Walking on Thin Ice

essaouira day 8, morocco day 41:

constant cry of gulls outside our door. seagulls have myriad voices - they sound at different times like porpoises, cats fighting, cats crying, a laughing maniacal mechanical clown from killer klowns from outer space… their default is a raucous obnoxious squawk.

this is a land of concrete, stone and stucco mixed with mud - peopled with backpacks, running shoes, stonewashed jeans- coke & pepsi on the side - all on cell phones watching tv.

the public baths here - hammams - are segregated into male and female, and have 4 rooms. you undress in outer room (down to shorts, underwear, or swim suit - though lady says she goes naked). inner room is sauna hot with a bin of scalding hot water and a bin of cold. you pour your own mixture into the two buckets they give you. you bring soap, a skin scrubber, and a dipping pan to wet wash and rinse yourself. i use 4 buckets of almost too hot, then sit and sweat in the heat. most men pay someone to wash them everywhere except the shorts, but i am uncomfortable with anyone but lady touching me, so go solo. the next room out is still hot but somewhat cooler (which isn’t used much where i go), and the last room is considerably cooler but still warm. figure if i walked from 40 minutes in inner sauna heat directly out to dress, i’d pass out, so sit and cool awhile.

on way back from my bath yesterday walking alone and refreshed through the narrow crooked streets with their white painted walls and multi-colored doors and trim in the sun with the bustle bubble of babel about, i felt high from happiness. a man called out, pointed to his wrist. can’t speak french so walked over, showed him the time. he smiled and pretended to steal my watch. we both laughed. he asked “francois?” (french), i replied english (english refers to both england and the u.s. here). he called out welcome. most folk guess i’m from the netherlands, or german.

i see moroccans pouring water over their left hand in the streets, washing the hand they use instead of toilet paper to wipe after defecating. watched one moroccan fruit vender stare in repulsed disbelief as a european left a greasy restaurant licking each finger of his left hand.

it’s hard to do daily shopping here - a small bag of fruit costs a dirham or 2, but the bank machines only dispense 200 dirham bills - none of the street shops can make change. and of course lady gives all our dirham coins away to beggars. they smile when they see us now, greet us. it’s hard getting and keeping small change coins when the dollar to local currency exchange rate is high like it is in poland, croatia, and morocco.

a friend worries my weight loss is due to parasites, that my flesh is eating itself. not to worry - my drop from 190 to 178 first 3 months of this year is due to changing my diet after my heart skipping and high cholesterol problems in croatia. from 178 down to today’s 172 is due to lady’s no longer feeding me. she stopped for two reasons - we have no refrigerator to store food, and must cook on a 2 burner gas camp stove… and she went on a diet so cooks less. plus basically since france we walk all day long, so i leave bits of my flesh in return trail - it doesn’t work though, the cats and gulls devour them.

looked up concrete because everywhere we’ve gone i’ve seen it used both now and then - been around 7,000 years according to cyber space - even used in the pyramids and the roman aqueducts. now why would aqua ducks contain concrete?

we watched wernor herzog’s “aguirre, the wrath of god” (1972) last night. bad insane money, power and fame driven folk steal command, then run the entire expedition into the ground, killing everybody in the process. couldn’t stop thinking of cheney bush and their iraq policy while watching it. i could easily see dick cheney in klaus kinski’s mad role. it was made while nixon was bombing vietnam and cambodia, so maybe the cheney regime overtones are valid. it is a marvelous movie with unexpected long gorgeous nature shots. the final scene is the mad aguirre/cheney chasing small monkeys overrunning the raft.

essaouira day 7, morocco day 40:

received an email about our blogs which made me think, and i love it when someone causes me to re-examine what i’m doing. here’s a selection from their letter:

We have been following the postings on your blog and there is one thing we don’t see much and would like to find there: more about Moroccan culture and its many layers and perspectives. Can one buy culture related magazines and journals on the newsstands there, or any place else? How about libraries and bookstores? What is the position of an intellectual in Morocco of today? Stemming from the best of intentions, fascination with poverty goes beyond the colonial division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ only when reminding the readers that, look, in Cleveland we have poverty too… what about their ‘popular culture’ and its conflict with elitism, what about paintings and music and schools and poetry, no matter if it’s oral or written, educated in the finest schools or beautifully instinct-driven? For us traveling is much less about the ‘personal experience’ and much more about taking responsibility to enhance dialogue between languages, cultures, continents – yes to learn, but also to speak, yes to witness, but also to do, to act

here’s what i answered:

so far we’ve found no intellectuals or art scene or poetry… just people from all walks of life trying to get money. this is the first place we’ve been we can find absolutely no culture. people see us as money machines, not people.

