by Craig Grant
I knew she was right. I knew exactly what she was talking about.
I said, “They’ll likely forgive us.”
Kelly said, “Never completely.”
Can’t remember what we talked about after that. I remember the way her cheekbones looked beneath her skin, her gawky walk, toes out. The way the world seemed to float up from the Venice puddles.
I guess we weren’t paying attention to where we were going because we ended up getting lost. Every alley we went down ended up in a drop-off into some canal.
I tried phoning up Dave. But the line was busy.
Finally Kelly took out this nickel and flipped it whenever we had to choose an alley to go down, and eventually we ended up at a dock where people were waiting for a canal taxi.
“I’m impressed,” I told Kelly.
“That was the whole point,” she said.
The canal taxi back to the bus was so crowded we had to stand up and Kelly ended up having to press her body against me.
I didn’t mind.
She didn’t seem to mind much either.
When we got to the bus, Pete said to Kelly, “I wouldn’t hang around much with this guy, Kelly, if I were you. He’s got bad habits and they might be contagious.”
Kelly looked back at me and smiled and then she looked at Pete. “Thanks for the advice,” she said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
from Kelly’s diary
Oct. 18
We’re finally on the bus. C thinks we would’ve been better off with the Fr. pervert. Major thing is, F.’s on the bus. C’s still not sure how she feels about that, or so she says. She’s relieved more than anything else, & it shows. Mars is hitting my Venus, & I have a feeling a guy named Mick would like to hit on me, or vice versa. It’s early morning. Just left Venice. We’re driving along the craggy Adriatic coastline. The sky is turquoise, edged with peach, garnished with a few cherry-coloured cloud swirls. The driver, a matinee-idol type, who’s cohabiting, of course, with the one cover-girl candidate on the bus, looked at our medical books this morning, & told C. she needs another cholera vaccination for Iran because her previous ones were only 7 days apart. Other negative notes: Rob & Suzie, Aussies both. The former has a crazy bend of mind & the latter wants to be my friend. This morning the former walked past me & licked his lips while looking at my crotch: a first. This afternoon the latter sat down next to me & told me what it’s like to be a sex surrogate for sexually confused people. I have a feeling she’s sexually confused herself. Tho I’m probably not the best one to judge.
Frank’s daybook entry
Today’s day 8, and I don’t have any idea what God did on the 8th day. I know we drove to Zadar. Suzie told me that might be a good place to start, when she dropped the daybook in my lap while I was busy trying to digest my supper. Which was sole of Hush Puppy with a mushroom sauce, or something.
Whoops. I take that back. It might be my turn to cook next. Actually, it was real tasty, whatever it was. So here we are in Zadar. Pete told us just before we got to camp that there’s a mass grave of plague and Holocaust victims not too far away.
I believe it. These are the spookiest trees I’ve ever seen. They look like hangin’ trees. But maybe that has something to do with the saloon brawl that almost broke out today on the bus. Forget that. Like Kelly keeps saying, let’s don’t dwell on the negative. So what else happened today? Well we ran out of eggs and cream and had to make do with black coffee and stale corn flakes for breakfast. Day started out sunny but around about three some scary-looking black clouds raced in from the south and it rained cats and gophers for a while. The trip’s been good value, as Suzie puts it, as far as getting your mark and lira’s worth of sunshine’s concerned but now that we’ve crossed over into Yugoslavia, maybe the dinar won’t buy us as much. But something positive must’ve happened today. Oh, yeah. Pete found enough wood that wasn’t damp to build a campfire. That was nice. Until those huge mosquitoes moved in and drove everyone into the bus. Well, almost everyone.
Mick
Not too much happened the rest of that day. The cantina threw another chicken on the fire for us but afterwards everybody kind of avoided the outdoor veranda for some reason. Nobody was in a party mood, I guess. So I took a walk down along the beach and almost tripped over Tim deLuca meditating. I would’ve tripped over him if it wasn’t for the fact he was chanting to himself, just a bit, while he sat on the beach Buddha style.
