Green IslandCandy Trips in the Jungle and Shnade Trips Up
April 28th 2010 10:27
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you – Jean-Paul Sartre
Candy’s stomach convulsed painfully but she could vomit nothing more than water and bile. Rapi was unaffected. He was sitting on a log by the fire with a stick in his hand. He told Candy that vomiting was natural. The ayahuasca that they had drunk thirty minutes ago often produced feelings of nausea. He had also spewed his first time on ayahuasca. Candy was bent over in discomfort a few yards away from the fire with a long elastic string of dribble arching in the gentle wind. She felt nausea all right and her Bolivian boyfriend’s words of reassurance seemed to carry a whiff of smugness that she felt was very male. He was alright. He had scored a kilo of coke, shagged a pretty Canadian girl in the dirt of the Amazon forest and now he was buzzing like a mother and handing out platitudes.
Gradually Candy’s stomach stopped lurching and she went back to the fire. She felt sort of normal. No cosmic storm of meaning had burst upon her consciousness. She’d taken acid a couple of times before with friends back in Canada but for some reason never really got into the drug like several other of her acquaintances. She preferred uppers like e, speed and coke that left you in control; well not really in control but under the illusion that you controlled your world. And she loved the fact that these uppers made you capable of being invincible to huge amounts of booze. Drugs that made you feel good about yourself and made you want to fuck – that was more Candy’s style. Whereas acid had just kept her awake and made her feel uncomfortable with her own consciousness. When she dropped acid, more than anything else, she longed to fall asleep and wake up the next morning normal.
caapi vine
As these thoughts flashed through her head she had another idea which was apropos of nothing, but it was an idea full of devilry and pregnant with amusement.
“Rapi, I have an idea. It’s a bit crazy, but it just popped into my head. It might be fun. Let’s bury ourselves up to the neck in the soil.”
Rapi was silent for a moment. Candy wasn’t sure if he had understood her English correctly. He then got up from the fire and went into the tin shack. Candy wondered what he was doing. She saw a flicker of a candlelight casting shadows on the back of the shack. Noises of plastic, metal and sacking suggested to Candy that he was looking for something. Before she could frame a question the candle went out and Rapi reappeared in the bright moonlight at the entrance to the shack. He was holding a broken trowel.
“We use this to make hole for toilet. This will do. We can go near the stream where there is sand and loose...suelo…tierra…”
“Soil.” Candy provided the missing word and got up. She felt somehow lighter as she walked with Rapi back down to the small stream where earlier that day she had fingered herself and screamed. It was the same stream that Rapi had crossed in the afternoon and had left her helplessly alone in the jungle. The memory of self gratification made her smile. Rapi didn’t notice her smirk because it was hidden in darkness.
By the stream, Rapi started digging using the trowel. She noticed it was missing a handle and looked so rusted and encrusted that it might shatter any moment. She took off her boots, socks and brown stained T-shirt and stood in the stream letting her combat pants get wet. She scooped water over her face. The splashing of the water seemed to send tinkling echoes through her skull. She wobbled slightly and for the first time in hours she laughed out loud.
She returned to see Rapi making rapid progress. He was already half way done with the first hole. Candy in her bra and still barefoot crouched down to look at the hole. The walls of the hole changed in texture from grainy and sandy to dark and veined with thin roots. She stared at the lower reaches where Rapi was kneeling and stabbing the earth to loosen it. The soil by his boots looked like black jelly that wobbled ever so slightly. The chunks of jelly soil seemed to bulge in the middle and give off glimmers of shade change that suggested movement.
Albert Hofman, the inventor of LSD
“Mi bella,” Rapi looked up at his audience and laughed with a beatific openness, “you are now in the power of ayahuasca. I see heaviness has left you. Now you can communicate.”
“Communicate with what?”
“There is no word for it. You can call it many things but they are just words. We believe the communication is with inner words, not outer mundano significado. You will understand. Now this hole is done. Come and sit down Candy.”
She got up and found her T-shirt and put it on again. She decided to remain barefoot. Rapi stumbled as he tried to jump out of the hole that he had just dug. Candy sprang in to replace him and felt the soil with her hands. It was wet, smooth and pliable like soft obsidian. She felt alive as Rapi pushed the piles of earth back into the hole. Candy sat cross-legged enjoying the cold putty slowly surrounding her.
