Green IslandCandy in Bolivia and Shnade in Hawaii
April 2nd 2010 11:13
"Ola, Chiquita. De donde es usted?” inquired the beautiful boy who sat next to Candy in economy class.
“Un pais que no es interesante,” Candy replied as she studied her flight companion more thoroughly. He looked like an Indian Bob Marley. He had big dreadlocks and sad Indio eyes. His nose was straight and his cupid lips were marked with spliff burns. He wore a collection of ragged colourful clothes that looked like only the dirt was preventing them from falling apart.
Candy soon warmed to Acarapi, or as he preferred to be called Rapi. He was gentle and witty. He was stunningly handsome and yet dismissive of looks. Candy felt that his gaze was assessing her soul and not her cleavage. This was rare for a straight man.
He suddenly broke off the small chat and asked, “Quieres volar?”
They were already flying but Candy caught Rapi’s drift soon enough. He went to the toilets and five minutes later returned to his seat. He took her hand and slipped something into her palm. Candy found a vacant WC and did a couple of lines from off the toilet lid.
For the rest of the journey Candy and Rapi snorted and drank Quilmes beer. They made jokes about the other passengers and swapped details about their lives. When they cleared customs it seemed decided without words that they would share a taxi and later share a bed.
Rapi was a considerate lover. Perhaps considerate was the wrong word. He spent hours worshipping not only Candy’s erogenous zones but also her mind. He sang mournful songs in the ancient language of Aymara that she couldn’t understand. He talked about the elements, about the benefits of bamboo charcoal, about strange herbs, about animals and animism, about colonial injustice and shamanistic ritual during the morning hours of their slow leisurely sex. It was a rare thing for Candy; she climaxed. It seemed like Rapi was curing her as much as he was enjoying her.
When Candy woke the next afternoon in the small room in the cheap hostales in La Paz she panicked when she realized Rapi was not there. That was a bad sign. Normally she was happy if the man fled the scene of his insincerity as quickly as possible. With Rapi she wanted more.
As she got showered and dressed her young body ached. The dizzy altitude of the Bolivian capital was strength sapping. She found herself out of breath as she climbed the stairs back to her room after a basic breakfast of bread, jam and coffee.
As she was preparing to leave, Rapi re-appeared with his one bag slung over his shoulder. He made Candy sit down on the bed as he explained what he was going to do.
It turned out he was a drug runner. He had two tickets to a jungle town called Rurrenabaque on a flight that evening. Candy was more than a bit heart-broken. She had fled Buenos Aires only a few hours before because of drug dealing. Pete was dead or in prison and it seemed a similar fate had nearly caught up with her. She needed another drug job like she needed a hole in her head. And yet.
And yet her funds were down to three grand. And yet, still more, she felt like falling through warm clouds into the invigorating charms of Rapi. She wanted their relationship to be about something more substantial than getting high, but if getting high and pushing dope was what it took to stay with Rapi Candy considered it a worthwhile experiment. She felt that she was getting somewhere that despite her inner reluctance was where she needed to go. And so for all these reasons she heard him out.
Rapi weaved a complicated explanation in Spanish and English. Candy couldn’t be sure but it seemed they were going to a remote place in the jungle to score a large quantity of coke then they were going to do something called ayahuasca. Rapi said it was necessary because Candy’s spirit was broken and needed the sacred vine to help mend the rupture. This talk of rupture and rapture scared and excited Candy in equal parts. Last night she had felt that thing buried in her beginning to surface and the fact that Rapi had sensed it too made his words doubly potent. The bullet needed to be pulled.
Candy could see no further than her growing love for Rapi and the possibility of some type of self discovery and so agreed to his scheme. The plan consisted, as far as could gather, of going to a village with a secret Indian name where they were going to score. Then they were going to get the coke sealed in canned fruit tins and fly back to La Paz where they were going to sell the powder to gringos. Candy could see where she fitted into the scheme – the end purchase was her end. Love hadn’t blinded her but it had made her oblivious to danger.
