The Coca Bums

By L. H. May

Set in Peru in 1985, the novel is narrated from the viewpoint of Jim Hiram, an American businessman, asked by Helen Seymour, a wealthy Philadelphian, to find her wayward brother, Peter. He had fled to Peru to avoid lawsuits filed by his father to have him declared incompetent because of cocaine addiction and incursion of high debts. Her last word from Pete was a postcard from Tingo Maria, a center of the cocaine trade and Maoist Sendero Luminoso rebel activity. When she turns on the charm, Jim reluctantly agrees to the search. A sister trading intimacy for her brothers safety is a variation on that theme in Measure for Measure, though the treatment is not so dark since theyre mutually attracted and are modern in outlook, not Elizabethan. When her parents arrive with their own detective, and the father has a heart attack in the Andes, the plot complicates and their love is strongly tested before they come through it together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504911825

L. H. May

L. H. May was born in Cincinnati, Ohio; was educated in public schools there; received his BA, cum laude, from Yale College, where he majored in English and minored in philosophy; and was strongly influenced by the synthesis of those two disciplines suggested by the groundbreaking lecture of Jacques Derrida at Johns Hopkins in 1966, introducing deconstructionism to the United States and expanding the scope of literary criticism beyond its previously narrow scholastic bounds. After graduating from college, May worked as a newspaper reporter before attending law school, receiving his JD from Indiana University. He then lived and worked in Peru, Lima, Arequipa, and Ayacucho, learning Spanish and researching international law, before returning to the United States to practice law in the Midwest while continuing to write fiction.

Book preview

Book One

Birds Of Passage

1

Lima, Peru

September, 1986

Jim remembered the day he met Helen Seymour. Pocha was having her last show in Lima that afternoon before leaving for a fellowship in Germany. It was right after the June El Fronton prison massacres and the death of a leftist cousin during interrogation, and she said all Peru was a prison now, implying that she was going for good. It looked like it was back to that sadsack song of ‘Alas, Alack, I lack a lass’. He’d woken in the wee hours from a Kafkaesque nightmare with a night scene in the row of three huge Mies blocks and bullet holes in cathedral walls, and stayed up reading poetry to forget his romantic loss. Wordsworth had the idea that Nature replaces our loss of young energy with experiential gains, but not much comfort to Jim pushing forty and wondering if he’d ever again find anyone as fine as Pocha. The dream also had an angel in it, whether that came from playing a favorite song, Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Angel’, or whether it was a fallen angel like Milton’s Lucifer.

So first the bad dream and the next morning the crew-cut gringo in the bank, maybe fifty, strong build, around six two, anodized sunglasses and woven straw Panama padrino hat with a dark blue band, dressed in a tan Palm Beach suit reading his paper in a side sala of the bank in San Liberto, when Jim came in with the deposits from the office. He thought he had the nightmare psyched out, since the day before Sendero Luminoso rebels assassinated a government minister at an upscale restaurant, which he knew from having dined there just a couple weeks before, and they’d used machineguns. Jim could see himself in the picture, blood on the linen while the Black Prince whispered ‘the rest is silence’, and he woke up gargling garbled words of terror and mercy reincarnated from that bloody stage. Maybe as he considered whether it was time for this gringo to leave Peru, he saw himself as the older American, and that’s how he got the sense that he’d seen that gringo before, perhaps in the dream.

Or maybe he was amalgamating the dream with the Wall Street Journal article he read that morning over coffee, about about new U.S. banking regulations designed to clamp down on money laundering to fight the War On Drugs. Oh great, he thought ‘Next they’ll want me to revise my intake questionnaire to ask my clients where they got their money. Do your funds derive from a royal grant dating back to The Conquest, or from any one of the following booms: gold, silver, copper, guano, fishmeal, or one with more bounce than Pará rubber, the grey-green leaf they call coca?’ Not that he didn’t know that the last accounted for some of the new money in town, for example at the dealership in Miraflores where he was picking up his metallic blue Plymouth Satellite, he observed somebody plunk down cash for a new Chrysler Imperial, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know coca was the best ever commodity boom for Peru, which however stayed poor, the beggar on the pile of gold. If they’d legalized it (you could buy leaf and lime openly sold in Arequipa Mercado Central near the steps) and taxed it, Peru could have eliminated poverty, built schools and hospitals, an Olympic stadium for the World Cup, exact replicas of the Great Pyramids, but instead it got drained off into accounts in Switzerland or the Caribbean. Not that there wasn’t still a lot of cash sloshing around Lima, and enough Limeños didn’t want to be all in cash in a Third World economy with hyperinflation and a guerrilla threat, that it meant Jim was doing a good business putting their money to work in the mid-Eighties NYSE bull market and the new NASDAQ with his pick of the month, MSFT. Well, to Sendero he would look like a Wall Street lackey, though he could have made the Maoists money too if they’d listened to him, put pension money with Comrade Jim and retire to workers’ paradise.

