by Pastor, Juan
“Heartpunch Beer.” The label reads.
“Got the recipe from an old college friend who used to brew this himself.” He says. “He’s gone now. Died one Christmas day, along with his wife, going to see family. This is my way of keeping his memory alive.”
Sin pries out an egg for himself, places it daintily in his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, and begins to chew. I look at his long gray hair, pulled back in a pony tail. He has a few days, maybe a few weeks of whisker growth on his face. His eyes are penetrating, yet kind. He smiles. The green, yellow, and white chunks of chewed up egg are all over his teeth. Some bits of it drop on the table. He looks so disgustingly unhandsome. But then he looks like Jesus might have looked had he lived to 60, had a hard life, did a lot of drugs, but was looking for one more soul to save.
Entheogens
Have you ever done drugs?” I ask him.
“People do drugs every day.” He replies. “Nicotine. Caffeine. Alcohol. Pain killers. Uppers. Downers. There are drugs in the dinner you just had. You can not get through a day without 'doing' drugs.”
“I mean recreational drugs.”
“I don’t really do drugs for recreation.” He says. “I do drugs for research.”
“Uh‐huh.”
“Well, I’m having a beer now.” He says. “I suppose that’s recreation. But really, I do a lot of drugs because I just want to learn more about them. Have you ever heard the saying, I think it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, that a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered?”
“No.”
“Well, drugs are a lot like that. There are a lot of drugs whose virtues have not yet been discovered. An awful lot of drugs come from plants, for some reason. Most of the ones that are really harmful are the ones that have been corrupted, superconcentrated, oversynthesized, or just used for the wrong purpose, or the right purpose in the wrong manner. For instance, I personally believe that small doses of caffeine and nicotine are actually good for you. But if you drink coffee and cola, and smoke cigarettes all day, you’re going way beyond good for you.”
“What drugs have you done?”
“Do you really want to know?” He asks.
“Yes. I do.”
“I’ve done mescaline, and LSD. I’ve used magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, salvia divinorum.”
“You’ve used Mexican Sage?”
“It’s my favorite psychedelic.” He says. “For one thing, it’s right here. I don’t have to go to Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, or Colombia to get it like I’d have to for ayahuasca.”
“You don’t have to travel to get peyote, do you?” I ask.
“Well, it grows mostly in the next desert over, the Chihuahua. But salvia is my favorite, not just because it’s right here, but because it has the effect closest to the Greek meaning of psychedelic.”
“Which is mind altering?”
“The Greek word for psyche means mind or soul. And the Greek word for delos means to manifest or reveal. I don’t like mind‐altering drugs, per se, but drugs that reveal what is already in the mind.”
“You mentioned mescaline and peyote. Isn’t mescaline found in peyote?” I ask.
“Well, we’re kind of flying off on a tangent from what I want to get to, but since you’re interested, I’ll answer every question you have. How is it you know what you do?" He asks.
“Rosaria was interested.”
“Did she ever do any drugs?" He asks.
“She was fond of café.”
Sin smiles. Egg is still on his teeth. He takes another sip from his bottle.
“Mescaline is found in peyote, as well as other cacti like San Pedro cactus. It’s also found in members of the bean and acacia family. Psilocybin is naturally found in over 200 species of mushroom, the most potent being from the Psilocybe genus. Psilocybin is not really a drug but a prodrug that gets rapidly converted into psilocin by the body. It’s psilocin that has the psychoactive properties like mescaline and LSD. Sometime, I’ll get into how that works. Psilocybin was first isolated from Psilocybe mexicana that grows only in Mexico, and your homeland, Guatemala. Isn’t it a little weird that the best entheogens come from Mexico and Guatemala?”
“What does entheogen mean?” I ask.
“It means generating the divine within. An entheogen is a spirituality‐enhancing agent.”
“Do you suppose things like this are why Americans look at Central Americans with suspicion?” I ask. “I remember American students telling us that the reason so many psychedelic drugs were made seriously illegal in the U.S. was because of the widespread use of them in the 60s and 70s, and that political, military, and law enforcement leaders thought that these drugs either caused or were accelerating social unrest.”
“I think that’s part of it. But Americans have this weird way of looking at things. You can sell just about any poison to an American if it is super‐refined, is approved by the FDA, is fashionably and convincingly advertised, and is sold in pretty little packages. The only other culture I can think of like it is the Germans. In fact, a lot of the drugs Americans buy are produced by German, or formerly German pharmacological conglomerates. Americans still buy drugs from Corporations that developed Zyklon‐B, which was used in Nazi death camps. My parents used to give me Bayer aspirin. Bayer was a division of IG Farben, as is Aventis, BASF, and Hoechst. IG Farben produced and distributed Zyklon‐B. And you’ll never guess where else Zyklon‐B was used.”
