Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

35. a fool for wonder

In the years since the selling of Still Life With Woodpecker, I’ve finally had the wherewithal to indulge, pretty much at will and in relative comfort, those urges kindled by that world atlas I bought at age eight. When I wasn’t absorbed with writing (including research, editing, and some publisher-generated promotion); and/or extracurricular activities such as reading for pleasure, attending movies, following the Sonics, playing organized volleyball, practicing yoga and Pilates, and periodically running away with Cupid’s circus (knowing full well I’d probably end up selling peanuts or watering the elephants), I was off to foreign lands in pursuit of fresh experiences: cultural, culinary, or simply thrilling (such as the African treks or the white-water rafting I’ve enjoyed on three continents).

My wife Alexa, the wisest person I know, says that all those pursuits of mine, including the love of words and the loving of women — and certainly not excluding my involvement with psychedelic drugs and Tibetan/Zen “crazy wisdom” philosophies — have been part and parcel of the same overriding compulsion: a lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder. I’m prepared neither to argue with that observation nor advance it; any reader who’s so motivated can draw his or her own conclusion. My immediate intention is to say a little something about Cuba.

I traveled to Cuba in 1978, partly because it was forbidden (no American had legally set foot there in about twenty years), partly because I wished to see for myself how much of the official picture the U.S. painted of our small island neighbor was just Cold War propaganda. (A fair amount, as it turned out.) I could not honestly say that the Great Mystery was in any way involved, although I did, after an evening of dancing at the fabled Tropicana nightclub, make love with a vacationing French Canadian schoolteacher during a ferocious Caribbean storm, and there was definitely a transcendent presence in the room. Forget Barry White, Percy Sledge, Mantovani, and Sinatra; forget romantic mood music of any genre: nothing surpasses crackling lightning, apocalyptic thunder, thrashing palm fronds (Aphrodite fanning the ozone), and hard-driving torrents of rain as inspirational background audio for a night of tropical love.

Upon learning that there were regular flights from Canada to Cuba, I’d phoned my friend James Lee Stanley and convinced him to join in the escapade. He canceled a few gigs (James Lee is a singer/songwriter), we booked a fifteen-day excursion, and a month later flew from Montreal to Havana on a Russian airliner. On the hour-long bus ride from José Martí Airport to the small, funky seaside resort which was to be our headquarters during our visit, our hosts passed around bottles of rum, and it wasn’t long before James Lee had his guitar out and we all — Cubans, Canadians, and us two Americans — were singing “Guantanamera.” We were already having fun, and I hadn’t met the schoolteacher yet.

James Lee and I, in fact, had rambunctious fun the entire time we spent in Cuba, which set us apart from the many Russians there and endeared us to the natives. In those years, Cuba was the Soviet Union’s Hawaii. If, for example, Ivan’s section of a Russian tractor factory met or exceeded its production quota, Ivan and his family might be awarded a holiday in a tropical paradise. Just how paradisiacal Ivan found Cuba, however, was open to question. The Russians would not even attempt Latin dances, they eschewed local rum in favor of their own vodka, and when besotted would sit around teary-eyed, singing old mournful nationalistic songs. You’d see a busload of them on their way to the beach and from their expressions you’d think they were being shipped to a gulag. In private, Cubans — a warm, ebullient people who love love love to dance — mocked the Russians, referring to them as “square heads.”

What became apparent during our visit is that ordinary Cubans were deeply grateful to the Soviet government for its assistance in a time of need, but were somewhat contemptuous of the Russian people. Conversely, they despised the American government but maintained a genuine fondness for individual Americans. That dichotomy is easy to understand if you know anything about Cuban history and America’s long record of oppressive behavior toward the island, but I shan’t get into that here. I will say that while I came away with sympathy, even admiration for Cuba, my favorable impression did not extend to its socialist economy, whose austerity and uniformity was itself oppressive. The conspicuous consumption in capitalist countries such as ours is deadening to the soul, but an absence of variety and choice can be psychically impoverishing, as well.

