Pecked to death by ducks (28 page)

Seven hundred feet below, I could see the ocean inlet in front of

Castro. It was shaped like a piece in a particularly baroque jigsaw puzzle. Tiny figures were digging for clams directly in front of the Castro market. The Catholic cathedral stood on a rise and fronted the town square. It dominated the town, a huge rococo affair paneled in tin and painted a strange, almost iridescent, orange. The roof was bright blue.

The intricate shingled houses of Chiloe, with their gables and ornate battlements, are often painted in such fever-bright colors. One theory has it that the odd bright colors help fishermen at sea locate their homes in the fog.

I scanned the water for a home traversing the sea and was disappointed. For reasons that have remained impervious to investigative reporting, people on Chiloe, or one of the nearby outlying islands, sometimes need to move their homes. The house is rolled down to the sea on logs, with dozens of men singing and whistling and pulling at ropes.

The house—and I've seen many pictures of this: It happens—is floated on the sea and dragged, by boat, six or ten or even fifteen miles to another island. Only the roof protrudes above the water-line.

When the house has been resituated on another island— "Honey, don't you think it would look better over here?"—there is generally a curanto, the seafood equivalent of an American barbecue. I intended to treat myself to a curanto —the dish was advertised outside most of the waterfront restaurants of Castro— but first I wanted to visit the soul of the island, the impenetrable interior forest, the damp and mysterious land of witches and sorcerers.

Tiny Cucao, the only village on the west coast of the island, is set along an immense curving gray gravel beach, ten miles long, that is guarded by rock spires on either end. The Pacific Ocean thunders into shore in huge breakers. Men on horseback—they wear panchos and wide-brimmed black hats—carry nets that they use to snare a kind of sea bass that proliferates in the surf. Women, bundled up in multiple skirts against the chill of the water, stand knee-deep in the breakers, looking for all the world as if they are dancing to music of the ocean. In point of fact they are

digging in the sand, feeling with their bare feet for a kind of shellfish called macha.

Other men spur their horses into a top-speed gallop down the beach. The horses cut sharp left, then right, agile as cats. They rear up on their hind legs, holding the pose, with their forelegs pawing the air.

The men are practicing for the local rodeo, always held in January or February. Most of the villages have a small stadium that looks a bit like a bull ring, but there is only one event, and a bloodless one at that, at a Chiloe rodeo. A bull is released. It is pursued by a man on horseback and driven against the high wooden circular ring. When the bull tires, the horse rears up and pins it to the ring for ten full seconds. During that time the forelegs of neither the horse nor the bull should touch the ground.

Rising above the beach at Cucao are the impossible emerald mountains of Chiloe National Park (established in 1982). These coastal mountains—protected now from lumbering interests—are a chaos of erupting vegetation, so thick that the government has established a wooden walkway through the woods. The forest is particularly dark: a twilight gloom at high noon on a hot, sunny day. The trees are covered with moss and lichen. There is an odor of rotting organic matter that mingles very closely with the fragrance of living things—parasitic flowers—and the marshy land is veined with small tea-colored streams.

In any clearing there will be ferns and large elephant-ear plants called malca that look fragile but feel like rough leather. A tree will grow in a twisting, slow-motion lunge, looking for the best place to steal the sun from its nearest competitors. The losers in this agonizing game of life and death fall, but they seldom reach the ground, such is the sheer proliferation of living things. Dead trees, held aloft by others, rot in midair.

Walking through the forest, I heard the warbling, junglelike call of a bird called the chucao, and it was coming from my right side. This, I had been told, is good luck. Strange sound though: half loon, half meadowlark.

I decided to experience, to the degree that I was able, the forest primeval, and left the boardwalk. The marshy ground took my boot to the ankle for the first two steps, then I crawled, creepy

damp, through the choked underbrush until I was out of sight of the wooden walkway. There was a tree that dominated this section of forest, a great straight-trunked monster that rose above all the others like a monstrous stalk of broccoli. A kind of warm, organic fog steamed up off the dark brown stream to my left, and the forest was thick with the odors of birth and decay.

