Novels sometimes have odd and oblique origins. For instance, Vladimir Nabokov said  that his novel Lolita was inspired this way: “The first little throb of Lolita went through me late  in 1939 or 1940, in Paris…somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin  des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever  charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” 

My new novel Make Believe is a light-hearted romance set in Los Angeles in a world of  wealth and celebrity. It’s nothing like the three novels that came before, which were dark and  violent affairs, dealing with organized crime and murder and lynchings and ghastly atrocities in  faraway jungles. But in its initial incarnation, Make Believe was pretty dark too. It even had  “dark” in the title. Beyond the Dark, it was called. I’ve loved supernatural books, movies, and  TV shows ever since I was a kid, and Beyond the Dark was to be a book about a vengeful ghost. 

So how do we bridge the seemingly impossibly wide gap between Beyond the Dark and  Make Believe? I will, with a nod to Nabokov, do it this way: The first little throb of Make Believe went through me in 1992 or 1993, in Westwood, in a high-rise office building where I  was seeing a psychologist. I’d turned forty a year or two before, and I was taking stock of my  life. During my thirties, I’d been on a crash-and-burn trajectory fueled by an ever-increasing  number of gin and tonics, but I’d met a girl and quit drinking in 1991 and didn’t have the fiery crash after all (I’m talking literally: during this period two separate sources, a Ouija board in  Arkansas and a young psychic woman named Suzanne that I met at a party in L.A., informed me  I would die in a car wreck within a few years. Suzanne also said the wreck would be caused by  alcohol but the future wasn’t fixed and disaster could be averted if I changed my ways).

I had decided I should take a look at my rather problematic childhood to see how it might have adversely affected my life. Seeing a shrink was one of those things I thought I’d never do,  and yet here I was in Westwood, sitting in the office of one. One of the first things I’d noticed was the box of tissues sitting on the coffee table within easy reach in case they were needed for eye-dabbing and nose-blowing. I liked Susan right away. She was a little older than me and petite and had short straight brown hair and a benign, calm demeanor that was just what I wanted in a person I’d be telling things I had never told anyone. Susan was to learn all about me, but it was interesting how in the two years I sat across from her for an hour every week I learned so  little about her. I was curious about her, but I didn’t get the feeling she wanted to talk about herself so I never asked her anything. The closest I got to a peek inside Susan was once when I  commented it must be a bummer for her sometimes listening all day to people like me talking about all the horrible shit that had happened to them, and she said no, to the contrary, she found it inspiring, she wasn’t listening to stories of suffering and sadness but to tales of survival. The only hard biographical fact I can remember getting from her came in the context of a  conversation we were having about the possibility of life after death. She said that before she was a psychologist, she’d been a registered nurse. She’d been with a lot of people as they died,  and she’d never had the sensation of a spirit or soul-like essence departing the body at the moment of death. But there had been something that had occurred that was very strange. Once she had happened to go into a room where lay the body of a recently deceased woman. She knew nothing about the woman or the cause of her death, but immediately she sensed something,  invisible but almost palpable, emanating from the woman. Not some kind of spirit or entity, but  an emotion. Anger. Fury. Rage.

Susan left the room. She asked another nurse what had happened to the woman. She was  told she’d committed suicide. She had left a note addressed to her husband: “I killed myself  because you wouldn’t take me to the movies.” 

Ah! And there was the throb! 

Cut to, as they say in Hollywood parlance, many years later. I was casting about for an  idea for my next novel. The sad, chilling story that Susan had told me about the dead woman  and her posthumous anger came to mind, and pretty soon I’d cooked up a story about a man  whose troubled marriage ends when his wife kills herself, but who then is tormented by her  wrathful ghost. Ghost stories usually take place in isolated settings, deep in the woods or on  craggy, wave-battered seacoasts, but my story would happen right here in palmy, crowded,  sprawling L.A. I’d spent most of my adult life as a writer in Hollywood, so I decided to use that  experience by making my hapless protagonist a screenwriter and his unhappy wife a fading  movie star. I became excited by my new project, I would write a classic supernatural story,  Beyond the Dark would be my Turn of the Screw or Omen or Exorcist—and then a funny thing  happened. I began to see a divergent path for my book. What if the fading movie star wife  asked her hunky screenwriter husband to dance with her, and he declined? And what if other  people were watching and the movie star felt furious and humiliated and she stormed away?  And what if the screenwriter husband was already on thin ice with her because she’d caught him  in an affair with a young Polish actress, and she locked herself in the bedroom in their Beverly  Hills mansion and wouldn’t come out? And what if early the next morning the screenwriter was  awakened by police at his door, who told him his wife’s clothing and purse containing her ID  had been found on the beach, along with a note addressed to him, and they handed it to the screenwriter? And what if the note said: “I killed myself because you wouldn’t dance with me”? And though it appeared the movie star had swum out in the ocean and drowned herself,  what if no body was recovered, and it was uncertain she was actually dead? And what if the screenwriter met an attractive young woman who worked in a sweater shop and rescued animals,  and he fell in love with her? And what if—what if I didn’t write a ghost story at all, but a comic novel about Hollywood instead? And that, my friends, is how the grim, frightening Beyond the Dark metamorphosed into the airy, sun-lit Make Believe. ​

Learn more and pre-order Make Believe here 

Our dog Ananda gets walked twice a day, in the morning by my wife Stefani and in the afternoon by me.  On a recent Saturday morning, when Stef and Ananda returned from their walk, I asked my usual question:  “How’d it go?"
 
What the question really means is, how did Ananda behave?  She’s an energetic two-and-a-half-year-old white Swiss shepherd who still has a problematic relationship with her leash.  Her philosophy is, a dog oughta go where a dog wants to go, and at 75 pounds of pure muscle, she can be difficult to manage, especially for Stefani, who’s not all that much bigger than Ananda.  And though Ananda’s a very sweet dog, she can also be aggressive, barking savagely and lunging at dogs she encounters for no seeming reason except she doesn’t like the way they look.
 
“She was great,” said Stef.  “Hardly pulled at all.”
 
“Good.  No problems with other dogs?”
 
“No.  We only saw one other dog, and it was across the street.  But there was something kind of odd.”
 
“Yeah?  What?”
 
“The streets were deserted.  We hardly saw anybody.  That one guy walking his dog, a gardener working in a yard, a couple of kids riding bikes.  That was it.”
 
 “Huh.”
 
“It’s a big holiday, it’s the Fourth of July.  You’d think there’d be a lot of people out today.”
 
“Well, it’s still early.”
 
And then it wasn’t early anymore, and it was my turn to walk Ananda.  I hitched her up to her harness, and I put on sunblock, a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a buff.  (I didn’t even know what a buff was until the pandemic thing happened.  It’s this stretchy fabric tube you can wear in different ways:  as a cap or a headband or a neck covering or you can pull it up over your face as a mask.  It’s much cooler than a medical mask, in my opinion.)  I stuffed some dog treats in my pocket to bribe Ananda to behave, and then we were off. 
 
July 4th, 2020, was warm, bright, and breezy.  A beautiful day to walk your dog.  We moved along at a brisk clip, Ananda walking like a perfect little princess at my side.
 
We live in Culver City, California, in a pleasant neighborhood south of Sony Studios called Carlson Park.  When the plague descended upon the land in March and everyone was told to hide in their homes, the streets were nearly empty of cars but there were people everywhere.  They were eager to escape the dire images and grim faces on cable news and breathe fresh air (even though it might be laced with coronavirus) and see trees and clouds and squirrels and others of their own kind.  Nobody wore a mask then.  The experts had told us not to.  People were nice, they greeted strangers like friends, there was a sort of hearty we’re-all-in-this-together cheerfulness about them.  And then the experts said wear a mask or you might die.  And since they were mostly progressive Westside types, the people of Carlson Park dutifully donned masks, but the camaraderie was gone.  It was as if the masks over their mouths stifled speech.  They became silent, insular, anonymous.  As they walked the streets, they cast cautious glances over their masks at the masked people they met to make sure the magic protective circle of six feet all around them remained inviolate.
 
