My Side Of The Jungle

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.

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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.

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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.

The Roast of the Mole

Iquitos has always been a fortune-seekers town, from the early days of the conquistadors and rubber barons right up to the oil companies and narcotraffickers of present times. And while those at the top of the food chain are getting richer than ever, it’s the little guys I find more interesting–the everyday hustlers who have to make the most of their opportunities. I’m not talking about night-sneaking, motorcycle-jacking, chicken-snatching breaking-and-entering type thieves and other cold-blooded criminals, (though there are plenty of those!) but the locals who survive on their wits.

Watching some of them work over the past few years, I now understand that not every theft is a crime. If someone charges you five times the actual value of a thing, and you pay it, that’s not theft, it’s foolishness. So very often, a fool and his money simply part ways due to another’s superior cleverness and persistence. Which is to simply say, it’s not robbery if it’s consensual! If fast talk and craftiness are what puts food on the table, well, that’s a virtue here, never a vice. It’s the attitude that in making money, the ends justify nearly all means, a mentality that is hardly unique to Iquitos. Though it’s said that in all of South America, con games and creative scams and general flim-flammery are elevated to rare heights of artistry here in Peru—and you can call me a believer on that point.

One of the standard-bearers of service-oriented opportunism here is my friend El Topo (the Mole), and I do genuinely consider him a friend. But today I come here to roast the Mole, in the spirit of the old-fashioned comedy roast, in which friends get together to tell off-color jokes and air out their dirty laundry about a mutual friend.

If you’ve ever visited Iquitos as a tourist, chances are pretty good that you have met El Topo. He keeps daily office hours every morning at Ari’s Burger, where he chats up the tourists, catches up on the talk of the town, and waits for some new action to develop. El Topo’s title, if he had business cards, would probably be ‘Jungle Guide,’ and that would not be a lie, and neither would it begin to capture his versatility. Having taken a jungle trip with El Topo (more on that in a bit) I can say with certainty that he knows the jungle well, and loves it truly in his heart. He’s internet savvy, rare for someone of his generation, and he also speaks excellent English, which he learned while working as a short-order cook in Manhattan as a younger man.

El Topo has many talents. Besides being an experienced jungle guide, translator and tour guide, he’s an old hand at reading fortunes with Tarot cards. He’s also a talented chef. But El Topo’s real talent is logistics. That’s where he really shines. He’s the bagman, the guy who can get you things. The man you call when you need to go searching for some hard-to-find item, or conduct some mundane task, that you have neither the time nor the energy for. That’s when you call El Topo, hence the nickname—like a mole, he goes burrowing away into the unknown on your errand, sniffing out the obscure object of desire and then, when he finds it, comes scurrying back again. He takes all requests, no project too big or too small, and he works for tips. I’ve noticed that El Topo’s technique is to tell the gringo (or whoever is hiring him) to pay him whatever he thinks the service is worth, because that generally is more than El Topo himself would have charged. But not always. So sometimes he makes a hundred soles for a job that takes only a couple hours, and other times he works all day and makes ten soles. When that happens, he complains, to everyone that will listen.

Other times, people who have hired El Topo for his services pay him not only in cash but also in gifts, for example, eyeglasses to aid his failing sight. One friend of mine bought the Mole not one or two but three new pairs of glasses over the course of a month or so. Why? He kept losing them. After my friend left town, and the Mole had a new client, I noticed that he had yet another pair of new glasses! The Mole really has a hard time holding on to his eyeglasses, which, incidentally, bring a fair value on the secondary market.

The following is a very incomplete list of some of the tasks that myself or my good friends have hired El Topo for in recent years:

–       Valet/door security for private party. El Topo showed up on time, but gravitated to the kitchen and bailed out on his duties, having decided he would rather be cooking up tasty batches of his special jungle salsa. Meanwhile, guests were ringing the doorbell and left to wait. We told him we weren’t paying him to cook. Surprisingly, he wasn’t too bothered by that.