It occurred to me that this was the kind of forest that gave rise to the grim tales of brujos, to a mythology that included many half-human creatures I had heard about: Trauco, Machuco . . . all of them dangerous and sinister characters, like the talking wolves and witches of my own childhood. I am a man unmoved by superstition, but when the chucao called on my left side—bad luck for sure, Chiloetes say—I decided to make my way back to the walkway. I did this in some haste and managed to scratch both my arms crawling through the thorny vegetation, all the while assuring myself that I am a man unmoved by superstition.

Maybe, after my curanto, someone would tell me about Trauco and Machuco, these supposedly mythological creatures indigenous to Chiloe.

Octavio was a plump, jolly man, the proprietor of a Castro waterfront restaurant called, not surprisingly, Octavio. He wore one of those thin door-to-door salesman's mustaches, and his establishment was a dark, bare wood, windowless cavern that you entered through a long, unlit hallway.

It was a friendly, family-run operation, obscenely inexpensive, and Octavio joined my table for a glass of good Chilean wine. A waiter brought fresh-baked bread and a bottle of the best local cabernet, which was excellent and cost all of six dollars.

Octavio said that there wasn't much of a cafe society on Chiloe, not during the winter months, anyway. He had to make his money during the season. His restaurant wasn't as fancy as some, and there was no view, so he had to depend on the quality of his food to draw customers. Every year, he said, the same tourists came back for more of his grilled conger eel (it tastes a bit like halibut), or his salmon, his oysters, or the seafood stew called pilas marinas.

Some repeat customers, Octavio swore, came every year from

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS ▲ 238

Europe just to sit at one of his tables and eat the curanto he served.

Originally, curanto had been a kind of Chiloe survival dish. At the end of the summer, in March, when the water is getting too cold for diving, fishermen go out and collect great quantities of shellfish. A hole is dug in the ground, and a fire is started. After a time the fire is covered with rocks, and they, in turn, are covered with thick leathery malco leaves, which hold moisture. The fruits of the sea are piled onto the leaves, and, over the course of hours, a thick, fragrant soup develops, while the shellfish are smoked for future use.

The curanto, like a barbecue, is a social affair, and herdsmen might add mutton or beef or sausages to the portion of the stew to be eaten on the spot.

The waiter placed an enormous bowl on the table in front of me: curanto.

"Where do they have the best food in the world?" Octavio asked me.

"Right here," I said, ever the diplomat.

"No. Tell me the place where everyone says the food is the best."

"Well, France, I suppose."

Octavio smiled brilliantly. "There are many people," he said, "who come from France. Every year. To eat my curanto"

I tasted Octavio's famous curanto, and it confirmed every word he said.

Renato Arancibia thought I should see the real Chiloe, which was not Chiloe itself but the outlying islands where there were no roads, few visitors, and no telephones. Every hour, local radio stations broadcast messages from one family to another; from a merchant with a load of goods; from a man in love to a woman waiting by her portable Panasonic.

The sea was glassy calm, tranquil, and it took on the color of the sky, which was to say, it changed throughout the day. One moment the vast expanse of water seemed lifeless and forlorn, cold and gray as iron. And then the sun burst through the clouds

for an hour, and the water was cobalt blue, clear as crystal, and I could see clouds of baitfish going about their single-minded business fifteen feet under the surface.

The largest settlement anywhere on the outlying islands was always the port. The village might consist of ten or twelve houses, and an enormous church bigger than all the habitations combined. On Quehui, the sound of mournful singing wafted out of the church—a funeral perhaps—and I walked up to the cemetery set on a hillock above the village. The graves were contained in small wooden houses, about eight feet long by five wide. Some of the houses were paneled with shingles, and inside there were rusting paint pots containing fresh daisies, and crosses above small altars where pictures of the deceased had been placed.

OUR DEAR MOTHER, CATALINA SANTANA, REST IN PEACE.

The graveyard itself was overgrown with ferns and grasses and wildflowers. One or two of the small houses had fallen into disrepair: They were filled with a riot of wildflowers and ferns. The trunks of small trees snaked out of broken windows.

On the island of Mechuque, a man was building a forty-five-foot fishing boat. He was working without a plan, hammering out the graceful swooping lines of the craft that would identify it as his work. The man's family had been the boat builders of Mechuque for generations.

There were palafitos built along a riverbed that drained and filled with the tide. A man stumbled out of the forest with a load of firewood on his back while children whooped and squealed at play on the beach.