Ananda and I didn’t have to go far to see that this particular Fourth of July in Carlson Park was unlike all previous Fourths.  We didn’t see a living thing anywhere except a few birds and an orange butterfly gliding by.  It was odd, as Stefani had said.  Spooky, sort of.  The neighborhood seemed abandoned as though evacuated ahead of some oncoming catastrophe, but I knew there must be people inside the houses that we walked by.  I mean, where else did they have to go?  The virus was everywhere.
 
Some of the houses had flags in front of them, big cloth flags, little plastic flags.  They flapped fitfully in a breeze, seeming forlorn and sad.  They made me think of the flags at Mount Rushmore.  The night before, Stef and I had watched Donald Trump travel to South Dakota and give a speech beneath the giant stone faces of four American presidents carved into hills that are sacred to the Great Sioux Nation, that were stolen from them by the white people, that they still claim as their own.  Trump was speaking to a crowd of several thousand proudly maskless South Dakotans.  Perhaps unfairly, I saw them all as racist, gun-loving white people who had fallen hard for a cult-like leader.  Trump was standing in front of a black backdrop and several American flags.  He was fulminating against protestors, far-left fascism, cancel culture, angry mobs that attacked statues, “bad, evil people” who wanted to destroy America, he was all but exhorting the stalwart Americans in front of him to arise from their seats and go forth and launch a jihad against people like me and most of the people I call friends.  Suddenly a wind kicked up, it began to blow quite hard, and the limp flags sprang to life.  Standing in front of the stygian blackness of the backdrop and the thrashing flags, Trump seemed almost like a demonic figure invoking the powers of darkness to bend the country to his will, though the effect was undercut somewhat by his hair or whatever it is on top of his head, which the wind seemed at the point of flipping over like a pancake.
  
The feeble flags of Carlson Park couldn’t compete with the robust flags of Mount Rushmore.  As Ananda and I continued our walk, I smelled smoke.  Probably somebody barbecuing in their back yard.  And then I saw a guy in a floppy hat and flip-flops come out of his house and go into his garage, and then I came across a cluster of small masked children playing in a front yard, observed by a pair of socially distancing masked parental types.  So Carlson Park wasn’t a total ghost town, but still…what was up?  Even yesterday it hadn’t been like this.
 
The best I could figure was that it was Gavin Newsom’s fault.  Early on, he’d done a good job of controlling the coronavirus in California, but then, proving that the governors of blue states can be as foolish as those of red ones, he’d opened up the state too quickly.  This had predictably resulted in a surge of new cases, especially in Los Angeles County, and Newsom had been forced to rollback his rollback.  People had been given a taste of freedom and then had it taken away.  Back to your boring abodes and your monotonous food, back to the kids running around and driving you crazy!
 
The Fourth of July is the most extroverted of American holidays, beer and fireworks and roasting meat and patriotic singing, and maybe the good people of Carlson Park, depressed, fed up, just didn’t feel up for that.  And maybe too they were just plain scared.  Just a couple of days before, the Culver City Police Department had announced that five of their officers had tested positive for the virus.  Ye gods, our cops had COVID, who would protect us?  We all knew doom was walking among us like the Red Death in Poe’s short story.
​
Ananda and I came to a small green pretty park.  Carlson Park, from which the neighborhood took its name.  So this was where everyone was, or at least a few people.  Scattered around under the trees, sitting in the shade in couples or little groups.  But a library-like silence pervaded the scene.  Walking with Ananda on the other side of the street, I’m not sure I heard a single sound emanating from the park.  Maybe a laugh or two, off in the distance.  A couple of young sunbathers were lying in a splash of sunlight on the green grass.  I wanted to walk over to them and tell them that at their age I’d lain in the sun like them but I’d lived to regret my pursuit of the perfect tan, but of course they would have been totally freaked out if some old dude had wandered up to them and actually started talking like that.  Besides, the concept of a distant future must seem hopelessly abstract, or naïve, or just beside the point to millennials and zoomers who are just trying to make it through the latest disaster that we baby boomers have bestowed on them.
 
A skinny guy without a shirt was standing by himself, tossing up a Frisbee and catching it behind his back.  He was obviously waiting for his Frisbee partner.  Yeah, I get it.  Waiting.  That’s what it’s all about.
 
Ananda and I reached the corner, made the turn toward home.  I gave her some treats for being such a good girl.  She nearly snapped my fingers off in her eagerness to eat them.  Carlson Park has a million dogs, it’s Dog City, but we had not encountered one dog today. 
 
We walked by the quiet houses.  Seeing no one, hearing no one.  There was an eerie, science-fictionish feel to things.  There are a lot of post-apocalyptic books and movies and TV shows these days, but that’s not what this was.  It was pre-apocalyptic.  A neighborhood, a city, a country breathlessly waiting for what happens next. 
          

 
​I’m a big fan of both iterations of the sci-fi show The Outer Limits, and recently I happened to see a great one from 1998 called “Lithia.”  The year’s 2055.  Fifty years earlier, a nuclear war devastated the planet and wiped out nearly the whole human race, and then the wretched survivors were struck by a deadly plague.  Mysteriously, it afflicted only males, so before long all that was left of the once proud and dominant species that unironically called itself Homo sapiens, wise human, was a small number of females.  
 
Now earth’s begun to recover from the war, and nature is green and flourishing again.  The women live in small agrarian villages that look right out of the Middle Ages except for the absence of men.  Their lives are hard and full of toil, and yet they seem content and happy.  They all get along, everyone is equal, they work out their problems peacefully. They think they’re better off without men.  As one of the elders in the village of Lithia explains to the young girls:  “When the males of the earth had vanished, so too did wickedness and wars and hatred.”  They don’t even need men to have children.  They have frozen sperm for that, though unfortunately (or perhaps not) boy babies die shortly after birth so their world remains all female.
            
Well, almost all. It turns out Lithia actually has a man.  Major James Mercer (played by the always excellent David Keith) was cryogenically frozen in an experiment that was supposed to last six months, but then the war came along and he’s been stuck in the deep freeze ever since.  The women decide it’s the right thing to do to thaw out the major, and let him resume his life.  After all, how much damage can one man do?
            
Quite a lot, actually. Major Mercer is a perfectly decent fellow and means well, but the mere presence of a square-jawed alpha male in Lithia quickly throws it into chaos.  Mercer’s an Adam in a villageful of Eves, and long dormant hormones begin to stir.  He’s got lots of ideas for making Lithia better.  When he finds out a neighboring village has gotten an old hydroelectric dam up and running but doesn’t want to share the electricity with Lithia, he decides to steal it from them.  Things go tragically wrong though, and several women die.  The horrified women of Lithia hastily hustle poor Major Mercer back into the deep freeze, and life in Lithia resumes its happy, peaceful, manless course.
            
We haven’t had a nuclear war and a killer plague yet, but the situation is dire on our planet. Life began on earth two and a half billion years ago.  It’s been only a couple of hundred thousand years since humans arrived on the scene, and 10,000 years since we invented agriculture and this thing called civilization began.  We look around us now and we see our beautiful blue and green world being turned into a dead, foul wasteland by human activity.  There have been five mass extinctions of life over the last 500 million years.  The causes are uncertain, but candidates include comets, volcanoes, asteroids, and gigantic methane belches that changed the climate.  Now many scientists say we’re in the midst of the sixth extinction, compliments of us.  And it’s not just the plants and animals and birds and fishes that we’re destroying, but we’re also, exuberantly and in great numbers, by the millions and tens of millions, slaughtering one another. 
            
We tend to take the killing for granted, as just the way things are; after all, isn’t nature “red in tooth and claw”?  But the fact is, humans are nearly unique among creatures in killing their own kind.  We kill each other in wars and in bar fights, in robberies gone wrong and in justifiable homicides, in terrorist acts and assassinations and public beheadings and drone strikes, we kill because we are hot-headed, jealous lovers or pissed-off mass murderers or sick serial killers or businessmen who want to bump off their partners and get all their money or racists or homophobes or despondent people who can’t bear to exist any longer and take their own lives.  We kill in multitudinous ways, with knives, swords, axes, all manner of guns, orange juice with arsenic in it, flamethrowers, bombs, rockets, our bare hands, bows and arrows, nerve gas, poisoned darts expelled from blowguns, clubs, empty whiskey bottles, we suffocate people with pillows or push them out of windows or helicopters or over scenic cliffs high in the mountains, we drown them or torture or starve them to death or run over them with trucks or tanks or withhold water till they die.  In short…we’re killers. 
 
