Medical Mysteries

There's a storm of speculation swirling through my cranium, in that I'm currently playing host to armies of tummy tormentors and it's universally known that exposure to germy kids, as teachers galaxy-wide will attest, is a surefire gateway to sickness.  Especially when the kids are third-world dwellers, and their dirty exploring digits tend to gravitate toward your face, squeezing your cheeks, pulling at the lips you've sealed tight to thwart the introduction of microscopic nastiness (thereby rendering impossible oral denunciations).  It's probable I leave school everyday with billions of crawling bits of promised torture and medical expenses smeared around my mouth, every chapped liplick inviting inside a few hundred million invaders.

That's conventional thinking.  But what if I've actually eaten a Peruvian child, whole.  What if there's a chusqui sucio clambering about my guts.  It's not so farfetched.  You couldn't have possibly eaten a child, you say.  Have you ever seen Peruvian children? I counter.  Every time I tread a pile of dogshit on the street, I fear I've trampled a Peruvian kid.  Almost every time a vendor accosts me near the market, hollering something about finger puppets for un solcito, I scour her palmed and finger-riding wares to verify no terrified children are mixed in with the cloth imitations.  No, you've probably never seen one, not unless you've rested your head on the sidewalk, one eye level with the concrete -- ¿hormiga o amiga? -- or regularly examine surfaces with a magnifying glass.

So maybe there was a niñito mixed in with the bunch of bananas I bought the other afternoon, or maybe one fell into the vat of leche at the school. Maybe, exhausted after a run, hands on my knees and breathing like a vacuum, I accidentally sucked up a pedestrian pequeñito passing between my feet.  I don't wanna abort the bastard, I just want him outta my belly.  So I should just do everything they advise pregnant mothers not to do, right?

Regardless, there was very little real threat...

There's something about booze that makes me, well, fucking stupid.  So here I am a week and some ago, walking home alone from the tragos gratis circuit around Cusco's Plaza de Armas.  It's 2am and I'm walking the deserted stretch back to my hostel, approaching two not-particularly-hoodlum-looking Peruvian youths traipsing my direction afoot.  Really, I'm just thinking about sandwiches.  A juicy thank you hamburger to offer the belly demons I'm happy have quieted themselves for the night, allowing me to drink and grind without anal-clenching.

I'm meandering through daydream, the sizzling grease hopping and dancing upon the pan, a sexy Cusqueña behind the grill ready to flip my burger, her short apron pegged midchest upon cold-activated -- when I'm startled from food porn by a two-handed thrust to the chest.  I stagger back, the alcohol advising me I can easily conquer these two normal-sized Peruvians, which is to say half-sized humans: "¿Cómo?"

"Dános dos soles."

I shrug my shoulders and try to walk through the human roadblock again, again detained by a push.  Well, I can just walk around the block, I think, though while the brain is occupied by thinking, the mouth begins to spout. "Ay, hijueputa, chúpame la verga, huevón."

The feet begin retracing their path down the block, I turn my back to the kids and my elevated blood alcohol content succeeds in raising a middle finger over each shoulder, while my mouth continues to spout obscenities.  The strange intoxication of adrenaline mixed with pleasure, pleasure that my Spanish is sufficiently proficient to fluently insult.

I end up at the corner and the two punks walk by.  We're still jawing at each other, my stares and stabs stalking them up the block.  Someone says something about go back to your country.  I invent something offensive generalization about Peruvians.  The more eager of the two stops and faces me, raising both arms wide and putting palms to heaven.  I do the same and continue practicing Tourette's, never one to let things die when my heart's beating booze.  Everything's a competition with me.

He begins to walk toward me, his friend lingering on the far corner, arms akimbo.  We're face to face, sharing breaths between strings of abuse, unblinking.  Then I'm laughing at him. Then he's slapping me, but gently.  Not enough to trigger my violence.  I don't see the friend approach, not that his presence changes my tune.  But I respond to the screwdriver he reveals tucked into his waistline, raising both hands, palms forward, "Ya no hay problema.  No tengo ningún problema con Uds."

