Green IslandCandy Comes in the Jungle and Shnade Becomes the Man
April 18th 2010 06:47
Candy was in a shopping mall. It was a mega mall several floors high. In the dream she was on the highest floor looking over the rails at the shinny mezzanine below. There was a massive waterfall in the centre of the plaza. People on the ground floor looked tiny. Candy turned away from the view and saw brawny Pete, a random Sikh with a turban and big beard and her father. Candy climbed over the barrier and from the corner of her eye she saw her dream fellows doing the same. Then something weird and unexpected happened: Candy woke up but she remained in the dream. She knew with a certainty that was clear and sharp as a diamond in the mind that she was aware in a dream.
As she leaned against the metal barrier with her arms bent over the railing, anchoring her she turned to her father. “We’re in a dream, Pop.”
“No we’re not Candy. This is real. Why don’t you come home?” Her father said with a slight wobble of emotion in his voice.
“You believe me don’t you, Pete?”
“Hey, Sugar. You left me in Buenos Aires. You let those wolves fuck me over. Why don’t you jump? If this is a dream then prove it by jumping. You can’t die in a dream.”
Pete’s speech started off coming from Pete who was to the left of her father but shifted from an external sound to an internal voice.
Candy turned to her right and looked at the Sikh who appeared preoccupied, locked into the vertiginous view. “How about you, do you believe that this is not real, that it is only a dream? I’m not in a shopping mall. I’m in the Jungle in Bolivia. This is a dream.”
Candy’s gaze lingered on the Indian expecting some response to her question but the thin tall bearded and turbaned man in western chinos and polo shirt didn’t seem programmed to respond. Like some silent Rosencrantz he was onstage but peripheral to the central human drama.
“Come on sugar. Jump. Are you scared to take a risk on your own? Are you too used to letting others do your dirty work?”
“Love, let’s go home. Your mother will be worried about us. I know why you ran away. An awful thing happened. But this is not the way to make it better.”
Candy was only half listening. She was fascinated about the dream. Her senses were her own. She could feel the cold of the plastic laminate over the metal hand rail. She could smell the artificial air; she could recognize several brand stores; and, she could hear the hum of the electric chandelier above. The scene was brilliant. Perfect in its detail and yet at the same time absurd and surreal. Why were they lined up on the precipice? Why were the other shoppers ignoring them?
Candy knew what to do. She unhooked her right arm from the rail behind her back and with a moment’s concerted rage she swung the arm out and forward. It hit the Indian Sikh on the neck. At the same time she shifted her body weight slightly on the ledge to give the flailing arm maximum force. The man silently relinquished his mooring and fell flat through the air. Candy, Pete and Candy’s dad watched in silence as the man soundlessly dropped to death.
Looking down at the twisted legs and the head lying in its own blood Candy calmly spoke: “Now do you believe that we are in a dream?”
“Es hora de desperatar, mi bella. Mi bella, get up.” Candy opened her eyes to see the shadowy figure of Rapi on the mattress next to her.
“Si, si,” Candy quietly responded and took a moment to lay still and try and remember the fast fading dream.
_______________
Shnade senior and Shnade’s religious mother took the news of their son’s marriage to a Japanese girl with a singular lack of interest. Shnade sent them the occasional email but all he got in response was advice about joining the army and the peril that he was subjecting his soul to by living in a heathen country.
Shnade had a hard time in the beginning adjusting to Japan. In a non English speaking country he was bereft of the powers that his gifted gab gave him. He felt that coming to a no where place in Japan was a side step if not a definitive back step in his ambitions to be a rock star or at the very least work in a beach bar. Still Shnade didn’t lose heart; the adventure was continuing for him, and anything seemed better than having to admit defeat and go home. He also knew that he didn’t want to enlist. Fuck that shit. Americans were getting killed all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His new bride, Otoko, was from a small city in the middle of Japan, a few hours away by bullet train from Tokyo. Her family was flustered by the huge hulking foreigner that sloped around their little wooden house that was squeezed into a neighbourhood which was itself squeezed into the foot of a small mountain. The mother and father could only say ‘How do you do?’ in English. The mother was a practical type that tried to make the best of a difficult situation and the father was a car mechanic that was slowly going about losing the family livelihood with increasing periods of drunkenness. The family seemed on a downward path into poverty and all they needed at that point was another mouth to feed. An expensive Japanese wedding reception was out of the question.
