by Mike Sager
The ruins, we were told, did indeed exist—deep within a treacherous and nearly impassable jungle. To reach the place, we were advised, our best route would be along a muddy river, which met the sea at a point four miles north of Punta Gorda. Exactly how far upriver we needed to travel was of some dispute. The Carib concept of time and space was difficult to fathom. Some measured the distance in days. Some said weeks or months. In the area around the ruins, it was further alleged, lived a small but fierce tribe of hunter-gatherers, said to be direct descendants of the mighty Mayan race which had built the Lost City. We could get nothing definite; the stories had the gossamer quality of legend.
As we know from archaeological studies, the Mayans developed a culture and civilization that flourished for more than a millennium, beginning around 850 b.c. Looking at the historical record they left behind, we find a curious and contradictory picture. Developmentally speaking, archaeologists of all stripes consider the Mayans a Stone Age people. They subsisted mostly by primitive methods of agriculture and had a limited diet. They had few tools that we know about—few material possessions beyond the rudimentary have been found in archaeological digs. And yet, as we well know, the Mayans were—oddly and concurrently—experts in theoretical science and mathematics. They developed complex systems of hieroglyphic writing and numbering, a well-ordered system of government. Their vast network of independent city-states was linked by roads; each magnificent city was itself a distinctive work of art, expertly designed and executed—breathtaking pyramids, soaring temples, exquisite palaces, beautiful shrines. Their religion was based on the rhythms of the natural world; they worshipped a pantheon of gods and superheroes who demanded regular tribute. In one such rite, the priest would remove with surgical precision and hold aloft the still-beating heart of a sacrificial victim, a young man or woman who had been pampered and groomed since birth for this divine service to his kind. The Mayans, we also know, were adept in the arts of clairvoyance and divination. They were avid astronomers who placed great emphasis on prophecy and prediction; they had a well-defined understanding of the annual calendar and the workings of the stars and were able to accurately predict eclipses. Imagine the power of a shaman who could predict the very day that the moon would blot out the sun.
After nearly a thousand years of growth and refinement, however, the story of the Mayans abruptly ends. Left behind was no evidence of famine, drought, disease, or war. They simply disappeared, as if into thin air, sometime around a.d. 830.
It was this grand mystery that brought me in quest of the Lost City of Tumbaatum. There, I hoped, were answers to these and other questions: From whence had the Mayans come? Who were their ancestors? How had a people—who hadn’t yet developed the wheel—gained the advanced knowledge necessary to build a great and complex civilization in such a short space of time? What secrets did they possess? Where did they go? And most importantly: What role did crystal skulls play in this mysterious and timeless drama?
Anxious to move onward, I engaged a small motor launch—the only one available in the village—and two ancient dug-out canoes, fashioned from cedar logs. As to our crew, the word “pitiful” would not be inaccurate: no one in the village seemed interested in undertaking an expedition. The best we could come up with were three smallish orphan boys and a couple of village drunkards whose fears and superstitions were overshadowed by their need for rum.
At dawn on the sixth day, we departed from the docks at Punta Gorda, our faithful Ninita bravely towing behind her the motor launch and the two dugouts. We were bound for the mouth of a river called Rio Pulgas—rough translation: River of Small Biting Insects. A more apt name could not be imagined, as we would learn soon enough.
As we stood on the deck, watching the village recede, Bobbie, my young ward, looked far from elated.
“What is troubling you, daughter?” I asked.
She looked at me dolefully. “I have a premonition of trouble, Father.”
Upon hearing this, I did not laugh. With me now since the first days of the new century, Bobbie had been a blessing in so many ways. Sixteen years old, she was an expert with both rifle and handgun, a savvy hunter, a patient and crafty fisher-woman; at the card table she was always a difficult adversary. A beautiful young maiden, an able comrade, a passable cook—she had been a loyal partner in my quixotic quest for the answers to some of life’s more compelling riddles. On more than a few occasions, I must faithfully report, I had found her hunches correct.