as for the blog, we write what we see, think, feel, experience. need to keep it real, not academic, phony or artsy. hard to write of cultural perspective when all we see is dollar signs in their eyes. the magazine racks we see are in french and the same shallow stuff you see in america, france, england for people with too much money and too little taste.

i’m glad we’re here - find this to be an essential experience, but it is not a place i like or respect.

and the poverty you have in cleveland is literally nothing compared to this… this is naked need, this is a society that feeds off tourists, lines their streets with tourist trinkets… we frequently wander way off the tourist routes, and the folk we see are shocked - they barely return our hellos. on the poverty scale i’d give cleveland a 1 and morocco a 100. people shit in the streets here.

i know there are intellectuals here, but have no idea how to find them or where they are. we even dined with an intelligent upper class european - their cultural activities consisted of tv, movies, and sofa art. don’t know what else to tell you - what you’re asking is foreign to everyone we’ve met. it’s all need and greed and tourist toys so far.
. . .

i had to end there due to being in a cyber cafe, but there’s much more to be said, and it will likely take years of sifting thought to do it justice.

lady k and i have been ambassadors for culture and dialogue since the day we left the states 10 months ago. we interact with anyone, rich to poor. we assure them the people of america are not like our politicians who have stolen power. they teach us there’s an equal discrepancy between their people and government. we’re friendly and open, and most everyone of every nation has been kind and generous in return. no one’s said a good thing about the american government, but no one’s said a bad thing about the american people - although a mentally retarded youth in leeds england did put his thumb down and said “america bad” when he learned where we were from. but he was still nice to us.

we’ve read poetry in a multiplicity of scenes, created reading opportunities on our own. lady’s incorporated poets from each place into her online City Poetry zine. each place we go, we dip into the culture, comment on the yes or no of it.

most importantly, we go into each place with our minds open, try to process what we see on its own terms. we do not have a pre-set philosophy of life or travel through which we filter fact.

what we’ve found in morocco is poverty, need, and greed - a culture devoted to fleecing folk.

the art we’ve seen is souvenir shop slop for tourists, the few book shops little better than magazine racks slick with tricks for the rich. we’ve seen major art galleries with minor work, banks hanging bad jackson pollack imitations - pretty much the same level of quality you’d see in an american motel or mystic seaport connecticut souvenir shop.

we bought a copy of The Casablanca Analyst - the 1st and so far only issue of the sole english language moroccan newspaper. it questions whether there is any modern art here. says there’s a lack of art groups, forums, organizations, brochures, manifestos, periodicals. the only categories of art they mention are folk, naive, decorative, tourist, children - all form, no content.

most of the rest of the paper is devoted to how bad america and israel are, and the crookedness of moroccan politicians - evidently it costs $12 to buy a person’s vote here. the very few cultural affairs they mention are all in casablanca, and the poetry they publish in english is turgidly terrible with lines like “Conflated conniving grievances, / Abjuring the gaucheries of the drooling Don.”

i’ll read the rest of the paper for clues, but it verges on the sophomoric and is wretchedly written - as our only taste of what the intellectuals think, it’s not encouraging. i’ve always found a great gap between intelligence and intellectuals… the intelligent evaluate what is, intellectuals try to make what is conform to theory. albert camus is the perfect example of intelligence, sartre of the intellectual - sartre sacrificed facts to fit philosophy while camus constructed his philosophy from fact, observation, life. sartre spent most of his career attacking camus, while camus spent his time pondering truth - and won a nobel prize for it.

the music is a polyrhythmic symbiosis of appalachian hill fiddle, country & western, and hispanic. as for the literature, i can’t read either language it’s written in, so cannot judge.

but it’s not just not knowing the language - i couldn’t converse in poland, croatia, the netherlands, or france either, yet had no trouble finding a cultural scene. i know there must be more, and we hope to find some of it in the upcoming 5 day music festival here next month. i’m hoping it’s not just more tourist bait.

