I’d thought Central America would be hot and tropical, but Guatemala was not like that at all. It was cool and almost alpine, with fir trees and grassy meadows, high cliffs, hemp bridges swinging across deep gorges, and fields of maize planted six or seven thousand feet up steep green mountains. Most of the people were indigenous, the most primitive I’d ever seen. Everyone went barefoot, and there appeared to have been no change in their lives since before the arrival of Columbus, except for the machetes — made in Chicago — that the men all wore at their waists. One day I was hitchhiking in the Guatemalan highlands, when up drove a tall, rangy, middle-aged American couple in a camper truck. They were the Schmidts, they said, from North Platte, Nebraska, headed for Guatemala City, and they would be delighted for my company. I hopped in, and we crawled…
Before I left Japan, in the spring of 1968, I went on a farewell excursion with my Tokyo girlfriend, a beautiful, delicate, porcelain creature…
After a two-week trip from Vladivostok, Soviet Russia, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I fetched up in Helsinki, Finland, without a kopek to my name.…
In the year 1966, I spent my twenty-third birthday on a truck crossing the yellow plains of the Punjab. My happenstance companions: three other…
You have not seen our home. You have never been to our village. You do not know its name. But what does it matter…
They knew well I was blind. The world could see that. Still, the transport on the road didn’t slow down. The bastards just wouldn’t…
Now when I try to conjure my essence as a young man, I see myself waking up one morning to the overpowering odor of…
Ernest Brawley, a native Californian, is the man behind the gritty prison novel The Rap, a runaway bestseller which went on to be adapted…
