Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  But then things get murky. Word had gotten out, apparently. The islands were no longer a secret. And now the migrations came in waves. We don’t quite know from where. The Philippines? Taiwan? Yunnan? Vietnam? Linguistic and bacterial evidence points us toward Taiwan as the likely wellspring that sent forth the hardy, seafaring people that eventually found and settled Polynesia and Micronesia, but no one knows if this was the only source of plucky folk willing to sail over the horizon or just one of several. In any event, here were a different people, newly arrived on the scene, and they too had wandering ways, finding their way to Samoa, which has long been regarded as the stepping stone to the hinter-islands of Oceania. No one knows what happened when our new arrivals encountered the Lapita. Did they fight? Or were they presented with a cake frosted with a decorative, swirly welcome, new neighbor greeting? Did they date and mingle? Or did they devour each other? We have no way of being sure. But onward they sailed, to Tuvalu and Kiribati, to Tahiti and the Tuamotus, to Hawaii and Easter Island, and finally to the Marquesas, whereupon they ran out of roaming room, there being nothing left to find in the Pacific. And what’s really extraordinary is that they were able to sail to the Marquesas some two thousand years ago, back when Jesus couldn’t even find a boat to cross Lake Galilee.

  “Actually,” Mareile said, “recent studies show that the Marquesas weren’t populated until about AD 1000.”

  Oh.

  Which brings us to Viking times. Still damn impressive.

  “And that the first Marquesans didn’t come from Samoa or anywhere else in Polynesia. Rather, they originated in Southeast Asia and migrated through Micronesia.”

  Really? That can’t be right, can it? That would make the I-Kiribati the forefathers of the Marquesans.

  It is an ocean of mystery.

  But surely, these first Marquesan settlers were refugees, exiles banished from their home island, sent on their way with a few coconuts and breadfruit, cast out of their communities and forced to scour the ocean. That’s how I’d always envisioned it. A little trouble at home and off to sea they went.

  “Nope,” Mareile corrected me. “They were explorers, and once they’d found the Marquesas, they headed back to their home islands and then returned with their families.”

  Ah. But why didn’t everyone go? I mean, do you have any idea what it’s like to live on an atoll, the thin crust of an undersea volcano, an island that wasn’t really an island at all, just a faint suggestion of land, not more than a few feet above sea level, often drought ridden and heat blasted, where lagoon and ocean nearly merge? It’s hard. And then to hear about these high, fertile islands to the east? Of course, you emigrate.

  But how did she know all this? How could she be so sure?

  “It’s what the rats have been telling us.”

  I’d found the Rat Whisperer apparently. Rodents never spoke to me. They merely regarded me with an appraising eye, but Mareile, it appeared, had crossed the human-rat communication divide. She told me of the research that was being done on the Polynesian rat, often described as the only mammal endemic to the South Pacific, but really, it’s a creature that’s as indigenous to the islands as we are. They were, for better or worse, the constant companions of the great Pacific navigators of yore, accompanying these fearless travelers from ship to ship, island to island. Most of the cultures that arose in the Pacific did so with a strong oral tradition, passing down stories through the generations, but of course many of the old tales are now lost forever, victim of the same diseases that decimated the populations in island groups like the Marquesas. And so people like Mareile turn to the entrails of rotting vermin, coaxing the story of the Pacific out through DNA analysis and a careful examination of stomach contents.

  “But really,” Mareile continued, “we still know so little about the ancient Marquesans. They had about seven hundred years to develop their culture, and then the Europeans arrived and so much was lost. I find myself envying Heyerdahl. He, at least, had a chance to see some of the old Marquesas. Are you finding his book helpful?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. Except, I thought, I found it helpful for entirely different reasons.

  Chapter Four

  One of the interesting things about sobriety is how your perception of people, places, and things changes. It’s like you get a do-over in life, and now you inhabit an entirely different being. Drunk You liked the color black; Sober You likes periwinkle. Drunk You liked England; Sober You prefers India. Drunk You liked Henry Miller; Sober You thinks he’s a dick. Drunk You never ate sweets; Sober You is a raging chocoholic.

