Rock, Meet Window by Jason Good

Author:Jason Good [Good Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Beetle Juice

After a week in California, I return home to New Jersey. My first night back, Lindsay and the boys are asleep upstairs, so I make the most of my alone time by browsing Netflix for a few hours. It’s after midnight when I finally pick something: a documentary that chronicles a group of sick people who follow a crunchy, soothsaying confidence man to the Amazon rainforest. He promises that somewhere in the jungle there is a cure for their illnesses, as well as a local shaman who can find it.

I expect to see the shaman of my youth—the bowl haircut, a bone in the earlobe, that leaf (or canvas flap) covering his private parts. But apparently, that image is from a bygone era, and I am at best old, and at worst terribly racist. What I see is a young man decked out in NBA garb, drinking Gatorade, and listening to a soccer game with his feet up on an old seventies-style metal desk. I trust he retained all his tribe’s ancient wisdom, but it’s obfuscated by the sad but comedic irony of how the Western world seeps into indigenous culture. How exactly does an authentic jungle healer come to feel so strongly about the Indiana Pacers? And shouldn’t he know better than to pair their jersey with a New York Knicks hat? Even shamans have to pick a side.

Nonetheless, dressed in his confused, yet colorful mix of gold and blue and blue and red, the shaman searches the rainforest for lifesaving ingredients. First, he makes a tincture for the woman with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS): a term so on-the-nose that I imagine a cartoonish, fussy, anthropomorphized bowel. In a battle of illnesses, IBS would likely stand on the sidelines complaining about its weapon.

It is a different cure-seeker who peaks my interest: a man in his midsixties, tall, thin, soft-bellied, and dying of leukemia. Though eager for a chance at beating his illness, he rarely, if ever, leaves the comforts of rural Wisconsin, and he struggles to find his groove in the jungle. Nor are the others settling in easily. Images of the rainforest are picturesque from afar, but the HD video cameras display all too well what it’s like to be in one. I can almost feel the humidity and the giant bugs crawling on me. Factoring in the bumpy truck rides, lack of air-conditioning in huts, and hammocks made of banana peels, I decide Dad and I wouldn’t last a day. The last thing either of us wants is to feel hot, damp, and itchy.

Sadly, the Wisconsin native dies in one of those hammocks from an embolism. Before that, though, the shaman had some success alleviating the symptoms of his anemia with large quantities of beet juice. I nearly gag watching him drink it from a hollowed-out log. Given that the group had been drinking from plain plastic cups until that point, I find it suspicious that they’ve switched to some ceremonial mug carved from a brazil nut tree.

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