Cortez the Killer

This morning I woke up to a strange sound, like a miniature helicopter. A black witch moth the size of a bat was thumping against my bathroom window. A window below was open but the moth had no plan B. I grabbed it and chucked it out the open window. It flew away.

Here in Mexico they call the black witch moth ‘Mariposa de la muerte’, meaning butterfly of death. If one enters a house where there is sickness, it is believed the sick person will die. 

Ever since we brought dad home from hospital our house has been infested with black witch moths. Every day I rescue one, help it circumvent a closed window or a screen door. But they just keep coming back. Even now, as I write this, there’s one on the wall above my desk. From the white V mark across its wings, I know that it’s a female. She hasn’t moved since morning.

Caring for dad at home has thrown up a plethora of new challenges. There’s no pattern to his needs, and he has no sense of time. Often he’ll come up with a whole new hair brained plan about what needs to be done, in the middle of the night. Still, he’s never short of praise, thinks mom and I are consummate caregivers that should be in business together. 

“Rectal cleaning service, mom and son business,” he quips, “$60 a crack. All repeat business - people need to shit every day. Discount for a month’s coverage. Market to Gringo retirees and seniors living in the South. No competition…Who the hell wants to clean assholes? No one!” 

He likes his wit like he likes his martinis, dry.

It’s hopeful and heartwarming to see him laugh heartily, but those moments are the exception not the rule. My time with him is mostly spent watching him sleep or just lie there, mouth agape, staring at the ceiling. Occasionally he looks up at me, but without his glasses I’m just a blur. 

What’s he thinking? Does he want to die? He hasn’t said as much lately. “I’m helpless,” he said last night, with a voice laden with confusion and remorse. “What can I do?”

“Not much.” I replied.

“Something has to happen…and I can’t do it from here.”

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t know…Do you?”

“No.”

“Can we let it happen tomorrow?” he asked.

“What?”

“Whatever…Will you come and look in on me from time to time?” 

“Of course.”

It took some effort and we shopped around a bit but we’ve finally got dad the home care he needs. Ernesto, a nurse who speaks fluent English, comes to bathe him on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Rossio, a physiotherapist, comes to help him with his muscle work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. She’s hopeful he will eventually stand on his own two feet.

As many people have been coming to fix the air conditioning. Like my father, it’s been working on and off lately. The situation is more bearable now that the temperature in Los Cabos has dropped a few degrees. But the workmen are unreliable, say they’re coming and never show up.

Gerry knows a guy who can fix air conditioners, and thinks we need a third opinion. “You don’t have to tear up the tiles to replace those air-con pipes,” he says, with an accent that sounds like both Cheech and Chong. “You can just put a little box against the skirting like this…” He bends down and runs his hand along the crease of the wall of my father’s room. “That way they don’t have to disturb Ian.” My mother frowns at this suggestion.

Considering our failing air, there sure is a lot of thin ice in this house. Caring for the old man is stressful. Sometimes we crack. Yet despite my mother’s anxieties regarding methodology, she is highly resourceful and practical. I admire her more than I let on; she thinks I talk down to her, regard her as intellectually inferior. But I don’t. She’s proved to me time and time again that she knows things beyond my scope, that subtle intuition trumps hubris, and that she has extra sensory sleuthing powers (she missed her calling as a private detective).

She keeps both husband and home functioning, has done for six decades. Her ultimate home, here in Los Cabos, was woven from the fabric of the more than two dozen rental homes all over the world that she made cozy for us to live in. Every new city to which we got posted involved my father flying out ahead of time and finding adequate digs. A month later the rest of us would follow. My mother would then correct his poor choices and find us somewhere magical to live. 

For me, home was never truly home until the shipment arrived. Therein lay my richest treasures, trapped for months on the high seas, possessions that grew more mysterious with the passage of time: Frogman Action Man and his blow-up Zodiac boat, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath LPs, and my six-inch reflector telescope. 

Toys and records aside, the family keepsakes too were a comforting continuum from one place to the next, the string that held together the bead of one posting to the bead of another. Now when I visit the house in Baja I see some of those totems on the walls and shelves, juju that triggers time machines, opens portals that I easily fall into.

Cortez is an angry sea. At night its waves strike the beach with an asymmetrical beat. For days now it’s been pounding the Baja coastline with massive swells, the consequence of a hurricane passing north west of the peninsula. Today, however, it’s calm.

Sitting on the beach, gazing at the salubriously tranquil water, and rubbing my injured shoulder, I think, “I could do with the hydrotherapy.” I stand up and stride into the surfy soup. Froth lashes at my shins. The currents are stronger than I had anticipated, but I continue wading out regardless. Once I clear the small stuff, I begin swimming breaststroke. It’s so refreshing.

Suddenly a swell rises up before me, much larger than anything I’d seen from the beach. Looking over my shoulder, I can see that returning to shore is no longer an option, and ahead, I cannot swim fast enough. All at once the wave brakes, thunderously avalanching a ton of brilliant white froth towards me. I dive underwater and swim beneath the surf. It sounds like exploding ordinance, like the beach is being bombed.

After surfacing, I barely have time to catch my breath when another massive roller, larger than the last, begins to rise up before me. “This one’s a killer,” I whisper. Hyperventilating to give myself more time underwater, I wait until the very last moment. On the face of it, time appears to stand still. Three pelicans skim across the crest of the wave, hunting for fish trapped in its pellucid sea wall. I dive under, and just in the nick of time, taking the brunt of force on my legs.

Resurfacing, I now fear for my life. The period between waves is insufficient to recover. Another comes at me, and then another, every time a bigger one. And I dive under them all, swimming longer and farther each time. Finally I get beyond the swell, and there are no more waves on my horizon. But I am some three hundred yards from shore and drained of all my might.

