Last India Overland (27 page)

The Merry Globester was reading the very last limerick when Mr. Cohen emerged from the Hotel Munster, with another Merry Globester in tow. Needless to say, Mr. Cohen did not seem too impressed by what he saw. Yes, yes. One of the limericks concerned him directly. And then the bus was gone, to whatever dark rendezvous, and the Merry Globester was left staring at the spot of dryness on the street the bus had sheltered. The spot very quickly merged itself with the rain-soaked asphalt. The Merry Globester rubbed his chin and stared up at the heavens. The sting of one particular limerick, a veritable assault upon his own sense of dignity, cascaded through his mind like a marble in a pinball machine. So cruel, so nasty. What had he done to deserve this? Some untimely ululation of fibrillated tissue? Some unseemly peccadillo concerning gastric inflammation? He had no idea. He was only grateful that more Merry Globesters did not see this rhythmic exhalation of abusive rhetoric and be as cut to the quick as he was. Thank Allah for small mercies!

Mick

When I opened my eyes, it seemed like years later, there were Rockstar’s yellow teeth staring at me. I never thought I’d be so happy to see those teeth.

Rockstar was giving me a shake.

“G’day, Muckle,” he said. He was grinning at me.

“G’day, Rockstar,” I said. My head hurt bad and my mouth was dry. I’d really partied it up the night before, I was thinking. It was just a dream.

“Guess what I saw today, Muckle?” said Rockstar.

“The Loch Ness Monster,” I said.

“Nope.”

“You saw the light, Rockstar,” I said.

I hate guessing games. That’s why I’m not really all that hot about sex, if the truth has to be told. And why not, what have I got to lose?

Don’t answer that.

Dave always has to fucking answer my questions.

He thinks he’s keeping me honest or something.

Which he is.

Whenever I start to stretch the truth a bit in this thing, he lays a loud Bronx cheer in my left ear. He claims a lot of people are going to read this some day. He says it won’t be for a while. Late eighties, maybe. But I got to tell the truth. Sure,

Dave, I will. If you will. Half of what he’s told me, for years, has been a pack of lies. Oh, no, he says. He always tells the truth. Whether or not I like it. Yeah, sure, Dave. Now pull my other one.

Back to Rockstar. He asks me if I’m up for going to a Turkish bath.

Dave tells me to say yes. So I say sure.

Half an hour later I’m trudging up a hill towards what looks like an old warehouse. Patrick’s on one side of me, Jenkins on the other, Rockstar’s bringing up the rear. Rain’s still coming down. No one’s talking. I’m wondering where Kelly is. I’m wondering what I’m going to say to her when I see her. I’m wondering about whether I’m crazy or not. And this old warehouse is squatting on the hill like one of those old whores in those Fellini flicks Nancy Pickles used to drag me to. It doesn’t have any windows. The sign above the door is hanging by one hinge, it has an H missing. Turkish Bat s. I liked that. But it makes me wonder if I’m still dreaming. Inside there’s an old crone with a glass eye and two dozen rings on her fingers and a crooked smile. She rooks us for as many lire as she can and then some skinny little kid leads us past six clothes horses loaded with towels and a couple mean-smelling Turkish Delights to these little cubicles where we get undressed. Mine smells like Cum Shot City. I hide my money under one of the mattresses, and I find something sticky, like brand new snot, except it ain’t the right colour. It’s pale yellow. I phone up Dave. Ask him if that was a dream I had last night. He says it wasn’t. I ask him about the yellow snot. I ask him if he knows what it is. He says, don’t ask.

I wrap myself in a towel the kid gave me, it’s not too clean, and then I wander out, join the rest, and the kid leads us to a sauna where there’s a bunch of fat old Turks sitting around like angels on the half-shell, and Patrick starts talking about how he’s heard that Turkish baths cater, quite often, to the extreme end of the perverse socio-sexual spectrum, and Rockstar, in his nicest voice, asks him what the fuck he’s talking about, and since I pride myself on being one of the world’s great multilinguists, I translate for Rockstar.

