Green IslandCandy and Shnade Move On
May 26th 2010 06:27
Candy came down in a crippling fashion the next morning. She woke up in the small tin shack in the jungle next to Rapi. The hut was hot and airless. She struggled to open her eyes. They were gummy and momentarily out of focus. She wondered where the fuck she was. Her stomach howled with hunger. Her last meal had been god knows when. Her throat was parched. Her bare legs were red and swollen from insect bites. And there was Rapi, untouched by the insects and in perfect repose. Fuck that. It was all coming back to her: the lonely afternoon in the jungle, the coke deal and her new relationship with a Bolivian Indian.
She nudged Rapi with her hand and spoke his name. He drifted out of his dream and opened his eyes looking refreshed and ready to go. He considered Candy and quickly grasped the fragility of the young Canadian woman. He got up and fetched some water from his bag. Candy drank greedily.
“Good morning, mi bella. I see you are not so happy. Let’s go to the river and wash. And then we make breakfast. After food you will feel better.”
Candy really didn’t have the energy to talk much about her feelings or to take out her growing irritation on Rapi. Instead she followed Rapi to the river. She wore only a T-shirt and her panties. She had no idea why she had taken off her combats before passing out. Then as she gingerly walked on the spiky grass down to the stream she saw the two holes and the loose soil from the night before when they had buried themselves. It was all coming back - the ayahuasca, the capybaras, her family, her sister Mia. The holes had something to do with her not wearing her combat pants she thought.
They splashed water over their faces and under their armpits in silence. Candy felt like she had something to hold against Rapi, like he still had to earn her forgiveness. At the same time she had a feeling that there was something important she had realized last night but had forgotten to remember the following morning- the elusive thought on the tip of her mental tongue that shrunk from a concentrated effort at capture, at internal verbalization. This inability to re-grasp her self-discovery (if the discovery was about herself) just added to the irritation.
Rapi tried to behave sweetly. He had an idea of how Candy must be feeling. He had also been psychically shattered after his first encounter with ayahuasca. It was his initiation into manhood and the mysteries of his people. A shaman had guided several adolescents through the horrors and wonders of the experience and had continually exhorted his charges to not indulge in the intoxication but instead to ally their spirits with those of the jungle, to connect with their ancestors, to see through the illusion of perceiver and perception. Rapi remembered being reprimanded by the wizened old man for ‘indulging’. He also recalled his best friend at the time laughing at the shaman and getting a boot in his arse for his disrespect. For years afterwards he still thought about that night when he was fifteen. He became a man that night but the promised connection with the jungle, his ancestors and their common purpose never really happened. The tribe met in the jungle but they lived scattered in cheap housing in small towns and villages set up long ago by the Spanish. His initiation into the tribe as an adult only made Rapi realize that there really was no tribe, only a post colonial dislocation – a fissure that seemed to compromise the validity of the whole process of becoming a man. He was a child split by manhood into two worlds: neither of which felt entirely like home. Rapi’s thoughts were interrupted by a sudden doubt. Why had he introduced Candy to the sacred vine? True he intuited something profoundly unhappy in this beautiful girl’s past; but was it more to do with lust and a great business opportunity that had prompted him to seduce the Canadian and induct her into the mysteries of ayahuasca? Last night she had moved closer to realization but in the end just dissipated the spiritual momentum with indulgence. Was it the impurity of his motives that had hindered the revelations? Or was it that she was just weak and indulgent? Perhaps where he saw hidden pain there was really only the white man’s curse – the curse of having the shadow of a soul that had long ago died.
“What’s for breakfast, Rapi? I’m starving.” Candy tried to smile. They were back at the shack. She was pulling on her combats and trying hard to ignore the desire to scratch. Rapi rummaged in his bag and pulled out a big packet of cheap biscuits and the last bottle of water. He gave them to her and went about cleaning up the camp site, burying their trash and washing out the cooking pot. Candy looked on as she devoured three biscuits at a time.
Within forty minutes they were off, retracing their footsteps from the previous day back to the dirt road. Candy felt sick with dirt, dehydration and the oddest drug hangover she had ever had. It felt like the air in her skull had congealed and was pushing down on her brain. What made it worse was knowing that the comforts of civilization were not near at hand. There was no medicine cabinet in the bathroom to raid. There was no convenience store to buy energy drinks and aspirin. And to compound it all, she knew that when they reached the road they would have to wait. This waiting business seemed to be as important to these people as being in a rush and doing two things at the same time was to so many people she knew back in Canada. Knowing that they would have to wait didn’t make it any easier to wait. They walked through the jungle in silence. Where the previous day she had seen no path only the tangle of tree roots, she now discerned a faint way. It was as if the jungle was revealing itself to her, little by little: last night the capybara and today the revelation of a path. It was only a shame that bitter mood cast a shadow over everything. They soon reached the road and the spot where the day before they had left the car. And of course Jose Carlos and Tupac were nowhere to be seen. Candy longed for a shower, clean clothes, warm food and a bed, somewhere a million miles away from the jungle.
