So...it is Carnaval in Iquitos,Peru. I wanted to write about the unbelievably gross boat trip here from Yurimaguas, but I will do that later becuase I predict that there may be many unbelievably gross boat trips in my near future. Sigh!. Today's events have eclipsed the boat trip, and now I am just baffled by life, laughing about the absurdity, the profanity.

In some places - Brazil,Venice, Trinidad....Carnaval is this glorious, sexy, colorful event.Lascivious, drunken, flamboyant, wonderful. Iquitos is none of those things. Iquitos is the anus of the Carnaval world. Take the cheap liquor, mix it with poverty, delinquency, and jungle heat. Add none of the colors...and voila! Iquitos!

In a lot of Latin America, Carnaval just means water fights...water balloons, the odd bit of shaving cream. Here it is just taken to a nasty extreme. People line the streets with buckets, scooping the fetid, swampy, feces water out of the gutter and chucking it at you. They smear you with paint and toss flour all over you. I know it seems like in the right spirit it could be fun, but it is just so unbelievably skeevy, smelly, fishy. And it is mean! There are no colors, no music, no dancing, just aggression. And perhaps a little Typhoid fever. I have been attacked so many times today. Piss and garbage. bleck!! Best was when someone ran behind me and slathered a large fist full of black shoe polish all over my face. For those of you who have never experienced the joy of getting shoe polish up your nose and in your teeth, let me tell you.........such fun! And now I have a really stylish Cruella de Ville two toned hair do. Fun Fun Fun. I love Carnaval.

  I have to laugh at myself for being so grumpy about it (though you might be grumpy too if your eyes were sealed closed with shoe polish!) I am always singing the praises of the recklessness here, the deathly go cart races, the bloody fireworks competition. I glow over these culturally sanctioned moments of anarchy, and lament the loss of that chaos in the United States. So, I guess i should just take the good with the bad and stop complaining about Carnaval here. It is merely the underbelly of a beast I love.

And speaking of beasts I love.....Dex! When I last left off, Dex was covered in parrot shit, yanking the horns of an angry bull, surrounded by shards of broken glass...........fast forward (through many precious moments too numerous to recount. That boy is a constant source of entertainment)...........Every time I saw him today he was dripping wet, smeared with various paints, the flour forming a pasty skin on his already scabby flesh. He smelled like garbage and looked bewildered. I will give him credit for being a great sport during Carnaval. He just kept right at it, set himself up for abuse. And then he kept wanting to hug me, and taking it personally when I kinda shied away from his drippiness.

He apparently accepted a few too many free shots of agua ardiente. He was drunk and contemplative.He wandered into the hotel room in one of these drippy, smelly states, swaying drunk. I was hiding out there, forgoing food in order to avoid the throngs of rabid sewer people outside. David was there too, playing his guitar. Actually, David was playing his guitar with a towel draped over his face....naked. David is a hippy and he does these things. I have been to enough Rainbow Gatherings and shit that it all seems perfectly normal to me. Dex didn't seem phased either. We are a nice bunch.

Somehow it was decided that David and Dex were going to run into the crowded street and flash everyone. Dex stripped off his clothes and bound down the stairs. It all happened while I was in the bathroom, and I wasn't quite aware of what was going on until I found David on the balcony, laughing and pointing to the crowded street below. And there was Dex. He held his nappy shorts like a bullfighter's cape. He proudly displayed his manhood to the gasping masses. He danced salsa. He shimmied. He threw up his arms and paraded down the streets like Madonna in "La Isla Bonita". It was marvelously wrong.

Everyone began screaming, which only brought more spectators. From the balcony two floors above, I could see people running from all directions. Apparently the word had spread like wildfire that a crazy gringo was dancing naked. And not just dancing, but PRANCING. For ten minutes Dex just skipped and twirled up and down the street, acting flirtatious and defiant.

Then he would scream like a monster and chase children.

Ug! I am reading what I write and it is SO insufficient. I don't think there is any string of adjectives that could quite capture the spectacle of a six-foot-four, skeletal white man pirouetting down a fetid market street, with legions of children marching behind him....like some creepy pedophile parade. There are no words. Only laughter.

This is the weird part, the thing that shakes me up and gives me pause: Precisely as Dex was causing a traffic jam outside our balcony, there was another commotion moving closer on a side street. From above I had a perfect view of these two masses of people about to converge. Looking down into the second group of people I noticed that they were all crowded around something. A dead body!

 They were dragging a dead man through the street. Dragging him! Everyone was crowded around, poking, speculating, laughing. And they just dragged him, directly toward the intersection where Dex was naked samba dancing. I have no idea who the man was, nor how he died, nor why he was being dragged. But the convergence of two such obscene spectacles, in the wake of such a surreal, aggressive, putrid day........I just felt like the air got sucked away from around me. I don't know what to make of it. Such contrast, the solemnity of death mixed with the absurdity of Dex, the profanity of the crowd.

Can you imagine to live your whole life, only to die like that?

Dex however, never noticed the dead man. He scampered up the stairs to the balcony. By now there was a vast crowd below us. Dex, still naked, still drunk, thrust his arms out to the crowd. He made me think of Evita on the balcony of the Pink Palace, addressing her devout supporters.

 "LIBERTAD!" he screamed.

"BE FREE!!! DON'T LET ANYONE CONTROL YOU!!!"

He gave a rousing speech in drunken Spanish. When the police lights appeared at the edge of the crowd, Dex ran into our room, dove on to the bed, and pretended that he had just quietly been reading his novel all along.

And this is where I left him. And here I am. Life is so funny. I think I am going to eat chocolate.

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