The lone pizza parlor in Havana did not sell beer, although it would have been entirely legal to do so. In no beer garden could you buy a snack. When you hailed a taxi, the driver would pick you up only if he happened to be going in the direction you wished to go. The cabbie earned the same amount each day regardless of how many fares he picked up, the merchant’s profits increased not a peso when he moved more product than expected. Was the average citizen happy with this rigid and prescribed arrangement? Despite his or her fierce (and understandable) pride in the 1959 revolution that overthrew the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista and evicted the U.S. businessmen and Mafia dons who supported him, I suspected not. Secretly, when they felt they could trust James Lee and me, the Cubans we’d befriended would plead with us to somehow get them cassette players, radios, rock albums, or blue jeans.

There are things in this world — even material things — that supersede politics, exhilarating things that support a personal liberation of the spirit; and on a crude, unevolved level may even represent a longing to connect to the Mystery.

Suzette from Quebec notwithstanding, my most cherished memory of Cuba stems from an occasion of mechanical and linguistic miscarriage. A party from the gringo resort was off on a day trip to the Bay of Pigs when our vintage bus stalled near the center of a small town. It was midday, hotter than the fiddles of hell, and having no luck in restarting the engine, our driver urged us to get off the bus and find a place, if we could, in the shade. We huddled beneath a lone tree in the square, preparing for a long wait as he tinkered with the engine. We should have known there would be bad juju associated with the Bay of Pigs.

James Lee retrieved his guitar and commenced to strum, even to quietly sing a little. Up to that point, the town had seemed unoccupied. There wasn’t a soul or a sole in the square, the surrounding houses showed no sign of current human habitation. Someone suggested that Castro had drafted the entire population to go cut sugarcane, someone else dismissed that as U.S. propaganda. James Lee continued to play. And slowly, very slowly, one by one — kids first, then adults — people came out of their homes and drifted into the square. It was as if James Lee was an immobile Pied Piper.

James played louder. People drew closer. And before long there was an impromptu fiesta in progress: literally dozens of people singing along, mostly to interminable renditions of “Guantanamera,” the one song to which all present knew the words. Obviously, we weren’t Russian, but it took a while before James and I were identified as Americans, for many, if not most of them, had never encountered an American. They knew some rock and roll, however, having listened clandestinely and at considerable risk to Miami radio stations. And they knew Chiclets. Man, did they know Chiclets. Somewhere — if only in their mythology — they’d come into contact with the tiny pellets of candy-coated chewing gum and automatically associated them with America. The land of the free and the home of the Chiclets. Chiclets and stripes forever!

Hesitant to interrupt James Lee — in Cuba you don’t mess with the music — kids surrounded me, just pleading for Chiclets. Now I knew practically no Spanish, and much of what I did know was from a Tex-Mex idiom not widely understood in Cuba — but I’d seen handmade signs in California shop windows that read SE HABLA ESPANOL, a statement I always took to mean “We have Spanish,” as in “We have command of the Spanish language.” For years, I’d been confusing habla with the verb haber, “to have,” when in actuality, hablar is the verb “to speak.” So when I kept protesting to the young Cubans, enunciating clearly so they wouldn’t misinterpret, “No habla Chiclets,” what I was really saying was “I don’t speak Chiclets.”

Well, it was an honest statement: I did not speak Chiclets. Later, however, when I came to realize why the Cubans had been regarding me as if I were some kind of Yankee nut job, I had to ask myself, “Why not?” Trying to imagine what Chiclets might sound like, I began to teach myself a basic Chiclet lexicon. You know, the essential phrases. I still recall a few (they sound like passages from Beowulf being recited by cartoon mice), but can only pronounce them after I’ve consumed four or more Cuba libres.

Linguistically versatile if far from fluent, I can goof up any number of languages and with varying results. The first time I dined alone in Paris, for instance, I made a mistake that conceivably could have gone in my favor.

Perusing the menu at Polidor, my favorite affordable restaurant in that city of magnificent and expensive places to eat, I thought that the veal in a cream sauce sounded good. However, when the drastically cute waitress came to take my order, I mistakenly asked not for veau en crème but vous en crème, and it took me a moment before I understood that I’d told her that I wanted her in cream.

