Iquitos, Peru: Mr.
Wonderful Takes Ayahuasca
I ain't so sick that I need the
“medicine” of Mother Ayahuasca to heal my psychic fucking pains.
I'm pretty much OK as I am, even if I'm not the greatest guy I know
or even attempting to be better than I am and could be if I tried a
little bit to improve my evil temper and to get over my seething
resentments festering over the decades. I live with who and what I am
and I am basically content with myself. I do not need. Mother
Ayahuasca? Nope. Had a mother once. I'm fine, thanks.
***
There I was, seated down at my
favourite restaurant in Iquitos, me hungry and pleased with my life
of sunshine, warmth, and a good chicken dinner looking tasty on my
plate when I felt a rap on my shoulder and I didn't reach for my gun
and spin around in a cold panic that someone was touching me and that
touch would be a prelude to pain when I don't think about it. I
remembered where I am and I turned around and saw a young boy, maybe
ten, and with the boy a man, boy and Ron Wheelock sitting down behind
me for dinner at a nice restaurant. We sat together and ate our food
in the light.
“Ron,” I said, “I am right sick
of drinking ayahuasca all this time, and every time-- nothing happens
to me. I'm writing a book about ayahuasca, and I can't just end it
with: 'Nothing happened'. I'll keep on trying, but I am not going to
pay for it any more. If anyone has confidence in their ayahausca,
then they can invite me and I'll let the world know how it went.
That's the deal I offer.” I don't say more, but I could have added
that aside from being totally pissed off by all this bullshit
ayahuasca drinking that gets me nowhere, as much as that I am upset
by my “performance failure.” I pay for that!? No way.
***
They say: “The difference between
Wheelock's ayahausca and everyone else's is the difference between
day and night.”
***
The weekend is gone and I find myself
sitting on a raw log in the hundred-plus degree heat of the Amazon
jungle, sitting while Wheelock adds more hand-split hardwood to the
two by four foot blaze he has roaring already under the grate that
supports half a dozen 25 gallon drums of fetid creek water and
machine-ground ayahuasca vines boiling down to coffee-coloured
extract that he will keep draining off and refining till he has his
right recipe finished for the world, his high-powered “medicine.”
Wheelock is 58 years old. He's stripped
down to the waist, covered in sweat and soot and dirt. With one
gloved hand he pulls a barrel off the grate and slides it down onto a
brick and then rolls the barrel over the jungle floor to a dirt mound
and brick stand where he yanks it up and slowly pours off the tea
into a cloth-covered tub, the process beginning again when that tub
is full. We swap back injury tales. We talk about back home, life in
rural America. We don't talk ayahuasca. Ayahuasca can wait. In the
heat of the day by the fire in the Amazon jungle it's time for two
old guys to talk about more important things. We talk about cars and
kids and women and making a living. We talk about the kids we would
have had if things had worked out differently between us men and the
women we knew. We talk about the girls we date now, the kids we will
have if only things work out well this time round. We seek good
women, yes, but we seek good mothers more. Mother Ayahuasca is not
part of our conversation. Fatherhood. We are men.
***
We serious seven were seated in a wide
circle on the dirt floor under a giant grass circus tent with green
mosquito nets stapled over the long, narrow windows, Wheelock to my
right at his altar from where he sat making noises with his leaf
wrapped rattle, his mapacho puffing, is horking and spitting,
is humming and hacking. To my left sat a young man who immediately
the evening began stripped off his shirt, he sitting still and silent
for the duration but for his gagging. Far, far across the open room
sat the others, a pair of house-sitters for el maestro during
his recent absence abroad, and beside them, again far removed, two
local men, assistants in training to Wheelock.
In the centre of the room between two
vertical support beams was a jungle wood frame, a rack inside which
hung down a massive brass gong from the 400 year old Zildjian company
of Mass, the gong covered in engraved Chinese dragon motifs, the gong
being in keeping, I thought, with Wheelock's love of musical things
and shiny black plastic stereo equipment. Wheelock finished passing
out the ayahuasca cup to the last man. He then blew out the two squat
square candles at either end of his altar and we sat.
