Magic Bus (5 page)

Like many of her contemporaries, she enrolled at art college. She worked in Marseille as a studio assistant and introduced tie-dying to Estepona. In 1961, she moved to Morocco and met the former owner of Greenwich Village's Gaslight. He had decamped with other ‘creative cats' to Tangier to open the first Western coffee bar in Africa. Penny rented a nearby
pasha
's house, invited Ginsberg and Paul Bowles – author of
The Sheltering Sky
– for tea and sold her paintings to Beat writer Bill Burroughs. With an artist named Tim, she turned on the town with an exhibition called
Your Own Thing
.

‘Tim and I created a cultural jam session,' she says, spreading a pinch of tin tobacco along a Zig-Zag rolling paper. ‘With chanting poets, Berber drummers, snake charmers and me naked in a wheel-barrow. A pair of Dadaists dressed as lobsters pushed me around the gallery, smashing into the sponge rubber breast sculpture and big, pink, phallic lollipops. For the climax of the show we all pushed out the doors and ran downhill calling, “Love!
Amore! Liebe
!” Tangier was my first little paradise,' she laughs, lighting her rollie and dragging on it. ‘We wanted to give the world new meaning.'

‘Did you manage it?' I ask.

‘I met a man,' she answers, shifting in her seat.

Our coach pauses for breath at a suburban terminal, belching hot exhaust over a muddle of rag merchants and discount satellite-dish shops. A Yörük carpet-dealer, an unhurried provincial couple and two grizzled conscripts climb onboard along with a young mother in black cloak and Nikes. When the bus pulls back on to the wide highway, the mother and her toddler wave at a huddle of faceless tenements, tears in their eyes.

Penny says, ‘The best thing he ever did for me was to have a tambourine made by gypsies.'

‘Your first man?' I ask.

‘My first husband. It looks a little tired now, but it still has a Grateful Dead ribbon,' she says, dropping a flick of ash on my trousers. ‘Or at least it did.'

‘You knew the Grateful Dead?'

‘I played with them on one track.'

‘With your first husband?'

‘With my second.'

About the same time that Ginsberg caught a boat to Athens, before travelling onward to India, Penny's first husband left her a widow.

‘No tears, Jack,' she instructs me, her bangles ringing as she traces a cross over her heart. ‘The Dalai Lama teaches that all is transient.'

‘Did he play with the Grateful Dead too?'

A wheat-brown country unfolds beyond the high-rise neighbourhoods. We follow the route of the ancient road, as did Eurasian camel trains and solo hitchhikers, as does a covered woman leading her cow. A cement works sprawls along the blue edge of the Sea of Marmara, salt water washing against the plains, a freighter moored beyond the harvesters.

‘Things always happen to me,' Penny goes on, turning towards me, her spectacles magnifying her wildly kohled, outsized eyes. ‘I follow my instincts and end up in happening places: London, Tangier, San Francisco. Only sometimes does stuff go wrong, like it did in Nepal in the end.'

‘I want to hear about California,' I say, and she tells me about Kesey and his magic bus. About the copy of
Journey to the East
on his bookshelf in La Honda. About the links to the trail and Kathmandu.

The bus wheels spin eastwards. The drivers change near a city called Adapazari. The Nike mother sleeps. Her son dances in the aisle. I put on my earphones to ‘Rock Around the Clock'. Alexander the Great travelled this way, Hannibal took his life near here in 182
BC.
Along this route marched St Paul, Crusaders and – in due course – luminous Penny.

On the outskirts of Bolu, she starts to snore. We skirt eroded mountains, climb into conifer woods, rise above them on to a spreading plateau which gives way to a second plain, more arid and broader still. A duck-egg-blue reservoir – Sakarya – flares on the horizon. A purple mountain – Sömidiken Dag – shimmers out of the heat. The deserted hills are raw and desolate, daubed by an occasional flush of purple lupins or a tight bounty of green pear trees. I lift my eye above the page to follow the stretching road across a continental vista of timeless steppe.

At the heart of the black Anatolian plateau 280 miles east of Istanbul, Ankara is a modern, planned capital of brushed-steel ministries and car dealerships grafted on to Hittite foundations. Most Intrepids paused here only long enough to visit the Iranian and Afghan embassies. The windswept city offered them nothing
more uplifting than wide views of a dank malarial plain. We, too, plan to hurry on.

