The Gringo: A Memoir

by J. Grigsby Crawford

  Later in the ride, I had to pee badly, but feeling I’d already pressed my luck with the bathroom facilities, I aimed into an empty 7Up bottle. It promptly gushed up over the opening like a geyser and overflowed into my lap.

  CHAPTER 9

  The last half of training was a downer. By then, all the trainees had formed high-schoolish cliques with the others whose sites would be nearby. This put me in an awkward position because no one would be sharing my site or living very close to La Segua.

  Our last big hurrah in training was our technical trip—basically a field trip for all the staff and trainees to a resort in the cloud forest a few hours west of Quito. In the mornings, we went to an “integrated farm” and, in small groups moving around from station to station, received speed lessons on things like digging irrigation ditches and cultivating tilapia farms.

  One afternoon, we gathered for a special session conducted by an American psychologist, or Larry the Therapist—an older guy with a thick northeastern accent. He showed up with his wife, who wasn’t a therapist but sat barefoot on the floor in loose-fitting yoga pants while Larry did the talking.

  I admit I was excited. I thought we all could benefit from some group therapy and was interested to see what direction it took.

  Larry the Therapist introduced himself and his wife and told us all about their lives there in Ecuador and how great it was to be semiretired, living in the tropics, enjoying the occasional therapeutic seminar for great organizations like the United States Peace Corps, and basically how absolutely fantastic it was to be Larry the Therapist. And since we were already there—also sitting on the floor barefooted, while Larry sat high in a chair looking out over us—he thought he might as well tell us about the beautiful son he and his wife had raised and how that son was now facing the terrors of indecision over whether to attend law school at NYU or the University of Michigan.

  Larry the Therapist’s wife interrupted him midsentence several times, once to share an anecdote about their dog eating the next-door neighbor’s chicken. Larry got back on track to finish, saying that he was sure his son would make the right decision by “listening to the voice inside his head.” And that, he said, was what we volunteers should do during our once-in-a-lifetime experience in Ecuador—we should “listen to the voice inside our head, because it’s usually right.”

  Larry the Therapist’s session came to a climax with an activity in which we broke up into pairs and talked about our reasons for joining the Peace Corps. The goal of the activity, said Larry, was not to just listen but to actually listen. He pointed out—and I couldn’t have agreed more—that most of the time when we listen to someone talk, we’re not really listening at all to the actual words, but thinking instead about other things, like what we’re going to say next.

  We went around the room one at a time and shared the answer our partner had given. One of the two married men in the group joked that he was there because his wife had made him. Everyone laughed except the wife. (They ended up quitting after seven weeks in site.)

  Larry announced that we’d run out of time, and the session broke up.

  That night after dinner we had a talent show and I played Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on the guitar.

  IN THE WANING DAYS OF training, we came across so many new acronyms and manuals that we needed other acronyms and manuals to explain what was going on in the original ones. Several training sessions were dedicated to introducing CAT, or Community Assessment Tools. It was a project we needed to complete in our first few months at site. We would have to interview every household in our village to see what the community had (or lacked) in terms of resources. Busy work, said some; essential for community integration, said others. After putting it together, we were supposed to present our findings, preferably in a PowerPoint presentation, at a conference of volunteers and counterparts five months hence. Even though we had already been assigned to communities with counterparts who had requested us for specific jobs, this was aimed toward helping us figure out what other projects we could do. I imagined how strange a “needs assessment” was going to look in my community, where people lacked running water but had TV sets and cell phones that played MP3s.

  All of this was explained in a PowerPoint presentation that demonstrated what our own PowerPoint presentations should resemble. In conclusion, said the program officer, CAT was designed to give us “structure in an unstructured environment.”

  We were told about our quarterly VRFs, or Volunteer Report Files, which tracked the progress of our program objectives. We spent more time being taught how to log in and fill out the Excel spreadsheet for our VRFs than we did learning about compost the day we took a field trip to the integrated farm.

  If any of us failed to remember that this was the twenty-first century Peace Corps, we were sadly mistaken.

  I also spent those final weeks of training living in utter fear of the medical office. A young woman in our training group I’d made friends with was abruptly kicked out when Nurse Nancy discovered that she had been taking an antianxiety medication the Peace Corps didn’t know about. My friend had told the Peace Corps—during the same hellish medical clearance process I navigated—that she used to take the drug; she just hadn’t told them she was now back on it. She divulged this offhand during the same type of meet-and-greet that I’d had with Nurse Nancy. When the medical staff found out about it, my friend was sent home less than forty-eight hours later.

  I lived in fear just thinking about all the things in my medical past that the Peace Corps didn’t know about. I was in a serious car accident when I was five years old that resulted in temporary paralysis, brain surgery, a skin graft, a broken jaw, and broken collarbones—among other bumps and bruises—but I hadn’t listed any of this stuff for the Peace Corps since all their questions asked for recent history. I felt nervous that something would come up, or that they’d spot one of my scars, and it was only a matter of time before I, too, was out of there.

