Sunday, October 30, 2011

Chapter 17: The End Of The Thick As We Know It.


As the 6 of us began our one-hour ascent to The Temple of the Moon no one spoke. A fevered storm had filled the night. It was Dios De La Muerte and lightning flashed so bright as to momentarily blind and then thunder would roll in minutes later, boom and echo for what seemed like an eternity. Little did I know I would enter there myself. 
Me, Ben, Chad, Mariana, Alej, and Julianno (our shaman), swept forward with our heads bent just above the neck, so as to stay the wind but keep the sight. We passed no other people on this path but directly below us sat the ceremonial pits and stones where the Incans would sacrifice and toss their human offerings. In front of us was where they would bury their own and worship the moon.
We were already soaked fifteen minutes in, as we slipped and wrestled with the mud and growing streams. My pants weighed heavy with water and my poncho did little to keep the feeling that this was fucking crazy off my back.
Once inside the cave we gathered stones to sit and unpacked our supplies for the night, ours consisting of blankets, water, and coca leaves. The Shamans of fur, tobacco, perfumes, tinctures, ayahuasca, rattles, and a stick. He spoke in only Spanish and maybe Quechqua, but had assured me once the medicine took hold I would need not for understanding.
The ceremony began with prayers and offerings, he put some kind of magical seal over the cave entrance to protect us, and we began in the dark with only the smoldering ash of incense burning. He shook, pounded, mixed the ayahuasca in a cup and passed it first to Ben (which worried me because I was told by a guide in the Amazon that the Shaman should always drink it first), then he refilled it and passed it to me, around the circle it went, until finally the Shaman poured for himself a large pull. Slowly and unsteadily I had drank. Fear is what I felt and that I was stupid for feeling it because maybe this was all bullshit.
For the first 20 minutes I sat with my eyes closed and could see nothing but blackness, did I have no soul, no questions? No vision at all I wondered? What could be worse? A growing sense of unease and annoyance began to grow in me, it was freezing in this cave and silent. 
Then he began to chant, I started to feel a heat first in my legs and then wherever he directed it until my whole body was warm. I started to feel very light and displaced in my seat. Slowly a serpent started to form behind him and I leaned closer to rub my eyes disbelieving and see it, not realizing that now I was way to close to him and knocking something over. The sudden clash of realities immediately made me sick and I went outside to vomit blackness upon blackness.
 Out of the cave the world looked wilted and winded and changing like it was inhaling and exhaling. Though I could tell it was raining I couldn’t tell it was different from the trees behind it. Slowly like a newborn trying to walk I made my way back into the cave and tried to find my spot amongst them again, though this time it seemed much lower down and Ben towered above me stoically  while Mariana had completely disappeared into some kind of dark recess right in front of me. The cave had quadrupled in size. 
I began to swoon and had to lay back from the Shaman as he chanted and spoke, then I realized by doing this I was moving away from the ceremony and that without it I would be truly lost, possibly forever. I was already tumbling thru geometric patterns and small Abysses. i had entered a long hallway with many keys and doors and at the end had chose to come back to my Shaman. As I leaned up to see him he turned first into a bear and then into a statue and then into all of his ancestors flickering dead on his face at once. The walls behind him continued to produce streams of serpents and bulges. 
Every question I asked of him he answered simultaneously with the twists of the words in his song and non-verbal communications. Everything he spoke of appeared, he told me to taste sweet and I did. He led me up into the sun and we peeled back layers of deep blue metallic inscriptions and crawled inside. Me and Ben began to speak telepathically. The Shaman lead us up and across the entire universe and back. I understood every word of Spanish he said without a single fault. At some point I receded into myself and deep into the past/future where alternate versions of me each came one by one and offered what gifts they had to give. The Shaman said “look how quickly we can go from one world to the other, its right here, all existing at once.” It was true in a span of less than then first hour I was watching with no doubt, one foot in front of me what was a bear with the face of a million dead leading me into the craziest most amazing thing I have ever experienced in my life. He spit mouthfuls of perfume with his lips directly on our heads. Any worry I had he immediately addressed with the boom of his stick or by simply leading me across a dimension where that worry no longer was relevant. The entire time I experienced the most extreme Deja-Vu. The ceremony winded out as if from a tunnel, he slowly took form again by smoking a big jungle tobacco cigarette and letting me see the light on his face as he flickered back and forth between all the shapes and then passing me a cigarette allowed me to do the same as I went thru all of my past lives and incarnations.
He said I didn’t have to remember what had happened or what I had learned, my soul knew it now and carried it with me as it always had. I was one step closer to the beautiful flight back of true death…and when I needed more I could return to this source and drink again of the medicine until someday I could go home. He would stay with me always as my brother and from my brothers I could drink as well as they would drink from me. 
In my life I have never experienced anything like this, shape shifting, ESP, thought-control, out of body, projection, transcendence, universe, time-travel. I know that these are just the names we have to put to things when the veil becomes lifted and we see that all things are a single unit existing simultaneously, but holy fuck.
The walk back into Cusco seemed perfect with time to adjust as eventually the city lights appeared below us and fireworks lit the sky while they celebrated The Day of the Dead. We had lived it a million times. We clasped each other and parted ways upon entering the city.
That night I dreamed and left my body many times again as I slept next to a beautiful Brazilian woman who had led me here to all of this, and though after a week together the thought that she was leaving back to Brazil in the morning welled me up,  I know now that The Thick is as much about beauty and true gifts as it is about heartache and fistfights. We can use the bad in us to fight for what is true in us. I will always be a little bit of a hooligan and a roughneck but I have other masks that fit me better nowadays, I am a lover and a leader too.
Yes we climbed Wannu and Macchu Picchu, sand-boarded the immense dunes of Wachachina, Sailed out to see sea-lions fight on the Ballestas Islands with TV star captain look-alikes, we went to Catholic-Mass drunk with no sleep in the golden capital cathedrals of Lima, fell asleep on dance floors that smelled of death, we ate beef hearts and gambled in the cities with all the earthquakes. Corey was here and gone, Chad came down and imported a crazy white girl, and Ben is shacked up with Elizabeth who I love in another hotel somewhere. Me, I’m just laying here with the smell still on me waiting for the night-bus out of this city, south to Lake Titicaca, signing out from the end of The Thick as we know it. 

Saturday, October 1, 2011

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.