Or are we?  Were the Lithian women right?  Is the problem not Homo sapiens per se, but male Homo sapiens?  Are “wickedness and war and hatred” the fault of men?
 
Well, yes, pretty obviously.  According to a 2013 United Nations study, 96 percent of all homicides worldwide are committed by men. And wars are clearly a guy thing. You’ll find female warriors here and there, like in guerilla units in Colombia or Kurdish militias in the Middle East, but they’re not fighting in wars that they’ve created but in the wars of men.  It’s simply a fact that men are far more violent than women.  The only question is, why?
            
Some say it’s a matter of nurture, not nature.  The nurture people seem to think it’s all the fault of the patriarchy. Males kill their fellow humans because they were raised as boys to be aggressive, and if they were magically plopped down in the middle of a matriarchy, you wouldn’t be able to tell the boys from the girls, at least as far as behavior is concerned.  The problem is, they have a tough time pointing to any actual matriarchies where boys don’t roughhouse and get in fights and play football and violent video games and pretend to be soldiers but instead engage in placid play with their sisters, perhaps because those matriarchies don’t seem to exist, either in the present or the annals of history.  It seems to be natural in our species for males to be aggressive and to dominate females.
            
Male violence is a matter I believe we have to take out of the realm of sociology and into the realm of biology.  When I said earlier that humans are nearlyunique among creatures in killing their own kind, you probably wondered what other animal engages in this disturbing practice.
            
You remember Cheeta, don’t you?  Tarzan’s chimpanzee sidekick?  Comical, loveable Cheeta, turning happy somersaults when he saw Tarzan emerging from a jungle river all dripping and victorious after saving Jane from a crocodile, or scampering off to get help from Tarzan’s other animal friends when the ape man found himself in a jam.  But we now know Cheeta had a dark side.  Primatologists who have studied chimpanzees in the wild have discovered the males are aggressive, nasty, domineering, and violent. They’re in constant competition with the other males in their community to be the top chimp, the number one dude. The females are definitely second-class citizens.  The males have sex with them whether they want it or not, beating them if they’re not compliant and often even if they are.  Sometimes a male will kill an infant if it’s been fathered by another male, then mate with the bereaved mother so as to put his own offspring in the place of the murdered infant.  Oh Cheeta, say it ain’t so!
            
Chimpanzees live in groups that wander through the forest hunting for food.  They’re very hostile to other groups, whom they’re competing with for food and territory.  Sometimes one group will launch an attack on another. A raiding party of half a dozen or so males, led by the alpha male, will sneak through the forest, making every effort to be quiet and stealthy.  If they find a chimp from another community by itself, they’ll launch themselves upon it, biting and kicking and dragging and pummeling the poor creature till it’s dead or badly injured, whereupon they’ll turn and run for home, exultantly hooting and screaming.
            
Biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, in his book Demonic Males:  Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (written with Dale Peterson), points out the similarities between chimpanzee raids and the intertribal warfare that takes place among isolated groups of indigenous people like the Yanomamo of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela.  Ten to 20 males will set out through the jungle and head toward a neighboring village.  “[I]f they find a lone enemy, they shoot him with deadly curare-tipped arrows.  The raiders then immediately flee, anticipating a chase and ultimately a retaliatory raid against their own village.”  It doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to go from jungle villages attacking one another for generation after generation to “civilized” modern nations doing the same, employing machine guns, tanks, artillery, bombs, rockets, and napalm to do their killing instead of the vastly less efficient curare-tipped arrows.
            
DNA analysis shows that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than to any other species. Somewhat surprisingly, the converse is also true; we’re chimpanzees’ closest relatives, more so than even gorillas.  Five to seven million years ago in Africa, the apes that would eventually turn into us split off from chimpanzees and went their own evolutionary way.  Eventually we developed the big brains that allowed us to become the dominant species on earth, but you, I, and everyone remain 96 percent chimpanzee, genetically speaking.  To make sense of them, human males might best be thought of as quasi chimps, ever eager to fight each other or to band together and go off and invade some hapless foreign country, and where females are concerned, evincing an insatiable urge to dominate, to procreate, to spread their seed far and wide.  Their propensity for violence probably made some evolutionary sense in a perilous prehistoric world of woolly mammoths and cave bears and dire wolves, with the added problem of males from neighboring groups sneaking up on them and hoping to skewer them with spears or bash out those big brains, but it just doesn’t fit into the world we live in now.  Or as Professor Wrangham put it in a more academic way:  “Perhaps humans have retained an old chimpanzee pattern, which, though it was once adaptive, has now acquired a stability and life of its own, resistant to new environments where other forms of society would be better.”
            
Hm.  “Other forms of society.”  Like what?, I wonder.  Oh, I know.  Like Lithia!
            
Is there any doubt that, generally speaking, women are more empathetic, compassionate, intuitive, patient, generous, collaborative, and practical than men?  It’s a common belief among men that women are more emotional and unstable than men and thus are less to be trusted in a crisis, but what is that based on?  The fact that women cry more?  It’s not the out of control egos and the limitless lust for power of women that are wrecking the planet.  Maybe I would cry more too if I were a woman having to put up with the madness of men.
            
The women of Lithia in 2055 were able to manage their lives very nicely without the presence of men (except for, briefly, the unfortunate Major Marcus).  The women of today, however, have nearly four billion males that have to be dealt with, in one or another.  Of course, by definition, all males aren’t alpha males, and many men share a vision with women of a world where “wickedness and wars and hatred” have been banished to a distant past.  “Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him,” said Orson Welles, and the artists and dreamers and mystics and just the regular guys who want nothing more than to lead peaceful, pleasant lives can align with women and create a new majority that can change our civilization.  I believe we witnessed the power and potential of just such a coalition in the elections last year that saw thousands of women across the country running for office for the first time and emerging triumphant. 
            
A note to the alpha males out there.  You have nothing to fear.  There will be a place for you in our new society.  We will be nothing if not inclusive.  Your broad shoulders, your boundless energy, your can-do spirit, your determination to succeed, will doubtless prove to be of inestimable value in many situations.  But a word of caution to every male.  If ever that ancient ape anger arises in your breast and becomes uncontrollable, it will be into the deep freeze with you!  I, for one, intend to be on my best behavior. 

Yesterday was sad.  A big headline in the L.A. Times said:  “Last male northern white rhino dies.”  Sudan, 45 and in failing health, was euthanized at a wildlife refuge in Kenya.  It was hoped he would produce offspring with the last two female northern white rhinos, Fatu and Najin, but alas, it was not to be.    Najin and Fatu are two Eves without an Adam, and the species will die with them. 

​All rhino populations in Africa are under intense pressure by poachers trying to satisfy the insatiable hunger of horny old Chinese men for ground rhino horn, an alleged aphrodisiac.  So the northern white rhino will soon join passenger pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, Falkland Island wolves, and all those countless other species that have been driven into extinction by human beings in their relentless march toward…what?  I’ve never been sure.  A bigger and bigger GNP perhaps?
 
Something else was sad yesterday:  one of my squirrels died.  Several squirrels hang out in the twisty trees and vegetation of our front yard, and twice a day I feed them walnuts.  Tuesday is trash-pick-up day on our street, and late in the afternoon I went out to bring in the empty trash containers.  I’d grabbed the first one when I saw a squirrel in the middle of the street lying on its side jerking and twitching.  It had obviously just been hit by a car.  Another squirrel was also in the street, looking at the first squirrel, moving toward it and away from it in a sort of anxious little dance.  What was it feeling?  I don’t know.  Maybe what you or I would feel if a friend had just been hit by a car.
 