For several months Shnade moped about the house. He used his ATM card, which his father had recently upgraded to a credit card, to buy a guitar and amp. Most afternoons Shnade disturbed the quiet area of ramshackle housing with his efforts at being a rock god. From Shnade’s point of view things got a lot better when he met a Japanese wind surfer named Tai who dealt weed. Tai worked in a hairdresser during the day, and at night drove a taxi. It was very easy for Shnade to phone Tai up in the early evening and get some dope delivered to his house.
Otoko tried her best to ignore Shnade’s nefarious activities. She was happy that Shnade stayed at home a lot instead of going out to bars and prowling for women to sleep with. Like most young Japanese women Otoko was intensely aware of other Japanese women and the vicious unspoken competition of having the right fashion, clothes, accessories and make up - the competition to have the most expensive bag and purse and to get the most attention from boys. Otoko hated it, but could see no other way. Rebellion might have been part of her nature, but her nurture had never given her the concept as a basis for action. Instead, Otoko did the best she could to appear shiny and smart and superficial while working hard in the same hairdresser as Tai worked. She had to pay for herself, Shnade and his drugs and for much of the family expenses when her dad was on a bender.
It took a lot of tears and silent treatment to finally get the message across to Shnade that it was imperative that he find regular paying work. Shnade knew what Otoko’s hints were about but he was just beginning to get settled, to feel relaxed. He had a routine of getting up at noon, getting high and blasting out power chords during the afternoon, and then watching downloaded movies until the small hours of the morning. He was loath to change but even his thick skin registered Otoko’s growing despair. Shnade had no idea how to get a job in Japan. He tried on the internet but couldn’t find anything locally. He tried asking Tai who just laughed at him. In the end Otoko gave up several Saturday afternoons to drive Shnade around the city centre. She made Shnade ask in several cram schools and English conversation schools for employment. Eventually one run-down, tiny school for children and junior high school students offered to take Shnade on for a trial period. Shnade felt really out of his depth. Suddenly he was in a job where his ability to talk up his abilities was irrelevant. He couldn’t drink on the job, but he still managed to smoke a bowl or two in the toilets. He really had no clue how to teach English. He couldn’t remember reading a book since he left massage college. Nevertheless, he wanted the monthly salary and he attempted to brazen it out. Much of the time he let the kids play Japanese card games in class. For the older ones he discovered that by just talking non-stop about guitar music he could kill most of the lesson time without having to face the prospect of actually teaching something. In the end, the management started making noises about not hiring Shnade on a permanent contract. So much against his nature, Shnade approached one of his fellow teachers from America who took pity on the new teacher who got high in the toilets between lessons, and attempted to show Shnade a few English learning games with flash cards.
This brought a real turn around in Shnade. Suddenly teaching didn’t seem such a drag, the employers were happy and the kids behaved better. Shnade got a year contract and soon had spending money in his back pocket.
The first thing he did with his new found salaried wealth was too buy a load of grass from Tai and hit the gaijin bars in town. Here he was in his element. He talked up the strength of his weed and his prowess as a kids’ sensei. Many of the drunken regulars, both foreign and Japanese, were keen to share a pipe with Shnade and he soon had another income stream pushing dope. He maximized his profits by taking a few pinches from every three gram bag to make up extra bags for sale. Of course some customers grumbled, but for every punter who gave up on Shnade there was another fool willing to chuck money at him to get high. Shnade was becoming the ‘man’.
