While not faithfully mirroring true events, the idea came for this story is inspired by certain character moulds that can still be found in Guyana. The characters and events are invented and placed against the backdrop of Guyana’s as yet untamed hinterland. I hope most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. For those who do not, be warned. Your storyteller is the Unabashed and Officially Uninformed Andrew Pay Biographer.
This story is the answer to a question an astonished user asked me on Facebook about my long time countryman Andrew Pay (a nom de guerre). I bet his mouth was wide open as he typed. Drew is first and foremost a man of the untamed Amazon bush. He is a curious mix of many character traits. To some, he’s horrible because he calls a spade a spade. The language he uses to say what he says often reflects a strong aversion to euphemisms. To others, Drew is horrible because it is only his understanding of what makes a spade a spade, the understanding that counts. To add injury to insult, he speaks too loudly. He forgets that not all ear drums have been on river bottoms for as long as his has. Pay is mostly old-school in his ways. He is plain and simple black and white. There is very little grey that can be said of the man. This old-timer prospector can be notoriously difficult to budge from his own point of view. To a few, Drew is famous for his loyalty and infectious sense of humour. These people are his friends. He has more of them than me. Internationally, Andrew Pay is the famous ‘Motormouth Drew’, so called because of his dangerous and dashing hobby.
My flabbergasted Facebook peer needs all the help he can get for an answer to the question he desperately posted. You see, the anxious chap is not from Guyana and so even this poor should satisfy some of his curiosity. Here is my attempt to share what I know about the rough and tumble bush man. I am the Unabashed and Officially Uninformed Andrew Pay Biographer.
Drew and I were destined to be countrymen for only a brief moment in time before life’s fork road sent us on our separate ways. It was thirty years ago and a lot of water has since flowed down the Cuyuni River. Be sure there is much more lore about his exploits that have not filtered up here to the top of the world where I now live. The bush grapevine is weak where it gets cold and dark and wintery for more than half the year.
Andrew Pay has a vast first-hand knowledge of Guyana’s untamed wilderness. The bush, as it’s called, is as familiar to Drew as the streets of Kitty Village where he grew up. Today, Andrew Pay knows the river systems like the back of his own hand. In fact, he knows the Amazon Basin so well, the only education he laughingly lays claims to is: Masters at Mazaruni from Bartica Campus; Masters at Kuruabaru River and one at Puruni River, and one at Ekareku! And there is Saint Stanislaus College, of course. Like all Saints’ men Drew is still proud to be counted.
Pay is in his fifties these days. He’s getting old and the man of the bush has a limp. I’ll tell you more about this limp later. He’s almost always far away, deep in the rainforest. Somewhere in there, Drew is prospecting. He’s driving his boat between never-ending jungle galleries or howler monkey stage, the other name for the green walls that border any Amazon waterway. They are the howler monkeys’ favourite places for letting loose their record-breaking loud roars that can curdle a grown man’s blood.
Pay has been plying these black waters and unmapped creeks longer than most of the native tribes. He has gone further up those rivers and creeks than most of the Patamona or Arawak, Carib or Arecuna, Akawaio or Warrau people who inhabit his stomping grounds. Drew and his Wai Wai side kick, named after two American missionaries, have been everywhere. Every vast Guyana savannah or jungle tract has been trodden on or through by Stuart Calloway-John and Andrew Pay.
When collecting specimens for Europe’s or America’s zoos Stu and Drew go walkabout in the bush for days on end. To me, Stu is to Drew as Aboli is to Hal Courtney, Wilbur Smith’s famous character. In his native Africa, Aboli’s weapon of choice is the sword, his fencing skills legendary. In the Amazon, Calloway-John is a blow pipe man. Drew describes his jungle companion in typical Pay fashion.
“Calloway-John? Well, let’s see. Stu loves his silence, and his curare… AND he never misses!”
“Get lost?” Drew smiles that crooked Pay smile. “The Wai Wai first. Me? Never!” The laugh usually reverberates round the Hibiscus Bar, his favourite Georgetown haunt when he’s in for supplies.
