The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  strike to end war strike to support the people’s peace treaty strike to march to westside park strike in solidarity with the indochinese strike to seize control of your life strike to become more human strike against increased tuition strike because there is no poetry in your classes strike because classes are a bore strike for power strike to smash the corporation strike to make yourself free strike to abolish rotc strike because they are trying to squeeze the life out of you strike

  The rhythm of the words mesmerized her, and she felt the presence of the word strike among the students gathered on the grass, inside the heads of the boys with their stubbly beards, in the lungs of the girls in their blue jeans and bell bottoms. Trying to squeeze the life out of you. So sad. She forgot about her memo and listened to the two students closest to her speaking.

  “I don’t think they’ll arrest us.”

  “Of course they will.”

  “Look, that jarhead over there. He’s got a flamethrower.”

  “What?”

  “The tanks on his back. They’re filled with gasoline.”

  “Holy shit! A flamethrower.” The word spread through the crowd. A flamethrower. Fuck, a flamethrower. What the fuck? Flamethrower, fuck, fuck, fucking pigs with a flamethrower, man.

  Virginia heard the snap of papers moving in the wind and looked downward and her precious memorandum was there, at her feet. Faceup. Fiscal year 1970–1971. Virginia Smith, accountant. She bent down and grabbed it and headed for the administration building and after a few steps a young man and a woman caught her eye. They were on the edge of the crowd of students, kissing. A French kiss. No decorum. Going on and on, their tongues. If your mothers could see you. As if it was going to be the last kiss before the end of the world.

  * * *

  AT THAT MOMENT, Joe was hitchhiking through Colombia, where he headed for a river where it was said a man could pan for gold. He found, instead, many ill and malnourished people. A month later, he took a job with the aid group CARE, and worked to bring food and medicine to the jungle region around the town of Barbacoas, until he was arrested and interrogated by the police and accused of subversive activities. He moved on to Bolivia and La Paz, which had become famous among American and European bums for its cheap drugs and good, indigenous vibes; unfortunately, there had just been a military coup. Che books burned and buried, vacationing Peace Corps workers with beards and work-worn clothes jailed and sheared. Cops think the gringos are commies; the people think we’re CIA. The growing turmoil has the road bums spinning. And they are here in South America by the thousands, Joe wrote home. Squeezed out of Africa and Asia by war and a growing intolerance for us gringos. Down here they’re at the end of the road.

  Joe’s plan in Bolivia was to organize relief work, someplace. He started planning to open “a hippie hospital” and he wrote home to say he was talking to some German fellows about raising money for it, in the town of Sorata. When the clinic opened it was staffed by an American nurse, a Dutch doctor, and Joe; they offered the locals immunizations, protein supplements, prenatal care, free toothbrushes and yoga lessons. When he returned to La Paz, however, the police arrested him and threw him into a vast open cell in the Ministry of the Interior in La Paz, where 150 political prisoners stood together, inside cement walls the color of corn rot. The walls had scratches that were like hieroglyphs from an ancient civilization, and soon Joe joined the prisoners in staring at the scarred concrete, looking for faces, maps, rivers on the walls and on the ceiling until they fell asleep, sitting up, the saliva on their lips glistening in the light. A yellow light. The lightbulbs hung out of reach, protected by wire cages. Incandescent spirals, slow-burning. They remained on day and night, the prisoners told him, a form of torture. “The light is eating my brain,” said a voice among the multitude. “If I open my eyes, I’ll lose all my memories.” The inmates were teachers, students and union guys, arrested in big sweeps through La Paz and the countryside. Police officers pulled them out of this cell, one at a time, and took them down to a room where other men applied wires to their testicles and their gums and electrocuted them. In another room, they made the prisoners stand on a flooded floor and ran the current into the water, so that the electrons ran up through their bare feet, and they felt the amperes flowing into the roots of their teeth, and into the vitreous gel of their eyes.

