CHAPTER 9
Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down – “Strange Days” by The Doors (1967)
On February 25, 1972, another startlingly beautiful morning, I flew out of Las Palmas on a small, twin-engine airplane that seated around twenty passengers. As I looked out the window, the Canary Islands, set against the shimmering, neon blue ocean, faded into the distance.
During the flight, I was overcome with sadness as I thought about how my relationship with Jenny had turned out so differently than I had wanted it to. I played out every alternative scenario in my mind, and all of them had a better ending.
As we approached the El Aaiún Airport in the Spanish Sahara, desert stretched out as far as the eye could see. Until I was able to see the runway, I actually thought we were going to land on the sand. The airport was merely a cement spot on the landscape about the size of a football field.
When I stepped onto the tarmac, the first thing that hit me was the overpowering heat. Maybe I had made a terrible mistake.
“Why the hell did I come to this God-awful place?” I asked myself.
The tiny terminal consisted of one room. I was handled by a customs agent who gave me a strange, unfriendly look before reluctantly stamping my passport.
After I walked out of the airport, I spotted a group of heavily armed soldiers and military equipment along with several big trucks and a tank. I wondered what was going on. I headed for the only other building in sight. Amazingly, it was a hotel. It didn’t make sense to try to look for another; I didn’t think I’d find one anyway.
The first thing I noticed was that the door to my room had no lock on it, but that wasn’t the biggest surprise. There were three beds, and one of them was occupied by a huge man with long, matted black hair who was snoring loudly.
It was the middle of the day, and the temperature in the room must have been at least a hundred degrees. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could sleep in that kind of heat. Even worse, the bed was nothing more than a plywood slab with a thin mattress on top.
Without warning, the hulking form began to move. As he unfurled his massive body from the shape he’d twisted it into while asleep, I could see that he was one real big ugly dude. He sat up and his hair fell down to the middle of his back. He pushed some of it out of his face, grunted, groaned, and slowly came to life.
The guy had a large nose, pockmarked skin, and yellow tobacco stained teeth. Underneath his thick, black hedge-shaped eyebrows were a pair of dark eyes that stared right through me. A disturbing, jagged two-inch scar cut across his left cheek.
As he emerged from his stupor, he introduced himself as Bob Black, a 29-year-old American from San Francisco. By the way he talked, I could tell that he was another hard-core traveler like the ones I’d met in Algeciras. He had been on the road for nearly two years.
Bob had trekked across Afghanistan, up through the Khyber Pass, and into the Hindu Kush. From there he’d gone into Nepal and on to the city of Kathmandu. He blew my mind with some of his tales, like when he smoked hash with Pashtun tribesmen in Peshawar, Pakistan.
As it turned out, Bob was a regular guy, and we had a good time trading travel stories. He was impressed with my goal of dodging the draft and heartily supported it.
Bob showed me around El Aaiún, which consisted of our hotel and approximately twenty tents that served as everything else. The heavy military presence, he explained, was because the area was a training ground for the Spanish army.
“I wound up in the back of a massive truck filled with crates of fruit.”
I was curious how he wound up in El Aaiún. He told me that he arrived in the back of a large pickup truck that was returning south across the Sahara Desert from Marrakesh. The truck that brought him was empty, and it was going to load up with fruit imported from the Canary Islands for the trip back north. He said that he was passing through the Spanish Sahara, planning to take a boat to Las Palmas, travel through Europe, and head back home.
Before he left, Bob gave me tips on how to deal with the local drivers and avoid getting ripped off on the price of the ride out of town. With his valuable advice, I began my trip north to Morocco.
The best part about running into people like Bob was that I always wound up learning a lot. If it weren’t for him, I might have wasted away in El Aaiún, trying to figure out how the hell to get to Morocco. With his help, it took me only three days. I never did have the nerve to ask him how he got his scar.
Armed with this information and a couple tips on negotiating, I wound up in the back of a massive truck filled with crates of fruit. As I rode along and ate oranges under the intense Sahara sun, I thought about Bob Black and wondered where he would be when he dropped that hit of LSD I had given him.
I was part of an eight-truck caravan on a three-day drive to the small town of Agadir, Morocco. The ride was hot, bumpy, and uncomfortable, but it was fascinating too. The Sahara Desert was exactly like the one that I’d seen in the movies. Dunes extended as far as I could see in every direction. With only a dusty trail worn into the sand, the drivers somehow knew where they were going.
