Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  I know what she’s getting at.

  I say, “Yeah, I feel the same way.” But it comes out sounding kind of lame. I have to come up with something else. “But you know what happens when cauldrons boil too long, don’t you?” I say.

  She looks at me. She’d been looking off into the mist in the canyon off to our left. “Since you asked, Mick,” she says. “Since you asked, I might as well tell you. I’m just a cauldron on simmer. For now.”

  I can tell she instantly feels embarrassed about saying that. Or maybe she figured it was time for a dramatic exit or something. Because she got up and left and went and sat next to Charole, who was reading. Didn’t look like she was anxious for any conversation or anything. But I could dig that. Kelly gave me something to chew on, for the rest of the trip through the Black Mountains. And I chewed on it over a game of gin with Jenkins.

  I didn’t mention anything else about his little trip across the plank. I was cool. Doesn’t mean I didn’t respect him for what he did, and I think Jenkins picked up on that and understood. Me and Jenkins didn’t have to talk much to each other. That was the funny thing about him and me. We just liked each other, though probably neither one of us could put an exact finger on why.

  Just the same, I think most of our nerves were shot by the time we got to Skopje which was near midnight, I think. It was still raining. And I don’t know about anybody else but I crashed just as soon as we got the tents set up. The last thing I remember hearing was Rockstar asking Jenkins how he felt when he was out on that plank.

  “Was ya scared?” he asks.

  “Only shitless,” says Jenkins.

  And when I woke up in the morning, I thought, you know, Mickers, there seems to be a theme developing here, and maybe that was the first time I got this idea to maybe write a book. All about a holiday in hell, with lots of sex and drugs and violence in it. Even though by that time there wasn’t much sex and there weren’t many drugs.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 22

  Just left Skopje. Name says it all. A graveyard encircles the town. M called it Donut of the Dead. Yesterday a nightmare of washed-out roads & planks for bridges. F crawled across a plank to get us through a date with eternity. Stopped in a town called Ivangrad where Pete told us to spend all our dinars in the dining room of the Hotel Berane (they’re “worthless” in Greece) while he copped a nap on the back seat. C, D. & T & Μ. & I were the only ones with any to spend, so we gorged ourselves, shades of the Last Supper. But a grateful Last Supper. Talked about death. Mary said she’s never prayed so hard in her life as she did today. Talked about the poor male psyche, all those expectations of courage. Raised to fend off bullies & score hat tricks, all meaningless skills once they get past 20. After T. & M left, we got down to specifics. C’s feeling bad about how she’s treated F. Now that he’s a hero. D’s feeling bad about how Pete’s treating her. Seems he’s a heel. Then we talked about birth. D thinks she’s pregnant. Too soon to be Pete’s. Her boy friend dropped by the night before she left on the trip. Her diaphragm was at the bottom of the suitcase. Got to Skopje near midnight. Morning came too early. We’re on our way to Platamonas.

  Mick

  The next morning Jenkins woke me up, since Patrick didn’t bother to knock on our tent pole like he usually did, and when I crawled out onto the wet soppy grass, the first thing I saw was Dana, in her pyjamas, crawling out of Pete’s tent. She looked like something out of a Bergman movie. I said good morning to her, and she said is it, like she had her doubts. I said maybe, it was too early too tell.

  But it wasn’t too early to tell. It was a bad morning. Or

  noon. The showers were cold and there wasn’t any toilet paper. Brunch was coffee and com flakes. And it started raining again when we hit the highway. Besides that, I just wasn’t in a good mood. When I signed on with this trip, I was kind of hoping to have a fun holiday as part of the bargain and that just wasn’t working out.

  I did my best to be philosophical about it, though. After all, Kelly was on the bus, and that day, on the way to Greece, I got into a long conversation with her about life and what it was about, and all we came up with was that neither one of us had any idea and that we’d probably have to wait until we died to find out, which has to be one of life’s biggest ironies. I’ve asked Dave about it and he claims it’s a mystery to him too, why there happens to be life on this particular ball of dirt, spinning around this particular small star in this out-of-the-way corner of the universe. But he did go to the trouble of throwing some odds at me. The odds of the temperature being just so, so many years ago, to let such and such protons and chemicals fuse together, and the odds are something like sixteen trillion to one, and so the odds, he says, are that there is some kind of master plan at work. And I said as much to Kelly, but she said, “I don’t believe in math.”