  The next morning an officer led Joe to an interrogation room and left him there for an hour, alone with a table and a file folder. Joe finally opened the folder and saw his passport; on a whim, he grabbed it and walked out into the corridor, which was empty of guards, then through an office where a secretary glanced up at the blue-eyed inmate and mistook him for an American adviser. She smiled at him as he stepped out into the streets of La Paz. He hailed a taxi and rode directly to the U.S. Consulate, where he waved his passport at the first guard he encountered, and took two more steps and stood on the tiled floor of the U.S. diplomatic mission. On U.S. soil, as it were, a free man.

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Joe remembered the men in “the Lighthouse” every time he saw the fading, powdery orange slow of a La Paz dusk. He wrote a letter to the U.S. Embassy describing his detention and the conditions inside the Ministry of the Interior’s prison and the torture of inmates there, along with the poor state of health of one elderly inmate, a Professor Joaquin Morales. Two days later Professor Morales was released. Joe contacted the Red Cross and convinced them to send food packages and blankets to the prisoners, and he helped Professor Morales’s daughter post leaflets across La Paz one night calling on Bolivians to support the mothers who were gathering every day to protest the incarceration of their sons and daughters. He visited neighboring socialist Chile, and a fortune-teller told him he’d be famous before he turned forty. Maybe doing good works in Bolivia would be his path to fame, instead of writing books. When he returned to La Paz, he learned the government had closed the universities. Trade unions were outlawed. His mother, meanwhile, wrote to announce the birth of a baby to Steve and his new wife, Carol. Kathy, they named her. The Bolivian security services detained him again. Happy New Year, Joseph David Sanderson: you are to be deported from Bolivia forthwith.2

  Joe was allowed one piece of luggage. He loaded up his notebooks and photographs into the same rucksack he’d carried into Bolivia bumming a year earlier. I turned thirty here, and became fluent in Spanish. Chocho means happy, choclo means corn. He was being deported on a lovely Andean afternoon of thin air and penetrating sunlight and unexplainable and perplexing events, and Aymara and Quechua faces staring as Joe rode in a car to the airport, chaperoned by a man in a leather jacket who was either a cop or military intelligence. The car climbed out of the city, up to the airport, which was on a vast plain that stretched all the way to Peru, where billions of potatoes rested as seeds waiting to sprout from the soil, and where Aymara ghosts wandered at night. Joe’s flight took off, and when the climbing aircraft turned, he looked out his window and saw a city of native people growing past the end of the runway, a sprawl of stubby concrete buildings stretching across the dusty Altiplano.

  15

  Cuzco, Peru. Pensacola, Florida

  STEVE SANDERSON OPENED THE DOOR. His little brother had an untrimmed blond biker mustache and sideburns, and rock-band locks curling up behind his neck. We’re both past thirty now. “Well, sir, I’ve got someone for you to meet. Come on in,” Steve said. “Kathy, come meet your uncle Joe.” The baby wore a white beanie against the cold, and was wrapped in a pink blanket with gray dots. “Want to hold her? Yes, of course you do.” Joe took the child in his cradled hands. A pair of luminous blue eyes peered back at him. The blue of lake ice when you turn it upside down. Eyes startled, searching. Sanderson blue. Wisps of whitish-blond hair. Little splotches of red on her cheeks and nose from the cold. Steve watched as his brother’s face softened with wonder. Suddenly Joe was just one more person in the orbit of loving people around this little baby girl, and Steve believed that wherever Joe traveled, for the re
st of his days, his path would lead him back to the place where Kathy lived.

  * * *

  URBANA WAS HOME AGAIN, for a while, but only until he saved enough money to return to South America. Months passed, a year, and finally Joe left for Peru, where he found a Walden and became a Spanish-speaking Thoreau. A ranch near Cuzco hired him as a caretaker and he lived alone in his own little adobe-brick house, with an acre to farm, and the responsibility of paying the farmhands who worked the bulk of the ranch. A stream ran at the bottom of his private acre, and fish swam in it. Big huge enormous trout that barely fit in the skillet, he wrote home. Besides fishing ’n’ farming, also building a kitchen, porch, front steps, repairing terrace walls, “corral” for animals, fish pond (also useful to cool my heels and chill my wine). The fields themselves are terraced on 5 levels, separated by Inca walls (probably around 500 years old). Even got peach trees and eucalyptus—growing corn + beans + alfalfa (any hints?). And oh, yeah, the rent is two bucks a month! Steve forwarded Joe a letter from Mafalda in which she wrote to catch him up on her life: a failed marriage, and two children. Joe described his new digs to her: The sun rises, the sun sets, the moonlight absolutely blows my mind at night when I sleep out by the fire.

