That Old Entheogenic Protocol

I'm going to bet that most of you are too old for this to matter--old as in experienced. But as something not nice just happened to a friend of mine, I thought I'd take the time to put it down here, just in case there are some younger readers who might not know these simple things about sharing medicines. And I don't mean prescription medicines, though those could just as easily be included here.
And if this doesn't relate to you, it might be something some of your kids might need to hear. It's written for them so pardon the tone.

A friend of mine just called to relate the story of how she was recently dosed at a very hip event in New York City. She was working the event when someone gave her some chocolate. Half-an-hour later she thought she was getting a good contact high, but when it persisted and grew immensely stronger she realized she’d been dosed.
And the hosts were not sympathetic. No one took her—by now having a very bad trip as well as being lost in her anger over being unwittingly dosed—aside and tried to calm her down, no one sympathized with her. No one even gave her a glass of water. From what she told me the essential response to her wretched condition was "Well, it’s your karma. Deal with it." Which she did, over the next 18 hours.
Now dear kiddies, I’m going to take a minute as an elder—that means old guy who’s been hanging around a long freaking time—and go over a couple of ground rules for entheogens and pot cookies alike. Call it stoner protocol 101.
First rule: Never dose anyone without them knowing what you’re giving them and how long it will last and what the effects are likely to be. No fuggin exceptions! No game playing with pot cookies ("Hey, man! You know what I just gave you? You’re gonna be real high pretty soon….") or chocolate covered shrooms ("Try one of these, man; they’re delicious..."), LSD or anything else. This rule is the heart of old-fashioned hippie consciousness. If people want to expand their consciousness and you’ve got a tool that can help them, fine. If they don’t, then don’t sneak ‘em something to get your rocks off. People who do that need their own consciousness expanded.
Second rule: If someone you are with is having a difficult time, help them deal with it. That means when your best friend’s wife is crying in a corner because everything looks like spiders to her, you don’t stand in front of a light and make spider shadows with your hands. It means you sit with them and very calmly ask what’s wrong. Listen to them. If they want their hand held they’ll tell you. Don’t just assume they want you to put your spider hand on them. Just be there and get them water, or a banana to calm them down a bit. And if you have to sit there all night and lose your own buzz over it, that’s cool. You’ll get another chance. And you’ll have those good karma points too.
Third rule: Each one, teach one. That’s what was printed on the buttons they put in each seat back in the old Filmore East in Greenwich Village in New York (along with buttons that read Pass It On) and what it meant was respect. Respect for the medicines, respect for your friends. You’ve done something someone wants to try? Walk them through the experience. Make it joyful for them.
Last word on this: Remember that no one gets their consciousness expanded when they’re fearful or have been surprised by a ‘gift’ of being dosed when they were not open for it. And the point of the whole thing is to expand consciousness, right?

Richard Evans Schultes Interview

Mentioning Schultes in the last entry brought a couple of voices asking for me to print the interview I did. Unfortunately, I don't have the full transcript of the many hours we spoke together any longer and don't have time to re-transcribe it. But I do have this version that was published in High Times magazine sometime in the early 1990s. It's pretty abbreviated and basic, but at the time I thought it was important to get some of the basics of what he had to say out there. So I did and here it is:

RICHARD SCHULTES:
ETHNOBOTANIST AND PSYCHEDELIC PIONEER

by Peter Gorman

Often called the Father of modern ethnobotany, botanist, explorer and author Richard Schultes is the Director Emeritus of Harvard’s famed Botanical Museum. Beginning in 1940, Dr. Schultes spent a total of 17 years in the Amazon, mostly in the remote regions of Colombia where he investigated and collected the medicinal, edible and toxic plants used by the Kofan, Witoto and other indigenous groups. He is the recipient of dozens of awards for his pioneering botanical work, among them the Cross of Boyaca—Colombia’s highest honor—and The Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund, presented by Britian’s Prince Philip. Additionally, he has authored and co-authored numerous books—including two written with LSD synthesizer Dr. Albert Hofmann—among them Plants of the Gods—Origins of Hallucinogenic Use (Schultes and Hofmann; 1979, McGraw-Hill, NY) and The Healing Forest: Medicinal and Toxic Plants of Northwest Amazonia (Schultes and Raffauf; 1990, Dioscorides Press; Portland, OR).
Now 80 years old, Dr. Schultes, the father of three grown children, continues to work at the Botanical Museum two days a week, is concentrating on finishing several book projects, and is hoping to make one more trip to his beloved Colombian Amazon.

HIGH TIMES: Let’s start with how you came to be an ethnobotanist?
RICHARD SCHULTES: Well, I’m from an old New England family, and when I was growing up one of my uncles had a farm up in what was then a small town, Townsend, Massachusetts. I spent the summers up there, helping in the haying, and I began to collect plants. I don’t know where I learned that you pressed them, but I pressed them in big encyclopedias. Then I began to learn what the vernacular names of the plants were and as I got older I learned that they had Latin names—which didn’t mean much to me until I studied Latin. So I always had an interest in plants.

HT: What did you study in school?
RS: Well, I did my undergraduate thesis on peyote. I went out to Oklahoma with an anthropologist, Weston LaBarre—who was then a graduate student at Yale and later became famous writing several books on peyote—and attended four or five all night ceremonies and tried peyote with the Indians. We spent time with three or four different tribes, mainly Kiowa. Anyway, I collected some peyotes and brought them back and did a little chemical work on it.

HT: Were you the first to do chemistry on the peyote cactus?
RS: No. But I’d had several courses in organic chemistry and I just became interested in it. I’m ashamed of it now because it’s very complicated and I was just a beginner at chemistry.
But in writing my thesis I became interested in a misconception that had taken hold in relation to peyote and the sacred plant of the Aztecs, Teonanacatl. William Safford, an ethnobotanist—I think he was with the Smithsonian—had said in 1916 that the Aztec’s Teonanacatl must have been peyote. Which did not fit in with my knowledge of botany because peyote is a cactus and cacti do not grow in high wet forests, while Teonanacatl was undoubtedly a fungus, a mushroom which doesn’t grow in deserts. And so I went to Mexico hoping I’d be able to see this plant, Teonanacatl, and I ended up doing my thesis on the useful of plants of the Mazatec Indians.

HT: Did you ever find Teonanacatl?
RS: Yes. I was able to bring back one identifiable species of this mushroom they were using, Panaeolis sphinctrinus, and in 1941 I published a paper in the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets identifying that one species as Teonanacatl. Of course, thanks primarily to the work of Gordon Wasson and the Mexican mycologist Gaston Guzman, we have since learned there are about twenty-four species used by the Shamans of Oaxaca.

HT: Did you get to do the magic mushroom with the Mazatec’s?
RS: No. I hadn’t tried it. I only had a couple of specimens.
But I fell in love with Oaxaca and thought I’d probably work all my life there on the flora.

HT: What changed your mind about continuing to work in Mexico?
RS: Well, after I’d gotten my PhD, I had two jobs offered to me: biology master in a private school in New England and a grant from the National Academy of Sciences to go to the Amazon to find out what plants the natives used in making their curare .

HT: Why was the National Academy of Sciences interested in curare?
RS: Because in late 1930s, scientists had isolated a chemical from one of the plants used to make curare called tubocurine, which was just becoming very important in medicine. It’s a muscle relaxant that’s now used in any good hospital before deep surgery. Now the Indians make many different kinds of arrow poisons so the Academy wanted to know as much as possible about the different plants they used. So that was the job I took. I took a plane down to Bogota in 1940 and worked out in the field on that project.

HT: How did you first go into the jungle?
RS: I first went in with Indians who lived along the base of the Andes mountains in Colombia, some of whom spoke Spanish. So I had an entree. And as I went farther inland I got Spanish speaking Indian boys who spoke the language of one or two of the tribes and that way I got in among them.
But they certainly knew I was there before I did, because the grapevine from one tribe to another is much more efficient than Western Union. So even some of the people who hadn’t had any contact with outsiders knew I was in the area and what I was doing.
I spent a lot of time with the Witotos. I did quite a bit of work with them and also with the Kofan, both of whom make a number of arrow poisons from different plants.
Later when I heard about the outbreak of World War ll I thought I would be conscripted, so I made my way back to Bogota and went to the US Embassy there. But instead of conscripting me they told me to go back into the jungle and try to stimulate the production of rubber. This Bostonian who’d never cut a rubber tree, but I’d been with the Indians nine months at that time so they assumed I had learned all about that.

HT: And how did you do?
RS: Well, I gathered a lot of material from species that had been known from the last century, and I also discovered one new species of dwarf rubber tree. It’s an endemic species, only found on one mountain in the Amazon, a mountain that has many unique plants on it. It’s recently been made a protected biological area. This is the mountain that’s been named for me.

HT: I didn’t know there was a mountain that had been named for you. What’s it called?
RS: Mesa Schultes. Mesa means table. So it’s Shultes’ Table. Before that I had a cockroach I collected in the Amazon named for me, and I thought that was a great honor. It’s the genus called Shultesia. But I’ve come up from cockroaches to mountains.

HT: There are a number of plants with your name as well, aren’t there?
RS: Oh, yes, about two hundred and ten species. Plants are frequently named for the collector. A number of my plants are also named for the Indians who use them. That’s also very common among botanists, to use geographical or tribal names.

HT: What’s the process of collecting a plant?
RS: The first thing you do is take a cutting of the plant and press it between sheets of newspaper in a plant press so that you can identify it later. Fruits and flowers are very helpful here, we always try to get them. Without this, what we call the herbarium specimen, you have nothing.
The second thing you do, if you want to later analyze the plant’s chemicals, is to take a wide mouthed plastic jug and put some 70 percent ethyl alcohol into it and then cut the plant in half-inch pieces and put the pieces into the alcohol. The alcohol—provided you use ethyl, and not methyl or booze—will not change the chemical composition of the substances. If they are leached out, they will be in the alcohol which the chemist will have. Actually it’s much more easily worked with that way than if the chemicals are in the actual plant material. That’s the only way to collect.

