A Bolt of Lightning and a Dream

I wanted more—more action, more enchantment, voyages and mystery—so off I went with a filmmaking friend on a plot to document the Zapatistas. We were heady with our proximity to the people who had so poetically been telling the whole neoliberal farce to fuck-off since their 1994 New Year’s Eve uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.

He’d helped establish a “peace camp” for international human rights workers in the indigenous community where we were filming. He was also working on water projects and independent media.

Don’t all women dream of rebellions and raffish revolutionaries? We met in the mountains. We met in the Selva Lacondon. We danced on a wet night in Morelia, wild stars flickering with the fire of esperanza. How could I not fall for this clandestino with a wicked accent and dusty combat boots?

His name was Ramor Ryan. He told me stories of high seas misadventures, anarchist martyrs, chicken buses and encounters with vast corners of humanity. Some of those stories appear in his new book, Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile. An excerpt follows.

- Holly Wren Spaulding

TALES FROM THE VANQUISHED PIER
“The unspeakable boredom of life at Champerico…” Aldous Huxley, 1934.

I met some bored young housewives at a bus stop in Guatemala. Having fled Mexico due to a problem with immigration and with nothing better to do, I decided to accompany them to their seaside town.

We chat away on the long journey over the mountains—in Spanish, in English and in light intimacy. It appears that their absentee husbands work as peons in New Jersey as part of the clandestine workforce, undocumented and vagrant. They send their cash back home while their wives swan around with their mobile phones, wearing the latest fashions, bored and listless with life in the abyss while this mad little port town, their community, and their families are being destroyed by the demands of the new labor market.

They are all delighted to talk a bit of Ingles with a dandy maestro—"a professor of English," my hat for this episode and as good a cover as any with all the wives so thrilled to have such a distinguished guest in their not-often-visited seaside town.

Champerico gets one line in the tourist guidebook—“a tawdry, sweltering, dilapidated place—dangerous and unfriendly.” My kinda town. It was the hub of Pacific coast commerce and seatrade until the end of the pier fell into the sea and all the ships went elsewhere. Now the town has become convulsed with criminality, the cocaine trade and all its unsavory spin-off industries.

“I am interested in the psycho-geography of places quite off the map," I explain somewhat mysteriously to my eager, newly initiated students. One takes out a pen and scribbles the new word down on her pad.

"Psycho-geography—a useful word, maestro,” she says enthusiastically.

"Yes," I say, getting into the swing of this maestro business, "next time you write to your husband, impress him by asking in English about the psycho-geography of New Jersey."

"I will, maestro, si!" she says, delighted, and I feel a little cruel as I chuckle to myself.

The wives bicker over whose house I should stay in as we finally pull into Champerico. It is dusk, the town is dusty and lazy, and we witness quite a dramatic hit-and-run outside the bus station. A man lies in a pile on the road as a large old American car drives away at high speed.

“Turf wars," says Veronica, by way of explanation, dismissing the violence petulantly. "You will, of course stay, in my house—OK, maestro?"

I decline the offer diplomatically, preferring instead to find my own hotel room. This falls well with all of the wives, and I am ushered to the deserted but atmospheric Neptune Hotel, which overlooks the ocean. The ocean is dark and vast, great waves roll in interminably from the deep Pacific crashing uneventfully upon the black volcanic sands of the deserted, unkempt beach.

A quaint, rustic circus haunts the beachfront. The large old tent is stitched together in a patchwork of many different materials giving it a vaudeville-like appearance. Amongst the junkyard of vehicles scattered around I spot some monkeys swinging about and a group of alluring transvestites smoking in the shadows. Beyond that, the beach is lined by a long row of eerie, decrepit, wooden restaurants. The wives have warned me of these establishments—places where men get gunned down in their hammocks. Here, they say, gangsters congregate, whores, bad cops, and drunken old soldiers as well, all of them consolidating useless lives. They leave their guns at the bar, drink for two or three days and nights, fight each other, and then stumble off with unsavory hookers.

A suspicious character joins me as I enjoy a quiet beer before the exotic sunset seated under a tired old palm tree in front of the Neptune Hotel. "Lovely ladies," he says, referring to the departed housewives. "But they don't like to, you know, enjoy life. I can introduce you to some girls who like to have fun.”

"I am a maestro de Ingles..." I begin, hoping to discourage any further hustling. But this slim, twitchy young-ish man sporting dark glasses and a fancy beach shirt has his own agenda. He claims he's Mexican, but judging by his accent I suspect he's South American, probably Colombian—a suspicion further validated by the wads of foreign currency he is carrying in his wallet, which he exhibits as he insists on buying me a cocktail and Caldo de Marisco—a seafood plate—at a nearby seafront restaurant.

I am proven wrong—he is not a pimp. As the night evolves, and he keeps buying me cocktails and telling wild stories, it becomes clear he is not trying to sell me anything, although he is definitely some variety of hustler. Despite the fancy clothes and fat wallet suggesting a businessman on vacation, he has that haunted look of a hunted man carrying many secrets. His particularly scurried demeanor is augmented by his continual glances over his shoulder, as if he expects to be grabbed at any moment.

Nevertheless, he is a sympathetic character, in need of nothing more than a friend upon whom to unload his horror stories before the night is through. He brings me on a wide roam of all the bars and brothels of this wretched place and introduces me to a whole variety of guttersnipes dressed in Tommy Hilfiger—the typical desperadoes and degenerates found in any criminal location beyond the global mall. Drinks flow, my glass is kept full, and the inevitable pandemonium ensues.

Why is this lovely old lady trying to sell me her pretty teenage daughter for $20? Why is the bar suddenly in a state of uproar? Has the Colombian drugged me, or is it the tremendously strong rum? How did I end up in the back of this police pickup truck? Why am I now running down backstreets pursued by my "pal" the Colombian? Why is the Neptune Hotel owner carrying a large pistol in his underpants as he holds me, naked and deranged, vomiting all over his patio?

Excerpted from Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile, by Ramor Ryan. Reprinted by permission of the author and AK Press (www.Akpress.org).

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