The Gringo: A Memoir (15 page)

CHAPTER
28

B
ut of course the pain returns and I’m back in Zumbi and the time is passing . . .

A man in Zumbi builds a cockfighting coliseum in his backyard, and even for an animal lover, it’s a pretty fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon of drinking. These guys take their cock fighting seriously. The entire time I watch, I contemplate the moral ambiguity of my participation . . .

I take more long bus trips across the country to see friends and attend conferences for volunteers. I pass through most of the provinces. I ride by every volcano, through every big city, on every major highway. I stare out the window, gazing at the wide-open spaces. And I think about all the things that people typically think about when they stare off into those wide-open spaces . . .

Here I am sitting on the bus next to Ecuadorians who strike up conversations with some of the weirdest questions I could ever think of: do we eat rice in the United States, have I tasted beer before, how much does my shirt cost, how much money do I make, how much does my hat cost, how much does my backpack cost, how much does my iPod cost, how many kids do I have.

And here I am with these passengers who badger me with statements like, “There’s no vegetation in the U.S., is there? No, there isn’t. Ha! Plants? Animals? You don’t have any of it. Ha! Not like here. Ecuador—we have the most natural beauty on the face of the earth. It’s true!” Then they say excuse me so they can reach across me and dump their trash out the window. The first dozen times, this leads to a conversation about the ails of litter. But after that I don’t have the patience for it anymore . . .

Here I am, as usual, spending the night alone in my apartment, soaking my balls in a bowl of warm water . . .

Here I am waking up on Sundays in Zumbi to such quiet and empty streets that I wonder if everyone moved out of town overnight and didn’t warn me about it . . .

Here I am buying groceries from the corner store and coming face-to-face with the status of Ecuadorian gender roles. “What—are you planning on
cooking something
?” the woman behind the counter says in a mocking tone, like I could only have some vague idea of what it takes to work in a kitchen . . .

Here I am making an addition to a daily journal I’ve been keeping since I arrived. Whereas before, it just had a few words describing where I was and what I did on a particular day, now I noted my testicular and prostatic pain. So instead of “Zumbi: talk with neighbor,” it would now say something like “Zumbi: morning, dull throbbing; afternoon, piercing feeling” . . .

And here’s Graciela barging into my room one day to ask me to lend her twenty dollars. The glorious part is that I actually don’t have any money on me because the ATM machine in the next town over hasn’t been working. Graciela looks me in the eye and says, “Liar. Of course you have money. All of you have money.” And she waddles out of the room shaking her head . . .

There are landslides on the only road leading out of the province to Loja—that winding deathtrap of a road that they’ve been trying to pave since I arrived in Zumbi. Rocks fall. People die. Traffic stops. And after five days without passage, Zumbi and nearby towns are running out of food and not receiving newspapers and the only topic of conversation all day long is the status of the road . . .

Older volunteers leave and newer ones arrive. The volunteer who lives a few hours east of me requests that a new volunteer replace him when he’s gone. I ask why, since he spent his two years struggling to get any projects going. His answer is that he wants his host family to keep receiving the rent money (“They
need
that income,” he says). A new volunteer eventually arrives in that site and lives . . . in a different house . . .

Shortly thereafter, I take steps to make sure the Peace Corps does
not
put any new volunteers in my site unless there is a foundation or group that specifically has a job for them to do . . .

And here are more emails and texts from Winkler making random threats of Administrative Separation for offenses like not properly texting him our whereabouts . . .

Here I am playing in Zumbi’s municipal basketball league (and eventually letting the municipality make false worker documents for me so I can be on their all-star team and compete against other teams around the province). Zumbi’s gym is actually an impressive structure, with a full-sized court and seating room for a few hundred, all covered by a tin roof. I am a head taller than everyone else on the court and after just one game in the league, I feel like Kobe Bryant—I
am
Kobe Bryant. Every time I touch the ball I know I will score. It’s a marvelous feeling. Players on other teams try tackling me and stage complaints to the referees that I—who haven’t played organized basketball since the seventh grade—am “too good” and that it’s “unfair.” Ecuadorian basketball brings out the worst in all of us, including me. I eventually am a magnet for technical fouls when I decide to point out to the ref that the other team jumping on my back and trying to trip me are, by any standard definition, fouls. When the ref is unmoved by my complaints, I swear in English, prompting more technical fouls and causing all my teammates to harass the ref for the rest of the game with, “Oh, smart guy here thinks he speaks English now. Ha!” My basketball career in Ecuador ends when I sprain my ankle in the opening minutes of the municipal league’s championship game. With the entire town watching, I play through it, we lose by one point, and the ankle bothers me for the next seven months . . .

