A Genial Parking Lot Attendant [Costa Rica]

 

 

      The magnificent Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica features a rain forest full of squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, and capuchins, as well as toucans, potoos, and motmots, and the regional favorites, the sloths, almost out of sight in the high trees.  On Sunday, however, the park was closed, so the travelers wandered toward the Espadilla Beach.  They could watch the monkeys look for small children whom they saw as easy marks from whom they could snatch candy or chips.  They might even have the chance to glimpse a sloth in the trees near the water.  as they approached, they caught in the air the sweet smell of cannabis and looked around for the source.  It was two rather butch young women, looking after a parking lot for swimmers.  No public parking is available for the popular beach, so many nearby property owners were selling dusty spaces on their land.  The American couple made friendly signs in the direction of the smokers who kindly invited the strangers to join them.  The Americans, whose Spanish was not what it should be, used what they could in a few pleasantries, thanked their new acquaintances, loitered and indulged in a bit of smoky communion, and then proceeded beachward, now levitating a subtle half-inch over the sand.  After this fortuitous beginning, the day proved quite lovely, as they walked on shores littered with coral fragments and met the iguana’s intense gaze and did even see a sloth. 

     The following morning, they passed by the spot of the previous days’ encounter and found only one of the smokers, burning another joint as though for her time stood still.  Short and pudgy, with a shaved head, her name was Roxana.  We paused and deployed our Spanish once more, complimenting the scene, the park, the country of Costa Rica.  “Ah,” she demurred with a sigh, “pero este pais esta gobernado por los ricos.”  As it happened, Trump was president, so they told her the situation was regrettably similar in their own homeland and with probably greater untoward circumstances for the world we shared. 

     The fat and still sizable roach had gone out as the three chatted, and Roxana crossed the street to get a light from an aged man preparing to grill pinchos to sell.  Though cannabis is illegal in this country, we had been smoking openly, and she approached him without even a wry comment.  He doubtless had observed her fondness for the stuff daily. 

     Resuming the conversation, one of the Americans ventured the opinion that Trump was very like el diablo. Though probably no expert on foreign affairs, Roxana agreed whole-heartedly.  “Ese hombre es el anticristo!”  We looked into each others’ eyes and found accord.

     The sun was warm and the surf musical.  On the sand local people of all ages, usually in family groups, snacked and played and relaxed.  The two travelers and the parking lot attendant talked until the joint had been consumed and the Spanish vocabulary of the Americans had been exhausted as well.   They were departing the next day, in the ephemeral way of tourists, but they had paused long enough to enough to recognize a fellow traveler through life with whom, despite appearances, they shared more than divided them.

