The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  The next afternoon Joe showed up at Mafalda’s cabin door and she invited him in and they sat next to each other on her bunk. “What about your girlfriend?” “We broke up.” The door was closed. Their lips met and they stepped out into the bright sun of the deck, the expanse of the Atlantic before them. He told her that he was a writer, and that the pursuit of his craft had taken him to rivers filled with diamonds in South America, and Caribbean islands with long-haired black rebels. Mafalda sensed they were both outcasts, and she squeezed his hands as if to feel the words that were inside them. She was only twenty and she still believed that magical things might happen to her in life, and she wondered if Joe Sanderson might be the first; in the luminous crown of his blond hair, and in the warmth of his demeanor, she thought she saw the nourishing future for which she longed. That night, in the dining room, Helen glared at Mafalda from across the dining room, but all the other young passengers in Joe’s circle continued their conversations. Something about their geographic location (on a ship, between continents) and the historical moment (they were all in their twenties, living in the Space Age, on the cusp of the Age of Free Love), added giddiness to their repartee. They discussed existentialism, feminism and the death throes of colonialism; the late Lumumba, the martyred champion of African independence, and the pan-Arab leader of Egypt, Nasser. You must read this, that and the other, they said, and especially Simone de Beauvoir. They conversed amid dancing tobacco smoke and aphrodisiac sea-foam, and when they retired as couples to their boxy cabins they ceased their intellectual conversing and became slaves to their urges and undressed each other, contorting their bodies and hitting their elbows and ankles and skulls on the steel walls, until they were bruised, soothed and sex-sated.

  In his cabin box, with Mafalda asleep next to him, Joe had an epiphany: He didn’t want to be a novelist because he wanted the fame of being a writer. Necessarily. What he really wanted was a life as interesting as a novel. Like this: being afloat on the ocean next to a winsome Portuguese artist. A life where he didn’t feel lonely and small, like a C student or a dropout. On this ship he was a hero. A movie star, a Romeo, a genius. As long as he kept moving, he’d be a hero over and over again. Mafalda stayed with Joe for the rest of their time at sea. They reached Southampton and Joe returned to the ship while she took a train to London. He was continuing on to Antwerp and Amsterdam. But before he left Europe he would circle back to London and see her, he said. “Don’t worry, my little tramp.” She did not entirely believe him as she watched him walk back toward the ship.

  * * *

  THE ARLANZA pulled into the port of Rotterdam. Pounding the rails since dawn, so don’t take my inarticulation seriously (as Grove Press did—dirty bastards). I get into Paris tonight, but still have my nose pointed toward North Africa. Europe, with all of its industrial force and precision, is a little claustrophobic after the aimless Latin American frenzy. Anxious to have sand in my shoes and sun in my eyes. Nothing here but smog and chrysanthemums!

  Paris was cold, overcast and filled with fashionable and beautiful women who were allergic to American bums. He felt lonely there, haunted by the ghost of Hemingway and the sight of other solitary people at the cafés, sitting at tables and scribbling into journals as he did. At the Pantheon, he said hello to Victor Hugo, and imagined the great author whispering epic stories from French history to the spiders in his crypt. He headed back to England and found Mafalda in the London flat she’d given as an address, sleeping on the floor of the living room (the flat belonged to a photographer friend) and they made quiet love there at night while the photographer slept in the next room, but Joe woke him up with his laughter. “Your laugh is beautiful,” Mafalda whispered. “You’re like a little boy with your laugh.” They took long walks through the nippy autumn streets. After the second night, she woke up and found Joe was sleeping with a string tied to his big toe, and she followed the string into his bag, and saw it was tied to a gun. She thought of the black revolver later, when he asked her to come with him on his trip.

  “It’ll be a blast. Western Russia is a possibility. North Africa for sure.”

  “No, I can’t.” She said her job would start soon, but the truth was she felt a sense of foreboding. He made decisions quickly, rashly, and changed his mind from one moment to the next. As with Helen on the ship. First her, then me, who next?

  * * *

  JOE REACHED GIBRALTAR and Africa was a charcoal scratch on the canvas of the Mediterranean, and finally it became a town of white buildings sharpening into focus through Joe’s spectacles as his ship floated toward it. Morocco. Africa. Tangier, he wrote home. There’s Coca-Cola in the casbah, yes, but much of the atmosphere seems not to have changed for centuries. Hooded robes, fezes, veils, opium dens, shop windows full of knives and guns and jeweled everything. Tangier was filled with European road bums. As if someone had made a casting call to every university town between Manchester and Munich. Send us your philosophers and your dropouts and your junkie apprentices. And your painting students and your gay men and your bold women, yearning to wear Moroccan cotton and be free. Tangier has more Beats than the Union building, if you can imagine that, Joe wrote home.

