Rude Ethnographies: Rude Ethnographies, #1

By Joseph W. Kuhl

 This eclectic volume of stories follows an unreliable narrator navigating the hazy zone between reality and fiction while traversing the globe through punishing landscapes engaged in futile work with strange colleagues, unexpected allies and exotic lovers. From fictional travelogue, to creative non-fiction and informal ethnography it is a wild tour around the globe, spanning 20 years of story-telling from this underground writer channeling Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changing Placez Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393291824

Joseph W. Kuhl

Dr. Joseph W. Kuhl was born on the move living in a dozen different cities before he was 10 with his carney family before being sent to the Grease Wood Boys Home in Hezbollah, Georgia from which he escaped at age 15. He spent the next 12 years digging holes, raking leaves, painting historic homes, pouring drinks and agitating as a Neo-Marxist among redneck cadres.  A compulsive peripatetic, he expatriated to Morocco, Andalusia, Niger, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Ecuador, Afghanistan and Lao PDR. He divides his time between a trailer in rural Georgia and a caravan in what was once Europe.

Book preview

A Clear Night in Summer

‘En estos campos de la tierra mia

y estangero en los campos de mi tierra’

Antonio Machado

Lyle was thrilled to find a vacant compartment during peak season on the midnight train from Algeciras to Madrid. The other cars were filled with Arab men, Spanish families, and European and American tourists. He stowed his two leather shoulder bags in one of the overheads. He settled into the seat, staring at his reflection in the blackened window, beyond which moved the outskirts of Algeciras and the foothills of the Sierra Ronda Mountains of southern Spain. 

The whole trip seemed a blur now: an uninterrupted series of trains, buses, taxis, hotels, hustlers, and friendly strangers from Paris to Marrakech. Three months and three thousand dollars gone. It was with a sense relief and completion that he boarded the ferry in Tangier back across the Straits of Gibraltar. A gang of youths spread out on the upper deck of the ferry with guitars and bottles of duty-free wine and whiskey. Leaning over the rail at the stern of the vessel staring into the white frothing wake and dark churning waters below, an exhilarating chill shook his limbs: ‘I made it,’ he said out loud, the stiff, warm breeze swallowing the sound of his voice; his eyes followed the swells and crests of the wake line thinning to a pale ribbon on the smooth, widening sea framing the copper and blue lights of Ceuta slowly receding into tiny diamond glints until the port resembled a heap of shimmering jewels piled beneath the looming, dark, jagged crags of the Rif Mountains rimming the coast of North Africa.

The moment the train lurched and began rolling, he settled back into the seat, suddenly exhausted from the long ordeal of travel, hassles, and rip-offs in Morocco. But now he relaxed to the more comprehensible, orderly, and peaceful, distinctly western world of Spain. He propped up his tired feet, admiring the torn and filthy Chuck Taylor Converse tennis shoes that had seen those miles and closed his eyes as the train picked up speed; with each passing instant, he grew more comfortable and secure: taking, for the first time, the same road more than once on his odyssey. ‘You know the way from here, Lyle,’ he mumbled aloud.

The vague familiarity of the train's rhythm was reassuring; he was no longer groping through space towards some unknown destination, but returning home. He smiled with anticipation, imagining the scene at Kennedy: his mother, father, sister; and Adalai, his girlfriend, with whom he would moving in for their last year at Dartmouth. Ah! The stories he had now

He roused himself, sat up, and pulled the pouch containing his passport, health card, birth certificate, social security card, and international driver’s license from beneath his shirt where it hung from a cord around his neck. He quickly recounted the $350 worth of American dollars, rechecked his plane ticket, and then returned it safely beneath his shirt. From his pants pocket, he pulled a wad of folded and wrinkled Pesetas: 20,000 pesetas, nearly two hundred dollars. It would be more than enough for the next four days and nights in Madrid before boarding his flight. He stuffed the banknotes back into his right pocket, leaving a thousand p. note in his left shirt pocket for easy access. He thought it unwise to flash large sums only to pay for a seventy-peseta glass of red wine. 

That done, Lyle pulled out a cigarette and was searching his pockets for a match when a voice sounded over the steady drone of train wheels, and the heavy glass door slid back. A gentleman in a red conductor's outfit stepped in.

‘Buenos noches, señor. Billete, por favor.’

Lyle passed him the ticket, grinning with the unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. The conductor punched the ticket, handed it back, and then, out of nowhere, struck a match and held the flame to Lyle's cigarette.

