Peter Gorman will be appearing at the 4th Annual Ayahuasca

Monologues in New York

on Tuesday, Nov. 30.





Peter Gorman has been places. He's been

inside, outside, upside, downside, this side, that side, and the other side. In

the words of Dennis McKenna; Peter Gorman has "been way, way beyond the

chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night." And that's putting it mildly.

His new book Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25

Years of Medicine Dreaming, is brewed with an enchanting lucidity. To read it is to drink down a

story, a whirlwind, a wild fire of spirits and curanderos,

pirates and teachers, frogs and vines, snakes and shamanism, plants and visions

woven across the arc of a quarter century's worth of heavyweight Amazonian,

Texan and New York City adventures.

Written with the total recall of an

expert investigative journalist, prepared with the special flair and flavors of

a Master Chef, the book is spun lavishly, elegantly. Reading the book places

you deep in the forest, late at night, around a small campfire, listening to a

savvy bard recount terrifying ghost stories. Stories you might only barely

admit to believing. Thing is, these stories, and the storyteller, are realer

than real. Furthermore, the ghosts in these stories appear to you in sharp

focus, they surround, they approach, touch, terrify, cajole and, they

are ones holding lights up to their faces.

Ayahuasca in My Blood articulates very clearly Gorman's relationship with the realms

of the "way, way beyond." It must be

said, however, that Peter has also been, and remains, very down-to-earth.

The heart of the book concerns Peter's

extraordinary experiences with ayahuasca. However, his struggles with his family,

his work, his truck, his ranch in Texas, his life in NYC and his old bar in

Iquitos all play major roles in an intense narrative

that manages to include magnificent, informal biographies of three of his most

important and respected teachers: Moises Torres Vienna, an ex-military man who

first takes Gorman out into the deep green, imparting lessons in survival;

Pablo, the powerful Matses headman who introduced Peter to sapo–the now

legendary frog venom medicine; and of course the story of the humble and potent

curandero, Don Julio Jerena.

Ayahuasca books are bursting forth like

wildflowers, yet it is rare to find oneself SCUBA diving through the veins

of someone who's traversed this terrain as long, deep and freaky as Gorman has.

Try as I might to avoid presumptions, or

pull cliches, it must be said that Ayahuasca in My Blood is destined to

become a classic. In fact it's already there. More than that, it's a valuable

reflection on the nature of shamanism, a reflection that has not, to my

knowledge, ever been illuminated in such a visceral way.

If one considers the spectrum of related

literature — take for example William S. Burroughs's The Yajé Letters, Terence McKenna's

True Hallucinations, Wade Davis's One River, Jimmy Weiskopf's Yajé: The New Purgatory, or Steve

Beyer's Singing to the Plants — Peter Gorman's Ayahuasca in My Blood weighs

in amongst these giants and, in many ways, ties them all together.

Like Gorman, William S. Burroughs

stumbled into the role of being a precedent setting, right-place-at-the-right-time

gringo drawn to the jungle and its medicines long before most of the world even

caught a whisper of anything to do with ayahuasca. Terence McKenna went very,

very deep and utterly lived (and loved) to tell the tale, however tall and

unlikely it may have seemed to be. Wade Davis, the gifted writer and explorer,

wove together a story of the jungle, plants, and his friends and mentors

Richard Evans Schultes and Tim Plowman. Jimmy Weiskopf courageously detailed

his own hell, transformation and learning, and Steve Beyer simply laid it all

out in one fell swoop.

Ayahuasca in My Blood is a mix of all of the above. What distinguishes the book is in

part Gorman's style as a writer;

he's most certainly and abundantly endowed with the Irish gift of gab, and a

memory of unparalleled clarity. However, perhaps more important is how

this book casts, with tremendous verve,

the doors of perception wide open, busting them off their hinges, sending them

flying into the deepest void you care to imagine, where a great wind sweeps you

clean off your feet, rockets you head over heels into a whole other ballgame,

brings you back to reality, momentarily, then threatens you, teases you,

provokes, challenges and simply never lets up until you find yourself dropped,

like some kind of jungle-fied Dorothy, breathless, in the eye of a poltergeist

tornado, with a snake in your stomach and bills to pay.

