Chapter 6. Escape to Passion

Phoenix Falling-gbcouper

“Conveniently, Max,” David primed my expectation, “this woman is going to be leaving town in a few weeks. She’s a fundraiser for schools or something in Nicaragua. She’s coming over this afternoon and is interested in being shown a good time, you know.”

That day I watched her walk across the sand and stand above the group with feet planted, giving me the once-over. David proceeded with the formalities, “Kuka, this is the guy I’ve been telling you about. Max, this is Kuka. She’s leaving for Honduras in a few days.”

There was the usual chit-chat and laughter but Kuka had a serious demeanor about her. Her name, Kuka, spoke of her experience growing up on the Rio Coco, the border between Honduras and Nicaragua, and her native Miskito culture. She wore an embroidered shirt emblazoned with wildly vibrating colors of silken threads; reds, greens, cerulean blues, contrasted by plain loose cotton shorts over the brown of her smooth skin. I sat in near rapture that any woman this beautiful and full of spirit was talking to me at all. Clearly out of my league, I thought. Besides the Beach Committee, no one I’d hung out with cared about anything but staying stoned.

Stoned, yes, Michael rolled a joint and passed it around. Each took a toke until it got to Kuka, she waved it off and passed it to me.

It was still a counter-culture sacrament to share a joint in those days. I had to ask, “You don’t smoke?”

“No, my job’s too demanding. I need a clear head.”

It was curious to me that her voice had a hint of a Caribbean patois. I’d expected a Spanish accent and just to hear her speak… hypnotized by her sensuous lips moving, I asked, “What kind of work?”

“I’m a teacher. It isn’t so much what I do, but where I do it.”

I wanted to impress her for reasons entirely unknown to me. I found this simple gesture of abstinence appealing to me and I felt a need to let her know that I had a serious side along with a rudimentary knowledge of world affairs. Opining, “I find it a paradox that the peaceful overthrow of the Government of the Shah in Iran was replaced by a worse oppressive and horrible theocracy while the much more violent revolution in Nicaragua was more favorable to democracy.”

I tried to be as erudite as I could but the sound of my own voice laying down the usual stoner rap embarrassed me. I thought of my words, I find it a paradox, eh? I never spoke like this in Vacaville… but it was a good word… an intellectual word… meaning very little more to me than blah… blah… blah. I had her attention but her reaction wasn’t at all what I thought it would be.

“You don’t get it, do you,” she accusingly snorted un-lady like, “It’s damned near worse there with Ortega than when Somosa ran the place. I was there in Managua when they decided the Miskitos weren’t fucking revolutionary enough for them. Some actually spoke openly of camps and extermination. That never made the headlines of the LA Times, did it?”

“I don’t know anything about mosquito Indians,” I admitted.

“Did it?” she repeated, demanding an answer.

“No. It didn’t. I guess you’re right.”

I’d expected her to be a Sandinista and, when she was evidently not, I was caught off guard. I had to admit to myself that I knew nothing of Nicaraguan history or politics. Her Reggie beat English Creole patois took over her accent. It became more like I’d heard in Jamaica.

“You guess right. But don’t be embarrassed. Not many in Washington know about us either. The Spaniards called the people of the coast, mosquitos, but that’s a name for a bug… a pest. We took the name, Miskito with a ‘K’, from them.”

My astonishment must have made me look like just another dumb-white-boy. She spelled it out for my benefit, “M – I – S - K - I - T - O.”

I looked around. David winked at me. He and the others were engaged in a scrabble game and weren’t paying attention to us.

Kuka’s deep brown eyes and a face framed by thick-wavy-jet-black hair, with lips opening and closing to a cadence of words about tragedy and failed expectations of the Creoles, the Miskito tribes, on the Gulf Coast of Nicaragua. Her story held my full attention. Then, breaking through the hypnosis of her eyes, I heard a familiar name.

“I was with my cousin in Managua when Edén Pastora took over Somosa’s palace in ‘78’. I was with him after he returned from Cuba.”

