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i o g r a p h y W r i t i n g s T o u r s E x p e d i t i o n s G a l l e r y S h o p L i n k s C o n t a c t |
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Ayahuasca
Healing and an Inkling of Darkness
by Peter Gorman
One family, my family —From a gift song from Julio Jerena |
Of all the people who had ever been with me drinking ayahuasca I have always known that I’ve been the most frightened. I would keep an eye on them as best I could, watch them as they cleansed themselves, bent over a railing or crumpled on a raised platform hut’s flooring absolutely giving themselves over to the powers that held them, unable to control the simplest body movements and even then knew they were less terrified than me. It was an awful feeling to be able to explain things about ayahuasca to people yet know that each time I drank I had less control over what would happen to and with me, not more. My experience wasn’t a shield, it was a door that was opened wider and wider to allow bigger and bigger monsters through.
They weren’t real monsters coming through, of course. They were the monsters that were me, or the visualization of the monsters that dwell in the horror men do one another. But the doorway was a real doorway. Not something one could grasp or see, just a kind of opening that allows one to glimpse what exists on other levels. All of it filtered through humanness, our vision needing to see a shape to grasp the isness of something; our hearing allowing us to imagine sounds in order to give meaning to something or someone.
My guests would sometimes ask if what they had seen while drinking ayahuasca was an hallucination or a vision. I only knew how to answer for myself. Years earlier I’d gone through a terrible blackness in search of my dead mother at the behest of my father who’d come to me in a dream. And after an eternity of that empty black space I’d come on a wall of white gauze which seemed to me to be the wall beyond which lay the world of the dead. Out of it my mother’s figure formed like a computer graphic in a movie—ten years before computer graphics like that were even imagined.
When she came together she said “You’ve got to stop calling me like this. It’s so hard to come together in a shape you recognize as me.”
Later I realized that had I been given endless time to make a list of ten thousand or a million things I might imagine my mother saying on seeing me for the first time since she’d died, that would not have been on it. And that became my rule for discerning between an hallucination and a vision: if something seen or heard or felt would not have been on a list of 10,000 possibilities, if it were nothing I’d ever dreamt or imagined or read or seen, then it was a vision. I don’t know how to prove that true, or if I need to, but that’s how I see it.
The Doctors and the Heart Healing
In the time since I’d first tasted ayahuasca more than 15 years ago, it had become an important part of my life. But at age 49, with a marriage that was still falling apart two years into its collapse, a couple of teenage boys who wondered what I’d done to make mom leave, and a three-year-old girl who wondered why she didn’t live with her brothers, I was wondering more and more if there was any point. I knew the power of ayahuasca. I knew that the curandero with whom I drank whenever possible, Julio Jerena, was an impeccable man with a generosity I admired tremendously. But Julio’s women left him as well, and his kids, all grown, had their own problems. So what was the point of it all? Was there another side to come out on? Was it just a process? Have I learned anything I wouldn’t have without spending all those nights in the jungle? Did I get any magic tricks yet?
Not at all. Maybe I’m just a lousy student. Maybe there are none to get. But then maybe I’ve gotten much more than super powers and just have to tilt my head and life a little to see it.
Damned if I knew. But there I was again, out on the Ucayali river at night, dead center of Peru’s Amazon with a dazzling sky overhead travelling on a riverboat. With me were five new friends, clients who’d paid to come to the jungle with me to see things they’d only imagined from movies, and to drink ayahuasca. They would be the experience of the river system around Iquitos, travel on an overcrowded, flat-bottomed riverboat with the people who lived in the area, see river towns, go night fishing and hiking through the jungle muck. There would be glorious sunsets, the wonder of the bromilids and wild orchids, the danger of falling from a canoe into rivers where caiman lived, the possibility of being nipped by vampire bats, and a visit with Julio, about whom most had read. There were a thousand other things that would occur, of course, some fantastic, some quite scary, but then that’s probably why they’d come.
I rarely if ever asked them, thinking they’d come because they were drawn by some childhood fantasy of the jungle, just like the rest of us who spent time there. That and the possibility that when they drank ayahuasca they would glimpse something that gave a deeper meaning to their lives, something that justified them being here. It was a question that generally came up only obliquely.
I’m getting ahead of where I planned to be here. Let me go back to where I left off three or four years ago. I had been living in Iquitos for a couple of years in the late 1990s. My wife was from there, as were our two older kids from her first marriage. We’d lived in New York and visited Peru frequently for the first five years of our marriage, then decided to turn it around and live in Peru for a while. When we arrived it was decided that I would take guests out to the jungle periodically as a means to make a living, and we opened up a joint called The Cold Beer Blues Bar as a family base while in town.
But after years of not drinking alcohol, during our time in New York I’d slipped back into it, and with the bar and my work there the slip became a serious thing. My wife Gilma—Chepa—while physically staying in our home, had decided to emotionally leave and I grew surly over it. The more I pushed, the more she fled, the more I drank and pushed harder. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t pretty, and one day I joked to one of my ex-pat friends at the bar over a beer that with all the damned healing my tourists were getting from drinking ayahuasca, it was really me who needed it.
The next time I drank ayahuasca I was visited by little creatures who called themselves the doctors who said they’d heard me and that they’d come to work on me. All they needed to do was take my heart out and get rid of the bad stuff, which would kill the me of me, and then I’d be cured. Naturally I panicked and did my best to cling to me, interfering with their work. Over the years since then they had repeatedly returned when I drank ayahuasca, and despite my fear they always managed to get some work done and I always felt better afterward and would swear to myself I would try to be more open the next time. But each next time when they arrived like the rustling of grass, I froze. It finally came to a head when one night, just as the initial effects of ayahuasca began to show themselves in green iridescent points of light that would connect into a great cathedral ceiling, I simply left the ceremony and spent the night staring into a light to prevent their arrival.
We moved back to New York shortly after that trip and it was months before I had a chance to return to Peru and be with Julio again.
The next time I drank was the time my son Marco drank as well, and the focus on him allowed me to sort of skim through things. The time after that was when I brought the five guests up to see Julio. They were a terrific group, open to Iquitos, to the overcrowded riverboat, to the filth of the marketplaces, to everything I loved. Among them was a former captain in the US Rangers who simply exuded strength of a kind most people don’t possess. His presence alone pushed me to promise that I would not panic this time when the doctors appeared, not be so cowardly in the face of such a man.
Unfortunately, I caved in almost the instant that Julio blew out the last of the coffee-tin kerosene lanterns that lit the little unwalled area of the hut where we sat. It was a dark night with the hint of rain in the thick clouds overhead.
In the darkness the twinkle of green lights appeared. I tried to stay calm. The lights connected into beams and the beams connected into a great arched cathedral ceiling. I opened my eyes: the lights didn’t go away. I knew I was there again, headed to the other worlds where things out of the ordinary happened, where the doctors worked and I knew I was not ready for them. I made my way over to a railing by the platform’s edge and stood. Julio wasn’t five feet away, shaking his maroella-leaf chacapa in time with the icaro he sang. I clung to the sounds like a lifeline, breathing deeply to try to get past my fear. I opened my eyes and looked out at the jungle past Julio’s living space and saw that everything was alive and moving and ominous. I tried to keep myself grounded but knew it was useless: Julio had called a lot of spirits to join us and they were coming in droves. It was going to be a long night if I could not control myself.
I couldn’t of course, and when, a few minutes later I began that wonderful and violent wretching that preceeds the ayahuasca dream, I was relieved to have something tangible to cling to. Up from my stomach came the residue of the ayahuasca we’d drunk, then up from deep within myself came the bile of my life: my fears, my anger, my disappointments, all of them bursting out of me like great chunks of something filthy I’d been carrying for too long. From places past where I existed, places I didn’t know existed came pain I’d hidden years ago and forgotten about. I spewed like a waterfall, roaring like a lion into the jungle night while Julio sang. Over and over I roared, eliminating junk I’d accumulated over time.
There was nothing to see on the physical level, of course, no real vomit to speak of since I’d fasted all day, but with ayahuasca eyes it looked like a pile of bad things at my feet that grew with each violent retch. What a fantastic feeling to eliminate so much so effortlessly, what a gift from the medicine to clean another closet in my personal wasteland.
When I finished I sat back down where I was and made my way over to my original spot on the hut floor. The others were in the throes of their own cleansings, and I hoped they enjoyed them as much as I.