HT: And how did the Indians feel about your collecting their plants?
RS: The Indians are wonderful natural collaborators, because they are so interested and knowledgeable about their flora. Everyone was always interested in why I wanted this plant or that plant. The fact was, I wanted it because they used it. If they asked me why I wanted something, I made up a disease we use it for—I’ve invented more diseases than we ever had, so they think we’re a good deal more decrepit than we actually are. And then they’d often say "You can’t use that plant for that. That plant is for treating earaches," or something like that. That’s how I’d find out how they used it, you see?

HT: How many medicines have been made from the plants that you’ve taken?
RS: Very few. There’s one that’s called yoco which has a very high content of caffeine which is now used to reduce obesity. I also have a couple of things in Sweden that are being looked at, and several that the American company Shaman Pharmaceuticals are looking into. But American companies, until recently, have looked down their noses at plant chemistry. They have no interest in it.
I’m glad some of them are starting to take notice because when you consider that the Amazon has 80,000 species of higher plants—and Indonesia, Southeast Asia, or Africa have at least that many as well—well, this is a tremendous chemical storehouse.

HT: Did you ever need an indigenous medicinal remedy?
RS: No. I really never got sick in the Amazon except for malaria and I always had chloroquine for that. It was always the first thing I put in my briefcase.
It’s generally very healthy there. There’s tuberculosis and leprosy, which is very common, but that can be controlled if you have soap with you.

HT: There’s an African shrub called Iboga plant, which is used, among other things, to stop people from obsessive behavior. It’s currently being looked into by the National Institute of Drug Abuse as an addiction interrupter. I’ve heard stories that ayahuasca is sometimes used similarly to treat alcoholism. Have you heard that as well?
RS: No, I haven’t, but I’m convinced that some of these so-called drugs will have side effects that can be used in certain diseases or conditions. For example, one of the big problems that exist among American Indian tribes is that so many of the young people become alcoholics. Many of these people stop drinking when they go to these peyote ceremonies, and I’m sure its not only religious teachings in the ceremonies, but the weekly taking of peyote that’s helping them as well.
But most of these things have not been properly looked at by medically oriented people. Some of the chemicals in them have not been investigated at all. And chemists take the chemicals that we get out of these compounds and change them to make semi-synthetic compounds. The possibility of making something that may have a special effect is enormous. That’s what i think when I see these forests burning up or being cut down in Brazil. It’s a crime against humanity.
One of the best Brazilian botonists has written that he calculates less than one percent of the Amazonian flora of Brazil has been even superficially looked at by chemists. And so imagine what we are destroying in the Amazon alone! Thousands of species that we’ll never be able to analyze and many of them we don’t yet even have botanical names for.

HT: What can be done to save this knowledge of the people’s whose native regions we’re so quickly destroying?
RS: Civilization, our culture, is advancing with every road, every airport, every commercial company after wood. And with missionaries, tourists and others who are coming into contact with primitive peoples and, while not purposely maybe, certainly destroying their cultures.
This is one of the things I’ve argued for: ethnological conservation. We’ve got to preserve the knowledge of these peoples. For example, one of my former students and best field men, Dr. Michael Ballick, is taking as much time as he can from his job at the Botanical Gardens in New York to work in Belize where there are three or four old medicine men; if they die all the knowledge of what they’re using is gone. He has a woman there who speaks their language who works with these medicine men and he goes down three or four times a year and she gives him the notes. It’s a wonderful thing. All that will be saved.

HT: Once we’ve saved their knowledge, how do we make sure that the indigenous people from whom it comes get their fair share?
RS: There’s a lot of discussion about that and many drug companies have agreed to see that some help, whether its financial or some other way, gets back to the tribe. Where I worked, money would be useless, absolutely useless. They don’t need money. It would have been much better for me if they had since I had to pay them in things and had to carry all the stuff down into the jungle. But in many other places where they can use money, money can be given to the tribe or some representative of the tribe.
In the case of Shaman Pharmaceuticals, they have set up a special sub-branch of environmental conservation, The Healing Forest Conservancy. And they’ve agreed that if they make any money from any of the things they get from the Indians, that they will give back to the group in some way or another. Either by sending a doctor there, or sending money if they can use it, or sending a bright young boy out and giving him a year or two in school somewhere. There are many ways of doing this.

HT: And how do we save the environments of these peoples?
RS: This is another thing I argue for: botanical and environmental conservation. In many places, especially in Brazil, commercial interests are bringing in all sorts of mechanical material and cutting not only the trees they want, but taking down every twig. The pictures that you see from Brazil are horrendous. I’ve seen them cutting everything down and letting it dry and then setting it afire, and then, of course, nothing else grows. What we’ll have is a great extension larger than the United States, of desert scrub, small plants and trees. You’ll never get the forest taking over.

HT: Is the same true in Colombia?
RS: No. Thanks to the lack of much white penetration and thanks to the rapids and the rivers which make navigation with boats impossible on all but the Putumayo River, the destruction is only by Indians with axes. They cut enough to get their food, period. They don’t take down a thousand acres at a time.
They work those clearings for five or eight years until the land doesn’t give any more crops, and then they move. And in those small areas the jungle takes back over. Which it doesn’t when you cut large areas.

HT: Isn’t a large part of the problem the population explosion, particularly in the Third World?
RS: I have long thought that the number one crisis facing the world is population. For every child born it means a few inches less soil for food. And the way we’re destroying the forests and agricultural land, we no longer have the luxury to procreate the way we have. You have to make people aware, particularly in a place like Colombia, that after two or three children they have to stop.
Now the Colombian government was doing this with medical advice, and then the Pope comes in there, the first stop of any Pope in the New World—and Colombia is a very Catholic country—and he berates the government for this. He should stay over in Rome and leave governments alone. But he said this was a terrible thing to do and most of the ordinary Colombian people, being so strongly Catholic, believed him. Fortunately the government didn’t. They’re still doing it.

HT: Let me ask about your vision plant experiences. Tell me about using ayahuasca and virola snuffs with the indigenous people. You must have had some extraoradinary experiences...
RS: I wouldn’t call them extraordinary. With virola snuff you don’t usually have same effects that you get with ayahuasca. I have taken peyote in ceremonies with the Indians, and ayahuasca, and with both of these I get color reactions. But I never had visions and I don’t see things, although I know that many people do. With peyote, for example, or mescaline, many people see things from our culture. And the Indians, with ayahuasca, see huge snakes and jaguars and in some cases, if they have been indoctrinated to think they can, they see other-world spirits, or the spirits of their anscestors. But I have never seen anything except color. If you remember Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the first thing is a color interpretation of Bach’s Tocata and Fugue. That’s the closest I can tell you of my experience with peyote and with ayahuasca. I see vague things like clouds or smoke of different colors going across my field of vision, but I’ve never seen anything concrete. I think this is mostly a psychological difference; that these people expect to see those things. As a scientist, I don’t expect to see them.

HT: You’ve had a long relationship with Dr. Albert Hofmann. How did you two meet?
RS: I met him in a conference in Berlin. I knew that he was interested in the work of Mr. Wasson on the intoxicating mushrooms. That was when Wasson was just beginning that work. So I said I’d been in the Oaxaca area and knew a little about them. And that struck up a friendship. We boycotted a lot of lectures and just sat and talked. And after that we wrote two books together. We’re great friends.

HT: Did you ever do Hofmann’s LSD?
RS: No. I always told him I didn’t want to because it wasn’t a natural thing, it was a synthetic. And because of that I had no interest in it.

HT: What about Gordon Wasson, the mycologist?
RS: Well, I went to the Amazon right after Mexico and I hadn’t been home for two years during the war—I was getting rubber out—and when I finally got home this banker called up from New York and said "I know of your paper in which you identified one species of mushroom as Teonanacatl. I’m going to go down there because this is very interesting to me. Can you give me some names?"
Well, I didn’t know anything about Wasson, and I told him it had been several years since I was last in Mexico but gave him the name of a doctor, Dr. Reko, who worked in Oaxaca and who’d been interested in these mushrooms too. So Wasson went down to Mexico and got in touch with this doctor who set him up with names of people to see.

HT: Wasson and yourself later became good friends, didn’t you?
RS: We became very close friends. He even had an honorary appointment in the Harvard Botanical Museum, because even though as far as science goes he was an amateur—in the best sense of the word, a lover of knowledge—he was doing research that no one else had done. And publishing it. He published I think six or seven books in the 22 years he had an honorary appointment.

HT: Did you ever get to use the mushrooms?
RS: No. Because I never went back to Mexico. I would have had I been with Wasson on one of his trips, as Albert Hofmann was.

HT: Is there any truth to the stories that Wasson kept them around for his guests....
RS: I don’t think that’s true. He gave most of his specimens to the museum here. You can see them in our lecture hall in bottles.

HT: What about datura? Is that something you’ve used?
RS: There are six species in the Andes of South America, and a number of the Indians do use it, alone or with other hallucinogens. But I would never take a solanaceous plant.

PG: Why not?
RS: The scopolomine and atropine which they contain are very very toxic alkaloids. And not only that, the concentration of these alkaloids in a single plant can vary from one season to the next and very often from one day to the next. In any event it’s too dangerous to fool with. I wouldn’t do it.

HT: What are your feelings about drug use in our society?
RS: I am concerned with the excessive use of drugs like marijuana and cocaine, but I don’t know what you can do about it, especially cocaine. Coca, you know, is harmless when used by the Indians, who chew the leaves of the coca bush. But that’s quite different than processed cocaine. I’m sorry about what Colombia is going through now, with their drug problems. But who’s responsible? We are. If we didn’t buy the cocaine or Europe...well now Japan is buying it. They’re having a terrible problem there.

HT: I’m not a fan of cocaine either. Marijuana, you and I might disagree on...
RS: I don’t necessarily disagree with you on that, except I think it’s got to be controlled in a motorized civilization. The effects of marijuana differ with different people and at different times with the same person. But there are two things it always does, and in the beginning when you don’t feel too woozy you don’t recognize them: It distorts the sense of time and of space, both of which you absolutely need when you’re driving.
But I do think they should decriminalize it. I have been to court many times to testify for these young kids who were caught sharing a marijuana cigarette with a friend and they want to put them in jail and make a real criminal out of them. What a travesty of justice.

