Goodbye Danny Uy

Living in Baguio does not afford the residents much to do at night, especially us “non-alcoholic,” aging (”are we getting old or is this music simply too loud?”) singles. After dinner, one watches TV and prepares to sleep.

For 10 years though, this was not my routine because I was in the food and beverage business running restaurants, bars and even a huge canteen concession where, whenever my 3rd shift dish washer would fall ill, I would get to wash a few hundred dishes myself at 3:00a.m. with really cold water in Loakan.

After dinner meant a game of cards with the boys. First it was just pusoy, or Russian poker. Then, as the group got larger we HAD to start playing poker, if just to accommodate everyone who wanted to play. In the beginning, we played all the different games, with the winner calling the next one, until we all just wanted to play 7-card stud high-low.

Stakes were not very high but it meant a night of intelligent conversation plus all the chismis of Baguio. Everyday each one would receive a text message from someone in the group that would say, “Game tonight?” And we knew that one more evening was going to be spent in pleasant company, an honest group of players (for we had weeded out all those who proved to be untrustworthy early on).

We were all compadres, having been made godparents to the late Benjie Buena’s youngest son. Benjie was then the youngest judge in the Philippines and part of our “quorum” until he passed away a few years ago. We so looked forward to the games every night, which were usually held wherever I was — the billiards bar in Legarda, the restaurant at Nevada Square (after it closed at 11:00p.m.), the condo at Outlook Drive, the condo on Kisad Road.

One person we could always count on to be there was Danny Uy.

He was one of our best friends. A total gambler, his happiness being a game of cards. We used to joke that if given a choice of a beautiful willing woman and a poker hand, Danny would choose the cards (unless of course the beautiful willing woman was holding cards).

Nico Cawed loved him and their friendship went as far back as the days Danny ran Junkyard on his family’s backyard on M. H. del Pilar, which was behind their building on Kisad Road. Junkyard was, and still is,  considered one of Baguio’s best bars ever, because it was the simply coolest hangout during its time, where folks could walk in, buy cheap beer and sit around what was literally a junkyard. It was even featured in the inflight magazine of Philippine Airlines.

One night as we were having one of our “after-game meals” at 3:00 a.m. at 456 restaurant on Session Road, we overheard the conversation in the next table, “Whatever happened to Junkyard? That was such a cool place!”

Danny said to us, “The reason I closed it was not because it was not making money. It was just that, after seven years of puyat (late nights), I got tired.”

Danny, Nico and I had many adventures both in Baguio and Manila. He was a constant guest at my mom’s house where we would lay over whenever we were on a “Danny binge” in Manila.

Yaya Minda in Manila loved having the occasion to speak to someone in her dialect as Danny spoke Cebuano, too, having lived in Cebu for a while, after the Junkyard years, running his family’s businesses of souvenir handicrafts and dormitories.

The binge would mean going down to Manila for restaurant supplies and other purchases, and accompanying Danny to the PAGCOR branch near the airport, which was his favorite, where we would watch him turn Php2,000 to Php80,000 to Php0. And this would go on for many nights. In fact, Danny Uy is the reason we stopped going to the casino altogether. Watching him play for hours was tiring enough for anyone to want to stop.

We had many other adventures with Danny Uy — mostly nocturnal, as we were all busy running businesses in the city, like impromptu decisions to have dinner in La Union. For years we saw each other every night, and during the day, we would catch him watching the family stores on Session Road, and at Maharlika, with his hand on his chin, usually very sleepy (or asleep) for all our late night games. We used to kid him that since he was 100% Chinese, we could not tell from his eyes if he was awake or asleep!

Danny would always talk about business, and he was good at feeling the pulse of the students, who were his market for the retail shops. In his brain was an abacus so he was quick to compute costs and profits, multiplying numbers by the thousands. He and Nico shared the love of the Forgotten Realms series and R.A. Salvatore. He and I loved talking about food, comparing recipes. His mom’s kitchen at home, he said, was so well-stocked they could survive a war with all the supplies.

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