After I drank the foul ayahuasca from
the wooden red wine style short stemmed glass with the wide, deep
bowl, I returned to my too tight plastic seat, my legs stretched out,
my bare feet invisible to me in the darkness. I sat still, my head
tilted back, and I waited, nauseous, for others to barf around me,
their sick sounds signal to me that I could then puke as well, it
being for me a matter of pride that I am stronger than the others and
I don't puke so easy. I sat.
I was aware of others in the vast dark
shelter around me in the jungle, particularly aware of the crude
sounds of puking. But those others weren't close to me in any sense
at all, just others out there, which suited me extra-fine. I'm not
one for huggy instant friendships. I sat alone in the dark and
wondered if I might lose my mind.
I sat alone in the dark and wondered if
I might lose my mind, selah. What if my mind is already
cracked and ayahuasca is the hammer blow that shatters me mentals
into splinters across the endless empty skies and I am nevermore me?
Is there no hand to gather me?
I rested my chin on my chest and felt a
surge of sadness that this was the end of a long and sometimes
tortured quest for a life of meaning in what is for me a meaningless
universe, a meaningless existence, a life that cannot mean anything
at all but nothing. I had hoped for more. I had struggled for all of
my life in a state of faith that the meaninglessness was my mistake
and I could somehow, someday, finally figure it out if only I tried,
if only I held this faith. Thus I confronted the end of it all, here
and now, no hope of rescue, no hand to hold to pull me back from this
horrible catastrophic mistake I'd made, my final end, and I am
helpless now to stop it that my mind is coming apart in pieces and I
am no longer integral me. My mind is lost. I am madness the man. I
did this to myself. There is no going back. It's just... too...
fucking... late.
Then the drug hit me.
***
The transformation seemed to be
immediate. I was one moment sitting in my chair wondering what would
happen to me, how I would behave among others, concerned that I might
be a danger to them. I was worried that my mind might break apart and
never recover. Then there was a change. I didn't feel different from
one moment to the next, didn't feel it coming on, wasn't are that I
was being flooded with this drug. I was, as it were, me in a
different state of mind. My mind didn't splinter into myriad shards
of crazed reflections of my former coherent self. I wasn't terrified
by visions of monsters out to harm me. I didn't, like so many I have
listened to, confront my own death. Nor did I see snakes devouring
me. Instead, I encountered the strangest kind of me I could imagine,
one wholly out of character. That was real. It was so real that now,
some time after the fact and long enough ago to dispassionately
consider it all, I can't tell how much of my drug experience reflects
the real me and how much was sheer drug-induced weirdness.
Me? Not-me? The effect of a jungle
drug? Or maybe it was the effect of a jungle drug on me while under
the influence of the machinations of a master manipulator of my
moods, my curandero. I'm left to wonder, as ever in this
kaleidoscopic life of travel and adventure, 'Who is the real me?'
Twenty minutes after getting it down
the gaggy goo, thick and slimy ayahuasca this time the exotic taste
of dog shit flavoured cherry cough syrup I found myself sitting back
nice and easy in a bulk-bought-from-Walmart, white stackable plastic
patio chair, my fingers laced behind my head, me grinning big as I
realised that Jack Paar, the earlier host of The Tonight Show
before Johnny Carson took over, which is to say that Paar is
essentially the coolest guy ever to do late night TV, is not even
close to being as excellent a guy as I am. I didn't even want to
waste my time talking to Jack Paar. I wanted to chat, but I demanded
someone worthy of me. That could only be one other person: I wanted
to talk to myself for the sake of good company. Leaning back in my
plastic chair and feeling better than I have ever felt before, I
called into the aether for myself, conjuring Other-me from my mind so
I had me to talk to. I like Other-me. He likes me, too. I am,
however, more excellent than he. Being with myself was such a happy
pleasure that I found myself, both of us, laughing out loud, which
shot hot stabbing pain though my gut and hurled me out of my plastic
chair like a cat snagged on a passing pant leg and dumped in the damp
dirt like a sack full of smelly laundry. I laid on the dirt floor of
the ayahuasca centre, settling in on my side and I was flooded with a
sense of my heavenly greatness and a tsunami as well of nausea. I
pulled my Inca-motif cloth day-bag under my head and covered my nose
with my fingers and my mouth with the palm of my hand to muffle as
well as I could the bubbling-porridge sound of my laughter that I
suspected was pissing off the half dozen pukers seated around me. But
my snickers, giggles, guffaws, and outright howls of laughter escaped
me anyway till I shook, laughing in the dirt. I liked myself so much
I was overwhelmed by myself, which is no wonder, given that I was
lying in the dirt talking to myself, i.e Other-me. I laughed so hard
I shot a zucchini size walloping gob of quivering candy-coated slime
into the round plastic basin I fumbled my fingers to find. I laughed
at that and all the night till the earthquake hit the aeroport as the
jet plane was landing just in time to crash headlong into the
on-coming steam locomotive freight train. All that massive monster
noise and all that crashing cascade of crazy-colour swirling in
endless manic rainbows all around me, it was all just for me 'cause I
am, now I know-- Yeah! I am Mister Wonderful.