PG: You’ve joked about being the guru for the psychedelic generation. Did you and Wasson and Hofmann ever sit around and laugh about being the trinity of psychedelia?
RS: Well, yes. We were all in a meeting some years ago which Jonathan Ott put on in San Francisco, and he had all sorts of experts on hallucinogenic plants there. The peyote man, Weston LaBarre was there, and Albert Hofmann and myself and Wasson and many other people. And we naturally thought it was funny, all of us there in our suits and ties, not looking like gurus at all. Well, I’m not a guru and never thought about myself that way.
I used to lecture down there in California during the hippie days, and I think many people were disappointed when they saw me. They thought I would look like Allen Ginsberg or something.

HT: Despite your conservative appearance you really did usher in the psychedelic revolution, the three of you. Shultes, Hofmann, and Wasson...
RS: I don’t think I did, but altogether I suppose you could say we did. Actually, I think Mr. Leary did more than any one of us in ushering in that.

HT: Do you regret your part in bringing the idea of vision drugs to the Western world?
RS: No. I don’t. Not at all. I never have.

Richard Evans Schultes

Here's a small story about Richard Evans Schultes, the father of modern ethnobotany--man's use of plants. He was, of course, the head of Harvard's Ethnobotanical Museum until his death in 2001, and he was an astounding botanist. More than that, he was a great great explorer. He was in Colombia doing research on plants in the early years of World War II when he was called to the US Embassy in Bogata and told that his job for the war effort was to discover new sources of rubber so that if the Malaysian rubber plantations were cut off from the US by the Japanese we would still be able to make warships and airplanes and big guns and so forth. Even now, all sidewalls on tires on cars in the world are made from natural rubber and all airplane tires are made from natural rubber, and if someone ever put the rubber tree plague in the Malasian rubber plantations it would bring all world travel and all war to a halt, as big guns, all aircraft, and all vehicles depend on natural rubber and Malaysia is the only source for it in the world.
That's another story and it belongs to the great botanist and writer Wade Davis.
But Schultes, at the behest of the US government, found over 8,000 species of rubber trees that could be used in a pinch during the war. His efforts were never really needed as the US maintained control of Malasia's rubber production during most of the war.
But Schultes did a lot more during his time in the Amazon, and one of his interests was the use of hallucinogenic plants. Prior to his work in the Amazon he'd studied the use of peyote among native Americans with Weston LeBarre and he was the one who turned on Wasson to Marina Sabina and the magic mushrooms in Zacateca, Mexico. And during his time in the Amazon he came in contact with Yopo, the magical snuff used by some northern Amazonian tribes, as well as Ayahuasca, the vine of the little death, a brew made from a vine and some leaves ubiquitos to northwestern Amazonian healing on several levels.
But he'd never admit that he indulged personally. He wrote books about magic plants and general plants but he always stayed away from saying he'd personally partook.
Until an interview he did with me in the mid-1990s.
I'd gone to his offices in Harvard's Botanical Museum and done a wonderful eight-hour interview and taken some pictures for High Times. But the pictures were dark. So I had to drive from New York City to Harvard a second time a week after the first interview. And on the second drive Chepa, my wife/ex-wife, joined me.
When I arrived he said he was too busy to have new pictures made. But I insisted and he, at about 86 or 88-years-old, begrudgingly opened his door. The minute he did he saw Chepa and said she reminded him of some Colombian women he'd known 50 years earlier. And so he and Chepa had a 12-15 hour conversation about everything under the sun, including his use of ayahuasca, which I taped, with his permission, while I took the photos I needed. He simply fell in love with her. He laughed, they both laughed. They told stories about Amazonia and let me into only a part of the conversation.
And when the day was done, Mr. Schultes had finally told the story of using ayahuasca and of falling in love with Colombian Indian women during his years in the deep jungle.
And it was a personal but wonderful story. And it made the interview fantastic. And it could not have been done if Chepa had not been there. He simply loosened up around her. And as far as I know, that's how we know that the brilliant father of ethnobotany, actually drank ayahuasca.
And that was a wonderful interview to do.
So when I'm reading something today about Mr. Schultes and ayahuasca that's supposed to be new, there's a part of me that laughs and says to myself: 'If only that writer had had a wife named Chepa with him. He wouldn't have had to take years to get the answers I got in just two days."
And I don't say it with arrogance. I say it knowing how lucky I was. For all our issues, all the times she thinks I wronged her and I know she wronged me, Chepa also came through more times than I can count. So just in case I have not given her her due on this blog, here's some points. She made an old man who'd kept his secrets melt with her smile. And not with bad intention: Neither of us knew they were secrets.
So this one is for you, Chep. I hate you but I love you.
You still got points with me.

Just Loving My Kids

So I got home yesterday and am still wondering if I have a job at the paper I work with. I blew a rewrite in Peru--my plane was delayed in Miami and there is no computer availability there for rent, got to Lima very very late, to tired to work; got to Iquitos next day and discovered there was a nationwide strike called for the following day which meant I had one day to outfit for nearly 10 days all the goods, dry goods and fresh vegetables needed for 23 people plus a party for 60, so stalled the rewrite thinking I could do it after I finished provisioning, but then time went by and by the time I got to the computer, about six PM, with the story going to press at 8 PM, I fell asleep at the computer until 10, when the computer place closed down. So I never did the final rewrite, leaving my boss in a horrible bind. I knew the story was good, no real holes to fill, no errors, but still, when I was the boss, that was the sort of mistake I fired people for. So I'm getting home not knowing if I have a job or not and understanding both ways: one error every five years, let him off the hook. Or: One error every five years, maybe that's the start of a trend. Fire him. So I still don't know.
What a preamble, eh?
And when I got home yesterday, two days late, my Madeleina wasn't here. She's still with my ex out at the new boyfriend's place in Iowa. Been there for weeks and won't be home for another few days. So to say I came home feeling weak and then got weaker without a hug from my daughter, due here three days ago, is an understatement.
Ah, but then there was Boots, the wonderdog, the blind watchdog who played with me for an hour. And then Marco came home from work and he, at 19, if you can believe it, came in and hugged me and then simply sat in my lap like a kid and had me hold him for 15-20 minutes. And right now Italo, my oldest at 22, came in an hour ago from working on his car at Chepa's house, all hot and sweaty and angry from working on hard steel on a 105 degree day out in the sun and he asked me questions about all sorts of things, then asked if he could take a nap on the couch behind this computer, which is where I sleep. Or try to, at night. And now he's sleeping behind me and I feel like a crazy and wonderful dad. And Madeleina called me today and said she had the best time going on her first jet-ski and I'm proud of her. She'll be home soon. But the boys, the boys who are really men, they surprised me with their overt affection. And Marco, right now, Marco who has only been working for six months but who had just won Stock Person of the Year for the Brookshire's store he works for, is out at the Texas Motor Speedway getting his award and later tonight he'll find out if he was voted Stock Person of the Year for all of Texas. Either way he's a winner. And Italo starts his college scholarship in two weeks.
And in the oven there's a chicken cooking Peruvian style, to be served with good garlic rice, red beans and bacon, broccoli and a jungle guacamole. That's my recipe, with two 2 lb avacados (smuggled in from Peru, but in very plain sight of Customs, who let them fly) mashed to pulp, mixed with diced sweet red onion, garlic and tomatoes that are all cooked in olive oil with a couple of lemons, then a bit of salt and pepper. It makes for a good guacamole in the woods.
So here I am with one kid affectionate enough to sit in my lap like he was four-years-old, and another sleeping on my couch/bed behind me.
That is something I am in wonderment about.
These have been a series of very intimate entries. I will get back to humor and stories soon, but right now I'm full of medicine from the jungle that's making me very vulnerable to my emotions. I hope you all don't mind.

The Dreams Sometimes Have It

Okay, without making too much of a fuss, and knowing that this tidbit isn't entirely true but is probably sometimes true--and knowing that it's entirely more than anyone could care about--here goes.
I was taking a little nap after going through several hundred emails this morning and in this dream this guy I know from India comes up to me in Peru as I'm walking down the street. He launches into this great plan of his which has me paying him a lot of money and I said I couldn't afford the plan, and certainly couldn't afford to pay him what he was asking even if I could afford the plan.
And he turns and says, "Not now. Now you don't have to do the plan. Just pay me now and we'll do the plan later." And then, before I can even protest that that's absurd, he shouts, "Or at least give me enough money for lunch you rotten idiot! Don't you understand anything?"
So I reached into my pocket to grab a few bucks for his lunch when he suddenly runs two steps ahead of me, turns and says: "You're a fucking drunk who wants to know everybody's business in Iquitos!"
Well, of course that was a stunner and hurt but is sometimes right--and then I thought, 'hell no. I might be a bum but I don't care about anybody's business. Not my style.'
And though I hadn't said that out loud, the fellow runs further ahead, steps behind a large, buttressed tree and begins throwing rocks at me. "You want to bet that's what everybody thinks of you?"
And then I caught a rock, looked into my hand to see if I really had it, and woke up.
So much for my nap.

