(Some of you have been reading these. if you don't think they are real, I understand. It's crazy stuff, but I am telling the story the best I can remember it. Also I was a troubled piece of garbage.)
I am son to a family of shamans who live in the jungles of Peru, if you can believe it. My mother’s name is Marina and the closest to me. She gets on Facebook and sends me pictures of what they’ve done to the house in Pucallpa or in the village where her brothers and sisters live. Hola, hijo. Te quiero mucho. Te extranamos. Hi, son. I love you a lot. We miss you.
Second closest is Erika. We called her Yuri when she was a girl, but she goes by Erika now and learned English. I had been closest to Brian when I lived there, but he was only a toddler then. He’s 13 now and can hardly hold a conversation on the phone when they call. There are seven kids, and I am the eighth.
Cheo arranged for the guys making the movie to accompany me to Peru, and we stayed at Gustavo’s hotel in Pisac. They planned to make the movie about Gustavo’s community, but decided that my stories of addiction and the dynamic of trying to change my life in the jungle with the Shipibo tribe was more viable and certainly more interesting than whatever they had planned with Gustavo. It was a funny thing for them to choose me, because they only came with me to make sure that I didn’t disappear on a coke binge before I got to the jungle. Now they would make their movie about me. They called it, A Crooked Line and would spend over 500,000 dollars over four years to document absolutely no change in me.
Gustavo took us to different places around the area and taught us about the Andean culture. It was a profound experience for all of us to learn about the beautiful way of life destroyed by Spanish colonization and the Catholic Church centuries before. In our downtime at the hotel, I used my Spanish to be sweet to one of the girls who worked there, but when I asked her for a date she turned me down, having some long standing and rocky relationship in the way.
The natives cover their faces when photos are taken as a rejection of their individuality, because they are nothing by themselves. Instead of handshakes, they greet each other by grabbing each other’s wrists signifying the reciprocity that exists in their culture. There is no word for thank you or sorry, because those are actions, not words. Gustavo also taught us how they built the ruins and moved the huge stones.
Each stone is unique from any other, but they all fit together so that not even a sheet of paper can be put between them centuries later. One stone was assigned to one family that worked closely with the families making the stones surrounding theirs. Different families and individuals worked closely with other families or individuals to create a strong community like the unique stones working in harmony to create an indestructible form without using mortar.
Shamanism and folklore laid the foundations of their culture. Celebrations and customs, even their dress, were all based on the seasons and the cultivation of crops. Nature meant everything to them, and they were never alone, because the rocks, hills, trees and everything else lived and breathed in harmonious existence with them.
I was a product of western civilization and extremely privileged but entitled, addicted and angry. Here, this culture had nothing I had growing up, but they were content. Despite all they suffered, they smiled and knew how to live. I had everything but wanted to die. Gustavo believed that the introspection obtained through shamanic medicines and immersion in a culture built on community and nature would help me overcome drugs.
He explained how rats isolated in cages choose cocaine over food and water till they die, but rats that live in a community and have quality of life choose to live by eating and drinking even when cocaine is available. I saw his point. My cold, internal isolation was responsible for at least some of what was wrong, and I had nothing to lose. The soundman and cameraman from the movie crew flew to Pucallpa with me and the Shipibo shaman who would attempt to heal me of my addiction. His name was Teo Valdo.
I knew things were different the second I felt the hot humid push of air through the doorway of the plane and walked down onto the tarmac. It was like movies I had seen as a kid about Vietnam, and droves of modified dirt bikes with three wheels and a carriage for passengers called Moto taxis filled the atmosphere with the chorus of their two-stroke drone. Everyone wore flip-flops and their open personalities matched their scant clothing. They talked in a distinct jungle dialect of Spanish. The dirt bike rickshaws buzzed through town on roads of red clay and carried as many as seven people at a time and maybe some live chickens tied upside down, a bushel of plantains or a squealing pig.
Teo Valdo took us to the hotel where we spent the night and came back in the morning to take us to the river port. We walked four blocks to the port market. It teemed with commerce and activity. Barefoot men carried large quantities of plantains on their backs and grunted up the muddy bank of the river and loaded them into trucks. Women and children sold bags of bread or apples or rice and chicken meals wrapped in banana leaves from small canoes to passengers waiting on the boats for departure to their village. Frantic crowds of men and women jumped up and down and bargained over the pigs or chickens or bags of grain poor families of farmers brought into town earlier that morning.