Of course, that was what I really wanted. Like no habla Chiclets, it was a truthful statement, and Freud, bless his heart, would have immediately recognized it as such. The waitress, being French, simply took it in stride. With neither a giggle nor a blush, she wrote down my order and brought me the veal. It was delicious, but having now comprehended my error and fantasized about the potential result, I couldn’t help but feel a wee bit cheated.

Linguistic malfunctions involving chewable and edible substances are not limited to peasants such as I. Consider John F. Kennedy on a historic day in Germany in 1963.

Among the confections favored by sweet-toothed Deutschen is a jelly-filled pastry they call the Berliner. Now, in the German language, articles of speech (such as “a,” “an,” “the,” etc.) are never placed in front of nationalities or other nouns that identify persons according to their place of origin, although articles, quite naturally, are placed in front of pastries. Thus, there are waggish grammarians who insist that when President Kennedy — shod in hand-tooled leather shoes, a fine Harvard cravat about his neck — buttoned himself into a heavy black cashmere-and-wool topcoat, stepped from a bulletproof limousine onto a privileged podium, and with dignity, passion, and compassion announced his solidarity with a beleaguered city by intoning, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” what he actually said was, “I am a jelly doughnut.”

There are others — mostly earnest liberals — who argue that this interpretation is merely an attempt to besmirch the reputation of a great statesman. I contend it’s nothing of the sort. From my perspective, in fact, the opposite is true. I’ve had occasion now to lug my taste buds all over the planet, exposing them to dishes ranging from the sublime — foie gras mousse in a brown morel sauce (Paris), and warm zabaglione with fresh wild strawberries (Rome), to the challenging — snow-frog fat in custard (Hong Kong), and red ant larva (northern Thailand). In all my gastronomic globe-trotting, however, I cannot honestly say that any food item, with the possible exception of a perfect tomato sandwich, has had a greater impact on my palate and my eye or generated richer, more varied imagerial associations than the jelly doughnut, that plump pastry Pantheon, that unbroken circle, that holy tondo, that doughy dome of heaven, that female breast swollen with sweetness, that globe of glorious goo, that secret round nest of the scarlet-throated calorie warbler, that sun whose rays so ignite the proletariat palate, that hub of the wheel of sustenance, that vampire cookie gorged with gore, that clown in an army overcoat, that fat fried egg with a crimson yoke, that breakfast moon, that bulging pocket, that strawberry alarm clock, that unicorn turd, that jewel pried from the head of a greasy idol (a ruby as big as the Ritz), that Homeric oculus (blind yet all-seeing), that orb, that pod, that crown, that womb, that knob, that bulb, that bowl, that grail, that… well, you get the picture.

Whether consciously or subliminally, JFK could not have identified himself with a more wide-ranging, democratically inclusive sustenance than a jelly doughnut. How might it have affected his legacy, not to mention world peace, had he proclaimed “Ich bin ein Kraut” (I am a cabbage) or “Ich bin ein Kartoffelpuffer” (I am a potato pancake) instead?

As I may have made clear in these confessions (luckily for the reader, and me, as well, Chiclets isn’t a written language), I’ve never been accused of gastronomic timidity. In recent years, I have become increasingly disinclined to partake of morsels intimately connected to deceased members of the animal kingdom, but I can recall only once in my travels when I shied away from an opportunity to sample exotic fare in an exotic setting. That occurred when I was invited to sup with my subjects (that’s right, subjects) on the day I reigned (I’m not joking) as King of the Cannibals.

I was in northwestern Sumatra with a small group — eight paying river rafters, four guides from Sobek/Mountain Travel (the California-based adventure company), and an English-speaking Indonesian forest ranger who spent his downtime reading Louis L’Amour cowboy novels — intent on becoming the second party to ever run the Alas, a remote river that cuts through the largest expanse of tropical rain forest left in Asia; a dense jungle, home to orangutans, rhinos, and tigers, and perpetually threatened by Japanese timber companies.