“I can guess, but I doubt I’ll guess right.” I say.
“It was used for decades, starting about 1930, to disinfect entire trainloads of Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. And by 'Mexican' I mean anyone trying to enter the U.S. through Mexico.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. That’s how it was first used in concentration camps, for delousing and to control typhus. But then, since it is basically cyanide, it was discovered, after a few trial runs on Russian POWs, to be a very efficient way to kill large numbers of people.”
Sin pauses for a while.
“I’m upsetting you, aren’t I?” He asks. “I’ll stop.”
“How come you lost your license to practice medicine?” I ask.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He says.
“Try me.”
“I developed cures for several types of cancer.”
Stigmata
The day came when I was declared fully healed. Is
there really ever such a thing as "fully healed"? I would walk again among my friends, disciples, and past and future enemies. I would show them my stigmata, but only if they asked politely.
They would ask, "Is that where the bullet tore through you?"
"Yes" I would say.
Sin noticed me looking in the mirror. I was wearing a badly fitting bra that had once belonged to a woman with breasts much smaller than mine. It made me look as if I were wearing a push‐up bra, or, more accurately, a "spill‐over" bra. I don't know how Sin acquired it. He never told me. He had washed mine several times, but could not remove the blood stains from it. I had on a pair of his underpants, tighty‐whiteys, as he called them, and they were definitely tight, as I had a big butt and he had no butt at all.
"It's all vanity." Sin says.
"What's all vanity?" I ask.
"All of it." He says.
I ask him, as I look at myself in the mirror, turning so that I can look at the scars of both the entry and exit wounds, "Will anyone ever consider me beautiful?"
"Some day," Sin says, "someone will cover you with kisses. And he will kiss your scars twice."
"But will he think I'm beautiful?"
"I've yet to meet anyone who likes to cover ugliness with kisses." He says. He smiles, revealing his yellow crooked teeth.
"Would you cover someone like me with kisses?"
"The days of me covering anyone with kisses," Sin says, "or anyone even wanting me to, are things of the past. But trust me, little lady, you will be loved. And you are beaut
iful."
He puts the emphasis on "you" twice.
"Can I tell you a story?" Sin asks.
"Will it be long?" I ask.
"Yes."
"Will it be boring?" I ask.
"Long and boring like a Sunday sermon." Sin says.
"Will you tell it anyway, whether I say yes or no?"
"Yes." Sin says.
"Okay." I say. "You can't tell me a story."
Sin laughs. It is a hoarse, dusty laugh, much like his speech. It is the first time I've heard him laugh. Up til then he's only expressed amusement in quiet toothy smiles.
"There was a young boy..." He says.
"You're not going to start with the day he was born?" I ask.
"Do you want me to?"
"No."
"Then shut up and listen to the story." He says. "There was a young boy. He was riding his bike on the way to go fishing. There was a certain intersection that allowed thru traffic for a highway, but the town road that intersected it at a T had a stop sign. Since there were few people in the town where the boy lived, since it was quite rural, and few cars ever went by on the highway, the boy usually ran the stop sign. He was about to run it again when he noticed a car approaching. Since he had always run the stop sign his brain told him to do it again. But since the car was very close, and going quite fast, his brain also told him to stop. Since he was a young man, the part of his brain telling him to run the stop sign won out. 'You can do it.' It said confidently."
"And he got hit by the car, right?" I ask.
"Had he not hesitated, he would have safely run the sign, and not gotten hit. It wasn't the decision that got punished, but the indecision that caused the delay of the final decision."
"Of course," I say, "if he'd just always stopped like he was supposed to, he wouldn't have gotten hit."
"And if Guatemalans would just stay in Guatemala, and not try to go through Mexico, and get into America by running the wall, they wouldn't get shot at."
I couldn't argue with Sin's reasoning. It was sound.
"The car broadsided me on the bike." He says. "My bike was demolished and run over. My body damaged the grill of the car, ripped off the hood ornament, and my head went right through the windshield. I looked face to face at the startled driver, who was a young woman. As the car screeched to a stop, I rolled back off the hood of the car, and landed on the asphalt just in front of it."
"So you are the boy?"
"I was the boy." Sin says. "I don't know how much time passed, as time loses its relevance on such occasions, but another car appeared, then another, and another. For so many cars to appear at once on a country road, a good deal of time needs to pass. And this was long before cell phones. A police car came. He must have radioed for an ambulance. I kept telling everyone I was okay, that I just wanted to go home. The people inspected all the damage, and decided to just keep holding me down on the road. I must have had a lot of adrenaline flowing because it took a lot of them to keep me lying on the pavement. Someone took off a jacket or something, I can't remember exactly, folded it up, and put it under my head."
