The Drifters
‘Are you Jemail?’ Cato asked, and the boy drew back, as if afraid.
‘You know Jemail?’ he asked warily.
‘He’s my friend,’ Cato said, whereupon the boy fled.
And then they saw what must surely be Jemail. Coming toward them with an insinuating shuffle was an Arab boy of eleven or twelve dressed in a unique mixture of clothing obviously stolen from previous visitors: German leather pants cut down to size, a high-sheen rayon bowling jacket labeled Mildred’s Diner, army boots, and a Little League baseball cap from the Waco Tigers. He had an alert, foxlike face and he flashed an ingratiating smile as he addressed his prospective customers in a make-believe deep voice: ‘Hiya, buster! Come wiz me to ze casbah!’ Laughing at his own joke, he asked, ‘You like place to stay, eh? You got Volkswagen pop-top 1969 automatic shift. You could afford the best hotel if you liked. But you want to be near Djemaá, eh? I have just hotel you want, not too expensive. Rouen, very classy, you smoke marijuana in the lobby, you like.’
‘We’re looking for the Bordeaux,’ Gretchen said.
‘You won’t like it,’ Jemail warned her. ‘Fleas … very low type of people.’
‘You take us to the Bordeaux,’ Gretchen said.
Jemail stood back, stared at her, and said, ‘You so fucking goddamned smart, you find Bordeaux yourself.’
Joe took a hefty swipe at the boy, who had anticipated the move and had jumped back, whipping out a knife. ‘You lay a hand on me, you stinking draft dodger, I cut your balls off.’ He continued a vile outpouring of profanity, including much instruction as to what the two girls could do sexually, either with each other or with their goddamned nigger friend. When this explosion subsided, the boy calmly put away his knife and said, ‘Now we understand each other. I think Rouen is best for you … more class.’
‘We’re going to the Bordeaux,’ Gretchen repeated.
‘Okay. But when rats run over your face at night … nibble your tits … don’t scream for me.’
Cato said, ‘How’s the grass?’ and Jemail said, ‘My boy bring you four bags,’ and putting his fingers to his mouth, he gave a shrill whistle, at which the boy who had first spoken to them returned respectfully and listened as Jemail barked out a set of orders. When the boy had gone, Monica took Jemail aside and asked, ‘How about heroin?’ and he said, ‘The best. This I handle myself. I bring it to your room Rouen.’
‘Bordeaux,’ Monica corrected.
‘You let her order you about?’ he asked, jerking his thumb at Gretchen. ‘She a lesbian? Got you under her thumb?’
‘Let’s keep the discussion on the heroin,’ Monica said.
‘All right. Four dollars a packet, guaranteed not to be lactose.’
As Gretchen studied the child, wondering how a mere infant could have become so totally corrupted, he sidled up to her and said, ‘You look damned good. You ever want to earn some real money, let me know.’ Gretchen shook her head, but the boy, undaunted, continued his sales talk. ‘Respectable Europeans at Mamounia Hotel, fifty dollars. If they like you, even more. But black men other side of the mountains, you name your price.’
‘We’ll go to the hotel now,’ she said.
‘Rouen?’
‘Bordeaux.’
‘Find another boy, I not take a dog to the Bordeaux,’ and he stalked off, but when he saw them being approached by yet another boy, Jemail returned and drove him away. ‘Follow me,’ he said, and he led them across the Djemaá, explaining in various languages to passers-by the sexual habits and parentage of the four he had in tow.
They were a long time getting to the hotel, because when they reached the center of the Djemaá they found large circles of men and children gathered around storytellers who were giving them impassioned accounts of Moroccan history and such world events as the conquests of Alexander the Great and the landing on the moon. Some had acquired old music stands on which were hung large sheets of oilcloth containing a series of little squares depicting the adventures of Hercules, which the storyteller would point to as he recounted the miracles. The most theatrical storytellers used tripods from which were suspended numerous sheets of painted oilcloth, one on top the other, so that as the narrator progressed, he could quickly flip the sheets over and illustrate each lurid incident.
