Unknown Pleasures by Andy Kirkpatrick

Author:Andy Kirkpatrick [Andy Kirkpatrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub

– CHAPTER 2.15 –

CHONGO BY THE POWER

‘I wake each morning filled with hate,’ said Chongo as I stood to leave the table, a wincing self-indictment, the punchline to the ‘stupidity’ and ‘obedience’ of his fellow Americans sitting at tables all around us in the Yosemite Valley Lodge cafeteria, shovelling in their pancakes before hitting the trail. I laughed like it was a joke, or if not a joke then so that in laughing I’d take some of the edge off such a man as this being filled with such nasty sentiment. But Chongo didn’t parry my smile with another, his wrinkled face remained uncracked. Instead, I got a slow nod. ‘Filled with hate.’

Our long conversation that morning had begun around eight with Vogue’s war photographer Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath, and ended about ten via a winding trail with the Jesuits, Chongo unpicking their vows of chastity, poverty and obedience as a metaphor for American society. The only interruptions had come from people wanting to use the power socket by our feet, the only one in the cafeteria that worked, the search for power the anxiety of our age.

Chongo was the first and only homeless big-walling quantum mechanic I’d ever met, a man I first bumped into living in the trees below Tangerine Trip at the base of El Cap in 1997. Seeing his things hanging in a tree I’d been told by another climber, ‘Oh those are Chongo’s’, conjuring up an image of some monster Vietnam vet living wild, faded army fatigues cut off at the knees and shoulders, a climbing Tasmanian devil. But the man himself, when he appeared a few days later as I belayed Paul Tattersall on the first pitch of Zenyatta Mondatta, a route far less cool once you realise it’s named after a Police album, is no Tasmanian, yet he did not disappoint – a devil of another form.

‘If you want to be bitchin’ you need to look bitchin’,’ said Chongo, touting a bottle of tequila, toasting the walls, the sun only just painting the boulder where I sat. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, and I didn’t, which was a shame, as to get stoned with such a man is what dope was made for. ‘Everything you need falls from these walls,’ said Chongo, as Paul shouted down for me to focus on his A4 lead, not some hobo-alco bullshit. ‘You just wish for it, and it falls from the walls,’ he added, a light tinkle coming as a full stop to the sentence as a wire landed about a hundred metres away, dropped by a team on The Shortest Straw. ‘See,’ he said, hobbling and stumbling over the talus to snaffle it up. ‘Dude! Number one BD Stopper!’ Chongo shouted, slipping it into his holey, tatty shorts, where it fell out on to the floor again unseen. Turning around, he declared, ‘Fuck, and here’s another one!’

That memory came back to me as I stood to leave, Chongo’s hate hanging in the space between us above the empty plates and saucers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.