We maneuvered up a plank from the mud into a wooden boat before we ducked our heads under the roof and crawled over other passengers to our seats at the middle of the boat. A light drizzle started. It was clear that we were in a different world, and whatever I thought mattered back in America didn’t really matter here.
We waited over an hour to take off and when we finally did it was slow. It took six to get there, so we talked to a small group of Americans coming out to the Shipibo village with us. They had met Teo Valdo some months earlier and wanted to visit his wife’s family’s village: Ceylan, and they were coming with us.
Our clothes stuck to our skin, and our backs cramped on the tiny wooden seat before we arrived. Red clay stuck to our shoes as we got off the boat, and a group of women halfway danced in traditional Shipibo garb. The men played clumsy drums and flutes to greet us. A hoard of kids carried our bags a half mile up to the hut where we would sleep and invited us to eat chicken and dance in a different hut by an enormous puddle they called the soccer field.
My lungs struggled to breathe the soggy air, and mosquitos bit our skin through the repellent. It was hot and still and muddy and arguably the most miserable place I had ever been in my life. No matter how cool it sounded to live in the jungle, it wasn’t. We only escaped the mosquitos under our nets, but the air sat even stiller and hotter under them. Different bugs or biting ants usually made their way into the damp bedding.
The other Americans boasted of how they would fast for several days in preparation for the ayahuasca ceremonies the whole boat ride into the jungle, and they had big plans to stay for a week or more and do several ceremonies. But the women left less than 24 hours in and the men only made it another 12 before they took off after the first ceremony. Throughout my time in the jungle Canadians, Americans and Europeans alike would come with big ambitions about how long they would stay and tell me how happy they were to be there, but when the mosquitoes became reality and heat beat them down and ants were crawling in their beds, they always left frazzled and desperate for a porcelain toilet and air conditioning. Me on the other hand, I didn’t have a choice. The jungle days in a tribal village were the life I was living at the time. There wasn’t anywhere else for me to go.
But we had ceremony the first night before that first group of Americans left. It was with Teo and his wife, Marina, and her whole family: her mother and father, three brothers and their wives, two of her sisters, besides cousins and uncles and aunts, maybe 25 people. We sat in a circle and took turns letting the alkaline sludge slide down our throats before Teo blew out the kerosene lamp and lit a cigarette. Mosquitos bit. He began ceremony with a guttural moaning that ascended into a chorus of him and his in laws singing slithering incantations to the snake spirit. Teo fanned random members of our party with a large eagle feather and sing songs particular to that individual. He put his mouth to each one’s head and sucked loudly before puking into a bucket. A cousin stood and sang loudly. He made strange geometrical patterns in the dark with his cigarette.
The jungle swallowed my mind on the medicine, and the entomological chirps of the life teeming all around coursed through my veins. I could feel the silent vegetation encroaching and knew it could make me disappear in a second like a scene from Jumanji. The spirit spoke to us each in our own way, and we shared our experiences through the broken Spanish of one of the other visitors before we all crawled under our mosquito nets and slept.
The guys from the movie interviewed me in the morning sitting around a smoldering fire with one of the cousin’s and his friend cooking up the next batch of ayahuasca in a big pot. I talked about my hepatitis and what I thought about the medicines curing it. It was hard to imagine that there was much Teo could do for me with ayahuasca and the other plants. We talked about this and that on camera before they hugged me and took off to catch a boat into the city.
Besides ceremony there was nothing to do but read, and the days passed slow and hot. I got diarrhea from the microbes in the well water. It was so bad that I cried in the outhouse. Teo’s family adopted me as their own. They called me “Bebe Grande” on account of all the candy I ate, and I was very close to their youngest, Brian. He was only two and loved to eat bananas.
Once a month or so they would bring me back into Pucallpa to their house where their other 6 kids lived and went to school. It was a tiny wooden house with a corrugated tin roof, and as many as 19 people slept on the floor in a night. I imagined the tin roof would glow like a coil in the oven from all the radiation it had soaked up during the daytime, but it never did. An outhouse sat about 10 feet from the back door, and when the back yard flooded from the rain, water licked the threshold. I spent as much time as possible at phone parlors called locutorios and used the computers to watch YouTube videos or read Wikipedia articles and use Facebook. Sometimes I called the girl working at Gustavo’s hotel to tell her that I loved her.
