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Part 5 Turn the Page

OCTOBER 23, 1999

After over three years on the road Ms. Hud and I started hankering for a tad more domesticity—cleaner sheets, a full kitchen, and some more water pressure sounded like Shangri-la, so I decided to rent a two-bedroom house in the sleepy little neighborhood of Tarrytown, in the heart of Austin, Texas. Besides the autumns and going to college there, I liked Austin because it always let me be myself. It’s really the secret to why Austin is so cool; all you have to be in Austin is you, and Austin appreciates it when you are. It’s never needed proof of me in a picture, it’s always just been happy to see me.

Tarrytown was the kind of neighborhood where dogs ran off the leash, kids could chase a ball into the street without looking for oncoming cars, and grandparents hadn’t changed their address since they were born there. I had a garden to tend to, a one hitter to hit before I did, and my alma mater’s football season to watch. Live.

It was late Saturday afternoon in Darrell K Royal Memorial Stadium when my eighteenth-ranked Texas Longhorns had just beaten the undefeated and number-three nationally ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers 24–20, handing the Huskers their only defeat of the season. The city was on fire and so was I. It was time to celebrate.

I partied through the night into Sunday, and through Sunday night without sleeping a wink.

If you’re high enough, the sun’s always shining.

At 2:30 that Monday morning, I finally decided to wind down. It was time to lower the lights, get undressed, open up the window, and let the jasmine scent from my garden come inside. It was time to smoke a bowl and listen to the beautiful African melodic beats of Henri Dikongué play through my home speakers. It was time to stand over my drum set and follow the rhythm of the blues before they got to Memphis, on my favorite Afro-Cuban drum born of ceremony and speaking in tongues, the congas.

For me, the congas, bongos, and djembe have always been the purest and most instinctual instruments. No sticks, no electricity, no equalizer, no strings, no tools or amendments, just skin to skin with the most analogue spoken language, prayer, and dance known to man—the percussion. The root of music, from the roots of music, Africa. It was time to lose my mind in it, take flight into the haze, and slip into the dream. It was time for a jam session.

What I didn’t know was that while I was banging away in my bliss, two Austin policemen also thought it was time to barge into my house unannounced, wrestle me to the ground with nightsticks, handcuff me, and pin me to the floor.

“Ohhh, looky who we got here,” the ‘roided-up cop with a crew cut, who looked like a Nebraska Cornhusker himself, said as he read the driver’s license he picked up off my coffee table.

Then he picked up the bong. “And looky what we got here. Mr. McConaughey, you are under arrest for disturbing the peace, possession of marijuana, and resisting arrest,” he proudly stated while squatting atop me, knee in my back.

“Fuck you, motherfucker! You broke in my house! Fuck, yeah, I resisted!”

“That’s enough!” he grunted, then wrangled me to my feet. “We’re takin you downtown.”

The other officer, the more civil one of the two, grabbed a blanket off the couch and moved to wrap it around my body.

“Ohhhh no!” I barked. “I’m not putting shit on! My naked ass is proof I was mindin my own business!”

They escorted me out of my house through the courtyard entry on the way to the street. Still naked and reluctant to submit to the inevitability of my predicament, I got relative, and decided it would be a clever idea to run up the walls left and right of the gated passageway and do a somersault backflip over the Cornhusker cop who was guiding me from behind. My thinking was that in midflight, while upside down in the air, I would assume a pike position and then slide my cuffed wrists under my butt and up and over my legs, then stick the landing behind the Cornhusker, now with my fettered hands in front of me. My rationale at the time was that after pulling off such an extraordinary Houdini-like stunt, the officers would be so impressed that they would abrogate the arrest and set me free. I know, stupid, but remember, I’d been celebrating for thirty-two and a half hours straight.

Whether my plan of action was physically possible or not, I’ll never know. It didn’t happen. Instead, before I’d taken three steps up the wall, the Cornhusker body slammed me back down onto the brick footpath.

Meanwhile, word must have spread over the police scanner as to just who had been arrested because there on the street were six lit-up cop cars and about forty of my neighbors.

“Sure you don’t want this blanket?” the civil cop asked again.

“Hell no, this is PROOF of my innocence!!” I yelled to everyone on the block and one more over.

They lowered my head, put me in the back of the patrol car, and drove me to the precinct. After we landed and I declined the third offer to wear the blanket, we headed up the steps toward the entrance of the Austin Police Department.

