25 Years of Shamanism--Part 2

READERS: This is the second section in an ongoing piece called 25 Years of Shamanism, which is based on notes for a talk I was to give at the 3rd Annual Shamanism Conference in Iquitos--a talk that wasn't given due to a surgery I needed on the day I was to give it.


My second extraordinary experience with shamanism occurred just two years later. Before I get to that I should mention that after the trip with Chuck and Larry I really did seem to have the jungle in my blood and so the following year arranged to study jungle survival with Moises Torres Vienna. It was just the two of us.
I’d asked him to take me back to Alphonso’s before we went into the jungle to study, but he said Alphonse had moved away and he didn’t know where. On the other hand, he said, he’d learned of a very good curandero named Julio Jerena that we would visit as he was on the same river we’d use for the survival course. I was disappointed but said okay.
We traveled on a large flat-bottomed riverboat that was wildly over-crowded to a small town called Genero Herrera, just a couple of hours short of Requena. We then spent some hours arranging for a smaller boat—a peque-peque, an oversized canoe with a small motor notable for its long propeller shaft that allowed it to maneuver in very shallow water—that took us up a little river called the Auchyacu. That river would become my jungle home for a quarter of a century.
There was a small town on the Auchyacu, and then individual homes every half-mile or so for perhaps 10 miles. In all, maybe 20 or 30 families lived there. Among them was Julio.
Four things of note occurred on that trip: the first was that Moises sent me out with a young fellow in a canoe on our first night in the jungle. The fellow, Alberto, was to let me listen to the jungle. Instead, he shot a cayman, a money, a large rodent called a mahas, and wounded an ocelot. When we returned I was furious with Moises. I told him I hadn’t paid him to kill endangered species and that if that’s what this trip was about then we should just cancel it. Moises stood his ground and explained that this was simple life in the jungle: Killing was part of living, and that if I wanted to learn about the jungle I’d better damned well get used to killing.
The second thing was meeting Julio and his then-apprentice, Salis Navarro. They did an ayahuasca ceremony that was powerful—they sang together, and the chanting of the two curanderos began to echo in my head, a resounding noise that seemed to pull me apart, as though a wedge were splitting me in half. I grew terrified of what might happen if I allowed the parts of me to separate. It seemed, on one hand, to make sense: I needed to be pulled apart if I was ever going to become whole. At the same time I didn’t know whether I would ever come together again. It was a frightening experience, one I wasn’t prepared for. Louder and louder the chants resounded, deeper and deeper went the wedge, until I finally fled the porch for the safety of the river’s edge. Moises followed and warned me against going into the water. His voice was like an anchor that pulled me back from the edge of some horrific abyss. I turned to thank him. He was still on the porch.
Suddenly more afraid of the voice than of the doctors, I returned to the circle. This time the chanting was no longer frightening. It was soothing and beautiful and I soon fell asleep. When I awoke Moises and I returned to our hut.
After a river wash the next morning I asked Moises what had happened and why I hadn’t been able to fly with the bird again. He said that while I was asleep Julio had explained that I needed to be opened up so that some personal things that were holding me back could be removed. That was what Salis and he had done. Moises also said that the magical effects of ayahuasca that I’d experienced the first time were not to be sought or missed. When I needed to bird the bird would guide me. When I needed to become friendly with the jungle ayahuasca would guide me in a different way. "Ayahuasca gives you what you need," he said, "not what you want."
The third thing of note on the trip was that when we left Julio’s we headed up the Auchyacu by canoe for three days before disembarking and walking nearly three days into the jungle to make camp. By the time we reached our destination Moises had gotten rid of all of our food. Each morning he’d go out and hunt, bringing back a monkey or a macaw, and roast it. I refused to eat the animals and so he’d go and collect edible plants for me. On my fourth day without real food—I think it was my fourth—Moises went out hunting early and by the time I awoke there were a couple of birds on a spit over the fire but Moises was nowhere in sight.
I was starving. I could smell the roasting birds. I tried to ignore them but finally walked over to the fire, pulled one off the spit and began to eat it. Just then Moises stepped out from where he’d apparently been hiding and announced: "That’s the first right thing you’ve done in the jungle! If you don’t eat you will die here. That’s the most important lesson."
I was embarrassed but never again complained about hunting for food.
The fourth important thing that happened during that month occurred perhaps a day or two after my stealing-the-bird event. It was mid-morning. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a young man walked into our little camp. He was dark and wiry. His hair was black. He was barefoot, wore a pair of old shorts and had two strips of what looked like bark-strips wrapped around his chest and stomach. Most unusual though was his face: He had a hash-mark tatoo that circled his mouth and ran across his cheeks nearly to his ears. He also had thin, six-inch splints, like whiskers, in his upper lip. And his forehead was painted a ruddy red. He looked very much like a jaguar. I was scared to death.
Moises, however, simply said some words in a language I didn’t know—"Biram-bo! Biram-bo, bu-chi!"—and the young man smiled and returned the greeting. The man then pointed to our shotgun, which was standing against a nearby tree. Moises nodded and made a hand gesture that indicated that it was to be returned. The man nodded and picked up the gun. Moises reached into his pocket and pulled out three shells. The man took them and walked into the forest.
When he was gone Moises explained that the man was a Matses Indian, though they were often called the Mayoruna. While in the military he had led a jungle unit in a ground war against them in the early 1970s in retaliation for a raid they’d made on Genero Herrera.
"They stole machetes, shotguns, ax heads. They also took several women captive. Among those taken were two young Franciscan friars, who wore long brown robes and kept their hair long. The friars were later found with their genitals crudely cut off—probably when the Matses discovered they weren’t women."
The conflict lasted four days. The Peruvian military won. In its aftermath, the Peruvian military built a small base at the confluence of the Javari and Galvez rivers on which most of the Matses camps were built, effectively preventing further raids.
Twenty minutes into Moises’ story, we heard a shotgun blast, and a few minutes later, another. Twenty minutes after the last the young man walked back into our camp. He carried two large monkeys he’d shot in sacks fashioned from leaves that hung from templines around his forehead. On his head, clinging to his hair, was a baby monkey. He replaced our shotgun against the tree, and then put one of the sacks next to it. Then he turned and started walking in the direction from which he’d originally come.
Moises picked up the gun and a machete and said we should follow. He’d heard a rumor that there was a new Matses camp nearby but had never seen it. We walked quickly through the jungle for perhaps an hour, before coming on a clearing.
The clearing was demarked by posts, on each of which was the skull of a wild boar. At the rear of it a large hut was being built; closer to the near side there were three or four very low temporary shelters. There were more than a dozen children milling around as well as several women, two of whom were tending an open fire. The young man handed the sack he had to one of them. The woman quickly unwrapped the monkey and she and the other woman stretched it over the fire and began burning off its hair. To my horror, the monkey began to scream and thrash about, trying to get out of the flames. The women didn’t seem to notice.
While the large monkey screamed, the young man walked over to a young woman who was nursing and handed her the baby monkey. Without hesitation she put it on her free nipple.
In ten seconds I had witnessed both the cruelest and kindest acts I’d ever seen.
Moments later, an elderly man I later knew as Papa Viejo—old papa—came running at us. He held a shotgun and pointed it at Moises and began shouting. Moises raised his shotgun and began shouting back. I felt like I was watching two silverbacks in a dominance challenge. The shouting and threatening continued for perhaps 30-seconds and then, abruptly, both men put down their weapons and began to talk. Some of it was in Spanish, a little was in Matses, much was in hand signals. A few minutes later Moises said it was time to go and we left.
On the way back to camp he explained that the Matses, like most indigenous Amazon groups, always challenged visitors. If you buckled, they’d have everything you owned. If you didn’t you were generally welcomed. He said he was proud I had stood my ground with him, but that in this case there was not much to fear: "He had no shells for the gun," he laughed. "If he did his son wouldn’t have borrowed ours."
The incident marked me. If ayahuasca had put the jungle in my blood, then seeing the Matses gave me a destination: I would return to spend time with them.

