The Drifters (100 page)

Later we trailed down to the Djemaá, where the night cast was putting on its show, then on to the Bordeaux, where Rolf and Inger introduced me to hash. We were seated on the beds, some twenty of us, with fine guitar music filling the room. Gretchen had announced, ‘Child 12,’ and there had been applause. This was a ballad she had taught me, and when other guitars joined in, the effect was powerful, and I noticed especially a verse I must have heard before but had not listened to, for the words, although they referred to a young man, seemed painfully applicable to Monica, and as they rose in soft echoes from a dozen voices, I had to believe that they referred to my beautiful English girl, and I took her hand, and when the verse was ended:

I whispered, ‘Why don’t you quit taking eels in broo?’ and
she reproved me, ‘Don’t talk like my father,’ and I said, ‘I am your father, and I am heartsick when I see how you are destroying yourself,’ but she put her fingers to her lips and said, ‘Listen to the music,’ and we listened as Gretchen sang:

‘Nobody need bother about making my bed,’ Monica whispered, ‘because I don’t intend to lie down.’

It was now that Rolf, with Inger’s help, rolled a blockbuster cigarette, about as long as a commercial one but at least three times as thick; indeed, it looked more like a cigar. It was made first of marijuana leaves, arranged lengthwise, but when these were in place, Inger sprinkled over them a generous helping of crumbled hash, so that the brownish stuff filtered through all parts of the cigarette. When it was lit, it flamed like a torch for a moment, then subsided to an ordinary cigarette glow, emitting a heavy coil of smoke which hung in the air, yellowish and pungent. ‘We call this the Winston Churchill,’ Rolf said, referring to a man who had once lived in Marrakech and loved it.

Inger took a deep draw, allowed the freighted smoke to circulate through her lungs, and blew it out. She took another, then passed the joint to Rolf, who puffed and handed it to Gretchen. She was preoccupied with her guitar, so passed the cigarette unused to one of the girls from Wellesley, who took a deep drag and handed it along until it reached Monica, who took three tremendous puffs, which seemed to have no effect. She handed the joint to me, and since I had never tasted hash I thought I might as well try it under these favorable circumstances, so I took a token drag, feeling the smoke enter deep into my throat and lungs; even that small quantity carried an authority which I perceived immediately. I tasted the smoke, then blew it out. ‘I can see how this might become popular … but not with me,’ I said as I handed the cigarette to Holt, who passed it immediately to Britta. She took two deep puffs and said, ‘It’s been a long time since the last one,’ and Harvey said, ‘It’s gonna be a long
time till the next one,’ and she patted his hand. Holt asked me, ‘Is it pretty strong?’ and I said, ‘So far I feel no effects, but I’m sure they’re there.’ When the mighty Winston Churchill made its subsequent rounds, Monica tried to shame me into keeping up with the crowd, but I, not being a teenager, felt that I could survive the accusation ‘chicken,’ and as the night progressed I observed that those who continued smoking hash grew more lethargic and poetic and amenable and drowsy, and when familiar ballads were sung they tended to sing about half a bar behind Holt and me, and one of the girls from Australia said, ‘Isn’t this beautiful? Just sitting here and singing and not being mad at anybody?’ But her singing kept no pace with ours.

Early next morning Cato was at my hotel. He was most distraught and said he felt powerless, unable any longer to try to help Monica, who was now alternating heroin and hashish cookies in a way that kept her unconscious much of the time. She was not eating at all and occasionally had hallucinations in which her father and I were oppressing her in a London hotel.

He brought me her handbag: passport proving that she was seventeen years old … British citizen … notify Sir Charles Braham in case of trouble … and other items of ugly import—cap from a Danish beer bottle, cork liner scraped away so that the cap could be filled with water and held over a match for the dissolving of heroin powder; a good German hypodermic needle, not too clean and with marks of blood on the interior, indicating that she had stuck the needle into her vein, then aspirated it to be sure of its location; a small square packet of paper containing remains of a whitish powder; and finally a letter seven months old addressed to her in Torremolinos. ‘Should I throw the needle away?’ Cato asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I feel as powerless as you. But she looks terribly sick … maybe we’d better talk to Big Loomis.’