How powerful the voices of the storytellers were when the hero was in danger, how dulcet in the love scenes. Blood was a feature of almost every painted scene, and there was so much depiction of death that history seemed an unbroken succession of treachery, ambuscade and strangulation; indeed, in these parts it had been.
Within other circles, acrobats performed, holy men expounded the Koran, clowns put on crazy acts, and three men from the hills who could have performed in any theater of the absurd in Paris or New York had as props a bicycle pump, a German saber, a baby carriage and one long-tailed black frock coat. By swiftly changing into and out of the coat and leaping into the baby carriage, and by using the saber and bicycle pump in a wild variety of ways, they created a half hour of hilarity, their faces grave and their personalities constantly affronted by what was happening to them. Every so often one of the members of the troop tried to swallow the saber, and actually got a substantial length of it down his esophagus when his two partners rammed the bicycle pump up his anus and blew so much air into him that the saber kept popping back out of his mouth.
At the conclusion of each segment of a performance, a brass bowl was passed through the crowd, and occasionally someone put in a small coin, but the large majority of the audience sat on the macadam and watched for nothing. Gretchen was so delighted with the sword-swallowing trio that she gave them two dirhams, whereupon the clown working the bicycle pump produced from it a fanfare that sounded like trumpets.
It was now well past sunset, and as darkness fell over the great square, kerosene tapers appeared in brass holders, giving the open-air theater a ghostly aspect, with caftaned Berbers moving silently from one circle to the other while wide-eyed newcomers from the southern deserts looked upon a metropolis for the first time. More than fifty circles were now operating: snake charmers, dancers, orchestras, balancing acts, haranguers, and always the enchanting storytellers dragging their hundreds of listeners back into past ages, back to the glories of Islam.
‘You seen goddamned near everything,’ Jemail said impatiently. ‘That boy got your keef. I got your heroin. Now we go to Rouen.’
With a sudden movement, Joe grabbed the boy by the throat and said, ‘Listen, you punk, you stay away from us with your heroin. Now take us to the Bordeaux.’
‘I gonna castrate you yet, buster,’ the little Arab said, calmly pulling Joe’s fingers away.
He led them away from the Djemaá and into a dark alley that zigzagged its way through the most ancient part of Marrakech. They would have been afraid to go down this forbidding lane alone, for it was an evocation of every cheap film about the casbah.
And then, coming toward them out of the shadows, they saw a startling sight: a man of about three hundred and fifty pounds moving in slow rhythms, attended by three scrawny, long-haired types, one of whom could have been an adolescent girl. His heavy ankle-high boots of gigantic size were made of yak skin. For trousers he had a South Pacific lava-lava cut from finely woven gray-brown cloth. He wore an immense Nehru jacket, but no hat, for his beard and hair comprised an enormous circle which no headgear could encompass. The jacket was virtually covered with strings of beads, and above his left ear he wore a woman’s comb with a long, straight handle. As he talked rapidly with his disciples, the newcomers noticed that he moved with a delicate grace, lifting and dropping his immense feet in the competent way an elephant does when moving through high grass. Then, as he was upon them, his face clear of shadow, they saw that he was a Negro with a countenance of almost childlike simplicity.
‘That’s got to be Big Loomis,’ Joe said, moving forward to introduce himself.
At this moment, however, the Negro’s manner changed, for he spotted Jemail, and the two faced eac
h other in the narrow passageway, screaming curses. With big swipes the huge Negro tried to cuff the little Arab, who deftly avoided the blows and returned infuriating epithets.
Jemail, taunting the fat man, screamed, ‘Motherfucking fat slob, why you don’t pay your bills, shit-heel, blubber-gut?’ to which the fat man shouted, at the very top of his voice, ‘Listen here, you miserable little cork in the asshole of progress, if I get my hands on you I’ll barbecue you,’ whereupon the child screamed, ‘Bloody likely you get your hands on me. You find your own little boys.’ And here he descended to new depths of depravity, describing the fat man’s presumed sexual life.