The following year I did, taking a seaplane with my brother-in-law Steve Flores and Moises out to the military post of Angamos on the Galvez river where we rented two peque-peques and bought fuel, then headed up the river to the Matses camps. At one of them there was a unique and amazing headman named Pablo—who later became a great friend and teacher—who introduced me to the two primary Matses medicines: sapo and nu-nu, which I’ve written about elsewhere.
We’d been on the Galvez nearly three weeks when we decided to take a hike with two Matses men from their village of Remoyako to a village called Buenas Lomas. It was to be a two-day hike, but by the end of the first day Moises decided to abort. There was something about the behavior of the Matses men that he found threatening and he didn’t think they’d actually get us to where we were going. So we returned to Remoyako village the following afternoon and left not long after that, heading in our peque-peque downstream to Pablo’s village.
The next morning a man from Remoyako arrived just before dawn to say that a jaguar had attacked a young man who had been rummaging through the hut we’d used there, probably looking for things we might have left behind. The jaguar must have smelled our scent and come looking for prey. The man wanted our peque-peque to return to Remoyako and transport the young man to the infirmary at the military post of Angamos. We let him have it and he left.
Late that evening he returned with news that the boy had died. The Matses at Remoyako and its sister village of Buen Peru were out hunting the animal, and when they found it they would burn it and the two villages as well, then make balsa rafts and float down the Galvez looking for a good place to build new villages.
Moises said that we’d have to leave, that it was "going to get very Indian on the river" for a while and we wouldn’t be welcome.
Our plan had been to hike back across the jungle from the Galvez to the Auchyacu but not from Pablo’s village. As it was we had to change plans, and as Moises didn’t know the route from that spot on the river, Pablo had one of his young sons accompany us.
The son didn’t know the route either, it turned out, and after four days the boy simply disappeared one morning after we’d reached a small river called the Rio Lobo. With supplies running very low, Moises said the best plan would be that he’d return to Pablo’s, secure us a boat or peque-peque, and return for us. He left with only his machete and a canteen of river water, leaving Steve and I to make a camp while we waited for him. He returned the following afternoon—he said we’d basically walked in circles for four days—and we took off down the Lobo. That night, as we neared the confluence of the Lobo and the Galvez we passed a small flotilla of Matses balsa rafts lit by jungle copal torches and crowded with people and goods. They were the people of Remoyako and Buen Peru, searching for a place to build their new villages.
We continued down the Galvez to Angamos, where we were lucky enough to get seats in a small military plane headed out the next morning to Iquitos.
From there we caught an afternoon boat back to Genero Herrera and arrived at Julio’s home the following day. We arranged to drink ayahuasca that night, but before we did, Moises asked me to drink ayahuasca with the idea of finding his son Junior, whom he said was in the jungle, waiting for us with new supplies at the Rio Matanza. We were to have met up with him but because we’d left by a different route, hadn’t, and now Moises wanted me to somehow find Junior and tell him that we were already safe and to meet us at Julio’s. The request stunned me. I had no idea how to do what Moises asked, but I couldn’t refuse trying.
That night, during the ceremony, I tried to do what Moises asked but failed. In fact, I felt nothing the whole time, except for the beautiful calm that came from listening to Julio sing his icaros, and finally went to my hammock. No sooner did I lie down than I found myself feeling as though I were in the river, near some brush. But there was something odd about my eyesight: It was flattened out and very near the water, as though I was submerged up to my eyes. I could make out shapes in a logical way but not the particulars of things. It was very disorienting, until I realized that I felt tremendously strong and fantastically limber. I looked around at myself and realized I had somehow connected, as I had with the bird, with a huge snake. Of course I knew it was impossible, but as had happened with the bird, just when I was sure I was inventing the entire episode, I felt my mouth opening and my tongue shot out and grabbed a large frog. I, we, ate, swallowing it whole and quickly squeezing it to death with our powerful throat muscles before passing it on to the stomach.
The event was wholly unexpected. The absolutely tactile sensation of feeling the snake’s (and my) muscles squeezing the life out of the uncooperative and squirming frog gave me enough confidence to simply ask the snake if it knew where Junior might be. I’d no sooner asked the question—and felt foolish for doing it, since I knew it was all in my head—than the snake began moving upstream. We moved quickly and it was a thrill to feel myself able to move my muscles in that serpentine manner that propelled us forward. We moved through the water for some time and then finally turned off the river and into the forest. I began to shout "Junior! Junior!" but no one responded. We moved deeper until we came to another riverbank where there appeared to have been a recent camp. I didn’t actually see any camp, just the shapes of trees around a small clearing and then an opening took to be a river, but sensed that there was acrid smoke in the air. But it felt lifeless, as though it had been abandoned.
With that realization the snake and I returned to the Auchyacu and began heading downstream back toward Julio’s. We were moving very quickly, but slowed when we neared what appeared to be a long object with a mound at either end. The mounds were moving, and I realized it was probably a canoe with a person paddling at both the bow and the stern. Moments later the snake disappeared and I was once again just lying in my hammock.
I woke Steve, in the next hammock, and told him about the extraordinary experience, then asked him if I should tell Moises. I was hesitant because I had no idea if I’d seen what I seemed to have seen, or if I’d made it up. Too, the canoe I’d seen, if that’s what it was, had two people in it, not one, and we were looking for Junior, so it probably wasn’t him.
Steve said that he’d asked me to look for Junior, and so I should simply tell him what I’d seen.
So I got out of the hammock and did. To my surprise, Moises asked me if I could remember what part of the river I’d seen the canoe on. I couldn’t exactly, but I was able to say that I thought it was just downstream of the small river camp we’d made a year earlier before heading off into the forest, and he estimated that the canoe would reach Julio’s by noon.
Let me emphasize that I didn’t believe I’d actually found anyone, but at the same time the eating of the frog and the vision of travelling with the snake—which might have taken as little as a few seconds or as long as a few minutes—seemed so real that I knew I might have been hallucinating but I couldn’t have been inventing.
The canoe showed up at Julio’s the following day at quarter past noon with Junior and another man on board. Moises berated them for being late. Julio just laughed.
Steve and I were the only ones surprised.
Moises explained that he’d known I’d seen Junior in the river when I told him that I’d seen two mounds, not one. "I only told you about one, Junior, because I didn’t want you to make anything up."
I was simply dumbfounded.
Moises said that ayahuasca was used in the jungle because it worked.

Jeez Louise! I'm Not Quite Ready for This

Well, I was sitting at the desk catching up on a few emails that needed real responses when I remembered that I needed to get copies of a couple of papers that Chepa has. So I called over to her house, woke her and asked if she'd pulled the papers yet. They just relate to getting everyone's passports renewed, nothing great, but I'd earmarked today for that so was getting to it.
And while on the phone I asked if she wanted to go for coffee and danish at a place nearby the copy center.
In a sleepy and indescribably delicious voice she said "The girls are in La-la land. You want to take us for coffee, you come over here and wake them up. I'm not even going to try."
I told her I would in a while, and she said she'd try to find the papers I needed.
Well I guess she mentioned the coffee and cake part to my beautiful Madeleina--who just started playing soccer with a club and has a great coach and absolutely loves it--because in a few mintutes I got a call from her.
"Hey dad. You know in my room...?"
"Yeah, baby. What do you need?"
"Well on the bed--I think I forgot to make it but don't worry , I'll do it later--there should be a pair of capri pants, a blouse with green and red hearts on it and a bra. Can you bring those when you come to take us for breakfast?"
I said I would, hung up and collected the clothing for her.
A bra. A lady's undergarment. My daughter Madeleina is 10-and-a-half years old and she has a bra. I'm not ready for that. Heck, she was younger than Sierra--who is 19 months--and talking the same full-sentence baby talk as Sierra just last month, wasn't she? And now she has a bra? What's next? A boyfriend?
Gee whillakers, I'm simply not ready at all for my little baby to be wearing lady's undergarments.
I don't mind time flying, really, but this is beyond the beyond.
Gonna be a great day, I guess, if I can just catch up with it.

25 Years of Shamanism

NOTE: I'm going to try to get this thing written as a whole, but will deliver it in installments until I do. Here's the first installment.
PG


