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.
Jungle Love 