‘Where did you learn about Thomas Aquinas?’ Gretchen asked.
‘Like wow, everybody knows the greatest, you know, the father of the church. Like wow, could you consider yourself educated if you’d never heard, you know, of Thomas Aquinas?’
I was constantly astonished by the reliance these young people placed on the occult. A group of serious students would lead a rebellion against the antiquated methods of a university, and one of their first demands would be that the updated curriculum initiate courses in astrology. I had often sat in gatherings of otherwise intelligent students who had worked hard to make their society a better place but who fell apart when coming under the influence of some guru who had a cursory acquaintance with the Bollingen edition of the I-Ching. In India I met one California girl who was convinced that if only she could determine the exact sequence in which the various chapters of the Pentateuch had been written, she would have at her command the secrets of the universe, and I remember with amusement the Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago who refused to leave Marrakech for his new job in Massachusetts until his readings in the I-Ching were favorable.
It was because of this frightening rebellion against intelligence that I learned so much from Claire, for she represented the assault against the smug self-satisfaction of science. If scientists could control space ships 186,000 miles distant, it became imperative to prove that they could not control the inner space ships of the human mind. In an age when science dominated all universities, these young people found it necessary to proclaim their faith in the least scientific of human endeavors: astrology, the Tarot, witchcraft, numerology and palmistry.
I once calculated that of the roughly three hundred young people I had met in Marrakech, all but a few believed in astrology and at least two hundred and seventy were convinced that flying saucers were arriving from outer space. They believed not on the basis of recurrent reports from our southern states of people who had actually made trips in the saucers, but because such belief infuriated their parents and confounded their professors.
As Claire said, ‘Like wow, my father is unbelievable. He’s a scientist but he has the vision of a mole. Like wow, he doesn’t believe in astrology, or the Tarot, or the I-Ching, or practically nothing. The only thing he’s, you know, good for is sending me my monthly check.’
After she finished her reading of Cato’s Tarot she announced that she had decided to move her gear from the Casino Royale to the Bordeaux, and her reasoning was interesting: ‘Like wow, on his floor Big Loomis attracts all the kooks in Marrakech, and if you lived up there you’d see the craziest, and you’d find the answers to everything.’ When Big Loomis came klop-klopping into the hotel, she asked him, ‘Like wow, could I move into one of your rooms? Like wow, it would be the greatest.’ He nodded benignly and klomped upstairs. ‘Besides,’ she added as she prepared to leave for her gear, ‘like wow, he has the best supply of grass in Marrakech.’
The others were busy, so I walked with her through the alleys, which were now more familiar to her than the streets of Sacramento, and after many turns into tight little passageways and with many greetings to tradesmen who had come to know her blond hair, she brought me at last to a dead end, and I saw a sign scrawled on a once-white wall: Casino Royale. ‘Home,’ she said.
The Casino, named by some hopeful Arab in the days of French occupation, was a one-story, mud-walled affair with a central courtyard around which were ranged sixteen of the smallest cubicles I had ever seen offered for rent. Not one had a window, so doors had to be left open, and as I stood in the court, almost overcome by the stench from the one inoperative latrine, I could look in upon any of the sixteen rooms, each of which contained up to six sleeping or dozing forms, not in beds—for the Casino Royale contained not one stick of furniture of any kind, neither bed, nor chair, nor table—but in sleeping bags or, in some cases, on wafer-thin blankets spread directly on the earth. This was Marrakech at its worst, a sleeping area renting at forty American cents a night, supervised by a miserable one-eyed Arab whose sole responsibility was to collect money, if he could, and keep the foul bathroom functioning, if he could. He performed his two tasks with equal incompetence.
Claire went directly to her cubicle, which she shared with four young men she had met in the Djemaá, and when they heard she was leaving they showed much apprehension, for like most American girls in Marrakech, she was supporting the men, since it was easier for a girl to get money from home than for a man. She told them not to worry, that she would look out for them for the rest of this month, after which they would probably be leaving anyway. ‘But we have nothing to eat,’ one of the boys complained, so she gave him half the money her father had sent her that morning. They thought that would enable them to get by. At this point she introduced them: Harold from Detroit; Cliff from New Mexico; Max from Portland, Maine; Bucky from Philadelphia. I spoke with the boys briefly and found that all had been to college for one or two years, had dropped out, might return at some future date. I didn’t ask, but I judged that none had had a bath during the last three or four months, and the only luggage I could see was four sleeping bags. They probably had toothbrushes and passports, but I doubted that they had razors or soap. There was, of course, a communal bag of marijuana and a newspaper cornucopia of green cookies.