There are many, tales to tell about my countryman Drew. There’s one I’m itching to tell you about. It concerns the time he was captured and tortured by the Venezuelan army. They took him near Ankoko Island where the Cuyuni and Wenamu Rivers meet. They say the place is theirs. We disagree. His escape from deep inside that hostile country could be the script of a Hollywood movie. Sadly, this is not that story. I can’t help but let you know though, that Pay had to dress up like a woman to make his getaway.
Drew has survived at least two helicopter crashes to date. In the one I know more about, Pay grabbed his diving gear and jumped out the door a long way down into a ravine. The doomed chopper he had evacuated a moment ago had been diving, hell-bent for leather “with mucho, mucho cojones” over the lip of a waterfall. Some heavy barrels of miners’ fuel they had on board came loose. The dashing pilot had no room to recover from the dramatic shift in balance of his craft and Drew instantly knew their fate had been sealed. He jumped! He fell a long way down into the gorge, hitting the raging river at speed. Poor Andrew, on top of falling, he was moving forward at well over a hundred miles per hour. IN TANDEM with the whirlybird. It was STILL just above his head! He felt the massive swash of the blades THUMPING inches from his head. Suddenly, the chopper jerked away from him to plough violently into the jungle.
“Que sera sera,” he remembers thinking to himself as he saw the foaming water come at him.
“Kaboom!” He felt the massive sound of his body making impact. Or was it the helicopter?
He went in feet first. “The water! It exploded in my head! From the inside coming out is how I heard it.” He said.
Drew was tumbling deep under water in total blackness when he came to his senses.
“I was under for an eternity.” Pay said. “When I came to, I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know which way was up!” He related. “It was my diving experience and the wet suit that saved me.”
Somehow, the senseless Drew had become entangled in the diving suit he had grabbed before he jumped. Its buoyancy showed him which way was up.
“I only reached the shore about a mile down river from where I finally broke surface,” he explained. “How I had the presence of mind to swim for the same shore the helicopter crashed into, I don’t know.”
He remembers it took him a long time to make his way back and up the gorge to the crash site. The jungle was wet all the way to the wreck. Pay followed the path of destruction deeper into the rainforest than he expected.
“To count the dead,” he said.
Incredibly, there was no fire. The barrels of fuel had been thrown clear and spray from the waterfall kept everywhere wet but, he could see motionless forms. Pay checked them. He examined one inert body after another.
“Red blood was splashed everywhere, but the bodies I was touching were warm!” He paused to bring home his point. “They were breathing! Alive, but still out cold as they lay!” The surprise could still be seen on his face.
Everyone was hurt to various extents that day, including Pay, but they all survived to live another day.
Andrew Pay has survived the divers’ dreaded bends. “My blood has boiled more than once.” He grins.
I personally saw him bleeding through his ears in 1982. Before I left in ’83, I saw him sweat and shake when his bloodstream was host to malaria.
“I’ve stopped counting malaria bouts.” He told me in 2011. “It’s part and parcel of the job.” Pay smiles that crooked smile of his again. I could see the caution in his grimace this time. “It’s a tough place and a lot of good men are gone today.” Was what I heard before he moved on to another subject.
“But me dead? No, not me! I’ve been bitten by poisonous snakes and piranha. I’ve fought man, caiman and Camoodie. Even broken my neck! I’ve been shot and nearly dead. “ He pauses. “All in the plural.” His Copenhagen smile this time nothing short of infectious. “And look! I’m still here!”
One day, Pay and his men were, as usual, after gold in a river bottom somewhere. They went down in shifts, each diver after the sand and gravel. Soon they had dug a sort of cave into the river bank at the pitch black bottom. Unfortunately for Drew, when it was his turn again the pay dirt pit they had dug was now occupied by a huge and very angry electric eel.
“It hit me so many times, I think it discharged itself!” He claimed. “My lights went out and my muscles seized. Game over!”
