By Paul McGuire © 2011
The wake-up call was set for 4:30 -- that's AM, in the fucking morning -- a time when I'm usually winding down the night and going to sleep. I passed out around around Midnight after chewing on a Vicodin to help ease the throbbing headache that accompanied altitude sickness after my abrupt ascent into the 11,000+ zone.
Our caravan had to ship out of Cusco no later than 6am if we wanted to catch the 8am train out of Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes, which was at least a 100-minute drive away. The breakfast buffet started at 5am and I was still in bed at that time, although I heard the shower running in the adjacent room where Sos and Shirley were staying. I assumed the former military man in Sos was up and at 'em before the wake call echoed in the room. I skipped a shower in favor of checking the previous night's scores from the NBA playoffs via wifi that was a step quicker than dial-up, before I made my way downstairs to the dim dining area.
The majority of the lights were shut off in the lobby with the exception of a few stray lights illuminating the dining room. I peeked into the metal buffet tins and didn't see much edible fare to my liking. No bacon, instead, they offered up what looked like mini-hot dogs as their breakfast meat du jour, the Peruvian version of nitrate-riddled breakfast sausages. I skipped the dogs and scooped up two spoonfuls of runny puke-yellow tinged scrambled eggs, then tossed a couple of hard rolls on my plate next to a couple of slices of fruit. Along with a glass of orange juice and a cup of coca tea -- that might have been my only fuel to carry me atop of Machu Picchu. The runny eggs tasted as expected -- like runny eggs. I just prayed that the eggs wouldn't run right through me with a two hour ride in the Peruvian countryside ahead of me. I'd really hate to have to shit on the side of the road and I made sure I took some extra TP with me -- just in case.
By 5:55am, I checked out of my room and waited in the lobby with Sos and Shirley for the little old lady with the limp who spearheaded our entire tour. Two large groups of other travelers surrounded us, one American and the other Brits, where the median age was anywhere from 15-20 years old than us and everyone looked like wealthy retirees of the adventurous sort, spending a portion of their savings on a trip of a lifetime. I felt a tinge of luck because I got to embark on the same trip at a much earlier juncture in my life and sorta got paid to do it because my client got me halfway there -- I was already in Peru, all I had to do was figure out how to get from Lima to Machu Picchu in order to cross off an exotic destination that appeared in the Top 5 on my bucket list. That's where the little old lady with the limp came in.
Two huge buses idled in front of our hotel, but we were not on neither bus. The little old lady with the limp waved over to us and we followed her to a white station wagon parked behind the buses. She arranged a private car to take us from Cusco to Ollantaytambo. Our driver, Joseph, spoke passable English and cranked up a mix of reggae songs on his car stereo. I stuffed my bag in the back and slid into the front seat. I was gonna be riding shotgun all the way to Ollantaytambo and hoped that I didn't have to shit my pants.
Our route took us up to the outskirts of Cusco up into the hills and we quickly passed any of the big buses on the way. We reached a valley surrounded by rolling hills and farmland that was flanked by the ominous Andes Mountains in the background. At one point, Joseph stopped the car and parked on top of a vista for us to snap a few photos. After an hour or so of driving, we reached the town of Ollantaytambo, located in a valley, and we made our way down from the mountain. We drove through the main part of town, the only route to the train station on the outskirts. We got caught up in traffic at the end of one square. A clusterfuck of small vans and buses filled with tourists were trying to force themselves into a one-way cobblestone road. An exhausted solider with a rifle slung over his shoulder acted as a traffic cop, but there was nowhere to go. We had about ten minutes before our train left the station. At some point I wondered if we should start walking...but then the traffic miraculously subsided and Joseph dropped us off in a parking lot adjacent to the train station.
Vendors as young as six years old swarmed us as we walked down a hill to the depot. It reminded me of Shakedown Street in the parking lot of a Phish or Grateful Dead show -- minus the spun-out wooks slinging drugs -- instead locals were hawking hats, sunscreen, bottles of water, and batteries.
We found the toilet, but it cost 1 soles (35 cents) to get in, and an old lady on a stool front handed you two squares of toilet paper -- hardly enough to clean yourself if you seriously busted ass. The runny eggs were rumbling inside of me and I rushed for one of the two stalls. I was greeted by no toilet seat and the toilet itself was rather small, only a few inches off the dirt floor. I had a false alarm, which was good, because I wasn't prepared to shit in a hole in the ground.
We approached the platform and got caught in a crossfire of mass confusion. People were streaming in all directions from all areas. A group of Peruvian guides, all short men around 5 feet in height with reddish brown skin in alpaca hats, had disembarked from what looked like a cattle car and two Peruvian rail workers at the train's doors hurled backpacks into a pile on the platform, where the guides hovered to retrieve their gear. Meanwhile, hundreds of tourists were getting off the train, while hundreds more were scrambling to catch the train before the doors closed. The train from Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu ran on the same singular track. A couple of times a day it transported tourists and supplies back and forth, back and forth.
Sos found a Peru Rail worker who pointed out our exact train. We had less than a few minutes to spare when we boarded what appeared to be a "first class" car. The little old lady with the limp arranged us passage in the "vistadome" car which had windows partially built into the ceilings to view the Andes on our two hour trip to Aguas Calientes.
I had a window seat and noticed that a Japanese guy sat in the aisle seat in my row and his girlfriend sat across from him in the aisle. With the few Japanese phrases I knew, I excused myself and asked him if they wanted to sit together. They were extremely grateful for the gesture and continuously thanked me as the train pulled out of the station, even offering to take a photo of me. Sos gave me a little guff for becoming their new best friend and a celebrity in Japan.
I kept my camera out of sight. I shot a few minutes of video en route to Ollantaytambo, but didn't want to shoot my load taking photos/videos of the mountains along the Urubamba River, an uniquely dangerous waterway where no boats could traverse the narrow river because of all the jagged rocks underneath the water that created rapids that were unnavigable, even for the most astute class five rapids adventurers. I understood why the Spanish never conquered or reached Machu Picchu, because it was in such a remote place, then boats could not get in and the only way to reach the spiritual center of the Incan empire as by foot on the Incan trail.
The railroad had been built at the turn of the 20th century and it followed alongside the Urubamba River, which I nicknamed as the Chocolate Milk River because of it's milky brown color. On the other side of the river, you could see the infamous Incan trail, and a few brave souls were in the middle of their arduous hike.
Our first class car was filled with tourists from all over the globe, which I quickly learned from the variety of languages spoken. A teenager next to me was from Argentina. In front of Shirley and Sos were Germans. A few Brits were in front and a horde of Brazilians were behind us. They went a little loco when the train pulled out of the station and made its first turn through the mountains. Everyone with a video camera or professional camera went berserk in the narrow aisle of the train, elbowing each other for a shot of the mountains. At first I was perplexed -- it was just mountains and not Machu Picchu -- why the fuck was everyone going apeshit trying to get a few seconds of videos in the mountains?
That frenzy died down after twenty minutes and it felt good not to have someone's sweaty ass in my face trying to steady themselves to snap photos of cloudy mountains. I ignored the vapid jackals and settled in with my iPod and mentally prepared myself for the eventual summit at Machu Picchu.
An hour into our voyage, the crew served us a snack in baskets comprised of cookies, fruit, and a roll with a slice of ham and cheese. I skipped the cheese and ate everything. I ordered a coca matte to drink because I needed another injection of Incan Red Bull before we reached the end of the line.
As we inched closer to Aguas Calinetes, the rolling hills and farmland gave way to thick, jungle canopy cover. The mugginess set in and the train grew eerily quiet as we inched into the station. Aguas Calinetes had hot springs at the edge of town, but the mood seemed somber and intense. The lush, green mountains shot up all around us like New York City skyscrapers, but it was surrounded by puffy white and grey clouds, which blocked out the sun and gave the air a smoky, dreamlike quality to it.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas and Jack Tripper Stole My Dog.
Showing posts with label Paul McGuire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul McGuire. Show all posts
June 01, 2011
May 03, 2011
Cusco
By Paul McGuire © 2011
I probably should have slept for more than an hour, but I wasn't thinking properly. I blame the decent bag of weed a friend of mine scored in Lima along with a steady flow of local beer Cusquena. Whenever I'm done with a work assignment in a foreign country, I partake in a tradition among my fellow reporters and stay up as late as possible partying, drinking, and gambling. Sunday night was no exception after dinner with my colleagues at a restaurant hanging over the cliffs of Miraflores in Larcomar Mall, overlooking the Pacific Ocean as an illuminated cross flickered in the distance. We stayed up way, way, way late on Sunday night playing cards with my buddies, joking around, and listening to friend’s selection of Costa Rican reggae.
My wake-up call was set for 7am, even though I finished packing at 6am and crawled into bed as sunlight filled my expansive loft. I slept for an hour before it was time for me to meet up with Shirley and Sos -- my travel companions to Machu Picchu, both good friends from LA and we got along perfectly during a journey to Costa Rica a year earlier.
The journey to Machu Picchu isn't easy because there’s no direct road from Lima to Machu Picchu (aside from the infamous Inca trail). Tourists have to take a train to the foot of the mountain, which isn't the most accessible spot in Peru. In short, we flew southeast from Lima over the Andes Mountains into Cusco (or Cuzco as some locals spell it), then take a two-hour bus ride from Cusco to a small town called Ollantaytambo. From Ollantaytambo, we would board a train on Peru Rail which wound alongside the Urubamba river (which I dubbed the Chocolate Milk River, because it looked like... chocolate milk) through the Andes and reached an even smaller town called Aguas Calientes (literally translated into Hot Water because of the warm springs at the edge of town), and from Aguas Calientes we could hike up to the top of Machu Picchu, or take a 20-minute bus up to the top.
No wonder the Spanish never conquered Machu Picchu. They might have heard it existed, but they never got that far into the Andes. Besides, by the 1530s, Machu Picchu had been deserted for many years, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
At the least, we had a two-day journey ahead of us to get from Lima to Machu Picchu. If we wanted to trek to Machu Picchu from Cusco, it would have taken four or five days, something we considered, but none of us had the luxury of extra time to hike the Inca Trail. Alas, we flew to Cusco as a staging area for our trip to Machu Picchu.
We landed in Cusco on Monday around noon and I kept thinking how it reminded me a bit of Telluride, Colorado -- a plush valley in a mountainous region -- except Telluride is tiny and Cusco is huge with almost a half a million people, the majority of them living in shanty towns and adobe shacks up on the mountainside and descending into the city to work in various aspects of the blossoming tourism industry.
Cusco is not just a launching point for Machu Picchu -- it's also the site of its own historic Incan ruins. At its height of power, Cusco was the Washington DC and NYC of the empire -- the center of both political and commercial interests for the entire region. Cusco was strategically built to be the true center of the Incan empire. But then the Spanish waltzed in and conquered the Incas, but that's a whole other story.
At the airport in Cusco, we were swarmed with different sales people from competing Machu Picchu tour operating companies. We ignored them and headed outside. Before we left Lima, Shirley and Sos arranged the entire trip through a company (referred by the client who had flown me to Peru in the first place) so all we had to do was show up at the airport and find the dude waving a piece of cardboard with our names on it. He waved over to us and we followed him to his big, shiny, white Mercedes van. A very tiny, yet well dressed lady with a limp (think the Peruvian version of the seer in The Poltergeist flick, which I quickly nicknamed the "Go into the light!" lady) climbed into the van and told us that she was taking care of our entire sojourn. Her English was passable, but Sos and her conversed in Spanish as the driver left the airport and took us into the center of town to our hotel. The tiny lady with the limp apologized for traffic in advance. We had chosen the holiest week of the year to visit Cusco and Machu Picchu. Even though Peruvians worship Incan gods like Inti, the powerful Sun god, they're also devout Catholics (the religion brought over from Spanish missionaries). The previous day was Palm Sunday with Easter less than a week away. On that particular Monday, the entire town was getting ready for a festival celebrating the Lord of Earthquakes, because Cusco was nearly destroyed in the mid-1500s by a destructive quake. Sos loosely translated the Holy Monday festival something to the effect of the Black Jesus.
We arrived at our hotel located on the most famous street in Cusco, the Avenue del Sol. The tiny lady with the limp told that our rooms weren't ready yet, and we had ten minutes to drop off our bags before a bus took us on a five-hour tour of Incan ruins around Cusco. I had broken up my luggage into two pieces; I left my carry-on behind at Lima airport in storage (which had work clothes) and only took my backpack (with 2 days of clothes, rain gear, headlamp, laptop, and camera) with me. I ditched my backpack at our hotel and the tiny lady handed us cups of light greenish tea -- the infamous coca tea or coca matte. Instead of chewing coca leaves to help adjust to the altitude, we sipped the bitter tasting green tea. I eventually acquired a taste for what the locals subbed "Incan Red Bull."
Cocaine in a cup, baby! Yep, talk about cocaine in liquid form. I wish I could grow that stuff in my backyard without the DEA destroying it.
A few sips definitely perked me up considering I was working with an hour of sleep. The coca tea also helped open up the breathing passages in my lungs. I sipped more tea as I staved off the massive migraine that invaded my head. I had been to Colorado enough (flying from sea level to the mountains cause side effects like headaches, stomach aches, and the shits), so I knew what was wrong with me, so I didn't freak out. Part of the reason the locals discourage foreigners from flying directly to Machu Picchu is due to the abrupt change in altitude. Most tour operators want you to spend a day or two in Cusco to adjust to the thin air (oh, and to bilk you out of a few more gringos out of tourist dollars). At times I was gasping a bit considering Cusco was in excess of 11,000 feet or almost 2,000 more than Telluride.
I slammed the rest of the tea, grabbed my camera, and piled into the back of a tour bus with Sos, Shirley, and six others. Our first stop was the old Suntur Wasi (aka House of God) that was also an Incan temple called Koricancha (aka Temple of the Sun) that was destroyed by the Spanish, who built Santo Domingo church on top of the remnants of exquisite masonry. We met our guide who was knowledgeable, but chatty. He was rather famous for running the Inca Trail in 4:09... yes, a shade over four hours... (but I had no idea what he was bragging about, I assume he meant a specific section). In high school when I was on the cross country team, I once ran a mile under 5 minutes and thought I was a badass. That was on flat terrain in Central Park and not in the high altitudes of the Andes.
The Capilla del Triunfo cathedral (in the Plaza de Arms main square) and Santo Domingo church represented Spanish domination of the culture, spurred on by greed to accumulate gold and silver, which the Incans didn't see any intrinsic monetary value other than that it was shinny and that the gods gave it to them. Our guide showed us spooky parts of the old temple and the engineering was astonishing.
Cusco is in an active seismic area, so the original architects created stones that had some "give" to them so they could absorb a major quake without tumbling over. That's some of the stuff that you'd see on the History Channel's Ancient Aliens -- because there was no way humans could have created such precise construction with rudimentary tools. Blocks of stone the size of washing machines sat on each other. You couldn't even squeeze a business card or Metrocard in between the cracks. Check out more photos of the ruins here.
I quickly found out that most Peruvians got angry when you mention or reference aliens because they take offense to the fact that gringos like myself doubted that their Peruvian ancestors were the most advanced culture on Earth at the time. However, I also met a few locals who believed in "gods from the sky" that assisted in construction of the first temples and shared their knowledge about astronomy. You can interpret those gods as aliens if you wish, which meshes with my view on the legends and lore of ancient cultures like the Incas. I believe that men and women built the pyramids in Egypt, South America, and the Incan ruins, but with a little help from their extra-terrestrial friends. I wanted to see proof for myself... with my own eyes... and after this trip, I'm a firm believer, yet, I have even more questions. At Capilla del Triunfo, I saw the first example of temple construction with assistance from other worldly beings.
At the church/temple I got yelled at by a security guard for snapping photos of the artwork. As a former museum security guard, I apologized with a hearty, "Lo siento!" But made sure I was much more stealth with future photos, especially the spooky alien stuff, like the images I saw on a gold-plated relief.
During our tour of the cathedral, our group of eight doubled in size because a different tour guide couldn't finish up his tour. That sucked because the new folks included a pair of annoying families... from the good old US of A... of course. Within seconds of their arrival, one of the fathers put Sos on uber-tilt. The guy was born in Peru but moved to Miami where he raised a family. He was very well-to-do and his wife and daughter wore super-expensive Chanel sunglasses. He kept asking stupid questions and our guide loved talking, so we had to sit through extra lectures on stupid shit. The other family had a young boy and a girl who were typical annoying Americans than give us a horrible reputation abroad. The chubby son was a bit of a momma's boy and he complained about going everywhere because of rough headaches. I felt bad for him because my head was pounding too, but I was also gutting it out by abstaining from pharmies. The little girl was bored and spent most of the tour in the cathedral smacking her father in the nuts. Too bad we couldn't ditch our tour and got stuck with them for another three long hours.
The next stop on our tour covered the Saqsayhuaman ruins. We piled into the bus and drove up to the mountains surrounding Cusco. Saqsayhuaman was supposed to look like a puma's head, but in reality it looked like a fortress.
The walled complex on the outskirts of town became the last stand for the Incas, who holed up there when the Spanish invaded Cusco. We were visiting scared ground where many warriors lost their lives. Saqsayhuaman had been the center of many rituals for centuries before the Spanish arrived. Again, the engineering and construction was so impressive and precise that it was hard to imagine aliens didn't have a hand in its construction. Some of the rocks are bigger than city buses and two or three stories in height.