"Andate, huevón."

I walk home quickly, hand jammed into my pocket, fingers caressing cold metal casing, the pen that, until now, has only been considered an implement to scribble notes.

Like they say, traveling teaches you to adapt.

The ugly side of third world travel

When the message materialized on my Facebook wall, "tell me an adventure... i want to live vicariously through you... :)," I figured it was time to demythicize the pure-heaven factor the cubicle-bound suburban-toiler adheres to the quit-your-job-to-continent-hop-until-the-cash-quits-you travel addiction.  Granted, if sanitary standards in the third world approached those of the squeaky clean USA, or if I had any willpower to resist hygienically dubious, corner-vended streetmeats or papas rellenas scooped from a basket and bequeathed via waste-caked, wart-gnarled hands, I'd probably not be approaching a fully-fingered hand's-worth of months of intestinal dystopia.  Or, in the doctor's words, "Where and what have you been eating?"

So, if you wanna live vicariously through me, the only exercise you'll be enjoying is toilet-tag, the sprint between bed and bathroom, an experience where any venture outside of the 100m I can make it in time anal-blast radius is opportunity for your intestinal partnership in discomfort, asshole-dwellers Salmonella and amoebas, to surprise you with a 10-second countdown, leaving you bug-eyed and swivel-headed, which business is getting invaded this time? and, fuck, please tell me I've got some toilet paper in my back pocket!  Then there's the drastically restricted diet, and don't forget that diarrhea drastically reduces your (maybe self-ascribed) sexiness, so careful when you answer the question, ¿Cómo estás?

Draped in chiquitos

Hoy kicked off my third and (for now) final week volunteering with Aldea Yanapay, a Cusco, Peru organization that operates an after-school program for seventy-some-odd Cuzqueñitos, beautiful and affectionate children arriving from predominantly impoverished families, many further afflicted by abuse, addiction, anything from the litany of crushing conditions I've been privileged never to encounter; conditions which, between the mind-boggling statistics (i.e. 75% of Peruvian women are subject to some form of physical or psychological abuse; estimations that over 40% of Peruvians live below the poverty line; etc.) and the tangible squalor radiating away from every city's scattered and gated enclaves of cash, we can conclude are disturbingly common conditions.

Working with mis chusquitos, whose smiling faces illuminate my weekdays from 3-7pm, is nothing short of a challenge, a welcome test of patience and flexibility after the numbness of eternal saturday, the alternate reality through which I've floated since...

Ah, mis corazoncitos, who for my bronzed complexion and relative giantism must mistake me for a cheerful, bipedal tree, their constant charging and climbing adorning my limbs with adolescents, scissored legs around my back securing una chiquita to my torso, gleeful shrieks and gap-toothed giggles bobbing at my face as I tickle her sides.  

Presentando la colección Verano Peruaño 2010, diseñando por PBA: Draped in chiquitos.

During class I can generally repel their charges, though sometimes their sneak leap-and-clamber street assaults have me ready to turn-out my pockets until I discern their squeals and featherweight, the peck at my cheek. ¡Hola, Profe!

During school various classes are intended to busy the kids from 3-7, math and art, games and study hall, later an hour or so with one's respective, age-determined "family" to plan and prepare a presentation for the week's-end show, though childhood's as-easily-inflamed-as-acetone excitability coupled with attention spans shorter tha-- wait, what were we talking about? transform this objective into struggle-of-the-day.  But it's a welcome struggle, an exercise in adaptation and creativity, how can I sustain their interest while working within educational parameters?  It's exhausting. It's rewarding. It's my new addiction.

Of tantamount importance is the quality of the organization's contributors; from the direction to the volunteers, Aldea Yanapay is brimming with eager and inspirational, genuinely hilarious (after-hours rum-swilling, rumba-fiending) souls (soulless me excluded, obviously), unconditionally-loving role models as positive as -- dammit, I was so close to achieving the rare, nay, mythical, "clean post" -- Magic's HIV.