“What Dr. Livingstone’s saying, Rockstar,” I said, “is if you’re smart you’ll keep your butt to the wall.”

Rockstar really wasn’t too swift. “What?” he said.

I said, “You’re so cute, Rockstar, that you might get bum-fucked if you don’t watch out.”

“No bloody poofter’s going to get near me,” said Rockstar.

As it turned out he was right.

After about five minutes, this kid, I guess you could call him cute, showed up at the door and looked around at all of us. This is after all the old Turkish snails had been led away. And the kid looks at Jenkins and smiles. Kind of waves him over.

“I believe he wants you, Mr. Jenkins,” says Patrick, who’s in kind of a good mood, I don’t know why. Maybe it was because of the way Rockstar was treating him so nice all the time. Not calling him a poofter any more or anything like that. Patrick was probably starting to feel safe.

Jenkins actually blushed and shrugged his shoulders, almost said aw, shucks, I’m sure of it, but the kid insisted, and so Jenkins got up. The kid actually took him by the hand. That got a cackle out of all of us. And Rockstar was hilarious. He could be, when he wanted to be. He put this little kid’s scared look on his face and wagged his head like he’d just lost his mother.

“Where’s Jenkins?” he said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere without Jahnk-ins.” He stretched the name right out. You had to be there. Even Patrick laughed. But yeah, you definitely had to be there.

If there’s one thing Rockstar knew how to do, though, it’s kill a joke. He did his little routine for the next two minutes or so, until another kid showed up at the door and took a look at us. This kid wasn’t as cute as the last one, and he didn’t go into the smile and wave, he just pointed at Patrick and said you, and he didn’t take Patrick’s hand, he just walked away, and Patrick, with kind of a shudder and grimace, followed him, and Rockstar bawled out, “Where’s Dr. Livingstone? I ain’t goin’ nowhere without Dr. Livingstone!”

I laughed. It was still kind of funny.

But then the next kid showed up, and he pointed at me. I went. And Rockstar, of course, did it again. “Where’s Muckle?” he brayed. ”1 ain’t goin’ nowhere without Muck-hole!” But this time he sounded kind of lonesome saying it. The joke had worn real thin.

The kid took me out into this huge marble amphitheatre,

Dave says that’s what I should call it, and in the middle was a round slab. There was a few bodies being massaged on it. Patrick and Jenkins were over on one side of it, getting the works.

The kid I got was kind of a sweetheart actually. He had the face of a girl and a real sweet smile. The one that Patrick got was kind of mean, to tell the truth. I could hear Patrick moaning. He really got worked over, as it turned out. I guess every once in a while these Turkish baths hire sadists, just to make everything interesting, like Russian Roulette.

My kid gave me a great massage, head to toe. It was so good it made my brain tingle.

And then afterwards, he washed me off in this little side alcove and gave me a shampoo Patrick had brought. I’d forgotten to bring my own so I borrowed it.

I think a few centimetres of dirt came off me in that little rinse, which was kind of embarrassing, but the kid didn’t seem to mind. He’d probably seen worse.

But I was done, and Patrick and Jenkins were still getting mauled, and Rockstar still hadn’t got a kid to take care of him. Which was sad. Though kind of funny at the same time.

I went and got dressed and waited out in the lobby for a while. The kid who massaged me came out and snapped me up for some cigarettes as baksheesh. Actually he traded me a couple Turkish jobs for six Marleys, and I decided to leave before he hustled me for any more, and I remember walking back to the hotel, smoking this lousy Turkish cigarette and just feeling good, walking in the rain. It felt good to be free and alive. I even jumped up and clicked my heels together.

“Where’s Jahnk-ins?” I hooted. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere without Jenkins!”

I thought it was kind of a strange thing to do, at the time. But looking back on it now, I don’t think so at all.