25 Years of Shamanism



I was asked to speak at the 2007 3rd Annual Conference on Shamanism in Iquitos Peru, as I’ve been asked the previous two years. This year, unfortunately, I had emergency surgery in the very hotel where the conference was being held just two hours before I was to make my presentation. As a result, I was weak, in pain, on painkillers and simply unable to speak.
Had I been able to give my talk, these are some of the points I would have liked to make concerning my very long—25-year—apprenticeship to the very kind and wonderful curandero Julio Jerena (spelled Llerena in Spanish).
Apprenticeship might be an exaggeration: I was introduced to Julio in 1985, the year after I drank my first cup of Ayahuasca with a curandero named Alphonso, and over the course of the next two decades drank with him sometimes once a year, sometimes 10 times a year. We had no structure—I’d never heard of an ayahuasca dieta until probably three or four years ago—and Julio never suggested I come and stay with him to drink regularly. I’d simply show up, and if he was available, he’d make me ayahuasca the following day, after which I’d generally return to Iquitos or head further up the Auchyacu, the little river he lived on some 212 kilometers upriver from Iquitos. But whatever I was doing, wherever I was exploring in Peru’s Amazonia, I always made a point of visiting Julio, generally at the start of a trip, but sometimes at the end as well. And during those three years when I lived in Iquitos, 1998 through 2000, I sometimes went to visit him once a month or more.
So it wasn’t a formal apprenticeship at all. I wasn’t trying to become a curandero: I didn’t want to live on the Auchyacu and fish for my dinner out of a dugout canoe like he did, while ministering the 20 or so families who lived on the river. They’d come to him with all manner of ailments: some brought their babies who were unable to stop vomiting; others came with bushmaster snake bites; still others brought their parents or spouses who’d lost their souls and with them the will to live.And Julio treated them all to hours of work with very little reward: a chicken here or there, some fish, a shirt, a baby piglet and other similar things. It was a wonderful life for Julio—made even richer by having several of his children and a sister live nearby on the river—but not something I ever considered.
Still, over the years it became something of an informal apprenticeship. We each looked forward to the other’s company and loved doing ceremony together, him running it, me being taught some of the endless lessons ayahuasca has to teach.
Now I’ve been asked to talk about the highlights of 25 or so years of shamanic work. That’s not easy. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of highlights. How do you pick one over another when so many helped me at crucial points in my life? I’m not sure.
Given that codicil, I’ll try to touch on several moments that standout, knowing that I’m omitting a lot of others that could just as easily be included here.
The first unforgettable highlight occurred during my very first ayahuasca ceremony. I was in Peru in 1984 with two great friends. We’d spent several weeks on the coast and in the highlands before heading to the jungle, the place that seemed to be calling me more than the others. With no roads into the jungle we took a flight into Iquitos, a city just north of the point where the Amazon begins being called the Amazon. It was quite an unusual town. City is more like it, because of its size, perhaps 150,000 at that time, but with very few paved roads and not much sense of organization it had the feel of a wild west town to this city boy.
There was some tourism, but not of the kind we were interested in: We wanted to go into the jungle, deep jungle like we imagined was there, and no one we spoke with seemed interested or able to do that.
Except for one fellow. His name was Moises Torres Vienna. He was short, dark and muscular. He had a tatoo of a woman on one arm and his initials—MTV—tatooed in a heart on the other. He said he could show us the real jungle.
For some reason, despite him offering us exactly what we wanted, I didn’t want to travel with him. Instead, I insisted that we take a riverboat up the river somewhere, where I was sure we’d find real indians and real jungle. Moises said that no one up the river or down the river would take us into the jungle. He said people were afraid of the jungle and only lived near the riverbanks. I thought he was crazy.
He wasn’t. In nearly ten days in a little town called Requena—an absolutely crazy place that requires its own story—we couldn’t find anyone to take us out under the canopy. They took us to their fields, which were sometimes a kilometer or so deep, but when we asked to go further we were always told that there were too many snakes, jaguars and Indians there. Not to mention tunchis—jungle spirits that would make you lose your way home.
Interestingly, on the day of our return to Iquitos, Moises found us and asked if we were ready to see the real jungle and maybe do something called ayahuasca. We’d never heard of it, whatever it was, and I still wasn’t keen on Moises, but he was apparently our only shot at going deeply into the jungle. Chuck and Larry were also only so-so on him, but then he explained that ayahuasca was an hallucinogen—"Like LSD," he said, roping us old hippies in effortlessly. We agreed to let him take us out.
We spent the next half-hour haggling over price until Moises agreed to $20 per day each. And the minute he agreed his demeanor changed. He switched from salesman to guide in an instant.
"Okay. Half now, half when we come back. I need to buy supplies and leave my family food money. We’ll leave at 7 AM. Sharp. I’ll be here with supplies at 6:30. Don’t bring much. You can leave your bags with the lady of the hotel. Bring your passport or a copy in case we run into soldiers."
"Do we need machetes or anything?" I asked naively.
"No. I don’t want you to get hurt."
He collected the money, shook hands, saluted and was gone.
"He’s going to be good," Larry predicted.
The next morning Moises knocked on our doors promptly at 6:30. "Good morning!" he called. "Time to go. Hurry."
He wore a tee-shirt and camoflauge pants with old military boots instead of his city outfit, and had a green rucksack from which the black handle of a machete was protruding. He was all business, telling us to hurry, collecting the things we were not bringing and having them put into a locked room behind the hotel lobby, then checking the rooms to make sure we hadn’t left anything. Satisfied, he stepped into the street and hailed two motorcars and gave them a destination.
We stopped at a market not far from where we’d caught the boat to Requena. Moises—who constantly amazed me with his ability to communicate clearly despite his limited English and my limited Spanish—pulled a large plastic ladies shopping bag from his pocket and began to stride through the market. The building was large and open aired, with dozens of vendors selling everything from fish and meat to fruits and vegetables, dry goods and breakfast. He turned to us and pointed to his eyes, and then our bags, signaling that we should keep our eyes open for thieves, then began picking up our supplies. He bought an empty quart bottle from one vendor and had it filled with aguar diente—"good quality, no kerosene," he said—from another. He bought a dozen .16 gauge shotgun shells, some fishing line and hooks, a bundle of black-tobacco cigarettes from a man who was rolling them, salt, toilet paper, sugar, tins of coffee, canned sardines, rice, ketchup and three huge pineapples.
He was a lesson in Third World purchasing: he knew what he wanted from each vendor and asked its price before he ordered. He didn’t haggle. He just walked away if he didn’t like it. Not angry, just walked to the next vendor. He double-checked each package and said aloud what he bought and what it cost, as if there was a calculator in his head, keeping the tally. He was quick but courteous. In minutes the shopping bag was full and he asked us if we were ready to go. We all said we wanted coffee, and he wove through the market and brought us to probably the only person in the market with it.
Coffee finished, he pointed us toward a wooden stairway built out over a steep bank. At the base of the 50-foot stairway, tethered to a post, was a floating dock with a one-room house on it. Around the dock were a dozen thatched-roof boat. Moises put his things down between Chuck and I, pointed to his eyes and then to the bags, then went to talk with someone at one of the boats. In a few moments he moved to another boat, pointed to us, nodded and then returned.
"Okay, let’s go," he started, then, looking down at his shopping bag, asked Chuck and I where the kilo of salt was. We didn’t know. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered it being on top, but it was no longer there. "Look. Eyes. Thieves," he said, berating us. He looked up the stairway and we followed his gaze: halfway up a young man held a kilo of salt and laughed at us, then turned and continued up the stairway.
Moises made a snatching motion with is hand in imitation of the thief and to show us how fast it was done. "Olvida," he said. "Forget it. But you have no salt now. If I say look," he pointed to his eyes, "look. Military style. The jungle is dangerous. One mistake…" he made a throat-slitting motion with his hand, then picked up his things and walked to the boat.
Chuck and I could hardly have felt worse. It was only salt, but we’d been standing on either side of the bag, not 24-inches from it at any time. The thief risked getting caught for maybe $.30 and he knew he could get away with it. It felt like we had "FIRST TIMERS" written on our foreheads.
The boat was long and narrow with benches on either side. The hull came up just to the middle of our backs, leaving an open space between it and the thatch of the roof. A few minutes later we were back out on the river.
It was a different river from our new vantage point: fishermen were close by and we could watch them throwing out the nets, or hauling them in with their bright, shining fish. We ran much more slowly than the slow riverboat, and crossing the river at the bends was a much more laborious process. But we only traveled about two hours before Moises was telling us to collect our things and the boat was pulling up to a bank.
We stepped out onto the tiny bow of the boat, then jumped the 4-feet or so from it to the soft mud below, sinking up to our ankles. Moises turned when we were off and pushed the boat back out into free water and they were off.
There were no houses near the bank, and we asked Moises where we were. "Survival camp. This way please."
There were several logs embedded in the mud that made a sort of trail up the bank and onto drier land, where a foot path was cut through an otherwise closed wall of young forest. Ten minutes into that and the canopy suddenly soared higher. "Jungle," said Moises. "Not virgin."
I guessed he meant secondary jungle, jungle that had previously been cut and had grown back. It was real jungle none the less, with tall trees soaring skyward, though there wasn’t much sky to be seen, only tiny patches between the foliage of the canopy. The air was humid and hot. In minutes I was as wet as if I’d been caught in a storm. Thick and thin vines hung from trees everywhere, and there was little ground growth, just a thick carpet of leaves and some young bushes and trees fighting for sunlight. Unexpected was the smell, a combination of fresh growth and decay, of living and dying, growing things and rotting vegetation. As we walked on the well-marked path I began to notice that every tree trunk had other vegetation living on it. Some had vines climbing on them, their fresh green leaves clinging to the bark in fantastic patterns; others were covered in thick moss or had air plants up in their branches dropping down 20, 30, 50 foot dangling roots that might have been the tendrils of octopii had we been in the ocean. Ants and insects were everywhere. Just stopping for a moment allowed me to see that the whole jungle floor seemed to be moving in tiny pieces.
"Pedro! Rapido!" It was Moises, interrupting my reverie. Chuck and Larry were already out of sight up a hill, and I hurried to catch up. A little while later we turned off the path and onto a narrower one, and a few hundred yards into that we came on a clearing with two buildings, both of them fairly small and low to the ground. Unlike most of the other buildings we’d seen near the river though, these were well built with thick planks painted Army green. One was a sleeping quarters for maybe up to a dozen men. The other was a small school house, but it wasn’t for children; this was a Peruvian Special Jungle Forces training center. The ground area around the buildings was well kept. Moises showed us the generator building behind the two larger buildings, and a latrine off a clearly marked path nearby.
There was no one else at the camp when we arrived and so we were free to look around. One wall of the schoolhouse was a sort of display of perhaps 30 stuffed animals that included a jaguar, an ocelot—a variety of smaller cats—a caiman, an anaconda, a tree-sloth, a couple of wild boars and a variety of turtles, lizards and fish, including several different colored piranhas. They were easy to identify with their narrow, meaty heads and the row of razor-sharp little teeth in their bulldog-like jaws. One yellow piranha had two-rows of teeth and Moises explained that the indigenous called that a yarawashi, though he added that much that we knew about piranhas was probably exaggerated. "They are no problem in the rivers. Only in small pools with not enough food. No hands in pools, no problem in the river."
I asked him where the kitchen was and he asked if I was hungry. I said no, I just wondered where the kitchen was. He explained there was none. "The kitchen is the jungle. It’s a training school for soldiers. Oh, and no television," he laughed.
He didn’t believe I wasn’t hungry, though, and took out his machete and walked to where Larry had put down the pineapples. He held one up by its stalk and snapped his machete, cutting off the sharp leaves, then snapped again and again and in 10 seconds had a perfectly cleaned pineapple ready. He handed it to Chuck by its stalk then did the same with the others. We asked Moises where his was and he laughed and disappeared down a path. We heard a whack, and he returned a few moments later with a long piece of sugar cane. He trimmed its outer hard skin expertly with his machete, then bit into its sweet core. "Cane," he said. "Like pineapple. The jungle is full of food."
Eating a whole pineapple while holding it’s stalk made it feel like some huge and dripping ice cream cone. Sugar slid down our chins and onto our hands. When we were finished we rinsed with water from a barrel outside the bunkhouse, then Moises took a bottle of alcohol from his bag and poured a little into our cupped hands and had us wash with that.
"Protection from insects that like sugar."
We did as told and wondered what his next trick would be. There wasn’t any. He had us leave our things and head back to the main trail and deeper into the jungle. He told us we were going to see a Shipibo curandera. "Shipibo," he explained, "Indian people that live close to Pulcallpa. Experts with ayahuasca. Not primitive."
We arrived at the woman’s house—a platform hut set apart from several others that made up the village, not far from a small running river, in about 15 minutes. She was a beautiful woman, strong and old, but when Moises told her what we wanted she said no, and no amount of pleading on Moises’ part would change her mind. We asked what she was saying and he explained that she’d told him we were dilettantes who had no business using ayahuasca.
She wasn’t entirely useless to us, though. She did let Moises barter for the use of two dugout canoes pulled up on the nearby bank for a trip to another curandero Moises knew.
With the help of two of her sons, who were also our canoe men, we got into the impossibly unsteady dugouts and began to head upriver. Moises told us to be still and they wouldn’t sink. I wasn’t certain: their sides were within an inch of the waterline, so the smallest motion would flood the boat. We traveled upstream perhaps half-an-hour to another village where we disembarked and walked up the bank to the home of someone named Alphonso. His home, like the Shipibo woman’s was set apart from the other huts in the village. A surprisingly fat woman surrounded by a handful of children told us Alphonso was out in his fields. Moises cajoled the woman until she sent one of her children to go get him and it wasn’t long before a bull of a man came walking out of the woods with two ramas of plantains on his shoulders. He wore raggedy clothing and an old painter's cap. His feet were bare, covered with small scars and thick calluses. But he had a radiant smile that split his face in half and showed a full set of teeth.
Moises greeted him like an old friend and told him what we wanted. As he did he made gifts of several of the items we’d picked up at the market: the black tobacco cigarettes, which Moises called mapachos, the aguar diente, the shotgun shells and some fish hooks and line. Alphonso took the presents with a grin and climbed the three-step ladder to his house, then told us to come back at eight that evening.
"Let’s go back to the training camp to rest," Moises suggested.
I started back toward the river, but Moises said the boys had already left and that we’d be walking this time, then started past Alphono’s house and onto a jungle path. It wasn’t very well used and Moises had to cut plants that grew across it. He pointed out trees covered in long spines, like thick porcupine quills with no bend that we were to avoid. There were muddy patches and places where large trees had fallen across the path that we had to clamber over. It was hot and sticky and there were plenty of mosquitoes and the jungle floor was frequently covered in tangles of exposed roots. There were several places were trees had been cut and served as single-log bridges over creek beds, and I slipped into the creeks more than once.
Along the way, Moises entertained us with a course in Jungle 101. He pointed out trees and bushes that were used for medicine, and cut several sections from a thick vine called pawfil chawki, then held them one at a time and had us drink the mineral water that dripped from the thin-straw-like tubes making up the vine’s meat. "Very good water. It will save your life. But don’t pick the wrong vine, it may be poison. Rule number one in the jungle: taste it. If it’s bitter, don’t eat it or drink it. If it’s sweet, eat or drink a little. Wait half-an-hour. If you’re not sick, go ahead and eat or drink."
He pointed out animal holes and tracks and droppings, a band of monkeys in the canopy overhead and several birds we would have otherwise missed. "Full jungle. You just need new eyes."
At one point just before we reached the Shipibo woman’s village where there was a single log spanning a 25 or 30 foot near dry creek bed that was probably 15 feet deep. There was a flimsy hand rail set up next to it but the moment you put your weight on it it gave way, so wouldn’t be much help at all.
Moises crossed first to establish it’s worthiness—to him it was just walking—then told us to follow, one at a time. Larry went first and though the log was narrow and rounded he was a terrific athlete and had no problem. When he reached the other side he turned and told me to just "put you chi in your feet and don’t look down. Just cross."
It wasn’t my favorite thing, but I managed, slowly, despite several near falls. Chuck was a little better than me but not much.
"We’re never going to do this at night," he said. "Especially stoned."
"I know," I answered.
The path from the Shipibo woman’s house was well used and easy walking. Back at the training camp Moises told us just to rest. He offered to make some tea if we wanted but told us that on days you drank ayahuasca you couldn’t eat after breakfast. "It interferes with the medicine," he said.
When we asked how we were going to manage the log bridges at night he said going would be the problem, but coming back after ayahuasca would be easy. "Ayahuasca makes the jungle your friend," he said. "It puts the jungle in your blood and lets you see in the dark. Don’t worry. No problem."
Despite Moises’ assurances, we insisted we leave early, while there was still at least a little light left to the day, and even then we moved slowly and carefully to avoid getting hurt. Moises thought we were hilarious and laughed at us the whole way.
We arrived at Alphonso’s before seven to find him at a small hut not far from the house where he was straining off a small amount of thick brown liquid from a big aluminum pot through an old shirt into a little pot. "Medicina," he smiled. "Bueno."
When the liquid was ready he covered the pot and carried it to his home. He invited us up the little ladder and offered us seats on small benches he’d put out for us. He told us we’d drink when the medicine cooled down and it was time.
I looked around the platform: there was a small walled off section that I figured for the bedroom, though there were also several white mosquito nets hanging in the open platform area as well. All of his childen were already sleeping.
The night bugs were awful and our repellents were worthless. Alphonso watched us for a few minutes, then laughed and promised that after we drank ayahuasca the insects wouldn’t bother us. Moises reiterated that we were not to be surprised if we got ill, and showed us where we were to go to vomit if that happened. He pulled a handful of hard lemon candies from a pocket and gave us each a couple to clean the taste out of our mouths if that happened. He also said that we might not like the taste of the medicine, but that we should drink all that we were given at one time.
Alphonso suggested an hour of silence before we drank and we sat quietly, listening to the sounds of nearby chickens and the rustle of night animals foraging in the brush.
When the hour was up Alphonso retreated to a corner of the house and returned with the small pot, a serving gourd, the aguar diente and mapacho cigarettes we’d brought, a small bottle he said had camphor and gasoline, another labeled Agua de Florida and a sort of fan made of leaves which made a percussive sound when shaken. He placed all of the articles carefully on the platform floor in front of him. "Yeah?" he asked.
"Si, professor," answered Moises.
Without any more fanfare, Alphonso lit a black tobacco cigarette and began to chant quietly. Moises had us form a semi-circle on the floor in front of him, although he didn’t join. "Watcher," he said, pointing to his eyes and then us. "Someone has to look out for you guys."
It was unsettling to realize that we were on our own with Alphonso but he reassured us that someone always had to watch if for no other reason than to make sure no one left the circle.
Alphonso ignored us and picked up the little pot. He took the lid off and blew smoke into it while he chanted. Then he filled the little gourd—it couldn’t have held more than four ounces, and passed it to Chuck. Chuck drank and made a face as he did, as if he’d just bitten into sour fruit, then passed the gourd back to Alphonso, who handed him the bottle of camphor and gasoline and told him to hold it to his nostrils and breath deeply. When he was finished with that Alphonso told him to cup his hands and then poured a little of the Agua de Florida into them and had him wipe his face with it. It smelled like sweet oranges, a cheap aftershave.
I suddenly found myself anxious. What did I know about these people. Yesterday I thought Moises was a smarmy little huckster. Had anything changed? Who was this fellow Alphonso? What the heck were we drinking anyway? For all I knew it was poison. Or even if it was an hallucinogen, what if I had a bad trip out in the middle of the Amazon?
I pushed those negative thoughts aside. Chuck drank. I’d drink, and when the gourd was passed to me I put it to my lips and did. The liquid was thick and warm, the consistency of spit, and it tasted like burned grapefruit infused with dank smoke. I nearly choked. I didn’t though, and inhaled the camphor and gasoline deeply when it was passed to me, then rubbed my face with the orange water. Its smell kept me from throwing up right then.
Alphonse was the last to drink. Afterwards, he invited us to each take a few of the black tobacco cigarettes, then he blew out the candles, putting us in a pitch dark. Nothing happened. We were just sitting in the dark, listening to Alphonso chant quietly to the rhythm of the leaves he shook. Then, suddenly and without warning, Alphonso leaded over the edge of the platform and began to vomit. I’d never heard a sound like the sound he made. His vomiting sounded like a rushing river washing through the jungle. It came in waves, louder and louder until it had the clarity of a mad spring, but it came from deep within him like molten lava making its way boiling up from the depths and exploding out of him. It drowned out all other jungle sounds, moving, powerful, thrilling; long after he could conceivably have anything left in his stomach to eliminate his rich sounds echoed off the jungle walls. I wondered if Chuck and Larry had heard the same thing I had.
And then suddenly I realized that I too was beginning to vomit. I lunged for the edge of the platform and let heave, though my own was much more ordinary than Alphonso’s.
Through with being sick, Alphonso began chain-smoking the awful cigarettes and had us do the same. We were told to make ourselves comfortable and we took positions near one another on the platform. Only Moises stayed alert, assuring us he would maintain watch over our external world. "Just relax and don’t try to see or do anything. Enjoy the night."
Alphonso changed the rhythm of his fan and along with it his chant. It was an eerie song full of Spanish and Latin and what sounded like Indian dialect, but it was somehow a clear and beautiful, repetitious, thrilling, powerful.
The night grew peaceful. The mosquitoes stopped bothering me. And then, suddenly, an image appeared before me, within me: A bird flying over show-crested mountains, a huge brown bird with dense wings tipped in white. I was looking at the bird from a great distance one moment, and the next I felt as though I was merging with it. I began to see from the bird's perspective: my sharp eyes picked out the most minute details from the landscape. I flew over a range of mountains, searching for something—I had no idea what. I only knew that we were travelling with such speed, such airlessness that in moments we had traveled halfway around the world. Oceans passed beneath us, islands were inspected and passed and great stretches of land appeared and disappeared behind us in what seemed an instant.
I found us slowing, peering into a stream: I could see blue and green fish in the shallow water moving slowly from our perspective. We were thousands of feet above a mountain stream and I could look into the stream and pick out fish scales: the colors were unimaginably rich! And then, suddenly we, the bird and I, tipped off the face of the earth. Down we raced! Nearly visionless we plummeted toward the stream! I don't remember any feelings of fear: I knew we were hungry and wanted a fish; we split the water with the tiniest of splashes and in an instant were headed skyward again, the fish in our beak split in half, unchewed, the pieces sliding into my stomach whole.
I thought it an unusual way to eat: the moment I did, the minute I thought of myself apart from the bird I was back in Alphonso's house, sitting on a platform with my friends. How sad that my flight was over. I tried to bring the image back, tried to fight my loss, but nothing except blackness filled my mind. No images, nothing. I wanted desperately to see with my new perspective!
Only when I let my desire go did the image return: suddenly I would be flying again, with the bird or some moments just below it, admiring the arrangement of feathers and realizing that each feather moved independently of the others; each hair on each feather seemed to be controlled by an act of will, by separate muscle. I'd never thought of a bird as so complex before; and then, of course, the moment I thought that way I was back at Alphonso's home with that incredible longing in my stomach.
Twice during the night I was able to direct the flight of the beautiful bird: the first was to see Clare—my estranged wife—in Los Angeles. Instantly on thinking of her I was in her room, hovering on her ceiling. I watched her making love with someone new and nausea flooded me—there was a saving grace in the jealous rage: my ego brought me back to the jungle hut, away from the unexpected and awful sight.
The second image was of our—my—apartment in New York now that Clare was in LA, and of our friends who were staying there while we were gone. There was a comforting quality in the scene, two friends sitting in the living room, reading. But something was different—I realized our furniture had all been rearranged. (On returning home, I found that it had indeed been rearranged.)
At one point, when I thought the vision of my bird was returning something happened, and instead of soaring, I found myself reduced in size and moving about a birch tree. The start of the image was like looking through a camera lens or a pair of backwards binoculars: I saw the birch at the end of darkened cone, opening up onto it, and then I traveled through the tunnel. The vision zoomed in on one of the birch's burls and I saw thousands of ants moving around. But I didn't just see ants. I saw ants in such detail that I could study the way they worked, how their bodies moved one section at a time, could see them holographically; red and black ants moving on the same burl, working side by side on different tasks. I was so close to them that I could count the hairs on their bodies. I was unimaginably small; so tiny that the rings on the burl seemed like vast plains before me.
There were other images too, but they were less clear. Some of them appeared and disappeared with such speed that I simply hadn't time to focus on them.
And then suddenly I heard talking. The others were saying they weren't having much effect from the drink and all they were feeling was ill. I protested but was overruled and in a few minutes we prepared to leave.
I threw up once more, this time effortlessly, after I'd stepped from the platform. We thanked Alphonso and left his clearing and started back to our camp. We walked in silence for some time, and then Chuck and Larry began to grumble that it had been an effectless night. I laughed to myself. It had been a most incredible night. Moises laughed too, and pointed out that none of us were using our flashlights, even over the log crossings. "You don’t need light," he said, "when the jungle is your friend."
Later that night while I slept I flew with my bird all over the world, seeing cities and mountains; pulling fish from the sea and resting on small ocean rocks; crossing vast dunes and peering into thunder clouds.
For my friends it had not been a visionary; I felt differently. I felt as if I’d been given an extraordinary glimpse into something possible that all the drugs and drinking I’d done had never been able to show me. I felt like me in my own skin and I liked it. I wanted to learn what Moises knew, what Alphonso knew. I knew I was a bumbler, would take a long time to learn, but I felt it would be worth it. This was what people were talking about when they said you know when you find your path.
That was my first extraordinary experience with Shamanism.

