Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India

by Cleo Odzer

  "What have you DONE," she exclaimed, entering as I finished. "You DEAR!"

  I couldn't spend time with Petra the following months, though. I couldn't afford to miss the business I had left. She, in turn, couldn't visit me because she wasn't supposed to walk. As it was, she walked too much, and everyone worried about her. She suffered painfully.

  Meanwhile the Saloona suffered also. The Sikh chai shop next door stole more of my customers. Their business thrived and mine was all but finished. Keeping myself in dope required sleight-of-hand manoeuvres. Other Freaks besides me sold dope or coke. If I didn't have the cash or the will to go to Rachid's man in Mapusa, I'd arrange to meet a customer near one of the alternate sources. To prevent the customer and the source from meeting each other. I'd have to exchange one's money for the other's dope without ei ther suspecting, a feat requiring deft chicanery.

  I sold more of my belongings. Strangers now wandered through my hallowed rooms as if I were having a garage sale.

  "How much do you want for this?" asked an unknown person pointing to my beloved Laotian marriage canopy.

  "Four hundred rupees," I said.

  "I’ll give you fifty."

  Fifty! What did I Look like? A fishwife? Did they expect me to bargain over cherished possessions? At first I would walk away without answering. But as the weeks went by I hesitated more and acquiesced with greater frequency. Bit by bit I sold the things that defined my Goa Freak existence.

  New Year's Eve 1980. In four months would be my thirtieth birthday. By then I’d have nothing left. The waterbed was gone. The downstairs stereo. The hanging chair. The rocking chair. The cuckoo clock. I rubbed a band over the empty spaces they'd left, massaging the ghosts of once-loved objects. Serge used to sit in that hanging chair, I thought as I looked at the hook from which it had hung. Alehandro had sat in the rocker the time he'd guarded Mental as he cowered beneath the mattress. Maybe soon I'd have to sell the mattress too.

  "I'll give you one rupee for this Jefferson Airplane tape," said a browser.

  That had been Neal's favourite tape. "Okay," I answered numbly.

  To the fence in Mapusa I brought two rings from an old teenage romance and the silver Aries spoon that had been a birthday present from Dayid in Montreal.

  Then I discovered a convenient method of business-I joined forces with the Sikhs. When a customer came I'd take his or her money, go upstairs, slip out the bedroom door, and dash to the Sikh place to buy from them. This strategy solved the Problem of insufficient funds to buy stock. In three minutes I could be descending the stairs without anyone suspecting I'd left the house. Though everybody knew the Sikhs sold drugs, "purists" refused to deal with them and preferred to buy from their own kind. They came to me.

  Collaborating with the Sikhs offered another advantage—their willingness to exchange things for dope. They soon possessed my tape machine and a fan. They even accepted the old useless kilo of border hash I'd had for years.

  One day I heard that Eve and Ha were in Goa. Rumor said they'd been having a hard time, struggling to live in different peoples huts. Searching for them, I followed a trail of horror stories and a variety of sleazy people, until finally someone directed me to a Jesus Freak community on the other side of the paddy fields.

  Four white-robed devotees were sanding wood outside the house and blessed me as I approached.

  "Peace," said a bearded man sitting on the front steps. "Have you heard the good news?"

  "Uh . . . yes. Thank you. I'm looking for . . . "

  "Jesus is back and he's calling for you."

  "Well, that's very nice, but I'm looking . . ."

  "He loves you, you know."

  "Uh, I'm . . . happy to hear that . . . Do you know Eve?"

  "He's watching you all the time. He's looking out for you."

  "Eve has a little girl about four years old?"

  "I LOVE JESUS!" he suddenly sang, and a voice somewhere nearby joined in with a "HAIL, MARY!" I stepped around his robed knee, which blocked the way, and proceeded up the stairs. "God bless you," he said to my departing form.

  On the porch I found a Westerner sweeping the floor. A Westerner doing housework! What an unheard-of thing in that land of cheap labour. His "Welcome, sister," discouraged me from further inquiry. I entered the house and succeeded in searching three rooms before being confronted head-on by another person in white with a smooth senile.

  "Welcome, sister," she said, clasping her hands together. "Can I help you?"

  "I'm looking for someone named Eve. She has a daughter Mahara. About this high."

