BIRTH OF A JEEP 

My friends tried to talk me out of it. A jeep will cause you a lot of headache. The driver will give you problems and constantly bother you with requests for new parts, and various issues. You might even lose money, and if there's an accident and someone is hurt, you'll get blamed and end up footing hospital bills.

I didn't listen. I had a driver in mind; a friend had been laid off and had in fact had long ago suggested that I buy a jeep. He was young but he had experience as an armored car driver. He was clean cut, never talked about money, and had a wife and three kids. I decided to trust him and pushed ahead.

Finding a jeep supplier is easy; just cruise around Cebu and you'll see plenty of "surplus" shops with display centers along the road. I went to the more famous shops, which have branches in several locations: Hilton, Doris, RDAK, Aztek Motors. After looking at countless jeeps and talking to several mechanics, whom I dragged with me to the inspections, it boiled down to this. If the jeep emits smoke even after the engine has warmed up, especially when revving the engine, then the engine is beyond hope.

I couldn't find such a jeep at any of the suppliers. I also didn't like any of the designs available. I then realized that I'd just need to observe jeeps running on the streets, and take a note of the shop of the ones which had nice designs and didn't belch too much smoke. After a few days of observation, I knew I wanted to work with TSC Motor Sales, formerly known as Tabunok Surplus.

TSC is located in Talisay City, in the urban sprawl to the south of Cebu. Back then the south coastal highway hadn't opened yet, and the traffic on the South Road was terrible. It took me a good hour to get to the shop from my home in Cebu City. That is one reason why I didn't show up at the shop as often as I'd have wished, and I have fewer pictures on this page than I'd like.

The owner turned out to be a friendly Filipino-Chinese gentleman by the name of Chaw. I never found out what his full name was, but when he showed me around his workshop I was immediately impressed with the organization and the gung-ho attitude of his staff. I later found out everyone got paid by commission: the bodywork, the mechanical work, the painting, and the electrical work were all commissioned to a specialist who hired his own crew. He'd have every incentive to make sure they worked quickly.

I saw a bright red number in the shop with a stunning yellow geometric pattern. Chow told me it had been sold but he had two trucks sitting in his yard which had just come off the boat. The big Elf trucks would be able to accommodate 25 passengers, 12 on each row of seats in the back and one in the passenger seat in front. This is the largest type of city jeep; some jeeps can carry only barely half that number. Moreover, I would be able to dicate my own design. Perfect. I just had to choose which truck I wanted. The engines had already been removed and couldn't be tested. I quizzed Chaw about this; he gave me his word that he'd get a clean engine. I decided to trust him and his reputation. I chose the truck with the cleaner cab interior and gave him a down payment of PhP 100,000.

We'd agreed on a total price of PhP 400,000. This was a bit high - more than I'd expected to spend, since you can get a jeep for as little as PhP 120,000 - but I knew I'd be getting top-of-the-range work. Plus, Chaw had promised to include a valid franchise. This meant I wouldn't have to deal with a horde of obstructive bribe-seeking petty bureaucrats, something I'd been worried about. I was happy with the price. I guess Chaw was, too; he never hesitated when I asked permission to take pictures of his factory and work on my jeep. Or maybe he's just a naturally friendly guy.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me when I chose the truck; when I came back a few days later the bodywork had been completed and Chaw and his staff were pressuring me for a design decision.

I rushed back to the city, my mind spinning. I wanted something cool, and unique. But a jeep is, first and foremost, a business venture. You have to please the customers and make them want to hop on your jeep. I pondered with a Little Mermaid or Hello Kitty motif. That would go down well with female customers. My driver said it was fine with him, too, but I sensed reticence. Cebuanos will never say to your face that they hate your idea.

There was the option of getting a design based on a favorite basketball team. Mine happened to be the Kings; while plenty of Lakers jeeps run the streets, a Kings jeep would be a first, and I liked the idea of breaking new ground. But I'd be alienating people who support other NBA teams, and since I only support the Kings because of the players on the roster, I was worried that I might be stuck with a Kings design for years, even after switching allegiances to another team.

After much deliberating, I decided to join the ranks of the F1 jeeps. I'd seen jeeps with designs inspired by every F1 team, even perpetual losers Petronas - except Panasonic Toyota Racing, who had just joined Formula One racing that season. I liked the fact that Toyota do not carry advertising from a tobacco company, unlike the other major teams. And while there were plenty of Ferrari and Williams jeeps on the streets, some of them not at all faithful to the original design, mine would be the first Toyota jeep.

That very night I took a stack of photos downloaded from the Internet and a talented designer friend of mine to a 24-hour restaurant - Cafe Fortuna in the casino of the Waterfront - and we started jamming on the design. The artwork guy from TSC, a dreamy-eyed fellow called Ken, had provided me with photocopies of the blank outline of a jeep, which we could fill in with artwork. I'd managed to find red and black pens at a convenience store. My designer friend went through dozens of photocopies. I suppose it was terribly difficult adapting the design of an F1 race car - a small vehicle with a tubular body and wings - to a boxy truck. It was almost dawn when he finished. I showed up at the workshop at 8:00 AM, proudly bearing a completed design and high resolution printouts of the logos of the sponsors of the Panasonic Toyota team.

Ken took a look at the design and nodded wordlessly. I wondered what would happen next. How would they transfer the logos from the printouts to my jeep? Probably scan them, then use an automated cutting machine to cut out strips of plastic, and glue those to the sides. I was dead wrong. Ken proceded to hold the designs in his left hand while sketching them directly on to the Jeep with his right. He got everything exactly right; nothing looked oddly proportioned. The designs were then cut out from masking tape and sprayed; it was an amazingly quick process.

There was one problem. The Toyota racing cars featured brush strokes - inspired by Japanese calligraphy, I guess. Ken told me he couldn't do droplets of paint using masking tape, but that it would look okay from a distance. I was in awe of the man's skill and immediately agreed that it would be just fine.

Some readers in the developed world may note that we were violating copyright law by pasting corporate logos on my jeep. Well, technically, I suppose that is true. But you've got to understand one thing: the logos and designs are a tribute to these companies and their commitment to F1. Since they are getting free advertising, they shouldn't be complaining, anyway.

Now, some jeep operators have Disney characters on their jeeps. But even that is not really abuse of copyright law. I'd argue that the companies that own the copyright aren't being ripped off. The jeep operators and drivers, and the designers who do the actual painting, make less money from the whole thing than the average Western firm spends on phone calls related to copyright issues. Ken was paid about PhP 6,000 for decorating the whole jeep. That's about 100 bucks! Owners get between 500 and 800 pesos a day from the drivers. These sums are peanuts. I agree that copyright owners should go after Chinese companies that manufacture and sell knock-offs on an industrial scale, but the jeeps of Cebu are works of love, painstakingly crafted one by one. They are a tribute to the power of the images, a way to show the world the appreciation felt for the images, like a tattoo of a favorite character. You wouldn't bust someone for getting a tattoo of Tweety, would you?

Meanwhile, the mechanic and his team were working on the engine. I'm not sure what he was doing but it did seem, from the expression on his face when he listened to the engine running at decibel levels enough to bust an eardrum, that he knew what he was doing. For all I knew this man might be a first-rate engineer who had worked at multinational corporations in Saudi Arabia. I didn't know much about diesel engines and tried not to bother him.

I did make sure, however, that everyone felt good about working on my jeep. I gave the mechanic and the design team a little money, for beers and barbecue, and I guess it worked, because the jeep hasn't had any major problems. The tips added less than 1 percent to the sales price; it was good value for money.

Chaw asked me if I wanted a sound system. I didn't know it at the time but Chaw is a die-hard audio buff, and his Paj has zero luggage space due to all the speakers stuffed in the rear. He introduced me to a guy called Dodong, who offered me a quote of PhP 27,500 for the speakers, baffles, wiring and amplifier. The only thing I'd have to buy would be the stereo. I checked the figures; it was a good deal.

When I came back a few days later, an array of speakers had been installed under both rows of seats. I rushed to the nearest department store and came back with an 8,000-peso Pioneer CD stereo. They turned the volume all the way up and it was loud enough to get the guys at the workshop shake their booties. My jeep was taking shape.

In fact, the next time I came back, the jeep was ready. The paperwork was, too - almost. We decided to have the jeep registered with the LTO - Land Transportation Office - in my driver's name, since, although foreigners are allowed to own vehicles, they are not allowed to own LTFRB franchises, and these must be under the same name as the registration of the vehicle. The registration had been completed before the jeep left the shop. We still didn't have the LTFRB franchise, but we had a temporary permit.