My joy at momentarily forgetting what I’d come to learn quickly dissolved as I heard the familiar rustling of tall grass, the world began to change from green to the familiar red in which the doctors worked and I knew they were on their way. I panicked and sat and lit a cigarette, hoping to keep them at bay. It didn’t work. The rustling became louder than Julio’s singing. Perhaps it was Julio calling them. I opened my eyes: No help. The rushing was filling me up. I crawled across the floor and stood against the railing, facing the jungle again. The rushing grew still louder until I thought my head would burst, then abruptly stopped. The sudden silence was deafening.
“We’re here again,” one of them said.
“I know,” I heard my inner voice answer.
“There is still work to do and not much time.”
“I don’t know how to let you work. I want you to but I can’t do what you want. I’m terrified to let go.”
“Would it be easier to work on you if we looked like this?” they asked, suddenly transforming themselves from the tiny creatures I’d never really seen into a young woman. I couldn’t see her face but felt she was lovely.
“Is this better?” she asked, chiding me.
“It’s just a trick. You’re still the doctors,” I said.
“I’m just me.” She said plainly.
“It’s a trick. If I relax you’re going to turn back into the doctors and tear me to pieces.”
“Not this time. It’s not going to hurt a bit,” she laughed.
“Bullshit. I can’t do it. I don’t trust you.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not going to hurt at all. It might even tickle.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just reached into me and grabbed my heart and began to massage it. “You really don’t have a choice this time. I’ve got to get this work done.”
I didn’t know if I was talking out loud or not, but I knew I was moving around and disturbing the others, so I made my way down the three step ladder to the clay earth outside the hut.
“Bien?” Julio asked as I left the platform.
“Los doctores,” I said.
“Yah!” he laughed. We’d never really spoken about them, but Julio seemed aware of them anyway. “Not that far,” he said in Spanish as I began to step outside of the immediate area of his voice, drawing me back to the base of the hut.
Outside was as frightening as it was inside but I had no place else to go, so I lay on the ground and listened to Julio singing as I looked up at the red world around me. Years earlier I’d drunk from a red flower and been covered in a syrupy red liquid that took me into my veins and blood vessels and heart. Later the red world appeared again and again and it was in that world, what’s called red magic, that healing with ayahuasca is apparently done. That was the world where the doctors were and when I was there, everything, even in our own world, was tinted a darkish red. I’d once, with my oldest son Italo, even been graced with going to a cavernous red room where all the world’s pain goes as solids, like the bile from ayahuasca retching, and which the doctors somehow transformed into healing things. Except for the doctors themselves, everything about the red world was fantastic.
“That’s much better,” the woman laughed, taking out my heart and beginning to reshape it.
Her voice startled me, but her demeanor was so open and light hearted that even though I knew she was just the doctors pretending to be a woman, I didn’t fight her.
And in not fighting her she worked easily. She didn’t provoke fear. She just seemed to be tickling me. Up came the question I’d been asking for years: How can I make my wife happy? What does she want? And the old follow up: to make her happy you must be her. I still didn’t know the answers and asked the woman.
“This isn’t the time for that," she answered. "I’ve still got a lot of anger to take out.”
Images of things I’d done in anger, or wished to do came pouring out. The sourest moments of pain from my marriage came back to life and I was forced to relive them in wretched detail. A hundred things, a thousand moments or hours I wish I’d never lived were all relived horribly. But something about this nurse, this woman and the joy with which she worked allowed me to allow her to dredge all those things up, things I’d fought the doctors over reliving for years.
I don’t know how long she worked. I remember that it started to rain and my wonderful assistant Corina told me to come into the hut but I told her I was fine. I was more than fine. I was singing something, an ayahuasca song was coming out of me effortlessly and I was singing it and laughing and anyone seeing me would have surely thought I was crazy, but I knew better. I was letting some of that stuff go, some of that stuff that was keeping me locked in a sour place and I was getting lighter and more giddy with each bad memory I relived and threw away.
Finally, she said she’d done enough for one night and put my heart back into my chest. I tried to see what she looked like, but as I did she crumbled back into a thousand little doctors, all of them laughing at me.
“That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” they asked.
“You should have done that years ago,” I said.
“We couldn’t. You weren’t ready.”
And then the rustling of the leaves began and they disappeared, taking the sound with them until only the sound of Julio’s singing and the che-che-che of the chacapa remained.
I lay where I was for a long time, until I realized what I must have looked and sounded like to my guests, then stood on ayahuasca drunken legs and made my way to them one by one to see if they were alright. They were.
In the morning, after we’d all gone to the river to bathe—Julio insisted that we put our heads in the river to seal the opening ayahuasca had created so that uninvited spirits wouldn’t come in—I found out that only one of the group actually got it. The others all did before they left Peru, but only one did that night.
The Man Who Tells Me Things
It was six months before I got another chance to visit Peru, and this time I managed to bring Chepa and our baby Madeleina, who was nearly four. I thought that things were getting better with Chepa and that a return to the scene of our worst crimes would be good. She had been saying that living with me in New York was not her life anymore, but she had stayed and I thought things were progressing well. We fought sometimes, maybe often, but we drank beer every night and so managed to get a lot of laughter into the mix as well. In any event, I flew one of her sisters in from Fort Worth, Texas to watch the boys for a few weeks, and Chepa and Madeleina and I took off for Peru.
To my delight, Chepa wanted to help with the group, and made them a great party at our bar, took them out dancing, and even came along on the river to help me cook and attend to things.
Julio was delighted to see her (we’d left Madeleina back in Iquitos with Chepa’s mom), though he did note that she would be leaving soon and that I shouldn’t fight it since she had no control over it. Another impossible challenge I would fail miserably, but at the time I hoped he was wrong and might take a moment to see what it was she needed to make herself happy, so that I could provide it for her. I didn’t actually ask him to do it; I just thought he would know.
After we said hello and I’d introduced everyone to Julio—he always stands very erectly for introductions and formally announces his full name to everyone he meets—Corina and Chepa went about catching some fish for dinner. While they did, my boatman, Mauricio, and a couple of assistants set up hammocks and mosquito nets for my guests at Julio’s son’s home and I did the same for Corina, Chepa and I on Julio’s porch.
That night, Chepa and my assistant Juan, who lives near Julio on the Auchyaco river, took my guests out night fishing under the starlit Amazon sky. They didn’t catch anything except those fish that leapt into the dugout canoes, but their catching fish wasn’t important. What was important was that by being on the river in those uncomfortable little canoes that tip so easily they had all been forced to be perfectly still. And in the silence of that motionlessness, the presence of the jungle makes itself known in a way they could not otherwise grasp. The dark shapes of the trees overhanging the riverbanks and the dead yellow eyes of cayman reflected in a flashlight’s glare conjure up childhood fears and excitement; the sounds of fish breaking water, or the kingfishers crashing into things, the whistle of bat wings near your face all call on you to summon up your courage. There could be jaguars on the banks, after all, or boas in the water. And those shapes and sounds of the jungle will never leave you. It’s as if they find a way into your blood and become part of you, a rich and wonderful and slightly frightening part of your landscape.
When the canoes returned it was late, well past midnight. Corina gave them something warm to drink and a bite to eat, then sent them off to bed.
I got them up much earlier than they would have liked, so that they could go along with Julio to collect the vine and other plants he would need to make the ayahuasca for that night’s ceremony. I always brought the chacruna, the leaves, with me from Iquitos as I never knew whether there would be any nearby. But collecting the vine itself was part of the preparation for drinking.
Julio waited graciously, as he always did, for the gringos to finish brushing their teeth and taking care of their other essentials. When everyone was ready he headed out on a path that took us past his own small fields of yucca and plantain, behind his son’s house and the soccer field there, past the new blue-painted one-room schoolhouse the locals had built and finally up a hill onto a hunter’s path. That path took us to where the jungle looks like the jungle of our dreams: towering trees whose crowns joined in a full, closed canopy, through which only dappled sunlight shone; fifty-foot strands of wild orchids growing side by side with llianas, vines, as thick as a man’s leg. Bromilids so old they’d dropped root-strands nearly eighty-feet. This was a glimpse of ancient things.
Julio walked in front of us. Eighty-two years old, he still had to walk slowly to make certain we didn’t fall behind. When he came on something he thought might give one of us trouble—a plant or tree branch he thought might hurt us—he flicked his machete to cut the path clear. He didn’t swing his machete, or hack with it. He flicked it. Walking with Julio in the jungle is like watching a karate master at work: his movements are so economical they seem more like a suggestion to the plants to clear the way than an actual cutting-and-clearing of them. And the plants seem to simply separate for him, as if they’ll put themselves together again once we’re gone.
