The Drifters (98 page)

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-Ching
, 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.’

It was a difficult assignment. After his terrifying experience that last night in Moçambique, Cato refused even to sniff the deadly white powder, and for this decision, suffered much abuse from Monica. Frequently she denied him the right to sleep with her, screaming at him, ‘You climb in my bed, you climb all the way.’

He tried to speak with Joe about this one day, but broke into tears. After controlling himself, he mumbled, ‘How could I ever leave her? Christ, I love that girl in ways you couldn’t even guess. I need her. She’s tearing my heart out.’ When Joe tried to comfort him, he said, ‘But I will not touch Big-H. Not ever again.’

Often the other guests on the third floor could hear him, when Monica was being difficult, imploring her to quit what could only destroy her. If something’s bound to kill you, why mess around with it?’ He did his best to divert her to hashish, which he felt she could handle, but she laughed at him tauntingly. ‘That’s for kids, and I’m a woman now.’

In one respect his efforts to rescue Monica were misdirected; hashish was a more powerful concoction than he supposed. As purveyed by Jemail, it was a cube of compressed resin extracted from the mature marijuana plant and ten times as strong as a joint. It was thus a concentrate of marijuana and could be used in two ways: smoked, or eaten in the form of the hideous green cookies common on the Djemaá. Cato had learned about the cookies from the Swedes.

On the ground floor of the Bordeaux, to the left of the entrance, stood a room somewhat larger than the others. In recent years it had been occupied by an engaging couple from Stockholm who stayed on from June through November. Rolf worked the rest of the year in Sweden as male nurse in an asylum for the insane, and Inger taught kindergarten. Their room was known throughout Marrakech as Inger’s and it served as a mail drop for Scandinavians passing through and as the social center for all other Europeans. Inger’s, when the Swedes were in residence, was one of the most civilized rooms in Africa, a place where you could get a drink of cold gingerale, a kind of rude smorgasbord, back copies of the
London Times
, and conversation that had wings. Rolf and Inger were in their late twenties, unmarried and quietly attractive. When on the first morning, they heard that three new Americans and a lovely English girl had checked in, they climbed the stairs to introduce themselves and to offer the hospitality of their quarters. They assumed responsibility for locating empty rooms—Cato and Monica on the third floor, Joe and Gretchen on the second—and then assembled the group in their room.

‘Music!’ Monica cried as she spied a gramophone, which she quickly activated, closing her eyes to the heavy beat of the latest recording by Blind Faith. ‘It’s like rain in the desert,’ she said, but after a few moments she opened her purse and asked, ‘What about these green cookies Jemail sold us last night?’

‘Rather potent,’ Rolf warned. ‘They brew an infusion of concentrated hash and rancid butter. Then bake these sticky macaroons.’

‘How do you eat them?’

‘With care. Girl your size could handle about an eighth of a cookie. If you were heavier, you could eat more.
Big Loomis, I suppose, could eat a whole one, but you couldn’t.’

‘You don’t know me,’ Monica replied, plopping the entire cookie into her mouth and chewing while she grinned at the others. Rolf watched apprehensively, and Inger started to clear a section of her bed, but Monica showed no immediate adverse reaction.

Cato and Joe took small nibbles of their cookies. Gretchen refused any but did accept a cigarette that Rolf had been rolling, half marijuana, half hashish. ‘It’s certainly different,’ Monica said as she began to feel the authority of the hash. As Gretchen was about to take a second puff of her cigarette she yelled, ‘Oh my God!’ Monica, as if struck by an axe, had dropped unconscious to the floor; Cato, who had not seen her fall, turned and stood with his mouth open, an unswallowed cookie fragment visible on his tongue. Joe stooped down to pick her up, but Rolf and Inger had anticipated him and stretched Monica out on the bed. She remained there, motionless, for eighteen hours, watched over by Cato.

During this time a constant flow of young people from all parts of Europe visited the room. They would see Monica stone-cold and say casually, ‘Ah, hah! Tried one of our cookies.’ No one seemed particularly disturbed; they sat on the edge of a bed and on the floor and talked about Sweden and Germany and Australia. Toward evening one of the Wellesley girls produced her guitar, which encouraged Gretchen to get hers, and they sang ballads, with the group joining in when they knew the words—and through all these hours of chatter and song, Monica did not move once. Occasionally Cato would shake her and try to get her to speak, but she remained totally immobile, and Rolf said professionally, ‘Only thing to do is let her sleep it off.’

It was almost dawn when Monica finally made a movement. Half an hour later she opened her eyes, looked about the unfamiliar room and said, ‘Next time only half a cookie.’

‘The beauty of this letterhead,’ Big Loomis explained to Joe in his office on the top floor, ‘is that it confuses a draft board for at least two months. In that time, a smart man
can be in Nepal … or Shinjuku.’ He produced a formal-looking sheet of high-quality paper, at the head of which appeared: