The Slug of Iquitos

A Story

The air in Iquitos is not breathed; it’s drunk in thick, tepid gulps and leaves a tacky film on your skin. The city, a frantic belch of Tuk Tuks and crumbling colonial facades, sits on a lip of green jungle. A place of light and darkness, where money from rubber, oil and cocaine washes up beside the quiet of those whose history the river itself swallows. The Hostel, nestled in a sticky corner of its own making, is a perfect pustule of this dichotomy.

Carlos, owner/chef/shaman, moves through the stagnant heat like a pleased cat. Believing and manifesting himself a conduit, a bridge between bewildered gringos and the ancient wisdom of the forest. His smile, as he serves a dubious ceviche on a sticky Sunday, is a masterclass of benign condescension. The hostel needs a deep clean. The tiles permanently damp, the mosquito nets necessary but nowhere to be seen, and in the rooms, like the one I occupy, the darkness is sweaty and heavy.

And by the pool, less a pool than a concrete hole filled with chlorine, skin and sweat, sits the Slug. He exists in a single, permanent spot on a broken plastic lounger, his pale body, draped in his tribal wares, a monument to inertia. Around him grows a landfill fortress of his own making: packets of crisps, empty cups of instant noodles, a battalion of fizzy drink bottles. Time stretches around him; it’s unclear if he’s been here a week or a year. His universe is the lounger, his gaze fixed on finding his next cigarette.

Every Ceviche Sunday, the hostel erupts in a chaos of local children, friends, and family. Laughter, cutting through the humidity. Carlos plays the part of a generous patriarch, glowing. The Slug does not move. He is a rock in the stream of life. His inability to move matched only by his willing to pass on words of wisdom and answers to questions nobody asked.

“The brew Carlos uses is… pedestrian,” he confided, not lowering his tone. “I have connections. I go to tribes he’s never heard of. The real masters. I can prepare it for you. Purer. Stronger. It will change your life.”

He spoke incessantly of the book he was writing, a literary masterpiece on alternative medicine that would dismantle the modern psyche and rebuild it. “It will be banned on five continents before the ink is dry,” he’d say, with tremendous pride.

Carlos was unsure of what to make of the Slug. The Slug was proof of the powers of healing. He was living, breathing, evidence of the transformative nature of the plants Carlos peddled. “He is on a very deep journey”, Carlos would murmur. “He has seen things that have… anchored him to contemplation”

 The ceremony room, was a cheap theatre of the sacred, tattered mandalas and the smell of incense failing to mask the stench of The Hostel. Carlos’s ceremonies, borrowed and bought from various local indigenous villages, was a performance. His love for himself being the only authentic sacrament.

Returning to the Hostel after some beers, it was silent. But there he was. The Slug. Not asleep but sitting upright in the dark, his eyes reflecting the faint light like a caiman lurking in the murky waters of the amazon at twilight. He didn’t look at me, but his voice slithered through the impenetrable heat. “Have you got a cigarette?’ Reluctantly I surrendered my supplies.

He said nothing more. The next day, his fortress had grown, you could barely see the slug from behind the pot noodle walls. Carlos bustled about, planning the next Kambo session, his ego palpable. And in this windowless room, in the grotty heart of that place, I understood. The Hostel was not a hostel at all. It was a space where souls came not to be found, but to be quietly lost. And in its centre, by that stagnant water, the Slug was both king and prisoner.

A Poem

We found a slug on a deckchair in Iquitos.

What are you here for?

Can I roll one off you?

What are you really looking for?

The Slug asks a lot of questions, but none of the obvious and doesn’t wait for answers.

He takes without giving, popping out an antenna for Ayahuasca;

A lizard tongue testing the air out of his deck chair for tobacco;

Yet unmoved by movements around him – this is his home:

humid, hot, wet, and an endless supply of disciples-to-be.

Here the slug has no worries; the spring of his mind can never run dry;

and everyone else must be thirsty in this heat.

What have you been looking for I have been looking for answers to the big questions

The Slug ask-answers.

But after all these years the biggest high was under my nose; sniffling up a stalactite of white foam.

A mushroom more powerful than anything else,

that can only be found in one forest

He teaches us all about it.

And he’s here to be a teacher

and we have a lot to learn

and he has a lot to give – wisdom he has taught the four tribes hounded for the real shit, the paste, not the liquid.

Wisdom learnt from looking inward

Stuff you wouldn’t understand

Slugs look at life differently to us.

The slug is brewing something up and we shouldn’t miss it

We must learn the answers to questions we haven’t yet thought of.

The ceremony is tonight he says, sliding from east to west, wary of too much sunlight.

But when the time comes he’s lying in the deckchair, miraculously salted by the Amazon waters, unperturbed by or unaware of any preying bird, foaming

His book is going to fuck up the world; will be banned in most countries before it is published; and will expose how natural highs are to answer for everything sound and sacred.

But everything is natural

The get out clause as he wriggles to the kitchen to cook up a feast of pot noodle and crisps.

We left the slug alone

You shouldn’t mess with nature’s plan

We were looking for wildlife in the jungle

But nothing compares to what we found in Iquitos.

We found a slug on a deckchair in Iquitos.