There are very few people alive who have

25 or more years experience with ayahuasca, most of them are the old mestizo and

indigenous shamans of South America. Rarer

still are those among this experienced group who are willing and able to write

about their experiences. Peter Gorman, in opening his heart, his life and his

talents, shares a masterwork in this respect; a tremendously earthy, rich,

poetic, way-out and honestly magical artifact, gathered from the deepest of

depths.

Morgan Maher: What first brought you

to the Amazon jungle?

Peter Gorman: I always loved travelling.

Starting in high school I began to hitchhike, eventually crossing the U.S. several

times and logging about 50,000 miles on my thumb. Feeling like I'd seen a good

deal of the U.S., I headed

out to Europe and then on to Mexico

for a few months.

In Mexico

I fell in love with the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. I'd have gone back but the woman I

lived with bought me a book on my return called Headhunters of the Amazon, by a

fellow named Up de Graf. I think it was published in 1923, but it dealt with

his time in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon from about 1896-1906 or

something like that. Large sections of the book took place on the Yavari River,

the border between Brazil

and Peru.

He painted it as a wild place, a no man's land. So I decided to go see that

river.

The nearest jumping off point was Iquitos, Peru,

and so that's where I went in 1984 with a couple of pals. I returned in 1985 to

do a month of jungle survival training with a fantastic guide and teacher,

Moises Torres Vienna.

I didn't get to the Yavari right away,

but did get there in 1986, and in 1988 spent some weeks there. A couple of

years later I was able to secure my own boat and run the length of that river.

It was as wild when I reached it as it sounded like it was for Up de Graf.

Much of the book, and your experiences

in the jungle, is inspired and connected to your friend and teacher Don Julio

Jerena. Could you tell us about Julio?

Julio…hmmm. Well, he was the local

curandero-healer on the Aucayacu River, about 212 km south of Iquitos,

not far from the river town of Genero

Herrera. I first met him in 1985, when Moises took me

out that way. He was small, strong, handsome. He had a bright smile and ears

that were too big for his head. But he had a light in his eyes that I'd rarely

seen. He was impish, full of fun, and an amazing healer. He was also the father

of a pretty huge brood; I know nine of his children — the youngest born when he

was 70 — and I'm told there are a few I've never met.

In real life, he supported his family

with his military pension, which was several hundred dollars a month because

he'd been in action in two wars as a young man, and as a fisherman. He was the

simplest of men. He loved living on his little river, loved his small fields of

yuca and sugarcane, corn and plantains. He loved his boiled fish and plantains.

He loved to laugh. He was elegantly humble.

But he was also a man of immense power.

When he walked in the jungle he didn't slash at the underbrush, he sort of

waved at it with his machete as though the suggestion that the vines part was

enough to get the vines to part. And most of the time it almost seemed as that

were true. He healed with a wonderful touch, using ayahuasca to connect with

the spirits — the sentient side — of the plants he'd need to utilize to heal a wide

variety of ailments. Over the years I saw him work on snakebites, sick

children, cancer patients (that one was one of my guests, and she got several

more years than she thought she would), fungal infections, parasites — a host of

things a lot of medical doctors would have a tough time healing. And he loved doing

that.

What lessons did he impart to you?

How to laugh when kids are driving you up

the wall. How to apply patience to jobs to get the work done. To realize that

the spirit of ayahuasca and the spirits of the other plants, and the guardian

spirits are the doctors and that if we're lucky enough to get the chance to

heal someone sometimes to never believe that we are the doctors. To understand

that this world, this universe and the other realities are all connected and

that we have the ability to connect with it all.

What lessons, or what kinds of

lessons, have the plants taught, or continue to teach you?