So when he saw the crew-cut gringo in the bank, he wondered whether this was Agent Ness checking up south of the Border, but the Journal article was mainly talking about cash deposits. Still he was closing out a large account for his artist friend, Pocha, who was on her way to Berlin, and that check was for around Seventy Thousand Dollars. He asked the clerk to see a banker, who’d need to approve the withdrawal in any case, though he had power of attorney on the account, and when he turned around, the other gringo was gone. The traffic was light on the autopiso, and he ran his Plymouth V-8 with the custom hemi up to eighty-five and they’d tuned it nice at the dealer. He put the big check up under the seat frame when he went on to the track—nobody could cash it anyway without identification—and he went to unwind on a Friday afternoon, watch the ladies in their sunglasses and chiffon scarves and the big horses and the colors of the silks.

At the track with the touts and the sheets with the odds, it was all feeling good and getting into a party mood, when after the first race he noticed that same gringo from the bank in the next spectator section, tall with the brushy crew like ex-military and the anodized sunglasses and that padrino hat. About then Jim said to himself, Okay, that was him in the bank and the dream was a caution, I’m hopping the next rail over to bump into this guy there or at the window and asking him ‘Oh, perdon. Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ He didn’t want to have to worry about Sendero on his left, and then over his other shoulder, have to worry about Jedgar’s boys again like in Peacenik days. It hadn’t all been sweet memories. Lyndon had pumped a bunch of money into education, and most TA’s weren’t averse to taking loyalty oaths and some not to making money on the side with reporting on their fellow Americans who dissented from war on the Vietnamese.

The gates swung open and they were off. And they’re off. And you’re off, because there was no other gringo there in the next section now when he looked back. The other guy was gone, the horses were running and the crowd noise rising seemed like special effects in a movie and the dream was still an anxious enigma. He hadn’t had déjà vu in years, but this was like it. Hell, Lima was over six million now, and despite the State Department advisory about U.S. citizens travelling to Peru, there were quite a few gringos there, and his eyes maybe weren’t as good after reading all the small print in Standard and Poor’s and quotations in the Journal. Hume said mind was merely a succession of sense experience and Kant said no, there was an a priori structure of reason that ordered sensation, but as Hamlet told Horatio, there is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. It cheered him to hear the roar of the crowd, and it calmed him to remember a Degas with the jockeys up going into the stretch. Ten years before he’d been a stringer for a story he was researching in Argentina travelling up the La Plata estuary when he’d seen horses in the bottomlands near San Pedro and later had a dream where the horses were in colors like in another painting by Franz Marc, a German Expressionist who was killed in the First World War. At River Downs in Cincinnati they had a fire in the stables when he was last back there visiting his Mom, and they said there was no mob in Cincy, and he thought they just call it something else.

Still he was shaken up enough that he went up to the track lounge for a short one and called the office to reassure himself about his premonitions, like his dad had said, sometimes in business you needed to act on your instincts.

Anything happening back at the ranch? Jim asked.

Not much, his secretary, Consuelo, replied.

No notices of attachment of accounts? Jim said.

No, what are you worried about? Consuelo said. You said you were gone for the day, after you got your car and stopped by the bank, you were going to the track to watch the ponies, then maybe on to your girlfriend’s show.

Luz is my friend, not my girlfriend, Jim said.

Isn’t a friend who’s a girl a girlfriend, or don’t I understand English? Consuelo said.

You understand the English, just not the relationship, Jim said. She’s an artist. She wants to create, not procreate.

She’s a woman, Consuelo said.

For God’s sake, did I hire a secretary, or a surrogate mother? Jim said. Que metida. Just like my real Mom. She used to inquire about the girls I dated. And you wonder how I got sly.

Go have your fun, sinverguenza, Consuelo said. Oh, there’s one other call that Anita took while I was out to lunch. The lady was an American, just passing through Lima, Elizabeth T. Danielson, and then the number. Is that an old client from Chicago?

