Kissing the Hand of the Dead

© 2013 Wayne T. Williams. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 1/30/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0493-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0491-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0492-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013900411

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Table Of Contents

Book One

Adventures in Ukraine

Preface

Fourth Floor at the Dnipro

Aglow with Dr. Glow

Chernobyl Museum - Kiev, Ukraine

Dinnertime at Korostevich, Ukraine

Magic on the Dance Floor

Kissing the Hand of the Dead

In Defense of Central Planning

Eating Peaches in the Park

An Argument Against Private Property in the Audience of Two Irinas

Reality Check

Book Two

South of the Border

Preface

1. Mecapal De Guatemala

From a Garden in Eden

Mama’s Melons

Milagro En Guadalajara

The Toast

Monterrey, Mexico Blues

Mexican Firefly

Buying a Sombrero in Taxco

Some Notes on Modern Mayans

A Prayer to Isis to Stop the Drought

Before the Monsoon in Guatemala

Going on Eleven

Some Ecological Implications of Human Recolonization in the Peten Jungle of Guatemala

Chicleros Disease and the Chewing Gum Syndrome

There’s Something About the Lowlands

Ecosystem Interconnectedness (Rats and Cats)

Lunch at Rio Blanco

Sundown in Guatemala City, 1973

Society in Harmony

2. Guerrilla Stories

Another American Priest

More Guerrilla Stories

Controlling Peach Powdery

Mildew in San Miguel Ixtahuacan

Dry Lands

What Me with Adventures in the Amazon?

3. Some Comparisons with Northern Latitudes

War Moratorium Speech, October 13, 1971

The Why of Peasant Uprisings

A Tale of Two Sergeants

Mr. Skylark

The Scientist

Looking for Work

U.S. Amphibian Force

The Real War …

In Retrospect

Book Three

Memories of Tajikistan

Preface

Offerings from Khujand

Tajikistan Diary

Buying Half-Kilos of

Pistachios in the Khujand Bazaar

Some Songs and Essays from Tajikistan, 2010

In the Botanical Garden in Dushanbe, Tajikistan

In Retrospect

On to Tajikistan

Impressions of Samarkand

The Trainride

Lonesome Blues in Tajikistan – Kanibodom

This Desert Wind

Searching for Maknyna

Now I’m Home

Uzbek Apricots

Reality Checks

Book Four

Travels Through California

Preface

El Diablo

Sequels to El Diablo and Verification

Sonoma Mountain Blues

The Search for the Next Orgasm

A Treatise on Rainbows

Blue Collar Workers

Fall Equinox

The Crows

Maelstrom Anunciado

December Wind on Sonoma Mountain

An Ocean

10-19 October 1978

Winter’s Solstice in California in Coon Creek Canyon

Short Night

Night Watch

The Emerald

For a Spring Equinox

A Natural History of Hounds Tongue and

the Long Nosed Flies on Sonoma Mountain

Ode to Summer Solstice

Condor

The Blood of the Oak

Straight Ahead to Babylon,

A Grave on Sonoma Mountain

Another Friend

Joey

The Red Rose

The Yellow Dress

Woodcutters Tribunal

‘Lil Bobby Gardner

Chess and Bobby

Notes on Trees

On Harmony

Tunes of the Western Chaparral

The Trout

The Wolf

The Elk

The person who understands the wisdom of the ancestors can control the world as though it was a top spinning on his finger.

Attributed to Confucius.

Book One

Adventures in Ukraine

Preface

Returning from Guatemala after ten years and looking for work in Santa Rosa, California for a year with absolutely no luck, I was offered a job in the ex-soviet Ukraine. I jumped at the chance to be an ex-patriot once more and pay the bills perhaps saving enough for a pension. In 1997 the United States and western European capitalists had their eyes on making money in the dissolved Communist Union and America knew that they could cure all the problems of Eastern Europe with good business practices based on trickle down economic theories. I went there as an agricultural and environmental advisor to help with the development.

No one from the West would admit that Ukraine was still fully a communist country, and had an ancient and very successful history of trading and winning commercially from the invaders, no matter what color or race century after century for over 1500 years just in Kiev, the capitol. We were the lambs before the slaughter.