Favored Places

     The traveler can hardly name a favorite destination any more than a favorite food or play. Roast lamb does not compete with cashew-fig ice cream or a dish of just-shelled peas in butter. One might laugh with Aristophanes in the morning but be ready to cry with Aeschylus by evening. It is inevitable, though, once the traveler has wandered long enough to make comparisons, some places are recalled more fondly than others, and the traveler finds himself musing on ratings, pretending for a time that all the world was made for nothing more than a pleasure trip.
     Travel is about experiencing difference. There would be little point in visiting a destination very like one’s home. A destination may gain sensational appeal if it deviates radically from one’s home. I recall my first sight of Morocco. On my Wanderjahr, after months traipsing about Europe, thinking myself full to capacity with admiration, I was struck with that seemed a new magnitude of wonder when I crossed from Algeciras to Ceuta and found myself feeling as though I was not merely walking the streets of a medieval neighborhood (as one may do in Carcassonne if one is unbothered by small boys with wooden swords); I seemed rather to have been transported to an earlier age. All around me were the sights and smells of a preindustrial society: charcoal fires with bubbling tajines, incense of unknown kinds, street musicians, animal handlers calling warnings to those with whom they and their beasts shared the narrow lanes. From the minarets the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. On top of everything else fifty years ago Morocco held out a kief pipe with its long stem and small clay bowl to the visiting American, ideal accompaniment to a glass of mint tea, a beguiling bonus indeed. We stayed in Fes for several months, mostly sitting in cafes chatting, rarely seeking out sights. When we were not socializing with our friends, the youths of the streets, marvels came to us. We observed nomads forming a vast camp, enacting rodeo-type games (the tbourida or fantasia), firing their blunderbusses in a grand fête for the circumcision of the king’s son, now the ruler.
     Visiting India provided a similarly rich sensual assault, sometimes retaining even the cannabis as well. A week on the shore of the Ganges in Varanasi included countless rhesus monkeys snatching food and offerings and scampering over roofs, onto terraces, then to trees while holy men chanted and sang below and a constant stream of devotes came to partake of the river’s divinity. To the foreign visitor the scene is a pandemonium of marvels: Shiva-lingams on every corner, Hanumans dripping with sindur-tinted ghee, paan vendors whose trays offer a galaxy of accompaniments, scents of burning incense and burning corpses. The imagery is expressed in one of the most elaborate and variegated pantheons of mythological beings ever imagined on earth. Active temples are everywhere with chanting here, prayers there, a friendly, English-speaking priest in a third. Every evening at the Dashashwamedh Ghat a service is held, the Ganga Aarti, with worshippers exhibiting the same brand of fervor one might expect at a pentecostal service. The visitor who grew up in the suburban Midwest can hardly stray further afield.
     Difference alone is no guarantee of satisfaction, though. I enjoyed Morocco and India on my own terms. Working in rural Nigeria was exceedingly unlike home. While exciting and rewarding at times, the daily difficulties often seemed overwhelming: living apart from shops (other than the market every four days in Agbarho) in a place where such ordinary goods as cooking gas were rarely obtainable even to those who knew the ways of the black market, while playing as neophytes our roles near the bottom of the formidable Nigerian bureaucracy, all of this in steam-room temperature and humidity. It did get the better of us.
     Around the great attractions of the globe, the places that comprise people’s “bucket lists” (a horrid term), the volume of crowds can distribute the pleasure more widely, though unfortunately in markedly smaller doses. When I was last in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli I could view the bell tower only past myriad other spectators, half of whom seemed to be posing gag photos in which their subjects were either holding up the structure or knocking it down. It is enough to make one feel like a snob.
     If people are not standing shoulder to shoulder, though, or even if they are, some sights live up to their reputation. The mountainous setting of Machu Picchu is flat-out breathtaking as is the prospect from the far less remote Delphi. The Taj Mahal has a precise symmetrical beauty like that of Versailles. For me perhaps the greatest revelation among wonders of the world was Angkor Wat. The vastness and grandeur of the place with literally miles of unfamiliar reliefs made it an easy matter to avoid the groups and lecturing guides, the selfie-takers and vendors they attract, by simply stepping a few feet off the standard route. The grand panoramas of events mythic and historic seem never to come to an end, and it is all carved upon vast fanciful, partially overgrown structures and overseen by the massive big-lipped heads on the Bayon temple.
     One could hardly sustain being bowled over every day, though, and a mood for the monumental at times gives way to a wish to sit in a quiet cafe. Two small towns that I find utterly charming are Nafplio in Greece and Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Neither is in any sense off the beaten path; both are popular, yet each has a beauty that has so far survived the crowds. In Nafplio a short stroll takes the visitor from the pleasures of the town with its battlements and bougainvilleas to Arvanitia Beach which seems more secluded than it is. Český Krumlov with its medieval streets and looming castle struck me as the closest approximation of the illustrations in fairy tale books.