The first squirrel quit twitching and lay still, but the other squirrel remained in the street.  It could get hit by a car too if it didn’t move.  I hurried inside and grabbed some paper towels and went back out and gently picked up the dead squirrel.  I was struck by how limp, how utterly relaxed its body was.  Living bodies aren’t like that, and dead bodies don’t stay that way long before they start to stiffen up.
 
It was a big, fat squirrel and I was afraid it was my favorite:  the brave audacious one that would come right up to me and take walnuts from my hand, putting a paw on one of my fingers for support.  I carried the poor broken thing away from the street as the other squirrel followed and became lost in the tangle of trees in the yard.
 
I woke up about three o’clock last night.  Couldn’t get back to sleep.  I was thinking about the squirrel.  It was clear to me I had indirectly caused its death.  The squirrels always come running when they see me because I’m the guy with the nuts, and I’ve always been nervous one of them would cross the street and get hit by a car.  If I’d come out just seconds earlier or seconds later to bring in the trash containers, the squirrel would have been fine; the timing had to be precise for car and squirrel to meet.
 
I know many people consider squirrels to be pests and rats with bushy tails and all that, but I’ve always loved squirrels and found them beautiful.  Since the beginning of time there have been billions of squirrels and the death of one may not seem to count for much, but there have been billions of us too, and I believe our lives, and all lives, count.  When the last male northern white rhino dies, the world takes note, but people don’t care enough about the deaths of common, little creatures.  “Squirrel Killed While Crossing Street” is never going to be the headline in any newspaper, but it was the headline of the day for me.

Robin had named the puppy Buddha—because, she said, there was an aura of calm and quietness about him.  She had very little information about Buddha.  He was of mixed, indeterminate ancestry.  A mutt, in short.  And someone at the shelter had suggested he might have come from a puppy mill in Mexico. 
 
We sat on the floor of the back room by Buddha, where he rested on a little bed, still recuperating from his illness.  Quiet.  Calm.  We petted him and murmured to him.  He looked up at us speculatively with those dark eyes.
 
“Okay,” I sighed.  “Let’s give it two weeks.”
 
It was the old story:  Cat-Loving Guy Falls Hard For Dog.  We changed his name.  “Buddha” to me seemed an odd name for a dog, like calling him Jesus Christ or Muhammad, though we both liked the spiritual connotations.  Stefani read up on Buddha, and discovered he became enlightened while sitting under the bodhi tree.  So we brought the newly christened Bodhi home to Culver City to meet the cats.
 
We carried him into the house in his crate, which we deposited on the floor of the living room in front of our curious but wary cats.  Bodhi looked at Trubble, Sunny, and Sheera.  Trubble, Sunny, and Sheera looked back at Bodhi.  Suddenly Bodhi began to bark, whereupon the cats fled the room in terror and panic, ran down a hallway and into the bedroom and dove under the bed.  Sunny threw up.  Stef said my face turned red as a tomato. 
 
I was sure at that moment that at the end of his two-week probation Bodhi would have to be returned to the shop on Montana Avenue like a sweater that didn’t fit, but fate, and Bodhi, had other ideas.  Turned out he had the perfect personality to insinuate himself into a household of haughty cats.  He was gentle and unaggressive and unfailingly deferential to any cat that happened to cross his path during the course of a day.  Over time the cats learned, not to love Bodhi or even to like him, but to tolerate him, and Bodhi was fine with that.
 
As we all know, a dog’s biology, as compared to a human’s, is poignantly speeded up, and in the first year Bodhi moved swiftly from ball of fur to gawky, big-eared adolescent to magnificent white wolf-like creature.  I think it was a good life for a dog.  Stef and I both worked at home, so he was hardly ever by himself.  Tall walls and gates surround our house and guesthouse and peaceful, plant-filled courtyard, and Bodhi could spend his time inside or outside, wherever he wanted.  In the courtyard we found out his gentleness did not extend to bees.  He was hell on bees.  He would leap into the air and his jaws would snap shut on some poor bee minding its own business, on its way from one flower to the next.  He got stung sometimes, but never seemed to mind.
 
And so Christmas came, Bodhi’s second on this earth, and in a malicious twist, it proved to be no kinder to Bodhi than the first.  On Christmas Day, he became terribly ill, vomiting and defecating endlessly.  Our vet didn’t know what caused it.  Poisoning possibly.  Maybe he’d eaten a rat that had been poisoned itself and crawled into our courtyard to die.  Or maybe the culprit was a pretty shrub with yellow, bell-shaped flowers, suggestively called an angel’s trumpet; we found out later that every part of it, flowers, leaves, seeds, was deadly to people and dogs. 

Bodhi was hospitalized for days, halfway between life and death.  Our vet allowed us to spend as much time as we wanted with Bodhi.  Stefani was small enough to crawl in his cage, and she would lie there with her arms around him as he slept or dozed, barely aware of us.  And then one day he took a sudden turn for the better, and what a sight it was when he came trotting out of the hospital, his thick white coat shining in the sun, and he lifted his leg and took a voluminous ecstatic pee on a bush.

I hadn’t realized how much I cared for Bodhi until I feared he was about to die.  Walk followed walk and week followed week and the years passed, and I came to think of Bodhi as my animal son.  Bodhi was special.  (I know everyone thinks that about their dog, and everyone of course is right.)  A friend said he seemed like a magical beast out of a Russian fairy tale.  He loved other dogs, but was very afraid of people.  For the longest time, only Stef and I were allowed to touch him (eventually he extended the privilege to Andy, our good-natured next-door neighbor, and to our old friends Jim and Susan who live down the block).  He liked for us to pet him, but not too much.  If we overdid it, he would simply rise and walk away and plop down in some other spot.  He was like some half-wild creature; I wondered if his father had been a frisky coyote that had snuck one night into that Mexican puppy mill.
 
Bodhi had a deep and ferocious bark that he’d unleash on anyone who came on or near our property, but he would never bark when we left the house and took a walk.  But there was something very odd he would do.  Sometimes we’d go by a house where some little yappy dog lived, and if the dog started barking at Bodhi, he’d lift his head and start howling like a wolf.  I mean, it would sound like a dadgum wolf was loose on the streets of Culver City.  People would peer out of their windows or look back over their shoulders or stare at Bodhi as they passed in their cars, and the howls wouldn’t stop till we had walked past the house and Bodhi couldn’t hear the dog anymore.  He wouldn’t react that way to being barked at by a big dog, just by a little one.  The only thing I could figure was he’d think the little dog was in some kind of distress or danger and the howls came out of some primeval part of him, the wolf in him commiserating with the wolf in the little dog trapped behind the fence. 
 
We pampered Bodhi.  We bought him stuffed toy animals that squeaked when he bit them (which he would do repeatedly, playing them like a musical instrument) and rubber balls for him to fetch (we’d read tennis balls were toxic to dogs) and thick short ropes so he could play tug-of-war with me (but he preferred playing tug-of-war with one of the squeaker toys, whose life spans tended to be rather short).  He had not one but two outdoor beds in the courtyard and we hired a carpenter to build him a bed right by our own.  We fed him a healthy diet and made sure he received the best veterinary care.
 
I was obsessively concerned with his safety.  He never spent a second off-leash when we left the house because I knew it only took a second for something to go terribly wrong.  You would hear about dogs on walks being attacked by other dogs that were running around loose and being mauled or killed.  I was always worried we would encounter some big savage dog that would go after Bodhi, and then one day that very thing happened.    
 
Stefani was walking with us.  Bodhi was never happier than when it was the three of us on a walk.  Across the street and a little ahead of us an SUV pulled into a driveway.  The automatic door on the garage began to open, and then instantly, as if he’d been waiting for just this moment all day, a large black dog shot out of the garage and ran across the street straight toward Bodhi.
 
