Chapter 16: That Indigenous Drunk

I’m sitting in a room with 6 beds and no windows, dressed in a fur coat that goes well passed my thighs. It’s been a while since I’ve been this high. My mouth is open as if to speak but I’m about to sing. There’s two Uruguayans playing ukuleles and I am telling the story of a loss of love, my melody is high and the boys begin to sing along with me, “Please stranger won’t you hold me” Over and over again goes the chorus “Whoah I’m so lonely.” Chris is beside me encouraging me to never stop. Someone has their arm around me and it feels good, like home in a world away. I may have gotten cut off for spitting on a guinea pig only a few hours before and though I’ll never know why I did it, right now I’m feeling pretty fucking good. Welcome to Lima. To the catacombs of 20,000 bones and Presidential Palaces where you come-to with a distant friend of your grandmothers at 8 in the morning. It’s one thing to know Saint Francis licked the wounds of the sick, it’s another to see it depicted in one of the most gruesome and eloquent paintings you’ve ever laid your molly-balls on. When life becomes literal it looses its possibilities. I prefer it slathered in mystery, after all a senior detective needs a job. Saint Francis take your tongue away, I am better than I used to be. Interpret me well.

For ten Soles I grab a plate of civeche and a beer, sit out overlooking the jagged ocean cliffs that wall this city in and think about a snake I saw once when I was young. I get invited to a boxing match by a ring-girl and her sister, its cold out and I know those punches sting a little worse. I’ve felt em before. The doctor says my rash and sleepless nights are due to a fungal infection. Pour some whiskey on it and take it better places to eat and it will probably go away. I raise it one and take the bus out of town.

Tuk-Tuk drivers hide behind windshields so covered in Jesus decals they need not see, only the lord to guide them as they careen down these thin-lipped streets like stray bullets and three legged dogs. Roads covered in bananas and grain. Streets with no lining tell you to follow your heart. Don’t they know I have two. Huaraz sits her ass just above 10,000 feet and I am supposed to wait a day to acclimate to the altitude. The high Andes surround me and loom down with avalanches for promises like love letters. They’ve wiped this city out before, July of 1941, May of 1970. Not a single building remains from its past. 93 survivors lived to know what it felt like as they clamored to high ground and a sea of snow and boulder crushed 70,000 of their countrymen, somewhere in the states “Let It Be” by The Beatles was playing while this was happening. That’s just life.

I don’t wait to acclimate. I get off the bus and begin to run to the outskirts of the city, I climb over the walls, scramble up the hill, pull myself over the cliff and bury my face in the cross that overlooks all the girls who sleep here and those who go hungry in the streets at night. Just watches them. If I can breathe here I can breathe anywhere in the world. That thought comforts me.

I hiked 10 kilometers that day, the next me and Ben did 14, and the third we did 18. At almost 16,000 feet I found myself looking out over the top of the world, amongst lagoons and glaciers older than all my blood, all my lines. The sun sears you here. The people speak an ancient Andean language called Kichwa, I don’t speak much at all anymore. Against the advice of a local woman we head into the ghetto to help them celebrate a local Catholic holiday. 500 of the drunkest people I have ever seen surround us, the only two white people here. We are treated with all the respect a spectacle can expect to get. Indigenous drunk is just a different kind. You can see it in the tear filled regretful eyes of men who were born to know great secrets but have been cut in half by liquor induced amnesia and the hardest times. They got the roughest hands. Somebody turns his fingers into a gun and puts it to my head telling me he has spent time in hell and that he is still there. Another cries to Ben about his dead godfather. A third kisses me on the neck. A 17 piece peruvian brass band is the soundtrack to that South American affection that reminds me of all my close friends.

This week we go ice-climbing, hiking, camping. We promise each other always to fight back to back. I’ll be on Machu Picchu for my birthday. Corey and Chad will be here. I’ll be in Argentina for Christmas and maybe London for the New Year.

 I’ve been bitten by snakes and attacked by monkeys with sticks, in my life I’ve climbed the Andes and crossed the Amazon. Put out 4 records and played shows with my favorite bands. I sang a song that made a grown man cry and rode on a boat that carried the dead. I’ve wrecked motorcycles just because I knew how much they loved me and left women for less, but never in my life have I been in a place like this, feeling this way.