The Ordinary Seaman

by Francisco Goldman

  Again, Elias did not even bother to reply; he simply watched Davey’s performance with a saddened expression, then looked at Mark.

  “Come with me,” said Mark. Elias followed Mark to his room, through the crowd in the hallway, their grinning or horrified expressions.

  “She left through the window,” said Elias, with a thin, wry smile, seated on Mark’s couch. “A game girl, I’ll give her that. Chíngale. Tied sheets and T-shirts together, seaman’s knots, you know, tied it around her waist and lowered her down, while you all were trying to kick down my door. And then I lowered her suitcase down. Funny thing is, I don’t think anybody even saw.” The rear of the dorm faced a paddleball court and woods. “She’s had it with that twot. He’ll never see her again. He’s all wrong for her. She’s mine now.”

  Mark laughed, he couldn’t help it, Elias’s composure and self-possession struck him as hilarious. Elias’s winning heartlessness suddenly reminded him of his little sister, Linda.

  “I suppose she’s on the bus to Ithaca now,” said Elias. “I’ll go see her in a few days. Funny, I almost went to school there myself, but they wanted me to start as a sophomore. Don’t have the time, güey.”

  “Way what?”

  Elias spelled güey and shrugged. “Mexican word. Obviously, you weren’t paying attention to Davey’s Spanish lesson out there.”

  “I think you should have a new roommate,” said Mark. “Actually, you should probably live alone.”

  “Maybe I could take Tish’s room. I think I’d make a good resident adviser, don’t you?”

  They stayed in Mark’s room talking and smoking pot until they heard Davey knocking at the door and Mark realized he’d forgotten all about him. God, he felt terrible, but Elias’s weed was really strong.

  Mark stumbled out into the hallway. Davey’s eyes were puffy and red from weeping.

  “You’re in there getting stoned with him?”

  “I’m finding you a new roommate,” said Mark.

  “Yeah, I know. But where’s Elaine?”

  “I don’t know. Davey, are you sure you weren’t just hearing things? That would have been unbelievably cruel of her.”

  Later that night he and Elias walked into town together for some beer and pizza at Onondaga Tavern, went there and a few other places together, trying to pick up town girls.

  Streaking was in fashion, and in the middle of the long, terrible winters, especially during blizzards at night, Elias liked to sprint naked across the quad, screaming at the top of his lungs into the wind and snow. Stranger, he became somewhat obsessed with the preppies, who held themselves aloof from the rest of the student body. He began adopting their words, especially when he addressed other preppies, calling them Ace and Sport. He began to dress like them too, in tweed jackets and pastel button-down shirts, baggy chinos or jeans, wore those clothes and nothing else when he went outside in winter, with the added embellishment of going barefoot. Elias went barefoot in winter, said it was good for the whole spirit, somewhat like walking on hot coals. Despite these peculiarities, the preppies even tried to rush him for their fraternity, inviting him to cocktails in their pillared southern, antebellum-style mansion with maid service, all those Benzes and BMWs parked out front. Soon, of course, Elias was seducing the preppie girls too. Mark was often at his side now during those and all other outings, though the preppies still wanted nothing to do with him. No matter how hard and sweetly he tried to charm, they were barely polite, and soon Mark often felt as unhappy as he had in high school.

  That summer, while Mark went home to New Hampshire and worked as a waiter in a tourist hotel, Elias went to the Amazon, found work as an assistant river guide for an adventure tourist operation, and contrived to get full course credits for all of it. He came back for the winter term, to graduate. Now Elias was full of stories about shamans and taking a drug called ayahuasca that made you vomit and shit all over the place before taking you off on incredible twenty-four-hour trips during which your spirit merged with those of jungle and river animals; he’d turned into a jaguar and a pink river dolphin. The notion of such a drug did not appeal to Mark, but he pretended he couldn’t wait to return to the Amazon with Elias and try it himself. Someday, yeah, man, maybe they’d go into business there: have their own adventure expedition company, find ways to market the medicinal marvels of the shamans, buy one of those old-fashioned steam-paddle riverboats and turn it into a floating, very hip hotel, open a beach bar in Rio. Great life, Mark. You want to spend the rest of your life in a suit, in some bleak little office? It’s not like you’re getting into Harvard Law, is it?

