23 May

2nd-World Evangelists In Green Suits

Posted by calebwhitaker in characters, Iquitos. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I have an outdoor office where I like to sit and work at the computer. It’s a nearly flawless location, breezy and sunlit and right by the garden, but it’s not perfect. There is a bit of noise coming from a second-floor window a few doors down. I didn’t think much of it at first, but as the days and weeks passed, I listened to this noise throughout the day, and concluded finally that it wasn’t going to go away. It sounded like people holding some kind of church revival meeting up there. There was something a little funny about the whole vibe—but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, so I decided to investigate.

The company that has rented the building down the street is a sales training organization. There is no sign out front, but the employees all dress formally every day—the men wear green polyester suits with a white starched shirt, and the women wear green polyester sport coats with matching skirts, and nylons with high heeled black pumps polished to a blinding shine. They have not a hair out of place, these people. Which is highly unusual for Iquitos, which is more of a t-shirt and flip flop kind of town.

The formal dress code told me that these people wish to project an image of prosperity, professionalism and financial success. What they do is recruit Peruvians who are looking for honest work, and train them to be salesmen. Those people are also trained to bring in new recruits, to start the process all over again. But it is so much more than that. When I asked the company what kind of business it was, they replied that they are an economic and lifestyle development training organization. They teach people how to get excited about their careers, and in doing so feel good about themselves–how to be motivated, confident, and full of self-esteem. They teach them to believe in themselves, and then get out there and sell, sell, sell.

The basic format might remind you of a Tony Robbins seminar. Except that this is the developing world, and their methods have an equivalent level of sophistication. How can I make that sort of judgment? I’ll tell you.

I worked in a hard-core, 100% commission sales environment for five years. I was an executive recruiter in the construction industry. It was a classier version of Glengarry Glen Ross. I know what it is like to make cold calls all day long, to cultivate long-term business relationships, to be self-motivated, and more importantly to be money-motivated. The people I worked with were very highly motivated on both counts, and while the founder/CEO of the business was an evangelical Christian, he was the best kind of evangelical. He wanted to use his wealth to help other people. He had compassion, and he practiced it in real life. OK, there were Bible study groups every Wednesday in the company conference room, for example, but they were also attended by non-Christians, non-denominationals such as myself and even some of the Jews who worked there. It didn’t hurt that the half-hour lecture on scripture was followed by a nice catered lunch, paid for by the boss. For me it was a bit like sitting through a time-share presentation in order to get the free meal.

It was always interesting to me that the most successful salesmen in our company, (which was in fact the largest and most profitable in the country in its industry) were evangelical Christians. With a handful of exceptions, the true believers tended to be the best and most natural at the whole business of sales, and I believe this is true for a very simple reason.  They had total faith in the product they were selling. They had complete belief in what they sold, and that confidence projected across the telephone to everyone they talked to, client and candidate alike. They were tireless workers, non-drinkers and smokers for the most part, and they were focused on the goal like you wouldn’t believe. Sales and evangelizing are really two sides of the same coin, if you really look at it. Every priest and monk and man of the cloth who ever ventured out to distant lands, preaching the message of the Good Book, had to be a good salesman in order to win converts. And in the sales industry, as in the religion business, confidence in your product is everything– winning confidence is the same as winning converts.

I say all this with respect. Some of these people that I worked with in the headhunting business remain my good friends. I loved my boss, he was the best one I ever had. Some of the recruiters in my company consistently earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and they deserved it—it’s very hard work. It’s just an interesting observation, is all, that sales is evangelizing and evangelizing is sales.  All that’s different is what’s being sold.

I share all of that so you can appreciate my unique perspective on the neighbors, who hold sales training ‘classes’-slash-lifestyle development seminars every single day. Sometimes they go on for hours. I’ve listened to enough of them that I now know the entire script.  They start by chanting a little mantra-like thing that is basically a commitment of their seriousness to the cause. They actually chant words over and over in a monotone during this part, usually ‘trabajo trabajo trabajo trabajo’ or ‘dinero dinero dinero dinero.’ Work and Money. Repeat as necessary. Then there’s a series of lectures, in which the speakers often get worked up to a fever pitch of yelling and preaching with intense urgency. Then more chanting, then more talking, sometimes with a soundtrack of eighties power ballads playing in the background.  They break up the preaching with a round of games, some sing-a-longs, and then some call-and-response type cheerleading (a lot of it actually) where the intent is to get everybody whipped up into a big froth of entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and it always works.

After that, the big boss comes in and delivers the main sermon. He’s up there with the microphone on the PA system, and he’s talking fast, using the dry-erase marker on the board to lay out all the math, and he’s wheeling and dealing, and he’s talking fast in cascades of rhythmic cadences, and he’s making true believers out of everybody. The numbers don’t lie. You too can be rich, you too can drive a shiny new motorbike and wear green polyester suits in the midday sun. Then the big boss hands it back over to the emcee, and they finish by playing the theme from “Rocky” over the PA system and sending everybody off to go knock on doors in a flush of enthusiasm and confidence.

My friend La Gringa, who has lived in Iquitos for ten years, once made an observation about Peruvians here that has proved unfailingly accurate. She says that, whenever you are in the middle of a business deal or wherever money is being exchanged between two parties, you know you’re being lied to when you ask for an explanation and they start to talk fast. They feel the need to over-explain themselves, and so give themselves away. I’ve tested this many times, and it’s never wrong. When they start talking fast, you’re probably getting scammed.

So anyway, the big boss is up there sermonizing with his hair gel and starched collar, and he’s talking fast– really fast. He’s breaking it all down by the numbers, just how much each person needs to sell in order to make good money, as well as tips and tricks for selling to people that aren’t motivated to buy, and also (this is key) how to recruit other people to the cause along the way. He’s showing them that, if they bring other people on board, and those they recruited become successful salesman, then they will actually earn a cut of the other person’s sales!

Does that sound familiar? It should, it’s called a Ponzi scheme, or a pyramid scheme.  Pyramid schemes are as common as greed, although many times they’re disguised as something else. Let it not be said that all pyramid schemes in Iquitos are doomed to failure, as this is one that seems to be doing very well indeed! What really fascinates me about the salesmen next door is that they are this bizarre hybrid between a Tony Robbins-style motivational program, an Amway or Avon type pyramid scheme in which products are sold door-to-door, and a cult.  But nowhere in this entire script is God or Jesus mentioned. No, instead, what they are explicitly worshipping is money! And in that, I have to grant that they at least have the courage of their convictions.

The vibe you get from this place reminds me a lot of the small-town country evangelical churches that were everywhere when I was growing up. But instead of preparing people for the afterlife, they’re running a secular seminary, training their acolytes to go out and sell as much as they can in the here and now. And what, you might be wondering, is this product that needs so much motivation, training, and instruction in enthusiasm in order to sell?

In truth, it could be anything, really. Just as the fruit that Eve gave Adam could’ve been a pear or a peach instead of an apple. It’s not the object itself that matters, it’s the context in which it’s presented. Temptation has a thousand faces, it’s all in how badly they make you want it. In this case, the company is selling a line of women’s beauty products, including perfume and skin and facial creams. All of it made in Lima, where the business is registered. I know this because, after taking an interest in their business model, I did a little internet research to fill in the missing pieces.

The only problem I really have with these people (besides the noise) is that they are manipulating all those upwardly-mobile-inspired Peruvians into believing something which is basically an illusion. They are selling a lifestyle to them, saying, ‘look at me, I’m wearing this green polyester suit in the blazing tropical sun, and see how shiny my shoes are? I must be very successful! Don’t you want what I have?”

They’re preying on the enthusiasm of people, some of whom I’d venture to dare grew up going to an evangelical church (an introduced species similar to other exotic invasives that have long been popular here) and who likely aren’t much appreciating the substantive differences between the style and subject of their worship. The format, after all, is almost identical, and I really do wonder whether that is more accidental or intentional.

So after being properly taught to worship wealth and prosperity by their handlers, the congregation are sent forth door-to-door to peddle perfume and facial cream to locals out in the neighborhoods who probably don’t want or need it. I feel for these people, the congregation I mean, because they are being manipulated. As new recruits, if they don’t make their minimum quota for the month, they get nothing. But their bosses above them still get their commission.

And that kind of sucks. I know it well because I was once a fledgling salesman myself. And I feel that most of the people up there on the second floor, sitting for two hours in front of the dry-erase board going through their motivational training, would be better off getting an actual job. Instead of getting involved in all this sales programming propaganda cult nonsense and paying—yes, actually paying out of their own pockets!—to attend classes every week.  But then, it’s a lot harder to leave a cult than it is to join one.

And that’s what brings me to the punchline, the incident that made me realize I could finally laugh about it instead of just complaining. Corrina and I recently went to talk to the sales-cult people directly, and Corrina very diplomatically asked them to close the windows and turn down their PA system during their revivals (classes).  They agreed, but then did nothing about it. So we went around and talked to all the neighbors. And what do you know—all the neighbors were sick of the noise just as much as we were! Let me tell you, that’s saying something. Peruvians have no concept of noise pollution, they do not care if other people make noise, and half the time they don’t even notice. But the accountant at the office next door said they’d been to the police, only to discover that this group had legal permission to do what they were doing. Corrina got everyone’s names and vowed to carry on the paperwork fight with the Fiscal, a government agency where you can lodge complaints, even though we already know very well that trying to use the legal system to effect change here in Peru is a symbolic gesture and nothing more.

And so, this morning, when the big boss came up and took the microphone for the morning’s sermon, I just decided that I’d had enough. I got the ladder from the back and propped it up against the wall. I climbed up until I was at eye level with the open window, perhaps thirty feet away, and I started yelling at them in Spanish, “Attention, sales group! You are too loud! Please close the window! I can’t listen to this anymore, close the window please!” But the boss carried on oblivious, or else he was ignoring me. I yelled at them again, very loudly. Yes, there was no question now, they were ignoring me. I left the ladder up, and went down the street to check the price of a megaphone at the pawn shops around the corner. A hundred soles—about thirty five bucks—and I could take the audio assault to a level that would get their attention. And in that moment I realized that I did in fact know enough about their organization to make fun of them and embarrass them in front of their students/clients/congregation. Tempting as it was, I did not buy the megaphone. Instead, I went back to cool off and think about it. Because neighbors have to find a way to work it out, after all, and I am not planning on going anywhere.