Under an azure sky, treading water just enough to keep my chin above the sea’s deceptively calm undulations, I think of Neil Young’s ‘Cortez the Killer’. “He came dancing across the water / With his galleons and guns / Looking for the new world / In that palace in the sun.” The song is about Hernán Cortés, a conquistador who conquered the Aztecs and colonized Mexico for the Spanish, and the eponym of this sea on which I am floating. 

With a slow butterfly stroke, or moth stroke, I carefully swim back to shore, occasionally looking over my shoulder to see what might be coming up behind me. Sure enough a whole new set of waves is on my tail. Swimming side-stroke now, with an eye on the breakers, I take a chance on riding them. Every wave, as mighty as it seems, simply picks me up and gently plants me closer to the shore, before breaking just beyond me. I can’t believe my luck. In due course, and much to the surprise of the Mexicans who have been watching me all along, I step out of the surf and calmly walk back up onto the beach.

Dad is sitting on the porch in his rocking chair, comfortably surveying the view. Rossio, his physio, got him to stand momentarily while she shifted him from his wheelchair to the rocking chair. Progress! Soon he’ll be back on the dry martinis as well.

Looking around I notice something is missing. The black witch moths have all gone. 

The Old Man Staring At The Sea

“Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. 
Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.” 
- Golda Meir

My dad’s eyes twinkle, a glimmer of triumph spreads across his grey bristly face. He has just had a sip of Scotch whiskey, his first in six weeks. My mother and I smuggled it into his ward at the Clinica San Jose. Seems to have done the trick. 

For a while there he thought he was in Singapore, in our old apartment on Mount Elizabeth Drive, and that our Scottish neighbors the Reeves were having a party upstairs. 

“It’s a storm, dad,” I tell him.

“Did you say storm?” he asks. I nod. “Oh Christ!” he moans.

“Lets spare him the details,” my mother says quietly. Hurricane Newton, with wind speeds of up to 95 miles an hour, is due to make landfall in Los Cabos during the early hours of the morning. “You’ll be safe here,” she says, propping up dad with extra pillows.

She has spent countless hours since he was hospitalized propping up his pillows, and at times thinking about putting one over his face. Now she would rather he was at home, with all the challenges that entails, than confused and alone in this hospital room, staring at the walls. “At home he can stare at the sea.” 

Yesterday I bathed him. Getting an uncooperative octogenarian into the shower, even with a rolling commode chair and my gorilla tracking skills, was no easy task. The ordeal seriously tested my commitment to be his caregiver. 

Earlier this evening his doctor dropped by, having been away for a week in Mexico City. “He is strong,” he said, “my best patient.” He agrees that the old man should return home soon. “But not until the day after tomorrow, because things will surely be chaotic after this hurricane.” 

Six weeks ago when I got the call I was thousands of miles away on the Kenya coast. My mother phoned to tell me my father had suffered a stroke and a bout of infections, and was critically ill in hospital. His doctor didn’t think he’d make it through that night.

Unable to change my air ticket, dazed and confused by the distance, and not knowing his condition from one day to the next, I was sure I’d never see my dad again. How does one prepare for the death of a loved one?

I took comfort in knowing that earlier this year he and my mother had visited me in Kenya, a journey halfway round the world that others thought they were mad to make. Returning to where they first expatriated 50 years ago, the fountainhead of all our peripatetic lives, completed a circle for me, if not for my parents. They stayed for 6 weeks.

When I finally reached his bedside, I was surprised by how healthy he looked. His breathing was labored and he was suffering from a bundle of aches and pains, but as far as I could see there was not much else wrong with him. 

These days he’s more compos mantis, if not always sure of his whereabouts. And because he is one of only two patients, both of whom are men, in a maternity hospital run by nurses and nuns, he is going a bit stir crazy. 

A nurse steps into the room, says in Spanish that the rain has started to fall quite heavily and whomever is going home should probably do so now. My mother promptly leaves.

Now it’s just me and my dad in the hospital ward, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, a few of his favorites. “It’s not unpleasant,” he says, drifting off to sleep. 

My father, my captain, architect of my life, how could I not care for you in your dotage? I am a creature of your design, the product of a lifetime spent moving from one Third World posting to another. For better or worse, you made me the Third Culture vulture I am today. I owe you.

Things are starting to go bump in the night. While my father sleeps soundly, I worry about my mother all alone in her home. 

Home is a boutique, beach-front villa on an estate called Sampaguita, one of fourteen semi-detached, two-storey units shaped into a horseshoe around a palm-shaded desert scape with a pool and jacuzzi. For all it claims to be a “secure gated community”, my parents’ home abuts a beach-front wall that’s barely a meter high. 

Despite the fearsome clangor outside, the Sea of Cortez rising up to reclaim its shoreline, I lay down on the cot next to my father’s hospital bed and fall into a deep sleep.

It’s 8:30 am and he’s still sleeping. I step outside to observe mother nature in action.

Since daybreak the wind has died down a bit, though gale-force gusts still batter the barrios. Tin roofs and door frames rattle, and palm trees oscillate like VU metres in a Thrash metal studio. Still, from where I am standing, on the front steps of the clinic, the damage does not look too bad. But where is mom? The networks are down.

Back in the ward, my dad is awake. “I need to get out of the market,” he says. “I made a big mistake, fell asleep after it dropped. I may have lost over $10,000, which was a lot money back then, though not for the big players.” He’s lost in time and space.

My dad has dementia, a persistent disorder of the mental processes marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning. Gorillas, those hairy mountain cousins I've dedicated a lifelong career to saving, don’t suffer from dementia, even though they share 97 percent of our genetic makeup. Research into the great ape genome has revealed that the gene which causes dementia is common in gorillas but does not cause them ill-health. When they discover why, it will probably be too late for my dad.

“Is the hurricane still blowing?” he asks. Alas, he’s back in the moment.

“Gusty but not so bad,” I reply. “Doesn’t seem to have done much damage.”