You've Got a Story Coming

Okay, I just returned from my third trip to Peru in the last three months and I am freaking exhausted. I could not have had better guests, a better crew--I am the luckiest guy to have a team like I have, no fooling--or better anything except a slightly better Peter Gorman living in my skin. But forget that. For now, at least.
And I'm way too tired and jet lagged and have nasty spider eggs in one leg that are feeling like they'll soon open up and need some flesh to devour on the way out into open space and are really beginning to itch like mad to go into things tonight. But in the interest of fairness should anyone be reading, one of you wrote me today saying they were concerned that I'd had that little heart attack a month or so ago and then had gone to Peru and had not written anything on the blog in nearly a month. So if anyone else out there had the same thought, then thank you for your concern. But no, it was just me being selfish and not wanting to face email from home while I was in Peru. It's so hard to cut myself in two that way. I hardly even call home anymore when I'm gone, just a message on the phone now and then. Not because I don't love my kids and Chepa's new kids and so forth, but it's hard--and I've written this before so I won't bore you--to try to be the dad when I'm about to get on a boat and head out two hundred miles into the Amazon. I'm still a dad, I just can't do anything about the latest crisis. Anyway, same reason I don't go on the blog. I'm there, not here. So it's not like I've forgotten you, just that I'm busy doing other things. And if I were cooler I would know better how to integrate both sides of this life, but I ain't so have nearly quit trying.
But I think I'll have a story or two to tell in the next few days, so for those of you who remain patient, I'll try to get out something interesting. How's that for a deal?
I will say one thing, a personal thing, here. I think I got all the love any kid could get when I was a kid. But somehow, nonetheless, I still manage to hate and abuse myself a good deal of the time. My fault. And today I came home to several hundred emails, and among them was a request to marry two friends of mine next month in Colorado, someone simply saying they'd dreamt of me; someone wondering how the last couple of years had gone and so forth. And at some point, reading those letters, I just broke down and cried. And cried. And if somehow I could understand and integrate the fact that the work I do--and I do not mean that arrogantly at all, okay--but that my investigative reporting, or my occasional public speaking, or my work with people in the jungle, really has a positive effect on people, well, then I would be more well rounded and maybe abuse myself less. Because while there was all this love coming my way, I read the letters and felt unworthy. And then I got one letter from someone whom I've never even met, someone who wrote me for some advice a couple of years ago, and they said my general advice hadn't fixed their lives (I promise I never said it would) and so I was part of a scam to keep them down. And that letter, written by someone I hope gets what he/she needs/wants, but accusing me of something I had absolutely nothing to do with, somehow took up more space in me than all the letters saying the work had helped them. And I was later at Walmart, trying to fill the fridge that was pretty bare, when I wondered why the heck I'd given that person so much space and the people who meant me well so little?
I've been working on that one for years. I thought I had it but I don't. Time to keep working, eh?

My Back Yard

It's Saturday night and I've already posted once today, as well as having written the front end of a huge feature story that was due yesterday and will be delivered tomorrow as I leave on Monday. I'm full of life and living and have been all week. Almost a little too much: I was doing math calculations on an invisible chalk board in my head during one dream last night--related to how I can possibly offer the 8 1/4 day tour I'm doing starting Thursday for the price I'm doing it--I can't--when I woke just because the numbers were confusing me and I heard myself saying, as I was waking: Can't you just wait till I wake up to do this? I'm supposed to be having dreams now, not doing trip math!!!
Remember I told you I thought the little heart attack had at least a little to do with reliving conversations, and rewriting conversations, with my guests at 4 AM? Well, now you know I also do the math....AM I NUTS OR WHAT??????? I mean , I know it has to do with my being a freaking potato for a year, and with smoking 2 packs of smokes and being 20 pounds overweight and drinking too much whiskey, but then none of that would hurt a body if that body was working out, drinking a gallon of good water a day, sweating twice a day and eating wonderful fresh food--with lots of fresh garlic, onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes, broccoli and asparagus, as well as fruit--daily, which I do.
At least that's what I think. I mean, I think you're supposed to strain your lungs to make them strong. But that only works if you're playing handball, riding a bike 10 miles fast every day, walking 5 fast miles a day....and those are things I have not done in 6 years since we moved to Texas where none of that is freaking available because there are no sidewalks, bike paths, parks or anything else anywhere within half an hour drive of my house. My excuse, forgive me.
But this week, I did take the doctor's order and I worked out every morning and evening and I am sitting here drenched for the third time today in sweat. Wonderful, cleansing sweat. Full of salt and impurities and junk my body was holding onto for no good reason sweat.
That's cause I was in the yard. Now it's only an acre and a half. So it's a big yard but about 1,000 acres short of a ranch here in Texas. And about 100 square miles short of a ranch in Nevada or Wyoming. Still, it's broken into several distinct areas, has maybe 25 trees at least 100 years old, two little bridges across a run-off creek that is dry at the moment, a chicken coop, a huge fire pit, a wild corner or two, two fantastic lawns that are a perfect and wonderful Ireland green....man, I was sitting on the tree swing after I'd moved most of the tree and the branches that me and Italo cut the other day from the yard to the fire pit and cleaned an area of the creek--maybe 5 by 30 foot, of reeds by hand and then re-nailed the boards on the larger bridge and I was thinking: Thanks, God. Thanks spirits. Thanks, trees. Not just for being alive but for having this to look at from a tree swing set with 1-inch cotton rope. I miss New York. I miss my family, my friends there, my routine, my stores, my restaurants and especially sidewalks, riding a bike, handball courts everywhere, my handball partner Earl, and Central Park and the free concerts, the huge trees, the secret places me and Chepa, and before her me and my girlfriends used to use to make a little love, do a little dance and so forth (Whoa! Nellie! That's way to much information!!!!!! That should be on a need to know ONLY!!!!!)
And then I'm sitting in the tree swing, the hammer hanging out of my back pocket, my stomach hanging over my belt (I hate you and am getting liposuction if you don't reconsider and get back inside the belt soon you stupid little show off!!!) and I'm thinking, Thanks, everybody. Thanks for giving us our own little central park. It ain't the ritz, but I don't know if I'd trade this yard for any yard I've ever seen. It's just that fantastic.
Okay, give me one of those 1,100 square mile ranches in Nevada and I'm changing my tune, but you get my point: This place is so beautiful and I'm so freaking lucky to have wound up here for this time.
And the sun was dropping in the sky and I remembered a fire we had in the pit just last month before I went to Peru, and some friends had come in from far away places and we just sat by the fire all night in wonderment of it all. Life is so rich, so fantastic. Not easy. And especially if you make problems for yourself like I have, but still, so wonderfully rich. I must have seen 100 kinds of bugs and been bitten by 35 kinds of ants while pulling out the reeds. So what? The stings didn't matter, the variety of life forms did! They were wonderful to watch! Some bit me with tail stings, some with little head clamps; spiders glommed me and I don't know how they bit. But that they were all so vibrant and alive that they were protecting their little Central park, the park I was eliminating, was fantastic. I mean, it's like talking with the power of the universe to be outside and be me in my yard tonight.
And I still havn't lost an ounce and am still a fat pig. But this week, me and that yard have made love like new lovers and she has been enthralling and I have been amazed.

A Quick Note on Intent

On a forum I sometimes post on there has been a raging and boring debate recently regarding whether the forum should permit discussion of plants other than ayahuasca, or whether by sticking only to ayahuasca the DEA will be less likely to begin coming down on people for it. I've stayed out of the debate because, as noted, it's boring. But then this afternoon, the fellow who started that debate suggested that ayahuasca was, in the end, only a plant, not a plant spirit, and that its power came from the chemicals it had within the plants used in its brewing.
I couldn't disagree more.
And here is what I wrote in response to such poppycock:

I believe when you say it is only a plant you are not recognizing that plants have will, desire, intent and soul--however one defines soul. I think stones do as well, as do tea cups and lampshades and everything else in this universe and probably a million other universes as well. Just because we cannot communicate with a lampshad--or at least I can't yet--doesn't mean it doesn't have a life spirit. And plants, in particular, have life spirits that allow them to put out 5-foot root sections in very short order when a riverbank falls away and they begin to topple. That indicates will to live. Intent. Desire.
Harder to see that in a desk, I know, but still, just the fact that whatever made that desk or went into making it has its beginning at the very beginning of time, at the creation of the universe--just as you and I do--I'd think most anyone should give the desk the benefit of the doubt.
With ayahuasca, I don't think the chemicals have a darned thing to do with anything. Maybe they're good at the beginning when the colored lights begin to go on. But having done ayahuasca for a long time now, I often only need to smell it to have a full blown--I mean full blown--experience. I have had them at home without seeing or even smelling ayahuasca, and those are not flashbacks, those are push-forwards. My oldest son has had them and the last time he did was more than a year since he had done ayahuasca. Born in the Amazon, he of course was introduced to it as an infant, with a blessing of a drop on his crown; then later on his lips. And at 12 a full cup as is the custom of the locals in certain parts of northwestern Amazonia. But to have a full blown experience, a wonderful, healing experience out of the blue more than a year since his last experience...well, I'd be hard pressed to chalk that up to a very minor chemical present in minute doses in two ounces of something he drank in Peru a time ago. No, I attribute that to the will of the plant. And I think the plant never leaves you. I think once you have opened that door to those other worlds, it can never close again. It never should close again. And when the plant feels you need to learn something, well, I think the plant will willfully give it to you, whether you ingest it or not.
And that's a good thing because she's such a wonderful teacher.
As for her being feminine: Well, the vine is certainly considered feminine. And to balance that, the chacruna used, if done well, will all be male chacruna--identifiable by the tiny spikes on the back of the male chacruna leaf that the female doesn't have. So the medicine is both female and male, traditionally, though the vine is certainly female.
Maybe I'm wrong, of course, maybe plants don't have will or intent. But when you see a 60-foot tree get its footing on the riverbank torn away one night and you return the next day to see that that tree now has two 10-12 foot long root sections going out into the river and holding it up while the tree behind it has suddenly produced five branches that are sticking out forward and have wrapped themselves around the falling tree's trunk, well, that to me is will and intent and action based on intent. Just take a trip up any river in the Amazon. You won't see it happen but you will see that it happened. To me that's very obviously will to live, desire to live, will to help a friend and so forth.
So if you think ayahuasca is chemical in nature, I'll respectfully disagree.

