Tantric Plunge

I never knew things could work this way, never imagined it. I guess I knew it in a way, I mean, I´d seen shit like this in obscure kung-fu movies, but I never thought I´d encounter it in Guatemala, much less in Todos Santos.

I first heard about The Healers because Gay Matt was giving free yoga clinics. I wasn´t interested in the yoga, but I was curious about the free Reiki treatments that he and Erin were giving.

I´d studied a little Reiki in college: the art of how to heal just by laying hands on someone, Jesus shit. Buddha shit. Who wouldn´t want to be Buddha? So I checked it out. It was hard stuff to get my mind around, much less accept. I take that back. I can totally get my mind around Reiki, the ideas are simple. I just have a really hard time accepting shit I can´t see or feel or at least read that some dude with a PhD thinks it´s worth my time. I trust those Phds, wherever they are.

So I made my way to the House of Healers. I´d heard from other travelers that it was just a bunch of hippies sitting around, smoking pot and doing yoga, but I didn´t know what to expect. A friend of mine who was also interested in Reiki got directions to the house, and Todos Santos being ass-small, 3 minutes later we were shaking hands with Erin and Gay Matt, making small conversation and appointments for the following day. Turned out Matt was part of the original species from Jupiter that inhabited Atlantis, as well as on of the the few witnesse s to the fall of Atlantis millennia later, all in past lives, of course. Not only was I getting free Reiki, I was getting free Reiki from an alien. Bonus.

Man I don´t know what this Reikki shit is, or if it´s real, whatever you consider that to be, but that shit feels good. Just feels...good. I´m an articulate son-of-a-bitch and I don´t know how else to explain it. The Reiki session I got from Gay Matt, lying in the shade of the outdoor veranda, was going really well until the left side of my brain started freaking out when Matt told me about the visions he´d seen while giving me Reiki. Then he introduced me to Dr. John.

The doctor was making use of his poor Spanish downstairs in the House of Healers with a room full of local Mayans and holding something that looked like a growth-stunted blow-dryer to a woman´s belly. He explained to me that these were sick people, who had come to him for help. Right then he was curing a women from a virus in her bloodstream with an Electromagnitc Pulser: the growth-stunted blow-dryer. “This can cure anything,” he explained, waving the blow-dryer around as if attacking any air-borne pathogens floating in the room. “I´ve cured people with malaria, AIDS, cancer. Tumors just go away.” Hell, a coupla weeks before, The Healers in Dr. John´s group had gone to Antigua to get tested for STDs (for reasons I´ll mention later), and Dr. John had wanted someone´s test to come up postitive for AIDS so he could heal them with the Electromagnetic Pulser thing. He went on to tell me that the miracle blow-dryer has been outlawed in the U.S. under pressure from powerful pharmaceutical companies that know they´ll be out of business if this thing gets released.

Dr. John explained that people here know him as “Dr. Gato”: Dr. Cat, for some reason I couldn´t figure out until he started making purring noises and laughing with the Mayan woman who had the blow-dryer back on her belly. When he finished with her he took me into the back room. We talked for a bit and I felt slightly less sketched-out by this shady character when he told me he had a Masters in psychology, was a licensed chiropractor and had studied Tropical Medicine for three years. Then he read my tarot and did kinetics tests with crystals and hugged me while speaking in tongues: “Samma lanna koofa janana,” Dr. Cat told me.

Over the next couple months I spent enough time with Dr. John and his House of Healers to get to know them a bit, and I never knew things could work this way, never imagined it: Gay Matt and Erin are two of Dr. John´s followers. Dr. John´s been in Guatemala for years, holding ceremonies, healing his followers and doing clinics to give medicine out to locals. Right now he´s just got a couple followers, but other times he´s had 15 or 20 people living with him, following him as he travels the country, taking classes with him and having lots of Tantric Sex.

Yes, they have lots of Tantric Sex, or “Sex Magic” as Dr. John sometimes calls it, which doesn´t necessarily include penetration or even oral-sex. From what I gather, the idea is that there´s something very powerful about the moment of orgasm and in that instant, the possibility briefly opens to make profound life changes.