We never stayed in the city more than a few days before we returned by boat back to Ceylan where we cooked everything on open fires and the roofs were made of neatly folded palm fronds instead of corrugated tin and the mosquitoes really bit. There were different boats, but we always got on the one going to Masisea, which was a tiny century old settlement where 2000 people lived. It was two miles up a dirt road from where we lived in Ceylan, and a pharmacy and a barbershop sat on one side of the plaza. On the other side were several stores selling butchered chicken out of a bucket, hot bottles of soda, crackers, cookies, clothes and instant coffee with fried eggs and rice for a lunch time meal. A couple of bars ran big speakers and refrigerators on generators at night while people danced and drank beer at tables. At a few small covered stations along the road, men and women sold gasoline out of plastic jugs and poured it through funnels with cloth filters into motorcycle tanks. I visited from time to time, but it wasn’t much to see. One of Marina’s sisters had a little store in the village that sold cigarettes and candy, which was all I ever bought anyway.
We continued with the shamanic treatments at night, and sometimes ceremony would shake me to the core. On one occasion I had no recollection of coming up into the plateau or anything other than a thick fog rolling over me before it transported my whole body, not my mind or imagination but what literally seemed to be my physical body.
I was in a similar village where men in tactical gear burned huts to the ground with flamethrowers. The men slaughtered Asian looking adults and collected the children in cages to be carried away to some horrific fate, but I wasn’t sure where. Whatever was happening wasn’t clear to me, but I knew that it was a reality for someone somewhere at some time. The terror of it poured through my veins like acid. I woke up from it completely sober and troubled by the vision. Teo Valdo told me that the medicine had a conscience and could impart knowledge or healing at her own will. What I saw was the reality of human trafficking, and it scared me.
Another time an American girl who came to stay with us told me in the middle of ceremony that a fairy was stroking her hair and telling her that she was beautiful. She lauged and say that she was being healed of her poor self-image and the other deep hurts in her life by the love and affirmation of the fairy. She laughed harder and say that the fairy was pulling her hair now and that it was getting to be too much. Before it was over a strange, chirping language that was not human seemed to be channeled through her and stifled her terrified screams. She sounded like a fairy, and the memory has never left me. In that same ceremony I felt sick but couldn’t puke. Teo sang over me and fanned me with his eagle feather, and I purged immediately. I almost never puked. Teo sang again, and a strange digital language washed over me. The medicine reacted to the influence he exerted over it.
I thought a lot about different things to get through the boredom of months in the jungle. My mind imagined the large dirt hives of termites to be piles of cocaine and thought about starting a grow operation back in the states when I returned. The Shipibo language fascinated me, and I thought about it.
Shipibo makes phonetic distinctions between words that originate in the lower throat or are created by movements of the tongue and lips that don’t exist in English. It was a chipper language and guttural and primal with the Spanish alphabet crudely representing it on paper. I imagined the language had evolved in the jungle bush and ants had carried it off the branches and into the minds of the natives through their ears. It seemed to mimic brightly colored mating rituals between wild birds or monkeys in the trees. The hoots of nocturnal birds and croaks of lazy frogs have contributed to the Shipibo vocabulary. I wanted to speak it so badly but couldn’t get much further than: scrambled eggs, fried plantains, good morning, hurry and you are pretty.
My father sent me big boxes of books to pass the time. I read James Joyce, Steinbeck, as much of Kurt Vonnegut as I could, Tom Robbins and everything else. I read an 800-page biography on Che Guevara and idolized his socialist ideology and devotion to the cause. He probably would have killed me for being a lazy, white, drug addicted American, but that didn’t matter to me. When I read that people were upset at the executions he oversaw after the revolution, I didn’t understand. Deep down, I knew that no one’s life had any more inherent value than the fish or bacteria from which it evolved, so why would executions offend me?
