Prologue

Sometimes I wonder if I ever really left the jungle. Not the one in Honduras, but the one I grew up in—where truth bent like vines and danger didn't always wear camouflage. In the jungle, at least you knew what could kill you. Back home in Miami, survival meant something different. You smiled at the woman who had just screamed at you. You carried bags of stolen goods out of department stores like it was a game. You learned to stay quiet, stay watchful, stay useful.

When I was 17, my father sent me on an expedition into the Mosquitia rainforest to search for a legendary lost city. On paper, it sounded like the kind of bold, coming-of-age adventure boys dream about, with my brother and three friends joining the expedition. But in truth, it was an exile—my father's way of removing my brother and me from the wreckage left behind by our mother's crimes, her arrest, her unraveling world. He called it an opportunity. At times, it felt more like a test. Or a setup.

There were five of us teenagers—and one Vietnam vet, with secrets and demons, who was sent to guide us—and no real idea what we were walking into. Before long, the line between leader and threat blurred, and the jungle began to feel like the least dangerous thing around us.

What I didn't realize then, and what I've only come to understand through the long echo of time 50 years later, is that everything I needed to survive out there had already been hardwired into me. My mother's schemes. My father's betrayals. The shame. The silence. The fear that shaped me. The jungle didn't just strip us down, it revealed who we already were—and who we might become if we weren't careful.

Except for a few close friends and my wife, no one ever knew the full story. And for decades, I avoided writing it. I didn't want to tell it while my mother was alive (she died in 2019), because she never wanted anyone to know about her shoplifting, her scams, her double life. For years I kept her secrets out of loyalty, out of fear, and maybe out of habit.

I've spent a lifetime trying to reconcile those two worlds: the jungle of my childhood and the one we hacked through with machetes and blind faith. This is the story of both. Because the truth is, I thought I was going into the jungle to find a lost city. But somewhere between the rivers and endless rain, the mud, and ghosts that I carried, the jungle found me—and left its mark on everything I became.