Then my business partner came home. The Brasilero had long lost patience with these people, and he tends to be very much more direct than I am in these kinds of matters. I told him why the ladder was against the wall, and his reaction was to yell at them also, even louder than I had, but he was ignored in turn. So he bent down to search the garden for rocks. He found a small one and threw it over the wall, aiming for the tin roof. It missed, and went into the neighbor’s garden.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I said.

“Just to get their attention. I need a bigger rock,” he said.

He found a good size chunk of concrete and hurled it high into the air. It landed right on the roof, smack! That got their attention. The Brasilero pointed at them and yelled, “Hey, yes, you see me now? That was me that threw that! You are making too much noise, as always! Close the window, dammit!”

And what do you know, they closed the window. And they kept I closed for the rest of the day, and the noise level was much better. Almost acceptable, even.

I suppose the lesson here is that you can forget about diplomacy or the legal system if you have a dispute here in this little corner of the developing world. Work it out yourself, in whatever way works best; throw rocks if you must. For us, throwing rocks did in fact accomplish more than a thousand pleading words or threats. And we may still have to upgrade to megaphones, if the problem persists. But I now feel ready for something like that.

13 May

For Mother’s Day

Posted by calebwhitaker in Poem for the day, Sundays. Tagged: .

For Mother’s Day

 

For Mother’s Day this year, Mom, I’m sending you a list

Of some of the ways I’m grateful to you, I know I’ve missed

A lot but here’s a few things that come to mind.

 

Mom, you’re the best. I don’t say it often enough

But I feel lucky in the lottery of life to be born

To such a kind and caring mother. I appreciate so much

 

That you gave all your time and energy to raising us.

I still remember the time, in 1st grade, when the janitor

Made me clean up a mess I hadn’t made, you emptied a coke in the hall

 

In protest, so he would have to clean up a mess he hadn’t made as well.

And you were a teacher at the school! You taught me how to fight

against injustice and stand up for what you know is right.

 

When we moved to Little Rock, and I was an outsider suddenly,

You went undercover at the public pool to fight

The bullies who were trying to steal my bike.

 

They figured out you were my mom, but after that they let me be.

You taught me that the bump on my ear was where the angel

Kissed me, a thing to take pride in and nothing shameful.

 

All of us have something like that, that keeps us from perfection.

And kids can be horrible. You taught me not to be. Do unto others,

No exceptions, that was the extent of my Christian indoctrination.

 

And it’s the heart of the whole movement, it seems to me.

So thank you for your wisdom, in limiting it the essence of the thing.

Thanks for naturally being such a good human being.

 

You’re the kind of person Christians say everyone should try to be,

And you don’t even go to church. You’re totally under the radar.

You don’t advertise it. But you always made me do the right thing.

 

When you discovered the pilfered traffic cones and garden gnomes

In my closet, when I was in high school, you hauled them down

To the police station, to report stolen property–to the great delight

 

Of the cops! When I got busted for speeding, and the wise old traffic cop

Gave me a choice– a speeding ticket, or being escorted home to be

turned over to you– you demanded that he issue me

 

A ticket. The expression on that cop’s face. He thought

He was giving me a break! He barely got

Away without you forcing him to write me up!

 

You were always there, for every soccer match, cheering equally

Through failure and through victory,

Giving me the support to be the best I could.

 

Thank for all that guidance through my childhood–

You can do anything to which you put your mind,

You said to me, from the earliest time

 

That I could understand, and it is with me to this day,

And I teach it to my own son now, disguised as child’s play.

Now you’ve lived to see your own kids grown

 

And become parents of their own, the whole thing starts again.

You taught me through your own example that trying to be kind

Is its own reward, so I will try to do the same for mine.

25 Apr

My Side Of The Jungle

Posted by calebwhitaker in characters, Iquitos. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by “My Side Of The Mountain,” the award-winning 1959 book by Jean Craighead George. It’s the story of Sam Gribley, a twelve-year-old boy who runs away from his family’s New York City apartment to survive in the wilderness of the Catskills. He faces many challenges along the way, and the book is filled with dozens of small details on how Sam manages to survive. From making his own fishhooks, to identifying and gathering edible plants, to capturing and taming a falcon, his greatest struggle turns out to be learning how to reconcile a life of freedom in nature’s solitude with a desire to also live among the companionship of family and friends.

When I visited Otorongo Lodge, the pristine Amazon jungle retreat built and managed by Anthony Giardenelli and his wife Ivy, I felt like I was back in that story again. Many twelve-year old boys, myself included, daydreamed about running off to the wilds and carving out a life of substance and meaning, in tune with Nature and its rhythms. Well, Anthony actually did it. And he’s not burdened by Sam Gribley’s dilemma either, because his wife, who is from Iquitos, loves spending time at the lodge as much as he does.

Built from scratch over nearly seven years, Otorongo is set back from the Amazon on the banks of the Oran river, just above the town of the same name. It is two hours by speedboat and a world away from the city. If Iquitos is the edge of the frontier, Otorongo is a way to find what lies beyond it– a forward operating base for close encounters with all kinds of wildlife.  “Otorongo” means jaguar in Spanish, and there have been jaguars detected (but not seen) close to the lodge. Seeing a jaguar in the wild is like the holy grail of all jungle tourism, but they are the ninjas of their native habitat, almost never seen in the wild. Just knowing they’re out there is enough for most people.

Tuning into the wildlife is what Otorongo is all about. Anthony’s knowledge of the plants and animals of the Amazon is encyclopedic (birds and fish are particular specialties), and he holds his guides to the same standard. He puts a premium on a dynamic, interactive experience between his guests and the jungle. To do this he employs a rotating staff of bilingual guides, so that there’s never more than a ratio of two people to one guide. Which means that, wherever you want to go in the jungle, at any time of day or night, there is someone there to show you the way and tell you what you’re looking at.

His guests clearly appreciate this level of personal attention. Otorongo is near the top in Trip Advisor ratings, and his online reviews speak for themselves—they account for most of his lodge bookings now. He told me that, in the peak season of June through August, he’s hosted as many as 28 people, with enough guides to accommodate the desired activities of every single guest.

Which may not sound impressive, when you compare it to the industrial-sized tour operators in the region. But for an independent operation, it’s quite a feat. He’s running a profitable business in Iquitos—that alone sets him apart from countless other gringos that have come and gone here!—and he’s doing it without ever losing the personal touch.

When I visited Otorongo in early March, it was just at the end of the slow season for Iquitos tourism, and the lodge was more than half full. The vibe there was very casual and relaxed. Two American guys I’d come on the boat with were preparing to set out for a two-day canoe trip upstream into even deeper wilderness. A retired couple from San Francisco were getting ready to go out with a guide by canoe to have a look at the many caiman, snakes, lizards and tarantulas that are all active at night. Other guests were taking advantage of the chance to simply lie in hammocks and catch up on their reading.

The creature comforts at Otorongo are all in the details, and they are indeed expertly observed. Solar panels powering LCD lights in every room. Mosquito-proof common spaces with beautiful views of the jungle. Creative, abundant cuisine coming out of the kitchen. And modern, tastefully built bathrooms—in the jungle, that counts for a lot!

Anthony seemed to be everywhere at once—one minute joyriding around the lagoon in his small boat with guests, the next minute hanging out in the lodge’s dining room, riffing on the behavior and frequency of poisonous snakes in the area. He was dropping little bits of knowledge all over the place. I commented on a plant with large elephant-shaped ears growing outside the lodge.

“Ah yeah, paticina negra they call it, black arum or elephant ear arum. The locals believe the presence of it enhances your dreams. My brother in law doesn’t like to sleep out here because he thinks this plant gives him strange dreams.”

I asked him how the fishing had been lately, and he mentioned that that one of his guides was fond of noodling for armored catfish eggs. Noodling is a technique that requires either bravery or foolishness, or whatever you want to call it when you swim down and stick your hand into the submerged holes under the riverbank, feeling around for the nests where these catfish lay their eggs.

“They really are delicious. Like caviar from the Amazon. But you go poking around in holes like that, you could come up with coral snakes or piranhas. Not so much fun.”

That reminded me of the electric eel that Anthony caught when the people from National Geographic were at his lodge. They asked him in advance to try to catch one for them, and he did. It was more than six feet long. Check out the most excellent video footage of this feat on youtube:

So what happened to it?

“It died. I kept telling them we need to let it go. Just half an hour, they said. But by then it was dead. I took it out to the Amazon and split it open, little fish were eating it.”

Electric eels here in the Amazon can generate up to six hundred volts, enough power to kill a man. Why don’t they electrocute themselves?

Anthony also caught a huge stingray last year, so big it made news in the local paper.

Anthony vs. the giant stingray

“Yeah, short-tailed stingray, 155 pounds (70 kilos), took me half an hour to get in the boat. I got a hernia from it. I took it to Oran and weighed it, then chopped it up and gave it out to the locals to make for dinner.”

You can see that Anthony is completely in his element at the lodge, spending every day looking for wildlife and exploring the jungle, and being able to share that with people who are almost all seeing it for the first time. Every time I see him in town, he’s either coming back from or going out to the lodge. He’s always itching to get back out to the jungle, and now I understand why. He is Sam Gribley, all grown up. He’s found his side of the jungle.

+++

Anthony is originally from upstate New York, which is where the Jean George novels take place. (She wrote several sequels, more than thirty years after the original classic was published.) Anthony often wears a baseball cap from the Upstate New York Falconry Association, and he can imitate hundreds of birdcalls on cue. He’s a true bird geek. I mentioned at one point that he reminded me of that self-taught survivalist Sam Gribley, the boy falconer, thinking he’d surely have read the novel at some point in his youth. Anthony laughed when I mentioned the comparison. Not only had he read it, Ms. George wrote him into one of the sequels!

As a teenager, he worked and studied with a master falconer named Jonathan Wood, founder of the Raptor Project, the world’s largest traveling raptor exhibit. Jonathan Wood is also based in the Catskills, as is Ms. George. Through that association, he earned a passing mention in the third book.