  And so it is with Thor Heyerdahl. Not that I couldn’t relate to his tale of departing the continental world for a mysterious island on the other side of the planet. In fact I could relate to it all too well. Run away from civilization? Where do I sign up? I too had felt the siren song of escapism, the urgent desire to say to the world I’m outta here and depart for a sunny shore on the far side of the world. For me, however, this had been no idle dream. I too had met a woman of similar thinking, albeit someone who would only engage in bat-shit crazy endeavors in a sane, thoughtful, responsible manner, and moved with her to an atoll in the equatorial Pacific. I soon learned, of course, that paradise would forever remain a day’s sail away, that islands, even balmy, tropical ones, are real places with real people with real problems, and eventually I’d seek my escapism through far easier and more efficient means. For Heyerdahl, however—at least the youthful Thor on display in the pages of Back to Nature, the first long-haired, bearded hippie as he’d come to describe himself—reality would always be forged, manipulated, and molded into the same romantic ideal. You read passages such as this:

  Once upon a time, a hundred thousand Polynesians were supposed to have lived in the Marquesas group. Today, a mere 2,000 were left, with only a handful of white men. The Polynesian islanders were dying out at a tremendous rate. And Fatu Hiva was the most luxuriant island in the South Seas. If 98,000 had disappeared, there had to be room for the two of us.

  And you think, well yeah, I guess there’d be space, but must you be such a self-absorbed clod? Of course, this was written before World War II, so maybe the extermination of a people wasn’t regarded as quite the faux pas that it is today, but still, a little empathy please. But it never comes. We read of lepers and islanders afflicted with elephantitis; we meet, briefly, an elderly missionary and a wizened, old cannibal living by himself, the last of his tribe; but they, in Heyerdahl’s eyes, have less life than the tikis he stumbles upon in the jungle, evidence, in his mind, of Incan travels to the Marquesas. Even Liv comes across as nothing more than a decorative plaything. It was all about him, his adventures, his theories, his happiness.

  Now, of course, I completely understood the narcissism. I’d always thought of myself as a simpatico kind of person, but just a year previous I too was all about me—specifically, my need for a drink—and just as Heyerdahl could only perceive things through the lens of his own fantasies, I too could only live through the prism of the bottle. Polynesia was settled by indigenous South Americans, Heyerdahl would declare over and over again, whereas I would think, Everything would be better with another shot of vodka, and I’d do it over and over again. The end result, in its own strange way, is remarkably similar: It’s a boring way to spend the day and it gets kind of tiresome for the people around you, though—I may be going out on a limb here—I suspect most would still prefer the company of the free-thinking contrarian to the vodka-sodden alcoholic. Just a hunch.

  And so, after three days of sailing, as we approached the southern Marquesas, I resolved to take a different attitude to the islands. I’d already decided to jump ship in Nuku Hiva. I had no idea what would follow, just that it seemed like a good idea. There is a fine line between the tourist and the traveler, and it didn’t take long to figure out that as long as I remained on the boat, I would be on the wrong side of that divide. But in the meantime, I’d have some
time on the other Marquesan Islands, isles unvisited by Stevenson, and it seemed necessary to have a plan, an objective. I looked at the itinerary—we’d have a day in Fatu Hiva, a morning in Ua Pua, an afternoon on the north shore of Tahuata, and so on and so forth, far too little time to get familiar with the islands—and concluded that I needed a disciplined approach. Heyerdahl was looking for freedom. I was looking for limits. Heyerdahl saw the Marquesas as a refuge from civilization. I saw them as a cross-training, multiuse obstacle course.