‘Muchas gracias, senor.’

‘De nada, hombre. Buen viaje,’ added the porter politely, stepping back into the corridor, sliding the door closed. What a cool country, he thought. He remembered the painter women on the bus from Almeria who gave him a color postcard of one of her paintings. She rolled a hash cigarette on the bus as they talked and said that out of respect for the old people on the bus, she would wait until the rest stop before smoking it. Spain was that kind of country.

He sat up for a time smoking and listening to the voices passing in the corridor. Thankfully, no one came in. He bought a cheese sandwich through the window at the station in Ronda, ripping at the tough bread and washing it down with bottled water. He ate every crumb, smoked another cigarette, and stretched out longways on along the seat, folding his jacket into a small pillow. 

Sometime later, he was roused from his slumber by a creaking noise overhead. He opened his eyes, adjusting to the foggy, amber light of the compartment. Abruptly, a shadowy figure dropped before him with a light thump. He was too startled to even sit up

‘Mira! Mira!’ the man urged in a raspy whisper, bringing his forefinger against his lips, signaling silence. The man slid the door open slowly and looked both ways down the corridor before ducking back into the compartment.

‘Dame un cigaro’ he asked, motioning for a cigarette.

‘Si, si,’ Lyle responded, coming to his senses and sitting up, finally realizing that the man was a stowaway who had been hiding in the luggage rack and intended him no harm. He handed across a cigarette. The man thanked him with a brief nod and looked down at his watch in the flare of the match he'd struck against the wall. He smoked rapidly, staring at the floor. 

He was in his early twenties, Lyle reckoned, wearing a pair of tight-fitting black pants, a black leather jacket, and low-heeled boots. A brown cloth sack slung over his shoulder. His face had the thin, chiseled look of constant hunger, his skin of a man mostly outdoors.

‘A dónde vas, amigo?’ Lyle asked.

The man responded with a crooked smile. ‘El campo. To a big feria. You want to go?’ His deep, rusty voice suddenly switching to heavily accented English.

‘A big party? In the country?’ Lyle repeated the phrase back to him.

‘Claro que si! It's summer, the season of the ferias in Andalou.’ 

‘Andalou?’       

‘An-da-lu-ci-a . . . the south of Spain. This!’ he said emphatically, pointing to the blackened train window in which Lyle saw only their reflections.

‘In our Spanish, we eat the 's.' The man glanced again at his watch, dropped the smoking cigarette, and ground it out on the metal floor. He rose just as the train began a loud groan and began shuddering as the brakes hit steel.

‘Te gusta E'pana?’ he asked Lyle.

‘Si, mi gusta mucho, pero solo fui a Madrid y Algeciras. ‘

‘Vacacione'?’

‘Si, para tres meses.’

‘Tre' mese'? Three months here, and you've only seen Madrid and Algeciras?’ He sounded incredulous.

‘No, no. I was mostly in France and Morocco,’ Lyle corrected.

‘Why don't you spend more time in Spain? You speak very well for 'an English.

Lyle couldn't answer, and it suddenly struck him as very strange that he hadn't spent more time in Spain. He'd always taken for granted his facility with Spanish, which he'd learned as a child from his Latina nanny. 

‘No lo sais,’ I don't know why he finally replied. ‘Volvere algo dia.’ I'll come back some day. He was suddenly depressed at the thought that his journey was over just when he was becoming a seasoned traveler and just when a stowaway had invited him to a big party in the countryside.       

‘When you return, amigo, come straight to Andalusia. You'll never know the real Spain until you know Andalusia. Madrid and Barcelona; politics and money.’ His husky voice lowered to an impassioned whisper, ‘But Andalou . . . It's the heart and soul of the whole country. Without Andalusia, there is no Spanish culture . . . Lorca, Jimenez, Goya, Picasso, Flamenco, bullfights. It is all that makes Spain!’

‘La feria, es muy circa de aqui?’ Lyle questioned.

‘Si, si. Cinco kilometers. It already start!’

A piercing, extended note of shearing metal rose and the train shook once more, slowing considerably. ‘Damn!’ Lyle muttered. 

‘You like to drink wine and listen to music and dance with las chicas?’ he asked, adjusting his shoulder sack and stealing another glance up and down the hallway outside the cabin door.

‘Yes! Especially Flamenco.’