Bodhi weighed about fifty-five pounds.  The black dog was a lot bigger, maybe seventy-five or eighty.  You could tell he didn’t want to play with Bodhi, he had mayhem on his mind.  I tried to get in between Bodhi and him, but he was past me in a flash and on top of Bodhi.  The black dog was snarling but Bodhi was silent and didn’t seem to be fighting back, as if he didn’t realize what was happening.  I saw the black jaws of the dog close on the white fur of Bodhi’s throat, and then I dived on top of the dog.  I locked my left forearm around his throat and pulled him off Bodhi.  I held on to Bodhi’s leash.  The last thing I wanted was for Bodhi to go running off down the street with the other dog chasing him.
 
Now I saw the young woman that was the driver of the SUV running across the street.  She was looking on in wide-eyed horror; she probably couldn’t believe her precious Blackie was wrestling on the ground with some old dude with a buzz cut.
 
The dog was struggling to get free, but with my arm around his throat and my other hand grasping the back of his neck I seemed to have him under control, at least for the moment.  I screamed at the woman to get her effing dog away.
 
She grabbed him and pulled him away and said over and over:  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”  She probably had visions of me calling the police and her dog being taken away and put into some ghastly pound, but all I wanted was to get away from there.  Stef and Bodhi and I walked off quickly.  Stef had been freaked out by the whole thing, of course.  She wanted to know if I was okay.  I told her I was.  So was Bodhi; his fur was at its thickest around his neck. It must have been like chomping into a pillow for the black dog.  And I was glad the black dog was okay too.
 
Bodhi was his usual cheerful self as he walked along between Stef and me.  I honestly think he had no idea about what had just happened, it was just some kind of game to him and a pretty fun game at that.  Once again we’d seen his aversion to violence, it was like Robin had nailed it when she named him Buddha.

As for me, I was shaking a little from all the excitement, but I also felt exhilarated.  I had saved Bodhi!  I’d have done anything for Bodhi, if he’d fallen into a roaring river I would have jumped in right after him.  The earth is such a brutal place, and Bodhi was such an innocent creature, and I always wanted to do all I could to protect him.  But I couldn’t protect him from growing old, from getting sick—couldn’t protect him from the age-old cycle of life and death.

Last summer Bodhi’s front right leg swelled up and he began to limp.  We took him in on a Sunday afternoon to the specialty hospital where he’d been treated for some other problems.  They discovered a growth tucked away in his right armpit.  They first suspected a malignant tumor, and then, to our limitless joy, they told us it was just an internal abscess, but eventually it turned out they had been right the first time.  Bodhi had cancer and was going to die.

It had already spread into his liver and spleen.  He was put on chemotherapy, but at best it would buy him just a few more months.  All Stef and I could do was provide Bodhi with as much love as we could in the time he had left, and then to end it for him when love wasn’t enough to justify any more days.

Summer turned into fall.  Bodhi’s unofficial birthday was November 15.  He would be eleven then, and I very much wanted him to make it that far because eleven seemed a lot older than ten, and I wanted to think of Bodhi as living into old age.  We celebrated his birthday, and then we were hoping to have just one more Thanksgiving with him, and that happened too.  And then I started looking ahead to Christmas, and New Year’s, and after that…Martin Luther King Day?  Valentine’s Day?  Maybe even Easter?

Our walks continued, though we weren’t going as far or as fast.  They were bittersweet, at least for me.  Yeats said:  “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.”  But Bodhi hadn’t vanished yet, nor had I.  I focused on the fact that Bodhi and I were still alive on this earth, and we were still taking our walks together.  

On November 29, 2017, at about three in the afternoon, we took our last walk.  It was very short.  We went down the street in the mellow autumnal sunlight, and as we were about to make our usual turn to the right, Bodhi instead dragged me straight ahead.  I knew he wanted to go to Jim and Susan’s house.  He stayed with them when we went on trips or even just went out for a few hours, and he loved their house.  So we showed up at their door and they were there and glad to see us and we went in and hung out for a bit and their two cats ignored Bodhi but Bodhi seemed to enjoy himself and then we went home.

About nine that night, I went outside.  Bodhi was lying in his favorite spot in the courtyard, near the door to the kitchen.  He liked it there because it was a glass door and he could keep an eye on what was going on in the house.  I stooped and gave him a quick pat on the head and went to the guesthouse, where I brushed my teeth and fiddled around on my computer awhile and then turned out the lights and locked up.  

I noticed Bodhi had moved; now he was lying near the door to our bedroom.  I told him it was time to go in.  He struggled to stand up but couldn’t.  It was like his back legs weren’t working.  I tried pulling him up but his back legs just dangled uselessly.  I hurried into the house to get Stefani and then I picked up Bodhi and carried him into the bedroom and laid him down on his bed.  I’m sure he must have been frightened but he had always been a stoic dog and he didn’t whimper, never made a sound.

Before Bodhi became sick, something like this would have caused us to rush him to the emergency room, but things were different now.  We were hoping he’d be better by morning, but when the sun came up, his back legs were still paralyzed.  I carried him into the courtyard to pee and poop, and then we called the oncologist.  She told us what we had already figured out, that it was likely the cancer had spread into his spine, but we would have to bring him in for tests to be sure.  There was no chance of us doing that.  Bodhi was going to spend his last hours at home, and they were going to be as peaceful as possible.

We called a home vet, Dr. Graham.  She’s a kind and lovely woman who had come to our house three years before to euthanize Sheera (Sunny and Trubble had passed on too, after lengthy happy lives).  While we were waiting for her to arrive, we brought in our new cats Yama and Hana to say good-bye to Bodhi.  They were just two years old, yellow tabbies, a brother and a sister.  They had come to us as tiny kittens and had grown up with Bodhi and unlike our other cats adored him.  He was their big brother and their protector; when intruders approached the door he would warn them by woofing mightily so they could run into the bedroom and hide.  They seemed to know something was up.  They sniffed at him, nuzzled their faces against his muzzle.  Then Jim and Susan came by to say good-bye, and then it was just Bodhi and Stefani and me.  Waiting for Dr. Graham.

Do animals know?  Our usual answer is no.  They don’t understand death.  But maybe they understand it far better than we do.  Maybe they understand that death and life are two sides of the same coin, that to affirm one is to affirm the other and how can you not affirm life?  Maybe that’s why Bodhi was so calm.  He knew he had come to the end of his life, and it had been a beautiful and joyous thing and he had loved and he had been loved and now Stefani and I were with him and that was all that mattered.

Dr. Graham arrived.  She injected him with the sedative.  It would be a few minutes before it completely took effect.  Bodhi looked up at us with his soulful, haunting, ageless eyes.  Stefani and I leaned over him, caressing him and whispering to him and weeping, weeping.  Bodhi raised his head and licked my beard, then lowered his head and closed his eyes.

                                                                   ***

We had a wedding to go to the next day.  Itzia, the daughter of our long-time housekeeper Amelia, was getting married.  We had known her since she was a little girl.  We definitely didn’t feel like leaving the house, but we knew Itzia and Amelia would be disappointed if we didn’t come, so I put on my dark suit and Stefani donned a pretty dress and we Ubered down to Pacific Palisades.  

Itzia and Carlos were getting married in a little gazebo overlooking the beach.  It was a splendid spot for a wedding; to the west, the sun was setting over the sparkling ocean, and to the east, a big full moon was rising over the hills, and arching over everything was the endless, eternal sky.  About twenty of us crowded onto the gazebo.  The bride and groom said their vows in Spanish.  Itzia’s dress was lovely and white and rippled in a breeze.

Afterwards, everyone drove to a restaurant in Redondo Beach for dinner.  Amelia loved Bodhi, but we didn’t tell her or anyone else what had happened; it was a happy day, and we didn’t want to sadden it.  But Bodhi naturally filled our minds.  I sipped my second gin and tonic, and remembered how sometimes out of sheer joyous exuberance Bodhi would run at breakneck speed in a circle around the courtyard.  I would stand in the middle of the circle, turning slowly as I watched Bodhi, his long white hair blowing in a wind of his own making, his beautiful tail streaming behind him.  I’d urge him on.  Run, Bodhi!  Run, Bodhi!  Run faster, Bodhi!  Run!