It was nearly an hour before we reached the ayahuasca vine he worked with. Before collecting he lit a black-tobacco mapacho cigarette and blew smoke all around the vine, then chanted softly and began to cut foot long sections and lay them on the ground. Julio worked meticulously, slicing several sections of vine for each of us. When he was satisfied that he had enough—perhaps three pounds of vine for each—he smoked the bag we'd brought to carry them back in, then allowed me to fill it and tie it shut. Before we left he placed several mapacho cigarettes at the vine's base to thank it for being so generous and to help its spirit grow quickly again.
On the way back to Julio’s we stopped at a huge and vibrant lupuna negra tree, one side of which is in relative perpetual light; the other in relative perpetual darkness. Julio asked me if we ought to include just a little for the ceremony, but he already knew my answer. For Julio, adding a four or five inch square section of the bark from the dark side of the tree of light and darkness to the ayahuasca was an invitation to the spirits of that tree to come teach us those things we too often keep hidden in the dark parts of ourselves. “Let’s put the darkness in the light,” he has often said.
It was nearly 8 AM by the time we’d reached his home. While we all sat to a breakfast feast Corina had prepared Julio directed his sons in where he wanted the ayahuasca cooking fire and which tree he wanted cut as the primary fire logs. While his sons set off to do as he said, Julio cut a small section of catawa bark from a nearby tree and added it to the bag of vine. Then he sat on a log, laid out the contents of the bag and began crushing the vine sections with a hardwood root that served as his mallet. When all the vine was crushed he began to layer his pot with the leaves I’d brought and the vine he’d cut, putting pieces of the barks he’d cut in among the layers.
By nine the fire was burning, ten gallons of water had been brought from the river to fill the pot and Julio was standing near the ayahuasca as it heated up, chanting softly and blowing smoke from the mapachos he lit one after the other into the mix.
All day Julio would stand or sit by the fire, sometimes chanting, sometimes talking with the neighbors on the river who came by to say hello, but always smoking mapachos and infusing the ayahuasca with their smoke. When the water had been reduced to a couple of quarts, Julio took a piece of old tee-shirt and stretched it across the pot’s top, then poured off the strained essence into another pot that he set on the ground in the shade. Then he filled the pot with water again and resumed cooking. When that too was reduced to almost nothing he strained it off as well, then filled the pot a third time.
Not long after breakfast I’d sent my guests out with Juan for a good hike in the hills to keep them occupied while Julio worked. They came back at about 4 PM, ravenous, but unable to eat, as a minimum of an eight-or-10 hour fast was necessary to make sure their stomachs were empty for ayahuasca that night.
Julio, of course, does what he likes, and he ate a good meal of boiled river fish and plantains with coffee once the three essences had been combined and cooked down to just under a quart of the medicine.
At about eight my guests and crew assembled on Julio’s porch. Among us were a number of locals as well, and while we were in what we thought was a proper reverential state of preparedness, Julio and the locals chatted and joked for an hour or more before everyone but the several of us were left alone with Julio. The only extra people there were Corina, who would stay in the kitchen area unless she thought one of the guests needed something, and Juan, who would help anyone who needed the bathroom area to manouver the little three-step ladder from the porch to the ground, and to make sure that no one left the area where Julio’s voice could be heard.
My five guests and Chepa and I made a sort of circle on the porch flooring, while Julio sat on a low stool with his back against the porch railing next to the ladder. On a piece of blue plastic sheeting in front of him, Julio had place the things he needed for the ceremony: the old bottle half-filled with ayahuasca, his plastic serving cup, his chacapa, a clear bottle filled with aguar diente, camphor and garlic cloves, a bottle of Florida water, a plastic bag of mapachos, his book of the saints and the old Inca stone hatchet-head he’d found as a young man in the foothills of the Andes.
When Julio was satisfied the time was right to start the ceremony, be began to speak in a mix of Spanish and Quechua, calling on the spirits to join us, guide us, teach us. He also called on those spirits he had not invited to stay away from the sound of his voice, to let us learn what we’d come to learn unmolested.
When he finished he reached for the ayahuasca and the cup, then lit a new mapacho and blew smoke into it three times. He asked me for the name of the first person who was going to drink and I gave it to him. He poured a little of the ayahuasca, perhaps two ounces, into the cup, then began to quietly say a prayer, using the name of the person I’d given him while he called on the spirits to help them in their work. When the prayer was finished he handed me the cup to pass along. I did, and when they’d finished drinking I passed my client the bottle of aguar diente and told her to put it to her nostrils and inhale deeply. When she had, I passed her the bottle of fragrant Florida water and told her to sprinkle a little in her hands, then wipe her face with it. I also handed her a lemon drop to suck on to help her keep the thick, foul tasting, still-warm ayahuasca down.
The simple ritual was repeated with each of us until Julio himself drank, after which he stood with his book of the saints, made one more invocation, then he had Juan put out the kerosene lamps. The little platform on which we sat was in utter darkness. Next to me I could hear Chepa breathing.
Julio picked up his chacapa, lit a fresh mapacho, and began to shake the leaf fan. Che-che-che, che-che-che, the sound of the leaves was instantly rhythmical and comforting. In a few minutes he began to chant in tune with them. I knew that the first few people who drank were probably already beginning to feel the effects of the ayahuasca; they might already be seeing the patterns of light that would connect like the dots of a children’s puzzle to make a picture and I hoped they would all be alright. What couldn’t be explained to them, or what I couldn’t effectively explain, was that those first images, whatever they might be, were just the welcome-to-the-funhouse sign. The real images, the absolutely three-and-four dimensional rock-solid images and landscapes that they would learn from would come much later in the dream, long after the neon hallucinations were gone. But to get from the hallucinations to the visions would require the death of their ego. It’s such an easy phrase to write, the death of the ego, but for me at least, such an impossible and terrifying thing to go through. And while most of my clients had read some things about ayahuasca, and some had done their share of visionary substances, I didn’t know anything that could explain the abruptness with which the you-of-you was snatched by the spirit of ayahuasca when it was your turn to learn.
Past that point, once you gave up, then ayahuasca could be a wonderful and joyful teacher. But the giving up part, that was hard, and in the darkness of Julio’s I could feel that nearly everyone was beginning to regret having come here, having trusted me enough to convince them to trust Julio.
For my part, thinking these things allowed me to stave off my own dissolution for a little while, but not long enough. It probably wasn’t twenty minutes after Julio had begun to chant when the green sparkling lights began to appear and my familiar panic began to set in. I opened my eyes, hoping I would find myself on Julio’s floor in simple jungle darkness, but it didn’t help. The lights were still there and they were connecting into the rich green cathedral ceiling as they’d done so often. I felt Chepa’s hand on mine and squeezed it, hoping she was was alright, but already watching the cathedral shift shapes into a broad endless twising strand of DNA sparkling in the darkness, inviting me to climb its ladder-like structure either up or down. It wouldn’t matter which direction I took; as I grabbed hold of one of the rungs it changed from green to the dark red hue of the world of red magic.
Surprisingly, my panic didn’t overwhelm me. Perhaps it was Chepa’s presence, or how gently the doctors had treated me the last time they’d visited, or that the ayahuasca and Julio were so powerful tonight that there was little time to indulge in trying to hold onto myself. Whatever the reason, I seemed to pass into another space so quickly I didn’t realize it had happened. One moment I was squeezing Chepa’s hand and hoping she was alright; in the next I found myself leaning out over the platform railing to Julio’s right, beginning the familiar ayahuasca cleansing. Up came the bile of my life, up came the weaknesses and failures for me to see once again; up came my anger at my ruined family, my anger with myself for having taken on a family and then not being able to maintain it as one. I watched my children vomit out of me, not understanding why I wasn’t good enough or strong enough to hold onto them and keep them together. I watched my baby come tumbling out in a heap of questions she wasn’t old enough to ask. All of it came rumbling up from deep deep places in me I didn’t know existed and burst from me in a lion’s roar spewed into the jungle night.
I was still standing by the little doorway to Julio’s three-step ladder when the doctors arrived, the rushing of the tall grass preceding them by only an instant this time, not giving me enough time to let my fear of their coming well up within me.
“We’ll make this quick this time,” they said. “We know you have to take care of people tonight.”
Standing where I was they showed me Chepa and my Madeleina. “We’ve taught you how to give to them,” they said. “Now you have to work at that. You have to learn to do it freely, with no expectation of return.”
