Who are We? And Should We Care?

The apartment is unseasonably stylish for Latin America. It's not really an apartment. A penthouse. If no one lives above you, it's the penthouse right?. A terraced brick balcony wraps around the two exterior walls pleasantly cluttered with tropical plants, giving way to expansive views over the entire city of Bogota, Colombia. Based on the haircuts below, we're in the hip part of the city. The cedar boarded ceilings are vaulted, giving it that chapel in the sky feel. The walls show off cubist paintings, and a coterie of wooden handicrafts litter the floor. Shelves are lined with the complete works of Shakespeare and one book titled, "Bogota Theatre: A Year in Review; 1986." Another book bind reads, "Musica de Los Andes: Instrumentos y Letras."

Flutes, chimes, and high pitched whining came from concealed speakers. Strangers sat in poorly sewn cushions, burrowed in the thick chocolate carpeting of the disco decade. The pregnant one, well, there were two. The smaller one, who looked much younger than she spoke, the white one who went by Petra, she offered me hot tea. Her husband, barely taller than the wife, and of similar skin tone, he had a spot in the corner, chewing something that required refills.

The other pregnant one, 'RamayanaKrishna' she asked me to call her, she leaned over a handcrafted coffeetable, her unaborted belly supporting her, while chewing something and playing solitaire with a deck of tarot cards. Her long dark hair matched the skin, and six months of pregnancy had yet to damage a decade of early morning yoga. I was reminded that I've never met a fat person who does yoga? This is something that needs to be taken up by Advocates for the Fat and Portly. Their people are being unfairly closed out from the Sport of Deep Concentrated Breathing.

Another guy, unshaven, in his mid- thirty's like the others, sat open legged and smirking, next to the Indian Goddess.

Facing them all, me included now, sitting in a solitary chair high above the others, was a man-boy with the boyish face of someone barely out of their teens, and the wisened eyes of somebody who knew something we didn't. He didn't say much. He stared. At me. Every so often he would pass around a plastic food container with a mound of tea. But it wasn't tea. It looked like cheap crushed tea leaves, but it couldn't be. And every ten minutes or so, the bin would pass to another before making it's way back to the Quiet One.

It was Friday night without an alcoholic beverage or cigarette in site. It was my first night in Colombia. And this was the capital city. I expected a sledding hill of cocaine! Cocaine milkshakes and cocaine sushi. I wanted to play Tony Montana on the balcony. What is this crap they are chewing? Can't you get the Bogota powder for cheaper than a soda? Cool apartment. Cool 'hood. But This ain't cool.

"Actually, it is cocaine. Not the way you know it. It is the coca leaf crushed into powder form known here as mambe. Completely natural. Cocaine is not natural. We chew it the way the Indians do. Guillermo (pointing to the man-boy) is a Taita who comes from the Putomayo region of our country. He has brought this all the way from his home, which is far away, in the jungle," Petra said to me in a motherly way, clear and educational, in a kindergarten teacher voice fitting of her size.

"Sure, I chewed a lot of that stuff when I spent time in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. Tastes terrible with an effect slightly stronger than coffee with a lot more effort. I mean, why eat a tofu burger when you can have the real thing."

"We're all vegetarians here," RamayanaKrishna uttered, her face still lost in the vagaries of tarot.

"I eat meat. I hunt for it when I am home," retorted the Native in clear Castellano Spanish.

The others responded with approving smiles. Petra told me, "Where he comes from that is their main source of food."

"It's my main source of food too," I exclaimed defensively.

"But you can eat vegetables where you come from. You don't need to eat animals," HairyhairyKrishna blurted, her head still face down on the card table.

"Have you been to the jungle? They can grow just about any fruit imaginable there. And root vegetables too. Even nuts. They could survive without eating animals if they wanted. They have chosen to hunt, to feel like men, big and powerful. I have chosen to order a heaping plate of pulled pork, cause there are no wild boars to shoot in the city."

"I lived in the States. Man, I am missing pulled pork (chuckles to himself). You can't find that here. There was some good food there, totally." That came from the unshaven one, Carlo, who was clearly the loose one in the group. "But I'm trying to be a vegetarian now. It's alright."

"Have you people tried crispy southern fried chicken, peking duck, braised pork belly? Do you believe in God? These things were put here for us to enjoy. Eating a soy patty is like being forced to watch a Bette Midler movie."

"She did something decent. The one where she was kidnapped," Jose, the diminutive white partner of Petra, barked from the corner.

"Do you not like vegetables? You can make so much from them," said Petra.

"Yeah of course I do. Steamed broccoli with grilled fish. Baked Pork loin on a bed of pan seared asparagus. A simple chopped salad, with arugula and thinly sliced beets spread below chargrilled marinated skirt steak. Yeah, I love the veggies too. A real non-discriminatory eater!"

The Krishna mutha lifted her head for once, and looked right at me, "Your spanish accent...you're from the States right. I spent time in California. I wouldn't go back. Americans aren't really conscious of a healthy lifestyle, including the food. Just my opinion."

"You should have spent time in Wisconsin instead. Those people know how to eat healthy. Beer boiled brats, cheese curds, fried fish cookouts. Look, I don't want to get into an argument, but it should be noted that the entire organic movement that's spread internationally was born in the States, northern California to be exact. Yes, I know. So were the pesticides and modified seeds and morbid obesity. But we are a polarized country. For every terrible thing we create, we come up with something else the world can't live without. Don't be a hater."

The Hindu harlot stared me down; lustful, desirous eyes hidden beneath a look of scorn and contempt.

"Have you lived somewhere that you enjoyed?", I asked back, attempting civility with just the faintest tone of condescension.

"Yes, of course I have. I spent six months teaching at an ashram in India, and I went to an arts school in Sydney....Australia. I just moved back from Buenos Aires, which I loved, much more than California."

"That's because it's cheaper and there are more brunettes."

"No, that is not it. The life was cultural, and alive. And I loved my best friend there, Eduardo. He was so great."

"Was he a professional football player?"

"What? Definitely not! He was a fifteen year old boy who collected cardboard boxes and soda cans and lived on the street. He was so natural, and funny. And...genuine. I took him with me everywhere."

"Like a pet."

No response. Head up. A stare. And back to the cards.

More mambe went around the room. Even the two pregos were indulging. Then, little Jose asked the Native for something. It was in a thimble sized porcelain bowl. Tar like. He put it on his finger, then on the gums. Jose followed. Then Carlo. Soon the whole floor was partaking in bitter leaf chewing and sticky tar gum pasting.

I wasn't going to be the clothed guy on shore while everybody else skinny dipped. Maybe it was from a lot of experience chewing stimulant leaves, but my mouth never felt so abused, excluding that one time I had to do a favor for a ride across a deserted stretch of Egyptian highway. Maybe with the new revolution there, men will have more options.

What does the all natural Indigenous approved practice of smashed coca leaf chewing consist of? Good question.

You put a tea bag size handful in your cheek taking caution to not actually get teabagged. Precisely between your cheek and lower gum. Like a good Jewish girl, you absolutely do not swallow. Then again, try not to spit either. You move the gunk around, attempting to make a cohesive ball. Once the ball has been moved around for a bit, you add more powdered leaves to the wad, and continue for hours until you end up with a tennis ball goiter protruding from the lower mandibular. The flavor is similar to raw green tea leaves on your tongue. And that tar stuff, that heightens the buzz. You'll need about an hour of cud chewing to get the equivalent of two espresso shots. But it's natural. The Indian Way.