The Ukrainians turned out to be quite brilliant in being able to get rich on western investments. Not so necessarily for the investors. There is just too much gypsy blood in the Slavic races to let naive westerners make a financial killing. Ukraine proved to be the smartest country on earth. For one thing, they disarmed their atomic weapons and their supersonic bomber delivery systems. They made deals with Russia to send Moscow their atomic bombs for Uranium recycling in Russia’s many atomic power plants. Frequently when I flew out of the Juliani local airport in Kiev for almost four years, I could look below at the open bunkers that housed the bombers and noted over time the disassembly of their air force piece by piece, first the wings and then the jet engines were removed and laid on the ground next to the fuselages so that the spy satellites from the west could confirm Ukraine’s peaceful intentions. After all, Sputnik came from Ukraine and they continue to make their famous T-34 tanks, the best in the world, for export to their friends, our enemies.

My travels throughout Ukraine, the size of France, for about four years were full of adventures, especially interacting with communist bosses and heads of collective farms, and the commissars of a multitude of abandoned factories that were reminders of the past glorious days when the Soviet Union was at its prime. But now everything was decaying rapidly because of an almost universal lack of maintenance of infrastructure and no capital inputs to pay for anything.

Chernobyl loomed heavily over the countryside.

The Ukrainians invited us in warily, and proceeded to be quite adept at removing investors of their coffers. The Americans couldn’t fathom what a context of a deep history and numerous invasions on their land meant to the culture. Time after time the Americans lost their shirts toward the rapidly growing oligarchy of the host country. We were losing and they were laughing, especially at the many parties rampant with caviar, vodka, fine cognac, shashlik on the spit, red beet borsche, varenikis and salo, great music and what is probably the greatest collection of beautiful willing women who ever walked the face of the earth. How those ladies are able to walk in those high heels and skin-tight clothes down the icy winter sidewalks on Kreschatic Boulevard is beyond me. They are irresistible in the winter freeze dressed to the hilt in their sable, mink, fox and ermine fur coats ready for the arctic frozen and seemingly endless winters.

This interim period before real stability, through the formation of a novo-communism blended strangely with a developing banking system, and before the European football championships held in Kiev in 2012, was a whirlwind of struggles, development and scandals sweeping across the steppes of the richest dirt in the world, with huge reserves of coal, iron ore and uranium lying below those black chernozem soils. This period witnessed a strengthening of cultural values based on their survival of World War II, where the Ukrainians defeated the Nazis after horrendous losses of their sons and daughters, and now the new invasion from the west of greedy investors, most of who became sacrificial lambs before the treacherous abilities of the communist bosses who now declared themselves to be capitalists in order to get massive loans from the European Development bank and USAID. Ukraine is a wonder to behold. Bravo to them for their inventions, intellects, unsurpassed love of poetry, music, dancing and partying. Thanks so much for being my hosts for so many years in such a far away place.

Fourth Floor at the Dnipro

The Hotel Dnipro is one of those massive, heavy, beautiful and monumental Soviet buildings packed into this ancient Kiev City. The tinted grey revolving glass doors let you in from the freezing winter sleet into the universal dark and foreboding Ukrainian foyer, replete with clean shiny black and white diamond laid granite floors and red granite columns. Everything is quiet and formal, somber and secret, unlike the Los Angeles Hilton where pizzazz, lots of light and bright colors make you feel at home. The Dnipro Hotel holds its secrets.

All the baggage I brought in, of course, required massive tipping, but I settled in for my first week in Kiev. The hallways were thickly laden with beautifully woven red and white oriental rugs. The rugs were set upon the universal hard wood parquet floors, well varnished and polished. My room on the fourth floor was tiny, but clean. Good hot water and a satellite dish provider showed me programs in Ukrainian, Russian, English, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Arabic (Dubai in its sunny desert programming seemed a long way away). The sophistication of multilinguicity of ancient societies mixed in the airways over Eastern Europe. Conquering hoards untold times have overrun Kiev, and now the capitalist businessmen have invaded Hotel Dnipro.