Adventure travel is by definition unpredictable, and in the steamy dawn, as we set out from Berstagi aboard a snub-nosed buslike vehicle of unknown manufacture, hoping to put our inflatable boats in the water before the sun became more ornery than any L’Amour gunslinger, we found ourselves on a fortuitous anthropological detour. At a pee stop in the leafy hills not far from where the pavement runs out, we met a surprisingly sensitive field geologist from Mobil Oil, who informed us with genuine excitement that a rare daylong exhumation ceremony was about to transpire in an isolated village of the Karo Batak, a tribe of former (?) cannibals, and though disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to join us there, he drew us a crude map to the place in case we were intrigued. We were. Following the oilman’s directions, we drove an abusive dirt road to its dead end, then hiked five miles (this had better be good) into a National Geographic wet dream.

Aside from the occasional oil explorer, timber cruiser, or misguided Christian missionary, the Karo Batak had never been exposed to blue-eyed devils. Yet, when — blue eyes as wide as poker chips — our foreign mob suddenly appeared out of nowhere, we were received as honored guests. So gracious was their hospitality, in fact, that after a confab, tribal leaders declared that a pair from our group would be crowned their king and queen for the day.

Being obviously strong and demonstratively sweet-natured, Beth, a veteran Colorado River guide, was a logical choice for queen. Why they chose me as their king I haven’t a clue. Certainly it had nothing to do with my literary reputation, although some novelists are known to practice verbal cannibalism, biting and gnawing on one another insatiably at cocktail parties or in reviews. At any rate, our hosts escorted Beth and me to sexually segregated longhouses where they wrapped us in regal sarongs and other colorful raiments and hung about thirty pounds of solid gold ornaments — the village treasury — from our respective necks and appendages. (They must have figured we were too weighted down to skip town.)

There was then a royal procession back to the principal longhouse, where now on display were the remains of seven persons recently exhumed from the graves where they’d lain for seven years while their families saved enough money to fund the ceremony that would finally usher their spirits into the Karo Batak version of heaven. The bones were lovingly washed, dried, and stacked in seven neat piles, a skull atop each pile like a bleached cherry on a Halloween sundae. Then the celebration began.

Squatting along the sidelines, several older women, grandmother types, were chewing betel nut, and though readers may find this hard to believe, I felt it only polite to join in. The grannies, with big toothless grins, obliged me. Well, as I soon discovered, betel nut ain’t Chiclets, baby. Wrapped in a leaf coated with a paste of mineral lime (the stuff with which we used to line ball fields and tennis courts), betel nut numbed my mouth, stained my teeth and lips the color of a matador’s hankie, and left sores on my gums that didn’t heal for days, but it gave me the energy to keep pace with my “subjects” as the lot of us danced ritualistically around and around and around those graveyard sundaes.

The steps were repetitive, fairly easy to learn, and in a kind of conga line that jerked rhythmically to music provided by two groups of drummers and snake-charmer flute-tooters, we literally danced the day away. The relatives of the deceased, having sacrificed for years to finance this ritual, at the conclusion of which the remains were to be permanently reburied, weren’t about to waste a minute of it.

Afternoon was beginning to purple like the best English prose when the music abruptly stopped, dancers relaxed, and the entire tribe seemed to utter an extended sigh of accomplishment and release. Queen Beth now emerged from a dark corner of the longhouse, where she’d sequestered herself most of the day, afraid perhaps that she might be pressed to dance, chew betel nut (though only the elderly — and I — so indulged), or, worse, allow her royal spouse his conjugal rights. Members of our rafting party exchanged glances now, wondering if it wasn’t time to take our leave. It was then that our eyes were directed to a voluminous cauldron resting on live coals at the center of the longhouse, and in which there bubbled a stew more gray in color than that shade of gray that separates the eater from the eaten. It was din-din time in the cannibal village. Definitely time to go.