Chapter Two: We've got a new shirt slogan here.

I'd flirted with zzzs for the last few hours but never settled any deeper into dream than the average person does driving home from the bar at 3am (get a taxi), a little nod here and there with a quick and unpleasant recovery, thanks to giggles and shrieks and such emanating from the $3 orgy-pad in our sound-conducive hostel.

So when the girls were finally booted I sighed and began melting into the mattress until CRACK! smashed the door into the wall, anew shaking lead-based flecks from the painted concrete, shuddering flakes across the carpet like wall dandruff.  My eyelids craaaaaaaankily garage-doored upward, exposing my looming tomato-headed amigo, his brain-container sagging so far toward his chest that it appeared his torso had gobbled his neck, his inebriated T-Rex shortarming adding a comical effect to his personage.  He gurgled something, pinballed between beds and the wall and ended up seated on the queen, facing me, left arm stabilizing his woozily leaning mass against my travel pack.  "Oh, jesus, don't throw up," began it's loop through my cranium.  Chase's chin would slowly droop into his ribcage, he'd begin a Gumby-topple to one side, then he'd shake his head, mumble something, gaze around the room in senseless stupor, and then rise, his heavy, tilted head providing the momentum to carry him back out of the room.

This routine was repeated at least ten times over the next hour, with several highlights, the most hilarious being several sudden crumples onto the concrete patio outside our room, followed by several minutes of Peter Griffinesque, knee-hugging, monotone moaning.  There was also the glossolalia-heavy tirades directed at the night watchman, and, once his shift had ended, at Sunday-morning sweetheart Milagros ("Whaaaarsh yooooour - *bleeeeeeeaaaaach* - naaaaame?" "Wha'on'cha talk a'me?"), profanity-laced abuses that eventually urged me out of bed, ready to scold.

I encountered a googly-eyed maniac chomping down an apple. "Chase, calm down."

"Whah? 'M no' dun' anythin'.  Wh'on't sh'talk a'me? FUCK!"

"Dude, she doesn't speak English.  You're hammered and being a fucking asshole.  Please, shut the fuck up and get in bed!"

"What?  How'uh fuck can'u calmyan asshole.  You wur sleep intha street laznight!"

Touché.

So he continued to stalk Milagros as effectively as any shadow, a Silly Putty-postured bumbler occasionally swigging from the half-liter of warm beer he'd discovered stashed in the corner of our bedroom -- as Chase'd inform me later, prior to the warm Pilsen, he'd already drained a bottle of liquor he'd pilfered from the community fridge -- occasionally veering from her side to yet again have his attempts to pump "Still Dre" through the hostel's sub-woofer equipped computer thwarted.  The first round of retard-karaoke had been sufficient torture for all the hotel's inhabitants, regardless of any language barriers.

It was quite miraculous, witnessing the alcohol-induced deterioration of a human being at 8am, yet fearful when surfaced the rage, a windmilling, air-punching, sudden onset violence straight from 28 Days Later.  He'd storm into the room, ranting mindlessly that nobody would let him do what he wanted! and why wouldn't she talk to him?  The indiscriminate screaming and punching pulled me upright in bed, with both hands readying my comforter to smother the beast should need be.  Chase picked up a plastic sheet of 50-caliber stomach pills and pushed one through the foilback, popped it into his mouth and began to masticate.  He managed an impressive, senses-delayed ten seconds before his eyes crossed and he began thrashing towards the bathroom, white-specks flying his lips, the tortured howls escaping with the powder-shower reminiscent of the primal pains of a full-grown human suddenly freed from lifelong captivity below some pervert's staircase.  He spent a few minutes in the bathroom spitting and gagging and growling, emerging stamping toward his bed, where he lifted his large travel backpack from the floor, proceeding to shake all its contents onto the floor.

