Last India Overland (24 page)

I also find it interesting that I’ve developed a taste for chai and baklava. I’m not sure if there’s a connection there or not. I hope not. I’m not ready to go astral travelling yet.

Last night was very unsettled. The downpour forced us inside, where we slept among pans and pots. The bray of Pete’s alarm clock, as it always does, woke most of us. Others managed to remain impervious.

After Dana’s delicious breakfast of diced ham and scrambled eggs, we ventured out into the moisture to visit the Blue Mosque.

As I write this we are stranded in the waters of three days’ anger. I pray there aren’t thirty-seven more to come.

Mick

One of the days on the trip I remember best is Hallowe’en. Well, parts of it anyhow.

Hallowe’en was the day of Kelly’s new moon.

The morning muezzin woke me up. I thought someone somewhere was getting murdered.

It was still pouring rain, that morning. Pete told us to load up the gear, we’d try to find a hotel to stay in for the night.

It poured down rain all day. In the morning we went to see the Blue Mosque which was actually grey. I stuck close to Kelly. Because I felt I had to, I guess, given what we’d agreed was going to go down that night. Wouldn’t have been right to keep my distance, even though I did feel nervous about the whole idea.

I prefer these things to happen spontaneously, so you don’t have to think about them much beforehand.

There’s not much that makes me more nervous than making love to some woman for the first time. It’s worse than hypodermic needles.

We had to take our shoes off outside the Blue Mosque. Inside, some guide told us it was called the Blue Mosque because of the tile of the floor, which was blue and white, actually, and he told us some story about why there were more minarets than there were on any other mosque in the Islamic world. Some competitive thing going on between Istanbul and Mecca.

I told Kelly the mosque would be a great place to hold a rock concert. A band like Led Zeppelin, maybe. She told me not to hold my breath waiting for Bill Graham to announce it.

“The evangelist or the promoter?” I said, even though it was obvious which one she meant.

“The promoter,” she said, giving me a funny look. A look that was full of second thoughts about that night, I could tell.

I decided I was better off keeping my mouth shut.

There were all these Turkish women rushing in out of the rain after the noon muezzin blew. I was tempted to get down on my knees like they did. Maybe pray to Allah that this little Hallowe’en tryst went off without a hitch.

In the afternoon we got stuck in a flood. The water must’ve been running three or four feet deep in some places. Stalled cars everywhere. There was this one Turk not too far from us who stood up on the hood of his car and shook his fist at Allah. After that the rain came down harder or so it seemed.

There was this other car that looked a lot like the ’65 Buick the old man used to drive except it was pink not black. It was a little ways away but the guy behind the wheel even looked a little like my old man and I started thinking, hey, maybe it is my old man. Maybe that guy who got his face blown away in The Olde Salvador Deli wasn’t my old man at all. Maybe it was just a scam he worked out to get away from the loan sharks on his back. I asked Dave about it, and he said sorry, no way, the old man is dead, and reincarnated as the daughter of some crime boss in Chicago and she’s going to be three years old in May.

It was when we were stuck on the bus that Kelly got to talking to Suzie and Tim deLuca about witches and pumpkins and Charole came up with the idea of a Hallowe’en party because Suzie said she’d never been to one, and so they went up and asked Pete if we could go to the Grand Bazaar when

we got out of the flood and he said sure, but first we had to find a hotel.

We got out of the traffic jam about an hour later. By this time it was about three in the afternoon. And Pete drove us to this hotel called the San Sophia. That’s what the sign said. Patrick said something to me about how the T and A were missing from the sign.

“I find this ominous, Mr. McPherson,” he whispered. “Does this mean the hotel prohibits, as the Yanks so succinctly put it, tits and ass? Is this perhaps a homophile environment that Mr. Cohen has delivered us to?”

I guess what Patrick was saying was that the hotel was actually called the Santa Sophia, and yeah, it could’ve been a fag hangout. But it was a hangout for lots of other types too.