“In the book, Sam has to give up the bird to a rehabilitator,” Anthony said. “’So Anthony from Altamont was taking care of the bird,’ I think that’s how the line goes.”

At Otorongo, Anthony has two eagles that he is rehabilitating. They truly are noble creatures to see up close. And much as one would like to see such animals outside of a cage, he told me that they would not survive on their own in the wild. A self-proclaimed bird psychologist, he explained how keeping them caged was the only humane option.

“These birds are generally caught young, and not properly fed,” he told me. “And one of these eagles was obviously abused at some point. The locals here often give them very severe treatment in order to ‘tame’ them. They do things like stretch its neck almost to the breaking point, to break its spirit. They tie them to stakes and actually roast them over a fire. They do it to other birds as well, smoking live owls over a fire, things like that. It’s incredibly cruel, and these birds can get permanently shocked and stressed as a result.

“Normally you would train birds like eagles with hunger, but one of these eagles has mental problems, and training with hunger is not fair. Even when I release live food into his cage, he stands on his perch looking at it. You can see him thinking, “should I go, or not go?’ He can’t make up his mind. Everyone has to get out of the way for him to finally go after it.”

From time to time, locals will bring captured birds to Anthony’s lodge, hoping he will buy them, and often he does. And sometimes they stick around. He bought and released a screech owl once, but it didn’t go far. It sits and sings over his room all night long.

+++

There’s a feeling that you get in the jungle, that you just don’t get anywhere else. It’s tranquil, but never quiet. Life happens ravenously, insistently, and with more brilliant diversity than you can begin to imagine, even after you see it up close. The jungle is absolutely riddled with living things, great and small, all intertwined together in chaotic, impenetrable curtains of green foliage. This curtain extends just to the perimeter of the lodge, and then suddenly civilization takes over. The grass is cut and there are orderly gardens and fruit trees, macaws in the trees and hot coffee waiting in a thermos night and day. I sat on the porch as dusk, drinking a cup, and pondering the hundreds of plant and animal species to be found within just a few hundred yards of the lodge. The air was dense with the perfume of flowers and rich with oxygen. It sounds funny to say it, but it smells like air that’s never been breathed by anyone before—air that has just been born. The flowers of wild ginger planted all around the lodge gave off a strong aroma of honey, adding to that effect of preternatural sweetness.

After dark, many of the guests retired to their rooms or headed out with guides to canoe upstream. Anthony showed up with rubber boots and a headlamp, and asked me if I wanted to go out and do some night fishing. I said, hell yes.

I thought we’d go down to the river where he kept his boats, but instead I followed him down a trail leading further into the jungle behind the lodge. It was completely dark by this time, and the circular halos of our headlamps scoured a path before us, revealing a steady stream of creepy crawly critters—highways of ants working the night shift, termites, lizards and chameleons skittering up and down trees, and spiders—everywhere, spiders. One of them, a hairy, scary variety the size of my hand, skated off on the surface of the water when we approached it.

“Wandering wolf spider,” he said.

“Great name.”

Anthony was shining his light along the water’s edge, scouting for cyclids. These fish, a species known as Aequidens, have over two hundred varieties, most only three to five inches long. They like to slumber right next to the shore where they are safer from predators. Most predators, anyway. Anthony saw one, slowly enclosed his hands around it, and plucked it right out of the water. “This one is called bujurqui rojo,” he said. “Not much meat on these little guys, but you catch enough of them, they make a pretty tasty soup.”

We went on along the water’s edge, through flooded forest and dense undergrowth. The rainy season continues in the Amazon from November through April or May, and the water was still rising. Anthony saw another fish by the water’s edge, a shuyo rojo (Erythrinus erythinus), but this time he swung his machete and cut it neatly in two. “This species eats other fish, I don’t mind killing ‘em,” he explained.

So I have to say that our fishing trip was a success, though we had no boat or fishing poles. Anthony seemed content using a machete, and his bare hands. Further on, he stopped and pointed at what looked like a large, submerged leaf. I looked closer and saw that it was in fact a frog, the strangest looking frog I have ever seen. It was floating motionless in shallow water, perfectly camouflaged.

“Suriname toad,” Anthony said. “Pretty cool to see those in the wild. It’s a male, and see, its carrying eggs on its back. Otherwise I’d try to catch it.”

Suriname toad, with embedded eggs

We continued off-trail, with Anthony aiming his light up in the trees. He was looking for snakes. He stopped and pointed something out to me. I didn’t see it at first, but when I looked closer, I saw snake scales stuck to a leaf at eye level. The imprint was perfect, a whole section of multi-colored scales stuck to the leaf like some kind of conceptual art project.

“That’s a rainbow boa,” Anthony said. “And it’s fresh. You see how it rubbed against the leaves to shed its skin. It might still be close by.”

OK, that was kind of cool. Now we were forensic detectives, hot on the trail of a big snake. We went along following the waterline, deeper into the jungle, when something ran by us, a lizard, right between us and on into the water.

“What was that?”

“A golden tagu. We surprised it. It ran into the water for safety. Of course, it’s not safe there either. This is prime hunting ground for the jergon, right along the waterline at night.”

Well, that’s just great. I wish he had not said that. Because there’s a folk wisdom here that you tend to attract the thing that you dwell on in your thoughts. So try not to think about the poisonous snakes that are probably active and hunting for their dinner all around you . . . The fer-de-lance (Bothrops atrox), or jergon as it’s locally known, is one of the deadliest snakes in the Amazon. Its bites are often fatal. As we walked along, Anthony explained that most adult jergons will conserve their venom, and not actually inject it when they bite. Another trick they have is that they do a warning strike first. He described walking along a trail, when a curled-up jergon right by his foot struck out in front of him, intentionally missing, like a shot across the bow, as if to say: next time, it’s for real.

fer-de-lance

“That’s why the young jergons are more dangerous than adults. They haven’t learned these tricks yet. They feel threatened, and they’ll inject their whole load of venom into you. And that means trouble, even though they may be only babies. One of my workers was walking through the jungle, carrying a load of yucca back from his farm, and he got bit on the foot by a baby jergon, less than eight inches long. He thought he’d be fine. Well, by the time he got here, we had to evacuate him to Iquitos on the speedboat. He’s lucky to be alive.”

I was suddenly very self-aware of every awkward and loud movement I made as I went blundering through the underbrush. “Don’t worry,” Anthony reassured me, “with rubber boots, you’d need a jergon about thirty inches long to be able to strike above the knee. Besides, sometimes I go for weeks out here without seeing a single jergon.”

Only weeks?

But in the end, after an hour of actually looking for snakes, in those ideal conditions, we didn’t see a single one. And that was fine with me. Lightning was blinking on the horizon, a celestial strobe making flash pictures of the jungle as we walked, and big thunder was right behind it. Rain was coming soon. We turned back, and before we even got back to the lodge it was pouring down. Ever the accommodating host, Anthony cut me a banana leaf to hold over my head, but I didn’t mind the rain. I was just sorry our walking tour was over so soon. There was so much more to see.

I returned to the same area early the next morning, right about daybreak, and it was teeming over with subtle activity. Frogs, lizards, birds, and monkeys were all around, and every square meter was revealed, on close inspection, to contain worlds within worlds. Life was happening everywhere you looked. The sheer density, the intricate details emerging everywhere from undiscovered spaces, the almost at times alien nature of such complex biodiversity—it’s exhilarating.

More people who live in cities should experience the Amazon like this, at close range. It can really shift your perspective, because nothing about it is man-made. It happened all on its own, we had nothing to do with it. And it is infinitely more weird and complex than we ever have cause to imagine, until we dare to venture out into it, up close and personal–especially at night! Then the truth of it is undeniable—there’s a whole other reality out there, a biological treasure-trove of astounding variety and creative expression, and all of it engaged with itself in a constant struggle for survival. To spend even an hour out there, at night, among the hunters and the prey, can expand your horizons in a dramatic way.

As I said, I can understand why Anthony spends so much of his time out there. It’s where the wild things live.

 

UPDATED May 17, 2012

Ms. George passed away this week, on May 15 at her home in upstate New York. She was 92.

Two weeks ago, I e-mailed Ms. George in order to send her a link to the above article. I thought she might enjoy reading it, and I wanted to communicate the effect her books have had on people like Anthony and myself. I noted in the email that:

“I am one of many people across several generations who were deeply influenced by “My Side of the Mountain.”
It was my favorite book as a young adult, and I have read it more times than I can remember.
“I am writing to you now to share with you an article that I wrote about another young man who was equally influenced by your books. But when he grew up, he became a real-life Sam Gribley. In fact, you may remember him, as you you wrote him briefly into one of the sequels.

“By the way, this is the first ‘letter to an author’ I have ever written… But I felt compelled to contact you, so you can see one example of the way in which your stories continue to inspire young people to live a life close to the Earth and in tune with Nature in all its forms.”

To my surprise, she responded the very next day, thanking me for sending her the article. She then wrote,

“My life changed after I wrote that book, I divorced, But I knew I could do it on my own, even with 3 children to educate and send to college — and did. The kids and I have camped, hiked, canoed wild rivers and my two sons are Ph. Ds in mammalogy and ornithology. My daughter is a writer and young peoples librarian. I am replete. The tree in the forest though, is still my home when things get rough.”

RIP Jean Craighead George. Thanks for all the great stories.

16 Apr

No Place I Wouldn’t Go: A Conversation with Alan Calder

Posted by calebwhitaker in characters, Iquitos. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Alan Calder, a New Zealander by birth, is the co-owner of the Amazon Bistro in Iquitos, Peru. He can often be found at the bar reading the paper and enjoying a cold one. When he’s not in Iquitos, he travels to some of the world’s most dangerous places to work as a private security contractor on behalf of humanitarian organizations. He has shielded civilian aid workers from trouble in places like South Sudan, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria, and half a dozen countries in Africa. The title on his business card reads “Global Roving Security Manager.” I’ve often wondered how Alan gets around so easily, because you’d think he would be weighed down by his balls of steel.