Our greatest purpose was to die as transitional forms, evolving to perfect the species. I wondered if some future museum might display a life-sized replica of me in my habitat, like we have for cavemen, today. It would be made of fiberglass and plaster mold. My dwelling would be behind a dumpster. My shoes would be wet, and instead of prehistoric tools, there would be a lighter and a spoon in my hands, a dirty syringe behind my ear. I would represent a failed branch of the evolutionary process, a glitch in mutation that expressing a fatal trait: Auto-Cerebral Cannibalism. Luckily only the fit survive, and I wasn’t it.
Auto-Cerebral Cannibalism. I imagined myself sitting at a table and eating my own brain like a melon with a spoon, but that did not adequately convey the inner horror. The grainy visual of my own brain somehow eating itself was getting closer, but the image of my brain devouring me from the legs up with all the blood and ferocity of an oversized piranha was the only image that seemed sufficiently heinous to me. The thoughts and beliefs in my own mind were destroying me. Even though I didn’t know how they got there or even what they were, they vehemently and violently opposed me. At least part of it was that I hated myself for being white, male, educated and American. You see? I rejected my father and all that he was, but you can’t reject your father without rejecting yourself. So, I did, and it would kill me. That was okay though. It would be a favor to the world.
In three months we did something like 30 ayahuasca ceremonies, and when it was over Cheo came with the guys making the movie to take me back to Pisac. We had a big celebration and danced all night with the Shipibos before we left in the morning, and I loved the hot shower and sit on porcelain at the hotel.
My mom met us in Pisac and did some interviews with us, and before they all left it was decided that I would live and work for Gustavo in Pisac for the next 10 months. The girl who worked for him had me interested enough that I didn’t make much fuss about staying.
I enjoyed talking to tourists who came into Gustavo’s restaurant and hotel. The American boy living abroad and immersed in a culture and language they could only experience briefly enamored them. I told them about my past and that Gustavo believing in me was a catalyst to my turnaround in Peru. It seemed like things would really change for the first time in my life.
My sister came to visit for my birthday, and when she got to town we had lunch and cake at the hotel, which I could barely eat. That night we had some beers with the girls from work when one of them pointed out a white crust hanging out of my nose. Nosebleeds started soon after that, but my sister pretended that everything was okay anyway.
While she was in town I took her to visit different sites of ancient ruins, but it was difficult to take the long walks up and down the old terra forms. I always needed another line and left her hanging in awkward situations while I chased a bag through the cobblestone streets or did coke in the bathroom. When I came back my stories had holes, and I sweated and sniffled and labored to breathe. I got paranoid and demanded the girl who worked at the hotel with me admit her boyfriend planned to kill me. My sister’s last 30 bucks disappeared before she left in a cab.
The bender lasted another few days before Gustavo confronted me by the gate in the wall around his house. He was stern, and when I punched the wall he pushed his forehead into mine and walked me backwards. I told him three times to get out of my face before I punched him. The sequence of events is hazy after that.
I pulled my pocketknife out and stuck it in my stomach in front of everyone in the plaza and chased him towards his front door. He fell, and I broke a heavy potted plant on his leg. At some point I had the knife in my hand and lifted it towards my left ear where I planned to bury it in my neck and pull it across. His gardener grabbed the knife out of my hand and threw it over the wall. Gustavo’s three-year-old son watched the whole thing happen.
I walked back to the hotel somehow and gathered my clothes before I fell on the ground in front of his patrons like the small stab wound was causing me to bleed out. Gustavo threw his hands in the air and balked to the girls who worked there. The next thing I knew I was in one of the hotel rooms with a nurse who would help me get to sleep. She gave me an IV shot of liquid Valium for being ridiculous, and when I woke up the same nurse gave me another one in the butt cheek this time. My father would have to come get me.
When he showed up, we got along great considering all I pulled and he was only there to help me get back to the jungle. Since I didn’t give him any real trouble off the bat he assumed the best. We went to drink beer and talked about different things that we both liked, but that night I stole money from him while he slept and took a taxi to Cusco.
Teo and Marina had come to help him, and we planned to take a bus from Cusco to Pucallpa. Outside of the bus station I told my dad that I left my hat at one of the bars by the plaza and needed to get it.
“Well. You’re going to have to go without it. I’ll get you another one.”
When he turned around for a second, I jumped into a cab and took off. I spent all the money I had on a bag of fake cocaine. It was so frustrating that I sat down on the dirty stairs and held my sweaty head in my hands until my dad came with one of the other girls from the hotel. I refused to leave until I had some cocaine and forced him to buy me a bag in exchange for my cooperation.
