When we last spoke, I, Peru-bound, along with a couple of partners in crime, had lost my passport.
You know how it is when you lose something, and part of your mind just won’t let it go? What the fuck did I do with it? Just now, thinking about that, decades later, and I’m still trying to retrace my steps.
In any case, the very hour of departure upon us, my passport was gone. Sam and Felix took off anyway, and said they’d wait in Lima for me to get there, and we’d go on together to Cuzco. School was out, shut down for the month, so I joined my sister, who was recently out of college and doing the news for a little AM station in Taylor, a little town maybe 30 miles out of Austin.
Yes, Virginia, even in those days we had terrorists — notably, El Sendero Luminoso in Peru, for example, and the Red Brigade in Italy (that’s another story) — and fierce bastards they were, but even so, back then, turning around a lost passport in a few days was not such a big deal — the big downtown post office in Austin was also the Federal Building, and so I got to hang with my wonderfully adult sister and her husband while it got processed, and so it was that inside of the week I was in Lima.
When I got there, I took a cab — all garbed in military surplus clothing and a huge backpack, a study in young traveler — to the Intercontinental Hotel downtown, where my wealthy cohorts had decided to hole up while they waited for me. Much to my surprise, when I went up to their room, they were packing up and getting ready to fly home.
What’s up, I said, c’mon! There’s plenty of time for us to get the hike in.
And then I noticed bags of cocaine — not a ton, but definitely kilos, which they were breaking up and tucking away, here and there, in the nooks and crannies of their backpacks.
They gently broke it to me that they’d never planned on making the hike with me, and had gone to Peru with, yes, tons of their parents’ money (and full knowledge) to score, secure a substantial profit, and take the rest of the month off, doing whatever it is that languid, corrupt, well-to-do blond people do in their time off.
I say I was surprised, and I was — but not that surprised. I’d met Sam’s parents. I was one of those weird creative kids that rich folks like to sort of adopt, so I been out with Sam’s parents — they’d come up to the school one Friday to whisk us away for a weekend in Dallas of fabulously expensive restaurants in Dallas, along with rooms in a 5-star hotel. Proto-yuppies, they were probably among the first white folks to adopt the SUV lifestyle; I still remember the ride — it was a Ford Bronco. And while we were driving to Dallas, I remember Sam’s preternaturally tanned mom turning around in the front seat, leaning over, and offering us generous lines. A mirror, a coke spoon: the works. Sam’s dad had a tight perm.
There really was a decade like that.
Trying hard not to stare at her impressive breasts, wanting to belong in the company of such casual and easy corruption, that night, in the back of an SUV, I tried cocaine for the first time in my life.
You might wonder how it was that I, so recently removed from Peru, had never tried cocaine. All I can tell you is that in my circle of friends, Peruvian and otherwise, we looked at the drug with contempt as shit the stupid fuckin yanquis did, not at all fit for human consumption.
That is pretty much my attitude to this day, but I have done many foolish things in the presence of good-looking women.
Sam and Felix were a pair, as I said, but they weren’t brothers: Felix had cut a similar deal with his mom and dad, and using my amazing knack for talking my way into unlikely opportunities as their selling point, they had gone to their parents with a deal: fly us to Peru with thousands of dollars, we’ll score big on pure flake (not that challenging, but it showed an admirable, if misguided, fearlessness), sell it to your rich friends, and enjoy tax-free liquidity.
They were done with their Peruvian adventure. I don’t know what the profit breakdown was, but I’ll bet the intra-familial negotiations were intense and thorough.
Meanwhile, this little shock aside, I was thrilled to be back in a real country of real people (I am not, to this day, fully adapted to my own motherland) — but I was concerned for my friends, inexpertly tucking all that coke away here and there in their gear, so I called a guy who knew a guy who knew someone, and so helped them obtain modified Samsonite luggage, shot though with aluminium tubing and false bottoms.
Just as there were terrorists in those days, the Drug War was on — Nixon, I think, actually declared it — but as is true to this day, smugglers were well ahead of law enforcement, and so it was that Sam and Felix, 16, maybe 17 years old, already so confident, so completely corrupt, beautiful, and blond, unlikely burros, left me in Lima, determined but alone.
With an extra 500 bucks in my pocket for my help.