During our time in Saqsayhuaman, our guide gave a long lecture (spurred on by the annoying guy who asked questions). I took the opportunity to lie down on the soft grass. I was so tired after less than an hour of sleep that I actually passed out for five minutes. Sos and Shirley poked fun of me because I started snoring, but luckily it wasn’t loud enough that anyone else heard.
Our guide wandered over to a different series of rocks and picked up two plants. One was eucalyptus, which he showed us how to pinch the leaves and then inhale/sniff the plant. The aroma of eucalyptus gave you an instant boost in lung capacity, sort of like the effects of Vick’s vapor rub when your mom rubbed it on your chest when you were a little kid and had bad congestion. Our guide also picked up another herb (I forgot the name) and it had similar effects. We sat on the rock and got high on natural herbs.
Our next stop was a healing spring. It wasn't as impressive as Saqsayhuaman. I wished we skipped the springs and spent more time at Saqsayhuaman. We hiked up a steep incline to reach the springs. An old guy in our group lost his mud and had serious breathing problems. His right arm went numb. Our guide pulled a bottle out of his jacket -- combination of herbs and rubbing alcohol -- rubbed it on his hands and cupped his hands over the guys nostrils and mouth. He told the old guy to inhale and he repeated the process a second time. The old guy sneezed and all of a sudden, he could breathe again -- in fact that was better than ever. The guy went from looking like he was having a heart attack, to looking like an Ethiopian marathoner.
I had a second batch of coca tea and I was also jacked up, enough so that I kept pace with our guide as we reached the top of the trail near the springs at the same time. Although my noggin was still throbbing, my lungs were able to handle the thin air and we chatted for a few minutes while everyone caught up. By then, Shirley and Sos had gotten chilly from the mountain air. Their thin SoCal blood couldn't handle the cool, brisk Andes air so they purchased alpaca hats from women hawking souvenirs along the trail and picked the perfect spot to sell tourists warm gear.
By the time we reached our hotel, I was starving and had a wicked headache. I popped a Vicodin to reduce the pounding, throbbing pain. We ate dinner at a place next to our hotel. Our waiter was awful, but the food was good and we got free Pisco Sours. I loaded up on pasta because I needed to load up on carbs for the next day, when we took off for Machu Picchu. A local band using traditional Incan instruments (wood flutes) played random cover songs like Bridge Over Troubled Water.
I retreated to my room and collapsed on my bed. I had been working on an hour of sleep and I had less than six hours before a 4:30am wake up call. The tiny lady with the limp arranged for us to leave Cusco at 6am in order to reach Machu Picchu by noon. Unable to find any basketball playoff games on TV, I settled on a random baseball game with Spanish-speaking announcers. It was the last thing I heard before I drifted to sleep.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
I probably should have slept for more than an hour, but I wasn't thinking properly. I blame the decent bag of weed a friend of mine scored in Lima along with a steady flow of local beer Cusquena. Whenever I'm done with a work assignment in a foreign country, I partake in a tradition among my fellow reporters and stay up as late as possible partying, drinking, and gambling. Sunday night was no exception after dinner with my colleagues at a restaurant hanging over the cliffs of Miraflores in Larcomar Mall, overlooking the Pacific Ocean as an illuminated cross flickered in the distance. We stayed up way, way, way late on Sunday night playing cards with my buddies, joking around, and listening to friend’s selection of Costa Rican reggae.
My wake-up call was set for 7am, even though I finished packing at 6am and crawled into bed as sunlight filled my expansive loft. I slept for an hour before it was time for me to meet up with Shirley and Sos -- my travel companions to Machu Picchu, both good friends from LA and we got along perfectly during a journey to Costa Rica a year earlier.
The journey to Machu Picchu isn't easy because there’s no direct road from Lima to Machu Picchu (aside from the infamous Inca trail). Tourists have to take a train to the foot of the mountain, which isn't the most accessible spot in Peru. In short, we flew southeast from Lima over the Andes Mountains into Cusco (or Cuzco as some locals spell it), then take a two-hour bus ride from Cusco to a small town called Ollantaytambo. From Ollantaytambo, we would board a train on Peru Rail which wound alongside the Urubamba river (which I dubbed the Chocolate Milk River, because it looked like... chocolate milk) through the Andes and reached an even smaller town called Aguas Calientes (literally translated into Hot Water because of the warm springs at the edge of town), and from Aguas Calientes we could hike up to the top of Machu Picchu, or take a 20-minute bus up to the top.
No wonder the Spanish never conquered Machu Picchu. They might have heard it existed, but they never got that far into the Andes. Besides, by the 1530s, Machu Picchu had been deserted for many years, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
At the least, we had a two-day journey ahead of us to get from Lima to Machu Picchu. If we wanted to trek to Machu Picchu from Cusco, it would have taken four or five days, something we considered, but none of us had the luxury of extra time to hike the Inca Trail. Alas, we flew to Cusco as a staging area for our trip to Machu Picchu.
We landed in Cusco on Monday around noon and I kept thinking how it reminded me a bit of Telluride, Colorado -- a plush valley in a mountainous region -- except Telluride is tiny and Cusco is huge with almost a half a million people, the majority of them living in shanty towns and adobe shacks up on the mountainside and descending into the city to work in various aspects of the blossoming tourism industry.
Cusco is not just a launching point for Machu Picchu -- it's also the site of its own historic Incan ruins. At its height of power, Cusco was the Washington DC and NYC of the empire -- the center of both political and commercial interests for the entire region. Cusco was strategically built to be the true center of the Incan empire. But then the Spanish waltzed in and conquered the Incas, but that's a whole other story.
At the airport in Cusco, we were swarmed with different sales people from competing Machu Picchu tour operating companies. We ignored them and headed outside. Before we left Lima, Shirley and Sos arranged the entire trip through a company (referred by the client who had flown me to Peru in the first place) so all we had to do was show up at the airport and find the dude waving a piece of cardboard with our names on it. He waved over to us and we followed him to his big, shiny, white Mercedes van. A very tiny, yet well dressed lady with a limp (think the Peruvian version of the seer in The Poltergeist flick, which I quickly nicknamed the "Go into the light!" lady) climbed into the van and told us that she was taking care of our entire sojourn. Her English was passable, but Sos and her conversed in Spanish as the driver left the airport and took us into the center of town to our hotel. The tiny lady with the limp apologized for traffic in advance. We had chosen the holiest week of the year to visit Cusco and Machu Picchu. Even though Peruvians worship Incan gods like Inti, the powerful Sun god, they're also devout Catholics (the religion brought over from Spanish missionaries). The previous day was Palm Sunday with Easter less than a week away. On that particular Monday, the entire town was getting ready for a festival celebrating the Lord of Earthquakes, because Cusco was nearly destroyed in the mid-1500s by a destructive quake. Sos loosely translated the Holy Monday festival something to the effect of the Black Jesus.
We arrived at our hotel located on the most famous street in Cusco, the Avenue del Sol. The tiny lady with the limp told that our rooms weren't ready yet, and we had ten minutes to drop off our bags before a bus took us on a five-hour tour of Incan ruins around Cusco. I had broken up my luggage into two pieces; I left my carry-on behind at Lima airport in storage (which had work clothes) and only took my backpack (with 2 days of clothes, rain gear, headlamp, laptop, and camera) with me. I ditched my backpack at our hotel and the tiny lady handed us cups of light greenish tea -- the infamous coca tea or coca matte. Instead of chewing coca leaves to help adjust to the altitude, we sipped the bitter tasting green tea. I eventually acquired a taste for what the locals subbed "Incan Red Bull."
Cocaine in a cup, baby! Yep, talk about cocaine in liquid form. I wish I could grow that stuff in my backyard without the DEA destroying it.
A few sips definitely perked me up considering I was working with an hour of sleep. The coca tea also helped open up the breathing passages in my lungs. I sipped more tea as I staved off the massive migraine that invaded my head. I had been to Colorado enough (flying from sea level to the mountains cause side effects like headaches, stomach aches, and the shits), so I knew what was wrong with me, so I didn't freak out. Part of the reason the locals discourage foreigners from flying directly to Machu Picchu is due to the abrupt change in altitude. Most tour operators want you to spend a day or two in Cusco to adjust to the thin air (oh, and to bilk you out of a few more gringos out of tourist dollars). At times I was gasping a bit considering Cusco was in excess of 11,000 feet or almost 2,000 more than Telluride.
I slammed the rest of the tea, grabbed my camera, and piled into the back of a tour bus with Sos, Shirley, and six others. Our first stop was the old Suntur Wasi (aka House of God) that was also an Incan temple called Koricancha (aka Temple of the Sun) that was destroyed by the Spanish, who built Santo Domingo church on top of the remnants of exquisite masonry. We met our guide who was knowledgeable, but chatty. He was rather famous for running the Inca Trail in 4:09... yes, a shade over four hours... (but I had no idea what he was bragging about, I assume he meant a specific section). In high school when I was on the cross country team, I once ran a mile under 5 minutes and thought I was a badass. That was on flat terrain in Central Park and not in the high altitudes of the Andes.
The Capilla del Triunfo cathedral (in the Plaza de Arms main square) and Santo Domingo church represented Spanish domination of the culture, spurred on by greed to accumulate gold and silver, which the Incans didn't see any intrinsic monetary value other than that it was shinny and that the gods gave it to them. Our guide showed us spooky parts of the old temple and the engineering was astonishing.
Cusco is in an active seismic area, so the original architects created stones that had some "give" to them so they could absorb a major quake without tumbling over. That's some of the stuff that you'd see on the History Channel's Ancient Aliens -- because there was no way humans could have created such precise construction with rudimentary tools. Blocks of stone the size of washing machines sat on each other. You couldn't even squeeze a business card or Metrocard in between the cracks. Check out more photos of the ruins here.
I quickly found out that most Peruvians got angry when you mention or reference aliens because they take offense to the fact that gringos like myself doubted that their Peruvian ancestors were the most advanced culture on Earth at the time. However, I also met a few locals who believed in "gods from the sky" that assisted in construction of the first temples and shared their knowledge about astronomy. You can interpret those gods as aliens if you wish, which meshes with my view on the legends and lore of ancient cultures like the Incas. I believe that men and women built the pyramids in Egypt, South America, and the Incan ruins, but with a little help from their extra-terrestrial friends. I wanted to see proof for myself... with my own eyes... and after this trip, I'm a firm believer, yet, I have even more questions. At Capilla del Triunfo, I saw the first example of temple construction with assistance from other worldly beings.
At the church/temple I got yelled at by a security guard for snapping photos of the artwork. As a former museum security guard, I apologized with a hearty, "Lo siento!" But made sure I was much more stealth with future photos, especially the spooky alien stuff, like the images I saw on a gold-plated relief.
During our tour of the cathedral, our group of eight doubled in size because a different tour guide couldn't finish up his tour. That sucked because the new folks included a pair of annoying families... from the good old US of A... of course. Within seconds of their arrival, one of the fathers put Sos on uber-tilt. The guy was born in Peru but moved to Miami where he raised a family. He was very well-to-do and his wife and daughter wore super-expensive Chanel sunglasses. He kept asking stupid questions and our guide loved talking, so we had to sit through extra lectures on stupid shit. The other family had a young boy and a girl who were typical annoying Americans than give us a horrible reputation abroad. The chubby son was a bit of a momma's boy and he complained about going everywhere because of rough headaches. I felt bad for him because my head was pounding too, but I was also gutting it out by abstaining from pharmies. The little girl was bored and spent most of the tour in the cathedral smacking her father in the nuts. Too bad we couldn't ditch our tour and got stuck with them for another three long hours.
The next stop on our tour covered the Saqsayhuaman ruins. We piled into the bus and drove up to the mountains surrounding Cusco. Saqsayhuaman was supposed to look like a puma's head, but in reality it looked like a fortress.
The walled complex on the outskirts of town became the last stand for the Incas, who holed up there when the Spanish invaded Cusco. We were visiting scared ground where many warriors lost their lives. Saqsayhuaman had been the center of many rituals for centuries before the Spanish arrived. Again, the engineering and construction was so impressive and precise that it was hard to imagine aliens didn't have a hand in its construction. Some of the rocks are bigger than city buses and two or three stories in height.
During our time in Saqsayhuaman, our guide gave a long lecture (spurred on by the annoying guy who asked questions). I took the opportunity to lie down on the soft grass. I was so tired after less than an hour of sleep that I actually passed out for five minutes. Sos and Shirley poked fun of me because I started snoring, but luckily it wasn’t loud enough that anyone else heard.
Our guide wandered over to a different series of rocks and picked up two plants. One was eucalyptus, which he showed us how to pinch the leaves and then inhale/sniff the plant. The aroma of eucalyptus gave you an instant boost in lung capacity, sort of like the effects of Vick’s vapor rub when your mom rubbed it on your chest when you were a little kid and had bad congestion. Our guide also picked up another herb (I forgot the name) and it had similar effects. We sat on the rock and got high on natural herbs.
Our next stop was a healing spring. It wasn't as impressive as Saqsayhuaman. I wished we skipped the springs and spent more time at Saqsayhuaman. We hiked up a steep incline to reach the springs. An old guy in our group lost his mud and had serious breathing problems. His right arm went numb. Our guide pulled a bottle out of his jacket -- combination of herbs and rubbing alcohol -- rubbed it on his hands and cupped his hands over the guys nostrils and mouth. He told the old guy to inhale and he repeated the process a second time. The old guy sneezed and all of a sudden, he could breathe again -- in fact that was better than ever. The guy went from looking like he was having a heart attack, to looking like an Ethiopian marathoner.
I had a second batch of coca tea and I was also jacked up, enough so that I kept pace with our guide as we reached the top of the trail near the springs at the same time. Although my noggin was still throbbing, my lungs were able to handle the thin air and we chatted for a few minutes while everyone caught up. By then, Shirley and Sos had gotten chilly from the mountain air. Their thin SoCal blood couldn't handle the cool, brisk Andes air so they purchased alpaca hats from women hawking souvenirs along the trail and picked the perfect spot to sell tourists warm gear.
By the time we reached our hotel, I was starving and had a wicked headache. I popped a Vicodin to reduce the pounding, throbbing pain. We ate dinner at a place next to our hotel. Our waiter was awful, but the food was good and we got free Pisco Sours. I loaded up on pasta because I needed to load up on carbs for the next day, when we took off for Machu Picchu. A local band using traditional Incan instruments (wood flutes) played random cover songs like Bridge Over Troubled Water.
I retreated to my room and collapsed on my bed. I had been working on an hour of sleep and I had less than six hours before a 4:30am wake up call. The tiny lady with the limp arranged for us to leave Cusco at 6am in order to reach Machu Picchu by noon. Unable to find any basketball playoff games on TV, I settled on a random baseball game with Spanish-speaking announcers. It was the last thing I heard before I drifted to sleep.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
April 01, 2011
Solomon's Cranium
By Paul McGuire © 2011
"I always wanted to be an artist."
"Well, you are...in a way."
"I'm a musician, sure, but I wanted to be a traditional artist. I wanted to become a painter and when I was a kid I used to draw all the time."
"But what happened?"
"My parents got really angry and outlawed drawing in my home."
"What? Where did you grow up? Russia? Nazi Germany?"
"Boston suburbs. Okay, it's a really long backstory but you promised you won't think I'm weird or something?"
"How could I think you're weird? You're a lesbian with a purple mohawk and orange-dyed armpit hair."
"Okay, so my grandfather was some World War II hero or something and he was working for the government. My mom said he was a 'G-Man'. Are you old enough to know that term?"
"G-Men? Like FBI agents in trench coats and hats?"
"Exactly. That's what my generation knew them as. You guys call them 'Men in Black' after that Fresh Prince movie with Tommy Lee Jones."
"Awesome movie. Was your grandfather chasing aliens?"
"I don't know what he was doing. He died before I was born. I saw old black and white photos. He was always in a drab suit with a scowl on his face. Anyway, both of my parents were anthropology students when they met. My mother said she never expected my father to propose because he was one of those 'free spirit' types but when he returned from a nine-month long field assignment in the Solomon Islands, he started acting really strange but everything was strange then, so she chalked up his peculiar behavior to the incendiary political climate of 1968. She was too excited about getting married and she overlooked the drastic changes. Those were the first of the warning signs, but my mother ignored them."
"Of what?"
"Nightmares. My father had horrible nightmares. When I was a kid, I noticed that my father never slept. When we were all asleep, he was in his study or in the kitchen reading books or writing various letters to the editor. But my mom said that he had nightmares about something that happened to him in the Solomon Islands."
"What was he doing there?"
"I think he was studying tribal behavior, I don't know for sure, because he wrote some boring text book instead of a sort of Indiana Jones type of adventures. So let's fast forward a decade or so. I'm eight years old and I'm at the peak of my curiosity. Both of my parents were professors and I spent a lot of time being watched by an elderly neighbor who babysat for a couple of hours a day. Anyway, I used to hide in my father's office and snoop around. I learned how to pick locks that summer and I picked open a lockbox that he had unsuccessfully hidden in one of his desk drawers. That's when I saw the photograph dated 1968."
"Where was it taken?"
"The Solomon Islands. But it's the skull that freaked me out."
"The what?"
"The skull. My father was standing over what looks like an excavation site. The skull is the size of a VW Bug."
"Like a 'punch buggy' bug?"
"Yes."
"Was it a dinosaur?"
"It looked human to me."
"Human?"