I tiptoed away. I didn’t want to disturb him.
What happened the next day? Right. Me and Patrick and Jenkins, sitting at the tables—on the bus, I mean—playing penny-point poker with lire, and there was Rockstar all of a sudden, standing in the aisle, wearing his good T-shirt, the one with the bloodstains on it and the four safety pins holding it together, and he’s saying, hey, you sooks mind if I play?
No one says yes, we do mind, lots. Though Patrick looks like he’s about to.
Rockstar sits down and I deal him a hand.
I was running short on money a lot quicker than I thought I would.
Only problem is, I can’t get Dave on the phone, bastard plays that trick on me sometimes, and so Patrick ends up winning most of the pots.
The Yugoslavian border shows up just in time, since they have a moneychanger there who scalps a few American traveller’s cheques for us which allows us to keep playing poker all the way to Zadar. Thirty clicks from Zadar I finally get Dave on the phone. I offer Patrick double or nothing on the pot in the middle of the table. He looks at me and says no thanks. But I’ve been losing so bad, Rockstar reaches into his pants and pulls out a money belt. A thick money belt. Plucks from it a couple thousand dinars, lays them on the table.
By the time we get to Zadar Rockstar doesn’t have a single dinar left. Most of them are in Patrick’s pockets.
Mainly because Dave played a little trick on me, said Patrick only had two aces when in fact he had four.
Dave doesn’t really understand cards too well, that’s the problem. Or so he says.
Anyway, so Rockstar loses a whole bunch of money to Patrick. Which didn’t exactly please him a whole bunch. I think he called Patrick a bloody poker shark a couple times, along with the usual things. Patrick didn’t let it faze him. I think he was getting used to having Rockstar call him names.
But then Rockstar pulls out Jenkins’s steel-tipped pen and sticks it up Patrick’s nose like Polanski did to Jack Nicholson’s in Chinatown, and Rockstar hisses, “Nice little kitty-cat. Nice little poofter. Poofter want to lose his nose?”
Patrick’s eyes bug out like the fenders on a ’59 Olds.
He manages to say, “Not particularly.”
Rockstar laughs, takes the pen away, saunters back to the back seat, where he sits and stares at Patrick until we get into Zadar.
I have to give Patrick credit. He’s a real actor. He picked up his copy of The Honourable Schoolboy and read it like nothing had happened.
I happened to notice, though, that he didn’t turn nearly as many pages as he usually did when he read.
I forget what Zadar looked like. Big empty city, as I recall.
Pete didn’t take us on any sightseeing tours. Everybody just sat around after supper, reading or writing letters home. I don’t know where Patrick was, he wasn’t around.
Me, I played a couple games of gin with Charole and did my best to keep my eyes from wandering over in Kelly’s direction. She was sitting talking to Teach about where her planets were. Kind of thing you’d expect a witchy-looking woman like her to do. And I said to myself that if I was going to let her cast any spells on me, I’d better save it until near the end of the trip, just in case I screwed things up. Because that’s one of the things I do best with women. Screw things up. And so I did my best not to look at her too much.
Instead I talked Charole out of finding some little Greek island and grabbing Jenkins off the bus. She said her wrist hurt and it needed some Mediterranean sunshine in order to heal.
I knew that if she got off t
he bus, Jenkins would get off the bus, and Kelly would get off the bus. And that would be terrible.
And so I managed to tell her that India is one of those places that changes your soul forever. This was Dave’s idea and I went along with it because I knew it was in my best interest.
I said, “People are always coming back from India and saying how it’s changed their perception of life right around and they’re never the same again. It’s the kind of experience, you know, that doesn’t even happen to people sometimes, let alone once in a lifetime. How can you pass that up?”
She looked at me like I was some kind of venereal fungus and said, “I don’t think you have the complete picture, Mick. Let’s switch this game to Hearts.”
I said fine.