  Another year of his life passed in this way. One day walking into town he picked up a newspaper and saw the Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon. On most days he was asleep by 9:00 p.m., and up at 5:30 a.m., and a week could go by without him speaking to a soul. He read Man’s Fate, by André Malraux, and kept twenty-three chickens outside in a corral, until a hawk came swooping down and hauled two of them off and he felt obliged to move the survivors inside. On the terraces he planted corn like the Incas did, using a stick. He finished building the stone walls of his kitchen, and while cutting grass on the mountainside to make a thatched roof for it he discovered an Inca tomb. Dug up the skull—teeth in better shape than mine—and gave it to the village school. He chopped wood, built fences and grew lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes, onions and broccoli. It’s a good life, only about a hundred years behind the times.

  Joe might still be living on that farm, with a local señorita taken on as permanent company, but for the labor and social dispute that erupted on the property, and throughout the valley of Cuzco during his second year in Peru. The people who worked for the rancher claimed the right to take his land under a new agrarian reform law—they said the property, including Joe’s small rented patch of it, was part of their Incan ancestral lands. Four members of the community, all over fifty and dressed in wool garb, showed up at his spread one afternoon to make their claim. When he wouldn’t leave, they began to steal his corn at night, and spread rumors that he had been killed. “I thought you were dead,” one of his wide-eyed neighbors told him when they crossed paths on the road to his place. Finally, Joe walked, unarmed, over to the huts of the insurrectionary workers and told them he would leave in two weeks, as soon as he brought in his corn crop. The theft of his corn stopped and the hawks overhead disappeared and no longer threatened his chickens. He brought in a big mound of corn and sold it on the cheap to a Quechua woman at the Cuzco market, and on his last day on the ranch he took all the ancient potsherds he had collected from the property and returned them to the earth.

  * * *

  BACK IN ILLINOIS, Joe took jobs in painting and construction. And he signed up for flying lessons and wrote to Mafalda: Pepe Pelican takes to the clouds! America doesn’t seem like “home” anymore and hasn’t for a long time. But of course I’ll try hard to be a loyal Yankee and a good little white boy—at least until the next revolution comes along somewhere in Latin America … He took more flying lessons, and soloed. Wonder of wonders, apparently I can fly a goddamn airplane. Much fun dodging clouds, chasing rainbows, and in general wandering alone through the cities of the gods. He wrote to Bolivia to tell his old friends he was a licensed pilot, and one suggested he come back home to South America and set up a bush flying service. Andrew Buford was a small-time cocaine dealer from La Paz, who apparently wasn’t so small-time anymore, because he said he could send Joe enough money to buy an airplane. Buford also relayed good political news from Bolivia: President Banzer, the nation’s torturer in chief, was being forced to call elections. Democracy was on the horizon. Buford offered to pay Joe enough to get his hippie hospital in Sorata started again.

  The adventure did not turn out as planned; among other things, the Bolivian authorities refused to license Joe to fly there. On his return journey to the United States, six months later, he was arrested at the international airport in Miami by United States customs officers for failing to declare the nine thousand dollars in cash in his possession. He spent twelve hours in an airport detention facility, in a well-lit room with a table, seated, answering questions from two customs agents, watching them look through his journal. “You’ve got really lousy handwriting. What’s this K here? K means kilos. 20 kilos.” But he was holding nothing that would allow the agents to charge him with drug trafficking. He explained that all the twenty-, fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills in his possession were the money left over from his failed attempt to restart a Bolivian hospital, which was partially true. In fact, he’d invested a bit in Buford’s smuggling operations, and reaped the profits, and also arranged a sale in La Paz to a friend who had traveled to the United States with one hundred and fifty grams hidden in various parts of her baggage and body. The customs agents confiscated his money and slapped a federal charge on him. Failure to declare. He was released on bond, and he stepped out into the Miami sunlight as an accused felon.

