SOUTH AMERICA
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma,
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma . . .
I am a sincere man from where the palm tree grows,
And before I die I want to share these verses of my soul . . .
—José Martí, from “Guantanamera”
When I showed up for my final day of high school in 1972 I had thirty joints rolled up in my pocket. I had seen a Western movie about this one-armed cowboy named Lefty who could roll a perfect cigarette with only one hand, and I was so impressed I became an expert joint roller. I lit each joint, took a hit, and then passed it to the other students on the quad. There was a huge cloud of marijuana smoke over Bethesda, Maryland, that day. Twenty years later my wife’s cousin, who was a hair stylist in Virginia, mentioned to a customer that Deb had married Gary Himelfarb (a.k.a. Doctor Dread). Her client said she had gone to high school with me and told her this same story about how I had the whole quad immersed in a huge cloud of marijuana smoke. I guess this is how urban legends get started. I did not care much about the possible repercussions as I was going off to South America in a few days.
Most of my fellow students were going to college to become doctors or lawyers, but I had worked my final year of high school at a piss lab in downtown DC and had saved up a good amount of money. The lab was pretty disgusting. We would test the piss of soldiers and heroin addicts to see if they were using drugs. It was the worst job I ever had. I would pour urine samples into test tubes that had a reactive chemical agent which could then be analyzed to see if there were drugs in the urine. I always came to work wasted and would pour red wine into grape soda bottles so I could drink during my shift to put up with the environment. I also used to drive around to methadone clinics across the city and pick up urine samples in this big old station wagon. I saw firsthand how down-and-out these junkies looked—and although I have tried almost every drug known to man, I never, ever stuck a needle in my arm. I was so turned off by the predicament of these junkies that it kept me from going too far down that road. No thanks.
I was only seventeen but I was ready to go out and experience the real world and get away from what I considered to be a suburb filled with Naugahyde chairs and people whose whole lives were dedicated to making money and raising families. (In retrospect, I admit that there is nothing wrong with this, and maybe that is what the American dream is all about.) I was running away. A friend named Tom Quinn was stationed in Bogotá as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He had sent numerous letters to my friend Charlie Becker and told him that we could come visit him and stay on his farm in Popayán, Colombia. It seemed like an exciting adventure, so I boarded a plane by myself and flew into Barranquilla on the north coast. Little did I know that this would sow a seed of wanderlust in me that took root and has stayed with me my entire life. My awe at meeting people of all different cultures and social backgrounds would become a reason for my very existence. This way of becoming worldly is something I have tried to pass on to my family.
On this first trip to Colombia, I stayed at a small hotel in Santa Marta and hung around with a bunch of Colombians my age, picking up Spanish very quickly. I had a girlfriend Nora there, and it’s easier to learn another language if you have a partner to help teach you. After two weeks I began to dream in Spanish and that is when I knew my transition from American to Latino was really coming on. Nora and I visited her parents in Bucaramanga but I was a scruffy hippie and was never welcomed into her family. After going back to Santa Marta I had the harebrained idea that I could sell weed to tourists who frequented the outdoor cafés along the coast there. I would put it in little airmail envelopes and carry them in my muchilla. I talked to a Colombian about buying some, and the next thing I knew there were two police officers in their green uniforms standing over me. They led me off to the police station and looked in my bag and found all these envelopes of marijuana. What the fuck was I thinking? I was thrown in jail, and I can tell you that Colombian jails are no four-star accommodation. Drifting asleep in my cell I would be awakened by rats that would come from out of the walls, and I had to stomp on the floor to chase them away. Maybe this is why I became such a light sleeper. It was an extremely unpleasant experience, as there is nothing worse (nothing!) than losing your freedom. It was not an easy week for me but I got through it and was soon set free.
My next trip to Colombia came about six months later. My friend Tui and I drove in my Volvo P1800 sports car to stay with my aunt and uncle in Florida so we could fly the cheapest way to Barranquilla on Avianca Airlines. My parents had bought me this car for my seventeenth birthday and I loved driving it. They handed me the keys and said it was mine and I think I was the happiest kid on the planet. I learned how to drive a stick shift on this little sports car and I believe this is when my love affair with cool automobiles first germinated inside me.
Tui was a big blues fan and had turned me on to the blues in high school. Lots of blues. He was also the first person who ever played reggae music for me. It was 1972, and I had just returned from that first trip to South America. He played Bob Marley and the sound track to The Harder They Come. I was completely blown away. Having soaked up the tropics and experienced a new culture made me ripe for this island beat. And the powerful message of Bob Marley spoke to my political and spiritual sensibilities. Tui likes to laugh and say that he created a monster. I was already known as “The Doctor” at the time, and this is where the embryonic “Doctor Dread” first came into being. I can never forget sitting in his house on MacArthur Boulevard in Washington, DC, and hearing those records.