and finally (since this could go on forever), this for us is a journey of self discovery, an attempt to see how things are done in other cultures, to see how we can rise above what we are. the blog is titled The Adventures of Smith & Lady - we write what we do, what we see, who we interact with, how they change us, how they say we affect them. in england we wrote of the museums. in krakow we wrote of the underground music scene. we get to morocco, and whammo - we find ourselves in filth, shit, poverty and cockroaches, so that is what we write. it would be a sin not to.

i think questions of the elite versus power structures miss the mark - the primary theme is the rich screwing the rest. there’s enough on this earth for all, yet the very few grab all they can, then hire armies to steal more, and make laws and police to keep it. were it not for greed, there’d be no need.

the other factor involved in blogging is sharpening our writing skills and entertaining folk (and for me, getting a few laughs from readers along the way). we are neither travelogue nor essay. i’m less an academic in spite of my college degree than i am a social humorist and cultural commentator - more mark twain than marking time.

we are on a self-financed incredible adventure that cannot be anything but a personal experience, one which by its very scope and nature enhances dialogue between languages, cultures, continents.

we learn, we speak, we witness, we do, we act, we share, we educate, we entertain - so far in more than 30 cities in 10 countries on 3 continents over a 10 month period.

and we’re having a heck of a fine time doing it.

Thinking a lot lately about the beggars. It’s too easy for visitors to dismiss them as ’something that happens in countries like this’, to just see them as part of the scenery, to romanticize their position as cogs in the karmic wheel.

When a woman begs here, it seems typically stylistically different from a man’s manner. There are scores of old women, who hood their eyes under their scarves, hold their hands out, shaking. Although in Essaouira they often meet my eye and smile.

There are young women with children. It’s distressing. One women coaxed a toddler to hold out her hand. The toddler laughed, bat her beautiful eyelashes and dark eyes at me. It is not my desire to put a coin in a child’s hand; it feels exploitative. But I have yet to train my automatic response to give the coin to the mother instead.

When I give someone money, I try to look them in the eye, say hello and let them know this is a gift from one human to another.

There are the young teens who loiter around the gates of the city. They ask for pocket money. “Please, Madame, I need money to eat.” Meanwhile, they have a decent haircut and new clothes and are obviously well fed.

Then there are the aggressive men. There’re a quantity who roam the streets, sometimes following us as we purchase produce for our meals.

In Marrakech, I favored a man who had deformed legs. He sprawled his legs to exhibit them for sympathy. Smith said he was faking it, but I don’t think so. Smith said, “He’s shameless. Displaying himself to get money.” But I thought about this and said, “Well, if he didn’t display himself, maybe he wouldn’t get enough money to survive. No one would know he wasn’t able-bodied. So he’s compelled to display himself.”

One week it was really really hot, and he sat out in the 90F or higher heat under the blazing sun without any obvious food or water or shade. I packed up some food and water for him. Smith wouldn’t let me bring it.

* * *

Yesterday we walked around before the beggars came on to the streets. Now it is apparent to us that most are professional, or are at the minimum not homeless. They are not on the streets until 7 a.m.

The blind man who sits at the gate Bab Marrakech: we saw him install himself into his slot. A man brought him there, and then he ran his wheelchair backwards against the wall. It was as though he was showing up for a job.

* * *

We are ever out of change. I try to keep a handful of dirhams in my right pocket, and it is never enough. It is depleted in just one brief trip in our neighborhood.

Smith feels that they are exploiting us, but I think it would be a sad occupation for someone to have to depend on others’ whims for a living. How awful it is that the most sympathy I feel is when I see the needy in degrading postures. They often sit against a filthy wall, on a filthy sidewalk. There is the smell of human and cat urine and the frequent human coprolite and spent food. I wonder if they try to appear more submissive to elicite more sympathy.

* * *

And there is our guide, who extorts a last hundred dirhams from us the day we leave Marrakech. We call him “Hamid” in the blog to protect his privacy.

We did not ask Hamid to help us; we gave him a goodbye the day before. Yet he waits outside our building until we leave, and then he tries to take our bags to the taxi. Smith grabs them back. “No, no, Hamid, I can carry. I can carry. We must carry our own bags.”

So he walks with us to the taxi. He says to me, “I have no food today.” I know this is a lie. He’s built an addition to his house with the money we’ve given him, and I also gave him all our food before we left, a substantial quantity.

I cannot call him a liar. I cannot refuse someone even when I know they are lying. He also knows I know he is lying. “We can give you 100 dirhams,” I say.