“How?” I asked.
“Just keep giving. There’s no end to it. And nothing will come back but keep giving. No return. No investment. Just giving like we’ve taught you.’
“Will that bring them back to me?”
“No. But you must still do it. You must give freely or it isn’t giving.”
I felt a rush of immense sadness begin to wash over me but the doctors didn’t give me time to indulge in it.
“You also have to learn how to receive love. To get love. Love and be loved,” they said.
They didn’t say anything for a minute and I wondered if there was more. I hadn’t asked it, just felt the question, but they answered anyway.
“Yes.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No. It will be even better than that. Something special.”
I felt that they were about to show me how to be loved, but I suddenly began to grow very afraid of what that lesson would entail. They, in turn, transformed into the young woman they’d been the last time, the one who tickled me while she worked on my heart. They must have been tired of me, tired of still making me learn the lessons they’d started so long ago.
I was glad they’d changed their shape into the woman but I still kept my eyes open, afraid of what would happen if I closed them.
Then, unexpectedly, another voice started talking. A man’s voice. I don’t remember what he said but he showed me my sons Marco and Italo. I loved them when I saw them.
“You’ve been a father to them,” the voice said. “But now it’s time to learn to be more of a father to them.”
Again I realized how second-rate and inadequate I’d been. Even to my boys. I felt wholly useless to everyone now.
“Do you ever ask them what they’d like to do sometimes? Like for whole days? Do you ever ask: ‘Yo, guys, what would you like to do today?’ So they could have a whole day without hearing you say ‘I’ve got to do this or that?’ Just to give them the day with you as a father and not as the father? Not as the father figure?”
I had to admit I’d never thought of that. It made such perfect sense that fathers ought to do that that I couldn’t believe I never had.
I didn’t have much time to mull it over as the doctors interrupted and said it was time for them to go. It was a simple announcement followed by their getting into an open-ended capsule of some kind. Brilliant colors began to glow around them like an aurora borealis and they told me they were leaving. I knew what they meant and my stomach dropped out from under me.
“Leaving for how long?” I asked.
“Leaving,” they answered. “We’ve worked with you and spent time with you and now we have to get on with other people.”
I began to panic, realizing at once how much they’d taught me over the past few years and simultaneously knowing, without knowing how, how much more they’d tried to teach me but which was lost because of my fear.
It occurred to me that I’d been taught the lessons of Red Magic, one of the four colors of magic Julio sings about, and that I wouldn’t get any more, that they really wouldn’t be back.
For a moment I glimpsed the red room, the cavernous room I’d once visited where it seemed to me all the pain and evil of the world accumulates and which the doctors then re-form and reshape into good and positive things. I knew at that instant that if I hadn’t been so afraid of them and spent so much of our time fighting the work they needed to do with me they would have shown me how to work with that pain to heal. But they are going for real.
I called for them to stay. Odd, no? I would have reverted to my utter panic if they stopped and said “Okay, we’ll stay, but we are going to work on you like we need to.” Still, the idea of my world without them seemed bleak.
Those doctors who were still in the shape of the young woman called to me and told me not to be so afraid of The Man Who Tells Me Things, the name they gave the voice, as I had been of them. They told me I missed so much of what they’d come to teach, that I’d only learned a smidgen of what they’d intended and to do better with my new teacher.
The last thing they said as they closed their capsule was that I’d missed the colors they’d meant to teach me. I shouted back that I didn’t know what colors they meant, or what they planned to teach me about them. They answered that they knew that and were sad for me because of it.
And then they sort of blasted off and flew away. Their capsule ship was really more like an upside down bottle cap than any other shape I knew. As it flew it grew smaller, not from the distance it was travelling, it was just my perception shifted and I saw their ship as tinier and tinier until it disappeared into a liquid like a droplet, with slight splash, then was absorbed by the liquid. The liquid was red, almost the thickness of nectar, almost like the nectar of the red flower I’d drunk years ago to start the red medicine sessions.
The thought of it coming full circle like that hit me like a sharp crack on my consciousness. Is it really like that? Is that all for red magic learning? I wanted to shout “But I don’t know anything yet!” but knew it was no use. They were not coming back, at least not then, if ever.
Silence and sadness engulfed me. In the distance I could hear the che-che-che of Julio’s chacapa and the sound of his voice. They seemed to pull me like a rope from a far place back to the railing of his hut where I stood.
I had no idea how long my visit with the doctors had lasted. When my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw that my guests all seemed to be either in the midst of their ayahuasca dreams or sleeping. I made my way past Julio to my spot on the flooring next to Chepa. She was huddled up in a fetal position and shaking. I leaned close to her and asked if she was alright. She didn’t answer so I asked again. Corina heard me from the kitchen area and came over and shook her, also asking if she were alright.
Chepa seemed lifeless, until she suddenly turned her head and told us to leave her the heck alone and to stop interrupting her dream.
I sat back, embarrassed, and lit a cigarette. Just then the voice of The Man Who Tells Me Things spoke: “I can teach you some things. But I’m not as patient as the doctors. If you lie to me or hide things I will take you to hells you never imagined. You will wish the doctors were just tearing your heart out.”
“I won’t hide from you,” I said, lying.
Instantly, faster than that, I found myself in a place so wretched, so awful, so full of the stink of things so evil that even the doctors couldn’t reshape them into something worthwhile. It was as if it was a place not of pain but of fears. A place where fear and the malice that creates it are born. It was overwhelmingly horrible.
“I am not fooling. I am stuck here teaching you and I don’t have time for games,” the voice said, bringing me back to Julio’s hut.
“I’ll try,” I said, shaken at the power he’d unveiled.
“Good. I’ll be back soon.”
And with that the voice vanished and didn’t reappear that night.
I spent the remainder of the ceremony keeping an eye on my guests as they came out of their dreams. After they were all awake and moving, Julio lit a little kerosene lamp, gathered up his things and said goodnight. Juan walked the guests over to Julio's son's house were there mosquito nets were. I stayed awake and listened to the jungle for a long time, the image of the doctors disappearing like a drop into a bowl of soup fresh in my mind, as was the sadness I felt at their leaving.
A week later, after my guests had all returned to their homes, I was preparing to return to New York as well. Chepa had said she’d stay for a couple of weeks with Madeleina as she needed to take her mother to the cancer clinic in Lima for a checkup.
She never did return and it was nearly six months before I saw either her or my Madeleina again.
Healing and a Hint of Evil
On the home front things were hard. The building we had all lived in was being torn down to make room for a luxury apartment house, and we’d moved just two months prior to that trip to Peru. My boys were already adjusting to a new space in a new neighborhood when I returned without their mom, and when, a couple of weeks later, she called to say she’d changed her ticket and moved to Fort Worth to start a new life near her three sisters there, things got really difficult for them. They never dwelt on it, but I’m sure they wondered what I’d done this time to make mom move so far away. And while at first Marco me that mom always did this but would soon return because she couldn’t live without us, after a couple of months he was wondering if this time was the exception.
I did the best I could, but lived with the damned failure every minute of the day. I’d thought that when I’d given up hard liquor two years earlier that things would change. By this time, with the exception of sheer stupidity that occurred maybe once a week, I was avoiding getting drunk on beer and when I did I did my best not to let my Irish temper catch me yelling needlessly. I was working hard at both my family and my writing. I was producing some of the best political material I’d ever done, had new and good connections deep within the US government that supplied me with information no one else had. I was loving my kids to death and calling Madeleina nearly every day. But since I didn’t really know what it was I’d done wrong this time, I couldn’t give my boys an answer or even change anything to make things better for them. That Julio had told me this would happen and that there was nothing I could do was no consolation. That the doctors had told me to give and keep giving and not to expect return was something I worked at but which didn’t give me any consolation either. In my mind, and in our lives, I’d just fucked things up to that awful point, and nothing made it easier to bear or understand.
In April, four months after she left, I sent the boys out to visit her over their Spring break. In June, out of desperation, I filed a custody suit for my little girl, which forced Chepa to return to New York for a few days for the hearing. There, it was as if she’d never left and we’d never argued, as if the past three years had never occurred. For three days we laughed and played. There was no animosity at the hearing and we came to terms easily. Madeleina was in heaven with her brothers, as they were to be with her and their mom. But when the weekend was over she didn’t stay. I just wasn’t her life anymore.
At the end of July I had a trip lined up. I invited Chepa to come stay with the kids, but she was working and couldn’t, so I brought one of her sisters out again.
I hated leaving my boys but I had to work and determined to do it well.