  This makes me a shallow person, I realize. Here I was, on the very periphery of the known world, approaching islands steeped in mystery and romance, and I prepared by studying maps, searching not for ancient ruins or prominent headlands offering grand vistas, but rather for trails and roads I could run. Every evening, during the golden hour of sunset, as most of the passengers headed upstairs to the bar I descended into the entrails of the boat, settling into the gym, which I had come to think of as mine alone, until one day I was joined by a Swiss woman of indeterminate age—thirty-five? forty? forty-five? I can rarely tell, anymore—but, clearly, a woman who was fit. I know this because her workout attire consisted of a leotard, nothing more, revealing chiseled guns for arms and the kind of marbled legs more commonly found on Olympic gymnasts. She was a StairMaster junkie, I soon discerned, and as I nodded my greetings I wondered if she was of my tribe. I would sometimes speculate about the people I encountered running fourteen miles at dawn until I began to meet some of these very same people in church basements. I had always imagined your typical twelve-step meeting as occurring in some grim, darkened chamber full of cigarette smoke, bad coffee, and doughnuts, filled with fat, spiteful old men telling you to take the cotton out of your ears and stuff it into your mouth and listen for a change, why don’tcha, but these days, you’re more likely to find a meeting in a smoke-free hall serving herbal tea, filled with people discussing Bikram Yoga and their latest marathon time. This made sense to me, of course. Try as we might, the word moderation leaves many of us scratching our heads. Why run one mile when you can run ten? Why do half an hour of sun salutations when you can do ninety minutes of pretzel-like contortions in a 105 degree sauna? More is better. Always.

  Wait, I can hear someone say. Isn’t recovery from addiction supposed to be all about finding serenity and some kind of inner peace? Well, yeah, but did you know for every year you used your substance of choice, it takes about a month for your brain to heal? For some of us, that adds up to a lot of months. In rehab, upon learning this, you could feel the collective groan. These had been sharp minds when it came to math; all those years of measuring grams and ounces, calculating cash flow, pilfering savings accounts, the extended cost/benefit analysis involved in choosing between a pint of Popov and a bottle of Grey Goose—this was a crowd that would have aced advanced calculus were it not for the hangovers—and now, in a nanosecond of well-honed mental gymnastics it’d suddenly dawned on most of us that we weren’t looking at twenty-eight days of brain-scrubbing, from which we’d emerge like a cherubic bodhisattva or Hindu ascetic, but rather at months and years of unsettling feelings and occasional, monstrous cravings. Well, that sucks, I’d thought, and for the first time I’d begun to envy the heroin addicts. You have about five years of injecting black tar until you hit the wall, when the veins recede and the abscesses deepen, when your tolerance has reached the point where no matter how much you inject, you can no longer get high—the dragon is gone forever—but of course you can’t stop, because withdrawal is such a motherfucker, and now you have to choose: OD or get clean. Choose the latter and the brain is up and running again in five short months. Lucky folks, indeed.

  Now think of the alcoholic. In rehab, we’d played an exciting game called Guess the Addiction. Whenever a newcomer slinked into the dining hall, there’d be a moment of collective silence as we’d appraise our new comrade, and then we’d engage in furious scribbling, the goal being to ascertain their substance of choice, age, and hometown. I personally was awful at this, but my roommate Pin Cushion (heroin addict) was a superstar. It was as if he were a sage, an oracle, who with a mere glance could discern everyone’s darkest secrets. “Twenty-four,” he’d say, as a young blonde shuffled in. “Xanax and Vicodin. Montclair, New Jersey.” And he’d nail it. “Fifty-eight,” he’d move on, as an older gentleman wandered in, baffled to find himself here. “Anesthesiologist. Fentanyl. Washington, DC.” He was like a mystic, pointing out the pill poppers, the tweakers, the smack-addled, the coke fiends with the bloody noses.

  But no one needed any help discerning the alcoholics. In they shuffled; the women typically in their thirties or forties, wondering how the evening glass of chardonnay had descended into the coffee cup of vodka hurriedly gulped down during the morning commute, followed by a breath mint and a quick spray of perfume until the lunchtime nip; the men, more likely in their forties or fifties, whether Hells Angels bikers who’d been intervened upon by fellow gang members, Big Law partners, or airline pilots; usually admitted under the threat of a job termination or divorce, sauntering in full of attitude and self-pity; and all easily identified by the broken capillaries in their noses, the gin-blossom hue to their faces, and the alcohol bloat around their guts. And then there were the really horrifying cases, the end-stage alcoholics, who’d arrive skinny and jaundiced, their guts distended with fluid, who’d mosey about afflicted with disfiguring edema in their legs and a grotesque case of ascites, marking their remaining weeks until either a liver transplant could be found or, more likely, they’d disappear and a counselor would announce that, sadly, another had been lost to the disease.

