Guido Bondioli is a 73-year-old artist and vigilante born in the Arizona desert who lives in a secluded house near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. He always carries at least one pistol, has been stoned every day since 1993, and routinely keeps sex trafficking rings out of his town. He also serves as the Guatemalan’s medicine man. "No me digas" is Guido's catchphrase. It basically means "No shit!" in Spanish. He hand-carves rubber stamps with the phrase and inks it onto his mail. Every few weeks I call Guido in Guatemala and he tells me another story about his life. All I can say is, "No me digas!"
Juan Simaj used to watch after my land in Jaibalito, Guatemala. He was big and aggressive, which made him good at keeping thieves off the property. But it was also the reason that he wound up dead, with his teeth in a jar on my shelf.
In 2002, a Norwegian guy named Kenneth moved to Jaibalito. He quickly found a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to spend time with. He dumped her on the day she turned 18, disgracing her in the eyes of the town. The girl was relegated to the fringes of the Guatemalan community. It was then that several men started using her. One of these men was César, Jaibalito’s crime boss. Another man was Juan Simaj.
I was in the United States when it all happened. Juan Simaj was watching my house. He slept on a mattress he dragged onto my living room floor. The girl slept with him, too, when she wasn’t with César. One night, César sent a pair of men to my front door. They shared a shotgun between them.
The men waited on my porch for a while, listening to Simaj and the girl. Then they let themselves inside. Simaj only had time to stand up out of bed before they unloaded both barrels into him.
The first was birdshot. Simaj took a few in his stomach but the rest missed. The birdshot speckled holes in my bathroom door, curved in a line where Simaj’s body blocked them. The sunlight pokes through the holes sometimes. I never had them filled. The second shot hit Juan Simaj in the head.
The two men dragged his body away. The girl followed them all the way back to César.
It took me two months to organize my life and get down to Guatemala. My front door was wide open when I arrived. There was a body-shaped crust of blood on my living room floor, near the kitchen table. It was almost a half-an-inch thick and had dried into something that looked like instant coffee grounds. There was maybe three quarts of the stuff, undisturbed, on my floor. The crust crumbled and fell apart when I bent down and touched it. Juan Simaj’s teeth were scattered throughout. I picked them up, one by one, and deposited them into a jar on my mantle. Then I swept his blood outside.
Sometimes the Guatemalan Indians come to me and say they’ve been hexed. I give them one of Simaj’s teeth as a cure. They all remember how big and powerful he was. How it took both barrels of a shotgun to bring him down.
Read more of Guido's stories on VICE every other Wednesday from now until he's dead.