Meanwhile, the taita boy would occasionally dip into his bag, and pull out some other leaf or cream or stick, and pass it along to his disciples, then he'd make some loud blowing noise, PFFFFFFFFF, like he had to move a sailboat with his mouth before leaning back against his cushion, throwing me intermittent stares.

"Tonight you will come with us to the farm. Tomorrow will be the ceremony and you are invited to join us. Have you tried yage (ya-hey) before?"

Petra. She's the one talking.

"Is that like the Indigenous form of tantric sex? I haven't. Unless the woman's not very attractive, then I can go all night, full-on Sting tantric."

"Huh? No. Yage is ayahuasca. It is the name the indigenous use for the medicine. You should be sure and not call it a 'drug'. That is highly offensive to the indigenous in our country."

"I didn't know there was a difference between 'medicine' and 'drug'. Does a Doctor give you a prescription for a drug or for medicine? I think the only difference is how you decide to use it."

"Please, if you could use the term 'medicine' when referring to yage, that would be appreciated. Thank you. Now, tomorrow, as I was saying, there will be a ceremony conducted by Guillermo. He is a Taita. His other brother is also a Taita at the farm, but he has taken some patients to the jungle for the week to experience the yage in it's natural home."

"Is Guillermo an Indian name? It sounds very Conquistadorish?"

Petra answered, "All indigenous peoples have Spanish names as a result of our difficult history. His native name is Inokixilipl. It is not easy to pronounce. Most people will call him Taita Guilly."

"Sure, yeah, I'm familiar with that concept. We have a lot of Chinese guys who can't speak English with the name Steve. And when I call customer service for the US State Department I always get an Indian, the curried kind, not your kind, who has a name like Bob or something. I always tell them, 'c'mon, just tell me your real name. I know it's not Bob'. But they insist on saying their name is Bob. So I tell them I can pronounce Deepak Chopra and Mohatma Ghandi. They usually pause, then respond something like, 'how are yoooooou knoooowing our greaaaat leader, The Mohatma." With which I follow with something along the lines of me loving chicken masala despite its british invention and aloo gobi, but not really understanding cricket. And then I'll get a verbal lesson in cricket..."

Petra, always so calm and polite, interrupted me, "Alright then, you can refer to him as Inokixikipl, but you will find that everyone at the Farm will refer to him as Taita Guilly."

Taita Guilly sat there, mambe in his mouth, just staring at us, a man-boy used to people talking about him in the third person.

"Does anybody have a beer?"

"We don't drink alcohol," came abruptly from the Ganesh bearing mother-to-be, still ensconsed in the ancient science of crudely drawn inaccurately prognosticating playing cards.

Carlo gave me a look. One that said, "We tolerate her. And yeah, I'd love a beer right now, totally."

Petra clarified matters. "The Taitas don't drink alcohol. They believe in keeping the body pure."

"Strange, cause the Indians in my country love alcohol. Which, I might add, in regards to beer, is made up of hops, yeast, barley, and water, if you follow German brewing laws, which you may not. Regardless, all natural."

"Alcohol is an intoxicant. We don't drink any intoxicants." HairyKrishna once again.

"If you don't ingest intoxicants, why are you all so willing to ingest a hallucinogen that will intoxicate you for hours."

"It's enlightening, not intoxicating." Yes, put forth by Ramayana.

"As I mentioned previously, the yage is medicine, taken for a specific purpose which is not to get high but rather to help clean and revitalize you." Petra.

Petra's husband, who had been quiet this entire time, motioned Taita Guilly for more mambe. And it made the rounds once again.

"Isn't the coca leaf that everybody's chewing an intoxicant?"

"The Taitas permit the use of pure tobacco and the coca leaf. It has been in their culture for centuries."

"I'm confused. If you want to be natural. Shouldn't you stick to yoga and water? Maybe smoke a few banana peels. I think these stimulants are like religious Christian teenage girls taking it in the backside to avoid the wrath of God."

Taita Guilly stared at me. Again. He didn't speak. Only the left side of his mouth swished around with his growing ball of coca leaf swill.

I stared back. But he won.

"Most of us do yoga too." Petra noted proudly.

"I'm still not there yet. Same for the butt thing," Carlo added with a laugh.

Did nobody else see the absurdity of this situation? I was trying not to jeopardize my free housing situation, but people like this need a big indigenous pecker whipped across their elitish face. My new 'Colombian' friends were not alone in their unquestioning adulation of the 'exotic' class. There always seems to be a select class of the educated set, normally of artistic sensibility, who feel an association with a chosen member of a marginalized group will allow them to break the bonds of privilege, and gain yet another status bump among their relatively wealthy friends. So what happens is, when Oscar, another buddy not affiliated with a lower caste, begins to speak about this lower caste, Ramayana can interrupt and say that he doesn't know what he's talking about. She's practically indigenous. And she will pontificate about their lifestyle much to the admiration of her non-indigenous culture craving friends.

It's not much different than Marx preaching about the working class, and living the high life among the upper bourgeoisie, entertaining them with his toils down at the mill. Or certain members of the British colonial ruling class who would befriend a native to learn a few things about life in the bush so they would have a strong conversation starter about the Hunt for cocktail hour back at the governor's mansion. Obama did this when he stepped outside of Harvard circles to associate with the working class blacks of Chicago, who eventually helped get him elected, despite the obvious fact that he is clearly not one of them. Or the entire nation of DeadHeads, who after a week of living un-showered on grilled cheese and floor mats returned to their parent's suburban mcmansions to teach their family the hardships of thrifty living, before Dad got them a job at his investment bank.

We're talking about 'street cred.' As Petra would say, this means the credibility of one among his peers, while located on the street, among the people. In my esteemed neighborhood of welfare abuse and gangbangers (these are not necessarily people who have five on ones with intoxicated women, but they may also do that), there are always artists, often socially inept, who move in to escape association with the preppy class who rule over the better located, cleaner neighborhoods of the city. Every year, a few of these white social outcasts, generally the new recruits in the area, they will 'adopt' a local teenager, who is usually of hispanic descent, raised on welfare, and spends more time on the corner than the classroom. The White Social Outcast will take the Corner Dweller to their functions where the other Outcasts gather to talk about how much they hate society, mostly the corporations, who offer their only chance of earning income for their questionable design work. The Corner Dweller will play up the crowd, offering to smoke his blunt with them, and maybe, just maybe, enlightening them to a little bit of gangland play-by-play. The Outcasts will feel as if they are finally accepted into a caste of real genuine people. The Scumbag from the Corner will get free food, drink, smokes, maybe a Wii or somebody's discarded MAC. After a year, the neighborhood punk will get caught stealing things from their apartment. The Outcasts won't violate their new rule of "No Snitching man" so instead, they'll move out, and the cycle will be repeated next year.

Is it wrong to use each other? Is their a problem when a portly man from Nebraska, seventy-one years of age, marries a hot twenty-three year old from Saigon. It's obvious what they're both getting. If they're happy, then maybe that's fine.

They were getting ready to leave. I should probably say something. It's been awhile. "Are we going to stop for food?"

"Sure, we'll take you to a typical Colombian restaurant in the country," Petra offered.