And so it was that they both found themselves sitting next to each other on a much smaller plane heading for the Amazon. The plane struggled to gain height as if it couldn’t get enough purchase on the thin air, but within a couple of hours they had cleared the Andes and were descending into the thick air of the rainforest. Many of the passengers on the plane were gringos like her, all eager to do a pampas tour of the jungle. They had come to see river dolphins, capybara, toucans and alligators. Candy hadn’t. The difference seemed to create an insuperable barrier between her and her fellow gringos. Candy stared out the window at the unrelieved darkness. Rapi sensed Candy’s isolation and did his best to make her smile with his unassuming charm and stories of the Incas. This didn’t really help because Candy soon fathomed that Rapi in some ways was lost like her. He clung to an Indigenous identity that had long ago had the heart ripped out of it by the Spanish. All that was left was an ancient language and a few religious ideas about Pachamama, the Mother Earth God that somehow co-existed with Rapi’s Rastafarian demeanour.
__________
P.J Shnade Junior wasn’t so much brought up as fell up through the years and managed to fall up and out of education. His schooling years had made little impact on his cerebral acuity, rather they had been years of experimenting with drugs natural and synthetic, and with pulling together a very rough neck charm that had managed to persuade some of the worst girls to put out or at least give some release to his hormonally bursting constitution.
He was P.J Junior at home and Shnade to everyone else; just as his randomly present father was P.J Senior to his nearest and Old Man Shnade to everyone else.
The Shnades were an American success story. This generation had made it up and over a keenly felt barrier that separated those who lived in trailers from those who lived in houses. P.J Junior could still remember his childhood in the park. He would disappear with another boy his age and creep out beyond the trailer park fencing to the spinney where people dumped their unwanted fridges, cookers, mercury thermostats and barbecue sets; and where teenagers went at night to start unwanted families. Junior and his mate Jim B would sit in a burnt out car and inhale solvents that they had lifted from the hardware store in town or, if they were lucky, smoke a pipe of weed that P.J had nicked from his father’s stash.
Picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue
When P.J Junior was twelve his dad took his family out of the park. Despite the whiskey and the dope P.J Senior had managed to get a vocation. He had learnt carpentry as an apprentice and later got a job fitting hardwood floors. It mostly involved making subfloors and using a nail gun to staple the hardwood flooring down. For most of the jobs he was accompanied by another guy who was a bit higher up the ladder in terms of housing and education. This man knew about flooring and made the smartest decision of his life. And that was to borrow some money from the bank and set up his own flooring company which specialized in bamboo flooring. This was back in the 90s when many Americans were in denial about global warming and the harmful impact on the environment of chopping down hardwood forests. Shnade was skeptical of his mate’s idea but joined the fledgling enterprise thinking he didn’t have much to lose and had quite a lot to gain. It turned out he gained a whole bunch. The nouveau riche still went for oak, the established middle class went for laminated flooring, but the new brand of upper middles that were flourishing in the dot com industry wanted something cool and green. That was strand woven bamboo flooring.
The business was a hit and Old Man Shnade became a type of partner in the enterprise. I say a type of because he was generally kept away from the customers and instead oversaw the materials and installation side of the business. The money rolled in and they moved out of the park into a suburban area. He bought a big new sprawling house and a SUV and started to enjoy success. He partied at the weekends and sometimes didn’t come home. P.J Junior was generally left to his own devices. His mom spent most of the time getting drunk, popping antidepressants and watching TV soaps. The old man was obviously shagging bar skanks and bowling alley whores but what could anyone do? He had bought them up in the world. They had a house and a huge TV and even savings in the bank.
Old Man Shnade’s new found respectability knew no bounds. His attention turned briefly to his son who had recently sort of graduated high school and was now just hanging around with musicians that played in a nightclub in town. Truth be told, he was pushing dime bags and humping musical equipment. On gig nights he tried desperately to look cool and mop up the third choice groupies. Old Man Shnade was too busy with bamboo and getting his own end away to know much about this, but he did want his son to follow his footsteps and also get a trade.
He announced his decision one Monday night over TV dinner. P.J Junior was underwhelmed by the parental interest and tried to duck out of the scheme with non-committal grunts and ‘yr naws’ but it didn’t work. P.J Senior had been to the local college and had picked up some course information. He gave his son a choice – more education or the army.