Yeh, hold on while I get something to write the number on, Jim said, his hand shaking as he got out his racing news to take it down, because it had been ten years since he’d seen Liz Teris, and her departure from Lima had not been unhurried at the time. So she was now Mrs. Danielson, married to the Danish art critic, but why she’d come back to Lima was a question, even though no pending charges existed from the unfortunate incidents at the hotel. What was more of a concern would be the photos she’d taken in Ayacucho Province, which was the birthplace of Sendero Luminoso and the site of several atrocities and massacres. She’d taken the film to Holland and transmitted it to international human rights organizations, not that Sendero was not responsible for some of them, but the ones by the Peruvian military would be of more concern to the government, fighting a bitter, internecine war and not needing sanctions, especially now with the rebels at the gates of Lima.

He took the number down, and felt bad as he thought of Consuelo and what she’d do if he left and relocated to Miami. Though he’d thought of her keeping his Lima office running and him commuting for a week or so every couple months, if things got really bad, he’d go and she’d be stuck there. He never shared with her how much he was thinking of Miami, and now he was lying to her about Liz being a former client from Chicago, where he started out in stocks in Stan Lucca’s firm, and occasionally one would come through and stop by on their way to Machu Picchu.

The phones at the track were loud and anyway Jim wanted to think about it before he called this number back if indeed it was the Liz Teris he well knew, having rolled back into Lima and into his life ten years after she’d exited quick and clean except in his dreams, um, three other lovers since then and now Pocha was going to Berlin, and they’d been drifting apart for some time and he decided she needed a part-time lover, not full-time man which would be the functional equivalent of a husband, which she had a fear of, having grown up in a seriously paternalistic culture that if they tied the knot and she found herself begging for a new position, though he said that wouldn’t ever be a problem since he believed women were in the superior position morally, so it would be a turn-on to be in a new position, like she’s right and she wants it, oh, I can do that. Now he began to feel that was the center of his anxiety that morning, not the other gringo at the bank or track or the new banking regs which he could deal with, as he could with the departure of Pocha who had been delicious with him a year ago but for an artist that could be like yesterday if she hadn’t been able to process it, and his anxiety had refocused on calling Liz. They’d been lovers and lived together in Cuzco1973-74, but by the time she left for the Netherlands in August ’74, their relationship had been in tatters a while.

It was better, more meet the Elizabethans would say, to drive downtown and let the news of Liz simmer, especially since he had to get the big check to Luz Maria. As he worried about his world falling apart, hers also was in jeopardy. She was going to an artist-in-residence position in Germany, a move not unrelated to her leftist politics and opposition to the military in the terrible civil war raging in the sierra and now coming to Lima. She came from a wealthy, Aprista (Old Left) family, and that was an invisible barrier protecting her unlike others on the left, like a favorite cousin from a branch without money, recently found dead under suspicious circumstances. She was in a depression about it, mentioned Toulouse La Trec getting killed by French government agents for criticism of the regime, like she might be next on a list.

Pocha, her family’s pet name for her, was not an abstract artist, though she started in op and kinetic art following the Venezuelan, J.R. Soto, and the Argentinian, Luigi Tomasello. After working in that mode for a few years, she began to find it constraining and sterile, decided art should have some blood and traces of life and had turned to assemblages, the early ones separate on a wall or in a corner, but then on to those occupying a whole room. This latest one occupied much of one floor, and it was entered through a long, dim tunnel with weavings hung from cables on either side. So he was carrying a cashier’s check for around Seventy Thousand Dollars down this dark tunnel with side show salas like the Fun House, masques of Atahualpa and Pizarro, the Devil and St. Michael, feeling some anxiety that he might get robbed and garotted, mirrors that distorted his image, and then a fan that was hitting playing cards with its blades and a tape recorder with traffic sounds, sea birds, a snatch of huayno, a few notes from Beethoven, but then it became lighter with a skylight brightening through a light muslin above, and the solid hangings replaced by strips of paper like the strings of lottery tickets the andantes sold, different color combinations, yellow and red. He had seen no one and so he called out to her and she answered from through a couple of diaphanous partitions.

Oh, Jimmy, I’m so glad you could come, she was saying.

Where are you? I can’t see you, he said.

Back behind here, Pocha said.