With his life panning out nicely, Shnade made the effort to get to live gigs as much as possible and let his mouth and dope do the talking. Many an early morning hour Otoko had to put a coat on over her pajamas and go and fetch her errant husband from outside a nightclub or a convenience store. She mostly suffered the interruptions to her sleep in silence because she didn’t want to ruin what she had. She had got a man, now with a job, and soon she would get her own place, and since Shnade never cared about contraception, she believed she would soon have a baby. She firmly kept in mind her friend, Ai, who had gone to Hawaii with her. Ai was prissy and spoilt and unprepared to take a risk on happiness outside the comfort zone of her family and close friends. She was a twenty something who was fast becoming a middle age parasite daughter who would never fly the roost.
Shnade neither knew about nor overly cared that much for Otoko’s dreams. He still digged on her cute slightly wild box, but he was also fascinated by the multitude of bad and dumb girls to be seen on any given weekend in clubs, bars and outside the train station. They wore tiny skirts and were sexily brazen in their dismissal of those who didn’t party or wear heels and false lashes. Shnade latched on to any cool looking member of Japan’s fractured youth sub-culture who knew a bit of English or who played in a band.
He stepped up a notch in his own self-reckoning when two things happened. Firstly, he managed to talk up his way into a quick shag over the hood of a car in a dark multi-storied car park with a chubby Japanese teenager who, like Shnade, had grown up contently feral on the other side of the tracks. And secondly, he met Ryo and Taka – respectively poor singer and poor guitarist – who were looking for a bassist for their new band called “Jim Jumps”. Life was expanding in a beautiful way for Shnade. From having to sell vacuum cleaners and be content with a peripheral role in a band and meager sexual pickings; here he was now centre stage: the man, the dealer, the shag star, the mega gaijin, and soon to be the kick ass bassist for “Jim Jumps”.
That name will have to go, though, Shnade thought as he waited outside of Lawsons for Otoko to pick him up.
As he waited this night shortly after his double triumph of infidelity and getting in a band he saw a drunken office worker with a tie around his head stumble out of the Lawsons convenience store. He wobbled at the automatic door as he tried to open his bottle of energy drink at the same time as pocketing his change. A note escaped. It floated in a graceful ark and landed near Shnade. The drunk hadn’t noticed and was off down the road. Shnade bent down to pick up the money. Score. It was a 5,000 yen note. 50 bucks.
Minutes later Otoko arrived in her mum’s small box shaped car to dutifully pick up her late night husband.
_______________
Candy was left in the jungle. She was starving. As she waited outside the tin roof shack in the jungle alone she re-played in her head the events that had led her to being left out in the Amazon jungle by herself.
Rapi had woken her early that morning and with Jose Carlos had led her down a path into a jungle. The three of them had walked through waist high pampas grass for an hour. Candy remembered getting bitten everywhere. She couldn’t tell if Rapi and Jose Carlos were also suffering from the mosquitoes but they never scratched or showed any irritation. At one point while crossing a huge plain they saw a deer feeding in the distance.
After the unexpected pampas trek they came out onto a muddy road. They drank warm water from plastic bottles and smoked cigarettes as they waited. Candy wanted to ask what the hell they were doing in the jungle but the stern macho look of the two men made her realize that any female moaning would not go down well. All she could elicit was an encouraging smile from Jose Carlos. Rapi seemed preoccupied; he wasn’t being the considerate lover that Candy had recently grown so fond of. She wanted to tell Rapi about her dream to see if Rapi’s supposed knowledge of spirits, ancestors and mother earth could shed any light on the lucid dream. Instead she held her own council and waited for the men to break the silence.
They waited an hour in the shade of a tree before an impossibly beat up ford rattled down the road and stopped. The driver was another dark skinned indigenous man. He spoke Aymaran rapidly to Rapi. Their conversation seemed animated. Several times the driver pushed his chin out in Candy’s direction, obviously talking about her. It took Jose Carlos’s intervention in the growingly heated exchange between the driver and Rapi for the driver to eventually say: “Vale”. With that the three of them got in the car: Jose Carlos in the front and Rapi and Candy in the back.