“Pastora, Commander Zero: isn’t he a Contra?” I listened and asking questions was my way of letting her know I was doing just that. The truth was, since the concussion, I didn’t give a rats-ass about Nicaraguan revolution or the Iranians either. But I vaguely remembered some of it.  Clinical depression was an entirely self-obsessed dysfunction. It had to be so, I supposed. My theory about depression justified itself by proposing that it was evolution’s way of equipping folks to survive serious trauma… trauma like cracking one’s skull from ear-to-ear. I feared that the way out of depression might have been to care about something; a cause, or, a union with something greater than myself. It is as though I’d been waiting for something like that since I lost it all. But, any reluctance was based on the possibility that the way into suicidal depression was to be presented with a calling, and then hopelessly finding oneself unequipped for it. Such a cause as hers was a great wager to throw myself into but I was almost intrigued enough to do so for a beautiful and strong woman like her. Anything like that, after what I’d experienced, was the cure but, like chemo-therapy for cancer patients, this sort of action had its risks. I was already imagining us making love in the jungle when her voice broke through.

“You Americans have this warped idea of what the Contras are.” She drew a rough map in the sand with her finger… “This is the North of Nicaragua… and this is the East Coast where the Miskito live. The Northern command is heavily armed and aided by the CIA but they mostly sit around smoking dope in Honduras… sending raids across the border to hit heavy targets: heavy targets like children in elementary schools.”

I had to admit that she was right, I had no idea what to think. My ideas of the Contras were based on reports in the LA Times and the LA Free Press: that they were all reactionaries… death squads… mercenaries, bought and paid for by the CIA.  I’d read a little about the Sandinista’s and how a few of their military leaders had switched sides shortly after Somosa was ousted. I knew very little of the inner workings; who’s in, who’s out, of the mess in Central America except, that President Ronald Reagan was for the Contra’s, and Daniel Ortega was damned near a saint. I liked watching the way her brown arms contrasted with the white embroidered blouse and how her perky breasts wiggled and peaked through at times to complete the hypnotic trance she had me in.

“The Miskitos are here,” circling the side of her map, “and the ones not driven into camps have fled to Honduras and Costa Rica with either Pastora or Bermudez. We are independent; the Spanish, the English, the Americans, Somosa, and now, the Sandinistas, have tried to co-opt, enlist, or erase us from the Coast.” She slammed her fist down on the sand where I imagined a naked people with blow guns scurrying into the forests to hide from Conquistadors. “But we are still here.”

The Iran/Contra Affair had been buzzing around the alternative press at that time; and, of course, anyone opposed to the Sandinista’s was the personification of evil. Among my liberal friends, myself included, there was a ready acceptance that leftist revolutionaries were beacons of humanity and, any contrary groups, however slight the gradient distinctions, were considered ogres of neo-fascism.

Myra would move on and out of my life along with the illusion that all would be healed. David and Michael moved away and bought a house in Malibu. The Beach Committee was no more. High-end shops and clubs were replacing, one by one, the funky stores on Main Street and only the Circle Bar remained. I had no ambitions for the future. My hopes for rekindling a career in the arts, which had risen in Santa Monica, had come tumbling down. The energy of creation slithered like a snake and rarely ascended in a straight line for my kind. It had eluded me once more except for the introduction to Kuka before the Beach Committee disbanded.

Much to my delight and wonder, Kuka preferred drives up the coast beyond Malibu instead of Santa Monica restaurants that I couldn’t afford. On these trips, she enjoyed casting a line into the surf, lighting up some briquettes, and throwing some fresh sea bass on the grill. It was around the third adventure of this sort that Kuka proposed, “I can’t afford paying the rents here. I’m not going to be in town much longer before my business is done. How about it if I…”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I hadn’t made a move on her of any kind. I was too intimidated by her beauty to even try but, whew, “Sure, there isn’t much room though.”

“I don’t have much. Just a back pack,” she added. “I don’t mind sleeping in a van. Sometimes we sleep on hammocks in the forest. This van is a luxury, you know.”

I listened, late into the night, to stories Kuka would tell of her life on the sacred Rio Coco and what happened later of the betrayals and intrigues fighting alongside of Eden Pastora and the Sandinistas to oust the dictator, Somosa.

Kuka was mysterious and, once intrigued, my ego fluffed up when she first proposed I join her in Nicaragua as a journalist. “You don’t speak very much Spanish, but you could grasp enough of our Creole to write, Max,” Kuka drew me in with her full Creole lips, deep brown saucer eyes set within a Miskito moon face. She said, “you have a typewriter.”

“But, it’s old,” I protested feebly. “and I’m not connected with any journals or news outlets. Besides, every newspaper between the New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor, already have several professional journalists down there and, as you’ve made clear. I’m as ill-informed about what in the hell is going on in Central America as anyone can be.”