If You Don't Write, I Don't Know You're There...

Listen up, readers. The last week I've had about 50-people a day come to this site. I work hard trying to keep it interesting. Just since July 30, I've written about datura, my Irish-Twin sisters, about my second son moving back home at 19, my friend/enemy Lengua--The Tongue--trying to kill me, and Matses Indian women stealing. I've also written three pieces I've taken off until I can write them better: Two about a few stinking, rotten apples I had on a trip in June and one about my wife's new baby that I love way too much for someone who is never going to be called daddy.
I'll repost those three when there is not so much emotion involved: I don't mind sharing my real heart but I get embarrassed sharing my anger/pain/love with nothing to back it up.
Still, if you all think I am going to spend hours daily trying to write interesting stories and you won't even click on one stinking advertiser to let them know we love them and want them there, then you're more innocent than I think you are.
And if you won't write responses to my work: "I hate you, idiot"; "This sucked. My girlfriend forced me to read it," and so forth, then I am going to stop writing the kind of truth that hurts to write. Heck, you want me to write about a movie I saw? (I havn't been to a movie in 7 years, but pretend I go regularly). I can do that. You want me to write about nonsense just to fill a page? I can do that.
But you want me to write to make you laugh and cry? You want me to write to make you evaluate your station in life, to tell you the truth about being a dad in a busted marriage, then I damned well expect you to visit my sponsors and I very very damned well expect you to respond to my missives.
Cause I'm way too old to be writing into a mirror that only I will see.
Peter G

Just a Little on Old Style Matses People Stealing

I got a letter this morning from someone I don't know who said he'd spent time on the Rio Galvez in Peru, which is home to several villages of ingigenous Matses. The fellow said he'd heard about a fierce group called the Boca Negras and wondered if I knew anything about them. I told him I'd often heard my friend, the amazing Matses headman Pablo, talk about them, and that there used to be at least one kidnapped Boca Negra woman living at the village of Remoyako on the Galvez. She had the same hash-mark tatoo from ear to ear and around her mouth as the Matses wore, but while the Matses tatoo is blueish and made from an extraction of huitochado, the Boca Negra woman's tatoo came from charcoal embedded under the skin,and so was a bit thicker than the Matses and very black. In addition, the woman had several nipples tatooed on each of her breasts, I think to ensure plenty of milk for her babies. Not having seen other Boca Negra women I can't say if that's standard for them.
But remembering that stolen woman--who was fully adapted to now being a Matses woman, I remembered by friend Wilfredo and his mom. Wilfredo, sporting a Matses facial tatoo was a great Matses headman and curandero. He was one of two--Pablo was the other--Matses with whom I collected medicinal plants for Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s. He was extraordinary in the jungle.
But on my second or third trip to his camp--shared by two wives, his mother and brother and one or two other Matses families (though there were often visitors as his camp was very close to the Peruvian military post of Angamos which the Matses often frequented)--I discovered something interesting.
While I was out plant collecting with Wilfredo, Chepa, who would later be my wife and is now my estranged wife, spent the day speaking with Wilfredo's elderly mom. And she'd taped part of the conversation.
What the woman told her was that she'd grown up in the Iquitos area, and had married a fisherman. He grew tired of the city and moved them out to the Jivari river, the border between Peru and Brazil, and they'd carved fields out of the jungle, built a house and had three children. And one day while she and her husband and the youngsters were out in the chacra--their plantain and yucca field--they suddenly found themselves surrounded by several Matses men armed with bows and arrows. Her husband was killed, as were her two young daughters. But she and her son, Wilfredo, were taken captive.
She told Chepa the Matses ran her for 18 days, stopping only at night at camps to sleep. Her head was shaved with fish teeth, roughly, and she ate little. She described it as a sort of brainwashing. But she also said the man who took her, the headman it turned out, also bathed her in the river each night several times, and that by the end of the 18 days she'd fallen in love with him and once she had the running from camp-to-camp was over and they were able to settle down. She bore him at least one other son whom I know, Wilfredo's brother, who lives at the camp he started when their mother decided to run away from Buena Lomas, where they lived, following the death of her husband and the appearance of some bad anthropologists who were taking genetic samples at that camp.
Wilfredo was raised as a Matses man, tatoo and all, and became a wonderful headman.
The woman told the story very simply, the way a riverino would, as if it happens all the time. And I guess that in the old days, up until about 30- years ago, it did. I know that Pablo once asked me--just 15-years ago-- to go on a raid with him to get champi--young girls--so that he could add to his then-four wives.
I didn't take him up on the offer, though I've occasionally wished I had, just to see how they did it. At the time I didn't want to be party to the bloodshed that would probably be involved and that was the right choice.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that a Matses headman wasn't a Matses at all. I also learned a great lesson that day: that the most important collection of the day wasn't my plant collecting, it was Chepa's collecting and recording of that story--one of the only modern day stories verifying Matses people-stealing. And it was a story I'd never have gotten out of Wilfredo's mother: it was only talking with Chepa about Iquitos that brought it up.
And since then I've always tried to bring others with me on any expedition: my sons once got some fantastic stories from some young kids that their father's were too embarassed to repeat to me. But the kids had gotten the stories--they involved a fossil bed and the bad dreams of dinosaurs that came to the people who sleep near the fossils they dig up--from their grandpa.
And I think that in the future if I get a chance to do some more real explorations, I'll try to bring out a whole team--a botanist, a geologist, an anthropologist, a woman from Iquitos and some sharp kids--so that we get as much information as we can all at once.

Lengua

Not long ago a friend who's been studying Spanish, wrote me an email titled Lengua. He meant idioma, but rather than correct him I thought I'd tell him a story about a guy I used to know called Lengua. Here it is.

The Iquitos Port of Mastranza, on which sat my Cold Beer Blues Bar/Cevicheria Madeleina, was considered by many locals to be the single toughest block in Iquitos. During high water season the port, the oldest in the city, would have as many as 15 large riverboats each loading or unloading their hundreds of tons of goods and hundreds of passengers daily. All of those goods, from freezers to motorcycles to bags of cement, had to be carried up and down a muddy slope from street level to the boats, and the cargonderos, the cargo men, were a strong and underpaid lot.
The street at the top of the hill, Pablo Rossel, was one of two streets in Iquitos where trucks were permitted to park while waiting for a contract to move the cargo from the boats to wherever it was going. And the men who worked those trucks, the men who loaded and unloaded all the cargo the cargonderos carried up the muddy slope, were also strong and underpaid.
Both groups were moving unimaginable tonnage in the course of the day, much of it in the heat of the day, and were generally fueled by aguar diente--cane liquor--cut with kerosene. In the evenings many smoked pasta--unrefined cocaine base still heavy with lyme. Either can make a man want to fight. Both together after a day of carrying 300 pound motorcycles up and down a slippery hill on 140-pound shoulders only increased the desire to want to take on the world.
And of all the men who worked both the boats and the trucks, the strongest was Lengua. Lengua grew up in a little house at the top of the port, across the street from my bar. He was a full-size bigger than most of the other men, at maybe 5' 10" and 170-pounds of pure muscle. At his best he could carry five 92-pound sacks of cement on a templine up the hill, nearly triple his body weight. He had long arms that hung low from broad shoulders and earned the moniker Lengua--the tongue--because after his extraordinary feats of strength he'd often leave his very long tongue hanging out of his mouth to help cool off, like dogs do.
Lengua had two vices: He drank aguar diente and smoked pasta and nearly every day he'd pick out one or two workers to take out his wrath on: I'd often stand at the door of my bar and watch his victims run from him, screaming. Those he caught he'd hit mercilessly until he was pulled off--or more often, lured off by the offer of a good drink.
Lengua had a sister. She was a lovely girl who knew my wife, Chepa, and would sometimes come into the bar and they'd visit. She also had an ex-husband with a bad temper.
One day she came in looking for Chepa while I had a friend who was getting quite drunk sitting with a couple of other pals at the bar. My friend, who had a lovely wife of his own, took one look at Lengua's sister and fell in love. I'd never seen him behave the way he did in the next hour. He sent her a drink, introduced himself, asked me to put on some good dancing music, moved some tables and danced with her. Lengua's sister behaved just as oddly: she drank and got giddy, danced with my friend, and in an hour agreed to leave with him.
They climbed into his old jeep and started off down the road.
In five minutes my friend was back. I asked him what happened.
"Well, I was going to take her to a hotel. I've never wanted a woman so much, so instantly, before," he said. "But by the time I had driven about five blocks I realized what I might do to my marriage if someone saw me with her and so I changed my mind, drove back and here I am."
"And where is she?"
"Oh, you didn't see me drop her off across the street at her house?"
I told him I hadn't but took his word for it. He sat back down at the bar and ordered another beer.
A few minutes later we heard a terrible, piercing screaming coming from across the street. We all went to the windows to see what it was: Lengua's sister's ex-husband was beating her senseless.
We had the police there in no time and they took him away in one car and her in another. My friend offered to ride with her to the police station; she insisted that he not.
In a little while the officers came in to get some free beer while they explained that someone had seen her leaving in my friend's car and alerted the ex-husband, who lived not far away and had been drinking aguar diente and kerosene that day. So he'd come to kill her.
"So lucky we were nearby," said one of the officers. "Let's have another beer, eh?"
I served them up. It's just how business is done in Iquitos.
What happened next I only discovered a couple of days later.
It seems that while Lengua's sister was at the police station giving a statement, the fact that a gringo--my friend--was part of the story came up. The police immediately brought in a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent. The agent, since dismissed I'm told, took the woman aside and while talking with her convinced her to have sex. Or at least that was his side, explained another DEA agent who frequented my bar and told me the story.
Her story was that he'd simply raped her.
In any event, according to the agent who told me that part of the story, the woman was quieted by an official US Embassy offer to produce for both her and her children US passports, plane tickets to Dallas and a free home there. So long as she never mentioned rape by a DEA agent again. Lengua's sister took them up on the offer and was gone from Iquitos the next day. I hope she got what was promised.
But Lengua didn't like it at all. And because the whole thing started in my bar, he blamed me.
I didn't realize that until about three days after his sister had gone. It was closing time and my small staff had gone home. I'd closed the big wooden windows and even the oversized metal door, but hadn't closed the small door within the large door that I would leave by.
I was behind the bar, having a drink before I went home. Suddenly I saw Lengua's long arms, then head and shoulders, come through the small door. He was drunk and he was high and he stood there just inside the door swinging his arms, his tongue hanging from his mouth. He said that I'd ruined his life. He said that I'd caused his sister to have to leave the country and that I was probably friends with the man who raped her. He said he was going to kill me.
If I could have gotten around him I'd have run for my life. That wasn't an option.
He took a step toward me. "I'm going to kill you now."
My mind raced. I had a bat under the bar, but if I took it out I'd have to use it, and if I was going to use it successfully I'd have to try to kill him. I didn't want to do that because I didn't think he'd actually kill me. But I did think he'd beat me to within an inch of it and didn't want that to happen either.
So I stepped out from behind the bar without the bat and without a plan, praying that something would come to me in the four or five short steps it would take me to reach him.
On maybe the third step, just outside the range of his arms, lightning struck.
"You're going to kill me?" I asked, much too hesitatingly to sound tough.
"Yes."
"You're going to kill me now?" My voice had much more conviction in it.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you ruined my life...my sister is not here anymore..."
"Not why are you going to kill me, Lengua, why are you going to kill me now?"
"What?"
"Why now? If you kill me now, who will know? What are you going to tell the cargonderos and truck crews tomorrow? That you killed me?"
"Yes."
"So what? Who will believe you? You kill me now, in here, with all the windows closed and no one here and it means nothing. You wait and come and kill me at 7 AM when there are two hundred men her and you'll be famous! You'll still get to kill me, but at least they'll get to watch you do it!"
He looked at me--I thought he might just reach out and grab my throat and do it right then--then began to nod. "Yeah. That's much better. I'll kill you in the morning because you ruined my life. And everyone will see me do it. I'll kill you on the street at seven in the morning."
He paused, said "Don't be late and don't try not to show up because I'll find you," then turned and walked out through the little door in the big door and was gone.
I closed the door behind him, thanked whatever god I believe in for the inspiration, and shivered in fear and relief for a few minutes. Then I headed home.
I was there at the bar by 6:30 AM. The minutes waiting for Lengua to appear were some of the longest in my life. But at 7:02 I stepped into the bar and started working. At 7:10 Lengua appeared and said he was ready to kill me.
I told him it was too late. I had a bar to get open. He should have been there on time. As it was, he'd have to wait until the next morning. He said alright.
And by the next morning he'd forgotten all about it.
About six months later the dock got fixed up a bit and a wooden stairway was put in that ran part of the way down to the port. Shortly after it was completed Lengua, drunk, stepped out of his house, missed the top stair and fell, breaking his neck.
It was a sad end for the strongest guy on the port.