     The museums that remain most strongly in my memory are the ones anyone would name: the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Archaeological Museums of Athens and of Mexico City.
     Smaller museums of which I am especially fond include the Musée Moreau in a little-visited street of Paris with paintings covering the walls and endless cabinets, cupboards, and drawers of intricately imagined and constructed mythic scenes. I recommend as well Teylers Museum in Haarlem, fundamentally unchanged since its founding in 1784, which bills itself as a Museum van de Verwondering. With the Illumination of daylight only, the visitor can wander the galleries and central multitier library and see a large collection of elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific instruments, with marvelous fossils and crystals around the corner, and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the next room. In Bangkok the walker can enjoy a green respite from the sometimes sweaty streets by entering the gate of the Wang Suan Pakkad Palace (called the Lettuce Farm), in fact a small museum with a number of objets d’art as well as entire buildings, including the wonderful Lacquer Pavilion. A pleasant attendant added a grace note, giving us woven fans, saying they were a gift from the queen, but they seemed superfluous in that leafy and refined realm.
     And then there was the Ramnagar Fort Museum in Varanasi which we reached in a pedicab passing over an unsteady pontoon bridge to reach the crumbling structures where the current maharajah resides (though his title was abolished a half century ago). Here one may view tigers killed in royal hunts during the days of the raj, now leaking their stuffing amid decayed crocodiles and the remnants of the old glory: palanquins, howdahs, ivory carvings in glass cases covered with a layer of dust. When a tourist entered a room, an aged gentleman arose from the seat he seemed to have been occupying for the last century to gesture with a whisk, raising a bit of dust and justifying his request for baksheesh.
     In hotels I look for character over grandeur, but I appreciate the Ottoman Legacy Hotel in Istanbul with its majestic central court and high ceilings. Though built originally for offices, the structure features domes on either side modeled after those of Jerusalem’s Masjid al-Aqsa and in the interior a generally princely waste of space. The window of my room overlooked the spice market, the Mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, and, further off, the water. It was only a few steps to the Topkapi and Hagia Sophia.
     I loved the San Tomas Hotel just by the market in Chichicastenango. Once the residence of the United Fruit agent, its rooms wander on sometimes in irregular levels, with courtyards with macaws and monkeys and luxurious plantings, religious art on the walls, rooms without television or air conditioning. I only hope it has not changed.
     A share of every day is given to eating. I think it is true that in France the diner is likeliest to be given a memorable plate, often notable for smoothness and elegance what with butter and cream and pureed vegetables, capable, too, of the intoxicating aroma of bouillabaisse, the earthiness of truffles or buckwheat, and the simple straightforward excellence of a fresh baguette. Not surprisingly, Italy and Spain can offer comparable pleasures. Greece hasn’t the range but, using only garlic, oregano, and thyme, can prepare the best roast lamb or grilled cuttlefish with which cold retsina is the best wine, little as one would wish to drink it daily.
     India offers the most dazzling array of “aromatics,” as the spices and herbs are termed in Dharamjit Singh’s cookbook. A thali plate, like a mandala, represents a universe, including the spectrum of flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy. Without a doubt the finest vegetarian cuisine in the world, Indian cooking is superb at making tasty dishes out of inexpensive ingredients while requiring considerable cutting, chopping, and the assembly of grand symphonic combinations of seasonings.
     Much good criticism is at bottom appreciation, but discernment is impossible without value judgments. Britain’s grey peas are not extinct, nor is the fried bread that might await the traveler at breakfast there. Yet the U. K.’s colonial history redeems it: inexpensive Indian restaurants are often a wise choice as are Indonesian places in Holland. Generally, I found little to like in the cuisines of the Czech Republic, Nigeria, or Puerto Rico. I can recall a dish in Prague with both potato dumplings and wheat dumplings and a bit of pork, a grey-brown assemblage, filling to be sure, but with little to recommend it other than the accompanying beer. And in San Juan the second frying of the plantains in mofongo rendered them hard and heavy, resembling the carnitas with which they are served. A Nigerian meal is typically a ball of starchy tuber – cassava or yam – with some meat and hot pepper in a bit of sauce called stew.
     As I write I remember the pleasure I took in hearing stories from friends who had bummed around Europe before I made it there and the delights of reading books that allowed me a wider range of experience vicariously than I could accomplish on my own. There is an equally abstract delectation as well in recalling these details from a lifelong travel habit. They are now arranged in the house of memory like a series of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, baubles one can study and turn over in the mind, sparkling yet fixed. The living fetish, though, of travel, is always in the future; the appeal is surely in not knowing, in vacuity in fact. Before visiting a place for the first time, I entertain an odd vacancy about what I might experience. In fact no one knows tomorrow, but the future contains a promise which is only enhanced by its mystery. That next trip, the visit to a place previously unknown, beckons always from the horizon.