  At the insistence of the local drug peddlers, he partook of a taste of hashish. An entire valley of Jamaican ganja in a pebble of green, and a deeper understanding of the word hallucination. The crystals in the beach sand became a million blinding suns, and he was repulsed by the deafening sound of a seagull torturing a worm. He tried opium, and the flame and his inhaling breath produced a pleasantly pungent cloud of flower-smoke, and in a minute he was inside a dream of bliss, and he closed his eyes and saw the spring meadows of a perfect, unsullied land, and he felt all the joy and warmth of human existence would always be his. The next day he smoked it again, and a third day, and then he sold his .22 to buy more, until he realized that he would soon go broke chasing opium smoke, and he stopped and slept and vomited and suddenly he wanted to buy his .22 back and shoot someone.

  * * *

  AT ABOUT THIS SAME TIME, his mother was working at her desk at the bank when a young undergraduate walked past on the way to see a teller. Virginia thought he looked a bit like Joe; tall, clean-shaven, lanky strides. And then he turned to look at her, and she saw his pupils were dilated; he was a human with blue owl eyes, otherworldly, and in that instant she realized how far Joe was from her supervision, alone, on the other side of the world. For the rest of the day, she imagined her son in various drugged states. Vulnerable, not fully himself, suddenly a boy again. Like a kindergartner at a carnival, unaware of dangers, unaware of the possibility that a stranger might take him by the arm, and guide him away.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER a detoxed Joe had tea at the Gran Café de Paris and wrote letters home, and a young man of about eighteen approached his table. He asked Joe, in English, “Are you a writer, mister?”

  “Yes.”

  The young man had wiry hair and a whispery voice and introduced himself as Abdelqader and asked if Joe had met a Mr. Bowles, the most famous of the many foreign writers living in Tangier. “No,” Joe said. Abdelqader said he was friends with Monsieur Bowles, who was in Paris at the moment. Monsieur Bowles had introduced Abdelqader to many other American writers who passed through Tangier, including a Mr. Truman Capote and a Mr. Williams Tennessee. Monsieur Bowles was helping a Moroccan writer with his memoir, Abdelqader continued. His name was Mohamed Choukri. Abdelqader and Monsieur Choukri were both Riffian Berber people who came from the mountains and Monsieur Choukri’s book told the story of the drought there, and how Monsieur Choukri became a pickpocket and landed in jail, where he learned to read and write for the first time when he was twenty years old.

  Abdelqader took the cloth bag he carried over his shoulder and showed Joe pages from a notebook filled with Arabic writing—his own book manuscript. Joe told Abdelqader about his travels, and when they parted Abdelqader watched as Joe walked down the street. A tabby cat followed after the American writer, and th
en a yellow dog, and after Joe disappeared into the medina, Abdelqader saw a hawk flying high above the street, and Abdelqader wondered if the animals were djinni sprits protecting the American Joe.

  In his room in the medina that night, Joe listened to the call to prayer, sung at sundown by a voice at a mosque somewhere. The Arabic words were beyond his comprehension though the pious meaning could be felt in the intonations of the voice, the lilting vowels. Allah. No God but God. Mohammed is the messenger of God. Allah, one of the many names of God.

  * * *

  HE TOOK A TRAIN to Marrakesh and found swinging London women there, dressed in bright, short dresses, and German men in seersucker suits. Just off the Air France flight, sporting the latest fashions for an excursion to Africa. And the local people in loose-fitting kaftans and tightly wrapped shesh turbans and big, wide straw hats. Donkeys trotting in short strides and women selling grains from burlap bags as big as barrels. Magicians and child acrobats. Fiats and Citroëns parked in the plaza, and horse herds, and drooling camels, and men leading Barbary apes tied to strings. Boys selling water from leather bags, wearing tin drinking receptacles on their bodies. Fantastic place, Marrakesh, Joe wrote home, from a café adjacent to the mosque and its square-sided minaret. Sitting on a rooftop terrace above the main plaza where a 19th-century Coney Island is in perpetual session. The Berber peasants have come down from the mountains to witness big city life, to see what all the stories were about. You name it, Marrakesh has got it. It’s the most spectacular gathering of human beings I’ve ever seen.

