BAD TIMES IN QUITO

Joe wakes up back in Quito, Ecuador - and it is not a pretty picture!

I do not want to get out of bed.

 It’s raining heavily.

 Chilly. Damp.

 I put the covers over my head, even though it’s around 11:30 AM. I just do not want to move from this position. Yeah, I’m not at Rio Muchacho anymore, as you’ve probably guessed by now.

 Back in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, the place I stayed in for one night when I first arrived here. Came back from Rio Muchacho a few days ago with my friend Kiriakos Katakos (how do you like that name?) after more than six and a half weeks there.

 It was just time to leave - everybody was leaving. These kinds of places are very transient like that. Oh well, guess it’s time I started exploring the rest of Ecuador, anyway. Kiriakos left to go back to Montreal yesterday evening though, and I just feel so alone in the big city.

    This city feels totally foreign to me. No trace of that community ambience I felt at Rio Muchacho or Bahia de Caraquez  and Canoa.

 Vanished into the ether, man.

 The anxiety and emptiness that I hoped had already been vanquished forever - has returned. This is not good. Confusion reigns. Summoning all my resolve, I sit upright in my bed, assuming a meditative posture. I reach for my Sony Discman on the night table and I begin to meditate.

 In April, on my 43rd birthday, in fact, at the dawn of my last nervous breakdown, I finally sprung for The Holosync Solution.

 The best way I can explain it ? 

    It’s a system of meditation CD’s based on precisely pitched carrier frequencies which affect the entropy (mind noise) coming at the brain. Basically rearranging what the mind can handle, as you become less prone to overwhelm. I know it sounds hokey - but it’s actually quite amazing - and after years of contemplating whether or not to purchase it - I finally took the plunge. I’ve been sitting to it every day for an hour since, even at Rio Muchacho - and  man, I consider this to be easily the best thing I have ever done.

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 I don’t want to go back to New York now - it’s like the Olympics there, man.

 Very clear winners. Very clear losers.

 You are acutely aware of what side you’re on, too.

 I can’t be like the Friends characters! 

 But that is what New York has become - populated by Friends characters.

    Despite my Holosync meditation, the longer I stay in Quito, the more anxious and confused I become. It’s always raining here. It’s always chilly and windy - and it’s not the most inviting place in the world, either. It’s intimidating to even walk around here because it’s so busy, and easy to get lost, too. I’m spending almost all my time in my room, except to go out for food and Pilsener, the Ecuadorian national beer which comes in liter bottles -  and I’m drinking way too much of that.

    The other bad thing about spending too much time alone in my room is that I have way too much time to think, brood and reminisce. I’m still meditating everyday, but apparently, I still have a long way to go. I think about how I’ve always been searching for meaning in everything I do, and how I always feel that I’ve failed - somehow. I figured this trip would cure that - bring meaning, peace of mind, adventure - if I survived, that is.

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL

The continuing adventures of Joe, as he settles in to his life in Ecuador and Rio Muchacho.

Philippe is leaving Rio Muchacho tomorrow to go on to another project. I’m gonna miss that guy. He’s like one of these stereotypically disillusioned French guys you see in old French (Godard) movies. Like the kind of guy who sits sullen on the beach, looking out at the waves and smoking French cigarette after cigarette, saying:
“Ah, what is thees life all about anyway?” in a heavy French accent.
Good dude, though.
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Oh Mariposa… Mariposa Traicionera.
Huge hit song in Ecuador. All over South America, in fact. It’s playing rather loudly over the scratchy boom box uneasily mounted - or tied - on this hilariously ancient bus, which is complete with no windows. I'm just really digging the ride as it creaks it’s way up this series of potholes that I imagine is supposed to be some sort of a road back to Rio Muchacho.
I love this song, Mariposa, man.
I love the mellow instrumentation of it, the Latin beat. The whole thing. I’ve been hearing this song everywhere I go, since the minute I first arrived in Ecuador nearly six weeks ago. It’s very comforting, like the essence of Ecuador.
In any case - the song, the sea breeze, the white sand, the aroma of corvina (fish) frying from the bamboo thatched hut restaurants dotting the shoreline… man, this feeling sweeps over me.
I lean out the frame where the windows used to be, look up at the sun, and take it all in, thanking God for the deep sense of satisfaction I'm feeling right now. Like - this is the exact place I should be at this moment.

ADVENTURES OF A BROKEN NOSE

A continuation of the 2nd chapter of my latest memoir - Escape From The Planet of The Arts. Joe has just downed a few cups of Aguardiente - and adventures follow!