"Yeah, it had a rib cage which was big enough to fit all of Parliament Funkadelic inside. The femur was as long as a city bus."
"Wait, so you found a picture of your dad with the bones of a giant?"
"Yes."
"Was it pre-historic? Was it Godzilla?"
"I don't know what it was. I put it back, but I couldn't get image out of my head, so I started drawing images of giant skulls, or stick figures of my father in a ditch with giant bones."
"Holy shit."
"Yeah, and when my father saw the drawings, he went berserk. He demanded that I hand over every single drawing. I remember that day -- he ripped one off the fridge and followed me into my room where I kept most of the drawings in a large folder. He grabbed the entire folder and went outside in the backyard and set it on fire. My mother was screaming at him. I was crying, but not wailing, more like silently pouting with a trickle of tears. That's when he outlawed drawing or anything related to art. I think my father felt guilty about what happened, so he encouraged me to pursue music. They let me pick any instrument and paid for lessons and in six years, I went through five or six different ones before I finally settled on a guitar. They hounded me about practicing on days I didn't want to, but they were always supportive of my music even to the point of not objecting when I said I wanted to drop out of school and move to Portland and play music. You would think that academics like them would have been wicked pissed if their daughter dropped out, but they were totally cool with it. I can't help but think all of that loving support stemmed from their guilt about restricting my access to drawing. All because of those silly skulls. I wouldn't have a career and a kick ass band and be talking to a music writer like yourself unless I didn't have that amazing support and encouragement from my parents."
"So what was the skull?"
"I don't know. But my bass player has a theory that my father was working for the government on some sort of top secret mission because they knew he could be trusted if my grandfather was an FBI agent. So Harvard sent him to the Solomon Islands to study the people, but the entire time it was just a cover story for a covert op in which my father was helping the CIA excavate the remains of an ancient alien race."
"The skull is alien?"
"I have no idea for sure. It's just a theory. A half-baked theory that my bass player concocted in the back of the tour buss after drinking one too many shots of 151."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
"I always wanted to be an artist."
"Well, you are...in a way."
"I'm a musician, sure, but I wanted to be a traditional artist. I wanted to become a painter and when I was a kid I used to draw all the time."
"But what happened?"
"My parents got really angry and outlawed drawing in my home."
"What? Where did you grow up? Russia? Nazi Germany?"
"Boston suburbs. Okay, it's a really long backstory but you promised you won't think I'm weird or something?"
"How could I think you're weird? You're a lesbian with a purple mohawk and orange-dyed armpit hair."
"Okay, so my grandfather was some World War II hero or something and he was working for the government. My mom said he was a 'G-Man'. Are you old enough to know that term?"
"G-Men? Like FBI agents in trench coats and hats?"
"Exactly. That's what my generation knew them as. You guys call them 'Men in Black' after that Fresh Prince movie with Tommy Lee Jones."
"Awesome movie. Was your grandfather chasing aliens?"
"I don't know what he was doing. He died before I was born. I saw old black and white photos. He was always in a drab suit with a scowl on his face. Anyway, both of my parents were anthropology students when they met. My mother said she never expected my father to propose because he was one of those 'free spirit' types but when he returned from a nine-month long field assignment in the Solomon Islands, he started acting really strange but everything was strange then, so she chalked up his peculiar behavior to the incendiary political climate of 1968. She was too excited about getting married and she overlooked the drastic changes. Those were the first of the warning signs, but my mother ignored them."
"Of what?"
"Nightmares. My father had horrible nightmares. When I was a kid, I noticed that my father never slept. When we were all asleep, he was in his study or in the kitchen reading books or writing various letters to the editor. But my mom said that he had nightmares about something that happened to him in the Solomon Islands."
"What was he doing there?"
"I think he was studying tribal behavior, I don't know for sure, because he wrote some boring text book instead of a sort of Indiana Jones type of adventures. So let's fast forward a decade or so. I'm eight years old and I'm at the peak of my curiosity. Both of my parents were professors and I spent a lot of time being watched by an elderly neighbor who babysat for a couple of hours a day. Anyway, I used to hide in my father's office and snoop around. I learned how to pick locks that summer and I picked open a lockbox that he had unsuccessfully hidden in one of his desk drawers. That's when I saw the photograph dated 1968."
"Where was it taken?"
"The Solomon Islands. But it's the skull that freaked me out."
"The what?"
"The skull. My father was standing over what looks like an excavation site. The skull is the size of a VW Bug."
"Like a 'punch buggy' bug?"
"Yes."
"Was it a dinosaur?"
"It looked human to me."
"Human?"
"Yeah, it had a rib cage which was big enough to fit all of Parliament Funkadelic inside. The femur was as long as a city bus."
"Wait, so you found a picture of your dad with the bones of a giant?"
"Yes."
"Was it pre-historic? Was it Godzilla?"
"I don't know what it was. I put it back, but I couldn't get image out of my head, so I started drawing images of giant skulls, or stick figures of my father in a ditch with giant bones."
"Holy shit."
"Yeah, and when my father saw the drawings, he went berserk. He demanded that I hand over every single drawing. I remember that day -- he ripped one off the fridge and followed me into my room where I kept most of the drawings in a large folder. He grabbed the entire folder and went outside in the backyard and set it on fire. My mother was screaming at him. I was crying, but not wailing, more like silently pouting with a trickle of tears. That's when he outlawed drawing or anything related to art. I think my father felt guilty about what happened, so he encouraged me to pursue music. They let me pick any instrument and paid for lessons and in six years, I went through five or six different ones before I finally settled on a guitar. They hounded me about practicing on days I didn't want to, but they were always supportive of my music even to the point of not objecting when I said I wanted to drop out of school and move to Portland and play music. You would think that academics like them would have been wicked pissed if their daughter dropped out, but they were totally cool with it. I can't help but think all of that loving support stemmed from their guilt about restricting my access to drawing. All because of those silly skulls. I wouldn't have a career and a kick ass band and be talking to a music writer like yourself unless I didn't have that amazing support and encouragement from my parents."
"So what was the skull?"
"I don't know. But my bass player has a theory that my father was working for the government on some sort of top secret mission because they knew he could be trusted if my grandfather was an FBI agent. So Harvard sent him to the Solomon Islands to study the people, but the entire time it was just a cover story for a covert op in which my father was helping the CIA excavate the remains of an ancient alien race."
"The skull is alien?"
"I have no idea for sure. It's just a theory. A half-baked theory that my bass player concocted in the back of the tour buss after drinking one too many shots of 151."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
March 01, 2011
Matisse's Chorizo
By Paul McGuire © 2011
Washed-in morning. Cotton-candy mouth.
Awoken from a dream. My alarm clock? Nope, rather from the conversational chatter from the neighbor across the alley.
I stepped outside and looked up. A cigarette snugly fit in between her fingers from her hand that lazily hung out the second-story window. She gripped a land-line cordless phone with the other hand and rapidly spoke in Farsi.
I stopped because of the music. Sounds. Musical sounds of unknown origins. Which one of my neighbors on the other side of the alley watched a Bollywood musical or blasted gypsy music peppered with Egyptian scales? And was someone actually practicing a xylophone too?
The unfriendly woman in a purple sweater allowed her leashed shar pei to nip at the bottom on my jeans when I walked down the alley. The hashed-out censor in my head muted my scornful thought: "Hey, fuck you lady! Your yapping wrinkled mutt bit my ankle! You're lucky that I don't drop a dime on your ass and report you to L.A. Animal Control as an animal hoarder!"
The heartless twat drizzled a thick, bluish goo into a gurgling laundry machine instead of reeling in her ornery canine. I didn't exist to her. Me? A mere scruffy ghost to my neighbors, maybe even a scruffy goat? No, definitely a ghost. I'm invisible.
Who knows if anyone of my neighbors were callous snitches who answered one of those "If you see something, say something" Homeland Security-funded advertisements that the Military-Entertainment-Fear complex pawned off as each American's Patriotic duty. The entire campaign in the War of Terror became a successful re-branding of Soviet Union-era intimidation tactics against the populous. The intelligence apparatus easily converted your paranoid neighbors into "snooping toms" in order to keep America terrorist-free. They were an additional layer of surveillance in our post-modern digital age and kept tabs on your comings and goings. Domestic espionage.
While continuing to reside in a major metropolitan area, I will NEVER evade the Watchers -- security/traffic/copter/satellite cameras -- for more than a couple of minutes at a time, but even when I'm off the grid temporarily, I'm still being watched by my fellow humanoid homegrown spy network (armed with iPhones, Crackberries Droids, and other tools of the citizen paparazzi), who filled in gaps for the Great Eye in the Sky.
They knew your every move before you made it.
My every move.
Every move.
My. Every. Move.
My.
Every.
Move.
My. Every. Mood.
The Eye saw me kick the dog before I sauntered down the street and paused in front of a palm tree. I hoisted my own CrackBerry toward the sky and snapped evidence of the white smudges. Zig-zag. Zag-zig. Across the sky. More chemtrails. More jets. More unknown contents. Aluminum? Unknown? Harmless or helpful? If the smudges over the horizon were helpful, then some slippery politician would have seized the opportunity to steal credit for "saving the world" by curing the ills of out environment, and signing autographs for his best-selling book en route to accepting a Nobel prize (and hypocritically flying first class on Royal Scandi Airlines).
I forgot what day it was. It is.
Thurfrisatursunday?
Fuck. The cluster of hungry hipsters in front of the coffeeshop narrowed down the choices to Saturday or Sunday.
Satursunday.
On Satursundays, the undersized pixies in scarves and oversized sunglasses and their douchenozzles boyfriends, clad in plaid-checkered shirts and tight black jeans, all impatiently waited for an empty booth at my small, yet beloved coffeeshop. They hovered and drooled over the outdoor tables filled elderly ladies in hats and pearl necklaces. They wolfed down omelets. Wolfed. Even though the post-Church crowd were spiritually nourished after services, they were still famished in the food department.
At that bewitching hour, the coffeeshop's clientele were divided between: 1) religious Baby Boomers observing the Sabbath, and 2) disenfranchised, spiritually-rudderless Gen X-Y-Z philistines.
Regardless of who worshiped who/what, everyone in search of food had to wait for their place in line. But... not me.
Life is so much smoother if you're well-liked by the right people in this fucking town. Or I should clarify -- well-liked by the powerful watch guards of Hollyweird holding the clipboard.
The omnipotent list.
Coincidentally the cosmos aligned perfectly that my faded ass stumbled into the one joint in all of Los Angeles where I actually had some pull. That juice finally came in handy on a slammed Sunday. No wait. I got bumped to the top of the list, a welcomed a perk of a valued regular (good tipper) at a family-owned and operated business -- a true rarity these days. Miserly corporate conglomerates boast about their so-called rewards clubs, but those mega-monsters can't match the residual benefits of a small business who look out for their best customers.
No list. I didn't even put my name on a list. I bypassed all of the hipsters by simply making eye contact with the owner's son (a.k.a. the guy with the list). He nodded and I nodded back. I discreetly passed the drooling hipsters and walked into the back. I slid into an empty stool at the end of the counter. Right above my head, a Eastwood's spaghetti western played on the TV.
The mayhem behind the grill was organized chaos -- nonstop chatter mixed with food lingo and broken Spanish. Much needed communication at the busiest moment of the week. And in a city with "special" denizens, that also meant lots of "special" orders.
The Beatles faintly played on the radio. Penny Lane sounded like a hapless opening act that none one in the crowd paid any attention and talked over, because they anxiously awaited the headlining act -- the symphony of sizzling bacon and sausages.
I never saw anyone work faster than the two cooks. Two cooks, only two. They did the work of eight men. They were octopuses. Octopi. It seemed like 16-arms cranked out a variety of breakfast dishes every twenty seconds. All sorts of eggs concoctions. Fried. Sunny side. Over hard. Poached. Scrambled. One of the prep cooks in the back emerged with a pair of tightly-rolled breakfast burritos. Piles and piles of yellowish greasy potatoes were quickly converted into darkened strands of hasbrowns. French toast. Banana pancakes. Canadian Bacon. Real bacon, but sadly a health-nut ordered that lame excuse of a substitute. Turkey bacon. The methadone of bacon. Turkey bacon.
The lottery winner of the day was the fortunate soul who ordered a swirling maroon and gold plate of Chorizo and scrambled eggs, which reminded me of a Matisse painting.
Maroon + Gold = Matisse's Chorizo and eggs.
A young woman with a Rhode Island accent sat on the stool to my right. She wore her pajamas pants, flip flops, and a UCLA hoodie and updated her Facebook status on her iphone while simultaneously tearing apart creamers and dumping them into her coffee. The silver-haired gentlemen three stools down ruffled the pages of a gaunt copy of the L.A. Times. He took a more classy and dignified approach while dressing up for breakfast: a paisley bow-tie and seersucker suit. He looked more like a clarinet player in a Dixieland jazz band who had been up all night playing sets in the basement of a whorehouse, than one of the Bible Beaters grabbing an omelet after communion. The clarinet player sipped a cup of black coffee infused with four spoonfuls of sugar; the only thing keeping him awake and face-planting onto the counter. For me, a strong big-assed iced tea was the only thing that kept me awake. Although a bump of nose candy would have been fine and dandy. In an L.A. diner full of Jesus Freaks and hipsters, the percentages were good that someone was holding cocaine.
A sticky cup of maple syrup became my first nemesis of the day and it made a few pages of a book stick together. Dirty plates scraped against each other as the busboys rushed back and forth clearing off tables to seat the ever-growing line outside. The clattering of silverware and plates (made in China) sounded like a gentle rain. Bright beams of sunlight cracked through the chemtrail-laced fog and blasted its way through the front window. Even though I sat all the way in the back, the sun was so intense that it blinded out Eastwood on the TV. I considered wearing sunglasses to shield myself from the irritating beams.
The waitress whizzed by in front of me with a maroon and gold swirl dancing on a plate followed by its own chemtrail of deliciousness.
Matisse's Chorizo.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
Washed-in morning. Cotton-candy mouth.
Awoken from a dream. My alarm clock? Nope, rather from the conversational chatter from the neighbor across the alley.
I stepped outside and looked up. A cigarette snugly fit in between her fingers from her hand that lazily hung out the second-story window. She gripped a land-line cordless phone with the other hand and rapidly spoke in Farsi.
I stopped because of the music. Sounds. Musical sounds of unknown origins. Which one of my neighbors on the other side of the alley watched a Bollywood musical or blasted gypsy music peppered with Egyptian scales? And was someone actually practicing a xylophone too?
The unfriendly woman in a purple sweater allowed her leashed shar pei to nip at the bottom on my jeans when I walked down the alley. The hashed-out censor in my head muted my scornful thought: "Hey, fuck you lady! Your yapping wrinkled mutt bit my ankle! You're lucky that I don't drop a dime on your ass and report you to L.A. Animal Control as an animal hoarder!"
The heartless twat drizzled a thick, bluish goo into a gurgling laundry machine instead of reeling in her ornery canine. I didn't exist to her. Me? A mere scruffy ghost to my neighbors, maybe even a scruffy goat? No, definitely a ghost. I'm invisible.
Who knows if anyone of my neighbors were callous snitches who answered one of those "If you see something, say something" Homeland Security-funded advertisements that the Military-Entertainment-Fear complex pawned off as each American's Patriotic duty. The entire campaign in the War of Terror became a successful re-branding of Soviet Union-era intimidation tactics against the populous. The intelligence apparatus easily converted your paranoid neighbors into "snooping toms" in order to keep America terrorist-free. They were an additional layer of surveillance in our post-modern digital age and kept tabs on your comings and goings. Domestic espionage.
While continuing to reside in a major metropolitan area, I will NEVER evade the Watchers -- security/traffic/copter/satellite cameras -- for more than a couple of minutes at a time, but even when I'm off the grid temporarily, I'm still being watched by my fellow humanoid homegrown spy network (armed with iPhones, Crackberries Droids, and other tools of the citizen paparazzi), who filled in gaps for the Great Eye in the Sky.
They knew your every move before you made it.
My every move.
Every move.
My. Every. Move.
My.
Every.
Move.
My. Every. Mood.
The Eye saw me kick the dog before I sauntered down the street and paused in front of a palm tree. I hoisted my own CrackBerry toward the sky and snapped evidence of the white smudges. Zig-zag. Zag-zig. Across the sky. More chemtrails. More jets. More unknown contents. Aluminum? Unknown? Harmless or helpful? If the smudges over the horizon were helpful, then some slippery politician would have seized the opportunity to steal credit for "saving the world" by curing the ills of out environment, and signing autographs for his best-selling book en route to accepting a Nobel prize (and hypocritically flying first class on Royal Scandi Airlines).
I forgot what day it was. It is.
Thurfrisatursunday?
Fuck. The cluster of hungry hipsters in front of the coffeeshop narrowed down the choices to Saturday or Sunday.
Satursunday.
On Satursundays, the undersized pixies in scarves and oversized sunglasses and their douchenozzles boyfriends, clad in plaid-checkered shirts and tight black jeans, all impatiently waited for an empty booth at my small, yet beloved coffeeshop. They hovered and drooled over the outdoor tables filled elderly ladies in hats and pearl necklaces. They wolfed down omelets. Wolfed. Even though the post-Church crowd were spiritually nourished after services, they were still famished in the food department.
At that bewitching hour, the coffeeshop's clientele were divided between: 1) religious Baby Boomers observing the Sabbath, and 2) disenfranchised, spiritually-rudderless Gen X-Y-Z philistines.