I'll say one thing about Mother
Ayahuasca: she's got long fingers who can reach so deep she can touch
my deeply buried pleasure centre and make me laugh till I puke. That
alone doesn't impress me. Any fool can get the giggles by drinking
jungle dope, as I found out eventually. But I was laughing so hard as
an expression of my utter delight at being in company of myself, the
most amazingly interesting, amusing, charismatic man I have ever
encountered. That was me. Mr. Wonderful.
Ayahuasca? Couldn't care less. Give me
more of me. A little more of this and I might fall in love. All this
time I thought I was one of the nastiest guys I've ever dreamed of.
Turns out I was wrong. I'm wonderful. Who would have known? Who'd a
thought? I am Mister Wonderful.
As I laid in the dirt grooving with
myself, an absolutely fun way to live by any reasonable measure, as I
know now, I happened to look across the room to see a six foot tall
and slender Paraguayan beauty goddess sitting dainty on a stool, one
of her long, slender legs crossed over the other, a fetishist's foot
dream dangling in the darkness, the girl aswirl in floor length silk,
black and lightning luster that must have been her hair, her electric
eyes blindingly blue gazing unseeing into the night, she sat statue
still and never moved for hours, a yoga girl as still as cold white
marble, her face a radiant moon glow. I scratched myself as I laid in
the dirt and laughed as I thought of clever things to say to her. I
shifted my hip from a hump of dirt to a dip. “Hi, I'm Dag. Many
people say I look like Brad Pitt.” In Spanish it sounded like
“Broad Pete.” I ain't so fat.
I realised (Hey, didn't phase me,) that
the girl had a boyfriend. I saw him squatting on a stool beside her,
his heels on the rim of the seat, his long gangly legs drawn up to
his huge bulging chin, his little arms resting on his knobby knees. I
might be a bit colour blind but he looked particularly spotty green
to me. He had a wide, flat head that sloped down to his neckless
back, his flabby belly was a dirty off-white leatherette. I've seen
beautiful girls with butt-ugly guys before, but this guy was
repulsive. He saw me looking at him and he looked back at me with
huge bulging eyes and smiled with the widest mouth I have ever seen.
I snapped back when he stuck his tongue out at me. Jesus! I looked
away and saw that his feet were even uglier than his face, way too
long, and he had, like, webs between his toes, like a duck. I might
not be Broad Pete, but that guy was fuckin' ugly.
I didn't exactly lose interest in the
beauty goddess. Instead, my attention was diverted by a strong sense
of nausea spreading through the pit of my lower gut, and the nausea
spread till I was awash in it, filled with sickness weighing me down
like an infusion of weakness-inducing mud. I was sucked from the
lights of my life into a murky darkness of terrible draining slumber,
pulling me down, down, down. “No!” I cried. “Nooo....” I
called out feebly. Then I fell asleep.
It's hardly surprising that I fell
asleep. I'd woken at 6:00 a.m. and had gotten to Wheelock's centre by
7:30 p.m., shortly thereafter hallucinating heavily and puking
intensely, so intensely that I had secretly hoped I not only would
get away with such behaviour in the presence of strangers but that my
manly, macho barfing would impress the beauty goddess with my
masculine force. Regardless of how others might critique it, I was
definitely impressed. So impressed I had to laugh. I woke off and on,
expecting any time soon to see the sun illuminate the world and me.