In Colombia, Tui and I rented a house outside of Santa Marta with some other travelers we met. We were up in the mountains, and houses would go for around five or ten dollars a month. We would string up hammocks to sleep in, smoke lots of dope, and find food each day in the markets. It was a mellow existence and the time passed slowly. There were jugo stands in the Santa Marta market where we would get all kinds of incredible fruit smoothies. A vendor there once circled our truck and shouted out, “Chicharones, chicharones!” I loved the way that word sounded, so I decided to buy whatever it was he was selling. When I opened the wrapper, I discovered pig skin with these repulsive little hairs sticking out. I was a vegetarian, so I gave them away to someone else on the truck, but I still laugh whenever I see people eating pork rinds. Chi-cha-ron-es!!!
One day we went to this river that had twenty-five-year-old mango trees all around it. It was a rocky river with many pools cascading down a beautiful tropical mountain. All these Colombian kids were jumping into the water and eating mangoes. We would sit in the trees and eat the mangoes, then cool off in the pools of water. Once, we gathered up more than 250 mangoes into burlap bags and brought them back to our place, which is an image that will remain in my mind forever. And I asked myself then why this was not as good as being in an American suburb with its homogeneous society with picket fences and tacky little boxes. These Colombian kids all had big smiles on their faces and the surroundings were magical.
After hanging around the north coast for a while we eventually made our way down to Medellin and Cali. We traveled by bus, and there was wild cumbia music blasting the entire trip, which—along with the live chickens and goats onboard and the constant threat of someone ripping off our backpacks—made it difficult to sleep. Our plan was to score some weed in Cali and then head on to San Agustín. The pre-Colombian Indians had built a number of stone idols all around San Agustín, so the place was considered sacred. It was also known as an area where people were taking psilocybin mushrooms and many American and European hippies had made their way there to experiment with these mind-altering hallucinogenics.
One afternoon, we were sitting in a park in Cali when we were approached by two Colombians who looked like hippies. (Of course I had on my colorful Ecuadorian poncho.) The four of us went back to our hotel room and Tui and I expressed our desire to buy a pound of weed—and that we wanted the very best. It was decided that I would go with the one guy and Tui would remain back in the room with his friend.
We headed into some ghetto neighborhood and into a house and found this rough-looking guy and his wife. She was cooking and he had some different types of weed for me to try. I sampled the first one and said, “No, I need better.” The second one did not pass the test either. I took one hit of the third one and immediately said, “Yes, this is the one.” He told me to give him the money and he would go and get the weed for me. I refused. He said that is how it works and I explained that I could not trust him. He said it could not happen any other way, so I gave him the money but told him if he did not return that I would do something crazy like kill his wife.
I peered out a little crack in the door and watched him talking to one of those green-uniform cops on the street. I was sure I was being set up. I had already spent time in a Colombian jail and had no intention of returning. Typical story: Gringo gives dealer money for weed. Dealer gives weed to gringo and has cops waiting to bust him. Dealer and cops split the money, dealer gets his weed back, and gringo goes to jail.
I was nervous as hell. The guy from the park who was in the house with me assured me everything was okay. Soon the dealer came back with the brick of weed. I quickly examined it and put it in the back of my pants, covered up by my poncho. The two of us then left the house and caught a taxi to the hotel. Tui and the other Colombian dude were sitting there waiting for us. When I took out the weed and we started to roll it up, the Colombians exclaimed, “Ay, carajo, es la sinsemilla!”
The small green buds had red hairs, and amazingly there were no seeds. Sinsemilla is a Spanish word meaning without seeds. It was 1973, and I will challenge anyone to say they knew about sinsemilla this early. That first hit was nice, but I never expected something this monumental. The rest is history.
You may wonder why I speak so openly about marijuana. Weed. Ganja. Kushumpeng. It has many names and also many uses. This is a plant that Jah put onto this earth. And I cannot overstand how a plant can be made illegal. Weed never killed anybody. If you smoke too much you will most likely just fall asleep. You cannot OD on it. Alcohol makes some people mean and get into fights. Marijuana makes you mellow and not want to fight. So many deaths each year are caused by drunk drivers, but I do not believe there are statistics which confirm deaths from the use of marijuana in car accidents. Drunk people go into violent rages and hit their wives or kids. Marijuana does not do that to you. In a city like Amsterdam where weed is essentially legal, people are not lighting up all over the place. People are not trying to get kids “hooked” on marijuana. No one is pushing it on you in some alley or dark corner of a park. It is all very civilized. The people who choose to smoke do so respectfully and those who do not care to smoke go about their lives. No big deal.