The Medicine, the Medicine

There are days and there are days. Yesterday and today I received 11 emails from former clients who've been on trips to Peru with me. I've only had about 100 clients altogether over the last 11 years, so that represents a huge percentage. And I was sitting here with my kid Italo--my fantastic kid Italo, the brave, the courageous, the decent--and he was looking over my emails and he knew three or four of the people who'd written me, people who had been on trips with me and him, back 10 years ago. And he was astounded: Dad, how do these people even remember you? That's a long time ago...
And I respond: Yeah, but the medicine we give them keeps working. Forever. It's good medicine. You've had it, You know...
Yeah, but I'm Peruvian. I know it keeps working but does it really keep working on them? On white guys and women?
It's good medicine. I can't explain it any better than you can. I just think that once you open certain doors they never close again. And through those doors come threads that some people pick up and find valuable to their lives.
I guess so. I know what you mean. I just didn't think the average white person born in the US would get it.
They wouldn't. But then the average white/black/Spanish person born in the US isn't coming on my trips.
You can say that. If I didn't know how to do canoes at night and you sent me out to the river in a dugout canoe at night, I'd probably kill you. Man, that's scary. Fun, but scary. That thing goes over, you're lucky to get out alive.
That's why I tell them not to move. I don't want accidents.
But what if there are?
Oh, hell, Italo, I don't know. I hope I can swim out and save them.
But if it's a big anaconda?
Oh, man, don't even got there. These are guests, after all. THey don't even want to think about that.
But do you?
All the time. That's why there is always an extra canoe and a loaded shotgun at camp. We hear the word, the scream. we'll be there. Me and Juan.
Do you really have the guts to do that?
I fail at half the things I try in my life. That's not one of them. A snake is just a snake. I'm used to them. I've never been afraid of them and I'm just lucky I guess.
What if you don't kill it and it gets part of you?
Man, you're thinking about my worst nightmare.
So you're sometimes scared?
Not in real life. But in my imagination, I'm scared all the time.
Okay. Just so I know you know fear.
More than you know, I know.
Thanks, Dad. I'm gonna start the barbeque now.
Cool. Thanks for being my kid. You make me strong. I love you.
You got a couple of ranks coming in the next life dad. That's what we're preparing for in the next life, right?
What are ranks?
Accomplishments. You're doing okay, dad.
Thanks, buddy.

Nasty Feedback

For some reason, last night I got a letter from someone whom I worked with on a story about the county in which I live. It was one of those forwards and was sent to probably 20 or 50 people and I don't have any idea why I got put on the list. The letter regarded Barack Obama and was one of those "Would you want this man president?" and then had maybe half-a-dozen sentences allegedly extracted from his book. They were, of course, the most volatile sentences in his book, when taken out of context. And they all smacked of fear and racism, urging people to consider that Obama was essentially an Osama, that one Muslim was another Muslim/Christian; that Obama would create terrorism here in the US and that we shouldn't vote for him.
If it hadn't come from someone I knew in a different context--someone who had run into this county's legal system and been steamrolled by it--I would have just tossed it. But coming from someone who has been buried by the white establishment--and who herself is white, but poor white--I got snippy and responded that people who sent this sort of drivel were fear mongers and perhaps mentally challenged. And I also asked to be taken off the list.
Well, man did I get a quick response. More than 10 of the people on the list have written me to note that I'm quite rude and that Jesus could save me, or that I should be run out of the county, or that I must love n.....s, and so forth. I answered a couple with the notion that Jesus, as a black man or Jew would have looked like a Muslim, and that I certainly do love everybody and that no, I wouldn't be leaving the county any time soon. And then I didn't respond to the rest.
I would have done the same if the letter denigrated John McCain in a similar fashion. Part of me gets irked at racism. At stupidity. At playing to fear. I don't like it. I guess I don't like it because I know it works and I've seen its results. You can get a crowd worked up and the next thing you know there are riots and someone gets killed or neighborhoods get set on fire. I remember seeing those awful KKK photos of lynchings and seeing those hanging black men in newspaper photos as a little kid in the 1950s. I remember listening to people shout at Jackie Robinson for being black as late as 1956 at Ebbets Field and watching my father stand up for him with the drunken racists in the stands. More recently, I watched our nation plunge into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq largely by fear mongering based on racism. I have friends fighting over there now because of that.
I don't go for racism. And getting that letter from someone I've defended, someone I've tried to help exposed me: I assume we're all on the same side these days, at least on that count. And I guess we're not. And so I felt stupid, and I felt ashamed that I was included on a list that would promote racism. So I responded fiercely but stupidly.
And I got some nasty feedback and might have my house set on fire today. Hopefully that's just hyperbole. But man, I wish this country would grow up already. We've got people running for president here. We've got a couple of choices that might make a small difference in the direction this country takes for a few years. The choice we make really oughtn't be made on six lines from a book written very honestly several years ago. Just as the choice shouldn't be made by denigrating the suffering that McCain went through as a POW for several years. The choice should be made on things more meaningful.
Anyway, wanted to get that off my chest. Please don't send me those sorts of missives.
Good morning all, have a fantastic day, heah?

Reconing Things Up

Okay, so it's a Sunday and time for some realistic reconing on a couple of counts. First off, after the matter of my minor heart attack and subsequent cracked couple of ribs last week, I made a deal--you never know if anyone with both authority and responsibility is listening, of course--that if I would be allowed to get through the pain, I'd get back to at least one hour a day of outdoor activity--and I mean activity. And when capable, I'd get back to my 800 crunches and 100 pushups a day, something I've done for 8 months a year for 25 years. Wouldn't know it to look at me, but it still is true.
And the night I made that deal I had the idea that if I took some Ibuprofin my ribs wouldn't hurt as much. And in fact, as of a couple of days ago when I started, the Ibuprofin has allowed me to work/live/cough with just a level 39 pain, as opposed to wishing I was dead with each breath. So I figured I had to live up to my end of the deal--don't know whether you believe in spirits, but whether you do or not, when they do their part, you had better be prepared to do yours or there will be hell to pay, no fooling--and have these last couple of days, cutting lawn, cuttting down a tree that was starting to tear our roof apart, taking out pickup loads of garbage. And man, there is nothing like doing an honest couple of hours work! I hurt more than is imaginable--if you're catholic, remember those Saint's for Six O'Clock where they described horrible tortures saints survived?--but at the same time I can hear my heart ticking nicely. Can hear my muscles saying: Hey! It's been a year almost to the day since your intestines blew and you haven't done near anything--couple of starts at situps notwithstanding--and now you're going to push mow and rake a couple of acres, then take down a 30 foot tree, then pile garbage bags into a truck and toss them 20 feet into the pit at the local disposal? Who the heck do you think you are?
And the answer is: I'm sick as a broken fiddle. After 30 years of nothing but a freaking case of malaria that recurs about annually, in the last two years I've had a flesh eating spider bite that set off a septic system in my body that had my legs and arms open over 20 holes to let the poison out. Then last year the intestine burst and that led to three major freaking operations and lots of pain. Then this year I thought I got through but then the freaking mild heart attack and couple of cracked ribs. I am through with this nonsense. I am finished! If I have to work outdoors carrying trees for two hours a day for the rest of my life to get my strength/heart/soul back, well, then I'm telling you all right now that that's what is going to happen. Cause I am one strong boy from Whitestone New York, not some aging, broken down muthafukka from Joshua Texas. I have a lot of explorations left to do and I cant do those unless I am back to being at least a mediocre athlete. And so that's what I'm going to be. Or better. But 57 years old is not old. It's right in the middle of the middle of the strongest a person will ever be and somehow I lost my way and let my body down and it is time to recognize that my body was always good to me because I was always working on being good to it. And these set backs have made me realize that I've been depending on my body to do the work these last few years since we moved to Texas, rather than me doing the work on my body.
So not that anyone cares, but the next time someone tells you their body is letting them down, the truth is that they are letting their body down. Or at least that's the truth in my case. And I'm facing a day of reconing again. And I've had four this year alone and I'm going to fall on the side of strength. I may hate it, and I'm going to have to work to get back into shape and I'm going to be a chicken, but I made a deal with spirit and I am going to live up to it and the next time you all see me you are going to see someone who is trying, not dying. I've got so goddamned much to live for I don't know how I lost sight of things. Just working too hard. Heart attack because I was worried whether my guests liked me? Hell with that. Other tour guides could care less. I will still care but I will not kill myself for people anymore. There must be a way to love them and cater to them without also fretting so much. So I'm not going to fret. I'll give the best trip I know how and let it go. Or at least I'll try. But reliving every moment of every day with a guest, remembering conversations at 4AM is not doing me any good. In fact, it's making my blood pressure spike from 110 over 70 to 210 over 140 hence the mild heart attack. So no more of that. You don't like me, don't like the trip, tough luck. I'm going to do my best and then sleep at night.
Is this a rant or what???????
Just wanted to let you all know that I appreciate your concern for my health and I think I am going to begin being concerned for it as well.
Thanks for the good thoughts.
Time to get strong for the next 25 years.
That's what I recon, anyway.
PG

Heart Aches, Heart Breaks

Well, the docs here say I seem to be fine and that the mild heart attack was an abberation, not something I should be too concerned with. The cracked ribs that came with the damned fall when I had the attack, however, hurt like Roberto Duran caught me cleanly just under my left breast.
The heartache in the title, however, refers to missing my Madeleina. This house seems pretty empty without her, and also without the wild impishness of little Sierra trying to vie for control of my keyboard. And next year, when little Alexa gets to be old enough to fall in love with, I'll be missing all three.
But Chepa's got to be Chepa and she appears determined to like that new boyfriend/father of Sierra and Alexa and that has to be okay with me. I'm still gonna love those girls when they're around, because they're around an awful lot, and I'm still going to miss my Madeleina when Chepa takes her to visit that boy and his parents. And she should, just to be with her sisters, but it's still a heartache for me to get up mornings like this thinking I'm going to make breakfast for everybody and then have that one second crushing feeling when I remember there is nobody. Italo and Marco leave for work at 3 and 4 AM respectively; Italo and Sarah are slightly broken-up, so she's not living here, and then Chepa, Madeleina and the babies are gone.
So what I'm gonna do is work hard, and as soon as these ribs let me--and there is nothing to do but take a couple of aspirin every few hours to dull the pain--I'm going to go out and take it out on the lawn. I'm going to cut that grass this morning till it shines.
And the next time I get on this to write something I'm going to do it from joy, not self-pity, okay? I mean, I'm entitled now and then, but there is still lots and lots of wonderment just in being alive. Just in knowing that some of the people on my last trip--which finished for some yesterday and will finish for the rest this afternoon--got the medicine and breakthroughs they needed. Some fell in love again; some got healed from deep pain; a few just has a blast; a couple probably think I just stole their money and gave them a lousy trip. Even the last group will find out that the medicines will keep working and in six months will probably be in touch to say they've changed.
One of the odd things that happened on this trip related to last year's June trip. One of the people on that trip who really had it in for me--just the wrong trip for that person--has recently been in touch with a couple of my team members to ask if she and her husband can redo the trip--just without Peter Gorman.
I hope she does. It did her a world of good, and it might do her even more good if I am not in her way the way she perceived it.
So hooray and thank you medicines for taking such good care with those who entrusted themselves to me. And thank you, team, for being the best goddamned team to ever grace the ballfield of my life.
And thank you sun, for rising again this morning.
Now, let's go out and play two today, as the great Ernie Banks used to say.

