The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  IN BOMBAY, Joe paid fifty-eight dollars for passage on a ship across the Indian Ocean to Djibouti via Yemen. After two days of rough sailing the rocky hills and promontories of the Arabian Peninsula emerged from the sun-drenched horizon, followed by the white buildings of Aden. If Rebecca had been there, she might have quoted the relevant passages from Marco Polo and his Book of the Marvels of the World, which described the vigorous trade through this very port: the eastward flow of Arabian horses to India, the westward shipments of peppercorn, cinnamon and sandalwood. Yemen had been torn up by a war of independence against the British, and a civil war that had ended a few months earlier. Hopped a bus into the countryside, getting into a few villages no whites had visited since Independence. Hell must be a desert just like Yemen. The Queen of Sheba, I’m quite certain, had air-conditioning in her palace. Cruel boiling sun, hot wind that drives the nomads crazy, blowing sand, little water, much of it salty. Buildings shelled and riddled with machine-gun bullets, barbed wire, bunkers, fresh graves. I’ll write again from Africa. I can’t believe it’s autumn in America. Go out and step on a brown leaf for me.

  Back on board his ship, he sailed to Djibouti, where he landed amid old wooden dhows; one of the first things he did was to buy stamps for his collector brother, issued in the odd name of a territory no one in Illinois had ever heard of: Des Afars et des Issas. Africa! Joe wrote home. Finally here after seven days on the sea. Mighty weary too. So I’m here, now what? Five days later, from Addis Ababa, he wrote: Hail Rastafari! Jamaica to Ethiopia. Now how’s that for carving a wide circle into the globe. So much to see. Young studs boarding the trains with spears, native girls with maybe 50 small braids of hair, nomads carrying huge knives and homemade guns (like the Khyber Pass folk). Rode night trucks to a savanna, stopped off at a village (sleeping on feed bags in back of a truck beneath a full moon), moving out at dawn. Animals everywhere! Herds of antelope, tiny deer the size of a jackrabbit on stretched out legs, bands of foxes, wild boar, huge flocks of guinea partridge, and onyx, a large animal the size of a pony with 2-foot-long horns. He was zoologically overwhelmed. From a canoe and wild geese on the Sangamon, to hyenas stalking the train tracks in the Horn of Africa. He caught a long ride in another truck, driving along roads paved and unpaved, and entertained the driver with stories.

  “I started like this: in a truck. Driving, working. Painting flagpoles.”

  His visa to enter Kenya required that he purchase a plane ticket into the country, so he boarded a jetliner in Addis Ababa and flew over the savanna he had just bummed across, now covered by tessellated rolls of clouds, and landed in Nairobi. He hitchhiked out of town toward Mount Kenya, and found shelter at a Sikh temple. Beautiful sunset but the mountain was clouded over, unfortunately. The next day he discovered he wouldn’t be able to enter the Mount Kenya national park bumming—a five-dollar fee was required, and he’d have to visit with his own car or a guide. Undeterred, he returned to the park the next day and passed himself off to the man in charge as an Illinois entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera. Conned my way into a 2-hour run with the warden. Really great. More giraffe, mother ostrich sitting on a mound of eggs, hartebeest, gazelle, impala, bushbuck, warthog, and the real prize—5 cheetah, the mother with 4 young. Warden said every day she had to make a “kill” to feed the little bastards. Would knock off a gazelle at 70 mph. Almost sad, the beauty of the hours I’ve spent with animals here in Africa, remembering the repulsive tragedy of Viet Nam. At least nature kills with a reasonable amount of fairness.

  * * *

  THIS LETTER, which Joe mailed from Tanzania on October 28, was his twenty-ninth since leaving home to paint flagpoles and drive to California and travel to Asia. By the time it arrived in Urbana it was the middle of November, Richard Nixon was the president-elect. Virginia was preparing for the Thanksgiving holidays, when Steve and Maggie would be over and her mother would visit from Kansas. On Thanksgiving Day, the pink bird cooked in her temperature-controlled Westinghouse oven, her mother sat on the couch, hands folded, content to let Virginia do the work for once. Mother, born in the age of kerosene and calico and hay, granddaughter of the first woman to graduate from the University of Kansas. Sassy once, writing in notebooks and on chalkboards with the long, delicate fingers that tremble now when she lifts her plate.