Teo and Marina had already taken the bus to Pucallpa, but my dad and I would wait for a plane ticket in a couple of days. He was too embarrassed to return to Pisac, so we went to another little town to wait. From the back seat of the taxi and in front of my dad and the driver, I blatantly solicited the girl who had helped him find me for sex, which she rejected. We got a hotel, and my father divvied the cocaine up into small paper bindles, which he used to control my behavior.
Gustavo’s gardener visited us a few times, and one afternoon my dad and I drank beer in a crumbling hole of a bar with a dirt floor. I demanded a younger patron explain to me how he lost his eye even though it humiliated him. My dad told me to drop it, and I raised my voice. At night, I walked streets of black stone hoping to find trouble. And I did when someone outside of a bar asked me,
“Hey, gringo, do you want to knife fight?”
“Yes. With you? Where are the knives?”
I was calling his bluff as much as anything. He yelled to one of his buddies by the bar to go get so and so and bring the knives. I stared down at my feet in wet gravel and scattered trash. All I could think about were my own blood-soaked socks and the despair of my father walking up to the scene if my throat were slashed. It was everything I ever wanted.
“What’s taking so long? Didn’t you ask me if I wanted to knife fight?” He pretended not to hear me, and I walked away.
I bought blister packets of Xanax and harangued my father day and night while he tried to keep me calm between distributing the tiny bindles of coke. When we got to Pucallpa, he had to hire a police officer to keep me from hurting him or myself until the next morning when we met Teo and Marina at the port. He said he would see me in two months, and I got on a boat in the rain with Teo and Marina.
I was back in the jungle with the Shipibos depressed and hating my life. Two months turned into three. Three months turned into four. Four months turned into five, and month after month passed with no kind of plan to come home or do anything different.
The jungle became my home, whether the city of Pucallpa or in the village of Ceylan. It was where I lived, and everyone knew me. I had considered the popular music in Peru to be garbage when I first arrived, but as time went on I came to love the cumbia groups like Mallanep, Kaliente de Iquitos, Papillon, and the rest of them that made speakers sweat sex and demand your body bounce to the beat. Even when I went to the Internet cafes by the house in Pucallpa, I listened to the local groups instead of American music. When Marina and the kids watched TV at the house, I watched the variety and comedy shows like them.
Marina asked me about her sister-in-law.
“Bebe Grande, where are the eggs?”
“Eggs? I think Elicia took them.”
“Did you say she could have those eggs?”
“No.”
“Well then who told her she could have those eggs? She’s always taking stuff that’s not hers.”
Marina loved me like her own kid. She could say things that would annoy me like any mother can, but I loved her very much. We were close. I wish I could say the same about Teo, but it wasn’t like that. He showed great patience with me and my antics, but I could not stand communicating with him. His voice and the way he spoke Spanish made me angry. It was partly his need to give an answer to things he didn’t understand (exacerbated by the attention and adoration he received from foreigners). The kids all loved me. Luz was four and laughed at me but wouldn’t hug me. Brian always wanted a bite of my food and called me “amiguito.” The other kids all liked me too, except the second oldest daughter. She thought I was rude, and she was right.
I don’t know the things that go through a Shipibo’s head, and they didn’t know what went through my head either. The differences in our cultures were immense. Most of the kids living in the village with me didn’t even speak Spanish until they were 11. They walked around barefoot and excitedly ate the burnt, black rice out of cooking pots as a snack. Their mothers washed all their clothes by hand. Their father caught their dinner daily, and if he had work, the most he could hope to earn was a dollar or two for the day. Many of those women had never seen a sanitary napkin or even taken a hot shower. The only prescription for an abscessed tooth was to hold your hand on your cheek until it went away, but the life they lived produced the gentlest and kindest human beings.
Marina’s oldest sister, Soila, wins the prize for most amazing person I have ever met. She spoke soft and sweet and probably still has a kid every three years with her husband who looks 15 years younger than she does. Her eyes were always red, and she spent her days tending to the fire, carrying water, sweeping the floor and holding her baby like any other Shipiba in the village. I doubt if she can even think poorly of someone.