  The street-drug addicts were typically young. Coke, heroin, crack; they hit hard and fast. Rare is the middle-aged junkie. No, scratch that. There are no middle-aged junkies. Keith Richards? He’s been off heroin for thirty years. Nick Cave? Clean since the nineties. Lou Reed since the eighties. Trent Reznor hit the wall in 2001. Iggy Pop’s been clean forever. He’s sixty-seven. You don’t get abs like that while freebasing. Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe? Technically speaking, he died twice from overdosing, but I suppose it doesn’t really count since he’s now coming up on eleven years sober. A quick search tells me that many of those bad boys from the eighties—from Slash to Tommy Lee—are now sober, though God only knows what Axl Rose is up to these days.

  But what of the other drug-addled rock stars? Dead. People speak of the curse of twenty-seven—Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin—but it’s so limiting. What of Jay Bennett, guitarist for Wilco, and Mikey Welsh of Weezer, and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, and Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon, and Hillel Slovak of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones, and Bobby Sheehan of Blues Traveler, and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, and Kristen Pfaff of Hole, and Bradley Nowell of Sublime, and God help you if you were ever a member of Alice in Chains—two down so far. Shall we go on? Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli. Milli Vanilli! And perhaps most tragically, Vinnie Taylor of Sha Na Na. You can’t even write about music without kicking the bucket—Lester Bangs, the best music critic of all time, OD’d at thirty-six. So, kids, remember, there’s no such thing as recreational IV drug use. Nice suburban boys and girls get scooped out of Dumpsters every day.

  But these days, of course, it’s the pharmaceutical companies that are enabling a whole new class of junkie; the well-to-do kids on Adderall and other uppers, the anxiety-ridden moms on benzos like Xanax and Klonopin, the chronic pain sufferers on OxyContin, which they then sell on to the opiate addicts for rent money, and when those addicts can’t afford Oxys they move on to heroin, ’cause it’s cheaper.

  And the doctors? They’re just middlemen. Every nineteen minutes in this country, someone—Heath Ledger, for instance—dies from an overdose of prescription meds. Roughly 10 percent of the US population is addiction prone they say, though I think that’s a meaningless number. Some substances will ensnare your brain no matter how wholesome you are. Let a nice Mormon like Mitt Romney sm
oke crack a few times, or shoot dope, or be prescribed Oxys for a recurring injury, and I guarantee you that within a month he’ll be giving blowjobs in an alley to fund his habit. (Okay, maybe a year. He’s got those accounts in the Caymans.)

  And then there are the old-school alkies. I recall when I’d first heard that Amy Winehouse song—“They tried to make me go to rehab and I said no, no, no.” Even then, that voice, those lyrics, hit me like a wall of bricks. Whoa, I thought, what’s going on in the pop universe? A rich, smoky voice singing a tune that felt honest, a little disturbing, but with a clarity that I hadn’t heard since I was a wee tyke on a tricycle listening to Stevie Nicks (recovering Klonopin addict, incidentally). And then, because I’m far too oblivious to pay attention to Top 40 radio—do they even call it that anymore?—I paid no more mind to her until she was dead. And it wasn’t drugs, but, according to the early reports I’d read, alcohol withdrawal. That was an enlightening discovery. Opiate addicts bitch and moan about withdrawal, but it won’t kill them; meanwhile, the hard-core alcoholics die, their last vision a hallucinogenic spider crawling into their eyeballs as their bodies convulse and roll into bone-shattering contortions during delirium tremens. No fun that. It’s no wonder that every year a quarter of a million Americans are hospitalized for alcohol withdrawal.