The thing about Alan is, he is an actual bad-ass. When he’s off the clock, he can be very low-key–except for the bone-crushing handshake, you definitely notice that. In Iquitos, he keeps a fairly low profile. Before Alan left to go back to Afghanistan last month, he sat down with me to talk about his unique career path. In light of this weekend’s coordinated Taliban attacks across several Afghan cities, it seemed like the right time to publish this interview, as he deals with this kind of violence and instability on a daily basis. (He will be returning from Afghanistan later this year, and I wish him a safe and speedy return.)

 

How did you get into this line of work, as a private security contractor?

I got contracted three weeks after I got out of the French Foreign Legion, by Defense Services Ltd. out of London. They sent me to Algeria as director of armed security for a contractor there.

What was it like in the French Foreign Legion?

Oh… I traveled a lot. I saw a lot of African countries—Chad, Central African Republic. I was involved in Sarajevo, the first Gulf War–places with lots of problems, including a two year posting in Ohea, Djibouti.

How did you end up in the Legion?

I was on holiday in Scandinavia, heading back to New Zealand, and I saw the poster for the Legion at the Gare du Nord in Paris, and I thought, “yeah, I’ll have a go at that.” That was 1988.

Did you have another career before that?

No. (laughs)  It was a great experience, I enjoyed my time there, learned to speak French (even if I didn’t lose my Kiwi accent), and met a lot of people you’d never imagine meeting in a lifetime.

The Legion, it’s had a reputation as a colorful outfit, full of rogues, and other hard characters like that.

It’s had that reputation in the past, yeah, and well deserved. But, basically, it can give anybody a second chance at life. From the Legion, I went straight to Algeria as a private contractor–because Algeria is French-speaking, I got picked up immediately to go there.  Simple work. Just get in, take it over, do what has to be done. I was there off and on for nearly six years.

What do you remember about Algeria?

It’s a desert. (laughs) It’s a country in conflict, during that period of time, and the expat staff was very restricted in where they could go, so I really couldn’t say what it’s like from a tourist perspective, because I never got to see those places. You’re dealing with the military, as well the Algerian oil partners, a group that is basically part of the government.

There’s got to be a lot of friction and ego in coming in and having to interact with military and intelligence detachments, as the one in charge of organizing private security.

Not really, no. From the standpoint of coming in manage the security, they accept that as a fact—we can’t boss them around, we just ask them do help us with what we require, and as a general rule they cooperate. In Algeria they did, because there was a mutual interest everybody had, in protecting the oil. In some of the other African countries, that didn’t apply.

What places in the world were difficult to organize?
Everywhere else in Africa. Chad, Cameroon, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya to an extent, definitely Mozambique. The Congo was even worse. Those are examples of where organization doesn’t work so well, in terms of the humanitarian aspects. And of course corruption comes into it, in a big way. If one particular person in that country’s military decides it’s not in his interest, then it doesn’t get done.

How does the funding work for private security, who pays the bills?

All humanitarian organizations get funded by various private or government donors. They can be USAid, or donors from the European Commission, for example. Lots of different donors.

I think some people confuse your work with that of a private security outfit, like Blackwater during the Gulf Wars—basically modern mercenaries. What’s the difference?

Well, most international NGO’s provide expat security, for their workers. Even humanitarian organizations need security.

Whereas Blackwater are just hired guns, paid to fight. You’re working to protect people, not to fight.  That’s a big difference. So, what are the rules of engagement for humanitarian private security workers?

We’re not allowed to be armed.

Really. Wow. That’s a huge disadvantage.

It is. Especially when you have to rely on the host country’s military or police.

So you organize the guys with guns, but you don’t get to carry one. What do you do when you get in trouble, throw rocks?

I just hope that the host country’s military or police respond accordingly!

So. Where did you go after Algeria?

Initially I went to Darfur with a medical mission, and spent nearly five years with them.

You’ve really been a lot of places that nobody ever sees.

They aren’t on the tourist map, that’s for sure.

Darfur was a mess during that time.

It’s still a mess. It’s getting worse by the day. Nine months after I started with them, I became their African Regional Security Coordinator, and was traveling more. After that, I became a consultant.

And now you’re still choosing to go to the most dangerous places in the world—places like Yemen, and Kandahar City, Afghanistan.

That’s because I’ve got a good boss! (laughs) No, that’s just where the work is. It’s not really for the salary, in some respect it’s good experience, even today. And you get to see another country. You get to see it in war, and hopefully one day you get to see it in a peacetime situation.

So if you’re not money-motivated to do this, then what is your motivation?

I don’t know. I’d like to think I’m pretty good at what I do.

When you left Yemen last time, it was right in the middle of the ‘Arab Spring,’ and you went from there directly to Afghanistan. That’s like going from the frying pan into the fire.

Yeah. Stationed in Kandahar City, not in the Kandahar Air Force base like just about everybody else who is doing construction, humanitarian aid, or doing business there. The whole lot runs out of the Air Force base. The military also has several different types of forward operating bases outside the city. Most of it is US Marines, some are Special Forces camps, and we may or may not have an expat aid worker there, but definitely most of the FOB’s have a humanitarian aid worker there, and he will always have his own private protection. The aid workers are there for reconstruction, agriculture projects, basically assisting in improving life for the general Afghan.

I’m surprised that private aid workers are there at all.

Yes, they are there. So we’re coordinating through US-Aid and the U.S. Military, as a general rule we do not have anything to do with the Afghan military.

And the U.S. Military is happy to have the help, I imagine.

Oh yes. I stay in close contact with them. They have a very, very good response team that goes to work if we get hit.

What else can you say about that?

(Alan thinks for a moment.) What everybody has to remember is that because of the location, in Kandahar City especially, the Taliban and other insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan regard everybody as a target, regardless of whether you are military or a humanitarian worker. So every day you risk your compound being attacked, your vehicle convoys targeted by remote detonation or your everyday road side / vehicle bomb.

Doesn’t that constant threat of danger wear on your nerves? And you don’t even have a gun!

I have access to people who carry guns, if I need them. There are a lot of other people with guns around me.

Clearly you’re not bothered by working in combat zones. That would be enough to deter me from that kind of work, right there.

There’s no place I wouldn’t go. I like the work. I mean, I don’t see how people sit in an office all day! You know, you just need a good head on your shoulders, and be able to understand your own capabilities. I get to see some of the most beautiful and remote places in the world. And I hope to return to them some day in peacetime, as a tourist. You know, the one thing that all these places have in common is that they’re all corrupt. And that’s my least favorite part of the job, dealing with all the corruption, especially the inability to control one’s borders. You never know when the ruling party are going to change their policy on immigration, they change it just to suit themselves.

So, you’re 57 this year. How much longer are you going to do this kind of work?

I’m retiring at the end of the year! (Editor’s note: he said that last year.) You know, I have a nice Peruvian girlfriend now, and I’m a partner in the restaurant, which is a very good and unique business. I love Iquitos. It’s about time to settle down.

6 Apr

Look At This Renaco Tree

Posted by calebwhitaker in Iquitos, nature & the environment. Tagged: , , , , , , .


This Renaco (Ficus trigonata) grows on a busy main street in downtown Iquitos, and it is enormous. It is probably the largest tree in the city. It’s so big, it’s growing right out into the road. Up close it looks like a tree designed by H.R. Giger. There is something slightly unsettling, almost scary, about this tree.

Don't mess with the Renaco.

There is a long-standing rumor in Iquitos about this tree. They say that the city decided to cut it down years ago, but the city worker who climbed up into it, to start cutting the top branches, fell to his death. After this happened more than once, the workers became superstitious, and the tree remains there unmolested to this day.

I don’t know if that story is true or not, but that’s what all the locals say. I know I wouldn’t mess with this tree. This tree would kick my ass, no doubt about it.

 

6 Apr

Now Look At This Baby Macaw

Posted by calebwhitaker in nature & the environment. Tagged: , , .

A baby guacamayo, or macaw.

Because it is right there on the line between adorable and weird-looking. Because it is zygodactyl, in which one’s first and fourth toes point backwards. Because though it is cute like nearly all baby animals, it appears to have a big saggy ballsack for a stomach.

Yes, that's what it looks like.

But no matter. It is only a month old, and guacamayos live 30 to 40 years in the wild. One day it will grow up to look like this:

Attorneys can live up to 100 years in the wild, but significantly less in captivity.

I mean the bird, not Pete Davidson, though if it grows up to look like him, that would be pretty amazing too.

6 Apr

How High’s The Water, Ma?

Posted by calebwhitaker in characters, Iquitos, nature & the environment. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Too high for school.

The Amazon river floods every year, but even by its own voluminous standards, this year has been exceptional. As of today, the Amazon river has now broken the all-time record high water mark. That goes as far back as anyone has been counting. Mainly, this is not a good thing. A lot of people live along the rivers and tributaries, and many thousands have been displaced. These are mostly people without a lot of resources to begin with, and now many have only what they could carry with them. Refugee camps have popped up all over town, even along the Boulevard near Belen which is more of the tourist quarter, with makeshift villages of blue, government issued Civil Defense tents popping up like swaths of mushrooms. Dislocated from their homes, farms and fields, without any way of providing a living for their families, they just sit and wait for the waters to subside.

My friends who have businesses along the Amazon or its tributaries—jungle lodges, retreat centers, sawmills—have all seen the water sneak up beneath their floorboards, causing damage to their businesses and possessions. They’ve worked overtime to build temporary walkways, relocate valuable equipment, reschedule guests and visitors, and generally scramble for security in a way that has disrupted lives and livelihoods everywhere in the region. It’s a big blow to the economy. Even the flow of goods has been disrupted—there’s no natural gas for cooking right now in Iquitos, for example, a fact I learned by running out at the wrong time—and on top of all of this, it’s Easter weekend, and tomorrow is an official holiday with banks and all major businesses closed. True to form, most businesses began that holiday this afternoon. Downtown, everything is shuttered. Iquitos has come to a halt—it’s been Peru’d.

As you can see from the chart below, the Amazon has indeed broken all records.

That black line is the one we're on.

But a chart like this doesn’t really bring the human element into focus.

