on the righteous path, but that voice never really went away. Most of the time, it’s just a faint whisper; still, it persists. Lingering. A sinister, malicious presence.  When I go to Ruins, however, it becomes The Philippine Madrigal Singers singing Handel’s Hallelujah. Totally drowning.