A Little Less Screwed

Upon reflection, I realize that this whole trope of gringos-getting-ripped-off-by-Peruvians is an ongoing theme here at Jungle Love, and a rich storehouse of accidental comedy as well.  I mentioned my last post to a few friends, and they all chipped in with stories of their own, prefacing them with things like, “oh man, that’s nothing, listen to this…”

If you’ve read this blog even casually over the past year or so, then you know the running theme that Peruvian are not merely predisposed to swindling and deception, but in fact are among the greatest con men on the planet, and that this fact is a not just a dubious honor, but something to be praised, as far as it goes.

Chillum reminded me today of some of his own experiences and I must say that, compared to him, my sour interaction with the plumber was fairly mild. Let’s say that the standard here, as La Gringa likes to say, is that you know you’re making progress if you get a little less screwed this time than you did the last time.

So, Chillum was developing a piece of jungle property outside of town into a jungle retreat center. He needed wood. So his guardian, who had worked for him for a year and was making far more money with this steady job than he ever had in his entire life, recommended a lumberjack upriver. It was legal, but it was also cheap, he said. No need to pay the markup of a sawmill, when this guy can go into the jungle and cut the trees direct from the source.

Slocum put half the money down up front, and waited for a shipment of wood that never came. The lumberjack lived on the same river in which the retreat center is located, so it was easy enough to float the lumber downriver, but none came. Chillum investigated, interrogating both his guardian and the guy’s brother, but they knew nothing, or pretended as much. Finally, Chillum paid a couple of big, mean-looking gringos to travel up to the lumberjack’s place in the jungle.

They arrive there, and the guy’s nowhere to be found. But his wife is there, looking scared, and after the situation is explained, Chillum seized the guy’s chainsaw as collateral. They found out later that the woodcutter was cowering in the woods nearby, too afraid to come out and deal with the confrontation.

After that provocation, a small fraction of Chillum’s order did in fact arrive, along with the message that the woodcutter would need his chainsaw back in order to complete the order. So Chillum traveled again to the woodcutter’s house with his merry band of hired pretend-thugs, and exchanged the man’s chainsaw for the title to his house. They secured a promise to receive the remainder of the shipment, but to this day the order has not been fulfilled.

I ask you, what kind of man would let such a deal lapse, knowing that someone else held the title to his house? I do not know. But it sounds like it ended like so many half-realized deals do here, where the aggrieved party gets the minimum of what they will settle for, and it ends there.

I went out to visit Chillum today. He is still developing this truly beautiful retreat center in the jungle, having already constructed seven tambos (huts) and a very large main house, and he’s now building a twelve-bed dormitory with a balcony and bathrooms, overlooking a creek and the deep guileless jungle. He had just sunk 24-foot blood-red Pali Sangre wood posts into the earth as the foundation. I asked him what had happened to the remainder of the order he’d been expecting.

“I don’t know, man, I still have the title to his house,” he said. “In spite of all the bullshit, I got these logs from him for fifty soles apiece, and If I’d gone to the sawmill just down the river, I’d have paid two hundred dollars each. (That’s about one tenth the price).   “But I won’t do business with him again. He’s a thief. Really, he’s a genuine crook. I know for a fact that he got a lot of contracts from Ivan (the regional governor of Loreto) and when he got the money up front, he just fucked off. He didn’t provide the wood at all. He just ran off and got drunk, and shacked up with a lot of women in the jungle and hid out until they stopped looking for him.”

Nice. Perhaps you can see the pattern there . . . not exactly what you want in a business partner, whether you are gringo or Peruvian.

And my dear friend Chillum is out about five hundred bucks, by my estimate. Not good. But he has a long memory, and he’s here to stay. So karma comes back around, eventually.

Funny side note here. I was inspired by Chillum’s thug-life antics, and the marginal results they obtained. I have another friend here, a savvy Dutchman by the name of Geert van Gelt. He runs a jungle lodge built by a very kind-hearted and well-intentioned Norwegian fellow. Which means, of course, he got ripped off by the locals in the process of building it. One Peruvian in particular signed a contract for work, did only a small, shoddy part of the work, and then disappeared.

Neither Geert nor the Norwegian were happy about this, but when reckoning time came, Geert went round to his house multiple times deep in the dusty, suburban recesses of Iquitos, and the guy managed never to be home. Finally when I told Geert my story about Chillum and the hired pretend-thugs, he asked me if I could round them up to collect his debt. He was even willing to pay for the service.