That's not easy to answer. I am just

whoever I am. I'm a dad, a journalist, a guy trying to put good healthy food on

the table. Someone who has cats and dogs and chickens and ducks and birds and a

goat and who tries to remember to feed them all before I feed myself.

Would I be who I am if I'd never gone to

the Amazon? If I'd never had ayahuasca? I don't know. I would still be me, but

I'd be a different me. But what part of that can I compartmentalize to say "Oh,

that's the ayahuasca?" versus just plain "Oh, that's the experience of living,

of raising kids" or whatnot?

A great deal of the work that ayahuasca

and other plants have done on me, I think, relates to my heart. To the ability

to love freely, knowing there's no shortage of what you can give. To forgive

freely, knowing that holding the anger or pain is only going to make you sick

and will do no one any good.

I think I also understand the first

inkling of healing others. Not that that's something I can do, like a trick.

But when my mother-in-law was dying, the plants let me put my hands on her back

and absorb the heat her body was putting out. They allowed me to take it and

eliminate it so that she could sleep. It blistered my hands but gave her rest.

There's really a great deal of learning

that's gone on. It's the compartmentalizing that's difficult to do. In other

words, I think I'm a better person than I might have otherwise turned out, but

when I look in the mirror I see that I'm still full of flaws.

An important person in your life, and

in the book, is your jungle teacher Moises Torres Vienna. Could you tell us

about Moises?

Like Julio, Moises was one of three

extraordinary teachers I have had as an adult. Four if you include my ex, who

taught me an immense amount about the jungle she grew up in. But the three were

different. I met Moises with my two pals on my first trip to Peru. We'd seen

Cuzco and Machu Picchu and hiked in the Cordillera Blanca near Huaraz and had

finally gotten down to the jungle in Iquitos, where I was instantly at home. On

our first day there, Moises, a ruggedly handsome former trainer of jungle

forces for both the Peruvian and American military, was by then retired and a

guide. He approached my friends and I on the street in Iquitos and asked if we

wanted a guide.

I was so tired of people saying they were

guides by that time that I blew him off. I told my friends we should just catch

a big riverboat somewhere and we'd wind up in a jungle town and find a real

guide there, rather than use this smarmy little guy.

So we did. We took a boat that took us to

a little town — at that time — called Requena on the Ucayali River, headwater for

the Amazon. It was a fascinating place. But difficult for gringos, which it

didn't get many of. For a hotel we had to take a place where wood partitions

ran halfway up the wall and were topped by wire mesh. The guy downstairs kept a

burro that brayed all day and night. We were followed by maybe 100 people

everywhere we went — which was up and down the single street of the place. No one

could change US money, and nobody had food prepared in restaurants. When you

came in and ordered, they went out to try to buy a chicken for your meal.

And nobody would take us into the jungle.

They were all afraid of ghosts, Indians and jaguars. People went out as far as

their chacras, fields, maybe 1000 yards behind the main street but that was

pretty much it. Nobody we met in the nine days we spent there would even consider

stepping into the canopy behind the last field.

We spent the nine days in that crazy

little place — which has grown up a great deal in the last 26 years — because the

water was low that time of year and no riverboats coming from further up the

river at Pucallpa could navigate. A couple of days of rain raised the river

sufficiently though, and just about the time we were acclimating to Requena, we

were out of Peruvian money and had to return to Iquitos.

Shortly after we returned to our little

hotel — I always took a single room so that I could make trip notes — there was a

knock on the door of Larry and Chuck's room. It was Moises. The guys got me and

Moises asked how things had gone. I told him they'd gone great. He laughed. He

said he knew we hadn't gone to the jungle because nobody in Requena went to the

jungle. They were all too afraid. But he would take us to the jungle if we

liked. Full jungle was how he put it. Then he added the word "ayahuasca?," which

none of us had ever heard of. He explained it was an hallucinogen that was a

powerful traditional medicine. We could try it during our time in the full

jungle if we liked.