Such was the magnitude of disquiet and discomfort caused by Candy’s come down that she wanted to lash out, to hurt, to be vindictive. As if seeing another hurt would lessen her own suffering. With this feeling gripping her she prepared to tell Rapi of her intention of finishing their relationship. They were sitting in the shade of a massive gnarled tree. She never got the words out because just then Rapi pulled one of Jose Carlos’s badly made joints from his pocket. He lit it with Candy’s lighter, took a deep drag to get it going and passed it to Candy. The joint had pre-empted her.
Ten minutes later she was smiling and looking at the colourful birds in the trees. Thoughts of throwing a barney and dumping Rapi went momentarily up in smoke. It almost seemed too soon when they saw the jangling ford ease its way towards them over the bumpy road.
Both Jose Carlos and Tupac were happy to see them. They bought an icebox with cold cokes and steak sandwiches for the two exhausted trippers. They spoke Spanish slowly and Candy appreciated that they were doing their best to put her at ease. The cold coca cola was pure heaven and nothing had ever tasted as good to Candy as the lomito wrapped in cling film.
The sun was past its zenith when Candy was woken up by Rapi. Tupac had kindly driven them all the way back to Jose Carlos’s place. It seemed they were in a hurry. Rapi explained that she had an hour to take a shower and pack. They were flying out that night.
_______________
Otoko had given up trying to reason with Shnade. She began to secretly despise his fatuous righteousness. It was pointless trying to penetrate the bluster of the American. Her parents didn’t want to get involved in the dispute. The mother was overjoyed with the announcement that her daughter was pregnant. The prospect of being a grandmother gave her a new sense of self-worth. She felt less cowed by the silent judgments of her neighbours. The father didn’t give a fuck either way. He couldn’t understand a word that her daughter’s husband spoke, even when it was in Japanese. The only thing he did like about the foreigner living with them was the homemade cigarettes that he sometimes doled out to the old man. They made him feel strangely high-spirited, made him feel young again.
Shnade was persona non grata in his own home. Otoko and her mum stopped cooking for him and cleaning his clothes. They spent much of their free time out shopping for maternity clothes and organizing hospitals. The two women did their best to ignore Shnade. It was made clear to him that he was no longer welcome in Otoko’s bed. If he must sleep in the house then he could make do with a mattress in the living room.
untouchable woman in India
At the same time he was getting it at work. Parents had complained about his lessons. The boss confronted him one day with the accusation that he had shown a high school boy porn on his cell phone. Shnade talked up his denial the best he could but it made no difference. A red faced boss informed him with barely controlled anger that his contract was going to be cut short by four months and that he was out of there at the end of the month.
It wasn’t just his wife and work that was getting to him. Shnade’s teenage mistress, Miyuki, was also out for his blood, or so it seemed to Shnade. Miyuki’s English made leaps and bounds as she took advantage of her trysts with Shnade to demand marriage and money. Shnade preferred it when they couldn’t communicate. Miyuki’s self-restraint also made startling progress. Her slutty but indifferent compliance to dropping her knickers suddenly developed into a woman’s ability to withhold sexual favours. Shnade was looking at ways of brushing Miyuki off. If she wasn’t putting out what use was she? And the same went for his wife.
Shnade knew damn well what everyone wanted from him. And he knew damn well that they weren’t going to get it. He wasn’t going to give Miyuki money. He wasn’t going to divorce Otoko. And he certainly wasn’t going to marry Miyuki. His only trump card was the final pay package that he would receive in a couple of weeks. He had one bag of weed left that he had intended to sell to some sucker friend, but since he knew Tai was also into him for cash he would just have to take that final bag for himself. That final bag of weed was grabbing the headlines in his brain. The fact that he had two children on the way by two different women, one of whom was only a teenager, was lost in the small print of page ten in the Shnade chronicle.
Time was running out. His job would soon be lost, his weed would soon be all smoked up and he was sure that Miyuki’s threats to tell her father about who the bastard was who had given him a bastard grandchild were imminently on the event horizon. No band, no sex and soon to be unemployed. Shnade couldn’t quite fathom how it had all come to this. He was the man; the man that could get the weed (well not any longer); the man who could make a band; the man who could nail any Japanese bird. It was obvious to Shnade that this small town just didn’t appreciate his talents. Some other lucky place was calling to him. This was Shnade’s take on the situation and thus by definition the truth of the matter.