The same can be said for the coca plant. Many Indians in South America use the coca leaf to combat the ill-effects of high altitude. And they use it for endurance for the longs walks to and from their villages. Jah also put the coca plant here on this earth.
But cocaine is different. Cocaine is made by man. And it is addictive and makes people do crazy things and ruins lots of people’s lives. So I do differentiate between what is a natural plant and what is a drug. And even though I do not use marijuana anymore (the main reason being that when I do smoke, my brain starts going a million miles an hour and is filled with a preponderance of thoughts I cannot control until I begin to mellow into my high about an hour later), I still cannot believe this is considered an illegal drug. It is almost legal in many states, and I am sure it could provide much-needed revenues for our suffering economy. The healing of the nation. But time is the master and time will tell us what will be. For I and I marijuana is just a simple plant whose benefits have been overlooked by mainstream society.
So Tui and I continued on our way to San Agustín. It was an extremely long bus ride deep into the mountains. There was a hotel in town where all the foreigners stayed and where we found our friend Charlie Becker from high school, who had first told us about the marvels of Colombia. The three of us decided to rent a house, where we ate lots of fried plantains and did lots of mushrooms and explored the culture of the pre-Colombian people.
After a while, Tui and I ended up going back to Bogotá to experience some of what the capital had to offer. We found a steam room that used eucalyptus to open up your pores and we bought some cocaine and snorted it and went inside. I am not sure if we thought this up ourselves or had been told to try it. But just like Vicks VapoRub (which is made from eucalyptus) opens you up when you are congested, the eucalyptus opened up the nasal passages and the steam carried the effects of cocaine to the brain. It really was “cocaine, all around my brain.”
We then flew back home to Miami. The Volvo P1800 was waiting there and we made the trip back up I-95 to DC.
* * *
At the time, my oldest brother Steve and his wife Judy were living in upstate New York. I had always looked up to Steve; of my three brothers, he and I were the closest and had the most similar lifestyle. He liked the hippie culture, though I was more of a militant and was reading Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and thinking about politics instead of just getting high. I remember my mom once found a copy of Revolution for the Hell of It and blamed it on Steve and he took the rap for me. My parents could never have imagined their sixteen-year-old would be reading such radical literature.
Steve had fallen into being a caretaker with a bunch of other people at a 440-acre estate in the Shawangunk Mountains. This was owned by an eccentric New Yorker named Thomas Ketchum who would sometimes come up and visit from the city. He went around pretending to be a priest, and I guess that was part of his persona, but he was wacky as a lunatic and he let all these hippies stay on his property almost rent-free. There was a massive Tudor mansion that had been a lodge, along with two smaller houses. The large house was occupied by the Intense Space Circus (a band that frequently played in Woodstock and would rehearse endlessly in the mansion) and the Theatre of Madness (a drama group who would do performances back in the city). The ice house was a small building occupied by my brother’s best friend Steve Berman and his girlfriend Amy. My brother Steve and Judy were in another cottage over a garage.
I drove my Volvo P1800 up there and stayed with them. Some of us got menial jobs in the mountains but most of our time was spent hiking to the far cliffs, hanging out in the streams or in our teepee sauna, gardening, or tending to our goats. Steve and Judy really took good care of me and never put any pressure on me.
Soon a girl named Ava and her boyfriend Steve Cochran moved up to the area and rented a trailer not far from where we lived. I have always believed in the chemical attraction between people that it is fundamental to any deep relationship. And this attraction can turn sexual if that chemical reacts in the right way. It was obvious that Ava and I had that attraction, and before long Steve moved out and it was Ava and me in that trailer. Ava was my first true love. We were soul mates. She was from New York and somehow related to the actor Gene Tierney.
Eventually, Ava and I moved into the ice house where we lived the hippie lifestyle. We would lay in bed during the day and drink red wine and smoke weed and walk in the woods and talk about life and going to South America together. Ava was also a true nymphomaniac. That can be a good thing and it can also be a not-so-good thing. She said she lived to experience her next orgasm and that it was sex that she craved and wanted all the time. I was a novice but Ava taught me well. It did not matter where or when, it just mattered that we did it. She was a year younger than me but she had that New York City style and was so wild and free and I knew she could not be tamed. Freedom is a very precious commodity and allowing someone to be free and be themselves is one of the greatest gifts you can bestow. Allowing someone to just be who they are and not putting pressure on them to be something else. Accepting the good and bad we all have within ourselves.