When she was buried with only her head above the earth, her body felt sheathed in loose sand and soil creating a weight that only confirmed how full of vitality she was. Her perceptions moved up a gear: she felt that she was noticing everything more or perhaps, noticing the moreness of everything. She could hear a distant humming of a night animal; she could hear the grunts of Rapi working on a hole for himself. She loved the pattering of the spraying sand as Rapi worked the ground. The stream bellowed a deeper noise that seemed to underline all other sounds. Her head itself seemed to be making a popping noise like her synapses were sparking with electricity. She closed her eyes to savour the auditory feast. As she did she realized that Rapi’s was the only human generated sound in her magnified scope of hearing. Well, that is excepting her own imagined synaptic explosions. That felt reassuring. It felt safe. Nothing human, nothing bad could touch her here.
Candy opened her eyes. She had no idea how long she had been gripped by her internal dialogue. She had no idea what that dialogue might have been about. She laughed again and turned her head in Rapi’s direction. He was gone.
“Rapi,” Candy hoarsely whispered. “Rapi.” She didn’t know why she was whispering. But it felt right - as if reverent of the drug and the jungle.
“Ola, senorita.”
Candy matched the noise with a darker patch of the night. Her pupils at her unspoken command dilated like a kaleidoscope being twisted. She saw Rapi’s dreads snaking along the ground, sprouting from his head, like he was now plugged into nature and being a conduit for the jungle’s unceasing growth.
They chatted and laughed in a friendly manner. Both of them were high-spirited and buoyant with joy. All the time there was something new happening in the jungle beyond the stream that caught their attention and made them give off appreciative gasps and giggles. The new angle on the world plus the new mental stimulus was having a profoundly joyful and playful affect on both of them.
Candy felt like she was back in her dream in the shopping mall. She was fantasying but lucid in her fantasy. The jungle that she 5 sensed around, on and through her was a generation of her mind, but still her inner voice remained sober and aware of the illusion. She could parcel off herself and enjoy the ayahuasca movie. And she could do all that while having a conversation with her boyfriend in the middle of the night in this moonlight splashed centre of nowhere. The striking difference was that, unlike in the lucid dream of the previous night, she felt no need to convince anyone of the unreality of the situation. She didn’t want to kill a stranger, she didn’t want to stare from a height and flirt with death. She wanted.
That stopped her.
“Rapi, what do you want from life? I mean what are you trying to achieve? Su aspiracion. Your hopes.”
“To get out of this fucking hole.” They both squealed with tearful laughter. It seemed very funny, but at the same time so true and serious.
“Bella, I know not what my fate is. I have no hopes, other than to stay alive and not have to slowly die as a beggar living on the streets. Food, friends, family and a little money, and maybe a son; that is all we should hope for.
“Bolivia is a poor country. Having a President with indigenous blood has not changed anything for us. We still are poor. Many men blame something for their penuria. Pachamama has shown me this is without point. Now I sell cocaine to make money. Why? That is, how you say, largia historia, long story.”
Candy considered Rapi’s words. Her brain was split into two processes. Wondering what she wanted and examining Rapi’s answer.
“I thought I wanted to be free. To escape my life in Canada. To have adventure. You know, not a boring job, trabajo aburrido. I see that my life is so different to yours. The... the...” Candy struggled for a moment to get the right phrase, “the accident of our birthplaces has given us such different perceptions about what we might achieve. I don’t know; maybe you are right. It is pointless having dreams because we are tied to our fate.”
“I, we, you, Canada, Bolivia: toda esa mierda, all shit.” Rapi was going to continue but both of them were startled by the sudden appearance of an animal on the far side of the stream. They had both been too absorbed in their conversation to see the dark outline of an animal stepping from the jungle fringe into the clearing on the far side of the stream. It moved closer to the light.
“Capybara.” Rapi whispered.
The animal had a heavy barrel shaped body. It had a big head with narrow eyes. It was about four feet long. It looked like a cross between a giant rat and a beaver. It stood for a moment tense with investigation and then after the longest of moments its family also scurried into the clearing. There were three baby capybara and two more adults, although none as big as the first to appear.
“Don’t worry. They are herbivoro. Cute yes?”
Candy was having fits of delight. She found it hard to contain herself and stay quiet. She took a deep breath before answering Rapi.
“Is it a family?”
“Well, normally they stay together in much bigger numbers. They are sociable animals preferring the protection of greater numbers. This looks like a male with two females and three babies. I have spent many nights here before, but I have never seen capybara at this stream. It is a sign.”