Drugs and Religion

Though not a review, the following essay is in part based on my reading of the remarkable volume by R. Gordon Wasson Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), part I, chapter 7. Wasson was the vice-president of J. P. Morgan as well as an important investigator of psychedelic substances. His 1957 Life magazine article in “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about psilocybin experiences was ground-breaking.


     Religion is universal. Around the globe during all eras, people have believed in the existence of invisible beings and unreachable realms. No sooner are supernatural beings conceived than they begin to have love affairs and rivalries with each other and with the human race. Though most of our conclusions are based on observed reality, in this one area one is told it is meritorious to accept the tenets current in one’s own area based on faith alone. Ultimately sophisticated philosophers – Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike -- may draw a vision of reality that sheds much of the accumulated mythological tradition or interprets it symbolically, but the base of belief in religious issues is clearly not fact-based as it is for all other sorts of knowledge. What can be the source of this odd phenomenon?
     Burial customs indicate that belief in the unproven, in an afterlife for example, reaches deep into the Palaeolithic, probably all the way back to the invention of language which enables lies and the depiction of the unseen. An entire discipline developed based on methods of gaining access to the spiritual realm through alteration of consciousness. Those Aurignacian hunters crawled through lengthy dark chambers to do rituals by lamplight most likely to the hypnotic beat of music. Ascetic practices such as fasting and sleeplessness are common in both East and West. Prayer, meditation, chanting, and recitation serve much the same purposes. All of these techniques strive to break the ordinary assumptions that serve practical human survival needs, allowing the practitioner to reach possibilities otherwise inaccessible.
     Among the tools people have used to pursue a connection with Ultimate Reality are what advocates like to call entheogens, meaning plants that seem to awaken the divine within. Their fundamental function is no different from that of the other methods of alteration of consciousness: to shake up the received ideas that habitually serve the individual daily practical ends and to allow for the development of a stronger connection to the cosmos. The shamanic hallucinogens used in Siberia and in the Americas and the cannabis used by Shaivite devotees fall into this category as does the bhang lassi consumed by masses at Shivaratri and the substances used by such modern groups as Rastfarianians, members of the Uniao do Vegetal, and the Native American Church. Those with a long history may seem more legitimate than such recent formations as the Temple of the True Inner Light, the Church of the Awakening, or the League for Spiritual Discovery in either its original or reborn version, but all use the same tool to alter consciousness.
     Other human uses of psychoactive materials have also been widespread, of course. In every place and time, people have consumed mind-altering substances, sometimes as an anodyne to cope with suffering or as a euphoriant to enhance well-being, sometimes for therapeutic reasons. Use as an aid to spiritual growth is distinct from these practices.
     The generalization that religious truths are by their very nature not amenable to logical demonstration is true all the more of mystical openings, so I would not attempt to defend the truth or even the value of the prayer, meditation, mortification of the flesh, or drugs. My aim is simply to place chemical methods on a par with the rest.
     Culturally shaped expectations are critically important in all use of entheogens. A participant in a Sioux sweat lodge ceremony enters only after hearing the reports of others and systematic personal preparation. The event is under the guidance of an experienced leader. No less rigorous arrangements are customary among the traditional users of peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, or kava. Contemporary use of these substances by outsiders is frequently haphazardly careless, sometimes to the point of danger, but risk is virtually absent for those for whom what once were called psychedelics is normative.