Avacado and I were inseparable. We did everything together. We did acid and got high and really connected on a profound level. We once drove into New York and snuck into Madison Square Garden to see Bob Dylan and the Band perform. We were discovered hiding in a small closet in a dressing room but they let us stay anyway since we explained how we had come all the way from upstate and had no money. I remember Bob sitting at the piano that night and playing “Ballad of a Thin Man” and hallucinating as the stage moved up and down. I was not on drugs; it was just such an intense moment with those chords banging out from the piano that the whole place was moving around. The only other time that happened to me was at a Stevie Wonder show. That is the power of music.
* * *
I sold my Volvo P1800 for $1,700 and we got some more money together and booked our flights to Colombia. As usual we flew into Barranquilla, which was the closest city in Colombia to Miami. We spent time around the Santa Marta area and rented a house up in the mountains. Early on we made a trip high into the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the last of the true Arawak Indians lived. These people, the Kogi, are the same as the Carib Indians who were the original inhabitants of the Caribbean, including Jamaica, before Chris Columbus and subsequent Spanish explorers came and wiped them out. We encountered them as we hiked through these high mountains. They made their own clothes and chewed coca leaves. But the Kogi were not friendly and preferred to live away from the rest of society, so we did not really get the chance to know them.
Returning to our house in the mountains, we lived simply. It was a lesson in the basic task of feeding yourself each day so you can make it to tomorrow. It is amazing how many people on this planet live this way and never drive through a McDonald’s to find their daily bread. But we were happy and in love. One time we took a trip up the coast from Santa Marta toward Venezuela. We were on a desolate beach where we decided to sleep our first night. The next day we were making love just out in the open on this isolated stretch of sand when I looked behind me and saw these young Colombian kids peering from behind some rocks with their thumbs up in the air, whistling with big smiles on their faces. I got up and chased them away but inside I was laughing. When we returned to our mountain house we realized we were covered with thousands of sand ticks. We got out the alcohol and scrubbed every inch of our bodies and finally killed them all off. Another adventure in paradise.
We spent about six weeks on the north coast. You could only get ninety-day visas when you entered Colombia so our plan was to stay in the country for three months and then head to Ecuador and get our visas renewed when we returned. We traveled by bus and settled into a small town near Cali. One day we went to the park there and encountered a man who offered to sell us a monkey, which we thought might make a nice addition to our country home. The monkey was asleep, but the man assured us it was just tired and not sick. We took the monkey back to our hotel room where it continued to rest all day. But then, late that night, the monkey started to attack us with its claws—it turned out to be a fierce, nocturnal jungle creature called an “oso arquero” (ant-eating bear). We were stuck with it in the hotel room all night and it was like being trapped in a horror film.
Another afternoon, we went to our neighbor’s house for a visit. In Colombia almost everyone has a pot of coffee on the stove at all times. I had brought my Spanish-English dictionary with me and was going through it with my elderly neighbor. I came across the word judeo (Jew) and asked what that meant to her. Her response was, “Those who killed God.” These were her exact words. During our travels through the country, Ava and I had noticed that as the bus approached each small town, the largest and most obvious building was always the church. And teaching people that the Jews killed God was a fundamental part of their Catholic indoctrination.
Another time in Cali we went to receive a package at the main post office from Ava’s mom in New York City. We were both strict vegetarians at the time and her mom had sent a care package with peanut butter and other healthy foods we couldn’t find there. When we took possession of the package we noticed it had been rifled through and that a number of items were missing. We were both pissed and started to berate the postal employees. Us two hippies heaping upon them as much antiestablishment bullshit as we could come up with. When we left, I slammed the large glass door and it smashed into pieces. Oh shit. There was a big scene and the cops came and arrested me. They put me into the back of a jeep and we were driving off through some backstreets when the cops stopped to talk to some people they saw. We were just sitting there so I decided I would make a run for it; when I noticed they were deep into their conversation, I jumped out the back of the jeep and tried to make my getaway.
I was sprinting at top speed when I heard the boom of a gunshot ring out. I never froze so fast in my life. The head cop ran up to me and punched me in the face and I hit the ground. My advice to you if you are ever running from the cops and you hear a gunshot ring out is to stop running. You never know where that next gunshot may end up. They threw me in jail and the warden grilled me about how I had ended up the way I was. How I only owned one pair of jeans. How I had not cut my hair or beard for many years. He actually seemed perplexed about why and how I was living the way I was. As I sit here now and reminisce, I cannot even answer these questions myself. I had rebelled to such an extent against society that I had gone way overboard. We would not allow any mirrors in our home; maybe we were trying to prove that appearances were not important. This rebelliousness had really taken over and I am not sure from where it had come. The warden let me go the next day and told me to get myself together.
Ava and I were reunited and decided it was time to make our way down to Ecuador. We got onto the bus with all the possessions we owned, which fit into our backpacks. We were of the Jack Kerouac generation and lived day-to-day with no intention of garnering material possessions. We were “on the road” and trying to experience life to its fullest by seeing what we could learn and take away from our experiences.
