Live Fast Die Hot (28 page)

At the gate we looked around for Denny, who seemed to have already boarded the plane. We boarded ourselves, and Chelsea reclined in her seat. She started playing with her sleeping mask while I looked for my row. When I got there, Denny was waiting.

“Oh my God! This is happening!” I said, looking for a jovial high five. Denny had his blanket pulled up to his neck and was seemingly unable to form words. “Denny?” I asked, waving my hand in front of his face.

“This was the worst idea I've ever had,” he said, closing his eyes and trying to breathe deeply.

“Denny! What the fuck?! You told me this was a great idea. The whole reason I decided to do this was you.” I started to freak out as the doors of the plane sealed shut. Denny shook his head back and forth, unable to articulate a response. Chelsea hung over her seat, aiming a rubber band at Denny's head and shooting. “Who am I supposed to talk to? This person?” She looked at the elderly woman sitting next to her, then back at us.

Our plane to Lima lifted off; there was no backing out. Just over eight hours later we were in Peru.

“Hope you don't mind if we mic you guys before you get off the plane,” Molly said, motioning for Chloe and Andre, the boom operator and sound engineer, to bring up some lavaliers. Denny turned to me, hungover but increasingly coherent.

“Sorry about whatever I said last night. I ate some crazy edibles on my way to the airport.” He rubbed his eyes and looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

“Denny! You scared the shit out of me. For a second you had me convinced we'd made a terrible mistake.”

“Oh, we have,” he said, serious. Chloe taped a mic to my skin and fed a wire down the back of my shirt.

“What? Why are you saying this?” I looked around, worried the crew was hearing all of what was transpiring.

“I shouldn't have left. My wife is about to have a baby. We have two other kids. It was a shitty, selfish thing to do.” Suddenly Denny, my quasi–role model, was sounding exactly like me two weeks ago.

“Remember, this is the opportunity of a lifetime?” I said optimistically. I needed to get Denny back on my bandwagon before I lost my balance and fell onto his. “Look, we are here. We have to make the best of this.”

The camera crew retrieved our luggage while Denny, Chelsea, and I were escorted through customs and put on another plane. After a short two-hour flight, we arrived in Iquitos, the city known as the gateway to the Amazon. We checked into a modest hotel with barred windows on the far side of town and tried to FaceTime our loved ones while we could, before disappearing into the jungle the next day.

Once the center of the great Amazon rubber boom, the former banana republic, battered and bruised from years of colonialism, was undergoing a face-lift with the growing popularity of drug tourism. The largest city in the world not accessible by road (the only way in or out is by plane or boat), Iquitos was an eclectic hodgepodge of cultures, isolated from the rest of the world. Crumbling colonial mansions shared the sunlight with pastel concrete warehouses and floating barges with palm-thatched roofs. Latin-influenced foods and flavors commingled with the wild, unfamiliar tang of the jungle.

The next morning, Chelsea walked downstairs wearing the same silk shift dress she'd been wearing the last time we'd vacationed together. She'd bought the dress in Spain the previous summer and hadn't worn much of anything else since. I'd seen her in a winter coat in New York, but I'm not convinced she wasn't hiding the dress under a sweater. It came off while we were in Tahiti, of course, but only after she was told she wasn't allowed to scuba dive in it. Here, a year later, the dress was back in full force.

We cut across town on colorful moto-cars down to the Mercado de Belén, a huge outdoor market that offered the predictable hearts of palm, coco leaves, cow innards, and skewered piranhas. There were fruits I'd never seen at Whole Foods and an extensive array of indefinable jungle products said to cure anything from erectile dysfunction to breast cancer. Lower Belén, where most of the vendors lived, was an expansive shantytown floating on the Río Itaya, a tributary of the vast Amazon. Children sold clothing out of storage shacks along the river basin. Everything was embroidered with a serpent, a symbol of life, rebirth, and wisdom.

Everywhere you turned, there was something about ayahuasca. Throughout the ramshackle stalls it was touted not as a drug but as medicine. I was surprised by the kinds of tourists I kept seeing. They were yoga instructors, doctors, mothers and daughters on college graduation trips, many of them there for their second or third time. One woman I spoke with told me that she'd bought a package online that included a day trip to Machu Picchu followed by a three-day ayahuasca ceremony. Nobody seemed scared, only eager for what new insights they might discover about themselves. Though I couldn't help but wonder if the pursuit of self-understanding was any less narcissistic than the pursuit of Netflix stardom, it did calm my nerves knowing that ayahuasca drew such a varied crowd.

The air was muggy and the sky looked hazy and foreboding as we piled into a long wooden riverboat and prepared for a two-hour ride down the Madre de Dios. It took several tries for our single-engine vessel to cooperate, gargling in a mouthful of muddy water, then choking it back up. But finally, after some prodding and pounding, we were on our way. I looked down at my phone with zero service, good for nothing other than scrutinizing the smile lines in my pictures from hours earlier. Chelsea sat on Molly's lap until she was certain no snakes had managed to slither aboard. Denny tried to open a bag of Qancha, a type of large-kernel corn that is toasted with oil in a hot skillet, but he was already too dehydrated and weak. The arduous demands of travel were no match for his fragile hipster body. I was eye level with the water when I noticed a fleshy pink hump breaching in the distance.