And so it was that young Shnade enrolled at the local college to do a massage course. He figured massage probably involved the least reading and he was all about women getting their tops off and letting him cop a feel; and besides, going to college still gave him plenty of time to learn guitar and smoke bongs in the parking lot of the nightclub.
And so the Shnades went on. The Old Man did his best to not disappoint his partner and ignore his wife. And she in turn had a mild turn around: she quit the booze and soaps (but kept up with the Prozac) and found community in the Church of the Screaming Southern Messiah of Latter Day White Baptists. She made a brief effort to save her son’s soul but of course fire and brimstone didn’t frighten the teenager who was all into pyrotechnics and volatile organic compounds.
One night Junior surprised his parents when he announced that he had got a job. This was shortly after passing out from massage school. The new employment was selling vacuum cleaners. These cleaners were thousand dollar sucking, shampooing monsters that could deal with any spilt ashtray or Jim Beam stain. It seemed that talking up shit was one gift that P.J. had in trumps. His guitar and song writing abilities were his two weakest suits but the two he talked up the most. He just figured he had to get a job to pre-empt his father`s irrational desire to see his son killed in a Gulf War.
The bottles, the dime bags, the skanks, the awful songs and the Lord rolled on by for a year or so in the Shnade household before P.J. Junior crossed the line. He had two customers one Saturday pay for vacuum cleaners in cash. Two ‘g’s in his hand. He went out and sold his beat up car to Jim B for a hundred bucks and managed to scrap together another 700 from his savings, his mum’s wallet and selling his guitar and amp. Nearly three grand was his ticket out of there. On Sunday morning he caught the Grey hound to the state capital and within 24 hours he was in Hawaii.
Waikiki
He had chosen Hawaii because the lead singer in the band had raved about the paradise island; he had told Shnade about his friend who worked in a beach bar and slept with lots of tourists. That was all the recommendation Shnade needed.
For the first week or so Shnade got drunk and high and stayed in a hostel dorm in Waikiki. He couldn’t surf but that didn’t stop him talking up his surfing abilities.
As the stolen money started running out Shnade made an effort to try and find the lead singer’s mate and the legendary beach bar. Neither came on the radar and he was universally rejected in his attempt to gain bar tending work. All he could get was a job as a ‘steerer’. He was paid cash in hand to steer people off the main drag into a dirty and dimly lit bar playing R n B and serving watered down spirits. He got the job because he wore three quarter length jeans, basketball tops and baseball caps at a dorkish angel. Nevertheless, it was a job he could do – he could talk up the seedy run-down establishment and he could push his fringe benefit free drinks to the limit when the boss wasn’t around.
Shnade still couldn’t surf or play the guitar any better nine months later; but, he felt vindicated and self-proud about managing to stand on his own two feet. He had phoned his mum twice in that time. It had made his dad angry to discover his son was a thief and a deserter but blood was blood and he had paid off the irate vacuum cleaners guy. He had also sent out an ATM card to his son and put a few dollars in an account every month to help Junior get by.
“You in-ne-rested in a party?” Shnade drawled one Saturday night to a couple of Asian chicks strolling down the main drag in Waikiki. The young women were all dolled up. They giggled.
“Hai…Yes.” The cuter of the pair answered.
“That’s cool. You like R ‘n’ B? Real cool tunes.” Shnade was digging the giggles and making eyes at the more forward, attractive one. The other was a definite ugly-mate-kill-joy.
“You ladies from China?”
“No we’re from Japan.”
“Oh really! Konichiwa.” It was evening not afternoon but there was no holding back the multi-lingual chat up.
Before they knew it Otoko and Ai were sipping watered down rum and cokes in a nearly empty bar marveling at Shnade talking himself up in pigeon American. The boss wasn’t around and he was taking full benefit with the free drinks. The more he became a guitar hero and a central personality in the underground Hawaiian scene, the more his subtlety dropped away. He played his pitches directly to Otoko and forgot about Ai’s existence.