I agreed. The pillar of this thug mob is an Israeli-by-way-of-the-former-Yugoslavia gentleman who landed here in Iquitos recently after a series of global peregrinations that are petty much balls-out crazy, frankly, so I won’t even go into them here because that would be just asking for trouble. He looks like an extra from a movie, the goon from the scene where the mob boss shows up at your door in person, when things get really serious.

You know what, on second thought, fuck it. I have the time. I will go into it, you’re curious after all, right? I mean, there’s plenty of boilerplate freaks that wash up on the shores of Iquitos, but this guy is something special. So I present:

The Backstory Of The Yugo, Just So You Know

His family hailed from the Balkans, where trouble is steeped in the soil a thousand years deep. He joined up in the Israeli Army, but then some really fucked up shit happened. Refusing to fire on unarmed civilians during a commando raid, he was reprimanded but unrepentant, and so went from AWOL to dishonorably discharged.

He went to Goa, India. He started dealing small, and worked his way up to a fortune. He was dealing big, in anything you’d want for a trance party, among the trance crowd there and also the Israelis of whom there are curiously very many expatriating or at least staying for extended vacations after their military service.

But other, larger and more sinister competitors lay in wait. The Russians had an eye on the drug trade, and they already had strong footing there in prostitution, especially with underage girls. Yugo learned the names and addresses of the culprits, and took this information to the police. They weren’t interested. They wanted to be paid up front for their trouble, and paid substantially. That’s how things work there. Yugo had the money, but he didn’t want to pay for justice that should be free. So he went vigilante, to the house of the Russian ringleader and his cronies, and when they answered the door, he beat them all senseless.

After that, Trouble. Word came soon after that the Russians Were Coming, and he needed to leave his house, like now. He fled his house and all the trappings of wealth, on foot in epic wide-screen style across the Himalayas, and never looked back.

So I can say for a fact that this guy has a conscience, moreso than most of the rest of us, in the sense that he is willing to stick his neck out for people he doesn’t even know. And he is tall and thick and he has that icy thousand-yard-stare that says in bold letters, in every language, tangle with me at your own risk. A vigilante of the old-school, Lone Ranger variety, a warrior with a conscience, with a questionable history but unquestionable motives.

And That’s What I Understand About the Yugo, Don’t Fuck With Him.

So it was that he came to Iquitos seeking healing from this checkered past, and began to make his way in and around town, and so it was that I showed up at his hotel one morning seeking muscle for hire.

“Hey man,” I called through the door, “I have a proposition for you. Easy money. Fifty soles for an hour of your time.”

Silence. Then a creak of bedsprings. I knew them well—I’d lived in that very room in the hotel a few years previous. I remembered rogue bedsprings poking up from the mattress, which were a source of complaint for myself and anyone sharing my bed. Those fucking rogueys had stabbed my ass more than once.

“Go away.”

“No, you don’t understand. I have a job for you. You can get paid.”

“Come back later.”

“Really?”

“Seriously. Fuck off.”

So yeah. I left a note saying, “hey man, I have a job for you, as the Enforcer. Easy money. Call me.” But no. That was the end of that. I called Chillum and he told me that the Yugo had been involved in a whirlwind romance with a Polish girl, and she’d left town that morning, after they’d been up all night saying goodbye.

So much for the Enforcer. He couldn’t be bothered. Who else could I hire to act intimidating? I was well aware that this is the type of situation that’s probably not good to get involved in, in the first place, in that it involves placing yourself in opposition to other people who don’t know who and who might come to identify you as enemies. As a strict advocate of pragmatic pacifism in Iquitos, I was really pushing the line here. My friends warned me not to. But I persisted. It was exciting.

I remembered my Peruvian friend Arana, who owed me fifty soles. He spoke English, and we’d always been friendly. Even though he was short, he was stacked. He could definitely kick some ass, when called upon, and he talked a good game too.

“Arana,” I said. “I need some muscle. The Yugo has dropped out. Just show up and act tough, and your debt is forgiven.”

The thing is, Geert was prepared to pay fifty soles to anyone acting this role, so I figures we were equal in the long run. I’d collect fifty soles from Geert, and we’d all be equal.

So it was that we all met up at The Don, the local café in Iquitos where everything goes down.

“So, Yugo, this is Geert. He’s the man collecting the debt. He’s been to this guy’s house four or five times already.”

“That’s right,” said Geert. “The first time he said he’s agree to pay a little bit each month, starting the next month, but the following month when I returned, he said it wasn’t going to work for him, and he didn’t owe me anything.”

“So you see how we must put on a show of force,” I said.

