The Ordinary Seaman (40 page)

Soon Elias was sleeping with Tish, the resident adviser upstairs. She fell so desperately in love with Elias that she started coming to Mark for advice, and when Elias dropped her later, she was so overwrought she flunked all her finals and had to leave Bley for a term. Soon Elias was sleeping with some of the girls Mark used to sleep with, and often locked Davey out; Mark let Davey crash on his own floor a number of nights. And now, when girls came to his door late at night, often they wanted to talk about Elias, the hold he had over their hearts, this Mexicanized English seaman seducer or whatever the hell he was, this “man”—the girls often said so—among “boys.” Then one day Davey came to Mark’s door in tears because his girlfriend Elaine had come to visit him from Cornell and he’d had a three-hour lab class that day and now Elias was in there fucking Elaine with both Bread and Chavela Vargas turned up full volume.

That was a problem. That was terrible. Mark was ready to take a fire ax to the door, if that was what it took. He promised Davey he’d have a new roommate next term, no matter what. They went down the hall, and Mark rapped on the door, ready to give this arrogant son of a bitch hell. Davey sat on the floor with his hands over his face and then suddenly sprang to his feet and kicked at the door, cursing Elaine savagely and loudly.

Finally Elias opened the door, both stereos still pouring forth their ludicrous music. He yawned sleepily. “I was just having a nap,” Elias said calmly. “What’s the racket?”

Davey charged into the room and began looking in closets, calling Elaine as if he expected her to appear out of some fabulous hiding place, like genie smoke from under his putting pad.

“I thought Elaine left,” said Elias. “Didn’t she say good-bye?” He made a little smile at Mark and shrugged.

“He heard her in there with you,” said Mark.

“Bollocks, cabrón,” said Elias—Mark was familiar with neither word and must have looked puzzled. “She wasn’t,” said Elias. “Maybe you should advise him a little before I break his face.”

Now Davey was screaming hideously at Elias; even students from the floors downstairs and above were coming to see what it was all about.

“Do get a hold of yourself,” said Elias, putting a hand on Davey’s shoulder. Davey punched Elias; it connected and looked as if it hurt. After all, Davey, an empassioned golfer, was no weakling. To Mark’s amazement, Elias did not hit him back; he simply stood there glowering thoughtfully, rubbing his cheek as if he had a toothache.

“Where’s Elaine?” bawled Davey. “I heard her in there with you, I know I did. You fucking degenerate Mexican piece of dog shit.” In a tone of voice that made him sound like a strangling Holy Roller duck possessed by tongues, Davey was jabbering incoherently—this turned out to be his fed-up imitation of all the Mexican slang Elias had been insulting him with for months.

Again, Elias did not even bother to reply; he simply watched Davey’s performance with a saddened expression, then looked at Mark.

“Come with me,” said Mark. Elias followed Mark to his room, through the crowd in the hallway, their grinning or horrified expressions.

“She left through the window,” said Elias, with a thin, wry smile, seated on Mark’s couch. “A game girl, I’ll give her that. Chíngale. Tied sheets and T-shirts together, seaman’s knots, you know, tied it around her waist and lowered her down, while you all were trying to kick down my door. And then I lowered her suitcase down. Funny thing is, I don’t
think anybody even saw.” The rear of the dorm faced a paddleball court and woods. “She’s had it with that twot. He’ll never see her again. He’s all wrong for her. She’s mine now.”

Mark laughed, he couldn’t help it, Elias’s composure and self-possession struck him as hilarious. Elias’s winning heartlessness suddenly reminded him of his little sister, Linda.

“I suppose she’s on the bus to Ithaca now,” said Elias. “I’ll go see her in a few days. Funny, I almost went to school there myself, but they wanted me to start as a sophomore. Don’t have the time, güey.”

“Way
what?”

Elias spelled
güey
and shrugged. “Mexican word. Obviously, you weren’t paying attention to Davey’s Spanish lesson out there.”

“I think you should have a new roommate,” said Mark. “Actually, you should probably live alone.”

“Maybe I could take Tish’s room. I think I’d make a good resident adviser, don’t you?”

They stayed in Mark’s room talking and smoking pot until they heard Davey knocking at the door and Mark realized he’d forgotten all about him. God, he felt terrible, but Elias’s weed was really strong.

Mark stumbled out into the hallway. Davey’s eyes were puffy and red from weeping.

“You’re in there getting stoned with
him
?”

“I’m finding you a new roommate,” said Mark.

“Yeah, I know. But where’s Elaine?”

“I don’t know. Davey, are you sure you weren’t just hearing things? That would have been unbelievably cruel of her.”

