“Keebler. Like the biscuits,” Janey was saying into her phone. A selfconscious singsong whine entered her voice, especially when she was attempting a joke. It came again. “No. Pfister. The P is silent. Like the pee in bath.”
Janey began tapping her phone — she had lost the signal, she said. “You’re eating that frightful tuck?” When Steadman did not reply she said, “It looks like something the cat sicked up.”
He listened to Hack telling Ava, “We work hard, we play hard,” and he wondered whether he should interrupt, to rescue her.
More coffee was brought and poured, and it was only now that Steadman noticed the people who were serving: small hurrying Indians, looking anxious as they moved among the visitors, smiling fearfully, in toothy terror-struck appreciation, whenever they made eye contact. Nestor gave one of the Indian men some money for the meal and said, “Now, let’s boogie.”
They reboarded the van with the brittle politeness of people who dislike one another, the sort of brusque formality that verges on rudeness. “Excuse me.” “You are excused.” And, “May I trouble you for a tissue?” “You may indeed trouble me for a tissue.” And, “Thank you very much.” “You’re welcome very much.”
“I am going to be terribly rude and put my cheesy feet up on the back of your seat,” Janey said to Manfred.
Misunderstanding her, Manfred tapped his headphones and widened his eyes and shouted, “Weber! Die Freischutz!"
Janey peered out the van window as they drew away from the building of rough planks where they had just eaten. She said, “Everything here is so retro.”
Planning the Ecuador trip with Ava, Steadman had imagined just the two of them with Nestor, negotiating the descent to the jungle from the plateau, Nestor confiding the secrets of the Oriente. Back then, this van and its occupants had been unthinkable. He had not counted on any intrusion, especially from tourists. And he had looked forward to being with Ava. He had wanted the journey to be singular, even risky. But it was over with Ava, they were not alone, and he felt disgusted and nauseated, resenting the other passengers, hating Hernan’s driving, and with the sickly premonition that this was all a waste of time. He had wanted his Ecuadorian adventure to be the first stage in reclaiming his reputation as a writer, which he believed would be the making of him as a man. The drug tour that he had hoped would be unique, his own, was apparently a widely known trip down a well-traveled path, in the sort of full-color brochure that also described gorilla encounters in Africa and white-water rafting on the Ganges and treks to the Everest base camp and birding in Mongolia.
For a while, for too long, he dishonestly complained about his celebrity and his book sales — secretly, he had been delighted. But after that his complaints were sincere. He wanted to move on; he took any work that came his way. He was hired by magazines because he had established his name first with Trespassing, and the assignments he chose always involved travel. Ava loved to travel. For several years there was hardly any difference between his work and their vacations.
As the author of Trespassing, Steadman, a traveler, a writer, became known irrationally as a travel writer. He had been prevailed upon to take magazine assignments to write about cities and hotels and restaurants. In the beginning he could not believe his luck. “To travel writing,” he would toast, clinking glasses with Ava over a sumptuous meal — and the meal might be lobster agnolotti followed by osso buco on polenta with baby carciofi, in the restaurant at the Hotel Cipriani — the crenelated, ecclesiastical skyline of Venice across the Giudecca Canal, San Giorgio Maggiore just out the window.
His assignments had been so pleasurable that he did not need to be told by editors that the underlying assumption in all such magazine writing was that the pieces would be friendly and positive. Most of the time there were no expense forms to fill out. Magazines sent him on press trips. The hotel or tourist bureau provided the airfare and treated him to meals and drinks. He was given helicopter rides and expensive presents and sent home with a press kit from which he was expected to write his story.
At first he did well. He had enjoyed himself; he expressed his gratitude in lush description, repaid the hospitality with praise. But the novelty was dulled by repetition, the travel became more laborious — more like work, even the luxury seemed humdrum and superfluous — and instead of the places seeming interchangeable, they became distinct, joyless, hardly human, and often odious to him. There was something peculiarly rigid and unspontaneous in the glamour. All this he described in travel pieces that he believed were fluent and truthful and sometimes humorous.
The pieces were not received well. One editor said, “You don’t seem to have had a very good time. All you talk about is the bad driving and the dangerous roads.”
Steadman was not discouraged. He quoted his line in Trespassing — Travel at its most enlightening is not about having a good time— and continued to go on press trips. But when they received his pieces the editors said, “This needs a little work,” or “This wasn’t exactly what we wanted,” and would explain in vague, insulting terms how he ought to rewrite the piece—“Tweak it,” they said — to make it publishable.
Steadman endured a terrible time on a press trip to Trinidad. The place was crime-ridden and dirty. It was noisy. Steadman hated the music. The Trinidadians he met were rapacious. He used the words “risible” and “jungly” and “sweaty” and “cacophonous,” and all of them were crossed out by a subeditor. So was the word “stink.” He had looked into the island’s racial politics. The piece was rejected. “It was supposed to be for our ‘Island in the Sun’ slot. You didn’t even mention the raw bar at the Intercontinental.”
Steadman sent the editor a signed copy of Trespassing.
Sour or carping pieces were instantly rejected, irony was discouraged for its ambiguity, humor was unwelcome for its belittling, satire for its subversion, and any mention of ugliness or ruin was forbidden. In all such writing a note of fawning gratitude was mingled with submissive bonhomie. The theme of each excursion was pleasure: How lucky I am to be in this lovely place, eating this delicious meal, and you will love it too!
“It isn’t travel. It isn’t even writing,” Steadman said. “This is advertising copy. I am expected to be an adjunct to the public relations industry.” The magazines demanded pretty pictures and gusto and undiluted praise, in order to encourage advertisers and build income. It was how they prospered.
Real travel was risky, uncertain, difficult, and not very comfortable. What these magazines called travel were in fact beach holidays. For the upscale magazines it was the fake sophistication of gourmandising or the indolence of a luxury cruise — self-indulgent, undemanding, pleasurable, lots of sunshine, swimming, moonlight. Steadman had been hired because he was a real writer with a reputation, the author of a travel classic; but he realized that as an open-minded and wealthy traveler he was feared by the hosts, whose pretensions he would ridicule, and disliked by the magazines, which felt he would drive away advertisers. It took almost two years for Steadman to understand that he had no future in this business. He returned to struggling with his noveclass="underline" work in stoppage.
And later, with the reading of Burroughs’s Yage Letters, he yearned to take a trip to Ecuador — to visit a shaman; to experiment with yaje, which was also known as ayahuasca, “vine of the soul”; to revisit the drug that Burroughs had praised in his obscure book; to rediscover a true story and perhaps find the inspiration to go on with his novel. He needed fuel. He read the other recommended books — the ethnobotanical work of Richard Schultes and the more mystical Reichel-Dolmatoff. The drug literature was respectful, more about spirit and ritual and cultural roots than about thrills. But all the botanists mentioned the risks.