When we climbed the stairs to his quarters we had to pass Monica’s door, and as we peered inside we could see that she was unconscious and would remain so for many hours. ‘What ought we to do with this child?’ I asked Loomis. ‘She ought to be in a hospital … but not
in Morocco,’ he said. I said I wished I had the authority to ship her out to England, then asked how far gone he thought she was in her addiction, and he said, ‘It boils down to this: will she give herself an o-d and kill herself, or won’t she?’ I asked what an o-d was, and he said, ‘Overdose. It happens by accident—her accident in taking too much, or the seller’s accident in making his mix too strong. In the first case, suicide. In the second, murder.’

‘Does this happen often?’

‘Yes. We’ve had three young people die in this hotel of o-d. That skinny drink of water from Mississippi better watch out, or he’ll be next.’ He spoke with the professional detachment of one who had seen much tragedy from the use of drugs, and I asked, ‘Are you on heroin?’

‘Me?’ he asked in astonishment. ‘On Big-H? I’m here to beat the draft … not to wreck my life. When this is over I expect to lose a hundred and fifty pounds and coach football in some college. But recently I’ve been thinking maybe I ought to go into counseling.’

‘We have Monica’s outfit here,’ I said. ‘Should Cato throw the hypodermic away?’

Big Loomis reflected on this for some moments. ‘With Monica I’d have to say no. There’s still a chance you can bring her back. But not cold turkey. She’d rebel and you’d lose her.’ From the authoritative way he spoke, I judged he had handled several such cases. He concluded, ‘One thing you can do is keep that filthy little Jemail away from her.’

‘Why do you hate him so?’

‘Because people like you think he’s cute. Actually he’s a depraved little monster—the creation of his society, yes, but he kills much of what he touches. You might call him the curse of Marrakech … and only eleven years old.’

As we descended the stairs we spotted Jemail sneaking out of Monica’s room; we were sure he had brought her a new supply of green cookies, which she had been too unconscious to accept so he had probably slipped them under her pillow, on credit then moved on to deliver his daily ration of heroin to the young man from Mississippi.

Ever since that night when Cato nearly died from an injection of heroin, I had been preoccupied with the problems raised by this destructive drug, and now Jemail seemed to provide an opportunity to find out more about it, so while Cato stopped off to see if he could make
Monica eat something, I purposefully followed the little Arab into the alley, but as soon as he detected me, he stopped abruptly, turned to face me, and asked, ‘What you want, buster? Nice young girl, very clean?’

‘Where do you get the heroin you peddle to these people?’

Instantly he became a businessman and I could see his shrewd brain clicking like a computer. ‘Maybe you like to buy a load … fly back to Switzerland? You smuggle a lot of good stuff into Geneva … you make a million.’

‘I’d like to see where you get it … how good it is.’

‘Why not?’ he asked, shrugging his shoulders. Then remembering that I came from Geneva, he continued our discussion in very good German, switching to French when we reached the Djemaá; this he spoke idiomatically.

We left the plaza and entered the low-covered souks, where he spoke a flippant Arabic to the shopowners. We passed the goldsmiths, the rug merchants, the metalworkers, the shoemakers, with all of whom he maintained a running conversation. I judged that he was saying, ‘No business with this one, Gamal. But later today I’ll bring you someone.’ The merchants nodded as he passed and some even greeted him with respect, acknowledging the fact that he was an important cog in their operation.

Our first stop was an apothecary’s stall, where a serious-looking Moroccan in red fez was parceling onto paper squares minute portions of heroin, weighing each on a bronze balance whose index arm wavered back and forth like a butterfly preparing to land on a flower. When the papers were prepared, sixteen of them lined up carefully in rows, he placed on each a spatula full of dextrose, which formed the bulk and body of the package. With a different spatula, carefully cleaned, he mixed the powders on each of the papers, then folded the edges to make neat packages, which he would sell to runners like Jemail.

‘Very scientific,’ Jemail said proudly. ‘With this you never catch an o-d.’ For some minutes he spoke to the chemist in Arabic, then informed me, ‘He says that for a large order … he puts everything together for you … very small package … two American dollars each one. In Geneva you sell each one for thirty dollars … in New York, fifty dollars.’ I said I would think about this, and the red fez nodded.

