The Drifters (102 page)

As the girl rattled on, Gretchen unraveled the fact that her mother and older sister had refused to move to Houston when their father was assigned there, ‘because you know who wants to live in Texas, like wow, I’m no cowboy and you know when a man makes love to me I don’t want spurs up my tail, like wow.’

Gretchen noticed that the girl seemed to have a wide circle of friends, because any American who entered the bank to pick up money from home knew her, and spoke to her on familiar terms, as if he had been doing business with her. When one pair of especially unkempt girls, who may well have been stoned from too many green cookies, reminded her of an important date, Gretchen asked, ‘Are you selling something?’ and Claire threw back her head
and laughed heartily. ‘I read the, you know, the Tarot.’

‘The what?’

‘Like wow, the cards. I read the Tarot, you know.’

Vaguely Gretchen remembered something about a gypsy deck of playing cards with special designs. The Hanged Man, swinging insouciantly upside down from a holly tree, had been used in an advertisement she had once seen and it had inspired her to look into it further. The only other cards she remembered now were the Hierophant on his throne with the two cardinals kneeling in obeisance and the Hermit in gray robes carrying a lantern. As she recalled these three striking images, Claire kept talking: ‘Like wow, I give maybe, you know, twenty readings a day, you know. If I charged money I’d be rich, like wow, twenty times a buck, like wow, that would keep you in hash for weeks.’

On the spur of the moment Claire threw herself prone on the lobby floor and took from her bag a pack of slightly oversized cards, shuffled them, asked Gretchen to cut, then laid ten of them out in diamond form, chanting as she did, ‘This covers her. This crosses her. This is behind her. This crowns her.’ When this was completed, she looked up at Gretchen with a beatific smile and said, ‘Like wow, if I’m gonna read your Tarot, come down to my level,’ and she tugged at Gretchen’s miniskirt till the latter was sprawled on the floor beside her. Big Loomis and the others, familiar with Claire’s skill in reading the Tarot, gathered about the two recumbent figures, and the reading began, but Claire had made only a few preliminary observations when a bank guard hurried up and said petulantly in French, ‘I’ve warned you before, you cannot lie on the floor of this bank.’ Claire beamed up at him, patted his shoe, and kept on reading her cards. Gretchen, not particularly interested in what Claire was saying, smiled at the guard and said in French, ‘Officer, she’ll only be a minute. Please excuse her,’ but the guard remained where he was and kept tapping his toe. This annoyed Claire, who gently placed her hand on his shoe, smiled at him and said, ‘Like wow, I need all the concentration, you know, I can get,’ and she proceeded to ramble on about Gretchen’s future, much of which the latter did not hear. Then suddenly Claire was saying, ‘In the last election you backed Senator McCarthy and were beaten up by the police.’ Gretchen stiffened, looked at Cato and Big Loomis, but
they were staring down at Claire, who had now passed on to other inconsequentialities, but just before the impatient guard reached down to pick up the cards and clean his bank of rabble, Claire said, ‘You were in love with a man who makes music, rather excellent music, but that’s ended.’

The guard tapped Gretchen on the shoulder and said, ‘Your paper is ready,’ and she replaced Monica at the window, where her regular check for four hundred dollars was waiting. When our group left the bank, eleven other young people were in line for their drafts from home.

As we walked back to the Djemaá, Claire from Sacramento stayed with us, and her conversation, under open skies, seemed even more bizarre than it had within the confines of a well-organized bank. I shall not try to indicate all the ‘like wows’ and ‘you knows’ she used; once when she told me of her family she must have uttered each phrase a hundred times. Her father was a space-age scientist, who, while working at Lockheed in Southern California, had married a girl from western Oklahoma who was in the secretarial pool. They had had two daughters, after which the mother took up astrology—‘Like wow, she gives, you know, the best readings in all California. Wow!’—while the older daughter specialized in numerology—‘Like wow, did you know that everything you do has a number, and every number a meaning?’—which left the Tarot to Claire.