So Shnade became proactive. He needed the next move. He knew that the next turn of the road held an ambush for him and he was going to do his best to avoid that ambush. He turned to the internet. At first he aimed high and tried to get band work in Tokyo. He phoned up all the music people he had met during his brief moment in the spotlight as the bassist for Jump. That turned up nothing. Less than nothing it seemed. Then he widened his search and looked for English teaching jobs in Tokyo and Osaka. This threw up some possibilities but the pay seemed very low and the hours irregular. Finally, he started applying for anything. He got a few responses but the fact that he didn’t have anything that resembled a degree and that his only job contract had been cut short frightened off most would be employers. Then he remembered Jay who had moved to A City. Jay had promised to help him the last time they had spoken on the phone.
leprosy victim in India
Shnade was just about to phone Jay on his cell phone when he paused. He rarely hesitated when he had decided on a course of action but something made him cancel the call. He needed to rehearse his story. If Shnade had known the word duplicitous he would have used it at this point. He couldn’t deal with another polite or brusque refusal. It was now just five days until his pay day. Living with Otoko was becoming unbearable. It seemed to him that now that she had the baby on the way she really didn’t need him anymore. And Miyuki was a nightmare. Any day now her parents would discover her pregnancy and be down on him like a ton of bricks.
“Yo, Jay, my man. How’s it going?”
“Oh, hullo Shnade. I’m OK and you?”
“Yeah great. What you doing next weekend? I was thinking of taking a road trip. You know see something of Japan. I thought about you, my buddy in A. City. Why not visit Jay? Hang out, have a few beers.”
Jay was confused. He lived eight hours away by train. It seemed a long way to go for a weekend. He did a mental check. No there weren’t any public holidays coming up. What was Shnade up to?
“Well…It would be great to see you but…” Jay just wasn’t quick enough to finish his sentence.
“That’s awesome, man. What’s your address? Hang on I’ll get a pen to write it down.” Shnade smiled to himself. He was a smooth operator. No doubt about that. He held the phone to his chest while he pretended to get a pen.
“OK. Shoot. What’s the address?” Shnade asked in his best off-hand manner.
Jay felt compelled to give out his home address. He had a bad feeling while he was spelling out the address and giving directions how to get to his place from the train station.
Shnade didn’t really pay any attention to the directions. He had already decided that he would just call Jay when he got into A City and get him to meet him in town. Best to get him drunk before springing on him the reality that Shnade was planning on staying beyond the weekend. Once Jay had completed his directions Shnade wrapped up the conversation quickly and hung up before Jay could withdraw his implied invitation.
As the phone went dead on Jay he stood there for a good minute wondering how exactly he had been suckered into agreeing to put up Shnade. He couldn’t for the life of him remember agreeing to anything and yet he had finished the call by saying: “See you.” Such was the malignant genius of Shnade. Oh well how bad could it be?
_______________
Candy and Rapi had an argument while packing for the plane. There were two cans of fruit salad that contained the coke. These two cans just looked so out of place in the jungle which was teeming with exotic fruit. Rapi tried to persuade her to put them in her bag for the plane journey but she realized immediately what he was asking of her and refused point blank to do it. It was a one sided argument with Candy raising her voice and spewing a litany of invective against Rapi. For his part he remained calm and tried to talk about the benefits of her being the dope runner – namely that the security for internal flights was lax and that what foreigners bought as souvenirs never surprised the authorities since most coppers regarded foreigners as ‘crazy gringos’. Especially if she feigned a complete ignorance of Spanish they would soon let her pass. Candy was having none of it and bought the whole conversation to a close by a threat not to get on the plane if she was the sucker who had to do the drug running. The ultimatum had the desired effect. Rapi took the cans and took the risk. He was indeed stopped at the airport but soon allowed to pass after a cursory inspection of his bag. Police were lazy in Bolivia. That was apparent.