In October 2009 the indigenous groups go on strike to protest new laws that, among other things, would extract more water and minerals and petroleum from the Amazonian provinces. They block major roads with boulders and burning tires, effectively paralyzing the country for about a week. In jungle towns to the north of me, skirmishes break out between Shuar political leaders and the military, resulting in deaths. The Peace Corps puts volunteers on Stand Fast, meaning we can’t leave our sites until further notice. (Other times we’d been put on Stand Fast included national Election Day and a short period of time months earlier when the swine flu hysteria first hit.) During this Stand Fast, one volunteer I don’t know very well sends a text message to his friend saying that they will leave their sites, meet up in a big city nearby, and—using some crude terms to describe a vagina—will be, um, meeting females. But he doesn’t send it to his friend; he sends it to the Peace Corps country director, whose cell phone number was apparently listed too close to his friend’s name in his contacts list. The volunteer is not a member of Peace Corps Ecuador much longer . . .

Near the end of the year, our country director resigns. In addition to making the correct decision to pull me out of La Segua before things got worse, she was kind and smart and professional. A lot of other volunteers had a bizarre distrust of her because she herself had never been a volunteer. After she leaves, others in the Quito office label her a dictator. But I liked her. Two interim directors follow before our new country director arrives . . .

CHAPTER
29

O
ver the Halloween weekend, three other volunteers and I traveled north to Cuenca. We left our sites on a Thursday afternoon. Our plan was to wake up Friday at another volunteer’s house located in the mountains outside the city and do San Pedro, a cactus that grows in the northern Andes and contains the psychedelic chemical mescaline. On Saturday, we would head back down into Cuenca to celebrate Halloween with dozens of other volunteers in the city.

The trip got off to a strange start. As I got on the bus at the Loja station, I was pickpocketed. In all my previous travels, the closest I’d come to being hurt or robbed in any way involved getting chased down a street by a gang of transvestites in a bad part of Buenos Aires at 5 a.m.

This was the first time anyone had ever stolen from me.

After the initial flush of panic and frustration over the violation, I realized this was likely the least successful larceny operation in modern history: Not only was my cell phone in the opposite pocket, untouched, but my ATM card was also safe and sound in another pocket. A hundred dollars in cash was stuffed in my shoe. My important documents were hidden away in other secure locations. All that was gone was my wallet, which had $1.60 and an expired credit card in it. But the best part was that the stolen wallet had Che Guevara’s famous image emblazoned on the front (because whoever designed it understood marketing but not irony).

We got to the volunteer’s house outside Cuenca after nightfall. She was there with another friend. The house sat on a giant piece of property that was fenced in toward the street and opened up to a view of a giant sweeping valley out back. The next day we prepared the San Pedro. First we had to peel the cactus and take out the pulp that was closest to the outer skin. When we skinned enough of it, we sat around for hours, waiting for the cactus parts to boil down into a putrid black tea. All six of us were going to do it. I hardly knew any of them; they were volunteers who’d been in Ecuador longer than I had and treated me the way high school seniors treat freshmen.

The first time I did San Pedro was two and a half years before, outside Cuzco. It was the most beautiful experience of my life. And it had been a year and a half since I’d eaten psilocybin mushrooms with my two best friends from college and lain on our living room floor thinking I had figured out the purpose of life.

Now I was nervous.

We drank the awful tasting tea around 4:30 p.m.

An hour later I felt it.

Chills set in. I wrapped myself in a large blanket and sat outside staring off over the valley. The last rays of light pierced through the clouds and glowed orange and red out over the butte. Earlier in the day the power had gone out in the area, so the valley quickly darkened as the sun set.

I found scrap wood and built a fire. I watched the flames alone. Then four of the others came over giggling like hyenas. I returned to my chair and stared out across the valley for a bit. I put on my iPod and played Ennio Morricone’s theme to
Once Upon a Time in the West
. It was around eight o’clock and the sky was dark purple.