  "Oh, yes. She came to us a week ago."

  The woman led me out the back door, and I found Eve outside putting dishes on a table.

  "Eve!" I kissed her and turned to Ha. Neal's little girl sat stiffly on the wooden table. She looked at me but didn't move or smile or change her serious expression. "Hi, Ha!" I said. She didn't answer.

  "Look, Ha, It's Keo. Say hi to Keo," Eve whispered in that soft voice of hers. Ha stared. After her first glance at me. Eve didn't look my way again. When she finished laying plates, she began moving them around. Ha just stared.

  "Um . . . I wanted to see how you were," I said to Eve. "Took forever to trace your path."

  "You co me here for us? Nobody else even says hello."

  I didn't know what to say. Eve didn't say anything more.

  "Um . . . I met the guy from that big hut you lived in . . ."

  "He threw us out. Said we couldn't stay there anymore. Before that we slept in the hut next to it, but they threw us out too. We were in Baga a while, but that didn't last long. They've been nice to us here, so far."

  "Isn't it hard living with these people, though? I've been blessed nine times, and I've only been here a few minutes."

  She shrugged. "You should see mealtimes."

  Silence.

  "What about dope?" I asked.

  "I have opium."

  Eve still avoided looking up. So far she'd moved one plate to three different locations, and she seemed about to pick it up again. Ha sat there unmoving.

  "Hey, Ha, how're you doing?" I said. "What's that in your hand? Can I see? Will you show it to me?" She moved away as I stepped closer to her. "Please?"

  "NO!" she yelled angrily and swiveled to present me with her back. Silence.

  Eve poked at another plate and said, "Thank you for coming."

  I grasped at what seemed like a good moment to get away. "Well, stop by the house sometime and visit. Don't forget, okay?" Ha ignored my goodbye wave; Eve half-smiled at a spot midway between her and me. I backed out of the yard and took a side route so I wouldn't have to pass the well-wishers.

  "GOD BLESS YOU," shouted the man on the front steps. "AND DON’T FORGET THE GOOD NEWS. TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT."

  Now I had to prepare for Eve's visit. For sure she'd come; she knew I was still dealing drugs. I didn't have much left for her to steal since I'd peddled my jewellery and returned Kadir's. I made a quick run to collect stash bottles and emergency caches of opium. I hid them upstairs under a mattress. I'd have to remember to keep valuables on my body when she arrived and prevent her from going to the second floor. I'd also have to watch her behaviour toward the one or two customers I had left. I didn't want her driving them away.

  Within hours of my finding her, Eve appeared at the door. "Hi. We're here," she whispered.

  From that day on she came regularly and stayed for hours, sitting quietly and smoking bhongs. She never looked anyone in the face when she spoke. Instead she'd fidget with her belt, her hair, or whatever lay in front of her. She made people nervous. When she was out of earshot they'd take me aside.

  "That's a strange one you've got there," they'd tell me.

  "Oh, Eve's okay."

  "Her kid's even worse," they'd comment next.

  Ha had become a nasty beast. She'd yell and throw things and stamp her foot and do everything you told her not to. She never smiled, never laughed. She'd grow crankiest at night. Eve let
Ha carry on by herself, no matter what she was doing—a fit of rage, even a destructive rampage. Not only did I have to watch Eve, I had to watch Ha too.

  "No, Ha, please don't touch that," I would say, spying her molesting a souvenir I'd bought in Moscow. "It comes from Russia." Ha loved it when you told her not to do something; it gave her a sense of direction. "NO, Ha. I said do NOT touch that. You'll ruin the fur." Just what she wanted to hear. "STOP! Don't pull the fur OUT!"

  Eve paid no heed. Only if it was late at night and Ha was particularly bratty would Eve finally call her over.

  "Come here, Ha," she'd whisper. Then Eve would blow hash smoke in the face of Neal's daughter. "It helps put her to sleep," she explained. Yes, it was time for me to leave Goa.

  Occasionally Eve managed to get her dexterous hands on something or other, but since I kept money and drugs tied around my waist, she only stole candles and rolls of toilet paper. The house was bereft of items worth stealing.