“How I want to do this,” Geert continued,  “is that I’ll pretend you’re a really bad guy, and I’ve transferred my debt to you. That I’m basically selling my debt to you, and you’re going to collect it, and you’re like in the mafia or in with the narcotrafficking scene or something like that.”

“Yeah, OK,” Arana said. He was bluffing, of course, I don’t even know if he even knows any people like this, but he was up for some theatrics anyway. Theater is what this was, nothing more.

So away we went, the great fake repo men into the far distant suburbs of Iquitos, bent on collecting a debt from an obfuscating Peruvian.

When we pulled up in front of the deadbeat’s house, he wasn’t there. The grandmother in the rocking chair out front didn’t know where he’d gone or when he’d be back. She was indignant with our very presence. From a peek inside it would seem like this guy was not doing too badly from himself, though. The mud streets and ragged jungle intruding outside belied the wealth inside, the flat screen TV and Honda 150 parked in the living room where, like, the living room would be, except it was stacked with what have looked like stolen goods in a stereotype of this kind of character.

It seemed like overkill to threaten the grandmother. She seemed tough enough anyway. So in the end we left, agreeing to convene later, to enact the charade some other time.

Bur then there emerged some question of whether the legal contact signed by the Peruvian was even valid in court, and Arana was never recalled for a second act and so considered his debt annulled, and I considered it null because I offered a debt owed to me for a favor, and when the deal went pear-shaped, it was on me to collect, which I didn’t, and which is just as well. I was just as happy to consider Arana’s debt annulled so I could count him as a friend, since it was obvious we was never going to pay me back.

And Geert never got any of the money owed to him. Because we could not nail him down, in the moment with the money in hand, the Peruvian got away with it. You know, it is worth pointing out here that the reason they call them ‘con men’ derives from the phrase ‘confidence men’, which means men that earn your confidence so firmly that you invest in their schemes, go along with their plans, and hold their words as truth so far as their evidence bears it out, and even beyond.

So in this I judge my accounts square, even though I’m now sharing with Geert in taking a loss. In the strict sense, I’m only out the fifty soles Arana owed me, about eighteen dollars, while Geert and the Norweigian are out a thousand dollars or more. But I feel their pain. There’s nothing for it. You tracked your debt to the lair multiple times and still came up short. Go ahead, get mad about it! Or learn from it, your choice.

Of Contractors and Crackheads

how high's the water, ma?

I can say this about contractors and crackheads: they are both notoriously unreliable, and they share the same love of an underhanded bargain. Contractors typically quote me at least twice the price of what a job is worth, and then act surprised when I negotiate. Crackheads are almost worse, interrupting my personal space when I’m strolling on the boulevard with their nattering nonsense, and always trying to collect half a sole for ‘guarding’ my scooter, though they were nowhere to be found when I parked it there.

Contractors like to buy cheap materials, and if you aren’t checking your receipts, the numbers get fuzzy in a hurry. Like most gringos I know who have any ambitions whatsoever to build or repair something larger than a blender, they always buy the material themselves. To do otherwise is to invite chicanery.

Likewise, crackheads here also make a living as petty thieves using pretty words, empty promises and other forms of con artistry. They are a fixture on the boulevard, where they I always see them out in public trying to get someone to believe something that isn’t true. I could stretch this parallel even further, I suppose. The reason it came up in the first place is that I got both swindled and robbed this past week, by a contractor and a crackhead, respectively. And I’m feeling a little salty about it.

The contractor came into the picture because Corrina and I are renovating the Casita, on a budget. I wanted a recommendation for someone who could run pipes as well as build brick walls to build out a shower. I asked a local foreman that I know, and who I trust to give recommendations even though I also know him to be a thief when the opportunity presents itself. He came over with a young guy we’ll call Segundo, and they priced out the job. You always price a job up front, in total, and never by the day, or else the work will take forever. He wrote down a number and, while Corrina and I were still discussing it, he picked up a shovel and got to work. We’d never actually agreed to hire him, he just started working. I should have recognized then, that was the first sign that something wasn’t quite right.

He worked fast—too fast. The work was sloppy and half-assed, and Corrina had to stay onsite and watch everything he did to make sure he was on track. He ‘finished’ in two days, and wanted full payment, but I withheld the final third, sensing that he wouldn’t return to actually finish up the rest of the work. He did come back the next day, and completed the bare minimum of what we had asked. We had only to wait overnight for the pipe sealant to harden, so we could test it. I paid Segundo the remainder in good faith, and that was the last we saw of him.