  Immediately after graduating from Bley, Mark moved to New York City with his new girlfriend, Mindy Olin, who wanted to be an actress; they both waited tables. Mark and Mindy broke up, and he moved to the Lower East Side. He went on waiting tables, and lost himself in the rocker night life, CBGB, Barnabas Rex, Mudd Club, the years plowing by through a sludge of stuporous late nights, drugs and alcohol, minor fashion adjustments, and downtown women variously tuned to a muffled key of desperation, Mark harmonizing with them well enough. Elias often wrote, and visited at least once a year, sometimes staying with Mark in one dingy apartment after another for as long as six months. For a while Elias was making good money trapping baby spider monkeys in the jungle, selling them to the pet trade. He assured Mark that he did this as humanely as possible, employing Amazon Indians who used blowguns to incapacitate the mother monkeys, the darts coated with nonlethal doses of curare, just enough to knock them out awhile, the dart points left sharp and smooth so that they’d be easy for the mother monkeys to pull out, and then Elias and his “boys” would climb up into the trees to go after the baby monkeys with nets. (Elias told that story in CBGB’s one night and a German punk girl spit in his face and started to cry.) He attached himself to one Amazon adventure travel outfit after another, keeping up his interest in medicinal plants and natural hallucinogens; once, Elias was hired to serve as guide for a group of physicians and medical specialists from the United States who wanted to witness firsthand the way Amazon shamans treated people’s health deep in the rain forest. One was a young woman physician who was also a licensed naturopath and had incorporated herbal and homeopathic treatments into her practice. She and Elias almost married; she spent months at a time with him in the apartment he kept in Iquitos, Peru, studying medicinal plants and trees with the licensed shamans who ran their own clinics there almost like Western doctors, buying their cuttings, bark, and roots from the river and forest people who journeyed to Iquitos to sell them. After they broke up, Elias went to sea again, signing onto a freighter as third engineer out of Santos, Brazil. (Peru’s Sendero Luminoso rebels were then a furtive presence in the Upper Amazon, ruining the adventure tourist trade for years.) He lived in London for two years and enrolled in a homeopathic medicine institute there. He returned, briefly, to the Amazon. He spent a year in Mexico as first mate on a yacht that took tourists deep-sea fishing out of Isla Mujeres, owned and captained by an old schoolmate from La Escuela Náutica. Back in the Amazon, he worked the specialty timber trade as the front man for a Swedish investor he’d met in Mexico City, procuring cargoes of a relatively rare deep-forest tree whose wood is naturally blue for export to fashionable furniture makers in Europe. On vacation in Rio he met the young conceptualist photographer Kate Puerifoy, who was having a show at a gallery there, her famous series of gigantic photographic flip books illustrating midwestern recipes. They fell torridly in love, and Elias followed her up to New York, staying in the apartment where Mark had been living with Sue for two years already, and with Miracle—Miracle had been a birthday present, a puppy waiting for him inside a cardboard box at the breakfast table—until finally Kate decided she was ready to let Elias move into her newly purchased loft. Elias and Kate were married a year later. That was three years ago.

