Well, my friend Alan Shoemaker asked me to write a forward to his new book, Grace and Madness, to be published probably next year by Bear and Company or one of their affiliates. I took a few weeks to do it because I knew it would be a pain in the ass. It was. But it got it done. Might be some changes when I look it over, but here is what I wrote, for better or worse.
SHOEMAKER FORWARD
Alan Shoemaker first arrived in Iquitos, Peru, in 1993. And
he arrived with a bang, coming down the Putumayo with several friends in an
outsized canoe with a 15 Hp motor. He’d come from Washington State via Ecuador,
where he studied with Dr. Valentin Hampejs, the noted medical doctor and
curandero, who was as familiar around San Pedro cactus and ayahuasca as he was
around antibiotics.
I
didn’t intend to spend a lot of time thinking about Alan Shoemaker when he
first arrived in Iquitos. I’d been using the waterbound city for nine years as
a staging point for work in the jungle before he’d ever set foot there, after
all, and I’d met two dozen Shoemakers already who always showed up in town,
thought it was an easy place to get by and then discovered, three months later,
that they were calling family and friends for money to get home.
But this gringo turned out to be different from most of the other
dreamers I’d met: It turned out, as he explained to me, that while wondering
where to go for a break from his teacher Valentin, he’d found a copy of
Shaman’s Drum magazine—a wonderful magazine produced by Timothy White that
dealt with all things Shamanistic—in which there was an article written by me
on Ayahuasca. And that led the good Mr. Shoemaker to decide to visit Iquitos,
my haunts.
Now for
better or worse, I’d written the first national article about ayahuasca for
High Times magazine in 1986. Yes, Burroughs and Ginsberg had written about it
previously in the San Francisco-based City Light’s Books as The Yage Letters,
but that had not captured the national attention. But the High Times article
resounded in pre-internet times, being passed around from person to person
until probably more than a million had read it and from those, more than
several thousand decided to seek out the medicine.
The
article Shoemaker read was written several years later but still had influence.
And so he showed up in my second home. But that is an understatement. He showed
up and within a month or two had begun to publish the first modern English
language newspaper in Iquitos. Months later he was making large batches of
ayahuasca in the street in front of his residence, to the delight of the
locals.
He
worked with several curanderos, but seemed to focus on Juan Tangoa, whom we
affectionately call Airport Juan, because his home is on a block in a barrio
very close to the Iquitos airport.
But
Alan didn’t just work with Juan: he became the first gringo to publicly take a
Peruvian curandero on a multi-continent tour to the U.S. and Europe. While
others might have done that previously, Alan did it with flair, introducing the
concept of traveling curanderos to the world.
And
just as with Airport Juan, everything Alan did was with flair, and everything
you might know about Iquitos and Ayahuasca has been influenced—some say for
better, others for worse, but still, the influence is not disputed—by Alan.
Within a
couple of years of landing in Iquitos, Alan had set up a small souvenir shop
just off what is now the “boulevard”, and not long after that a young woman
came to town looking to drink ayahuasca. She wound up going with Alan to drink
the medicine with Francisco Montes, at a place his family had bought him out on
the then-uncompleted road to Nauta at kilometer 18. The young woman had such a
transformative experience that she tried to give Alan a $500 bonus for his
work. Alan refused, suggesting instead that she give the money as seed funds to
Don Francisco (Poncho to those who know him) to spend on identifying and
marking all the plants on his property to create the first botanical garden in
Iquitos. She did, and from that first $500, Sachamama, the first Ayahuasca
center was born. Every other center there owes a debt of gratitude not only to
Sachamama but Alan as well.
For me,
the first hint of something extraordinary occurred probably in 1995. During the
late 1980s, whenever I flew into Iquitos from Miami on the now-defunct Faucett
Airlines, there were always two, three or four wheelchair-bound end-stage AIDS
patients aboard. And when we reached Iquitos they were whisked off the plane
and into cars and quickly disappeared into the night.
After
the third time, perhaps, my curiosity was so peaked that I managed to slip off
the plane with a group of them, got a taxi and drove after them. They wound up
at river’s edge and were loaded onto a fairly small boat. They then took off
and disappeared.
Something was up. These were end-stage patients. There was no going home
unless there was a miracle. So I began asking around town about them. I got a
word here or there about some strange near-blind bear of a doctor who was doing
experimental work on them. But I could never pin it down. I just could not find
out what was what, though I knew that something was up.