Stef and I said good-bye to the newlyweds and Ubered home.  We knew what awaited us, or rather didn’t await us.  For eleven years, whenever we came home and opened the driveway gate, Bodhi would be there, looking eagerly up at us and wagging his tail, but tonight there was nobody there, nothing, absence, empty space.  Stefani went inside the house.  I keep my clothes in the guesthouse, and headed back there to take off my suit.

I couldn’t believe Bodhi was gone.  The big round moon was now hanging over the courtyard.  I looked up at it and began to cry.

“Where are you, Bodhi?” I said.  “Where are you?”

Maybe one day I’ll open my eyes, and find myself walking again with Bodhi.

          ​About mid-day, the crew packed up and we headed toward the mountains.  We were going to get a shot of Roberto gazing down at a spectacular view of Bogotá.  I was riding with Carlos in his car, when a few fat raindrops plopped down on the windshield.  Moments later, a ferocious rain began to pummel the car.  What had happened to our sunny day?

        Carlos said the good news was that when it rained this hard it wouldn’t last more than fifteen or twenty minutes but he was wrong.  It kept coming, and the sky flashed with light, and thunder rumbled over the city.  Hailstones rattled off the hood of the car, littered the street and sidewalks.  Pedestrians ran madly through the rain for cover as though under attack by strafing fighter planes.  People and dogs huddled in doorways.  The always horrible traffic became even horribler.  Carlos tried to take another route to our location but it was no better.  Rivers of rain gushed down the steep streets.  Nervousness began to gnaw at my gut the way it had most of the day yesterday as I worried that we would run out of time.

        Carlos said we would have to forget about getting the shot in the mountains, but that Roberto’s apartment had a great view of the city and we could do the shot there.  He said we would meet up with the crew somewhere for lunch and hope the storm would have subsided by the time we were done.

          We drove through the gray rain to a big gray building, and found the crew already eating in a vast food court.  Glumly and without appetite, I ate my eggplant lasagna.  Everything had been going fine till I had walked off wearing the basuquero’s bracelet.  I looked at it, thought about taking if off.  But it was ridiculous to think a skinny kid with some colored strings could control the weather.

          We finished lunch and left the building and found hailstones melting on the sidewalks and a gray but rainless sky.  We still had two locations to go to.  I wanted to shoot in the park near my hotel.  It was in the upscale northern part of Bogotá, and all the joggers and dog walkers and attractive women in their stylish clothes would provide a nice contrast to the grunginess and homeless people we’d filmed downtown.  Then after the park, we’d finish at the apartment.  But we were running behind because of the storm, and since the apartment had a couple of scenes we had to do, we decided to go straight there.

         And everything went smoothly.  No creepy curse of the basuquero seemed to be in evidence.  We got the scenes of Iván Lopez as Roberto receiving the death threat over his phone and then hastily packing to get out of town one step ahead of his executioners, and then, as the long day drew to a close, the setting sun appeared through a scrim of clouds and shed a lovely light over the city as Roberto stood at his window taking it all in; the shot was almost certainly better than what we would have got in the mountains.

           It had been a difficult two days, but we were finished!  Carlos and I were elated.  We had gotten everything we wanted except the stuff in the park, which would have been nice to have, but I could live without it.

          I went outside.  Night had fallen on Bogotá.  The crew was packing up the van.  I stood at the top of a driveway that sloped to the street, and called Stefani in California; I was using Carlos’s cellphone since mine was on the fritz.  I had been keeping Stef abreast of the vicissitudes of the trip, and she was glad to hear we were done with the shoot and it had turned out well.

         Do you remember The Omen?  Gregory Peck’s son is the Anti-Christ, and seemingly random, horrible accidents happen to anybody who gets in his way.  What happened next kind of reminded me of that.  There was a white case about three feet tall sitting at the top of the driveway to my left.  I think it belonged to the hair and make-up or the art department.  It had been left there unattended.  It was on wheels.  Now, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it moving forward. 

          I turned my head.  The case was rolling down the driveway, picking up speed.  The van was at the bottom of the driveway, maybe twenty feet away.  I took off after the case, determined to catch it before it hit the van (not that anything very terrible would have happened if it had; it’s not like it was carrying nitroglycerin or something).  I caught up with the case and grabbed it with my left hand.  I tried to put the brakes on so I wouldn’t slam into the van myself, but it’s tricky to run downhill, easy to lose control, and from that point on, it was like when I fell in the river; I know I did it, but I’m just not sure about the mechanics of it.

         I found myself going to the left, and maybe I stumbled over that accursed case, I don’t know, but at any rate there was a sickening second of losing contact with the ground, of being airborne.  I let go of Carlos’s phone and it sailed ahead of me.  I landed near the back of the van half on the curb and half on the street, my left knee and elbow and my right outstretched hand bearing the brunt of the impact.

             It must have looked pretty bad, judging by everyone’s reaction.  Crew members crowded around me, helping me to my feet.  “What you did, it was crazy!” said the hair and make-up person, whose case it may or may not have been.  I brushed myself off, telling everyone I was fine.

          “Are you sure you’re okay?” said Helkin wonderingly.  “Your face, when you were falling…”  He didn’t complete the sentence, but I assumed he meant it had born a look of wide-eyed horror.  I assured him I wasn’t hurt.  And then Helkin smiled.  “So Tom, you fell again.  That means someday you will own this apartment building.”
 
             Someone handed me Carlos’s phone, and then I remembered I still had my wife on the line.
“What the hell happened?” she wanted to know, and I told her but insisted I was fine.  But I wasn’t quite being honest with everyone.  When I fell in the river nothing was hurt except my dignity, but the spill I took in Bogotá was quite painful.  My left arm and leg were abraided and bruised, and my right wrist was throbbing with pain.
 
            I went to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner with Carlos and Mariela and Helkin.  We were all happy and ate hummus and baba ghanoush and drank celebratory wine.  Helkin was excited about a documentary he had recently shot called A River Below.  It was about the imperiled (by us, of course) pink dolphins of the Amazon, and it had been a big success at film festivals.  It was getting some Oscar buzz, and Helkin said that if it got an Academy nomination he was thinking about moving to L.A. and giving American movies a go.  Helkin in Hollywood, that’s a documentary that I’d like to see.
 
            We left the restaurant and walked toward my hotel, which was just a few blocks away.  It was Friday night and Bogotá was jumping.  Hundreds of young people were hanging out in parking lots listening to loud music and openly drinking, which is legal in Colombia.  Suddenly Helkin grabbed my arm.  Just ahead of me in the sidewalk was a dark circular hole missing its manhole cover.  Helkin steered me around it, saying that if I stayed much longer I would wind up owning most of the country.
 
             My wrist had continued hurting during dinner, and when I got up to my hotel room I took a good look at it.  It was beginning to swell a little.  The swelling was happening directly underneath the blue and red and gold strings of the bracelet the basuqero had put there.  And then I remembered how weird it was when the white case began to move.  Almost like an invisible hand had pushed it.  Maybe the basuquero had cursed me after all!  I fumbled at the bracelet, trying to undo the knots, then ripped it off my wrist and threw it in a trash basket.  I hoped my wrist wasn’t broken.  I was just lucky the basuquero had tied a bracelet around my wrist and not a necklace around my neck.
 
                                                                         •••
 
          So I returned the next day to the cozy confines of Culver City, to my wife and dog and cats, and the squirrels playing in the dappled light in the tree outside the window.  Carlos is in Bogotá, editing the trailer, and he says it’s looking good.  He says we finished shooting just in time because it’s been raining constantly and torrentially ever since I left.  He also told me his cellphone had quit working a couple of days after it and I crashed to the street, so I’ve had to add $700 to the production budget to replace it.
 
             And I’ve seen Helkin’s movie, which conveniently opened at a theater in Beverly Hills just a week after I got back.  I thought it was beautiful, disturbing, morally complex, and photographed wonderfully.
 