We said okay, negotiated a price and then

just as we were finished, he looked at my feet and said, "you can't come. No

boots, no jungle. Spine trees on the jungle floor."

That was a new take. A Peruvian guide

turning down a gringo's money?

Then he laughed. "Don't worry. I have a

pair of boots that will fit you."

When he returned that evening with a pair

of size 10 leather workboots, I was sold.

Over the years we became great friends.

He'd take me out on long hikes, teach me jungle survival — like what vines to

drink from and which would kill you — how to figure out if a food was good to eat

or poisonous, how to build shelters, set traps, avoid snakes or kill them if

you had to, brought me to the Matses, helped me put together my first boat for

a 30 day trip on the Yavari. He was patient with a lousy student, made certain

his lessons were well learned, was tireless at the end of long hiking days when

I was too beat to get a fire and food going, and never forgot to bring extra

coffee and a couple of spare packs of smokes for me. And he laughed the whole

time doing it. Just a wonderful teacher.

Another element of your experiences in

the Amazon concerns your friendship with the Matsés. Could you speak a bit

about the Matsés, and perhaps about Pablo in particular?

Now you're on to the third of my three

extraordinary teachers, Pablo, the curaka. Pablo, like Julio and Moises, had

this fantastic light in his eyes. All three looked like they were chuckling on

the inside, enjoying every minute of living, despite all three of them living

in the physically difficult Amazon.

Moises and I ran into some Matses

on the Aucayako in 1985. A year later I went to one of the rivers they have

traditionally lived on, the Galvez River, which drains into the Yavari. We

spent about a month on the river on that trip, moving from camp to camp — there

were six camps of Matses at that time up there. Pablo's was the smallest: Just

he and his four wives and his friend Alberto and his two wives, and their kids.

Maybe 20 kids all told, though I later met a number of Pablo's older kids and

in all he probably had 30.

Moises and Pablo had history. In 1970 or

1971, Pablo had been a young Matses among a band that had raided the city of

Genaro Herrera. They stole machetes and axe heads, several women and two young

long-haired Franciscan Friars or monks. They later killed the latter, probably

when they discovered they weren't women.

In retaliation, the Peruvian military

bombed the Matses camps for four days. During that same time, Moises, then a

sargeant in the military, led a ground group against the Matses. Despite being

half-indigenous, Moises cared little for indigenous and always described the

ferocity with which he killed some of them with a sort of perverse enjoyment.

But he said that changed when he saw Pablo and some other Matses trying to down

the Peruvian bombers with their bows and arrows. "They were completely

unafraid," he said. "And Pablo was the bravest. I admired his courage and we

became friends because he said he admired my courage as well."

Meeting Pablo was no disappointment. He

took me hunting, showed me medicinal plants, gave me my first dose of sapo-frog

sweat, and laughed when I was writhing in pain on the ground. He talked with

plants and animals and swore they talked back. He'd blow nu-nu, a tobacco and

macambo snuff, at the clouds to keep it from raining and damned if it might not

be raining all around the little camp but not in it. He really was one of the

last of the "antiguas," the old timers who knew the old ways of the Matses, and

those ways involved deep interaction with the jungle in ways that seem

mysterious and magic to those of us who witness them but don't understand them.

For medicines, it seemed — and I knew Pablo

over a 20 year period, maybe eight long visits in all — like every plant was a

cure. If it wasn't a cure it provided food or shelter or the material to make

hammocks with. He'd use plant medicines like nu-nu to see where to hunt the

following day — and he had to hunt well to feed all those wives and kids. He

shared everything with me, even tried to get me to go on a raid to a distant

village to rob some champi — young girls so that I could have a couple of wives.

That was the only adventure on which I turned him down.