     In a sense such psychotropic substances are at the root of human spirituality. Without considering the significant scholarly disagreement as to exact dating, it is safe to say that the Sanskrit Vedas are the oldest religious writing associated with a surviving cult. The strength of the tradition is such that even today’s casual visitor cannot avoid encounter its manifestations at every turn in India. Staying by the Ganges in Varanasi across the lane from a sort of saddhus’ dormitory, I believe there were three Shiva lingams within fifty feet of my door, each the recipient of daily offerings. Holy men took up seats all along the river and through the night one could hear chanting and praying. From what wellsprings might such potent and longlasting effects arise?
     R. Gordon Wasson suggests “that the whole of Indian mystical practice from the Upanişads through the more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to recapture the vision granted by the Soma plant” and this “the nature of that vision – and of that plant – underlies the whole of Indian religion.” And is Indian religion not a wellspring for much of the world with Buddhism spreading east and a thousand influences percolating through Persian and Indian lands to reach Europe both before and after Alexander had interviewed the gymnosophists. One need not entirely endorse Wasson’s enthusiasm for the amanita muscaria, but his thesis is a salutary correction to the moralists who consider the ingestion of entheogens to be an activity altogether different, and less admirable, than the practice of yoga or meditation. Are they not sister technologies, each aimed at assisting the mortal to glimpse a longer view?
     The drug personified as Soma was a significant deity in Vedic times. The Soma Mandala of the Rig Veda contains a hundred and fourteen hymns in praise of the marvelous substance. Its use was evidently brought to the Indian subcontinent by the Aryan invaders in the second millennium BCE. The same drug is praised as haoma in the Zoroastrian Avesta. When Zarathustra encounters haoma in Yasna 9 the personified drug is praised for his beauty and his role as the driver out of death. The use of this chemical followed the example of Yima in the Golden Age as well as a host of other heroes and legendary figures. “Praise be to thee, O Haoma, (for he makes the poor man's thoughts as great as any of the richest whomsoever.” (Avesta 10.13)
     The Vedas describe soma as radiant and golden. It is compared to a bull (and, somewhat contradictorily) to an udder and to the sun. It is a single eye, and it is a navel. Identified with health, insight, and everlasting life, Soma is the most compelling deity in the Vedic pantheon.
     Considerable dispute exists concerning the identity of this plant, whose preparation and consumption are described in some detail, though not always consistently. Scholars have suggested cannabis, amanita muscaria, psilocybin, ephedra, even opium and alcohol, as likely candidates, but the issue remains unresolved. Some recent authors have made the reasonable suggestion that the same term was used to refer to several plants, and thus could be only loosely defined a plant with ritual usage. What cannot be doubted is that this entheogen is one of the most significant elements of early Indian spirituality.
     We have no objection to taking drugs to protect our physical health, yet, in spite of the example of self-experimenting researchers like Humphry Davy, William James, and Aldous Huxley, many frown upon their use as aids to philosophy or religion. All religions consist of symbolic systems of myth, narrative, lyric, pictorial and other arts that allow people to feel some grasp of the cosmic. Their efficacy in practice is evident as religion is coextensive with humanity for the last forty thousand years, yet it seems clear that the imagination must be jump-started by some alteration of consciousness, though this role is sometimes delegated to shamans, priests, or bikkhus. As the medically therapeutic potential of what once were called psychedelic drugs receives renewed interest, so should their spiritual and philosophic value.