           My wrist is sprained, not broken.  I’m wearing a black brace on it, and it’s gradually getting better.  Do I think I hurt it because I was cursed by a basuquero?  No.  Of course not.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t think the basuquero was involved somehow.  I believe we live in a universe of meaning, we are usually not aware of it for the same reason a fish isn’t aware it lives in a world of water, water or meaning is all there is.  I believe there was meaning in the chain of events that began when I had a brief encounter with a lost young man named Luis, and then literally turned my back on him and walked away.  That day, it was meant for me to learn something.  Be humble.  Listen.  Be curious.  Be kind.  That’s what the basuquero and his bracelet taught me.
 
 
November  11:  The Basuquero, Part One:  The Jungle
 
November 14:  The Basuquero, Part Two:  The City
 
Today:  The Basuquero, Part Three:  The Bracelet
​

          ​The white crew van picked me up in front of the hotel and we drove downtown, mostly beating the monstrous traffic.  The sun rose above the mountains and filled the city with beautiful light.  It promised to be, at least compared to the day before, an easy day.  Iván Lopez would be the only actor involved.  We’d shoot him in various settings around the city and then finish the day with a couple of scenes at Roberto’s apartment.  The Bogotá traffic was always a factor but there was enough time built into the schedule that it shouldn’t be a problem.  Today, unlike yesterday, would not be fraught with mud and rain and danger, with fears of falling and of falling behind, with gorges and rocks and wild, rushing water.  It ought, in short, to be a breeze.

         We hadn’t been working long when I made an interesting discovery.  Iván was sitting on the steps in front of a church checking his phone as people incessantly do these days while Carlos and Helkin set up a shot.  There was a high fence with metal bars in front of the church with a locked gate.  A couple of dozen uniformed schoolgirls came out of the church.  I noticed one of the girls looking at Iván.  She came closer then let out a scream and shouted his name and then all the other girls screamed too and rushed the fence.  They stuck their skinny arms through the bars, they looked like desperate prisoners, they were all holding phones hoping they could get a selfie with Iván.  They were thrilled when Iván good-naturedly obliged them.  Soon an elderly priest came out of the church, frowned at the situation, then shooed the protesting schoolgirls back in the church.

           I’d known Iván was a successful actor, but I had no idea he was a celebrity in Colombia, some kind of freaking teen idol for god’s sake.  I asked him how it felt to be famoso.  He laughed and shrugged and said some of it was good, some of it was bad.  But Carlos told me that he loved it, that all actors love it.

       We went to Bolívar Square, a plaza surrounded by government buildings and a great cathedral.  Iván was filmed walking across the plaza as pigeons arose en masse and swirled perfectly around him.  Carlos declared himself a great director of pigeons.

           I sat down on some steps in front of the bronze statue of Simón Bolívar as they set up the next shot.  The plaza was beginning to fill up with people.  Among them were a number of scary-looking, ghoulish figures.  It was a few days before Halloween, and somebody had told me there was going to be a zombie parade later.  When I saw three ragged, shambling men headed my way, I at first thought they were zombies, but then I realized they were basuqueros.

            Basuco is a potent, impure, poisonous kind of cocaine.  The shit of the shit, it’s called.  It damages the lungs, the liver, the brain.  It’s highly addictive, and the cost of a hit in pesos is equivalent to about one American quarter.  In Colombia, it’s the drug of choice of the poor and the lost, the wretched and the damned, and its users are called basuqueros.

           The three basuqueros sat down on the steps not far from me.  I eyed them warily.  It was not unknown for basuqueros to rob or even kill people in their desperation to get money to buy more basuco.  But I knew it was unlikely anything was going to happen to me on a sunny morning in the middle of Bolívar Square.

          They could not have stood out more from the other people on the plaza (excluding the zombies) if they had been wearing clown costumes.  Their clothes were filthy and torn, their skin was dark with grime.  All three had dreadlocks hanging past their shoulders, and two of them had bushy, matted beards.  The beard of the third was short and wispy.  He was different from the other two.  They were a lot older, for one thing, and seemed hard and harsh.  Not guys you would want to meet on a dark street at midnight.  But the third man didn’t seem like someone to be threatened by.  He was small and slight and had regular, handsome features.  One could imagine a cleaned-up version of him as an earnest young graduate student, or a guy dancing at a disco with his pretty girlfriend.  He was wearing a beaded necklace with long pieces of colored string dangling from it.

          The three of them were laughing and talking with one another as they made themselves comfortable on the steps.  Maybe it was a good morning in basuco world.  I forgot about them, and watched Helkin following Iván with his camera as pigeons fluttered up.  And then I saw that one of the basuqueros was approaching me.  It was the young one, with the colored strings.

           “Buenos días,” he said.  “My name is Luis.  What is your name?”

          I told him.  I was surprised by his slow, careful, but grammatical English.  I also wondered how he knew to speak English to me in the first place.  I knew I didn’t look like a native Colombian, but I could have been French or German.  I guess I just had American written all over me.

         “I would like to make you a bracelet,” he said, reaching for the strings hanging at his neck.

         I told him no thanks, I didn’t want one.

      “You do not have to pay for it.  This is what I do.  I make bracelets.  I like to make bracelets.”

         I could have said no again but it seemed awkward to do so, so I reluctantly extended my right arm.  The basuquero began trying strings around my wrist.  His dirty fingers were deft and fast, and soon I had my bracelet.  It was made of four strings:  one blue, one red, and two gold.

         I saw Alex, a young bespectacled baseball-capped P.A., coming in my direction.  No doubt concerned I was being hassled by the basuquero.  This was a good time to go.  I stood up, and looked at the bracelet.  The sun was strong in the thin air of the mountains, and the red and blue and gold strings glowed in the sunlight.  The basuquero—Luis—was watching me.  No matter what he had said, I knew he was expecting me to give him some money.  A two thousand peso note, worth less than a dollar, would have made him more than happy.  But instead of reaching for my billfold, “Gracias,” I said, and walked away with Alex.

          The film crew left the plaza, heading north into La Candelaria, the old colonial district.  I glanced back toward the statue of the Great Liberator.  The three basuqueros were still there, talking and laughing among the people and the pigeons.

       We moved along La Candelaria’s hilly, cobblestoned streets, past churches and museums and centuries-old houses painted every beautiful color in the book.  I looked at my bracelet.  It was a pretty bracelet.  I liked it.  I decided to keep it on.  But I was troubled by what had happened back in Bolívar Square with the bracelet’s maker.  

          Why hadn’t I just given him some money?  It was out of character for me not to.  I always give money to people on the street if they ask me for it and look like they need it, just so long as they’re not acting threatening or belligerent.  And Luis was the opposite of belligerent.  There was a gentleness about him that reminded me of Helkin.  Maybe he was a vegetarian too.  It could be argued that his tying the bracelet around my wrist after I’d already told him I didn’t want it was a subtle form of coercion but I had stuck my arm out, and one could assert that I shouldn’t have given him the money because he was just going to go off and buy basuco with it, but as someone who in an earlier part of my life had gone deep down into the dark hole of depression and drink and was lucky to get out of it alive, who was I to judge?

          We walked past the Museum of Gold, as I continued to berate myself.  Not only had I been ungenerous as a human being, I had failed as a writer.  A writer should be open to life, should seek it out, unless all he or she wants to write about is the probably not very interesting contents of their own skull.  Instead of shunning him because he was dirty, I should have taken him to a coffee shop and asked him question after question.  How did an apparently well-educated and probably middle-class kid like him wind up a basuquero?  Where did he sleep at night?  What were his friends like?  Who did he buy the basuco from?  Did he ever see his family?  Did he hope to return to his old life?  How did he happen to start making bracelets out of colorful lengths of string?

         We stopped to set up a shot.  “Roberto” would walk past a store that had a mural of a shaman with an evil-looking monkey peering over his shoulder.  I still couldn’t quite figure out why I had walked away from Luis.  I did recall being aware that some members of the crew might have been observing us, so maybe it was because I just didn’t want to look like a gullible American being parted from his dough by a local hustler.  I was standing next to Tatiana, the first A.D.  Tatiana had had a British boyfriend for seven years, and she spoke perfect English with a somewhat eerily exact Liverpool accent.  I showed her my bracelet, and started telling her about my encounter with the basuquero.  My eyes drifted over to the mural, and then I pointed and said, “Tatiana, look!”