He's the man responsible for the medical

breakthroughs now being made using the peptides from his sapo frog — which turned

out, when I was able to bring it out of the jungle — to be the phylomedusa

bicolor, the giant monkey tree frog. And because of his work — primarily — on plant

collecting with me for Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s, he's the

reason that all of the Matses are now the only tribal group in all of Peru that

now has permanently demarked land along with air, water and mineral rights.

That was something Shaman arranged after the second of my very successful

medicinal plant collecting trips on the Yavari and Galvez rivers. My trips, but

it was Pablo and a couple of others at different camps, who produced the goods

for Shaman. I was just the conduit.

I've written a lot about Pablo and plant

collecting, and someday I would like to just write about Pablo the person. He

was just an hilarious character top to bottom.

How has your life changed over the

course of more than 25 years learning and working with ayahuasca?

Well, now that you've gotten me talking

about my three great human teachers, I will add ayahuasca as my great

plant-spirit teacher. My life changed? Don't know because it's the only life

I've had. And that includes those guys, that jungle, those rivers, the sounds,

the shapes, the food, the rain, the crossing of log bridges… and ayahuasca is a

big part of that. But my life also includes being an investigative journalist, a

dad, a brother, a plumber when the sink gets clogged, and everything else that

goes into living. For me, it's just a life. Ayahuasca and the jungle are not

separate, have not been separate from my normal life since I met them.

Sometimes I'm in the U.S, sometimes in the jungle, but it's all one life.

I really think that ayahuasca, more than

anything, has shown me in a very real and concrete way, that things like

personal guardians exist, that everything is sentient and must be respected on

equal value with everything else. I mean the old coffee grinds as well as the

tallest tree, as well as that fly that's buzzing around you incessantly. It's

showed me the value of life in a way I was taught but didn't understand. It's

allowed me to see the other realms, to even sometimes operate in them to affect

changes in this realm. It's filled me with wonderment about every single day. I

wake up wondering what's going to be shown to me every morning and I love that.

I might have done that without my three

teachers and ayahuasca, but I'm not sure. I do know that I used to push love

away, thinking somehow I wasn't good enough or worthy, and that in the last 10

years I've learned to say "give it here! Gimme what you got!" and to give it

away freely as well. That's one place where I think the change in me is

noticeable. To me at least.

In what ways has your experience and

relationship with ayahuasca affected your day-to-day life?

Well, I like that I can fly now, And

having superstrength is a gas….kidding. Ayahuasca is part of my day to day

life, so I don't know, beyond what I've said about giving and receiving love,

how else it's changed things. The spirits in general, have been helpful:

they'll sometimes tell me what plants a person needs to use to rid themselves

of a physical ailment, or get in my face if I start overreacting to the kids

and bring out the dad voice too quickly. They remind me when I've had too much

to drink and think I can drive just to the corner….and then they'll make the

keys disappear if I try to ignore them. And I am very glad they do those

things. I'm very appreciative.

Your book is filled with amazingly

detailed descriptions of your ayahuasca visions. Perhaps they could even be

described as experiences, in that you tend to go far beyond what may be commonly

associated as "ayahuasca visions." For example you describe going to "the red

room. The place where the healing happens," or the market "where you get the

medicines" or Joe's Café. What do these kinds of places mean to you, and how

have they changed your perception reality?

Those places are real places. Something

to remember is that our human brain needs to compartmentalize things. Since

we're not brought up dealing with spirits on a day-to-day basis, when we run

into one, we tend to give it a human or monstrous shape — a shape it might not

have at all. But our brain needs to be able to process things so we give those

spirits a shape, a name, a visual we can deal with so our brain won't explode

from not knowing how to process the information.

