Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (6 page)

We go over to Mickey Ruskin’s restaurant at One University Place for dinner.

With William Burroughs
, 1997

‘. . .
IT IS NOT
for the anthropologist to attempt to usurp the role of the gods whose worship he studies.’ A quote from a standard textbook on the sociology of shamanism.

The path seems to wind uphill for ever, a thin drizzle laying its damp hand across your shoulders, as you stagger uncertainly over yet another bank of eroded clay, slipping into a dark grove of sodden banana plants. The surface of the path turns from a hard, compacted orange subsoil to a thick black mire mixed with jagged pebbles and rotting leaves, churned by the hooves of a thousand stamping horses which have passed this way before. You cast off your shoes and plunge knee-deep into the ooze, the
barrial
, toes squirming as you are sucked down to a narrow stream and through the flow of its icy waters – your body one transient slick of mud and sweat driving relentlessly through a slipping universe. Shooting star or retinal flare, after-image fading . . .

Slime-climb the next rise, grabbing hold of roots which slack and slap back, your butt-end falling through endless space to a single, solid curse: ‘What the
fuck
am I doing
here
?’ The gods thunder without lightning. Clouds sunder, yielding shaft-rays of luminous afternoon sun, pouring gold across the open valley. Flame sparkles on the leaves, tanager birds come out to strut, prance across and twitter, pearls of water casting reflections from their yellow feathers. The scent of sodden leaves, a curtain pierced as you break out across the open hillside, long grass itching, pricking, as it wipes blood and blister from your feet, shirt heaving in a cloud of steam.

And then – you hit that picture of a house, the first one since five miles back, since before the rain began. Brown mud walls, thatched roof, small outhouses made of split bamboo and rushes. A wooden mill, the sugar-cane crusher, set in the middle of a patch of horse-shit and vegetable debris. Dog barks, hens cackle. A couple of kids’ faces, covered with soot, loom out from the darkness at the door. Alarm. Man appears, leans against the wooden door frame, feigning nonchalance. He greets you with a suspicious smile.
Eucha
, you reply, careful to put the stress on the first syllable. You enquire as to the state of the path further on, you mention the names of some mutual friends.
Esh gueninga?
You offer some coca leaves, a little tobacco. You are asked indoors.

Enter one large square room with an open wood fire set on the floor over to one side. The smoke makes your eyes water. It has long covered all the rafters with a thick layer of the blackest grime, but you can make out a few net bags hanging above the fire, preserving dead meats, suspending cobs of red, black and yellow-speckled corn beyond the reach of hungry rodents. Beaten earth floor covered with cowhides, large dented pans and the occasional bundle of tattered woollen blankets. Maybe a half-dozen stools placed around the hearth, small blocks of wood a foot long by half across, carved anatomically to hold the body in a squatting pose, no more than three or four inches from the ground.

You sit – women and children retire to the other side of the fire and eye you with amazement. You are presented with an enamel bowl filled with about a pint of steaming soup –
mote
– containing maize and beans and cabbage, tasting strangely of a light wood ash used to dehusk the grains of corn, the whole effect somehow rotten and fermented, as if the vegetables have been sitting in water for a few days. Then, the inevitable questions: Where from? And what for? But most of all, why here?

Why, indeed. Hardly the right time to trundle out a string of platitudes about scientific models and methodologies, about the need for an abstract Mama Coca as a prop to structure your research.

Your answer, therefore, comes out direct and to the point, measured with a blade of tempered absence: ‘To learn how to chew coca . . .’

Your words are greeted with a smile. A knowing smile. A friendly smile, even. And yet an edge of doubt, of disbelief suspended only through cunning, a flash of mockery in the Indian’s eyes.

You spring forward – metaphorically baring your chest – preferring some direct, explicit repudiation to the dead weight of misunderstanding, hoping that some final encounter will at last shake off that ghostly academic identity carried with you like a shield,
muy estimado, Doctor
, allowing the field of enquiry to strike back and finally gobble you entire. Phrases like: ‘No more trying to become something while maintaining a critical distance from the process of becoming . . .’ – or even, curse the thought, ‘A rich confrontation between the thing itself and one’s own awareness of it . . .’
Logico, hermano, ni hablar
 . . .

Personal bees in your bonnet swatted, brought down by sudden hits of the specific. The next morning you may awake with a terrible rash spreading up your arm from the fingers to the elbow. You could rush out to smother the fact with some timely explanation, only to find that the tools of such a deliverance are no longer in your own hands – that in Tierradentro it is the Paez
te’ue
who call the shots. Rash on the right arm; that is a sign of something coming in. On the hand, notice, meaning that you have touched on things you would have done well to leave alone. Things like
sena
-magic? The coke business?

Or, wait a minute – the horror, the thrill, the dawning realisation – could not these trips be entirely tame in comparison to the overbearing Pride, the sheer aggressive witchcraft, underlying your belief in the scientific endeavour itself? The evidence is conclusive – so take it, your itch and show it to Eliozondo:

‘A
caspi
rash. An
ech
attack. Either you must leave Tierrandentro for ever, or . . .’