I arrived three days before my guests, reassembled my crew and worked furiously to get things ready. Hammocks were washed and hung out to dry in the Amazon sun. Several new ones were bought in place of those that had gotten a bit shabby. Foam matting, blankets, mosquito nets, jungle boots, kitchen equipment and everything else we’d need was scrutinized and either scrubbed or replaced. Corina, my right-hand man Jonny, and my mother-in-law Lydia did the scrutinizing and were also the beneficiaries of what was tossed, so nearly everything had to be purchased new. Half-a-dozen day laborers I knew scrubbed down my bar since it had been closed for several months. Corina saw to stocking the bar’s fridge with food, and I took care of beer and exotic jungle liquors my guests might want to try.
The group that assembled for this trip and the party at my bar that night included Larry, an accountant, who was ready to take on the world; Alan, a young seaman looking for an adventure; Brian, a young fellow searching for himself; Angelica, an artist and visionary who was caught between living in France and the southwest US; Bonnie, a councilor and a healer in her own right, and Lynn, a former NASA scientist whose software still graces our space shuttles who had come as a last ditch effort to save his marriage.
Over cold beers at the bar I went over our itinerary and answered some questions, but before long the gringos in Iquitos began to make their appearances. There were several ex-pats, a couple of DEA boys, some oil men, and two DynCorp pilots working coca crop dusting as part of Plan Colombia. Also present were Duke, a former SEAL who’s still wired from Vietnam and Jake, a former Navy captain who was living off and on in Iquitos to get healed from incurable kidney cancer. He’d stayed alive years longer than the docs had given him. There were also a dozen tourists who’d heard there was free beer and food, some working girls, a couple of dozen of my Peruvian friends and most of my crew.
The party lasted a long time. Stories flew, music blared, dancing happened, food got eaten and beer got drunk. I stayed in the only safe place I knew, behind the bar, and took it all in joyfully.
Despite the lateness of the night's festivities, I got everyone up early the next morning for a trip to the teeming marketplace of Belen, where we picked up mapachos for Julio, the chacruna leaves I’d ordered from an herb-seller a couple of days earlier and a number of other things—shotgun shells, flashlights, fishing line and hooks—we’d need to bring as presents to the river. By late morning I’d had everyone in my group, including the vegetarians, taste salt-dried wild boar, drink a glass or two of aguardiente—hard cane liquor—and generally get the smell of jungle-goods in their souls. We walked in muck near the riverbank where local boats brought in those goods and where the stench is overwhelming.
We’d begun, starting with the party the previous night, the process of stopping their worlds so that they could be open to the experience they’d come to have.
By noon I’d taken them to the far end of Iquitos, where the Nanay river meets the Amazon for something to eat and a cold beer in the bar built for the movie Fitzcarraldo. I didn’t usually run into anyone I know there, but that day was surprised to find Jake sitting in a corner with his new girl and her mother. He joined us briefly, and as I was sitting he noticed a small growth in the center of my scalp.
“How long have you had that?” he asked
“I don’t know. Couple of months, I think.”
“Have it looked at.”
Since he’d left the navy, Jake had become a chiropracter and was sort of the resident doc among the gringos in Iquitos. He was bright and funny, but he could irk me with his pushiness, so while we were friends we’d never gotten close. And sure enough, just after his impromptu medical examination, he insisted I come over to his table to tell his girl’s mom that he really was a chiropracter. I did, but she didn’t believe me and Jake wanted me to stay and insist that he was until she did. I begged off, wanting to get back to my group and he complained that I always treated him in a second-rate fashion. When I told him I didn’t mean to do that, but that I had guests to attend to, he asked why my guests should be more important than my friends.
After lunch, I set the group free with a plan to meet up at the town center in a couple of hours for a sunset canoe ride. All but Angelica agreed. She said she had made plans with Duke the night before to go see a healer he wanted her to meet. I said okay, but inside I seethed a little. Duke and I had a bit of history: When I was moving to Peru I invited my friend Larry L. to pitch in for a year or two. Larry had mentioned that his friend Duke would like to be part of the team and I'd said okay. Unfortunately, our personalities clashed incessantly and I decided it would be better for me to do the tours without him after the first one.
Since then, I always felt he was trying to one-up me, and his inviting one of my guests away from a planned event seemed like just another incidence of that. But Angelica was capable of making her own choices, so I let it go. Still, I thought it was rude of Duke to do that.
The evening trip went calmly, and I sent the group out dancing later that night, with a meet called for the next morning.
But at the morning meeting time, Duke was there with Jake and announced that both women on the tour, Angelica and Bonnie, would miss what I'd planned because they were taking them to the university to meet someone important. Again I rankled a bit because this was not the way to get a group interacting, but the women wanted to go, so I let them.
Our boat was scheduled to leave at five, so I had Corina take the four remaining members of our group on a day trip while I went shopping for food supplies. They were due at the bar at two with packs ready and all arrived on time but the two women, who appeared an hour later. With them were Duke and Jake and a middle-aged Peruvian man I’d never met.
Duke asked for a bottle of beer and a couple of glasses. I told him to help himself as I was busy, but he insisted that out of respect for his friend I bring them myself. I stopped what I was doing and did as he asked and when I arrived at the table Duke presented his Peruvian friend as a shaman. He was dark complexioned, thick and strong with a good handshake. I told him I was glad to meet him then excused myself to go back to my preparations.
While my team and I packed, half-a-dozen friends showed up, and in no time an impromptu party commenced.
At some point Jake came over to look at the small growth on my scalp again, then showed it to the healer he and Duke had brought in, who made a comment I didn’t hear over the din. I thanked Jake for his concern and assured him I’d have it looked at first thing in New York.
Angelica commented that she’d had a great time with Duke and his curandero and hoped that Julio would be as powerful a man. I laughed and said I hoped her experience with him was good too. Duke leaned in and told that he was confident that Angelica would bring the angels to the ceremony, and that he’d be there with us in spirit. “I’ll be there with you, brother,” he said.
By four, my boat man, Mauricio, and his son had taken the hammocks across the street and down the long steep stairway to the boat we’d be taking, secured a space and began setting them up. Not long after I hired several dock hands to carry the rest of our stuff over, and just before five I locked the bar and we all headed over.
It was mayhem, as usual. The 80-foot-long, eight-foot-wide stairway was crammed with people headed to the two large riverboats leaving from that port that evening. Each boat held about 300 passengers and a couple of hundred tons of cargo, and everything was being loaded by way of the stairway. Additionally, there were family members saying goodbye to their loved ones and dozens of vendors selling food, soda, gum, crackers and anything else they could carry crammed onto the stairway and the boats anchored at its foot.
Just after five our boat sounded its whistle, and fifteen minutes later we were on the Amazon river. The boat was a spider web of hammocks and lines, and to reach the little area Mauricio had secured one had to crawl on hands and knees. I recommended we all head for the roof, which would be windy and cold at night but glorious for the next several hours.
It was. There is something magical about sitting on the roof of a riverboat travelling on the Amazon, gliding past the jungle at river’s edge. I have never grown tired of seeing the villages or the fields of plantains and yucca interspersed with the trees, the canoes anchored in the river at the base of steps carved by machete into the vertical banks, fishermen and slash-and-burn farmers bathing with their children on balsa rafts tethered to stakes buried in red clay that underlies much of the area. It really is the Amazon jungle, the way it has probably been for as long as man has lived there.
The hours passed easily. Overhead, the sky was ablaze with stars. We all just laughed and laughed until it was time to head down and brave the uncomfortable crawl to the hammocks.
We arrived at Genero Herrera by nine in the morning and transferred to my friend Hernan's 30-foot dugout with a nine-horsepower motor for the next leg of the trip.
The trip took us off the main river, onto the much smaller Supay river, fed by the glorious Supay lake, home of several families of pink and grey river dolphins. Beyond the lake the feeder river, the Auchyako, was even smaller, with tall jungle hanging over the banks. Colorful kingfishers flew about; pairs of macaws flew overhead; monkeys we’d disturbed with the peque-peque sound of our motor yelled at us and an occasional sleeping turtle slid off a sun-drenched log and into the river at our approach.
We arrived at Julio’s by three to find that he wasn’t yet home from his chacra, his field. But one of his daughters-in-law who was staying there welcomed us warmly. I sent Mauricio off to set up the hammocks for our guests at the nearby home of another of Julio’s sons while Corina began to go through the food supplies collecting things for dinner.