At the double doors to admissions, a six-foot-six, 285-pound, tatted-up, working inmate greeted me just outside the entryway. He was holding a pair of men’s orange institutional pants. Before he could say a word, I said, “Proof of my innocence, man.” He just looked at me, seeming to understand but knowing better. “We all innocent, man. Trust me, you do wanna put these on.”

Maybe it was his honest eyes or the fact that he was a fellow offender, or maybe it was the sudden realization that, when a six-foot, six-inch jailbird built like a brick shithouse tells you You do wanna put on some pants before you go in the clink, it’s probably best to listen.

“OK.”

He dropped to his knees, opened up the pant legs, and shimmied the prison cottons up my shanks until the elastic waistband was around mine; then, I headed for the pokey.

At 9:30 a.m., my thirty-two-and-a-half-hour buzz now turned hangover, I was sitting in the corner of the cell when two people showed up on the other side of the bars.

“Mr. McConaughey, I’m Judge Penny Wilkov and this is criminal defense attorney Joe Turner.” An orderly unlocked the cell door.

“I don’t know how in the hell a disturbing the peace call escalated into a class A misdemeanor of resisting arrest and a class B misdemeanor of possession of less than two ounces of marijuana,” the judge said, “or why two of our police officers forcibly entered your home without fair warning. I am going to dismiss the disturbing the peace and possession misdemeanors and give you a personal recognizance bond on the resisting arrest. I don’t understand or agree with how this situation escalated.” “Well, Judge Penny, I’m not sure what that all that means, but I don’t either,” I said.

Joe Turner, who was the same attorney who successfully defended Willie Nelson years earlier in a possession case, spoke up. “Judge, we all agree that this situation got out of hand very quickly, but you also gotta understand that these policemen literally broke into this man’s house while he was playing some bongos in his birthday suit! The resisting arrest was self-defense! I suggest you dismiss it altogether and my client will plead to the class C violation of a sound ordinance as he was indeed bangin on those bongos pretty damn loud for 2:36 in the morning.” “Deal, case closed,” said the judge.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

Joe pulled out his wallet, grabbed a fifty-dollar bill, waved it in my face, then looked at me and said, “Means I’ll pay your get-out-of-jail fee and you owe me fifty bucks, you’re free to go. I got a car waitin for ya at the back entrance or you can meet the press out front, there’s plenty of em waitin. Here’s a bag of fresh clothes your neighbor dropped off for ya.” I thanked them both, got dressed in the lavatory, splashed my face with cold water, and tried to breathe out the blues that were starting to set in. Why the blues, you ask? Well, obviously I was lucky, walking out of jail only $50 poorer—this didn’t happen to everyone who got hauled in on charges like resisting arrest and marijuana possession. The problem was, as I’ve said, in my family, we didn’t get in trouble for committing the crime, we got in trouble for getting caught. I wasn’t raised to end up in jail, for anything or any amount of time, and even though my offense was one I’d committed many times before and would many times more, I got caught, and for that, I felt guilty. Outlaw logic.

Looking for some fearless consolation, I decided to call my mom before I chose which way to leave my first prison stint. Maybe it was the fact that while I was sure she would have no mercy for my circumstance, at the same time I knew she would pour a drink and toast to how it was I got into it. Was it going to be her that answered or was it going to be that new groupie fan? I didn’t know. Turns out it was both.

“They what, Matthew?! Broke into your house!? Those son of a bitches, you keep your head up,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with smokin a little fun stuff and playing your drums naked at night in your own home; who do they think they are comin in your house like that?!” Just what I needed. I hung up and decided to stride toward the media mob out front instead of sneaking out the back.

Greenlight.

Two days later, Bongo Naked T-shirts were all over Austin.

I framed that “violating the sound ordinance” ticket.

The “Cornhusker” was later dismissed from the force.

Joe Turner got the resisting arrest expunged from my file and I got my virginity back, turning my life of crime around.

But my two-day party had other consequences.

With the help of an editor of the local newspaper, who carelessly printed a picture of my house with the address on the front page of the Metro section, my residence in Tarrytown quickly became a tourist attraction, even for the locals. Good-hearted people dropped off six-packs of beer, different kinds of drums, and a lot of weed. It was amusing and kind, but it turned our sleepy little neighborhood street into South Bundy Drive in Brentwood. No more leashless dogs or chasing bouncing balls into the street without looking.