  Then she smiled, so I smiled too. A little joke.

  We also got into talking about suicide. She said she’d tried it once, in high school. For no particular reason, she said. She just felt like it one Saturday night. I asked her how she tried to do it and she said pills.

  I said, “Oh. Gee, I kind of had you pegged for a razor lady, myself.”

  “Maybe next time,” she said.

  I told her about that time I tried to hang myself with Peggy dil-Schmidt’s pantyhose. And we figured it out. We did it in the same month. Which may or may not have cosmic significance, as Kelly said. We won’t know for sure until we

  die, she said.

  “If then,” I said.

  “If then,” she said. And there was a brief moment there, when we caught each other’s eyes. It was a moment of real communication. We were on each other’s wavelength and both of us knew it. And we didn’t say anything after that. We didn’t need to. We just sat and watched the scenery roll past.

  That was a great feeling. I could’ve sat there and watched the mountains roll past forever. But all the cosmic forces gave us was an hour.

  At the Greek border, a border agent came out, looked at our passports and medical books and waved us through.

  We camped that night at Platamonas which isn’t too far from Mt. Olympos. We put up the tents in a soft drizzle. The tents were just starting to get that mildew smell, from being packed up wet, and that mixed real nicely with the smell of Rockstar’s socks.

  Speaking of Rockstar, though, he didn’t spend the night with me and Jenkins, which broke both our hearts.

  “You don’t think he got lost somewhere, do ya?” said Jenkins.

  I said, “Nope.”

  We were just lying awake, listening to the rain patter on the tent canvas.

  “Well, you’re the psychic on the bus,” said Jenkins. “What’s he doing?”

  I really shouldn’t have let the cat out of the bag in Venice about being a psychic. Hardly a day went by when somebody didn’t bug me about it.

  I called up Dave and asked him and then I said, “Oh, he’s just getting some sexual therapy from Suzie.” Because that’s how Dave put it.

  “How d’ya mean?” said Jenkins.

  I said, “Well, it seems that Rockstar’s only got one testicle. His old lady chopped the other one off when she caught him playing with himself.”

  Jenkins gave me a weird look. “No kidding,” he said.

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  “Told ya. I’m psychic,” I said.

  Jenkins gave me a deadpan look I couldn’t have read with a microscope. “Oh, yeah, right,” he said.

  Jenkins said goodnight. I said goodnight. And I drifted into a dream in Dave’s TV where Rockstar and Suzie are sitting up in a bed with a real nice canopy and Rockstar’s naked except for a pair of grotty gotch and Suzie’s wearing skimpy midnight blue lingerie and they’re snorting coke and dropping acid and drinking retsina. Then Suzie goes down on Rockstar and when she comes up for air she tells him she’s weird, she knows it, but she’s got this thing for men who are completely fucked u
p, and Rockstar says that’s bloody nice, but if she ever tells anyone that he’s only got one bollock she’ll be the one who’s completely fucked up. Suzie goes back to work, except this time she put his one testicle in her mouth. Don’t you bloody dare, hisses Rockstar with a worried smile, and Suzie grins up at him and laughs and then the TV goes black and a few minutes after that Rockstar comes staggering through the tent flap and he steps on Jenkins’s face, or was that the next night?

  GREECE Platamonas—Athens

  Day 13

  Departure: 8:00 a.m.

  Route: Platam0nas—Larissa—Lamia—Athens Camp: Voulas; tel: 89.52.712.

  Points: 1. Just beyond Lamia there’s the Thermopylae monument, commemorating the place where Leonides and three hundred Spartans withheld the Persian army of Xerxes, in 480 B.C. (Those three hundred Cyprus trees you see aren’t there by coincidence.) I guess Xerxes’s army was some few thousand strong (can’t find a book anywhere that says exactly how many). The hot springs at the foot of the pass has lime, sulphur, salt and carbonic acid in it and they say it’ll cure your scrofula (whatever that is)* and your rheumatiz.