After a full day of scorching, punishing sun, a spectacular sunset filled the sky, followed by three hours of pleasant temperatures. It had gotten rather cold when we stopped for the night. The drivers all slept in a big circle on their mats right on the ground. I joined the group, bundled into my sleeping bag, and tried to stay warm. An endless blanket of stars filled the night sky.
Shortly after dawn, the trucks continued through the desert and drove until they reached a small abandoned coastal village. That evening, the drivers built a fire, made lamb stew, and shared their meal with me. We slept in one of the empty buildings.
Once I got to Agadir, it was easy to find the bus station since it was the only real building in town. Within a short amount of time, I was on an old, beat-up bus continuing north.
The bus dropped me off in a dusty village, where I got on the train for Marrakesh. It was jam packed and torturously slow. I was exhausted and slept sitting up most of the way. Although Marrakesh was only about 125 miles away, the ride took eight hours.
I was pleased at how I had accomplished this on my own. I got out of the Canary Islands, flew into Africa, and hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert into Morocco. I felt like a hardcore traveler, and it was great. The best part was that I had finally shaken off the crushing depression that had dogged me following my disastrous meeting with Jenny.
When I arrived in Marrakesh, I found a hotel near the main square of the city. I spent my first day walking around the thriving, pulsating, crowded bazaar which was filled with thousands of people selling almost everything. Never before had I seen such unique architecture or so many mosques.
Anything a person wanted could be found in the medina, as it was called. Dozens of vendors sold all kinds of local foods, and the smells were extraordinary. Tea vendors, guys selling sweets, and places where huge legs of lamb roasted over an open fire shared the bazaar with men repairing shoes and making clothing. People were selling a variety of goods from exotic rugs and jewelry to chickens and goats.
Throughout the square different characters had found ways to make money: snake charmers, fortune tellers, musicians, pickpockets, and con artists.
I particularly liked Story Man, a guy who would tell a tall tale in Arabic in an animated way. He obviously knew how to work a crowd and always seemed to have a large group of people leaning in to hear his every word. On some days, they would be laughing hysterically, and on others I saw them in rapt attention as he spun a suspenseful tale. The guy had quite an act and it looked like he was making a lot of money.
And then there was the famous Hash Cookie Man. For a few cents, you could buy a small, greasy, soft brown cookie that tasted like sweet modeling clay. Whenever I ate one, I floated on air for several hours.
Concentrated near the square were several hotels, restaurants, juice bars, and coffee shops, all there to serve the booming tourist trade. The establishments with names like Cafe Hippie, Cafe Hollywood, and the Amsterdam Cafe catered to numerous stoners like me.
“I found myself in a maze of narrow, cobblestone streets that looked like a typical slum in any poor country.”
Almost every Westerner I saw was wearing a djellaba, the local wool shirt, often hooded, and made famous in “Marrakesh Express” by Crosby Stills & Nash. As much as I wanted one, I decided against it because I didn’t want to be like all the damn tourists.
At one stall, I bought a beautiful pair of leather pants. They were brown suede on the outside, soft and smooth on the inside, and cut like jeans with two pockets in front and one in back. Although the pants were a little tight, I figured they’d break in nicely.
I spent a lot of time in the medina. Each day I’d walk around, eat a hash cookie, drink some tea, and talk to the other travelers I met. A couple of coffee shops became my favorites, and I spent most of my time in them people-watching and writing postcards and letters.
I could see how some travelers could totally lose themselves in Marrakesh spending years smoking hash and drinking tea. But after about a week, I started to get bored and became anxious to move on.
My next stop was Casablanca, the largest city to the North, and the place where I would get my mail. How could I not go to Casablanca? That movie was permanently etched into my brain, so there was no way I was going to get this close and not see it. I bought a train ticket on the Marrakesh Express, heading north to Casablanca, the opposite direction that Crosby Stills & Nash had sung about.
Casablanca was the largest city I had seen in a while. It had a completely different vibe to it than the sundrenched, sleepy, stoned atmosphere of Marrakesh. A bit of intrigue was in the air, too. Or maybe that was something I was projecting because of a preconceived notion I had from seeing the movie so many times.
The city was a mixture of modern architecture and poverty. When I ventured a block or two off the wide, modern boulevards, I found myself in a maze of narrow, cobblestone streets that looked like a typical slum in any poor country.