Home Again; Nearly Here for Six Months

Well, hello everyone. Just got back from a reasonably grueling 26 hours from Iquitos to Joshua. And while everything there in the jungle was difficult but rewarding, everything here is difficult, period. As per the trip, I think it went well. Lots of medicine for lots of very very good people. One or two nit-pickers who needed a bit of attention more than I wanted to give but what the heck, that's the job. So you don't sleep for 2 weeks and when you fall asleep at the restaurant table, the word is that you've been drinking. I've learned to live with that. Don't like it, but live with it. I drink enough to get blamed for lots of stuff, so when I'm innocent it's hard to explain/complain. Still, it wasn't until Saturday night, two nights after my group left with my partner Carolynne for Lima and the mountains, that I slept more than 4 hours. And then I had this minor heart attack, which left me slightly dead for about 36 seconds, so that sort of interrupted that nice sleep. The fall to the floor on the way to the bathroom left a couple of nasty cuts on my nose and forehead, but fortunately a couple of my crew were sleeping in my super-sized room and heard me fall and got me to the hospital post-haste and the docs there said: Well, you had a heart attack. Any problem with that?
No, I answered.
Well, stop being so damned anxious.
And that was that. COuple of hours of monitoring, all was good and now I'm good to go again.
Oh, and they told me to stop smoking 50 cigarettes a day. Like I woundn't if I could.
Other than that, and the fact that we had 4 jergon's in a three day period, three of which we killed, and the trip was good. Jergon's are pit vipers and when you're a couple of days from anywhere and there is no antivenin for them, well, I can only say we were lucky my team found them before they found my group.
But then I was coming home and supposed to meet Madeleina, leaving with Chepa and Sierra and Alexa for wherever Chepa's boyfriend lives, at the airport, and my plane was delayed several hours so we didn't meet. And if you don't think I feel blue about not seeing Madeleina before she left--against her will--to see boyfriend's parents for a month, well, then you have no idea who I am.
And Italo's girl, Sarah, who's lived with us for two-three years moved out while I was gone, though she showed up today. So that's another person gone. And the brand new stove/oven went out while I was gone but nobody noticed since they simply ran through the food I left and forgot to buy any, including for Boots, the wonderdog, who apparently has bitten four people in the last three weeks. No wonder, as no one has been feeding him. First thing I did yesterday when I got home was to buy and cook him a 5 pound chicken, then top that off with a rack of ribs and a pound of Pedigree dog food and some chinese Beef with broccoli with extra garlic, his favorite. He's a happy dog now. Tonight he got half a chicken and two pounds of ground beef. Can't have him biting the postman who brings me the checks now, can I?
Okay, so there's lots to tell. While away I won several awards from the Houston Press Club, and was the lead man on the Fort Worth Weekly's second place award in a new category in the national Alternative News Weekly awards, which is fairly excellent, and if Madeleina were here we'd still be banging the fantabulous jungle drum I brought her.
On the other hand, Juan, my pal whose place I use in the jungle and a son-in-law of my late teacher Julio, drank aya the other night and had a conversation with Julio in which Julio said I need to drink more ayahuasca to get strong again. And I know he's right, I've just been intimidated since Julio's death 18 month's ago. And I did drink a couple of times but now I've been directed to grab my cojones and drink a lot and so I'm looking for my cojones as I write this and hope I find them because mother ayahuasca has been making serious demands of me lately when I drink her and it's more than intimidating, it's freaking terrifying. But I know I have to step it up a notch or six and move to strength and I hope I have the fortitude to do that.
And while this ain't the best or most moving post I've ever written, it's what I've got to give right now and so I hope you all accept me for what it is.
And maybe tomorrow I'll be inspired while tonight I just wanted to give you all an update and let you know I have not forgotten about you. Not at all.
And I am missing you, Madeleina, in case you are reading this.

One Story About Last Trip

Because of the nature of the trips, the vulnerability people face, sometimes vulnerability they have not ever faced due to the medicines, our circles are closed. That's why I don't tell or relate many stories about the actual trips. I'm sworn to secrecy0--read that privacy--as much as my guests are.
But every now and then something very ugly or cool happens that's worth sharing. On this trip there were several moments, but one in particular. One of my guests had worked at a couple of death row prisons, working as a therapist for death row inmates. He was a wonderful guest, full of laughter and love, but he was also followed by a shadow. Now I'm the worst reader of auras in the world, but if I tell you I could see a shadow following this guy, then it was a 10th degree shadow that allowed even a horse's derriere (that's the last dismissive to you Ms. M) like me could see, then I'm not fooling. This was a heavyweight dark shadow.
Anyway, the fellow drank ayahuasca for the first time and for three, four hours it seemed to be so nice to him he didn't have much effect. Some colors, some faces, a few spirits visited him but nothing to change his life. Nothing so different than what he experienced in normal life that it would justify the expense of time and money for this trip.
I felt rotten that he hadn't 'gotten it' but what could I do? The medicine gives you what it feels you need, and almost never what you want.
I went to bed after all the guests were back in their hammocks.
I woke 20 minutes later to hear this violent retching from the guest house. I looked down. There was this fellow, puking his heart out. Sounded like a lion. Sounded like a waterfall in reverse. Wonderful, difficult, fantastic.
I stayed awake a few minutes: He was doing fine, so I went back to sleep. Fitless, I woke a few minutes later to listen again: Deep, deep marvelous retching from a soul the bottom of which I couldn't perceive. But wonderful and healthy. I tried to go back to sleep.
I couldn't. The retching continued for hours. I wanted to go down and talk with him but thought the medicine was already in deep conversation with him so what could I add? Nothing. Just Whitestone, New York bullspit. He was talking with freaking god or something like god--compared to humans--so I left him alone.
It went on way past dawn, maybe four or five hours after the ceremony.
In the morning he came for breakfast. All the other guests, or most of them, complained that they couldn't sleep for the racket. I asked if he was alright. He was.
"I nearly died of dehydration," he said. "I couldn't keep any water down at all. And I was losing all my water every time I vomited. But," he added, "it finally occurred to me after the first couple of hours, that I was vomiting up all the pain I'd absorbed from all the people on death row I'd helped with therapy. And once I realized that, that I was giving up pain I didn't even know I was carrying, well, I didn't care if I died. What was important was that I inadvertantly kept the pain those people had when I took it out of them. And this morning I feel light as a feather for the first time in 20 years. I'm done. I let it go. It almost killed me but I let it go."
And I sat there drinking coffee and started crying. I cry easy when it's legit. Ask my kids. This guest had been a sin eater for people who had done bad bad things to other people. And that night was his chance to have ayahuasca medicine eat his sins for absorbing theirs.
He may not be done yet, but it was a start to cleansing.
And that's why I do these trips.
I am still crying when I think about him.
My prayer when they are vomiting uncontrollably: Throw it, throw it, get rid of the things that wear you down. Get rid of the things you don't need to stand straight and tall. Botale, botale, toss toss the sickness you carry for yourself and others, Be free and fly little soul. Toss the things you don't need and let us catch them and get rid of them for you. Just release those things that are tying you down and fly fly fly little soul. Fly and be free.
Maybe this was a little more intimate than I meant. Ah, nuts.

The Goats are Gone

Well, one of the neat surprises awaiting me when I came home last week was that the goats are gone. And good riddance, I say. Not to the one with no nuts, who was a darned decent goat, but to the full-fledged male who made using the backyard such a chore, what with his constant head-down, ears up, full-bore charges at me. By the time you got to the garage to play a little pool you'd already have spent 15 minutes wrestling with the 140-pounder just to get him locked in the chicken coop. And speaking of chicken coops, the damned goats chased the rooster around so much he finally had a heart attack. We found his body in the runoff creek ditch.
I liked the rooster.
So the last few months haven't been real good for animals here. Marco released his rat into the neighbor's yard--he initially swore he gave it away--and it's now made a home in my office, tearing up three years worth of magazines and newspapers that have been kind enough to print my stories to make, I'm sure, a luxury condo in one of the little room's corners. Then we lost Sneakers to a high-speed water truc--just after he ate the fish Sarah bought out of the fish pond--and now the goats belong to the same neighbor we tried to lay the rat off on. Fortunately, she no longer lives next door, just uses it as a Rent-A-Movie and Tanning Salon. The goats are at her new house, about a mile away. But I know her husband Ty, and I'll bet dollars to donuts (of course now that donuts cost more than a buck each I probably should say donuts to dollars) that the big one winds up on a spit over a fire pit before June is over. Any takers? Takers over here?
Cause Ty ain't gonna put up with no goat bullspit. And his kids are going to jump the fence to get into the goat area and that goat is just too big for them. Ah, well, I told Italo that if Christy wanted to give them back she'd have to pay us. Or give us free movies for a couple of months, anyway.
Now we're not completely animal free, of course. There are at least three families of Cardinals and a couple of Blue Jays living here, and lots of squirrels. And we've still got Boots, the wonder guard dog, and Italo and Sarah found and brought home an abused black chihuahua (or some such football-sized mutt) that's now a house dog named Lady. Whomever had her scared the willies out of her because she is one frightened pup. We'll get her over that, and if we can keep her in the house, maybe get to keep her for a few years.
And then there's the horse....yeah, I know, what the heck do I know about horses other than that I'm frequently a horses derriere (that's in deference to you, Ms. M)? Well, not a lot. But one of the people I wrote about in a story about contaminated water wells recently has just had three foals. The one I asked for is a paint with beautiful brown and white colors and I don't think he's going to grow very large, or at least the owner promised he wouldn't. We won't get him till September because foals need mare's milk for about six months. So me and Italo are going to build him a barn when I come back from the next trip--which I leave for on Tuesday morning, yikes!--and that'll be fun.
I've already told the owner that I think we'll be great horse parents for about half a year, after which he's to find the colt a permanent home. He says no sweat, that his horses are always in demand. I just don't see Madeleina or Sarah up for brushing every day for longer than that, and when the job falls to me, well, maybe I'll love it. We'll see. But I promised Madeleina a pony when we moved to Texas and now I'm going to have my chance to give it to her. I actually promised a pink pony, so I'm going to have to do some watercolor work for a couple of days before I bring him home.
Back to the primaty tac: the goats are gone, the Gormans own their yard again. Hooray!