Notice how the phrase ‘in good faith’ shows up in so many cautionary tales . . . the next morning, we turned on the pipes and almost every single joint sprung a leak, including one inside a wall that he had already cemented, a very Chaplinesque moment, where it all goes wrong at once. We called Segundo and he said he’d return on Saturday to fix it . . . but Saturday passed with no Segundo, and then calls to his phone went straight to voicemail. That’s when the situation tilted from comedy into tragedy.

When I looked closely at Segundo’s work, I saw that the cement on the wall was laid too thin, and was starting to crack. He’d mixed up too much sand in the concrete, and in places it was already eroding into dust upon contact. The drain in the shower was clogged where he’d let sand and concrete into it. He hadn’t covered it before he let the wet concrete drain down into it. This is partly the reason why Corrina now refers to him as “The Asshole.” I refer to him this way also, more because he mixed the concrete directly on top of our brand new shiny lovely wooden floor, spilling it everywhere, and after it dried we had to scrub it off, because it just looked like crap, and even then it was scratched and stained and will never be like it was again.

Also, the piping was off-kilter; the angles were all off. You’d like to think that the contractors you hire are all conscientious craftsmen who approach the work as though it were their own home. With this kid, it was almost like he had some kind of contempt for the work he was doing. But, to an absolute and not-even-barely-acceptable minimum, he’d built what we hired him to build.

All I could do was call and yell at the foreman who recommended him, which I did, more than once. To his credit, he did send a proper plumber around to survey the damage, but at that point Corrina had learned how to the work, and had repaired it herself. I don’t know why this foreman sent me a young kid who rushed the job and overcharged me for sloppy, incomplete work, but the fault is all mine. I could’ve waited to test his work before paying the balance of his wages, and in that sense, Segundo is my teacher, and I won’t be making that mistake again.  Because once the balance is paid, and you’re not happy with the work, chances are you’re just never going to see that guy again, and there’s not much more you can do about it.

As for the crackhead, well . . . when I was managing my friend’s café last week, I was locking up about one in the morning, with a wad of cash in my pocket, when I saw him twitching and scratching and talking to himself on the steps of the Safari casino. I walked to my scooter and he came up behind me, in the dark, not cool. He was trying to hit me up for money, for ‘guarding my bike.’ I told him in Spanish to back off, that he had no business with me, and to get out of the way. He started cursing and sort of made an effort to chase me down the street as I drove off.

Now, I have no tolerance for junkies, and I am not afraid of confrontation.  I would have run this guy off on the spot had he come into the café. The next day, I parked on the same street, and when I left that evening, someone had broken into the locked recess under the seat, apparently using a crowbar to break the lock, and stole a gore-tex North Face rain jacket that has been all around the world with me. Along with my dinner for that night– some carrots, garlic, a can of tuna, and a bag of brown rice.

Now, I can’t prove this crackhead did it. But I saw him around the next day, lurking like a jackal. It seems fairly clear that I was targeted out of spite– after having no trouble in the streets of Iquitos for over a year, this was done in broad daylight, on a busy and otherwise very safe street.

This too is a teachable moment, in that you realize that you are not your possessions, and nearly all material things can be replaced. It makes you grateful for the things that you do have. All in all, not very much was lost in these two encounters.  Perhaps I should count myself lucky that I can find some levity in that fact.

It reminds me of that Buddhist parable where the thief broke into the zen monk’s house, only to find there was nothing to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away.

The Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, ” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Sadly, I am not that enlightened. I am not sitting naked and gazing at the moon. I am grumbling to myself and pouting like a child, because I really liked that jacket. It kept me dry whether I was hiking in the western North Carolina mountains or the Outer Banks or even high up in the Cordillera Blanca of Ancash. Plus, it was expensive. To imagine it now in the hands of some thieving crackhead seems somehow undignified.

So, kids, don’t smoke crack, and keep a close eye on your contractors too. And if you must be a thief, at least steal properly like the professionals do here, and go into politics.

The Gospel of Purity

Everything is temporary.

 

I was up early the other day, and was leaving the room before dawn. I stepped outside and the cat batted aside a dark form just as I was about to step on it. I didn’t think much of it until I returned to the house later, and looking down at the same spot right outside the door, saw that the cat had dispatched a terrifying-looking tarantula. It was covered with coarse hair and had huge horrible Dracula-like black fangs, and even in death, on its back with legs curled under, it seemed to stare defiantly at me. I’m told by some of my neighbors that this particular variety is the poisonous kind, and it looks every bit the part. So thanks kitty, for earning your keep.

I’ve never seen a spider like this before. I think it happened because we hired a gardener the other day, who cleared out all the dark overgrown spaces in the yard, and I suspect this freakish spider was flushed into the open.

So, not an hour later when I returned, the ants were already on the job. These guys do forward recon like no one else. They were deconstructing this spider and taking him back to the lab, in bite-sized parts, while he was practically still warm. To see such a fearsome predator, tops in his weight class, reduced to snacks by tiny ants was kind of humbling in a way.

Whether it be such sundry crumbs as spiders or fish or fruit or even secrets and lies, things decay quickly in the jungle. Nothing is wasted, everything is recycled, and all is revealed in time.

I had a Buddhism professor who was fond of noting that, given a long enough timeline, the prognosis for all living things is death. How true that is in the jungle, where everything not growing is decaying. The worker I hired to paint my house made a similar observation—“every wall in Iquitos is either freshly painted or in need of repainting,” he said. “there is no in between.”

The office where I work is a little wooden cabin we fondly call the Casita. It was built just two years ago by Corrina and her then-boyfriend, Julio Carraldo, whom I am glad to also count among my friends.  When I first met Corrina, she and Julio were living there, in the back of a lush, spacious garden filled with guayaba trees. The place was really very cozy and modern considering it was all hand-built from local wood.

Julio eventually went back to England after the whole Pyramid affair, which by the way is the subject of an upcoming feature in Vanity Fair, no kidding. I understand it is to be published in the next few months and I wish Julio all the best with whatever happens after the article comes out and he becomes for-better-or-worse famous for his visionary but ultimately doomed attempt to construct a giant floating pyramid on the Amazon.

That’s a whole other story, of course. The thing about the Casita is, well, as finely constructed as it was, it too had a fatal flaw.  Julio did not want to use any chemicals or preservatives on the wood to protect against insects. I remember at the time he was very much into dieting, and purity in all things as a life practice. He had been reading Edmond Szekely’s “Essene Gospel of Peace” and was greatly influenced by it. This so-called Gospel of Peace is a most likely fictional text in which Jesus extols the virtues of a vegetarian diet, and preaches at length about the importance of fasting and bodily purity in general. If Jesus had been a nutritionist rather than a carpenter in his earlier career, this is a sermon He might have delivered.

It was interesting to watch Julio live out these practices in Iquitos. He railed against store-bought shampoos and toothpastes, and was obsessed with keeping himself physically purified as an ongoing spiritual practice. He preached against smoking cigarettes, though he occasionally gave in to the temptation. But lest you think he merely talked the talk: at one point right before he left Iquitos, he went out into the jungle, living in a tent, and did not eat anything at all for sixteen days. He came back a walking skeleton. That’s commitment.

Anyway, that’s all just to say that he applied the gospel of purity to the Casita as well. Normally the people here use chemical insecticides or diesel oil to treat the wood. Julio isn’t around to see the effects of using untreated wood, and maybe that’s a good thing. Because it’s clear that purity is just not practical as a building practice. Only two years after its construction, the Casita is riddled with termites. Absolutely consumed from the inside out. When you knock on one of the support beams, you can hear them scurrying and rattling about inside like a rainstick.

Yeah, that's gonna need some fixing.

Curiously, when you crack open the damaged wood planks, what you find is hollow spaces interspersed with these funky, Dr. Seuss-meets-Gaudi looking pieces where the termites digested the cellulose and used the remains as building material to form their houses. Note the crazy anthropomorphic curves of this non-linear architecture.  There’s no apparent pattern, it’s almost like they were just making it up as they went along. I swear you could put some of these objects on a pedestal in an art gallery and sell them for thousands of dollars. They’re some of the trippiest natural forms I’ve ever seen.

Termites. I will never underestimate them again.

Corrina and I have now hired workers to gut the place to find out how bad the damage is. It’s pretty bad. The beams under the floorboards are eaten through, the bathroom floor is collapsing, and we’re going to have to strip it to the studs and rebuild the entire interior. Even the main support beams have had to be replaced, lest the roof itself collapse.

I’m not sure what kind of lessons you prefer to extrapolate from this tale, but I present it to you nonetheless. Many of us want to live in a cleaner, more eco-friendly world, but as I tend my own garden I wonder: how many of us want to be bothered with re-building the roof over our head every couple of years? I mean, if you are willing to forego such luxuries as treated wood, why build a house at all? Hey, Jesus was a carpenter, after all, what do you think He would do? Build it on the sand, or on the rock?

That said, thanks be to the idealists among us. They show us the margins of error in the ever-shifting line between ambition and folly.

I believe T.E. Lawrence said it best:

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”