The pure pitched voice sang in my ears. Clouds rolled over. I was cold but I inhaled and a blissful warmth filled my lungs and torso. Ahhhhhhhhh. As the song reached a crescendo, the electricity came back on, illuminating tiny sparkles across the valley in a wave that seemed nothing short of miraculous. It nearly brought tears to my eyes; I applauded and laughed hysterically. The others asked what was happening. I explained. They stayed around the fire I’d built making stupid jokes. When they came over to sit by me, I felt claustrophobic.

HERE, TONIGHT, I LOOK AROUND
at the five other people and there is no common wavelength. First, see them dancing around the fire making comments like, “Dude, bro, I’m tripping
balls
.” See them gyrate and give high-fives because of a hysterical burp. Or make potty jokes and erupt into tears-in-the-eyes laughter. Or insist on watching a bootlegged DVD of
America’s Funniest Home Videos
and make comments like, “Dude, that’s the most awesome pet cat I’ve ever seen.”

And then comes the most terrifying, soul-scratching feeling of them all (as the chemicals slip deeper into my bodily tissues): that the people I have chosen to share this mind-altering psychedelic occasion with are . . . not funny.

So do I sit and close my eyes and ponder space and the incomprehensible beauty of life and soak it all in?

No. I freak out.

I get up to take a walk around the property. I get some water and come back.

It doesn’t feel right.

I go get some more water.

It still doesn’t feel right.

I go back inside the house where the others are now lying down.

“I’m not doing too well,” I say.

No answers.

“I mean really, I’m just all of a sudden having a bad time here,” I say. They all stare at me with dark, judging eyes.

“What do you want us to do?” one of them says, his words spilling out all at once.

“I don’t know. I think I just need some comfort. I’m going to lie down.”

The one who kept announcing earlier that he was “tripping balls” stands up and looks at me for a second. “Dude,” he says, “just chill out. We’re all tripping out of our minds too. Just . . . whatever.”

Everyone laughs. “Yeahhh, man,” a couple of them say. “Whatever.”

“Yeah.”

“Dude.”

I lie down by a floor heater and stare up at the ceiling and the clock on the wall.

At 9:15, the true terror sets in. It is true, Satan-scratching-at-your-doorstep fury—a spiral of paranoia.

You’re losing your mind
.

The woman whose house we were in, Katie, offers me milk. She is, and always was, kind.

“This is going to end sometime, right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You’ll be fine.”

“I think I just have to remind myself that,” I said. “Ehhhhhh Ahhhhhhh. Oh fuck.” The noise lurches uncontrollably from somewhere deep in my chest.

I go outdoors and puke. I try to puke everything that’s in my belly, even the bile. The vomit piles up next to the woodpile by the tool shed. I have to pee, so I do that too—on top of the pile of vomit. I venture back indoors and lie down by the heater. Something evil still scratches away at me.

My torso is in pain, like all the pain I’ve ever felt in my life is clawing to get out of there. The terror and dread come on heavy like another growl.

I’m not coming out of this. Losing things. No comfort
.

I close my eyes and a giant snake leaps toward me. Its skin is shiny and metallic and all different colors. It tries to swallow me whole. I tell it no, with an evil giggle.

Oh god, what a mistake
.

“I’ll get through this,” I say out loud.

Then I whisper under my breath, “I’m here now.” I close my eyes and open them again.

Something screams at me,
why do you feel this way, huh
. There are no question marks. These are not questions.

Like vrooooooooooommmmmm powwwwwwwwwwww, there’s a beast escaping from my stomach. I growl and let it out.
That giant scary serpent better never come back, I’ll make sure of it
.

I want to cry, thinking it’s a way of getting rid of the demon.

What a pussy
.

“Ooohhhahahhaeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhggrrrrrrrrrr.” A growl comes out of me again.

YOU STOP IT
.

You’re a monster
.

People doubting me. People laughing at me. No one gets it. Space travel. Bicycle rides.

I am here now. This will pass. It’s 9:35. This will pass. I am Grigs. This is me, this will pass. I will be all better in a few hours. Don’t panic. Stay calm
.
I will
NOT
fucking panic. There is no panicking here. No panicking!

Heart leaping from my chest. Pain coming from everywhere.

While this pain is making its way out, I may as well let it all out.

I announce that the pain in my nuts is going away forever. (Not, as it turns out, true.) Another howl through the night and I’m dripping in sweat.