The hotel works with a system of tickets for its guests. After paying with my Corporate American Express card for the week and surrendering my passport, I was issued tickets. One ticket was proof of my payment. Each time I wished to enter my room on the fourth floor, they required me to display the ticket to the floor lady, who was actually a group of at least five ladies in their particular shifts. Of course, my baggage was excessive and did not fit into room 412, so they moved me to 410. My ticket said 412, so for several days I had to explain that I was actually in 410 and not 412, which was fun since I could not explain this in Russian nor Ukrainian and the floor ladies didn’t understand English nor Spanish nor Deutsche. Finally, by Wednesday, the chief floor lady ‘Dejournanka’ got up the initiative and changed the number on my ticket from 412 to 410, and so it didn’t matter that I had learned by then how to tell them the difference in Russian.

Besides the room entry ticket, I was issued two other sets. The first was for breakfast each day. Every morning, after my constitutional walks through the frozen parks along the Dnipro River, or to the clumps of medieval churches - Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox, I would breakfast at the fancy buffet on the second floor. The restaurant was large, with imposing red granite columns holding up the hotel, and there was a full sized two-meter white concert grand piano always laden with a bouquet of colorful flowers. In front of the piano was a jasper-colored granite dance floor laid in a semicircle. Around the dance floor tables were set for formal breakfast. The waiters were all tuxed-out and the chefs wore tall spotless white hats and white smocks. The buffet was more than generous, and each morning I had two fried eggs, a blintz with sour cream, apples or oranges, fruit juice, coffee from Kenya in large cups, and an occasional small pastry. It was delicious.

I couldn’t recover rapidly from jet lag from San Francisco, so when I returned in the evenings from work around 6:00 P.M., I had some sleep in front of the TV, until about nine. Then I woke refreshed, did some calisthenics and yoga and reached for my third set of tickets. These were for free drinks! The tickets, although in English, were not precise where their redemption was possible. They said ‘good for one complimentary drink’ and mentioned that the holder was invited to the fourth floor snacking bar, but didn’t exclude other places. So I tried (first) the Casino bar - straight poker and roulette – Nyet was the reply from the barkeeps. It was the same answer at the adjacent bar loaded with women dressed fit to kill – Nyet, Gaspadin. No was also the answer at the twelfth floor sky view of the city fancy restaurant - NO. The hotel was rather luxuriant. I didn’t expect such wealth in the ex-proletariat. Nevertheless, it was fun wandering around trying to spend my tickets. Finally I ended up in the fourth floor snacking bar.

The hallway down to the bar was cold and drafty reflective of the freezing sleet outside in the March winter wind. The parquet floor squeaked at each step, as only pieces of Ukrainian oak can, designed by Muscovite architects in the near-universal proletariat herring-bone patterns. The cafe sat five tables, burgundy table clothes and heavy drapes over white lace looking out to the wide traffic circle ‘Plochad Europeo’ below. Across the street was a trio of billboards - those revolving kinds, showing Revlon perfumes, revolving credit and new banks; sexy babes advertising wares through languid eyes. Then a duo of pictures came up. One was of a bucolic Ukraine scene with a river, wooded hills and golden domed orthodox churches. The words were in Russian and I couldn’t read them through the cold mist. The other billboard was an ad for L&M cigarettes, with a background of the San Francisco skylines showing the Trans American Pyramid and black skyscraper of the Bank of America, the one with the huge black granite stone on the front plaza known as the banker’s heart. The U.S. Appraisers Building was visible at 630 Sansome Street where I had unhappily worked for the U.S. Forest Service for three years back in the 1970s.

Every evening the Fourth Floor Snacking Bar at the Dnipro Hotel in Kiev is full. The new conquistadors staying at the hotel have come to hang out and relax, drink a few beers, and cash in their tickets. The smoke hangs thick and American is the dominant language. An English TV channel and signs advertising Carlsberg beer, Snickers candy bars, and Mr. Planter Peanuts provide entertainment. The waiters are attentive, almost overanxious, even when the tables are full. Heavy Turkish tobacco smoke fills the bar but everyone is oblivious to it. The waiters have a few pat phrases ready at tongue Carlsberg and peanuts, whiskey on ice, a bottle of white zinfandel, Sir? My first bottle was a white zinfandel from my home in Sonoma - Heavenly Hill winery, costing $24 here and $14.99 in Safeway, Santa Rosa. It was too sweet, as usual for a White Zin.

