Expats and Their Guns
“Magnus crashed his car into a house going to get more bullets.” This isn’t a sentence I constructed, but rather a quote I promised friends I would use to begin my long-planned Guatemala novel. As experienced a writer as I am, it surprised me how difficult it was to start this newest novel when the first sentence wasn’t of my choosing. Makes me think of the old sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, who, legend has it, once sat in the front window of a Manhattan bookstore for a week and each day wrote a complete story whose opening sentence had been supplied by a fan. Yesterday, looking over my project, I reflected on the events leading to the utterance in question and realized the amazing fact isn’t that a friend crashed his car into a house going to get more bullets, but that it happened only once. After all, guns are not in short in supply in Guatemala. The place is almost an incarnation of the American old west—with cocaine instead of whisky.
The Guatemala tourist board would surely not want me to say so, but the reality is theirs is a dangerous country. About one in four of my friends was jacked, beaten, or kidnapped—at least once. A female friend was manually violated by the border police. “I’m not going to rape you,” he told her, as he shoved his fingers inside her. Even my adopted hometown—blissful Antigua—had its dangers. One acquaintance was attacked while riding his bicycle on the road to Cerro la Cruz. My pal Charlie had a gun pointed at him outside Monoloco. Yes, much of my crowd ended up in the crosshairs—except me. I don’t say that as a boast or to imply that I’m a tough guy, but to indicate that I have no basis upon which to judge my friends’ reliance upon firearms. I like to think that nothing could drive me to patronize the
local gun dealer, but since I’ve never been attacked or victimized, I can’t really make that claim.
I do know this much, though. When you carry a gun around eventually the temptation to use it can prove irresistible. The night Magnus crashed his car there had been some drinking involved—always the case with us expats. In the picture at the top of this post Magnus is still relatively sober, but soon he and a friend were on the terrace shooting at bats. This has to be the definition of a fruitless endeavor, but the creatures had brazenly taken up residence in the eaves of the house and they had to be exterminated, pure and simple.
Nothing changes the mood of a party like gunshots. The guests would have bolted, but they were waiting for confirmation that panic was the best move. I got them calmed down, a few minutes later Magnus raced out the door on his ammo quest, and the party went on as before. The parties always went on. We learned the rest of the story the next day. Magnus had decided the one-way streets of Antigua were too much of a bother and driven the wrong way down 4th Calle, which is the main artery into town from the west. The police happened to be passing by and a chase ensued. Magnus lost control of his car, rammed a house, got out and took off on foot. He’d have been shot, I think, if he weren’t white. Nevertheless he went to jail for the night.
I think the first inkling I had that Guatemala has a love affair with the gun that rivals America’s was the first time Charlie and I escorted a departing friend to the airport. I noticed a lockbox at the entrance in which visitors are asked to voluntarily store their firearms while in the terminal. The first gun I actually saw was during a visit to the seaside town of Monterrico. We were hanging out at my favorite beach bar, El Animal Desconocido, and a gangster type rolled up, pulled out a chrome-plated .44 and fired off a clip. And while we’re going through the progression, the first gun victim I saw was in Zona Uno, Guatemala City—a fatal head shot.
Still, guns were not prevalent among my friends until crime skyrocketed after the election of Oscar Berger. Under his stewardship the country sank even deeper into poverty. Perhaps it was not his fault—Guatemala had been bullied into one of those disastrous free-trade agreements with the U.S. But setting aside the issue of blame for a moment, economic hardship undoubtedly made Guatemalans desperate. Workers became thieves, and foreigners became targets. My friend Brendan was pistolwhipped in a park at 7 pm. A group of friends were dragged into the woods and made hostages, while one girl was molested with a vibrator gunmen found in another girl’s bag. But the fun and games never stopped for us—we were partying at the end of the world.
In San Pedro men walked into a friend’s bar and robbed him at gunpoint. In Guatemala City a dozen men broke into a police impound in broad daylight and stole two tons of cocaine than had been confiscated in a raid the week before. It took them over an hour to load the drugs and nobody stopped them or bothered to call for help. Expats bought more guns. Carrying them created the illusion of safety. Firing them relieved the pressure of living in a place that was inching ever closer to hell.