Fame can change people, but in this case, it changed a place. My anonymity gone again, it wasn’t fair to me or my neighbors for me to live there any longer as the peace I had found on Meadowbrook Drive was now disturbed. They all heavily protested my evacuation, but I had no choice. Time for goodbyes instead of see you laters. Ms. Hud and I packed our bags, ducked out of the lease, and headed west again.

Nobody gets in trouble for what they do,

they only get into trouble when they get caught.

The art is in gettin away with it.

The outlaw don’t live on the edges, he lives in the center,

cruisin through the slipstream.

January 2000. With an actor’s strike looming and a few films since my last box office hit, I needed to get back to Hollywood and start the hustle again anyway. I needed to be in the industry’s eyeline, work the town, take meetings, be around the creatives that were making the decisions.

Neither the box office performance of The Newton Boys, Contact, Amistad, EdTV, and U-571, nor my performances in them met or raised the white-hot expectations of Matthew McConaughey in the movie industry since A Time to Kill. The first-class dramatic studio offers I was looking for were no longer being offered. I was still a bankable star but my shine had dimmed, I’d lost some heat as the industry calls it, and I was losing my hair.

With the strike imminent and Hollywood scrambling to start as many productions as possible before a walkout, I got an above my market value cash offer to play the lead opposite Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner. I read the script, it looked like fun, the money was generous, and I was ready to work. Shooting started in two weeks in downtown Hollywood. I said yes, and Ms. Hud and I made our new address the legendary Chateau Marmont in the heart of Tinseltown. Yes, where Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham rode his hog through the lobby and John Belushi OD’d on coke in Bungalow 3.

Ready to rock ‘n’ roll, congas in tow, I cashed that healthy check from the studio, bought a pair of leather pants and a Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle, wrote the Chateau a running tab of 120 grand, and got a key to my room until whenever I turned it in.

Acting in a romantic comedy was different from anything I’d done before. Engineered to be light, not lightweight, they are built for buoyancy and I learned to enjoy skipping from cloud to cloud as one needs to do in order to keep these types of films afloat. I quickly realized that, unlike in dramatic acting, you cannot drop anchor and hang your hat on humanity in a rom-com, lest you sink the ship. I enjoyed this kind of acting, it was all greenlights, like a Saturday character in a story that was a series of Saturdays.

Back at the Chateau it was always a Saturday, easy street, and I was on it, once again, having committed to my man. Now, eager to dance with my devils instead of fight them, I was keen to negotiate the abyss, broker a deal with lack of restraint, and see if I could come out the other side unscathed.

My days of it’d be rude not to and I don’t have to, so I will, led to many a morning of I don’t knows and let’s not remembers. You know how it is, when you’re up to nothin no good’s usually next.

Single, healthy, honest, and eligible, I enjoyed the transience of a high-class hotel that promoted mischief: transactions; flings; affairs; renting to rent, not to own. I wore the leathers. I rode the Thunderbird. I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook.

I embraced the fun, my fame, and the curfewless hours. When I wasn’t working, I’d read scripts tanning by the pool, write poetry, have a friend over for lunch, take Ms. Hud for a walk, go for a run, then get ready to saunter into the Hollywood lights. My life being designed for ease, these nightly adventures could take place on foot, which was a perk considering my affection for liberal libations. I’d meet friends for dinner and ultimately return to the Chateau for late-night revelry of song, dance, and the occasional wrestling match. Localizing and customizing once again, I also had a key to the hotel’s kitchen, which I conveniently used to find and cook 3:00 a.m. steaks.

kiss the fire and walk away whistlin

I swallow vitamins with a beer I do,

chew more tobacco than I ought to,

I crawl around and chase the moon,

and sleep with women who ride in on brooms.

Just so I can kiss the fire, and walk away whistlin.

Then I got offered the role of Denton Van Zan in the film Reign of Fire. Van Zan was a cigar-gnawing, apocalyptic badass dragon slayer who ate the heart of every dragon he slayed and carried a dwarf around on his shoulder. The dwarf on the shoulder part later got cut out of the script but I always loved it. I immediately had an understanding and a need for a character like Van Zan. A man with a singular constitution, alone, not doing what he could to survive, rather doing everything he could to deny extinction. An island of a man whose freedom was his isolation.

Maybe it was the eighteen-month hedonism tour I’d been on at the Chateau—the booze, the women, the gluttony. Maybe it was an aggressive recoil to distance myself from the bubbly mendacities of my recent rom-com emasculation. Maybe it was both and then some. Either way, I felt like it was time to earn my Saturdays again. I needed some yellow lights.