Alright guys, I just want to take a minute to defend Dr. Gato. The guy is out there, that´s for sure, and he´s got a lot of fucking weird beliefs. I mean shit, the guy thinks he can communicate with aliens (other than Gay Matt). But hold off for just a second on completely dismissing the guy because I can´t because well…

Listen: about a month ago I went to Antigua to take a course and learn how to give Reiki. The guy who taught it was awesome: a Guatemalan named Luis, so wise and soft-spoken and the course was fantastic and its one of those things I only wish I could realy make a part of my life. The guy travels around the U.S. and Europe teaching and giving Reiki. At the end of the course, Luis told us how he´d first been exposed to Reiki. Four years ago, he was homeless and addicted to heroine. He met Dr. John and became one of his followers (and had lots of Tantric Sex with him, I´m sure, although he didn´t mention it). Dr. John taught him Reiki and changed his life around.

Two hours ago I was sitting in my kitchen talking with Alex, a level-headed all-around cool Scottish dude. Alex had one normal and one seriously shrunken testical: we´re talking pea-size. That and a severe case of Paraniod Schizophrenia with whip cream and a maraschino cherry to top it off. Yes Alex had problems when he started his Arizona-to-South-America-over-land trip 6 years ago. But he never made it past Guatemala after meeting Dr. John. In the end, he spent a year studyding with the doctor and doing lots of Tantric Sex. His testicals are now both normal-sized and his schizophrenia hasn´t come back since.

In the age of Spam emails telling me I can reverse hair loss, enlarge my penis, extend my life and have live internet-sex with Jeniffer all at the same time I´m skeptical of everything. And you better believe I´m skeptical of Dr. John. But theres something going on that my western upbrining can´t explain, and I can´t help being curious.

So what do you say…should I take the Tantric plunge?

Third world t-shirts

Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Sylvester Stalone may have fallen from glory in the U.S., but in Guatemala they´ve never been cooler. Saturday is market day in Todos Santos, when the small town is flooded with thousands of vendors and buyers and women with children strapped on their backs. Half the make-shift stalls sell fruits and vegetables, the other half sell extra-large shirts depicted epic classics such as Arnold Schwarzenegger´s "Predator" and Chuck Norris´ famous hit-series "Walker; Texas Ranger". Che Guevara t-shirts, with a photo of Latin America´s symbol of revolution and socialism, are apparently clumped under the same rubric of "action heros", and are as such displayed on the same clothes rack.

These cultural gems, combined with an odd assortment of second-hand clothes from the U.S., makes market day Todos Santos an interesting time to just relax and check out the apparrel.

I´ve seen all sorts of stuff. A month ago, I walked past a guy wearing a "Utah´s Hogle Zoo" baseball cap. Last week, a construction worker next door showed up wearing a T-shirt that read "BEAT THE HELL OUT OF PENN STATE." And Maximone, perhaps the oldest living man in Todos Santos, and a name you will hear again, showed up at the school a few days ago wearing a Beanie hat with the gangster slogan "Dirty South" printed on the front in grafitti font. Even funnier than what these artifacts say is that the people who wear them have no understanding of their significance. They just like the style, or they saw their friend with one, or someone gave it to them. America sells down here.

Last Saturday, I was in the market looking for a Chuck Norris shirt in my size (A more challenging task than you might imagine, as these small Mayans love wearing huge shirts), when I came across what was the most shocking article of clothing I´ve encountered in my travels: A t-shirt with pictures of Che Guevara and Osama Bin Laden displayed side by side.

What the hell does this mean? What is the maker trying to say? Are people buying this? I, at any rate, knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and immediately pulled out the 20 Quetzales (about $2.50) for the purchase and took the shirt home with me.

I´ve worn the shirt a few times, but I´m always afraid I´m going to meet an American who knew someone who died in 9-11. I´ve had a few tourists ask me about it: "Whats up with that shirt?", they ask. I have to tell them I have no idea, I just found in in the market.