And by
maybe 1995—give or take—when I came down to Iquitos for a few months, Alan had
taken what I’d said and actually located the doctor doing the work. His name
was Dr. Inchaustegui and he was treating those dying people with a
mixture of una de gato—cat’s claw—essence, sacha jergon—a jungle tuber—and
other things. And while most of those people still died, some had survived and
a few had thrived. It was Alan who found the man I could not find.
A year
or so later, it was Alan who introduced me to the idea of ayahuasca healing in
a way I’d never considered. Remember, there were few books on it, no internet
existed to refer questions to; there was just experiential knowledge. He came
to me one day and told me his mother was dying and asked me to drink ayahuasca
with him at Airport Juan’s house to see of we might not see what was killing
his mom and what might help her to stay alive.
I
reluctantly agreed, sure I could not help.
But
that night, during ceremony, I saw her issue, up close and personal, and “saw”
that una de gato would help. I wrote a note when I saw that, and the next
morning I showed my note to Alan, sure that I was crazy. Alan had a note as
well, which also said “una de gato” but added “sacha jergon”.
He sent
or brought the medicines to his mom—I forget which—and some months later, the
woman who was supposed to die within weeks, was told by her doctors that they
could not find any cancer and that they might have misdiagnosed to begin with.
Alan and I knew better.
Several
years later, Alan would come with me and my mother-in-law, Lydia Cahuaza, a Peruvian
woman two generations out of jungle tribal life to Airport
Juan's to help heal Lydia's cancer. They did. She got another several good years, just like
Alan’s mom.
At the
same time, Alan’s drawback was that he loved being the tallest rose in the
garden. And he often was. He was the first public gringo to set up an official
plant export company from Iquitos. Large companies had done it earlier, but no
one had done it on a personal level. To do it, he had to learn how to set up
Peruvian corporations, what papers and permits were needed, how to satisfy both
U.S. and United Nations’ bureaucracy. It took years of painstaking work. It was
done in part with the help of my family’s “paper” man, Jorge “Flaco” Panduro
Perea, the best man at moving papers in all of Iquitos. He never missed or
misses a trick. And he set Alan and his then-wife Mariella up as a unique
company, capable of moving plant material legally from Peru to anywhere in the
world.
Life,
somehow, seems to intervene at the most ackward moments. I had a bar in
Iquitos, The Cold Beer Blues Bar, across the street from the Puerto Mastranza on the toughest block in town. Tourists were
terrified of going there, so my clients included ex-patriots, locals, U.S.
Special Forces and every CIA/DEA/NSA personnel in Iquitos at a given time. Plus
drug dealers, arms dealers and every other person the DEA/CIA/NSA had an
interest in following.
Well,
as luck would have it, some of those young bucks from the U.S.A. would get
drunk and cry into their beer to the bartender—who was often me. Now everybody
knew I was a journalist, and I told everybody that whatever they told me at the
bar was likely to be published if I thought it worthy, so we didn’t do any
sneak attacks. Still, over the course of the couple of years I had the place at
least two or three black-ops were stopped in their tracks when I published
stories about them with Al Giordano’s seminal NarcoNews.com website.
And, as luck would have it, a couple of former Navy Seals who were then
Spooks working for the CIA as merceneries, were at my bar one night. They were
there at a party we had for some guests I was taking to the jungle. Well, one
of the guests took a photo of me behind the bar. One of the ex-Seals thought
she might have captured his image via the mirrors behind the bar, walked over
to her, ripped her camera from her neck and stepped on it, breaking it. His
lieutenant called him on the infraction, and the drunk mercenary then ate a bar
glass. Simply ate an entire 6 ounces of glass out of shame and anger.
But before he’d done that, he had told me what he and the other former
Seals were in town to do: They were in place to head to the Putumayo River to
slaughter any and all people trying to escape a pincer movement planned by the
U.S. and U.S. trained Colombian forces for the following month. There would be
bonuses of $1,000 for every confirmed kill, whether combatant, civilian man,
woman or child.
I wrote
the story and the op was cancelled.
A
couple of days later I was in my friend Jim’s Gringo Bar. At one table was the
lieutenant with a local girl. I sat with them, while Alan stayed at the bar.
The fellow told me I was in serious trouble for mucking up the operation. I
told him I respected the military, but not the idea of trying to force civilians
to flee a U.S. paid for onslaught to the Colombian rebels in a 30-year-old
civil war that would result in either he or his fellows making money by killing
fleeing children. Then, for some reason that seemed to make sense to me at the
time, I decided to “sopla” the fellow. Sopla is a blessing where you take magic
liquid into your mouth and spray a fine spray over someone’s head and body to
cleanse their aura. I didn’t have any sacred liquid, so I used beer. The
lieutenant didn’t see it as a blessing: He thought I spit at him and in an
instant had his finger around my thorax and told me he might kill me. I told
Alan to explain that I was blessing him to not kill non-combatants, not
spitting at him. Alan, the tallest rose in the garden, seized the moment and
hurled a hailstorm of shit on the fellow’s head, making it clear that not only
was his position finished, but that he would likely wind up doing hard time for
attacking a journalist such as Peter Gorman.