They bumped over the muddy, pot-holed, single lane jungle road for ten minutes in silence before Jose Carlos told a joke in Spanish. Candy couldn’t get the double entendre but the other two men thought the joke was hilarious. Candy was beginning to have immense respect for the way Jose Carlos did the smallest things, showed the sweetest deference, made the subtlest of self-effacing gestures to try and put people at ease. In this case the sour silence created by Rapi turning up for a drug deal with a gringo chica was broken by a lame dirty joke. The driver introduced himself as Tupac. He explained slowly in strangely accented Spanish that he was named not after the American rapper but after the last ruler of the Incas. He then told Candy that any friend of Jose’s and Rapi’s was also a friend of his. But. Candy held her breath as Tupac paused after the ‘pero’. He then spoke in slang that Candy didn’t get. She turned to Rapi who explained in English: “You must stay in the Jungle by yourself for little time. The village we go to for buying cocaine is not safe for a Canadian. Recently, Marxist paramilitaries move into the area. Maybe they see you and think ransom or…”
Rapi left that unpleasant and pregnant possibility linger in the air for a second before Jose turned on the car stereo and reached into his shirt pocket and lit up a twisted bent joint.
The four of them got high and listened to the laments of the Andes. Two hours later they pulled up at the end of the road and walked down a path into thick jungle. The path disappeared amongst the twisting roots of giant trees. There were fewer mosquitoes. After a thirty minute walk they came to a small clearing next to a stream. The clearing was maybe forty feet wide and twenty feet deep. In the clearing was a corrugated tin shack, a fire pit and a couple of logs to sit on. The men left the remaining water and some weed with Candy and reassured her she would be safe. Rapi said that they would return in a couple of hours. Candy had been in South America long enough to know that “a couple of hours” could be a whole day. Candy didn’t feel very happy with this arrangement. She looked pleadingly at Rapi and told him not to leave her too long. Rapi crossed the space that separated them and hugged her. He whispered something in her ear.
Then the three men said adios and waded through the stream and onto the opposite bank and vanished into the jungle. Candy was alone. She had never been this alone before in her life. She realized that if you knew where you were or had access to people or even just a cell phone then you weren’t fully alone. Here in the jungle with an invisible path somewhere behind her and an invisible path on the other side of the stream with nobody around for maybe miles, and with no cell phone she was hopelessly alone. Candy had always thought of herself as a loner: a person with friends, but not dependent on friends. A person that was self-contained. Not weak. In the few months she had been in South America she had neither thought about her parents nor missed her previous life. All she could feel was a slight nostalgia for the vulgar cattiness of Teddy and Anil, her gay mates.
Now the sun was directly overhead and burnt her blonde hair. The jungle was only kept at bay by this small clearing. It screamed and howled with insects and birds. With the three men the jungle seemed benign. It was their medium and it was thus her new adopted medium. Now by herself, she felt un-adopted, foreign to this much burgeoning nature. Only the wobbly small shack shared her displacement, her lack of connection.
Candy felt like crying. This was a big mistake. Hostels and small time dealing and a bit of slutting around were her tools in trade. Off the map escapades involving big quantities of drugs and paramilitaries were, in contrast, not her stock in trade.
Then an odd thing happened. It felt like a wire had snapped in her head - her mental processes left the rut of despair and she remembered how she had killed a man in her dream that morning. The dream details were returning to her. Without thinking she sat on a log by the fire pit and made a joint and smoked and thought. She felt a swelling sadness for the dead Sikh. She hung onto this feeling and her lungs lurched as she shed a tear.
After the moment had passed and the joint was stubbed Candy snapped out of her reverie and realized how hot she felt. She drank some warm water and found a tube of sun block in her small day bag that she had bought. She started to apply the thick cream but got some on her dirty white T-shirt. She peeled off the sweat drenched top and then thought what the hell and proceeded to strip all her clothes off. The water in the stream looked clear, cool and inviting. In bare feet she strode over to the stream. Being naked made her feel less alone, made her feel she might be watched.