Early in the evening about nine-thirty, the music starts. One night an accordionist played some very nice blues and one night a guitarist, whose arpeggios were noteworthy, interpreted the Beatles. It was nostalgic. Women would come into the bar, case it out, and leave. They were always knockout lookers, wearing low-cut blouses and miniskirts. In pairs, one of them would tend to ignore you and the other would begin flirting.

Sauntering in by herself, Irina was tall, with strong long legs, dark hair, Siberian features, great tits pushed up and out, and a mascara job befitting her profession. Her eloquent fake fur coat slipped off her shoulders like hot maple syrup. She worked several tables asking the gents to fuck her for only $200. The sun had not seen her skin for months and it was pure white to the point of being irresistible to want to lift her breasts out of that pushed up black bra and suckle them. Her come on was like a stalking leopard, ready to extract every farthing, dram or ruble from her prey of the evening. She sat at our table asking Ver ar you from? California we replied. Oh, she exclaimed, A friend of mine in California bought this coat for me! Her accent was alluring and sensual. She was breaking out, ready to devour us. Her movements were reptilian. Her posture revealed all, as only a woman in the know about hundreds of men knows. You know, I will give you very good sex at my very nice apartment, she purred. Irina, you are quite lovely and I am sure worth $200, but I cannot afford your price. She pursed her lips in disappointment. Her green eyes looked like fire through those oriental eyelids so heavily supporting the weight of the mascara on her beautiful eyelashes. She rose like a cobra and left after depositing her telephone number, should $200 dollars somehow magically appear in my budget, for miscellaneous expenses.

The next night, the fourth floor snacking bar in the Dnipro Hotel was a repeat of the previous night. Americans, some of them women this time and therefore unattractive, heavy cigarette smoke, English music on the French television station. Shane and I had struck up an acquaintance the night before, so we sat talking, drinking Johnny Walker black label on ice, lying about our life adventures, and listening to the Ukrainian guitarist, who appreciated our attentiveness where everyone else was ignoring him. His fingering on the frets in 16th and even 32nd notes was remarkable. All those ancient and lonely Cossack songs flowed out from the sad and long history of Kiev and made us forget how far away from home we had actually chosen to be. Here in the heart of Mother Rus, we were strangers, not knowing much about the antiquated and rich culture, so we gathered here to try to remain in touch, even if for nothing more than eating Planters Peanuts together.

Tanya appeared at the next table flirting with us. Her blond coiffure was perfect and very north, and contrasted against her black lame’ dress and miniskirt. Her black see-through stockings were accented by crocheted flowers. Her perfect white skin was blushed by the cold air from whence she just arrived to entertain us, and her rose petal lips were painted red as red can be. Very kissable, though she was a little plump, and nervous. Picking up the pig-johns must be tough. She sat at our table and made some conversation in a wonderful Ukrainian accent – nervous and very quiet. She didn’t want to be heard soliciting us, and looked around to be discrete where discretion was impossible. The guitar drowned out her voice so it was mouth-to-ear for the negotiations. I mentioned to Tanya and Shane that I was moving into my apartment Monday and that we should have a house warming party. Tanya became upset and exclaimed that she never made sex with two men at the same time. As the negotiation continued she became preoccupied about who would pay for her coffee. The two-dollar coffee was the price of admission for the ladies, whereas we had free tickets. So I paid for her coffee and cashed in one of my tickets to buy her a gin and tonic.

I would love to make sex with you, darling purred Tanya. Her skin blushed peaches and blond. Her blue eyes revealed their Cossack desperation and innocence of necessity. I can give you my telephone number, but only after we make sex, she whispered. Shane was preoccupied with the guitar and I kept remembering that Jesus Christ consorted with prostitutes, and that Mary Magdalene was his squeeze. Tanya, I don’t have the cash you need but (mistakenly I said) call me Sunday. She wrote down her number and left the fourth floor snacking bar after finishing her gin and tonic.