Just wish I had someone here who understands me. Someone I love. Someone who loves me. Someone who doesn’t doubt me. Someone to hold me
.

WHAT ARE YOU SCARED OF? ARE YOU SCARED IT’S NEVER GOING TO END?

Please, please,
PLEASE
. Go away
.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?

I’m just living. Growing. Leave me alone
.

NOBODY LOVES YOU.

You are losing your mind
.

YOU ARE LOSING YOUR MIND.

I am losing my mind
.

My family loves me, I’m sure of it. This will pass and I’ll look back on this and be proud of myself that I climbed out of this darkness
.

AT SIXTEEN YOU BEGAN BEING DEPRESSED. HOW PATHETIC. NOW YOU’RE TWENTY-THREE. TIME TO GROW UP.

Time to grow up
.

TIME TO GROW UP.

I’m sorry. I’m trying
.

YOU FEEL LIKE A BLACK SHEEP, DON’T YOU.

None of that’s real. All stuff made up in my head. Somewhere else
.

“Yeeeeeeeeeooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww. Ahhhhhhhhh.”

I remember the time I lost a small red shovel in the ocean and the surf carried it away. I remember Topanga. I remember running around dressed like an Indian. I remember my first pet dog.

I feel my life and it feels like a tin can being scraped across the sidewalk. The soul is drifting farther and farther away and getting scratched more across the pavement. And then . . .

Skiing in the pure silence. Christmas mornings. Your grandmother reading everything you ever wrote and saying she loved it and thinking you had talent. All your doggies cuddling with you on the couch. Catch-22. Elephants. Bulls. Penguins. The end of the world—no, the tip of the continent. Argentina. You felt at home in Buenos Aires. You felt connected. You remember waking up in the hospital with your mom by your side holding your hand and her looking very sad. Getting wheeled down the hospital hallway. The kid in the next room having seizures. A friend bringing you a big stuffed cow. You’ve got the scars all over you. You’re proud of them, aren’t you. You’d be nothing without them. Being underwater. Swimming out at the golf club in the California desert. Climbing Longs Peak. Lewis and Clark expedition. Monticello. You remember when you were little, lying there in the top bunk during the earthquake. The fires. The mudslides. Rainy days when you were a kid. A house burns down. Visiting the Middle East with your brother. A sandstorm. North Carolina. Barbeques. Northern Michigan in the summer. Making mistakes with people’s hearts. Shooting a shotgun and feeling the strange jolt. First kiss. First real kiss. First fuck. First real fuck. Going back and doing things over. Favorite colors. Pirates off the coast of Mexico. Mayan ruins. The dream when you were little about Captain Hook taking you away in a wheel barrow. Blood streaming down your arm. Being a scapegoat. Being the class clown. Everyone laughing at you. People not forgiving you. People blaming you. All the women you’ve ever had sex with.

You remember driving to Graceland. Graceland. You remember the wind blowing through the windows between Nashville and Memphis. Graceland. You remember Sun Studios. Graceland. You remember Tupelo and Birmingham. Graceland. You remember the jungle room. Yes: Graceland.

You remember the English professor in college who stood in front of your class in a tweed jacket and said, “Someday you’ll look yourself in the mirror and realize that one day you’re going to die. And it’s a strange feeling.”

You remember talking to your friend about Hemingway and how he said, “I challenge you to find one story of his that isn’t about death.” And you keep on looking
.

The spiral of terror comes and goes.

Oh man oh man, oh my, don’t lose your fucking mind. You’re smarter than this. Don’t lose it all.

Landslides of thought.

Take a deep breath and it swells the belly full. Feels good. Exhale and rub like a satisfied bear
.

YOU’RE BITTER, AREN’T YOU.
It rasps at me.

I’m so sorry. Is this ruining my brain? No, I’ll be back. This is scary
.

I get inside a sleeping bag that Katie lent me for the night. It’s warm in there. I love that warmth. Second best thing next to comfort—the warmth.

I can’t find any comfort with these people here. I’ve got to get it on my own
. A beast of pain leaves my torso in an outward rushing funnel of bad energy.

Take the bad energy and turn it into good. Do it, now. Flip it upside down like a giant pendulum swinging vertically. Flip it.
That’s
what you’re supposed to do
.

I yell more and announce that I’m getting rid of the pain. I am pushing the pain out of my nuts forever. The pain doesn’t stand a chance. None of it. The tears still won’t come.