Candy felt the last comment from Rapi was him doing his pompous Indian me-know-the-truth-white-man spiel again but her inner voice told her to let it go. Instead she thought about her family. Mia, the younger version of herself. She also was blonde with blue eyes but much more serious than Candy. She was quiet. She never really gave much of herself; instead, she did what was required of her. She got good marks at school and made the right noises about wanting to go to university. The two sisters weren’t close. Sometimes Candy tried to confide in Mia but it was hard work. There was no reciprocation. Candy just put it down to being an awkward teenager. She had vague recollections of them both being lively little girls who loved nothing better than to concoct some wild scheme, to act out some pre-adolescent fantasy together. And then it stopped. Candy couldn’t remember when her sister had retracted into her shell. At the time it didn’t seem a big deal because Candy’s attentions were at that time starting to zone in on the forbidden fruit of male company. Candy tried once or twice to tell Mia about her encounters with boys but Mia got all huffy by Candy’s confidences; and so Candy gave up on her sister and started to move away emotionally from the supposed security of her family. And now here was a strange family drinking water in the silver night of the jungle. Strange to her. They were together and contented on an instinctual level. Candy felt the unnaturalness of her own situation. Why was she buried up to her neck in dirt far from civilization? Why had she made herself a fugitive of the law? Why was she so estranged from her family? She cried silently as she watched the father capybara hunch by the water’s edge protecting his family.
__________
Shnade’s life in Japan was going in two directions. Two divergent directions. The first direction could be called ‘reality’ – what was really happening – and the other was what Shnade considered to be the direction of his life. Indeed, if he did choose to interpret the facts of his life in a way that showed him in a good light, it was a choice so subconscious that he was unaware that he had been guilty of inaccuracy. According to Shnade’s version of Shnade he was amazingly popular. And no wonder really. He was becoming incredibly good at playing the bass, becoming awesomely good at teaching kids and he was becoming unbelievably adept at growing weed in his bedroom at home. His beer gut and pock marked complexion were signs of his manliness. And what a manliness! The J girls loved him on stage and off. He was getting plenty of action. Well just that one chubby teenager had actually put out but he was lining up several more conquests. It was just a matter of time. And then there was the dealing. Shnade couldn’t really figure out how much of Tai’s weed he was pushing or if he was making any money out of it. But he was stoned a lot of the time and he had loads of mates from whom he could beg drinks at the bars in town.
The alter ego to Shnade’s devastating success in Japan was beginning to become apparent to a number of people who knew Shnade. Several of his earlier friends had chosen to have nothing further to do with the young American with a big mouth. Shnade had organized a couple of gigs for his band “Jump” (he couldn’t get them to change the name to “Radicalizer” but he managed to persuade the other band members to reduce the band name from “Jim Jumps” to “Jump”); and these gigs had seemed a huge success to Shnade, financially and artistically. He did all the money stuff and lied about the door-take to pocket more than his share. He also got a bloke whom he met in a bar to design and print off promo fliers. That bloke was expecting to get paid. Shnade ditched the friendship to make the saving. Shnade got a once-friend to do some warm-up djing for another gig. When the guy asked for some money to cover his travel expenses that’s when the friendship went into the past tense. Otoko was struggling to keep up her warm feelings for her husband. She was now pregnant and struggling with work, morning sickness and having to be Shnade’s taxi service. These broken friendships, duplicitous deals and strained marital relations inhabited the reality that Shnade ignored with a masterly disingenuousness.
One Saturday night Otoko had to wait forty minutes for her errant husband to show up. She waited in the car in a parking space belonging to a restaurant opposite the club. It was really Sunday morning and the light of Sunday wasn’t far off. Otoko didn’t want to go into the club to fetch Shnade. She was wearing a jacket over a tracksuit. Not glamorous heels and cakey false eyelashes like the three girls squatting on the road outside the club. Besides, she didn’t want Shnade to think she was henpecking him and ruining his good time. She wanted a husband and a father for her child, but she wasn’t sure if she could continue much longer like this. She felt tired all the time. She was beginning to imagine Shnade was seeing other women. That last thought really hurt.