Now the "red room" is how I see a

particular place. That place is an unmeasurably large cavern where all of the

pain and suffering, all of the rotten deeds and selfish acts go. And in that

place there are spirits who know how to transform that pain and horror into something

positive so it can be let out into our world again without hurting anyone

anymore. So when I'm called on to take someone's pain or grief or whatnot, I

don't want to just keep it or it'll stay with me. So having been shown the red

room — and someone else's brain would have them perceive it entirely

differently — I know that's the perfect place to put that awful stuff I've taken

out of somebody. So to me it's a place of transformation for rotten, pain and

anguish causing feelings and suffering that's very accessible in real life

terms. I just open the door — which happens to be right next to me when I need

it — and ask those spirits to take that junk and transform it into something

good.

The market to get the medicines is

another interesting place. I'm not someone who knows all the plants — heck I

probably know less than the average person. Still, I'm sometimes asked to come

up with a remedy for someone. And the guardians — call them guardian angels if

that's more comfortable, though they don't look like classic angels to me — know

that, so they very nicely introduced me to a market filled with plants. And

when someone needs something, I go to that market — no, you can't see it, it's

only in my perception the way it is — and shout out the name of the illness or

problem that needs fixing. And the plants are so freaking generous they just

sometimes shout out the name or names of those that I'll need. And then I'll

write them down and relay the information. Ridiculous on the face of it, and

I'll probably be sent to the looney bin for even suggesting what I've just

said. Still, even when I'm given a plant name I've never heard of, I can

usually find it on the net and because the plants are so generous, the use of

the plant is generally spot on for what needs healing.

Joe's Café is another spot. Just a little

café where you get to see things not normally visible to the human eye. It's

not around all the time, just when I need it.

Now, the most important thing to remember

with all these places, these gifts, is that I've been warned they can't be used

selfishly. I couldn't go to Joe's Café and see who is going to win a ball game

tomorrow night. If I did and then bet on the outcome, I'm sure I'd lose, and

not only that, I'd probably never be allowed to go to the café again.

Also important to remember is that while

this stuff is crazy, it's not. It's just accessing other realities that exist

but move at maybe a different vibratory speed than the reality in which we

exists does.

And facilitating access to those

realities is what the plant teachers like Ayahuasca and San Pedro and Peyote

do. The codicil — if that's the right word — is that once you've opened the door to

those realities, once you've broadened the bandwidth of your sight to see those

realities or experience them, you probably won't be able to fully close that

door again. And that's pretty frightening to some people. I mean, to say there

are ghosts is one thing. To have them waking you at 3 AM while they clomp

around the kitchen is quite another.

What guides you?

A simple sense that this could be a

wonderful world if we'd all just pitch in and make it one. In journalism my

work involves trying to expose rotten and vile things so that we can see them

for what they are and eliminate them. Sometimes that means exposing the horror

the war on drugs creates — from politically/financially motivated private prisons

to mandatory sentencing laws to property forfeiture, to keeping hemp illegal

when it might do so much good if its status was changed.

Other times I'm motivated because I see the

poor getting shafted in a million ways, or how the U.S. can manipulate politics

around the globe to ensure benefit to private companies at the expense of whole

populations.

Those things motivate me and they become

my guide posts as well. I'm not going to fix this damned world, but I am damned

sure allowed to keep trying in my own way.

Then there are my jungle groups, where I

take guests out into the deep green and have them experience the jungle and

ayahuasca in a pretty traditional setting. So many of those guests are so ripe

for change, so hoping to change their lives — even if they don't know it — that

those trips often are just the thing they needed to either find a new direction

in their lives or to give them the courage to deal with their lives in a more

positive way. Those people, already good people, mostly just need a little

polishing after life has kicked them around some. And I love being able to put

them in touch with the things that can polish them up. 'Cause that makes a

better world too.

What is important to you?

My kids, my friends, the under-served,

underprivileged, the folks getting the short end of things. And my ex-wife's

new babies. And my granddaughter. And the dog and cats and everything else we

take care of. What's important to me is to keep looking at life like a new

thing. To keep working to get the same gleam in my eye over living that Julio,

Moises and Pablo always did.

What is the most frightening thing

you've encountered?