It was a staggering performance, one that the young people frequently referred to when I met up with them later. Gretchen told me, ‘They stood there in the night, cursing each other, a great obese black man and a skinny little Arab boy, as if the elephant and the mouse we used to read about had come to Marrakech. The fat man accused the boy of trying to trick us for a few miserable dirhams into the Rouen, the vilest sink in town and no place for a lady. Here he bowed to Monica and me, a mountain of flesh and flowers bending in the middle. The boy countered with the charge that the fat man was trying to lure us to the Bordeaux so that he could make money by selling us drugs. There were more unprintable curses, then the black man moved majestically on, like an ocean liner steaming past a tug. I won’t repeat what the boy said of him as he disappeared. And that was our introduction to Big Loomis.’
Jemail did finally take them to the Bordeaux, a hotel of marked squalor perched at the edge of the alley they had been traversing. An ancient door admitted them to a central courtyard, around which ranged four stories of rooms, with a rickety interior staircase leading from one level to the next. Each floor had its own wooden balcony, so that if anything exciting happened in the hotel, all residents could be on the balcony of their respective floors within a few seconds. Also, each sound from a given floor was magnified many times as it reverberated up and down the central shaft.
To the left of the door stood the concierge’s room, its walls covered with colored scenes from airline calendars and festooned with cobwebs. The office was occupied by a man known only as Léon; what nationality or race, no one cared to guess. He was a patient man, much harassed yet always willing to listen when stray Europeans or Americans came to his door seeking help. He was able to be generous partly because Big Loomis occupied the whole top floor; if any traveler was really broke, Léon simply shunted him up to Big Loomis, who invariably found a place for him to sleep. There were eight rooms on the top floor, and some nights they contained as many as forty vagabonds in a confusion that could not be unraveled.
Léon led Jemail and his charges up the wooden stairs to the top floor, where he kicked open one after another of the six doors until he found a room that was more or less empty. ‘You sleep here tonight,’ he said, and Jemail added, ‘My boy be here soon with keef. But to give you welcome to Marrakech … here!’ And from his jacket he produced a greasy piece of brown paper containing four greenish cookies. ‘Four dirhams. Be careful, they knock you flat on your ass.’ Gingerly the girls placed the cookies in their luggage, saying they would try them later.
Jemail now came up with another proposition. He snapped his fingers and cried, ‘We go back to Djemaá and see it in moonlight?’ They considered this, and were so enchanted with Marrakech that they agreed, but Jemail said, ‘First we arrange money. I gonna take care of everything. I guard your car. I got a boy there now. So what’s it worth?’ Gretchen proposed a figure, which he rejected with scorn, pointing out: ‘I take care of you … no trouble. Police … nobody. No little boys bothering you in Djemaá. Good prices in the souks. I interpret. I do everything. You lose your passport? I know the man who prints new ones.’ He proposed a fee of six dollars a week, and they agreed.
He led them back to the square, where a transformation had taken place. The storytellers and actors had vanished. In their places had risen a multitude of transportable kiosks offering all kinds of food and tier upon tier of handsome oriental cakes and candies. ‘Don’t touch!’ Jemail warned. ‘Cholera catchers.’ He was about to explain what he meant by this when a tourist asked the candy seller a question, and in a flash Jemail took over the negotiation in German, which he spoke as well as he did English. Pocketing his tip, he returned to his charges and said, ‘See the moon … resting on the Koutoubia,’ and there it was, a half-moon standing tiptoe on the minaret.
In the morning they had a chance to inspect their hotel, and found it even dirtier than they had expected, but also more interesting. It had been built sometime in the last century and left untouched since then. Heavy deposits of grime discolored doorways and bathrooms, but Léon did sweep the floors weekly, so they were fairly clean. What attracted the newcomers was the social warmth of the place, the easy movement of many young people from room to room and up and down the flights of exposed stairs.
Each of the four floors contained eight rooms, and each room an average of three people, excepting the top floor where Big Loomis crowded large numbers into his quarters. There were thus more than a hundred residents, with Canadians, Australians and Swedes in the majority. The average age could have been no more than twenty, and girls slightly outnumbered boys. They were a clean lot, not too well dressed or coiffured, but presentable; the fact that it took considerable money to reach Marrakech meant that a natural weeding-out had taken place.