He seems disappointed with the amount, yet a Moroccan can live a good life on 2000 dirhams a month. He’s made 3000 dirhams or more from us already. Marrakech has been our most expensive city, and it is because of him.

We’re here for six more weeks. We cannot afford to meet another person like Hamid. He was getting so greedy. He constantly tried various ideas on us, even suggesting that we take a carriage around the city with him. We are loathe to do this. We only see white people in the carriages, and it seems so privileged.

He took us to a hammam one day. I wanted to go with his wife, and he could go with Smith. I offered to pay for massages for the four of us, a gesture of friendship and solidarity. But instead, he had his twenty-something son accompany Smith. Fortunately, the son only helped orient Smith in the hammam, and didn’t give him a massage. Smith is uncomfortable having someone he knows massage him. It was uncomfortable enough for him with the help he did get.

Exiting the hammam, Hamid paid his son 30 dirhams of our money for massaging Smith, though Smith did not receive this effort.

Another day, Smith mentioned that he has arthritis, that he aches all over. So Hamid very aggressively tried to convince Smith to buy a massage. He grabbed Smith’s leg, rubbed the skin. Smith said “No” adamantly enough for Hamid to get the message.

essaouira day 6, morocco day 39:

in books and movies, when something’s repeated, it’s a clue. our apartment toilet seat is not attached, so moves - and can even fall off, with or without you. we also have 4 iron dining table chairs with round wood seats. the seats sit on the chair unattached - you move, they move… you move the chairs, the wood circles crash to the floor - a sound highly magnified by the tiled floor and walls. what does this metaphorically mean? what plot device does it serve? perhaps it signifies “we better watch our ass.”

the cockroaches seem to have lost interest in us now we’ve scrubbed the place and cleaned their camp stove cockroach motel (you can check in, but you can’t check out). they’ve been replaced by tiny black ants. i don’t mind them so much - they’re kind of crunchy, like rice krispies.

there’s 2 prices here in the markets - the usual price for the locals, and the 2 to 10 times higher price for caucasians. this blatant rip-off discrimination gives us a feel for what minorities experience every day of their lives in the united states. hmmmm, “united” states - what a lie… it’s more the rich and powerful united against every one else. i don’t believe in heaven, though i know this life on earth is hell, but sometimes i yearn for the 1 god 1 belief 1 heaven thing to be true so the rich would roast in hell when they die.

this being constantly besieged by beggars for moneys and ripped-off by the not-poor for more is souring how i see, hardening my heart. i’m going to create a new product for the tourists, call them beggar blinders. put them on and you can’t see the poor. we’ll sell them along with out 3rd eye patch which when worn in the middle of your forehead over your insipient third eye blocks enlightenment - figure the republican and c.e.o. enclaves will eat them up.

but it’s not all doom and gloom. yesterday a greasy clothed drunk accosted us laughing, demanding money. i held him away from lady, my hands filthy from the touch. a middle-aged arab lady in a burka started admonishing him, shooing him away with her hands. he went. we thanked her. it sounded like she apologized to us for him. wherever you go, there’s good and bad in people, places and things. from what i’ve seen in 61 years, there’s more good people on the earth than bad - though it seems the more money people have, the slimier they become. people like dick cheney lie their way out of serving their country, people like george bush lie and cheat and steal and desert their outfits in war time and let daddy fix it all. there is great evil and sin at the top. my only consolation is they are not happy people, not sound souls, not integrated spirits. i know it’s unkind of me, but i hope some how some day some way they suffer. may they return in their next life as diarrhetic cow dung in a field of dung beetles.

lady says the french phrase “ensemble tout devient possible” is pronounced “onsom two devi-a posseeb.” i love the way french sounds, and i like the french people we’ve met - but their language drives me up the wall because they only pronounce 2/3s of each word. why bother putting all those extra letters and syllables in when you’re not going to use them. they talk with lazy tongue, mush of mouth. the phrase means “together all becomes possible.” i guess they mean all’s possible except saying all the word.

told lady telephone sex mystified me since you couldn’t see or touch the person, or even be sure they were who or what they claimed. “what could you possibly get from phone sex?” i asked. “baby telephones,” she replied.

THE A-1 MOTEL
Smith Story

I think there’re only four things I remember about Phoenix: It was really hot. There was absolutely no rusted metal trash on the streets, because there’s no humidity, no snow, no salt. You absolutely can not get anywhere in Phoenix you have to be by public transportation.