There were six of us at the table. Five ordered rice and plantain dishes. I got the bandeja paisa. An enormous plate of three blood sausages, a slab of skirt steak, a pork cutlet, a rotisserie chicken breast, beans and whole bunch of other assorted crap. Ramayana eyed me with contempt. Carlo with longing, and Taita Guilly, with suspicion.
Who was this man-boy?

Arriving at night, nothing is interesting. It's like arriving in the rain. Always arrive somewhere in the day. Make sure it's not raining, or you should halt the arrival. I waited until morning to check out the farm. I slept in the same room as Taita Guilly. I saw him watching me as I slept.

The farm was two hours outside of Bogota, in the tropical forested (basically jungle) mountains, about 5,000 feet above sea level, which in the tropics is a near perfect temperature. Humidity free day temperatures stay at eighty and night time refreshes at just under sixty. There was a main concrete sleeping bunker with four rooms, and a kitchen on the other side of a small courtyard. A concrete slab landing overlooked the verdant valley below, and the rest of the property, five acres, ran along a hillside. There was a bucolic pond with ducks down the hillside. A lot of the land ran almost vertical on hillsides.

Time up! The ceremony was getting ready to start. Something I learned about my previous experiences with ayahuasca/yage was that it wasn't something you took at a rave. A shaman, really a spiritual guide, stayed with you during the experience, playing music, chanting, and attempting to guide you to the right places, lest the medicine pull you into the devil's playground. Notoriously, it was a medicine drug that removed solids from the body, through any exit necessary. Maybe those blood sausages weren't the brightest idea. But I showed those vegetarians! Communists.
And I pre-empted a colonic cleanse, just in case.

It looked like we were heading out on a trek. People did yoga stretches. One girl, a blonde I hadn't met, was meditating on a wall that dropped down very very far. I imagined her falling and being saved by some all natural netting. Taita Guilly was going around blowing things up people's noses. Rappe. Aptly named cause he was essentially raping your nose. He put a powder similar to that chewing mambe in a small crack straw. Then he proceeded to blow it right up your schnaz until it hit your cerebral cortex. All natural. It's how the indigenous people roll.

It clears you out they told me. Gets you ready for your trip. With clean nasal passages a higher world awaits. Sudafed could market that. With my 10 percent cut of course.

I felt like Kennedy in the Zapruder film. But Jacqui wasn't there to catch my brains when the rappe shot them out my ear. Wasabi tears streamed uncontrollably, and an overall sensation of 'what the fuck are you doing?" swept over me.

One by one the blind faithful stepped up to take their nasal shot. I noticed Ramayana wasn't one of them. Pussy.

Taita Guilly opened up his knapsack, and pulled out some menthol like liquid. He rubbed it on Petra's forehead.

She turned right to me, now knowing my constant what the fuckness, "It's from the jungle. He brought it back with him. It will help center your thoughts. It is all natural."

Of course it is.

I'm going to go in my bag and pull out a syringe full of high fructose yellow number five and inject every fucker here.

I met a German guy. Deiter. He was the boyfriend of the girl meditating on the wall. He seemed reasonably upbeat for a Teutonic. Blonde and boyish for a man in his early forty's. And he spoke Spanish. His eyes would widen when he spoke, and his smile would correspond like a subway mime.

"Are you ready? It's very special this yage. You will not find anything else like it anywhere. There are other taitas who are saying we have one of the best formulas in the country. And I think our taitas are some of the best."

"Is this place some kind of ayahuasca resort? Where's the pool and my concierge?"

"We host ceremonies here. The Taitas do them, but we are not an official health center, even though they do have a license to dispense the medicine here in Colombia. You are ready? Are you ready? It's going to be a GREAT day!"

"Do you live here or something, or just come out for the nose candy?"

"I live here. I'm one of the owners. You met the couple, Petra and Jose. They are another partner. And then one more woman who isn't here this weekend."

"Is that woman white too?"

"Ha. Why are you saying that. Petra and Jose aren't white. They are from Colombia and so is the other partner."

"But her skin, is it white?"

"Yes, sort of. I think her parents, or maybe grandparents were from Spain."

Ha. It's my turn to say 'ha'. Whites in Colombia are normally from the upper classes. But we had a sociological anomaly as The German White was probably using the Colombian Whites for street cred, and they were probably doing the classic 'take advantage of his dinero' thing. And they both were using the indigenous guys, but what were the yage boys getting....

"So I noticed Taita Guilly has his bed here, as do the other two boys I saw walking around."

"Yeah, they have live here. They're great aren't they. Did I tell you that they are making some of the best medicine in Colombia? This is the truth. You won't find medicine this strong anywhere else."

It was like calling a Bong a WaterPipe. The 'medicine' business was absurd.

"Are there are a lot people who come here to use the drug?"

"What drug? There are no drugs here. Oh. Are you talking about the yage? It is a medicine. This is very important, ok. You can't refer to it as a drug. The taitas only call it a medicine."

If the taitas only had sex with armadillos, these people would do the same.

"What?"

Shit. Did I say that out loud?

"What's it like being a German in Colombia? Do you have relations with your Aryan ancestors who came over in the 1940's?"

"Yeah, yeah, everything is fine. I don't spend time with too many people. I was a baker, I think is how they say in Spanish, so I did this for many years in Stuttgart, than I sold my business and came here. The farm is my life."

"Do the taita boys work here, or just rent a room?"

Deiter's crystalline blue eyes were on the rise again, an inching smile on his face, "No no. These are special boys. Not really boys. Men from a higher world. They are here for the ceremonies. They have brought the medicine from their home, deep deep in the jungle."

"Do they pay you part of the income they make from these ceremonies?"

"Of course not. That is their money. They earn it. Is is not mine."

"I'm sorry, I forgot that Germany still had a strong socialist movement. But the Mark was once strong, dominating the continent. You must understand. These boy-mens are not destitute. They are here earning a profit, a nice profit, and they don't have to pay to use the land that you worked so hard to buy. You should franchise it and open up yage retreats throughout Europe."

He's smirking now. The eyes have shrunk back down. "Yes, yes, but yage must stay here in Colombia, from where it comes. I'm not interested in their money. Nobody here is. They are special boys. You will see."

With his high pitched Spanish and torn jean shorts, I couldn't help but think that Deiter was enjoying some kind of perverse papal authority over his 'special boys.' Perhaps his meditating girlfriend was decoy to distract the others from his clandestine indigenous romances.

Everybody had left. Petra was yelling for me. They were waiting. Hopefully they would be sacrificing Ramayana first.

I walked along the hillside, past the sleeping bunkers, over the duck filled lagoon, and down a long wobbly brick walkway that led to a massive circular hut. A palm thatched roof rose to a near thirty foot apex. The group from the previous evening sat buddha-ed up, spread equidistantly along the hut's perimeter. Where was Ramayana? Or Petra? They were replaced by the blonde hair Aryan couple.

At one end of the hut, directly opposite the entrance, was Taita Guilly, in full regalia. He looked like the Chief from YMCA's Village People. I tried hard, very hard not to laugh. I thought about my grandmother naked. Were these people for real? Was this twenty year old kid some kind of serious shaman? He could barely move under the weight of his Mr. T collar, replete with feathers, beads and stones. I thought of my grandmother naked again to help placate the laughs percolating way too close to my mouth's exit.

