7. FUNNY CAKES AND SAD TEACHERS

I went to a fancy gallery in Antigua. It was full of brown wax models of overweight women in various states of distress. I couldn’t understand it. It looked as though one had bad armpits



whilst the others were lamenting the situation.



Perhaps the figures were a symbolic representation of the political turmoil during the civil war. I walked around the figures very slowly for about ten minutes (as if that might hone my artistic sympathies) but it didn’t come to anything. I decided to leave the artistic stench for others to savour.

I decided to get out of Antigua. I had intended to check out a coffee plantation nearby but realised I had no interest whatsoever in seeing little black beans and that my motivation was prompted only by a weird sense of touristic duty mixed with western guilt – ‘is it fair trade?’ etc etc. So I didn’t. Instead I headed for Lake Atitlan, a big lake 60 miles west of Antigua. By this time I had picked up a Christian chap called Alan (not in the biblical sense of ‘picked up’) who wore pressed shirts and sensible sandals and walking trousers but who would turn out to be a great friend nevertheless. Really good heart and kind. He came from a diametrically opposed religious/political/sports background to me. He was a Christian North American jock who excelled at all physical activity. I was not. We got on a bus together and formed a friendship as if slowly sculpting a vase from clay. Conversation was intermittent and tentative but something solid was being created between us. We were not, before the mental image intrudes, like Demi Moore and that ugly dancer freak Patrick Sway-zeee - what a creature that man is!

Oh, I have to make this aside: I have been reading E.M. Forster (Howard’s End) and I can’t get his tone out of my head. Its funny. This is the sort of thing one of his characters would say ‘That Patrick Swayze, what a creature that man is!’ and then… ‘Quite the most vulgar specimen imaginable, yet undoubtedly a mover! Don’t you think Margaret? One could be forgiven, if one were from the lesser classes, for being attracted to those ill fitting trousers and quick step, yet not even the most plain of us could ever suppose he was good looking. Oh, heaven forbid. What a primitive beast he is!’ But Margaret flushed. She was filled with an emotion she barely recognised but which she could only assume by the building pressure in her cheeks to be shame. Yes shame! She dropped her eyes into her night cap as if to dissolve her embarrassment in the alcohol therein. For images of Mr Swayze were spinning uncontrollably through her mind and it was all she could do to not cry out with a fevered lust. She gripped the velvet arms of her chaise long and let a single bead of sweat roll from her forehead. If Mr Bruce, or one of the other men of eminence knew the extent of these feelings she would be rejected from their social circle at once. Margaret decided that the best course of action was to get up, turn off the light and walk out of the room, leaving Patrick Swayze, his tight trousers and Dorothy to dissolve into the darkness of their own moral depravity…’
Sometimes our life-specs become coloured by what we read or see or hear. You come out of a film or exhibition and the world looks, for about 30 minutes, like you are still in it. It’s a little high that fades back into normality. Oh Margaret, its true!

But we must return to Alan, yes we must! The thing is he was my age, (terribly old by traveller standards, past 30 oh dear, time for bed) but I enjoyed having proper conversations and more importantly being able to disagree without causing great offence (i.e. ‘no, no’ as opposed to ‘yeh, man, totally’).

He was also, I later found a truly kind bloke. There are few people that are. I knew he was kind, not because of any overt gestures, although he did always buy pineapple in the mornings, but because he was generous with my occasional tetchiness and always open to suggestions. Actually that’s not it, I am not sure WHAT made him kind exactly. He was certainly not kind in a Christian do-gooder self-conscious sort of way, like smiling too widely and saying ‘ahhhhh’, but rather in an uncontrived and hard to spot kind of way. That sort of kindness is like a background hummm. A dishwasher hum or a hairdryer humm. Few people have it. Don’t you think?

I once knew someone who had it and they told me they had never given any money to charity or to any good cause or to any homeless person or to ANYONE in need WHATSOEVER.... EVER. But they had it. I was struck by the discrepancy and it made me realise that kindness is not really in gestures but somewhere else, somehow more core than that. His kindness made you feel at ease, but you wouldn’t notice it at first. It was like a room heated by an Aga rather than a burning fire, although that’s the wrong metaphor because kindness isn’t twee and its not limited to the middle-classes who move to the Cotswolds.

But kindness ISNT very cool, is it? And Pete Doherty was not voted KIND icon of 2005 and rock stars don’t get screaming girls after them for their GENTLE WARMTH. And that’s why it took me till at least I was 30 to appreciate it. And next time you meet someone kind (properly kind, not christian kind) you should go after them screaming and pull your hair out and then ask for their autograph. I mean it.