Julio arrived home carrying a machete and an arm of plantanos to find me, half-a-dozen people he’d never met and two or three of my assistants having taken over his home and acted as though it were a normal occurrence. He handed the green plantanos to his daughter-in-law, then climbed the three step ladder to the unwalled platform that was the primary living space, and disappeared into his bedroom. He emerged with a clean shirt and a laugh in his eyes.
“Ah, ya. Pedro,” he smiled, hugging me.
I introduced my guests, gave him a bag of mapacho cigarettes and a couple of lighters, then told him I hoped we hadn’t disturbed him but that we’d come hoping he might have time to make us ayahuasca.
“Yah. Yah, Pedro. Yah. Bien.”
I don’t know what my guests thought of the visual of Julio. If you look at him objectively, he’s a frail old man with a light shock of white hair, huge ears, and a head much too big for his 4-foot-eight-inch frame. His clothes are always clean but ragged and hand-patched, and while his feet are size 9, he always wears a pair of size 11 or 12 jungle boots. But to me he is an immense human being, with eyes that seem to know everything you are going to ask as well as most of the answers. He is so clear that he has become almost see-through over the years, and when he finally goes, I imagine he will just vanish rather than die.
He's simply magnificent, and it didn’t take long for most of my guests to get that. Bonnie came away from simply shaking his hand on being introduced saying that she’d already gotten some of the answers she’d come for.
Both Bonnie and Angelica asked me if I would translate some questions they had for Julio. I told them I never actually talked much to him because he didn't understand my Spanish--maybe a few sentences a day—and didn’t think it would work. We seemed able to communicate very well wordlessly, but on the regular talking level, he simply didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand him.
At their insistence I tried, but after a few minutes of trying to ask about the spirits of ayahuasca, about other realms and such things it became clear to them Julio had no idea what I was talking about. I assured them that all their questions would be answered, just not in a Q & A session. They let it go and simply enjoyed being in his presence in his rickety jungle house on the beautiful.
That night I sent them out fishing, and in the morning we went with Julio to collect the ayahuasca and other barks he wanted to add. The walk was glorious as always. When we returned Julio began to prepare the ayahuasca while my guests went out for a hike with Juan.
That evening we gathered in a circle on the platform flooring. Julio took his seat on his stool by the platform gate. I thought that as usual Juan and Corina would help people navigate the little ladder from the platform to the jungle floor to use the bathroom, but when Juan surprised me by saying he needed to drink as well, I switched my place to one near the door so that I’d be available to help.
Because of my position I was first to drink that night, and because I thought I might be needed to help out the others, I had him pour me a small three-or-four-gulp portion. Nonetheless, before he’d finished the circle and served himself I could feel the first waves of the medicine washing over me. Neon-green lights appeared like iridescent fireflies and I felt the usual panic begin. I had a moment when I could have vomited the ayahuasca out before it had taken full effect but decided not to do that. Instead I concentrated on Julio and looked around the space at my guests to see if they were beginning to feel it as well.
Julio finished his prayer, moved the bottles to the corner, then flicked out the kerosene lamp with his chacapa. The darkness was sudden and utter, but in moments it all seemed lit up to me as the green lights intensified. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before I found myself in a landscape that seemed to be constructing itself from what looked like a kind of cartoonish leggo blocks. The sidewalk where I seemed to be was maybe two bricks higher than the street being built to my right. To my left a wall was going up about five bricks higher than the sidewalk, as was another across the street. Everything was coming together for me it seemed, in a slow, syrupy fashion, as though the bricks were not quite solid yet, still undulating and distorted as they found their spots. Accompanying the construction was a loud grating of gears ringing in my ears in time with the movement of the blocks. I was of course terrified and wanted out but couldn’t leave. I tried to tell myself that it was all right that I was there, but I had a hard time letting go. The colors of the bricks—red, blue and white—were more solid than the bricks themselves. I recognized them as the colors of the funhouse of desires and fears, but the funhouse had never appeared this way before. Faces came out of the landscape and floated by, some of them changing grotesquely as they did, others breaking into broad grins.
Time passed in the real world in which I felt myself unable to move. When I could it was to head off the platform to the bathroom area. There, I was tempted to simply sit on the ground near the kerosene lamp in the hopes of running away from the experience, but chose to return. I convinced myself that I was needed in the circle as I’d told Julio to pour large portions for my guests and didn’t want them to feel like I’d abandoned them.
Julio was singing beautifully. The speed of the moving landscape changed as his songs changed, and I decided not to be too afraid of the experience this time out. Chepa appeared in the carnival atmosphere and I watched her change horribly and saw how rottenly she’d treated me. I threw that out as fast as I could. I didn’t want to go there at all.
Suddenly the voice of The Man Who Tells Me Things asked “Do you remember you were told you couldn’t really love Chepa and Madeleina because you’re giving them things you think they need and not what they really need?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Do you remember you were told you can’t love them until you are them?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to know how to love Chepa?”
“Yes. I want to know how to do that more than anything.”
“Then come with us,” The Man said, and instantly the sidewalk I was on began to slide up the street toward a dark bend. The street and wall on either side of it and me simply undulated where they were, so that the sidewalk seemed to be moving like a conveyor belt. The colored blocks passed like pouring molasses and The Man said, “First you have to learn to accept unconditional love,” but the way he said it didn’t sound like a joyful experience was about to occur. It had more of the ring of the doctors telling me they just had to take my heart out and cut away the bad parts, so I got petrified again.
The Man ordered me to relax. “It’s just love you have to get,” he said. The thing was, he wasn’t a man. It was just a voice but it was a man’s voice, but not quite human. More like something allowing me to hear an idea in the form of a voice. I heard the voice like a man’s voice but knew it wasn’t really that at all.
“Are you going to play tricks?” I asked?
“I won’t trick you. I am asking if you want the answer to the question you asked years ago. Do you want to know how to love Chepa and your baby?”
I felt silly because she didn’t love me, but the voice continued. “It might be the next Chepa. We can’t promise to bring her back, but she might come back or there might be another and at least you will know how to love her.”
It was a very sad thing to hear but it was also so honest that I began to really relax, even though I was still afraid. We’d been moving up the street and around the dark corner during the whole conversation and continued to move further into the dark spaces. Still, I was ecstatic because I believed that I was finally going to learn how to love Chepa and Madeleina in a way they needed to be loved.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, I felt something land on my right shoulder, toward the back. It startled me completely. It was like a baby’s puke that simply pops out of its mouth without warning. It was just suddenly there and spreading and when I looked I could see a mouth sort of spitting it from the real world into the ayahuasca world. It was brown and full of hatred and horror. A splooch of something evil, intended and wretched.
The ayahuasca world was instantly gone. This stuff, this awful stuff that was splooched on me was meant to destroy the ayahuasca world for me and it did. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I’d never even heard of anything like that happening.
All of that took less than an instant to see and feel and experience several times over in a series of replays, and it terrified me. I sat bolt upright on the platform and knew I’d been attacked. Someone purposefully spit a glob of hatred on me from the real world and I turned to see who it was and there was Jake, looking cold and jokerish. He was so clearly there I felt I could have touched him, and I realized he had done it and asked him why. He just grinned in a horrible way, then said, “Because I can.”
I wondered what I’d done to make him do that but he’d already answered all he was going to. It was so frightening, his line: “Because I can,” because I knew instantly that yes, he could do that, and he could have done it anytime he wanted and that scared me.
And then Duke leaned in over my left shoulder and said, “I’m here to, brother,” and smiled coldly and the realization that they wanted to harm me was awful. I wanted to get away but there was no place to get away to, so I skittled next to Julio and opened the platform’s gate and sat with my back to my group, facing the jungle, my feet on the first step of the little ladder. I wanted to grab onto Julio’s legs to have something to hold on to, but didn’t dare. I wished he would sing loudly and get that awful icky stuff off me. I was reeling, really reeling from what Jake and Duke had done and how cold it was. I thought maybe it was a game people who used ayahuasca and learned to do tricks did to each other but I didn’t play that game. I didn’t know it existed. Here they’d spit evil on me and I suddenly saw demonish, evil things with points and sharp edges like strangely shaped thorns starting to go into me and I realized they put virotes—magic, invisible darts that ayahuasqueros talk about sometimes—in with the splooch and I could hardly breathe. But I made myself keep breathing, fast and heavily and lit a cigarette and realized that Julio had stopped singing and was snapping his chacapa leaves like a whip while he shouted “Bete! Bete! No moleste este hombre! El es bueno hombre!. No mas moleste. Bete!” “Get out, get out. Don’t bother this man. He’s a good man. Don’t bother him anymore. Get out!”