On either side of baby Mr. T, the other young indigenous boys, who I'd yet to meet, were acting like Farrakhan's Nation of Islam guards. They were mini-me versions of their leader, except one of the two had a giant red and yellow bird feather going directly through his nose. Once again, I had no choice but to quell my laughter with grandma's natural state.

Behind the three leaders of the yage cult hung an outsized 1980's era poster of a tiger. It was looking right at us.

One by one, graduation style, the Jim Jones juicing began. You walked up to the three boy-mens, the tiger eyeing your every move. There was chanting. Words not of Conquistador origin. The boy without a feather in his nose waved a metal tin of rising smoke. Smelled like frankincense. I'm not exactly sure what that smells like but if you're going to discuss ceremonial burnings, frankincense is your resin.

It was my turn to graduate. I had finished with this world. The murky liquid sat stagnate in a cleaned out coconut shell. I was unable to see my nude grandma in it's reflection. A flavor so putridly bitter, so vile, that one's imagination is unable to conjure the taste. Vomit hung precipitously to the edge of my tongue. If not for the tiger's vengeful eyes, nothing would have made it's way down my gagging throat.

Time for a layover. Whether medicine, or drugs, you need an hour or so until there is any effect. It's never a fun hour. Imagine having sex and feeling nothing until an hour after you've finished. Can't men invent a medicine that takes effect immediately? This is why heroin users have above average intelligence levels. Next time I will inject. And the bloodstream would be spared the noxious taste.

Now was my time to move. The medicine-drug often takes away your mobility depositing you in a solitary meditative position for hours. The first wave of euphoria, really more of a warmth, came up through my body. A voice told me to wander. It wasn't the tiger.

A grassy hill rose from behind the hut, overgrown like a Guatemalan's pubes. Slowly, with steps of the newly inebriated, I climbed. Thirty yards up, perched above the ceremonial palace, the hill bordered the jungle. Tiny flowers of tropical pinks and yellows were visible through the branches. A river ran unseen, lost in the thick web of green, it's flowing rapids luring me. Turning back, the view went over the thatch roof peak and into an expansive lush valley below. The perimeter was hemmed in by a range of ten thousand foot Andean peaks. This was my spot.

The moist blades of unkempt insect infested grass, moist and infested like the aforementioned Guatemalan, weren't conducive to lying down. But the voice, it said it would be ok. Remove your sandals, take off your shirt, enjoy the Earth. I did as I was told. I coupled with a twelve foot branch, much bigger than the Guatemalan could handle. I didn't let go, feeling it's every nipple, the sunken grooves of it's trunk. We were partners.


The drug-medicine dug deeper, scraping away my identity. Family, friends, people, they no longer existed. I could barely recall the memory of anybody I knew. The sounds of the jungle intensified. Were those cicadas or crickets, or killer bees? It didn't matter. My eyes were closed giving way to clarity. That outside noise, the noise of so much stuff, the one that rules our quotidian lives, had vanished. I was nothing. My worries were draining, a waste of time. We were a minor part in a massive play that I was still trying to understand. I dug myself into the ground, clawing through the mud, feeling as if I, whoever I was, had become a part of the Earth. I slithered along the steep hillside, the land becoming my bed, my blanket. I opened my eyes to find the trees above me had formed a glowing web across the sky, leaving me to wonder whether it was protective or suffocating, but I had no fears so I quickly forgot it. Eyes closed brought swirling geometric patterns, brightly illuminated, punctuated by the enveloping leaves of the jungle's various matrons.

As I rolled to my left, my eyes open again now, the mountains had taken on the image of true giants, looking down on me, keeping me pinned to the grassy floor. Chants were wafting from the hut below. It wasn't the melodic sound of wind instruments I'd heard on previous trips, but intense chanting, the words definitely not born of Latin.

Time was passing, and feelings were intensifying. The dancing colors in my mind, geometric patterns forming plants and flowers, were sinking. Rising up were intense thoughts about the nature of existence. Scary ruminations on the meaningless of modern life. Not just modernity, but all human life. Man was a blip. These mountains, this ground I buried myself into, these were our rulers. An unseen force, greater than all the mountains before me, ruled us, controlled us. Was it a call to take myself less seriously, or for suicide, or to abandon everybody and everything and live among the rustling leaves? I didn't know. But the thought was intense. It took control over me. It was my essence. My only thought. My being.

Rain had been falling. Hard at times. But some time must have passed until I noticed my soaked shorts. I caught the rain in my hands, looked at it, and had to ask myself, "what is this?"

The hillside that had become my bed developed into the precipice of the world. I no longer dug in, but held on. With eyes still open, my arms were melting, the skin peeling itself off, trying to get into the ground. And yet that didn't scare me. I knew from experience, even at that other-wordly time, that that was a side effect of the medicine-drug. But these thoughts, that nobody in life meant anything, that they even existed, and that the Earth, the land, it was the only thing, well, it scared me. It became me. When you have trouble recalling the names of the people who gave birth to you, of your life-long friends, of your girlfriend, your questions intensify.

The boy-mens were making their way up the hillside. The assistant with a head like a monkey was holding the smoking frankincense. The feather nose was flapping a broom full of dried palm leaves. And coming up from behind them was Taita Guilly. He was chanting. They all were chanting, singing at times, in an unknown language. Taita Guilly was no longer a boy. His face was the same. It wasn't like he had horns or snakes in his hair. But he was older. Shaman old. A wisened countenance revealed wisdom, and experience I didn't see earlier. I could separate hallucinations from physical reality. I couldn't control the thoughts hijacking my soul, but I knew what I saw. How could this kid have the face and demeanor of an old man?

He was talking to me. Not native cluks cluks, but Spanish. Smoke obscured the words. He wanted to know where I was, because he knew I went somewhere. But I couldn't answer. I physically couldn't get the syllables out of my mouth. He stared into my eyes, knowingly. More words came through the cloud but they weren't penetrating. I was trying to return to my world of nothingness. The three amigos had become a distraction. The chanting was disturbing.

I wanted to laugh. But I didn't know how. I didn't understand what funny was. How could I, of all peoples, not understand funny? Why weren't these three kids, with their regalia of medicine man tchotskies, laughable? It was ridiculous. Wasn't it? Life had become very serious, beyond serious, beyond what I call life. Were they here to guide me through a new world, one where I had become a granule of dirt, barely capable of thought?

The chanting continued. Distant now. Barely enough to remind me I wasn't alone. But it wasn't enough. I had never felt so alone. I craved love. I knew what that was now. I wanted to be cared for, wanted that sensation in my gut, and in my heart, that glowing warmth, that shot of eternal joy. The Earth wouldn't give me that. It wanted to reclaim me, to show me how insignificant I was. I couldn't put a face on love. Not one. I still didn't know who anybody in my life was. But I recognized an emptiness, an abyss that could only be filled with what I remembered to be love.

The light was beginning to soften. The girlfriend of the German had arrived. She brought toilet paper and a radiating smile. There had been no sudden defecations, and only a bit of bile had left my mouth, nothing substantial to wipe up. I wanted her to stay, to hug me. But her smile went back toward the chanting, into the valley.