  Empty spaces left by sold objects surrounded me. They matched the empty spaces inside me left by missing people. I sold the four-foot Kashmiri lamp that had hung over it. Now the dining room was a vast desert I hated to walk through. Gone from the bedroom were the Laotian mobiles that had hung between the bags of glucose at the glucose party. The fancy brass doorknobs and light switches in the shape of Hindu gods were gone too.

  One day I found myself with no dope in the house. Not a granule. I'd already snorted off the carpet whatever vaguely resembled smack, along with a lot of dust and sand. I possessed only Opium and the package of morphine that had been sitting in my blowtorched safe for years. Yuck. Morphine was disgusting. You couldn't smoke it or snort it because of its horrible taste. Maybe I could fix it? I'd never tried fixing myself before.

  Well, why not? I'd give it a try.

  The only vein I could see was a tiny one in the middle of my right arm. I hit it first try. But I felt nothing. Maybe I hadn't used enough powder. I wanted to do it again, but now a bump covered the vein and I could no longer see it. Veins were visible on my hand, though. I decided to try one of those. Couldn't get it. I tried again. It moved. I tried a different vein. Damned thing wouldn't hold still! I tried over and over and over. No good. After a half hour holes speckled my hand, but not one of them had reached a vein. Hmmm. Interesting. Was this how Maria had felt when she couldn't get a hit? By the time I finally gave up, the back of my hand sported dozens of red dots.

  "What happened to your hand?" Eve whispered later when she came by.

  "Couldn't get a vein."

  "Rands are impossible. The veins roll. You need someone to hold one in place."

  Yes, it was past time for me to leave Goa.

  I needed a departure date. Any date. It didn't matter. How about March sixth? Okay. March sixth it is. On March sixth I'd leave Goa forever.

  "Come here. Bach," I called, having made the decision. His ears were my favourite place to wipe tears.

  I owned one special item—a three-foot Balinese wooden sculpture I'd shipped from Denpasar. A myriad of carved figures peeped from its core. Painted in pinks, purples, and gold, its flat top made it usable as a table. I couldn't bear the thought of selling it. How could I condemn such a wondrous piece of art to the smoky back room of the Sikh chai shop?

  I decided to give it to Canadian Jacques. A bulky chunk of heavy wood, it should probably not have been lugged across the shadeless sand in the hot mid afternoon.

  "Bonjour," said Jacques as I came in. "What have you there?"

  "It's for you. My last memory. I want to give it to you before I resort to selling it. I'm leaving soon."

  "It's beautiful. If you return, you can have it back."

  "I'm not coming back."

  "You never know. You might luck into something this monsoon." I shook my head.

  "When are you going?"

  "March sixth. I'll go to the consulate in Bombay and ask them to send me to New York."

  "They do that?"

  I nodded. I had it planned. "They'll give me money to go to the embassy in Delhi, which is where I have to go anyway to finish my court case and pick up my passport. Then the embassy will provide the ticket to New York."

  "You Americans have all the advantages. I don't think my embassy would pay for me to go home."

  "No, I think they all do. They can't just leave you to starve in some foreign country. I'll have to reimburse them, of course. They're not going to hand me a free ticket. Even the American embassy won't do that."

  "What about your dog?" he asked, giving a not-too-pleased look at Bach, who was sniffing a pile of his clothes.

  "I'll have to leave him. He's an alien; the U.S. would never allow him into the country. He doesn't have papers. No chance." There was a huge lump in my throat. "I think land in New York dead of a broken heart."

  Later that afternoon I presented Alehandro with the red Buddha bhong. Let the fat Buddha smile for the crowd at Alehandro's. The living room carpets had been sold, and the sacred pipe deserved better than to sit on a naked floor.

  In February the Bugs took over the house. Couldn't they have waited another month? They invaded the bedroom first. I woke up one morning to find, not one, but two trails of ants marching on my body. Eeek. A troupe of large black ones had entered under the outside door. They strode across the red-and-white linoleum, mounted the carpet, hiked up the mattress via my pink satin sheet, proceeded over my naked back, came around my waist, hopped to the sheet from my stomach, then made their way over the carpet on the other side, across the linoleum, up the wall, and out the window. The smaller grey ants took approximately the same route but traversed my legs. Hey, come on, guys! There must be an easier road than this. Especially since the bedroom was on the second floor. I'd seen ants plenty of times before, but they'd usually had the courtesy to go around the bed. Many a time I'd amused myself by watching them scatter in confusion as I plopped something in their path. This new habit of theirs was a little much. I knew the root of the problem—I'd given my insecticide spray to Petra.

