The Drifters (96 page)

Cato said, ‘It’s curious. In Africa I’ve met Portuguese, and Boers, and English judges, and Arab saints, and American sailors, and Chinese cooks. But I haven’t met one damned black … socially, that is.’

‘They’re not yet visible,’ Mrs. Gridley said.

‘They will be,’ he predicted.

Moçambique should have ended with the beauty of the sable antelope or the friendliness of the night music at the Gridley’s, but it didn’t.

About five in the morning I was awakened by rough shaking and Joe’s frightened voice. ‘Mr. Fairbanks! We need you! It’s Cato.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘He mainlined. I think he’s going to die.’

I pulled on a pair of pants and dashed across the grass to the rondavel. I rushed past Monica, who was standing in the doorway, wringing her hands and staring vacuously into space. Gretchen, weeping, was leaning over the bed, applying cold towels to Cato’s sweating forehead. ‘My God, he’s going to die!’ she said, and I could see the terrible convulsions that racked his body.

First thing I did was to grab his left arm and look at the veins, and the evidence was clear. Even on his dark skin a raised dot showed the mark of a hypodermic needle. In spite of his promises to Joe and his arrogant assurance to me, he had done exactly what he had sworn never to do. I glanced up, and Gretchen said, ‘She pestered him for more than an hour. She told him there’d be no more sex if he didn’t keep up with her. We could hear her screaming in our rondavel.’

I looked back at Monica, shivering by the door, incapable of comprehending what was happening. I wanted to shake her, bring her back from that awful shadowy
world, make her acknowledge the hideous thing she had done.

I turned again to Cato, who had begun a series of tremendous contractions, any one of which might end in his death. It seemed probable that he had got a poisoned dose, and I grew as frightened as the young people. Beckoning to Joe, I said, ‘You’d better get Mrs. Gridley. This is too much for us to handle.’

Joe ran to the warden’s cottage and returned with Mrs. Gridley, who brought with her a doctor’s kit. She went directly to the bed and started examining Cato. ‘He’s nearly dead!’ she cried in horror. ‘What in hell has he been doing?’ She looked at his arm and saw the mainline nick.

‘Let’s walk him around,’ she directed Joe and me. ‘This may be just the wrong thing to do, but this boy’s about to die. It might at least restore circulation.’

So we hoisted him from the bed, and with his arms slung around our necks, we walked him back and forth. He was no burden, for he carried no excess weight, and after a while he began to breath deeply.

By dawn it was apparent that he would survive, so we laid him gently back on the bed. Only then did we notice that Monica had gone peacefully to sleep on the floor. She looked like a little kitten, tired from playing, and Joe helped Mrs. Gridley lift her and place her next to Cato. But as the Scottish woman tucked the sheet about the beautiful and pallid face, she said, ‘It’s a shame she wasn’t the one to catch the lethal dose.’

Tunis is a beautiful mare, Algeria a proud stallion, Morocco a lion.

When one of the editors of
The New Yorker
retired, he told about the time they had this fabulous story but wasted three weeks trying to think up something funny to say about it. Seems a New York bank clerk absconded with $100,000. and blew it all in riotous living in Philadelphia. No comment you make is funnier than the fact itself. I feel the same way about Algeria announcing that it is firing 1,200 teachers trained at the Sorbonne and replacing them with 1,200 trained at the University of Cairo.

So there was this mighty conclave of the leaders of Islam in these parts … distinguished-looking kings and philosophers all in turbans … enough gold cloth to found a bank. And when the Arabs had left the lobby, this Texas GI comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, bub, who was all them rag-heads?’

Koutoubia, Koutoubia!
Land of keef and hash and honey,
Where brotherhood is a bond of love
And who gives a damn about money.

Koutoubia, Koutoubia!
Bring me home from across the oceans,
I must return, I must return
To the scene of my devotions.

That guy in the corner of the fort is a sorry case. There’s so much noise in here he can’t remember what it was he joined the Foreign Legion to forget.

Before the war I used to see this Arab striding down
the road followed by his three wives carrying the bundles. After the war I see him coming down the same road, with the same three wives carrying the same bundles, but this time they are in front and he is in the rear. I stop and tell him, ‘Abou, this is progress.’ He looks at me with contempt and says, ‘Not progress. Land mines.’