Shnade eventually came out the club carrying his bass guitar and stopping to cool hand shake with the random Japanese in his path. He wanted to take the plaudits even if it was from strangers whom he didn’t understand. Otoko saw her husband stop by the group of squatting bleached hair tarts and doing his thing with his free left hand, like he was some rap star on stage. Like all wives and girlfriends she could see, or imagined that she could see, the lust in Shnade’s demeanour to the dumb, giggling, mini-skirted bitches he was doing his hip hop showing off to.
When Shnade finally managed to pull himself away from his ridiculous display and get in the car, Otoko gave him the silent treatment. That was fine with Shnade. It allowed him to internally eulogize that night’s epic display of guitar virtuosity and con man skill at walking away with 300 bucks of the band’s money. That was worth a congratulatory pipe or two when he got back he thought. He was just settling into his enjoyable reflections when Otoko got fed up of waiting for her husband to show some sympathy for her plight or some remorse at shamelessly dragging her out of bed in the early hours of the morning.
“Shnade I want you to leave. Go away. You are not good husband and not good father.” Otoko cried as she drove. She tried to stay calm but she was hitting the stresses on the not’s with venom. “Are you fucking one of those girls?”
“What girls?” Shnade asked innocently.
“The girls you talk to just now.”
Shnade imagined fucking all three of them on a waterbed in a love hotel. “No, of course not, honey.”
“Don’t fucking ‘honey’ me. Tai tells me you owe him money for your drugs. Is that true?”
It might be true. Tai often subbed Shnade because he was the husband of a work-mate. “I’m gonna pay him back tomorrow. I made lots of coin tonight honey.”
“If you make lots of money, why you give me so little for food and you still not pay my parents for rent? I go to the hospital tomorrow for check up for baby. You have money for that?”
“Sure I do, Otoko. How much do you want?”
As Otoko parked in the family space (which also cost money) she turned her wet face to Shnade. “You are a fucking pig. I regret get married to you. Just go. I do better without you.”
The next day there was a band meeting at Ryo’s house. Shnade was late because he had had to walk. Otoko wasn’t talking to him, let alone ferrying him around.
Ryo looked at the other band members and began. Shnade could see that they had prepared a speech for him. He could also see that it wasn’t going to be about Shnade’s awesomeness.
“Shnade, Taka counted over 40 people at the gig last night. 40 times 3,000 yen is 120,000 yen. Minus 50,000 for renting the club is 70,000 yen. But you say we made 40,000. You are..”
It was definitely time for Shnade to cut this mathematical speech in the bud with a bit of talking up.
“Ryo. That’s wrong dude. I split all that was left with you guys. Honest, dude. Ask the man on the door. What’s his name? You know the one with the dreads? Sho-chan. That’s his name. He was there. We only made 40,000, dude. It was Sho-chan. He let a load of girls in for free. And I had to pay off the bar bill, dude. Do you know how much we drank last night?”
Ryo, Taka and Ban, the drummer, looked with dismay at each other. Shnade could see their resolve crumbling. He was undoubtedly going to be able to talk his way up and out of this. The three moaning bitches. Didn’t they know that he made “Jump”? That people came to see him?
Ban the drummer looked hard at Shnade: “You fucking cheat us.”
Shnade puffed his chest out nearly past his beer gut and made a show of squaring up to Ban, like his honour was at stake. Ban without warning swung wildly at Shnade and caught him on the side of his potato shaped head, knocking his baseball cap off. Apart from a ringing in the ear Shnade wasn’t hurt much. He didn’t fight back. Instead he just said “Fuck you lot” and left the house. “Sweet, still 300 bucks up,” he thought as he strolled towards the town centre.
Fuck the lot of them. And fuck his moaning fat-assed wife. He just wanted to have some fun. He worked hard so he deserved it. He was the real musician. He was the one going places. He didn’t need either his wife or the band holding him back. Those three talentless wannabees, they would be nothing without him. It was a shit band with a shit name anyway. He got out his cell phone and called up the chubby teenager that he had nailed in the car park a few weeks back.
“Moshi, mosh. Miyuki. karaoke hoshi desu ka? Yeah now. Ima. Yes. Okane arimasu. I got the money, you got the honey. Ah come on. It’ll be fun. Tanoshin ne? OK? OK. What’s the time now? OK. Meet you in one hour outside of Joyland. Wakata? Cool.”