Now, in fairness, the Karo Batak seemed much too innocent, too tame to be practicing man-eaters, and despite periodic reports to the contrary (rumors spread by neighboring tribes), were said by the Indonesian government not to have lunched on their fellows in about four generations. Some were converted Christians (leading me to wonder if they didn’t especially enjoy Holy Communion), and the Karo Batak mind is so inexplicably disposed to the game of chess that within a year after being instructed in its intricacies, members were said to be playing on a par with European masters. Go figure. Nevertheless, one look at that ghoulish gray stew and we were moved to excuse ourselves. Beth and I changed out of our sarongs, surrendered our gold trappings (the headpieces alone could have financed a Las Vegas pawnshop), and as abdicating monarchs, shook every hand in the village before taking the long muddy trek back to our bus.

Now, at the very worst, that stew meat was dog. Or monkey. More than likely it was only chicken. Be that as it may, I shall never cease to insist that once upon a time, in the tiger-haunted hills of Sumatra, I wielded the savage scepter of the King of the Cannibals. And at those who might dispute that claim, I’m fully prepared to hurl the ancient and traditional curse of the Karo Batak: “I pick the flesh of your relatives from between my teeth.”

Two days before we hobnobbed with the Karo Batak, we’d visited an orangutan rehabilitation center. It’s true, but lest anyone think that in some Darwinian fluke the big red apes might be distantly related to Lindsay Lohan, let me assure you that what plagues orangutans isn’t drugs or booze. These primates were addicted to something far more dangerous: human beings. Imagine a Betty Ford Clinic where the demon to be exorcised was Betty Ford.

Baby orangutans were said to make wonderful pets. Beautiful in a sort of goofy way — resembling a cross between Homer Simpson, Lucille Ball, and the Gerber Baby — they look like a creature you might expect to speak Chiclets. Instead, they jabber primate nursery noises, and gurgling and cooing, become very attached to their human owners, upon whom they bestow bountiful hugs and kisses. They remain affectionate as they grow older, but by the time they’re half grown, they’ve become so strong they’re breaking ribs with their embraces and furniture with their playfulness. Among affluent Indonesians, it has long been a fad, a status symbol, to keep a young orangutan as a house pet — that is, until it reaches an age when, innocently enough, it becomes a house wrecker.

There’s a law in Sumatra against harboring an orangutan, but the Dutch, who controlled the island until 1949, devised a program whereby a wealthy violator could “donate” his rowdy juvenile ape to the government. The owner would thereby avoid punishment and save face (important in that society), the ape would go into rehab. At the forest compound east of the capital, Medan, pet apes would be weaned from human dependence, made wary, even fearful, of men; and gradually reconditioned so that theoretically they could function independently in the wild. A high platform had been erected in the jungle about a half mile from the compound proper, and very early each morning, bananas and milk would be set out atop it, on the presumption that the surrendered apes hadn’t yet learned to sufficiently fend for themselves. Visitors like us, who’d hiked into the feeding station, would start to hear branches snapping as one by one, young orangutans would come swinging through the trees to receive their government handout: a simian food bank, you might say.

As implied, the rehab compound was quite a ways in the boondocks. In order to make that sunup hike to the feeding platform, our rafting group had to spend the night at the compound. The Dutch had built two Western-style houses on the grounds, one of which was occupied by resident rangers, the other left empty for visitors; and by empty, I mean completely unfurnished. We were to lay out our sleeping bags on the bare floors of the two main rooms. There was, however, a tiny room in the rear, off the kitchen and near the edge of the jungle, that had a separate entrance — and a cot. Now, I’d hurt my back on the volleyball court shortly before leaving home, so I petitioned our Sobek guides to allow me, for my spine’s sake, to sleep in that room. To be honest, sore back or no sore back, the main reason I coveted those isolated accommodations was that I’m an almost pathologically light sleeper: should a moth land on my windowpane or somebody strike a paper match within forty yards of my bed, I snap instantly awake. You might as well set off fireworks next to my bed as snore in my vicinity, and I knew that Big Jim Pleyte, with whom I’d previously camped in Africa, was, for one, a world-class snorer.

When, however, our guides asked permission for me to sleep in the little room, it was denied. We were told that it was reserved for rangers. As bedtime arrived and the room showed no sign of occupancy, Beth petitioned again on my behalf. And when refused, she persisted. Beth wouldn’t give up. She just badgered. Finally, the ranger in charge reluctantly caved in. I unfolded my sleeping bag on the cot’s bare mattress and enjoyed a restful slumber there.