I’d been questioning my own existence, and searching for meaning in my own life for as long as I could remember, but now, for the first time, I was also questioning the existence of God. An existential crisis? I’d call it an existential challenge, and one I was up for. I didn’t as much cease believing in God as much as I doubled down on self-reliance and the responsibility of my free will. I was done with the excuses that fate allows, I was ready to be the boss of me, the one to blame and acquit, I needed to own that it was my hands on the steering wheel.

Tired of letting myself off the hook on easy street, I was done with unearned forgiveness, feigned compassion, the protocol of manners and graces, and self-indulgent sentiment. Livin for tomorrow when we might just all be racing to the red light seemed like a fool’s errand. Brave enough to say it’s on me and me only in my prayers, but still scared enough to keep praying, I gave credit to the notion that it might all be for nothing, and I quit doing it for something.

“If you are there, God,” I prayed, “I hope you appreciate a man who won’t retreat from the sweat it takes to gain self-determination. I hope you will reward a man who has decided to quit hiding behind the fatal blind belief that it’s all in your hands.” Van Zan’s boots were my size; I was ready to wear them.

to agnostics: Just because it says anonymous, doesn’t mean it has no author.

I accepted the offer and immediately shaved my head. Why? Well, I could tell you that it was my vision for the character or that I knew if I did it would piss off the studio and I was looking for a fight, but really it was about the fact that, like I said, I was losing my hair.

I had recently gotten turned on to a hair restoration product called Regenix that required twice-a-day topical applications. I also had read that a good skull shave can improve the chances of thicker regrowth, so, being a man who appreciates the value of vanity, if I was playing Van Zan, he was going to have a shaved head.*1 I don’t know if you’ve ever shaved your head before, but if you have, you know it can be gnarly under there. I had dents in my cranium, a psoriasis patch, and my scalp was chalk white. The paparazzi got a shot of my freshly shaved nugget the day after I did it, and that photo was in People magazine the next week.

Soon enough, my phone rang.

“You did not shave your head,” an ominous whispering voice stated. For the sake of his privacy I’ll leave his name off the page, but he was a top studio executive with a very large financial investment in Reign of Fire.

“Yes, I did,” I said bluntly.

“No, you didn’t, I refuse to believe this, Matthew. You just wore a bald cap as a prank.” Again stating not asking.

“No…I shaved my head.”

He hung up.

That afternoon the front desk delivered a handwritten letter to my room.

In our talk this morning, Mr. McConaughey, you refused to admit that you had in fact not shaved your head.

If you are in denial of this fact please come clean so we can proceed on the journey of making this film together.

If, in fact, it is true that you shaved your head, this would be a tragedy, a major mis-step, and an act that May bring you very bad karma.

Yes, he underlined and put in bold print, “bad karma.”

Well, I thought, I oughta kick this guy’s ass for throwin the karma shade but the shaved head sounds like a real dealbreaker. Hmmm. That fight I was looking for? Got it.

I’d learned a few things about the Hollywood hustle over the years. For starters, it’s better to play your own game in the business of Hollywood than to do your business playing Hollywood’s game. You have to get the joke, and the joke is, nothing’s personal. From the I love yous to the unreturned phone calls when your last picture didn’t perform, they will pick you up in a limo, but you might have to catch a cab home. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

That bad karma threat? It wasn’t personal, but it was arrogant, cavalier, and in very poor taste. It was time to trump his gesture.

superstitions

The other day I went in a roadside quikmart

and bought a candy bar and a beer.

The total came up $6.66 on the register

so I paid the cashier.

And left a penny in the “need one take one, got one give one” saucer.

There was a big Hollywood industry party coming up that weekend. All the top executives and bigwigs would be there, and most likely Mr. Bad Karma as well.

I bought a custom-cut three-piece Gucci blue suit that matched my eyes. I tanned my pale head poolside for four hours a day for the next five days, then I greased my now beautifully browned scalp with some oil, not of Mink, until it was so shiny it would have made Dwayne Johnson jealous. Then I went to that party.

I didn’t see Bad Karma. I didn’t have to. People noticed, especially the ladies. And people noticed them noticing me.

The following Monday my phone rang again. Bad Karma calling.

“It scared me at first, but I’ve had a change of heart, Matthew. I love the shaved head! You look original. And so handsome! I love it.”

I put a penny in the saucer.

Greenlight.

Some people want the AC on in the gym so they won’t sweat. I wear my beanie in July so I will.