I am not sure if Aldous Huxley was kind but I know he remarked of lake Atitlan that it was ‘too much of a good thing’. I worried that he might have been on drugs when he said that (you know our Aldous) but as the bus descended a hill and we saw the lake beneath us, massive and glistening, I had nothing to fear because the lake really is too much of a good thing



Endless volcanoes surround a terrifically placid lake that sits on a plateau at 1500 metres. The expanse of water is huge and towns are dotted around the shoreline under the steep incline of the hills. The water is so silky and blue you want to skim rocks and see how it breaks into rings. Boats leave white streaks like skates on ice which then fade back to blue. Its good for swimming in too.



Have you noticed how swimming is better when you are thirsty? You feel like you can drink the lake.

Then the idyll was shattered. I walked up the hill and I met some travellers. Perhaps Aldous did come for the drugs. It’s a massive dope hangout. More dreads that you can shake a comb at. Poor locals, really, you’ve got to fear for them. I stayed at a little village called San Pedro which was overrun with hangouts such as ‘Buddha bar’ ‘Munchies’ and ‘Sunset Strip’ and in between were the original family homes, where they tried to hang their washing, make their food, do whatever they always did, except now with the drug addled attentions of westerners tripping over their ethno trousers whilst snorting coke, smoking dope or even in some instance cooking up a little crack. Of course I was terribly shocked. Indeed!

You see I was here not for the drugs but to become addicted to Spanish. This town was one of the cheapest and best places in Guatemala to learn the language. Schools here, amazingly, are affiliated with Universities in the States. 5 days of tuition, one on one with a native teacher, 5 hours a day, sitting in lush gardens over looking the lake with a table and a note book costs only 70 dollars. Craziness gone crazy.

Loco!

I booked in with a poorly pronounced ‘muchas gracias’ and a commitment to avoid all drugs and hedonism. Needless to say things did not work out as planned.

For a start I had a teacher who was very pleasant and whose knees bent in all the right places but he was terrifically depressed. He spent most of his time slumped in his chair looking as though his mother had died or something. I wanted to ask him what was wrong but didn’t have the Spanish. He spoke little English too so we stared at each other quite often without saying anything. A big black dictionary sat between us rather ominously. I thought he might lash out at me with it. He spent his whole time tapping his foot against the table so when I tried to write anything my pen went everywhere. I was trying to learn Spanish not Arabic! It was one of those foot ticks that is not quite strong enough for you to say something yet strong enough to be really quite annoying. You know how you sit next to someone on the plane and they press their elbow into you but it isn’t quite hard enough to warrant a remark and yet your entire angry army is ready to march to that point in your arm as if it’s the next pearl harbour. His foot tick was of that order. I didn’t want to criticise him in case he would top himself or something. It was a difficult relationship which was not entirely ideal for learning spanish. Very gradually I did pick up some basic conversation – what is my name, where am I going, what is the point of life etc, but whenever I spoke he looked at the ground as if I was telling him awful news. I began to feel guilty for everything I said. In the end I started feeling down too. It was no good at all. When I had enough vocab to ask him if he was alright he looked at me and said in English (weirdly enough) that he was boring.
‘No, no, not at all’ I replied (‘no no es OK maestro’)
He opened the dictionary. ‘No mr Martin I make the mistake. I mean this. I am BORED’.
‘Oh’
He stared at me and repeated ‘ I am BORED’
‘Yes I heard you.’
‘Que?’
‘Nothing.’
I got really angry on the inside. I am paying you, I thought ANGRILY to myself, admittedly I am paying you bugger all, but I AM PAYING YOU, you can’t get bored WITH ME! But he dropped his head to the ground and I said nothing and then he started to tap the table with his foot again. Tap, tap, tap.

I tried to spice up my conversation to excite him but with a vocab of 200 hundred words there are only so many combinations of interesting things one can say. I am from London, are you from London, my mother is from London is your brother from London, is your brother your mother etc. I managed by the end of the week to tell him that I had taken photos of dead animals and that I liked eating meat but this seemed to depress him further. After the fourth day I gave up and didn’t return for my final class

There is, I should add, another strand to this story runs concurrently to this. I did slip into a little, minor, ever so slight drug binge during the week. I cannot blame his depression for everything. My ever increasing hangovers are what IN COMBINATION really made the bi lingual conversations dry up. I turned up in the mornings to see him slumped in his chair head to the ground while I was dry in mouth, wearing sun glasses and unable to speak much English - let alone Spanish. There was little chemistry between us (or perhaps too much chemistry if you must) Perhaps he was depressed because he had seen so many students go the same way as me. All wide eyes and empty notebooks to start, all bleary eyes and scribbles to end.

I didn’t indulge much, nothing heavy. I am over 30. Just a little weed and some very, very funny cakes. I entirely blame my Christian friend. He was a fair trade coffee importer from Toronto and he searched for weed with the same nose and buying acumen that he used to select fine roasts from Kenya. Thus we spent 4 hours trawling the town sniffing and sampling and nibbling before finally stumbling across a dealer who was up to international organic fair trade standards and who could supply us with fresh 100% home grown. The dealer was called DAVE and he was 60 and a junkie from the USA and he had a long white beard and sunken eyes and looked like Gandalf on. He had left the States after his heroin addiction became too expensive, moved out to become a dealer and so fuck other people up and thus found himself sober for the first time but in the middle of a civil war. ‘Fucking brilliant’ to use his words. I suppose he had replaced the war in his head with the war in Guatemala. Fucking brilliant.