Later that night he and Elias walked into town together for some beer and pizza at Onondaga Tavern, went there and a few other places together, trying to pick up town girls.

Streaking was in fashion, and in the middle of the long, terrible winters, especially during blizzards at night, Elias liked to sprint naked across the quad, screaming at the top of his lungs into the wind and snow. Stranger, he became somewhat obsessed with the preppies, who held themselves aloof from the rest of the student body. He began adopting
their words, especially when he addressed other preppies, calling them Ace and Sport. He began to dress like them too, in tweed jackets and pastel button-down shirts, baggy chinos or jeans, wore those clothes and nothing else when he went outside in winter, with the added embellishment of going barefoot. Elias went barefoot in winter, said it was good for the whole spirit, somewhat like walking on hot coals. Despite these peculiarities, the preppies even tried to rush him for their fraternity, inviting him to cocktails in their pillared southern, antebellum-style mansion with maid service, all those Benzes and BMWs parked out front. Soon, of course, Elias was seducing the preppie girls too. Mark was often at his side now during those and all other outings, though the preppies still wanted nothing to do with him. No matter how hard and sweetly he tried to charm, they were barely polite, and soon Mark often felt as unhappy as he had in high school.

That summer, while Mark went home to New Hampshire and worked as a waiter in a tourist hotel, Elias went to the Amazon, found work as an assistant river guide for an adventure tourist operation, and contrived to get full course credits for all of it. He came back for the winter term, to graduate. Now Elias was full of stories about shamans and taking a drug called ayahuasca that made you vomit and shit all over the place before taking you off on incredible twenty-four-hour trips during which your spirit merged with those of jungle and river animals; he’d turned into a jaguar and a pink river dolphin. The notion of such a drug did not appeal to Mark, but he pretended he couldn’t wait to return to the Amazon with Elias and try it himself. Someday, yeah, man, maybe they’d go into business there: have their own adventure expedition company, find ways to market the medicinal marvels of the shamans, buy one of those old-fashioned steam-paddle riverboats and turn it into a floating, very hip hotel, open a beach bar in Rio. Great life, Mark. You want to spend the rest of your life in a suit, in some bleak little office? It’s not like you’re getting into Harvard Law, is it?

Immediately after graduating from Bley, Mark moved to New York City with his new girlfriend, Mindy Olin, who wanted to be an actress; they both waited tables. Mark and Mindy broke up, and he
moved to the Lower East Side. He went on waiting tables, and lost himself in the rocker night life, CBGB, Barnabas Rex, Mudd Club, the years plowing by through a sludge of stuporous late nights, drugs and alcohol, minor fashion adjustments, and downtown women variously tuned to a muffled key of desperation, Mark harmonizing with them well enough. Elias often wrote, and visited at least once a year, sometimes staying with Mark in one dingy apartment after another for as long as six months. For a while Elias was making good money trapping baby spider monkeys in the jungle, selling them to the pet trade. He assured Mark that he did this as humanely as possible, employing Amazon Indians who used blowguns to incapacitate the mother monkeys, the darts coated with nonlethal doses of
curare,
just enough to knock them out awhile, the dart points left sharp and smooth so that they’d be easy for the mother monkeys to pull out, and then Elias and his “boys” would climb up into the trees to go after the baby monkeys with nets. (Elias told that story in CBGB’s one night and a German punk girl spit in his face and started to cry.) He attached himself to one Amazon adventure travel outfit after another, keeping up his interest in medicinal plants and natural hallucinogens; once, Elias was hired to serve as guide for a group of physicians and medical specialists from the United States who wanted to witness firsthand the way Amazon shamans treated people’s health deep in the rain forest. One was a young woman physician who was also a licensed naturopath and had incorporated herbal and homeopathic treatments into her practice. She and Elias almost married; she spent months at a time with him in the apartment he kept in Iquitos, Peru, studying medicinal plants and trees with the licensed shamans who ran their own clinics there almost like Western doctors, buying their cuttings, bark, and roots from the river and forest people who journeyed to Iquitos to sell them. After they broke up, Elias went to sea again, signing onto a freighter as third engineer out of Santos, Brazil. (Peru’s Sendero Luminoso rebels were then a furtive presence in the Upper Amazon, ruining the adventure tourist trade for years.) He lived in London for two years and enrolled in a homeopathic medicine institute there. He returned, briefly, to the Amazon. He spent a year
in Mexico as first mate on a yacht that took tourists deep-sea fishing out of Isla Mujeres, owned and captained by an old schoolmate from La Escuela Náutica. Back in the Amazon, he worked the specialty timber trade as the front man for a Swedish investor he’d met in Mexico City, procuring cargoes of a relatively rare deep-forest tree whose wood is naturally blue for export to fashionable furniture makers in Europe. On vacation in Rio he met the young conceptualist photographer Kate Puerifoy, who was having a show at a gallery there, her famous series of gigantic photographic flip books illustrating midwestern recipes. They fell torridly in love, and Elias followed her up to New York, staying in the apartment where Mark had been living with Sue for two years already, and with Miracle—Miracle had been a birthday present, a puppy waiting for him inside a cardboard box at the breakfast table—until finally Kate decided she was ready to let Elias move into her newly purchased loft. Elias and Kate were married a year later. That was three years ago.