But the time for questioning was behind us. The mysteries of the Mayan civilization, I was convinced, were connected to the mythical island of Atlantis, which had been located, according to ancient maps and writings, in the Caribbean Sea due east of British Honduras. Surely evidence of this connection—one or more crystal skulls—could be found in Tumbaatum. To think otherwise was impossible to consider. We had come too far.
I pulled Bobbie close and gave her a reassuring hug. “Have courage, my daughter,” I told her. “We must press on.”
18
Behind the red door of the ruined townhouse Seede found an alcove, and behind that another door, most of the glass panes broken or missing. The foyer was expansive, with a filthy marble floor and dark wainscoting, the wood scarred and gouged. The rooms immediately to the left and right—in Victorian times the library and the parlor—had been put into service as separate accommodations; tattered blankets hung in the doorways in lieu of doors. The smell was a pungent mélange of fried food, dirty diapers, mildew, garbage, and decay.
A little girl appeared. She sported a full head of pickaninny braids, each one anchored fastidiously with a pink bow. Seede followed her up the central staircase to a room on the third floor. The door was partially open.
He stood for a few seconds, working up his courage. From an early age he had wanted to express himself, to be noticed, to be heard. After false starts in high school with rock guitar and photography, he figured out he was good with words—a good bullshitter, his mother liked to say. A couple of creative writing seminars in college led to the next lightbulb: he loved to write but had nothing to say. Hence the newspaper career—another stubborn quest. Next key realization: He was not outgoing. He did not like to meet people. He did not like to ask questions. Owing to an incident when he was ten years old—intending to send him to his grandparents for the summer, his parents had inadvertently put him on the wrong interstate bus—he had a fear of being lost. Every time he had an interview he’d arrive fifteen minutes early, just to make sure he found the place, which was usually not very hard, given that the city encompassed barely twenty-two square miles, a good portion of which was parkland and federal memorials. With the site of his appointment clearly in view, he’d sit there on the Honda or in the car, psyching himself up, making himself ready to take off his helmet or open the car door, to walk up to the house, to knock, to introduce himself, Jonathan Seede from the Washington Herald, to commence asking deeply personal questions of strangers—all of which, supposedly, served the public’s right to know but really served his own need to have something to write about, his own need to be read and recognized and loved.
He poked his head in the door, meanwhile rap-rapping with his knuckle, a dribbling series of tentative knocks. The room was dim, the only light a Tiffany table lamp, a diffuse ruby and amber glow. The lamp sat upon a round, leather-topped table, which itself sat inside the semirotunda of the bay window. Next to that, in a bent-arm morris chair, sat a substantial man wearing an Arab djellaba and a black wool cardigan. His salt-and-pepper hair was plaited into cornrows; his stocking-clad feet rested on an ottoman.
Seede took a hesitant step into the room. The air smelled of sandalwood and freesia. “Bo Franklin?” he inquired.
“Who askin?” He had the gravelly phlegm-tinged voice of a bluesman or country preacher.
“Jamal sent me.”
“What’d you bring?”
Seede knelt and reached into his sock, came out with a lightweight plastic sandwich bag, knotted at t
he top.
Franklin tore the bag with his teeth, poured into his large, leathery palm a piece of freebase cocaine, white and crystalline like an aquarium stone, a perfect sphere. He nicked it with the edge of his manicured thumbnail. “Where you get this at?”
“Cooked it,” Seede said.
“You cooked this?”
He shook his head, affirmative.
Franklin’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”
Seede froze—not the reaction he expected.
Franklin looked him up and down. “What do you want?”
“An interview.”
“About what?”
“I thought Jamal was supposed to—”
“Run it past me again.”
“I’m doing this, well—it’s sort of a long-range project.”
“Sort of?”
“A book. About the war on drugs—that’s part of it. I trace it back nine years to Nancy Reagan.”
A blank expression.
