Tag: Botany

I’ve written at least one piece about the Belize portion of this Central America trip – the one I went on with my sister and her best friend Elizabeth Raffer. To put things into perspective I had returned home to San Diego in the wake of 9/11 and by the Summer of 2003 I’d been working as an aide in Special Education classes and attending City College for at least a year. It was the most rigid structure I’d had in my life since walking away from SF State back in 1999 so planning a special trip to take advantage of the Summer break in both of my responsibilities made perfect sense.

Now that I think about it this would have been my first time out of the country if you don’t count brief forays into Tijuana, Mexico and Windsor, Canada. I had satisfied my High School foreign language requirement with German due to an early obsession with the X-Men character Nightcrawler and wouldn’t start my college level Spanish courses until the following Fall so once we crossed into Guatemala I had no choice but to depend on my companions for translation and navigation.

We’d had a few days in Flores to visit the Tikal ruins so I’d been able to learn how that particular city is laid out like a wagon wheel and that sketching the bits of Mayan artifacts displayed in the central plaza was a great way of meeting people despite the language barrier. This was how I learned that the skeletal figure I’d been reproducing in crayons was actually Ah Puch – the Mayan God of Death.

I also spent a decent chunk of time in Lago de Atitlan – leisurely floating on vegetative rafts made from clumps of floating water hyacinths. When I returned to the United States I mentioned this detail to my friend Badger and learned a discouraging detail about the waters I had recently enjoyed:

“As a botanist I can tell you that the water hyacinth only flourishes under one specific condition – an excess of human excrement!”

From there we took a sequence of buses southward into Guatemala’s highlands. As we climbed in altitude the highways became increasingly narrow and along their edges every available stone or boulder had been painted with the colors and stenciled with the logo of one of the major political parties. Staring out the windows felt a bit like watching a protracted board game where rival paint teams struggled for control of a constantly shifting field.

While one of the not infrequent avalanches would have almost certainly spelled death for everyone on board our overcrowded transport the aftermath would have triggered a flurry of painting as marked rock faces tumbled to reveal new and unmarked sides.

We rolled into the capital – Guatemala City: a stark contrast from the smaller towns and villages Jenny had filled our itinerary with. The most immediately striking thing was armored guards with AK-47s posted outside of every business containing items of significant value. It wasn’t too much of a surprise to see them in front of banks but the fact that one was stationed in front of what seemed to be the local equivalent of a 99 cents store put the relative poverty of most of the residents in perspective.

The other thing about Guatemala City is it felt like an endless sprawling maze of bus stations, passenger rail lines and open air markets. The terminal we’d arrived in didn’t offer buses traveling eastward toward Honduras and the information in Jenny’s guidebooks was evidently already out of date. I trudged behind as she and Elizabeth asked a sequence of street vendors for directions that after several false starts brought us to the necessary ticket counter but the next available bus was early the following morning.

After purchasing our tickets we grabbed a room in a nearby unassuming hotel and finally put down our overloaded and encumbering backpacks. I’ve never bothered with acquiring a temporary cell phone while passing through foreign countries and in 2003 it probably wasn’t even an option. Our only method for communicating with people back home was the numerous Internet cafes.

I had been trying to teach both of my parents how to use e-mail and computers since moving back home but only my dad seemed to be getting it – my mother wouldn’t catch on until the ultra-simplified iPad became available a handful of years later. Even in my father’s case he never would have gotten as far as he did if I wasn’t constantly available to offer tech support over the phone every time he ran into a problem.

It was another one of the limited applications, like this very writing project, for my near photographic memory. I had spent enough time using the contemporary version of Windows to be able to tell him exactly where on the screen he’d need to hover the mouse cursor to bring up the pull down menu with whatever would solve his problem in any particular moment. My father was also moderately connected and in the loop with both mine and Jenny’s friend groups.

It might not have been the exact day we passed through Guatemala City but it was definitely around then. I can’t remember if this simple sentence made up the entire message but it was the part that stuck with me:

“It looks like your friend Dave did the od thing, sorry.”

It had been a little more than a year since two of our friends, Fern and Nick, died from overdoses exactly one month apart. Nick had even been living in Dave’s City Heights apartment and Dave may well have been with him the night it happened. Everybody had gotten together there and attempted to divide up Nick’s important possessions based on who he would have most likely wanted certain things to go to.

The thing I clearly remember is that Nick’s parents wanted his Bible and Dave was agonizing over whether he should give it to them considering that Nick had written out the clearly labeled phone numbers of several Mexican heroin dealers just inside the cover.

People often called Dave Malone “Blinky” because of a tic where he’d rapidly open and close his eyes while speaking. I’d been told it was the result of excessive drug use but it seems just as likely that it was something he was born with – he’d certainly done it for as long as I’d known him. Regardless of what fashion trends were coming in or out of vogue he always wore his hair with severe Spock style bangs and gently curling pieces in front of each ear.

He wore hoodies and Converse All Stars in either black or purple and covered the white parts of his shoes in stars and Smashing Pumpkins logos. Nearly every person around the San Diego underage music scene went through at least one or two reinventions – a punk phase, a skater phase, a rockabilly phase, a skinhead phase, a ‘70s rocker phase…

I knew Dave from about 1995 until he died in 2003 and his style never appreciably changed. I guess you could call it “Emo” but only if you understand that descriptor from the specific late ‘90s hardcore-adjacent scene it arose from as opposed to the Hot Topic infused post-MySpace “scene” fashion it is used to describe today. Mostly he looked like Dave – although the individual elements were definitely trends in a specific time and place the fact that he rocked with it for nearly a decade made it uniquely his.