And one of my special memories: The first night I got there, hitchhiking, I arrived at four in the morning. I climbed a hill in a park in the dark. Set there surrounded by the sweet smell of honeysuckle, which I’d never smelt before. Smoked the last of my dope. Watched the sun come up.

That’s about all I remember about Phoenix.

“Why did you go there?”

Cat had no sense about women. His girlfriend left him and got a job in Phoenix in a hamburger bar. So he convinced us to go with him, to win her back.

Jones took one car and another engine, jury-rigged them together. That got us a quarter way there before we blew the rod.

“Jones had mechanical skills.”

Theoretically. The car didn’t make it to Phoenix, though, did it.

“But he swapped out a whole engine.”

Didn’t work, did it. His brother kept trying to synthesize hallucinogenics from local plants, which never worked either.

So we were high on chemicals and grass and maybe mushrooms, going down this long highway hill. Threw the rod. Black smoke billowed out the car. Pulled on the side. Looked down the hill: there’s a state trooper radar trap.

Cops are looking at us. Me being the biggest, the oldest and probably the smartest… I can lie better than they do, I get out, walk down to the cops. With a straight face, I ask them if they can call a wrecker for us.

They ask just enough questions to realize we don’t have triple-A or insurance, so they can call one of their friends and get a kickback. Makes them happy.

So I walk back up the hill. That’s when we start hitchhiking.

“What happened when your brother found his girlfriend?”

We went to where she worked. The other thing about her. She looked, from top to bottom, like Olive Oil. And after Cat died, I saw a nude polaroid of her. Olive Oil may have had a better figure. This woman was one line, from top to bottom, with stick arms, and stick legs.

She fed us free hamburgers. She convinced Cat the reason she left him is because she didn’t want to be with him anymore. So that was that.

We were staying in the A-1 Motel. Drinking cans of A-1 beer.

“Really? You’re shitting me.”

Yes. A-dash-one. The three of us. Smith, Smith and Jones.

“So, Jones again, eh? He must have egged you on. You have some stories with him.”

No, Jones was quiet. Cat and I were the egger-onners.

“Uh-huh?”

There was one bed. An unknown number of large… dry… chittering… cockroaches. They were big. They made noise.

We took turns. One night in the bed, two nights on the floor with the cockroaches.

“Ew hew hew.”

The cockroaches even took showers with us.

* * *

Our second night in Phoenix, we looked for work. Got a job taking the carnival down. We did speed, White Crosses. I love White Crosses. And after we were done, we were told we took the Ferris Wheel down an hour-and-a-half faster than it’d ever been taken down before. They offered us a job. But they were going back the way we’d just hitchhiked, so we said no. And as you know, that’s one of my major regrets in life.

So we went to the City of Phoenix’s employment agency. Got a job putting in sprinkler systems in a new housing development being built in the desert.

“Yuck.”

You really don’t want to dig trenches in hard, baked desert earth. Every lunch, the boss’d take everybody to lunch, and we drank pitchers of beer to replenish our liquid levels. Did that for three weeks. The boss really liked me. Moved me from digging ditches to installing the timer mechanisms for the sprinklers. When we told him we were going home, he offered us more money to stay.

Before we got that job, we were running out of drinking money. So we called Pappy, told him to send us the rest of our money. When Pappy answered the phone, Cat said, ‘Have I got some aluminum siding for you…’

Pappy said, ‘No you don’t.’ Hung up.

That was the period Cat’d read ‘Steal This Book’ by Jerry Rubin. So he followed some of his advice, which is, go into the stores, try their colognes every day, try and smell good.

“Hahaha!!!”

And there was a shopping center next to the motel. And they left their plants out at night. We we stole twenty plants one night. Filled the A-1 motel room with plants.

The night before that, we’d gone through the shopping center and every single decal they had on the outside of the door, like ‘Enter’, Visa credit cards, the hours of the store — anything that was a stick-on decal on the outside of the store — we peeled off.

Being collage artists, we were really skilled at getting *things* off of *things*. So we peeled off all these signs, stuck them on our shirts and pants, went back to the motel room covered in lettering.”

“I’m wondering what it’d be like if you were apprehended in such a state.”

I have no idea.

* * *

There was an American Indian in the room next door with his family… every time he’d get ready to go back to the Reservation, he’d say, ‘Well, back to the Resolution.’