It looked a little like that house the Munsters lived in. So it didn’t look much worse than the rest of Istanbul. It was your basic rundown dive. There were some freaks sitting around in the lobby with their eyeballs hanging out. One guy was passed out on the stairs. There were a couple of low-life white women in the chai shop that could’ve been hookers. I saw one of them close-up a little bit later and she had turkey tracks all up and down her arms.

Pete did some talking to the guy at the cashier’s desk, who looked a little bit like a strung-out Iggy Pop, and then he gave us our room numbers. He threw me and Jenkins and Rockstar and Patrick all into one room, which didn’t make Patrick too happy, and seeing what the room looked like didn’t warm the cockles of his heart much either. Right in the middle of the floor was a tin pail almost full of water. The beds looked like they’d been through a couple world wars. One of the windows was broken and even so it smelt like something had died in the room and it was still there. Not exactly the kind of room you want to kick back in, even if it was raining cats and camels outside. We all decided that yeah, sure, let’s go shopping in the Grand Bazaar.

On the way there, Pete told us the girls maybe should stick with the guys when they’re in the Bazaar, unless they liked getting their bums pinched, and that got Suzie in a minor uproar.

What she said in effect was that she could bloody well take care of herself. She said she didn’t need any wanking poofters to watch out for her buns. Rockstar told her that with the buns she had, she wouldn’t need to worry about it anyhow and they spent the next half minute yelling at each other until Pete told them to put a lid on it.

When we did get to the Bazaar I was kind of hoping Kelly would ask me to walk around with her, but her and Charole were talking to Jenkins and somehow I didn’t get asked, which hurt my feelings just a tad. But that was okay. I had some shopping to do. It’s just too bad that Rockstar had the same thing in mind and he leeched onto me like a duck on a pancake. He asked me if I was going looking for a sleeping bag and I couldn’t say no because I planned on coming back with one, and I’d seen enough to know that I wanted to stay on Rockstar’s good side, if he had a good side.

I have to admit the Grand Bazaar was something else. It was one big tent with maybe a couple thousand little shops inside and these shops sold everything from leather jackets to condoms to meerschaum pipes to sheepskin pyjamas. Maybe they even had edible chadris.

I went for a box of Sheik condoms and a pipe, one that had a bowl shaped like a sheik’s head, in this other shop where everything was shaped like a sheik’s head. There was even something that could’ve been a toilet that was shaped like a sheik’s head.

It was Rockstar who spotted the Turk selling sleeping bags, thousands of them. They were all second-hand and most of them either smelled sour or smelled like they’d been sprayed with Florient.

It seemed like an hour but finally I found one that didn’t churn my stomach too much, and I asked the ugly, hunchbacked Turk how much he wanted, and he said something like three hundred lire, special price for me. I just laughed and pulled out five American bucks and waved them in front of his nose.

“How about five Yankee dollars, Pedro?” I said.

He shook his head and no, two hundred lire, special price for me.

I pointed at a couple suspicious looking stains on the sleeping bag and said, “Look, somebody’s had an orgy on this thing, I’ll make it four Yankee bucks, my last offer.”

He gave his head a sad shake. One hundred lire. Good sleeping bag. Special for me.

I said, “Let’s go, Rockstar, this dude thinks I was born yesterday,” but Rockstar was still sniffing through the bags.

The Turk said, “Okay, five American dollars. Special.”

I said, “Nope, four.”

It took about five minutes more but I finally got the bag for four, and as for Rockstar, he only haggled for a minute or two. He had lots of cash in that money belt of his. I hardly saw him haggle at all on the trip, thanks to all the money he made from selling off Charlie Putrid’s coke stash, mostly in Soho bars, so Dave says.

As for the bags, though, as it turned out I got the best deal, because I got something thrown in for free.

I’ll get to that later.

Pete had told us to get back to the bus by five and we figured it must’ve been getting close to that so we started heading back, but we got lost, and we must’ve looked lost,

because this blond Swede came up to us and asked us if he

could help us, and we said yeah, we’re looking for our bus, and he said, oh, he thought maybe we were looking for some good hashish, and Rockstar said yeah, we’re looking for some good hashish too.