Before I left the States, I would sometimes read about a terrorist bomb exploding in a nightclub in some warzone or other, and wonder why people were out socializing in the first place. It was beyond belief for me that people would go out drinking when bombs were bursting. Guatemala is no Gaza or Falluja—make no mistake about that—but I still learned the answer to my question. You never stop socializing because the interaction is an unquenchable human thirst. You’d swim a lake of flames for a good cocktail party. And you party until you're gotten by the bad guys or you get fed up and leave.
My friends got gotten and l got fed up. We scattered. We dispersed to San Francisco, Miami, London, Shanghai, Roatán, while others of us started traveling again and haven't stopped yet. Myself, I’m looking for another Antigua, but with fewer guns. That’s why I’m headed to San Sebastián. Of course, that’s in Basque territory, where an occasional bomb has been known to explode. But I hear the cocktail parties are tremendous.
Labels: firearms, guatemala, insane expats
Ballooning Bodies and Bank Accounts
I got a query from Tony Brown in the comments section of my post
A Torso from the Past. He said: "By the way, I am hungry for your comment on the whole Barry Bonds thing!" I've actually started posts on this subject a couple of times, and both times decided not to bother. But asked a direct question, I'll go ahead and answer before getting back to stories about carousing in the third world. So thanks for the prompt TB.
My main thought is that it amuses me how, in a country that values money above all other things, people continue to be surprised by what people will do to get it. Cheating is not just part of sports, but part and parcel of American life. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to pick up a history book and turn to the chapters marked "Indian Treaties", and then flip forward to the chapters marked "Enron" and "Hedge Fund". America's top income earner last year was a hedge fund manager who made 1.1 billion dollars. Yes, you read that figure correctly. He did it by selling shady investment packages, the same ones that now threaten to destroy the U.S. economy.
So, if we're discussing this like adults, rather than like flagwavers or moral watchdogs (Won't somebody please think of the CHILDREN!) then I'd point out that baseball players who used steroids were rewarded handsomely. Take Ken Caminiti, who posted an MVP season on steroids. He was a solid but unspectacular player who, after the juice, became bionic. He was given a fat contract as a reward for his stats and profited, I'd guess, ten million dollars just for taking some chemicals. Most people would eat a bowl of feces for one hundredth that amount.
Take a good look at the photo of Bonds below. That is what he looked like upon joining the Pittsburgh Pirates. And he possessed the same physique, pretty much, for the next few years of his career. He was hitting maybe twenty-five, thirty homers a
season, stealing some bases, playing good defense. He was a very good all-around player. But it was the homers everyone wanted. Now imagine it's 1995 or 1996 and baseball contracts are skyrocketing. You've performed well, but your clubhouse has some guys who are taking steroids and, league wide, team owners are rewarding these guys by dumping millions on them. Some of these guys strike out 150 times a year, wasting 150 at bats, but in forty five of those at bats they connect for homers, and for that they get enough money to last them ten lifetimes. And while it's true you're making good money too, it could all end tomorrow, with one injury. You've got a nest egg, but your expenses are through the roof, which means that with a little bad luck you could still end up doing used car commercials when you're 60. So fuck it, you give these drugs a try. Other guys are earning mints while your 30/30 seasons get you treated like some kind of warm-up act. And the drugs are legal, so what's the worry?
A few years later, after you've transformed into the Hulk, baseball starts to worry about steroids and bans them. But the substances keep evolving and the new ones aren't banned. And, by the way, you got that massive contract you were looking for, so you trust this stuff because it made you, and your children, and their children financially secure—for life. And let's not forget, if you quit and your numbers drop you'll have to deal with a raft of grief for not putting up your usual numbers. And lastly, not every player is planning to quit, as far as you can tell. If everyone quit, okay, maybe you would, too. But why give other players an advantage when it'll just hurt your earning power?
Another year or two passes and, weird as it seems, public opinion is turning against steroid use even as the crowds cheer you on. And somehow—maybe you didn't even believe it at first—the most hallowed record in American sports is dangling before your eyes like a ripe pomegranate. It's
right there. Baseball is coming down hard on steroids now, but your chance to quit the juice with no questions asked was two years ago, or maybe three, so you're on the chopping block either way. You saw what happened to Mark McGuire. They crucified that guy and he never broke the law or the rules of baseball. He was smarter than you, though. He retired. The same record was within his reach and he walked away. Unbelievable. You should have done the same, but it's too late now. Fuck it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Abandoning my dramatization of Barry Bonds' baseball life for a moment, we have to ask, does anything I wrote make steroid usage okay? Well, I don't believe any sort of drug use is inherently right or wrong, but you obey laws and rules—even stupid ones—if you don't want to get in trouble. Bonds didn't obey, and now he's in trouble. However if anyone out there believes the morality of the situation is black and white, I suggest they try to get the same corner table at Nobu that Bonds gets. They'll learn the harsh lesson that it is better in America to be rich than good or moral. Money is America's God, and Bonds worships it no more and no less than others. After he is ridiculed, after he is asterisked, and after his life is dragged through the mud, he'll stroll into Nobu and still get that corner table. He'll get it every day of his life. The politician, the slimy hedge fund manager, the juiced up athlete, and the tax cheat are all of similar stripe, doing what they do for the exact same reasons. So who can really throw stones?