The water was flowing fast enough to spittle white against the bigger rocks on the stream bed. She stood in the middle of the stream, water up to her pale thighs and for a long time stared at the sun ripping the surface with streaks of gold. The strangeness of being naked and alone in a stream in the Amazon jungle seemed less plausible then her dream murder. Candy found a shallower part of the stream and sat down.
At first Candy touched herself absently while she sat preoccupied with her thoughts. Then she realized that she felt aroused. She remembered her orgasm on her first night with Rapi. Now she was intent on crossing the finishing line. She crushed her breasts and teased her bud and felt the water tingling over her pubis. Like a rock rolling towards her from a great distance the climax rumbled closer and closer and grew in size and volume. When it came she screamed.
When Rapi, Tupac and Jose Carlos returned they found Candy in the tin shack sleeping on some old sacking. Rapi gently called to her and roused her from a deep dreamless sleep.
Candy stepped out of the shack and noticed the sun was going down. Jose Carlos and Tupac had their heads close to a burlap sack. They were staring intently into the sack. Candy knew that it was the coke they had scored. For the first time in her life she wasn’t bothered about checking out the score. From the bulge in the bottom of the tall sack it must have been a considerable amount. She wondered for a moment how three obviously poor Indigenous Bolivians could afford such a mass of powder. In Buenos Aires it would be worth a small fortune; in Vancouver a huge fortune.
Rapi was walking around on the periphery of the clearing collecting firewood. By the fire pit were some long thin mud coloured roots and a pile of green leaves. Candy picked up one of the root looking things and studied it. It was smooth and not earthy like a root. It smelt of nothing. Rapi returned with a bundle of fire wood. At that point Tupac and Jose Carlos pulled their attention away from their cocaine wealth and spoke quietly in Aymaran to Rapi. He nodded and replied with a few short monosyllables. With that Tupac shouldered the sack and Jose Carlos lit up one of his badly made joints. They politely said goodbye to Candy for the second time that day and then slipped into the pitch darkness of the jungle. Rapi explained that Tupac would drive by tomorrow morning and pick the two of them up.
Candy felt detached after her afternoon isolation spent getting stoned and fingering herself to apoplexy naked in the stream. She stopped and did something she rarely did. She analysed her feelings. She didn’t feel much love anymore for the beautiful dreadlocked man busy beside her making a fire. She didn’t like being this helpless. Even camping as a child in the vastness of the Canadian forests she never felt this intimidated by nature. She resented herself and Rapi in equal measures for bringing her to this state of affairs.
She watched as Rapi pulled a big steel pot from the shack. He scrubbed it with his hands in the stream and then carefully carried it back full of stream water. He was cheerful and tried to tell Candy about the village he had gone to and the meeting he had had with both the village elder and the paramilitary leader. How the three of them had drunk coca tea and calmly come to an agreement about the price of the kilo of coke that was being sold. Candy interrupted:
“What’s the root?”
“It’s not a root, bella. It’s a vine. The caapi vine and this leaf is called chacruna, and this smaller leaf is called chaliponga. We must boil them together for a few hours and then drink the remaining water. This is how to make ayahuasca. After you take it you will have the answers to questions you have been trying not to ask yourself.”
As he spoke he thumped at the long pieces of caapi vine with a rock to reveal a fibrous inside, like a coconut husk. He pulled the strands of the root apart and beat them again. After that he shredded the leaves and put them in the pot with the strips of vine.
When the fire was blazing away happily and the big pot was safely wedged between two rocks and gently bubbling away in the moonlight, Rapi turned his attention from the preparation of the drug and reached over to Candy sitting next to him. He bit her ear and started the elaborate pinches, kisses, whispers and singing that signaled his male intent. Candy didn’t want sex, she wanted food – she hadn’t eaten since last night. She, nevertheless, put up no resistance to Rapi’s overtures. As the ayahuasca brewed on the fire Rapi took Candy in the dirt. For the first time he came inside her.
The Candy and Shnade Chronicles:
Shnade Gets Drunk 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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