Regardless of who worshiped who/what, everyone in search of food had to wait for their place in line. But... not me.
Life is so much smoother if you're well-liked by the right people in this fucking town. Or I should clarify -- well-liked by the powerful watch guards of Hollyweird holding the clipboard.
The omnipotent list.
Coincidentally the cosmos aligned perfectly that my faded ass stumbled into the one joint in all of Los Angeles where I actually had some pull. That juice finally came in handy on a slammed Sunday. No wait. I got bumped to the top of the list, a welcomed a perk of a valued regular (good tipper) at a family-owned and operated business -- a true rarity these days. Miserly corporate conglomerates boast about their so-called rewards clubs, but those mega-monsters can't match the residual benefits of a small business who look out for their best customers.
No list. I didn't even put my name on a list. I bypassed all of the hipsters by simply making eye contact with the owner's son (a.k.a. the guy with the list). He nodded and I nodded back. I discreetly passed the drooling hipsters and walked into the back. I slid into an empty stool at the end of the counter. Right above my head, a Eastwood's spaghetti western played on the TV.
The mayhem behind the grill was organized chaos -- nonstop chatter mixed with food lingo and broken Spanish. Much needed communication at the busiest moment of the week. And in a city with "special" denizens, that also meant lots of "special" orders.
The Beatles faintly played on the radio. Penny Lane sounded like a hapless opening act that none one in the crowd paid any attention and talked over, because they anxiously awaited the headlining act -- the symphony of sizzling bacon and sausages.
I never saw anyone work faster than the two cooks. Two cooks, only two. They did the work of eight men. They were octopuses. Octopi. It seemed like 16-arms cranked out a variety of breakfast dishes every twenty seconds. All sorts of eggs concoctions. Fried. Sunny side. Over hard. Poached. Scrambled. One of the prep cooks in the back emerged with a pair of tightly-rolled breakfast burritos. Piles and piles of yellowish greasy potatoes were quickly converted into darkened strands of hasbrowns. French toast. Banana pancakes. Canadian Bacon. Real bacon, but sadly a health-nut ordered that lame excuse of a substitute. Turkey bacon. The methadone of bacon. Turkey bacon.
The lottery winner of the day was the fortunate soul who ordered a swirling maroon and gold plate of Chorizo and scrambled eggs, which reminded me of a Matisse painting.
Maroon + Gold = Matisse's Chorizo and eggs.
A young woman with a Rhode Island accent sat on the stool to my right. She wore her pajamas pants, flip flops, and a UCLA hoodie and updated her Facebook status on her iphone while simultaneously tearing apart creamers and dumping them into her coffee. The silver-haired gentlemen three stools down ruffled the pages of a gaunt copy of the L.A. Times. He took a more classy and dignified approach while dressing up for breakfast: a paisley bow-tie and seersucker suit. He looked more like a clarinet player in a Dixieland jazz band who had been up all night playing sets in the basement of a whorehouse, than one of the Bible Beaters grabbing an omelet after communion. The clarinet player sipped a cup of black coffee infused with four spoonfuls of sugar; the only thing keeping him awake and face-planting onto the counter. For me, a strong big-assed iced tea was the only thing that kept me awake. Although a bump of nose candy would have been fine and dandy. In an L.A. diner full of Jesus Freaks and hipsters, the percentages were good that someone was holding cocaine.
A sticky cup of maple syrup became my first nemesis of the day and it made a few pages of a book stick together. Dirty plates scraped against each other as the busboys rushed back and forth clearing off tables to seat the ever-growing line outside. The clattering of silverware and plates (made in China) sounded like a gentle rain. Bright beams of sunlight cracked through the chemtrail-laced fog and blasted its way through the front window. Even though I sat all the way in the back, the sun was so intense that it blinded out Eastwood on the TV. I considered wearing sunglasses to shield myself from the irritating beams.
The waitress whizzed by in front of me with a maroon and gold swirl dancing on a plate followed by its own chemtrail of deliciousness.
Matisse's Chorizo.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
February 01, 2011
Sweet T'ings
By Paul McGuire © 2011
Our cabbie took off from the airport without asking us where to go. Nicky was slightly concerned, but I reassured her that everything was cool. He was obviously engrossed in the middle of an important phone call. I tried to put together what he was saying, but it was a combination of English and Bahamanian Creole.
After driving about five minutes the driver put his call on hold. He turned around and apologized to us, before he asked for our intended destination. I blurted out, "Atlantis. Coral Towers."
He nodded and repeated what I said before he quickly returned to his call. His conversation lasted for only a couple of more minutes.
"My bookie," he tried to explain, which he didn't have to.
I really didn't give two shits. I'm the last passenger on the island that would want to disrupt a transaction between a man and his bookie.
"I wanted Pick 4 tickets," he said as he passed a slow moving pickup. "Florida and New York."
Wow, a lottery degenerate. That's hardcore. I didn't ask if he wanted an actual ticket or if this was some sort of side action, like the mob running numbers back in the old neighborhood. Somethings in life I don't want to know about.
The cabbie pulled into Atlantis and I tipped him fairly decent, enough that he tried to sell me a bag of blow. I politely declined. Do you know the six words that aptly describes cocaine from the Caribbean? Clumps together, but only cut once.
It's hard to be anything but a tourist in a place like Atlantis.
I pride myself on being a traveler, and not one of those gaudy tourists in floral print shirts clashing against their pinkish sunburned skin sipping tropical drinks while carrying around a mass market paperback. It is nearly impossible to blend in with the locals in the Bahamas. If anything, I feel like a parasite contributing to the downfall of modern society perpetuating neo-colonialism. The capitalist inside my head reminds me that hundreds if not thousands of Bahamanians would be without jobs if this monstrosity of a beach resort was not constructed on a small patch of coral and sand.
In many ways, the island's original name of Hog Island seems more appropriate than it's re-branded name of Paradise Island. Paradise seems elusive when you're paying $25 for a cheeseburger. I feel more like a hog rooting around in its own feces than someone in search of spiritual revitalization. I blame David Foster Wallace's remarkable essay about his experience on a cruise ship for ruining whatever fun I should be having. DFW made me question the stark fact that most vacation destinations are by definition gaudy and would be a hell of a lot better if tourists were not even there. I can't help but wonder what the island would look like without the resort -- I imagined only two shacks sprinkled along the beach, one that only sells conch and the other that had bottles of Kalik, the local brew, sitting in semi-lukewarm buckets of water.
When I took a long stroll on the beach with my girlfriend, I tried to imagine that we were all alone, just the two of us, feet sinking into the moist white sand with every step and dodging the run off of the waves. That illusion only lasted for a few fleeting moments before reality returned and I felt sorry for the lifeguard, who resembled a sherpa bundled up in a wool hat and several layers of clothing. He didn't look like someone ready to dart into the water and rescue a tourist from a shark attack. Then again, no one was actually swimming in the water because it was too cold and way to windy. The lifeguard's biggest challenge was avoiding frostbite.
The flavor of the Bahamas ran up my nose when I unpacked my bag and caught a whiff of my dirty clothes. If you ever want a quick and last memory of a vacation spot, just quickly inhale your clothes as soon as you unpack them. They will smell like the last place you were when you wore or packed them. In this case, my clothes smelled like the Atlantis resort, moreover a combination of the beach and whatever air freshner the maids sprayed in the room. The Atlantis aroma is unique unto itself. It came back the moment I stepped into the sprawling monstrosity of a complex.
The last time I visited the Bahamas, I was in the middle of a work assignment and didn't really have time to enjoy fun in the sun, spending most of my time in a room watching poker players and spending my nights binge drinking Kaliks, the local beer, at the lobby bar with other members of the media, an eclectic hodgepodge of Canadians, Brits, Americans, Germans, and one giddy Frenchman.
On the current sojourn, my poison switched from Kalik to the Bahama Mama, a pink and fruity flavorful mixture of juices and rum. The secret of the concoction was that you couldn't taste any of the booze. The good barkeeps unleashed a heavy pour and you'd ingest at least three or four shots of rum with every cocktail. Some drinks with skimpy rum shots were heavily diluted with punch, but those were few and far between and sometimes welcomed because a weak fruity cocktail would slow down the booze intake. It was like easing off the breaks without actually easing off the breaks.
Pink and blue cocktails were the rage in the Bahamas. No one frowned upon you if you consumed seven or seventeen. In fact, considering the amount of booze in them, the drinks were the cheapest item at the Atlantis. Food cost an abysmal amount of money considering they also slapped you with a mandatory 15% service fee charge, which means they already got paid for the lackadaisical "island time" service that made European cafe waitresses look liked speed addicts. But for an overpriced resort, the drinks were fair market price. Cocktails at trendy lounges in LA, meat market clubs in Vegas, and hipster bars in NYC were priced much higher than those we consumed in the Bahamas. Booze was so freaking cheap in the islands that even at their inflated rates, we still got a bargain.
And that's why rum is evil.
Well, one of the many reasons. Delectable fruit-inspired cocktails with catchy names like Bahama Mama and Rum Runners go down so smooth because you can't taste the main ingredient...lots of rum. After the fourth cocktail everything went blurry and you spoke gibberish for three hours, then blacked out and woke up three hours later fully clothed with a pounding headache, cotton mouth, and a rum-induced sweat seeping through all of your clothes as your pores spewed every sip of rum that you consumed in the previous twelve hours.
Then you get up and do it all over again.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
Our cabbie took off from the airport without asking us where to go. Nicky was slightly concerned, but I reassured her that everything was cool. He was obviously engrossed in the middle of an important phone call. I tried to put together what he was saying, but it was a combination of English and Bahamanian Creole.
After driving about five minutes the driver put his call on hold. He turned around and apologized to us, before he asked for our intended destination. I blurted out, "Atlantis. Coral Towers."
He nodded and repeated what I said before he quickly returned to his call. His conversation lasted for only a couple of more minutes.
"My bookie," he tried to explain, which he didn't have to.
I really didn't give two shits. I'm the last passenger on the island that would want to disrupt a transaction between a man and his bookie.
"I wanted Pick 4 tickets," he said as he passed a slow moving pickup. "Florida and New York."
Wow, a lottery degenerate. That's hardcore. I didn't ask if he wanted an actual ticket or if this was some sort of side action, like the mob running numbers back in the old neighborhood. Somethings in life I don't want to know about.
The cabbie pulled into Atlantis and I tipped him fairly decent, enough that he tried to sell me a bag of blow. I politely declined. Do you know the six words that aptly describes cocaine from the Caribbean? Clumps together, but only cut once.
* * * *
It's hard to be anything but a tourist in a place like Atlantis.
I pride myself on being a traveler, and not one of those gaudy tourists in floral print shirts clashing against their pinkish sunburned skin sipping tropical drinks while carrying around a mass market paperback. It is nearly impossible to blend in with the locals in the Bahamas. If anything, I feel like a parasite contributing to the downfall of modern society perpetuating neo-colonialism. The capitalist inside my head reminds me that hundreds if not thousands of Bahamanians would be without jobs if this monstrosity of a beach resort was not constructed on a small patch of coral and sand.
In many ways, the island's original name of Hog Island seems more appropriate than it's re-branded name of Paradise Island. Paradise seems elusive when you're paying $25 for a cheeseburger. I feel more like a hog rooting around in its own feces than someone in search of spiritual revitalization. I blame David Foster Wallace's remarkable essay about his experience on a cruise ship for ruining whatever fun I should be having. DFW made me question the stark fact that most vacation destinations are by definition gaudy and would be a hell of a lot better if tourists were not even there. I can't help but wonder what the island would look like without the resort -- I imagined only two shacks sprinkled along the beach, one that only sells conch and the other that had bottles of Kalik, the local brew, sitting in semi-lukewarm buckets of water.
When I took a long stroll on the beach with my girlfriend, I tried to imagine that we were all alone, just the two of us, feet sinking into the moist white sand with every step and dodging the run off of the waves. That illusion only lasted for a few fleeting moments before reality returned and I felt sorry for the lifeguard, who resembled a sherpa bundled up in a wool hat and several layers of clothing. He didn't look like someone ready to dart into the water and rescue a tourist from a shark attack. Then again, no one was actually swimming in the water because it was too cold and way to windy. The lifeguard's biggest challenge was avoiding frostbite.
* * * *
The flavor of the Bahamas ran up my nose when I unpacked my bag and caught a whiff of my dirty clothes. If you ever want a quick and last memory of a vacation spot, just quickly inhale your clothes as soon as you unpack them. They will smell like the last place you were when you wore or packed them. In this case, my clothes smelled like the Atlantis resort, moreover a combination of the beach and whatever air freshner the maids sprayed in the room. The Atlantis aroma is unique unto itself. It came back the moment I stepped into the sprawling monstrosity of a complex.
The last time I visited the Bahamas, I was in the middle of a work assignment and didn't really have time to enjoy fun in the sun, spending most of my time in a room watching poker players and spending my nights binge drinking Kaliks, the local beer, at the lobby bar with other members of the media, an eclectic hodgepodge of Canadians, Brits, Americans, Germans, and one giddy Frenchman.
On the current sojourn, my poison switched from Kalik to the Bahama Mama, a pink and fruity flavorful mixture of juices and rum. The secret of the concoction was that you couldn't taste any of the booze. The good barkeeps unleashed a heavy pour and you'd ingest at least three or four shots of rum with every cocktail. Some drinks with skimpy rum shots were heavily diluted with punch, but those were few and far between and sometimes welcomed because a weak fruity cocktail would slow down the booze intake. It was like easing off the breaks without actually easing off the breaks.
Pink and blue cocktails were the rage in the Bahamas. No one frowned upon you if you consumed seven or seventeen. In fact, considering the amount of booze in them, the drinks were the cheapest item at the Atlantis. Food cost an abysmal amount of money considering they also slapped you with a mandatory 15% service fee charge, which means they already got paid for the lackadaisical "island time" service that made European cafe waitresses look liked speed addicts. But for an overpriced resort, the drinks were fair market price. Cocktails at trendy lounges in LA, meat market clubs in Vegas, and hipster bars in NYC were priced much higher than those we consumed in the Bahamas. Booze was so freaking cheap in the islands that even at their inflated rates, we still got a bargain.
And that's why rum is evil.
Well, one of the many reasons. Delectable fruit-inspired cocktails with catchy names like Bahama Mama and Rum Runners go down so smooth because you can't taste the main ingredient...lots of rum. After the fourth cocktail everything went blurry and you spoke gibberish for three hours, then blacked out and woke up three hours later fully clothed with a pounding headache, cotton mouth, and a rum-induced sweat seeping through all of your clothes as your pores spewed every sip of rum that you consumed in the previous twelve hours.
Then you get up and do it all over again.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
January 01, 2011
Waiting on Eastman
Paul McGuire © 2011
I knew Eastman was a dealer. He knew that I knew, which meant that he also knew the cardinal rule: no dealing inside the bar -- especially the bathrooms and in front of the bar. Maybe Eastman skirted the rule when I wasn't working, but in the three years I tended bar at the Lodge, he never crossed the line. He met his clients at the bodega down the street and conducted deals on one of the adjoining blocks. He hung out in bar when one of his clients was running late, or if he happened to arrive early. He never met them at the bar. Always down the street. I never asked where he lived, but assumed it was within a five or six block radius.
Eastman didn't have a particular drink per se, sometimes he ordered bottled beer, sometimes he'd nurse a mug of Budweiser draft, and occasionally he's drink a vodka and juice concoction. Eastman always left a $2 tip per drink. About one-third of the time, he'd just ask for a club soda or diet coke, and he'd still tip $2. Drug dealers were good tippers. Cops? Horrible tippers.
Peggy with the Lisp was one of three Peggys who worked at the Lodge (one server and two bartenders). The server had seniority and known as Peggy, just plain old Peggy. The two bartenders were called Peggy Red and Peggy With the Lisp. Of course, we never called them that to their face, but whenever my co-workers and regulars engaged in banter, we used the three variations of Peggy for clarification purposes. Yes, it could be confusing to an outsider because neither bartenders had a lisp, nor were redheads, while Peggy, the server, at one time was a natural redhead but she constantly changed her hair different colors and styles. I have no idea how Peggy Red got her name, but the owner's wife told me a story about the origins of Peggy with a Lisp that I have yet to determine is the truth or just bar folklore. Supposedly a year before she got a job at the Lodge, Peggy with a Lisp worked in Times Squareat one of those campy-themed chain restaurants with a faux neighborhood bar up front. Peggy with a Lisp was the size of a ballerina. She's tiny and graceful behind the bar, which is why I always liked working with her because she never got in my way. As the story goes, one hot Friday afternoon in August, a couple of Puerto Rican secretaries were getting their drinky drinky on at Happy Hour before they rode the subway back to Queens. They were sloshed on Margaritas and giving Peggy with a Lisp a hard time the entire shift. At one point, one of them complained that there wasn't enough tequila in her drink and called her a "skinny lil white bitch." Peggy with a Lisp had her back to them and turned around as the secretary threw her margarita at Peggy with a Lisp, but her nimble self easily dodged the drink and in one swoop, she jumped across the bar and cold-cocked the secretary, who instantly fell off the stool. Peggy with a Lisp packed a powerful punch and fucked up the secretary's jaw so badly, that the secretary spoke with a lisp the rest of her life.
You see, I told you it was hard to believe, but that's supposedly how Peggy with a Lisp got her moniker.