I returned to the world beneath my eyes. It was still heavy with nothing. Like returning to the womb. I would try to recall people and events from my life, only to have them removed, my access denied. A message started to dominate the void. And these messages, and feelings were not transitory, they weren't words on a paper. They were everything that existed at that moment. The only feeling I had now had, that came with this thought, was that life was a dream. I have been living in a dream, and nothing is real in the way I think it is. I am not who I think I am. It wasn't revealed who I was, but only that everything I thought I knew was meaningless because the entire Show was a dream. Right now was real. Right now I was experiencing my true nature, which was a futile molecule among a power so immense, and so inconceivably omniscient to render me powerless. God?

My eyes opened again. Most of the light had faded. The German approached. He was a figure from another dimension, not a resident of the universe I now occupied. He was speaking to me. In Spanish, then English, but it was all static. I didn't know who I was, or what I was. But I knew I couldn't move. I had become a part of that hillside, the mountains, the valley, the forest, they had all become my guardians. But this blonde hair patron prodded me, tried to drag me, convince me that life was different down below. They were waiting for me in the hut. Who? He spoke gently, but assertively. It was imperative that I leave the wooded area and join these people below. He kept talking about a 'maloca.' This is a common word in Brazil signifying 'madman.' I couldn't understand why he would call me that.
Had I gone mad!?

He held me up, practically carried me as I was drunk from yage, incapable of proper steps. Going down toward that large rounded hut I tried to pull my way back up toward my home, on the edge of the world, but the man with the big blue eyes wouldn't allow me.

A primitive fire burned in the center. Smoke wafted heavily with the whims of the air. A few unrecognizable faces loomed, one of whom appeared to have a beard that connected at his waist to thick matty hair. The boy shamans were brewing something. The German deposited me into a hammock along the far wall, sitting up.

I wanted to know what happened. What happened up on the hill? Is it all a dream? This environment with the dirt floors, and smoky air, somebody playing handmade drums to an unknown rhythm, this wasn't comforting. The others were far from me, along the other end, or in the center, but they weren't far enough.

The shamans started to chant. The drum beat grew stronger. The heart followed. The chanting went from melodic to diabolical. People whispered in the background. I became sick. At the pit of my stomach. And then the avalanche began. A purging would be an understatement. The body's fluids were being vacuum sucked from their depths. When the chanting subsided, so did the vomiting. After a short recess, the drums would begin again, followed by the chanting, followed by yet another violent explosion from the bowels of my mouth.
Somebody else was vomiting vociferously in the distance, with that barfing geronimo often heard at 3am in an alley behind the bar. At some point, my head was hanging sideways off the rear of the hammock. There were no more deep thoughts about the universe, or human life, just a desire for the chanting to cease, and the barfing to end. It wouldn't. I hadn't eaten a thing in 24 hours. Where was it coming from? But it came. Chaos rained in my head. What did I do? What happened to me? Would it ever end? The safe word for hallucinatory drug (medicine) experiences is: IT WILL END. IT'S ONLY A MEDICINE-DRUG. EVERYTHING WILL RETURN TO NORMAL. It's a kind of mantra to use when the emotions are overwhelming. I knew this, but it couldn't mitigate this insanity. What was 'normal' anyway? My new normal was to evaporate into the Earth. The boy-shamans had been to my side a few times, their voices echoes, their ensembles just a blur. I couldn't sit up. I wouldn't sit up. Just lied there in the hammock like a man who'd been shot. I'd say 'si' a couple of times and they would leave.

The hut was quiet now. A couple of people talked softly in the distance. The puking had ended, but a sea of chunky fluid lay beneath me. Deiter, the calm speaking German, returned to my side. Once again he was asking me to move. I wanted to sleep in the hammock, to die there, leave me alone. He wouldn't. He got on one knee, down to my level, and pleaded that I trust him. The boy-shaman with the feather in his nose would save me. He understood the madness in my head. The shaman taita children felt my trip was particularly strong due to the cleansing I needed, but if I didn't trust him the madness could continue. I'm still not sure from where the will power came, but I moved enough so he could drag me before the FeatherNose.

They sat me on a crudely constructed wood bench before the Feather. Shirtless, despite the cool evening air, I gave myself to anyone who could relinquish the delirium. Chants began to bombard me. Loud, demanding chants. Each incantation left a wake of hot air on my chest. The Feathered One commenced with spitting on me. More like blowing. A menthol glaze covered me above the waist. He walked around me, chanting, blowing, vigorously waving a wand of dried palm leaves. The dancing rays of light swimming from the fire reminded me I was far from sober. Cool air whipped across my face, each wave of the witch's broom sending a morsel of clarity to the mind. He gave me some herbal concoction to drink. Then I was told to take several large breaths, while more menthol found it's way onto me.

The ceremony stopped. The Feathered One asked me how I felt. Deiter was there watching, crouched beneath us. I understood him. I understood the question! Where was I? I wasn't sick anymore, nor part of the Earth, nor was I the person I thought I was that morning, before this madness started. I felt NEW. New like a person who got two deep tissue massages and an intense blow-job, and then ate some stimulants and got a haircut. My head was clear. An absolute fearlessness enveloped me. Had I been reborn? Was there a cross on my chest?

Deiter took over from the Feather. He told me the process wasn't finished yet. I needed to bathe, specifically in the 'choro', which was a small waterfall at the very bottom of the hill. My balance wasn't completely back despite the total rejuvenation. My Hessian bodyguard took hold of my hand as we carefully descended the steep hillside, down a muddy slope running along the edge of the jungle.

He turned off the flashlight. It was just me. Alone. Naked. Blackness. The chirps and haws of the jungle surrounded me. I entered the water without thought. The water rained down a higher power, another entity, right into me. My fearlessness had become primal, really, it was animalistic. As the deluge entrapped me along a wall of unseen rock, noises started to emanate from my mouth. I had no control of them. I was unable to stop them. Tiger or Lion. Not sure, but some large dominant feline. I roared with a power I had never felt in my life. An indomitableness completely conquered my soul. The roars continued. Louder. And louder.

I was upside down. My feet were in the air, pointed straight up into the waterfall. One hand was reaching for the sky while the other supported us. What the fuck was happening to me? I was butt naked, standing upside down on one hand, in the pitch black, under a waterfall at the edge of the jungle, roaring uncontrollably from my mouth. I've never done a handstand in my life.

I came down to my homosapien two's, and began to create my soul's music: hand drums on my thighs, roars were the vocals. Water splashed everywhere. I heard laughs. I forgot Deiter was there. He turned on the flashlight.

"Deiter, is that you?"

"Yes, yes, I'm still here," he said German inflected English, still laughing. "You feel it. Yesyes. I know you feel it. It is the animal spirit. Sometimes the yage will deliver this. The water is very, very powerful energy. Very powerful. That is why this is happening. How do you feel?"

"Fucking unbelievable!"

"Haha. Yes. Yes. This is the power of yage. You are know it now. Yes?!"

Deiter led me back up the hillside toward the sleeping bunkers. He had brought me a pair of mud boots. I wore them. Naked.
So as I walked back across the darkened compound, rejuvenated, stark naked, and in my black rubber galoshes, I began to question my new spiritual guide.

I launched into a recap of my trip, in English, as my Spanish had not fully returned.

"Yesyes, It was very deep your experience. Many of us have gone through this, and we still remain unsure if life is what we think it is."

"But how can I go from a feeling of being one with the Earth, to feeling alone, to feeling crazed and sick, to eventually feeling like this, which is... fucking amazing!"