  In all the years that Elias was in and out of the Amazon, Mark only visited him there once. In Iquitos’s floating slum of Belém, amidst the river traffic
of long dugout canoes and barges bringing in all the nibbled wealth of the Amazon forests and rivers, he and Elias drank a liquor made from fermented monkey testicles that was supposed to increase your sexual potency, though there was no way he was having sex with one of those painted up, sweaty little Iquitos whores, attractive as their sprightly, small-breasted bodies were. And no, he didn’t want to try ayahuasca, he already had diarrhea, thanks. But Elias really put himself out to give his friend a true Amazon experience; they boarded some kind of long, narrow, screened-in riverboat-bus called the Worm and slowly chugged downriver in nonstop rain for two days, struggling with the passengers—mainly people from little river towns who’d come to Iquitos to sell one thing or another—for places to hang their hammocks. Many traveled with live chickens roped together by the claws into giant, multieyed dusters. They got off in a desolate little river village where everyone lived in wooden huts elevated on palm-trunk stilts over a sopping, muddy marsh. There they borrowed a dugout canoe and Mark sat in the bow under his poncho, already out of cigarettes, miserably steaming, his skin colandered with insect bites, shining a flashlight ahead, while Elias paddled them up a tributary at night, making his way around and under fallen trees so expertly that Mark was not once smashed in the face by a looming branch, though there were some close calls. Fish kept jumping into their canoe, thudding around on the floor, some of them as dangerously horned and plated as miniature rhinos; some flopped back into the water, and one, leaping out of the dark, crashed into Mark’s chest with the force of a flying wet dog. Some of the fish were piranha, chuckled Elias. Now and then Elias stopped paddling and swept his own flashlight’s beam along the banks, looking for the red eyes of crocodiles. Mark made sure he kept his hands inside the canoe. Or Elias stopped and stood up in the canoe with his hands cupped around his nose and mouth, making strange snorting and grunting sounds, claiming that he could hear wild boar stampeding through the forest and that he was calling to them. Elias stopped the canoe midstream, and Mark sat face to face with a poisonous, lime green frog the size of a basketball, perched in a crook of a tree fallen into the river. Finally they reached their destination, a river hamlet even smaller and more ramshackle than the last one. Here lived Elias’s great shaman buddy, Cumpashin, with his family: apparently everyone in the village was his relative, and they’d followed him here out of some even more remote, dark place in the forest, a place so wet and mushy, said Elias, that they thought stones were magical objects because the only stones they ever saw there had been brought from far away.

  Oh well. Something to tell your grandkids about. Cumpashin was a riot. Mark hardly grasped a thing that went down for the next three days. Cumpashín and his, Mark guessed, immediate family lived in one of those elevated huts, a big one, with no walls, a floor made of thin, springy slats cut from a bamboolike palm that somehow you didn’t fall through, which also supported a sandbox for cooking fires; a thatched roof, with an attic, which Cumpashin was always climbing up into, bringing down jaguar skulls and pelts, long blowguns and a double-barreled shotgun, all his stuff. There were animals and kids and mothers and wives all over the place. Cumpashin had named one of his sons Elias, another Thriller, and he had a little daughter named Elvis. (The more intrepid adventure travel outfits had been coming through the area for years.) All of them, including some of the animals, slept in hammocks; Elias and Mark hung their own hammocks in Cumpashín’s big, happy “house.” Cumpashín changed his headdress, made from the feathers of all different birds, about three times a day; he wore necklaces made out of jaguar teeth. The women wore loose, ragged T-shirts like dresses, and intricate necklaces and bracelets made of porcupine quills and colored seeds. Cumpashín had hardly any teeth, a smooth, brown jack-o’-lantern of a face, and always went shirtless, wearing frayed black jeans. He had the build and muscle tone of a lightweight boxer.

  “Guess how old he is,” said Elias.

  “As old as the father of all the great waters,” guessed Mark.

  “At least fifty. Can you believe it?”

  “Well, this is a pretty good health club.” He just couldn’t stop being the lame New Yorker.

  Mark felt nervous around Cumpashín. Whenever the shaman stared at him for such a goddamned long time, Mark sensed that somehow his aura and ineffable core were on display—quills of tainted spirit radiating out through all his mosquito bites—and tried to summon Lorca’s long-lost light to his eyes.

  Cumpashín and Elias would talk baby talk all day, a mixture of the little Spanish Cumpashin knew and the little bit of the shaman’s Amazonian language that Elias had picked up; except Cumpashin spoke in a whirring, nearly whispered way that sounded as free of consonants as his home terrain had been of rocks, Mark didn’t see how Elias could understand any of it. But they’d roar with laughter, and stamp their feet, and call each other Cumpashín, which Mark didn’t get at all. The first morning that Mark woke up in Cumpashin’s palatial hut, he looked out from his hammock and saw a wild boar’s head in one plastic tub on the floor, and another tub filled with a boar’s entrails, and boar’s meat hung in red, ropy clumps all over the place, all of it clouded with flies. Cumpashín hunted with blowguns and only sometimes used the shotgun, ammunition being hard to get. He fished using just a sapling trunk, string, and a hook with no bait, dancing the hook over the water, and somehow caught thirteen fish in half an hour and put them whole into his fire to cook like baked potatoes. When Mark had used up all the mosquito repellent they’d brought, Elias taught him to rub red ants into a rudimentary paste between his palms and smear it on his skin to keep mosquitoes away.