This guy led us outside and gave us a test hoot. It was okay. Rockstar bought about twenty grams of it, and I bought a few myself, at something like a buck a gram, and the guy was nice enough to drive us around the Bazaar in his little Toyota, but the bus was gone, so he gave us a ride to the Santa Sophia.

On the way there, he told us that he was just selling drugs on the side. He was mainly in Istanbul to buy carpets. He said he’d take a whole bunch back to Stockholm and sell them for a nice little profit. It seemed to me like a decent enough way to make a living. Maybe that’s what I’ll do if I ever get out of the Ko Samui General.

I gave him a couple bucks for the ride. He said thanks.

Inside the hotel, Kelly and Jenkins and Charole were sitting in the chai shop, sipping chai.

“The lost lambs return,” said Kelly when she caught sight of us.

“That’s us,” I said.

We sat down and we ordered a couple Trova beers, and

Charole asked us if we’d bought any costumes for the Hallowe’en party, and I thought about it for a minute, and then said oh, yeah, sure, of course, and Rockstar looked a little surprised.

Kelly looked at my sleeping bag on the floor. “You can’t come as a sleeping bag. You’ve got to be more creative than that.”

“Of course,” I said.

Then we did some talking about the Grand Bazaar, and the funniest thing that happened was that Suzie was walking back to the bus when a Turk on a bike rode past her and bent down and pinched her ass, and apparently Suzie had quick enough reflexes that she was able to twirl around and hit the guy with her handbag and send the guy flying off his bike. Kelly said she’d had a bottle of raki in her handbag for the Hallowe’en party. She hit the Turk on the head with it and almost knocked him out.

I wish I’d seen that.

Rockstar laughed. “That Suzie, she’s something else. She’s a bloody spoiler, that’s what she is.” Like he was some executive at a party, bragging about his wife.

“Yeah, you got a prize one there, Rockstar,” I said, and I could tell that my little comment made him feel good about himself.

He said, “Anyone want to smoke some hash?”

Kelly said sorry, no thanks. Which kind of disappointed me. I was hoping Kelly was into smoke.

“I don’t think I want to spend much time in a Turkish jail,” said Kelly.

Well, it didn’t sound much worse than the Santa Sophia, as far as I was concerned, and so I was up for a toot. We got up to leave, and Kelly said, “Party starts at nine in our room.”

I said fine, and asked Jenkins if he wanted to come along. He just shook his head.

Rockstar stopped at the bar and bought a case of cold Trovas. I figured that was a good idea and bought one too.

“We gonna get good and blitzed tonight, huh, Muckle?” he said to me, on the way to our room.

“Sure thing, Rockstar,” I said, stepping over a passed-out doper on the stairs.

from Kelly’s diary

Oct. 31

It’s the dark of the moon. On the 7th degree of Scorpio, almost trine my descendant. Μ & I have a date near midnight, though

C. & S. might’ve thrown a hitch into our plans. Right now we’re in a dilapidated old hotel called the Santa Sophia. Rain keeps falling. I should be feeling expectant. My hormones should be plucking roses & dabbing on perfume. But all I can do is worry.

Mick

Up in our room, Rockstar scraped off a chunk of hash and dumped it into the bowl of my sheik’s head pipe. He lit it and sucked in a lungful, let his cheeks balloon out, and passed the pipe to me. Rockstar held the smoke too long, though. He let the smoke go with a hacking cough that must’ve felt like razors in his lungs.

The hash was kind of moist, it kept going out, but we managed to get stoned, and Rockstar’s dropping another piece of hash in the pipe when Patrick comes in and makes a big production out of whipping a sheet off a bed. I asked him if he wanted a toke but he said no thanks. Then Jenkins came in and got out of his clothes and got into a slinky red and blue chadris. He wrapped a black lace veil around his face. That got a whistle out of Rockstar.