"This is the power of the yage. Each trip, each time, for each person, is very different. Most likely, you are having so many questions about existence, and you are having many fears, and worries. This why you make so many times to throw up. You throw up many times in the maloca, right?" He's laughing at me.

"Too many. Why are you calling me a 'maloca.'"

"Nono. That is the name of the ceremony place where you come from now. When you throw up like this, it is why we say the yage is a medicine. It's a limpieza, a, you say, its a cleansing. The man, he is full of un- pure thoughts, and behavior, and negative past experience. The yage cleans this out. And you have not done it in very long time. There is much to clean. If you do again soon, the trip will be smoother, and more to enjoy. The first time is hard for most. Man always needs a deep cleaning. Very deep, yes. And this is very very true with modern life. We are worry about so many things that we should not have worry about. You understand now, right?"

"Yeah."

His voice lowered, and he waited for me to catch up, as my nudity took it's time to climb the hill. It must be the germanic sauna culture because Deiter didn't hesitate to chat with an unendowed naked man in rain boots.

"This yage that you are taking today is the best. Remember I tell to you before. What you take today you can not find in other parts. The yage you have from Peru, is like this? No. I thought it so. We have taitas who come here from all parts of Colombia. We are knowing now, that maybe only you find this quality yage in maybe four places in whole country. Yesyes."

I could make out his smile in the night, his cropped blonde hair and clean shave giving off a slight Lowenbrau glow.

A group of people sat around an expanding bonfire perched on the concrete landing with vistas to the expansive darkened green valley below. A guitar passed from a high voice to low.
A light baby and a dark baby crawled between light and dark hands. Yogi floor mats and sleeping bags were strewn like a torn quilt. People were laughing, dancing, playing. Minature cast iron bowls of soup sat eaten between the sprawling bodies. Everybody invited me to join the fire. They were so genuinely warm, and inviting. Why had I been so mentally cruel to them the other day? They brought me blankets, and soup. Even Ramayana welcomed me to the fire.

It was New Years Eve. Holy shit. It was New Years. I completely forgot! Maybe it's because nobody here drinks alcohol. Or plays kazoos. It's like India meets Berkeley here. Did I miss it? It wasn't even ten o'clock...I thought it was three in the morning.


The only person with a cell phone let me call the States to say hello to my girlfriend. Maybe it was better she didn't answer. The words were still slow to depart my mouth.

That hairy bearded creature from the maloca, he really WAS a hairy bearded creature. He was some kind of new age healer in Bogota, donning a long white rag for an outfit, his illuminated Blackberry somehow out of place.

"Hey sure, sure, all that vomiting is cleaning you out, man. It cleans you out! You take drugs before? You drink? Eat meat? Have a lot of women? You need to clean those things OUT. That's where it came from. Clean the impure OUT."

His name was Santos. Somehow, he seemed like somebody who had been through this more than a few times.

The brown boys, the taita shamans, they were passing around a cornucopia of natural intoxicants. Handrolled tobacco, the bitter chewing mambe, herbal nasal shots, some bark that people would chew on. One of them sported a backpack like those guys who walk around outdoor festivals with weed and mushrooms. These were the pushers for the New Age.

Was this my new world? Would I no longer enjoy the rich coffee notes of a freshly poured stout? Would a bloody bacon cheese burger be a thing of an embarrassed past? An eighteen year aged barrel bourbon, served neat, in a rocks glass...no more?

I danced for awhile around the fire, oblivious to the fact that I was still very very white, letting the music keep that animal alive, trying to ignore a future without barbecue. Fireworks began to resonate across the valley like an Andean Tet offensive. Someone yelled NEW YEARS. The hugs felt good. Then I isolated in a forgotten corner of the circle, attempting to recollect what the fuck just happened to me?

Morning came. I thought I was a new man. Born again but with my Sundays still free. No beer. No liquor. No meat. No humor. The pure life.

The three boy shamans were playing video games. One would leave to text message, then another, and return back to video games.

Should holy men, holy boy-mens, who have the power to alter consciousness, and to heal your soul, should they be playing video games? Shouldn't they be meditating, or reading dense meta-physical literature?

They were huddled on the ground. No more feathers, beads, tiger teeth. Just three young guys with a cell phone and a couple of handheld video games.

"What are you playing?"

"Tetris, do you know it?"

"Of course. Very Russian. Hey, I wanted to ask about my experience yesterday. It was very strong for me. Difficult at times."

Without looking up from his game monitor, Taita Guilly said in an emotionless monotone, "You were trying to control the situation. You can't control the yage. The yage is in control." Then he'd make that irritating blowing sound I heard the other night. PFFFFT. Like a nervous tic on timer, I could expect it every three minutes.

Is yage God? Is that my problem? Did I meet God yesterday? Do I need to submit to God to achieve a higher sense of satisfaction in life? Am I controlling?

"Ok. I can see that. And how about the vomiting? There was so much. It wouldn't stop."

Still enraptured with the moving shapes, he issued blankly, "bad thoughts. You had a lot of negative thoughts. Vomiting is removing them from your body. PFFFFT."

I stopped to think about what those bad thoughts could have been. I probably don't call my mother enough. But vomiting like that is an excessive punishment. I've also thought about letting a dog lick me after I got out of the shower. But it's been awhile.

Taita Guilly spoke up an octave, without turning to face me, almost ready for the really fast levels. "You need to breathe more. Don't forget to breathe. PFFFFFT."

Well, duh, I'd be dead. "It's impossible to not breathe."

No answer. Another moment passed. No answer.

"How about the tiger? I think I turned into a tiger under the waterfall. I know that sounds crazy, but something entered my body that I've never felt before."

He slowly moved his head to stare in my eyes, definitely missing a chance to get that skinny tall block sideways onto the two square pieces. Then he returned his attention to flipping shapes. "The yage is powerful. Animal spirits can enter you. This is very special. What happened to you is a good sign. PFFFFFT. A very powerful sign."

He paused for a few moments. Then he added, "You need to do the yage again. You can do it tomorrow if you wish. Don't wait so long to do it next time. PFFFFT."

Was he giving me a sales pitch? Was I asking a twenty year old playing a video game from the 80's about life advice? What happened to my re-birth, my all natural way, the lifetime of minority friendships? The cynicism was creeping back, creeping back like those Guatemalan pubes on an Acapulco chaise lounge.

Did these kids know anything, or were they like those idiots from mechanics class who did acid every weekend in high school, and now had become Holy Seers?

Is it wrong for a shaman to be playing video games? Or facebooking? Or passing around jungle highs at the dwellings of his wealthy patrons?

Would we think different of the Dalai Lama if we saw him behind closed doors playing that guitar hero video game, where you strum a plastic guitar to a video version of a really mediocre rock song. He chose Rock Me Like A Hurricane, by the way. Would Catholics be offended to find the Pope playing poker with those clowns who guard the Vatican? Would a Hassidic Jew cut his curls if he knew his rabbi had an avatar that went around searching for cyber treasure and sabering the occasional warlock?

It's one thing if your spiritual leader is raping a kindergarten full of retarded Indonesians, but if he (or...she, or...he-she) doesn't want to stay in uniform all day and enjoy some of the modern joys that make life tolerable, should he be admonished? Is a man no longer holy when he takes a time out from deep ascetic matters?