“Christ, I hope not,” he sighs. Two years ago Hurricane Odile devastated the Baja peninsula. In the aftermath there was no water, no electricity, and many hundreds of Gringos had to be evacuated, he and my mother included.

My mother steps into the room. “Damn, am I glad to see you,” I sigh. “How’s the house?”

“Flooded,” she smiles. “I’ve spent the last hour mopping up. Still, it could have been worse. At least the electricity’s back on. How’s he been?”

“Slept soundly through most of the night.”

Leaving my dad in his hospital bed, we drive home. Although nothing major has been toppled by the hurricane, the town looks like it’s been dunked in the sea a few times. The streets are littered with palm fronds, highway signs, cacti, and a few fallen palm trees, and none of the stop lights work. Meantime the downpour continues unabated.

Closer to the beach the streets are cluttered with a lot more detritus, and everything is coated in drifts of wet sand and mud. At the entrance to Sampaguita, my mother taps in the entry code. The gates open jerkingly, grinding against a sand encrusted mechanism.

Outside the house is coated with sand and inside flooded with seawater. After a slap-up breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, and toast, we begin a marathon mop up. Then the electricity cuts out. Now we’re trapped on an estate where the electrically-powered security gates no longer function. The only solution is beer. I drink half a dozen before tackling the sand caked patio, shoveling it up bit by bit with a dust pan. Late in the afternoon the power kicks back in. 

Remarkably by nightfall, while storm swells continue to pound the beach, the sky is almost clear. My mother and I sit on the patio, drink Don Pedro brandy, and watch Mars and a half Moon descend beneath the arches. The coastline is unevenly lighted. Many homes have yet to see their power return. We are the lucky ones.

She tells me how after Hurricane Odile she got the barbecue going and cooked up all the fish, beef, pork, and chicken she had in her freezer. “There was no electricity, so it was all going to go to waste anyway. I cooked and Gerry distributed the food to the local community. It went down well.” (Gerry’s good people, brought me some weed today without me even asking.)

My mother is sitting at the dining room table, sifting through bits of paper. “I wish your father had half a brain,” she says, grimacing at the pile of paperwork, “so he could help me understand what some of these things are for.” Overwhelmed by the full magnitude of managing both of their affairs, she is prone to panic at times. 

My sister and her husband are helping her sort it all out. After my father fell ill, they made staggered visits to Cabo to offer their support. My brother came too, despite a flight cancellation that reduced his visit to less than two days. They’ve all since returned to Canada. I arrived late but I’m here for six weeks, until my mother’s 81st birthday.

She’s quite dynamic for her age. I cannot believe how much energy she has. Half the time she can’t find what she’s looking for because she put it somewhere unknown to her now. Consequently, she’s kept busy by an endless treasure hunt of her own making. She is also a control freak. It’s not enough to try and help her, if you don’t do it her way you’re not helping at all. 

And yet, we've always been close. I was her willing accomplice when she searched for Yoruba wood carvers in the backstreets of Ibadan, or master painters in Colombo. And she was my mine when, with just three months left in my senior year, I got expelled from boarding school in Fort Dauphin, Madagascar, for smoking marijuana. She subsequently convinced the faculty to allow me to graduate, which they agreed to only if I lived off campus with her.

Dad is home from hospital. We parked his wheelchair out on the patio then let him stare at the Sea of Cortez. Maybe now that he's back home, in the comfortable surroundings that he worked so hard to acquire, he'll find pause to die peacefully. His quality of life only gets progressively worse. I think it would be a blessing if he passed sooner rather than later. I am not comfortable about praying for my old man’s death, but there you have it… 

It’s four days later, and he’s staring at the same scene. “Take me back to bed,” he moans.

“Already?” I ask. The strain of lifting him in and out of his wheelchair is starting to take its toll. “But you’ve barely been up ten minutes.”

“I want to go back to bed.”

“I only got you out here because you asked me what the hell you were doing in bed at ten to twelve. Now you want to go back in again..? Okay, no problema.”

I’d be lying if I said me and my old man don’t still got beef. Nothing I did ever warranted his admiration. He couldn't find it in himself to forgive me for getting expelled from boarding school, spiriting his wife away to some godforsaken island for 3 months, all because of pot. Consequently, we were at loggerheads when I needed him most. Pooh-poohing my ambition to be a writer (not cool), he railroaded me into engineering instead. In due course, I dropped out of three universities.

“Three strokes and you’re out,” he says, lying in bed in the adumbrated light of his bedroom. “I’ve already had two, so one more and I’m gone.” He’s surprisingly lucid, waxing lyrical on the subject of his impending death. It’s official, at 5pm today he says he’s going to pass. “An hour earlier and you get minus points. An hour later and you get plus points.” 

He wants to know that the booze he bought - a bottle of Black Label, bottle of gin, bottle of vodka, and the brand of beer that Peter Hatton likes (Modelo) - is in the fridge. He expects a bibulous wake. He never bought nothing.

“Are we in Singapore, Thailand, or where?” he asks.

“Mexico,” I say.

“Mexico? How…” He stares into the nothingness for a moment, searching for the portal which opens the corresponding memory. “Los Cabos?”

“That’s right.” I turn up the music on my Beats Pill, a silky smooth crooning diva of the Golden Age who's seducing the spirits. “Who’s this we’re listening to, dad?”

He concentrates on the music, closes his eyes for a bit. “Sarah Vaughan,” he says. I nod satisfactorily, then wonder.

Last night he almost turned down a glass of Black Label. The effort needed for twisting his wrist and tilting back his head was just too great. He shook his head in despair. We wondered if this was it… But in the end he used a straw to finish his whiskey. 

Keep on keeping on, mzee.

Loving The Repat

“Now I'm going back to Canada / On a journey through the past / And I won't be back till February comes / I will stay with you if you'll stay with me.” - Neil Young, Journey Through The Past

“Just chill, uncle,” says Liam. “You’ve done so much with your life already.” 