I had two months to prepare and train to become my man, Van Zan. I needed isolation so I decided to go out to my brother’s ranch, LocaPelotas, in West Texas, seventeen miles outside of the nearest town of 518 people. Very secluded, fifteen hundred acres, hot as hell in the middle of summer—a perfect place to prepare to slay dragons. Next up was devising my own original dragon slayer mind, body, and spirit daily workout regime. What would a dragon slayer do? How would a dragon slayer train?

I made a plan that would be executed in the mid-July 108-degree weather:

1) Take a double shot of tequila every morning at sunrise before I get out of bed. Yeah, a dragon slayer would do that. Have fire breath to beat the fire breather, get the insides on fire first thing to start the day. To beat a dragon, be a dragon. Perfect.

2) Run five miles across the desert daily, barefoot. Two and half miles out, two and half miles back. Yeah, toughen up the soles of my feet. I’ve got tender feet now, I wear shoes. I’ve got to toughen up the soles of my feet. Plus, dragons have tough skin and I have to become more like my prey, yeah, a dragon slayer like Van Zan would have tough soles, ward off infection. Brilliant.

3) Keep my heart rate below 60 while standing on the edge of the barn’s rooftop overlooking a forty-foot drop onto the concrete below. Yeah, I’m afraid of heights, but Van Zan wouldn’t be. I’ll do it every day until I can stand on my heels with my feet over the edge while holding a resting heart rate in the low 50s. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Fuckin aces.

4) Run out into the pastures every night at midnight and tackle sleeping cows. Yeah, I’m gonna full-on tackle cows, knock em off their feet, I’ll get thick, burly, strong, yeah, that’s what a dragon slayer would do. That’s what Van Zan would do. Deal.

So, how did it go?

Well, on the sixth morning I gagged up the double Cuervo shot that was awaiting me bedside at sunrise. Then again on morning seven. Bad idea. Done.

At midnight on my ninth day a large bull headbutted me and gave me a concussion as I tried to wrestle him to the ground. Oops.*2

After eleven days of running five miles barefoot across the rocky, 108-degree hot desert sand and stones, oyster-sized blisters formed on the bottoms of my feet so big and so bubbled that I couldn’t even walk, much less run. Uh-oh.

And after two months of trying, I never got closer than three feet from the edge of that barn’s rooftop, and even then my heart rate never got lower than 125. Nice try.

My dragon slayer workout regime had failed miserably, but the upside was that I experienced a lot of pain, as any good dragon slayer would.

With my self-inflicted sixty-day dragon slayer boot camp complete, I headed to Ireland to make the movie. Van Zan was a blast to inhabit—a warrior without a country and bald with a battle-ax. I miss him. Great characters earn my respect and Van Zan was one who didn’t so much get the madness out of my system as he made me own more of my own. He elevated my expectations of what it takes to survive and reminded me that duty is worth more than the vanities of a home field advantage. His tomahawk still hangs on the wall behind my back in my office today.

After wrapping four months of filming in the wet and cold Irish winter I was physically and mentally exhausted, and pleased to finally get some rest and mend my bruised and battered body and mind. Spiritually, I was strong; challenging my reliance on God’s existence in order to rely more on my own was proving a valuable practice. Like the time when my dad moved on, I practiced being less impressed, more involved once again.

It was three days after completing principal photography, and I was getting some much-needed sleep one night in the Morrison Hotel on the north side of the Liffey River in Dublin, Ireland, when… I had a wet dream.

I was floating downstream on my back in the Amazon River. Wrapped up by anacondas and pythons. Surrounded by crocodiles, piranhas, and a few freshwater sharks. There were African tribesmen lined up shoulder to shoulder on the ridge to the left of me as far as my eyes could see.

I was at peace.

Eleven frames.

Eleven seconds.

Then I came.

Again.

Yes, the exact same wet dream I had had five years earlier.

I was sure about two things in the dream. One, I was on the Amazon River and two, those were African tribesmen on the ridge.

It was a sign.

Having already been to the Amazon and physically proven that it was, in fact, located in the continent of South America, I knew it was now time to go to Africa. But where in Africa?

A couple of nights later, while cross-examining the African atlas, wondering where in this massive continent the wet dream was calling me to, I was listening to one of my favorite musicians, Ali Farka Touré.

Then it came to me. Ali is known as the African Bluesman.

Where’s he from? I hopped from the couch to grab the CD case with the liner notes. “Niafunké, Mali,” north of Mopti on the Niger River.

“I’ll go find him,” I said.

It was time to chase down the other half of my wet dream.