“See, when Ronald Reagan first got into office, Nancy needed an official cause. All first ladies have them—ever since Eleanor Roosevelt. Usually it’s something warm and fuzzy like literacy, hunger, poverty. Lady Bird Johnson’s was highway beautification. Remember? Keep America Beautiful. When Reagan was elected, Nancy decided—or her advisers, whoever was pulling the strings decided—that her cause should be kids and drugs, you know, stopping children from abusing drugs—which, by the way, was not a term in common use at the time. Back then it wasn’t called drug abuse, it was called drug use, which is subtle, I know, but that’s what we’re looking at here, the subtle way language can change societal attitudes, or the way it reflects changes, or both—it’s a chicken-or-egg kind of question. And not only that: if you ever met Nancy up close, as I have, you could tell she was totally blitzed—tranquilizers, sedatives, antipsychotics, something. Once, during an appearance she made at this camp for underprivileged kids, I was the designated pool reporter; I followed her around for the entire day. She was wearing this pleated skirt and pink espadrilles. And she never blinked her eyes. Not once. She was like a fuckin zombie, I shit you not. Toward the end of the day, she was in the arts and crafts shack. It was Nancy, her handler, the camp counselor, a dozen of these little black kids, and me. They wanted Nancy to help them make a silk-screen T-shirt commemorating her visit. Somebody squeezes the paint onto the screen, you know, out of the tube, and they give Nancy this squeegee thing that you use, the wand or what have you, and she starts drawing it across the screen. And then, like, halfway across, she drops the squeegee, just lets it fall. She’s gotten paint on herself—this forest green paint, a few dabs on her knuckles. And she looks stricken. Horrified. This look of pure panic, you know, like she’s been dosed with radiation or something. So her handler rushes over. And Nancy looks up with her big, round, unblinking eyes and asks, ‘Will it … come off?’”
“Just say no,” Franklin laughed.
“You know what I’m sayin? Crazy, right?” Seede continued. “I bet you didn’t know this: they kicked off Nancy’s campaign with an appearance on a TV sitcom. Remember the show Diff’rent Strokes?”
“With that little guy.”
“Gary Coleman.”
“I think I partied with him once at Studio 54.”
“The show aired in March 1983. A rainbow-colored assortment of children and teens gathered around the first lady. They all shouted into the camera: ‘Just say no to drugs!’ In retrospect, it was probably the defining coinage of the late twentieth century: Just Say No. Bush spent eighteen billion dollars last year on the drug war. The ranks of law enforcement agencies across the country are swollen to all-time levels. The court system is grid-locked with drug cases. New laws dictating mandatory minimum sentences leave judges with no discretion; they hand out prison time with the help of little charts—this much drug equals this many decades behind bars. Meanwhile, according to NIH statistics, among high school seniors, the use of cocaine and marijuana was up by 10 percent last year.”
Franklin dropped his chin to his chest. He pretended to snore.
“It’s more than that,” Seede said, struggling to explain. Granted, there wasn’t actually a proposal. He was still fleshing out the idea. But in his heart, in his soul, he knew what he wanted to say. “I want to write a book about the whole notion of prohibition. I mean, what happens when we follow Nancy’s advice? What happens when we Just Say No? Think about it. It’s the basis of Judeo-Christian ethics: abstinence, control, denial of the human urge. Idle hands are the devil’s playground. All that shit. But I wonder: Maybe too much self-control is bad for us? What happens when people are wrapped too tight? What are the ramifications of living in a world where everything pleasurable is evil? No fat, no sugar, no cigarettes, no sex. Everything will kill you. Everything is bad. Where does that leave us? What does that do to people? Doesn’t that fuck them up even more?
“Denying your natural urges makes you pent up inside. When something natural is withheld, it becomes idealized, fetishized. It festers and mutates, turns malignant. Like Catholic priests. They can’t have sex. They can’t even masturbate. And look what happens: The pressure builds. People explode. All sorts of aberrations ensue. This is how our culture teaches us to deal with normal desires and emotions. We’re taught to suppress our instincts, our human needs, lest we end up consigned to hell. But doesn’t that end up leading us to a whole other kind of hell? What if we were allowed to have our fantasies and secret desires? What if it was all okay? Would the world come off its axis? Or would it be a better place?”