The fellow took it seriously. He let me go but told Alan that he would
pay for the incident.
And pay he did. A few months later, Alan, with all the proper paperwork
in the world, sent a huge shipment of banisteriopsis caapi—ayahuasca vine,
maybe 700 pounds of it—and chacruna and huambisa—the admixture plants used to
make ayahuasca, along with black tobacco native to Peru and some other things
to his ex-wife’s address in Atlanta.
Now
what Alan did was perfectly legal. And if the U.S. had not wanted to receive
the shipment, Customs had the option to say the plant
material was not wanted in the U.S. and they could offer either to destroy it
or return it to sender on the sender’s dime. Of course, if the material had
been mislabeled, it would have been smuggling. But as the material was all
labeled properly in both English and Spanish, with local and Latin names, that
was not the case.
Nonetheless the U.S. permitted the shipment to go through Customs and
then arrested Alan’s grown son for picking it up off the front lawn.
Despite
the outlandishly illegal move by the U.S. Attorney’s office—which was brought
on by the former Seal’s complaint to “Get Shoemaker and Gorman”, and which was
confirmed by the DEA on tape to me—when Alan tried to go through Atlanta to see
his mom before she finally died, Alan was
picked up, put on a bus for 30 days and then delivered to a prison. He was
given house arrest, not able to leave the U.S. or even go further than a block
or two from the home of his deceased mom. That lasted just under one year, the
limit the U.S. Federal prosecutors had to either prosecute him for a crime or
let him go. Well, they had no crime to prosecute him for: The only crime
committed was done by U.S. Customs in allowing legal plants to go through and
then arresting Alan’s son and finally Alan.
So
after 360 days, and I might be off by one or two, but just shy of the limit,
the U.S. Attorney sent Alan’s passport to his Attorney and sent me a letter
saying Alan was free to leave the country. Alan came to my home in Texas. He
stayed here for a couple of weeks. Then I called the judge, U.S. attorney and
everyone else and got it confirmed that he was free to travel where he wanted,
so long as he’d be available should they ever decide to prosecute.
Alan,
who had not seen his wife or kids for a year, bought a ticket to Lima and on to
Iquitos. I double-checked with the judge and prosecutor. And finally, knowing I
had everyone on tape saying he could leave, I drove my friend to the DFW airport
and sent him on his way.
Less than a week later the prosecuting attorney in Atlanta charged Alan
with Flight to Avoid Prosecution—a ridiculous lie considering
she was on tape suggesting he should visit his wife in Peru. Unfortunately for
Alan, if he ever returns to the U.S., he’ll have to answer to that charge
before there are any “ayahuasca”
charges, which means that unless he’s got a quarter of a million dollars in
legal fees put away, he’s sunk.
But none of that sunk him.
He went back to Iquitos to discover that his family had had a hard time
without him. He countered by coming up with the idea of a Shamanic
Conference in 2003 or 2004. He brought in some inspiring people to talk,
collected several good curanderos to offer medicine to the participants, and
began what has become an annual staple for the last several years. And out of those conferences has blossomed the thriving business of ayahuasca tourism in Iquitos and Pucallpa.
So Alan's fingerprints have been on all things ayahuasca in Iquitos more than anyone else's. Even the beautiful mantas, weavings, done by the indigenous Shipibo that are sold Iquitos and Pulcallpa, bear his influence: At the very first Shaman Conference the weavers began to incorporate the conference logo, a stylized cross-section of an ayahuasca vine--designed by Johan Fremin--into their weavings, and now depictions of ayahuasca appear on nearly all of the mantas the Shipibo sell.
Alan is
loved by many. He’s also been called every name in the book by people of all
stripes. But few of those people have ever walked a day in his shoes. Few of
those people have had the courage he has shown. I am not always his biggest
fan. I wish he had not set Sachamama and all of the subsequent Ayahuasca
Retreats in motion. I wish it could all have been kept secret and slowly let
out over the next 50 years, rather than just taking it to the streets. But that
doesn’t mean I am right. History will let us know.
What
needs to be known is this: that he’s my brother, good, bad or in between. I fight for his right to be
the tallest rose in the garden.
Enjoy his story. Enjoy the book.
Peter Gorman, December 5, 2012