It is after midnight and, too drunk to drive, we are slumped in the back seat of a Tesla electric car hired from Uber, an online taxi service. The ride across town is smooth and hushed, and the abundant window space provides us with dramatic views of the streets. 

“I know I haven’t been much of an inspiration lately,” I say, slurring my words, “moping around the house in my pajamas, smoking blunts, listening to tunes with the volume cranked up…”

He puts a hand on my shoulder then smiles. “You’re always an inspiration to me, uncle.” 

I am blessed. After decades of wandering aimlessly in a cloud, I have returned home to a mother lode of kindred hospitality. My sister Andrea and her husband Dara have given me work, and their son Liam has put a roof over my head. How can I ever repay them?

The Tesla drops us off at a club in The Glebe. Inside, Liam bumps into an attractive young woman who, it turns out, once had a crush on him in high school. “I’m on a Tinder date with another guy,” she says, “but I’ll come over and dance with you later.” That never happens. The next morning he fervently scans Facebook, looking through friends of his school friends, in a vane effort to try and spot among the multitude of profiles the pretty face he saw in The Glebe last night. 

Charge your glasses, I am now the proud owner of a Purple Card, consequently a fully fledged repat. All that remains is for me to fill out a stack of forms and wait in line at a bunch of government offices…The immigration lawyer did warn me that life would have to get a lot more boring before it got exciting again. Jet-setting is anathema to customs officers. Put simply, I need to repatriate gracefully. 

I never intended to repatriate. I know from experience the locals think “repats" are off-topic. That thousand yard stare is fixed on shit way beyond their comfort zones, and they do not want to hear about it. “The fuck cares that you’ve been anywhere?”

A repat is the opposite of a refugee. Canadians love refugees. Our new prime minister promised to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year. After the recent attacks in Paris, however, that number got reduced to 10,000, of which most will be privately sponsored. Still, following a more rigorous screening, the remaining 15,000 are due by the end of March.

The talk in my sister’s house is about taking in even more. Neither she nor Dara, her husband, believe refugees pose a serious threat as potential agents of jihad, nor do they care that when the time comes many will not want to repatriate. Just throw open the damn doors, they say.

As a self-made man of Irish origins, Dara fully appreciates what the chance of a new life in a new world can mean to someone. Last week on Facebook he posted this: 

“Mums, dads, kids, friends, brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles - all welcome to come to my Canada from any refugee place on earth. If you are suffering or fleeing the horrors of wars or such you are very very welcome here at my dinner table.”

Christmas decorations are going up early in our house, a reflection of the residents’ good cheer. Eric is stringing lights up on the front porch. Erin, his girlfriend, is standing by the door watching. Liam’s tenants, a handsome couple in their late twenties, have been remarkably obliging about uncle gorilla man living in their basement, rent-free.

“Do you hate Christmas?” Erin asks me, scrunching up her elfin features. It seems an odd question to ask. Perhaps she wrongly detects I am having some yuletide doubts. “Not at all,” I say, “I fucking love Christmas. The tinsel may go up late in Africa but it stays up until March.”

The house on Bell Street seems an unusually large residence for unmarried hipsters. But my housemates are exemplary of Canada’s bright future. Ambitious, driven, with decent jobs and cars, they work hard, go to bed early during the week, and play hard on the weekend. 

Pastimes revolve around the large TV screen in the living room: watching series and movies on Netflix, YouTube fail videos of people harming themselves, and Super Mario Racing, a game Liam and Eric seem to have mastered.

I see in them an alternative life-path for myself, how I might have turned out had I stayed put. And they have helped me dispel a few misconceptions about my fellow countrymen. Turns out they are not all outdoorsy, passive aggressive, browbeating social engineers. Some could actually care less if their neighbor has the music up too loud, lets the dog off its leash, or drives around without wearing a seatbelt. Live and let live, they say.

Lately I have been listening to a lot of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, eating poutine, and drinking craft beer, but I have yet to find my inner Canuck. I am certainly not built for this weather.

We live close to the action. Little Italy, a hub of trendy restaurants and bars, is just a short walk away, or the time it takes to listen to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven. At the end of the day, if it is not too cold out, I like to wander over for a relaxing beverage. 

Wrapped up against the elements, I skulk past my neighbors’ doorsteps. Even in icy conditions they gather outside on their porches to smoke. Brrr! A wolf, or a coyote, or even a ‘coywolf' would be less out of place. I am a leopard, uneasy in a tropical town, maybe, but completely at ease in jungles and savannas. Here in the Great White North, however, I stand out a mile.

It is too early for regulars at the Moon Room. The music is up loud but the bar stools remain empty. Like a mine shaft, the only source of light is a dozen mason jars laid out around the bar with candles inside. Stare at one long enough and the rest of the place fades to black. 

Moon Room has hit on a winning formula: bijou, intimate, and quirky, with high standards and a visible pride among its staff. The bar is known for its all-female cocktail bartenders who also prepare the food, an eclectic menu of expensive but funky bar snacks. Watching young women prepare ‘Sexy Grilled Cheese’ in front of me as I drink my St Amboise beer is more than a thrill.

As a third culture vulture I came home to scavenge my heritage, and can serve no other purpose except to add a bit of contrast to the local color. Maybe my purpose is to be a guiding light.

Liam is a man with many solutions and few problems. Charming, smart, and with an upbeat disposition, he has what it takes to get by in life. At work he is a star, racking up mountains of cash for his employers. They call him the wizard. “Give it to the wizard, he’ll know what to do.”

He insists that the abundant hospitality he has shown me since my homecoming in September is simply good karma for when I welcomed him into my home in London ten years ago. 

I have mellowed in the intervening years. Dug in deep in Uganda, hammering out the dents in my soul, I found a more sympathetic voice for inward dialogue, and stopped beating myself up about my mistakes. The conversation continues.