A Day at the Beach

Some days, it's almost like we're a family around here. Today, for instance, we went off to the beach. Sarah, Italo's-live-in girl, had asked me yesterday to pick up some meat for a barbeque and so I'd gotten chicken, hamburger meat, hot dogs, hot links and boudin--a creole rice sausage flavored with sage and pork--and then this morning Sarah showed up with chips, crackers, cookies, bottled water, soda, fruit drinks, watermelon, peaches, grapes and made a potato-and-egg salad and a whole lot more. And then she packed two coolers with all of it--Chepa had prepared the chicken, which showed up a bit later--on ice, and D-Ray, Italo's friend who comes around and is sort of part of the family, picked up some beer and everyone looked for every floatation device we own and off we went. Found a pretty spot at Benbrook lake, next to a stand of trees, hung a hammock for the baby and got the floatables blown up while Italo made a home made grill stand and lit a fire and put the grill on and half an hour later, after lots of splashing around, the meat went on.
Heck, I even took family photos for someone's album. Madeleina was wild, as she always is around water, and Sierra was frantically tossing as many rocks as she could. Little Alexa needed breast feeding about every ten minutes; and me, I stood back a bit, wondering how in all goodness I'd come to be part of such a lovely thing and then too, wondering how it had all fallen apart. But I tossed the last away: Today, like our best days, there was no broken anything, there was just what there was: some laughs, some good food, some horsing around and then another pocket full of laughs.
Hope your day went as well. Despite the reason for the holiday and the sadness it brings up--lot of good men and women have died in combat, mostly useless combat, but died bravely nonetheless--it's one of the holidays that, unlike Christmas, which can rent and tear at you, brings families together. And for a little while, for a morning and afternoon, it was nice to be part of a whole one again.

Back Briefly

Well, made it back from the most recent trip with an armful of new friends, no septic spider bites and sans exploding intestines. Despite the lack of drama, it was a pretty good trip, I think, and hope my guests feel the same.
I'm sorry I've been away from this blog so long. It's difficult for me to get on it when I'm with guests in Peru. My kids, and Chepa, in particular, have always felt my lack of contact--I only call about once a week and email the same--was cold. To her it signifies that I'm spending my time with lots of girls, having lots of parties, and too busy to care about what's happening at home. There are some nights of late night drinking with pals on the boulevard--heck, it's my only chance to do that all year--of course, but more than that what keeps me from more contact is that I'm nearly a different person. THe part of me that's dad wants the kids to be great the family to be getting on well; the part of me that is playing host to guests, and coordinating a thousand details from riverboat cabins to organizing 66 meals per day for 7 days and checking mosquito nets for holes is just very preoccupied with details.
This trip, for instance, I called home on the day I arrived. I had gotten off the airplane at 6 AM after a brutal 24 hours of flying and layover time, brought my things to the hotel Isabel (oldest extant hotel in Iquitos, built in 1916--no running water) that's been my home away from home for 25-years, then went out to the Belen market and bought several hundred dollars in dry goods. There was tomato sauce and laundry soap, instant coffee and evaporated milk, canned sardines and spam, cheeses, lentils, canary beans, dried yucca, spices, dried herbs, salt, flour, sugar and a hundred other things that go into feeding my team of 10 and the guests. Two of my team were with me as we hauled about 300 pounds of stuff in old wooden crates and thick plastic bags out of the market (my stomach held: Hooray!) and into three-wheeled motorkars a couple of blocks away.
At the hotel we re-packed everything, noting what was missed for later purchase, and began to assess what we'd need in the way of fruit and vegetables, though we wouldn't be buying those until the day we were leaving on the riverboat.
Me and the crew--they were joining one-by-one as word spread that I had hit town--then retrieved my jungle gear from its storage location and began sorting through it: How many mosquito nets/hammocks/blankets/towels we'd need, how many flashlights we have and how many work; whether to buy a new box of shotgun shells or go with what was already there; check jungle boots for sizes and complete pairs...and that was followed by checking the quality of each item.
Late afternoon was spent going over what had already been delivered to our jungle home earlier in the week by Juan, whose place we use: Gasoline, kerosene, sleeping mats, bottled water, toilet paper: Had he rented enough canoes? Where were my magic mushrooms? Was Hairo in town and ready to go? and all the rest.
And then, at about 6 PM, just before I intended to get good and drunk on a bottle of Jim Beam I'd bought at Duty Free with a couple of pals and raise a little hell to announce my arrival, I called home. Exhausted, but so missing my kids I was wondering why the hell I was even in Peru. I mean, I knew I was there because I had guests coming who wanted to see Iquitos and the jungle, to do medicines that would work wonders on their bodies and souls, then head up to the magical ruins at Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu, but despite that I wondered what the hell I was doing there. What kind of father leaves his kids for weeks at a time to go off on jaunts into the jungle. The answer was obvious: I need time away from being a journalist and I need to make a few supplemental bucks to keep the family going. But the last several trips had been disastrous financially: shorted of thousands by various organizers, three emergency operations, a city-wide strike that forced me to rent a private boat for $2 grand to get to where we were going....houses falling in the jungle that needed to be completely rebuilt. So if there was no financial gain for at least two years, then what the hell was I doing there? Just to party with my friends Alan and Richard and the other Richard? Just to say hello to Mad Mick and Bill? Just to get a new CD from Mr. Curtis? Just to meet a bunch of strangers who might or might not like what I had on offer for them? Who might make me feel wonderful about sharing what I had to share but who might also turn on me and, like at least one former client, continue to send hate mail a year after her trip?
So with exhaustion, a brain jammed with a thousand details and a heart full of doubt, I called home. And Italo answered.
"What's up?"
"Got here. I'm safe. Everything's good, buddy. I'm missing you guys already...."
"Dad, we have an emergency here..."
"What? Is anybody hurt? Did the house burn down?"
"No. It's an emergency with the college papers. If I don't have them filed by the morning I lose the scholarship and I'm not sure how to fill them out right. I need you here to read them..."
"Nobody's hurt?"
"No, dad. But it's still an emergency..."
"I can't help you with that, Italo. I'm in freaking Iquitos. What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Just fix it."
"I can't. I couldn't fix it even if the house burned down. Call uncle Bruce or Lynn or somebody, but I'm not there."
"I'm gonna lose the scholarshsip..."
I told him I loved him and hung up. What the hell could I do? I was so tired I could no longer even see straight, much less fill out forms 3,000 miles away.
Still, it made me feel rotten and reinforced the question of what the hell I was doing there when the kids needed me at home.
And then I thought: Italo, just do it. Dad is not there this time. You'll have to buck up and count your own hammocks, look for your own cracks in the rubber jungle boots. I love you but I'm just not able to help.
And then I grabbed Kay, my cab-driving member of my team, and had him take me to the hotel for the bottle of Jim Beam and then on to my friend Miriam's El Noche restaurant. I sat down, asked Tanya for a glass and some ice, and poured a long one.
Nothing I can do, Italo. Except miss you and everyone and send you love. I'm in another world now.
I took a drink. Alan Shoemaker and Richard 'Auckoo' Fowler appeared. I took another drink and tried to forget how rotten I felt about abandoning my family to be sitting there with pals on the boulevard. Half-a-bottle later, and four deliberate cigarette burns to my arm, I did.

Off Again

Everybody: I'm leaving in the AM. I was hoping to write something cool today but the family, last minute jobs and all that jazz left me with no time. Not it's 10:30 and I'm left with no time since I've got to be up at 3:30 to do some work on the cover story I'm working on because it goes to press Tuesday and I won't have a better shot at getting it done than the morning.
Just know that though I don't even know who you are, I appreciate your taking the time to come and visit and if I can ever figure out how to log onto this thing from anywhere but my home computer, where it's automatic, I would drop a line just to see how you're all doing while I'm in Peru.
Not a long trip this time: Just three weeks. So I'll see you towards the end of May, okay?
Have a few great weeks.

Touch of Malaria

Well, everyone, sorry it's been nearly a week. But what a week. Jeez, Louise. Saturday night I came down ill, crossed my fingers and knew the worst was coming. By Sunday, when we went out and got Marco a car--a 2004 Kia Sentra LS with 63,000 miles for $4,000 in what looks like perfect condition (at that price it was probably stolen in some other city and wound up on a lot here, though I hope the heck not!!!)--I nearly couldn't make it back home. Malaria had got me by the throat and man, Sunday night through Wednesday night seemed to take a year. It's a pretty amazing malady: the first time you get it, in my case in 1985, I was laid up for a month, alternately freezing and boiling, lots of vomiting, and the key thing: Delirious thinking. After the fact the delerium is funny, but at the time, it's just impossible to think straight. I mean you can go to get water to cool down and take three steps and forget what you're doing, or realize that there's no point, that you'll never get cool and then you just lie down on the floor. But you can't sit still because your body is jumping out of your skin so you get up and put your head in the freezer. Then go to the shower and sit on the floor in scalding water for hours. And you can't sleep. And the first time for me it went on for a month till my body got control.
But when your body gets control that doesn't mean you eliminate the parasites. It just means they retreat into your organs--kidney and liver I think, though I am not perfectly clear on that this sec. And they sit there until something happens to weaken your t-cell count: an enormous amount of stress, working so hard you forget to eat for a few days, coupled with drinking and then toss in maybe an infection like I had a couple of weeks ago that caused me to take antibiotics--which wreak havoc with your immune system--and voila, the little buggers see their opening and are all over you.
So I was out out out. The only thing I was good for was for a laugh for the kids now and then when I was sitting in our house with the heat on on 80 degree days, my teeth chattering, me under covers an inch thick. "Hey look at dad! He thinks he's freezing!"
Anyway, that broke on Wednesday night and what a wonderful day yesterday was. I mean, I felt like I'd been used as a punching bag by a real mean guy, but still, just being able to think clearly was so fantastic.
So no big deal. Just try not to get malaria.
The only think worse is the prophylactic Larium. Larium can not only have your body duplicate the symptoms of malaria but toss in psychosis, suicidal tendencies and occasional violent outbursts. It's why I think our kids are killing themselves in such numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just an opinion.
Anyway, I leave town for a trip on Monday. I'll try to think of something to write before then.
Oh, and for any of you who might be interested: There's a piece in the current Men's Journal (Harrison Ford cover) from a guy who was on a trip with me in January. Mostly relates to his ayahuasca experience in Peru, but he's a pretty good writer and it's a pretty good piece.