Otoko didn’t mind so much. The two were school friends who were travelling together. They had both just graduated women’s college and had taken the opportunity to go on holiday before their lives hit a constant tedium in Japan. So far they had been in Hawaii for 8 days and they only had 6 more days left. In those 8 days nothing beyond going to the beach and going shopping and going to restaurants had happened. Otoko was getting frustrated. More than Ai she dreaded the thought of a life spent without incident back in an anonymous city in Japan. She wanted these few days of freedom to count. She was regretting bring her friend Ai who was sweet and nice but timid and lacking in imagination and daring. They both knew that after this holiday two paths were open to them – marriage or work. It was only Otoko who squirmed against the rules of fate.
And so it was that the two Japanese women got a bit tipsy and Shnade got his bulging belly full of Canadian club and coke and the three of them wondered off to the beach in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Ai could see she was the only crowd member and went to splash delicately in the waves. Shnade wasted no time in lunging for Otoko and getting his tongue in her pretty little mouth. The stars were dimming and the air hugged her like silk and for a moment before the dawn Otoko felt that at last she had found some adventure in her life. Then the moment passed as Shnade reached for her right tit. She coyly parried him away.
__________
Outside Rurrenabaque airport the tourists were all herded off to their accommodation for the night. Rapi, Candy and a few other Bolivians stood around the small taxi rank smoking and waiting their turn to get a battered taxi to town.
Even in the dark Candy could tell that Rurrenabaque was no more than an outpost in the jungle. Street lighting was patchy. The road was compacted dirt. Most of the houses were made of concrete green and crumbling under the immense humidity. They took a taxi to a poor barrio. They got out of the taxi with their few pieces of luggage. There were no lights on in the people’s houses: just piles of rubbish on the broken sidewalk and the insect noises of the jungle. Rapi whistled loudly. No response. He whistled again and then whisper-shouted at the dark house. A rat scurried past. Eventually a light came on and a man opened the door. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a dirty white vest. His thick black hair was glued at an odd angle from sleep. He warmly greeted Rapi. They hugged and then turned to Candy. They muttered in Aymaran and looked at Candy. The matter was quickly settled and the man introduced himself in Spanish and politely invited them in to his humble abode.
They sat in his bare front room around a wobbly table. A bare light bulb illuminated the scene. Except for the table and four chairs there was no other furniture. Everything was piled against the walls. Magazines, car parts, an electric hot plate, a bowl with dirty crockery, a football and a big bulging sack. On the wall was a poster of a Latin girl bearing her breasts and an old calendar showing a vista of Swiss mountains and pine forest.
Their host, Jose Carlos, rummaged around in a plastic bag and produced an old tobacco pouch which he gave to Rapi before leaving the room.
While Jose Carlos was away, Rapi started making a joint with some type of leaf material instead of paper. He didn’t use any tobacco and used a copious amount of spit to hold the inelegant joint together. He told Candy how Jose and he were old friends that used to go to school together. He told of how they were jungle boys who were sent to Rurrenabaque for an education of sorts. Candy was sweating. Shadows flickered on the concrete walls. She felt culture shock like she had never done before. Buenos Aires felt normal; this felt alien.
Jose Carlos soon returned. He explained he had ordered some food for them. Candy wondered where the hell food would come from at such a time. But then again she was beginning to realize that time seemed less important the poorer you were. You either had something to do or you didn’t and that was that. It was of little consequence when labor began or ceased. The poor could not afford the luxury of regular hours. They slept when they could and took their opportunities whenever they presented themselves. And one of those opportunities it seemed involved Candy.
Rurrenabaque in Bolivia
The soggy joint came to her. It needed constant relighting. After three or four ineffectual sucks she got it going and inhaled a rasping lungful that made her cough. She asked for water. Rapi explained that the water from the taps would make a stranger ill. That she must wait until the boy appeared with some food and then they could get her a bottle of mineral water. Rapi explained that this was going to be their last meal until after they had come down from the ayahuasca.
Sure enough there was a knock in the dark and a barefoot teenage boy in torn shorts and a Brazilian football top appeared carrying a tray with two plates of beans, rice and pork. Jose Carlos gave him a few Bolivanos and ordered him to get some cola. Candy had wanted water but felt it would make her look ungrateful and spoiled to start demanding things from their host.