  CHAPTER 10

  Training ended and our swearing-in ceremony took place at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Quito. The ambassador, country director, and the training manager all gave speeches. We raised our right hands and swore an oath. Then, a fellow volunteer from our training group—Inner Peace Mark—walked to the podium and spoke. The theme of his speech was “heroes.” He said we volunteers were all heroes. As he said the word “heroes,” he paused, lifted his head, and scanned the room, looking at each one of us and nodding.

  Heroes.

  That night, we threw a party at a bar in a trendy Quito neighborhood and everyone got stumbling drunk. Several volunteers who’d been in the country for a while came into town just for the party. One of them walked around the dance floor selling pot out of a fanny pack. Later on, a married woman said she’d had dreams about having sex with me and asked me to make out with her. She tried to crawl on top of me while I lay in a beanbag chair in a room full of neon lights. I said no, thank you. Her husband was sitting five feet away smoking a cigarette and rolling his eyes like it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  In the morning I peeled myself out of bed and took a taxi to the south Quito bus station. The long dark corridor of ticket windows was filled with men screaming names of cities so intensely that you’d think they were trying to talk you out of your intended destination and into going to theirs instead.

  I was on my bus for less than an hour when I got a call from my program manager.

  “Hi, uh, this is Winkler. What are you doing?” he said.

  “I’m on the bus out to my site.”

  “Do you, uh, have a minute?”

  “Yes.” We were weaving back down the same treacherous road that I’d been heading up when I had my intestinal explosion.

  He began reading from a script illustrating the horrors of the swine flu virus and then rattled off a bunch of ways to avoid too much contact and germs. Keep a week’s worth of food stockpiled at your home, he said. And don’t tell anybody in yo
ur community that you have the bird flu vaccine in your medical kit.

  “You got all that?” he said.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Goodbye.”

  When we were an hour outside Chone, the bus driver tried to pass by a tiny white coupe brimming with six or seven people where the road made a blind curve leftward around a small hill. When he thought he’d gone past, he let the bus swing back wide to the right, crashing into the coupe and tossing it against the road barrier. The jolt came from right outside my window. I looked down and saw broken glass and mirrors and mangled doors hanging open.

  Our driver kept on going. He didn’t even slow down. Minutes later, the banged-up coupe came roaring after us with pieces of metal dragging on the road, kicking up a wake of sparks behind it. When we reached a straightaway, the coupe pulled in front of the bus and slowed down to a stop, forcing us to pull over behind it.

  The driver of the white coupe jumped out of his car, ran up to the bus, and started banging his fist on the door. All the passengers lurched to my side of the bus to see what was happening. The bus driver and his ayudante stepped down off the bus and got in a yelling match with the driver of the coupe, whose family was now standing behind him. He wore a white tank top that looked like it’d been stained with motor oil. He screamed and yelled while the women behind him wailed. He pointed to the damage on his car as the bus driver peeked at the side of the bus to see what damage he’d done to his own vehicle.

  The yelling went on until it looked like they’d reached an agreement. Both men returned to their respective vehicles. The white coupe followed us all the way to Chone and into the bus station.

  CHAPTER 11

  We arrived just as the sun was going down. Juan was waiting for me at the bus station with a few other certified ecotourism guides. They greeted me and one offered to take my bag.

  “Wow, that’s really heavy,” he said, trying to lift it.

  “I’m going to be here for two years,” I said.

  “Oh, right.”

  “But I can carry it if it’s too much.”

  He handed the bag back to me. Juan and I hitched a ride in the back of a pickup heading out to La Segua and pulled into the long driveway in the dark.

  The population of my host family had grown to almost twenty since my previous visit. One more of Juan’s cousins—a single mother of three in her late twenties named Sandra—was now living there. She was pretty and kind and recently divorced.

  And then there was Esteban, another of Juan’s relatives, a slightly cross-eyed guy in his midthirties who had a big potbelly. Juan referred to him as an uncle, but based on my understanding of the family tree, he was actually a second cousin. I could describe this man in several ways, but the day I met him I wrote down one word about him in my notebook and underlined it: dangerous.

  The room next to mine on the bottom floor now belonged to a man in his eighties who wasn’t related to the family and never spoke a word to me. No one ever gave me a straight answer on who he was or why he was there. He had old, leathery skin and walked around muttering to himself. Whenever he saw me, he waved his hands around in an odd, made-up sign language.

  That first night I dragged my two duffel bags into my room and began to settle in. Right away in my dungeon-like quarters, I was jockeying for real estate with spiders, moths, and cockroaches. Within the first week, I reached my breaking point and bought some chemicals to smoke out the critters.

  Before heading to the outhouse one night, I sprayed down the room with the bug spray and turned on my fan to create a cyclone of toxic air while I left. When I returned and opened the door, I was hit by an exodus of bugs toward the threshold, like when pepper spray hits a group of rioters and they scramble for the exits. The fumes from the spray were so bad I sat wearing the face mask from my medical kit as I wrote in my journal.

  At night I could hear rats crawling above me in the rafters. During breakfast the next morning I mentioned the rats, and Esteban flashed me a smile, exposing several missing teeth and a lazy eye. He was overjoyed to help me with my problem.