When word of Claire’s departure drifted through the other cubicles, their occupants streamed out to bid her goodbye, and there was a show of real affection for this good-spirited, convivial girl with the limited vocabulary, but I noticed that from the room next to hers no one appeared. I peeked in and saw six young people, boys and girls, lying on their sleeping bags completely unconscious, as if dead. For a moment I was frightened, thinking that some disaster had happened with poisoned heroin, but Claire, noting my apprehension, looked in the room, kicked one of the girls, got a groan in reply, and assured me, ‘Nothing wrong here. They’re in good shape.’ I must have betrayed surprise at this evaluation, for she added, ‘Well, last night they did want to see how strong the cookies, you know, were—and, you know, like wow, they each ate two and went all numb. But you can see for yourself that they’re all right now. Another ten hours and they’ll start to move.’
As Claire went about saying her farewells, I was left with the six immobile bodies and knelt to tap the shoulder of one of the girls. Slowly her eyelids opened, but only the whites were visible. She groaned, rolled over and returned to total unconsciousness. One of the boys—Claire told me later he was an honor student from the University of Michigan—seemed to be slowly working off the effects of his two cookies, but when he tried to raise himself on one arm, he collapsed and again fell into his deep sleep.
I thought, as I surveyed this filthy room with its extraordinary freight, that these busted students represented a significent portion of the new world that was evolving. They stood for that legion of lost young souls in Paris and London and Tokyo and Berlin who had rejected their societies. It was they who populated the communes in the hills above Taos, the colonies in Nepal and the caves of Crete. They were a new breed, most difficult to understand, and as I looked at this selection I thought of the homes from which they had come. They must have been little different from the home that I had left when young; their parents surely had the same hopes for them that mine had had for me. Each of these sleeping six had probably gone to college and had busted out, forfeiting the tuition his parents had provided, and I wondered what those parents would have felt had they been able to stand where I was standing. This was the new part of the world, and the reverberations it was arousing would echo for many decades.
Then I visualized that familiar other part, those millions of young people throughout the United States and all nations who had entered college on the same terms as these six but who had found it possible to accommodate themselves to traditional demands, and I knew that the future work of society—the factories, the hospitals, the art museums, the city councils—would be accomplished by those who were back home learning and
working in the way most young people have done throughout history. The drop-outs of California and derelicts of Marrakech were spectacular; the stable young people working at their education were reassuring. It was inspiring to remember that Harvard and Michigan and Tulane were producing just as many well trained graduates as ever, and that by and large it would be these students who would ensure the continuance of our society. Young men who had to learn calculus were learning it; girls who required chemistry were mastering it.
But then I had the nagging suspicion that the spiritual leadership of the society—whose physical continuance was assured by the standard students who stayed on the job—would probably be provided by those more adventurous ones who had picked up a vital part of their education in such unlikely dormitories as the Casino Royale in Marrakech or the pads in Greenwich Village. I thought of St. Paul, who gave the Christian church its greatest impetus; he came not from the conservative yeshiva but from the sinks and alleys of his day. The singers who would best express the spirit of this age would come not from Harvard or Stanford or Tulane, but from less-structured centers of learning like Pamplona or Copenhagen or Conakry, for the true education of a probing mind occurs unexpectedly and in surroundings that could have been neither anticipated nor provided.
I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.
Standing in this mud-floored cubicle, with the stench of the latrine filling my nostrils and six unconscious scholars at my feet, I judged that of the young people then occupying the Casino, a good ninety per cent were already ruined for creative work. Of these doomed ones, a handful would escalate to heroin and become totally incompetent. Others would be content to move lazily from one marijuana session to the next, never completely incapacitated but never fully in control of their capacities. Some would acquire sex habits which they could not accommodate, and I would see them a decade from now haunting the Torremolinos bars or living in Algarve with some rich widow from London. And there would be others among the lost ninety per cent who would be stained by a terrible disease from which there was no recovery—memory—and these would repeat endlessly to the irritation of their friends, ‘You should have been with us that year in Marrakech.’ They would recall it as the high-water mark of their lives.
That left a group of about ten per cent from which would rise the survivors, the one or two who would come to see the world whole, who would comprehend life as a terrifying reality, a combination of accomplishment and failure, and who might provide some degree of spiritual guidance to the world. The education of such leaders is never easy, nor is it cheap or safe. No man with a precious son would educate him in the baleful way that Saul was educated, on the dicey chance that as an adult he might mature into St. Paul; no logical planner would require a crocodile to hatch a hundred eggs a hundred yards from water in hopes that one newborn reptile might make it to the river before hyenas and storks devoured him as they had his ninety-nine brothers and sisters, but that is the way nature has ordained it. The system is prodigal and tragic, but it functions.