I woke off and on, Wheelock's icaro
singing in an alto tenor with a lingering Kansas drawl bringing me
back to awareness. Wheelock sat on a stool behind a hand-made wooden
table, his altar, his back against the wall, a mosquito net covering
the narrow window above him. Wheelock sang icaros, and I was
surprised by the variety and range of his songs, many of them to my
mind quite funny, sing-song parodies of cartoon Chinese, some ending
with a pause and then a funny cartoon witch's cackle that trailed off
into silence. I suspect it was Wheelock's icaros that account
for the episodic nature of my hallucinations, broken visions of
colour and wind, odd thoughts about issues of my time, (i.e the
nature of museum curatorship and conservation,) and the continuous
theme of my own wonderfulness, that laughter that kept me hurting
from the strain on my belly. I dozed off and on throughout the night.
It was the icaros.
I laid on my side in the dirt, the
floor having contracted into sections like giant jungle water lillies
of dried mud floating on the aether below, not uncomfortable, given
that the dirt was moist, soft from the ever-present humidity of the
Amazon. Wheelock sang, and once, strangely, I found myself in great
discomfort, the repetitive sibilants annoying, the high nasal tones
irritating, driving me to my feet to seek relief from the whinge of
the tune. I had to get up, and it was difficult, to say the least,
because the ayahuasca not only causes vomiting and hallucinations, it
also creates a feeling of physical drunkenness, making standing and
walking all the harder. I marshaled my strength and finally I was
able to stand. Wheelock's icaro ended, and it was then I
understood the whole thing, the situation, the meaning of it all. I
really had to take a piss.
I made my way across the centre floor
and out the door to the jungle path that laid out before me like the
tracings of a delicate finger drawing a line through deep green
velvet to the two hole outhouse where I stood and peed. I have peed
before, of course, but never with such accuracy or beauty or such a
deep sense of serenity. I was overcome, in fact, by the lovely arc of
golden doves with silver filigree wings as they flew in perfect
formation into the black hole of eternity. I stood when I was done
and pondered it all. I didn't say much. I could have said more. All I
did say was: “Wow.”
The walk down the path and back was
tiring, and when I returned to my chair in the centre I laid my chin
again on my chest and dozed, the long hours of hallucinating and
vomiting and the lack of sleep during the long night having caught up
to me. I was aware of Wheelock puffing noisily on his mapacho
pipe, he puffing in all directions the harsh smoke that devils are
afraid of. Wheelock is a non-smoker, so the taste of tobacco makes
him spit and the smoke makes him hack and choke. Each and every noise
was amplified in the darkness, each bit of spit zinging through the
air like a dart poking a hole in the solid walls of the sound of
vomiting. In comparison to the others I hardly puked at all. Some
went full-out barfo.
At times Wheelock's assistants would
begin an icaro only to give in to hurling bouts of puking.
Wheelock would wait for them to finish so they could resume their
icaro singing, but mostly they could not and Wheelock would
continue in their place, no two icaros alike, some loud and
boisterous and filled with comic tones that would have amused me
straight simply for the Dada effect alone, like Kurt Schwitters'
poetry or Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire. I found most of it charming
and often delightful, and I noticed too that if I concentrated, I
could with effort control my hallucinations, if not totally, at least
in theme, my lucid dreaming.
The hours dragged on and still the sun
had not risen. Other-me was too tired to remain and so he gathered
himself into a storm of bedazzling colours and made a dramatic exit,
both of us laughing in wonder at our wonderfulness. Again someone
puked, and I could not control my laughter. I laid back down in the
dirt, too tired to care anymore, and I laughed till I dozed off.
Drug effects or not it was clear to me
as it happened that Wheelock's performance, his huffing and puffing
on the mapacho pipe, his broad-leafed rattle shaking out crisp
and soothing sounds, all his various icaro songs, his various
tones, his comic tone contrasts to the solemnity of Quechua icaros, his sudden insertion of an English
language commercial for Mother Ayahuasca in the midst of a Quechua
song, his comic aside cartoon laughs, his whistles and pings and
pops, all of this and the rest was well-considered, highly polished
professional entertainment by a grand performer. It's a business, as
those honest enough to admit will admit. Wheelock grosses about
$100,000.00 per year. Clearly, the man is extremely good at what he
does.