In the end, there’ll be only one thing
that’ll bridge the generation gap: Money.

The
I-Ching
is the Bible without its
capitalistic moralizing.

Old boys have their playthings as well as young ones; the difference is only in the price.—Franklin

As late as 1941, when travelers from the desert arrived in Marrakech without their harems, they stayed at this hotel, and in every room there was a little Arab boy to satisfy their accustomed sexual needs. I have some of the old bills. ‘Boy, thirty-six piasters.’

The trouble with television is that it is like a sword rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.—Edward R. Murrow

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.—George Eliot

For the Negro to hate the Jew is like a left halfback hating a right end, or a merchant hating a fireman, or a lieutenant in the army hating a sergeant, or an older brother hating a younger; for in each of these instances, cooperation is unavoidable and joint action to a common end makes each partner markedly stronger than he could be alone.

Being educated means to prefer the best not only to the worst but to the second best.—William Lyon Phelps

Youth is truth.

When the Greek freighter docked at Casablanca, Joe suffered traumatic shock. The customs official, after having checked the young people’s luggage, pointed a forefinger at Joe and said, gruffly, ‘In that door.’

Wondering what could have been found in his gear, Joe went through the door and found himself in an unexpected situation. An obese Moroccan official, wearing a fez, sat stuffed in a chair before a cluttered desk, while a short, wizened barber in a long white gown stood by an old-fashioned barber’s chair. The official said briefly, ‘If you want to land in Morocco … no beard, no long hair.’

Joe started to protest that as a free citizen … but the official cut him short: ‘Don’t shave and stay out.’

‘But …’ Joe’s protest was halted peremptorily when the official plopped a cheap watch on his desk and said, ‘You have three minutes. Shave or no shave.’

Joe felt the blood rising to his brain. He wanted to kick that office apart and punch the fat official in the nose, but the man merely stared at him and pointed to the watch: ‘Two more minutes and out you go.’

‘Can I speak to the others?’ Joe pleaded.

‘Ninety seconds left. Better get in that chair.’

The little barber, who needed a shave himself, waited unperturbed as the decision was being made. He did not exactly invite Joe into the chair, but he did stand at the ready, so at the last moment Joe shrugged his shoulders and climbed into the chair, whereupon the little fellow sprang into hectic action.

‘I cut hair for three years … Boston. Fine city, Boston. Red Sox. Ted Williams.’ He spoke like a machine gun, but his hands were even faster. With a creaking electric clipper he started at Joe’s right ear and plowed steadily down through his chin, then up the other side. When he reached the left ear he did not stop, but continued right across the back of Joe’s head until he returned to the right
ear. Three more times he completed this circuit, zipping away all of Joe’s beard and the long hair at the back of his head.

Then, switching rapidly to a pair of scissors, he cut huge swatches of hair from the top of the head and within a few minutes had Joe in a condition from which it was possible to proceed with a rational haircut. ‘You gonna like Morocco,’ he said. ‘Marvelous country … good food … first time you taste couscous, remember me. I recommended it.’

He was employed by the government to whisk off the hair of every hippie seeking entrance to Morocco, and he would have carried out his responsibility if he had merely hacked off the offending hair, but he was an artist, so as soon as he finished his brutal preliminary shearing he became a polished barber, giving each young man his personal judgment as to how the new hair should look. ‘I see you cowboy type, maybe,’ he told Joe. ‘Or maybe bicycle champion touring France for glory. Very manly … big chest. I want you to have good hair about your ears … not shaved. And maybe brush type on top. Your physique you could stand brush type … very manly.’

As he lathered Joe’s face he whispered, so that the official at the desk could not hear, ‘They don’t give me money for good razors. You not gonna like this, but I rub your beard a long time, make it soft.’ At the first swipe of the razor Joe winced, and the little fellow said, ‘I sympathize. I sharpen this goddamned thing one more time,’ and he stropped it furiously, producing a tolerable blade.

After he had washed Joe’s face and combed his hair he stood back to admire his handiwork. ‘You a very handsome man … when you allow us to see you. Such a perfect haircut. The young ladies outside will applaud.’ He then took a small bellows whose handles were decorated with copper rivets, and with a quick twist of his wrists, applied a generous helping of powder to Joe’s head.

‘Please!’ Joe protested, reaching for a towel. ‘I don’t use talcum powder.’