  The next night Mark watched Cumpashin cure a patient who seemed to be suffering from, Mark would have guessed, a gallbladder attack, he so painfully writhed and groaned on his palm-sapling floor, clutching himself above the groin. The whole thing was crazy: Cumpashín drank from gourd bowls filled with wild garlic root shavings and aguardiente, and smoked wild tobacco while Mark quaked with nicotine fits. And then Cumpashin pulled a little stone out of a leather pouch, a smooth little egg-shaped stone, cupped it in his palms, and spoke conversationally and sweetly to the stone for about an hour, going, Sí… No … Ahá … Sí… No, no. Sí! Looks like a gallbladder problem to me too!—who knew what he was saying? It was his magic stone, Elias solemnly whispered. He’d found it as a boy apprentice shaman: the stone had been hopping around on a jungle path. Through it Cumpashín was consulting with the spirits of all the medicinal plants in the forest. These spirits told the shaman what to do: apparently they told Cumpashín to suck the illness out of his patient’s body. The shaman placed his mouth against the guy’s belly and made loud sucking noises, got to his feet holding his hands over his mouth and making horrible retching sounds, staggered over to the side of the hut, and then theatrically spat the illness out into the darkness of the forest. (Every time Mark gets up in the middle of the night needing to vomit, staggering to the bathroom with his mouth already filling, he remembers that.) And then Cumpashín went away and came back about an hour later, gave the guy something to drink brewed from a tree bark.

  Later that night Cumpashin offered to treat Mark for whatever was ailing him. He tapped his temple in such a way as to indicate that he’d cure Mark of mental illness; Elias and the shaman had a good laugh over that.

  Mark said, “He’s not sucking on me no matter what.” And then he said, “I don’t know. I’d like to quit smoking, I guess.”

  Cumpashín asked if Mark had a photograph of himself. A photograph? Well, yeah, he did, an extra passport picture in his wallet. Cumpashín put Mark’s picture into his little leather pouch with the magic stone and looked at Elias and said something like “Done.”

  Mark had been out of cigarettes for days, and the one puff he’d tried of Cumpashín’s wild, leaf-rolled tobacco had him practically coughing his brains out through his ears. By the time he and Elias were back in Iquitos, Mark had already been more than a week without smoking, and the cravings had passed. Mark hadn’t smoked another cig
arette since, not one—until just about a month ago. Now he’s up to two packs a day. At dinner parties like the one last night, Elias used to enjoy telling people about how Cumpashín cured Mark of smoking.

  Parties like the one last night used to seem like the most interesting thing Elias had been doing during his three plus years as kept husband of the Imperial Loft: posturingly reliving his Amazon exploits for a very captive audience. There was something poignant about Elias; there was a restless greatness of spirit in his friend, Mark began to believe during those years, that was slowly being laid waste. Who knew what Elias would have talked about instead, if all that rain forest stuff hadn’t become so trendy? Well, perhaps not the most interesting thing Elias had been doing: all his secret women. He kept saying he was going to go back to school to become licensed as a master herbalist, naturopath, or homeopath or some combination of all three, then open up a practice. But, really, back to school, at his age?

  Then Elias found their ship. Three weeks later, and sixteen years after he and Elias had first imagined sharing in such adventures, Mark put Miracle in the kennel and flew to St. John, took a taxi to the shipyard, and climbed the ship’s ladder onto the iron-and-rust manifestation of a dream finally made real. A ship, and he was part owner. Mark had never even owned a car. A dead ship, dumped by an owner too impatient and cheap and unimaginative and law-abiding to know how to make her seaworthy again; a ship that was only acting dead, just waiting for someone to come along, recognize her true worth, and rescue her from scrap. Haley, Elias’s big, hairy ex-soldier friend—he’d been attached to a U.S. Marine and DEA outfit based in Iquitos that monitored Sendero Luminoso’s narcotics trafficking in the Upper Amazon basin—and Yoriko, dressed in black, a pretty, willowy, twenty-something Japanese girl Elias had been secretly seeing, were already onboard. Haley was a nightclub bouncer now; Mark and Elias had hired him to help out in getting things under way.