  “Where’s Joe now?” she asked.

  “Funny you should ask, I just got a letter from him. Let me read it to you.”

  And so, with the meal over, and Steve cleaning out the cranberry-sauce dish with a teaspoon and licking it, Virginia opened the shoebox where she kept Joe’s correspondence. She took out Joe’s letter.

  “Climbed Kilimanjaro,” Virginia began, reading her son’s words. “Took me 4 nights and 5 days, but I made it to the crown, nearly 20,000 feet.” At this point, Virginia skipped over the next phrase Joe had written—It was a bitch—and instead said, “It was a real bear.”

  “I bet it was,” Joe’s grandmother said.

  “Still have a bad sunburn to show for it, lips peeling,” Virginia read from the letter. “But it didn’t require ropes and spikes, nothing but good lungs and caution and endurance. The last couple months of pipe smoking paid off!” Joe’s grandmother chuckled at the joke. “Caused a slight stir in the base town of Moshi (Tanzania) because I went alone. Climbers usually have guides and a flock of porters. Had to clear it with the police and sign release papers. Brought my own rations (including a bottle of brandy), rented snow goggles, helmet, fatigue jacket, boots, etc., then just up and hauled…,” Virginia read, skipping the word that followed: ass. “Incredibly beautiful up yonder. Bitterly cold at night, but I took it all right. Began the final ascent shortly after midnight (the third night) and had nearly reached the top by dawn. It was rough but once I got back down Africa seemed so boring I felt like going back up again.”

  “Well, he sure is an intrepid boy,” Joe’s grandmother said.

  * * *

  JOE WAS GETTING CLOSER to the Republic of the Congo and its war. His next letter was addressed from Bujumbura, in the neighboring country of Burundi. He described an encounter with some wealthy safari hunters in Kenya who bagged a Thomson’s gazelle with very long horns and served him copious glasses of “raw whiskey,” and a series of shenanigans involving Christian missions in Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. In search of free room and board whenever possible, he approached a mission in Kampala, Uganda, and announced he was a “theology student,” and tried the ploy again in Burundi. Damn if it didn’t work, he wrote home. Gave me food and drank scotch and sodas with the abbes that night. Pulled the same stunt in Kigali (capital of Rwanda) and Jesus Gawd was the good Lord waiting for me there. He told the rector at the French Catholic school that he was a graduate of the University of Illinois, the University of Florida and Hannover College. I really laid it on, he wrote home. The rector thought me extremely intelligent since I agreed with all of his ideas, what but he gets the notion I’m to give a lecture to the students (St. Andre College). And there I was that p.m., stalking the floor, answering questions, scowling like Wagner, giving them my best. Must have rapped for over an hour.