  Downstairs I was faced with another predicament: Bach's flea collar had expired. My poor friend scratched continually. To make matters worse, the little buggers over bred themselves and had abandoned him in search of vaster horizons. Now the fleas were jumping all over the house. If I'd had the insecticide spray, I could have killed the fleas and obliged the ants to find an alternate roadway. Alas, the spray was gone, and I couldn't afford a new one.

  I went to Petra's hut—only to discover she'd left Goa. There was nothing in the hut but a shred of sari hanging from the doorway and the broken top of a kerosene lamp.

  To live in India, one had to dominate one's insect Population. I'd lost control. In no time the fleas propagated themselves into every corner of the ground floor. They hopped nonstop. I could not read a page of a book without a flea hopping on it. The damned things were everywhere. They didn't five on me the way they did Bach; but there were so many of them that, no matter where I went, I was in their line of hop. And they bit. Hop, hop, bite.

  Only once-in-a-blue-moon customers weren't thrilled with them, either. "Hey! What was that?" a customer remarked.

  "What?"

  "Yo! There goes another one. What was it? Ow! Something bit me! Hey! Now it's jumped in the tobacco!"

  I couldn't ignore the fleas, though they didn't really bite that often. It was the racket they made—the sound of tiny footfalls as they hopped on the pages of the book I was reading. Very annoying. Then they'd slide down the crease between the pages and get stuck there.

  The ants were what really did me in. I hated waking up to two double lanes of parading feet criss-crossing my body. Eee! Get off me. SLAP. SLAP. SLAP. Actually, it was wiser not to get too excited. At the first hint of something amiss, the ants would panic and break their neat formation, each one running in a different direction. Which meant they'd be running in different directions over ME. The wisest way to handle the situation, when I awoke to it, was to calmly brush them off.

 
Though I couldn't afford a new spray can of insecticide, a packet of DDT powder cost only sixty paisa (sixty percent of one rupee). I tried it out. I sprinkled the white stuff across the ant trails. The ants didn't like it one bit. However, it didn't take them Long to find a way around it. They detoured up the wall. So I ended up with trails of white powder on the bedroom floor and trails of ants climbing the wall before descending to cross over me.

  Eventually the ants won. I retreated. I moved the carpet, the mattress, the little Kashmiri tables, the bhong. I dragged the whole lot into the movie room, which was bare now anyway.

  And then—more ants! Soon I was once again awakening to find ants strutting over me.

  I finally beat them. To an ant, a wrinkle in a piece of cloth could be Mount Everest. I collected clothes, bunched them together, and created an impassable mountain range around me before I went to sleep. It didn't work all the time, though. Sometimes, during the night, Bach would climb into bed next to me, and his body would flatten the wall of clothes. If he did that on both sides of me, that was all the encouragement the ants needed.

  Yes, it was way past time for me to leave Goa. Three days before my departure date, I found someone who wanted my projector and agreed to pay Maria's hospital bill. He kept the projector and I took back the movies. I let him have The Blob and The Thing That Swallowed the Earth.

  Everything had been sold. My souvenirs from Russia, my Japanese kimono, the topaz from Taiwan.

  On March fifth Sasha came by with some people I didn't know, including one beautiful guy in a silk lungi. I was immediately enamoured. He liked me too. When the others left, he stayed. He didn't even mind the fleas.

  "You're leaving?" he asked, seeing suitcases.

  "In the morning," I told him. "A taxi's coming to take me to the Panjim dock. I don't know how I'll fit in it with all this luggage."

  "I'll drive you to the boat on my bike, if you want. Then you can use the whole taxi for luggage."

  We stayed awake all night. I touched the long, brown hair curling around his shoulders—it took my mind off Bach, who was freaking out over the suitcases. Bach always freaked out when he saw a suitcase. By now he knew what a suitcase meant. I tried to ignore my furry blue-and white friend as he stuck his nose into open cases and shook his head furiously. Bach would look at a suitcase, look at me, and whine. He dragged his toy elephant to me by the ear that hadn't been chewed off yet. I pulled the ear off and packed it. Dawn came.