Okay, fast-forward a week. We’d set up camp on the banks of the Alas after a long day on the river, and were heating our evening repast over an open fire when two forest rangers passed by in a motorized canoe. Following a friendly exchange, during which we inquired about wildlife in the vicinity (I, for one, was hot to see a tiger), we invited the rangers to eat with us. After dinner, they inquired what we’d seen of Sumatra since our arrival in the country (our personal ranger, temporarily setting Louis L’Amour aside, was interpreting). When we related that prior to putting into the river we’d spent a day and night at the orangutan rehab center, they nodded approval. Then one of them asked, “Did you happen to see the haunted room there?”

The “haunted room”? Hello! Instantly, we knew the room to which they referred, and as the rangers elaborated, all eyes swung back and forth between them and me. That small room off the kitchen is left empty, they said, nobody will sleep there anymore. Why? Because on several occasions in the past, a beautiful naked woman with very long black hair has appeared in the narrow clearing at the rear of the house, called to the ranger who happened to be staying in that room, and beckoned him to follow her into the jungle. Those who did were never seen again.

The account was told with sober conviction, and in that setting — in Sumatra, generally — it was easier to accept as truth than it would have been in Seattle, or even Appalachia. There is something a little spooky about the Indonesian hinterlands, a dark undercurrent, a sense that preternatural forces are at play there, generating in foreign visitors skin-prickling sensations that cannot be easily dismissed as mere susceptibility to the primitive fears of superstitious locals. As the rangers talked about the haunted room, there was around our campfire an epidemic of goose bumps, and people kept looking at me as if I, a survivor, might have something to add. I did not.

I did not. But why not? Why hadn’t the jungle girl, this unexpected manifestation of my boyhood Sheena fantasies, come for me? Under scrutiny, I developed several on-the-spot theories to explain why I could have been rejected. First, I had an aching back, not a promising attribute in a prospective lover. Moreover, for that back pain I’d swallowed at bedtime a Percocet, an opiate that renders one sleepy, dopey, and limp. I could have been so drugged that I hadn’t heard her call, or she might have sensed that I wouldn’t have been of any use to her anyway and let me be.

Then there were the mushrooms. In Sumatra, Borneo, and a few other places in that part of the world, there grows a phosphorescent shelf fungus, a mushroom that literally glows in the dark. That afternoon, on a short impromptu venture into the jungle, I’d come across an outcropping of that luminiferous species attached to a fallen limb, a dead branch about the length and circumference of a baseball bat. On impulse, I brought it back to the house, where I stationed it in the doorway of what I was hoping to be my room, thinking it could serve as a kind of organic night-light. It appealed to my romantic sensibility, but for some arcane arboreal and/or mycological reason, it might have signaled the lethal nymph to keep her distance.

There was one other possibility, one, that is, if I discount the possibility that she simply found me physically unattractive. Pinned to the otherwise bare wall of the little room was a page torn from a missionary tract or some Sunday school pamphlet, a color picture (no words) of a solitary Jesus kneeling in prayer in a wide shaft of moonlight. Drawing upon my Baptist upbringing, I recognized the scene as the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus went to pray alone on the night before his crucifixion. Someone with a pen dipped in or filled with silver ink had elaborately outlined all of the contours in the picture, paying special attention to the beam of moonlight, energizing it with a heavy sprinkling of silver dots. From an artistic perspective, the effect of these embellishments was quite interesting. They added aesthetic and emotional weight to an otherwise rather hackneyed illustration, and I removed the picture from the wall, intending to take it home as a souvenir.

Later that evening, however, I’d begun to feel increasingly uneasy about confiscating the picture, and just before retiring, I’d retrieved it from my pack and tacked it once more to the wall. Now, around the campfire on the Alas, I found myself wondering if that picture had been placed in the “haunted” room for the specific purpose of keeping the female demon at bay. If so, the doctored image of Jesus may have saved my scrawny white butt.