I have no idea why he was going back, since he lived in the A-1 motel. He claimed he used to drive Marty Robbins around before he got famous. Said back then, Marty Robbins was drunk most of the time.”

“Who’s Marty Robbins?”

You don’t know country music, do you. Devil Woman. Ah, remember El Paso? The town of El Paso, the song? If you heard it, I think you’d know it.

“Hmmm.”

His huge hit was El Paso. ‘Bout a guy who was dancin’ with another man’s girl. The guy called him on it, and he shot him down. Then he rode away and escaped. But missed the woman so much that he rode back, and they shot him. And he died in the woman’s arms. And he said, ‘Dying is less pain then being away from her.’ Then he had ‘Don’t worry about Me,’ ‘Devil Woman’, and one called ‘My Woman, My Woman, My Wife.’ Tons of huge hits. And he had a real purty voice.

“Back to the Indian…”

Well, Jones had left. So our conditions improved. One night in the bed, one night on the floor with the cockroaches.

When Cat and I left to hitchhike back to Michigan, Indian gave us a handful of weak marijuana. Somewhere in Arizona, where you could see Shiprock, after a ride, Cat and I left the road, climbed up a butte, sat on the top, our legs dangling over, smoked some of the grass and got really stoned. Came back down and a Grand Canyon river guide picked us up in his small pickup. We shared our grass with him. Then Cat said, ‘That’s all.’

Forty minutes later, Cat said, ‘I lied.’ And we had a couple more bowls. This time, it really was gone.

River guide said he lived in Telluride. It’s famous for the Sundance Film Festival. He said he was going on, he wouldn’t be there, but we could sleep in his place that night. Always amazed me that a total stranger picked us up and let us sleep in his house without him. But since he was going on, we decided to catch a further ride with him.
By this time, I was riding in the back of the pickup. Because without grass, it was too many people up front. He tapped on the back window. Pointed up the mountain, Rocky Mountains. There was a herd of elk going up the mountain.

He let us off. We slept in our sleeping bags, high in the Rocky Mountains. Woke up covered in snow. This was in the summer.

Drank ice cold pure water out of the river.

Our next ride was a van of part-time carpenters. They worked six months a year, took the money, and drove down to South America the other six months a year and smoked dope.

We smoked their dope a couple hundred miles.

Then some *family* picked us up. Had one space in the back seat with the family and the kids and everything, but got us and our bags in there too. Very uncomfortable, but real nice people.

Our last little bit, we *could not* get a ride. So we walked back on the highway where we knew it was illegal and we stuck out our thumbs.

State cop pulled over. While he was questioning us, found out we lived in Brahman, Michigan. His brother lived there. So he drove us most of the way home!

* * *

“Why did you stay so long in Phoenix?”

It was another place to be. We were there. We found dope the first couple nights in a pool hall. The A-1 Motel had some character to it. There were three of us. Ah… there’s one other part to this…

After we ran out of money, before we called Pappy, we were really getting desperate. So we talked about doing another armed robbery.

“Oh no.”

It’d be their first. It’d me my third. But none of us had the heart for it. It never went beyond talk.

So we called Pappy, got a little more money, and then at the last moment, the desert ditch digging job came through. So at that point, we could’ve stayed. But who in their right mind wants to live in Phoenix and dig ditches in the desert?

day 5:

walking before dawn

west african coast
low tide, shadows, sea bottom
tracks from brine to blues

Smith and I disagree on a point of grammar.

“I’m your WIFE. You must consider me your equal in these matters.”

“You’re one of those engineering types. But you defected. Came over to our side.”

“Who *am* I, anyways…”

“Yr the person who took me from Cleveland.”

“If I didn’t, you’d still be sitting in the dark, croaking. And toking.”

“Toking and croaking until I died.”

(Smith had had cancer of the larynx, diagnosed after I pushed him to get a biopsy.)

* * *

We’re walking out in the open towards the medina. Everyone stares at us. Smith offers to hold my sleeve, rather than my hand. “We won’t offend local sensibilities this way.”

I say, “You could get me a dog collar, with a leash.”

“Ooh, with spikes?”

“Yeah, one of those leather fetish outfits. And you could pull me along.”

We’re now at the medina wall. Taxis drop people off at the gate, where men with carts wait. They try to pick up customers. Most often, it’s luggage they carry, but I’ve also seen feeble old ladies pulled along in the carts.