My own selfish behaviour. Watching and

being forced to relive some of the stupid, selfish things I've done over and

over before Ayahuasca will let me vomit them out. The spirits can be demanding

and they can be very very frightening, but in the end it's my own negativity,

my own failures, my own stupidity, my own self-centeredness that provokes the

greatest fear. And when the medicine tells me we're going to be working on

something related to that on a given night, well, many times I have tried my

best to run away from the experience out of sheer terror.

You've experienced many different

peoples, plants and places. What is it about the Amazon and ayahuasca that

continues to captivate you so?

In all my time in Peru, both as a guest

and when I lived there and ran my bar, I have never once gone to sleep without

having learned something new. That is a very amazing thing to be able to say.

And that is something that keeps the Amazon, the jungle, the rivers, the

medicine fresh. It just thrills me to be there.

Of course, there's a lot about it I don't

like. I don't like the noise of the motorcars, I don't like the dust in the air

and the diesel fuel smells in Iquitos. I can get bored when I have done my work

for the day — and when I get bored I want a drink to get a party going, and

that's led to some hilarious and not so hilarious events over the years. But

overall, something still happens every day, and I mean every day, that makes me

look at the world with just a slightly different pair of eyes when I go to bed

than I had when I woke up. That's a pretty irresistible lure for me.

I've asked this kind of question

before, and I know you're a fantastic chef so I'll ask you, too. You're out in

the jungle, you've packed some fruit and vegetables with you and some supplies.

You're hungry, you've got a few of your team with you, some of them just

returned from hunting, others from fishing. It's a beautiful day and you've all

worked very hard. What are you going to cook up?

Well, I'm not much on most jungle

meats — I'm just not big on monkeys and sloths and such — but if my guys happened

to come on a majas, a large jungle rodent, well, for sure we're gonna roast

some of that. It's one of the few animals in the jungle that has fat on it, and

when that fat starts to drip into the flames, well…..

Now if the guys were attacked by a cayman

and had to kill it, we'd cut the tail into thick steaks and grill them, then

slather them in lime and garlic…

If the guys fishing happened to bring

back a couple of fat piranha's, well, put those guys on the grill and toss a

bit of vinegar on them, and some wild cilantro if we can find some. Piranha are

some of the best eating fish in the world.

For fruits, I can always go for a thick

slice of jungle papaya with lime juice and a bit of salt.

For starch, I'd try to find a couple of

yuca roots. Just boil them simply is good by me, or, if you've got a bit of

oil, sauté them babies.

For veggies, let's do a stir fry with

ginger, cabbage, cauliflower, green beans, tomatoes, spinach and whatever else

we've got or can find.

If we have some Ucayali beans — kind of like

a pinto bean that comes from the Amazon — with us and we we're smart enough to

start them early, well, we'd have a little oil with lots of garlic and onion — or

onion grass if we don't have onions — in the pot. When that was just right, I'd

fill the pot with water, add the beans when it's boiling, toss in several diced

tomatoes and some acholte or cumin other local spice. And four hours later,

when the beans were ready, I'd finish it off with fresh cilantro. If we don't

have any, I'd put some Yerba Louisa, lemon grass, in to give it that final

bite.

That sounds like a pretty good meal to

me, even if nobody has any majas or cayman tail or piranha.

Your book is fecund, and flowing with

amazing stories and experiences. Any stories that you would have loved to fit

in, but somehow couldn't? Anything left untold?

There are a lifetime of stories not in

the book. The book concentrates on ayahuasca and my relationship with it. There

is some jungle, some damned good adventure, some love, some loss, victories and

defeats, but it's primarily about ayahuasca's relation to all of that. Each of

the two plant collecting trips in my own boats from Iquitos to Leticia to

Angamos and up the Galvez — 30-plus day trips after the month of finding and

rebuilding the old boats I used could be its own book. Trips up the Rio Napo

are not even mentioned. A hike from Tamishacu to the Rio Midi is passed over.

That was a good one. It was my first time, real time spent on the Yavari River.