We entered into Ecuador and the whole vibe of the people changed. It was very tranquilo and not as intense as Colombia. Being the simpleminded person that I was, I attributed this to the fact that the people there were not all jacked up on caffeine. We had read up about Ecuador and decided to make our way to a small town in the south of the country called Vilcabamba. Both Ava and I were interested in herbs and we had read about how the people there lived to be well over one hundred years old, so we wanted to see if we could discover some of the reasons for their longevity. We slowly made our way there with stops in the capital Quito, then Cuenca, then Loja, before reaching Vilcabamba.
We rented a house two hours by foot outside of town, way up in the valleys that surrounded Vilcabamba. We had no running water or electricity. There was no road. No cars. It was very remote, but it sat in a nice valley with pasture land all around it and some other small houses farther up the way.
We soon made friends with a man named Miguel Carpio who was 127 years old. Yes, that is correct. National Geographic eventually did a story on this place and a few books were also written about it. I remember one day in town when all the people over a hundred years old came in for a group portrait. It really was amazing. The town was on the eastern slope of the Andes and it felt like it was shielded. And the people all consumed food that was grown right there in that valley. Even the tobacco was grown there and they all rolled their own cigarettes. Nothing was produced from outside their area. It was a completely natural and healthy lifestyle and the people there only used herbal remedies and no medicines from outside of the region. The people of Vilcabamba drank lemon balm tea every day. Lemon balm is in the mint family and grows prolifically where there is water and spreads just like mint. There it was called lemoncilla, but it was the very same lemon balm. Needless to say, I always have a large patch of this in my yard and my family is always drinking it. And I give it away to friends so they can plant it. I also began to learn about herbs at this time through books like A Modern Herbal by Margaret Grieve from the early 1900s and Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, and through the likes of Johnny Lovewisdom, who had settled in South America and made discoveries about the healing properties of papaya and raw foods when Western medicine couldn’t treat his liver problems.
One day Ava and I noticed some San Pedro cacti growing on the hillside behind our house. This is a seven-sided cactus and is the one that contains mescaline. You have to carefully remove the waxy outer layer and spines and then make sure you do not cut into the white part that contains poisonous strychnine. It is only the thin green layer you want to ingest. I was of course known as The Doctor and I was studying herbs and plants and had probably prescribed one or two drugs in my time and always wanted to learn more about psychotropic substances. We knew the mescalito would induce vomiting as this was its way of cleansing the body. We slowly transcended into a very high and spiritual place. It was mellow but clearly psychedelic. Much different from the acid I had taken which always came on like a gangbuster and had a much less organic feel. As we sat outside our house on that hot sunny day getting higher and higher, who should show up but our landlord, who also happened to be a policeman. He was dressed in his green uniform and had decided to take a Sunday stroll up to the house to see how his tenants were doing. It didn’t matter; we were in such a different place and not completely on the earth that we were able to just quietly sit and talk with him and let him know everything was okay. I am sure he felt it was unusual to have two hippie gringos renting this house so far up in the mountains, but maybe since he could not understand it he did not see any harm in it.
Many years later back in Washington, DC, I was working at the Warner Theatre and was backstage with the Jerry Garcia Band. They took The Doctor back to see Jerry and he was alone in a room with a small amp just noodling around on his electric guitar. Just the two of us hanging out. We were sitting there sniffing cocaine and rapping a little bit and it was a very cool vibe. Later, before the group went on stage, they gathered in a prayer circle and passed around a bottle of mescaline. I had been asked to be part of the circle and when the bottle was handed to me, I passed it on and did not partake. I have wondered what might have happened if I’d ended up tripping with Jerry and his Grateful Dead cohorts and if I would have been welcomed into their entourage and even worked for the band. Jah had a different destiny in store for me, and that would be the world of reggae and Jamaica and I am glad it turned out that way, as I am sure I would have burned out quickly in the world of the Dead.
Ava and I cut down a stalk of bananas from some land near us one time and hung it in our house. Late that night we heard some rocks landing on our roof. Then we heard people yelling from up above us. It was pitch-black in those mountains. Apparently we had inadvertently stolen the bananas, and the owners were furious. Plus, we were hippie foreigners and maybe we were not welcome. As terror rained down on our house that night, we were scared for our lives. We did not realize we had taken something from somebody. We had thought these were just plants that were growing naturally in the valley where we lived. I was screaming and saying I had a machete and I would fight to the death if need be. Believe me. That was a very long night and I learned an invaluable lesson that has stuck with me forever and that fits into the Rastafari lifestyle I eventually adopted: I will never take something that is not mine. I cannot steal. I cannot cheat. Those people were right to want to stone us for taking what was theirs. It still brings sorrow to me when I think of that night and how terrifying it was.