​          The shaman was wearing a many-stranded necklace of bright beads.  I had just noticed that a straggly row of colored strings was hanging from the necklace.  I told Tatiana that the strings the basuquero had used had been hanging from his necklace too, and then I said:  “Maybe he was a shaman.  Maybe he’ll put a curse on me for not paying for his bracelet.”  We both laughed.


November 11:  The Basuquero, Part One:  The Jungle

Today:  The Basuquero, Part Two:  The City

November 17:  The Basuquero, Part Three:  The Bracelet

​           Two weeks ago I went to Colombia.  I traveled into the jungle where I fell into the Río Negro, then returned to Bogotá and fell down on the street after a basuquero had put a curse on me.  Or maybe it wasn’t a curse at all.
                                                                             ***
             I’ve written a novel called Roberto to the Dark Tower Came, which will be published next May.  It’s about a young left-wing South American journalist who receives a disturbing phone call:  an anonymous voice tells him he has ten days to leave the country or he’ll be killed.  Roberto takes the voice seriously, and makes plans to leave, but then he gets wind of a big story developing in the jungle.  He decides to take a quick trip to investigate the story, and then get out of the country before his ten days are up.  And so begins a journey up a river and through the jungle and into the heart of a darkness so deep Roberto wonders if he’ll ever see the light again.
 
          I flew to Colombia to make a trailer to promote the book.  Trailers for books are a relatively new thing.  Most of the ones I’ve perused on the internet have been pretty basic and have left me unimpressed.  I felt with my background in film I could make a kick-ass trailer with high production values that would leave all other book trailers in the dust.
 
             I took the red-eye out of LAX.  I have never been able to sleep on a plane and kept my record intact that night.  I changed planes in Panama, and even though it’s in the tropics it had the coldest airport I’ve ever been to.  My teeth actually began to chatter as I walked through a long, drafty terminal in search of my gate.
 
        The next morning I was picked up at the airport in Bogotá by my old friend Carlos Gaviria.  Carlos went to NYU film school with my wife Stefani, and would direct the trailer.  He’s short, plump, and jovial, with a beautiful head of graying hair and a matching beautiful beard.  He drove me to my hotel through the chaotic, smoking, honking traffic of Bogotá that makes L.A.’s traffic in comparison seem like something you would find in some poky small town in Nebraska.  I was supposed to be able to check into my room early but inevitably it wasn’t ready, so without changing clothes or even brushing my teeth, I embarked on the first of a series of sixteen-hour days.
 
           We were going to shoot two days, one in the city and one in the jungle.  Bogotá is in the mountains, so the next morning we left the chilly city behind and went down and down a winding road into subtropical heat and drove west till we reached the little town of Tobia.  It was serene and lovely.  Dogs would lie in the street till a honking horn would make them reluctantly rise and walk away a few feet and plop down again.
 
          An actor named Iván Lopez would be Roberto.  Iván was handsome and charming, as our Roberto ought to be, and played an abogado, a lawyer, on a popular Colombian TV series.  We picked up some shots of Iván driving around in Roberto’s aging Jeep Cherokee, had dinner at our hotel, and went to bed early.  The hotel was right by the river along which we’d be shooting all day tomorrow.  My window was open, and the river was narrow and fast-flowing, and I listened to its soft roaring till I fell asleep.
 
           Someone knocked on my door at 4:30 a.m., and the river began to roar again.  The cast and crew assembled outside the hotel as the dawn came on.  There were about fifteen crew members, four actors from Bogotá, a half dozen guys from Tobia who’d be playing paramilitaries and guerillas, and another half dozen guys in helmets from a security company who would help us cope with the difficult terrain ahead and make sure everyone was safe when we shot the scenes on the river. 
 
        Paramilitaries had been active around Tobia before the recent signing of the peace agreement between the government and the main rebel group, the FARC, so everybody had a good laugh when a cop on a bicycle pedaled past and saw our paramilitaries with their fake assault rifles walking down the road toward him.  The poor guy thought they were the real thing and hit his brake and looked like he was about to fall off his bike with a heart attack.

         ​It was the beginning of the rainy season in Colombia, and just as we were about to head out, it started to rain.  It quit after about twenty minutes.  The rain was good and bad for us.  It made the jungle lush and green and glowing.  Also, it stayed cloudy all day which was good, since you don’t want to shoot in the jungle when it’s sunny because there’s too much contrast between the sunlight and the shadows.  But it made the hilly trails we had to traverse muddy and slippery and ended up costing us a lot of time.

       This actually wasn’t the “real” jungle—in Colombia that lay south in the Amazon—but it definitely looked the part.  We walked single file along a path that ran along the edge of a gorge at the bottom of which the river surged and roared over huge rocks and tossed up sparkling drops of water.  I felt dizzy as I gazed down on it.  I don’t like heights at all.  It was maybe eighty or ninety feet down to the river.  When the path was flat it was okay but when it went up or down it was daunting, and it was easy to imagine slipping in the mud and sliding right over the edge and screaming piteously all the way down.  And then Carlos would have to call Stefani back in Culver City to let her know her unfortunate husband had met his end on the Río Negro.

          I would have liked to have gone a little slower, taken my time a bit, but since I was the oldest person on the shoot I was determined it wasn’t going to be me that would hold up our intrepid little column of filmmakers.  I slipped and stumbled some, but I wasn’t the only one, and after about an hour we had reached our first location.  The guys in helmets helped the actors and the camera people rappel down the side of the gorge to the river.  I was barely able to watch it, it made me so nervous and “Is this safe?” I asked Carlos.  He assured me that it was.  Although I noticed he didn’t go down there himself.

         We spent the day moving from location to location down the river back toward the hotel.  The only casualty we suffered was when some idiot banged his head on the bottom of a rickety old bridge, but I think the baseball cap I was wearing saved me from getting a nasty cut in my scalp.  

       At one point we had fallen a couple of hours behind because of the logistical problems the brief rain had caused along with the malfunctioning of our Steadicam.  We’d lose the light around five-thirty or six, and whatever shots we hadn’t gotten then would forever remain ungotten because we were headed back to Bogotá that night.  I kept letting Carlos know I was on the verge of freaking out and he kept telling me to not worry, that it was always like this, that we would pick up the pace as the day went on and we’d be fine and he was right.  We got to our last location with just enough light left to shoot.  And, as if I’d been moving toward this rendezvous all day, this is where the river and I became, let us say, intimately acquainted.

          The river was wider and calmer here, and we were doing some stuff with boats.  I was trying to step out of a rubber raft onto the riverbank and gee, I just don’t know what happened.  The raft moved?  My boot hit something slippery?  Anway, bang, into the water I went.  Crew members scrambled to help up the old gringo.  I was drenched and muddy from the waist down, and each hand was covered with mud.  As I stumbled up the bank, Helkin René Díaz, our gentle elfin vegetarian D.P., was beaming at me approvingly.

           “You are a warrior!” he said.

        Helkin told me it was believed in Colombia that if you visited a place and fell down, that meant you were going to buy it.  I said it was beautiful here and I’d like to buy it.

          Our last shot was Roberto and his photographer friend Daniel splashing frantically across the river with the paramilitaries in hot pursuit, and then the river did a slow fade-out in the dusk and we went back to the hotel.  I pulled off my boots and stripped off my muddy clothes.  The hotel had no hot water, so I skipped a shower and put on clean clothes and sneakers then hit the road with Carlos and his wife Mariela.  Carlos’s car wound up and up till we were high in the mountains again and back in Bogotá. 

        They dropped me off at my hotel, where I discovered I’d left my boots, which I was quite fond of, back in the hotel in Tobia (along with falling down, losing things was a central theme of my time in Colombia—my boots, my reading glasses, my house keys, my denim jacket, twice).  It was very late.  I took a shower and crashed and then at 4:30 opened my eyes to darkness and a wake-up call from the front desk.


Today:  The Basuquero, Part One:  The Jungle

November 14:  The Basuquero, Part Two:  The City

November 17:  The Basuquero, Part Three:  The Bracelet