Bonds took a risk, and though in one respect he may get caught, in a much more important respect—money—he succeeded spectacularly. So did Martha Stewart, and Oliver North, and thousands of other all-American liars who, when all was said and done, still got to keep the cash they cheated to get. Bonds may appear to whine about his current circumstances, but this is to be expected, for denial followed by contrition are required by the American public. Thus repentance becomes part of the stage show. In the words of the immortal William Butler Yeats, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
Bonds got the money, and he got the record he wanted. It was a struggle. He had to chase the sacred number while living inside a pressure cooker, under extraordinary scrutiny from fans and with prosecutors digging through his personal history. Although he has already admitted taking
something given to him by his trainer, there is no doubt that performance enhancing substances were not available to him in 2007 as he gained on recordholder Hank Aaron. He'd have been busted if he came within ten miles of a steroid. Meanwhile every piece of dirty laundry he possessed was aired out in public—the affair, every bad thing he ever did. And what happened? He broke the record while having the greatest season ever by a forty-three year old player. Which conjures a most bittersweet thought: maybe if he had never taken anything he would have achieved it all anyway.
Labels: barry bonds, hank aaron, steroids
A Torso from the Past
Authoring a blog has had unintended consequences and benefits, both of which manifested last week. First, some octopoidal American corporate entity tried to track down Ari by using BlackNotBlack. They called the phone number of the Tony Brown Gallery in the link at right looking for him. Which just goes to show that nobody can be bothered to read anymore, because if they had perused even one or two postings, they would have known that Ari is not at the Tony Brown Gallery, nor even in the United States. Note to octopoidal American corporate entity: Ari lives very far away, but you’ll have to read to find out where.
I assumed that was the end of people using the blog as a homing device, but then, just a few days later, my old friend Bryon found the blog and dropped me a query. I haven’t heard from him for years, but as you can see from the above photo of his redecorated torso, we had some good times together, though I think we would both agree, neither of us remember them. But that’s the great benefit of people arriving back in your life after an absence—it’s an excuse remind each other of the stunts you pulled.
I should explain that when the gory shot above was snapped we were pretty sure we were going to be rock stars, and in fact, we had already attained a measure of success—if success can be measured by two CDs, several tours, gigs at places like CBGB and the Cabaret Metro, a management deal, and some support slots for a number of internationally famous bands. Around that time Bryon and I also launched a magazine together—the one on whose cover we put Bjork—so he was especially thrilled that I saw her in Iceland.
Anyway, Bryon and I had our rock star fantasy and milked it pretty much dry, and they were interesting times, but I never name-drop or discuss those events in detail because the end of that era was the beginning of the best and most adventurous time of my life. I mean, if you’d told me on the day we called it quits as a band that I’d soon smuggle coatimundi in the Caribbean, take part in the
runtur in Reykjavik, and see violently dispatched corpses in Guatemala, I’d have asked for a rail of whatever you were snorting. And because the future always seems to hold so much promise for more thrills, I habitually resist fetishising past antics (this blog notwithstanding).
But hearing from Bryon has made me reconsider my stance, because it stirred up the silt at the murky bottom of my memory and some remarkable items floated to daylight. So expect some gonzo posts in the upcoming months. I mean, what’s the point of good stories if you don’t share them, right? If people don’t want to hear them they don’t have to read the blog. Oh wait—I already have no readers. Almost forgot. In any case, Bryon figures in a number of good tales and I think I have permission to share. Boy, is he going to regret it.