  That afternoon, he came back to the house with a box of rat poison, complete with a skull-and-crossbones warning label. He got up on a ladder and scattered the pellets about. And then we waited.

  During the night, I was awakened by the sound of rats asphyxiating and vomiting to death above my head. I would hear some raspy screeching sounds followed by a plopping noise. For several mornings after that, I’d get up and sweep dead rats that had fallen from the rafters out the front door. When the old man in the room next to mine saw me doing that, he used his sign language to insist that I leave the rats by the front door for him to take care of. He would scoop them up and walk off, muttering to himself.

  CHAPTER 12

  As a survival mechanism, I constantly assessed the people I met and categorized them into two groups: those I could trust and those I couldn’t.

  One I trusted the most by far was Homero, the uncle who lived in the small house on the other side of the rice field. He wasn’t the oldest of the army of Mendoza offspring, but he struck me as the most responsible. His young daughter acted like less of an animal than the other third-generation Mendozas wreaking havoc on the farm. Even more amazing, I suppose, was that Homero had just one child.

  Since Esteban had begun answering every question I directed his way with “I kill gringos for fun,” it was a relief to swing in a hammock in the afternoons and talk with Homero. He was legitimately interested in my life and the first person I met in La Segua who caught onto the fact that what I was doing was hard. On Sundays, he drove me in his giant yellow pickup truck—which required a hot-wiring maneuver every time it was started up—down to the far end of town to watch local soccer games and drink beer. After a few beers he would start asking if I wanted to go to the whorehouse with him, and when I said no, he’d call me a faggot.

  His pickup truck didn’t have a functioning radio, so he sang to himself while driving. He was a really big fan of Queen and often launched into a long monologue about Freddie Mercury.

  “Unbelievable!” he said. “All that talent and fame and money. He could have fucked any woman in the world but instead he decides he wants to be a faggot. Too bad.” Homero just shook his head saying what a shame it was. Before long he’d resume singing in broken English: “I just want to be free!”

  In the mornings, Homero walked across the field between the houses, sort of strutting with his potbelly wagging side to side underneath his tank top, and join us for breakfast. In earshot of his old and feeble mother, he’d end nearly every meal by saying, “Come on, let’s go to the whorehouse.” If he didn’t attack my heterosexual bona fides, he just tsked and shook his head like I was making some grave error. Following maybe the twentieth invite and refusal, I asked, “Aren’t you afraid of getting diseases or anything like that?” After several weeks in La Segua and about a hundred conversations just like this, his answer truly stunned me.

  “That’s what condoms are for,” he said.

  A CHARACTER WHO WAS ALWAYS teetering on the brink of trustworthiness was Homero’s younger brother, Roger, whom I’d decapitated a chicken and dined with during my site visit. I learned very quickly that he was fun and kind. In my first weeks in La Segua, he and his wife were exceedingly generous in always inviting me over to their house and cooking me dinner. In typical coastal style, he, too, would hike his shirt up high on his chest, exposing a giant round gut. We always joked that he was eight months pregnant. He loved the Discovery Channel, which was one of the two or three channels people in the area could pick up through their antenna. The result was an impressive ability to transition between asking me if the United States was in Europe and then saying something like, “Did you know dolphins are the smartest mammal on earth?” Roger was also a good fisherman and recovering alcoholic. And he was—even by Ecuadorian standards—a chronic adulterer.

  One day at breakfast, I bargained Homero down from a trip to the whorehouse to a tri
p out on the wetland with him and his fisherman buddies. Roger was included in the group. I jumped at the chance for a bonding experience that involved zero risk of venereal disease. It was a good way to really get to know the community I was supposed to be a part of—not to mention the wetland. Also, this was during a time when Juan had disappeared for about a week straight without telling me how long he’d be away or where he’d be.

  Out on the water after the sun had just come up, I looked around at the foothills in the distance and had a profound sense of joy that this was the gritty land down south I had come here for. It was actually one of the first times in Ecuador that I felt like I was in the Latin America I’d always envisioned. For the month at site leading up to this, I was feeling as though I’d entered a very dark and disturbing place where people spoke nearly unintelligible Spanish and treated me like an incompetent. Those first weeks felt like a vacation mixed with a nightmare—and the two were blending together to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference.

  After my transcendent gaze in the distance, I looked at my immediate surroundings and saw a group of about eight fishermen of varying ages strip down to their tighty whities and proceed to play grab-ass while making jokes about one another’s mothers and calling each other faggots. In a bathing suit and T-shirt, I was unprepared for my morning out on the water and would earn a gruesome sunburn.

  I teamed up with Roger and we swam around the shallow water, setting up traps for shrimp after we’d helped with the big fishing nets. When it was just the two of us, we talked about all sorts of things. He, too, was disappointed about my lack of appetite for whorehouses. I asked him if he indulged and he said yes, “But only to drink beers.” Right. For coastal men whose wives had them on a short leash, this was their “I only read Playboy for the articles” denial of participation. With the intimidating way his wife, Veronica, forced me to murder that chicken back in May, I got the idea that she didn’t take much shit from her husband.