Lest anyone presume that this incident had motivated me to end my estrangement from organized religion, I hasten to explain that while I’m obviously aware that he is the figurehead of a vast rich and powerful theological institution, I’m disinclined to think of Yeshua bin Miriam, the man we call Jesus, as a religious figure, at least not in any theological sense. What he was, rather, was a wandering Jewish zealot whose philosophical axioms and behavioral advice (assuming they hadn’t been put in his mouth decades after his death by evangelists hustling a new dogma, as some scholars contend) differed not appreciably from the pronouncements of other great spiritual teachers operating in China, India, and Persia at about that same time. That said, could his visual image, so creatively enhanced by a believer’s silver ink, have been powerful enough to repel the enchantress? It’s irrational on the face of it, of course, but in some transdimensional interchange to the left of space and to the right of time (where was the Frito pack when I really needed it?), might the souped-up aura of the Savior archetype have produced a divine spark that checkmated the bewitchery of the universal seductress? I had to wonder.

As for the woman herself, I’ve since had second thoughts. The rehabilitation compound existed for the purpose of teaching domesticated orangutans how to be wild again. Maybe she called men back to the forest to teach them the very same thing.

Despite the bone-gnawed, marrow-sucked skeletons allegedly in their metaphoric closet, the Karo Batak were Harvard-educated Park Avenue socialites compared to the Yellow Leaf People, an elusive nomadic tribe that needs (if it even still exists) no lesson in wildness; so primitive, in fact, it hasn’t even a name for itself. My bride Alexa and I and some fellow travelers (another Sobek excursion) learned of its existence during an overnight stay in the Hmong village of Ban Huai Yuak deep in the hills of northern Thailand, circa 1995.

Fairly primitive itself (no electricity, running water, or motor vehicles), this contingent of Hmong, however, did possess knowledge of the outside world and was warmly hospitable. On the first of our two nights with them, the Hmong staged a welcoming ceremony for us, a production that involved a great deal of very slow, very mannered dancing around a large bonfire, at the conclusion of which they attempted, without much success, to teach us one of the dances. Feeling we should reciprocate, Alexa and I tried to teach them the simplest Western dances we could think of: the Mexican hat dance, and the bunny hop. The result was not pretty. Mentally and physically unable to fit the movements into their frame of reference, they were even more inept at our dances than we’d been at theirs, and that’s why, should you visit the Thai hills today, you’re not likely to find anybody doing the bunny hop.

Early the next morning, a scout arrived in the village with the news that he’d seen a plume of smoke rising from a distant, normally uninhabited valley, a sign, the Hmong believed, that Yellow Leaf People could be in the vicinity. Hurriedly, we formed an expedition that included a villager who’d had some previous success in communicating with the little tribe. How little — it was estimated that fewer than 150 members were left alive, including two or three groups in Thailand and one in Laos — it was hard to know. They lived in the forest in temporary lean-tos that they fashioned from sticks and green leaves. When the plucked leaves began to turn yellow — which normally takes about two weeks — they would move immediately to a new location and build new shelters, believing it terribly bad luck to sleep beneath dying vegetation. Hence their name.

The Thai government had tried unsuccessfully to assimilate them, Christian missionaries had thrown up their hands and despaired of ever converting them, a resistance that naturally earned my initial respect, although once we were among them (after an arduous hike of several miles up and down a major hill), it was difficult to find much to admire — except their skill at climbing trees, an activity they performed literally with the speed and agility of monkeys. Despite my interest in mycology, the fungus growing in patches here and there on their bodies held such a minimum of fascination for me I didn’t bother to inquire if it glowed in the dark.

There were perhaps thirty people in this group, only one of whom ever conversed with our guide. We had brought them a slaughtered piglet, which they summarily hacked up with a machete, wrapping the pieces in leaves and tossing them into the fire. When they deemed the meat sufficiently cooked, the pieces were retrieved from the flames and distributed among the members. They offered us none. Neither, in fact, had they thanked us, not even with smiles or gestures, for the gift. They, in fact, had failed to greet us or show surprise when we turned up unannounced, and they did not say good-bye when we departed. I had the impression that once we were out of sight, they would maintain no particular memory of our ever having been there. It was as if they were night clerks at a Charleston hotel and we were all Neil Young.