Pestering Allen

     The summer of my undergraduate junior year – it was 1966 -- I couldn’t seem to hold a job. I began as a manual laborer for a company that maintained power lines for the electric utility. I had obtained this position through the intercession of the power company’s CEO, the father of a friend. The foreman felt annoyed by this rare directive from the executive offices into his domain, considering me a punk-ass college student. Even if I thought more appropriate terms would be sensitive and artistic, I would, I think, have welcomed being called a bit neurasthenic at the age of nineteen. Whatever the terms, the sequel justified them. I believe I actually passed out digging in the heat or maybe I just felt I was about to, but, at any rate, I resigned, much to my supervisor’s satisfaction.
     I then took a place at a drill press in a filthy foundry casting blast furnace parts on the west side of Chicago. This place had an all-black work force on the floor. They had no vacation days whatever, no benefits, cash pay at week’s end. Workers would simply leave for a while when they needed a break and then return, allowing me to insinuate myself as the only white person in this constantly fluid staff. I have no doubt that the place violated every labor and health code in the book, but they had doubtless made arrangements with the regime of the elder Daley. Every afternoon they would pour the molten metal, creating infernal clouds. At the day’s end one would shower on the premises and the water would run black. At home I would blow my nose and find my handkerchief gone quite black and noxious. Here I lasted a week.
     A friend then suggested I join him at the Loop employment agency where he had been working for a few weeks with great success. The place paid employment counselors like salesmen: a low base guarantee, bolstered by commissions for every person placed. This system played the varied interests of company, counselor, and applicant in such a way that it encouraged unethical, even illegal practices. Where to begin? In training one was initiated into a secret code by which employers could include race among their requirements and their preference would be preserved in a way that was not explicit. In contacting past applicants, whether they had found a job with the company or not, we were instructed to try to find how much money they were presently making and then claim to have an opening that would pay twenty percent more.
     My friend had such fluid verbal skills that he had been a roaring success, generally defeating the veterans at winning the weekly bonus that went to the most productive worker. He was willing to say anything to anybody and had the ability to size people up in a few moments and address them in the most effective way, making small talk and side comments that made people instantly trust him.  This was how it worked for him, but not for me. After a few days I was off again.
     I gave up on employability at this point and headed down to Champaign-Urbana where I could hang out with friends and enjoy the atmosphere of the largely depopulated University of Illinois campus. As it happened, that summer the National Student Association had chosen to hold its national convention there. It was to be another year yet before the revelation that the organization had been funded since its formation in 1947 by the CIA, but those reactionary spooks must have been worrying about their investment for some time. The government’s strategy was the same as in covert CIA support of, for instance, the Congress for Cultural Freedom or the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, that is, to see that socialism made no headway. Created to supplant the leftist student groups of the thirties, some of which were still alive, if feeble, the NSA’s president in 1966 was David Harris.
     Harris was the Stanford student body president who had gone south during the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was to resist the draft, indeed, to help found the organization called the Resistance and to serve fifteen months in federal prison. In the summer of 1966, though, the draft was not the issue it became several years later. Apart from discussing the widening war in Southeast Asia, the NSA was set to debate legalization of cannabis, and I discovered that Allen Ginsberg had come to educate the delegates on the benevolence of the good herb. He was to stay for a week.
     Led by a slightly older poet, Michael Holloway, a group of four or five of us went in search of Allen. We ran in to him almost at once in front of a dormitory elevator and introduced ourselves as the local poets. Graduate students, undergraduates, drop-outs, seeking then to establish a new American culture, we knew each other through happenings and parties and several had appeared the previous spring in what we regarded as the hip issue of the student literary magazine Oblique edited by Holloway.
     Ginsberg engaged us at once, taking a aggressive tack and saying to Holloway, “You’re a poet, you tell me. Well, what’s your best line -- the best you ever wrote -- come on -- what is it?” Not surprisingly, Holloway hesitated and, after a dramatic pause, Ginsberg continued, “You know, a beautiful line like my friend William Burroughs, wrote, like ‘Motels . . .motels . . . motels . . . loneliness.’”
     After regaining his equipoise, Holloway questioned Ginsberg’s mission. “You shouldn’t be spending time with those guys hung up on politics. Isn’t your place with the artists?” Ginsberg asked if we hadn’t had friends busted for pot, and wasn’t it a love-act to advocate for them. He wanted not just our coterie (where marijuana was pervasive) but the “mainstream” NSA, representing the future, to declare for legalization and, to that end, had painstakingly compiled fact sheets proving cannabis innocuous, citing evidence from scientific authorities, laid out in a logical array, and photocopied on pink pages.
     We succeeded in distracting Ginsberg as the marijuana issue only consumed a half-day of the convention’s business. Most evenings he attended parties in funky student apartments and talked for hours. I don’t really recall faculty there, though some may have found their way to the scene. There were some alienated high school students sniffing glue or something in a closet which elicited a warning from the poet: “That’ll cause your brains to drip out your nose.”
     I have heard accounts of Ginsberg behaving badly, but I have none to report. I would not count the incident of my straight friend who caught the poet’s eye. Asked to visit the dorm room where Ginsberg was staying, he headed off happily, though even a nineteen-year-old undergraduate might have known what would happen next. Twenty minutes later, he returned, shaken. “Man, Ginsberg just went in the room, and I shut the door, and, by the time I turned around, he was sitting on the floor naked and, oh my god, it was just like this big mass of hair with a penis sticking up!”