–       Amazon Raft Race coordinator. Whenever two loose ends needed to be tied together, and no one else wanted to deal with it. For example, the support boat ran short on breakfast food, so El Topo was duly dispatched by peque-peque to go buy eggs and bread from the nearest town, and then catch back up with the boat.

–       Jungle survival seminar presenter. Early in his tenure in Iquitos, my friend Captain Bill hired El Topo to teach him jungle survival. El Topo assembled a chalkboard in the lobby of the Conquistador, the fanciest, priciest hotel in town, to give his presentation. He covered some two dozen bullet-pointed survival tips in an informal lecture format, for which the Captain paid a hundred soles. He now says that, in retrospect, the whole thing wasn’t worth ten soles. But he laughs when he says it.

–       Errand runner. This includes attempting to locate objects and goals as various as: rental housing availability, gravestones rumored to exist in Iquitos cemeteries, immigration paperwork, bookings at jungle lodges and retreats, lost glasses, lost wallets, lost friends, women, total strangers, etc. Not to mention countless message delivery and courier services, on foot and by motorcar, all over the city.

–       Viral marketing spokesman. If you want to promote an event around town, or get the word out about anything, El Topo’s your guy.

–       Fortune teller.

–       Relationship Counselor.

Those last two are actually related. When Corrina was fifteen, her friend Angela hired El Topo to read the Tarot, in order to try and see if she had a future with a love interest, and if so, to find a way to attract him.  El Topo did the reading, and gave Angela some advice on how to use a little enchantment, such as many shamans here use, to draw her man closer to her. He told her to take half an onion, and pin a picture of the guy to the onion, and to stick the pin through his heart in the photograph if possible. Then she was to light a candle nearby, and speak his name aloud several times, and imagine him thinking of her.

El Topo then mentioned that he often provided his services to women in need, such as she might be, and that he could teach her some new techniques that she could use to please her man and keep him interested. He offered to tell her, or even show her, some of the methods that he’d used to help so many other women.

According to Corrina, she declined his offer. El Topo is a man of many talents, as I’ve said, but dental hygiene is not among them, and that surely worked against him there. (Hey, this is a roast, right?) Seriously, the teeth he still has are a mess. They remind me of that military footage of early nuclear tests, where a few crooked houses somehow hold to their foundations though the rest of the neighborhood is blown to bits.

Actually, El Topo once gave me some very good advice about how to tell if a girl you are about to hook up with has a venereal disease. I’ve thankfully never had cause to use it, but I have passed it on to friends and am told that it works. He told me to carry half a lime in my pocket and, during foreplay, to slip my hand into my pocket and get some lime juice on my finger, and use that to ‘test’ her ladyparts for sensitivity. If she winces in pain, she has the clap. (Disclaimer: This website bears no legal responsibility, if you rely solely on this folk wisdom, ya moron. Wear a condom.)

And that brings me to the jungle trip that I took with El Topo, I think it was 2007, my first time in Iquitos. Chillum and I hired him to take us upriver for three days. Which was all fine, but we made two rookie mistakes, which I am not ashamed to admit. First, we paid him all up front. Every penny. Second, I believed him when he told me that this would cover all costs throughout the trip, that there would be no additional expenses.

We went upriver to Tamshiyaku, where El Topo met up with his cousin’s friend, or something, who agreed to take us further up a tributary of the Amazon by peque-peque. Then we went grocery shopping. I was thinking, wait a minute, I thought all costs were included! But no, we then paid the boatman, paid to stay in the small hut on the outskirts of a tiny missionary-sponsored community, and even paid grandma to cook the dinner, which their entire family then shared with us.

And I was happy to share, too. These people were nice to us, took us into their home, and even offered a guided canoe tour of their creek at night, in which a bushmaster charged the canoe and was slain by machete. And El Topo taught me some real jungle survival tips, such as gathering (non-biting) termites from a nest, crushing them up between your hands and then rubbing the bug bits all over your skin. It’s a natural, non-toxic mosquito repellent, and it really works. The mosquitoes were pretty bad that day, and I was grateful for the advice.