Wheelock at home, the man, is my age,
my size. He looks like my grandfather. He could be my brother from
the look of him. At home, Wheelock is Ron, a guy who works hard out
in the backyard jungle boiling multiple 25 gallon barrels of wood
chips in brackish creek water with a furnace blast of blazing
hardwood, a shirtless, soot-covered middle-aged man who lives in the
jungle and is a working class guy who does OK and has a fair amount
of personal difficulty like any other guy. But comes the “ceremony”
and Wheelock is transformed into a persona that rises to dramatic and
exciting heights. Wheelock: Shaman Performer. I slept through at
least some of that, totally exhausted.
Then the earthquake hit us.
Earthquakes are frequent in the Andes
and on the Peruvian coast, but they are unheard of in the Amazon.
Thus it was a major calamity of cosmic proportions that we
experienced an earthquake while I was lying on the floor at
Wheelock's centre while under the influence of ayahuasca. Beyond
cosmic, though, is that at the same time a jet plane was making a
crash landing and doing so directly into an on-coming steam
locomotive freight train. That kind of disaster makes the history
books.
I curled up in the dirt and covered my
ears in a futile attempt to dampen the sound as I waited for smashing
death and burning. But the plane pulled up in time and the train
passed and the temblors subsided and soon all was well again.
I sat up in a state of complete bewilderment and saw with the aid of
Wheelock's glowing mapacho pipe that he'd been banging the
enormous Zildjian gong suspended from the rack in the centre of the
room. Time up. The ceremony was over. I searched in the dark for my
lantern to check my watch. It read: one, two, colon, zero, zero. It
was, by my watch, exactly midnight.
Wheelock lit candles, he huffed smoke,
he rose and came to me as I sat back in my stackable plastic Walmart
chair. Wheelock stood behind me and blew smoke on the top of my head,
his lips pressed against my bald pate. He pulled my shirt collar open
and blew smoke down my back, and reached into my shirt and ran his
hand down my spine and back up and again and drew out evil spirits
and tossed them away with a grand flourish. He did similar with my
chest. He put my hands together and blew smoke on them and withdrew
whatever daemons were living in this writer's fingers. He tried to
hug me, but I'm a reticent kind of guy, and Wheelock immediately
withdrew, sensitive to the last, moving on to the stone still and
silent German weight lifter who had not twitched an over-developed
muscle other than to puke continuously and loudly throughout the
entire evening. Around the room went Wheelock, and I gathered my
strength and made my way to the door, by which point the others had
all gone away, leaving me alone with my host.
***
As we walked up the jungle path to the
small clearing where Wheelock's four wheel drive Toyota was parked
nose first in a thicket, tyres resting deep in the mud and grass
brushing the windows, my head cleared, my body settled, and we sat in
the cab and drove through a rough trough to the highway back to
Wheelock's house, chatting on the way, the soothing road bringing
back memories to me of countless nights riding across the world going
nowhere. We arrived finally at the house, Wheelock making a five
point approach to the gate to enter the fenced-in yard in which the
sickly-looking toe bush is still hanging on to life in front of the
door. Wheelock doesn't use toe to make his medicine, but he keeps
the bush to scare away evil spirits and other trespassers who know
the significance of an ayahuasca maker who has such a poison so close
to hand. The pit bulls were sleeping, their eyes barely open as we
made our way inside the house where I promptly made myself a pest by
asking for anything at all sweet to drink to kill the taste of the
evening's ayahuasca. Orange power drink. For all the puking of the
evening I wasn't at all thirsty. We chatted some about the evening,
of how impressed I was by his performance, for such it was. But I was
tired, as too was my host. He led me upstairs and showed me the spare
bedroom. I thanked him and returned to the ground floor to look over
early notes and to make note of the new in case sleep drove out all
memory of the evening's events. I sat and made notes and considered
my ayahuasca lillies. I dragged myself upstairs and slept till 4:30
when the fighting cocks' screeching woke me and I couldn't get back
to sleep.
The sun actually did rise eventually,
and with it's revelations of the real so too did Wheelock rise,
joined by his long-time Peruvian girlfriend. They beckoned me to the
dining room table for breakfast, a lovely mixed vegetable omelet and
strong black coffee. For hours then Wheelock and I talked more about
back home, a place to both of us far stranger now than any ayahuasca
vision. Two middle aged men sat in a large western style house set in
the surround of towering palm trees in the Peruvian jungle and we
reminisced about rural America. Reality is too bizarre.