And I'll never forget what happened next, when Chase jammed the empty bag over his head, pulling it down over his shoulders and arms, and then proceeded to perform what would equate to a shriek-accompanied standing seizure, a human-imitation of starved pitbulls in a bag, fighting over a steak.  When the bag came off Chase set about the room, retrieving and jamming all of his possessions into his 60L cloth cavern, emptying the bedside table of everything including the lamp, which I somehow convinced him to return to it's place amidst shards of newly-broken glass.

I watched in utter disbelief as Chase hefted the pack onto his back, strapping the smaller daypack to his chest.  "Fuuuuuuuck you!  Nobody let's me have any fun!  I hate this place.  I hate it!!!" he shrieked, sprinting toward the door.  But our door is actually two small wooden doors that open inward, latching in the middle.  Thus, while attempting to squeeze out of the single, inwardly-opened door, his bulging bags caught on the doorframe and the immobile door, producing a few hysterical and maniacal seconds of sprinting in place, his legs churning and arms pumping through pained shouts, "Let me go, Pleeeeeeeease, LET ME GO!" before his determined wiggling sent him lurching into the patio, from where he sprinted to the hostel door, threw it open and flew into the street, famous last words freezing me in disbelief, "Fuck you! Fuck everybody! 'M'goin' to Bolivia!"


Despite the obvious instability of the gringo sprinting through the streets, screaming "TAXI! TAXI! Take me to Bolivia!", I guess Peruvian nuevos soles are scarcer than I'd realized, as the first taxi on the scene pulled to a stop and calmly loaded up the liquor-bomb, whose passenger seat wailing reverberated even after the taxi had disappeared around the corner, the taxi driver presumably deducing from the baggage and torrent of BOLIVIAs that la terminal terrestre was the desired point-of-departure.

Chase disappeared, without paying his bills, at 8:30am one Sunday morning.  Twenty-five hours later I received an email detailing a drunken emergence from blackout at 4:30pm, on a bus somewhere between Cusco and Lima, where after being calmed by the bus attendants Chase accepted his fate and crashed back into unconsciousness.  He even managed to arrive with all his bags.

Thank god I have Chase to make me look like less of a problem drinker.


(As some of my fellow Cusco volunteers have suggested, with a picture of Chase's face plastered between the quotes, "Fuck you! Fuck everybody! I'm goin' to Bolivia!" would make a fantastic shirt.)

Chapter One: Look what the dog dragged in.

I stripped down to my boxers and snuggled under the blankets, turning onto my side and cocooning myself from the cold Cuzco night, one foam earplug already wedged and expanding, the other being rolled between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand -- that arm exposed from armpit down, over the covers -- preparing for insertion. My right fist, knuckles set against my mandible, supported my head; the elbow burrowed in the mattress elevating my body from waist up as I followed Chase ambling about, Pilsen Callao pumping through his veins, huffing out fume-tinged last gasps to inspire my resurrection.

“Alright, dude,” he surrendered, then stepped through the door.

“Hope you find some cuties.” I called toward his back. “And bring me one back too, if you do,” I added with a sly smile and a snicker.

He turned around with a face that implied everything in a wink and closed the door. I laid back, reached over my head with one arm to pull the unplugged ear upward, stretching the canal to facilitate the introduction of a spongy sound barrier. Then I killed the lights and melted into sueno.

I startled awake as the unstopped door crashed into the wall.  Chase staggered in, mashing on the lights to illuminate a puffy face so universally beet-colored it might've passed for a bad sunburn, if the spike of liquor didn't so permeate the air, his motions, and his words.  Neither the scratches on my watchface nor my blurry vision distorted the time, 5:38am.

"Eh, aaaaaaahhh, I gotcha un," he burped and giggled mysteriously, with strange satisfaction throwing a thumb over his shoulder just as two rather-hooker-looking women made an entry that would certainly not be mistaken for gliding. “Your friend is crazy,” I heard in heavily accented Spanish. I was praying these were hideous aftereffects of the Chinese dinner until one touched me, Chase and the other falling onto the queen-sized bed, buried in each other's mouths, scavenger hunting for tonsils. He came up for air and instructed with a glance, “You fuck her,” before returning to tongue-drilling. Skin -- or more specifically rolls of flesh falling-over and bunching-up around a bra – jiggled into view as Chase wrestled the dress.