Before I got used to it, the jeep was rather hard to drive. My driver had asked Ken to put decorative tint across the window with his son's name on it - which we had agreed not to do, since the name of his daughters was already on the back of the jeep - and all I could see was a small patch of asphalt right in front of the truck. The gearbox had been modified during the conversion process and shifting had to be done extremely carefully or the gears would grate. Even though the jeep was LHD, the gears were still designed for RHD; first gear was way on the right, third and fourth were in the middle, fifth and reverse were on the left. But after a few miles I got the hang of it. True to his word, Chaw had given me a clean engine and the jeep ran beautifully, smoke-free.

Evidently, the design was good, too. Even though I had a "Family Use" sign up, ropes strung across the entrance, and the road from the workshop in Talisay to the garage I had rented for the jeep was not on the 21B route, passengers were running after the jeep trying to get on board. I was bursting with pride and couldn't have been happier, and was contemplating buying a few more jeeps and developing a proper fleet.

Then it all came crashing down.

My driver's wife, it turns out, was separated from him, and refused to co-sign the chattel mortgage agreement my attorney had prepared - the purpose of the agreement was to ensure that the jeep would be mine even though it would be under the driver's name. She said she didn't trust me. I tried to explain that I'd be blindly trusting her husband with a 430,000-peso machine, a huge sum of money in the Philippines, and I couldn't do that without some sort of agreement. I told her it was unreasonable of her to fight me since I'd even been paying her jobless husband a monthly salary while we waited for the completion of the jeep. The bitch just walked out of my office.

My attorney tried talking some sense into her; he explained that I needed some form of legal assurance to ensure that her husband would pay me for the use of a jeep that was already in his name. Unlike her husband, she was a college graduate, and she must have understood the situation. I guess she was just trying to annoy her husband.

I told my driver to keep the jeep in the garage we had rented near his house until the legal problems were ironed out. He asked me to reconsider but I was firm. Yet he ran it for a week without ever telling me; moreover, he ran it after dark - which we had agreed not to do - and drove it to the garage past midnight after drinking with his buddies. I discovered this when, annoyed that he hadn't answered his cellphone for three days, I confronted him after waiting at his parents house for five hours. He never apologized, and neither did he offer to pay me for the days the jeep had been on the road (PUJ drivers pay the owners of their jeeps a fixed daily rental fee; we had agreed on 600 pesos, which is fairly low, on the condition that the driver would pay for oil changes and minor repairs). In fact, he had the gall to ask me to pay for the plastic destination signs and some minor mechanical parts he'd bought.

I decided I couldn't trust this guy with my jeep after all. I drove the jeep back to my house, and took it back to the workshop the next morning. Chaw kindly agreed to let me use his display center.

But I still couldn't sell the jeep. It had been registered in my driver's name, and I needed him to sign a blank deed of sale. He refused to sign and nearly had a nervous breakdown. When, in an effort to entice him to sign, I told him he could keep the stereo he still had and offered him another job, he just cried like a baby and begged to have the jeep back. I told him the jeep wasn't a toy for him and he had proven himself far too irresponsible to drive my jeep.

Throughout, even though the jeep was already at the display center, I would have returned it to him had he uttered just one word in the way of apology, or promised to toe the line in future, but he never did either. I was pretty upset by this time, and, yelling at the top of my voice - which in this country is an extreme shock tactic most people never employ - promised him that I'd kick his ass unless he signed. He did.

An engineer from Toledo City bought the jeep three weeks later, for PhP 350,000. After the bitter experience with my driver I was eager to get rid of it. I never got a single centavo out of that jeep, though I have to admit that it was fun while it lasted. Apparently the engineer had better luck finding a good driver because the jeep is still running; I often see it cruising along, packed with passengers and lookin' good.

Months later, my ex-friend was harrassing the new owners of the jeep with threatening phone calls and phony complaints lodged with the LTFRB. He and his dad had even showed up at a Mandaue police station and asked to have the jeep impounded, claiming ownership on the basis of some old Xeroxed documents. In fact, the jeep did get impounded overnight, and the engineer called me up to complain. I apologized and assured him I'd solve the problem. And so it happened that I was left with no choice but to pay my latest enemy a visit with a few tattooed goons. He wasn't home but his dad was; we pushed the old man around for a while, broke a few things, and the harassment stopped. I hate to admit it, but that was fun too.