There are two Steven Froelichs in Guatemala: High Life, Low Life. One of them lived it: loaded, reckless, and thrilled about it. The other one wrote it down, stone-cold sober, years later and an ocean away in London. The surprising part is how little the second Froelich wants to correct the first.
For about a decade, from 2006 to 2016, Froelich organized his travel around a simple and unapologetic set of priorities. “I was looking for vacations which would bring me a) to countries I had never visited, b) where coke was readily available, and c) fun,” he says. Belize, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala. The itinerary tended to follow the supply. Guatemala is the first of these “misadventures” to see print, chosen, he says, because it’s the most accessible of the lot.
The one least buried under the drugs.
He got clean in 2016. Everything since has been written from the other side of that line. Which raises the question at the center of the book, and the one worth putting to him first: when the sober writer sits down to reconstruct the stoned traveler, who’s actually in charge?
A Gonzo Holiday Maker
Someone, early on, floated the word gonzo. Froelich has a good line about it. “If Hunter S. Thompson is a gonzo journalist,” he says, “then I’m a gonzo holiday maker.” Less a claim to the throne than a cheerful abdication of it.
Push him on the tradition and he keeps deflating it. “Gonzo does not quite fit the bill,” he explains, “because gonzo writers are wild sophisticated adults whereas I’m more a kid on coke looking for friends and fun.” It isn’t false modesty so much as an accurate job description. And he’s quick to wave off the idea that he was ever chasing trouble. “I’m not looking for chaos, I’m looking for the fun and ecstasy of coke,” he says. “With excess cocaine comes chaos.” He wanted Oscar Zárate’s illustrations to give the book the feel of a kid’s comic rather than a countercultural artifact. The register he’s after is play, not prophecy.
It helps to know he came up in the theater. A playwright and actor, Edinburgh Fringe and studio workshops, long before any of this. He isn’t a reporter who wandered into a war zone. He’s a man with a dramatist’s ear who kept booking himself into rooms he had no business being in, and then wrote down what got said.
Memory Recollected in Sobriety
The practical problem with a memoir like this is, how do you honestly report a trip you spent largely intoxicated?
Froelich’s method is stricter than you’d guess. “Memory recollected in sobriety,” he calls it. A dry play on Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility. Home in London, off everything, he writes down what happened in the order it happened, then rebuilds it as a day-by-day diary. “I try for memory without judgment or reflection,” he says. Any judgment in the finished book has to be the traveler’s, felt in the moment.
Not the writer’s, imposed after the fact.
“I stay absolutely faithful to giving an account of what happened,” he says. “I have no skill in adapting it to be a better story for a reader.” That job he hands to Salmon. Salmon is a character Froelich uses as his editor: the one who takes the raw, repetitive diary and cuts it by something like 80 percent, occasionally folding two real people into one, without — and Froelich is firm on this — changing a single word of what remains. It’s an odd and telling device.
The author holds himself accountable for what happened and hands the shaping of it to someone with a different name. The traveler lives it, the writer records it, Salmon makes it readable. Three jobs, and Froelich only fully claims the first two.
He says he can’t think of anything he cut for being unfit to print. Only names changed, here and there, to spare people. What you’re reading, in other words, is meant to be the whole diary. Trimmed, but not scrubbed.
Antonio and Anabella
The drugs are the hook. The book’s real center of gravity is two people. Antonio is a hotel concierge. Working class, streetwise, and warm, Antonio pulls Froelich off the tourist grid and eventually takes him home to his rural village, somewhere a foreign face is rare and quietly unsettling. Anabella is the other Guatemala: wealthy, glamorous, talkative, presiding over a gated community of armed guards and famous eccentrics that Froelich, true to form, talks his way into for an open-ended stay.
The two never meet. That isn’t an accident of the trip; it’s a decision Froelich made and stuck to. He describes “my decision never to introduce Anabella to Antonio because it would distress both of them, each despising the other, Antonio openly to me, Anabella secretly to herself.” He was conscious of the wall between their worlds the whole time he was climbing back and forth over it, and when he had to choose, it came down, in his words, with “an obvious preference for siding with those in the low life.”
The people in the book will most likely never read it. “I feel regret that I cannot share it with the people concerned,” he says. “I know if I did it would hurt them.” His reasoning is that “anything I write about another is unlikely to be how they see themselves and therefore more likely to hurt than entertain.” You can hear both the tenderness and the self-interest in that at once, and to his credit, Froelich doesn’t pretend it’s a tidy position.
No Redemption, No Regrets
If there’s a moment you’re bracing for, the one where the older, wiser man steps in to disown the younger fool, it never arrives. Froelich has built the book specifically to keep it out.
He calls the redemption arc by name and says he despises it. “These books are not ‘Look how awful I was but the good comes from me having learnt my lesson,’” he says. “On the contrary, the books are a testimony to the joys and fun of travel on coke and booze until they are not.” His sober writer refuses to second-guess the stoned traveler. “As a sober writer I try to put myself into the head of the stoned traveler,” he says. “The writer never second guesses the traveler.” If there’s self-criticism on the page, and there’s plenty, it belongs to the man who was actually there, not the one looking back.
Which is why “how does he look back on it” turns out to be almost the wrong question to ask him. He doesn’t, exactly. He reconstructs. The point of the exercise isn’t to make sense of that decade or to mine it for a moral. It’s to get it down faithfully, comedy and chaos intact, before it fades, and then to stop, because in 2016 the fun stopped being fun, and he walked away from all of it clean. “No regrets and no redemption,” as he puts it.
Get Him Down Before He’s Gone
That’s the quiet trick of the book. You come to it expecting a confession and find a diary instead. One kept by a man determined not to flatter himself with hindsight, and just as determined not to scold himself with it. The sober writer’s only real job, it turns out, is to remember the stoned traveler accurately. Not to save him. Not to sentence him. Just to get him down on the page before he disappears.
“It is a comedy,” he insists. “The insane is funny.” Whatever that decade actually was, Froelich would rather show it to you than explain it. The explanation, he seems to have decided somewhere along the way, was always the least honest part.
Images courtesy of Extraordinary Books.
Sponsored Content Disclosure: High Times was provided with a copy of Guatemala: High Life, Low Life and an interview with Steven Froelich for this sponsored feature. The article was written and edited by High Times.
