Upper Middle-Class Imperialists

CHAPTER FOUR from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale

Upper Middle-Class Imperialists

4

Raymond changed jobs like a soldier relocating bases. Motivated by desperation or alcoholic pride, he had the habit of uprooting his family with no warning. Such was the case, in 1974, when he announced he had quit his lucrative job in Manhattan.

Passed over for a promised promotion, a position dangled in front of him year after year like a carrot on a stick, he decided, yet again, that he could not, would not, move forward with any company willing to under-value his worth and play him for a fool.

After all, wasn’t it obvious that he was a financial wizard, a savant, even?

Yes, it was true. Petra’s daddy was a very smart man. She often found him deep in thought, hunkering down over his mathematical formulas. His forte? Converting foreign currencies into American dollars with a robust profit margin.

He was better than this, and the prestigious position his headhunter found him with DeMillus, an underwear manufacturer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, proved it.

The instructions left for the family, following his immediate departure, were to pack only their special mementos and keepsakes.

“Offload everything! We’re starting fresh. New country, new stuff, new life. We’ll be rich! Wealthy the way we were back in the day, back when we lived in Liberia.”

Terrified, Petra asked herself, “Doesn’t he remember what happened there? That baby Anne died? Has he forgotten that he had a murder contract on his head and was lucky to get out alive?”

In their household, any discussion about Africa was off-limits. It was the great family secret, drowned with alcohol, monetary gain and the quest for corporate power. Lingering regrets shut away hard, and cast into the hidden tunnels of slumbering despair.

In an ironic twist, while living in Monrovia, Raymond amassed an extensive collection of West African tribal art. Paintings and ceremonial masks lined the living room walls. Scattered throughout the rest of the house were hand-carved ebony statues of gods, goddesses and tiny iron elephants; haunting reminders of long-erased memories. When she was in the house alone, Petra beat on native drums carved from African hardwood and topped with animal skin. Her favorite artifact was a grotesque souvenir, a sixteen-foot African Rock Python skin. Unashamed and pleased with herself, she rolled it out every year at show and tell.

To the horror of her fifth-grade classmates, it fell apart and disintegrated to scaly dust on the teacher’s desk.

The narrative went something like this:

“My baby sister, just two years old, was sitting on the front porch. Our houseboy spotted this giant snake winding its way up the steps toward her. He shouted the alarm and within seconds, six men subdued the beast. Within minutes, they had skinned it, sent its meat back to their village and presented the skin to my stunned father.”

When she told the story at school, she would always say it was her on the porch. She avoided any mention of her sister. She couldn’t remember how Anne died. All she knew for sure was that there had been an accident and somehow it was all her fault.

Her father always said, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

She found the notion laughable and sad, but never found the courage to point out how few toys he had actually acquired. In the end, stricken with early onset Alzheimer’s, he lost his job, his retirement package, and his hefty life insurance policy.

On one rare occasion, when his desperation broke through his pride, he told her, “I’m worth more dead than alive.”

Had he foreseen the endgame of the company he made multi-millions for or the scheming of the life insurance company he dumped a fortune into, he might have stepped out of the rat race, cut the puppet strings and developed an appreciation for life. Instead, he lived his last days in terror and regret, leaving his second family penniless and living in a house well on its way to foreclosure.

It took less than a month to liquidate their possessions. Lou, who had spent close to fifteen years strangled by her husband’s strict budget, had a field day with the mountains of cash flowing through her fingertips. Petra watched her cook the books, claiming about two-thirds of the actual take while pocketing the rest.

She had been skimming for years on a small scale by shorting the kids on food, while her husband was consulting abroad, and pocketing the change for martini lunches with the girls. Who could blame her? Like so many stay-at-home mothers, she was unpaid and undervalued. Perhaps that justified her total lack of motivation and her children’s state of neglect.

While her daddy was off living it up in Rio, she happened upon her mother, her paternal uncle, Cornelius and his wife, Aunt Ava. Seated in the living room, they were stuffing weed into a corn-cob pipe. While the cat is away, the mice do play. Her father objected to marijuana use, calling it a drug for Beatnik losers. Not so her mother! Or, her uncle, a linguistics professor at Queens College and, by the look of him, some sort of literary hipster. Not her aunt, either, a former member of the Hitler Youth, who had escaped East Germany and now traveled weekly to West Berlin as a flight attendant for Lufthansa.