The food tasted great to Candy and it gave her something to do. As she spooned up her food she observed Jose Carlos and Rapi talking and laughing, passing the joint, catching up on gossip and dipping in and out of Spanish. Their fraternity and the food were doing Candy a power of good. It was balancing out the dope that was making her feel very unsure of her surroundings.
Soon the kid came back with a 1.5 liter bottle of coke. Jose Carlos found a chipped glass and went outside to do some rudimentary washing before he placed it before her on the wobbly table. Candy gratefully slaked her thirst on the tepid coke.
After the meal, Jose Carlos picked up Candy’s rucksack and led her into the room next door. It had more piles of stuff around the walls and a mattress in the centre of the floor with a mosquito net hanging limply over it. He opened another door and they were in his back yard which was illuminated only by the stars. They made their way in the dark to a small outhouse with no roof. He found some matches and lit a candle. In the dim light she saw a basic hole in the floor latrine and a bucket shower. Jose Carlos then lit a mosquito coil. He tried his best to put Candy at ease. He made jokes about him being a millionaire with a big house in La Paz. He spoke Spanish slowly for Candy. He explained that she could have a shower and use his bed for the night. And that she was to ask if she wanted anything. With that he discreetly disappeared.
Candy went back to the bedroom where she found her pack that had been left next to the bed. She rummaged around for her towel and some clean underwear. Next door she could hear the raucous happiness of the two men. She heard a radio go on and pan pipe music warbling psychotically from a lack of a constant electricity supply. Candy stripped, put a towel around her sticky body and made her way back to the bathroom block. In the dull candle light radiating from a shelf in the corner of the room she poured half a bucket over her head. The water cooled her down. As she soaped herself she stared up at the night and thought about the cold winter nights back home. A memory of her sister, Mia, when they were both little girls came to mind. She remembered Mia standing in the door way of Candy’s bedroom. Looking. Candy shivered despite the heat and the moment was gone. She then used the remaining water to wash off the soap. She blew the candle out and picked up the mosquito coil burning on a metal stand. She then made it back in flip flops and towel to the room. She put on her last clean pair of knickers and a sports bra, turned off the light and crawled under the mosquito net. Her last thought before falling asleep was about brushing her teeth with coca cola.
__________
Shnade didn’t get into Otoko’s panties that night; nevertheless, he went to bed on Sunday morning with a contented sigh. He had a small crib in the back of the bar where he worked in a room that was used only to store unwanted and broken bits of furniture. Before he passed out he thought about bringing Otoko to his makeshift room to steal the fifth base and thought maybe it wasn’t a deal sealer type of pad.
Two nights later Shnade convinced Otoko-chan to get a single room in the hotel where she was sharing with Ai. Naturally, the room went on Otoko’s credit card. At the same time Otoko took a disapproving Ai aside and gave her the ‘don’t try to stop me’ talk. And so it was that Otoko got her Waikiki romance and Shnade got his first Asian chick pussy. He really digged on Otoko’s cute little box and broke PBs going downtown. For Otoko it was a volcanic release. She had an intense gasping orgasm before Shnade had even entered her. She was so entranced with bodily joy that she failed to care about Shnade pouring his semen into her without a moment’s consideration for contraception.
After that night, Otoko had ants in her head. She itched to broach the single most important topic with Shnade. Shnade for his part was so talked up with his own prowess at getting Asian pussy that he was oblivious to the signs.
With only two nights remaining Otoko pierced the wall of Shnade wonderment with a carefully pitched tearful glance down. Shnade paused and Otoko rushed in with the ‘serious relationship’ topic.
It worked better than Otoko might have wanted because within five minutes Shnade had decided that Otoko was going to use her credit card to get them married in Hawaii and then the credit card was going to get Shnade back to Japan with her. Shnade framed his ideas not so much as a proposal but as a genius result of his staggering ability to talk life up to a perfect pitch of happiness.
Otoko went silent. She then thought of her flat-chested friend, Ai. And moments later she and Shnade were walking down the beach hand in hand looking for a hotel to get married in.
Otoko and Ai
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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