ERAP BEFORE ERAP ] My favorite scene from Quijano de Manila's Reportage on Crime

With Boots Anson-Roa. Photo from bootsansonroa.com

About a month ago, Joseph Estrada went nightclubbing with a girlfriend and another young man. At about four in the morning, they went to a Dewey Boulevard restaurant for a breakfast of arroz caldo. As they entered, two men at a table whistled in admiration at Estrada's girlfriend. Estrada seated his party at a nearby table, put his gun on the table when he saw the two whistlers displaying their artillery. The waiter arrived with the arroz caldo. When Estrada next looked at the neighboring table, the two men there, he says, had their guns pointed at him, daring him to draw. "Don't draw!" screamed his girl companion. "There are others behind you!" Estrada glanced around and saw three or four other men standing behind him, their pistols at his neck. The other folk in the restaurant were meanwhile fleeing to the exits, shrieking like mad. Estrada, believing his last hour had come, picked up not his gun but a spoon and began to eat the arroz caldo. Suddenly he felt as if the ceiling had crashed down on his head. He was pistol-whipped unconscious, had to be hospitalized for a week.

---From "Gun Duel at LVN," Reportage on Crime, Quijano de Manila, reissued by Anvil Publishing, 2009