Anyway, sorry for this odd tangent, but Peggy with a Lisp was the one who told me that Eastman was a trust fund kid, and an heir to the Eastman-Kodak fortune. Why he was a dealer, no one at the Lodge knew for sure. My hunch was that his lifestyle was so extravagant or his habit was so bad that his monthly checks were not enough to cover his vice, so he sold on the side just to cover the deficit. My other theories were that 1) he was bored to death, or 2) he lacked intimacy and human interaction, and we all know that known drug fiends will always call you to "hang out", and 3) he wanted to rebel against his uber-rich family, and what would be a better fuck you to his uppercrust parents than dealing cocaine and speed?
On his good days, Eastman was fun to chat with -- very intelligent, funny stories, and obviously well-read. But sometimes, Eastman showed up to the bar spaced out of his tits and floating ten feet off the ground. On those days, it was tough to talk to him because he incoherently babbled.
"Prozac," he whispered.
"What about it?"
"You're not on it? Are you?" he leaned in closer to ask.
"Never been on an anti-depressant. Whiskey is the only happy pill that I need," I proudly boasted.
"Well, that's good. Because the people who are on it are fucking crazy. Stay away from them. They can snap at any moment. They are ticking time bombs. That stuff is like crack."
"Like crack? Prozac? Are people on that these days? I thought there were better happy pills, like that Wellbutrin. I think that's what Peggy Red is on."
"Keep an eye out for her. You never know when she'll just lose her shit and start stabbing customers. Every day people do crazy shit in the City and most of them flipped out because they didn't get their daily dose of Prozac or Wellbutrin, or they build up such a huge tolerance that they can't function. That's when the hallucinations starts happening, and the voices in the head won't ever go away. Instead of cops busting potheads and drunks, they should be going after everyone on Prozac, setting up surveillance on shrinks, who are their suppliers. They need to compile names of shrinks and add them to a crime database. Anytime you have mad scientists mixing chemicals together to create a new wonder drug, you're in deep trouble, because people have different reactions. You see all of those happy shiny people in commercials for drug companies, and yeah, maybe the drug improves the life of some people, but then they get hooked and become major addicts. You never see commercials warning you about the dangers of getting hooked on Prozac -- like the housewife who fell into a zombie-like trance and hacked up the family pet with a butcher knife, then carefully wrapped the pieces of Fluffy the Cat's carcass in aluminum foil, tossed the feline remains in the back of the freezer, and told the kids that the cat snuck out of the house and ran away."
"Dude, that's gross."
"Which is why they pay off the mainstream media to keep those stories out of the news. No one wants to hear that their neighbors, or the guy sitting int he cubicle next to you can explode into a fit of rage at any moment. I don't blame them. After all, we're all addicts, and a byproduct of our consumer society that does what it can to numb their senses from the constant bombardment of propaganda to get a job with corporate overlords so you can afford to buy stuff. We really need to blame the shrinks. Instead of actually teaching their customers how--"
"You mean patients?"
"No, I mean customers. When you buy drugs, you're a customer. When you see someone who wants to assist with your health, especially mental health, then they are a patient. But anyone who goes to see a shrink is a customer. OK, where was I before you interrupted?"
"Something about shrinks and customers?"
"Oh yeah, so instead of shrinks sitting down and showing these people how to dealing with life's problems, they do the opposite, they barely listen, scribble down the name of a drug and get them out of the office, so they can see another customer and repeat the process. Shrinks are quick to pawn off scripts. Problem solvers in pill form. Shrinks are the real drug dealers and complicit to hundreds and thousands of senseless murderers in our society. The kid up in Harlem hustling a few bucks for rock gets picked up by the cops and tossed into the system, never to be heard from again. But the shrink who sold the most happy pills got rewarded with a palatial Park Avenue apartment, a house in the country, and weekend getaways to St. Moritz."
All of the talk about Prozac and the evil pharmaceutical corporations was boring only because I heard his rant a dozens times already. Luckily, a blonde squeezed herself up to the bar a few spots down and I rushed to take her order.
"What'll have?"
"Um...shoot...I don't know," she asked. "Ummm....what do you suggest?"
"Anything but Prozac."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas. Originally from New York City, he currently resides in Los Angeles.
The Photo in this short story was also taken by Paul McGuire.
I knew Eastman was a dealer. He knew that I knew, which meant that he also knew the cardinal rule: no dealing inside the bar -- especially the bathrooms and in front of the bar. Maybe Eastman skirted the rule when I wasn't working, but in the three years I tended bar at the Lodge, he never crossed the line. He met his clients at the bodega down the street and conducted deals on one of the adjoining blocks. He hung out in bar when one of his clients was running late, or if he happened to arrive early. He never met them at the bar. Always down the street. I never asked where he lived, but assumed it was within a five or six block radius.
Eastman didn't have a particular drink per se, sometimes he ordered bottled beer, sometimes he'd nurse a mug of Budweiser draft, and occasionally he's drink a vodka and juice concoction. Eastman always left a $2 tip per drink. About one-third of the time, he'd just ask for a club soda or diet coke, and he'd still tip $2. Drug dealers were good tippers. Cops? Horrible tippers.
Peggy with the Lisp was one of three Peggys who worked at the Lodge (one server and two bartenders). The server had seniority and known as Peggy, just plain old Peggy. The two bartenders were called Peggy Red and Peggy With the Lisp. Of course, we never called them that to their face, but whenever my co-workers and regulars engaged in banter, we used the three variations of Peggy for clarification purposes. Yes, it could be confusing to an outsider because neither bartenders had a lisp, nor were redheads, while Peggy, the server, at one time was a natural redhead but she constantly changed her hair different colors and styles. I have no idea how Peggy Red got her name, but the owner's wife told me a story about the origins of Peggy with a Lisp that I have yet to determine is the truth or just bar folklore. Supposedly a year before she got a job at the Lodge, Peggy with a Lisp worked in Times Squareat one of those campy-themed chain restaurants with a faux neighborhood bar up front. Peggy with a Lisp was the size of a ballerina. She's tiny and graceful behind the bar, which is why I always liked working with her because she never got in my way. As the story goes, one hot Friday afternoon in August, a couple of Puerto Rican secretaries were getting their drinky drinky on at Happy Hour before they rode the subway back to Queens. They were sloshed on Margaritas and giving Peggy with a Lisp a hard time the entire shift. At one point, one of them complained that there wasn't enough tequila in her drink and called her a "skinny lil white bitch." Peggy with a Lisp had her back to them and turned around as the secretary threw her margarita at Peggy with a Lisp, but her nimble self easily dodged the drink and in one swoop, she jumped across the bar and cold-cocked the secretary, who instantly fell off the stool. Peggy with a Lisp packed a powerful punch and fucked up the secretary's jaw so badly, that the secretary spoke with a lisp the rest of her life.
You see, I told you it was hard to believe, but that's supposedly how Peggy with a Lisp got her moniker.
Anyway, sorry for this odd tangent, but Peggy with a Lisp was the one who told me that Eastman was a trust fund kid, and an heir to the Eastman-Kodak fortune. Why he was a dealer, no one at the Lodge knew for sure. My hunch was that his lifestyle was so extravagant or his habit was so bad that his monthly checks were not enough to cover his vice, so he sold on the side just to cover the deficit. My other theories were that 1) he was bored to death, or 2) he lacked intimacy and human interaction, and we all know that known drug fiends will always call you to "hang out", and 3) he wanted to rebel against his uber-rich family, and what would be a better fuck you to his uppercrust parents than dealing cocaine and speed?
On his good days, Eastman was fun to chat with -- very intelligent, funny stories, and obviously well-read. But sometimes, Eastman showed up to the bar spaced out of his tits and floating ten feet off the ground. On those days, it was tough to talk to him because he incoherently babbled.
"Prozac," he whispered.
"What about it?"
"You're not on it? Are you?" he leaned in closer to ask.
"Never been on an anti-depressant. Whiskey is the only happy pill that I need," I proudly boasted.
"Well, that's good. Because the people who are on it are fucking crazy. Stay away from them. They can snap at any moment. They are ticking time bombs. That stuff is like crack."
"Like crack? Prozac? Are people on that these days? I thought there were better happy pills, like that Wellbutrin. I think that's what Peggy Red is on."
"Keep an eye out for her. You never know when she'll just lose her shit and start stabbing customers. Every day people do crazy shit in the City and most of them flipped out because they didn't get their daily dose of Prozac or Wellbutrin, or they build up such a huge tolerance that they can't function. That's when the hallucinations starts happening, and the voices in the head won't ever go away. Instead of cops busting potheads and drunks, they should be going after everyone on Prozac, setting up surveillance on shrinks, who are their suppliers. They need to compile names of shrinks and add them to a crime database. Anytime you have mad scientists mixing chemicals together to create a new wonder drug, you're in deep trouble, because people have different reactions. You see all of those happy shiny people in commercials for drug companies, and yeah, maybe the drug improves the life of some people, but then they get hooked and become major addicts. You never see commercials warning you about the dangers of getting hooked on Prozac -- like the housewife who fell into a zombie-like trance and hacked up the family pet with a butcher knife, then carefully wrapped the pieces of Fluffy the Cat's carcass in aluminum foil, tossed the feline remains in the back of the freezer, and told the kids that the cat snuck out of the house and ran away."
"Dude, that's gross."
"Which is why they pay off the mainstream media to keep those stories out of the news. No one wants to hear that their neighbors, or the guy sitting int he cubicle next to you can explode into a fit of rage at any moment. I don't blame them. After all, we're all addicts, and a byproduct of our consumer society that does what it can to numb their senses from the constant bombardment of propaganda to get a job with corporate overlords so you can afford to buy stuff. We really need to blame the shrinks. Instead of actually teaching their customers how--"
"You mean patients?"
"No, I mean customers. When you buy drugs, you're a customer. When you see someone who wants to assist with your health, especially mental health, then they are a patient. But anyone who goes to see a shrink is a customer. OK, where was I before you interrupted?"
"Something about shrinks and customers?"
"Oh yeah, so instead of shrinks sitting down and showing these people how to dealing with life's problems, they do the opposite, they barely listen, scribble down the name of a drug and get them out of the office, so they can see another customer and repeat the process. Shrinks are quick to pawn off scripts. Problem solvers in pill form. Shrinks are the real drug dealers and complicit to hundreds and thousands of senseless murderers in our society. The kid up in Harlem hustling a few bucks for rock gets picked up by the cops and tossed into the system, never to be heard from again. But the shrink who sold the most happy pills got rewarded with a palatial Park Avenue apartment, a house in the country, and weekend getaways to St. Moritz."
All of the talk about Prozac and the evil pharmaceutical corporations was boring only because I heard his rant a dozens times already. Luckily, a blonde squeezed herself up to the bar a few spots down and I rushed to take her order.
"What'll have?"
"Um...shoot...I don't know," she asked. "Ummm....what do you suggest?"
"Anything but Prozac."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas. Originally from New York City, he currently resides in Los Angeles.
The Photo in this short story was also taken by Paul McGuire.
December 01, 2010
Christmas Bird
By Paul McGuire © 2010
After I lost my job after the dotcom bubble burst, I humped the morning shift at a neighborhood bar in Brooklyn. Initially, I worked four days a week, taking off one day a week to dedicate myself to interviews and finding a job. I gave up looking for a job after six months and called the bar my office for five days a week for the next three years. I showed up 9am on weekdays to open the bar and usually worked through the end of Happy Hour at 6pm.
Shap, one of the morning regulars, must have been in his late 60s, but Sully told me that he thought he was 75. With a full head of silver hair, Shap looked good for his age, whatever it was, considering he spent four or five hours a day inside the bar five days a week, only skipping Tuesdays and Sundays.
Shap dressed like a college professor -- with corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeves and a wrinkled dress shirt. I think that's what he did before he retired. Shap drank whiskey and soda but with no ice. He'd nurse two or three drinks in five hours and sat the end of the bar for hours on end attempting to finish the NY Times crossword. When he was done with the puzzle, he'd engage in spats with Sully, the resident encyclopedia of sports statistics and knowledge of everything sports. Sully knew that Shap grew up in Boston and always gave him shit about the Red Sox. Shap took his guff mostly because the Celtics won more championships that Sully beleaguered Knicks.
What Sully was to sports, Shap was to jazz music. I had been serving him for four days a week almost a year before I discovered his passion for all things jazz. One Tuesday morning, I pointed at his empty stool and quizzed Sully.
"Where does he go on Tuesdays and Sundays when he's not here? Sundays is for church right? Is he religious something?"
"Shap? That cheap Jew?" barked Sully. "You've seen how he tips. He's a full-blooded Jew as much as I'm a full-blooded McCatholic. He's a bad member of the tribe too because he's in here drinking on Saturdays."
"So Sundays? What's he doing?"
Sully told me that Shap took Sundays to visit his adult children and grandkids. I never even knew he had kids, something he never talked about. Some barflys bombarded you with unsolicited tales of their entire life story, while others don't tell you a lick. Shap was in that group that rarely spoke about his personal life outside the bar. Mostly everything out of his mouth was sports or politics.
"What about Tuesdays?"
"He's got that radio show. You know, on one of those college radio stations at the far end of the dial. I dunno if you can even hear it out in Brooklyn. Signal is too weak."
Radio show? I quickly discovered that Shap was a jazz historian who hosted his own show on NYU's radio station. He took the subway into Manhattan every Tuesday, and dragged a dozen or so LPs with him to the Village. Shap hosted the same show for over thirty years. He didn't get paid a dime and had become sort of a legend among the students who worked at the radio station over the years.
Shap taught literature at NYU for a decade and wrote record reviews for jazz magazines on the side. He got paid to write about his passion as he collected thousands of records, including thousands of hours of live bootlegged recordings of his idol Charlie Parker, otherwise known as "Bird."
Shap's biggest claim to fame was when Miles Davis accepted his invitation to drop by the studio in the late 1980s, and in his trademarked gravely voice, Miles told an elaborate story about how Charlie "Bird" Parker had arranged a series of gigs in Chicago.
"When Bird couldn't cop any smack, he drank cough syrup and whiskey. He'd get blind drunk and pass out and sleep for hours on end. He missed a lot of gigs that way. Bird owed a huge debt for failing to show up to four gigs in Chicago. The club was owned by a slick cat named Morris and Morris had friends with the mafia. Bird was scared that they were going to kill him, so he agreed to work off the debt, but with a crazy schedule -- Christmas Eve through New Years -- with only Christmas off, and three sets a night plus five on New Year's Eve. Bird rounded up a couple of his friends in New York and formed a band for the Chicago shows. I didn't want to go, but all of the clubs in the city were closed on the holidays. I didn't have any money to go home to St. Louis and visit my family for Christmas. I figured that I could get out to Chicago, earn some scratch, and then take the train down to St. Louis after the holidays. We took the train to Chicago and played our first gig on Christmas Eve. Bird didn't cop enough dope before we left New York and he started taking Seconals, which were these red pills that were heavy sleeping pills. We showed up to Chicago with only one rehearsal under our belt. Bird was useless and all fucked up on Seconals, so I picked the songs to play. On our first night at the club, the joint was packed for a special Christmas Eve show. Bird stumbled on stage and played when he wasn't nodded out. Most of the time he wasn't even playing the same songs as us -- but at least it was in the right key. That's the thing about Bird, even as fucked up as he was, he knew we were in F and just started playing the first tune that came to mind that was also in F. For the second set, I had kick him in the shin to wake him up for his solos. The next morning, I saw Bird in the lobby of our hotel. He said that his shins hurt and I told him it was because I had to kick him all night because he kept nodding out. That's when he told me, 'Miles, never take Seconals and play chromatics. You'll go crazy.'"
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
After I lost my job after the dotcom bubble burst, I humped the morning shift at a neighborhood bar in Brooklyn. Initially, I worked four days a week, taking off one day a week to dedicate myself to interviews and finding a job. I gave up looking for a job after six months and called the bar my office for five days a week for the next three years. I showed up 9am on weekdays to open the bar and usually worked through the end of Happy Hour at 6pm.
Shap, one of the morning regulars, must have been in his late 60s, but Sully told me that he thought he was 75. With a full head of silver hair, Shap looked good for his age, whatever it was, considering he spent four or five hours a day inside the bar five days a week, only skipping Tuesdays and Sundays.
Shap dressed like a college professor -- with corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeves and a wrinkled dress shirt. I think that's what he did before he retired. Shap drank whiskey and soda but with no ice. He'd nurse two or three drinks in five hours and sat the end of the bar for hours on end attempting to finish the NY Times crossword. When he was done with the puzzle, he'd engage in spats with Sully, the resident encyclopedia of sports statistics and knowledge of everything sports. Sully knew that Shap grew up in Boston and always gave him shit about the Red Sox. Shap took his guff mostly because the Celtics won more championships that Sully beleaguered Knicks.
What Sully was to sports, Shap was to jazz music. I had been serving him for four days a week almost a year before I discovered his passion for all things jazz. One Tuesday morning, I pointed at his empty stool and quizzed Sully.
"Where does he go on Tuesdays and Sundays when he's not here? Sundays is for church right? Is he religious something?"
"Shap? That cheap Jew?" barked Sully. "You've seen how he tips. He's a full-blooded Jew as much as I'm a full-blooded McCatholic. He's a bad member of the tribe too because he's in here drinking on Saturdays."
"So Sundays? What's he doing?"
