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Interviews with Shamans, Part Four.
Interview with Ron Wheelock, Part Two.
Meeting Ron Wheelock, Gringo Shaman
Most houses in the area outside Iquitos
are cobbled together from scrap wood, discarded sheets of corroded tin
nailed, more or less, into something boxish to create a family dwelling
space, something the residents can call home. Some times the roof is
braided palm fronds laid like shingles, one length overlapping the
other, to keep some of the rain out, to keep birds from dropping in
from the sky, to keep out the direct sunlight. More or less. The
walls are sometimes mud brick, the mortar oozing down in sharp-edged
clumps one must be careful to avoid for fear of cuts and infections,
if not to worry about disturbing the nesting places of spiders and
lizards and small black parasites that squiggle madly when they drop
into ones soup, waterborne creatures that live forever undrowned yet unable to climb out of the bowl and back into niches and
crannies in the darkness. Who knows what one steps on or steps in as
one makes ones way across the dirt floor trod continuously by men and
beasts and birds and bats and bugs. Rat droppings, dead bug shells,
piss, mosquito-breeding pools in dim-lit corners, moldy blankets,
discarded food the dog chews on and tosses up only to eat it again,
and garbage. All enclosed in a cozy, homey house of boards yanked out
the mud and hastily nailed up on the sly before anyone comes to claim
them, long red thick boards and thin short white boards, and broken ended
unpainted boards, it don't make no nevermind when one is providing
ones family with a home off the roadside dirt-track of massive wide
and imagination deep pools of creamy mud that sucks ones shoes from ones feet and
mud that clings like leaches to the skin and hair and clothes one
destroys in walking. This mud eats, as surely as any predator in the
selva; and it eats concrete quick. There so few stones, so
little gravel, that all is soft and gooey and slick as one make ones
way from the dust to the greasy mud to wherever; and surrounding it all,
sprouting from every sliver of space is the green of growth, vegetable exiles
of the jungle trapped in close cracks between bricks, huddled in clumps by deep tyre
tracks, trampled over beside doorways, locked out from the greater green.
Comes the darkening sky and the pelting rain and the rise of the
water in flood and fury running down and grooving and sweeping away
all that falls till at last there stands in silent defeat the heaps
of the dead and long forgotten in muddy biers rotting under reproachful
black wood trees and screaming lime leaves. One mounts the ridges
between tyre tracks in hope of remaining upright on the slick mud
path to the house where the Gringo resides, a different kind of
place, a different kind of man, house resident rather than one living
there like the trees and the snakes and the vines all twisting toward
the light. Squeezing between cracked shacks slumped in the muck and
plodding gentle down dark ways in the tangled wood one comes to the
light space surrounding the house of curandero Wheelock. The
light shines on the paving stones and the broad tree datura leaves and household
wares stored up side the house. The house's thin wooden frame door invites a
knock. Wheelock calls to enter in. A look. A glance. This man's house
and home. My mother would approve.
In the jungle of overgrowth and decay
and constant death and striving for food and life and space one
enters in to Wheelock's home to find a space so at odds with the
shacks of the villagers' razor thin rays of light passing between
them, one place fair mingled with another as if to be a foot apart is
fear itself, one finds in Wheelock's living room the wide open spaces
of Kansas, the flat floor tiled earth tones, the hand-hewn beams
painted startling white and shiny. No partitions, no high rising
impediments to sight, no crammed jumbles of hoarded goods piled
and forbidding. There are no obvious hidden things in secret places.
One could rollerblade in Wheelock's living room and have space to fly
and fall and land in large leather overstuffed chairs and couches
spread apart so far one has to shout across the spotless, dustless,
clear clean distance from man to man. This is Kansas in something of
a nutshell. Kansas as Wheelock is fly-over country in something of a
nutshell.