Last Sunday, Corrina and I went out to celebrate my birthday. I did a couple of things I’d been meaning to do, which really is what a birthday is all about—doing nothing but the things that make you happy, if only for a day—and I did things like play mandolin on the Boulevard, just for me own pure-D satisfaction.

I'm gonna rise up, find my direction magnetically.

We hired a boat and went on a tour of lower Belen. I knew how bad the flooding was, but I wanted to see for myself. We had to duck electrical lines as we passed in our boat, which ordinarily would be three meters above our heads. Every house not built on floating logs was sunk, anywhere from halfway up the first floor, to the roofline.

how's the reception?

All had been abandoned, the occupants having moved in with their families and neighbors, with those still living right on the water’s edge, or had tried their luck inland. People sleeping in canoes. Whole families packed onto a single small floor made of poles and lashed pontoons—each tiny thatched residence appears, from the outside, unsanitary and claustrophobic. It was a pretty sad scene, all around.

Water, water everywhere.

While we were out on the boat, we went to examine the ruins of the floating pyramid which sits, marooned, in the lagoon below the Boulevard. (see “Magnificent Visions” by Ted Mann for some background: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/amazon-201112) It was a wreck, stripped bare, although the enormous Remo Caspi frame was sturdy and intact.

the Pyramid, as it looks today

It could in fact be rebuilt by stripping it all the way down to the frame, and it would be solid. That’s a testament to the builders, and the materials, though I don’t know why anyone would go through the trouble.

The remains of the inner pyramid, seen from inside.

It might interest you, if you know the tremendous story of this pyramid and its builder, that Julio Carraldo was in Iquitos again recently. He did drop by the house a couple of times to say hello to Corrina and meet our son Maverick.

Apart from that though, I think he spent almost all of this time out in the jungle dieting in seclusion and repose. I hardly saw him at all. He was staying out on the Carretera as the guest of Meryl Mama, the crazy cat lady of expats living in the jungle beyond the city. She’s also a well-known and successful doctor of acupuncture, and a highly cultured, educated woman, so much respect for that. Still . . . I always get a little bit of that crazy cat lady vibe. We call her Meryl Mama to distinguish her from Meryl Baby, her twenty-something daughter who used to be an exotic dancer and now lives in Iquitos with a young baby of her own. And yes, Meryl Mama named her daughter after herself. You don’t see that very often. But there’s a lot that’s unique about both of them. The story of their own family migrations, all the way from their dislocated origins fleeing Soviet Russia after WWII, with all the desperation, the deprivation, and winding peregrinations through post-war Eastern Europe in search of a new home, is an epic worthy of Tolstoy.

But I digress. I was talking about Julio Carraldo, who is good friends with Meryl Mama and who, although he went thirty-six days without eating, considered that feat to be something of a failure. He’d been aiming to make it forty four days, one day for each year of his life. The next time I ran into Julio, we had the following actual word-for-word exchange, which pretty much sums up the difference between us:

Me: Julio, you’re really looking thin. Must have dropped a lot of weight out there, eh?”

JC: Oh, I don’t know, I gained a lot back once I came into town after the diet. My feet swelled up again from the sudden salt intake, when I started eating normal food again. I didn’t quite make it all the way as I intended.

Me: You know, I mentioned you to a professional nutritionist who I met recently. I told her what you were doing, and she said that, as healthy as fasting can be for a person, beyond thirty days, fasting is usually dangerous, because after that point the body starts to eat its own tissue.

JC: Then she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The Old Prophets used to fast for much longer than that, with no ill effects.

Me: Well, it seems like we do a lot of things differently now than the way the Old Prophets used to do them.

JC: Anyway, we were headed to the market. See you later.

But we didn’t see each other later. He left to go back to England, with no plans to return soon to Iquitos. He mentioned to Chillum, in the ayahuasca ceremony they did together right before he left, that he was considering returning to the Great Pyramids in Egypt, with the secret aim of sneaking inside to a ceremonial chamber and re-enacting another ancient ritual, involving hanging upside down for nine days. Which is in fact a real ritual practiced in antiquity, by people who trained especially for this ordeal over long periods of time, practiced in the pursuit of receiving some kind of esoteric knowledge or enlightenment. Hearing that, I think Chillum began to regard his old friend as something more than a casual seeker of knowledge. Meaning, you can respect a person for having the courage of their convictions, but when their convictions seem increasingly unhinged, sometimes all you can say is good luck. But then again, Chillum also said he’d figured out how to render the Kabbalah in 3-D, a project that had taken him several years, a major breakthrough that he had told no one about. Why? Who knows. Maybe the guy’s a genius after all. Whatever the case, you just gotta love Julio Carraldo, bless his heart, he remains a very nice guy and one hell of a character.

I also went out to visit Chillum, just yesterday, with a German freelancer doing a piece on Iquitos for German public radio. He wanted an interview with Chillum, and I wanted to see how his place was faring. The water had broached floor level on three of his tambos, which sit high on stilts and in a normal year would be impregnable. He did an ayahuasca ceremony the other night in the big maloca, with the water lapping at the underside of the boards, and by the end of the evening it was seeping up between the cracks. Chillum’s land borders the Itaya river and two creeks on either side, with a spine of high ground known as a ‘restinga’ running the length of the middle of the property. I asked him how his land was holding up, and he responded that he’d been over-run. He said it like he’d been infested by a plague of orcs. When I got there I saw what he meant. The water had totally covered the highest point on his land, like an island in the path of a tsunami—there was no dry ground left. I walked along the covered walkway leading to the main lodge, and it was waist-deep–everything was underwater.

Yet he still has clients. And they don’t seem too bothered by it all. Same with Otorongo Anthony, the intrepid jungle guide whose lodge is booked full, even though it’s so flooded now that he fishes right off the porch and goes spearfishing from his hammock! Go down now, water. Great River Amazon, carry it away.

Enough’s enough.

24 Mar

Peru’d!

Posted by calebwhitaker in Iquitos. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Keep dreaming. Have another Brahma.

 

I took some time off from blogging in the past month, in order to work on opening a business here in Iquitos. I joined forces with the Brasilero, who you may remember from the Amazon Raft Race, and we decided to open a hostel. We’ve spent the last few weeks getting everything ready, and I’m happy to say that we’re now open for business, and the place looks great. Our website is here: www.greentrack-travel.com. If you’re planning a trip to Iquitos, come find us.

Now that I’ve opened a business in Peru– a daunting task under the best of circumstances– I have to say a few things about how the Brasilero and I both got Peru’d during the pursuit of this venture. What does it mean to get Peru’d? It means that, in the course of daily life in this country, you eventually run into a predicament of total system failure, almost always when it is least convenient. It’s a common occurrence when navigating the wilderness of institutional paperwork and red tape that is required to do anything at all here. You can get Peru’d easily in the quicksand of bureaucracy. Other examples could involve crooked/incompetent lawyers, cops or politicians, or even something as simple as greed (theft and extortion). There are so many wonderfully diverse ways in which things go sideways here. Many gringos I know go half-mad from the dysfunction, while Peruvians merely shrug. They already know how long it often takes to accomplish simple tasks.

Sometimes you need to have a back-up plan for your back-up plan, as a wise man has said. So that when the German investors who seem interested in helping develop your business suddenly disappear overnight, owing money all around town, you have something else to fall back on. This actually happened to Pincho Loco, aka the Brasilero—the Germans he was working with had been buying up all kinds of expensive goods and equipment, using their credibility as German businessmen to pay up front only a small amount, promising the rest within a week ‘when the wire transfer went through,’ and in the meantime they pawned the goods and pocketed the cash. They were also running a fake NGO (non-governmental organization) claiming to raise funds for underprivileged people in the rural Amazon, but as far as I can tell, most of the money went towards hookers and cocaine—a fund for overprivileged con men, is what it really was. These guys didn’t show the best judgment, really, at any point. They screwed over the gringos and the Peruvians, left behind thousands of dollars in unpaid bills and debts, and then skipped town before anyone could catch up with them.

So even someone as smart as Pincho got Peru’d. Other times, systemic failure is just built into the way things work, and you simply get hit with bad timing. Take, for example, the opening day of our hostel. We had a big party planned that night, hosting sixty people with live music, food and drinks, and there was a lot left to do on the day of the party. I got up early and headed out. My first stop was the ATM to get some cash. The machine spit my card back out at me, flashing a message to contact my local branch. Which is several thousand miles away, and anyway it’s Saturday. Great. Maybe I maxed out my limit yesterday, and it hasn’t re-set yet? No time to sit around wondering. I drove around frantically to different ATMs, but got the same rejection each time. (It turned out later that my bank in the US had been bought out, and all customers had been issued new ATM cards! Mine is apparently still in the mail.) Then I have a game-saving insight: maybe it still works as a debit card . . . I took it to a grocery store that accepts cards, and yes, success! Of course, any store in Iquitos with the ability to process a debit card is going to be charging more than other stores, but it can’t be helped. I got back on the motorcycle and started to head downtown. But no, the motorcycle wouldn’t start! Mechanical failure! Excellent. Now the temperature is rising a bit, in the air and in my head.

I tried to call Pincho to come and help me out. But my phone’s battery had died. System failure approaching an elegant climax now. I took a minute to clear my head and remind myself to breathe. Then I found a safe place to stow the bike, hired a motorcar back to the hostel, and knocked on the door. Why not just go on in? Pincho had the keys to the locked front door! I would have called him at this point, but my phone charger was locked inside the house, and he wasn’t answering the door! No point in using a pay phone, I can’t remember his number. What a delightful conundrum. I paced back and forth like a rat in an invisible cage, wondering about my next move. Finally, Pincho showed up again. He had been out harassing the Brahma beer distributors, who had not yet delivered the beer or the cooler for the party that night.

When we first met with the distributors, we made a sales pitch about our business as being a unique place in Iquitos, a hostel and pub with an international flavor, and we asked them to be our sponsors. They loved the idea, and the promised us wooden tables and chairs, two commercial-size beer coolers, a neon sign to put behind the bar, and they even promised to send the Brahma girls to our opening night!