‘Not talcum powder,’ the barber said. ‘Flea powder,’ and with another puff of his bellows he gave Joe a snootful, adding, ‘Welcome to Morocco.’

When Joe stepped back into the customs shed and started walking toward his waiting companions, he got almost to them before they recognized him. Then Monica
screamed, ‘My God! It’s alive!’ and Cato shouted, ‘That’s our boy!’ As they clustered around him he said, ‘I feel naked,’ but Gretchen whispered, ‘You’re really very handsome,’ but when she tried to give him a kiss, he pushed her away and muttered, ‘This white stuff … flea powder.’

From the moment the yellow pop-top entered the broad highway to Marrakech the occupants were aware that they were approaching a very special city, one that had become a magnet for adventurous young people around the world. They spotted Swedes and Germans and Americans in small cars or hitchhiking. Whenever they passed a bus, they could see hanging from it an assortment that would have terrified the sheriff of an Iowa town or a mayor in Massachusetts awaiting a rock festival. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and when they stopped for gasoline at the halfway point they talked eagerly with a couple returning to Casablanca.

‘How come the long hair?’ Joe asked the man.

‘No problem. Big deal about cutting it off when you land. After that, who cares?’

‘Is it as much fun as they say?’ Monica asked.

The girl closed her eyes and blew a kiss. That was all, but the man said, ‘We were there for six months. Going back to the States is like committing suicide.’

They introduced one another: ‘This is Jeanette from Liverpool … Joe from California … Gretchen from Boston …’

Then Gretchen asked, ‘When we get there … how … well … what do we do?’

The departing couple laughed at her naïveté, and the girl said, ‘You drive right through town, past the Koutoubia—that’s the marvelous minaret—and go to the Djemaá el Fna.’ This was the first time the newcomers had heard the name that was to form the center of their life for the ensuing months.

‘What’s that?’ Gretchen asked.

‘The hub of the universe,’ the man said. ‘The big public square.’

‘You go to the Djemaá,’ the girl from Liverpool continued, ‘and you stand there for one minute looking like a foreigner, and so many things will happen that you’ll be
dizzy for a week. You don’t look for things in Marrakech. They look for you.’

‘Warn them about Jemail,’ the man said.

‘Oh, yes! Jemail you must be careful of. He’s a little Arab boy about eleven years old. He lives in the Djemaá. Speaks six or seven languages. And is the most evil human being since the Marquis de Sade.’

The man told Gretchen, ‘Within one minute of the time you step out of your car, Jemail will tell you that he can get you up to fifty dollars a night if you want to sleep with the local merchants. If you’re brave enough to go to a town behind the mountains, he’ll get you more.’

Cato asked, ‘Grass?’

‘Best in the world.’

‘Better than Nepal?’

‘I’ve been in Nepal. This is twice as good.’

‘They sell it in cellophane sacks like a supermarket,’ the girl from Liverpool said.

‘But where do you get it?’ Cato asked.

The man said, ‘Jemail will have four sacks waiting for you. Watch. You’ll take four sacks whether you want them or not. But be careful of the little green cookies he peddles. Almost pure hash. I ate a whole one on an empty stomach and was flat for twenty-one hours.’

‘Yes, he was,’ the girl confirmed. ‘He was damned near as green as the cookies.’

Gretchen asked, ‘Where’s a good place to stay?’ and the girl replied, ‘Jemail will try to put you in the Rouen, but don’t touch it. What a stink! We lived at the Bordeaux most of the time and it was super. Great crowd of kids.’

Tentatively, Joe asked the man, ‘You ever hear of a fellow called Big Loomis?’ whereupon the couple started talking excitedly, recalling various experiences with a man who had become a legend in Marrakech.

‘Big Loomis! If you meet Jemail within one minute, you’ll meet Big Loomis within six.’

‘Can he be trusted?’ Joe asked.

‘In Marrakech nobody can be trusted,’ the girl said. ‘Even at the Bordeaux, they would steal the last eight crackers from a stack and fill the space with crumpled newspaper. Big Loomis lives there, on a small check from home and what he can scrounge from people like you. But he’s worth every dirham. And let me assure you of this. If you get into trouble—I mean real trouble—Big
Loomis will stand by you with the police, the municipality, the American embassy. He’ll take on the world.’