Can we draw a line with our chosen one's private life? Are movies allowed if the action involves murder? Can a pastor joke with his colleagues about a parishoner's lousy new breast job? Can an Imam sunbathe naked in his backyard? Should a nation punish a leader for closed-door consensual fellatio, regardless of the fellator's unappealing figure and poor choice in dress?

I think the problem is spending time with holy people when they're not 'on'. We were all living in the compound. If I had only met the taitas during the ceremony it would be different. It's like going to your favorite Italian restaurant, and one day you wonder back into the kitchen to get that veal parm recipe and discover a young Ecuadorian with a tattoo saying 'Juana' on his neck, and a sous chef with a mohawk and a stringy goatee screaming along to Pantera. The mysticism is ruined. It didn't magically appear from a plump Sicilian grandmother's hands.

It's the same with religion. Blind faith is the best faith. The Catholics know this better than anyone. Why would you ever believe an effeminate balding male sheathed in a loose ball swinging robe all day, who has sworn himself to never experience a woman's throbbing wet vagina, would want to touch the innocent penis of an unshaven boy, who has also been deprived the knowledge of such beauty?

He is a man of the pulpit. He gave my son communion. He speaks to us about right and wrong, conveying messages from our heavenly father. He is not a sexual being. He is not human. For this he is a priest.

Petra came up along side of me, put her hand on my shoulder, and handed me a peeled tangerine. Her other hand was rubbing her unborn child, while the living one stumbled along behind her, playing with a stray dog that wandered onto the farm. She smiled that tender innocent smile that she does. "So, how did your trip go?"

"Strong. Real strong."

"Yes. This, as we say, can be the effects of yage. This is common when somebody is using yage for the first time. And how do you feel now?"

"I feel great. Really really great. I think all of life is a dream too."

"Of course it is. That is why many of us come back to drink the yage again and again. We want to know what is beyond the dream. We are trying to stay on a different level than the one you are accustomed to." She spoke the last words in kindergarten teacher mode, letting me know it's alright to still be a layman.

"Where were you yesterday, and Ramayana too? I didn't see you guys at the maloca ceremony."
"Yes. That is because we, the two of us, because we are pregant, we are waiting for Taita Antonio who is the lead taita with a lot experience and power. He leads the ceremonies for the children and pregnant women."

"You drink this pregnant? And give it to your child!!!"

"I understand why you would think that but your experience is not the experience a child knows of the world, nor that of a fetus. They are uncorrupted from the fears and litter that affect our healthy clear judgements. The children have wonderful experiences. It is the native way. It is how they do it. They are knowing."

"Ok. Hey, let me ask you something, why does Taita Guilly always make that noise with his mouth, the blowing noise."

"Yes, of course, the taitas believe strongly in the power of breath. By developing the habit of forceful breathing, Taita Guilly is constantly renewing himself and allowing his spirit to stay connected."

I may have had a strong journey yesterday, but I was not going to walk around making mouth farts all day.

"What can I do to improve my experience the next time, in order to get to this next level?"

She smiled again, softly, and with motherly ease said, "Ask a question, something important to you, and focus on that. Trust in the taitas as they are the ones with the knowledge. Remember to breathe, and to not try and control the yage. And you will be fine." Then she slid over to a mat and began to crayon color in a buddhist book of mandalas. I think she may have been sucking her thumb. It was definitely her thumb.

"We charge 60,000 for the ceremony. Can you pay now please?" It was Taita Guilly. He must have reached the Kremlin. The video game was now taken over by the boy formerly known as the FeatherNose.

"Sure. I'll give you forty five. Is that cool?"

"We charge sixty. It's the same price for everybody. PFFFFT."

"Alright, that's cool. I thought I'd ask."

Is it wrong to haggle with a shaman? Besides, if he was a real business man, he would have asked for cash first, then dole out the meds.

I felt gypped. I don't know why I thought it would be free. Everybody there was friends. I was invited as a mutual friend of friends. These guys don't pay to use the land. It was just some boiled up roots and leaves. That was a lot of money in local terms. It wasn't like I got a lot of personal attention. No one gave me an exorcism.

Why was I reluctant to pay? The Jewish thing...no, it was more than that. It was such a deep, moving experience. Many would claim it was an essential spiritual event. It felt weird paying for something that nature was providing to heal you. Churches give you an option to donate, but they will help you regardless. The Mosque is the same. But the synagogues...the Jewish people may be the only religious group on Earth that charges people for a service. You want to hear what God has to say...pay your monthly bill. You can imagine the collection agency for the temple, "Mr. Hershkowitz, you're two months behind, if we don't receive payment now, you will not be allowed to enter the synagogue...you're calling me a schmuck yenta, well, you're Friday night services are over Hershkowitz. Putz!".

Around the world, from Africa to Latin America, at certain times of the day, you will find a church's door wide open. The Lord is not a business, for those in need anyway. Many times nobody is even there. Sure, a few of them will have the Men of the CockFrock, cruising the pews for some pre-pubescent pleasure, but most sit vacant, a gratuitous invitation to connect with The Lord. The only time you'll find the Temple gates open is for fumigation. And the Hebrew leaders wonder why the Jewish youth aren't coming to service. Unlock the doors you cheap fucks!

I spent the first day of my new life moving from hammock to yoga mat to hammock and back to yoga mat. There was so much to think about. Too much maybe. The old life wanted to infiltrate, slowly peeking in, but the meat hatin' naturalist was holding strong. I pinched myself periodically. It hurt.

Ramayana was dancing with the brown baby, singing along to some indigenous wailing.

The one formerly known as FeatherNose sat with knees up, leaning against the wall closest to my cocoon. A rat tail barely revealed itself on the nape's left side. His face was a light hispanic tint, the epidermis de rigueur among the indigenous. His face was angular, practically triangular with eyebrows running straight up, adorned with a few random hoops of silver. He was battling enemies on somebody's IPhone.
I interrupted. Cause that's what I do.

"What's it like to be a shaman, with so much power and prestige?"

He looked up, obviously more interested in new business than a silly phone game.

"I'm not a shaman, I'm learning still. And we are taitas. We don't use shaman." He spoke humbly, almost apologetically.

"You can learn to be a taita? I thought you were born into it like royalty, or poverty for that matter."

"Yeah, sure. Taita Guilly and Taita Antonio who wasn't here this weekend, there grandfather was a taita, and so was his father. But you can study it also, just like me."

"Do they make you take all those worthless gen ed classes, or can you skip right to the advanced level chanting?"

"Que? Uh. No, I am not taking classes. I spend time with taitas from different tribes in the putomayo region, in the very south of the country. Each time I am with them I drink their yage, and learn from them."

I think he wanted to converse. He actually put down the IPhone. Obviously he wasn't studying under Taita Guilly.

"Why did you choose the taita life, was it for the girls or the free drugs?"

"Girls? Que? I wanted to keep the traditions of my family. I come from the Cofan people, and we have a rich history. There are a lot of older people who know about medicines. Really strong medicines. Different than yage. We have people who live over one hundred years old. But the young people, my age, and even older, they aren't following our customs now. It's sad. But I used to spend a lot of time with my grandfather, and he taught me so much. The jungle was his home, and he showed me how to live in it, and respect it."

"What happened to your other friends? Why don't more young people want to continue the traditions of the tribes? Is it because of hip-hop?"