  * * *

  JOE WAS TOLD he’d have to stay in the state of Florida until the matter was resolved. He found a house with cheap rent on the Gulf of Mexico, near Pensacola, and a job as a bartender. I’m gonna by gawd write me another novel, he wrote Mafalda. And this time total comedy, zany, utterly absurd. Should be quite a change from the usual cosmic sadness. He would capture the Wild West feel of Bolivia’s drug boom, with some of his past capers thrown in. And since “Joe Sanderson” had been rejected by every New York publisher he admired, Joe adopted a nom de plume for The Cocaine Chronicles: Lance Kilooroy.1 Buford became “Captain Sunshine,” and his aging hippie La Paz friends became “the mad fucking bastards of the Treefrog Beer and Mountain Climbing Club.”

  Joe wrote every morning in his new beach home, which he called “the Playhouse.” He turned on the color TV and he saw that Iran was splitsville with the Shah, and Nicaragua was divorcing Somoza. The places he’d been bumming were being consumed in flames, overrun by crowds and peppered with gunfire. The South African police murdered a writer named Stephen Biko, and “black consciousness” was the new byword of the angry masses who shuffle-danced and sang as they marched. Vietnam, now a unified communist country, was about to invade its communist neighbor, Cambodia. The pastoral, peaceful Cambodia through which he had bummed was now the site of a horrific genocide, the city people being marched into the countryside.

  In the world of Joe’s travels, and in the bosom of his family, one time was ending, and another was beginning.

  His mother wrote a letter from Kansas to say Grandmother Colman had died.

  I sat up nights with her from Sunday night on until she passed Thursday noon. The last thing she said Tuesday evening was, “I’m lonesome. Don’t leave me.” Days went by. Marg and I were having tea when we heard a gasp, and she was gone. Joe remembered his grandmother’s loose-fitting dresses, the spots on her fingers, and the milky smell of her. Her copy of Huckleberry Finn, cloth cover, sewn spine, sketches of Huck and Jim. Joe playing on the rolling farmland, coming back to the farmhouse and Granny’s lunches and dinners. The look of contentment when she saw him reading. Standing on a ridge above Lawrence. “That town was started up by people who hated slavery, Joe. Your own great-grandfather came here because he was an abolitionist.”

  The next letter Joe received from his mother said she was back in Urbana and had more sad news: Karen Thomas was very ill. Karen’s parents were ke
eping vigil at her bedside in the hospital. Joe began to write to her immediately. Just got a letter from my Ma with your “night alley” photo from the newspaper. Not bad, lady, not bad. Seems we used to wander through some of those alleys once upon a time, no? Ah, the lovely memories of our teenage years! But what’s this I hear about you being in the hospital? Early the next day, before he could mail the letter, his mother called. Karen had died from brain cancer. He felt the ordinary morning being swallowed up by the telephone receiver. Skinny and seventeen, fall in Urbana, Karen squeezing my hand.

  “Joe, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  The day after Karen’s funeral, which he missed thanks to the charges still pending against him in Florida, he received a call from his attorney in Miami: the feds were dropping the case and returning his money. He used the funds to buy an old Cessna and he became a flying bum, enjoying a series of aerial adventures skipping around the South and Southwest. He visited his retired father in Arizona. Milt had added up his contributions to the world catalog of living things and showed Joe his final tally: number of beetle species named, ninety-eight; number of genera named, ten; number of species named after him by other scientists, forty-six. Joe brought him the first chapters of The Cocaine Chronicles. Milt dove into the manuscript and after twenty or so pages, declared: “Son, I think some editing might help here.” He didn’t want to discourage his son, but the young man was thirty-seven now. “Point taken,” Joe answered. “But where in the hell am I going to find an editor?”