Here’s the thing about the Brahma girls, or Pilsen girls, or Cusquena girls. Anytime there is a promotional event and beer sponsors are involved, these companies dispatch fleets of attractive young girls in tight mini-dresses, who smile and hand out beer and pretend not to notice how much they are being grossly ogled by all the men around them, as they have been put on display for this very reason. It’s the same all over the world really, not exactly a news flash that hot chicks can sell tons of beer just by being hot. But in truth, Pincho and I weren’t initially all that excited about the Brahma girls being at our party, as we didn’t want to seem like we were buying into the whole way that they commodify sex and objectify women here, to sell booze and everything else under the sun, but it is part of the culture and we figured it would be good for a laugh.

Only one of these was at the party.

But the laugh was on us. We invited all the Brahma salesmen and execs who had made all those lofty promises, and not only did they not show up, neither did the Brahma girls. No tables or chairs, no sign, nothing but a single cooler and a boxes of beer delivered, after several harassing phone calls, barely on time for the party.  So we nearly got Peru’d by those guys as well, but to be fair, they did finally deliver everything on time, and they floated us a line of credit too, which was pretty nice of them.

The party ended up being a great success, in spite of the fact that the water in the hostel stopped working (more system failure) but it didn’t matter at that point, people were having fun and the band had everyone dancing until 1 am, and a friend of mine brought a bottle of cheap champagne, which we hung from a rope and smashed against the wall of the hostel, as you would do in christening a ship before its maiden voyage.

Since then, there’s been several more glitches. We were late getting our internet service installed at the hostel, to the great inconvenience of our guests. Why? Because transferring an internet line requires paperwork, of course. And because Pincho’s former employee, for whom he’d secured an excellent, well-paying job as a government consultant for the environmental and tourism industries, repaid his kindness by trying to extort him for 5,000 soles. The paperwork for the internet, it turned out, was in her name, as you need a Peruvian’s name attached, foreigners cannot do it themselves. She saw an opportunity to play an angle, thinking (mistakenly) that Pincho was rich and would just pay her off rather than endure the hassle. This turned into a long charade in which Corrina ultimately got involved, talking to this girl in Lima by phone, basically shaming her extortion plot into failure by pointing out there were other people involved, that I was trying to make a living for my family, and why was this woman depriving Corrina’s man of his chance to make a living and feed his child? That worked well enough, so we cut a deal with this scheming woman for the price of a round-trip airline ticket, so she could travel to Iquitos and transfer all the paperwork.

While all this was going on, Pincho needed money quickly, to travel to Brazil and film a nature documentary in the Pantanal for German television. The lawyer handling the transfer, who has been a trusted family confidente for decades, was on vacation in Mancora. So Pincho’s entire time-sensitive venture rested on the motivation of a lawyer who seemed more interested in surfing and lying around on the beach, because after many days, when the transfer finally went through, the lawyer had filled out Pincho’s middle name and last name in the wrong boxes, so that even though he had the correct passport number and all of that, Western Union would not release the funds.

Typical. As far as being Peru’d goes, these are actually very mild examples. But they are snags nonetheless. I remember once a few months back, I got pulled over during a traffic stop. It was the one time I happened to have left my license at home, and I was going to get a citation. More paperwork. So, when asked if I could provide any other ID, I showed the cops my bank card, a Visa debit card. When they handed me my ticket, I saw that instead of using my name, which was clearly embossed on the card, they had charged the citation to a Mr. Check Card Rewards. I still laugh about that. The cops had Peru’d themselves! As far as I know, that ticket is still unpaid, and Mr. Check Card Rewards remains at large.

 

 

17 Mar

The Confidence Man of Iquitos

Posted by calebwhitaker in characters, Iquitos. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

 

Part I – The Art of the Con

It’s often observed that, among all South American countries, Peruvians are especially adept at the art of the con. The city of Iquitos, capital of the Peruvian Amazon, is no exception. It is full of con men and swindlers of all varieties, from street-level hustlers to high-ranking businessmen and politicians.

There are a lot of thieves here too, and the line between a theft and a con is hard to discern sometimes— using forged paperwork to sell a house that does not belong to you, for example, is an elaborate con, but theft is at the heart of the gesture, because something promised was not delivered. A true street-level con, on the other hand, is just an act of creative storytelling, in which you get someone to hand over money willfully. This is not theft, because nothing was stolen, no one was robbed—it’s more like a very refined form of begging. The ‘confidence man’ does exactly that, wins over your confidence and makes you like them to the degree that they make you want to help them.

The greatest street-level con man in Iquitos, by a wide margin, is not a Peruvian at all, but an Englishman in his early forties named Brian. A former successful drug dealer, he fled England four years ago after a botched drug deal left him $60,000 in debt to some very dangerous people. When I first met him, he approached me in the street and introduced himself as George. Speaking in crisp, polished English, he proceeded to paint a brief portrait of himself as a stranded traveler who had been robbed and just needed money to eat until his wire transfer arrived. He was very sincere, and he extracted ten soles ($3.50) from my friend. I gave him nothing, although I was tempted to.

That was three years ago. I have since gotten to know Brian as well as his friends from England, with whom he first came here as a tourist. I remember when I came back to Iquitos a year after that first encounter, and ran into Brian again. He approached me in the same way as before, but as soon as he recognized me, he instantly dropped the pretense and we had a friendly conversation. His lifestyle was taking an obvious toll on him. In the year since I’d last seen him, his skin had turned grey and wrinkled, like an elephant, as if he had aged ten years. His teeth were a mess, and he was as thin as a wire. But his piercing ice-blue eyes still darted about, aware of everything, scanning the streets as we talked, like a predator on perpetual alert.

Recently, word got around in Iquitos that Brian had received a beating from some tourists who were not happy about being conned. I finally caught up with Brian recently in the main square of Iquitos, the Plaza de Armas, to talk about the state of his life. Before I could even ask him about his various confidence games, he cut me off with a demonstration.

“Hold on a minute,” he said, noticing a gringo in his early thirties, strolling through the park with a local Peruvian woman. As they approached, he addressed them, and the exchange went something like this:

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh thank God. It’s good to talk to someone else who speaks English. I’ve been robbed, you see, and I’m stuck here in Iquitos until I can get together the money to get home.”

“Well, I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“I was just talking to this man here (gestures at me) but I’m afraid he’s not much better off than I am at the moment.”

“Right. Well—“

“Oh, are you British? Where are you from?”

“London. You?”

“Brighton! What a relief, to meet another Englishman. I’m embarrassed to have to ask you this, but I really do need some help. I’m in a terrible spot, I’m afraid I’m stranded here at the moment. I’m working to get up a collection of funds to go back to England. Anything you could spare towards my plane ticket home would be such a great help.”

“Well, I have a policy of never giving money to anyone. But if you’re hungry, I suppose I could go and bring you some food.”

“That’s so kind of you. But I think I can manage to keep myself fed, I eat a lot of fruit mainly, and that’s very cheap here. But if you could give me, I don’t know, between fifty and seventy soles—how much is that in English pounds? Not too much, I don’t think.”

“Again, I’d like to help you, but I don’t give out money to people, like I said.”

“I understand completely. But you have to consider my situation, I mean, look at me. I’ve been injured, my fingers were broken in the robbery, see right there?”

He held out his right hand, and they both winced at his little finger, which was half-shrunken and stuck out from his hand at a crazy angle. Had they looked a bit closer, they would have noticed the scar tissue around the joint, the ‘tell’ that this was not a new injury. However his index finger was broken as well, and this was obvious by the color and inflammation.

“I’m forty years old, and I want my mum! I just want to go home. And my family has promised to wire money, but it hasn’t arrived yet, and I’m totally stranded in the meantime. If you could maybe just manage, oh, twenty soles, that would really be something. I know that’s hardly much money to you, but it would make such a difference to me.”

Inside of five minutes, the man handed over twenty soles and they both wished him good luck. He thanked them profusely and we walked off together. As we did, I noticed an angry-looking Peruvian sitting on the bench next to ours.

“See that guy there? He’s mad because I conned him last year. I thought for sure he was going to intervene, because he knows me as an estafador already. But he didn’t.”

Brian truly is an estafador in full. In Spanish, this is the very specific word for ‘con man,’ from the verb estafar, to con or swindle. (I myself prefer to think of him as a grifter, which is old carnival and circus slang for a “confidence trickster,” because of the dodgy, carny-like atmosphere in which he operates.) The word for thief is ladrón. People here will turn in a ladrón to the police, but they have a curious respect for the estafador.  This is because the estafador is using his wits alone for gain, without resorting to violence or robbery, and Peruvians respect a good liar, because a good liar is someone who is smart enough to manipulate a situation to their advantage, and get away with it. It’s a sporting pastime here, and all across Latin America really, and Peruvians love exchanging stories of clever and elaborate cons.

Brian himself told me a story that makes this distinction better than I can. One night recently, a couple of Welsh rugby players on vacation, who Brian had conned ten days earlier, ran into him in to the street. They chased him down and then knocked him around a little bit. He scrambled free, and as he ran away, he turned and called back to them, “It was worth every penny!” That made them mad, and they chased him down again. This time, they held him down and one of them stomped on his fingers, saying, “well mate, you’ll have a broken hand for real now!”

During this beating, a local street vendor came over to see what was going on. Brian called to him in Spanish, “don’t worry, I’m not a thief, just a con man! I didn’t rob these guys, they freely gave me their money!” And the man understood that distinction, and went back to minding his own business.

A few days after that incident, I asked Brian how many times he’d been beaten up by people he conned.

“Only twice,” he said. “I’m completely amazed, absolutely astounded (that it hasn’t happened more often). It was only three days ago, after the Welsh guys got me, that I actually sat down, and I realized that after three years of conning every day, sometimes twice, three times a day, we’re talking thousands of times, that there have been only two repercussions that included acts of violence.”

The second time, incidentally, was at the hands of a French tourist who took issue with Brian. He landed a few hard punches to the head before chasing him through the maze-like Modelo Market, weaving through vegetable stands and crowds of vendors. He even chased him into a motorcar and out the other side, like something out of a Benny Hill routine, until the chase ended at a crackhouse where Brian had been staying, and the other fumadores (pasta smokers) turned the tables. In the end, Brian had to pull them off and usher the tourist out the door before he was badly hurt.