My appointed girl kept looming and blabbering, but all I understood was a disc-skipping refrain of “STD. STD!”

“Nah, Chase. Hey. Fuck, Chase! Dude, not in here, please. And I’m not sleeping with this girl. Who is she?”

“What, man? You told me to bring you one! Just fuck her.”

“No.”

After a few dozen identical volleys, he proclaimed my loss and declared a threesome. But my hand hovered over the light-switch, stifling the impending orgy.

What ensued was a prolonged battle between a drunk-and-obviously-undiscriminating penis and a tired, sober and disgusted gringo too well-informed about bricheras and their penchant for slipping out with pocketfuls of swindled loot. Over the course of which voices were raised, the word “putas” slipped from my lips, and my outright refusal to tag my willing-without-a-single-encounter sextoy was used for ammo to blast me with a limited-English refrain of “You are gay,” and “I hope you have cancer in your penis.” There was a momentary intermission when an Argentinean friend also stumbled in, drawn to the commotion and female voices, and for a few moments occupied the mouth of my verbally-abusive appointed-pussy. But then it was more of the same.

“Pat, man, what the Fuck?!” Chase would scream. “Why’re you cockblocking me?”

“Have you ever had a threesome? Then why’re you fucking ruining my chance!?”

“Fuck, Pat, just turn off the lights. Yeah, turn ‘em off.”

Or flipping my suggestion back on me, “Pat, leave. Leave! Go get another room.”

Thirty minutes of logic later Chase angrily agreed to take the girls upstairs, when it became apparent my stubbornness wasn’t subsiding -- allowing me to unglue my eyes from my valuables. There followed a few hours of relative peace, though peals of laughter and reprimanding knocks at their door from the night watchman kept me from falling asleep. At some point the girls were expelled from the hotel, though not until after they’d entertained themselves, barricading themselves in their room, ignoring both Chase’s and the watchman’s appeals to open up.

Then somewhere around 7:30am it got interesting.

De vez en cuando...

Every once in a while you feel the impetus to write, and every once in a while that every once in a while is a 4am post-clubbing session, when the ringing in your ears is so pronounced that it's like Daddy Yankee followed you home from the club -- like a pesky Cusco coke dealer -- and is playing a concert directly in your ear canal. So if those filth-grayed, months-"recycled" earplugs can't drown out the sound, pump a little high-volume Elliot Smith through your earbuds and see what slivers of sensibility can stab through your volume-and-alcohol stifled senses.

I've lost track of time through my various regimens of anti-belly-buddy medications, and doubtless I've nuked everything good and bad, from natural intestinal flora to parasitic invaders, that once resided in my guts.  I think I might feel a bit better than I did a month ago, but that might be due to my recently unwavering commitment to a perpetually above-legal B.A.C.  And the bruises running down the right side of my body -- knee, hip, shoulder, and eye -- are reminders that my friend found me crumpled on the side of the road at 2:30am -- somewhere along the four block path between my Cusco hostel and the debauchery-mecca Plaza de Armas, sometime after following the first prolonged potent-beverage binge with an unadvisable corner rum-swilling session with four or five questionable Cuzqueños -- where for an undetermined number of hours unconsciousness had transformed me into a personalized form of third-world "urban sprawl,"  emerging somehow unrobbed, unraped, and undead. (And, yes, mom, dad, friends and relatives, I'm every bit as appalled and relieved as you.) Google helped me identify high altitude as the sneaky accomplice to excess, so tonight I stuck to beer and a few cocktails.  Which is why I can pound out coherent sentences approaching sunrise.

