an evening in the life

The sheet-metal door slammed open against the unfinished mud-brick wall with a bang, and in burst a cloud of evening mountain fog that could have been made by a horror movie smoke machine. My pal Manuel poked his head in, grinning in a floppy hat and wielding a large stick for no apparent reason. He was very drunk, which was funny because I had been working with him all day, and had decided that he was one of the hardest-working, most responsible guys I´d met in a long time. But a quick glance – and whiff – told me he had been drinking fermented sugarcane cañazo since we parted ways several hours before, and as a result he could barely put an intelligible sentence together. The two of us had been part of a 30-plus man work team, digging a several miles-long trench in which to lay piping for his town´s new water system. We had worked hard with shovels and machetes in steep, overgrown terrain from the crack of dawn until 4PM or so, and my hands felt like I had been rubbing them with chunks of fiberglass all day. I had also managed to give myself one of the worst farmer´s tans (read: burns) of my life, by somehow forgetting that, even though it´s the “rainy season” and may be cloudy at dawn in Chalaco, when you start at 7,000 feet and hike up a few thousand more it can be a different story.

I was now one of several guys sitting around in the front room of my friend Robert´s home, drinking a cañazo and soda concoction that didn´t burn the way the stuff does when you drink it straight, but has the same effect when consumed for a few hours. I was distinctly unopposed to drinking a lot of it tonight. I have a theory about sunburns that says although you can´t go back in time and put on sunscreen like you should have, you can certainly mitigate the effects by: A) taking a cold shower, B) liberally applying aloe vera (or the last of your cheap hotel moisturizer, whichever the case may be), C) popping a few Advil, and D) getting drunk enough to forget about it. Since we had stopped digging, I had taken care of steps A through C, and was looking forward to completing the equation to ease the burning on my face, neck, and arms. Working alongside Robert all day, him tearing up the ground ahead and me on clean-up duty behind with a small shovel, we had talked about everything from the weather, to why the hell I was working in a foreign country without getting paid for it, to American women and our respective positions on sleeping around. I found out he´s only 25, and we were actually the same age for a few days in January (surprising not because he looks older, but rather because he´s got a wife and a few kids). He had also repeatedly mentioned that we all needed to get together tonight and re-create the time we sat around and drank and played guitars a few months ago. Say no more. The group included myself, my host father Nestor, his brother and one of my best friends, Beto; Robert; Manuel; a kid named Dennis who I knew from teaching night-classes at the same school in town; an old man in a beat-up poncho; this guy Pascual who has nothing but a stub for a right hand; and two guys who didn´t do much besides drink. They both had very impressive mustaches, though.

I had walked up to Robert´s place with Beto after night settled and Nestor still hadn´t made it home. Their mother – who lives in the adjoining home with the grandfather and Beto´s wife and kids – was worried, but I was pretty sure I knew where he was. In his normal, socially-unpredictable manner, Beto made it to Robert´s house without any weirdness, then was very hesitant about coming in, despite the fact that the people inside were all men he had known since he was about four. He´s the kind of guy who gives me constant hell about anything he can think of, including above all, girls, but when one happened to be visiting and stayed at our house, he went running – literally – right at the moment he knew he was going to be introduced. Fortunately his friends convinced him to come in, and we greeted everyone with the custom handshakes around the small circle of chairs. I took off my jacket and unzipped my guitar case; Dennis and Nestor were already passing another guitar back and forth, and a bottle was being passed around, the cap used as a shot glass. My guitar was quickly snatched up (very politely, though) by a happy, half-drunk Nestor, who tuned it down half a step and played it with a plastic comb. Then the two launched into their repertoire of classic Peruvian highland tunes. Think of it as a bunch of buddies sitting around drinking and playing their versions of sing-alongs like “Free Fallin” and “Summer of ´69.” One-hand Pascual was wasted, and ironically it turned out that he loved to aggressively shake hands with people after making drunken, nonsensical comments. I wasn´t really sure how to handle that until I took a clue from Beto and just grabbed hold of the thumb like it was a gear shift and shook until it got awkward.

Every four or five songs, Nestor would cordially hand my guitar back to me, and they would all start shouting for me to play something “een eeng-lish!” Which I did, and as usual, all wanted to know what I was singing about. After playing “Rivers of Bablyon” to a chorus of enthusiastic, off-beat clapping, in an effort to help them relate I mentioned that the song contained few lines from a biblical psalm. “So it´s a religious song, then!” I pictured Sublime doing their version of it after shooting up backstage and wondered how carefully I had chosen my words, but answered yes, anyway. By now Manuel had passed out and was peacefully snoring with his head on his chest. Beto was trying to convince me that the buffalo on my hat had parasites. The old guy, who I would´ve placed in his early seventies maybe, turned out to be 98. He kept requesting marineras, a typical dance from farther down the coast. When they would finally pick one out, he would launch into an off-key ballad, clapping his hands and stomping his feet and sometimes getting up to dance a bit, to everyone´s amusement. Then he would sit back down and give Beto some shit about not filling his cup enough. Ninety-eight! At one point, he moved his chair over next to Dennis and started describing a song he remembered from before any of our times. A few minutes later they were belting it out together, and I had to wonder how many places were left in the world where a 98-year-old and a 17-year-old would ever do something like this, outside of a nursing home where the kid goes to do his required high school service hours.

After a couple hours things quieted down a bit. Robert was running out of booze, and the crowd had thinned to Nestor, Beto, Dennis, Robert, and me. Robert went into the kitchen and brought out a plate of gray-colored, salty tuna mush with a few individual packs of Saltine-style crackers. As we all dug in, it occurred to me that in another life this might be caviar with some uber-expensive organic crackers in a high-rise somewhere. And I immediately found myself deeply, deeply pitying people who had never sat around drinking moonshine and eating cat food and playing out-of-tune guitars under a bare light bulb in an adobe house surrounded by wonderful, hilarious people. With the food gone, the guitars came out for one last round, and with no drunks to accompany them, Nestor and the kid sounded better than ever. With Nestor on rhythm and Dennis´s quick fingers working the fretboard like few seventeen-year-olds can (or anyone for that matter), they went through a beautiful series of Peruvian Huaynos, Sanjuaneros, and Waltz, and my favorite, the Ecuadorean Pasillos. I realized that almost all the songs they played were based on the same three chords. They sang about women, drinking, and life. One song was a single line, over and over: “Unsalted beans for my husband, coffee and milk for my lover.” Pretty soon the music gave way to dirty jokes, and then jokes about the corruption, crime, and general lack of decency in Peruvian culture. I botched my way through one I´d heard about a Japanese guy, a Dutch guy, and a Peruvian together on an airplane.

Around midnight I suggested that it was getting a little late (my sunburn having bounced back with a vengeance after the booze ran out), and Beto, Nestor and myself packed up and headed out. As we all relieved ourselves outside, I looked up. The Big Dipper was back after an extended Southern winter absence; it looked foreign and strange, and not because it was upside-down. That familiar icon of my childhood – which, at this point in my life, basically means, well, my whole life – looked so distant, like it was out of some weird dream where it used to be right-side up. And that wasn´t as unsettling as I might have thought.