  2. Try not to get into Athens in time for rush-hour traffic. Might as well hit the Acropolis and the Parthenon right away. While they’re walking and gawking, you can pick up the mail at the Athena Club. You’re bound to get stalled in traffic somewhere, and that’ll be a good time to tell them that the Parthenon was built from 447 - 438 B.C. and it’s devoted to Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom. A guy named Phedias was head honcho of the architects. There are fifty columns in all, of Doric style. There used to be a 37 ft. gold and ivory statue of Athena until the Turks took it to Constantinople, and it was destroyed by fire. As for the Parthenon, some guys from Venice hit it with a cannonball in 1687 and the place hasn’t been the same since. There’s no single line that is perfectly straight. The most sacred place in the Acropolis is the Erectheion. This is where Athena and Poseidon had a little tiff concerning who should rule Athens. Poseidon struck the rock with his spear and a fountain sprang up. Athena caused an olive tree to grow on the spot. And then a temple was built which was converted into a Christian church for a while, until the Turks came through and turned it into a harem for a Turkish commander who had forty wives. No wonder the Greeks hate the Turks.

  3. Language lesson: Good morning—Kalimera. Goodbye—

  *A tubercular condition of the lymph glands. — D. W.

  112

  Kali andamosi. Please—Parakalo. Thank you—Efcharisto. Yes— Ne. No—Ochi. Good—Kali. Where’s the toilet?—Pou ine i oaleta? Ladies—Ginekon. Men—Andron. How much?— P0sso? The bill, please—To logariasm0, parakalo. Without oil, please—Horis lathi, parakalo. When?—Pote? Beer—Bira. Wine—Krasi. Red—Mavro. White—Aspro. Menu — Katalogo. Open—Anikton. Closed—Kliston. Breakfast— Proino. Eggs—Avga. Yoghurt—Yaour. Coffee—Kafe. One, two, three, four—Ena, dio, tria, tessera. Five, six, seven, eight—Pende, exi, epta, okto. Nine, ten—Enea, deka.10

  Mick

  Pete was playing a new tape on the way into Athens. Linda Ronstadt’s Living in the U.S.A. Great tape to have on a trip to India. And there was an Elvis tune on it, “Love Me Tender,” and so me and Kelly were talking about Elvis while the bus sat stalled in Athens’s nutso rush-hour traffic. We both agreed that Elvis’s Memphis album is one of the great albums of all time. And I told Kelly that I learned how to play guitar by listening to “Heartbreak Hotel,” which perked up her ears.

  “You know how to play guitar?” she said.

  “They call me Eric Clapton for short back in Kitsilano,” I said.

  She was sewing some leather. She was making a passport pouch for me since I’d forgotten to bring one along. I thought it was a neat thing for Kelly to do. Made me fall in love with her just that much more. Which was maybe the whole idea. Women are pretty sneaky when it comes to love. They’re all just a bunch of Venus’s flytraps and us males, of course, are the flies. Not that I’m bitching about it or anything. Soon just gave me a great sponge bath and so I just had to ask her to shack up with me once I get out of this hospital.

  She smiled, said sorry, she was still involved.

  Dave told me she was telling a little white lie there, so I called her on it. Told her I was psychic.

  Her eyes got big and wide. She said, “Really?”

  I said, “Really.”

  She said, “Am I going to have a baby soon?”

  Dave said most definitely. Within the year. I passed the info on.

  She smiled. “Oh, good.”

  I said, “Well, how can you have a baby if you don’t have a husband?”

  “I’ve already had a husband,” she said. “They’re no fun. Now I want a baby.”

  And then she took off. While I listened to Dave tell me she’d been having an affair with some married doctor in Bangkok she’d seen about once a month.

  “But he won’t be the father of her child,” said Dave, “he called off the affair a week ago,” and then hung up.

  Which left me fantasizing about Soon. Making love to her. I wouldn’t mind living on Ko Samui for the rest of my life. But it’d be a lot more fun to do it with a woman like Soon.