Wheelock's living room is close to 40
square metres of polished tile and wide open spaces that opens into
the kitchen organised for convenience and practicality and good use,
like a fine farmhouse. Jars of stuff I don't inquire into, pots
sparkling and spotless, cupboards closed and clean, a bright, a nice, a middle
class place for an American man to live in peacefully. And beyond the
kitchen, at the far other side, almost out of sight, a low space
enclosed, a light shining through the chicken wire cage wherein are
roosters or chickens or some such birds, penned and safe from
predators, or laying eggs or some farm thing I can't no longer recall
'cause the chef does my cooking and I don't know anymore about stuff
like killing to eat. Having peeked to see enough, having used the
small and deliberate bathroom functional and clean and nary a trace
of self-indulgence but to be clean, I enter again the domain of
Wheelock, taking my seat away from him in a large black leatherette
armchair, easy to clean in this humidity, my own leather jacket
mouldering daily, wiped and shined and next day grey and damp and sickly.
I spoke with Wheelock, let him do the
talking as I listened without taking notes that would give away my
devious game. I am not a journalist, though, not committed to my
crusade to tell the whole awful truth on a daily basis and to hell with the
damned by their own words and my righteous indignation as I silently
cheer my scoops and their devastation. Wheelock said and I listened
and I remember. I remember cringeing as he spoke and told the truth
and how the truth he told flopped like flightless birds at the snake
pit at Quistacocha zoo where anacondas lazed in the gloom till they
struck stricken chickens. He told me things I can't believe he told
me. I'm not Wheelock's babysitter, and I cannot protect him from
those who would, given any chance to feast, strike at him and wrap his words in their suffocating grip to drown and devour. Wheelock is
on his own; but I am not a snake, last I looked. I know what he said,
and better yet, I know the language he used and what it means. Better
yet still, I know the kind of man and what the man he means to me. I
won't say what he said because twisted men would twist his words and
make him suffer for it before they dragged him down to drown. I'll
tell the truth about Ron Wheelock.
We sat in overstuffed black chairs under a
sparkling white wood beam ceiling, our feet resting on golden brown
tiles running on to pristine clay brick walls that make this house
whole, and talked about home.
I've spent my life among books and
blood and gibbering idiocy and universal genius; I've traveled from
Jerusalem to Damascus, from Alaska to Manhattan; I've known Bach and
Kant and Weil and Novalis. I've known love as screaming bleeding
hungry hatred; and life as nothing more than a moment ended in
shuddering agony and the long grief of soulless survival. Wheelock
smoked a lot of pot. He rode in cars with laughing buddies and saw
the spider web cables of sheet lightening spread for miles across the
black Kansas night, empty beer bottles bumping against each other on
the floor of the back seat, and the hypnotic hum of the road and the
white lines of the Interstate Highway passing barbed wire fences
nailed to gnarled, withered posts atilt on the slopes of the treeless
prairie berms to take pizzas to Joey's house to get high and screw
some girls and play electric guitars till the sun comes up and sleep
descends till it's time to get up and make the bed and I know you
don't care that you live like dogs but this place looks like shit and you
should have some respect for yourself, and to wash up the dishes and
sweep the floor and make some money tending the pot plants till it
all comes crashing down and ends in prison and a record for life. I look at Wheelock and
I see my grandfather's face, gentle and peaceful and somewhat
wondering but not too much because there is work to do. I cannot for
the life of me spot a printed word in Wheelock's house. He speaks,
and I hear the driven boy hearing the driven professor say: “You're
smart enough, but you're illiterate.” Wheelock talks, and his words
are those of those I left when I left the mountains for the world and
lost my home.
'If'n ya don' know what the fuck,
then please shut the fuck up,' as I see myself walking across the
room of the third floor of the apartment at the university where a
tall blond from my department has thrust her luxury coat at my wife
and left the girl standing there embarrassed as I take it from her hand and toss it out
the window where it hangs out of reach caught in tree branches below
and everyone stares and the blond says, “It seems I've made a faux
pas,” a general laughter forced across the room very quietly among
the stunned, the blossoming career of Dr. Dag as hung up in the trees as any old rag upon a stick.
Wheelock says: “I said I would.”
He says: “I paid off my house.” “I
kept my word.” “I worked....”
He says: “They say we come from the
land of the free, but Ah ain't never got nuthin' for free. Ah hadda
gotta pay for ever thang Ah ever got. Ah gots ta pie for mah
VEE-hickle...” and so on it goes, and I go home, back to the
mountains where I gots to pay for stuff or I don't get none, and
that's the truth where I come from and where Wheelock lives, though
this is a foreign nation to some homosexual vegetarian animal rights
activists who might be able to talk about Peter Singer, a fool I
spoke with at great and deep length and whom I know too well. “If I
ain't got the money, I wait and save it up till I gots it.”
Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas
anymore. I think America is gone off the map and that we live in a
jungle somewhere.
Wheelock told Walker about stuff about
family things, and you don't have any right to know. I know, and
that's likely why he told me. If you know, then I don't have to tell
you.
I could hear every word Wheelock said,
though we were very far apart, his chairs spread wide across the
room, and he told me about a boy from back home come to visit and out
at a restaurant where the boy burped and farted and every time he did
he's say “eshucha.” Wheelock finally got fed up, he said, as people
all turned to hear the boy, and he told him that because the word
might sound like the Spanish version of “excuse me” it means
instead, “Listen.” I could hear it coming because I know that
kind of joke. In turn I told a joke I wrecked so badly that there
were no survivors among the litter of words that fell half dumb from
my mouth. Could write it out, but it would take another page and it
would likely only appeal to those who get elaborate puns in Attic
Greek, not those who write AUTOCHTHONOUS,* (a neologism (1845)) rather than the word any
self-respecting Classical Athenean intellectual** would use instead, chthonic,
for example. But this is not Wheelock's world, a world where he
bought his mother a VEE-hicle, (which I pronounce as he does and I
don't care) that he insisted be in his name as well as hers so his
step-brothers don't take it if anything should happen to the mother
in her eighties because Wheelock paid for that vehicle and they ain't
go no right to take it that ain't they'ern.
There are those who don't get it what
“Mine” means. They don't know.
And about those fighting chickens? I
never asked, but Wheelock felt compelled, though he had no idea why I
would wonder, to tell. I waited till he told me.
I will write this about the fighting
cocks Wheeler goes to America to buy and brings to Peru to train to
be fighters, his training as good as one can give, his desire to have
not only the best but to make money from winning, to gain respect for
his effort and skill, much as he needs to get money and respect from
making the best ayahausca in Peru. So there it is. There's nothing to add.
Wheelock told and I listened and here I
report some of what I heard. Others might tell what I won't, and
Wheelock might well tell. I'm not a babysitter. Wheelock is on his
own.
I haven't hinted at the kind of man
Wheelock is: it's as clear as a summer Kansas sky. This is not to
suggest that it will make any sense to those who don't know what
America is about. This is not to say that more than half of Americans
won't be bewildered by the man. More than half will see nothing but a
man they would attack and harm for being the kind of American they
think they are supposed to hate. I do think it more than passing
strange that those who would hate Wheelock and harm him are those
more likely to want ayahuasca from him than those who would sit as
guests in Wheelock's living room and chat up the man for hours with
next to no interest in drinking ayahuasca at all, not with him or any
other shaman of the jungle at Iquitos, Peru.
About the man, I said what I said about
what he said about stuff about him, his life, his family, our nation;
and I keep much of the rest locked away 'cause it's much about him as it's much about me because we are very much alike, him and me, and
you ain't got no right to know it if'n you don't know it.
There is more to this story than what
I've told so far. It might be that I won't be welcome back to
Wheelock's house again because of what I've written so far. If, though,
the man will have me in again for conversation I hope next time to
write at length about Wheelock the shaman and the best ayahausca on
earth. “It's not always only about the ayahuasca,” he says, “It's
also about the person who leads the ceremony.” Now we know the man.
Or we don't.
Next, Wheelock's ayahuasca.
* December 22, 2012 at 1:56 pm
http://dawnontheamazon.com/
**For a lengthy discussion of the term intellectual and the concept of, please refer to my upcoming book, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, Vol. V: "Intellectuals, Nazi Intellectuals, and Plato." (2013)
Meanwhile,
A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/
And here are some reviews and comments on said book:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.
* December 22, 2012 at 1:56 pm
http://dawnontheamazon.com/
**For a lengthy discussion of the term intellectual and the concept of, please refer to my upcoming book, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, Vol. V: "Intellectuals, Nazi Intellectuals, and Plato." (2013)
Meanwhile,
A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:
http://www.amazon.com/
And here are some reviews and comments on said book:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.
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