We were never extremely close but I liked Dave and always liked running into him. He was really fucking funny – he would talk in this exaggeratedly crass way that always reminded of the characters from the movie Kids. It was hard to tell what was real with him and what was just fucking with you. When him and Manjari came to stay with me for my San Francisco house sit in the Summer of 1999 he found a book about “secret cutting” in the Civic Center library and insisted I check it out for him because it was something he’d been struggling with.

I got him the book but still wonder if he was being genuine or just fucking with me. I never noticed any scars but he usually wore long sleeves and most people who grew up in the same time and place, myself included, have at least a couple of lines across their arms.

When I first moved back to San Diego I’d been running around with Badger, Nick and Ben Jovi doing the “Chicken Burrito Madness” thing. This referred to loading up a supermarket shopping cart with expensive food and liquor then pushing it out the doors and throwing it all into a car and driving off before anyone realized what has happening. I wasn’t there for the provenance of the phrase but heard it involved a stolen promotional banner with the words from El Pollo Loco.

I was usually tasked with running distractions on these runs. Ben Jovi always suggested that I drop a gigantic jar of pickles but I found it was more effective to take multiple employees on a wild goose chase for then-obscure Asian items I already knew they didn’t carry. I’d ask if they had fresh Yaki-Soba noodles and after they’d help me scan the ethnic aisle for a minute I’d throw out the detail that they needed to be refrigerated and we’d all shift over to the spot with tofu and wonton skins at the edge of the produce aisle.

By this point my friends had already slipped out the doors and I’d thank my helpers and casually walk out to the getaway car. One of the things we always took a lot of was Captain Morgan Special Reserve – an aged dark rum that in those days at least came with a special piece of red and white cord that we’d all wear around our wrists as bracelets. I don’t remember ever directly referring to ourselves as pirates but we certainly acted in a similar fashion.

After a night of heavy drinking I found myself passing out at Dave’s apartment and woke to find him burning the Captain Morgan bracelets off of me:

“You’re not a pirate anymore you’re a ninja now! It’s ninjas against pirates!”

Ninja was a more recent nickname of Dave’s. I’m not positive how he got it but considering his excitement it seems likely that he gave it to himself. He didn’t offer me any kind of replacement accessory to reflect this new found allegiance but he was almost certainly wearing pairs of black jelly bracelets twisted together in the popular hardcore-adjacent style.

A few years later the entire concept of “Pirates vs Ninjas” exploded in popularity as an internet meme and I always wondered if Dave was somehow indirectly responsible – while it seems unlikely he was constantly talking about it long before anyone else was.

In Guatemala City we had the good fortune of stumbling across a flyer for a punk show the exact same night we happened to be in town so we had to go. As we were walking over we passed a short man with a pompadour dressed in skin tight and brightly colored clothing. He deliberately bumped into my sister and she thought he might be trying to pick her pocket but he grabbed her ass instead. The most shocking part was that we had all assumed he was gay but we were evidently unprepared for popular expressions of masculinity in 2003 Guatemala.

The show was in a bar in a basement space under a store that was no longer open. The popular drink seemed to be ordering pitchers of a local variation on the “black and gold”: half filled with a lager called Gallo (sold as Famosa in the United States) and then topped off with a dark bock called Moza.

There were a couple of punk girls there that reminded me of the girls at shows in San Diego: dressed all in black with polyester stretch pants and thick soled shoes and vaguely chola-esque makeup. In contrast the rest of the crowd was either dressed like skinheads or the long haired Mexican headbangers that went to my High School. I was immediately drawn to the girls and they were drawn to me.

There was nothing flirtatious about it – just classic punk beer and mosh pit camaraderie. We’d been sharing pitchers and dancing for most of the show when I began to realize that the rest of the crowd had been furtively glaring at us but especially them with subtle hostility. When I walked toward the bar for my final pitcher purchase an abnormally tall skinhead of the sideburns and newsie cap variety pulled me aside:

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”

I replied that I did.

“Those girls are trying to steal you.”

I laughed and said something about being fairly heavy and difficult to conceal.

“No, no I mean they are trying to steal from you!”

I thanked him for his concern but as far as I could tell it was unwarranted. I had only left the hotel carrying the amount of money I intended to spend that night and so far they’d been buying beer to share about as often as I was. In fact the pitcher I was going to grab represented the last of my cash and they shared two or three afterward with no apparent concern that I was no longer buying.

If all of this was part of some insidious scheme I never saw any evidence of it. They didn’t make any suggestion to hang out after the show or I didn’t realize if they did as I didn’t speak Spanish and the girls didn’t speak English. It seemed like they just had an undeserved bad reputation in that city’s scene.

The bands were fairly forgettable and sounded like they played a lot of covers. I would have loved to buy a seven inch as a souvenir but none of the bands seemed to have any merch at all. At the end of the night the show converted into a phenomenon I’ve never seen before or after but may be commonplace in Guatemala: open band Misfits karaoke.

The final group left their equipment set up and members of the crowd would shout out the title of a Misfits song. Whoever knew the guitar, bass and drum parts would jump on stage and whoever requested that song got the mic and sang joined by five or six other kids linked by arms over shoulders. It was more or less the same drummer the entire time but the guitarist and bassist ended up switching out every couple songs because they didn’t know it and someone else did.

There was no organized system for deciding whose turn it was – you just had to be the loudest and most excited. Toward the end I figured I needed to take my shot soon or I’d miss the chance and yelled out “One Last Caress”. The drummer and bassist were into it. The guitarist on stage didn’t know it but it wasn’t a problem because a new volunteer from the crowd did. I grabbed the mic and crouched down a little to allow arms to loop over my shoulders forming a giant swaying human molecule nearly half as wide as the room:

“I’ve got something to say!”