Mint tea vendors stood on every corner, laundry hung from the balconies, and smoke from numerous small cooking fires filled the air. Deep inside the alleys off the beaten path, I found a suitably cheap hotel.
Unlike Marrakesh, I couldn’t find a hell of a lot to do in Casablanca, and I soon realized that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time there. Too restless to sleep, I figured, “What the hell, I’ll drop that hit of acid I bought from the redhead and see what happens.”
I unwrapped the rather flattened remains of the small round tab of Orange Sunshine LSD, and popped it into my mouth. Some of the orange color had melted into the small piece of paper wrapping, so I ate it too.
“Suddenly, I thought to myself, “I could fucking get killed here.”
Since it was beginning to get dark in the city, I looked for a bar or restaurant to hang out in. A young guy walked up to me and struck up a conversation. When he saw that I was American, he wanted to know where I was from and where I had been. We talked for a couple of minutes before he asked me if I would like to smoke some hash.
He was a Moroccan in his mid-twenties and was dressed in a clean shirt and a pair of American-style jeans. I figured he was probably not too dangerous.
“Let’s go to Rick’s,” he suggested. “We can find hash and some girls too.”
“Rick’s?” I asked, almost laughing at the suggestion. “There’s a place in Casablanca called Rick’s?”
“Oh sure,” he said, “Rick’s is cool. Let’s go.”
I wasn’t sure he even got the reference to the movie Casablanca, but it didn’t matter if it was a place with hash and girls.
At this point I started to come on to the acid. Time was bending, and I had a rubbery feeling in my legs. My stomach got wobbly as we rounded a street corner and came upon a dingy looking building with a small sign above the door that said RICK’S.
Well, it was a far cry from Bogart’s “Rick’s Café Américain,” but we went inside and found a nice table in the corner. The place was poorly lit, filled with smoke, and packed with local men in traditional clothes. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a Westerner in sight.
My new friend, Ahmed, seemed to know most of the people there. After shouting out some words in Arabic, a couple of cold beers landed in front of us. A minute later we were joined by two young, flirtatious Moroccan girls.
Ahmed darted off and returned with a large chunk of hash. He proceeded to break it up right on the table. Then he rolled the joint, and we lit it up. The girls chatted excitedly with Ahmed and me. They didn’t speak much English, but we drank, smoked, laughed, and tried to communicate as best as we could.
I was hallucinating strongly. The walls were moving like cellophane, as if a breeze was blowing through them. I was also mesmerized by the candle on our table. As I stared deeply into it, I became less and less aware of Ahmed and the giggling girls.
Sound started slowing down like a tape recorder moving at the wrong speed, and I had trouble distinguishing between people’s voices as well as understanding the words they were saying. When I saw Ahmed get up from his chair, I reached out, grabbed his arm, and begged, “Hey man, don’t leave me here. I’m really stoned. You might have to help me get back to my hotel.”
I remember him laughing loudly and saying something that caused the girls to totally crack up. He put his hand on my shoulder and reassured me, “I’m just going to the bathroom. I’ll be right back. Have fun, man. These girls like you!”
He walked down the length of the crowded bar, told the bartender something in Arabic, then disappeared in the direction of the restrooms. I’m not sure how long I sat at the table talking to the two giggling Moroccan girls before I realized that he wasn’t coming back.
Ahmed had ditched me. He had left me with the bar tab and two chicks who wanted to party all night long. I was pretty nervous because I didn’t think I had enough cash with me to pay the bill. I had plenty of money at my hotel, but I hadn’t been in town long enough to change more than a few dollars into the local currency.
Although, I was strongly tripping, I devised a plan. I would get up, go to the restroom, and run out on the bill just like Ahmed had done. Of course, if I’d really thought about it, I would have realized what a foolish idea it was. However, my predicament freaked me out, and I thought it was my only choice.
Even though I knew they wouldn’t understand a word, I mumbled to the girls that I had to take a piss. I steadied myself as I walked toward the bar, made my way through the crowd, and headed to the restroom.
I didn’t get very far. The bartender had his eye on me the entire time, and as soon as I got near him, he started waving the check at me and yelling in Arabic to pay up. He was a big, tall man with sharp black eyes that shot at me like darts.
I said something like, “I’m going to use the restroom,” but whatever my words, he wasn’t having any of it. His tirade continued in loud, angry Arabic, and he demanded that I give him the money before I took another step.
Suddenly, I thought to myself, “I could fucking get killed here.”