Labels: coatimundi, guatemala, runtur
Menchú Munched in Guatemalan Election
Newsflash from my former home: businessman Alvaro Colom was declared winner of Guatemala’s hotly contested presidential election. His main opposition was Otto Perez Molina, a former army general who had pledged to fight crime with an iron fist. Sunday's vote was actually a runoff between the two top contenders of a previous balloting. In that vote, way down at the bottom of the tally, was Rigoberto Menchú (pictured), a Mayan whose activism and writings won her the Nobel Peace Prize back in 1992, the Prince of Asturias Award in ’98, and won her exactly diddly-squat this year. I'm disappointed in my ex-countrymen, to say the least. Not that I expected Menchú to win, but I certainly hoped she'd garner more than 3% of the vote. I keep trying to spin it one way or another, but 3% is a humbling defeat and that's all there is to it.
Perhaps my understanding of politics is upside down, but personally I would sooner expect a general or a businessman to get 3% of the vote when facing off against a Nobel Prize winner. What’s more, Menchú is Mayan. When you consider that Guatemala is 41% Mayan (as of the 2002 census) her poor showing is especially mystifying. According to a poll conducted earlier this year by Vox Latina and published in Guate’s
Prensa Libre, 71.2% of respondents felt that an indigenous person could be elected president. It happened in Bolivia, so the precendent had been set in another country with a sizable indigenous population. But within the privacy of the voting booth, a dramatically opposite story unfolded in Guatemala.
Political and social analysts have, of late, agreed that polls often produce spurious results. This was certainly such a case. It is a medium that deals in hypotheses, after all, not facts. Polls asking about people’s beliefs are particularly apt to disconnect from reality. The question presented in the Guatemala poll was worded thusly:
Do you think an indigenous person can be elected president in Guatemala? Upon inspection, the query is more about high ideals than actual voting preferences. And of course the question says nothing about electing a female candidate. Having lived in Guatemala, it is easy for me to imagine that many voters were reluctant to back Menchú for this reason, ridiculous though it may be. It is also possible that, even in a country where there are more than a dozen political parties, brand loyalty prevented people from supporting Menchú’s shiny new coalition.
As for her shiny Nobel Prize—it clearly didn’t impress. In the United States, an honor like the Nobel is denounced by foam-flecked partisan commentators as a political ploy, but in Latin America these types of awards usually possess only positive value. Óscar Arias, president of Costa Rica, has a Peace Prize on his mantel, and its presence there helped get him elected. However, several details of Menchú’s life story came under scruntiny, and these led to some calls to revoke her Prize. In the end, the Nobel committee concluded, quite rightly, that a few inconsistencies in the inspiring tapestry of a life are not sufficient to revoke a recipient's Prize. And there is no besmirching Menchú's activism—her works are public record. I can’t offer any insight on whether the scandal-mongering hurt her campaign, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that when you get 3% of the vote, it didn’t help.
The good news for Menchú is that, at only fifty three years of age, she will probably be around for the next election. This year’s winner finally succeeded in his third try, and it’s likely Menchú will need at least that many to have a chance. Now that she has entered the political arena, her profile should continue to rise, and Mayans will probably become more comfortable thinking of her as something other than an activist and author. She will certainly need them to, because social division in Guatemala runs deep and it’s unlikely that even the smallest fraction of non-indigenous voters would cast a ballot for her.
Labels: guatemala, Rigoberto Menchu
“Magnus crashed his car into a house going to get more bullets.” This isn’t a sentence I constructed, but rather a quote I promised friends I would use to begin my long-planned Guatemala novel. As experienced a writer as I am, it surprised me how difficult it was to start this newest novel when the first sentence wasn’t of my choosing. Makes me think of the old sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, who, legend has it, once sat in the front window of a Manhattan bookstore for a week and each day wrote a complete story whose opening sentence had been supplied by a fan. Yesterday, looking over my project, I reflected on the events leading to the utterance in question and realized the amazing fact isn’t that a friend crashed his car into a house going to get more bullets, but that it happened only once. After all, guns are not in short in supply in Guatemala. The place is almost an incarnation of the American old west—with cocaine instead of whisky.
local gun dealer, but since I’ve never been attacked or victimized, I can’t really make that claim.
Before I left the States, I would sometimes read about a terrorist bomb exploding in a nightclub in some warzone or other, and wonder why people were out socializing in the first place. It was beyond belief for me that people would go out drinking when bombs were bursting. Guatemala is no Gaza or Falluja—make no mistake about that—but I still learned the answer to my question. You never stop socializing because the interaction is an unquenchable human thirst. You’d swim a lake of flames for a good cocktail party. And you party until you're gotten by the bad guys or you get fed up and leave.