Sully told me that Shap took Sundays to visit his adult children and grandkids. I never even knew he had kids, something he never talked about. Some barflys bombarded you with unsolicited tales of their entire life story, while others don't tell you a lick. Shap was in that group that rarely spoke about his personal life outside the bar. Mostly everything out of his mouth was sports or politics.
"What about Tuesdays?"
"He's got that radio show. You know, on one of those college radio stations at the far end of the dial. I dunno if you can even hear it out in Brooklyn. Signal is too weak."
Radio show? I quickly discovered that Shap was a jazz historian who hosted his own show on NYU's radio station. He took the subway into Manhattan every Tuesday, and dragged a dozen or so LPs with him to the Village. Shap hosted the same show for over thirty years. He didn't get paid a dime and had become sort of a legend among the students who worked at the radio station over the years.
Shap taught literature at NYU for a decade and wrote record reviews for jazz magazines on the side. He got paid to write about his passion as he collected thousands of records, including thousands of hours of live bootlegged recordings of his idol Charlie Parker, otherwise known as "Bird."
Shap's biggest claim to fame was when Miles Davis accepted his invitation to drop by the studio in the late 1980s, and in his trademarked gravely voice, Miles told an elaborate story about how Charlie "Bird" Parker had arranged a series of gigs in Chicago.
"When Bird couldn't cop any smack, he drank cough syrup and whiskey. He'd get blind drunk and pass out and sleep for hours on end. He missed a lot of gigs that way. Bird owed a huge debt for failing to show up to four gigs in Chicago. The club was owned by a slick cat named Morris and Morris had friends with the mafia. Bird was scared that they were going to kill him, so he agreed to work off the debt, but with a crazy schedule -- Christmas Eve through New Years -- with only Christmas off, and three sets a night plus five on New Year's Eve. Bird rounded up a couple of his friends in New York and formed a band for the Chicago shows. I didn't want to go, but all of the clubs in the city were closed on the holidays. I didn't have any money to go home to St. Louis and visit my family for Christmas. I figured that I could get out to Chicago, earn some scratch, and then take the train down to St. Louis after the holidays. We took the train to Chicago and played our first gig on Christmas Eve. Bird didn't cop enough dope before we left New York and he started taking Seconals, which were these red pills that were heavy sleeping pills. We showed up to Chicago with only one rehearsal under our belt. Bird was useless and all fucked up on Seconals, so I picked the songs to play. On our first night at the club, the joint was packed for a special Christmas Eve show. Bird stumbled on stage and played when he wasn't nodded out. Most of the time he wasn't even playing the same songs as us -- but at least it was in the right key. That's the thing about Bird, even as fucked up as he was, he knew we were in F and just started playing the first tune that came to mind that was also in F. For the second set, I had kick him in the shin to wake him up for his solos. The next morning, I saw Bird in the lobby of our hotel. He said that his shins hurt and I told him it was because I had to kick him all night because he kept nodding out. That's when he told me, 'Miles, never take Seconals and play chromatics. You'll go crazy.'"
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
November 03, 2010
Hot August Night
By Paul McGuire © 2010
In high school when things got rough, Birdy ditched class and drove to Denny's on the outskirt of town. She sat in one of the back booths and drank coffee for hours on end. Always with lots of milk and lots of sugar.
"The waitress was named Doris or Dorothy or Dee or something like that," Birdy told me. "She knew that something was wrong with me, but never said anything. She was polite and never asked questions. The last thing I wanted to do was talk... to her... about my problems. It's never easy being 17."
When Birdy ditched classes for a week straight, school officials notified her grandmother who acted as her official guardian for the last two years of high school. Her mother had a nervous breakdown, which was a polite way of saying that she ran off to Reno with a wanna-be wiseguy who was a third-rate check forger and second-rate safe cracker. Birdy's alkie father was long gone -- a distant memory aside from a faded picture that she used to obsessively stare out for hours on end. To this day I don't know if he died or he just left the family, because she never talked about him. Birdy was stuck living with her grandmother, a religious nut who clipped coupons all day and watched reruns of Little House on the Prairie.
"That's one of the many reasons I life Ohio," she said. "Well that, and all the redneck methheads."
These days, Birdy reverted back to old behavior whenever she was grief stricken. When things got too crazy at the office, she skipped out and hung out at a Greek diner on Third Avenue. She walked seven blocks out of her way, and past two other more popular diners, to make sure no one at her office saw her. I became fascinated with her routine -- she'd sneak out of the office, smoke a cigarette, buy a magazine at the newsstand and head to the diner. She always sat at the counter, ate wheat toast, and drank coffee with lots of milk and lots of sugar. She sat there until she finished the magazine, then she went outside, smoked two more cigarettes, bought another magazine, walked to the park and read until lunch time, then headed to the museum. It was closed on Mondays, so that was movie day and she went to the artsy theatre near Lincoln Center that played indie flicks. She'd sneak back into the office just before mostly everyone left for the day, which drew the stink eye from many of her co-workers. Birdy didn't care. She hated them all out of principle and was doing everything possible to get fired.
To cut up lines or crush up Ritalin, Birdy always used a Neil Diamond CD. Hot August Nights. It was missing Disc 2. Don't ask why, Neil Diamond just sort of happened like that one night, and ever since it became part of the ritual. Just like how most cocaine addictions begin, it started out casual and escalated. Birdy was originally a weekend dabbler when she moved to New York. She limited herself to a few keys bumps in bathroom in different bars on the Lower East Side. When things got a little boring with her life, Birdy graduated to buying her own eight balls from the elderely Dominican gypsy cab driver that a friend of a friend of a friend.
Birdy's weekend binges started earlier and earlier -- Thursday nights, then Wednesday nights and Birdy began skipping work on Mondays, which she spent most of Monday mornings ripping lines and watching Regis and Kelly. Everyone in the office noticed and hated her for her habitual absences. For the last month, I was running a "When Does Birdy Get Fired Pool" and the prize pool jumped up to over $1,500.
I never particularly liked Neil Diamond. I always thought that he was fake cool and not tough, like if he and Van Morrison got into a fight, Van would kick the living shit out of him. But then again, Van had a mean Irish temper and was a bit on the crazy side. Neil seemed to be too much of a pretty boy to win a physical test of strength.
"They used to call him the Jewish Elvis," explained Birdy. "That's what my grams called him, except she didn't say that in a fond way. Grams was full of hate when it came to..."
"Elvis?" I blurted out.
"Yeah," said Birdy. "She hated Elvis... and Jews too."
Birdy didn't like to talk much, so when she did, I attentively listened. I always felt a bit sorry for her. She was always in a dour mood, but she was hardly a negative person. I guess that's why she preferred cocaine and other stimulants -- to help pull her out of the doldrums.
I was curious about where Birdy went when she was in one of her moods and left the office, so I invited myself along without her permission. I guess you can say that I stalked her -- I waited for her to slip out of her cubicle and trailed her all the way to the diner. She never saw me, until I walked into the diner. I was surprised that she invited me to join her for a cup of coffee -- with lots of milk and lots of sugar.
Shortly after our encounter. I willingly joined her on Wednesdays -- it was the perfect way for me to split up my hellish work week. I'd fuck off all Wednesday and that way, I had only a four day work week. After a while, Birdy and I skipped the diner and just went back to her apartment to get jacked up and watch Regis and Kelly.
"That bitch Kelly Ripa is so fake," said Birdy as she gave the TV the middle finger. "But I betcha she gets some good coke."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
In high school when things got rough, Birdy ditched class and drove to Denny's on the outskirt of town. She sat in one of the back booths and drank coffee for hours on end. Always with lots of milk and lots of sugar.
"The waitress was named Doris or Dorothy or Dee or something like that," Birdy told me. "She knew that something was wrong with me, but never said anything. She was polite and never asked questions. The last thing I wanted to do was talk... to her... about my problems. It's never easy being 17."
When Birdy ditched classes for a week straight, school officials notified her grandmother who acted as her official guardian for the last two years of high school. Her mother had a nervous breakdown, which was a polite way of saying that she ran off to Reno with a wanna-be wiseguy who was a third-rate check forger and second-rate safe cracker. Birdy's alkie father was long gone -- a distant memory aside from a faded picture that she used to obsessively stare out for hours on end. To this day I don't know if he died or he just left the family, because she never talked about him. Birdy was stuck living with her grandmother, a religious nut who clipped coupons all day and watched reruns of Little House on the Prairie.
"That's one of the many reasons I life Ohio," she said. "Well that, and all the redneck methheads."
These days, Birdy reverted back to old behavior whenever she was grief stricken. When things got too crazy at the office, she skipped out and hung out at a Greek diner on Third Avenue. She walked seven blocks out of her way, and past two other more popular diners, to make sure no one at her office saw her. I became fascinated with her routine -- she'd sneak out of the office, smoke a cigarette, buy a magazine at the newsstand and head to the diner. She always sat at the counter, ate wheat toast, and drank coffee with lots of milk and lots of sugar. She sat there until she finished the magazine, then she went outside, smoked two more cigarettes, bought another magazine, walked to the park and read until lunch time, then headed to the museum. It was closed on Mondays, so that was movie day and she went to the artsy theatre near Lincoln Center that played indie flicks. She'd sneak back into the office just before mostly everyone left for the day, which drew the stink eye from many of her co-workers. Birdy didn't care. She hated them all out of principle and was doing everything possible to get fired.
To cut up lines or crush up Ritalin, Birdy always used a Neil Diamond CD. Hot August Nights. It was missing Disc 2. Don't ask why, Neil Diamond just sort of happened like that one night, and ever since it became part of the ritual. Just like how most cocaine addictions begin, it started out casual and escalated. Birdy was originally a weekend dabbler when she moved to New York. She limited herself to a few keys bumps in bathroom in different bars on the Lower East Side. When things got a little boring with her life, Birdy graduated to buying her own eight balls from the elderely Dominican gypsy cab driver that a friend of a friend of a friend.
Birdy's weekend binges started earlier and earlier -- Thursday nights, then Wednesday nights and Birdy began skipping work on Mondays, which she spent most of Monday mornings ripping lines and watching Regis and Kelly. Everyone in the office noticed and hated her for her habitual absences. For the last month, I was running a "When Does Birdy Get Fired Pool" and the prize pool jumped up to over $1,500.
I never particularly liked Neil Diamond. I always thought that he was fake cool and not tough, like if he and Van Morrison got into a fight, Van would kick the living shit out of him. But then again, Van had a mean Irish temper and was a bit on the crazy side. Neil seemed to be too much of a pretty boy to win a physical test of strength.
"They used to call him the Jewish Elvis," explained Birdy. "That's what my grams called him, except she didn't say that in a fond way. Grams was full of hate when it came to..."
"Elvis?" I blurted out.
"Yeah," said Birdy. "She hated Elvis... and Jews too."
Birdy didn't like to talk much, so when she did, I attentively listened. I always felt a bit sorry for her. She was always in a dour mood, but she was hardly a negative person. I guess that's why she preferred cocaine and other stimulants -- to help pull her out of the doldrums.
I was curious about where Birdy went when she was in one of her moods and left the office, so I invited myself along without her permission. I guess you can say that I stalked her -- I waited for her to slip out of her cubicle and trailed her all the way to the diner. She never saw me, until I walked into the diner. I was surprised that she invited me to join her for a cup of coffee -- with lots of milk and lots of sugar.
Shortly after our encounter. I willingly joined her on Wednesdays -- it was the perfect way for me to split up my hellish work week. I'd fuck off all Wednesday and that way, I had only a four day work week. After a while, Birdy and I skipped the diner and just went back to her apartment to get jacked up and watch Regis and Kelly.
"That bitch Kelly Ripa is so fake," said Birdy as she gave the TV the middle finger. "But I betcha she gets some good coke."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
October 05, 2010
September 04, 2010
Punta del Mota
By Paul McGuire © 2010
The last time I was in South America, I had gotten involved in a bar fight in Argentina and a cab driver accused me of being a CIA agent. I left with mixed feelings and wasn't that excited to return to South America for another assignment.
I groggily wandered through Montevideo airport behind a gleeful group of Uruguayan high school girls who shared the same flight from Miami. They were ending their summer vacation after a trip to Disney World and dragged souvenir bags of Disney schwag with them into the brightly lit immigration hall.
My vacation had also come to an end. Vacation is just another term for the luxury time in between my freelance writing assignments. I had not collected a paycheck in months and sunk into my couch, weighed down by a minor depressive funk without a creative project to get me out of bed in the mornings. I was marinating in my own malaise and numbed the pain by self-medicating with California's finest medicinal marijuana. After seven weeks of world class weed smoking, I had one foot stuck in a bong and the other one was trying to keep up with my girlfriend as I followed her through the immigration hall in a Xanax-induced haze.
I'm always confronted with slow people in front of me whenever I get into a line. The immigration line at Montevideo airport was no exception. I waited...and waited...and waited. Two immigration agents methodically quizzed all of the new arrivals as everyone who disembarked my flight waited for one of two booths to open up. I wondered if the Uruguayans gatekeepers were going to give me guff? Or if they were going to make things simple and just open up my passport to a random page and stamp it?
I sprinted to an open booth and barely said, "Hola" before the girl behind the glass window punched down on her stamp on my tattered passport.
I cleared immigration and walked over to the money exchange window for the customary raping of the gringos. I only changed $200, a hundred bucks each for my girlfriend and myself. I knew better than to get a few grand in the local currency, because after all, greenbacks were still royally accepted in South America. Uruguay was one of the few places were the U.S. dollar had totally bottomed out.
For a couple of months a year, Punta del Este is a resort town packed with wealthy Argentinians and Brazilians vacationing at their palatial summer homes. We arrived at end of the holiday season, and almost everyone had gone home. The entire town of Punta del Este was in the process of shutting down. Our hotel, located next to a church in a tiny beach-side resort of Punta del Este, had two swinging front doors that opened up into a large foyer with a couple of couches. A small bar with four empty stools flanked the left side of the lobby with the front desk in the back. The counter top was peppered with a hundred old photographs underneath a top layer of glass. Almost 90% of the photos contained the same person -- a portly gentleman with a wide warm smile and a cartoon-like mustache.
"The owner," said the clerk, who noticed that I was intrigued by the collection of photos.
The funny-mustached hotel owner posed with a variety of people, presumably other guests and travelers who visited his establishment. The oldest photos, with the corners curled back, turned different shades of orange. The owner sported significantly much darker and fuller hair in the orange-tinted photos. The most recent photos featured the owner as a balding guy, thirty pounds heavier, with a subtle grey mustache. Over the decades, the mustache lost it's bold color and its panache. It also lacked the vibrant character of the 1970s version. That was a perfect metaphor for the hotel.
Thirty years earlier, the hotel might have been a cool place to party, but in 2010, it was an overpriced dump. Our room cost $140 USD a night, rather expensive even for Punta del Este considering it was the end of the summer season. I was not paying the tab for our room, but my client handled that, and for the price I expected something a notch better than Uruguay's version of a Super 8. The moment I opened the door to our room, we were greeted by pungent smell -- a combination of industrial cleaning flowery that unsuccessfully masked the predominant odor of vomit. I walked into the bathroom to an unwelcoming sight: crack on the walls, mildew stains on the ceiling of the shower, and only one towel for the two of us. But hey, at least it had a bidet. We'd have to share a towel, but our assholes would be clean just in case we ran out of toilet paper.
My girlfriend inspected the minibar that contained a couple of warm local beers, a bottle of water, and two Sprites. I turned on the TV and the reception was below average, but the hotel's dish captured over 70 channels including random U.S. stations. I searched for sports channels on the rare chance that I'd catch the Olympics. It was technically the end of summer in South America, but the Winter Olympics were in full swing in Vancouver, Canada. After flipping through forty channels, I came across the local ESPN channel that aired the Olympics with commentators discussing the intricacies about the biathlon in Spanish. Then again, my Spanish was horrible and they could have been making fun of the retarded Scandis who came up with a sport that incorporated long-distance skiing and lying in the snow on your stomach to shoot things.
I drank too much my first night in Uruguay. That always happens no matter what country I visit, when I'm unable to find weed in the first 24 hours. I woke up hungover, ate a Tylenol with codeine to reduce the throbbing headache, and downed a bottle of water from the minibar. The hotel served a free breakfast in a small dining room adjacent to the lobby. I stumbled in the room in search of something to soak up the booze before my first day back to work. A couple of my South American colleagues were slumped over one table in the corner and sipping coffee while nursing their hangovers. Both were family men and took advantage of the time away from the wife and kids, and they also got snookered with me until the wee hours. It's never easy to stop binge drinking when you're doing it on the company dime.
I grabbed two croissants from a banquet table filled with breads, cheese, and cereal. I scooped up three spoons worth of scrambled eggs with bacon bits. The glasses at the buffet were tiny, like the size of double shot glasses, which posed a huge burden to someone like me who was dehydrated. All I wanted to do was chug a couple of gallons of water, but had to hold the pitcher in one hand and fill the minuscule glass, shoot the water like it was tequila, then refill the glass and repeat the process. An elderly French couple stood behind me in astonishment and scorned my gauche buffet habits. They must have thought that I was an insane and boorish American -- which to their credit, is highly accurate.
"Je suis le junkie," I wanted to tell them.
Every morning for week, my colleagues and I ate the breakfast buffet with horrible hangovers before we impatiently waited for our shuttle driver. He was always thirty minutes late and never offered up an apology for his tardiness, yet happily pointed out the lavish summer homes of famous people like Eva Peron, Julio Iglesias, Diego Maradona, and George Bush. Even though he drove us the same route every morning, he always slowed down to point out the exact location of the mansion where "George Bush conducted bi-annual secret meetings that outlined the New World Order."
