NOTHING BUT A CHEAP DRUNK

Eduardo did his utmost to be a superb visitor’s guide. For full three days he took me everywhere around the Capital City of Oaxaca. He enjoyed practicing English, pointing out the finer points about life in Oaxaca to the visiting psychologist who came all the way from the USA to look into the uses of psilocybin mushrooms. When I asked about marijuana in the area, he shook his head, wrinkled his face, twisted his middle finger in a circle above his ear, and reverting to his native spanish he said something including the word “loco”. He implied that he has little knowledge or contact with marijuana or crazies who use it. “But” he said in a voice that showed sudden animation, “would you like to meet the man who was the interpreter for the Wassons ?”

I could hardly believe my ears. Would I be interested in meeting that man! The Wassons were this legendary couple. He was a retired pharmacist and his wife was a botanist with a passion for the study of esoteric mushrooms. Together they traveled all over the world in pursuit of their studies of esoteric mushrooms. They wrote scholarly reports of their findings. Their studies took them to Outla de Jimenez in Oaxaca, where they had heard about the use of psilocybin mushrooms by the bruja (medicine woman) Maria Sabena who used them for their magical healing powers. Impressed, they tried the mushrooms themselves and reported their experience in scholarly literature. As an immediate consequence of their writings, there started a treck of Western scholarly researchers who came for mushroom sessions with Maria Sabena. Maria Sabena was was willing and interested in introducing the mushrooms to the western world. I had not expected an opportunity to talk with man who was the translator to the Wassons, the man who participated in this historical encounter.

Eduardo knew the man well. He was a member of a prominent christian family in town and the translator was for a number of years a well known missionary from the US. He went to make a telephone call, and very quickly returned telling me “Tomorrow at 2 p.m. he expects to see you at his home.” The next day I drove to the address several blocks away from downtown. The house was very easily recognizable. It stood out from the surrounding mexican houses. It looked like a ranch house transplanted from a midwestern town. It was sitting in the midst of a large yard surrounded by a wooden fence. As soon as I parked my car, a man in a grey suit, white shirt and tie came to greet me. He opened the gate with one hand, motioned me in with an gracious sweeping motion of the other hand. When I came in, before proceeding any further, he reached with his right hand into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out a wallet. From the wallet he extracted a calling card which he proceeded to offer to me.

I was a little surprised that he did that before we started to walk to his house, before he said anything to me. Does he feel the need to identify himself to me? Does he feel the need to prove to me who he is? Could there be any question in my mind that this American gentleman in his Brooks Brothers suit and tie, in this American style ranch house, could be anyone else but the missionary who invited me to his home at this address?

I looked at the card and noted that it identified an INSTITUCIA LINGUISTICA INTERNATIONALES (I am no longer sure about the spelling, but it was something like that), and had his name, phone number and address in smaller print. I looked for a reference to a Christian church or mission, but there was none. A bell rang in my head. He is not only a missionary, he is also a linguist and he wants me to know that. I said, “Ahh, you are not only a missionary but you are a linguist as well”. “Well, not exactly” he answered “I am not a linguist, this is how our mission works. His voice was not quite bombastic, but it sounded as if he was channeling the sound he was making, as if it was coming out from some hollow place in his lungs. There was something about his speech that also sounded as if he was talking to an audience, not just to one person, in slow, measured tones. He motioned me to start walking toward the house, and proceeded to explain.

The way this missionary organization trained candidates for their missionary work was to provide them with instruction in the language of a remote, isolated Indian tribe that is hardly known to outsiders. It is provided in the form of an apprenticeship that continues for years, until fluency is established. In his case, for example, his teacher was an Indian from the Oaxacan mountains around Ouatla de Jimenez who had come to settle to live in the mission for years. By the way Ouatla de Jimenez is not only high in the mountains of Oaxaca, it was so isolated that access by car required a four-wheel drive, my Porshe convertible would not get me up there. Instead I had to make arrangements with a pilot who flew supplies into the village with a small two-seater plane. When he flew me in he did not have to descend for a landing. Instead he jus kept flying straight away until we approached an area that stuck out like an outreaching arm that had a flat top, like a natural runway that stuck out from the mountain side high enough in the sky to fly into straight ahead, just as when he picked me up on his way back from distributing supplies, we started on the runway and continued to fly straight ahead when we reached the end of it.