  * * *

  AFTER BUMMING HIS WAY BACK to the Moroccan coast, Joe wrote to Mafalda for the first time. The road was long and hard between you and here, the letter began. The mountains, the crumbling cities, the ragged people—everything was so desolate and deadly I didn’t care what happened to me. Walking across the desert picking up crystals, sang ballads to the sun, watched the evening haze leave the mountain peaks. Don’t laugh but it looked like Heaven. Rode trucks, motorcycles, buses, cars, burros. Smoked hash with the Arabs, ate roast chicken and toasted almonds, drank mint tea, watched camels pulling wooden plows, black goats climbing thorny trees, saw child beggars blinded by cataracts. He mentioned nothing about returning to London and told her to write him care of the embassy in Cairo.

  * * *

  THE LIBYAN DESERT was dunes and hollows, and stone-covered plains, and then a steady wind that lifted up curtains of sand, followed by sheets of rain. Fat drops on the windshield, and a current flowing over the highway, ankle-deep. So, one bitch of a desert sandstorm and several thousand miles later—Cairo! Can’t remember where I mailed my last letter. Tunisia? Anyway, thereabouts. Hitchhiked through both Algeria and Tunisia and was just cleaning my toenails for the long run across Libya when I latched onto an impossible lift to Cairo. Met an old Swedish man at the Libyan Embassy in Tunis who was driving through in a VW van. Had picked up a Limey roadbum in Morocco (17 yrs. old, someone slipped him a mickey in Tangiers. Lost nearly all his $). On our second day, we picked up an Argentine student. Slept in the van, ate sardines and got pretty grimy after 2,400 miles. There was a letter waiting from Mafalda in Cairo, and he penned a reply from his next stop. Beautiful letters, my dear little tramp. Steals that wonderful laughter you claim I possess. Egyptian sun is burning and I’m half-naked on a rooftop just across the Nile from the Valley of the Kings. My pleasantly insane life moves on by the thousands of miles. So absurd, yes, but more absurd to stay home like everyone else.

  In Alexandria, Joe failed to find a ship that would take him to Beirut, and hopped on a flight to Damascus, a city of women veiled in black, and women in makeup and hair-sprayed bobs, and poor old men in gray suits pushing carts, and young Syrian dandys in polished leather shoes and girls in white stockings. He hitchhiked across Syria toward Jordan and Jerusalem, and got a room in the Old City, which in those days was still part of Jordan. Brother Jesus got here on a donkey, he wrote home, while I managed a maroon ’66 Dodge 440—how about that! When he dropped off his letter at the post office, Joe thought of home, and the snow that was likely falling there, and how long it would take for his letter to reach his family. He took a few steps to the window where telegrams could be sent, and paid for a short message home.

  * * *

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE in Urbana, a motorcycle puttered to a stop before Virginia Colman’s home, and a uniformed man walked up to the door. Western Union.

  =MUCH LOVE TO EVERYONE AT HOME MERRY CHRISTMAS

  FROM JERUSALEM=

  =JOE=

  At Christmas dinner, Virginia read Joe’s letters from North Africa out loud at the table, censoring the few cuss words and the mention of drugs, so as not to scandalize Joe’s grandmother. For the first time, Virginia had put up an aluminum Christmas tree. Calhoun’s idea. Much neater, put it away and reuse it every year.

  * * *

  WHEN JOE STUCK OUT HIS TONGUE to seal an envelope addressed to his mother, he could feel the words he wanted to speak but couldn’t put in a letter. Yeah, I should be in college, Mom, but I’m not. The world is my classroom, and one day I’ll write a book, and that will be my degree. Instead, as always, he described the dramatic events of the road. He’d seen the Jordanian army guarding the holy sites in Bethlehem and the Old City, and stood by the entrance to the Mandelbaum Gate, a passageway through the no-man’s-land between Israel and Jordan. On Friday, Israel opened up the barbed wire to 6,000 Christian Arabs. I was there to watch them cross into Jordan. Wasn’t cheerful. He took a bus to Beirut on New Year’s Eve and found a city without a care in the world, the Riviera of the Middle East. A little taste of Paris with souks and high-rise hotels and flashing walls of neon hawking Coca-Cola in Arabic. In the first hours of 1967 Beirut became a screaming, joyful party of Christians and Arabs and Druze, and Sunni and Shiʽite, and Armenians. Gunshots fired into the air, here, there, everywhere, a celebratory discharge of revolvers. Complete insanity, Joe wrote home.3