‘This place still looks like a dump,' yawns Penny, blinking out the window as we pull into the sweeping coach station, its wings of buses stretching out toward all parts of the country. ‘Last time, we got stuck here for a week waiting for visas.'

We have an hour's break before our connecting service so, after settling her in the Yeni restaurant, I visit the offices of the regional coach operator to ask about services a generation ago. Twenty minutes before departure, I'm back at the restaurant. But she isn't at the Yeni. I look at the departure gate. I ask in the waiting room. I call by the tourist police. She's nowhere to be found.

Then I spot her sitting cross-legged on the floor laughing with four Western kids.

‘We've got seven minutes until the bus leaves,' I tell Penny, picking up her pack, feeling protective of her. ‘Sorry to break up the party.'

‘There's been a change of plan, Jack,' she says, pulling free of my hand.

‘Debs and I are driving to Treehouses,' the first English woman tells me. Clear confident eyes. Short, uncovered hazel bob. Nose stud. ‘Yesterday, we picked up Jeff and Terry. Today, Penny wants to join us.'

‘We're heading in the other direction,' I say, trying to maintain order in the chaos.

‘Why don't you come along too?' says Debbie, the second woman. Shoulders tanned and freckled. Air of Coppertone. ‘There's always room in the back.'

‘I'm sitting up front,' says Penny.

Behind them, I see our Metro bus drive away to the east.

Treehouses is on the Mediterranean. I intended skipping Turkey's south coast, both because it's off the original trail and because no paved roads went there until the seventies. Instead, in under ten minutes, I'm hijacked to Olympos, a popular beach stop for modern backpackers.

In a lot behind the bus station is their vehicle: a canary-yellow
VW Camper. Perhaps the greatest automobile ever built. Mary bought it from a Newquay surfer, took a gap year from UCL and drove with Debbie across Europe to spend a couple of months under the sun.

‘Whoa-wheee,' Penny cheers again as the Camper gathers speed, breaking 45 miles per hour on the southern road. ‘This sure beats queuing for my pension at the post office.'

The guys are from California, doing Turkey and the Holy Land. At eighteen or nineteen, they're about the same age as were the first Intrepids though, unlike them, they haven't left the ‘system' behind. Terry tugs at the stub of his James Taylor ponytail with long, bony fingers and sends text messages home. A simple gold cross hangs on a chain round his neck. Jeff is curly-haired and baby-faced, a cross between Nick Cave and Jerry Seinfeld. He carries a Blackberry.

South of Ankara, the steppe opens on to a wide khaki plain. Flights of plovers rise from the grasses. In the creases of low hills, tight hamlets gather like sand in folds of paper. At the edge of the new highway, villagers hold back their thin herds of cattle and wait for us to pass.

With an arm around Debbie, Jeff watches the countryside roll by the window and says, ‘Get a load of this view. I keep thinking of friends stuck back in San Francisco.'

‘Now that was a happening town,' says Penny.

‘Penny knew Ken Kesey,' I tell them.

Terry sniffs at the air. ‘I can still smell the burning brain cells,' he says.

‘Whose?' ask the girls.

‘A generation's.'

As we drive towards the sea, Penny tells them about Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who in 1964 partied across America on
Furthur
, a glowing orange, green and fluorescent pastel International Harvester school bus with no springs. Their acid-laced, media-savvy wanderings popularized for a new generation the idea of the youthful journey of self-discovery.

‘Kesey's trip started with Kerouac,' she adds, pulling another
roll-up from her small, black rucksack, taking out a lighter, leaning back in her seat.

‘How's that?' asks Mary.

I explain that Kerouac – as author of
On the Road
– was the father of the Beats and grandfather of the hippies. According to Ginsberg, ‘he was the first one to make a new crack in the consciousness.'

‘I've read
The Dharma Bums
,' volunteers Jeff, Kerouac's story of the spiritual quest of a group of Californian travellers.
Dharma
is the Sanskrit word for the righteous path through life.

‘After Kerouac died, Ginsberg took Bob Dylan to his graveside because to both men he was a point of origin,' I say.