Tiwanaku
Back in La Paz Rapi tried to redeem himself by being the attentive boyfriend. He took her to see Iglesia de San Francisco, the witches market and the coca museum. They went on a day trip to the ancient Inca ruins of Tiwanaku and had fun sneaking around the back of the historical site and finding an exit to enter without paying. And of course they had sex every night. Rapi encouraged Candy to enjoy a few lines of coke in the evening but she refused. Candy was fed up with being used. In Buenos Aires she had initiated the coke dealing by approaching Pete to do the scoring. At that time it felt to her that she had been in control but also more than a little naïve. Now in La Paz she felt she was being recruited and possibly exploited. She didn’t like being passive nor did she enjoy the thought of being used. To Candy’s way of thinking it looked like Rapi’s reasons for taking her to Rurrenabaque had not been wholly altruistic. True he had tried to give her an enlightening ayahuasca experience but he had also tried to sucker her into taking a big risk. Her initial feelings of a developing love for the handsome dark eyed Indian rasta had been held in check by the need to watch her own back. There was nobody, it seemed, with only her best interests at heart. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t still lust for Rapi. That she didn’t still enjoy his company. It was just that looking out for number one was her main priority. And that meant making money and staying out of trouble.
Within a few days she stopped paying for cheap rooms for herself and Rapi and instead got a job at an Irish bar in a backpacker hostel. And so it began again. The long, long nights fuelled with booze and coke; both of which she supplied from the bar. She developed a neat trick of handing out the wraps with people’s change. It seemed to Candy that the only reason why over half of the guests at the hostel visited La Paz was to try the famous marching powder. The fact that they could score at the bar made it the perfect hostel in their eyes. Candy was a party girl but seeing it all from behind the other side of the bar made her change her attitude to travelling. These twenty somethings from Europe, Australia and Israel were uninterested in Bolivia, its culture and its people. They just loved that it was cheap and full of drugs. They did the ‘world’s most dangerous bike journey’, the coke dens and the partying and then moved on to Cusco in Peru or BA in Argentina to do more of the same. Seeing how superficial backpackers were made Candy wonder if she herself was or had been like that. The answer was ‘yes’ and that irritated Candy.
World's most dangerous bike journey
Rapi dropped by every couple of days to take cash and replenish her supplies. He did a trip to the jungle every few weeks without Candy. Ever since their fight over who should do the smuggling it was understood that she wouldn’t be doing any more runs with him. While in La Paz, Rapi stayed in several places, always at a friend’s apartment, often far from the centre. Candy sometimes made the trek out to the poor barrios to see him but more often than not he just came to her room in the hostel late at night.
After three months Candy made a decision.
“Rapi, I’m leaving Bolivia in a few days. My visa is running out.”
“No problem, mi bella. You can get new visa. Or maybe visa extension.” Rapi said trying to be helpful.
“It’s no good Rapi. I thought I loved you. I thought that this was what I wanted,” she pointed at the half finished wrap on the bed side table in her room, “but I’ve realized that it isn’t. Maybe that ayahuasca did work. I’ve come to realize that I’m not in control of my life. I stole money and ran away from Canada. I nearly got in trouble in Argentina and ran away. And now I’m being used by you and your friends to sell cocaine. Don’t you see that all I do is take risks with my life? One day I’m going to run out of luck. Everyone runs out of luck eventually. The same is true for you. Don’t you want a proper job?”
Rapi stared at her with a look of sadness she had never seen on his face before. His eyes were dark pools of sorrow. He broke eye contact and bowed his head. Candy thought that she knew him so well, but now his silence made him a stranger to her. She had been building up to this conversation with him for a long time it seemed. Ever since that night in the jungle, part of her had wanted to get out of the relationship. The other half saw romantic potential. This half had considered the possibility of Rapi trying to persuade her to stay. Maybe he would even propose marriage, at the very least some type of definite commitment. Rapi was a remarkable man with a gentle soul. He was someone that could make her happy. Her romantic side was sorely let down. Rapi’s silence was a cowardly refusal. He knew what she wanted to hear but he felt powerless to grab this beautiful Canadian, to take this opportunity for a new life. For all his ancient tribal wisdom and rasta love for humanity he couldn’t bring himself to believe his life could change. He would remain an artisan, rasta, Indian, Bolivian bum.
“Rapi, why don’t you get a job as a tour guide or in a hostel? Your English is good, you know about Bolivia’s culture. There must be something you can do in tourism.”
“No, bella. I don’t lie to you. This is who I am. Now you see who you are. That is good.” Rapi had recovered his composure and he lifted his head, “Where will you go?”
“Thailand.”
The Candy and Shnade Story:
Shnade Gets Drunks with a Serial Killer and Candy Arrives in Bangkok (Part 6)
Candy and Shnade Move On (Part 5)
Candy Trips in the Jungle and Shnade Trips Up (Part 4)
Candy Comes in the Jungle and Shnade Becomes the Man (Part 3)
Candy in Bolivia and Shnade in Hawaii (Part 2)
Candy in Argentina (Part 1)
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