Mr Brooks Brothers, as I called him in my mind, proceeded to explain that after the language of the tribe is mastered, the new missinary is transported to the area by helicopter and left there. I was a little shocked and asked,

“Aren’t you afraid to land in the midst of strangers, members of an isolated Indian tribe far away from anyone familiar?”

“Oh, no” the sound that seemed to come from some hollow tube, that appeared to aim to some far away place, responded. “When the people hear you speak their language, you don’t need to fear at all, they always are very friendly.”

In my mind’s eye I visualized, Mr. Brooks Brothers landing from a helicopter in this very remote Isolated Indian village, dressed in suit and tie, and probably with suitcase in hand, and he tells them in their own language the language that is only spoken by their tribe, that God sent him to bring God’s word to them!

Then he went on to tell me how difficult it was to convert these “stubborn, superstitious uneducated medicine men or women. “Why, they couldn’t even read or write! Only once, was I able to convert a medicine woman!” there was a high pitched oratorical intonation in his voice, and he proceeded to tell me the story of the one solitary success he had to convert a medicine woman.

At first she wouldn’t talk to him. Or listen. She just refused to have anything to do with him. But then one day he found out that she became ill. He went to her sick bed and recited a prayer. “She turned to me and said, ‘How beautiful! How can you do it! When I visit someone sick, I keep stumbling around, I can’t find the right words to say, and you have all the right words come out so beautifully.”

His hand went to the backpocket of his pants, the same as when at first coming out to meet me at the gate he went to get his wallett with his identification to show me the proof in writing that he was who he said he was, but this time he pulled out of his backpocket not his wallet, but a pocket book edition of the bible. He kept the bible in the upturned palm of his hand and patted it with the other hand. While doing this he continued talking. “I told her, that’s because these are not my words, they are the words that God gave us, these words are written in this book and I memorized them.” He continued to tell me that the medicine woman was impressed. She wanted to know what other written down words of God there were in his pocket book, and he continued to visit her and read to her God’s words from the bible. Eventually she converted, “Unfortunately she died six months later” at that point his voice grew triumphantly climactic, “but she never practiced her superstitons again”. The last word “again” was drawn out and was inflected in an unmistakable tone of a grand finale.

At that point I asked “So what about Maria Sabena?”

Mr Brooks Brothers first got up from the chair he was sitting on. He had offered me a seat on the couch and was sitting on a chair facing me. The living room was further remarkably reminiscent of what I would imagine a house of a church deacon in the middle East of the United States would look like, including the color schemes, furniture and furnishings. In my imagination I saw the house and all its contents being loaded up in some small town USA, mowed lawn and picket fence included, and unloaded exactly in the same way here in the middle of Oaxaca. He went to the cabinet that had two drawers like in a dresser. He opened the bottom one and it was half full with newspapers. He pointed to the papers and told me again. As if it was providing validation for what he was about to tell me. He proceeded to explain his gesture.

“See al these, these are reports in the press. After the Wassons, all the papers wanted to hear what I had to say about them. What I have to say about it is the same as what I told them all. It is all right there.” The thought went through my mind, it is interesting how he keeps seeing reassurance in the written word. He is letting me know that I can trust more what he is going to tell me because it is in the written word, not just something that he is saying to me. As if there could have been any doubt in my mind that he was totally sincere about what he was relating, whether I knew that he told the same thing to all the reporters who asked him about it or not.

He continued “I was getting upset with the Wassons when they seemed to take so seriously what she was rtelling them. This ignorant woman. Why she couldn’t even read or write. She was full of superstitions and they were taking her so seriously. I finally told them, you shouldn’t take these superstitons seriously, look, I will show you, I am not afraid of these mushrooms.” and he patted again the backpocket of his trousers, where he kep the pocket bible as well as the wallet with his Institucio Linguistica Internationales calling card “I’ve got the word of God to protect me. I am not afraid of any magical powers of these mushrooms”. Maria Sabena gave him some mushrooms, and he ate them. It was after that that the Wassons decided they could take them too.

“So what happened?” I asked. “How did they affect you?”

“It was nothing but a cheap drunk.”

Later the missionary translator was shown the articles that the Wassons wrote about their mushroom experiences and he believed that “it is a hoax”. He is convinced that they knew better and were just repeating the superstitions that the illiterate woman was telling them. After all, he ate the mushrooms first; he proved to them that it was “Nothing but a cheap drunk”. Now, after several years, he was still there to give his letter perfect proof to all the misguided souls who were intrigued by Wassons words to investigate further.