Aunt Ava was her favorite relative. For Petra’s seventh birthday, she gifted her a bright yellow micro-mini dress. It came with a belt crafted from tortoise shell circles linked by gold metal hinges. Her aunt found the little beauty in a Paris boutique and knew it was perfect for her niece.

“It’s all zee rage, darlink.”

She wore it to her second-grade class with pride. The school sent her home early, with prejudice.

Aunt Ava, appalled, insisted on picking her up. She let the teacher and the principal have it. In a heavier than usual German accent, she snarled, “Only perfferts react zis vay! Don’t vu know high facschion ven vu zee it?”

Through clouds of smoke, accented by coughing fits, they waved Petra in for a hit.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

She took several tokes of some fine Columbian Gold, laughed her ass off for hours and ate every snack in the house. In this, her first encounter with marijuana, she fell head over heels in love and made it her top priority to smoke morning, noon and night from that auspicious moment on.

—

Rio de Janeiro, referred to as the Calcutta of the South, was a lot to handle. Hello, extreme culture shock.

They speak what? Portuguese?

The staff at The Hotel Debret, on the infamous Copacabana Beach, spoke decent English and were delighted to teach her their language. Petra had plenty to learn, and it needed to happen fast.

She asked her new confidant, a young guy who worked at the front desk, “How do I say, a pack of cigarettes, please?”

Jonesing bad, she repeated the words, “Um maço de cigarros por favor,” over and over, believing that, if she said the words just right, she could blend into her new environment.

It was an unrealistic idea betrayed by her pasty, winter-white skin tone and her self-conscious demeanor. She was the exact opposite of her father, who had, upon arrival, become a local celebrity. He enjoyed the city’s wild nightlife, which allowed him to indulge his every whim. Infidelity was a way of life in Rio and he was in his element.

DeMillus made bathing suits, as well as underwear. She needed something to wear to the beach, but what in the hell were these things? Three tiny triangles and a thong that rides up the ass?

“I think not!”

Disappointed that she refused his gift, Daddy said, “Be that way. Go buy your own damn suit!”

For the first time in her life, he handed her, more like threw at her, a wad of cash. Petra had enough money to have some real fun in the shops. She purchased a bikini with the most coverage she could find and it was still tiny by American standards.

In a few short months, she would be, more or less, comfortable in her skin, loving her new life and shopping for a string bikini.

The sun, the sand, the sparkling barrel waves, and the dangerous currents worked together like a personal trainer. In no time, she was sporting a fit beach body like everyone else, except this one was light-skinned, with dark hair and blue eyes. Brazilian men, in the 1970s, would say any lewd thought that crossed their mind as they passed by a woman. Petra may have looked strong, but she was thin-skinned and fearful of men and their sexual desires.

She needed more than cigarettes and beer could offer. There was no drinking age in Brazil and alcohol was cheap. A huge bottle of beer was only fifty American cents, but alcohol only solved part of her problem. Reserved for afternoons and evenings, it fell short. There were twenty-four hours in a day. What about the ass crack of dawn?

She needed weed.

Cauli, the son of a prominent doctor who lived in a high rise next to the hotel, spoke damn good English. He was too much of an athlete, surfing the circuit and on his way to becoming the next big thing, to smoke weed himself. However, he knew everyone in the neighborhood and introduced her to Rato, pronounced, “Hatoo”, meaning Rat.

Rato was the head of the local street gang. He dealt drugs and ran several large rings of street urchins from the favelas (slums). Their job was to beg and steal, returning the take to Rato for distribution. When Petra headed out to the beach, she tucked some cash into the side of her bikini bottom, wrapped a towel around her hips and secured it with a diaper pin. She always buried her cigarettes and cash in the sand when she went body surfing.

Her new buddy, Rato, taught her these beach survival techniques and instructed her to, “Never leave the house with more than you can afford to lose.”

No one showed tourists any mercy. Robbers targeted and robbed them for sport. When her father became too furious to calm himself down, he would wear one of his expensive cameras around his neck, go out for a walk, and beat the shit out of the first thief who tried to take it from him.