I say I was alone, but of course I still had many friends there, and I was looking forward to seeing many of them before I hit the trail. My first day there was spent with altered luggage procurement, and I spent the night in the big downtown hotel. The next morning Sam and Felix left, and I called my closest friend, let’s call him Jorge — half Peruvian, half American, the guy who really put me on the musician’s path — and told him I was in town for a minute, let’s hang.
He knew I was coming sometime, but in those days, calling overseas was an iffy and difficult proposition, and of course I’d been delayed. His parents had always really liked me and offered me a bed for as long as I wanted while I got it together to go to Cuzco and start my (now solo) hike.
So that night, my second night back in Peru, I was staying with my best friend, and we decided to go out, hit a couple of bars.
In those days, at least in the countries I knew, drinking was a matter of having money, and maybe your chin clearing the bar. We didn’t get carded — no such thing, laughable, even — no one gave a damn. Added to that, all through my youth, my parents often had wine, and I was always free to imbibe — no big deal — so drinking was never a forbidden sin. Added to that, before I became a musician, I was obsessed with martial arts, and you can’t dial in to the exquisite, emasculating-a-fly-with-chopsticks level I (fruitlessly) aspired to if you drink, so I was a clean boy.
T’was your American ways what did me in.
But that night me and my pal decided to go hit some bars – I’d told him everything that had happened, shown him my wad of dough, and the young sophisticates decided to hit the town.
My dad always drank martinis — his formula was two shots gin, one shot vodka, and you open a bottle of vermouth in the same room (olive optional) — very dry. A man of the world, an aider and abettor of cocaine smugglers, I figured it was high time I started drinking like a man, so I taught the formula to the bartender at whatever joint we were in (I remember dark and red and plush — that’s it), and began knocking them back, chilled, bone dry.
At some point, a couple of prostitutes noticed these idiot man-children with money, and joined us. At some hazy point Jorge was simply gone, and I was alone with masses of black hair and eyes and the – I still remember this much — smallest miniskirt I’d ever seen.
Then I woke up, to someone poking me with a stick.
I opened my eyes to find myself in a bathroom, decorated with a frankly astonishing amount of vomit, a little guy with a mop and the most disgusted expression on his face you can imagine, poking me, trying to rouse me.
In all my life’s adventures, through all the accidents, mishaps, injuries, and illnesses I have experienced, I have never felt so bad. The janitor drove me from the bar and into the blazing morning light (Lima is almost always hazy and fogbound — the light is always diffuse, but that morning it was as though I was cast out onto the surface of the sun). Staggering to my friend’s house, past people going to work, into Miraflores, where he lived, I threw up on every other yard, on every street corner on the way home. In the magic cocoon that morons eveywhere live in, no policeman stopped me, and I proceded, unimpeded.
I would have begged a policeman to shoot me.
Jorge was at home, an I-got-laid grin on his face, assuming I’d done the same (the truth is I was still a virgin at that point) which quickly faded when he saw me, the very picture of hammered death. He and his mom bustled me in, cleaned me up, and poured me into bed, where I lay for a time at some dreadful precipice.
Later we checked my cash reserve — minus whatever paltry sum I’d spent on booze, it was all still there. I had apparently achieved such depths that the prostitute didn’t even roll me, and the bar closed with me in the bathroom, howlingly, pukingly, wretchedly, magificently toxic, for the janitor to find.
And oh, I was sick. I have no idea how many martinis I drank. 8? 10? Enough that I was so gross that a prostitute (or for that matter, whoever else was there, I remember nothing) couldn’t bring herself to relieve my inert body of its cash.
I was sick for weeks afterwards. A father myself, now, I know that sometimes teenagers actually overdose and sometimes die from alcohol poisoning, and in retrospect, I think I must’ve been close.
Feeling desperately bad, after a few days I nonetheless dragged my sorry ass to Cuzco, stayed for a few days trying to find my legs, and finally made the hike. February is in the middle of the rainy season, so I slogged the full distance, wet and toxic, and by the time I reached those magnificent ruins I had a new relationship with myself and alcohol.
But that is another story.
When I tell you I don’t think I’m an alcoholic, I’m speaking truth. If I drink too much — if I go beyond some particular dose — my body just refuses to continue.
And to this day, just the smell of gin is enough to cause profound nausea.
Thus was I inoculated.