All the local business owners in town know about Brian, so he does not show up along the main Boulevard of Iquitos much anymore.  And in truth, he has been a straight-up ladrón as well as an estafador, many times. For example, he stole the fire extinguisher from El Cyber internet café, pawned it for money, and then returned to the scene of the crime the next day to see what else he could take! But the employees recognized him and chased him off.

Brian has now conned so many people in Iquitos–both tourists and locals, gringos and Peruvians—that he’s often recognized when out in public. The Iquitos Times runs an article with a photo of him every month entitled “Gringo Con Man In Iquitos,” and some businesses have even posted this article in their stores. Once, standing in line at Saby, the corner market on the first block of Nauta street, I watched Brian conning a tourist right outside the entrance. The tourist was reaching in his pocket for his wallet, when from inside the store, a Peruvian standing behind me in line saw it and called out in English, “Hey, don’t give that guy any money! He’s a con man! He’s conned me before, I know him!”

Brian looked inside the store, then calmly turned again to the tourist. “I have no idea what that guy’s talking about. I’ve never seen him before in my life. I think he has me confused with someone else.”

At that moment, another Peruvian in line behind me shouted out, “No, it’s true! He’s a swindler, he conned me last year! Look, his picture is right there on the wall!”

By this point, Brian had the attention of everyone in the store. All eyes went to the wall, a few feet from where Brian was standing, and sure enough, there was the Iquitos Times article, and his photo. Brian looked at the tourist, and could see the game was lost. And then he just kind of sighed, and seemed to smile a bit as he turned and walked away without another word.

Brian, holding the article warning tourists about him.

That moment to me was funny and tragic and poignant all at once, and kind of captured in a moment all that was strange and sad about Brian’s life here in Iquitos. He told me later that he’s well aware of his photo on the wall, and he makes a point of pulling cons directly in front of the market, on purpose, just to annoy the owners.

In this as well as other incidents I’ve witnessed, it’s obvious that what he does takes guts, fearlessness, a taste for confrontation, and a completely shameless willingness to mislead people in whatever way is necessary. What exactly makes Brian’s pitch so convincing? The mangled pinky finger, the urgency in his voice, the contradiction of a person so clearly bright and articulate, who is disheveled and hungry, strikes an instinctual chord—most people would think: this person is clearly out of place, he is obviously educated and well-spoken, just a poor chap who has found himself in a tight spot.

His pitch also rings true because ninety percent of what Brian says is accurate. He has lost his passport, he has been injured, in actual fact he has no money to his name, and he really is living out on the street, so very far from home. All of that resonates on an emotional level, because he’s not faking that part, it really is his predicament. He is merely leaving out the other ten percent—the part about his addiction to pasta.

Pasta, or cocaine paste, is a crude, intermediary product that results from the first step of cocaine processing, which usually happens on-site in remote locations throughout the Amazon. Peru now leads the world in coca production, and the impoverished back streets of Iquitos are awash in pasta, which is cheap and plentiful. To make it, coca leaves are put in a barrel or a pit, and kerosene or other chemicals are poured over them to extract the cocaine base. It is known as the ‘poor man’s cocaine,’ because it is much cheaper than the refined version, and reportedly much more addictive. As it has no export value, it’s usually sold locally, and has become a serious epidemic in Peru as well as Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, and anywhere that cocaine is produced.

Brian was remarkably frank with me about his pasta problem. “I’ve done all kinds of drugs—acid, ecstasy, coke, I’ve smoked crack and heroin, though I’ve never used a needle. Out of all of these things, pasta is by far the most addictive drug I have ever done,” he told me. “You smoke pasta and get an incredible rush that lasts two or three minutes. And when that’s done, you want to smoke more immediately.”

This kind of addiction defies logic or reason. It has become all-consuming for a man that was once living life in style, and making more money than he knew what to do with. Of course Brian is smart enough to know better. But being smart has nothing to do with it–addiction is its own reason for being. Brian has spent years now living in crackhouses, with friends in very low places, living a life of petty crime, and for what?

I think back to the words of my friend Marco, who I ran into while talking to Brian in the Plaza.

“Hey Brian, how’s it going?” Marco said.

“In bocca al lupo.” Said Brian.

“Crepi il lupo,” Marco answered, and then we watched him walk off.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“It’s like a colloquial greeting in Italian, like, ‘break a leg’ instead of saying ‘good luck.’ He said, ‘into the wolf’s mouth.’ And I answered, ‘may the wolf die.’”

“I didn’t know Brian spoke Italian,” I said.

“Yeah, his pronunciation is pretty good, too,” Marco said.

“That guy is full of surprises,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s kind of brilliant, in his way,” Marco said. “What a waste.”

 

Part II – Down And Out In Iquitos: an Interview with the Gringo Con Man

 

I must admit that you’re an excellent con man, one of the best I’ve seen.

Thank you very much.

And I really do believe that if you ever decide to go straight and work a regular sales job, you could make a lot of money, if you wanted to.  But it seems like the thrill of getting away with the next con, is what’s fun about it.

Well, that’s what it is, it’s the adrenaline.

So . . . I’ve heard that when you first came here, there were some really bad people after you, that you owed them some money, to the tune of twenty grand or so.

More like sixty grand. Which is nothing in that game anyway, really.

And someone had ripped you off, is that right?

Yes, someone had ripped me off. I gave credit to somebody, and they disappeared and didn’t pay, and it was in my name. And half of that was my own money, and the other half belonged to a syndicate. And they weren’t very happy.

How long ago was that?

That would be four years ago, now.

What would happen if you went back to England now?

Well, they’d certainly be a lot more relaxed about it, because they’ve had time to think, time to recuperate. It should be a lot easier, hopefully. These kind of people, they’d probably give me another chance, to work it off.

You made a lot of money in this game, dealing drugs, before you ever came to Iquitos.

I did. But that kind of money is easy come, easy go. It’s like what I was saying about the Robin Hood thing—generosity matters. If you make ten thousand pounds in ten days, and it comes in an envelope, you don’t appreciate it. You open it, and your goal is to open the envelope as soon as you can. For one thing, if you get pulled by the law, they’re going to take it. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable about he police spending my money. So you have to appreciate it in the moment, and therefore it’s kind of like buying friends. You have this crowd of friends and they wake up in the morning and they think of you, they know that you’re going to be buying the beer, paying the entrance fees, that sort of thing.

How much money do you make conning people here in Iquitos?

The most that I ever made was from a Mexican lady, I don’t know, she must have won the lottery or something. I said about ten words to her, she opened up her wallet, and she gave me three pink notes, from Peru, which are two hundred sole notes ($225 in total). She was the first person that I spoke to that day. I didn’t look at her, she didn’t look at me, she just gave me money, closed my hand, and wished me luck. When I got round the corner and opened my hand, I almost dropped to my knees. I was like, hallelujah! But on average, I’d say I make a hundred soles a day.

That’s good money for Iquitos.

That’s really good money. That would be just going out once. Sometimes on bad days, I make thirty or forty soles. But other days, I just drop onto a really nice person, and I get a hundred right off.

And you were helping out people in lower Belen, the Robin Hood thing. I hear that the kids call you Papa Noel (Santa Claus).

I was helping out old ladies, people who needed the help, and there were a few people who would always come and ask. When they see me coming down the stairs with a smile on my face, here they say ‘ganado,’ I won, I did well. And they would approach me with some sob story that was obvious bullshit, but I over overlook that and give them something, and that was another way to justify what I was doing.

Yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, I am a human being, I do have feelings, and sometimes the goodness and kindness that some of the people I’ve conned, I have actually sat afterwards and felt quite bad. Because they are such genuinely good people, that it kind of echoes in your mind. But, that’s the price you pay.

You must have seen some really bad things when you were in lower Belen.

Oh, there was lots of fights, lots of beatings . . . the people in lower Belen are very . . . violence is almost a normal factor in their everyday lives. If they see something wrong, then they wouldn’t think twice about beating you, and with more than one person, and they will beat you with sticks , they will . . . so yeah, I’ve seen  a lot of violence, And my eyes are really tired of that, they really are. And no one wants to get involved. Men beat . . . men beat women. Quite a lot.  With almost no reason. It’s a real chauvinist kind of world, not like the States or England. If you saw a woman getting beating in those places, you’d probably get involved, and rightly so. Here, you get involved, and you’ll end up getting beaten too. I did it a few times. I pulled a guy off and people jumped in on me.

Did you ever get robbed yourself?

I’ve been robbed. For example my sandals, I go to sleep, and wake up and my sandals aren’t there, things like that.  When I’m conning people, I tell them I got robbed, but it’s not true.

No one’s ever taken money off of you?

Nobody’s ever taken money off of me. Because they respect me too much, I’ve worked for the people, and looked after the people, and if I go down the stairs with a quarter chicken and chips, I never would eat that in Belen alone. I would share it along the way, a handful here and there, it would always be shared. They eat the bones too, you know. In the initial days, I walked down the stairs of Belen with a quarter chicken, and somebody stole it from me. I mean, what can you say to somebody who steals food from you? My fault? Like I’m walking down there with a bag of gold, it’s like saying come on and rob me, this hot chicken.

Do you have any savings from all this, have you put anything in the bank?

I haven’t banked anything. Every day I begin with nothing.

You don’t have a stash somewhere for emergencies?

No. But that’s the adrenaline. I like to start from zero, every day. If I were in England, I’d be saving, but here, no. Every day when I wake up, I have nothing.

So you’ve been here for four years now. How long did you spend in lower Belen?

A year and a half. After that, the riot squad and the drug squad came down to deal with, like, four houses that were being used for smoking pasta. Filled with young kids, some of them terrible rogues but also a lot of nice guys but very problematic, difficult, very, very badly done by—they’d had a hard life. But nonetheless they’re stand-up people, really good people, something to admire among the elements of criminality. Something about that, I don’t know which drove me to work with them. Although they were my friends, I also saw them as just human. Anyway, the police came and just went berserk, because the government was building a new clinic down there and they wanted to clean up the area.  And basically, they squashed the houses with us inside them, literally, and all the contents inside them.

