Wholphin

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Liner Notes:

Strongest among my impressions of Bolivia is the memory of leaves. Guayaba leaves hissing like fire as rain filtered through the forest canopy. Bashful pink lapacho leaves moving softly, almost imperceptibly, like children playing dead. Coca leaves, drying on a clothesline by my tent, waiting to be ground into a fine powder with a rock, which I’ve since learned is not how you make cocaine. I was camping high in the Bolivian hills, breathing the same dense rainforest mist Che Guevara breathed when he visited this landlocked country in 1966 to turn an assemblage of ragged proletarians into fearsome Socialist revolutionaries. I wondered if, like me, Che had ever looked out over the vast, undulating arboreal plane and yearned, deep in his soul, for weather that was a little less muggy. He had asthma, I think, so probably he did.

My Swedish traveling companion, Richard Blomquist, hoisted our sack of provisions into a tree high above the campsite. He did this on the suggestion of townspeople who, days earlier, warned us strenuously about an indigenous creature known as “el Chupacabra,” or “the goat-sucker” — an aggressive, forest-dwelling beast capable of suctioning the viscera out of an adult goat with a single slurp. I told the townspeople there was no goat meat to be found in our provisions, nor were we hiking with goats. At this, a wizened Indian woman in a colorful wrap and traditional bowler hat fixed me with sad eyes.

“Planning on doing any swimming?” she asked.

“Not really,” I replied.

“Oh,” rasped the old woman. “Never mind then.”

“Well, I mean, I brought my trunks just in case,” I said. “What were you going to say?”

“It was about the goat-sucker. But apparently you aren’t concerned about him.”

“I am concerned about the goat-sucker.”

“Do not think the shunning of goats alone is enough to thwart him!” she shrieked, her face a sun-baked mask of fury.

“I don’t! I never thought that.”

“Good,” said the old woman.

“Sorry for the confusion,” I said.

The wind murmured. Somewhere close, a tapir grunted.

“So. You were saying?”

“Oh!” said the old woman. “The goat-sucker can swim.”

Shaken, I thanked her and trudged with Richard into the forest. I wondered if, decades earlier, Che Guevara had feared the same goat-sucker I now feared. Richard plucked an errant dragonfly from his unruly Swedish beard.

Richard. Sturdy. Laconic. He had been a first lieutenant in the Swedish Civil War of the 1990s. His old soldier’s eyes had witnessed gore-soaked horrors beyond human reckoning, but they’d also seen a lot of really hot Swedish people, so it sort of balanced out. Richard Blomquist sought what I sought. To drink deeply of the revolutionary passion Che had spilled upon this Bolivian soil like the drippings of a newly sucked goat.

Of course passion, once imbibed, must be disgorged. Che’s passion found release in guerrilla warfare and gonzo lovemaking. Plus he worked weekends at a Lhasa Apso rescue. And yet Richard and I were not Che. We would disgorge our passion through the medium of film.

“Clearing ahead,” said Richard, untangling an infant spider monkey from his untamable Swedish beard.

We had been hiking for two hours. I pulled a wine skin from the large, bladder-like animal skin I use to carry my wine skins. “We will rest here,” I said.

Richard nodded, and we dropped our gear. All around us the rainforest blared with chattering, chirping, hissing, howling life, and far away, a faint whoosh like a breeze in the mouth of a cave. Then the whoosh grew louder. The ambient cacophony turned frenzied and antic. Unseen birds screeched in the trees. Exotic varieties of squirrel freaked out loudly. Finally, Richard’s terrified voice rang out.

“Goat!”

At the edge of the clearing, a female goat, her goat-teats gravid with milk, grazed happily on the odd, grass-like plant that carpeted the clearing.

“You dumb goat-bitch,” I thought, assuming this to be the zoologically correct term. “You’re going to get me and my Swedish traveling companion killed!”

The whoosh grew louder still. Richard and I stood back to back, scanning the woods for signs of the terrible Chupacabra. Then, a deafening roar. Jet planes streaked overhead; it started to rain. Only the rain smelled very much like a Wal-Mart Garden Center, and it bleached Richard’s Swedish beard on contact. The plants beneath our feet began to wilt. The goat-bitch fled.

A bedraggled man in short shorts and a filthy Cornell rugby shirt hobbled out of the forest and dropped to his knees. Tears streamed down his creased, careworn face. It was awkward.

“My horny goat weed!” he wept. “Lost! The entire crop! Gone!”

Since the 1980s the United States has funded horny goat weed eradication projects throughout Central and South America. This much I knew. But to stand in an actual horny goat weed patch and witness the devastating consequences of such a facile policy firsthand was more than I could bear. The man lay prone atop his wasted harvest, cursing heaven and earth.

“My friend,” I asked softly, “why do they kill your crop?”

“Because,” he answered through tears, “it is an aphrodisiac. It gives the world love. And there is nothing los Capitalistas fear more than love.”

Suddenly I understood. El Chupacabra is no flesh and blood animal. It is us. Capitalism and all those complicit in its rapacious designs — we are the real goat-suckers.

The man stood up shakily. “Also there was a kid in Baltimore who took some and his heart exploded.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “What is your name, my friend?”

“Jose Reich.” He straightened his back and spoke with resounding pride. “Horny goat weed farmer.”

I looked into the man’s eyes and saw what Che Guevara must have seen in 1966: vibrant, indomitable humanity, thriving like a strange weed on hostile ground.

Later Richard and I accompanied Se–or Reich back to the tumbledown shack where he processed his herb and packaged it for export to distant, unimaginable gas station counters. Stamped on each and every packet was an image that will stay with me as long as I live. Under the trademarked horny goat weed logo was Che’s face, contorted into an expression of pure, wild, sensual abandon.

Richard and I looked at each other. We had found the image that would define our film.

Biography:

Rich Blomquist is a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and a regular contributor to Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse cartoons. He lives in Manhattan.

Scott Jacobson is a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and a regular contributor to Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse cartoons. Unlike Rich Blomquist, he lives in Brooklyn.

Jason Reich is a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and has been there longer than Rich Blomquist and Scott Jacobson.

One Response to “Wearing Che”

• Optical
  June 19th, 2008

  Silly me, I always thought Che’s accent would be argentinean, not Italian!

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