Sometimes which CHOICE you make is not as important as MAKING a choice and COMMITTING to it.

I got a one-way ticket to Bamako, the capital of Mali, then hitchhiked nine hours to the port city of Mopti, where I met a guide named Issa who had a boat. I introduced myself as “David” for anonymity’s sake and told him I was looking for Ali Farka. We set sail upriver toward Niafunké the next day.

After a four-day trip up the Niger River in a small, four-horsepower outboard-motored dugout canoe called a pirogue, I arrived at the small river town of Niafunké, where after five hours of searching, I found Ali at his second wife’s house. He had no idea who I was other than a traveler from America who was a fan. His second wife prepared lunch for us and we ate in the traditional Malian way, sitting on the floor in a circle around a communal bowl of seasoned rice, serving ourselves with our right hand, never the left.*3 Ali was one of my musical heroes but he was also, unbeknownst to him, my journey’s only port of call on the second-largest landmass on earth. The lone geographical coordinate I chose to chase in my dream: 15°55’55.92”N, 3°59’26.16”W (the longitude and latitude of Niafunké).

What sign would my stop with him give me that might lead me to the meaning of the African tribesmen lined up along the left ridge of my Amazon River wet dream? We ate, he played me some of his songs, and Issa translated my passion for his music in the local dialect, Bambara. Later I asked him, “Why do you only perform in West Africa and France, why do you not tour in other countries, including America?” He solemnly answered.

“Because there I would be dried shit, neither me nor my scent would stick with you.

Here, I am wet shit, both me and my scent stick with you.”

At the end of the day we hugged our goodbyes, then Issa and I returned to the pirogue, destination unknown. Now what? Where does the dream want me to go from here? I thought. Without any solicitation from me, Issa began to speak.

“There is a magical people in Mali called the Dogon. They have an extraterrestrial transmission of knowledge of the cosmological facts of the stars that they knew long before the development of modern astronomy. They fled to a place called the Bandiagara Escarpment to escape the Muslim invasion over one thousand years ago where they now live in villages along the river’s edge. I think this is a good place for you to go to, Daouda (“David” in Bambara), a place you will remember,” he said.

Another celestial suggestion.

Remember, I thought, better to have a scent and be remembered, than to have none and be forgotten. That’s it. Wet shit. “Yes, let’s go there,” I said.

We loaded the pirogue and headed up the Niger for a five-day journey, first north, then south to chase down the rest of my wet dream.

On the way to the Bandiagara, we stopped in the legendary town of Timbuktu. A center for art and learning, it is a quiet little trade settlement situated just north of the Niger River on the south side of the Sahara Desert.

One night, after an afternoon of racing camels in the Sahara, Issa, two of his well-educated friends, Ali (not Farka Touré) and Amadou, and I were finishing dinner on the veranda of the hotel restaurant when a pretty young lady about twenty-five years of age came strolling through, having a solicitous look at each table full of males. It was obvious she was a lady of the night and was trolling for business.

“Oh, this is, this is not good,” said Ali. “This is a Muslim woman, and this is not the Muslim way. You do not go and sell your body, this is a disgrace, she should not be doing this.” “Well,” Amadou countered, “it is not for any of us to judge what someone should or should not be doing. We do not know her particular circumstances, what she does or does not is not for us to say.” The two men went back and forth in this conversation, which grew increasingly animated, passionate, and loud. In what appeared to me to be an argument, I interjected at the first pause in their discussion.

“I agree with Ali. It is not what she should be doing. She is young and has her health, she should be putting out more effort to have a respectable job rather than choosing prostitution at her young and able age. I believe Ali is right, I think—” Just then, Ali, the guy whose side I was agreeing with, snapped at me,

“It is not about right or wrong. It is ‘Do you understand?!’”

Slightly stunned, I leaned back in my chair sheepishly as Ali stared at me with sobering vengeance.

At last, Amadou, whose side I was against, looked at me and asked kindly, “Do you understand that?”

I did. “Yeah,” I said, “I do, sorry.”

To which Amadou just as sharply and still holding my gaze said,

“You’d better be different, not sorry.”

Wow, he’d just recited to me a version of what I’d said to myself in Australia when I’d refused to call the Dooleys Mum and Pop. A double whammy of African proverbs: They are not trying to win arguments of right or wrong. They are trying to understand each other. That’s different. (Hey, America, we could learn from this.) The next morning we continued toward the Bandiagara Escarpment.

Educate before you indict.