Because they possessed and utilized those two machetes (gifts from compassionate Hmong), and wore odd pieces of clothing (a faded shirt here, ripped shorts there, foisted on them, surely, by missionaries traumatized by their casual attitude toward nudity), the Yellow Leaf People could not technically qualify as a Stone Age tribe. In all other respects, however, you’d have difficulty picking them out in a Neanderthal lineup. Having neither clocks nor calendars, having no names for the seasons, they live outside of time (though presumably not in a chemically or mystically altered state), a disposition all the more pronounced by their lack of a functional numerical system: they count only up to three. And not only do they not have a name for their tribe, individual members have no names either. Moreover, in their language there are no words for “I,” “me,” “my,” or “mine,” which puts them in bold, stark, dramatic contrast to another tribe with which I’d mingled at the Academy Awards in Hollywood four years earlier.

In 1991, I’d escorted Debra Winger to the Oscars. Debra was a presenter that year, so we had privileged seats; one row, in fact, behind Kevin Costner, who won the ’91 Best Actor award for Dances With Wolves; and afterward we made the rounds of the parties, including Swifty Lazar’s “A-list” shindig at Spago. It was wall-to-wall celebrities (I’ve never been so hard to see), but while a big ego may be as necessary for a film star as a space suit for an astronaut, in comparing Hollywood actors unfavorably to Yellow Leaf People regarding their usage of the first-person singular, I hadn’t meant to imply that the players with whom I socialized that long, long evening were all annoying narcissists. In truth, I had engaging conversations with the likes of Sean Penn (whom I’d met previously) and Michael J. Fox; and as it turned out, it was my own ego that caused me difficulty, put me in some danger, and nearly spoiled my night among the stars.

Following the ceremony, there was a dinner backstage for the nominees, presenters, and entertainers. Ranks of tables had been set up in the surprisingly voluminous space, each table accommodating six persons. At my table there was seated, besides Debra and me, Al Pacino and his date (a British fashion model), and the character actor Danny Aiello (a lovely man) and his wife. The dinner was sponsored by Revlon, and at each place setting there was a gift: Revlon cosmetics for the women, Revlon cologne for the men. There was a considerable amount of table hopping: “Schmooze More, Eat Less” seemed the slogan for the dinner. Being invisible in this milieu, I remained seated, though, alas, not entirely subdued.

At one point, only Pacino, his date, and I were left at the table. Either because he was bored, wished to amuse his date, or both, Pacino, who’d removed his tuxedo jacket, sprinkled some cologne onto his hand and began dabbing it demonstratively in his armpits. Reacting as if this were a challenge, and not to be upstaged by Al Pacino (never mind that he was among the finest actors of his generation), I poured a finger of cologne into my water glass, toasted him and gulped it down. I failed to register Pacino’s reaction. I was too busy dying.

Seriously, I thought I’d killed myself. Unable to breathe, let alone utter so much as a gasp or a squeak, I sat there frozen, tears streaming, waiting in terror for everything to fade to black. How long I remained immobilized in airless panic, I cannot say; it was probably no more than ten or twelve seconds, but it seemed the length of an Ingmar Bergman double feature in Swedish without subtitles. When finally I could breathe again (thank you, God!), I tried to act blasé, not even glancing around, after wiping my eyes, to see who, aside from Pacino and friend, might have witnessed my performance.

As I look back on the scene, it seems a reenactment of those early episodes in which young Tommy Rotten would drink ink, topical antiseptic, and stringent household products intended for scouring. I’ve joked that I was born thirsty, but (not to put too fine a point on it), I think in reality I was born curious. It’s likely that many, if not most, of my adventures and misadventures, on the page and off, have been simply an attempt to feel more fully the sensation of being alive. Ironically, the quest for aliveness can sometimes put one in closer proximity to death, whether one is barreling down a crocodile-infested African river or asphyxiating in glittery Hollywood on a mouthful of Revlon cologne.