I am not sure if it was related to the stress of that night, but a week later both Ava and I came down with a severe case of hepatitis. We had been drinking the water from a stream in front of our house in which cows were defecating; this was the perfect scenario for contracting hepatitis. We should have been boiling the water but had neglected to do so and the result was yellow, jaundiced eyes and fingernails, urine the color of Coca-Cola, and total lethargy. We were very weak and needed to take care of ourselves so we went to the main hotel in town and were put up by an acquaintance named Raul Mendoza. We needed rest as we treated ourselves herbally, so we took a room there for over a month. We ate lots of papaya and drank lots of parsley tea. Parsley is a diuretic which makes you piss a lot, so I figured the more urine that went through and washed out the liver, the quicker we would get healed. We slowly began to eat, starting with potatoes and some other bland foods to get us back on track.
We were so naïve that when Raul had invited us to the hotel to recuperate, we did not realize we would be charged for our stay there. Raul ended up writing to my parents and demanding money for our stay, and there were even threats of him kidnapping us if we didn’t pay—things had really gotten out of hand. My parents contacted the State Department and all these telexes alerted the US Embassy in Ecuador what was going on with us. I am not sure whatever happened with the outrageously high hotel bill, but it must have gotten paid somehow.
After we were well enough to hit the road, Ava and I packed up and headed north. We stopped in Quito, checked out the equator, where you can literally stand with a foot in each hemisphere, and we ended up staying at a yoga retreat just outside the city which was owned by an American who had at one time been Mr. Universe. The next day I visited the produce market with my long hair and beard and sandals and was given more fruits and vegetables than I could carry by the local women—they just kept coming up to me and piling them on. I had often used the phrase “Dios le paga” when people asked me to pay for what I was purchasing, as this literally meant that “God will pay.” I guess that day it had finally borne fruit.
We wanted to get to know the Indian culture better and set out for Otavalo, which has a native population who are direct descendents of the Incas. There, we learned of three small villages nearby where the people were almost 100 percent Indios. We set out the next day for Ilumán. We asked some people if they knew of any houses for rent. They did not understand this concept at all but we were told that the Cordoba family had a vacant home. We met the family and told them we could pay them a fee for staying there. They showed us a small one-room mud house in the cornfield behind their primary home.
These people were pure Indian and some of the most beautiful humans I have ever met on the face of this Earth. They worshipped the sun and the rain and family and life. They were natural and lived from their land. Ava and I were still recovering from our hepatitis and needed to keep resting and taking things slow. The Cordoba family was incredibly welcoming to us and would include us at many of their dinners. We became friends with all of them. The women would carry large bundles of wood from up on the mountain to use for cooking. I remember one day going up there and offering to help carry down a bundle and completely collapsing under its weight. Everyone was laughing, including me, as I struggled to get back to my feet. I decided to leave the heavy lifting to the Indian women.
Life in Ilumán was an amazing experience. We saw how the Indians would weave their beautiful clothes and Tomás Cordoba showed me how to work the loom. Although he did not know what arithmetic was, the way he explained to me how he created his patterns into his weave was akin to a higher form of math. They grew vines of beans along rows of corn, and by eating corn and beans together they were consuming fifteen of the eighteen essential amino acids the body is looking for each day. They did not read this in a book; it just evolved over thousands of years and their bodies somehow let them know this is what they needed. As Ava and I were both vegetarians, we found this fascinating and we basked in the wonderment of their culture.
We learned some of the Incan native language Quechua. The Incas had a massive empire in South America in 1500 that reached all the way from Ecuador into Peru and Bolivia. Most people in Ilumán continued to speak Quechua and some did not even know Spanish. The Quechua language had no alphabet until 1975, though it is perhaps thousands of years old. When the conquistadores first came to South America, the Indians were astonished how when they dismounted their horses, one being turned into two. And likewise, the conquistadores were amazed at how advanced this culture was, with vast acres of agriculture and so much gold and beautiful art. The Europeans’ lust for the gold and riches caused them to just take what they so desired and decimate an entire culture. And the Church with its missionaries played right along.
I remember one day the Cordobas returned from Otavalo on a Saturday, which was market day. The Catholic priests would always walk through the market with a collection plate and ask the people for money. The Cordobas asked me if I knew what “hell” was, and if such a place actually existed. They had been told by the priests that if they did not turn their lives over to Jesus and support the Church with monetary donations, they would end up in that horrible place. This made me so angry. Why did priests need to introduce this concept to these people who just wanted to live naturally? Who gave thanks for what they had and worshipped the sun and the rain and the simple things that made their lives work? I told them there was no such thing as hell and that the priest was a liar. Un mentiroso.