Quite a Week at the Gorman's

One of the things that seems to happen when I return from Peru--and has been happening more and more the past couple of years--is that I seem to bring back a sort of strange energy that interferes with electrical devices. I know that probably sounds odd, but I don't think I'm crazy on this count, as my kids make jokes that I shouldn't touch anything for fear I'll put it on the fritz.
Now I'm home three weeks now. This last week has been the loopiest. When I first came home the phone by my desk went out. It's a walk-around cordless phone, pretty new, and it simply stopped working. So we replaced that. Then my son's car, after he lent it to me, wouldn't start for him. Could be just that it's old, right? Then the sink stopped up--I know that's not electrical but still, it just stopped up. Again, no big deal.
But this week our microwave simply stopped working. As did my coffee maker. Both good machines. Then my truck just wouldn't start. Brand new battery--maybe four months old--and it wouldn't even take a charge. Changed that, checked the alternator/generator--both fine--and then the ignition went out. Not for everyone, just when I tried to start it. Kids worked on that to no avail, until we blew a little Florida Water--cleansing stuff--onto it: That did the trick.
But then the fridge, just 5 years old and a Kenmore from Sears, went out. Just like that, with no warning. Brought in a repairman who said it wouldn't be worth fixing. And then the keyboard on my Apple G-3 died. We had another one in the garage, by luck.
So yesterday we sucked it up and bought a new fridge and microwave at Home Depot (where my credit is good)and just to insure against more family car problems I bought a 1995 Mazda from a friend for $1,500. Works like a charm.
Until I got into it, of course. Then it wouldn't even start. The heck with it: I bought it for Chepa to use anyway, so that I can get my other old truck--the one she's been using for a couple of months--back. And it works for everyone else, so that's good enough for me.
And now I'm gonna go give myself a good washdown with Florida Water to try to neutralize this energy before I ruin any more stuff.
Life's full of mysteries, ain't it? That's what keeps it rich.

My Irish Twin Sisters

Couple of days ago it was two of my sisters' birthdays. Irish twins, Pat and Regina were both born on the same day, July 28, but eight years apart. Pat's the second of our 6; Regina the baby of the family. Every time they have another birthday I can't help but think what people must think when I refer to Regina as the baby: Heck, we're all past 50, though I think we all still consider ourselves just kids with a couple of years and some good experience under our belts.
Pat, who's four years older than me, was/is an amazing sister. When we were kids she'd give us pony rides on her back, and had different temperments for the different ponies she pretended to be. She once had us all collecting money for a real horse until our mom realized we were serious--I think we were up over $100--and broke the truth to us that there would be no pony as our yard, 75 X 100, just 1/6 of an acre, wasn't big enough to keep one.
Pat was also an excellent baton twirler: with my sister Peg--just between Pat and myself--they started a baton twirling group, the Whitestone Twirlers, and got good enough that they were finally invited to participate in the St. Paddy's Day Parade up 5th Avenue in New York City. Pat, like Peg, also had a shelf of trophies for both individual competitions and as a duo together.
But Pat's greatest love was being an artist: as a kid of 10 she won the Annual Whitestone (Queens, New York) store window painting competition held on Halloween, and later got a full scholarship to Pratt Institute. As an adult she turned to design, and with her partner Frank Olinsky designed the MTV logo and that earned them Time Magazine's Design of the Decade and a slot in Time's 100 Top Designs of the Century. She also did a host of album covers when those still counted, including some for Sting and the pretty famous The Cars Greatest Hits--which featured my sister Peg's legs sitting on the front hood of a car, looking real fine.
She found time to become a Tai Chi teacher and then an accupuncturist as well, while remaining a fine fine artist.
And she was always, to me, both an inspiration and a sounding board for both my life and my writing. She designed the sets for several of my plays that were produced in the 1970s on the Off Off Broadway circuit; she took chances with life that inspired me to take chances with life. The girl had/has guts, heart and creativity all at once.
Regina, on the other hand, was four years younger than me, was my baby when I was a kid. At four I was old enough to change her, and later, to be the one to give her pony rides on my back. I taught her how to ride a bike and when she got in over her head with boys she'd come to me to help solve it. When I was working as a chef in NYC, she got a job as a waitress at the next place over. And what a waitress she was: She could be thanking one table at the same time she was telling another that they shouldn't order a dish if they don't know what it is, and leave both tables happy, somehow.
And when she married, it was to the toughest guy in New York, Tommy Leonard, from the legendary Leonard family of New York Policemen. Tommy wasn't a cop, but he was a tough as one, while still having an Irish twinkle in his eye.
And Regina, at about age 30, got fed up with herself for not having frinished high school, so she did. Then she enrolled at Hunter College of the City University of New York and finished that. Then she became a teacher and got her Masters and raised a great son, my nephew Tommy, all a the same time. And she twice won Teacher of the Year for her school, an award voted on by the other teachers. Not bad for a High School dropout.
And somewhere along the line she became my sounding board as an adult. For years she's been the one straightening me out when I'm lost, or at least making me look at myself differently enough to see what I might do to fix this or that about myself.
Those are my Irish twin sisters and I think I was a pretty lucky to have them and have them still.
Happy birthday Pat. Happy birthday Reg. I hope you both have great years. You deserve them.

Something Short on To-E

The subject of To-e (brugmansia grandiflora) came up recently on a bulletin board, and I put my two cents in. One of the 7 Master Plant Teachers, To-e is one of the world's most powerful psychotropics and NOT something to fool with.
With that disclaimer, here's a very short piece on it from my little experience:
There are dozens of uses for to-e. Adding leaves to ayahuasca certainly makes things intense. I'm not a fan of the additional hours or intensity of the experience, though. Too much for me. Chiric sanango root material, is similar and also can add hours and intensity to the ayahuasca experience.
I've never done a pure to-e experience, however. My old teacher, Julio, once made me a pint of it but said he wouldn't be serving it to me as the spirit of to-e and he were not on the best of terms.
Richard Schultes said the problem with datura was that the plant's alkaloid content didn't just change season to season, or morning to night, but that it changed hour by hour, making it very very difficult to judge the potential strength of a to-e brew.
On the other hand, my right-hand in Iquitos, Jhonny Java (correct spelling), knows a to-e curandero that he regards highly out on the Napo (I think), and a friend of mine once went to do dieta with the curandero. If you were going to try it, that would be the way to go: As many of you know, ayahuasca can be very difficult sometimes. To-e, as probably the most powerful of all jungle medicines, is said to be much more difficult, and in my experience with leaves added to ayahuasca, or root of chiric sanango, I'd think that would be right. So I think it's not something to play with unless you've really got the right curandero to help with things.
But to-e's other uses are also interesting: it's used as a love potion that will make your unwilling would-be partner not only fall in love with you but cling to you for several years. I don't want to give up the recipe for fear someone will utilize it, but I've met two men in jail on the Peruvian coast who'd used this pusanga and gotten their wifes and then finally killed them because the women were clinging so much they wouldn't let the men alone, even to go to the bathroom. Not for a week, but for years.
Then to-e was used in brujeria to make my mother-in-law go completely crazy for a couple of years (a rival for my father-in-law had it prepared for that by someone whose specialty were those sorts of things.) My mother in law eventually came out of it, with no recollection of the previous couple of years whatsoever.
Then I used it once in an altogether different fashion. I'd been in the jungle with my jungle teacher Moises Torres Vienna (the father, not the sons) for about 5 weeks. I'd pressed some plants, among them various varities of datura I'd seen along the Yivari river. Unfortunately, the plants got moist and by the time I returned to Iquitos they were shot.
In any event, I guess the vibe was there, because within an hour of returning to Iquitos (this is probably 1988), an old woman came lurching up to Moises and I (having coffee at the Cafe Express on Prospero)) and told Moises that she'd had a to-e dream the previous night and had seen my apartment in New York and that it was all torn up, like a burglar had been there.
Then she gave me three to-e leaves and said that when I went to sleep I should put one behind my head, one on my forehead, and roll the third into a cigarette and smoke it. Then I would dream who robbed me and where my stuff was.
Then she left.
I thought she was just a crazy lady--I'd never met her before--but Moises said she was a to-e curandera, very highly respected by locals in her neighborhood in Iquitos.
I still told Moises she was crazy because she had no idea who I was and so couldn't possibly have dreamt someone she never met, and more than that dreamt their apartment in a city she'd never visited 3,000 miles away.
Nonetheless, I was curious, and later that morning I called my brother Mike, a New York City cop who happened to be in the burglary unit in my Manhattan neighborhood. And sure enough, Mike said he'd just come from my apartment, where someone had jimmied open a kitchen window-gate. He'd been called in to investigate on a day off because the responding cops (they responded to neighbors who called to say things were being taken out of the windown and down the fire escape) knew me and knew Mike was my brother.
I was astounded and therefore did with the leaves as the woman had said: I dreamt the whole burglary, and saw the stolen goods in an apartment with a lot of other stolen goods. I couldn't place the other apartment though.
Two months later my brother's unit busted a burglary ring which stored stuff in an apartment just down the block from mine (while waiting to fence it), and I got a television back.
To-e is also utilized--infamously--in Bogata, Colombia, on unsuspecting people to make them do the bidding of the person who gives it to them. Long before GHB or Rophynol, a little to-e was the standard mickey given to tourists who would later realize they'd gone to the bank and taken out their maximum and given it to a stranger--and couldn't remember why. It was also the medicine utilized in those famous cases where people have woken up to realize one of their kidneys was taken during the night.
And there are lots of other uses for it as well. Dr. Solomon Melchor Arroyo, who used to run the Museum of Natural Healing and Health in Lima (and who was a cuy curandero) for the Peruvian government, once gave me a list of more than two dozen uses for the plant--an awful lot of them having to do with the plant's ability to make people susceptible to suggestion: like falling in love, giving all your money, allowing a doctor to take one of your kidneys, going crazy and so forth. (Unfortunately, the Peruvian government shuttered that museum in 1987, and Dr. Arroyo moved to a private practice far from the city center. He was already quite old, and I've been told that he has since died.)
It's certainly considered one of the Master Plant Teachers, but I also think it, like Amanita Muscaria, are difficult to use by novices, and perhaps best left alone unless one were to find just the right situation with the right curandero.

Marco Moves Back Home, Quite a Disturbance...