He led us down a path away from the town, across fields, under starry skies, in and out of nights and through days until we got to his home: a small hut on the edge of the lake perched on some rock. He played a scratchy CD of ella Fitzgerald (which jumped continuously) while he made cooked up some Freebase with a pile of coke, some baking soda and a hot spoon. He spoke in long drawls with words that were as sunken as his eyes but which had a haunting eloquence. I felt both appaulled and drawn in. He chased the smoke, held his breath, and then curling up his thin white legs underneath his body came out with some theory or other.
‘This time, yaaah, in the early seventies, I was in a squat..ahhhhhh…. in the seventies.. yahhh… I was in the seventies….yahhhh ‘ – big eyes now,–‘… the seventies were like another world, a place we were all in, but didn’t know where it was…’ Eyes now even more wide open.
You understood him best not by listening to his words but by letting the strange drug induced sing-song of his voice wash over you. What had he told you? There was a revelation trying to get out, but what, where, what had he seen in the seventies? This was a man that had lived his life on the other side and was coming back to tell you of what he had seen - but there was no way for him to explain it and no way for you to know it. He was just a junkie! But no, his words dropped from his mouth collected stray bits of weed from the floor and then came to your ear warped but potent. I am not saying he had lived a good life, he was fantastically depressing in his way, but he had … something. It was like the CD he was playing, the music was skipping and broken and crackled but there was some tune underneath. Broken bird song.
‘Why did you take Heroin Dave?’
‘Yaahhh, cos I knew I could stop at any moment, yaaaah, I’ve been clean for many years, yaahhh – it’s a choice’ Eyes wide open and staring at me. He leans forward and stabs out the word. ‘It’s a choice, a choice. I would do the same all over again, Heroin was perfect for me, perfect!’
And the words did stab. Maybe I am terribly naïve but I would have thought a long term drug addiction was born from desperation and not positive action. He was quite clear on this. He had tried religion, relationships, friendship, painting and analysis. Nothing filled him up like drugs did. Now that he had taken a lifetime of Heroin he said he finally felt full. ‘The holes just about full up, yaaaaahhh, just a little bit more freebase, yaaaaahh’.

Did I believe him? Not really (he was sitting in a dumpy home in a druggy village in Guatemala with no life to speak of) but I believed his sentiment. Heroin was a life saver rather than life destroyer, and in his instance I could believe it. Where other people strive to make money, babies, films, whatever, he strove for the perfect high. I bet he had some good ones too.

We left with the most enormous bag of weed I have ever seen. An entire bush wrapped in plastic. Good old Dave. I didn’t buy it of course, Alan did. He held it to the light, turned a bud in his hand and then, like the man from Delmonte said ‘yes’. Dave would have jumped in the air for joy but he was fucked out of his brain.

I had no intention of smoking the stuff because it would ruin my Spanish lessons. Two hours later I was stoned off my face. ‘I was in London this time, yaaah, this time in the eighties, yaaaaaaaahh…’

That night we ended up going to a traveller’s party in some run down hostel. It was full of Israelis with sculpted hair and hariy legs. They sat sniffing powder and still talking a bit too loudly. A cocaine kibutz! They had fizzy drinks standing unattented on the table. I asked one of them for the coke bottle. A whole theatre of misunderstanding followed.
Coke?
Yes the bottle of Coca-cola.
CocaCola?
Yes. The fizzy drink? Yes.
Was I sure?
Yes I was sure, I was thirsty. I told them that I only took coca cola very rarely but it was an important experience for me. One of the travellers looked at me with genuine respect and held up his hands as if in surrender ‘whatever works.’

I have to briefly tell you about this Canadian chap I met at the party. He came over to talk to us and we said ‘Hi’ to him. He didn’t respond but stood shaking and contorting his body as though he had a stutter. We waited a good ten seconds but when the words didn’t come out we carried on our conversation while he continued his strange efforts. It must be the drugs we thought. But finally the words came: ‘mucho gusto’ (the Spanish for ‘pleased to meet you’) He looked tremendously relieved.
‘Damn!’ he said with perfect fluency straight after ‘Finally! I keep on forgetting those words man. Damn, this Spanish is hard!!’
Not as hard as the drugs you are taking son. I kid you not, he had been learning Spanish for two whole weeks and the only thing he could remember was that phrase. Even with copious drug abuse that is a startling slow uptake. He seemed a bright enough boy, but two words in two weeks, that’s a word a week. I am NOT touching his drugs.
The rest of the week was spent tearing through our weed. We also walked up a volcano, met dave again and ate chocolate cakes. It was a good week.

I think this image is funny.