This incident later reminded me of the Bob Marley song “Talkin’ Blues,” where he sings, “And I feel like bombing a church / now that I know that the preacher is lying.” I hadn’t previously understood the real meaning of these words, but now it made sense: how dare a religion lay such a heavy burden on these people. In every town we passed through, the church was always the most prominent building, right in the center of the village; the rebel in me was so disturbed that I realized I would never be able to reconcile the injustices perpetrated by the evil forces of Babylon and Rome and the Church. And now that the Church has been exposed for allowing the sodomizing of young boys by priests who have been denied the right to marry and enjoy a normal and healthy sex life, it makes me even angrier. And no, I do not believe Mary was a virgin. Anyone who has kids should know that.
After a month with the Cordobas, who ended up feeling like family due to their generosity and kindness, Ava and I decided to move on as our visa for Ecuador was going to expire and we needed to head back into Colombia. We left with great sadness in knowing our time there was over, but also with great joy for the experience we had been blessed with.
We had been told that when reentering Colombia it was very difficult to get a new three-month visa. We were also told that the border guards were open to bribes, so when one of them suggested he would give us a one-month visa, I asked him if it was possible to get a ninety-day visa if we paid an impuesto (tax). He looked at me and a small smile came across his face and he wrote down a number on the pad in front of him. I asked to borrow his pen and wrote another number that was much lower. I had become accustomed to bargaining in South America as a basic principal of transacting business. In the market you didn’t pay the first price someone suggested. I have never gotten this bargaining aspect out of me and I can be a real pain in the ass when it comes to business negotiations. It’s in my blood and I cannot deny it. We laughed and the guard accepted the impuesto I suggested and stamped us with ninety-day visas. Hola, Colombia. Adiós, Ecuador.
* * *
Ava and I wanted to go to San Agustín and eat the mushrooms and try to raise our consciousness. Some people may suggest this is just a fancy way of saying we wanted to get high, but in truth we were seeking spiritual enlightenment.
There were two ways to get to San Agustín. One was by taking a twelve-hour bus ride and the other was a hike through the jungle on a path that had been hand-cut by machete. There is a saying about choosing the path less traveled and I guess that is what Ava and I decided to do. There were road camps situated at either end of the path, as crews were working to eventually turn it into a road.
We set out to hitch a ride up to one of the road camps and were sitting by a high mountain pasture waiting for the next vehicle to pass. In many countries they do not really use bus stops. You just flag someone down and then figure out how much you will pay them to take you where you want to go. It’s the same in rural Jamaica. Just flag them down and they will stop. We were sitting by that pasture smoking a joint when in front of us appeared an old man with sunken eyes on a white horse. He did not ride up to us, he just appeared. He started to warn us about the “masamores” and about “los nubes del norte” (the clouds from the north). He just kept shouting warnings to us and then called out, “Hasta luego!” and galloped off.
I turned to Ava and told her that we needed to heed his warnings. We didn’t know what “masamores” were and we looked it up in our Spanish-English dictionary but could not find the word. His intense features, sunken eyes, white horse, and declaration that he would see us later had me convinced this was the angel of death. (He will see us all sooner or later, but this had me thinking about my mortality.) In truth, Ava and I were both unsettled by the occurrence as we waited for a vehicle to take us to the road camp so we could spend the night there and prepare for our hike the next day. Eventually, a truck carrying a bunch of workers stopped for us and carried us to the camp. We asked many people there about masamores, and were told it was a river we needed to cross on the path to San Agustín and that it was very dangerous and we would have to traverse it carefully.
The next morning we set out with a worker who showed us where the path started into the jungle. Ava and I were nervous but we knew it was our destiny to take this walk and we were not going to turn back. The jungle was thick and the path was narrow and muddy. About fifty yards in, we came to a fork. There was no indication of which way we should go. We walked a little ways in one direction and then decided it did not feel right so we turned around and took the other one. We walked and walked through the dense jungle. It started to rain, and the mud on the path got deeper. We made the mistake of smoking a joint and we became a little disoriented. There were more forks in the path, and the warnings from the angel of death still resonated in our brains. We saw large clawprints that resembled those of a fierce jungle animal. I took out my machete and kept on the lookout for anything wild. Soon we reached a raging river and slowly crossed it on a fallen tree, inching along on our butts. The rain came down heavier and the mud on the path kept getting deeper. After many hours of walking, we were both scared that we were lost.
Our fear gave way to comfort after a while when we heard the sound of equipment from afar. It was the sound of civilization. Of bulldozers working to clear the land and build the road that would connect the two sides of the path. Somewhere in the distance we knew we would find the next road camp and complete our journey. We picked up our pace as we were desperate to get out of that jungle. Nearing the spot where the bulldozers were working, we sank to our knees in a large pool of mud. As I reached the bank on the other side, I turned around and saw that Ava was stuck. She could not move. I managed to slowly pull her to safety and it was at this point that we realized we had just crawled through a pool of quicksand.