“That makes you more qualified than anyone going into Miskito country. Too many so-called radical pricks here see the Sandinistas in Managua as the only heroes of the Revolucion. The oppression on the East Coast is denser than it ever was by Somosa. Kuka would explain, “We have, since the Conquistadors, been independent of Spanish rule. Those in Managua say they are ready to eliminate the last Miskito Indians on the Atlantic Coast for the good of the Revolucion. Besides, this is a chance to drag your sorry ass out of that doldrums you’ve been languishing in. After all,” she drove her point home, “you aren’t getting any younger.”

I resigned and answered with a tinge of sarcasm, “I’m only a man of talk, eh?” This was the first time it had dawned on me that I hadn’t had much to drink since meeting her and that I was on the edge of middle-age and becoming no longer a young man.

“Yes, Max,” she sank the hook and laughed, “you will do well.”

I suspected that she over-estimated my strengths just as Celeste had. I had the demeanor of courage and, since the divorce, my spiritual core been sapped of the power to act. This was an opportunity to regain some of it and, I thought, what could be better than, if not committed to an ideal, at least being among those who are commited to an ideal? Hell, I had nothing else to do and there was nowhere I wouldn’t go with a woman like Kuka. I was drawn to women of power and turned away from women posing as the weaker sex. Maybe I hoped to sap into a little of her energy to rekindle my own.

To love, for me, was not an option. What love I once had for Celeste had become a crystalline pure hatred for her persistent refusal of any visitations with Ariel. This hatred drove me and the solution to join the violence in Central America seemed a perfect outlet for what stewed in my heart. I couldn’t see how my drinking and rage influenced Celeste fear of allowing me near Ariel. I’d even spit in her face once I found she planned to marry before the ink was dry on the divorce papers. Because of that she was justly afraid of what I might do even though I thought of myself as harmless.

Kuka stayed in the van at night and then was off on various errands for the day. Towards the end of our time in the beach town, she could find me in the Circle Bar where I’d gotten myself tight before she got there for a drink. I picked up drinking again after her offer and I thought she didn’t mind. She’d get the keys from me and the go back to curl up on the floor of the van. I tried to control my drinking, however, because she wouldn’t have sex unless I was sober. If I could have loved, I would have loved Kuka. I would have loved Myra too. I had to resign to being unable, or unwilling, to love anyone… not even one as attractive as Kuka.

I might not have loved Kuka in the sense that is commonly thought of as love, but I did have a wild, untamed lust, and affection for her. I would have gone to Antarctica with her had she bid it so. I realized later that she used the VW as a perfect mobile hide-out while she went about her business. She often demanded that I move it every morning and sometimes she would wake me in the middle of the night if she suspected a parked car nearby.

“There are watchers,” she warned.

I was compliant and thought she was paranoid until I spotted a pair of men parked down the street in a sedan with binoculars.

The Circle Bar was my office where I waited for Kuka but, by the time she was finished with her errands, I was drunk. This began to put her off to the idea of a tandem flight to Honduras, though she’d already gone so far as to acquire for me a bogus press card for an obscure mercenary trade rag like Soldier of Fortune, she had her doubts.

“Max, you don’t know what you are doing. I wanted you to come with me at first but you turned out to be a drunk. Do you understand? You can’t be a fuckin’ drunk in Nicaragua!”

I was insulted by her rude assessment. “I can quit drinking any time I want. I just have a few while I'm waiting for you."

"Oh? It's my fault now. Blame it on me!" 

"I haven’t always been like this, you know.” I dismissed her concern. 

I knew I had nothing going for me in Santa Monica and was desperate to leave. Besides, I was convinced I could manage my drinking and had become attracted to the idea of trying my hand at journalism as much as I was attracted to Kuka. After all, I hadn’t much to drink at all during our first weeks together… before she suggested Nicaragua. I never wondered why I started drink more after her offer and never suspected I was afraid of the challenge of a life with meaning.

Kuka moved back into a motel room after that talk. I put up for a few weeks at a friend’s place way out in Redlands. I parked the van in a vacant lot where I arranged with an old acquaintance to store it. I returned to Santa Monica in a Datsun wagon that barely ran and wasn’t registered or insured. The tags on it had been stolen and, therefore, it might as well have been stolen too. 

I drove her to the airport and we argued until we arrived. I begged her to let me join her. I thought of it as my only chance at redemption... my Fire Bird rising from the ashes.