So a few days ago my son Marco, who's been living with his mom mostly for the last several months, asks if he can move back into his old room. He says he needs discipline and that I provide it, insisting that he help with the house and yard chores, and now that he's going to college he's going to need more discipline than ever. Well, we love our kids even in the worst of times, so I said okay, but you're going to have to help with the house. And you're still going to have to help mom some, considering that she's pregnant and you've been--generally, as the boyfriend only appears occasionally--the man of that house. Worse, with my stitches still in and my belly still subject to reopening from the last operation, I still can't really help much physically for another couple of months.
He says No problem and I say as long as you understand the rules, I'd love to see you more often.
So he begins to get his things from Mom's and then Italo and his girl Sarah, who live here, say: Hey! Marco only moved back because Mom cut off his Direct TV, his cell phone and the computer last night.
Man, so I've been had again.
The worst part is that Mom, my wife Chepa, has been really really sour the last few days. Most of it might be that she's near 5 months pregnant and the baby is riding low and large already, and she works on her feet 12 hours daily. Some of it may be that I didn't happen to die in Peru when my intestine burst (that's at least half-a-joke), or that she's tired. Or that her old man is not around often enough to kiss her till she's drunk with love. But I'll bet that part of it is that Marco moved back here. Man, I didn't mean to cause confustion in this already broken and busted up family. I just said okay when my kid asked if he could move back home.
And Chepa's so sour that when I told her I was offered a 1995 Mazda in great working order (with 199,000 miles on it) by a pal and that if she wanted I'd buy it for her as her four cars are all busted and not really fixable (she uses one of my old Ford Rangers at the moment) she yelled at me that she didn't want an old car. Man, you offer me a car in working order with a good body and great interior for free and I'll bet I say "Hooray!" not "Who wants an old car like that? Why don't you buy me a new car?" (The answer to the last is that it's her boyfriend's job, not mine, but even if it was my job, I don't have money for a new car).
So Marco moved back home for the time being. Italo and Sara are upset. Madeleina is positively angry because Marco picks on her all the time. And Chepa is so angry that she doesn't want a free car.
Man, if no good deed goes unpunished, imagine what's waiting for me for all this???????
Still, I'm smiling. Ain't life crazy and still grand?

Why I Didin't Speak at the Shaman Conference in Iquitos This Year

Opening night of the conference: I'd had serious surgery for a busted gut--holes in my upper intestine--21 days before the conference was to open. I did eight days in the hospital, then a day getting to Iquitos from Cuzco,
then three days to prepare and then took a small pre-conference trip out into the jungle for eight days. I didn't do much and when I came back on day 20 and had the stitches removed, everything was good. But on day 21, the day the conference was to start, I took off my protective girdle and began to open the dressing when I realized I'd come open. Worst personal shock of my life. If there is such a thing as a trauma for a middle-aged guy, seeing my stomach coming out of my stomach was it.
So I closed the dressing and girdle and in a panic went to the Parthenon, where the conference was being started, thinking my Iquitos doctor, Rubi, Alan Shoemaker's sister-in-law would be pitching in--and sure enough, there she was. By the way, she was looking way way way too fine to be a doctor.
(For those who consistently think Alan is a bad money-hungry guy, you should know that Alan, with the help of a friend, paid for Rubi to go to University and Medical School and now she's a major doc in Iquitos. So tip your hat to Alan S and Bruno in New Jersey , who made it possible, as well as to Rubi, who actually used the funds for what they were earmarked and is now helping thousands of people a month in the regional hospital in Iquitos.)
And Rubi was there, helping her sister Mariela--Alan's fantastic wife--out, and I told her my stomach burst again and she didn't believe me and pulled me to a quiet corner of the Parthenon Hotel and had me take off my girdle and told me to unwrap my dressing. The minute I got to the dressing she said: "Oh, that's not good. Let me call a surgeon I work with at the hospital."
Two hours later he was there. In the meantime Rubi had taken a few bucks and bought what he needed to do the emergency surgery on site: gloves, medicines, suture kits, creams, alcohol, iodine, local anestheia, an antibiotic drip-kit, gauzes, and so forth.
Then we rented a room--nice rooms at the Parthenon--and did the surgery there.
The 12 needles to the stomach with local anesthesia hurt a bit, but overall it was a great great surgery.
Two hours after the suegeon arrived I was on the main floor, girdle in place, talking with Alan, who asked if I would still present that evening.
I chickened out. I was in pain, exhausted, on demerol, very recently stitched and simply couldn't think of anything to talk about except my pain. And I didn't think anyone would want to hear that.
I did stay around and talk t o several people who wanted to speak with me, but I didn't have the voice, ideas or anything else to talk to 150 people.
And now a couple of people are giving Alan nonsense about "Peter Gorman didn't speak. Can we get some money back???"
The answer is no. Deus ex Machina--the hand of God interfered. So leave Alan alone. No funds returned. I really couldn't talk above a whisper and had nothing to say. By not presenting that night I saved you all an hour of boredom.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Any questions?

Life Keeps on Getting More and More Complicated

So I get back to town two weeks ago today, stomach stitched up from the blown-holes in my intestines and feeling weak. Wearing a girdle and can't lift a thing. Then there's my wife Chepa--my estranged wife--looking pregnant and I ask if she is and she says "Four months," which is okay except that I still love her and wish the baby was mine. It's not.
So I get through a couple of weeks of reacclimating and start to get down to work: My regular gig in Fort Worth needs some stories from me to fill out my annual production, for which I get an annual stipend. I get lucky with Skunk Magazine, for whom I write the Drug War Follies column, when they forgive the lousy column I wrote a few weeks ago the day after my second sugery, under the influence of pain killers and pain, and say I have a new column due in 10 days. Thanks, fellas.
Then this weekend Chepa's boyfriend showed up in town and suddenly my haircut--that she said she wanted to give me--went out the window (I understand cause I know that love can make you forget everything else, and it's her right), and my kids say he's moving back to Fort Worth. Great. I'm in love with his and her first baby, 19-month-old Sierra, whom I've written about and whom I've pretty much raised--at least for 12 of the 19 months--and suddenly I'm going to lose her if her dad comes back into her life full time. Which he should, for her sake, but it's still a heartbreak for me.
And because he's moving back, my son Marco, who moved in with his mom several months ago, asks if he can move back with me. Of course: A dad loves his kids forever, not just on the good days. But then my son Italo says "If Marco comes back is he going to help with the work this time?"
Legit question as Marco doesn't generally help until you're screaming at him in the "Dad" voice, which I'd prefer not to take out too often.
I tell Italo that I've talked with Marco about his responsibilities if he returns full time.
And then today I'm told that Chepa's boyfriend isn't moving to Fort Worth, he's actually moving to Connecticut. Which means I'll get to play with Sierra for a while longer but also means that with Marco back at my house I'll have to mow the lawn at Chepa's and I'll be buying diapers not just for Sierra but for the new baby as well.
Ain't life mysterious and fantastic? I'm lost in all of this, of course, but I'm still loving living.
Hooray! Confustion at the Gorman household! Insanity of the sweetest kind reigns.
OH, and the goats escaped while I was gone in Peru and a neighbor took them in. Now Italo's girlfriend Sarah wants them back. Why not? A full house is a fun house. Maybe a crazy Coney Island, Brooklyn fun house, but a fun house none the less.

If You Had to Land in Texas

If you had to land in Texas, Joshua and surrounding areas might be the best place to land. Not politically, as Johnson County, in which Joshua sits, is a snakepit of old boy screwups, from the police to the DA to the Narco squad: AS the mayor of one of Johnson County's two big cities recently told me: "If a jury has the option of giving someone 2-to-20 years, they'll often ask the DA whether they can add a few to the 20. That's just Johnson County."
But aside from that evil, the physical is freaking bucolic: lush rolling hills, large farms, horses nibbling flowers everywhere you look, cows and goats and rabbits and you know you hit Joshua when you smell dead skunk--which is a scent I've come to love as it represents home. There's possum and raccoon, fish in every one of the 40 lakes in the surrounding 20 miles, dogs running in gorgeous packs on the roadways, roadrunners scuttling along the highways, more hummingbirds, cardinals and bluejays than I've ever seen before; scissortail blackbirds feasting on the trash left in the Walmart parking lot by drivers who dump their half-finished slurrys under their cars. And trees: when it rains enough, as it has this year, Johnson County, and Joshua in particular, can rival any urban forest I know, outside of the Amazon.
That said, because it's so gorgeous, and because Fort Worth, one of the fastest-growing cities in the US, is so close--just nine miles to the city limits in a couple of directions--the developers have come in since I arrived in 2002 and built maybe 25,000 homes here. Old 500 acre farms are divvied up into 8 homes per acre and the McMansions--small ones going for $80 grand, the larger ones, at 3,000 square feet on a 5,000 square foot lot going for $150-$170 grand--can get squeezed in by the thousands. So in many places where there were wide open spaces just 5 years ago there are now hundreds and thousands of homes built so closely together you can hear your neighbors argue. Or watch them shower, if that's your thing.
And because the building boom is going on so heavily here, a new road needs to be built to accomodate people trying to get to work in the Fort Worth area. And that road has caused the county to come and condemn a 30-foot swath across my front yard. That's 30-feet by 300-feet and it's not only eating the distance between our house and the country road in front of it--taking out 13 tall red-tip bushes and two beautiful trees that have given us privacy from prying eyes--but eating our very very beautiful large front yard. We'll still have the side yard, the back yard, the very back yard, the garden on the hill, but none of them will be private anymore once the road's been widened. And in their generousity, the state found it possible to give us $14 grand for the land, the fencing, the bushes, the trees, the driveway, the basketball hoop area and the yard.
Now I'm not saying I'm against progress--though I've been called a Luddite more than once and still can't get a DVD to play on the television--but I think that taking the Gorman homestead is a step in the wrong direction. Obviously, I'm only a force of 6 here, assuming I'm backed by Chepa, Italo, Marco, Madeleina and Sierra (though at 18-months she's not eligible to vote yet, I'm still considering her in my corner as her tree swing will be falling under the axe and I know she's ain't gonna be happy about that).
So bucolic Joshua, because it's so lovely, is becoming less lovely as people who want to live in this physical beauty cut trees and develop farms to give them access to it all. But when it's all said and done, there won't be any trees here. It will all be McMansions and everyone will be listening to everyone else's arguments and toilets flush and in ten years they'll be wondering why the hell they came to such a desolate place.
Ain't life full of ironies?
I'm just hoping someone will want to buy this place, even after it's been cut to ribbons, and that I can find a place further enough out that I don't have to worry about new roads for another 25 years.