  But getting back to Athens, Kelly said, “I think I read in Rolling Stone that they make good guitars in Athens. Guitars that aren’t too expensive.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Maybe I’ll look into it.”

  “We could roast marshmallows around the campfire,” she said, “and have little campfire sing-a-longs. ”

  “You’re just a romantic at heart, aren’t you, Kelly?” I said.

  She thought about that for a moment, as the bus began to inch forward a few millimetres. Linda was singing, “Ooh, Baby, Baby.” Finally Kelly said, “I don’t know. I used to be, maybe. I’m not sure any more.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  She looked up from her sewing needle. “I fell in love once, Mick. Once was enough.”

  I said, “You’ve spent a few nights at the Heartbreak Hotel, huh?”

  She said too many nights. So I said, me, the big expert, you’ve got to get up off the dirty carpet and dust yourself off, that’s what you’ve got to do. Go down to the lounge and cast your eye around the room. Check out the piano player.

  She laughed. Said she’d keep it in mind.

  She said, “I think that’s what Elvis died of. Heartbreak. I

  don’t really want to follow his example.”

  I told her she was wrong. I told her Elvis died because he had a needle shoved up his butt. I told her he died because of Hershey bar bloat.

  Kelly thought that it wasn’t quite that simple. She thought that Elvis was some kind of martyr representing the sick American culture. Where the pursuit of fame and cash finally lands you face up on a hospital gurney and all that. He was the golden boy martyr of a desperate society, that’s the phrase she used. He burnt out on the power trip syndrome. I told her yeah, it was a power trip syndrome alright. I told her Elvis just wanted to see how many housewives he could get to masturbate themselves silly with shampoo bottles to the tune of “Teddy Bear.”

  At the other table Patrick was playing gin with Charole. I saw him raise an eyebrow. As if to say I’d gone maybe just a tad too far. Which has always been a problem of mine. That’s what Hasheeba used to say. Know what your problem is, Mick? You always go just a bit too far.

  It’s the only thing she ever said that really irritated me.

  But it maybe was a mistake saying that, because Kelly gave me this tired look that as much as said the conversation was over, and I made a mental note not to say bad things about “Teddy Bear” any more, because it must’ve been a favourite song of hers or something.

  Though Dave says I missed the point altogether. Well, I know I missed the point. He missed the point of why I missed the point.

  While we crawled through traffic, Pete took the opportunity to lay some Greek on us. Efcharisto, parakalo, bira, etc. I didn’t pay any attention. The old man used to tak
e me to all these Greek pizza joints when we were living in Regina and I can say hey, malaca, with the best of them.

  While he was going ena, dio, tria, beware of gonorrhea, I was listening to Dave tell me I was being just a bit unfair to Elvis, and he told me why.

  When Pete was finished, I said to Kelly, “Hey, don’t get me wrong, I think Elvis is great. But he should’ve stuck with rock and roll. His big mistake was selling out to the movies. Like Blue Hawaii and Speedway. I mean, get serious. He turned himself into a joke. Though Jailhouse Rock wasn’t bad.

  And as for having a needle shoved up his butt, well, I feel bad about saying that, he didn’t have a needle shoved up his butt at all. That’s just tabloid bullshit. It was all his doctor’s fault. His doctor gave him every drug he wanted. Demerol, benzedrine, all kinds of drugs.” I said, “When Elvis died, he had the effects of six hundred and eighty pills in his system and twenty cubic centimetres of liquid downers, uppers and painkillers in his stomach. He was a walking, talking drugstore. He died of what the coroners call polypharmacy.”

  Kelly said, “You read this in the National Enquirer?”

  I said, “Nope.”

  “You have a good memory for figures,” she said.

  “Some figures,” I said.

  She looked out the window. There was a smog haze in the air. Some kids on the street were waving at us.

  Kelly said, “Well, one thing is certain, it was a tragic waste. ”

  “Sure was,” I said. “I know I cried a tear or two.” Which is the God’s honest truth. And I leaned back and lit up a State Express, just to have a puff or two, and then I put it out, because Kelly always waved her hand whenever smoke came near her, she was almost as bad as Teach.