He was shouting to the space between and around us and I knew he’d seen what happened and I was grateful. But at the same time I knew I had to do something to get rid of the ick and the virotes. And even as I knew that I saw more and more virotes in my arms and hands and legs and stomach and heart, thick thorns and nails sticking into me, or into the spirit me where I sat. I started to try to pull them out but each one that came out went in again as soon as I let it go, so I started singing softly, the first simple song I ever got from ayahuasca, the song to be less afraid. I was singing to give myself courage and I lit another cigarette off the first to smoke myself, hoping that would somehow help but feeling lost since I knew nothing about this or what it meant or if it was real or I was crazy or it was a game or I was going to die. I thought I was going to die, so even though I felt silly I took it seriously, and I heard Julio telling me over and over to keep smoking, not to let the cigarettes go out. While it was comforting to hear him—though I’m sure he was talking silently—it also meant that he was taking it seriously, which meant I wasn’t terrified for nothing.
I started to sing out loud. I was sitting with my back to the group and singing out toward the jungle, and hoped they wouldn’t hear me, or if they did, that they wouldn’t be too disturbed. I had never interfered with Julio’s ceremony before, but didn’t feel I had a choice. I gave up any guilt about it pretty quickly and just decided to do whatever I needed to do.
I lit a third cigarette off the second and saw the faces of Jake and Duke in front of me while I pulled out the virotes. I began to see other people as well: some I’d never cared for and some who were friends of mine, like my worker Jonny, in Iquitos, even family. I realized that they were all contributors to this, though it was Jake who could do it and did actually do it. I sang louder and began to bounce a knee in rhythm with the notes coming out of me. The virotes were easier to pull out the more courage I had, and the louder I sang the more courage I got. I lit another cigarette and smoked myself. I smoked my hands and held them to my body to get the smoke everywhere. I smoked the brown evil splooch, my shoulders, my face, my head, my arms and legs, my feet and heart. I was scared but getting stronger. I knew I didn’t know what I was doing but had to keep doing it. Some of the virotes were shaped like talons and hooked into me. I was pulling them out and coughing them up and wondering what to do to get rid of them and I heard Julio saying over and over “No mas moleste! No mas! Bete!” and telling me not to let the cigarettes go out no matter what. Suddenly my feet started jumping up and down like a nervous kid only they were moving in unison and with purpose and suddenly my song was getting faster and stronger, faster and stronger than it had ever been and out of the top of my head I felt something coming. None of it was my doing that I knew of: I couldn’t move my legs that way or sing that song so powerfully and with so many variations, and I certainly had no control over the thing that came out of my head. It was like a monster, all limbs, and it somehow took all the virotes I’d taken out of me and went straight to Jake and began putting them in him. And when it did I felt the doing of it and the satisfaction of inflicting the pain they caused him, so I knew the monster was connected with me, or was me, I just didn’t know how. The me of me was just sitting on Julio’s porch, uncontrollably bouncing my feet in time to an impossibly fast rhythm of a song that had taken on a life of its own. Still, I enjoyed the feeling of putting those sharp things into Jake and as I did I heard myself saying, “Here. Do you want these?” The monster that had climbed out of me was getting stronger and I put some the virotes in Duke as well, in his arms and legs and I felt like I was strong enough to kill them, strong enough to push the virotes in one side of them and out the back. I wanted to do that and my song was strong enough to give my monster the power to do that and my legs were moving fast enough to let me do that and it seemed like something I was going to do. But then I heard Jake saying, “Go ahead. Then you’ll be one of us.”
I knew what he meant and stopped everything instantly. He wanted me to do it. He wanted me to be as mean as he was, to inflict pain as joyfully as he’d splooched me. But I didn’t want to do that or be that. Which left me in the awkward position of wondering what to do instead of that. Then I felt the doctors near me and remembered that in the red room the doctors turn the evil to good. As I thought that I saw the room to my left and reached in and grabbed a handful of the red gloopy clay there and put it on Jake. I started piling him with it to stop him from coming back without having to kill him and becoming like him. I began to push more virotes into him but only half-way and then covered them with clay so he couldn’t take them out. I did the same with Duke and then put clay on me as well, all the while lighting cigarette after cigarette from the first one and smoking myself and tapping furiously and singing loudly and with power. In the distance I heard Julio yelling at me, ordering me to close myself. “Cierra, Pedro, cierra.” I turned and saw him motioning for me to call back the monster, to put it back inside and seal the opening. He was commanding and I did as told. I smoked my head and back and head again and hoped what I was doing would work. I thought that I felt the monster returning through the opening and back inside and I felt myself closing the gaping space in my head.
Just as I finished Jake suddenly smiled and said he wasn’t done yet. Out of the dark night birds of prey started swooping down, talons out, tearing at me. I grabbed for their talons and turned them in on themselves until the birds screamed then told Jake not to send any more or I would send them on to him and Duke. I don’t think I’d ever felt as strong and wanted to revel in it, but realized that Jake could do this anytime he wanted, so that I could never win a war like this, a war that an hour or a lifetime earlier I never knew could even occur. I started singing faster and faster and more and more clearly to push the image of Jake away, at least for the night to make him flee.
I don’t know how long it took but finally Jake was gone and it was over and I knew he wouldn’t be back. I waiting a little while longer, still singing, to make sure I wasn’t premature, and then turned to tell Julio it was over. As I did I saw that he was already turning away from me and back to my guests to sing for them again.
I lit another cigarette then stopped singing and was quiet. I felt beat up and dirty but wonderful and glad I didn’t kill anyone and become like them and still proud and scared and exhausted. I stared out into the pitch of the jungle.
Then, from the far right, from the position of 1 O’clock at maybe 30 yards, my oldest sister, Pat appeared and said, “Hey, Peter. I want you to know I was keeping an eye on you,” and a flush of warmth came over me. From behind Pat, her husband Steve, with whom I’d traveled to the jungle 15 years earlier, appeared and said, “So was I.” And the warmth grew. Then from my direct left my baby sister Regina appeared and said, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here but I guess I am” and then hugged me. And then my brother Mike was there saying, “Hey, Baldy,” and my sister Barbara and her husband Paul came. “Hey Peter, it’s Barbara,” she said and Paul added, “How are you?” From straight in front of me came my other sister, Peggy, with her husband George, and Peg said, “We’re here too.” And then their kids and their kids’ kids came and I was being hugged by everybody and then came my Madeleina who snuck up in the crowd to grab onto my chest and she said, “I love you, daddy.” Chepa was behind her and I felt her warmth but couldn’t see her face so I knew she loved me but couldn’t be with me, and behind them were Marco and Italo. Even Jonny, my right-hand man who had been in the background among the faces backing Jake and Duke, appeared. He was pretending to hug me but he had a sharp virote with him and I turned it back on him and he cried out and I told him he shouldn’t treat me like that anymore. And then my mother-in-law, mama Lydia, who loves me but hates me came and I asked her why she does brujheria on me and she shrugged. I told her not to do it anymore or I’d turn it against her and it will hurt. She says okay so I hugged her too and suddenly I was laughing and feeling this intense love coming at me a feeling of unconditional love coming to me from so many people, even some people I don’t even make time for. I was so complete and rich and I realized that Duke and Jack could never get me, could never have gotten me with that many people loving me and surrounding me.
It occurred to me that if the red room was around and available, maybe the red flower syrup would be too, so I put out my hands and got some drops and smoked them and put them on all my family, including my mother and father, both dead, who were in the space above everyone else. I blew the smoked red nectar drops into a red healing mist that rained out over them all. Then I lit another cigarette and wondered if in that second of love I had any access to healing power. Hoping I did, I reached over to my assistant Corina and blew smoke into her head for an easier life and then opened my sister Pat’s head and put some drops in there and told them to heal her physical ailment then closed her up. But her head was too full to close so I reopened it and looked inside and saw that a kind of red viscous gelatin had come to the surface. It looked like what my first teacher, Bertha Grove, a Ute healer, had talked about taking out of people to heal them. I wondered if I could do it, if it would do any good, then just reached in and took out the phlegmy stuff. I held it in my hands and wondered what the hell to do with it. Bertha had always said you couldn’t just take a sickness out and throw it away because it would land on someone else. It had to be neutralized. So I smoked it and put it in the red room so the doctors could turn it into something good, then shut Pat’s head again and closed it tight. I did the same with mama Lydia, trying to take her cancer away.