She kept laying the Queen of Spades on me for the rest of the night and hardly said anything.
It wasn’t one of the more exciting nights on the trip.
(an aerogramme)
Zadar Oct. 18 Dear Dex,
We’re on the bus. Finally. After a strange trip through Europe.
C with a cast on her left wrist. Me with the Stuck in a Tour Bus Blues. We caught up to the bus in Venice. F went ahead without us. Which has left a few tense feelings. C.’s been giving him a sub-zero shoulder. Kind of a strange troupe we’re travelling with. Your expected lost souls, truth seekers & sybarites, none of whom know where they’re going so they’re going to India. & 1 borderline psychopath, a punk rocker named Rob who likes to wave his steel-tipped pen in people’s faces, & he can’t take a hint, he inflicts his personality on all & sundry & refuses to make himself scarce. He’s having a deadening effect on everyone’s psyches. He’s the main topic of conversation in the women’s cans. (We’re getting used to cold showers. & awful toilet paper, or none at all.) C wants us to leave the bus when we get to Athens. She wants to camp out on some small Greek island. But Mick, your basic rebel type, talked her out of it. Said the trip could change our lives, etc., we’d never know what we missed. & so we’re going to hang in there at least until Istanbul & take stock of our finances there. Right now we’re camped near a mass grave of plague & Holocaust victims. Place has all the ambience of that landscape in The 7th Seal. Be glad you aren’t here. Take care, K.
Mick
The next town down the road was Dubrovnik. I remember Dubrovnik real well. That was where Charole got this great idea to go picking apples. That was where I saved Patrick’s life the first time.
The drive there along the coast reminded me of that place on the Pacific Coast Highway where I cracked up the old man’s Buick. Lots of cliffs. Lots of water below.
It was after we got to this camp not too far from Dubrovnik, in a forest of apple trees, and after we set up the tents and had supper, that Charole got the idea to go picking apples. This is on the bus, when we’re all sitting around and Neil Young is on the tape player and I’m trying to get the words to “Comes a Time,” just in case I ever want to play it on guitar. The chords to that song are real easy.
So I don’t pay any attention to Charole at first but then
Kelly asks me and Jenkins to come along, so I do, and when Kelly spots some big juicy apples on some branches up out of reach, I’m the guy that’s fingered. Jenkins looked like he had a few more muscles than me, though nobody said that was the reason. They said it was because I looked lighter.
Anyway, I go along with it. Stick my sneaker in Jenkins’s hand and he boosts me up and Charole and Kelly are holding on to my legs as I go along from branch to branch, picking apples off twigs and dropping them into a gunny sack that Jenkins is holding out.
I guess I reached too far for one of the apples, as Charole put it in the daybook the next day.
And it’s really too bad that when I fell, her and Kelly didn’t let go of my legs sooner.
I came down with a thud that loosened at least one of my fillings.
Kelly was real sympathetic afterwards, after Jenkins and Charole had taken off to bake an apple pie in the bus’s portable oven. She asked me if I was hurt. I said just a tad.
She smiled at me.
“Want me to kiss it better?” she said.
I said, “Couldn’t hurt.”
Just a little surprised that she’d say such a thing. So she gave me a kiss on the cheek. The first time I felt her lips.
“Feel better?” she said.
“Lots,” I said.
Then there was the problem of what to say next. I wanted to say, hey, why don’t we go hump in the woods and get this over with so we can relate to each other on a normal basis. But I didn’t.
And then Kelly said, “Well, it’s been another long day on the planet, better catch some zeds,” and I said, “Yeah, sounds like a pregnant idea,” and then she was walking away from me through the dark.
Seems like every night on the trip there was somebody walking away from me, through the dark, even though it probably only happened maybe half a dozen times.
19/10/78
So this is what Kelly and I were so anxious to catch up to. A bus full of lazy tourists, reading or sleeping, sitting and sewing, drinking and gambling, while the spectacle of the Adriatic Coast cruises past the windows unnoticed. Ho hum. We don’t want to get too excited and waste all our energy too early, huh? We’re waiting for the Taj.