Shnade then hung up and called the former teacher from the place where he worked, the American who had helped him with his teaching. He was a bit weird – full of long unintelligible words and talk about books and society and shit – but still in the friend’s side of the ledger that Shnade kept locked away in his rock god brain. When the American teacher, Jay, came on the line Shnade chatted with him about this and that. Shnade asked Jay about whether he was liking his new job in A city on the other side of Japan; and asked him if his new school needed any more teachers. And then Shnade asked if there was any weed in A City. The American regretted giving his number to Shnade before he left for A City but felt compelled to be polite to his fellow compatriot. He mostly just felt sorry for Shnade. In Shnade Jay saw a product of an environment that he thanked his lucky stars he had never had to endure. Jay couldn’t be certain but he thought there must be a gentle, giving and generous side to Shnade if only he was given the chance to show it. In short, Jay was suffering from the common middle class complaint of feeling both revulsion and pity for the lower classes; of invoking the concept of nurture to excuse the failings of those thought of as ‘less fortunate’. Shnade couldn’t have put it so eloquently, but he did know that Jay was worth cultivating as a friend. Jay didn’t know if there were any vacancies at his present school or if weed was available. In the end, Shnade got Jay to make a weak promise to look out for employment opportunities in A City.
The telephone conversation occurred as Shnade plodded through the hot late Sunday afternoon past convenience stores, drinks machines, mama san bars and small grocery stores. He was sweating by the time he got to Joyland. The building was huge and the concrete was stained. Shnade walked through the ground floor area to the stairs. He walked down an aisle full of assorted grubby looking gamblers mesmerized by the ball bearings cascading through the machine they sat in front of. Some people had buckets of balls by their side. Many chain smoked. Shnade briefly considered stealing a bucket of balls when some random sucker made a trip to the toilet but ditched the idea when he noticed he was late for his tryst with Miyuki.
Miyuki was also late. When she got there Shnade complained about being kept waiting. Miyuki ignored his whining and went up to the counter to book a karaoke room for two hours.
In the small dark room they ordered beers from the telephone on the wall. When the beers arrived and the waiter withdrew Shnade packed his pipe and they got high together. Miyuki then put on a J-pop tune and sang in a painful high pitched voice. As she did so Shnade started necking her and rubbing where he imagined her clitoris to be. Miyuki didn’t exactly shun Shnade’s sexual overtures, rather she ignored his advances because the song she was performing was one of new favourites and she needed to practice it before unveiling the new addition to her repertoire to her friends.
When the screeching rendition was over, Miyuki turned to Shnade and kissed him with the enthusiasm and wetness common to teenagers. Shnade tolerated the dribble that was running off his chin because he was busy trying to unbuckle, unfasten and unbutton the bizarre and colourful array of clothing layers that Miyuki wore. She made no show of resistance, nor did she groan with passion. Instead after an interminable amount of fumbles she broke off the turbid embrace and matter-of-factly exposed her plump breasts. Shnade dove in. As he feasted on the precociously big teenage mammaries, Miyuki with expert aplomb unbuttoned Shnade’s three quarter length shorts and reached into his boxers and pulled out his stiffening member.
If any passers-by had happened to look through the window in the upper part of the door to the room, they would have been met with the sight of Shnade banging Miyuki on the sticky plastic covered couch of the karaoke room. Nobody did. And neither Shnade nor Miyuki really cared if they did. They shared a mutual disinterest in anything that wasn’t related directly to their own small sphere of interests. What happened to other people held very little importance to either of them. Both were driven by motives of profit and gain. Miyuki thought she could gain by being the girlfriend of the foreigner in a band. She understood very little of what he said, but he paid for her and showed her attention.
Both over-weight bodies huffed and puffed until Shnade’s face froze in a comical aspect as he fired into Miyuki his fertile semen.
Once they were clothed again and another cold beer was placed in front of them Miyuki gave the speech that she had spent twenty minutes translating at home.
“Shnade-san. I am pregnant. I think keep baby. My mother, father not know. What you do? I want money for have baby. You give me money.”
The two of them sort of communicated and Shnade masterfully avoided committing to any definite course of action or remittance for the forthcoming illegitimate progeny. The conversation lasted for 30 minutes. By which time Miyuki could clearly gather Shnade’s position despite his artful talking up. She got up without a further word and exited the dark room. Shnade didn’t try to stop her. That bitch had left him with the room and beer tab to pay. He had another pipe.
Time to get the fuck out of here Shnade thought.
Thanks to Ross for the burying yourself experience.
The Candy and Shnade Story:
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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