“What the fuck, I think I just saw a school of swimming labias,” Chelsea screamed.

Our translator Frieda laughed. “Those are pink dolphins.” They didn't look like any dolphins I'd ever seen. They looked like lethargic albino sea snakes with prehistoric beaks. Our guide spoke a few words to Frieda, who informed us that we could swim with the dolphins if we so desired. While getting my vaccinations for the trip, I remembered my doctor saying that men shouldn't swim in the Amazon because there was a kind of parasite in the river that liked to swim up urethras. That was enough to convince me that animals in the wild need to, as much as possible, be left the fuck alone.

When we arrived at our eco-lodge, Frieda and Molly and the rest of the crew heaved cases of camera equipment up several sets of steep wooden stairs. Chelsea and I clung to each other as we hiked up behind them.

“Gorgeous view,” she deadpanned, looking out at the stagnant brown water that surrounded us. In my mind I guess I'd always pictured the Amazon to be more glamorous, more Tarzany. I thought it would at least look like the Rainforest Cafe at South Coast Plaza. Where were the adorable lemurs? The howler monkeys? The safari fries?

Frieda led Denny, Chelsea, and me to an open-air hut on stilts looking out over the water.

“The three of you will be in here.” She smiled, gesturing toward three twin beds lined up along a thin divider wall, separating our sleeping quarters from a shower stall. Denny looked at me, despondent. Chelsea looked at Denny, trying to decide whether he weighed less than her. I felt like we were the three bears in an Oliver Stone retelling of Goldilocks. Frieda, like everybody I'd met in Peru, was under five feet tall, with dark curly hair and large brown eyes. She seemed like the type of girl you instantly connect with when you first check into rehab but then quickly realize is the exact type of person who is going to peer-pressure you into drinking again. Molly stormed in and doled out three headlamps, informing us that the resort's generator would be turned off at ten and we'd be without power until nine the next morning. The headlamps had two settings. You could use them either as a bright white lamp or as a flashing red disco light.

“I don't get it.” I placed the lamp on my head and switched it to the flashing red setting. “So this is to notify people that I'm in distress?”

Molly shrugged.

“Seems a little subtle, no? We don't think screaming would work better?” I looked over at Chelsea, who'd opened her suitcase and pulled out a digital bathroom scale, the glass kind that belongs in your home and the kind that would definitely get confiscated from your luggage by airport security, not because it was dangerous but just because it was fucking perplexing. “Umm…Why do you have a scale with you? Did you pack that?” I asked.

“Denny, get on the scale! I need to see if you weigh more than me,” Chelsea demanded. Denny trudged across the room like Eeyore and obligingly mounted the scale. “Oh my God! Denny only weighs two pounds more than me!” Chelsea shrieked. “Denny? Be honest, are you eating, or are you too depressed because you left your pregnant wife?”

“I am depressed. But I am eating. There's just not much I can fucking eat. I've been on this ayahuasca-prep diet for a month and I'm withering away. I'm ready to just drink the tea and have a fucking beer.”

“Wait, Molly, we're not supposed to be drinking beer prior to doing this?” Chelsea said. “I thought just no hard alcohol.” She looked at Molly, then over at me. Molly had sent us a list of things to avoid before our ceremony, which included all alcohol, salt, pork, fried foods, hot spices, peppers, onions, red meat, cured fish, and overly ripened fruit. We were also instructed not to have any kind of sexual stimulation for at least two weeks leading up to the event.

“I think the only part I stuck to was the celibacy portion,” I added helpfully.

After meeting up with the rest of our crew for an excruciating dinner, where Chelsea, Denny, and I were allowed only chicken broth and yucca, the three of us headed back to our room to try to sleep. Our meager beds were covered in small gnats that had died there earlier in the day. Once the air conditioner shut off with the generator, we were left in total darkness, sweating and mocking the entire situation. We tossed and turned and laughed deliriously at things I knew would never be as funny again. I felt like I was at summer camp.

Trying to get comfortable, Chelsea removed articles of clothing until she was wearing nothing but a bra and her headlamp. (“I need it to pee!” she explained.) After discussing our favorite authors, which of Chelsea's friends Denny and I hated, and who on the crew we would fuck if stranded on a desert island, we eventually fell asleep.

Around 4 a.m., the sound of insects and nocturnal creatures partying outside our open-air windows was so loud it woke me. I sat up instinctively, thinking I'd set the volume too high on Sid's sound machine. Looking around the room, I saw Chelsea fast asleep, her headlamp having somehow made its way down to her ankle and flashing our room red like it was the whorehouse from
Beetlejuice.
I laughed to myself, then reached over and shut it off. As I was lying on my back giggling, waiting to lose consciousness, I reflected on the last year and a half. There was no denying that I'd been running—from the responsibility of parenthood, from the pain of being in love. Alone now, I saw the way I'd been completely at Sid's mercy. Emotions I thought I knew had evolved into feelings so electric and explosive that they tore my chest wide open.

For the first time, I entertained the possibility that maybe tomorrow's ceremony would bring me a sense of peace that I'd unconsciously been seeking.