I heard my voice as if it were coming from another person. It was lamely trying to explain that I had been ripped off by a man who had skipped out on his half of the bill. The furious bartender didn’t understand what the hell the voice was saying. My situation seemed hopeless.
I looked closely at the men sitting at the bar, and there wasn’t a sympathetic face among them. None spoke English, but I was certain that every one of them knew that I was in trouble. Ahmed had brought in yet another doped-out American tourist, ordered a lot of drinks, and then split like he probably had done dozens of times before.
Then I heard another voice. This time it was a man speaking into my ear in perfect English, “You’d better pay up, or this guy’s going to kill you!”
I turned around and saw that it was one of the older Arab men who’d been sitting at the bar. I was never so relieved to hear someone speak English in my life, even if he was warning me of my impending death.
“Oh, thank God, you speak English,” I cried with shock and relief. “Look, this guy came in here with me and he ran up a tab – ”
The man leaned into my face and interrupted, “Hey, I’m not kidding you. This guy will fucking kill you if you don’t pay him right now!”
I desperately tried to explain that I was from America, and I had the money, but it was at my hotel.
He regarded me with growing interest.
“You have American dollars?”
“Yes, yes, I have American Express traveler’s checks,” I said.
“If I pay your bill, you’ll sell me your American dollars?” he asked.
“Hell, yes!” I announced. “I’ll give you American Express traveler’s checks.”
He nodded his head, chattered loudly with the bartender, and settled the matter.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. This guy appeared out of nowhere and saved my goddamn life!
I looked around for the girls, but they were nowhere in sight. The two were probably off somewhere laughing it up with Ahmed over the latest American sucker they’d found.
My unlikely savior and I walked out of Rick’s together. It felt great to be outside in the cool evening with nobody screaming in my face. I was still tripping intensely as we weaved through the dark, narrow streets, and I struggled to remember where I was heading. We eventually found my hotel and went up to my room. I began getting paranoid that this guy might be planning to rob me. I didn’t even know his name.
Without turning my back on him, I grabbed the bag where I kept my money and passport. I quickly whipped out enough checks to cover our deal and ushered him to the door. Before leaving, he put his hand on my shoulder and softly whispered, “You are here alone. Maybe I could stay with you and we could…”
I never let the man finish his sentence. I removed his hand from my shoulder and yelled, “No!”
If this was a sexual come on, I didn’t want to find out. I firmly pushed him out the door, slammed it, and bolted it tight. I waited for a long time until I heard his footsteps walk away, then I breathed a sigh of relief.
The latest album by Jimi Hendrix was called Band of Gypsies, and I’d just bought the new cassette at the bazaar. I put it into my deck, shut off the light, and lay down on my bed. All night long, in the dark of my hotel room, I tripped and hallucinated while listening over and over to the incredible sounds.
The next morning, I was still buzzing from the acid with lots of flashing streaks of light. Stepping out into the blazing hot Moroccan sun, I tried to get my bearings, and shook some of the cobwebs out of my head.
I hadn’t gotten my mail since I left the Canary Islands, so I walked over to the American Express office and collected it. I was feeling the nagging worry about my draft board, and I hoped that I wouldn’t have another threatening letter waiting for me.
The good news was that I had received a lot of mail including three letters from my mom and dad and one from Ted Sutton. The bad news was that there was also one of those now-familiar large white envelopes from the Selective Service System. Once again, I shuffled it to the bottom of the pile.
My parents sent a photo of my mom sitting on the motorcycle I’d left behind because I didn’t have enough time to sell it. Someone gave my dad $500 for it, and my parents enclosed a bank-issued check for me. The money would certainly come in handy.
The letter from Ted had great news. It said that he would visit David in Dublin, make his way to London, travel through Europe, and take a boat from Italy to Tunisia where our trip together would start.
When I finally read the letter from the Selective Service System, my heart sank. They demanded that I report to them immediately, either in the United States or at a processing center in Germany. I stared at the letter for a long time. What the hell was I going to do now? I remembered how my Selective Service Attorney told me to not break the law if I didn’t have to.
This all came down to either blatantly defying the Selective Service and becoming a criminal or giving in and reporting for duty. Slipping in and out of a psychedelic frame of mind, I pondered my dilemma over tea and bread in a Casablanca cafe.
Faced with the choice of going on an unforgettable African travel adventure with my best buddy or fighting the war in Vietnam, it was an easy decision.