He and I share an impulsive gene. We can change directions on a dime. So far his horizons have been limited. I aim to change that. As a global nomad my legacy is simple yet intangible: an atlas of unrelated events, places, and people. For all I have tried to write about this journey, it has to be seen to be believed. I want my nephew to get a taste of that world.

Malindi on the Kenyan coast, where the wind cries, “Salaama”, is a good place to start. Aesthetically pleasing in the Moorish tradition, uncluttered and ancient - Vasco de Gama stayed for a fortnight in 1498 - the town is one of East Africa’s best kept secrets. A dose of whispering palms, coral cliffs, and dhows catching the trade winds on the up tide should cure all that ails him. I spent six weeks there last summer, in an ocean-front villa belonging to a good friend of mine, and did not want to ever leave.

The wind and the surf are quarreling. A coconut falls, tries to settle the argument. Then, one by one, from a large overhanging tree thick with wandering branches, a troop of Sykes monkeys descends onto the roof and begins foraging for windfall on the terra-cotta shingles. 

The sound awakens you. With one eye half-opened you see the tropical sunrise. You are lying in a four poster bed in the centre of a second storey bedroom sparsely decorated with antique wooden furniture, and surrounded by levered glass doors. They’re all open, allowing the fragrance of seaweed, salt water, and frangipani to waft in to your room.

Without leaving your bed, you part the mosquito netting to gaze upon a broad swathe of ocean, sapphire in the distance and mottled emerald and turquoise over the reef. A string of white-capped breakers stretches from horizon to horizon. Six dhows are sailing past, their progress marked by a grove of crooked palms on your property. You can see they’re moving fast, helped on by a brisk morning northerly. At this point you may struggle to recall how you came to be sleeping in a paradisiacal villa on the Swahili coast. Maybe this is a dream…

Man Without Country

“Hey uncle,” says Liam. “Hey nephew,” I reply. We press knuckles. Reunited after many years apart, uncle and nephew are seated by a roaring campfire next to a pond in a forest. It is not quite the wilderness, only an hour and a half drive north of Ottawa, but refreshing and inspiring. 

We are not alone. Thirty to forty others have gathered for Mocktoberfest, a weekend festival of live music and unlimited beer drinking. It is the dream-child of MaYo and his band of merry carpenters. They have erected a hamlet in the forest, a hodgepodge of tree houses and living pods strung together by ladders and wooden walkways. Basically, it is camp for grown ups.

For me, recently arrived from Kenya, it is a rare opportunity to observe the locals up close, jot down a few notes. “They drink like Africans,” I write. 

Liam sees me scribbling in my notebook, then says, with a goofy voice, “Dear World, this is my story. I hope you like it…” He never fails to make me laugh and is not afraid to take the piss out of me. We are wired the same way.

Spending time with kith and kin is good for the psyche and helps me adjust. My sister Andrea and her family have opened their hearts and homes to me. Nephew Liam has given me a place to live. Brother-in-law Dara, always an enabler, is helping me trawl through the paperwork. And Andrea’s cooking and knitting keeps me fat and warm. Bless them.

“Why is it,” I ask Liam, “that in every other country I’m like a chameleon, blending in nicely with the locals, but back here, no matter how hard I try, I stand out?” 

“They know, man,” says Liam, “they can smell an outsider.”

“Right,” I say, taking a sip of reposado tequila. “Watch how quickly the crowd becomes a mob when the outsider refuses to conform.”

“What the fuck you talking about, uncle. These people think you’re way cool.”

“I don’t mean these people. These are good people, my kind of people. Any one who enjoys psychoactive drugs is alright by me. I’m talking about regular Canadian folk.”


O Canada, my home and native land… Viewed from afar in the 1970s, your freedoms, tolerance, and uniquely progressive leader, Pierre Trudeau, looked mighty appealing to me. Growing up overseas, all I ever dreamed about was my next homecoming. 

I was born in Montreal, started out life in a two storey cedar-paneled riverside home on Green Island that once featured in Better Homes and Gardens, the kind of suburban utopia that people in far off dusty lands dream about. Then in 1967 my family expatriated to Kenya. 

While we were away, the radically francophone Parti Québécois rose to power in Quebec. After Bill 101 got introduced, defining French as the only official language, Mom and Dad decided to sell the house on ‘Île Verte' and transfer our home base to Ottawa, in anglophone Ontario. 

My first summer here was in 1978. I was planning to repatriate then, attend Woodroffe High School, and live in my parents’ new high-rise condominium. But as the summer wore on and I began to discover Ottawa on my bike, my outlook changed. I decided to return to the Tropics. 

Over the next two years I would be arrested in The Seychelles, get expelled from boarding school in Madagascar, go on safari in Tanzania, learn to dive with Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, celebrate my eighteenth birthday in Malaysia, have my appendix removed in Singapore, and barge up the River Thames to Oxford with the lovely Caroline Bull, object of my unrequited love.

When I did finally repatriate in 1980, Trudeau was still prime minister, re-elected after a brief hiatus, but I failed to fit in. To regular folk I was little more than an exotic freak. Strange talk of peculiar customs in distant lands caused them to roll their eyes and sneer.

Thanks to binge drinking and substance abuse, I did eventually find some common ground. And I could dance. But all I ever dreamed about was getting the fuck out. After Trudeau left office and I dropped out of university for a third time, I got my chance. But that’s another story.

Leaping ahead 30 years, due to circumstances beyond my control, I am again repatriating. Not much has changed. As before, a Trudeau is in charge; Justin, son of the late Pierre, was elected prime minister shortly after I returned. And I am still an exotic freak.

“When was the last time you filed a tax return?” asks Dara. He is treating me to lunch in Rockin’ Johnny’s Diner in Westgate Mall.

“One thing at a time, man,” I laugh. “First I need to find a job.” 

“You’re a man of many talents,” he says, with a hint of old country in his accent. “I’m sure you’ll find something.”