Political Comment on Hunting Endangered Species

For some reason, while just sitting here at the desk after getting dinner on the stove (a nice pork roast, saurkraut, good barbequed beans cooked in beer, a warm spinach and fresh corn salad with balsamic vinegar, and roasted new potatoes) a television special I saw a couple of months back popped into my head. It dealt with some secretive chef who bases out of Los Angeles. He doesn't run restaurants; rather he does private parties for wealthy folks at which he specializes in serving several courses that include endangered plants/animals/seafood. He also appears to have his own large walk-in-refrigerator where he has several beef carcases ageing nicely and a quite lavish lifestyle.
Most of the program centered on his illegal hunting/acquiring of endangered organisms. There were shots of him and Ted Nugent, the most atrocious, soulless (but fantastic technical) guitarist who ever lived, going out to shoot baby seals and other animals, and all the boastive camaraderie that goes with a good hunt.
It bothered me. And I'm not that sensitive: I was a chef in New York City--in some pretty good joints--for 18 years, and during that time I killed countless potatoes, carrots and onions, boiled living lobsters, shucked fresh clams and oysters, served living mice covered in chocolate sauce and must have sliced and diced a million pounds of formerly living cattle. I once cooked a party for the New York Explorer's Club at which I served Mastadon Marrow, Lion Steaks and Human Blood Pudding (everyone had to eat their own blood pudding as this occurred during the early rage days of AIDS when every restaurant in town lost a waiter a week to pneumonia or cancer or some other atrocious disease--a truly sad sad time that I'll write about another day). The Mastadon Marrow came from Siberia: An earthquake had ripped a chasm in frozen tundra, exposing an area where more than a dozen mastadon had died, and the freezing cold of probably the last ice age had quick frozen the meat and bones. Some crooked zoologist had made the marrow-filled bones availiable to a number of people, including my contact at the NY Explorer's Club, which is how I got my hands on some of them.
I also work in the jungle of Peru and in the course of that work over the last 25 years I have eaten dozens of monkeys, armadillos, macaws, parrots, sloths, caiman, paiche, manta rays, wild boar, mule deer, tapirs, rodents, slugs, termites and so forth. So I'm not clean on this count.
But I will say that I've never eaten those animals when there was something else available. I learned--was taught--early on that in jungle heat and humidity a person needs genuine protein. Fish is good when you're on a river. But when you are walking across a jungle, you take what you can get. Electric eels and manta rays are not tasty but you'ld be surprised in just how shallow a little rivulet you are libel to find them. Bugs stink of course, but nothing beats the available protein of of slugs and grubworms. But three days without protein and maybe every day losing a pint of blood to insect bites, many of which are infected, and you'd better believe that a Trumpetero--a gorgeous jungle turkey--or a howler monkey, despite how fantastic they are--is what's needed by your body to keep going. Bee pollen and canned sardines simply won't do it if you need to keep walking for another several days.
Now given that, I still resent and dislike that chef, who goes out of his way to discover what animals and plants are considered especially endangered, then hires jets and helicopters to take him to those places where those plants and animals are so that he can hack them down with a machete or kill them with high powered rifles to bring their carcasses back to people who have a yen for the exotic, money to burn, and no consciences (no consciousness). And that he does this and brags about it on television irks me. And that he's got Ted Nugent hunting with him--not skilleting roadkill but killing things that have already been rendered nearly extinct, mostly by man's cruel hand--irks me also.
I think they're cowards. I'd like them to show up at my door tonight; me with my stinking surgery and I'll still bet I'd make them cow.
I hope they're they're reading this.
I mean, evolution already eliminates the weak. Who ever said Darwin's theory needed freaking help, eh?
And I don't mind that the Aluetions eat baby seal or whale. I think that's okay. I think it's okay that I have a pork roast and potatoes in the oven and on the stove. I know that living involves relentless killing. I accept that.
But I don't think you ought to inflict yourself on other species--or even your own--for the fuck of it.
Just my opinion, but I am ashamed that I'm part of the same species as those people with so much money that they get off on that type of thing. And I'm glad I never bought a Ted Nugent record.

Been Home a Week and Still Lost

Returning from Peru has always taken more time emotionally than physically. Physically, it's about 24 hours from the time you head to the airport in Iquitos until you're actually home. Emotionally , on the other hand, it generally takes me a couple of weeks.
This time that's compounded by the damned surgery--the one that saved my life, actually, when my intestines blew a hole and spewed nearly three liters of muck about my insides--that has me feeling so listless and useless that it's hard to get anything done. I wake at 5 AM, check the email, make some coffee, wash last night's dishes, maybe get a load of laundry in and then I'm pooped again and go back to bed--the counch really, as that's where I sleep--for an hour or so until Chepa's baby Sierra, and my and Chepa's Madeleina wake up. Make some breakfast for them and then I'm washed out again.
In Peru, on the other hand, two days after the initial surgery and the eight days they kept me in the hospital I was taking a group out into the deep Amazon forest.
And in Peru I managed to get a column written for Skunk the day after the second surgery.
But here I just feel lifeless. Some of it's the physical. There really isn't much a person can do if they can't lift, push, pull, stretch, walk or run. I lift the baby anyway and hope that god and the angels don't let the surgery get ruined by something as nice as that. Nobody should be penalized for picking up babies, regardless of their physical condition.
The part I'm not keying into is how far my head is from being home, however. I can't seem to t hink straight. I've written several blog entries that are so tedius I fall asleep reading them and so trashed them before ever putting them up. And I havn't got a single good interview under my belt since being back. And I should have several by now as I've got some stories coming due and my new rep (The Houston Press Club recently awarded me Print Journalist of the Year for Texas (circ under 100,000) to try to do honor to.
And instead, I'm this freaking blob. Slow moving, slow thinking, useless waste of space.
I'd better get on the ball soon, eh?

Different Eyes See Different Things

It's Sunday afternoon and I've been home from Peru for about 4 days now. It's been a week since my second surgery--held in a hotel room at the 3rd Annual Shamanic Conference in Iquitos--and I'm still weak. Not thinking too clearly either, and what I'm thinking about is the big trip I had in June. 22 days in the jungle and the mountains, with lots of traditional medicine, from ayahuasca to San Pedro. The medicine, in fact, was the point of the journey, and I thought my 13 guests knew that.
Somehow, they didn't. At least not all of them. Now that we're all home, several have written the company that secures the guests for me: thus far three have written notes of extreme appreciation: They thought I essentially did magic, putting them in close proximity with wonderful curanderos who were able to affect great changes in their lives in a very short time. They found wonder in bathing in the river, seeing dolphins surface for air, in the night time jungle sky, in wandering in the streets of Lima and chewing coca leaves in Cuzco. They found Ayahuasca and San Pedro to be both agents of enlightenment and fantastic visceral medicines. In shourt, they found the trips well worth while and didn't spend a whole lot of time during or after them thinking about me, the trip leader.
But there were also four letters, one representing a couple, in which I was not just a demon, but someone who endangered them, offended them, and who must be stopped like a virus.
Their complaints run from the quality of the hotels we used to the fact that we had no showers in the Amazon, from my choice of eateries--the best in each city--to my unwillingness to allow them beer while in the jungle.
And those I can live with . They indicate people who simply didn't read the brochure, and three admit they didn't. But then there were also complaints with no foundation in reality: One woman complains of what she claims I was thinking about her--she can read minds and knows what I was saying to mysel, and it wasn't nice. Huh? Another waltzed in on a conversation about the age at which some girls in the jungle have their first babies--often very young--and turned that into a complaint that I was discussing a peurile fantasy. What? One complainant suggests that she was barraged by sexual innuendo... Wishful thinking maybe, but pure projection. These complaints get to me because there is no way to stop them. They are such inventions that I can't get them out of my head.
Two friends of mine who were along on the trip understand my frustration and have told me to just forget it. I suppose I should, but my heart has almost never been heavier from words alone. These people pay an enormous amount of money to come with me out to the jungle and into the Peruvian highlands and and when I fail so utterly with them I feel awful. Can't change things, but I feel awful.
And getting angry at them for their emotional baggage, their refusal to see the magic around them on the trips wouldn't do any good. As far at they're concerned they bought into a bogus trip.
So I'm left with this: That people going on the same ride will wind up seeing it very differently from one another. Some call it magic, some call it wretched. It's no wonder it's so darned difficult to make peace in this world. Different eyes see the same things differently.

Well, the Stomach is Finally Gone...

Well, my stomach, which has been getting huge over the last five years, is finally gone. All the tens of thousands of sit ups didn't do it, though. And all the hikes in the jungle couldn't make it disappear. Ditto the fasting, dieting and all the rest.
I've always been a fairly slim and reasonably in-shape guy. But about five years ago I suddenly came up with a BIG belly and I couldn't fathom why. I mean I was suddenly up 20 pounds, hovering at 200 or 2005 and nothing I did was making a dent. I gave up ice cream. I fasted three days a week. My malaria would come and get me annually and those bouts meant 3-5 days without water or food and they hardly made a dent. I drink, yes, but I ain't the worst sinner on the planet. And there are hours of yard work weekly, including raking 1.5 acres and so forth.
And then three weeks ago, in Ollantaytambo in Peru, my stomach disappeared in less than an hour. What happened was I was with some clients at the ruins and my friend Victor was due to appear to make a San Pedro ceremony--one of my favorites--and I'd been sick for a day, trying to dislodge this old pain in me that had taken the shape of something like a cat. I'd gotten the tail out of me, but the darned demon refused to leave and once its tail was gone I saw it rise up to my intestines and sink its claws into me.
So I shoved my fingers down my throat to force it to be vomited up and instead it sunk its claws deeper into me and in the next second I saw my intestines with holes, seeping muck into me. I also felt a pain--a lot of different pains--shooting through my stomach area like I was on fire. It got so bad that for a few minutes I wished there was some way I could simply separate from my body.
That didn't happen. Instead, one of my clients called a doc who said it was just gas but who got worried when three pain killing shots had no effect. So he called an ambulance and they took me to the local hospital where they got scared when more pain killers didn't do the trick and then they sent me by ambulance to Cuzco where I was given a battery of tests, after which a good looking guy in sports clothes announced that I was having surgery in two hours. I questioned that and he said I should go seek another opinion but that if I didn't have surgery in two hours I'd be calling a morgue. I opted for surgery.
What happened was that I'd gotten an ulcer on my large intestine. I had no idea, no pain, nothing but my big stomach to suggest it. And when I tried to eliminate the old pain it dug in and made a couple of holes in that ulcer which then released 3 liters of poisoned goup and old stomach acid into my upper body cavity, causing peritonitis.
I was lucky. The surgery got it done, even if it had to be redone this last Sunday in a hotel room in Iquitos because it split wide open when the stitches were removed.
Three freaking liters? I know and knew I was full of it but I had no idea I was carrying around a three liter soda bottle.
So now I've returned to the states to recouperate and my daughter Madeleina wants to know how I got so skinny so quickly.
And while the rest of it feels lousy, just her saying I'm skinny again might be worth it.
And that's the story of How the Stomach is Finally Gone.

Wish I Could Hide Sometimes

Well, just got back home after seven weeks in Peru. Lot's to tell, but right now the only thing on my mind is wishing I could hide. Had two trips booked: a three-week mountain/jungle trip and a one week jungle trip.
The second trip, the shorter one, was fantastic. Seven strangers became seven friends and I thank them all for coming.
The first trip didn't go so well. And the hate mail from some of the participants proves it. Others found it fantastic, but the ones who resent me have really shaken me. I mean I do these trips to allow medicines and the Amazon to do profound work on people. And when that works it's good. When I become the focus of the trip then I've failed completely. And when I become the negative focus--which mostly happens when I drink too much--I not only missed but caused pain. That's not just missing, that's deplorable.
Which makes me wish I could hide sometimes. Cause I don't want to read what people are writing about me when they're saying what a rotten trip they had because I was such a freaking drunken bum.
I understand why people in show biz don't like to read their reviews. But my trips are more intimate than a movie or show. You spend three weeks with people and they usually can get you pegged pretty good. And when they say you're a bum, you probably are.
And if you are you want to run away, like I do now. But I can't. I got to face whatever is coming and deal with it head on. Even though that's gonna hurt.