Well, those encounters with Irina and Tanya led to endless phone calls all night long for Shane and me. Mr. Wayne, would you like a beautiful girl to come to your room for sex and a massage? The Hotel Dnipro was well organized at speculating the extraction of Hrivnas and Dollars from the new conquistadors. Each evening at 8:30, the phone in all the rooms sequentially began to ring as the solicitors looked for solicitees. My room was about number 4 on the floor, but that is about all I could hear as the other rooms muffled the sounds beyond that distance. I learned rapidly to not answer phone calls and just slept though them catching up on the twelve-hour persistent jet lag that had brought me here as an expert for the Reconstruction of Ex-Soviet Ukraine. We were the innocents, and about to be reconstructed.

My company just assigned me to stay at the Dnipro, since the $115 per night was within my company’s per Diem. The best thing about the hotel is that it is just across the street from a labyrinth of parks filled with naked deciduous forests of chestnuts, maples, hornbeams and elms and stately old oaks this far north at 51 degrees latitude in a continental climate, cold as hell in March, the month of my introduction, and a hell of a lot colder from November through February. The Czars had designed and built the parks with expense not a consideration. But it was cold, fur coats and gloves required, with scarves of heavy sable draped elegantly over the slim tall Ukrainian lovelies sauntering down Krachatik Boulevard, the main street in town. I thought the Latin beauties from Panama through Mexico were special, dark, and they are, but the etiolated smoothness of eastern European winter women is fantastic! The lack of sun, low temperatures and insufferable climate does something to the liver and gonads, quite apart from just pure lust and acculturation.

The fourth floor snack bar at the Dnipro began to be an obsession as to the next acquaintance, and sure enough, at nine the next evening, Shane and Wayne showed up promptly for our next beers and handfuls of Planters and an occasional shot of Bells 8 Scotch.

With great expectations for the unknown pleasantries of this strange land, on Thursday I could hardly wait to get to the fourth floor after work and cash in my next to last ticket for a scotch on the rocks. I sat there in the company of strangers who chain smoked harsh tobacco, drank vodka in huge gulps, and who whispered in numerous tongues unbeknownst to this half-literate American. My surroundings were so harsh, yet very sophisticated, eloquent yet basic, fancy, but as though that condition was as it should have been. I had that hollow feeling growing in me as I waited with Shane for the first entrepreneurs to break out so clearly in the ex-Soviet, our hookers.

Irina made her entrance with a blue sequined extra skin, deep v-cut in front against her translucent marvelous skin and a delocotage that would swallow any heartbeat. She saw us, and came to our table. We invited her to sit. She went through her normal gyrations and sat with us. We bought her a vodka, and then another. She was alluring, beautiful, and as unpredictable as thin brittle ice on the riverbank. One step and you break through. Yet the danger was like a magnet and she was just beautiful. I felt fortunate to cast my eyes on her Russian features. After about five minutes, the door opened to allow Tanya in from the cold. Her blond hair and perfect skin were enough to melt any stranger’s inhibitions. She approached the table, but Irina saw her and said. Not tonight Sveetie, they are mine. Tanya, the irrepressible, huffed, turned around and grabbed Irina’s earring and yanked it hard, saying They’re mine for tonight, stupid! Irina didn’t scream or yell, but jumped up and a real scuffle started. Both women got in a few blows before the bodyguard pushed them out the door. I got a glimpse of a couple of Mafia goons grab them both and head them down the hall. They were amazingly quiet. The waiter came over to us with apologies, and for our troubles, gave us each a free ticket for another drink. The Snacking Bar then continued on as usual.

Later that evening, the two Annas came in though the fluoric acid-etched glass double doors and sat down at the table next to us. One Anna was slim and sleek. Her ankle-length leather coat trimmed with black sable fur slithered down over the chair as if it had never died, as she sat, back to us. The other Anna wore leather shorts criss-crossed with brown laces up the side, semi-transparent black panty hose, and one of the sexiest looks imaginable through her perfect white skin surrounded by red locks of hair coiffed around her Russian fox-like features and cascading onto her round shoulders that were only barely covered by a white silk blouse fitted for mid summer sweat and not the frigid winter outside. She was definitely one of the original members of the Ukrainian fox clan. She was an effective flirtatious wench if ever there was one. She flushed red when she flirted with me asking me for a fuck so obvious there in the fourth floor snacking bar. Boy, after all those nights and all those propositions, was I ready to snack.