He was gazing into my eyes. Even past them. His face was pensive, almost sad. The rat tail was still visible. "Life is almost impossible for people my age. We live outside of towns, in the country, or in the jungle. When you are fifteen or sixteen they come for you."

How can I not ask 'who'? "Who?"

"Little green people."

"Are you shitting me? You just made that up."

"No, you did. You just wrote that cause you thought it was funny. It's not what I said."

"True."

"Usually it's the narcotraffickers. More kids go with them because they can earn more money. There is no money in our villages. If you don't go with the drug people, you work in the field. And that's hard, really hard. Have you worked in the field before?"

"I picked cotton until abolition, then I got a job delivering pizzas."

"What? You are strange. You see, the field is hard. I think it's harder now because they can get money easier and quicker with the narcotraffickers. And if they don't escape with them, the guerillas will take them to fight for them, and they go very deep in the jungle. We'll never see them again until they return home dead. If there are still young people left when the paramilitaries arrive, then they'll take them."

"Can't the government help? The police? Somebody? That seems like a crazy hell of a life."

His face is still serious. His gaze hasn't diverted from me. "Help. Ha. No way. They are part of the problem. This drug war. There is so much money here and too much corruption. Too much. Nobody cares about us. That's why it's important for me to learn about our history, and to share our culture with other people. Here, closer to the city, maybe if we share with these people they will help us save our future. And then one day, when it's safer, we can return to our villages."

"Are you the only one you knew that left?"

"No, there are some. They are near to different cities in Colombia now. Some went to university to study, but they are studying about indigenous culture and how to return and educate our people."

He didn't know it, but I felt like such a dick. I thought these guys were con men. Or at least ripping people off. Just minority pusher kids trying to live off the guilty rich. But if what I just heard is your only option in life, then letting some spiritual seekers drink your native medicine is probably the most reasonable and honorable job you could be doing.

I think part of my issue was being an ageist, refusing to bestow belief unto these converse wearing kids. When I saw Taita Guilly's face transform into an elder, I instantly had respect, even held him in reverence. We come from a culture that holds childhood on a pedestal. Children are protectorates of society, free from the pains of labor, thanks to Dickens and Sinclair, and as such have no chance to be taken seriously as successes, in the non-academic world. Should a kid be geared toward higher education when he can earn a respectable living on the farm or at sea?

In the developing world I've seen kids running market stall stands, twelve year olds in restaurant kitchens, ten year olds collecting money on the bus, and eight year olds helping out in the fields. I have seen twelve year old girls working as women of the night. Alright, well, that's not really fair as I don't think they chose that work. And I didn't pay. Not after I found out they weren't able to take Visa.

Boys have been plucked from their pre-teen nocturnal expulsions to wear their dead father's crown. The Dalai Lama began to rule the Tibetan people as a child. Tom Hanks conquered the commercial toy industry as a gawky thirteen year old from Jersey.

The taita boys actually had a record keeping book. It was one of those blue graph paper books predominant in the American 70's. I didn't see any parabolas though. Taita Guilly had come up to the formerly feathered one to ask about some accounts receivable. Graph paper pages were full of clients names, dates, and other unreadable information. They had better records than the Mt. Sinai emergency room. They had already marked down my payment, and discussed a few outstanding debts. That's embarassing, to have a debt to a shaman. Do you really want to be fucking over somebody that can turn you into a frog?

These guys were professionals. They even sorted out who would lead the next jungle tours where people had the opportunity to drink yage after a three days walk into the jungle. Just a business or a way to show outsiders an ancient culture? Did it matter?

And I got it now. Why shouldn't these guys be entitled to a living? More than ever after learning of their alternatives. I still didn't get why they didn't have to give a share to the farm. There are always people that deserve a boost in life, that weren't afforded a birth into the right circumstances, but at what point to you stop the support. Do you give section eight housing for three years or a lifetime? Do blacks from the upper classes of society deserve the same affirmative action rights as those from the lower brackets of their race?

I overheard Ramayana in the distance, talking something about the ills of alcohol, with a mouth full of coca leaf.

And who determines what's fair wage for a medical practitioner? Do they deserve more than a plumber and less than a teacher? How much is too much? Can anyone actually answer these questions?

Petra and her husband were heading off into town in their Mercedes four wheel drive. They invited the shamanic trio and myself to join them for lunch.

We drank fresh juice and ate fried plantains. I resisted ordering the pork sandwich. Really resisted. We talked about the farm, and the future of yage, and if it could help people. They told me about people who have come there and been healed of diseases, even one young guy who spent a year coming there to clean his body of AIDS. They swore when he went back to the doctor that his blood results were virgin clean. The shamans seemed to visibly remember this fellow.

Now that the new year was over, Taita Guilly said there should be some new people coming next week. Petra promised she would try to bring some additional people for them.

The boys borrowed Petra and Jose's respective blackberry's. The three of them mock fought over the two available phones, and they began playing something. The 'adults' talked about the changing political landscape of Colombia, and the increased security that should bring more tourism, and more business. When the bill arrived, the boys didn't even bother to look up. They were clearly accustomed to this ritual.

I shouldn't be bothered by the indigenous- white relationship. Couples use each other for mutual benefit regularly. Right here in Colombia, the government had been using the United States government for the last two decades. It was simple. They asked for money to stop the drug war. The more money the U.S. sent the more money Colombia stole, and as long as drugs remained illegal in the U.S. the profits would keep the producers in business and the Colombian authorities chasing them with ever growing streams of cash. The U.S. got it's share. It got political clout because it could convince the paranoid naive voting public that it was fighting the war on drugs on the international front. If the local gang wars heated up over drugs, they just made more donations to Colombia, and publicized it the next day. And Colombia does it's part by making a large bust every month or so, and sending the footage to the American authorities. Mutually beneficial. Great Couple.

Back at the farm, it was more soup, more tangerines, more hammocking, more strolls for the valley views.

I ran into Carlo who I hadn't really talked to since the first night apartment gathering. He walked around with this permanent half grin on his face, like he just stuck a sleeping person's finger in warm water. And he seemed fond of the word 'totally', like he spent too much time watching bad 80's surf comedies. He wanted to know about my trip.

"Good. Scary. Strong. I'm still confused over whether I had a complete body cleansing or I saw the grim reality of life."

"Yeah man, totally. Typical when you haven't done it in awhile."

"And you?"

"Really smooth. Totally. Really happy. I'm always leaving the next day feeling so good. My job is real stressful man. And this keeps me clear and positive for weeks, and then I come back again."

"What's the deal with the other taita, Taita Antonio I think?"

"Oh, he's the main one. I think he is down in the south, in the jungle now. He knows a lot. Totally."

"Like if I had complex questions, he's the one to ask?"

"Yeah man, totally. He's the master. You know RamayanaKrishna, the pregnant one?"

"You can't forget her."

"Ha, yeah, well, man, you know he's the father of that baby. And that's not his first with a girl from the farm. Man, he's only twenty-five!"

"Yeah, I guess we all spend our whole lives looking for mutually beneficial partnerships."

I suppose there is a mystical world, where life takes on a different dimension, where monks and shamans turn into flying quarks and feral creatures, where mankind is rendered a worthless pawn in the creator's game, where enlightened ones can escape into a blissful vortex, and the spiritually inept are left to wallow in their own anxieties. But here, on terra firma, in the midst of the dream, shit never changes. That, I can deal with.