Franklin reached over to the table next to him and retrieved a hammered-copper ashtray, transferred it to the wide arm of his chair. He placed Seede’s rock in the tray, sawed into it with his thumbnail, extracted a wedge. “Sounds like you got plenty of theories. What do you need me for?”
“Because you’re right,” Seede said. “Theories are boring. But you … you’re the living antithesis of prohibition. You’re the poster boy for Just Say Yes. You’ve defied every convention, you’ve broken every rule, you’ve taken every drug. Like you said in your last Rolling Stone interview: ‘I never met a pussy I didn’t wanna eat.’ You’re the living, breathing embodiment of Frankenfunk—which, by the way, has always been one of my favorite albums.”
“And I got three years hard time at Folsom to show for it.”
“Everybody knows you got screwed. It was early in the drug war. They needed to make an example of someone, and you were it. That woman returned to your house on her own volition. She said as much. It was in her testimony. I read every word of it. I’ve read the transcripts to the entire trial. You put her up in your guest room. You gave her a clock radio, for chrissakes. Who gives a clock radio to someone they’re imprisoning?”
Franklin reached to the table again, retrieved a small glass water pipe. He placed the chunk of freebase into the shallow bowl, atop a multilayered filo dough of metal mesh screens. He looked up at Seede. “What’s your name again?”
“Jonathan Seede.”
A whimsical grin creased the big man’s face. “You mean like that storybook character—what the fuck his name?”
He’d heard it his whole life.
“Johnny Appleseed!” Franklin exclaimed. “That’s it, right?”
Seede raised a hand in resignation.
“You ever plant any apple trees?” Franklin laughed. He slapped his thigh with his free hand.
“I like to say that I plant seeds of a different sort.”
“That’s deep, bro.”
Seede felt himself blush. He removed his watch cap. “Mind if I take off my coat?”
Bo Franklin motioned with his pipe toward the empty chair opposite, a twin of his own. “Make yourself comfortable, Appleseed.”
19
At the eastern edge of town, just inside the District line, the Capitol City Motor Lodge occupied a small plot of land between a busy thoroughfare and a vast Amtrak railroad yard.
A dreamer’s notion of a can’t-miss roadsid
e attraction, it was built in the 1950s in the shape of a horseshoe. A later owner added the red tile roof in an effort to evoke association with a well-known national chain. Given its location, the building’s design served well. The base of the horseshoe fronted New York Avenue, a congested six-lane ribbon of rutted asphalt favored by truckers and commuters. Shrouded in fumes, permanently under repair, it functioned as a service entrance into official Washington—a back route through the ass end of town. Sharing the boulevard was an assortment of old warehouses and light industries, a plumbing concern, an office furniture outlet, a burger franchise, a couple of gas stations, and a miniature golf course, now closed, the entrance of which was guarded by a gigantic fiberglass likeness of King Kong climbing the Washington Monument, a putter clutched in one fist. A school bus abandoned on the premises served as a trick pad and transient residence.
Guest rooms at the Cap City were set around back of the building, tucked safely along the inner contour of the horseshoe, giving the place the protected feel of a natural harbor. The Amtrak acreage was visible from nearly every room—an elephant’s graveyard of old railroad cars, rusty components, barrels of solvent and other toxic stuff, obscured by a thick tangle of weed trees and wild grasses and shrubs, all of it surrounded by a high cyclone fence crowned with concertina wire.
At the center of the horseshoe was the parking lot. Moored there on this overcast morning was a remarkable collection of American-made land yachts—Rivieras and Electra 225s, Eldorados, Coupe deVilles, and Lincolns—their conditions ranging from brand-new to up-on-blocks, testament to the varying fortunes of the residents of the cap ol cit m t r lo ge, as read the rooftop sign with its requisite burnt-out letters. Above the sign was a brightly lit billboard featuring a bas-relief likeness of the Capitol. On a clear night, if you took a ladder to the roof, you could actually see the dome, rounded and familiar, upon its little hill, the geographical center of Washington, the highest point in town. In its literature, motel management touted this view, intimating proximity. Great was the disappointment of many an unsuspecting tourist who’d booked by phone or by Web site.