Lucky for him, his buddies up top realised something was wrong and pulled the seized up Pay to safety. He wouldn’t budge from the part of the river they were disputing, though. If it was still there when they went back down they would turn the powerful vacuum on it.
Would he kill it if it got sucked upstairs?
“Nah! I was invading his house, not he mine.” I heard.
The most painful encounter with an animal he remembers?
“Easy question!” Drew says. “It’s the Bullet ant sting! Man, I tell you! It causes no permanent damage but it hurts so much, and so long, it can screw up your psyche!” He adds as he goes on to explain how it was the worst pain he’d experienced from anything that had ever bitten him. “Unbearable pain for days.”
So much pain he said he had Calloway-John hide his gun. “Just in case the pain makes me lose my mind.” Bullet ant bites have a reputation for ending human lives that way.
Yours truly has never been bitten by a bullet ant but my new respect for this insect is from a man who knows more about pain than I do. It’s like I said earlier, a lot has happened to Drew. He has been, bitten by poisonous snakes, burned, tortured and shot. He’s even broken his neck. But, nothing from me on how those things happened to him. Instead, I’ll tell you about how Drew got his limp.
One day in Georgetown, Motormouth Drew broke many of his bones all at once. He crashed his bike at speed. Many thought fatally. The broken bones included, and most horribly, both legs. When he regained consciousness he was surrounded by a group of visiting doctors from abroad. They were about to amputate the two.
“The lines were drawn and all!” Pay fumed.
Loyalty to friends is all that matters in life for his crowd. So, it was his man Stu, who had made the surgeons wait. Motormouth Drew’s opinion on the matter at hand would be final and the doctors were told to wait by the Wai Wai warrior.
“It’s the ONLY way to save your life.’ Drew heard.
“I prefer death to no legs.” He answered. “Do you understand?” There was silence, just shaking heads. “You lot are too scared of death to know what I’m talking about! Stuart! Get me out of here!”
His refusal meant he was asked to leave the hospital, which he did and so Calloway-John drove him around Georgetown. From doctor to doctor, for hours. Each had a look at Pay’s bones and shook their heads. Motormouth Drew was barely alive when finally, they found a young surgeon who was brave enough to take on Pay’s life-or-legs defiance of medical knowledge. The young surgeon, I wish I knew his name, had just got back to Georgetown from studies in the USA. He patched up those legs that had caused the others to shake their heads. He worked all through the night on Motormouth Drew who lay on a cot in his unsterile office. Stuart Calloway-John was instrument nurse.
Drew still goes jogging today. Motormouth Drew must be slim because his dangerous and dashing hobby is racing motorcycles. He also tunes his friend’s racing car engine. It is the game he plays when he comes out of the amazon bush.
Our paths crossed recently in Port of Spain, 2011 and so I have a new first-hand Pay story to share. I saw it happen with my own eyes. We were under a magnificent starch mango tree. The shade of the fruit laden tree was a wonderful spot for drinking El Dorado 5-Year Old Rum and regaling each other with colourful stories. Suddenly, with catlike speed, Drew transferred his drink from his left to his right hand to reach out and catch a mango. Just like that! Pay didn’t spill his drink, or even look up. The rustling noise the mango had made as it started its fall from above was enough for Pay’s radar to home in. He caught it and tossed it to his niece, "A mango for you dear." He laughed and continued talking. It was as if nothing had happened, but I had to ask him how he had managed the feat.
“Feat?” He laughed. “If we were back home in Guyana and I had my gun, I’d have drawn and put a few bullets in it before it reached the ground.” He announced, smiling in that disarming way of his.
It was no empty brag I observed. No one under that mango tree contested Pay’s claim. Not even ‘Hardknocks’ Day. He was there and he nodded his head in agreement. The final judgement was passed because ‘Hardknocks’, like no other, is still the guy Andrew Pay says the buck stops at which is good enough for me. Sometimes I wonder whether Drew should continue to live the Louis L’Amour way. I know I wish he didn’t.
Disclaimer: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."