  His audience was composed of two hundred Rwandan teenagers who were captivated, especially, by his firsthand account of the war in Vietnam, and how the Viet Cong had Saigon under siege. They were just as intrigued when he began to discuss the Rastafarians, and the black civil rights movement in the United States, and his brief encounter with the Black Panthers, and what he remembered Rebecca telling him about the Panthers’ confrontations in Oakland with the police, and their belief in the right to carry arms, which was guaranteed by the Second Amendment (“my favorite constitutional amendment, actually”). “What do the black people of America want?” Joe asked rhetorically. “They want what I, as a white man, already have: equality before the law. Pretty simple, I guess.” The students peppered him with questions: “Were you frightened in Saigon when you saw the battles, Dr. Sanderson?” “Yes.” “Do the Black Panthers have a u
niform?” “Yes and no.” As a white man talking sympathetically about the concerns of black people, and critically about his own government, Joe was a paradox to them. Some sensed “Professor Sanderson” was exaggerating the incidents he described, but he was a witness to history nonetheless, and his presence spoke to the realness of events that otherwise seemed distant and legend-like. They noted the high-pitched oddness of his American accent too, and the nervous pacing of his thin and slight body, and his well-worn leather shoes, and the way he kept readjusting the thick frames of his glasses. This American character comes to speak to us about the Rastafarians and the hallucinatory effects of marijuana. “Stoned,” he says, and the French translator does not understand and Joe explains to him, and finally we all understand. Ha, ha, ha! Americans are not what they seem to be from afar. “Dr. Sanderson” had taught these future leaders of Rwanda a basic lesson about stereotypes. America: a powerful land of perfect white people? No, not at all. Nor is Rwanda the small, simple, peaceful land that white men think they see. Among us, we are Hutu and Tutsi: in truth, it’s very complicated. We have our own prejudices and misconceptions. The people of the long necks, and their foes, the people of broad noses. Stereotypes. The owners of cattle versus the tillers of the soil. Truths and untruths. Our exiles and our history, unknown to outsiders, including this American Joe who is shaking hands now and nodding as the rector thanks him for “a most illuminating lecture.”

  Joe bade the students farewell and spent the evening with the school faculty. The farce would not end, he wrote home. Rector had several teachers and my translator take me out to dinner that night. Real aristocrats, these priests. They taste their soup before adding salt and pepper. And it was Old Home Week when we dropped in at the local cathouse. Hooray for French Catholics! But I jumped back into my shower thongs and got out of town before they could have me holding high Mass.

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  THE FRENCH PRIESTS in Rwanda warned Joe against going to the Republic of the Congo and its tribal wars. “The army thinks every white man they see is a mercenary. And the rebels will think you’re a spy.” He entered the Congo anyway, and after Congolese Army soldiers caught him bumming a ride on a truck from Bukavu, they did, in fact, take him for a mercenary—besides being white, he was wearing a GI money belt. The soldiers hauled him off the truck to a military outpost, where he spent the night wondering if and how they would kill him. But soon he was a free American bum again, and suddenly immune to the eastern Congo war bug: there were no battles to see, just refugees. He heard there were mercenaries operating deeper in the country, and to cross the Congo and reach them he hitched a ride with a group of Christian missionaries who were passing out Bibles and clothes, and then with a Rhodesian businessman. Joe was traveling from Hemingway’s Africa and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to river bends and villages where invisible rebels were still operating in the bush, and where he heard stories of recent wartime atrocities inflicted by machetes and by airplanes. He made for Stanleyville, which had recently been renamed Kisangani, though most people he met still called it Stanleyville. The city had been the site of recent war horrors, and Joe traveled toward it in a Land Rover crossing flat terrain filled with wild palms and wild green everything, razor grass swallowing up the roadways. To the next village and a tollgate made of a plastic bucket and a long plastic pipe. Pay, please. A toll for the boys who clear the grass with their machetes. The road becomes an orange lake and then we must push, push, push the Land Rover to the next place. Urrrgh. Raggedy-Andy rough going, he described it in a letter home. And now Stanleyville, once an outpost of western colonizers. On the Congo River, the newest of the many rivers of my journeys. I have seen sampans, barges as long as football fields and now the hand-carved canoes of the fishermen of Stanleyville, floating sculptures they propel with paddles and pushing sticks.