“I’m not holding out too much hope,” I sigh. “As a fundraiser I raised over $10 million for good causes. That’s a wealth of experience you’d think was worth tapping, And yet I haven’t had a single goddamn reply to the dozens of applications I sent out for fundraising positions.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Probably because I don’t have a bachelors degree,” I say, tucking into my bacon Swiss burger. “Apparently, decades at the industry’s cutting edge doesn’t make up for dropping out of college.” 

“Don’t give up on that front,” smiles Dara. He is nothing if not quietly tenacious.

Another option is to look for bar work. I have got mad mixology skills, cut my teeth as a bartender in London’s wild West End. Not so straightforward. They told me I would first have to earn a Smart Serve qualification; Ontario’s weird liquor laws require special knowledge. That I did, leaned a few things along the way. But no one wants to hire a smooth-talking bar steward in his mid fifties who lacks the proper paperwork.

So I applied for an Ontario Photo Card, also known as a purple card. Having never learned to drive (yes, that’s right) I do not have a driver’s license, ergo no second form of photo ID. The purple card will allow me to get the citizenship certificate that I need to get the social insurance number that I need to be allowed to work here. After that it is all uphill.

Part of me just wants to get the fuck out of Dodge and go back to doing what I know best. Plan B is a business proposal for a backpacker’s hostel in Malindi, Kenya. I’ve been trying to draw others into the scheme. Who wouldn’t want to live on a paradisiacal ocean-front villa, eat paw paw and mango for breakfast, wet their toes in the Indian Ocean? Slaves to the treadmill, that’s who. Africa’s not for sissies. Anyway, Plan B would just put me right back where I started. 


Along the vacant tree-lined shore of Dow’s Lake, dead leaves cover the ground, stark boughs and branches claw at an overcast sky, and a chill wind encircles me: the ghosts of my ancestors. They are questioning the choices I made that led to this awkward situation: man without country. Never before have the consequences been so apparent to me.

Still, it has been a fun ride, seeking out adventure, living life imaginatively, and moving continents every six years or so. There is a movie of it in my head that I play over and over. None of it makes any sense but at least there aren’t too many scenes where I am unhappy. I have few regrets. One planet, one life - no rehearsal.

Repatriating, regularizing my citizenship status, trying to find work in Canada as an unskilled, middle-aged, third culture dropout: these are all big challenges. Over the next few months I will be blogging about my experiences of trying to fit in. I hope my insights help other people like me.

Who am I kidding, there are no other people like me.

Resurfacing

It’s a scorching, dry Saturday morning in California. Another rainless summer has turned the hills above San Leandro yellowish-gray. My taxi turns off a serpentine drive into an empty parking lot.

Embedded in the hillside, the Alameda Juvenile Justice Center is a vast, rectangular three-story construction, built with beige cinder blocks that blend in well with its surroundings. There’s no one in sight.

After instructing my taxi driver to return in 90 minutes, I activate the intercom next to the weekend entrance. “Who is it?” asks a female voice.

“Greg Cummings. I’m the author giving a talk to Unit 4 today.”

“Who?”

“Greg Cummings. Amy Cheney arranged my visit…”

“Hang on a minute hun.”

While I wait for clearance into the prison, Mountain Mike’s escape story comes to mind.

When Mountain Mike escaped a minimum-security federal correctional facility called William Head on Vancouver Island, he fashioned a raft from a coffin used in the prison’s amateur theatre production of Dracula, then paddled out across the Juan de Fuca Straits towards the Canadian mainland.

The coffin disintegrated and Mike sank to the bottom of the cold straights. “I was sure I was a goner,” he recalled, “but a divine light beaconed me upward again. And then I found the strength to resurface and swim ashore.” He had a couple of weeks of freedom before the Mounties caught up with him.

I heard about Mountain Mike from one of his fellow inmates. It was October 1983, and I had just watched a performance of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by William Head on Stage (WHoS), an inmate-run prison theatre company – the only one in Canada that invites the public into the prison to see their shows. I was struck by the force of the cast’s performances, playing to a packed house, unbound by their incarceration. I had never seen such savage intensity in the eyes of actors.

____________

Amy Cheney and I connected by chance, in July 2013, while I was googling mentions of my novel. In a piece titled ‘On the Shelf with Amy Cheney’ that was posted on the Children’s Book Review blog, Cheney is asked which books are most frequently checked out of her library. “Right now it’s War Brothers by Sharon McKay—anything about child soldiers my kids can relate to. Gorillaland by Greg Cummings is also doing well. Everyone has read Coe Booth, Simone Elkeles, Alexander Gordon Smith and Ishmael Beah. Action, relevance and overall great stuff.”

Her love of literature, and a tearaway nature led her to a career in the California correctional system, turning young minds on to books. “One of my students who never read before said when she heard me talk about books it sounded like candy, and she wanted some.”

Yesterday, pushing a cartload of my novels through the corridors of the Juvenile Hall, zig-zagging between cell units and the library, she seemed protected by a forcefield of persuasive intent, like a Jedi knight.

I was supposed to arrive in time to give three talks on Friday, but a mega-storm over Texas delayed my appearance by twelve hours, so I was only able to give one. Hence a second visit has been arranged. It being a Saturday, I’m now flying solo.



Every door has a buzzer and an overhead camera. I press the button. After a moment the door unlocks and I’m able to turn the handle. I pass through several empty rooms and corridors, repeating the process again and again. The final door slides open on its own. A guard in a darkened control room peers through the reinforced glass at the contents of my rucksack, takes my Canadian passport via a drawer in the wall, and then asks me to sign the register. I’m in.

Notwithstanding the two nights I spent locked up in British holding cells – for separate offenses – and the previous afternoon, this is my first time entering a correctional facility since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In the belly of the facility six windowless units house dozens of young offenders whose ages range from nine to seventeen. Most are serving long sentences. They’re all locked up when I enter Unit 4, a sky-lit two-story common room surrounded on two levels by cells. I introduce myself to a woman in uniform seated behind a raised console. She smiles, shakes my hand. She is expecting me and directs me to an adjacent classroom.