Smith says, “You’re gonna have to pull me. I’m gonna attach you to a cart, and you can pull me in your leather outfit. You can wear one of those little French maid skirts as well.”

“What are those?”

“That’s what they wear in the porno movies, the French maids. The skirts come halfway down the ass, and they’re not wearing panties. And then they bend over and dust the bottom shelf of books with their little feather dusters.”

“Oh, how literary.”

“And the rich fat fucks sit in their big soft chairs with their white mustaches and sherry, and chortle as they watch.”

2nd full day in essarouia:
lady’s lying in my lap with a bad stomach and a bit of the blues. i stroke her hair, say “poor lady, your soul’s tired, your spirit’s depleted, and your body’s turning on you.” moving always costs a lot of our psychic reserves, as does figuring out the unknown rules of the new strange town - and this place is strange. toss in her on-coming period and this being her 3rd day without hash after smoking for 31 days, it adds up. i’m used to the having/not-having cannabis cycle after my 40 years of serious research. i’m not used to the multiple inner costs of constant traveling and endless homelessness though. fortunately whenever one of us is down, the other steps up.

it’s cooler here - 75 to 85 degrees versus marrakesh’s mid to upper 90s. there the street cats sought shade. here they seek sun. we call our street ‘cat alley’. k’s worried all the kittens are dying. i pointed out if that were so we wouldn’t be seeing all the adult cats. must be hundreds if not thousands inside these walls.

i’m down 3 pounds to 173 again (i’m 6 foot 2 and a half inches - i lost half an inch somewhere along the way). we’ve no refrigerator and only a 2 burner camp stove to cook on. i’ll be down to the 160s before we leave. started the year at 190. my brain’s filling up while my brawn is depleting… i’m losing meat as i gain mind. brain brawn meat mind.

plus lady’s dieting - she wants to lose the last 20 pounds. if she does, she’ll have lost an entire lady k of weight. lost her weight, lost her 5 couches, lost her 1st husband, lost her job, and for the past 10 months even lost her country of origin. but then is it really “lost” when it’s let go on purpose? when lady’s dieting, i lose weight too because she cooks less food less often, and i no longer can resort to my basic food group diet of coffee, cookies, candy, ice cream and pizza i followed before she moved into my life. our usual meal now is cut up cucumbers, tomatoes and avocados in balsamic vinegar, olive oil with smeared garlic.

k’s at the hammam, a public bath. this one’s for women only (normally one side is fem, the other men). sitting here in empty apartment, i realize how little time we’ve spent apart. past 9 months she’s walked the moors once, taken the london subway twice, gone running a bunch, seen the hairdresser a few times, and went shopping twice with the belgium lady. other than that (and a couple amsterdam cyber cafes on my own), we’ve been together 24/7.

i’ve always been a loner, yet now find it strange to be alone. my spirit and soul are no longer only my own. when we first came to morocco, she refused to go out alone due to the horror stories and online warnings - but here in essaouira she feels safe. sitting here alone, i realize this is not my journey, this is lady’s journey - my journey is lady.

have to look both ways before going outside. we’re in an 8 foot wide crooked alley where motorbikes and bicycles whiz by, weaving through foot traffic at amazing speeds. we could be hit simply stepping out our door. it’s a noisy place too - people pulling carts with wheels clacking on alley stones… bicycles clinging bells or honking horns… children laughing shrieking playing… multiploids of people talking shouting arguing in arabic and french… babies crying… seagulls exclaiming need for food and territory in ugly squawking… roosters constantly crowing - a rich tapestry of sound that begins at sunrise and continues past midnight.

day 3:
went walking along the beach before breakfast. since the tide was out, we walked on the bottom of the ocean shallows as well. went out to an ancient shattered rock fort. coming back, a guy with 4 camels came by, sold us a camel ride back to town. when the camel went to his knees to let me off, i would have been thrown had i not held tight. early morning west african coast, low tide sea bottom, and camels - not a bad start to the day.