I didn't like the shuttle driver because he had been promising me a marijuana connection, which never came through. Trying to score weed in South America proved harder than you would think. Everyone has cocaine, even the nuns at the church next door to us had oodles of it to sell, but that's not my drug of choice. I was desperately seeking out the local produce -- which in Uruguay is ditch weed grown outdoors and nothing remotely similar to the genetically engineered potent crops that I was used to smoking in California. Marijuana is not a cash crop with very little demand for marijuana when compared to the high-octane buzz of cocaine. Plus, it didn't help my cause that it the end of the summer and all the local dealers were out of weed supplies. Meanwhile, in a cruel and twist bit of irony, I had to constantly pass up on the frantic fire sale of cocaine. End of the summer. All supplies must go.
I was about to give up when one of my herb-friendly colleagues found a source -- a bartender at a local Italian restaurant. He had a couple of chunks of ditch weed that looked like little black bars of soap. It was the best that we could find after three desperate days of asking everyone in town if they had weed. The bartender handed over the rest of his stash, but he felt bad about the quality so he didn't charge us. We thanked him because we were potheads and happy to get anything.
Our collective happiness disappeared after it took us over an hour to pry open the chunk that was several inches thick. We barely procured enough shake for two party joints after an excruciating process that entailed removing stems and seeds that made up 90% of the condensed chunk. We were better off smoking actual dirt, but smoked both joints even though we knew it would probably make us sick. Within minutes, we all got pulsating headaches from the ditch weed. I hadn't smoked weed that bad since an assignment in Bahamas, mainly because I foolishly allowed a Swedish cokehead do a pot deal for me with a sketchy cabbie on Paradise Island. Rookie mistake in the Bahamas. I made another big rookie mistake in Uruguay. The pursuit of herbal pleasure led us down the wrong path. I angrily flushed the leftover chunk.
I gave up and cracked open a warm beer. I took a long sip and nervously counted the hours until my next fix -- only 65 more hours to go until my flight touched down at LAX. It was going to be a long three days.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas. He is originally from New York City and currently resides in Los Angeles.
The last time I was in South America, I had gotten involved in a bar fight in Argentina and a cab driver accused me of being a CIA agent. I left with mixed feelings and wasn't that excited to return to South America for another assignment.
I groggily wandered through Montevideo airport behind a gleeful group of Uruguayan high school girls who shared the same flight from Miami. They were ending their summer vacation after a trip to Disney World and dragged souvenir bags of Disney schwag with them into the brightly lit immigration hall.
My vacation had also come to an end. Vacation is just another term for the luxury time in between my freelance writing assignments. I had not collected a paycheck in months and sunk into my couch, weighed down by a minor depressive funk without a creative project to get me out of bed in the mornings. I was marinating in my own malaise and numbed the pain by self-medicating with California's finest medicinal marijuana. After seven weeks of world class weed smoking, I had one foot stuck in a bong and the other one was trying to keep up with my girlfriend as I followed her through the immigration hall in a Xanax-induced haze.
I'm always confronted with slow people in front of me whenever I get into a line. The immigration line at Montevideo airport was no exception. I waited...and waited...and waited. Two immigration agents methodically quizzed all of the new arrivals as everyone who disembarked my flight waited for one of two booths to open up. I wondered if the Uruguayans gatekeepers were going to give me guff? Or if they were going to make things simple and just open up my passport to a random page and stamp it?
I sprinted to an open booth and barely said, "Hola" before the girl behind the glass window punched down on her stamp on my tattered passport.
I cleared immigration and walked over to the money exchange window for the customary raping of the gringos. I only changed $200, a hundred bucks each for my girlfriend and myself. I knew better than to get a few grand in the local currency, because after all, greenbacks were still royally accepted in South America. Uruguay was one of the few places were the U.S. dollar had totally bottomed out.
For a couple of months a year, Punta del Este is a resort town packed with wealthy Argentinians and Brazilians vacationing at their palatial summer homes. We arrived at end of the holiday season, and almost everyone had gone home. The entire town of Punta del Este was in the process of shutting down. Our hotel, located next to a church in a tiny beach-side resort of Punta del Este, had two swinging front doors that opened up into a large foyer with a couple of couches. A small bar with four empty stools flanked the left side of the lobby with the front desk in the back. The counter top was peppered with a hundred old photographs underneath a top layer of glass. Almost 90% of the photos contained the same person -- a portly gentleman with a wide warm smile and a cartoon-like mustache.
"The owner," said the clerk, who noticed that I was intrigued by the collection of photos.
The funny-mustached hotel owner posed with a variety of people, presumably other guests and travelers who visited his establishment. The oldest photos, with the corners curled back, turned different shades of orange. The owner sported significantly much darker and fuller hair in the orange-tinted photos. The most recent photos featured the owner as a balding guy, thirty pounds heavier, with a subtle grey mustache. Over the decades, the mustache lost it's bold color and its panache. It also lacked the vibrant character of the 1970s version. That was a perfect metaphor for the hotel.
Thirty years earlier, the hotel might have been a cool place to party, but in 2010, it was an overpriced dump. Our room cost $140 USD a night, rather expensive even for Punta del Este considering it was the end of the summer season. I was not paying the tab for our room, but my client handled that, and for the price I expected something a notch better than Uruguay's version of a Super 8. The moment I opened the door to our room, we were greeted by pungent smell -- a combination of industrial cleaning flowery that unsuccessfully masked the predominant odor of vomit. I walked into the bathroom to an unwelcoming sight: crack on the walls, mildew stains on the ceiling of the shower, and only one towel for the two of us. But hey, at least it had a bidet. We'd have to share a towel, but our assholes would be clean just in case we ran out of toilet paper.
My girlfriend inspected the minibar that contained a couple of warm local beers, a bottle of water, and two Sprites. I turned on the TV and the reception was below average, but the hotel's dish captured over 70 channels including random U.S. stations. I searched for sports channels on the rare chance that I'd catch the Olympics. It was technically the end of summer in South America, but the Winter Olympics were in full swing in Vancouver, Canada. After flipping through forty channels, I came across the local ESPN channel that aired the Olympics with commentators discussing the intricacies about the biathlon in Spanish. Then again, my Spanish was horrible and they could have been making fun of the retarded Scandis who came up with a sport that incorporated long-distance skiing and lying in the snow on your stomach to shoot things.
I drank too much my first night in Uruguay. That always happens no matter what country I visit, when I'm unable to find weed in the first 24 hours. I woke up hungover, ate a Tylenol with codeine to reduce the throbbing headache, and downed a bottle of water from the minibar. The hotel served a free breakfast in a small dining room adjacent to the lobby. I stumbled in the room in search of something to soak up the booze before my first day back to work. A couple of my South American colleagues were slumped over one table in the corner and sipping coffee while nursing their hangovers. Both were family men and took advantage of the time away from the wife and kids, and they also got snookered with me until the wee hours. It's never easy to stop binge drinking when you're doing it on the company dime.
I grabbed two croissants from a banquet table filled with breads, cheese, and cereal. I scooped up three spoons worth of scrambled eggs with bacon bits. The glasses at the buffet were tiny, like the size of double shot glasses, which posed a huge burden to someone like me who was dehydrated. All I wanted to do was chug a couple of gallons of water, but had to hold the pitcher in one hand and fill the minuscule glass, shoot the water like it was tequila, then refill the glass and repeat the process. An elderly French couple stood behind me in astonishment and scorned my gauche buffet habits. They must have thought that I was an insane and boorish American -- which to their credit, is highly accurate.
"Je suis le junkie," I wanted to tell them.
Every morning for week, my colleagues and I ate the breakfast buffet with horrible hangovers before we impatiently waited for our shuttle driver. He was always thirty minutes late and never offered up an apology for his tardiness, yet happily pointed out the lavish summer homes of famous people like Eva Peron, Julio Iglesias, Diego Maradona, and George Bush. Even though he drove us the same route every morning, he always slowed down to point out the exact location of the mansion where "George Bush conducted bi-annual secret meetings that outlined the New World Order."
I didn't like the shuttle driver because he had been promising me a marijuana connection, which never came through. Trying to score weed in South America proved harder than you would think. Everyone has cocaine, even the nuns at the church next door to us had oodles of it to sell, but that's not my drug of choice. I was desperately seeking out the local produce -- which in Uruguay is ditch weed grown outdoors and nothing remotely similar to the genetically engineered potent crops that I was used to smoking in California. Marijuana is not a cash crop with very little demand for marijuana when compared to the high-octane buzz of cocaine. Plus, it didn't help my cause that it the end of the summer and all the local dealers were out of weed supplies. Meanwhile, in a cruel and twist bit of irony, I had to constantly pass up on the frantic fire sale of cocaine. End of the summer. All supplies must go.
I was about to give up when one of my herb-friendly colleagues found a source -- a bartender at a local Italian restaurant. He had a couple of chunks of ditch weed that looked like little black bars of soap. It was the best that we could find after three desperate days of asking everyone in town if they had weed. The bartender handed over the rest of his stash, but he felt bad about the quality so he didn't charge us. We thanked him because we were potheads and happy to get anything.
Our collective happiness disappeared after it took us over an hour to pry open the chunk that was several inches thick. We barely procured enough shake for two party joints after an excruciating process that entailed removing stems and seeds that made up 90% of the condensed chunk. We were better off smoking actual dirt, but smoked both joints even though we knew it would probably make us sick. Within minutes, we all got pulsating headaches from the ditch weed. I hadn't smoked weed that bad since an assignment in Bahamas, mainly because I foolishly allowed a Swedish cokehead do a pot deal for me with a sketchy cabbie on Paradise Island. Rookie mistake in the Bahamas. I made another big rookie mistake in Uruguay. The pursuit of herbal pleasure led us down the wrong path. I angrily flushed the leftover chunk.
I gave up and cracked open a warm beer. I took a long sip and nervously counted the hours until my next fix -- only 65 more hours to go until my flight touched down at LAX. It was going to be a long three days.
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas. He is originally from New York City and currently resides in Los Angeles.
August 05, 2010
Invisible
By Paul McGuire © 2010
Within thirty minutes the initial effects start to take hold. It feels like I'm walking around on an invisible bubble, more like one of those maroon rubber balls that we used at recess and gym class for dodge ball or kick ball. I'm about six to seven inches off the ground with each bouncy step. That's the best way to describe the feeling, like the astronauts doing the slo-mo kangaroo hop on the moon. Floating. Bouncing. Sedated. Happily sedated, I should add. Demons quelled. Anxieties locked away.
I'm rolling along through L.A. with an impenetrable armor. The slings and arrows of scorn and negatively from the putrid citizens bounce right off. No pain. I'm a floating tank. Floating. Bouncing. No longer attached to terra forma. I could care less about everything else in the world. I'm completely detached. That's the best way to deal with the hopelessness around me. Anomie.
The filter through which I see the City of Angels does not have rough or sharp edges. Sort of like seeing the world through an underwater lens. The focus sort of drops off around the edges. I can only see what's immediately in front of me. Everything else is... blurry.
The self-absorbed souls around me are too distracted to notice my constant state of inebriation. Floating by, obviously, floating by. Yet, we're ignorant to one another. I smoothly navigate my way through daily life. Bouncing with my invisible armor. The secret pills. The more that I eat, the longer I will remain invincible and invisible.
If no one can find me, then no one can hurt me? Especially me. I won't be able to torture myself with my own thoughts. Even the mind floats on by. Each thought is a musical note strung together in a dream-like symphony. I groove along with the internal melodies. I sing to myself a lot. Sometimes I forget and I'm lost in my own karaoke world harmonizing with the Doobie Brothers. The check-out girl at 7/11 must think I'm insane. But I'm not. I'm happily floating.
I wouldn't know what to do if I had to stay straight for more than a day or so. If I'm in a positive space and sync up in a smooth writing rhythm for a few days, then I'm getting off on the tremendous waves in that creative tidal wave. When I'm in the writing zone, I lack the desire for the warm fuzzies. I can go up to a week even when I hit that groove, but the moment that I have to step outside and spend time in the real world, I quickly reach for the shaving kit.
I probably hadn't shaved in two months, but I keep my stash in the shaving kit. A dozen bottles and other assorted containers. Each bottle contains a different group of drug, but the individual pills may vary. I keep the Hydrocodone and Adderall in the fat bottles. The Oxycodone and Xanax are stored in the sleek bottles. The Oxycontin is hidden inside a bottle of Tums.
Friends of mine often sell, trade, or gift me their extra pills. A junkie could not as for a better assortment of friends. And most of them don't steal from me. At least the straight ones don't. I deal with a couple of shysters from time to time, out of necessity, but I would never give then an opportunity to rob me blind.
Lester threw out his back last summer and gave me fifty extra generic Somas in exchange for an 1/8th of Kush. I'm not a muscle relaxer kinda guy, but I had so much weed that I didn't know what to do with it. I was looking to trade it for anything, but the Somas never gave me the buzz I wanted. I like to keep a few around when my back flares up,so I took them off of Lester's hands. I soon discovered that I could trade the Somas with Drake, a grad student who lived around the corner. He said that the Somas made him sleep better and we'd swap two Somas for one 10 ng time-released Adderall.
Most recently, my friend Carly had wrist surgery and the doctor gave her three bottles of Vicodin. She hate Vidoin because it makes her queasy and she pukes uncontrollably. Me? That might be my opiate of choice because it gets me the most fucked up but still allows me to function properly. It's the drug of choice when I have to get work done or have an important social function to attend. Carly didn't use the first bottle, and was kind enough to get two more refills before she gave me 90 pills in exchange for a big ass bottle of Skyy vodka and a six pack of Fat Tire.
My buddy Fredo is a drug fiend and has been so for twenty years. During his high school years in San Diego, he used to deal weed right out of his parent's driveway. In college, he sold sheets of acid and cocaine to all the frat boys and hippies at Arizona State. After a nasty car accident, he was constantly prescribed different pain medication including Roxicodone, which is instant released Oxycontin. He also had more Xanax and Percosett lying around than most pharmacies, which he sold to me at wholesale prices. I also swapped hash and pot brownies for Fredo's extra pharmies. He was also too lazy to drive to LA, so I always had to figure out a way to get down to San Diego. I managed at least one trip a month. On the off chance that supplies were low, I'd make two trips a month.
My buddy Colby, a professional poker player who lived in Santa Monica, introduced me to a crooked doctor in Venice Beach. The doctor was on the verge of wife #3 and he had a shitload of alimony to pay to two ex-wives, so he sold illegal prescriptions on the side to cover his monthly nut. He hooked me up with Oxycontin but with one catch -- the prescriptions were for one bottle only Just 45 pills. That greedy fucker purposely made me set an appointment to see him. Shit, I had to drop $200 just to get the scrip.
You have to protect your stash like Fort Knox. The biggest enemy is yourself. You have to resist the urge to keep pushing the high and raising the bar higher and higher and all of a sudden, you can't even get out of bed without popping 30 mg of Oxys. I remember the days when I'd barely eat 3mg and I'd be fucked up for 24 hours. Now, 30 mgs barely takes the edge off.
You never want the floating to stop. Never. That's why you do everything possible to maintain that bouncy feeling. The moment that it stops, you're body crashes hard to the ground. You might as well be dead because that's all you can think about when faced with any option other than inebriation. Death before sobriety. Isn't that the name of a Swedish heavy metal band?
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
Within thirty minutes the initial effects start to take hold. It feels like I'm walking around on an invisible bubble, more like one of those maroon rubber balls that we used at recess and gym class for dodge ball or kick ball. I'm about six to seven inches off the ground with each bouncy step. That's the best way to describe the feeling, like the astronauts doing the slo-mo kangaroo hop on the moon. Floating. Bouncing. Sedated. Happily sedated, I should add. Demons quelled. Anxieties locked away.
I'm rolling along through L.A. with an impenetrable armor. The slings and arrows of scorn and negatively from the putrid citizens bounce right off. No pain. I'm a floating tank. Floating. Bouncing. No longer attached to terra forma. I could care less about everything else in the world. I'm completely detached. That's the best way to deal with the hopelessness around me. Anomie.
The filter through which I see the City of Angels does not have rough or sharp edges. Sort of like seeing the world through an underwater lens. The focus sort of drops off around the edges. I can only see what's immediately in front of me. Everything else is... blurry.
The self-absorbed souls around me are too distracted to notice my constant state of inebriation. Floating by, obviously, floating by. Yet, we're ignorant to one another. I smoothly navigate my way through daily life. Bouncing with my invisible armor. The secret pills. The more that I eat, the longer I will remain invincible and invisible.
If no one can find me, then no one can hurt me? Especially me. I won't be able to torture myself with my own thoughts. Even the mind floats on by. Each thought is a musical note strung together in a dream-like symphony. I groove along with the internal melodies. I sing to myself a lot. Sometimes I forget and I'm lost in my own karaoke world harmonizing with the Doobie Brothers. The check-out girl at 7/11 must think I'm insane. But I'm not. I'm happily floating.
I wouldn't know what to do if I had to stay straight for more than a day or so. If I'm in a positive space and sync up in a smooth writing rhythm for a few days, then I'm getting off on the tremendous waves in that creative tidal wave. When I'm in the writing zone, I lack the desire for the warm fuzzies. I can go up to a week even when I hit that groove, but the moment that I have to step outside and spend time in the real world, I quickly reach for the shaving kit.