The Dnipro River flowed by, glowing in its Chernobyl radiation sediments. The second Anna was enough to cause a melt down in any man’s soul. Shane was embarrassed and excused himself for a well-deserved rest after wracking his brain at telecommunications in the embassy. I went and sat at the two Anna’s table. A few minutes of conversation revealed that one Anna was an electrical engineer from the local Technological Institute and that the other Anna was a Doctor of Massage. Oh well, I was always a sucker for a massage.

The American businessmen come and go. The Dnipro Hotel, in its post Soviet Independence remains as a magnet to extract money - hard currency, so that the women of Kiev can pay the rent and feed their children and their Mafia pimps who run the country.

So, am I to draw judgment about these common day observations? Of my lust, someone else’s desperation, or is it just the pleasure I feel guilty about? I love prostitutes. I would have them all if they would pay me. But it is the other way around. How can I be considered to exploit them? They are exploiting me! All I want is do is to have sex with them and enjoy some warmth and hot smooth and pulsating velvet skin next to me. The beauty of the female whom I can enjoy and feel and fuck at the leisure of her time and my money is not an evil entity; in fact that beauty is quite the opposite.

Should I be rich, I would surround myself with all of them until absolute satiation took over. Like those Nubian kings and rich movie stars. I am not unlike them except for the money and power. I don’t think anyone is, but they lie about it. Oh God, what a simple thing. Each day my body makes sexual secretions and every day I want to fill some woman with them. If tenderness and love accompany that actuality, then good. Religious, societal and legal codified myths are made of that. If not, then my body still produces those fluids and I have to ejaculate them in one way or another or get prostate cancer by leaving them in my body until wet dreams take over. It is neither good nor bad. It just happens, and it is fun and is a central drive of my life, even at fifty-eight years old. Everything else palls at it. That is probably why I am a biologist, for the universal drive of all organisms is sex, and sex is so much fun to study no matter what the paradigm. We have developed it into morality and entertainment and happiness, but mostly sadness, violence and frustration. That insatiable hunt for freedom and fulfillment is found only in orgasms with woman/man that captures the Tantric aroma of life like nothing else. It has destroyed me. It has made me what I am, in the cast off guilt of Roman Catholicism, and a prurient misinterpretation of the definition of freedom. God save us all from the next steps we all will take toward the next orgasm.

Aglow with Dr. Glow

March 1997

Of course, since this is Kiev, Ukraine and I am an environmentalist, and Chernobyl is so close - just 80 short kilometers to the north, and because I did decide to come here and study the environment, radiation poisoning is somewhat of a vital concern. I dutifully bought my Geiger counter in Sebastopol, California, well aware that I would be monitoring in Sebastopol, Ukraine. There is plenty of Russian influence in Northern California, since the Russians founded Fort Ross, north of the Russian River, and they gathered the best collection of Northern Californian Indian artifacts, from fine-feathered and miniature baskets to carved wooded totems that are on display in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

So here I sit in Kiev, with my beeping Rad Alert Nuclear Radiation Monitor, which detects alpha, beta, gamma and X-radiation. The instrument is manufactured by International Med Com in Sebastopol, CA. While in Sebastopol, CA I set the counter at thirty counts per minute as that level being considered as one parameter of the upper limit of normal ambient. In Santa Rosa, CA it was about nineteen counts per minute. The alarm on the instrument was set to go off at thirty counts per minute.

From the instant I bought the machine, I’ve been monitoring. It is fascinating that so much radiation is all around us. For example, my son Mike’s chest has a hot spot in it from his duty on the USS Virginia, a nuclear destroyer in the U.S. Navy. Here in my apartment in Kiev on the eighth floor, the reading is twenty-four cpm; about what it is in Santa Rosa. Twenty-four counts per minute. That means that somewhere, a distant star exploded about five billion years ago and cosmic radiation from that blast out in distant hyper space just passed through the earth and my body to impinge