Accidents Happen

Holy Bill Murray! What day is it? You get so focused on work and family, time just sneaks off while your back is turned, that slippery thief of days, leaving nothing in return but a few more grey hairs to greet you in the morning and a big blank space where your latest blog post should be.

So what’s been happening? Well, we had a disaster simulation drill here recently, to prepare for some generic accident like a big earthquake. They did this throughout the entire country at the same time, and while this is not an earthquake zone, in other parts of the Peru they are a serious threat. There are plenty of homegrown safety hazards here though. This is a city where people steal manhole covers for the money they can get pawning the metal, and the city is not inclined to replace them, so they just leave these gaping holes in the streets and you have to remember where they are when you are driving through the neighborhoods, or you might have to take evasive action. From what I can tell, the city is not even able or willing to make repairs to streets which are so riddled with potholes that they pose actual threats to the citizens of the city on a daily basis . . . so it struck me as a funny contrast between that reality in the streets, which is an ongoing menace to public safety, and the fact that they used taxpayers money to shut down the city and carry out an elaborate disaster preparedness simulation for an event that will never happen here.

Closer to home, little Maverick had his own accident, and now he knows what happens when you jump off the dinner table when no one is there to catch you. I suppose everyone learns that lesson sooner or later. Maverick learned his when he did a faceplant onto a chair. It looked bad, and we thought he was really injured at first, but he’s fine. It was his mother and grandmother who really freaked out, in fact, they immediately fell apart at the sight of Maverick’s swelling forehead, and started squawking and pecking at each other like a couple gallinas regionales, one trying to rub soap on his forehead while the other said no, it should be ice, or menthol cream, and each trying to run and get first aid supplies while also trying to take him away from the other, playing out an ancient, multi-generational female power struggle in fast forward,  in that moment of crisis. You could really see the mother/daughter rift crystallize there, in that swirl of panic and crisis, and they weren’t doing the boy any favors either. I was appalled, frankly. I had to forcibly take him away from them and tell them to back off, calm down and start acting like adults.

Then just yesterday, an accident befell Aldous the Acai Wrangler, whom dedicated readers might remember from his profile on this blog. He was keeping his supply of acai in an industrial freezer the size of a shipping container, and the freezer unit broke down. He was not in Iquitos when it happened, and it was a week before anyone got round to repairing it. By that time, a lot of his acai and other frozen tropical fruit products had melted. Man, I’m glad not to be the one cleaning up that mess. I feel terrible for Aldous, he seems to have lost a couple hundred kilos of acai at least, and there’s no way to get it back. In America, this would be the point where everybody lawyers up for a legal fight. But here, its just an unfortunate accident, as everyone knows that wading into the thorny thicket of the Peruvian legal system will not solve anything, and is merely a sure way to lose whatever time and money you have left.

Things break down. It happens, you can count on it, and usually at the least convenient time. As Chillum is fond of pointing out, Murphy (of Murphy’s Law) was surely a Peruvian. So don’t try to fight it, just go with it. Keep your eye on the fundamentals, watch where you’re driving, and try not to piss too many people off along the way.

Readers of this blog might also remember a recent profile I wrote about the greatest con man in Iquitos, an Englishman named Brian (http://jungle-love.org/2012/03/17/the-confidence-man-of-iquitos/). One of the themes of that piece was how actions eventually have consequences, in his case typified by a group of Welsh rugby players who warned Brian not to bullshit them. When he did, they tracked him down and gave him more than one beating, out of principle.

Since I wrote that piece, Brian resurfaced again in a very unexpected way. There was a knock on the door of the hostel one night—it was Brian, with an Italian woman named Windy. I had seen her on the Boulevard, a little slip of a thing, just skinny as hell, floating by like a light breeze, and pretty clearly coked up, along with the guy she was with. But she seemed pretty harmless. Later, she asked me if she could rent a mini-fridge from me that I wasn’t using, and I said OK, because I could see she was trying to get her mess together, though I fully expected never to see that fridge again. Sometimes people deserve the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes you stick your own neck out on nothing more than intuition and an impulse for altruism. And sure enough, it was fine. She even came to the house and made us a gift of some pasta and excellent parmesan cheese brought from Italy.