He went through an opening hung with strings of beads like in the chifas, and it clacked with a miraculous sound like the sound of a break in a pool hall in another room. But no Pocha, so he called again.

Right here, she said. How clumsy you’ve become. And you used to dance the tango so beautifully.

Playing games, are we? Jim said. When I’m here with serious business, with something to give you.

Oh my, it’s been a while since we … she said.

Too long, but you’re on your way to Europe, Jim said. I read this morning they just banned ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll’ on the BBC.

All the good things in life, but just on the telly, right? Pocha said.

It’s the song, Northern Soul, not the things, Jim said. And they billed it as Cool Britannia, but Deutchland they say is pretty swinging these days. I brought you something so you can go in style. Not that you’re ever short on style.

Oh, you bought me a boat, how thoughtful, Pocha said. I hope it’s a yacht, a big fancy one.

Yeh, like the one my ancestors rode out of that place, Jim said.

From Hitler? she said.

From Bismarck, Kaiser Bill and universal conscription, he said. It’s totally modern now, no stink of the past. Though you might miss the sounds and smells of the Lima calle. Some artists are like wine, which doesn’t always travel well. I look at this work and I see a sierra market.

"You think I’m crazy to go?’ she said.

I’d be a hypocrite to say I’m not checking the exits myself, Jim said. But business is good, though I suppose I was trying to say I’d miss you, because I know you made up your mind, and I’d never presume to control you, but indulge my mother hen instinct to worry just a bit about you getting there and being homesick. Probably in reality it’s jealousy over your freedom. Even though it’s been a while since we were together, you know, that way.

Now you’re making me cry, Pocha said.

At that moment a door opened down the real hall and whoosh the curtains parted and there was gallery party chatter and Pocha was standing there in her embroidered cotton chemise, beautiful and strange as he always saw her. The main populus of the show was through a metal double door where tapas and wine were being served and a tall man maybe ten years younger than Jim and more handsome came through the door, well dressed, his beard neatly trimmed and Lothario presentable. He stopped to bid her good-bye and they did the cross-cheek kiss in the European and talk show style. She told him oh, Esteban, she was so glad he came, and when she came over to Jim after he left said that was the son of one of the big boys in the PIP, their FBI, whom she’d dated in high school, why was she so dumb then, but he didn’t know about her leaving for Berlin.

Good to have friends in high places, Jim said. Also good he doesn’t know I’m aiding and abetting your escape.

They had had a long talk after the prison massacres, because by chance from his days in the barrio he knew someone who had died in them, and she said that all Peru was a prison now.

Very few know I’m going, and I haven’t told anyone if I’m ever coming back, Pocha said.

Here, this ought to help you on your way, he said, taking out the envelope with the check and the close-out statement of her stock account.

Oh, you closed out my stocks, Pocha said, taking the envelope. Did I do okay, or did I take a bath? What was it twenty thousand I put in and you said, don’t worry, baby. Should I worry now?

It’s gone up, Jim said. Haven’t you opened your account statements?

I’ve been busy, Pocha said sheepishly.I have them all in my desk drawer.

With that he waited for her reaction, since he’d taken special care with her account, because she was a socialist and viewed capitalism in general as a rip-off and purveyor of political repression, and he’d responded that was the old laissez-faire capitalism which Peru had intimate experience with, as for example in the IPC oil contract which was fraught with duress, fraud, bribery, chicanery like page 11 of the contract had disappeared into thin air, and they’d taken a few hundred acres concession and expanded it into thousands, he’d written an article on it in law school, so it was exploitative in the classic tradition of J.D. Rockerfeller like long-term, legitimized rape and it had been a burr to Peruvians, but the oil royalties were their largest source of foreign exchange, so whoever got in power had been willing to protect it until Velasco came in with his progressive leftist Gobierno Revolucionario in ’68. He told her America was reinventing itself in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, that this IPO of Microsoft which had doubled and redoubled since he bought it for her account, was free enterprise at its best, because the goliath IBM thought the PC market would never take off. Pocha was impressed Jim knew the IPC case, which had remained an issue in Peru because LBJ had used the Hickenlooper Amendent for cut-off of foreign aid. He probably never would have come south to Peru, had it not been for LBJ and America Love It Or Leave It, fallen in love with it and come back to it. Now with the civil war making him seriously consider leaving Lima and repatriating, not necessarily an easy task for a guy who was bored by law practice in Chicago and got into stocks,