‘Ha-ha-ha! Flamenco!’ laughed the man. ‘Vamo con mi, hombre!’ he spat. ‘I swear on La Virgin you'll hear El Flamenco lo Andaluz . . . out there in my mountains.’ He pulled back the door and once more looked both ways down the corridor. 

Damn! This is it, Lyle. Last chance for adventure. He stared at the dark-eyed man with the shoulder sack. Now his whole vacation appeared dismal and boring in the face of this offer: Why not? Four days to make Madrid. Hell, I've got a credit card; I can rent a car if I have to.

‘Ahora! Ahora!’ the stowaway urged as he stepped into the hallway flinging open a door on the side of the train marked ‘NO PASAR.’ 

A gust of cool air and the roar of clacking wheels flooded the compartment. Lyle jumped up, worked down his two leather satchels from the luggage rack; and by the time he had turned around, the man had disappeared: the open door was now filled with dark fields, mountainscapes, a pearl-white half-moon cupped between peaks in the distance. The train lurched, throwing him against the wall, then churned ahead, picking up speed. It wasn't stopping. He leaped out the doorway and hung suspended for a moment next to the moving train before hitting the ground. The impact threw him hard against the gravel slope alongside the tracks. He tumbled for a moment, tangled in his bags, then stopped and felt the earth vibrating beneath him. 

The massive train cars hurtled past as he rolled over onto his back, fear and adrenaline bringing him to his senses. He waited for the pain of a broken bone. But nothing, the coaches creaking and swaying above him as if they might topple over at any moment. The windows a hundred dim frames of darkened faces and figures shuttering past. The last car raced by in a hot gust of metallic wind. His knees trembled when he stood, and watching its lighted body slither away across the plain towards the mountains, he wished very deeply for a long moment he was still aboard headed for Madrid. 

Complete silence engulfed him, and he panicked, thinking he had been abandoned. Then sounded a two-note whistle. Looking across the plain towards the mountains, he saw a silhouette waving from the brush.

‘Venga! Venga!’ Come on! The man shouted as they started off towards the dark mountains. Lyle followed a few paces behind on the rocky path cutting through an olive grove. The half-moon appeared between two peaks in the ridgeline filling the floor of the small valley with menacing shadows. They stopped at a small clearing and squatted in the shadows beneath the low branches, ripe green olives scattered at their feet. The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offering one to Lyle. In the sulfurous flare of the match, their eyes met, and the stranger grimaced.

‘You cut your handsome face, but only a little, amigo.

Lyle put his hand to his forehead, fingers coming away slick with blood.

‘Here,’ he said, handing Lyle the box of matches and digging into his shoulder sack. ‘Strike one.’

Lyle struck a match and saw that his companion had produced a small candle, a handkerchief, and a bottle of scotch from the sack. He placed a hand under Lyle's chin and raised his face into candle light.                   

‘Castilla del desdén y de la fuerza en esto campo de mi Andalou,’ said the man, as he gently daubed the blood from the laceration on Lyle's forehead, cheek, and chin.

It stung, but Lyle didn't wince as he tried vainly to decipher the poetic line.

‘Phuu . . . nada,’ he said, inspecting Lyle's face. ‘Scars are beautiful,’ he laughed, holding the candle beneath his own chin illuminating a long, razor-thin scar beneath his ear.

‘Machado, you know his poems?’ the man asked, sprinkling more scotch onto the handkerchief and handing the bottle to Lyle.

‘Yes, I read some of Campos de Castilla.’ The liquor burned down his throat into his gut.

‘In Spanish?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don't read very much.’ He shrugged and silently inspected Lyle's face. Lyle interpreted the man's ambiguous phrasing to mean that he could not read at all.

‘My woman, she read me his poems. They made a great fire in my soul. I change the words of our traditional songs, Flamenco songs, with his poems. The people love it. I will go to Madrid soon, play for the Madrillenos, and make a record of Machado.’

‘You play Flamenco?’

He took a final draw from his cigarette and tossed it aside.

‘No, my friend, no. I play my music and the women, they dance el flamenco,’ he said gravely and blew out the candle. 

‘Bueno, hombre,’ he said, slapping Lyle on the shoulder. ‘Your face is beautiful again. Vamanos.’

‘Thanks, man.’

‘De nada,’ he mumbled, adjusting his shoulder sack as they started off. The path wound through the dark and tangled arbors of an unkempt vineyard overrun with weeds, and from somewhere nearby came the murmur of a lazy stream. With each step, Lyle felt himself being pulled farther and farther from home,