Earlier this week, I had to make a border run to Mexico to get a new Guatemalan visa, which expires every 90 days. I spent a couple days in the Comitan, a gorgeous colonial town near the border, just eating good food and enjoying the luxuries the second-world enjoys over the third. Sitting in the central plaza, I looked up from my book to see a young guy walk by wearing a "U.S.A" shirt, only the "S" was a swastika. He looked like a nice guy, smiling, enjoying the afternoon with his young wife and newborn baby. I just stared. Did he understand the significance of the swastika, or did he just like the design?

That afternoon I headed to the bank to get some money from the ATM. Standing in line, I noticed the family infront of me waiting to withdraw money; the youngest kid in the family was wearing a Che Guevara/Osama shirt identical to mine. I waited till they were done using the ATM, gathered my courage, and approached them, asking in my broken spanish: "Excuse me. I have this exact shirt (pointing to the boy), and I am confused. What does it mean?". The mother answered in English, an embarrassed smile on her lips: "It means they are alike. They are fighting for the same thing."

Tread lightly, but carry a big stick.

It was a good night to own a guitar. Holding it by the neck, thrusting it around violently. At first there was just one, and then the pack joined in. When I saw Princessa I knew it was time to start swinging.

Every couple nights, when the town loses electricity, that´s when its the worst. That´s when the town streets are pitch black. That´s when dogs rule Todos Santos. I´d seen her eyeing me when I walked to my friend´s house at dusk. Princessa was peering from around the corner of her house, patiently waiting for the sun to set.

I knew she´d be there when I walked home. There was a big pile of rocks by the doorway reminents of a construction project, and as I left the comfort of my friend´s house and stepped out into the blackness I fumbled around to pick up 5 or 6, more than enough, I was sure.

I´d had discussions, near arguments. Everyone had their opinion. I opted for the aggressive approach. I´d seen the way locals handled the dogs: they threw rocks and lashed out with sticks picked up from the ground. And the dogs respected that: they ran.
I was sick of being afraid. They´d chased me too many times, and tonight would be different. Tonight I was going to make them run. And that´s where I made my mistake. I knew how the packs reacted during the days and during the nights when there was electricity and the street lights were working. It never occurred to me these animals might feed off the dark when the power goes out.

I left the house running, stones in my right hand and more in my pockets, guitar under my left arm, flipflops smacking the asphault with each stride uphill. Fuck em. They were going down. I saw the black one that hangs out near the house on the left, and started sprinting straight towards it, rock in hand and ready to rumble. As I got close it skirted away barking, alerting the others.

It felt good to be the attacker for once, but the battle had just begun. A tan colored dog came at me from the school driveway on the right, a little more aggressive than the last, barking and baring its teeth. A small mut quickly followed. The first dog saw that reinforcements had come, and ran back to join. I was scared, but doing ok. Throwing rocks and pretending to lunge at them as they began to circle around me.

And thats when she came. Her full teeth showing like a wolf, head tucked down, and those eyes just staring: Princessa.

I´d heard stories. She´d bitten more than 20 tourists over the past 4 years. One was lucky enough to have pepper spray on them and got her right in the eyes. She ran away wimpering but never forgot. Everytime that tourist walked by she´d stare pure evil.

The rocks had no effect and my shitty aim didn´t help. I ran out of stones just as Princessa joined the group, now 4 dogs, each trying to get a piece of me. I started swinging my guitar, trying to back off at the same time. But flipflops aren´t good battle shoes. I tripped, stubbed my toe, and the shoe fell off my foot. I tried to put get it back on, but the dogs were gaining ground and I couldn´t see the flipflop in the pitchblack street.

I heard more dogs barking in the distance, and knew that more might be on the way. Now or never. I made a lunging swing with my Goya guitar, my right foot anxiously searching the ground for my shoe. I found it, slipped it on, and took off running with the pack behind.

By some act of god, they gave up the chase after 30 feet or so, I guess I´d left their turf and that´s what they´d wanted. I stumbled home through the dark streets, grateful that all I´d received was a badly-stubbed toe, full of adrenaline, feeling defeated.