‘Don’t try to buy lower,’ Jemail warned me as we left
the shop. ‘You pick up some boy on the Djemaá … one of the others … sure he sell a little cheaper. But what you get?’ He led me past a kiosk whose door was barred and said, ‘This is where they bring you … cheap heroin to begin with … no scales for weighing … some here, some there … who knows what you’re getting? One dose very weak, one dose very strong. This man known as the killer. Don’t go.’

He now led me to a much different section; indeed, I wondered if it was technically a part of the souk, for it seemed more like a warehouse area, and even before I was well into it I could detect the rich, clean smell of new-mown hay. This had to be the marijuana center, and Jemail led me to his two principal hashish suppliers. The first was a small nervous man who kept cleaning his fingernails with a silver penknife. He greeted Jemail affectionately, and when the boy told him that I was interested in a large order of hash for Switzerland, he became businesslike and told me in French, ‘Jemail has probably warned you that I make only the cheap quality, and he’s right. If you had to sell my product in Morocco you might have trouble. But in a foreign country, where they don’t know, you could make a lot of money on my stuff.’

He led us inside his warehouse, whose floors were piled with cannabis which he said he got from plateaus in the High Atlas. Two men were sorting and packing it raw into the cellophane bags that Jemail sold on the Djemaá. In a shed nearby, a substantial fire burned, over which hung a large cast-iron cauldron in which huge quantities of marijuana were being boiled in order to extract the resin which, when drained and compressed, would form hashish. It was a crude process, uncontrolled and accidental—more than six hundred kilos of marijuana to produce one kilo of hash—and the hash which did result was undependable, but as the proprietor said while working on his nails, ‘Very reasonably priced.’ I said I would consider his offer.

It was the second warehouse that produced top-quality hash, and Jemail recommended strongly that I establish a long-time business relationship with its proprietor. ‘You could become rich,’ he assured me. What he said next betrayed his self-interest in this matter: ‘Maybe next year I bring you your supplies. Fly Air France to Geneva … Paris.’ I nodded, as if to encourage his delusions.

The proprietor of this establishment looked like an old-fashioned
miller; he could have come from the Canterbury Tales or from Shakespeare, for his face was round and covered with dust, as were his shoes and clothes. He had several teeth missing in front and was most amiable as he approached to do business with me. He spoke French and assured me, ‘Here you get the best hashish in Morocco … probably in the world. Now if you want to be our representative in Geneva, I can guarantee top quality. Come inside.’

He led me to one of the strangest industrial rooms I had seen in long years of inspecting the unusual. It was small and completely lined—the floor, the walls and the ceiling—with a coarse burlap. In the center lay a pile of dried marijuana, from which two workmen lifted small bundles to place on heavy boards, where they beat the leaves and stalks with whips, each consisting of a handle from which sprang ten or twelve heavy reeds. There was a constant flurry of dust, which, as it rose above the beating blocks, deposited its burden of resin on the waiting burlap. When Jemail explained what was happening, I could detect tiny globules of grayish stuff.

‘From the ceiling,’ the proprietor told me, ‘we scrape the very finest hashish. From the walls a good grade indeed. From the floor … well, not such high quality but infinitely better than the boiled stuff.’ Then he made his little joke: ‘Since you are a tall man, Monsieur Fairbanks, the dust on your clothes right now would be worth five hundred dollars.’

He said he mixed his hash with no adulterants and promised me that as his agent for Central Europe, I would receive only the best. ‘For your personal use,’ he confided, ‘I shall lift your hash only from the highest point in this special room.’ He pushed open a door to another burlap-lined room which contained no workmen or pile of cannabis. ‘Here, once in a while, we beat specially selected female plants. They yield the best.’

I spent some time with him, discussing the trade, and he assured me that smoking hashish carried no ill effects. He had heard about the assassins of ancient Syria and the oft-told fable that they murdered only when lost in hash-induced stupors. ‘This never happened,’ he insisted, and his manner was so cocksure that I had to say, ‘But I know of an English girl who ate one of your cookies and went stone-cold for eighteen hours.’ He raised his hands, causing
precious dust to fly from his sleeves. ‘Cookies … those damned green cookies. They are something else. A wise man never eats hashish. He smokes it.’