  Joe wandered about the onetime Belgian colonial city and stood before an old mosque and mansions of flaking paint and moldy plaster that were being consumed by vines and fungi. He watched the moon set over the Congo, the white orb casting pearly light on the ripples of water. The locals directed him to an old hotel, a plaster edifice pockmarked by bullets, and inside he met the squad of South African contract soldiers he’d been looking for; they were also the last white men living in the town. Once I hit Stanleyville I shifted from missionaries to mercenaries, he wrote home. Some change. Whiskey, prostitutes, loaded machine guns beside the bed, shortwave radios. Staying with one at a shot-up hotel on the Congo River. Radio crackling static as they play cards in their T-shirts or become lost in cheap novels. The mercenaries were themselves destined to become characters in many pulp novels, though never one written by Joe. They had been hired by the Congo government to fight a band of rebels from the bush called the Simba warriors. Some years earlier, the Simba had invaded Stanleyville and held the white population hostage, but now the mercenaries had nothing to do but entertain Joe with their war stories. Pictures of naked broads on the wall, a window still busted from a mortar shell, heavy bank accounts, jungle philosophy. Drank with them the last two nights and listened to stories of the Stanleyville massacre. On the third and final night sharing a room with one of the mercenaries, Joe woke up before dawn and saw moonbeams radiating across the body of the snoring soldier-for-hire and everything in the room: moonlight on his machine gun, his soiled underwear, the centerfold on the wall and her bare, voluptuous torso. Light from the underworld gleaming upon objects from the underworld.

  * * *

  JOE’S LETTER FROM CONGO told his mother and stepfather to continue to write to him in Zambia, because he’d be headed there soon. When she received the letter, number thirty-two on this trip, Virginia imagined her son with crow’s-feet around his eyes. Maybe he’ll come back to us as an old man. He is as far away as he can get, deep in the deepest jungles. Zambia. At the end of the alphabet too. How much farther can he go? How much more lost from us can he get?

  * * *

  ON THE LUMBERING steam train to Lusaka he met an old, aristocratic white man who said he had known the legendary Albert Schweitzer; he bought Joe a nine-course meal. Joe went to midnight Mass in Rhodesia’s capital city, Salisbury, which was lit up for the holidays with enough electricity to light up the entire Congo; he also met the only two hippies in Rhodesia and spent a night giving them inspiration. Joe traveled from the Lowveld to the Highveld, and the water evaporated from the landscape, and Africa turned scrubby again. He reached Johannesburg and its wide, open and clean streets and its late-model cars, and gawked at the signs posted at telegraph offices, bathrooms and on park benches. EUROPEANS ONLY. SLEGS BLANKES NON-EUROPEAN WOMEN. NIE-BLANKE VROUE. BUS STOP FOR NON-WHITES. Apartheid was an incantation of signs. The racial laws here are crimes in themselves, he wrote home. It would be a great honor to be imprisoned or deported for breaking them. Beneath the glitter and the prosperity, it’s an insane asylum. In the next letter, he was already in Cape Town. Hitched a ride with a couple of whites clear from Durban. Spent a day with the rock-rock, swing-swing teenie bopper set on the way down, then took off across the hills into some seaside wilderness. In Cape Town he found no ship to Nigeria had room for him. Anxious to reach Nigeria and get in on some action. I can’t stay down here in the sunshine much longer or I’ll get segregated, separated, regulated and agitated, he wrote in his last letter from Cape Town. Well, pissed off anyway. Haven’t blown up any radio towers, but recent legend has it that a stranger has been glimpsed riding in trucks at midnight shouting words of encouragement to his black brothers above the wind.

  * * *

  WHEN JOE REACHED LAGOS, Nigeria, the army denied his request for press credentials to enter the war zone. His next stop was the aid agencies. The Red Cross is desperate for workers to hit the bush and drink gin, contract malaria and get shot at for breakfast, he wrote home, and a short while later he signed a three-month contract. “Relief worker” is my title, which is a euphemism for doctor, ambulance driver, beer drinker or whatever the h
ell else is needed. After a series of pogroms across Nigeria against the Igbo people, the Igbo had created an independent state in southeastern Nigeria named Biafra; now the Nigerian government was trying to starve the Biafrans to death. Armed with a vaccination gun, Joe traveled with an American doctor in a twin-engine plane, crossing over rebel territory to the city of Port Harcourt, once part of Biafra, but recently retaken by the government. Then in a helicopter to a grass field in Calabar, where he heard stories of a recent bombardment by the Biafran Air Force, such as it was. Small planes dropping beer bottles of petrol, homemade napalm, plus a few proper bombs.