Like, with bulldozers, equipment like that?

No, just, militant police squads, they pushed the houses over, I mean they were made of wood, so they rocked them until they fell over. They had guns, they had sticks, they flushed us out like rats. The majority of the people there, they moved one block over to San Martin and Ucayali, and I then resided in similar sort of conditions for another year, until the police came and did the same again. We had a little sort of village by then, and after the second time I moved to Punchana, to a house with a huge reinforced iron door, with about six locks on it. It has a long stone corridor and then opening up onto a little yard. When I first got there we looked at getting electric currents running through the roof, which is the only way anybody could get in. So now it’s like a fortress, pretty impregnable.

And how long have you been there?

I’ve been there a little over a year, and you can come and knock on the door, and there’s a little square that opens, and clients come in, and you can smoke and do what you want.

So this is like a regular business?

Well, I can’t say too much about that, because I don’t want to expose anybody, but there is a boss, and he makes money off the drugs, yes. And he’s pretty selective.  They don’t entertain the guy who collects bottles off the street, for example, they need to know you.  And in all that time that I’ve been there, not once have the police come in. They’ve tried, but they haven’t been successful.

So how does it work?

The guys who run it, they get a package every morning, of a hundred grams of pasta, and they cut it up into little folded square packets made of newspaper, called tickets. And a ticket costs one sole each. So they pack them up into ten piles of sixty four tickets each. (When you cut a sheet of newspaper in an eight by eight grid, you get sixty four little squares of paper.) And they usually sell out every day.

I get the sense that you don’t really have a reason to bullshit me about any of this. But you are a con man, after all, how can I be sure you’re telling me the truth?

I’m telling 100% the truth. I’ll look you in the eyes, without looking to the left or the right, and I’m answering you with truth, because I have no reason to lie. I’ve known you for a long time. And if I know you, then it becomes personal, and it’s different.

I’ve watched you work on the streets of Iquitos, and I’ve never interrupted a con that you had going with tourists or whoever. I’m not sure if that is ethically the correct thing to do, but then on the other hand I feel like, as part of the ecology of Iquitos culture, this is a learning experience, and people are going to get an education from you.

That’s the way that I would like to justify it to myself. Against those who say, you’re abusing the goodwill of the people, which is what they say about me. The guy last night, for example, he said, ‘I never give money, I have a policy.’ Now, as soon as someone says that to me, I want to get even one sole from them, because it gives me a challenge. So the first thing I do is I agree with them. ‘I fully understand you, but please consider my situation.’ And you give them a low figure, which is just a breakfast in England, or a couple of cups of coffee. And this guy, he gives me twenty soles, and then maybe the same night he reads in the Iquitos Times about the gringo con man, sees my picture, and he realizes, shit, that guy conned me. He will never again give money to someone in the street.

And you know why that’s a good thing? Because in this day and age, there’s no way you could ever find anybody asking for help in the street, in that situation. There are too many facilities. And that’s a lesson that they have to learn. The fact that they believe me, it is from the goodness of their heart, and the sob story that I give them—and most people would see that I abused their goodwill—and it’s a hard lesson, but it’s very, very unlikely that you would meet someone like me who hadn’t been to the police, who hadn’t been to the Embassy, and who didn’t get help already. It’s very unlikely, what I say, but it’s just how I sell it. It’s the approach. And it’s totally to do with conviction. And the conviction, is, well, enchantment, and charm. I think that’s what it boils down to.

Yeah.

If you notice, I get a few laughs—“I’m forty years old, I want my mom,” it always works.

And that guy was British, he related to you there too.

Well, I don’t like doing the Brits, I really don’t, I called him over so you could sit there and be involved.

It was very interesting, in a weird way. You told him you were from Brighton.

That’s where I was living for years. I was actually born near Sheffield, in a place called Rotherham. Sheffield is where they make all the nice stainless steel knives and forks.

Let me go back to living in Belen. You probably didn’t see any other gringos living down there while you were there.

I didn’t. Occasionally I would see gringos walking down the stairs to go to the market down there, but no other gringos lived there. It is fairly dangerous there, but the grounds that I entered there, I entered already knowing the worst people, as it were, and they were the people protecting me.

Did you ever have any bad incidents, close calls, things like that?

I had quite a few. There was one point when I was trying to teach the guys to use fists instead of knives, and I got cut (shows a scar on his chest), not very deep though. That was from separating a fight. I also have a cut here, on my hand, about three inches, down to the bone. This was a meter long fluorescent light tube, and they broke it, and then stabbed me with it—I put my hand up to block it, and got stabbed there. And the finger.

Oh yes, the finger. Everybody remembers you by that pinky finger, it’s part of your con. I remember you waving it in people’s faces when you could actually see the bone sticking out. That got a lot of sympathy! How did it actually happen?

Well, I was smoking, I was out of my head, and it was nighttime. I was talking to a friend, we were sitting around a large table that had candles on it, about as big as half your thumb. This was not long after being stabbed in the hand, and it must have severed a nerve, as I lost all feeling from the point of my little finger, to about two inches down on my wrist. As I leaned over to talk, I felt absolutely nothing but I actually burned my little finger on the candle without being aware at all. I smelt burning flesh, and I didn’t know what burning flesh smelled like, but it’s something like you’ve never smelled before. There’s no other way to explain it—I smelled something rather odd. And my friend said, shit man, you’re burning your finger!

Wow.

And although it’s not that funny, it was really like an old Tom and Jerry cartoon—I lifted up my hand, and my finger was smoking, and it had a flame on it. I blew it out, and I just looked at my finger and I could see the bone. That’s where the finger injury really came from. And I felt nothing.  Not until the other day, when the Welsh guys stamped on it. I’d felt nothing for a long time until then, so maybe they did me a favor.

Do you think they broke any of your fingers?

Yeah, definitely. They broke the first joint of my index finger, maybe not the second but it hurts, and the one that was already broken, they broke it again. But they did not blacken my eyes, and I still hold my head up high!

So . . . you mentioned that you weren’t quite ready to go home yet. Recently you had an opportunity, but you didn’t go.

No. Nothing’s calling me. I need to have that inner sentiment that calls me, before I go, and nothing’s calling me.

That almost suggests that you are content here.

For the moment, yes. But, there are certain things. I need to collect certain personal belongings, and there are people that I’d like to pay back before I leave.  There are a few wrongs that I would like to right. Until I do that, I will feel incomplete.

Really, after all this time, you’d go and pay those people back?

There are a few people, yes.

One of these people who knows your case well, he suggested that you’ll never leave, and they’ll find you someday in one of these crackhouses, dead of an overdose, or worse.

They won’t. I will leave, one day, and I will leave alive. But I don’t have any plans to leave anytime soon.

 

Part III – Karma Is A Bitch

 

Later on that night, after our interview took place, Brian encountered another of the Welshman who had earlier given him twenty dollars. This was Ian, the unofficial leader of the group, and he was the biggest and baddest of all of them. With his bald head, tattoos and facial piercings, he could have stepped out of the landscape of a Mad Max movie. He’s quite a nice guy, I’ve found, but not someone you’d want to mess with.

I got to know Ian because he and his friends had spent the week drinking ayahuasca at my friend’s retreat center in the jungle outside of Iquitos.  This might appear to be kind of a contradiction—to go from the peace-and-love vibe of jungle medicine, to delivering beatings in the streets of Iquitos—but in fact it was a matter of principle. The Welshmen had told Brian quite clearly, before giving him twenty dollars apiece, that if he turned out to be a liar, they would find him and give him a thrashing.

Ian said himself that he didn’t enjoy giving Brian a beating at all, and was rather upset that Brian had forced him to administer it in order to keep his promise. “I told Brian when we gave him money that if he was lying, we’d give him a whipping, and I’m a man of my word,” he said.

When I heard this, I had to smile, because just earlier that day Brian had expressed his amazement about the lack of violent consequences over three years of working the con game, and then within hours he’d received his second beating in three days! The universe must have quite a sense of humor.

I say this also because, after Ian was done with him, Brian actually went and summoned the police, who detained them both and took them to the police station. According to Ian, Brian was furious at him, saying Ian would be put in jail, and was going to be in a lot of trouble, because Brian knew the police at the station and they were friends of his.

But when they arrived at the station, the police inspector talked to both of them, and then had Brian temporarily locked up. Afterwards, he came over to Ian and shook his hand. “Well done,” the inspector told him. “You are free to leave.” All the police seemed to be having a good laugh about it, and they congratulated Ian again as he left, for being so proactive.

It seems quite unclear what the future holds for Brian. He doesn’t want to leave, and thinks himself content. How can an intelligent person find contentment in such conditions? Is it fair to say that he’s deluding himself? People have tried to help him, but he doesn’t want the help, whether he needs it or not. He’s a survivor–he lived for a year and a half in lower Belen, where other gringos only venture after dark with a police escort, so I suspect he can survive anywhere.

If it’s true that great salesmen are born and not made, Brian is a natural. But where he once made piles of cash, he’s now reduced to playing for nickels, out here on the fringe of this frontier city on the edge of the world. It’s a shame that he is squandering his considerable talents for a pile of tickets. Sooner or later his tickets are going to expire. So I hope that one day soon, he will wake up and decide to use his powers only for good, in someplace worthier of his abilities, someplace more refined than an Iquitos crackhouse.

24 Feb

Jim King, RIP

Posted by calebwhitaker in characters.

 

 

Jim King, the American Consulate’s official Warden of Iquitos, passed away last night.

Jim was something of a controversial character in Iquitos. He was the type of guy who had seen it all and always told you exactly what he thought. I am glad I knew Jim, especially in the past year when we had an opportunity to work closely together. A longtime expat from Wisconsin, he spent many years in South America in the timber industry, and he made a lasting mark on Iquitos. I expect that many remembrances are to come. I will remember him as a man who was oftentimes misunderstood– beneath his Hemingway-esque persona of hard-drinking bluster and braggadocio was a man who cared deeply for people, a man who took on other people’s problems without looking for any credit in return. He was also a shrewd businessman, and a dedicated husband for many decades to his wife Pat, to whom I send my deepest condolences. Rest in peace, Jim King.

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