I stopped to talk with Don Paulino, a gentlemen of eighty-six years, who lived alone in an old wooden house with great high ceilings and dull green walls. There were several hard-backed chairs in the parlor and a photo of his long-dead wife on the wall. Some artist had colored in the old black-and-white photo so that a golden light haloed the face of the determined-looking young woman who had been Don Paulino's wife. A large horsefly buzzed loudly in the silence.

Don Paulino had been born on Chiloe, but he left at the age of

fourteen. In those days there was no school for the children of these islands. In 1826 Chiloe had been the last refuge of the Spanish, the last royal foothold in Chile. Its history was a festering sore when Don Paulino was young. The island was remote, and the government ignored its needs.

Don Paulino had traveled to Argentina, to work the sheep ranches, and he noticed that rich men owned land. When he returned to Chiloe, he bought land, then worked at sea to earn more money. Eventually, he owned two cargo boats—there were framed black-and-white photos of both on the walls—and he put the money from those ships back into the land.

Now, Don Paulino said, he was a very rich man. But it was all on paper, in deeds. He needed cash. This man—who never went to school, who taught himself to read and write—had many grandsons and granddaughters he wanted to send to college. He was selling his land and timber to the Japanese, he said, for the sake of his grandchildren.

There were no restaurants on Mechuque, but a woman named Dina Paillocar was said to provide a good lunch at low cost. Her simple wooden house was clean and bright. There was an un-framed picture on the wall. It had been torn neatly from a magazine and tacked up at eye level: a drawing of a friendly-looking lion with large blue eyes labeled, in Spanish, "Today is a marvelous day."

Dina served raw, marinated clams, a soup of rice and smoked fish, followed by fried clam cakes. Everything was delicious, and Dina was effervescent, indomitable. She talked about her husband, who had gone to work in Punta Arenas. He had been gone a long time when she heard that he had been seen with another woman. Dina went to Punta Arenas, confronted her husband, and told him that he could have one more night with the hussy he'd taken up with. In the morning he'd come back to Mechuque and help her raise their son.

She never saw him again.

"The one more night," Dina said, "it wasn't a good idea, I guess."

"Probably not," I said, and Dina's quiet laughter flowed like a stream in summer.

She was, she said, better off without her husband. She loved to cook and earned some money doing it. Her son was fourteen, very smart, and would earn a scholarship.

And she herself had survived many harrowing experiences in the forest that rose behind her house. Once, she even saw Trauco.

"Oh?"

"Yes." He was a little man, perhaps three feet tall: he wore a cloak of moss and a pointed hat made of lichen.

She had been out with her cousin cutting wood in the forest— stakes for the sheep pen—when she heard the sound of an ax. One single whack, and then the sound of a falling tree. Trauco: the man who could fell a tree in one stroke. Dina turned and fled. Trauco can kill with a look; he can bring sickness on a bad wind; he often makes young girls pregnant.

I wasn't sure if Dina was telling me about the folklore of Chiloe or if she was relating what she believed to be the truth of her own experiences.

"Trauco makes young girls pregnant?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," Dina said brightly. "Many parents have sued Trauco. In court. Because he made their daughters pregnant."

I asked Dina if she'd like to drink some wine I had with me. I had the afternoon free and loved stories.

Dina told me about Caleuche, a ghost ship that appears in the fog. There is always loud music and laughter on board this ship-sometimes you can hear the supernatural hilarity echo off the water—and when fishermen fail to return from the sea, it is assumed they have joined the party on Caleuche.

The wine was a Rhine from a vineyard outside of Santiago. Dina told me about Machucho, the man with three legs, who can jump fifty feet at a bound, and whose step sounds like the booming of a great cannon. Sun poured in through the window, the wine was tartly crisp, and today was just as advertised: a marvelous day on a fairy-tale island.

243 A OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

"Even so," Potter said, "they seem to gain enormous strength, crazy strength. It takes a lot of people to hold them down." The drug acts as an anesthetic, and on it, you feel only deep physical pain. "You can hit them in the face," Potter said, "break their noses, and that would stop anyone. On PCP it might just agitate them."