In all the years that Elias was in and out of the Amazon, Mark only visited him there once. In Iquitos’s floating slum of Belém, amidst the river traffic of long dugout canoes and barges bringing in all the nibbled wealth of the Amazon forests and rivers, he and Elias drank a liquor made from fermented monkey testicles that was supposed to increase your sexual potency, though there was no way he was having sex with one of those painted up, sweaty little Iquitos whores, attractive as their sprightly, small-breasted bodies were. And no, he didn’t want to try ayahuasca, he already had diarrhea, thanks. But Elias really put himself out to give his friend a true Amazon experience; they boarded some kind of long, narrow, screened-in riverboat-bus called the Worm and slowly chugged downriver in nonstop rain for two days, struggling with the passengers—mainly people from little river towns who’d come to Iquitos to sell one thing or another—for places to hang their hammocks. Many traveled with live chickens roped together by the claws into giant, multieyed dusters. They got off in a desolate little river village where everyone lived in wooden huts elevated on palm-trunk stilts over a sopping, muddy marsh. There they borrowed a dugout canoe and Mark
sat in the bow under his poncho, already out of cigarettes, miserably steaming, his skin colandered with insect bites, shining a flashlight ahead, while Elias paddled them up a tributary at night, making his way around and under fallen trees so expertly that Mark was not once smashed in the face by a looming branch, though there were some close calls. Fish kept jumping into their canoe, thudding around on the floor, some of them as dangerously horned and plated as miniature rhinos; some flopped back into the water, and one, leaping out of the dark, crashed into Mark’s chest with the force of a flying wet dog. Some of the fish were piranha, chuckled Elias. Now and then Elias stopped paddling and swept his own flashlight’s beam along the banks, looking for the red eyes of crocodiles. Mark made sure he kept his hands inside the canoe. Or Elias stopped and stood up in the canoe with his hands cupped around his nose and mouth, making strange snorting and grunting sounds, claiming that he could hear wild boar stampeding through the forest and that he was calling to them. Elias stopped the canoe midstream, and Mark sat face to face with a poisonous, lime green frog the size of a basketball, perched in a crook of a tree fallen into the river. Finally they reached their destination, a river hamlet even smaller and more ramshackle than the last one. Here lived Elias’s great shaman buddy, Cumpashin, with his family: apparently everyone in the village was his relative, and they’d followed him here out of some even more remote, dark place in the forest, a place so wet and mushy, said Elias, that they thought stones were magical objects because the only stones they ever saw there had been brought from far away.

Oh well. Something to tell your grandkids about. Cumpashin
was
a riot. Mark hardly grasped a thing that went down for the next three days. Cumpashín and his, Mark guessed,
immediate
family lived in one of those elevated huts, a big one, with no walls, a floor made of thin, springy slats cut from a bamboolike palm that somehow you didn’t fall through, which also supported a sandbox for cooking fires; a thatched roof, with an attic, which Cumpashin was always climbing up into, bringing down jaguar skulls and pelts, long blowguns and a double-barreled shotgun, all his stuff. There were animals and kids and mothers
and wives all over the place. Cumpashin had named one of his sons Elias, another Thriller, and he had a little daughter named Elvis. (The more intrepid adventure travel outfits had been coming through the area for years.) All of them, including some of the animals, slept in hammocks; Elias and Mark hung their own hammocks in Cumpashín’s big, happy “house.” Cumpashín changed his headdress, made from the feathers of all different birds, about three times a day; he wore necklaces made out of jaguar teeth. The women wore loose, ragged T-shirts like dresses, and intricate necklaces and bracelets made of porcupine quills and colored seeds. Cumpashín had hardly any teeth, a smooth, brown jack-o’-lantern of a face, and always went shirtless, wearing frayed black jeans. He had the build and muscle tone of a lightweight boxer.