Love Yourself

Just a short note to everyone to say it's better to love yourself than hate yourself. I woke feeling the latter this morning, and with good reason: I drank too much last night and wasn't good company to some family that were over. And the drinking too much was part of hating myself, and then I wake up guilty and really hate myself. But you know, I've been forgiven for sins for a long time and at my age you'd think I would have leaned, particularly with the medicine, ayahuasca, that I've been given, to love myself.
So I'm trying to. Despite my flaws. And if there was one thing I could ask of all of you it would be to stop for a minute today and simply love yourself. Let yourself take a few deep breaths, just for you. Let yourself really enjoy that coffee this morning. We do so many things with love for others, all of us do. And we shouldn't forget to love that mug in the mirror, because he/she counts too.

Let's Try Flowers Again

Being Spring in Texas, it's freezing one minute, hailing the next and lightning rocks the homestead later in the day. Then too, the goats have eaten every flower we've ever planted. So we're trying again.
Italo's Sarah went out yesterday and bought a bunch of bushes, some hedge-like, some rose bushes, a few hanging plants and who knows what else, and had Italo's pal, D-Ray use this cool earth turning tool to smash up the little strip of land in front of the front porch. So today's planting day. And it's going to look so beautiful there. And coupled with the tree-trimming Italo did with my brand-spanking-new chainsaw (Madeleina begged me not to buy it, saying she might go "Texas Massacre on your neck if you get one, dad!") and the lawn-mowing that Marco did and the grass-seed planting and the new rope for the tree swing, well, we are going to be one spiffy place.
So if you drive through Joshua and come on this little house with bushes along the front of a ruddy-red fenced porch with an old porch swing hanging there and a new tree swing out between the house and the barn, stop in. I'll find you a cold one.

Pivotal Moment

I just got an email from a guy I went to grammar school with, Frank G. He'd stumbled on the blog looking up an old ice cream parlor in our old neighborhood. And that was great. He reminded me of Bob Testani, who wasn't one of my best friends, but with whom I hung out sometimes. And in thinking of Bob Testani I was reminded of a night maybe 40 or more years ago. We must have been 14 or so and for some reason we were at Bob Testani's house. I think it might have been the only time I was ever there. And Bob introduced us to his father, who, maybe by Bob's prompting or on his own, suggested we all go to the basement and he would hypnotize us.
I didn't believe that for a second, but we did, maybe five of us all told, and in short order Mr. Testani had one of us acting like a chicken, someone else hopping on one foot and so forth. Pretty amazing demonstration.
But it was also a pivotal point in growing up for me. Because in seeing that Mr. Testani could do something so unusual it popped my head open with the idea that maybe all the kids parents could do something unusual--or at least that they all were real people who might do real things that kids like me never knew about. And in that moment everyone became an individual for me. I didn't realize how important that moment was until this morning when I read Frank's note and he reminded me of Bob Testani. But now I do and my whole body is shivering. Fantastic. What a moment!
So thanks for writing Frank. And thanks for the great great lesson Mr. Testani. Hope you're doing well wherever you are.

Just Your Basic Crazy Update

Well, Madeleina had her 11th birthday and surely got more than three presents. The boys looked at the air-hockey table full of wrapped things, some of which they'd bought for her, and were definitely disgruntled. "What is it, Christmas?" "Why does she get so many presents?" and so on.
Well, because she's a girl and she's my baby, that's why. One of the best, from my point of view, was that we restrung the tree swing out on the great big sycamore that's held together by a double wrap of chain from where lightning hit it some years ago. When we got this place the chain was tight on the split trunk; now it's embedded an inch deep. But I love that swing I made. Just a 2 X 10 with four corner holes hanging from a 14' branch by white cotton rope, but when we first moved here that was the thing that made Madeleina and the boys feel like the yard, and by extension the house, was ours, and not just a place we'd been forced to move to.
And of course, on her birthday Madeleina asked me to tell her again what it was like when she was born and I explained that mom was upstairs in the third floor apartment with Marco and Italo and I was downstairs in Richter's bar having a drink when she called to say her water broke and I should get her to the hospital. The fellows at Richter's got a cab, I called Chuck to have him come watch Marco and Italo and then got Chepa down to the cab and over to Lenox Hill Hospital. Her doc was alerted and said he'd be there in an hour. Chepa was put on a bed to wait it out. She was having contractions pretty quick but was still hungry so I dashed across the street and bought her a hamburger from a good little joint I liked. When I returned you could just see the very top of Madeleina's head starting to make a move.
Chepa didn't eat much of the burger.
The doc came finally and in about 30 minutes so did Madeleina. To my complete surprise she came out face up and with her eyes open. And once her little head was free she looked straight at me and said "Hep.Hep" and I swear I thought she was saying "Help. Help." and I started crying and I had to tell her I couldn't help. That she was a spirit who had chosen flesh and now that she felt the first air she'd ever felt and saw lights through human eyes she wanted to go back inside, wanted to change her mind but I couldn't help her do that. I told her she was basically stuck here in this foreign place for the next 70-years but that I'd try to make some of those years pretty good ones.
The doc thought I was crazy talking that way to a baby he'd thought only burped, but I knew what was really going on. And Chepa was crying with delight, not only for having a beautiful healthy baby but because the pain was done. And then the doc had me cut that umbilical cord and told me to walk my baby across the room and put her under the heat lamp and I swear that was the longest walk of my life, holding that brand spanking new baby and being terrified my legs would give out and I'd drop her.
I didn't of course.
"I love that story, dad," Madeleina said. "I especially love that you're always crying when you tell it. If I told my friends how much you cry about things they'd think you were crazy, you know that?"
I suppose they would.

Do Other Dads Put Up With This?

So my Madeleina is turning 11 next week and in that spirit, I wrote her an email at her new email address that I secured for her last couple of weeks. This is what I wrote:

Dear Madeleina: So you're going to be 11 years old, eh? That's a pretty big age for my baby. And good for you. The question: Don't you think 11 years old is too old for presents? I mean, wouldn't you rather have a nice card that says "have a nice day" or something? I mean, do you really want your dad to have to go from store to store looking for things like giant frogs and mittens made from kittens and the best worms to make your favorite, worm soup? I mean, that's a lot of work....
Okay, then a card it is....and not a credit card either. Maybe a nice post card...
Yeah, that would be nice, a nice post card....
Glad we had this talk honey.
Love,
Dad

And then I get this response today. Do other dads put up with this?

Dear Dad: if u don't buy my a least 3 presents i will get a hammer, and whack u till u r out
Love you u mutt, Bye

Life Goes On...Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily....

Well, well, well. I write a stinking blog about the world condition and everybody freezes like deer in the halogens, eh? C'mon, people. We all need a dose of reality away from Gorman's insane family now and then, don't we? I know I do. If it was up to my family we'd be sitting here shooting the spit about 24-hours-a-day and dad would be doing all the work with a wonderful smile on his face. But as an intense, insane, joyful and rowdy dad, that ain't happening around here, hear?
Pause for a second while I stir the franks and beans we're having for dinner, and NO, they're not just canned beans. There are those, of course, three types, but I started with bacon, diced, just to poison the family. To that I added a whole head of garlic, an onion, a sweet red pepper, 5 scallions, five smallish organic tomatoes and then the chicken franks, cut in 1/2 inch slices. Would have been bigger but I only had 13 franks and Sarah brought a friend over, as did Italo, so I've got to stretch the meat part.
And of course I'll be adding a nice touch of mustard, a bit of fresh jalepeno and a three-finger pinch of minced fresh cilantro. And some good Sam Adams Beer for liquid.
Okay, pause over. Family been busy. Chepa's still in Indiana with her beau and babies and now that she's there she's calling two, three times daily to check up on us. And putting Sierra on which I freaking adore. I know she's not really mine, but until her dad, the beau, steps forward to raise her, I'm the fellow in her life and she thinks she's mine.
And Madeleina continues to amaze. The other day, afraid to get on the skateboard which she just started riding without gear, she fashioned elbow and knee pads out of clothes wrapped in duct tape. Fantastic. Fell like a true pro half-a-dozen times without crying a bit.
Then this afternoon, while we were in Walmart picking up dog food and asparagus, which don't really go with franks and beans but will on my plate, there was this very pretty woman at the door. As we passed I said, loud enough for the woman to hear, "Wow, that's a pretty woman," and Madeleina hit me. But we saw the same woman on the way out and I saw she wore no wedding ring or engagement ring--she was probably 40 or 45, a woman, not a kid--and Madeleina saw her look at me several times. She was in a different line, however, and while I smiled, I couldn't think of anything to say cross-aisle, and so didn't. And so missed my chance.
And outside, Madeleina said: Hey dad, I thought you were great with women. Operative word 'were'.
Too smart for her own good, eh? She won't be 11 till next week.
I told her I was good with women, and everyone, when I started, but not good at getting started, particularly with pretty women I am fantasizing about.
"Why not?" she asked. "Do you think she wanted you to say something or do you think she was hoping you wouldn't?"
\ Floored me. I'd never thought of it that way and when I answered I said: "I guess I think she's thinking that if this creep says anything to me I'm calling the cops."
"Well, if that's what you think she's thinking, no wonder you can't think of anything to say. I wouldn't be able to talk then either. Why not start imagining that they're hoping you'll say something, even if it's lame? Just because they think you're handsome and nobody who was handsome said anything to them in a few weeks or so?"
I didn't have a rejoinder.
"Dad, I like it when you come to me with your problems, you know? But if I'm going to be like your psychiatrist, and I'm only a kid, then I'm going to have to start charging you. Is that okay?"
God I love my family. Thank you heavens, white light, angels. You've given me the best.