Pepe and I were cruising the corner of Story and King Road, in the heart of the heart of the barrio. The corner was a maze of parking lots, gas stations, and fast-food franchises: Jack-in-the-Box, Shakey's Pizza, Taco Bell, and a huge building labeled "the World's Largest Indoor Flea Market." In the parking lot outside the flea market, Pepe said, thousands of young people, mostly Chicanos in tricked-out cars—lowriders—gather in the late hours of a weekend night, and there KJ is openly smoked and sold.

I saw it all in my mind's eye: thousands of chronic PCP users stumbling and lurching through the parking lot, all of them sweating and drooling, growling and barking, attacking anything that moved in their delirium, stumbling after their prey with glazed, marble eyes. And you couldn't hurt them, these zombie assassins. They'd just keep coming for you, like creatures out of the Night of the Living Dead.

The place, I figured, had to be a real goon show.

PCP has had a history of near-universal rejection. It was developed by Parke, Davis in the late fifties and used as an experimental surgical anesthetic, a potent painkiller that worked without depressing respiration. Unfortunately, the side effects— agitation, disorientation, delirium, and frightening hallucinations —were so terrifying that human use was discontinued. In 1967 PCP was sold to veterinarians as an anesthetic for lower primates. Drug lore has it that one of the first shipments of this monkey tranquilizer was hijacked, and that it hit Haight-Ashbury in 1967 as "the peace pill."

PCP quickly acquired a reputation as a bummer drug. People named Strawberry were going around punching people named Wildflower. Others were seized by a terror so complete that they were afraid to move, or even speak. There were convulsions too: an electroshock snapping of the spine, followed by the shaking sweats. And, especially in cases of multidrug use, coma was com-

mon. So, while PCP was sometimes a good high, one that made you feel in tune with the music of the spheres, you had to watch those four ugly C's: combat, catatonia, convulsions, and coma.

In the early seventies PCP skulked back onto the drug scene. Certain scumbag dealers peddled it as "organic" mescaline or psilocybin. Even today there is a 90 percent chance that that stuff you thought was THC or cannabinol was actually PCP.

By 1972 people never much interested in psychedelics were getting into PCP and, indeed, accepting it as the drug of choice. The government was cracking down on reds (Seconals), but people who wanted to achieve that truly helpless, irresponsible, wall-banging euphoria—people who wanted to get all fucked up— could take a couple of tokes on a KJ and get there in about five minutes and stay kristalized, ozoned, for four to six hours.

There are times, in the ozone, when movement is difficult without sustained, even heroic concentration. "Let's see, lean forward, move the right leg . . . bend the knee and, uh, right, lift the toes so the foot doesn't drag. . . . This is taking forever. . . . Holy Christ, stiffen the knee or we all go down. . . ." In East San Jose this mode of stoned locomotion is known as the moonwalk.

The problem is that the line between moonwalking and serious trouble is very thin. You can get off on three milligrams of PCP; ten can make your stomach feel like it's full of dirty socks, and you may end up doing pull-ups on the toilet bowl; 200 milligrams is a suicide attempt. By sprinkling the drug on parsley and smoking it (rather than eating, snorting, or shooting it) you can more easily control your intake. This is why your chronic user is almost always a smoker.

Investigators have found that PCP aggravates preexisting psychosis. It also mimics the primary symptoms of schizophrenia, and it does this much more accurately than mescaline or LSD. By late '76 you could read about these effects in the paper—a guy broke a big chunk of glass off his shower door and ate it. Cut his insides up pretty good. Another fellow was using PCP pretty heavy, and one night, swimming around in the ozone, it occurred to him that since his wife was exactly nine months pregnant, it

245 A OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

would be a good idea to use a big butcher knife and "hatch" the kid. Luckily, his wife talked him out of it. She had to tell him about it the next day. Amnesia is a frequent side effect.

In Los Angeles an unemployed actor who wasn't the Hillside Strangler told police that he was. Another man found himself in a jail cell and put his eyes out with his own hands. (This is a hard one not to have nightmares about. Scientists believe PCP disrupts or distorts the way the brain receives stimuli from within the body. This is what frightens people and freezes them into catatonia. "It just seems," one chronic user told me, "like your brain cells can't hack it.") Treatment for a PCP bummer involves removing as much external stimuli as possible. No excitement.

There are other horror stories: One man murdered his parents; another stabbed a tiny baby to death. Users themselves die, not only from massive overdoses, but from what is called "behavioral toxicity." People fall from great heights, burn to death, drive their cars into large stationary objects, or drown in a few inches of water because they didn't recognize the danger, or couldn't cope with it, or simply because they were too fried to do anything about it, even move.