The principal characteristics of the Hotel Bordeaux was the heavy sweetish smell of marijuana; practically all the young people were smoking it, laced half the time with hashish, which was in some ways easier to buy in Marrakech than grass. To take a casual look at the inhabitants of the hotel, one would not detect that they were smoking marijuana, but upon closer inspection, one could see a fair number of vacant expressions that betrayed the recent user of hash.
The Americans in the hotel were an especially congenial group: two girls from Wellesley College, one of whom played the guitar; four or five from California universities who had persuaded their parents to send them abroad for a year to study European history and languages; the standard contingent from the midwest, most of them from some college or other along the Mississippi basin; and a quiet group of three from the south, including a pallid, sensitive boy from Mississippi.
Of all the young people from other countries, the Canadians and Australians were the most adventuresome and well heeled. Gretchen said, after meeting a score of them, ‘Those countries must be rolling in money. The kids are sure spending it.’ Joe found the Australian girls great fun: outspoken, brash, extremely active and courageous. With a knapsack and some bread they would go anywhere; most of them had been abroad for two years or more, working in England part of the time or taking ill-paid jobs in France, and almost every girl said sooner or later, ‘Six months more of this, then back to Australia and the long drag … marriage to some cattleman … yearly visits to the Melbourne Cup.’ They were a marvelous, roistering lot and several indicated to Joe that they would not be unhappy if he would do his sleeping in their room, but he always pointed to Gretchen, as if to ask, ‘What can I do?’
The generalizations I have just made applied to the first three floors. The fourth was something different. Here Big Loomis offered refuge to those who had come unprepared to Marrakech and had found themselves unequal to its demands: the high school girl from Minneapolis who in the souks had slept with dozens and become pregnant by one, but which one she could not say; the boy from Tucson who had dropped out of freshman year at Arizona State, who had discovered marijuana, hashish and heroin in one explosive week, and who would probably never recover—his main problem now was to master a sense of balance so that he could at least walk through Djemaá; the schoolteacher from London who had found the homosexuality of Marrakech overpowering; the three young men from California who were trying to avoid the draft; the terribly muddle-minded philosopher from a Catholic college who was determined to reconcile St. Thomas Aquinas, Herbert Marcuse and the I-Ch
ing, the joining cement being marijuana.
It was a mixed lot, over which Big Loomis presided with tenderness and understanding; some of his clientele, such as the Catholic philosopher, he provided with free lodging for months on end; others he asked to leave when he felt they had more or less stabilized themselves. The residents of the fourth floor did not mix much with those of the three lower floors; in fact, some of Big Loomis’s patients, to give them their proper description, did not leave the top floor for weeks at a time, content to lie in their rooms, smoking hash and dreaming of the better world they were supposed to be making.
To the average newcomer the principal advantage of the Bordeaux was its ready supply of hashish and heroin. One did not even have to search for these exotic temptations, because little Jemail knocked on the door each day, soliciting orders: ‘Cheapest prices Marrakech. Merchandise guaranteed.’ He made only three hundred per cent on each transaction.
Only three residents in the hotel were foolish enough to dabble with heroin—four, after Monica checked in—and two of them were sniffing, with only an occasional popping under their skins; there was a good chance that these two might withdraw, because Big Loomis kept them under his care on the fourth floor, trying to break them of the habit. The third user was the pallid young man from a good family in Mississippi, who Gretchen saw one day leaning languidly against the door of his room on the third floor. She doubted that he would ever make it back home, for it was clear that he was taking heroin into his veins and had not eaten for some days. His drawn face, slack body and emaciated arms betrayed a man who had passed into a walking coma—a frightening vision that should have been enough to keep any witness from heroin. But of course, Monica was already taking it intravenously … and secretly.
The three Americans now assumed the responsibility of trying to keep watch over Monica, and whenever they caught Jemail sneaking his packets into her room, drove him off, but it was on Cato that the principal burden fell, and his faithful attention won the respect not only of Joe and Gretchen but of Loomis as well. The big Negro told him, ‘You’re doing the only helpful thing, son. Stay with her, because she can fight her way back only with your help.’