In any case, these kids offer me some - and even though I am thoroughly wasted already - I down a few cups. Philippe is urging me to go back to the hotel with him before we get into trouble, but I drunkenly refuse. He finally just leaves by himself. That’s the last thing I remember.
Next thing I know - it’s the fuckin’ morning! I wake up in a strange bed - and Seinfeld is on TV - I begin laughing.
“Don’t you wonder what you’re doing here?”
I immediately recognize the British accent belonging to Trevor, one of the volunteers at the farm.
As a matter of fact, I do wonder, I think.
“Look around you…notice all the bloody towels?
Last night, around 4 o’clock in the bloody morning, mind you, this bloke knocks on my door, this huge Ecuadorian brute - and he has you hanging over his shoulder - and your face is all busted up.
Bloody hell, what the devil happened to him? I ask.
You’re bloody shit faced, dead to the world, and we have to deposit you in the bed here. Apparently, a couple of hours pass, you wake up to go to the loo, stumble on the step - and fall flat on your bloody face! Blood spurting everywhere - and I have the honor of picking you up, cleaning everything - and dragging you to the bloody bed! You can take a peek at all the soiled towels, if you dare.
Really, no offense, but aren’t you a bit too bloody old to be doing this sort of thing!?
In any case, you’re going to have to move on now and find your hotel, because I’ve got to meet up with my mate in a bit.”
I can barely stand. I weave and wind out of the hostel, staggering along the streets of Bahia for the next hour, with the vague hope of trying to locate my hostel. Finally, I do arrive there - and - the seńora at the reception desk lets out a gasp.
“Oh! Dios mio!! What happened to you!?
“Long story”, I mumble as I begin the sleepwalk to my room.
“Your amigo has been out all morning looking for you, he is very worried!”
I queasily unlock my room door, immediately crash onto my bed, perhaps with a case of alcohol poisoning… and maybe 10 minutes later, a distraught but relieved Philippe bursts into my room.
“Oh my God!”
He examines my rather battered face and now throbbing, swollen and bloody big toe.
We better get to the hospital!”
So we take a taxi to the nearest one. The doctor can’t do much with my nose, which is of course, broken - but he does shoot me up full of anesthesia - before removing the shattered toenail on my also broken and throbbing big toe. He wraps it up heavily in gauze, and with nothing more he can do - we head back to the hostel. Or rather, Philippe practically carries me there. He then departs back to Rio Muchacho to spread the tale of my plight.
As for me, I’m still so drunk it’s going to take days to recover - if not a week. Apparently, during my convalescence, the tale of my escapades has become legendary around town. When I finally venture outside to buy food, my toe is wrapped in gauze - probably three or four times the normal size.
I learn I have become something of a celebrity. It is at this time that I slowly begin to piece together the story of my adventure! It seems that when I was drinking the Aguardiente with the teenagers on the malecon, I excused myself to take a leak over on the side - and fell flat on my face - breaking my nose for the first time.
Barely conscious now, the teenagers attempt to help me to my feet - but as fate would have it - we are right across the street from a nunnery. Apparently, however, the sisters, alarmed by all the noise, yell at the kids to leave me alone - believing it to be a robbery.
Immediately, they dispatch the porter (the huge Ecuadorian guy) to rescue me - and as I am now dead to the world - he tosses me over his shoulder, proceeding to carry me to all the foreigner hangouts in town - before coming upon Trevor.
The rest, as they say, is history - and it becomes some sort of semi-urban myth.
The main gist of it is that because I am wearing flip flops with my heavily bandaged toe as I limp around town, I become known to the locals as “El Dedo”, which is Spanish for ‘The Toe’.
Oddly enough, this is the first time I actually feel accepted by the townspeople - and begin to really feel comfortable in my adopted home.

WHAT A LIFE!!

He goes on to tell about how he practically becomes a legend in Roxbury, (the black ghetto of Boston), when he gets picked up by this fine white woman, a blonde he calls Sophia, which was like totally forbidden in those days. She had her own car, a convertible, and her own cash. Which she was spending on him, and pretty soon, he’s parading her all over the black clubs and bars in Roxbury. All the big time hustlers and gamblers were salivating over her, and he says he felt like all eyes were on him when they were out together. And he’s still only sixteen! I know that feeling - that’s how it is when I am around Esperanza.
I fall asleep for about an hour and a half, before I have to wake up for school again and I’m only on page seventy-two - the book is four-hundred and sixty-six pages long. I can’t wait to get at it again!
For the next few days, it’s like I’m not even living my life. I’m not Joey Montaperto, in Roselle at this moment in this world anymore. Instead, I find myself cruising along on this odyssey, this journey with Malcolm X, our lives somehow oddly intertwined. Every opportunity I get to sneak away and satiate myself with this adventurous addiction, I grab it. I’m poring over every passage, sometimes three or four times, intent on slurping up each morsel of flavor, and bathing in the particular mood of those words.
He becomes known as Red, or “Detroit Red,” because of his reddish toned skin, and his bright red ‘conk’, which is what they called this process of using lye, to burn their hair straight, to make it look like a white man’s hair.
But my favorite part, no doubt, was the way he described how he got out of the draft in 1943, for WWII. The prevailing consensus among the young ghetto dudes was:
“Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.” Which of course, I totally agree with, in the first place. So I love it when he said he went down to the draft board totally bugging out, wearing his wildest zoot suit, frizzing up his red conk and talking a mile a minute with ghetto slang, like, “Crazy-o, daddy-o, get me movin’.”
He said a lot of the prospective white inductees in the draft room looked at him with that vinegary, ‘worst kind of nigger look’. Freakin’ hilarious. Anyway, he finally convinces the Army psychiatrist to 4F him, which is the rejection card for the physically/mentally incompetent, when he comes into the room all jumpy. He’s peeping under doors, and tells the guy he wants to get sent down South so he can organize the Negro soldiers, steal some guns, and kill them some ‘crackers’.
Now my admiration grows for him by the minute.