Moises and I hiked maybe four days to a little town on the Rio Midi, which lets

out into the Yavari. Our plan was to make a balsa raft and float to the Yavari

and from there, float down to Leticia in Colombia, where we would catch a boat

down to Iquitos. Problem was, the river was too low for that. Also, there was

very little balsa available.

We arrived in the little town just as

they were starting a 3-day celebration of Peru's Independence from Spain. That

was quite a party. People came from all over that part of the jungle to dance,

sing, drink and feast nonstop. You'd be given a huge gourd of fermented masato,

maybe a quart, and drink it down till it was finished. Everyone would cheer.

Then they'd give you another, and another. So you had to vomit out what you

drank to make room for more. So everybody was vomiting, and drinking and

vomiting….most wonderfully hilarious party I ever attended. And this was good

masato — the yuca had been properly chewed and spit out by the women, helping it

ferment and giving it just the right texture. Bit of an acquired taste.

At the end of the party, with no raft, we

convinced one of the partygoers to take us down to the Yavari and then down to

Leticia. The problem was, he had little gas. Just about enough for the few

hours it would take his little 15 Hp motor to the mouth of the Midi.

Moises was certain that once we got there

we could get gasoline to continue the trip. Well, we went from one little

shack — they were pretty well spread out — to another on our first day on the

Yavari and came up empty. We had to paddle with one oar as that's all the man

had, most of that day. And that night we got stuck in a very slow whirlpool

that simply spun us around and around all night long. We all woke up sick from

the spinning.

On the second day, Moises changed tack.

He ordered me to carry our shotgun, and he'd approach a little hut owned by

some fisherman and I've have to point that shotgun in the general direction of

someone and he'd demand whatever gas they had. Now most everybody out there had

a half a gallon of gas stashed somewhere, so we spent days going half-gallon by

half-gallon, essentially stealing everybody's gas on the river. We promised

we'd return it when the boatman came back upriver, but nobody believed us.

So there we were, stealing gas, and our

boatman was sure we were gonna leave him stranded in Leticia with no gas for

himself and no gas to pay back to people, so he was afraid he was going to get

killed when he returned home.

He wasn't. We were good for our word. In

the Brazilian town of Benjamin Constant, right next to Leticia, we stopped at a

floating service station and I bought — on credit — two 55 gallon drums of

gasoline. The boatman got one for his work, and everybody else was to get

double what we took from them at shotgun point.

It wound up working out fine, and

everybody remembered me as a good guy when I returned to them in my own boat a

couple of years later. We just laughed about it over masato.

There was also no room, or place in the

book, for a recent story when I came on an illegal logging operation and some

of my team and I, at my direction, cut all the logs in the log raft loose and

floated them down to a large lake where they dispersed everywhere. My hope was

that the logger would have to spend enough time regathering them that he'd lose

his profit and decide not to illegally log anymore, at least on that river.

And there was very little room in the

book for talking about being the only gringo in a place like Iquitos to run a

bar. And one that was on an old port on the roughest corner in town. There were

a million stories out of that place, and I think people still talk about The

Cold Beer Blues Bar down there, even when I'm not around. I probably still get

30 emails a year from strangers asking where it is. And it's been closed for

almost 10 years.

And the markets, and having an extended

family, and getting friends out of jail and run-ins with DEA types and military

guys and getting bitten by piranas and flesh eating spider bites and having to

do nearly a whole trip on a broken ankle and having an intestine explode in the

middle of a trip and what it's like to hang around the docks in the third

world, or fly in little Cessna's without any instrumentation over that vast

forest, or collecting artifacts for the Museum of Natural History in New York,

running into huge boas, having a boat of mine attacked by black cayman …

there are lots of things in the book, and I hope it's a great read and all

that, but there's lots more to tell. It's been one heck of a life.

Peter Gorman's Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of

Medicine Dreaming is available now in hardcover, paperback and ebook.