All in all, El Topo provided an interesting and unique jungle experience. We were deep enough in the jungle that when we walked to the rotunda in the village center, all the children came out of their houses and gathered around us, just to look at us. That’s how much of a novelty it was to have gringo tourists in their village. We sat there chatting with one of the village elders, who showed us a sample of sacha inchi nuts, which they had begun growing as a cash crop. I bit into one, but it was raw, and had a very bitter taste. I must have made a face, because when the old man asked me how it tasted, El Topo, answered for me, “amargo, como pincho.” This made all the children burst out laughing hysterically. I asked Chillum what he’d said, and he answered: “he said it’s bitter, like dick.”

For some reason I don’t remember now, we decided to return to Iquitos a day early. When we go to town, we parted ways with El Topo and went for a meal at a local restaurant. It occurred to me then that we had paid for three days but gotten only two, and I mentioned this when El Topo turned up again. He found us at the restaurant, with a big frown and sad puppy-dog eyes, to tell us that the money we had paid him had fallen out of his pocket, and he had looked all over the place but couldn’t find it anywhere.

“Please, please, my wife, she going to kill me!” he moaned. “Can you pay me again please sir?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “You owe us money! You owe us a hundred soles! Plus what about everything else we paid along the way? You told us that was all included!”

“Oh,” he repeated, “this is terrible, my wife, she going to kill me.”

We sent him on his way without any more money, and then it occurred to Chillum to follow him around the corner, to see where he was going. So we did, and saw him walking (returning?) into the casino on Napo, across from Ari’s Burger, where I can only presume the money in question had fallen out of his pocket, and was indeed lost.

But El Topo is always on the job, and I know now that he has multiple income streams—and not all of them come from slot machines. Just this week, I witnessed one of them, when I found myself at none other than the Conquistador. I had been called there by a movie production team from Argentina, with whom I had auditioned for a part in a feature film being made in Iquitos. They told me they wanted me to play a doctor in a team from Doctors Without Borders. The director and star are quite well known in Latin America, and the fact that they were headquartered at the Conquistador showed that they were well funded, and not some nickel-and-dime production. But I must say they had their own problems with logistics. After an initial delay of several months, they called me to meet with wardrobe on an hour and a half’s notice, and then late the following night, before we were scheduled to shoot the next day, the casting director called to say that our scene had been cancelled and that we were no longer needed. So my fellow actors and I went from Doctors Without Borders to Extras Without Scenes.

Anyway. While we were waiting in the lobby for the casting director, I noticed a group of attractive young local girls forming a halo around a pleasantly elephantine gringo at the next table. I listened to him tell the girls in bad Spanish that he was a lawyer from the US. Then his cell phone rang. It was El Topo calling, and a moment later he walked in the door and joined them. He made some jokes and some small talk that may not have been awkward to them, but was excruciating to eavesdrop on, and then one of them went off with the man to the elevator and the other girls paraded out.

Corrina, who was watching this scene unfold with me, said she couldn’t bear to listen, and got up to walk around. Because the fact was that El Topo was cold pimpin’. How often do wealthy fifty- or sixty-something gringos come to Iquitos to spend intimate time with some fresh young Latin tail? Often enough for there to be an economic niche filled by men like El Topo.

I want to say here that I think of El Topo as a fundamentally decent guy, in contrast to some of the truly unsavory characters around here. Would I still recommend him to tourists as a trustworthy guide, translator or errand-runner? Absolutely! Is that wrong? I don’t think so. Hate the sin, love the sinner, something like that. As Corrina said to me recently, it’s natural for people want to participate in modern life. It’s right in front of them, El Topo is merely facilitating their access to it. Some of the young women here may not have much money, but they want a new cell phone, and new clothes, and they want money to go out on the town where they have access to a different kind of society, and they can meet interesting foreigners from all over the world.