Rato asked her, and Cauli translated, “Do you want to try before you buy?”

Well, that was a no-brainer. They went up to an apartment several blocks back from the beach. These were the lower middle-class dwellings, seedy and a tad scary for an American girl. Cauli left her there, smoking dope that smelled like rich black earth. She later learned it grew wild in the Amazon jungle. It was powerful, way too strong for a teenage gringa. The world drifted and disappeared on an imaginary horizon as light disintegrated into darkness. It reminded her of general anesthesia and the fade toward unconsciousness. She lay there for what seemed like hours. Since she had no idea what anyone was asking her, someone ran to find Cauli.

He prepared some hot tea and gave her a cookie. It was the perfect antidote and brought her back from the brink to a normal high.

“Jesus Christ! That is some great weed. How much can I have for twenty American dollars?”

The Brazilians adored American dollars and, just like that giant bottle of beer for fifty cents; she got an enormous bag of killer weed for twenty bucks. With her earlier intention now solidified, she began smoking weed morning, noon and night until her drug use days came to an abrupt halt in the late 1980s.

Being an American in South America, in the seventies, had its perks. People considered a blue United States of America passport the gold standard of liberty. Petra attended the American school with all the other entitled kids who came from all over the world. They were a club of privileged youth, even though many of them did not amount to much in their own countries. Still, they had maids at home, some had drivers (not her, she rode the bus), their private education was part of the corporate, or armed forces, package and they were close to untouchable.

One night, machine gun-toting Military Police arrested her friend Richard Groden. He was in possession of a kilo of marijuana. He related his escapade with relish.

“I was sitting in a glass cubical, all the partitions inside the precinct were also glass, and in the distance, I could see an American Admiral talking to the Chief of Police. I waved my arresting officer over and said, ‘You see that Admiral over there? That’s my father. Please go get him so we can clear this up.’ Within minutes, I was whisked out of the precinct, put in an unmarked vehicle and driven wherever I wanted to go.”

The place Richard went was Billy’s Bar, a high school hangout, where all the kids enjoyed his tale over Cuba Libras.

Petra noted this tactic and employed it one night when police caught her smoking pot on the beach with her Brazilian boyfriend, Roberto. She saw two off-duty police officers heading their way and shoved the joint and her stash under the sand. One officer, knowing full well what she was up to, walked behind her, pushed his hand into the sand and pulled out her stash.

“What’s this?”

Lifting her to her feet by the elbow, he began frisking her, feeling her up is more descriptive, and when he went for her crotch, she exclaimed, “See that hotel over there? Yes, the Hotel Debret. My father is staying there. If it’s money you want, let’s go see him. He is the president of Johnson & Johnson.”

A lie. An executive of a Brazilian company like DeMillus wouldn’t impress them as much. In actuality, her family had moved to a different neighborhood, on a beach several miles to the south.

“That won’t be necessary,” said the cop, “but I’ll keep this,” referring to the weed. “You’re lucky you’re American.”

“You better watch yourself,” he told Roberto, “and if I were you, I’d stop hanging around with the likes of her.”

Her high school years were a blur. It was rare to see her in class. No one seemed to notice. Raymond and Lou were busy hanging with ex-pats at Lord Jim’s, a British-style pub. They had their lives. She had hers. It was a far cry, better than any life she had lived so far.

She was hanging with a street gang with a 3:00 am curfew. Rato had informed her father that this was the Brazilian custom and Pops not only bought it, he endorsed it as a form of cultural etiquette.

What parent does that?

With all the freedom, her addiction skyrocketed. She became somewhat feral. When she was in school, she would skip class and hang out in the smoking lounge, an open-air balcony with a view of the jungle. In solitude, while everyone else was getting an education, she chain-smoked and watched giant blue butterflies float across the sky while screeching howler monkeys swung through the trees. She could see it and hear it, but could not feel much of anything. She liked it that way.

When she went to class, she was a distraction. One time, she embarrassed Richard Groden by sitting on his lap. He was her friend, a real stoner, but just plump enough to be self-conscious. His face turned beet red and everyone laughed at his expense. Being the center of attention felt good. She was not a nice person and had forgotten what it felt like to be an object of ridicule.

Richard got her back. He got her back good.