I probably hadn't shaved in two months, but I keep my stash in the shaving kit. A dozen bottles and other assorted containers. Each bottle contains a different group of drug, but the individual pills may vary. I keep the Hydrocodone and Adderall in the fat bottles. The Oxycodone and Xanax are stored in the sleek bottles. The Oxycontin is hidden inside a bottle of Tums.
Friends of mine often sell, trade, or gift me their extra pills. A junkie could not as for a better assortment of friends. And most of them don't steal from me. At least the straight ones don't. I deal with a couple of shysters from time to time, out of necessity, but I would never give then an opportunity to rob me blind.
Lester threw out his back last summer and gave me fifty extra generic Somas in exchange for an 1/8th of Kush. I'm not a muscle relaxer kinda guy, but I had so much weed that I didn't know what to do with it. I was looking to trade it for anything, but the Somas never gave me the buzz I wanted. I like to keep a few around when my back flares up,so I took them off of Lester's hands. I soon discovered that I could trade the Somas with Drake, a grad student who lived around the corner. He said that the Somas made him sleep better and we'd swap two Somas for one 10 ng time-released Adderall.
Most recently, my friend Carly had wrist surgery and the doctor gave her three bottles of Vicodin. She hate Vidoin because it makes her queasy and she pukes uncontrollably. Me? That might be my opiate of choice because it gets me the most fucked up but still allows me to function properly. It's the drug of choice when I have to get work done or have an important social function to attend. Carly didn't use the first bottle, and was kind enough to get two more refills before she gave me 90 pills in exchange for a big ass bottle of Skyy vodka and a six pack of Fat Tire.
My buddy Fredo is a drug fiend and has been so for twenty years. During his high school years in San Diego, he used to deal weed right out of his parent's driveway. In college, he sold sheets of acid and cocaine to all the frat boys and hippies at Arizona State. After a nasty car accident, he was constantly prescribed different pain medication including Roxicodone, which is instant released Oxycontin. He also had more Xanax and Percosett lying around than most pharmacies, which he sold to me at wholesale prices. I also swapped hash and pot brownies for Fredo's extra pharmies. He was also too lazy to drive to LA, so I always had to figure out a way to get down to San Diego. I managed at least one trip a month. On the off chance that supplies were low, I'd make two trips a month.
My buddy Colby, a professional poker player who lived in Santa Monica, introduced me to a crooked doctor in Venice Beach. The doctor was on the verge of wife #3 and he had a shitload of alimony to pay to two ex-wives, so he sold illegal prescriptions on the side to cover his monthly nut. He hooked me up with Oxycontin but with one catch -- the prescriptions were for one bottle only Just 45 pills. That greedy fucker purposely made me set an appointment to see him. Shit, I had to drop $200 just to get the scrip.
You have to protect your stash like Fort Knox. The biggest enemy is yourself. You have to resist the urge to keep pushing the high and raising the bar higher and higher and all of a sudden, you can't even get out of bed without popping 30 mg of Oxys. I remember the days when I'd barely eat 3mg and I'd be fucked up for 24 hours. Now, 30 mgs barely takes the edge off.
You never want the floating to stop. Never. That's why you do everything possible to maintain that bouncy feeling. The moment that it stops, you're body crashes hard to the ground. You might as well be dead because that's all you can think about when faced with any option other than inebriation. Death before sobriety. Isn't that the name of a Swedish heavy metal band?
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
July 21, 2010
Everest
Paul McGuire © 2010
Lizzy's grandmother grew up grew up under tough circumstances. Money was tight back then and even though Lizzy's grandmother married into a predominately wealthy family, she still had foundation of savings. She had a difficult time throwing things away. She saved everything. It's not that Lizzy's grandmother was miserly, on the contrary, she enjoyed spending her money. Her hoarding problem intensified when Lizzy's uncle was killed in Vietnam and a few years after, Lizzy's grandfather passed away after a heart attack.
Lizzy's grandmother lived in a ten-room house. The outside was perfectly manicured. Lizzy's grandmother paid top dollar for the best landscaping company in Pasadena. The inside of the house, however, was an appalling opposite of the outside. You couldn't walk five feet into the house before you were panicking because of a claustrophobic labyrinth made up of hundreds of files cabinets, bankers boxes, shoe boxes, shelving units, milk crates stuffed with junk mail, and plastic bins stacked to the ceiling.
For five weeks every summer, Lizzy's grandmother went to a spa Colorado. Lizzy's sister drew the uneviable task of house sitting. She was afraid to enter the house because it was a "death trap, fire hazard, and smelled like dead cats."
Lizzy's sister offered her $100 to keep an eye on the house. All she had to do was take in the mail once a day and pay the landscaping crew once a week. Lizzy is a Trustafarian, which means she's constantly broke, just got back from three months in Cambodia, and smokes my weed. All. The. Time.
Lizzy and my friends are what you call functioning addicts. We're constantly chasing the next high. The problem is that the next high isn't cheap so we're figuring out every way possible to make money or score drugs on the cheap -- without actually breaking any laws or selling our bodies for prostitution. Heck, Lizzy refuses to get a job. Period. So how can someone as lazy as her get up early enough to turn a few tricks?
Lizzy was convinced that she could find a potential bonanza of stuff at her grandmother's house -- which she would pawn, fence, or sell on e-bay. All we had to do was sort through the piles and piles of junk. Lizzy convinced me to join her and a Midnight raid of her grandmother's house.
What was supposed to be the family room was completely unorganized clutter -- bags of clothes, empty containers, Betty Boop memorabilia, canned goods, grocery store fliers, and boxes of Christmas decorations. Everything was piled on top of each other like ever shifting sand dunes. You would try to climb one pile and have a couple of feet of junk topple over you and you're caught in an avalanche. One mountain of crap rose up from the middle of the room and shot up to the ceiling. Lizzy nicknamed that ten-foot behemoth: "Mt. Everest."
Lizzy had a theory that her granny hid everything of value inside that room because it would be too tough to steal it underneath the mountains of trash and crap. She wanted that area to be the main focus of her salvage operation. I saw it more like tomb robbing.
Lizzy brought a can of raid to kill all the spiders and other critters. I wore dishwasher gloves to avoid any potential spider bites. I also wore ski goggles just in case. I made a mental note to buy a SARS surgical mask because the excess dust complicated breathing.
After about an hour of sifting through a couple of suitcases filled with magazines and old newspapers as far back as 1979, I suggested that we look for pills and raid the medicine cabinets. Lizzy found pill bottles... hundreds of them... in boxes near her grandmother's makeshift bedroom which was actually the hallway. Her grandma slept on a couch in the hallway because her bedroom became over run with racks of dresses and boxes of shoes.
Lizzy found dozens of labeled bottles but expired for several years. She was ready to experiment and twisted off a cap.
"Wait...," I shouted. "You don't know for sure that's the same pills that supposed to be in that bottle. Think about it. Granny can't even keep anything in order, who's to say that she didn't mix and match by accident?"
"Shit, you're right. But what do we do?"
My plan was simple... gather up every possible bottle and bring them back to Lizzy's house. Which we did. We had two pillow cases filled with bottles and retreated to my apartment. We snorted lines at the kitchen table and four of us identify each pill individually. Bodie and his girlfriend brought their laptops. They were our researchers. We'd describe a pill and they'd check the internet. You'd be surprised how easy it was to figure out what kind of pill you had by simply heading to Google and typing the shape, color, and any markings on the pill. If that didn't work, all you had to do was post your discovery on the message boards at Drugs.com and fellow junkies or actual medical practitioners would respond with the correct answers.
Lizzy's grandmother didn't horde any pharmaceuticals of interest to us. She had plenty of blood pressure and hypertension pills. We found a couple of bottles of expired Percodan. I didn't think they made that anymore, but the effects were similar to Percosett. We didn't know what the dosages would do, so we all popped one to see how we felt and would reassess our condition in four hours.
Lizzy found a bottle of muscle relaxers and something for migraines. We were disappointed that it took us two trips sort through two medicine cabinets, granny's dressers, and the entire hallway outside of the master bedroom.
Lizzy decided that we needed to return to the house and take on Everest. You couldn't even walk on the floor and sometimes you were two feet off the ground. Lizzy was convinced that there was gold buried underneath Everest.
"How about a Jaguar?"
"Fuck you! Are you gonna help me or not? My mom said there's gotta be some jewelry hidden somewhere. If it's anywhere it's gotta be underneath Everest."
I let Lizzy lead the Everest expedition. I opted for a more practical mission: seek out higher end items that we could fence like electronics, pieces of art, and old vinyl records. Bodie and I each took a different floor of the house and wrote down items that we thought could be of value. Once we finished compiling the lists, we strategically went for the best stuff. Bodie found a brand new Casino keyboard lying underneath a stack of sweaters. It was still in the box. We quickly loaded that into his car and tried to figure out how much we could sell it. He was overestimating and thought we stumbled up a $2,000 score. I told him we'd be lucky to get $200 in craigslist.
In the former den, one of the shelved walls contained hundreds of books. Getting there was the tough part. Once we cleared out a path way, we went in search of something of value that we could sell. Bodie dropped out of high school to become a professional skateboarder, so he had no idea that there was a difference between John Grisham and Shakespeare. To him, they were both writers -- equally the same. That's why he looked at all of the books and couldn't figure out which ones had value and which were junk.
I told him to leave me alone in the den to sort through books. I suggested that he dig in the other corner and look for vintage records. Who knows what sort of old jazz records that we could find and eventually sell at a second-hand music store where hipster spend $50 for a scratchy vinyl version of Blonde on Blonde.
I found mostly text books and old science manuals that belonged to Lizzy's grandfather. I had no idea what I as looking for, but I tried to make two piles: books I wanted to keep for myself and books I wanted to sell. After three hours, I only found two books worth pawning (what appeared to be an original copy of Gravity's Rainbow and a signed copy of Breakfast of Champions). The other pile had about a dozen or so books that I wanted to read and then later on try to sell for like $2 each at the flea market on Fairfax.
Lizzy emerged in tears and heavily bruised after Everest swallowed her up a couple of times. She was tired and frustrated and hadn't slept in four days snorting coke and crushing up Adderall every eight hours. She was pissed too that all we got out of our salvage operation was a keyboard, a couple of books, and menopause meds.
"Don't forget about the six pairs of Santa Claus and Mrs.Claus salt and pepper shakers we found," I reminded her.
"I have no idea what granny was doing with those. She's Jewish."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
Lizzy's grandmother grew up grew up under tough circumstances. Money was tight back then and even though Lizzy's grandmother married into a predominately wealthy family, she still had foundation of savings. She had a difficult time throwing things away. She saved everything. It's not that Lizzy's grandmother was miserly, on the contrary, she enjoyed spending her money. Her hoarding problem intensified when Lizzy's uncle was killed in Vietnam and a few years after, Lizzy's grandfather passed away after a heart attack.
Lizzy's grandmother lived in a ten-room house. The outside was perfectly manicured. Lizzy's grandmother paid top dollar for the best landscaping company in Pasadena. The inside of the house, however, was an appalling opposite of the outside. You couldn't walk five feet into the house before you were panicking because of a claustrophobic labyrinth made up of hundreds of files cabinets, bankers boxes, shoe boxes, shelving units, milk crates stuffed with junk mail, and plastic bins stacked to the ceiling.
For five weeks every summer, Lizzy's grandmother went to a spa Colorado. Lizzy's sister drew the uneviable task of house sitting. She was afraid to enter the house because it was a "death trap, fire hazard, and smelled like dead cats."
Lizzy's sister offered her $100 to keep an eye on the house. All she had to do was take in the mail once a day and pay the landscaping crew once a week. Lizzy is a Trustafarian, which means she's constantly broke, just got back from three months in Cambodia, and smokes my weed. All. The. Time.
Lizzy and my friends are what you call functioning addicts. We're constantly chasing the next high. The problem is that the next high isn't cheap so we're figuring out every way possible to make money or score drugs on the cheap -- without actually breaking any laws or selling our bodies for prostitution. Heck, Lizzy refuses to get a job. Period. So how can someone as lazy as her get up early enough to turn a few tricks?
Lizzy was convinced that she could find a potential bonanza of stuff at her grandmother's house -- which she would pawn, fence, or sell on e-bay. All we had to do was sort through the piles and piles of junk. Lizzy convinced me to join her and a Midnight raid of her grandmother's house.
What was supposed to be the family room was completely unorganized clutter -- bags of clothes, empty containers, Betty Boop memorabilia, canned goods, grocery store fliers, and boxes of Christmas decorations. Everything was piled on top of each other like ever shifting sand dunes. You would try to climb one pile and have a couple of feet of junk topple over you and you're caught in an avalanche. One mountain of crap rose up from the middle of the room and shot up to the ceiling. Lizzy nicknamed that ten-foot behemoth: "Mt. Everest."
Lizzy had a theory that her granny hid everything of value inside that room because it would be too tough to steal it underneath the mountains of trash and crap. She wanted that area to be the main focus of her salvage operation. I saw it more like tomb robbing.
Lizzy brought a can of raid to kill all the spiders and other critters. I wore dishwasher gloves to avoid any potential spider bites. I also wore ski goggles just in case. I made a mental note to buy a SARS surgical mask because the excess dust complicated breathing.
After about an hour of sifting through a couple of suitcases filled with magazines and old newspapers as far back as 1979, I suggested that we look for pills and raid the medicine cabinets. Lizzy found pill bottles... hundreds of them... in boxes near her grandmother's makeshift bedroom which was actually the hallway. Her grandma slept on a couch in the hallway because her bedroom became over run with racks of dresses and boxes of shoes.
Lizzy found dozens of labeled bottles but expired for several years. She was ready to experiment and twisted off a cap.
"Wait...," I shouted. "You don't know for sure that's the same pills that supposed to be in that bottle. Think about it. Granny can't even keep anything in order, who's to say that she didn't mix and match by accident?"
"Shit, you're right. But what do we do?"
My plan was simple... gather up every possible bottle and bring them back to Lizzy's house. Which we did. We had two pillow cases filled with bottles and retreated to my apartment. We snorted lines at the kitchen table and four of us identify each pill individually. Bodie and his girlfriend brought their laptops. They were our researchers. We'd describe a pill and they'd check the internet. You'd be surprised how easy it was to figure out what kind of pill you had by simply heading to Google and typing the shape, color, and any markings on the pill. If that didn't work, all you had to do was post your discovery on the message boards at Drugs.com and fellow junkies or actual medical practitioners would respond with the correct answers.
Lizzy's grandmother didn't horde any pharmaceuticals of interest to us. She had plenty of blood pressure and hypertension pills. We found a couple of bottles of expired Percodan. I didn't think they made that anymore, but the effects were similar to Percosett. We didn't know what the dosages would do, so we all popped one to see how we felt and would reassess our condition in four hours.
Lizzy found a bottle of muscle relaxers and something for migraines. We were disappointed that it took us two trips sort through two medicine cabinets, granny's dressers, and the entire hallway outside of the master bedroom.
Lizzy decided that we needed to return to the house and take on Everest. You couldn't even walk on the floor and sometimes you were two feet off the ground. Lizzy was convinced that there was gold buried underneath Everest.
"How about a Jaguar?"
"Fuck you! Are you gonna help me or not? My mom said there's gotta be some jewelry hidden somewhere. If it's anywhere it's gotta be underneath Everest."
I let Lizzy lead the Everest expedition. I opted for a more practical mission: seek out higher end items that we could fence like electronics, pieces of art, and old vinyl records. Bodie and I each took a different floor of the house and wrote down items that we thought could be of value. Once we finished compiling the lists, we strategically went for the best stuff. Bodie found a brand new Casino keyboard lying underneath a stack of sweaters. It was still in the box. We quickly loaded that into his car and tried to figure out how much we could sell it. He was overestimating and thought we stumbled up a $2,000 score. I told him we'd be lucky to get $200 in craigslist.
In the former den, one of the shelved walls contained hundreds of books. Getting there was the tough part. Once we cleared out a path way, we went in search of something of value that we could sell. Bodie dropped out of high school to become a professional skateboarder, so he had no idea that there was a difference between John Grisham and Shakespeare. To him, they were both writers -- equally the same. That's why he looked at all of the books and couldn't figure out which ones had value and which were junk.
I told him to leave me alone in the den to sort through books. I suggested that he dig in the other corner and look for vintage records. Who knows what sort of old jazz records that we could find and eventually sell at a second-hand music store where hipster spend $50 for a scratchy vinyl version of Blonde on Blonde.
I found mostly text books and old science manuals that belonged to Lizzy's grandfather. I had no idea what I as looking for, but I tried to make two piles: books I wanted to keep for myself and books I wanted to sell. After three hours, I only found two books worth pawning (what appeared to be an original copy of Gravity's Rainbow and a signed copy of Breakfast of Champions). The other pile had about a dozen or so books that I wanted to read and then later on try to sell for like $2 each at the flea market on Fairfax.
Lizzy emerged in tears and heavily bruised after Everest swallowed her up a couple of times. She was tired and frustrated and hadn't slept in four days snorting coke and crushing up Adderall every eight hours. She was pissed too that all we got out of our salvage operation was a keyboard, a couple of books, and menopause meds.
"Don't forget about the six pairs of Santa Claus and Mrs.Claus salt and pepper shakers we found," I reminded her.
"I have no idea what granny was doing with those. She's Jewish."
Paul McGuire is the author of Lost Vegas.
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