That my friend, literally moments after bemoaning my disappearance to his taxista, happened to spot my splayed form and scream "STOP!", and then devote a healthy 10 minutes to wrangling my gibberish-gabbing corpse into the cab, then later into the hostel and into my bed, well, it's been suggested I should buy the chap a beer.  But for reasons I'll delve into shortly, that might not be the most prudent suggestion.

Nuking my belly-buddy

Last night's post-supper gulp of gooey, neon Pepto-Bismol led to a startling realization: these post-meal, 15ml shots will be my daily dietary highlight as long as I'm mired in this parasitic, tummy-pet genocide.

Shit.

Doctors are contradicting each other, one saying fill my page of prescriptions, another declaring this one solo medication will suffice, and at a fraction of the price.  One advising I can eat only this and that, the other suggesting his counterpart is delusional and hyper-protective.  I just get mad at my murmuring stomach and start punching it with closed fists -- something I've secretly done for years while running, cursing with innocence-corrupting ferocity any cramp that dare pinch my side.  Neurotic would be the word.  Therapy might be the solution.

My belly-buddy, or at least he who has been detected, is but a protozoa, Blastocystis hominis.  Sometimes I like to imagine all my sincerity and reflective powers reside in my intestines, which is why I haven't written anything with any emotional resonance in many a month, if not longer.  But I can tell by my blog's three visitors-per-week average that the world is enamored by regular reports of my eating binges and stool consistency.

Let's hope volunteering, my looming change of agenda, has rehumanizing, reinvigorating side-effects.  In the meantime: do people ever start cutting out of pure, intense boredom, just to bleed some color into their lives? I...am....soooooooooooooooo bored.

The cheerful beckoning of stool sampling (Stool Sampler is officially my new DJ name)

It's difficult not to be petrified when you read words about parasites "making Swiss cheese" out of your organs, even if aforementioned ominous wording comes courtesy of promotional materials for an unapproved product manufactured in some guys garage, whose floods of advertising are likely quarantined in your email's Spam folder.

I'm convinced my intestinal ravager is gaining strength with every carb-heavy pile of lomo saltado, every liter of ice cream and quarter pay de limón, every ají-painted plateful of cow's heart and stomach.  Now that I think about it, I can feel the little buggers burrowing through my body, nibbling craters through all my major and essential organs, and working in shifts to scatter cysts from my liver to brain.

Looks like I better pad the wallet for the doc's inevitable impuesto gringo.

Watered-down drive-bys on the rise.

Chances are you don't know me, not really.  Not the hairtrigger temper hanging behind the smile, infamous for not unprovoked but certainly unmerited instances of spitting and slapping and headbutting and otherwise abhorrent behavior directed against friends and family.

I'm running toward Arequipa's Parque Selva Alegra when the occupants of a passing taxi expel an unidentified liquid that spatters my t-shirt.  The laughter emanating as the car slows to the stop sign wells my reason-and-consequence-blinding rage, a phenomenon of a violence and uncontrollability to shame anything portrayed in 28 Days Later.  A viscous retort is conjured from the back of my throat and I begin to duck to window-level, ready to Hulk it out with this car of four, when chance has it I actually glance at my shirt, noting the dispersion and consistency of can-fired shaving cream.  I play it off like a graceful stumble and continue pounding pavement.

It's only then I recall the characteristics of Carnaval-time in Arequipa, principally that presence in the streets is acquiescence to walking-target status for the water balloon- and pistol-toting youths prowling afoot and scouting passenger-side.  I can't help but chuckle as I halfheartedly try to sidestep the shrieking and beaming chiquitas chasing me through Alto Selva Alegre with their spilling buckets and bulging balloons and water bottles.  And my laughter trails the the hazard-flashing hooptie -- that already doused my stationary, stretching self as it pulled into the gas station a few hundred meters back -- that slows down to 6:30/mile pace so a cute Arequipeña can soak me close-range with a high-powered stream, then smile and wave without leaving her number.

Tomorrow, promises César, one of the owners of my Arequipa residence, La Posada Del Parque, we'll camp out on the third story patio and rain havoc upon unsuspecting pedestrians below.