Allen Pestering: a postscript of second-hand anecdotes

     Fearful of idealizing the poet who meant so much to so many (including me), I add a few anecdotes told me by an Indian friend concerning Ginsberg’s visit there in the early sixties. Being a guest in a culture for which he had such interest and admiration did not obviate the poet’s fondness for shock. Without such a taste, we would never have had Howl and Kaddish, both monuments of twentieth century American poetry.
     He enjoyed people’s reactions when he introduced Orlovsky as his wife. More than one thought this term must be explained by some gap between Indian and American use of English. When presented to a prominent writer, son of a previous prime minister, Ginsberg immediately asked the man if he were fond of masturbating. He pressured a leading journalist to help him obtain a visa extension and then not only vanished without thanking him, but, according to my friend, later snubbed him when the Indian was visiting New York and happened to meet him again.

Cookie Man

     During the month the travelers had been in Fes, they had become habitués of two cafés: the first a small hole-in-the-wall operated by gold-toothed Mufis and his teen-age worker Ahmed who slept on a rug in the back and the second, the Gout de Fes, overseen by Abdullah (who had no teeth at all) and his aged father, while their ancient carp moved sluggishly about in clouded tanks. In either café one was entitled to a comfortable seat among the company of friends if one purchased mint tea once or twice during the day or perhaps a café au lait. In a shadowy corner of the Gout de Fes one was likely to find Driss, who managed to give the impression of reclining while seated in a chair and who kept within the capacious folds of his djellaba a store of kief which the tea-drinker might purchase for a few pennies. Some regulars kept their pipes behind the counter.
     Kief (the Arabic word means “well-being” or “pleasure”) refers both to the potent resin glands (or trichomes) of cannabis and to the mixture of this material with finely ground tobacco which is commonly smoked in the Maghreb. Though its use is traditional, it has been technically prohibited since 1954, and many smokers in 1970 were semi-discreet. Still, each café (except for a few would-be French places) had a dealer like Driss who simply lounged about and chatted between serving his clients who sometimes included police officers and army men. Workmen often kept a long pipe with its very small terra cotta bowl next to them as they wove or hammered patterns in metal trays. Though one saw users everywhere, on one medina wall was a government poster warning against cannabis with the most striking skeleton in electric primary colors smoking the Moroccan sebsi and shkaff. Had the traveler only had the temerity to snatch one, it would have been a fine souvenir!
     After traveling to Rabat. they were seeking new contacts. They had a room at the Hotel Rigini in the old town for $1.20 a night. Musicians strolled by the streets outside, followed by butchers carrying carcasses, donkeys with bales, and people hawking every sort of goods including, of course, what the travelers sought. When they first encountered the Cookie Man he babbled about his relations with American GIs during World War II, then trailed off in a more confidential voice, slightly husky and damp, naming his prices. At their next meeting both parties felt all right about becoming slightly more trusting. The travelers were prepared to follow to where the Cookie Man led.
     Walking along the old city walls, they came upon a series of cafés, the first rather neat and trim for an old town place, the second more funky, descending next to the third and then the fourth level, all contained within the walls of the medina. They entered the humblest establishment close behind their guide. The space was dark and smoky, low-ceilinged but crowded. The Cookie Man pointed wordlessly to a ladder that led to a loft above. They emerged into a room with balconies somehow invisible from below. They ducked next through a low passage to enter a second chamber on this level where they settled in to talk business. The Cookie Man spoke slowly, almost wearily, of his wares in a voice that sounded hypnotic or perhaps hypnotized. He had a variety of kief and hashish. In the middle of leisurely explanations about the town where each product was produced, he paused significantly, and, with an air of incredible lasciviousness, said, “You know, though, what I got is cookie, I got good cookie, gooooood cookie, ahh! Show you good time. Want some coookie?”
     He reached into his djellaba and rummaged around, reached a bit further, and withdrew what we recognized as a bit of madjoun, the Moroccan cannabis confection. In this “cookie” were kief and ground almonds and cinnamon and clove and honey and bits of detritus from the realms beneath the Cookie Man’s robes, and the travelers had a taste for it nonetheless and tried some and bought a bit more, and chewed thoughtfully, and eventually somehow they made their way down from the mysterious chamber where he held court and through the twisting streets, through a dozen blind turns, past a lane of metalworkers and the next of leather craftsmen, out in the end to the coast by the old Casbah (or fort). People there were cleaning clothes, where a freshwater stream entered the ocean. The travelers clambered atop huge rocks like frozen sponge, like the surface of the moon, and watched the people doing laundry.
     Suddenly the adhan, the call to prayer, arose: Allahu akbar! The people put aside their work, turned to face Mecca, and prostrated themselves in prayer. And, as the sea struck the rocky shore, and an odor of incense mixed with grilled lamb drifted by in the wind, the unbelievers watching from the rocks were moved and doubtless benefited from the pause in the day’s occupations. The water’s roar, constant and urgent as time’s arrow nearly obliterated the sound of the muezzin, whose melancholy soulful tone undermined the reassuring list of certainties he was reciting. “Hayya ‘ala ‘l-falah!” [Come to success!]