And then there she was again, that night with Brian to pay what she owed me to buy the fridge outright. Brian also owed me ten soles, and that night he turned and borrowed it off of her to pay me back, which was kind of funny, and also an ominous sign of things to come. I began to wonder what the catch was. But I had to admit that he had proven himself as good as his word, when he borrowed the ten soles he had said he would pay it back the next time he saw me, and he did. We sat in the back garden and had a nice chat for an hour or so. This woman, Windy, had learned where Brian was living in the hueco (the hole), the crackhouse where he had been staying, and she actually went there and pulled him out of it, offering him to stay at her house until he could get his life back on a better track. So he was telling me that he had not conned anyone in weeks, and was not smoking crack, and was looking to get a legitimate job so he would not have to go back to that life. He also told me a bunch of crazy stories about the two years he spent in an Italian prison, which is why he is fluent in Italian. To see these two skinny, high-strung tweakers sniping at each other in rapid Italian, you would think they had been married for twenty years. It looked like things might actually be turning around for Brian at last.

Brian returned to the hostel a few days later, alone this time, and asked for a job. Tucandeira and I told him that we would give him a shirt with the hostel logo on it, and some flyers, to go down to the ports when the boats come in, to find tourists coming in from the border and bring them back to the hostel. We offered him a job, and a chance to do honest, respectable work when no one else would. He said he was interested, and then asked to borrow twenty soles until he could get started. I did not have any money with me, but Tucan gave him twenty.

He came back again the next night and asked for twenty more. I gave it to him, and then Tucan and I sat down with him and had a long discussion about trust and responsibility. He assured us in the most passionate terms that he would be back the next day to repay the money and to start his new job. Tucan explained in very clear terms that if he did not, the time they saw each other, Tucan was going to give him a spanking.

This was almost an exact replica of the scenario with the Welshmen, and I was fully aware, as I had been with the mini-fridge, that I might never see that twenty soles again. But Brian seemed to adamant to want to change his life, and I wanted to help him get a foothold on that first rung on the ladder out of the hueco. But he did not come back the next day. And we did not see Brian for about another month after that. I knew that Tucandeira was going to follow through on his promise, because he mentioned it several times afterwards, in that joking-but-not-really way. It was clear he would not waste the first opportunity to extract his twenty soles from Brian in the form of his choosing.

And then, one night, of course it happened. Tucandeira was out in the center of town, after having a few beers, and while crossing the street he saw Brian before Brian saw him. He landed the first punch square on the mouth and then kicked him along the street. A couple of Peruvians came up and intervened but Tucan beat them back. Then a policeman came up and tried to break it up, but Tucan shoved him out of the way, saying, “this guy is a thief, and he stole from me. People here may not do anything when this happens, but I am doing something about it, and this guy deserves it, so get out of the way.” And the cop did not intervene further. This was right in front of Ari’s Burger, with lots of spectators and locals having dinner. Tucan beat him pretty bad, from the way he describes it, not letting him get back on his feet even when he protested that he had Tucan’s twenty soles. Too late for that, was Tucan’s reply.

A few days later, Jimbo and Barry Berserker were over at the hostel visiting, and I told them this story. These guys had tried to help Brian early on, and were familiar with the entire saga. They were the ones who told me that Brian has four kids, by different women, having met up with Brian and some of his family in better days, at a summer festival back in England years ago. All of these kids are growing up without knowing their father. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is impossible to say.

Tucandeira showed Jimbo and Barry the cuts on his knuckles made by Brian’s teeth. They have long since given up on Brian, and now I am sorry to say that I have as well. Because I can see that, as much as he really believed what he was saying that night about wanting to be straight, and get his life together, he just couldn’t do it. Windy kicked him out of the house when he started to revert to his regular habits, and he is back to conning on the streets and smoking crack and, I presume, living in the hueco again. And that’s too bad. I don’t expect to see my twenty soles again, especially now, but Tucan says he can get it back for me, in the form of another beating, and he plans to do so at the first opportunity. At this point I can’t say that I have much of a problem with that. If it does happen, it won’t be an accident.