Offering her some pills, he said, “You’ll love these. You’re going to have a fantastic trip.”

What he didn’t mention was that she would hallucinate real people down to the smallest detail. How does the brain even do that? She began conversing with invisible people. Unable to ignore the problem, her parents cornered her in the elevator. A long slow ride up fifteen floors. Raymond grabbed her by the shoulders.

“What are you on?”

“Not sure, ask Richard.”

In her mind, she imagined they would wake up and send her to a therapist. No such luck. The family could not afford to have its secrets uncovered, no matter what the cost. It became impossible to deny the simple truth that she was now a liability and her parents were entirely willing to lose another daughter.

—

Macumba is the official religion in Brazil, but if you were to ask, everyone would tell you they are devout Catholics. Every New Year’s Eve, women and men, from all over the country, dressed in solid white, descend onto Copacabana beach to practice their magic and send out offerings to Iemanjá, the goddess of the sea.

It is a spectacular sight. Thousands of candles light up offerings of food, alcohol, red roses and statues of Catholic saints. Each saint represents a different African god or goddess. As midnight approaches, people place offerings in small, hand-crafted wooden boats. At the stroke of midnight, they carry them out into the ocean. If Iemanjá takes the boat out to sea, you will have a blessed year. If she throws it back on shore, watch out!

Everyone respects a Macumba offering. To defile an offering will always result in karmic retribution.

On Petra’s first New Year’s Eve, drunk out of her mind and running down the beach picking up handfuls of roses, she learned the hard way. She came face to face with a Macumbeira witch. Gray-haired, with weathered dark brown skin and piercing green eyes, she cursed the silly young American.

“Your feet will bleed the disrespect you have shown here tonight.”

“Oh, shit!”

She lowered the roses onto the sand in slow motion, unable to escape the witch’s gaze. A “deer in the headlights” fear radiated from Petra’s eyes. In a trance-like state, she approached the street, noticing shattered glass everywhere from a car wreck.

“Good thing they make shatterproof glass these days, she thought.”

Unable to stop herself, she walked barefoot across the glass and watched her feet bleed.

She learned something that night, but what?

Stealing pills from the medicine cabinets of their parents was a weekend ritual. In Brazil, regulations did not control pharmaceuticals, and doctors prescribed anything to anyone. Anita and Amy’s mother was an upper downer addict. They stole some speed from their mom’s stash and, along with Petra, the three of them had a little party.

The sisters lived up a mountain, surrounded by dense jungle. They had a jackfruit tree in their front yard. It produced hanging fruit the size of watermelons and was home to a family of sloths. Lots of food, easy pickings, perfect for a sloth. The girls got crazy high, hiked out into the jungle and cut down a Magilla Gorilla, super-sized, bunch of bananas, stalk and all. Its stem was so long that they had to carry it across all three of their shoulders. The act horrified and enraged the locals. Here were these stupid, rich foreign kids destroying a productive, life-sustaining plant.

A group of Macumbeira witches dressed in their customary white robes intercepted the girls. They were in the middle of performing a voodoo ceremony. The witches began cursing them with a fervency that was frightful.

Amy’s hunting dog had followed them into the jungle. He was standing, immobile, on a 4-foot ledge above the tiny stream they were crossing. He appeared frozen or paralyzed. They watched as the dog lifted off the ground. He was stiff as a board. Still suspended in the air, he turned over on his side and dropped, rigid, into the water below. The dog yelped, shook itself free from the spell and took off running. The girls dropped the banana stalk and hauled ass. They did not stop running until they were halfway down the mountain.

An ugly American tourist is one thing. An ethnocentric, privileged white person is another. Petra was both abhorrent things and an addict, adding icing to a very stale, tasteless cake. Later, in college, compelled to major in Cultural Anthropology, she learned some of the basic manners one should exhibit toward other races, cultures and customs.

—

A side note from Rato:

“If you are driving on a secondary road at night and you see a Macumba offering in the middle of the road, do not stop. Hit the gas and run it over. No need to fear. It’s a trap set by the worst kind of thief, the lowest of the low, the scumbags, who will run a con using the sacred for monetary gain.”

Even Rato had strict moral boundaries and a healthy respect for the gods.

---

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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.

This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.

It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.