These weren’t the brown faces of strangers in an airport parking lot or the family in worn sandals and hand stitched clothing, selling toys made of wood and string at the hot springs two days before your flight home. These were my brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, my mother and father, my grandparents. This was my family. I lived with them.
We carried water from the wells in buckets back to the huts together and swatted at our legs and backs with a towel every evening to keep mosquitoes from biting us. We all slept on the floor with a small mat under nets and trudged through the mud in our flip flops when it rained. We ate mangos when they fell out of the trees and bore banana bushels or sacks of papayas on our backs from where they grew by the river. Sometimes we walked miles at 3 a.m. to catch a boat back into the city and shared our seats with squealing pigs or clucking chickens. It was not a temporary state of affairs for them, but an unchanging reality. Hot showers, epidurals, Albertson’s and air conditioning were things they simply did not know and probably never would.
After I had been in Peru for about nine months, the cameraman from the movie crew came to visit me in the jungle for a couple of weeks before my dad came. He and I talked to various locals about life around there, the drug trade and what they thought about me. A young man named Carlos sold flip-flops out of a big bag he carried on his shoulder along the dirt road between Masisea and our village. He came with 2 young girls who wanted to meet me, and he told me about Jesus Christ. I quickly shot him down and told him he betrayed his indigenous heritage with his faith.
“Christians killed your ancestors and destroyed their culture hundreds of years ago. Then they gave the survivors new names before they used them as slaves to build their empire. Don’t you understand?”
Sometime later the cameraman and I found him organizing a small worship event in the plaza of Masisea. We sat on wooden benches in the dirt and watched tears stream down a girl’s face who held her open hands high in the air. I asked him,
“Why is she crying? Why are people crying about this? I don’t get it!”
“Because of their faith, Riley. Because of their faith.”
I found the idea of faith in an invisible man who never existed in the first place to be revolting. Carlos didn’t waver in his statement or look for my approval. He stated it as the fact that it was to him, and suddenly I recalled sitting in an ice cream parlor with my mother’s father, Turkey.
“Riley, do you pray to God?” Turkey asked. Problems had been a part of my life for years by then. I smoked weed and cigarettes every day and had already talked to three different counselors.
“God? What do you mean God? What in the hell has he ever done for me?”
“I don’t know, Riley. Only you and God can know that.”
When my father showed up, we slept in the same hotel room in Pucallpa, and I stole a bunch of change out of his shoe in the morning. It had been four months since I did any cocaine, but I found out the shoe shiners outside of the hotel could get grams for 7 dollars.
On the boat, he knew I was high and accused me of it before we got to the village. There was a big celebration for his arrival with dancing and music and food and some beer. I screamed and punched him till Marina’s brothers pulled me off him. The night went on, and the party transitioned from dancing and celebrating to careful gazing at the lunatic and his father having it out. Cumbia still blared, but the dancing stopped sometime after I started getting violent.
I sat cross-legged and hunched over in a pair of cargo shorts on the floor. Somewhere, a generator hummed, powering the light bulb hanging over my head and speakers outside. My father stood on the other side of the partition and looked at me through the mesh screen. It was turning into one of the kind of nights only I could give him. Somehow, I had gotten a hold of a black handled paring knife with a five-inch blade, and I screamed at him. Strands of slobber fluttered in the jets of air shooting from between my teeth as I convinced him and myself that it was his fault. He was to blame for the way I was and why I wanted to hurt myself. My conviction was an act, but I told him plainly that I hated him. I buried the blade to the hilt three times in the meat of my right calf before I chucked the knife end over end at his face.
I think, the problem for us was that we were too much alike, and I think he would agree that he saw things in me growing up that he hated in himself. There were good things too, but I mostly remembered the bad.
I peed on him, once, when he changed my diaper. It was on purpose and made me laugh. He swatted at the golden arc of liquid with his hand and griped.
“C’mon, Riley. Don’t do that, baby!” Usually, people are impressed I can remember back to when he changed my diapers. I always say it’s easy to remember, because I was 16 when it happened.
On a trip to Mexico, my father pulled me into the bathroom and very seriously said,
“Riley, I am going to share something very important with you. It’s something the Chapman men all know how to do, and you will, too.” I was excited and nervous about the family secret he was about to reveal to me. I wondered what it could be. What piece of my identity as a male in our family would he reveal to me? What knowledge would he impart? What honor? What prestige? “This is important. My father taught me. His father taught him, and now, I am going to teach you.”