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 1

Weird night, last night. Got way too stoned, teased up some tentative sex, & then, when I’m caught up in the old heartbreak, thinking maybe Mick is the guy to mend it, we get early morning visitors & the spell is broken. Mick got rid of them with yet another example of unique technique, had a little flirtatious moment with D. & then was gone. My daybook entry has everyone buzzing, but none of us are saying a thing, they’ll have to get the story from Mick. Asked S. this morning just after Pete took D. to see the dr. if there’d been anything going on between M. & D. before Venice. S said not much, just a few sparks, but she herself managed to get sweet-talked one night, & isn’t he great in the sack? I didn’t answer that. But he can be an asshole too, can’t he? I asked her what she meant. She mumbled something about oral sex & then took off to the can. So my head is spinning & I want to talk to Mick, but he’s nowhere around. C said she saw him heading off to some baths with the other guys. The rain continues to come down in a torrent. I feel trapped in a strange limbo. C just came in. Said there’s a rumour going around about limericks on the bus windows. Some chai & baklava might be in order, she said, in order to plug into S.’s rumour mill.

Mick

I must’ve walked around in the rain for about an hour, grooving on the beef and onion smells and the old men in their doorways, smoking their hookahs. But then I had to take a leak so I headed back to the Santa Sophia, to the filthy Turkish Delight they had just off the lobby, and taking that leak brought me back to reality. My poor old ugly, all gummed up. It depressed me just a tad.

When I left the Turkish Delight, I dropped a few lire in the can belonging to the old man sitting outside the door, and I went to the chai shop to check out who was there. I was hoping Kelly was, and I was right, but she was sitting at a table with Teach and Charole and this woman that looked like a hooker. She wore lots of mascara. Kelly glanced at me, then looked away real quick. So I figured maybe it wasn’t a good time to talk to her. And so I went out to the veranda to smoke a Marley and watch the rain come down, and I was trying to get Dave on the phone, it was busy, when Pete drove up.

In the Turkish bath Patrick had said something about limericks on the bus windows and I looked to see if they were there, but they weren’t, the windows were nice and clean.

Pete slammed open the doors. But he didn’t come out right away. When he came out he had Dana, all wrapped up in blankets, in his arms.

I opened the hotel door for him, and as he went through it I asked him what happened.

“Nothing too serious,” he said.

He had the key to his room in his hand and he handed it to me. “Want to get my door too, mate?” he said.

I said sure, and as I followed Pete up the stairs, I noticed blood dripping from the one corner of a blanket that was wrapped around Dana. Not a lot of blood. Just a few drops. They almost disappeared as soon as they hit the dirty carpet on the stairs.

I got the door for Pete but he didn’t invite me inside.

He said, “Don’t mention this to anybody else, there’s really nothing to worry about, mate.”

And then he kicked the door shut.

I went back down to the chai shop. This was pretty dramatic stuff, as far as I was concerned, and it would have been unfair to everyone else to keep it to myself.

Although I could understand Pete’s reasons for wanting to keep it quiet. He didn’t have much money. Dana didn’t have much money. Good-quality doctors in Istanbul probably aren’t cheap.

When I got to the chai shop Kelly and Charole were gone, there was just Teach talking to the hooker, and I figured that might be an interesting conversation to listen in on so I bought a Trovas and sat down at a table close by, lit up a Marley, and yeah, Teach was laying her Baha’i number on the girl, trying to show her the error of her ways, but she was doing it in a nice way, she wasn’t trying to pound her over the head with a Bible. It was when Teach asked her what kind of drugs she used that I perked up my ears.

“A little smack,” said the girl. “Not much.”

Girl was white, maybe twenty. Already looked like she could use a retread.

“And do you feel a different personality coming over you when you take the drugs? Do you feel changed?”

Teach was speaking louder now, and I had the feeling it

was for my benefit.

“Nah, I just feel high,” says the girl. “It’s the same me.” “But you’re not as in control of your actions as you are when you aren’t on drugs,” said Teach.

“That’s maybe true.” The girl smiled. She was humouring Teach. “But that’s the whole idea.”

Teach said, “I have a friend who feels that there are all kinds of evil forces floating around like ghosts. We can’t see them. They’re spirits that haven’t been able to continue on to whatever light it is that death brings. His theory is that through drugs they can enter our psyches and experience again the pleasures of this world. Do you ever get that feeling, of something taking over you?”