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By Root 905 0

become one of the few orthodox anthropologists who was an enthusiastic supporter of Castaneda’s work, portrayed himself similarly as a fool among the Pygmies of the Iruti. Some readers were certain to see Castaneda’s book as a how- to manual for hallucinogenic drugs, which at the time more or less guaranteed the book considerable success, but oddly enough I saw it as containing many of the elements of Machiavelli’s The Prince, without, of course, the political context. What Don Juan was proposing, it seemed to me, constituted a way of looking at the world objectively, of breaking life down into acts—big and small, important or unimportant—each one of which had to be performed as well as one possibly could. Carlos nodded, beaming. “Impeccably!” he said. “Everything you do has to be impeccable.” (It was one of his favorite words, as I was to discover.) His expression was wry and self-mocking. “It isn’t easy,” he said. “Half-assed doesn’t count.” He paused. “There is an impeccable way of doing everything,” he said. He popped a piece of lamb into his mouth, with evident satisfaction, chewing powerfully. “Even eating lamb.”

So it’s a code of conduct? I asked. Carlos nodded thoughtfully. It could be. Yes, perhaps. You had to submit to discipline—that was what the kids who came to his lectures didn’t get, of course. “They thought the book was about freedom, about doing whatever the hell you wanted, about smoking pot!” He laughed. But this was a mistake, he went on. Drugs were an initiation, a way of going deeper, no fun at all. Above all, they were part of a way of looking at the world and a way of ordering one’s life. A code of conduct, yes, that was very good. He finished his lamb, and we ordered coffee. He drank his sweet and black—caffeine did not seem to cause him problems. He slept, he said, like a baby. Don Juan was firm on such matters. There was a time for sleeping, and you slept. There was a time for waking up, and you woke up. No complaints, no whining, no saying “I can’t sleep” or “I’m so tired, I don’t want to get up.” Don Juan, he said confidentially, was a hard taskmaster. Much worse than the nuns in school.

How had he come to pick Ned Brown as his agent? I asked. “Don Juan found him for me,” he said, laughing hard. “He told me to pick the meanest little man I could find, and I did.” He paid the bill, and we stepped outside into the warm night. I told him I would walk back to the hotel, and he nodded approvingly. Carlos believed in walking. The body had to be healthy or what use was the mind? Besides, Don Juan always walked, straight across the desert, moving so fast that it was hard to keep up with him, never getting lost. Carlos breathed deeply. “He told me you would come too,” he said, shaking my hand. “ ‘Somebody will come along who’s interested in power,’ he told me. You’ll see.”

“Am I interested in power?” I asked.

He gave me a crushing hug; then, as he tipped the parking attendant and stepped into his car, he smiled at me and said, “Do bears shit in the woods?” and was gone.

• • •

THE NEXT morning, I called Dick and told him I wanted to buy the rights from University of California Press for the doctoral thesis of a UCLA professor of anthropology. Dick grumbled a bit, but that was merely his way. By now, we had learned to trust each other’s instincts. He always backed my hunches, even when he thought I was crazy, and never, ever second-guessed me. “Anybody in this business who is right more than fifty percent of the time is a genius” was one of his favorite sayings. The truth was that for a man who boasted about being “a numbers guy,” Dick was in fact just the opposite. When it came to buying books, he had no patience with numbers, which he knew better than anyone could be skewed to prove anything. If you prepared a careful financial analysis for him on a book you wanted to buy, he was likely to glance at it, crumple it up, toss it in his wastepaper basket, lean back in his swivel chair, and say, “Now tell me why you want to buy the fucking thing.” Dick enjoyed a daring gamble and had no respect for people