I put some drops in my heart and lungs and on Madeleina and on Italo and Marco. I realized Chepa had been hurt too and put some on her as well.
Then I blew some more on everyone and they all said goodbye and disappeared until only Chepa and my kids were left. I tried to turn Chepa to me and blew smoke on her. She turned toward me a little. I did it again and she turned a little more, then again, but she still wouldn’t turn to me fully so I took her head in my hands and turned her until she was looking me in the eyes. “Chepa,” I said. “I love you and will take care of you and protect you from Duke and Jack and everything even if you are not with me.”
And in that instant I realized that that was what she needed all along, even if she didn’t recognize it. She needed to feel that protected all the time, and when I was drunk she didn’t. The answer to the question was that she never felt protected since her own family fell apart when she was a youngster. Her father had lost everything by an accident of fate and it tore everything apart. And if it could happen to her father, her immensely powerful father, it could also happen to me. And my drinking was a constant reminder to her of how weak I was, how little protection I had to offer, how little chance I had to satisfy that need in her. The awareness of that simple truth was almost unbearable. I simply had to protect her unconditionally and love her unconditionally. That was the answer to the question all along of how to love her.
I started to laugh out loud in the real world, like something was tickling my soul and I couldn’t help myself. I told her she could go and she suddenly smiled a little and called me a nickname I hadn’t heard her use in years. And Madeleina hugged me and said, “I love you, daddy, but I have to go now,” and then she and Chepa were gone and Marco followed them but before he disappeared he turned and said, “Don’t worry dad. She can’t live without us forever.” And Italo added, “Now you know what to do you just have to do it, dad.” And then they were all gone and I was spent, spent, spent.
And then, right in the middle of all that love and exhaustion Jake popped up again. “Or,” he grinned, “we could go after Madeleina.”
Suddenly I let go and found myself coming out of my head again and heard myself roaring, roaring like a lion and letting him know not to dare, not to dare touch my family. That I wouldn’t stop my monster next time, that I’d let my monster kill him on the physical plane. I started to smoke the whole universe furiously, white smoke bursts of power that I hoped carried my message to Jake and Duke and anyone else. “Don’t you dare touch my family!” I roared, sure no one would defy me. But Jake reappeared, smiling and nonchalant, like he could do what he liked. He was just so arrogant, so secure in his power that it utterly disarmed me.
Then, unexpectedly, my feet quit moving but my left hand began beating my thigh in a fast straight rhythm: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I didn’t know why my hand was moving like that, I didn’t seem to be in control of it at all, but the bang, bang, bang kept up until I recognized it as the sound of the beating of birds’ wings, birds I was sending to Jack and Duke. Thousands of birds’ beating their wings around them, slapping the air around them to my hand’s rhythm like thunderclaps until both of them were cowering from the power of the birds and Julio was again entreating me to close my head. “Cierra! Cierra!” he ordered.
I kept up the beating but softened it and took some red drops and smoked them and sent them to Jake and Duke to heal their hatred, or at least neutralize it and when it touched them they vanished. I knew the fight was over, at least for the time being, so I smoked the air and laughed.
I realized that the birds my monster sent were the same bird, multiplied a thousand times, that I’d flown with the very first time I’d ever had ayahuasca, nearly 20 years earlier. I knew too that what The Man Who Tells Me Things said I’d get I’d gotten. I found out how to love Chepa and Madeleina after I had gotten unconditional love and accepted it—even though I felt the way it happened wasn’t the way The Man intended it to happen.
I could still feel the horror of that glob of pain and hatred being spit on me, that awful splooch of wretchedness. But I felt like I would make it for the night, that Jake and Duke would not come back that night so I closed myself again as best I could and smoked some more and listened as Julio turned his attention back to the others.
Funny, but I was sure I’d ruined everything for everyone with all the noise I’d made but when I turned around to look at my guests they were all still lying down, not yet out of their ayahuasca dream. I took a moment to smoke Julio, and then it was over.
AFTERWARD
Later, after all of my guests but Lynn had gone back to Julio’s son’s house to sleep, we stayed awake and talked awhile. I was glad he was there as I needed to relate some of what had occurred to someone. Had the whole thing happened, as Jake had said, simply "Because I can", like a prank of challenge? Was it someone else who really disliked me who used Jake and Duke's faces so that I wouldn't see who really was behind the attack? It could have been a million things. Whatever or whomever had done it, I knew it was real because it wasn't on any list of 10,000 possibilities I could have imagined.
I was just glad that with Julio’s help I’d been strong enough to fight it off. And I was really happy to finally have an answer to the question of how to love Chepa and my baby.
For all the depth of my experience that night, Lynn said that he’d gotten nothing. “It was fantastic to be in the ceremony with Julio, but I didn’t get anything. Well, hardly anything. There was one point where I was sitting there thinking ‘Com’on, Julio. Show me something, anything,’ and he turned to me and shook his leaves at me and the whole darned hut filled with colored lights and he grew to about 20 feet tall and he was glowing. Then the lights started flying all over the room, so I knew what he could do, but it just seemed he had to work with the girls tonight, and with you, so he didn’t have time for me.”
“Sorry.”
"Oh, there was this one vision I had for just a minute, where I saw Julio take my heart out and put it in Corina’s breast, and take her heart and put it in me. Then I saw myself getting married to Corina and she was dressed in a beautiful white gown. I know it’s silly, but that’s all I got. I guess ayahuasca just didn’t want to teach me anything tonight.”
Eight months later Lynn married Corina. As always, ayahuasca didn’t give him what he wanted, but it did give him what he needed.
I think it gave the others what they needed as well, though the particulars never came up.
When we returned to Iquitos I made a point of running into both Jake and Duke and asked them about the incident. Both denied any part in it, though I didn’t know whether to believe them or not. I do know that Jake went through something difficult just after that, and for months was too frightened to leave his hotel room, while Duke, who’d planned on staying in Iquitos a while changed his ticket and left the day we returned. Shortly after going home, his house burned to the ground. I have no idea whether there was any connection with that night to those events, or whether it was just coincidence.
What I do know is that there was no email from Chepa when I returned saying that she’d had a dream and wanted to put our marriage back together, and though I didn’t expect one, I was heartbroken that none awaited me.
A couple of weeks later I returned home to New York, and shortly thereafter Italo and Marco made it clear that if I wanted to be around Madeleina I would have to move us to Fort Worth, where Chepa had settled in her new life. Six months later we did, buying a small house just outside the city. A few months after that, thinking I could do better, I quit alcohol.
Interestingly, not long after I did, I was lying in bed one night, feeling lousy that I hadn’t been able to fix things. They were so bad, in fact, that I was considering a legal action for full custody of Madeleina. That would mean getting Chepa declared an unfit mother, which I didn't really think she was, but I didn't see another route to get Madeleina back into my life. While I mulled those things over, the image of Julio suddenly popped into my mind. It was nice to see him. He smiled at me and the phrase More Joy, Less Pain came into my head. I repeated it over and over, trying to get his meaning.
It took some days, but when I did, it was simple and clear: do whatever I had to do, but whatever I did should cause more joy and less pain for all involved than anything else I might do. Which meant, of course, dropping the legal action, but that would probably mean never having Madeleina live with her brothers or me again, and that was horrible. Still, that seemed like the first step, and I did it.
I was secretly hoping that that was the final test, and that since I’d obviously passed I could now have my family back together but it didn’t happen. And so a couple of night later, again lying in my bed I called to Julio and asked him what was up. And then, unexpectedly, a new ayahuasca song came out of me. A song with words. I’d never had a song with words before. It was plain and beautiful and I sang it as though I’d known it my whole life. The words were in Spanish, but translated to English they read:
One family, my family
My family, one family,
Mama Chepa, Papa Pedro,
Italo and Marco
And my Madeleina.
Help me help me
Fix my broken family
Fix my broken family
Heal me doctors,
Heal me spirits,
Help me Red Magic
That lives in my veins.
Help me White Magic
That fills the sky,
Help me Green Magic
That gives life to the firmament
Help me Black Magic
Deep Magic that dwells in the earth.
Cleanse my Spirit,
Cleanse my heart
Cleanse my soul
Cleanse my body
Help me help me
Fix my broken family.
It took me a little while to come to terms with the idea that though I was asking in the song to fix my family, it wasn’t going to be fixed like in my fantasy. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be fixed some, and though it’s not perfect, though we don’t live together we do visit often and are still a family. We are healing the best we can.
© by
Peter Gorman, 1983-2007
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