The playwright Sam Shephard witnessed their tombstone seance. ‘This life seems like a miracle. Still ongoing,' Shephard wrote as he watched Dylan strum his guitar and Ginsberg play a flute, moved by the communion of men who embodied the potent force of the age. ‘Allen and Dylan singing on his grave. Allen, full of life, hope and resurrection. Poets of this now life. This here life. This one being lived and living.'

‘The Beats and hippies are ancient history,' says Terry.

‘History that put us on the road today,' I reply, trying to ease his cynicism. ‘History that brought minority rights, ecology and alternative medicine into the mainstream. History that also for a few short years tied together the world.'

‘There's too much economic pressure on us to have those kinds of aspirations these days,' he goes on.

‘And Haight's now a mix of Carmel and Calcutta,' adds Jeff. ‘Gentrified real estate, wall-to-wall beggars and way out of my price bracket.'

Penny stares at them though the cigarette smoke. The light catches her rings and flashes prisms across the ceiling. A shiver crosses her lips. ‘Back then, we believed we were all one,' she says with feeling.

‘Taking acid does that to you,' I point out.

The raised, arrow-straight road drifts west to skirt the Tuz Gölü salt lake. Knuckles of burnt earth reach down from supine hills,
through yellow grasses, to stretch their fingers into the dirty, white water. The sweep of salty liquid blazes in the heat, promising cool relief, delivering only crusty, ankle-deep slough.

‘Wicked scenery,' says Jeff with a yawn.

Low clam-shell islands, flecked with feeding gulls, break the horizon. A far cloud of dust is thrown up by a tractor. The sunlight is red against wind-breaks of poplars. We stop for fuel and split the cost.

As we drive on, Penny's monologues rove across the universe, or at least most of southern California, from the ghosts of Owsley's LSD factory to Cassady, the model for Kerouac's Dean Moriarty and chauffeur of Kesey's bus. Then she sleeps again, slipping back into the sixties as day slides into night. Jeff and Debbie talk in hushed whispers, saying, ‘Isn't she something?' and ‘Yeah, a tie-dyed dinosaur.'

I stare at her folded figure and see a story-spinner, stuck in a time warp, so tribal that she speaks only to those who know her language. Her juvenility fringes on the naive. Her introversion whiffs of egotism. Yet there remains an enticing purity about her, as if the ideals of her youth still guide her daily decisions and the trials of the world have not tarnished the dream of her own existence.

It's dark when we reach the coast. The azure Mediterranean is a black void which fills the windscreen. We pull off the highway after midnight and shudder down a dirt track to Kadir's Treehouses. The electricity has failed, so the only light comes from our headlights.

Along the floor of the steep, forested valley, wooden cabins rise on timber stilts. Above our heads, perilous walkways like narrow Nepalese footbridges loop between cock-eyed balconies. A year ago, the lofty shanty town won a Golden Backpack Award as the world's best hostel, but tonight its treetop love nests and rickety, cedar-bark dormitories seem deserted. No travellers do yoga on the open verandas. No sunburnt guests play backgammon in the trees.

Mary suggests that, rather than disturb her, we let Penny sleep
on in the Camper, but she's wide awake as soon as the engine is switched off.

‘I'm not tired,' she sparks. Then she asks, ‘What's that noise?'

Music echoes up from the beach. I try to make out the song.

‘Dear God,' Penny laughs in recognition. ‘It's Jimmy Morrison.'

‘You know that it would be untrue…'

We're stumbling in the dark towards the music, blind but for torchlight playing off the stones. Around us rises a forest of ancient masonry within a lush grove of vines and wafer-leafed bay trees. Our light catches a bone, a pillar, a startled night bird. Its feeble beam shivers off a glass-smooth pool.

‘… You know that I would be a liar…'

‘Got to do something that scares you every day,' says Penny, levering her cane between us and pushing ahead.

Our sandy footfalls curve into a hooked ravine, following a marble-lined stream broken by submerged Roman columns. The blackness and oleander banks close in on us. Underfoot crunch shards of terracotta pottery and fragments of roof tiles. There is no moon but I can just make out the wooded crest of Musa mountain against the night sky.

‘… Come on, baby, light my fire…'

As we loop towards the sea, a lamp flashes in the ruins. Then a candle appears on the citadel. Another light glints across the quay of the ancient port. Open fires flare beyond the entrance to this pre-Christian pirates' hideout. The music grows louder, yet still we see no people. Not a soul in the dark.