People of all ages, races, and social station are using PCP, but experts give San Jose, California, the nod as the epicenter of the epidemic. And in San Jose the focus of public use and sale was the parking lot at Story and King Road.

There were, at a guess, some seven hundred cars in the lot, and, aside from the lights of a club called Disco East on one side and those of Story and King Liquors on the other, it was very dark. At least four thousand people were standing around in the lot. Young men in groups of four or five leaned up against cars. Young women roamed the lot in groups of two or three, stopping now and again to talk with guys, have a beer, or share a joint, or just comment on the music blasting out of the car stereo. There were more people by the liquor store, more in the club, and cars were coming and going at all times. Most everyone was Chicano. It was, in fact, rather like being in Mexico, where every town has a plaza where people gather on weekends and feast days. In

America the tradition has taken wheels, and the plaza has become a parking lot.

People were there to enjoy themselves, and they refused to lurch, sweat, drool, vomit, curse, murder, die, or flop around in convulsions on the pavement. Socially, the place was like a huge stand-up cocktail party. I'd introduce myself to a group, exchange pleasantries, and stroll on. No one—not even those who thought I was the world's most inept Anglo nark—had a nasty word. I saw some people smoking KJ—it has a distinct, fishlike chemical odor—but they mostly did it in their cars in a secret, masturbatory fashion.

I stopped to talk to one group primarily because one of them was just finishing up a KJ roach. The fellow wore sharply creased black slacks, a patterned Qiana shirt, and stacked heels. I never did get his name—he may not have known it—and so I will call him Party Boy. No one really talked to Party Boy. He just moon-walked around for a time, and his eyes seemed to roll around in his head without regard to focus.

Just as I finished my second beer, Party Boy noticed me for the first time. It was as if some hideous extraterrestrial had materialized before his flaming eyes. "What?" he asked and grabbed my arm urgently, nodding for me to complete the sentence. I must have looked blank.

"What religion?" He was clearly annoyed at having to elaborate.

"Raised Catholic," I said, and nodded for him so he would understand that this was a good thing. Party Boy threw back his head and screamed, "I want to be free." He glared at me. His face was fierce. "Me too," I offered lamely. He grabbed the beer can from my hand—I had been using it as an ashtray—and downed the dregs, ashes and all. "You want to be free," I reminded him in the hope that this would take his mind off the ashes.

Party Boy pondered the familiarity of the phrase for some time, then asked me what religion I was. "Raised Catholic," I said.

"Uh . . . good." He tried to show me a swirling red-and-black tattoo on his chest that apparently had religious signifi-

cance, but his shirt was in the way. It took him a long time to get it off, and he fought with it, as if the shirt were a sentient thing.

Bernardo, a tall fellow with a goatee, pulled me behind some cars, out of Party Boy's sight. "The vato's [The word "vato" corresponds pretty much to the word "dude." It is good to be a vato loco, a crazy dude. It is not so good to be "a vato who's all fucked up."] all fucked up," Bernardo said. We watched Party Boy lurching around, trying to get his shirt back on. It took him most of ten minutes, primarily because one arm was inside out, and whichever way he put the damn thing on, there was always something wrong with it.

It was about this time, 2:00 a.m., that the fights started. There was one every half hour or so, but Bernardo didn't want me to watch. Instead he told me about the cars: hours of information about cars. "A lowrider," Bernardo said, "buys his car stock. Never customized. An artist doesn't display someone else's work." A hundred feet away I could catch the action in strobo-scopic bursts: arms whipping like hummingbirds' wings, thumps, whumps, smacks, and groans, fists thudding into flesh with the sound of a tenderizing hammer pounding into a two-inch beefsteak.

"The first thing you want to do," Bernardo said, "is mold the make and model name off your car." Your ride, he explained, is your pride, and to have a big chrome advertisement for Buick Riviera on it is tantamount to having Buick Riviera tattooed on your chest.

Party Boy, his shirt buttoned in an exceedingly strange fashion, wandered over and tried to say something, but there was no sense in him. "Man," Bernardo said in exasperation, "tomorrow I'll wake up with a hangover, but you're going to wake up as a tomato, man, a vegetable."