As I looked at the disheveled crowd saying farewell to Claire and her Tarot cards, I would not have wanted to gamble that even one of that unkempt mob would ever produce anything, for apparently they were among the doomed; but I also knew that if I were given the job of finding the charismatic leader who could speak to the coming generation, I would stand a much better chance of finding him not in the antiseptic Mamounia where I slept, but here in the Casino Royale where they slept.
However, no sooner had I thought this than I realized that I was using the word leader in two senses. From the hard-working young people at home, who were completing their education in traditional fashion, would come constructive leaders like Aristotle, Pericles, Maimonides, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill, while from the Marrakech gang would rise meteoric figures like Saint Paul and Augustine, who had confessed to living in similar conditions, Byron and Dostoievsky, who had absorbed equivalent experiences, and Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, who had been nurtured on the same kind of confused political thinking. I suspected that for all centuries to come the world would continue to produce and follow this same kind of dualism in its leadership and that history would be the record of interaction between the two worlds of Michigan and Marrakech.
As I carried Claire’s malodorous bedroll out of the Casino, she clutched my arm and said, ‘Like wow, this place, you know, I can never forget it. Even the smell. The long discussions we had.’
But when we reached the Bordeaux we found excitement of a different kind, for everyone seemed to be crowding the balconies. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, and one of the Wellesley girls pointed to the third floor toward Monica’s room. I dropped Claire’s bedroll and started running up the stairs, but before I got very far, I saw Monica in her doorway, watching as Big Loomis and Cato carried an object from another room.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘That skinny kid from Mississippi,’ a girl whispered.
‘What about him?’
‘Stiff.’
Big Loomis and Cato had moved to the head of the stairs. As they carried their rigid bundle down, the balconies grew silent. Scores of young men and women watched the procession, and not until it had passed me in solemn quiet did the second Wellesley girl whisper, ‘We went into his room … to give him some food. He was real stoned. We shook him but he didn’t respond … not even in the unconscious way he usually did. We got scared and called Big Loomis and he came down. We said, “Hadn’t we better call a doctor?” and he said, “Why?” Then we knew he was dead.’
There was now a commotion in the courtyard. It was Jemail rushing in to defend himself: ‘Not my fault, not my fault!’
‘Get out of here, you miserable son-of-a-bitch,’ Loomis growled. ‘You brought him heroin this morning. The girls saw you.’
‘He always buy cheapest stuff. Never pay for safe stuff. So he catch o-d. Not my fault.’
‘Why don’t you get the hell out of here?’ Cato asked, taking one hand from the corpse and pushing Jemail in the face.
The little Arab drew back and shouted venemously, ‘Goddamn nigger! Don’t touch me! Your girl up there, she not your girl much longer, goddamn nigger!’
We all turned and looked up to the third floor, where Monica was standing. Realizing that Jemail was speaking of her, she put the back of her left hand to her lips and retreated into the shadows. Cato, aware that she had been hurt by what Jemail had cried, tried to strike the boy, but Jemail easily evaded him, shouting, ‘Stinkin’ nigger, you ain’t got white girl much longer. I know.’
The pallbearers edged the corpse out the door, for Big Loomis had learned from involvement in earlier heroin deaths that it was best to carry the dead to the police station, where paper work was easier to complete, and as the impromptu cortege disappeared, Claire, in a hushed voice, delivered the funeral oration: ‘Like wow, that one is stoned, you know, for keeps!’
After the funeral was over, the Bordeaux echoed to happier sounds, for Clive flew into town on one of his periodic tours, his purple carpetbag crammed with new releases. As in Pamplona, his most popular disk was one he had written, ‘Koutoubia,’ consisting of two contrasting parts, a verse built around an oriental wail and a driving chorus which pictured young people cavorting across the Djemaá:
Koutoubia, Koutoubia!
Finger of Allah, pointing to Marrakech.
Koutoubia, Koutoubia!
Symbol of my desire.
In Djemaá and in the souks
I find a world apart.
Beatniks, flower boys and kooks,
Weirdos, singing girls and spooks.
Squares prefer to call them gooks … br />
I take them to my heart.
The song captured the lyric quality of Marrakech, while at the same time, in its broken and naïve rhythms, depicting the darker side of the city:
In Djemaá snake-charmers tame the serpents
While the souls of men stay free,
Inhabiting the edges of my mind
In smoke-dreams that become reality.
Listening to the childish sentiment of the song, I doubted that the poetry of this generation was much better than the sickly-sweet junk of my youth. Once I heard Clive play five successive songs, each of which happened to feature the word reality, partly because it contained four crisp syllables and an easy rhyme, but mostly because its philosophical concept was a teasing one: ‘Our generation had found reality.’ The misty smoke-dreams so often alluded to in the new songs had little to do with reality; they referred specifically to marijuana and hashish, and this constant indoctrination explained in part why so many young people wanted to try the two experiences.