And in El Topo’s defense, I don’t believe that he would ever approve of any kind of organized exploitation of people against their will. He’s not a criminal, as I said. He’s a survivor. And when money is changing hands in a consensual way, many people here would merely say that the ends justify the means.

So. That was fun, wasn’t it? If you have any memories, vignettes, funny stories, or even not so funny stories about El Topo, I invite you to share them with me, and everybody else, in the comments section.

Ah, what’s that enticing smell? Roasted mole? Que rico! How does it taste?

Amargo, como pincho.

Rainy Saturday

Not too much to report on this rainy Saturday. Drove downtown in the rain to try to catch the Duke basketball game, but that was a big fail. I have still yet to see a Duke game in Iquitos. So sitting here at the local café, watching a mentally impaired man pace back and forth, clutching his pants up with one hand while he uses the other to make his central points to the universe. He only has one flip flop. It is starting to rain again. He can’t sit still—he sits on the curb, nods to himself, stands again. He paces in the rain. He whispers into the void. He’s like an animal, caged for so long that he behaves as though still contained within it, even though he is free, or at least he appears to be.

And while I muse on freedom and madness and watch the clouds roll by, I’m also on guard for the snatch and grab thieves who pass in plain sight, ruthless pickpocket piranhas they are, always alert to the parade of eccentrics, hookers and seekers, healers, tokers and dealers. The dirty laundry list of transients, hippies, jewelry hawkers, pasta heads and bread bakers, butterflies and rain makers, and all the pobrecitos, holy fools and heretics that make up this crazy quilt down on the Malecon.

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon and by this evening this place will be alive, on fire with the flow of beer and the noise of good cheer. But I’ll be gone by then, back to the suburbs, to cook out with some good friends, a few beers and perhaps a pancake party if you don’t mind the calories. They do take their toll. Iquitos just slays me with the way weird things come to seem normal.  The restless swirl of madmen and pendejos feels like just another afternoon on the Boulevard.

I had a funny little non-conflict recently. A hard-edged Swede returning to Iquitos after living here for years was all hot to take a jungle trip—the interior-crashing, machete-swinging, in-your-face kind of jungle trip. He wanted me to go along, and at first I was interested, but the guide he picked out is a well-known con man. He also seems to be a legitimate jungle guide, in addition to being a crook. Both are true. Great jungle guide, great con man, No contradictions there. But them’s the facts. I had to gracefully bow out of the trip, though I had expressed interest in the beginning.

Reason being, I checked my own references. And these guys are crooks. Do I want to be the one slinging muck about the professional reputation of another? No I do not. I don’t want any enemies without good reason. My friend reckons this guy is gold, so I say, go with it. When you get back, let me know how it went, and how much you ended up spending. I don’t be the one talking shit about someone else being a crook unless I have a dog in the hunt.

William Carlos Williams asked, am I not the happy master of my own household? Do I not have the freedom to eat like a barbarian, and spill onto the tablecloth, or bust a dance move in the kitchen at midnight, because those clandestine leftovers are just so freaking tasty, without caring how it might look to others? Do I not have the freedom of choice that defines the man? And so I am free to choose not to keep the company of thieves, and am indeed the happy master of my house and hearth.

In short, I’m not getting involved with sketchy jungle guides. Should I warn my friend about all the bad things I’ve heard about these guys? I’m inclined not to. I already said my piece about it. My friend is old enough and wise enough to check his own references, and it’s his money, so go ahead, it might well turn out to be a great trip. But I’ll stay here where I can keep my own counsel on whom to trust in this gloriously sketchy little backwater town of half a million shysters, saints and thugs. I can only say, have a great trip, and try not to get ripped off. I’ll be here, with the chica and the baby, holding my pants up and trying to keep track of both my shoes–hewing to the basics, and staying out of the rain until the right cause comes along.