With a mix of anxiety and enthusiasm, I scan the colorful displays pinned to the classroom walls. The vibe is encouraging without being too condescending. Then, one by one, a coterie of teenage boys saunters in, comprising a range of heights, builds, ethnicities, and attitudes. Each one introduces himself, shakes my hand, then finds a seat. It’s like an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter.

“I’m here to talk about gorillas,” I holler, hoping the resonance of my voice will calm the room. “The band or the ape?” asks a round-faced Latino kid. He is a picture of candidness. On the faces of the others I see genuine interest, though many appear ambivalent, and a couple have only come to socialize. “The ape,” I smile.

During a gorilla slide show, I tell them how a silverback gets his name, the politics of gorilla groups, and their similarity to humans – that we share 97 per cent of our genetic makeup with gorillas. A wiry black kid at the back of the classroom raises his hand. “Is it true that you can get a blood transfusion from a gorilla and survive?”

“Good question,” I reply, surprised by his grasp of the subject. “Yes, you could potentially survive one transfusion from a great ape, providing the blood type matched.”

I do my impression of a charging silverback. Starting from a squat position, I utter a series of hoot sounds, rapidly slapping my chest in quick succession, and with a loud bark I leap forward, to uproarious laughter from the kids. “And what do you do if a silverback charges?” I ask, catching my breath.

“Bounce! Bail ass out of there…”

“No. If you run you are sure to die. You must stand perfectly still and act submissively, avoiding all eye contact with the charging silverback.” Incredulous laughter.

I read a chapter of Gorillaland, the story of Dieudonné, a child soldier who, after years in the service of the rebel warlord General Cosmo Zomba wa Zomba, is forced to witness the execution of his parents. In the aftermath of an earthquake he takes flight with the general’s diamonds, his heart set on freedom, and runs all the way to Uganda, only to have it all tragically end in the jaws of two hungry lions. 

“Aw what? No way! The kid gets eaten by lions? What happened to the diamonds?” 

But my hour is up. As they leave the classroom some of the kids give me a ‘bro hug’ and thank me warmly. I am touched.

Life is about choices and prospects. Young people make mistakes and face tough challenges as they try to revive their prospects in life. It’s the same for every one, whether or not you are imprisoned for your mistakes.

The difference with inmates is that they are given few choices after incarceration. Punishment is king. This absence of volition is an obstacle to inspiring them. On the other hand, they are a captive audience. Turn these young minds on and I know they will read my novels, and maybe one day write their own.

____________

Come Spring 1984, five months after I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I was working for Stage II, a theatre group established for, and by, ex-offenders, after their release from William Head. We were staging One For The Road, Harold Pinter’s bleak one-act play set in a prison in a fictitious totalitarian country, which had premiered in London and New York in the two months previous. Ours was the world’s first amateur production, and the company was excited about blazing such a trail in stagecraft.

Stage II faced unique challenges, like keeping the actors in one place. A month before opening night one of our principles went AWOL, hitting the road for greater freedom, and in total violation of his parole. No one in the company harbored any ill will towards the guy. He did what he had to do. We found someone to replace him and hoped the new guy would last. He stole the show.

Working in the theatre with ex-offenders I watched men struggle to temper their emotional intensity through artistic expression. Often the roles were reversed: the tenderhearted newspaper salesman on stage was once an armed robber. Having the freedom to express oneself is not the same as freedom itself.

In the eyes of the young men that came to hear me talk at the Alameda Juvenile Justice Center I saw souls that were drowning. I think I understand. I hope my talk and reading, a career milestone, provided some resuscitation, however briefly.

-----------------

Also posted on Reaching Reluctant Readers

Gorillaland - Chapter Three

When the earthquake struck, Dieudonné Batinde was already half way up the road to Goma. The first chance he got, he ran, and he had not stopped running since. Even when the road shook violently beneath him, and the lake overflowed, he did not stop running. He had Godspeed. He knew it was God’s will that he make it to freedom that day. He would keep on running until his feet, bound and bloodied, had carried him there. 

He hated the general with all his heart and soul. Five years he had been in his army. Those five years were the worst that any a boy could ever endure. He was made to do things no dog of war would ever do. How many people had he been forced to kill? How many had he killed willingly? How many had he raped, mutilated, tortured? He knew exactly how many as well as the exact nature of every one of his crimes. They remained clear in his mind, just as vivid as the moment they happened. No amount of ganja, pussy or Kahuzi whisky could ever erase those memories. 

They called them the Lost Boys, because that’s what they were, lost: lost from their childhoods, their siblings, their parents, schools, societies, lost in the jungle. Dieudonné had been lost for some time. He found his way again, through the Lord. He learned to take comfort in his nightmares. In a strange kind of way, they reaffirmed his faith in God. For he knew there was no way a just God would fix in his mind such horrifying memories, if he had not already forgiven him and, indeed, had a much better life planned for him elsewhere. 

Dieudonné had no idea how much the diamonds were worth but he knew they’d fetch a good price in a neighbouring country. He considered taking them to Rwanda, which was just across the lake. Both his mother and father were Rwandese. God rest their tortured souls. Taking into account his war crimes and the many battles he’d fought against their army, he did not believe he would get a fair hearing in that country. 

As the bird flies, Uganda was about two hundred and thirty kilometres north of his present location. He’d heard that they knew how to mend child soldiers up there. He would have to keep running at twenty kilometres an hour to reach the border before dawn. There was no doubt in his mind that he could make it. 

His prayers had been answered that very morning when he was chosen from all the other boys to accompany General Zomba on a trip to Bukavu. He should have killed him while he walked along the mountain road with him and a satchel full of deadly weapons. Foolishly, the general had made no effort to hide the fact that he was carrying his precious diamonds. Dieudonné knew how important those stones were to him, and how it would destroy all his plans if he were to lose them. He knew he must steal them. 