A Coffeehouse in Haarlem

     Lest anyone mistake the character of the place, the Frans Hals Café displays also a smaller sign: cannabis shop. The neon likeness of the “Laughing Cavalier” implies that the name recognizes Hals’ presumed cordial humor (though the art historians would prefer the acerbity of the “Lady-Governors”) rather than his improvidence (attested by numerous extant documents). Most likely, the shop expresses simple civic pride in Haarlem’s most celebrated artist. It is a casual place, much like low-rent coffeehouses anywhere, with miscellaneous furnishings, handwritten signs, improvisatory decor, and an old worn wood floor. A small booth near the door is tended by an pleasant young fellow. To one side is a display with the merchandise he offers: maybe ten varieties each of marijuana and hashish, priced from 12.50 to 18 guiders/gram (Nlg 2.47 = $1). At the bar behind, coffee, tea, fruit drinks, soda, and “space cakes” (for Nlg. 7 ½) are available as well as communal bongs. Though it is yet morning, several patrons sit rolling, smoking, sipping, reading. A computer is available in the front and a video game in the back.
     Music plays from the “Emerald Light” free jukebox. The young man produces plastic containers to display his buds. The visitor from abroad cannot avoid feeling that there is something stunning about this simple act. He offers impressionistic reviews of the goods. The tourist purchases some Afghan skunk (actually a Dutch-grown weed) and some coffee and passes an idle hour. Just before exiting, he visits the bathroom and observe that this Dutch toilet flushes toward the front rather than the back. And the flush is activated by a small button on top, flat and identical in color to its surroundings. Hmmmmm.
     In Amsterdam, at a well-known spot, the Bluebird (where an ambitious customer is purchasing Superskunk from an Irish heavy whose his aide in Caucasian dreads asks a customer is he is going to behave today). This place is loud and crowded and full of (humpf!) foreigners.
     Back in Haarlem the Theehuis was the original smoking café. It’s a small establishment, only two little tables and a ledge with a couple of stools, but it seems to have a reputation among the cognoscenti. A young tram conductor with a blond ponytail down his back says that he has never heard of a fight in a coffeehouse. Toleration of these establishments has been the rule his entire life. He says he must remind himself to be discreet when he visits Germany. The Dutch prefer to roll great spliffs, mixing the pot with tobacco. They say it’s because dope doesn’t burn steadily, but surely it is also the cocktail principle, watering down the intoxicant with a mixer. It does make for a denser tobacco atmosphere than we Americans would choose. Otherwise, these places seem wholly innocuous. Passersby pay no attention as patrons in windowseats roll fat joints.