"Were you badly injured?" I ask.
"I'll get to that." Sin says. "It's part of the story. The lady who'd been driving the car stayed in her car until the ambulance came. She must have known I wasn't dead because I kept trying to get up and leave. But she must have been stunned. Think of it. One minute she's driving peacefully down the highway. The next minute she is face to face with a young boy she's just almost wiped out. Anyway, she finally stepped out of her car, and immediately collapsed. She wasn't injured. She just fainted. So they put her in the ambulance intended for me, and drove her away. Another ambulance was called for. I insisted again that I was okay, but they still wouldn't let me get up and go home."
"God, that's actually kind of funny. If they took the lady first, instead of you, you must not have been injured that bad." I say.
"The second ambulance came. I was put on a gurney and loaded into the ambulance. When I got to the hospital, I was laid on the bed and told to undress. I rarely took showers when I was young, and rarely washed laundry, because we were quite poor. And my clothes were in a pretty sad state anyway. The nurse took them and put them in a plastic bag for disposal. I was given a robe. I was x‐rayed. The doctor asked me many questions, I think to determine whether I had a concussion or not. The doctor looked at the swollen bruise on my left ankle. A nurse shaved away some hair on the left front side of my head, and applied an antibiotic. The doctor applied five stitches to the small cut that was there. While he worked, he talked."
"You must be Superman." The doctor said. "The ambulance people showed me a Polaroid of the bike and the car."
"That's all you had, a bruise and a small cut?" I ask.
"Yeah." Sin says. "And every day a really cute nurse would give me a sponge bath, and rub some kind of lotion on me to prevent bedsores. She seemed to spend a lot of time on my behind, I guess because that's where people are most apt to get bedsores."
"How old were you?" I ask.
"Sixteen." He says.
"Just old enough to appreciate something like that?" I ask.
"Yes." He says, seeming to remember it fondly. "But here's the thing. I remember when I was laying in the road, thinking, 'Something has finally happened to me'. Something beyond the dull routine that comes with every single day. The harsh uncaring string of cause and effect, that up til then I was totally oblivious to, could have made of me a bloody corpse, or a cripple. But it hadn't. Why not? Round 1 was over, and for some reason, I had won it. I've since learned that overconfidence can kill, fear can paralyze, but nothing fate throws at you can prevent you from reaching your personal destiny."
"So was that your personal destiny?" I ask.
"Not even close, apparently. I still don't know my destiny. But finding out requires sticking around, doesn't it?" He asks.
"That's a weird story, in a way." I say. "I understand your views on it, but it doesn't account for what happens to people like Rosaria. But thank you anyway."
"You're welcome." Sin says. "When you look at those two beautiful scars on your body, think of them as gifts. Think of all the people living their zombie lives, going to school, going to work, going to church. They're bored, but they don't know why, or what to do about it. They want to be happy, but they haven't a clue how to obtain happiness. In reality, they're bored because they never volunteer to be tested, and they're unhappy because they've never passed any tests. But now you know what it's like to be on the receiving end of ignorance and hatred and greed, don't you?"
"Do you think Jesús was resurrected?" I ask Sin.
"I don't know." He says. "Maybe He was like us, you and I."
"How's that?" I ask.
"Maybe He didn't die. Maybe He was Superman."
Green And White Tips
I think it's time we had a little fun." Sin says. He had gotten out a very large gun from a locker he kept under his bed.
"We're going to go for a drive today." He says.
"What is that? I ask.
"It's a gun."
"I can see it's a gun." I say. "What kind of gun is it?"
"It's called a Barrett Sniper Rifle."
"Where did you get it?" I ask.
"From a friend." He says. "When he got back from the war, he got very sick. I cured his sickness. He said he had no money to pay me. He offered me the rifle. He said he didn't plan on using it anymore. He said he was tired of using it."
"So why do you have it? I ask.
"As I said, it's a gift."
"I mean, why do you still have it?" I ask.
"Because it kind of fascinates me." Sin says. "I don't know why."
"Will it be part of our fun today?" I ask.
"Yes, it will." Sin says.
"Then I'm not interested." I say. "I can think of many other ways to have fun."
"We're not going to shoot at anyone. We're just going to target shoot. I want to see you shoot it."
"Wh
at do the bullets look like?" I ask.
Sin got out one of the bullets and showed it to me. He said I needed to learn the proper terminology.
"The bullet," He says, "is the projectile. The projectile is held in the neck of the case. The case holds the powder charge. In the bottom of the case is the little cap called the primer. The primer is activated by the firing pin hitting it. The spark from the primer activates the burning of the powder. The entire package of bullet, case, powder and primer is called a cartridge."