Miraculously, the opportunity presented itself just outside Bukavu when UN soldiers stopped them. It was while the general was busy looking in Dieudonné’s satchel for his weapons that he daringly reached back and, with the agility of a seasoned pickpocket, carefully removed the diamonds. He expected to be caught that very moment, but the general was too concerned about being unmasked by the United Nations to notice. An hour later, after the general had sped away on his speedboat, Dieudonné wrapped the diamonds in the cellophane he’d saved from his cake, and swallowed them. Then he began to run. He was a good runner, as fast as an impala. God had given him the gift of savage speed.

With the wind behind him, he kept up his pace. He stuck to the road that followed the western lakeshore north. The lake of fire. One day God would throw the general and Duke into that lake, and they would burn for all eternity.

He reached Goma just before midnight. He knew the general probably had a search party already out looking for him, so he skulked through the centre of town, trying not to attract the attention of the Goma police. At least they were easy to spot in their bright yellow helmets, even at night on dimly lit streets. 

Once on the outskirts of town he started sprinting again. The road north from Goma would take him the final hundred and thirty kilometres to Uganda – west of the Virunga volcanoes, through Rutshuru, and Rwindi, and finally to the border. It was also the most dangerous road in Africa, and he knew it. Many had lost their lives on that road. He risked being shot by snipers, ambushed by thieves, knocked down by sleeping truck drivers, or even mauled by a wild animal. In any event, nothing could stop his headlong dash. 

He had not eaten anything since the half-cake the general had bought him in Bukavu, but he was nonetheless full of energy. Mount Nyrangongo’s red glow guided his way up the road, even through the gathering clouds. Respect to the mountain god, stirring your pot of molten rocks. The road had recently been graded, which made it easier to run on. It began to rain, then it began to rain harder, then harder still, but he was undeterred. It is God’s will that I make it to freedom this day. With every stride he grew increasingly filled with divine purpose, as though he was splashing through puddles of it in his Sunday best. The more the heavens opened up the more righteous he became. 

When he reached the deserted village of Kibumba, he found cause to reflect on his short, unhappy life. Though there was no longer any trace of it, Kibumba had once been a vast refugee camp. It was in that camp, back in 1996, when this country was still called Zaire, that his mother fell pregnant with him. His parents were Hutu refugees, who had fled from the invading Tutsi army in Rwanda. By the time she was due to give birth, the Tutsis had invaded again. Kibumba, along with all the other refugee camps, was raised to the ground. They were forced to move westward through the dense Congo jungle to Tingi-Tingi. It was in that unlucky place that Dieudonné was born.

Dieudonné had been running for twelve hours nonstop. He was beginning to see visions, but that was to be expected on such a rapturous marathon. He saw one that stirred him to his very soul. Floating blissfully heavenward like sleeping angels were all of his victims, all the people he had killed, all the innocents of Kivu, rising up from the jungle floor where they had been slain.

By now the clouds had scattered, and against the starry sky he could clearly make out the outline of the Virunga range of volcanoes. Mount Sabinyo, old man’s teeth, laughing like a mad witch doctor. The lair of the gorillas. He liked gorillas, more than chimpanzees. In all the monster fables he’d heard growing up, children captured by gorillas always fared better than those captured by chimpanzees. On occasion he’d even found cause to eat them, despite a tribal taboo, and gorilla definitely tasted better than chimpanzee. 

He was getting nearer to the Ugandan border now. How would the Ugandan authorities greet him? No doubt they would understand why he had to slip across their frontier unannounced. He was a refugee, a runaway child soldier. They would embrace him and then they would help mend him. A new abundant life was waiting for him just across that border. With the diamonds he would start a mission for former pikis like himself. Yes, that was his calling. He would use the general’s diamonds to do God’s work. 

It was in the final hour of darkness that Dieudonné at last reached Uganda. He recognised it by where the road descends into a flatter landscape, and the vegetation changes from forest to savannah, which also marked the start of lion country, though he worried no more about lions than he did about gorillas. He didn’t believe God would allow him to be eaten by lions after such a dash to freedom. By this time he was so filled with the Holy Spirit that he was utterly invincible. He continued to stride across the prickly savannah.

First light was appearing on the horizon. How appropriate that the sun should start to rise at that moment. Dieudonné’s visions were everywhere: burning bushes, talking serpents, laughing genies, dancing rods and staffs. But he was undaunted by Satan, and began to sing. 

The commotion did not go unnoticed by a pair of male lions who had been roaming the grassy plains for days, searching for food. The rains had driven all the antelope away and there was very little to sustain them in this valley. They were growing hungrier and hungrier with each passing hour. Soon it would be daybreak, when they would stand a better chance of at least catching a hare or a lizard. Now it would seem their search was over. They stood for a moment, panting through hungry jaws, twitching their keen circular ears for some clue in the darkness. Then they began to creep through the tall grass. Once they were close enough to see their prey they stopped. He did not look like much, but a lean meal was better than no meal, and he was coming towards them. They crouched down and waited.

Dieudonné stopped in his tracks. He thought he heard something. It was the first time during his entire day-long journey that he stopped. Who’s there? Is that you, Lord? He waited and then, as expected, out of the darkness, walking towards him, and wearing sackcloth and a seraphim smile, came the Lord Jesus Christ. His hair was golden and flowing, and he was surrounded by heavenly light. As the Lord opened his mouth to speak to him, he saw that the Lord had very sharp teeth. Why is that? The next thing he felt was a searing bolt of pain flash through his stomach. By the time Dieudonné realised what was happening to him it was too late: the two gigantic lions were tearing apart his abdomen, with stabbing, searing, excruciating blows. 

~~~~~~~~

Gorillaland by Greg Cummings, available on Amazon