“clean sheets, redemption, and you” - a line from a russ vidrick poem running through lady’s head. we bought new sheets and a blanket so we can sleep without dust and mustiness and clogged sinuses the next morning.

here’s a foto of our apartment - 2 bedrooms, a sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom in a 20 foot by 20 foot sort of square (there are no right angles in the place, nor in essaouira or marrakech as far as that goes).

day 4:
found a public bath for men. now both of us can the wash the filth from our flesh. bought a map of the city, found a laundry and super(ette) market. discovered a field of debris where lady can harvest good garbage for her art. each day we’re making it a bit better for ourselves. make it in morocco, we can make it anywhere - maybe even america.

speaking of which, we’re getting tired. after morocco and scotland and london and france (and looking at my wife’s underpants), we’re heading back to cleveland to visit for a few months, then heading down to new orleans to live for awhile. there we can have culture, read poetry in english, lady can continue to speak french, and it’ll have a foreign, exotic and 3rd world flavor as well. can’t wait for next hurricane season. “drove my chevy to the levy” to see what had died.

on our way to the laundry, we went through local neighborhoods. saw folk looking at us differently - they always look, but this look was more surprised. glanced about, saw we were once again a minority of two. said to lady, “i don’t think we’re in tourist territory anymore, toto.”

in the narrow alleys inside the old city, an arab touched my arm. i stopped, thinking yet another beggar, but he spouted angry sounds in my face, whapped my shoulder, stalked off. my only guess is maybe i crossed his path as we turned. he was young and militant, probably doesn’t care for slow moving erratic tourists. i’d resent us were i he. it’s a lose-lose situation for them - they need our money, but most of us are so insensitive and slow it’s hard to tolerate us. still, he was a rude prick. my first example of open anger. lady wants me to shave my moustache back off because i look meaner and more psychotic without it - rather like an amish mass murderer. not many wives talk like that. going to do it too.

yesterday’s camel ride aggravated my groin muscle. so did this morning’s sex. guess that means i can never have sex with a camel.

first full day:
at last, someone stepped out of an alley and asked if we wanted to buy drugs. AND, we turned him down. let’s hear it for principle and self control. came here to not smoke, and we won’t - at least not for awhile - no sense being too goody-two-shoes about it. but i have figured out the secret - you want it, it’s not offered… you don’t want it, it’s available.

perhaps i’ll pretend not to want fame and fortune so they’ll come my way. though fame is becoming more and more unimportant. only thing fame would do is give us more artistic opportunities, and maybe let me get stoned with willie nelson, have bob dylan record one of my poems. fortune would be nice though… we’d use it for ourselves, help our friends, the world, others.

found food, cleaning supplies, internet cafe on our own. washed the pillow cases, removing dust and must. cleaned floor. found our way through the medina and out along the beach. each day we’ll make our life here more to our liking - i figure in 10-20 years we’ll have made it bearable. for wandering off the edge of the known universe, we’re not doing too badly. it’s an improvement over this morning anyway when we first stepped into the alley and saw large splatters of blood, then came back to find our unlocked door ajar.

day 2:
our marrakech guide hamid was always pushing to make more money off us - tried to do our laundry, offered to give me a massage - even offered the last day to buy hash in marrakech, ride the bus 4 hours here, deliver it, ride 4 hours back. he cost us way too much money (thanks to lady’s kind heart, which is even softer than mine), but he also cost us psychically… it’s hard to be around such calculating naked need. but he crossed the line our last day - he showed up uninvited as we left to walk 3 blocks to the taxi, tried to carry our bags… when i said no and he couldn’t figure out how to get some money out of us, he told lady he had no money for food, so of course we gave him 100 dirham ($12). if he were so poor, how did he pay 3 men to add a room to the top of his house with our guide money? seeing so much poverty here makes me despise the rich.

on the other hand, gave a beggar a dirham today (12 cents u.s.) and got a smile. not a bad bargain. we could get 8 smiles for a dollar, more if there were a sale.

oh dear - our electricity just quit. 10 in the morning so don’t know if it’s just us or the area. if it is just us, don’t know what to do. second full day in this strange city and…

TOUJOURS MAINTENANT

Je suis normalement normal
mais pas de juste maintenant
et c’est toujours maintenant

Il y a deux fois:
Il y a maintenant,
et
pas de maintenant

Aujourd’hui,
et
pas de aujourd’hui

Ce n’est jamais demain

Cela est pour quoi je suis presque normal
nominalement maintenant

- S B Smith & Lady Kathy

EVER NOW

I’m normally normal
but just not now
and it’s always now

there’re two times:
there’s now,
and
not now

today,
and
not today

it’s never tomorrow

that’s why I’m nearly normal
nominally now