He looked in the mirror, leaned in close to it and pushed the tip of his nose up, before revealing scissors in his other hand. The discourse began, “When you trim your nose hair, you want to……..”
He taught me how to read on his lap every night after he got off work. School failed to teach me because I skipped pre-K and started kindergarten at the very end of the year. It took a lot of time and effort, but I owe 100 percent of that to him.
He checked my math homework every morning in middle school, and when I got four wrong, he would berate me at the kitchen table in front of my sisters until he took us to school. I can’t remember if I cried.
He left me in the jungle after a couple of days, but before he did, he asked me to show him my leg where I stabbed myself. We hadn’t talked since that night. He told me to keep them open and breathing and that the wounds would probably be fine if I did, but,
“If there’s any problem. Call me. I’ll tell you what to get.” The whole point of his visit was to determine if I was ready to come home or not, and it was clear that I was not.
After that, I would leave the village at night and walk the dirt road up to Masisea to drink homemade wine with whomever I found and smoke pasta basuco. Pasta basuco is the crude extract from the production of real cocaine. It’s poisonous and is essentially waste, but it is a freebase cocaine that can be smoked. The price is very cheap. Basuco either comes from the similar Spanish word basura for trash, because it is refuse from the production of higher quality product, but basuco is also the word for bazooka, possibly referring to the intensity of the high. Like the crack epidemic of the 1980s in big U.S. cities, so is pasta in South America. Smoking it was a last resort for me, but it happened from time to time.
To smoke it you roll a quarter of the tobacco out of a cigarette and suck the powder from the tiny bindle of pasta into the cigarette. Once it is all sucked up, you roll the cigarette pointing up between your hands and then grab it by the loose end to swing it back and forth to pack the tobacco and pasta powder together. After that you twist close the loose end and pull the cotton out of the filter to replace it with broken matchsticks. It’s ready to go at that point. They sold for about 30 cents apiece, and one was enough to make a man puke.
I bought the pasta in Masisea from a gay teenager, and I smoked them in the back room of his jungle shack. While I made up the cigarettes to smoke, he would unzip me and pull me out of my pants. I would push his head off me, zip my pants up and button them. Once I lit the cigarette and began to smoke the drugs, he would unbutton and unzip me again and lick my torso, and 15 seconds later when the drugs were all smoked up, I would push him off me. We went through it over and over until all 11 bindles were smoked up.
After smoking all night in Masisea, I would walk on the dirt road crawling with bullet ants and snakes back to the village. Marina’s parents and everyone else in the village knew I was smoking drugs, and they made plans to send me back to Pucallpa, where Teo was with his family (probably hiding out from having to deal with me). At the house in Pucallpa, the kids caught me rolling up some pasta into a cigarette, and I smoked it in the outhouse. Teo Valdo got mad. It was the only time I ever saw him like that.
I continued to smoke pasta in Pucallpa and borrowed money from the neighbors to do it. A guy who lived around the corner loaned me money and took me on his mototaxi to a place called paradise to buy it. He would park far away from the place I bought it and made me walk, because it was so dangerous. Teo and Marina would send one the kids to follow me to the graveyards, where I spent my time and smoked pasta. Marina cried over it.
Eventually everyone got tired of it (me most of all), and I asked my mom to help me visit some Americans I knew living in Tarapoto. My mother believed that I was sober and paid for a ticket. On the bus, a middle-aged woman across the aisle from me moaned in ecstasy and wrapped her hand in the curtains and pushed her head back into the seat in the dark. I knew she wanted me to make a move, so I jumped into the seat next to her and grabbed her thigh.
“What are you doing, gringo? Go back to your seat! Now!” I had imagined it.
After 16 hours on the bus I woke up in a concrete ditch in Tarapoto with traffic buzzing all around me. The Americans who let me stay with them kicked me out for eating their cereal in the middle of the night. Cheap hotels became my home, and some guys I met showed me how to use a pry bar and a piece of wire to get coins out of the pay phones. I broke a lot of hearts those two months in Tarapoto and snorted a lot of cocaine, of course.
Submitted October 29, 2017 at 09:14PM by ASavageLost http://ift.tt/2yc2ZPR Drugs
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