Though some people did get excited yesterday. We all know money is the root of all evil.
All of which leads me to the message our driver has asked me to pass along. If you boys can’t gamble in peace, this bus will adopt Merry Prankster principles: you’re either on the bus, or off the bus.
Only a warning.
Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
Yesterday we got to camp next to a city sprawled over thirty-six square miles. Tonight we’re camped in an apple grove. Not to fear, there’s no snakes, no real snakes, in sight. So Kelly and I thought it’d be safe to maybe go pick some forbidden fruit, so we could make some tasty Yugoslavian apple pie and see how it compares to the American variety. We enlisted two of the more amenable Merry Globesters to help us pluck the fruit from those high, high branches, and things went swimmingly, for a while. But then the mission turned tragic. Maybe we should’ve been happy with the miserable worm-riddled, low-slung fruit we had. We definitely should’ve listened to the bleatings of the one Merry Globester we did hoist up beyond his petard. He really didn’t have much sense of balance. Or maybe it was all his fault. Maybe he shouldn’t have reached for that last lonely apple. Browning’s poetic musings about arm length and paradise work well on paper but are less practical in day-to-day reality.
Be that as it may, Kelly accepts full responsibility for the shiner that may soon bloom like a fat harvest moon on Mick’s face. She says she’s sorry, Mick, for coming up with the idea in the first place. You get the first piece of pie, as soon as it’s out of the oven. And now Kelly’s on to other things, primarily doing what she does best: getting writer’s cramp. In the last hour she’s composed nine aerogrammes home. A record, said Patrick, noting the gigantic size of the Slavic stamp, that won’t be licked any time soon.
By the way, would anyone like an apple? Mick picked lots before his fall.
Mick
The next morning was one of those grey, dreary mornings I’m used to in Vancouver, and if my jaw hadn’t been hurting so bad I would’ve got homesick. If my jaw hadn’t been hurting so bad I would’ve remembered that it’s usually smart to get on the bus last. That way you don’t get many unpleasant surprises.
I got on the bus and sat at the back and lit up a State Express. I was out of Marleys. Rockstar got on behind me and sat across the aisle from me, and took Patrick’s wineskin out from under his shirt and offered it to me.
If my head hadn’t been hurting and if Patrick hadn’t been way up at the front and if there hadn’t been brandy in it, instead of water or wine, I probably wouldn’t have accepted it. But there was brandy in it, not water or wine, and I didn’t see what harm it could do, and so I had a gulp or two, handed it
back. The brandy burnt all the way down.
It made that State Express taste real nice. Almost as good as a Marlboro.
Rockstar took the wineskin and let the brandy gurgle down his throat and then he wiped his mouth and said, “You know, Muckle, you shouldn’t smoke.”
“I know, Rockstar,” I said. “But there ain’t a whole helluva lot I can do about it.”
“Me mom smoked lots,” he says. “And then she died.” “That’s the chance you take,” I said.
I finally looked at Rockstar’s eyes, which is something I usually tried to avoid doing.
On this particular morning they were wall-to-wall pupil. He had an acid vibe shimmering around his skull.
He tips up the wineskin again and lets way too much brandy gurgle down his throat and then he grins at me, wipes his mouth, offers me some more. I say no thanks.
By this time we’re on the outskirts of Dubrovnik. Which was a nice little city actually. Looked like one of those towns you see in old Frankenstein movies. Weren’t too many cars around, though. Made me think of that old Mel Brooks line in The Producers. Yugoslavia’s great, lots of nice scenery and baked potatoes, but on Saturday night Tito always gets the car.
Of course when we get off the bus, Rockstar latches onto me like a leech and the first thing we decide to do is go looking for some Yugo beer. Everybody else goes and walks around the rampart walls. But I didn’t want to do that because I’m not crazy about high walls .