Accept that the persona of the mere rational scientist is dead – yes, dead, deaded, dead.

Eliozondo sits in a menacing huddle in the dark, moonless night, the thousand muscles of his body in
sena
-communication with the spirit legions of the rainbows, riverbeds, the springs and caves. Maybe he sees them in the flesh, hairy bodies moving in and out through the lace outlines of the undergrowth, their presence in his vision sending a cackle of reciprocal machine gun
senas
echoing through your body. Your I dissipates into a twinkling of an eye to eye. The earth, the sky no longer simply up and down, but curling over the edges, a drunken swirling around the dead point you call observation.

A rush of cold fear and nausea breaks across you like a wave. You take a long, hard suck on your wad of coca leaves – but you get no freeze this time, no substance, no hard edge with which to draw the line. Coca dissolves into a vortex of spinning head and swoon – a clammy sweat on the body, a final panic of bubbles as you go down and out – your choking voice from offstage blurting out a desperate ‘Hey, wait a minute . . .’ The axis of your sense perception spiralling down, telescoped into an empty hole – black, still, a vacuum . . .

You wake up to the perfect stillness of the dead. All is a play of light on darkness, everywhere a timeless sleep. A long, hollow roll of thunder. In front of you an old man with half a dozen coca bags slung around his neck.

You croak. ‘Are you?’

A green smile. Ground shudders, trees bend without any wind. Feel the tongue, frozen, speechless . . .

Awe and wonder as you are forced to recognise.

Mama Coca
, 1978

D
URING THE LONG
nights and long days I spent under the influence of cocaine in Yag’s room I came to see that what counts in life is not the events that surround one but the reflection of those events in one’s consciousness. Events may change, but insofar as the changes are not reflected in one’s consciousness their result is nil. Thus, for example, a man basking in the aura of his riches will continue to feel himself a millionaire so long as he is unaware that the bank where he keeps his capital has gone under; a man basking in the aura of his offspring will continue to feel himself a father until he learns that his child has been run over. Man lives not by the events surrounding him, therefore, but by the reflection of those events in his consciousness.

All of a man’s life – his work, his deeds, his will, his physical and mental prowess – is completely and utterly devoted to, fixed on bringing about, one or another event in the external world, though not so much to experience the event in itself as to experience the reflection of the event on his consciousness. And if, to take it all a step further, everything a man does he does to bring about only those events which, when reflected in his consciousness, will make him feel happiness and joy, then what he spontaneously reveals thereby is nothing less than the basic mechanism behind his life and the life of every man, evil and cruel or good and kind.

One man does everything in his power to overthrow the tsar, another to overthrow the revolutionary junta; one man wishes to strike it rich, another gives his fortune to the poor. Yet what do these contrasts show but the diversity of human activity, which serves at best (and not in every case) as a kind of individual personality index. The reason behind human activity, as diverse as that activity may be, is always one: man’s need to bring about events in the external world which, when reflected in his consciousness, will make him feel happiness.

So it was in my insignificant life as well. The road to the external event was well marked: I wished to become a rich and famous lawyer. It would seem I had only to take the road and follow it to the end, especially since I had much to recommend me (or so I tried to convince myself). But oddly enough, the more time I spent making my way towards the cherished goal, the more often I would stretch out on the couch in my dark room and imagine I was what I intended to become, my penchant for sloth and reverie persuading me that there was no point in laying out so great an expenditure of time and energy to bring the external events to fruition when my happiness would be all the stronger if the events leading up to it came about rapidly and unexpectedly.

But such was the force of habit that even in my dreams of happiness I thought chiefly of the event rather than the feeling of happiness, certain that the event (should it but occur) would lead to the happiness I desired. I was incapable of divorcing the two. The problem was that before I first came in contact with cocaine I assumed that happiness was an entity, while in fact all human happiness consists of a clever fusion of two elements: 1) the physical feeling of happiness, and 2) the external event providing the psychic impetus for that feeling. Not until I first tried cocaine did I see the light; not until then did I see that the external event I had dreamed of bringing about – the result I had been slaving day and night for and yet might never manage to achieve – the external event was essential only insofar as I needed its reflection to make me feel happy. What if, as I was convinced, a tiny speck of cocaine could provide my organism with instantaneous happiness on a scale I had never dreamed of before. Then the need for any event whatever disappeared and, with it, the need for expending great amounts of work, time and energy to bring it about.

Therein lay the power of cocaine – in its ability to produce a feeling of physical happiness psychically independent of all external events, even when the reflection of the events in my consciousness would otherwise have produced feelings of grief, depression and despair. And it was that property of the drug that exerted so terribly strong an attraction on me that I neither could nor would oppose or resist it. The only way I could have done so was if the feeling of happiness had come less from bringing about the external event than from the work, the effort, the energy invested in bringing it about. But that was a kind of happiness I had never known.