When I talk to Wheelock I find myself
talking with the man who lives down the road, I talk with my
grandfather, I talk with the neighbour, I talk with myself. Talking
with Wheelock I find I am not Mr. Wonderful. I'm me, an ordinary guy
from a working class background of rural America. He and I talk about
making money, about having girlfriends, about building houses, about
paying taxes. Talking with Wheelock I find I talk to Other-me, a man
much like myself, neither of us, removed now from the drug-induced
euphoria of ayahuasca and the theatre of the mind in the deep selva,
particularly special. Mr. Guy talks with Mr. Buddy. I don't laugh
uncontrollably even at Wheelock's best jokes. I just laugh. I don't
lie down on the floor exhausted by the intensity of wonder as I am
elevated to supernatural heights of ego grandeur. Instead, we sit at
the dining room table and have coffee with breakfast and converse
like mature adults and the wonder returns, not through vines and
leaves entangling lives and minds on foreign soil but through
invisible webs of common memories of home and time and supra-nation
of our shared past. I find the experience wonderful in itself. I'm
not out of control happy at all. I'm content to live an ordinary life
with ordinary folks.
I left Wheelock's house surrounded by
palm trees so big I could never hug all around them, sunlight shining
through the tissue and the pulp of giant fanning fronds, air turned
yellow, little speckled flies darting through the clearings, brittle
grass grown high and swaying, six foot long red tailed iguanas
scaling up a tree, wispy birds flitting away to safety. I walk a
narrow grassy path still soggy from last night's rain. Beside me a
thin rail fence sags and rots and is eaten by ants till it's merely a
dark grey crust of skin and powder. At the clearing to the village I
see collapsing shacks unpainted standing behind crumbling concrete
sidewalks too dangerous to traverse, holes and gaping chasms
threatening far falls to the rutted road below. I glance inside an
uncurtained glassless window to see a big screen TV and a sleeping
dog on a bare dirt floor. I carry on walking up the washed-out road
to the village centre where the wooden buses turn around in the dust
or the mud for the return journey to Iquitos, the big city. In the
scorching heat and the fine dust of a blazing day that holds on tight
to uniformed school kids and slows them down to a shuffle as they
walk in small groups back home for lunch I stop under a leaf woven
roof on thin wooden poles that shade a plastic chair at the broken
wooden table, and I sit and order a bottle of warm soda to sip as I
wait for my trip back to town. The old wrinkled lady with the foggy
eyeglasses shows her brass bracketed teeth in a brilliant smile, her
creases smoothing over her face with the effort, she being a hundred
years old and very pretty, her long yellow grey hair tied back in a
bun. She's short and it's not far to fall for the bits of corn she
scatters under the next table for the chickens there in the dirt. A
couple of school kids see me from across the street and they
recognise me and they wave. I smile and wave back at them. I'm not in
any rush to get away from this. I sip my soda and stretch out my legs
and ponder stuff. A windowless wooden chicken bus crawls by, rocking
and swaying from dips in the giant pot holes in the dirt road, the
ride so rough the passengers are wrenched from their seats, hands
grabbing madly for a hold, the lurch shaking riders right off their
seats. I let it all go. I'll catch another bus later. A old brown dog
wanders past and lies down beside me and falls asleep against my
foot. I'm OK.
***
Back at my place I swing open the heavy
iron rail door. I enter the courtyard and say hello to folks
lingering there in hammocks in the shade on a warm afternoon and I go
upstairs in the old Rubber Boom mansion, the place I call my home,
and I trod the bare concrete walkway past the thick malocca roof that
covers the courtyard below. I head to the dusty little bare brick
bake house room where I live and I rush to see my kitten boys, to
grab them up with both hands, to kiss them and rub their ears and coo
at them. “Hey, kitten babies, daddy's home!”
There in the middle of my room sits the
German on my bed. She's holding my boys against her breasts and she's
smiling and she's lovely. Dare I say? “She is Miss Wonderful.”
We can close the door now on this scene
and begin again with whatever the next ayahuasca adventure reveals. Who needs to drink ayahuasca when I can sit along in the dark with the girl and hope?
A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker,
is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1