  * * *

  JOE WAS NEARLY HALFWAY around the world from Illinois, and he was bumming now with homeward momentum. He hitchhiked from Beirut to Damascus to Baghdad, where the day revealed a dusty metropolis of wide avenues and cafés that were filled with backgammon players and tea drinkers. He ate a delicious salted fish, watched boys roll up their pants to run into the Tigris, and stood before a mosque of inlaid green and blue stones that was so beautiful he wanted to go inside and fall on his knees and pray. Night came and Baghdad turned quiet and he turned in. Nothing there but a slow muddy river and Babylon, he wrote home. He hitchhiked across southern Iraq the next day, standing once at the edge of a sunflower field, listening to an air force of bees until a grizzled Iraqi in a pickup truck stopped and gestured for him to climb in the back, and in this way Joe made it across more sunflower and onion fields, through marshlands, and eventually to a desert filled with broken-down cars and lifeless khaki sand, and finally a sad border town with a few gray buildings resembling bunkers, and two cigarette-smoking soldiers of the Iraqi army, leaning against a rusty armored car, looking southward, blowing smoke toward Kuwait.

  The Japanese visa in his passport gave Joe a sense of purpose; by his own calculations he was more than halfway around the world now, and he’d skirt the Indian Ocean on his way back to the western hemisphere. In Kuwait City, where fleets of German and British luxury vehicles roamed the streets, he headed to the beach, and saw huge tankers just offshore, headed for America; and then, on the sand itself, a grounded ship. A black freighter with a white superstructure and clouded windows, listing diagonally like a drunk struggling to stand upright. Joe walked up to the vessel and was greeted by an American with long blond surfer hair and a saintly smile who was standing on the stern, leaning over the railing.

  “American? Yes? Cool. Welcome, brother! Welcome to Noah’s Ark!”

  The ship was occupied by a score of American and European devotees of the Meher Baba, a spiritualist from India, and their ranks included a sandals-wearing, very decent, lamblike beatnik who had be
en a confirmed drug addict for 8 years until Brother Baba let him in on the love bit. Beatnik is currently bumming around the world (with German wife) to spread the good news and get other road bums off drugs. Among the reformed addicts there was a California bum and his broad, a friend from Boston and a black dog. They went off into the city every day to beg for money from the Kuwaitis. Some of the Noah’s Ark crew were going to India too, so he hitched a ride with them—in another VW van, listening over and over again to the same ten Beatles songs crooning from the small speaker of a cassette player. In Basra, Iraq. I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me. In Shira¯z, Iran, driving past olive trees and a gorgeous eighteenth-century castle. I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.

  In Za¯heda¯n, Iran, near the Pakistani border, Joe wrote home, describing the beat-up van and the Noah’s Ark crew. Beautiful, beautiful people. Have been pounding the road hard with them—flat tires, engine trouble, lost dog, etc.—the whole way across the Great Salt Desert, but anxious to get to India so it doesn’t matter. His next cash infusion from home was waiting in New Delhi, and he said goodbye to them at the steps to the U.S. Embassy there, and they kissed him and wished him well.

  * * *

  IN NEW DELHI, Joe was overwhelmed by the great metropolis and its hand-pushed ambition, the frenzy of its people hauling and lifting their way into modernity. Forgive my unhurriedness, my mellow meandering ways. Joe felt inconsequential in New Delhi, and also on the train to Bombay and back. He headed for what he hoped would be the relative tranquility of Nepal, on a bus, passing beasts of burden shaking hips as they hauled carts, through the plains of Uttar Pradesh, over long bridges crossing wide rivers and their riverine beaches and frolicking bathers. On the second day, his bus slithered uphill on a curvy highway into green mountains, and finally it reached a city of pigeons and men with painted faces. Kathmandu. The city is loaded with pagodas + temples + shrines + holy places of all sorts, he wrote home. One mountaintop temple outside of town looks like the Land of Oz. Not surprising, since this is Shangri-La country. But I suppose Shangri-La is just another name for wherever you aren’t, the greener pasture. And for me right now, Shangri-La is cherry pie and a bowl of tuna and noodles. Having already reached the figurative bottom of the world on this trip (Tierra del Fuego), Joe decided he should try for the figurative top, and he headed for a mountain town said to be within sight of Everest, and reached a hostel in a valley filled with the smell of onions.