We sat on the bank trembling and shouting for help—“Ayúdame! Ayúdame!” The bulldozers were pushing the mud down the hillside into the pool below. Finally, one of the drivers heard us and came down and helped carry us up the hill. We were taken over to the road camp and given some dry clothes and hot coffee and we huddled together and talked about how we had escaped from the angel of death and that it was not the masamores we had needed to fear but instead the quicksand. We were so glad to be alive and back with people and out of that jungle. The people at the road camp told us of another couple who had left from their side and had come back out three days later after getting lost and were totally out of their minds and had to be hospitalized. The jungle is not for the faint of heart.
Ava and I thanked our lucky stars and left the next morning for San Agustín. We were in guerilla territory here, as they were known to frequent these mountains and seek help from the farmers. There had been an ongoing struggle within Colombia for over one hundred years—this is part of what inspired Gabriel García Márquez to write his famous book One Hundred Years of Solitude. The rebels were known as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and were fighting to liberate the people. Kidnapping, cocaine trafficking, and various acts of espionage were their forte. All to raise money to support the revolution. In any event, we settled into our house and got to know our neighbors.
We traveled by bus out to a large cow pasture near kilometer nine on the road outside of San Agustín. This field was well known as a place you could find plenty psilocybin mushrooms growing from the cow turds. We carried our basket with a cloth laid inside and began carefully picking mushrooms. We were both adept at picking the right ones: bright orange tops with a purple ring around the stem where the spores had fallen.
As we took our time and walked through the cow fields gathering mushrooms, we ate a few to help get in touch with our surroundings. I remember looking across the valley and seeing these bright green mountains as they would change hues and feeling so peaceful and so connected and disconnected to the Earth all at the same time. Maybe that is why they call it a trip. On the bus back from this field we were stopped by guerillas and searched, and some people were asked to get off for questioning and some items were taken from the luggage racks above the seats. It was all very strange but the bus ended up moving on.
That night Ava and I decided to make cream of mushroom soup. We cooked in clay pots on a wood fire and ate from gourds. We were trying to be as natural as possible. We got some milk from a farmer nearby and some green beans to put in as well. We added around fifty mushrooms that night and it was way, way too much. I thought I was going to die. I cried out for my mother. I cried out for God. Ava and I kept each other from sleeping. There were some New Zealanders who had stayed with us and they had a little monkey and it ate a mushroom, got all excited, then went to sleep and never woke up. We knew we had to stay awake if we were going to make it through the night. Somehow we did. Another long, eventful night way up in the mountains of South America.
* * *
Ultimately, during our back-and-forth adventures between Colombia and Ecuador, we spent thirteen straight months there. We had been disenchanted with America, with the Vietnam War, and with tricky Dick Nixon. I remember one day in Vilcabamba, Ecuador, being told that my president had resigned. Yes, Nixon had finally stepped down.
We returned to the States with a severe case of culture shock. Seeing all these suburban kids lined up at bus stops when in my mind I was remembering the days on the river eating mangoes and swimming. Ava and I ended up renting a basement apartment by Dupont Circle in downtown DC. I got a job working at a bookstore and read as much as I could and tried to increase my knowledge.
One evening during my dinner break I was in a park near work and I met a couple from Colombia. Eventually our discussion came around to marijuana and I suggested we walk up to my apartment so I could give them some. When we arrived, Ava was in bed with another guy. Everyone was shocked. I could not handle it mentally and things took a really bad turn the next week when I came down with the clap. Gonorrhea. I can tell you that if you have never had it, it is not fun. Not fun at all and quite painful. I will spare you the details but I would not wish it on my worst enemy. This was the beginning of the end for Ava and me, and when I told you earlier that there were good things about being with a nymphomaniac and some not-so-good things, this is what I was talking about.
* * *
South America will always hold a special place in my heart. Many years after I started RAS Records, I had Freddie McGregor sing a reggae version of “Guantanamera,” which was released on the Phillips label in Colombia and became a hit, and we did some touring there to support the single. And I also spent much time in Chile later, producing Gondwana and helping to start a local reggae and Rasta movement. My ability to speak Spanish has served me well as I continue to enjoy conversing with the many Latinos I encounter on a daily basis here in the US.
When I tell people I went to Colombia after high school, they assume I mean Columbia University in New York, and I never bother to correct them. I certainly got an education there and somehow graduated with flying colors. The impact this had on my life is monumental and has taught me how to take care of myself in even the most difficult of situations. Just think if I had just gone off to college instead.