Between them the three women pretty well blanketed the occult universe, and when Claire at age seventeen wanted to leave home and travel alone to Marrakech, her older sister gave a reading of this city and found that it would be perfectly safe for Claire to visit, but after Claire’s departure the sister discovered that she had been using the old spelling,
Marrakesh
, and that if you substituted a
c
for the
s
, everything turned quite ominous. But then her mother read the stars for a blonde like Claire in Marrakesh with an
s
, and things were clearly favorable, so mother and older daughter drafted a letter of advice: ‘When you are there you must always think of yourself in a city spelled with an
s
, and if you ever write the name down, be sure to spell it with an
s
, because then all confluences will be favorable.’

Claire explained that the women in her family had decided not to move to Houston because it gave off very bad
vibrations in numbers, was poor in the Tarot and only fair in the stars, but what was more important, her mother was making a nice piece of change in California as an astrologist and she doubted that the people of Texas were as far advanced as those in California; that is, they weren’t used to laying out real money to have their horoscopes read, whereas in California it was as much a part of a family budget as bread or milk.

Claire said she was staying at a place called Casino Royale, but she accompanied us to the Bordeaux, where she gave Cato a solid reading of his Tarot, in which she displayed considerable native cunning plus a shrewd sense of practical psychology. When she was immersed in the cards, she drew upon a whole new vocabulary, as if she existed on two levels—that of the flower people with their abbreviated speech and that of the occult with its arcane overtones. At times this girl with the bovine face, now eighteen years old, quite astonished her listeners; for example, she told Cato, ‘If I told you the full meaning of this card the Hierophant, you would understand when I say that you have lived in a world torn apart by religious factionalism, and you’ve failed to bring the two halves of your sphere into harmony. I see the left lobe of your brain totally compressed as a result of this failure, and you will be prevented from achieving what is within your power until you bring the two halves into balance. But when you accomplish that, you will find untold energies unleashed.’ At this point she looked at Cato as simple Claire of Sacramento and cried, ‘Like wow! A new Thomas Aquinas.’

‘Where did you learn about Thomas Aquinas?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Like wow, everybody knows the greatest, you know, the father of the church. Like wow, could you consider yourself educated if you’d never heard, you know, of Thomas Aquinas?’

I was constantly astonished by the reliance these young people placed on the occult. A group of serious students would lead a rebellion against the antiquated methods of a university, and one of their first demands would be that the updated curriculum initiate courses in astrology. I had often sat in gatherings of otherwise intelligent students who had worked hard to make their society a better place but who fell apart when coming under the influence of
some guru who had a cursory acquaintance with the Bollingen edition of the
I-Ching.
In India I met one California girl who was convinced that if only she could determine the exact sequence in which the various chapters of the Pentateuch had been written, she would have at her command the secrets of the universe, and I remember with amusement the Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago who refused to leave Marrakech for his new job in Massachusetts until his readings in the
I-Ching
were favorable.

It was because of this frightening rebellion against intelligence that I learned so much from Claire, for she represented the assault against the smug self-satisfaction of science. If scientists could control space ships 186,000 miles distant, it became imperative to prove that they could not control the inner space ships of the human mind. In an age when science dominated all universities, these young people found it necessary to proclaim their faith in the least scientific of human endeavors: astrology, the Tarot, witchcraft, numerology and palmistry.

I once calculated that of the roughly three hundred young people I had met in Marrakech, all but a few believed in astrology and at least two hundred and seventy were convinced that flying saucers were arriving from outer space. They believed not on the basis of recurrent reports from our southern states of people who had actually made trips in the saucers, but because such belief infuriated their parents and confounded their professors.

As Claire said, ‘Like wow, my father is unbelievable. He’s a scientist but he has the vision of a mole. Like wow, he doesn’t believe in astrology, or the Tarot, or the
I-Ching
, or practically nothing. The only thing he’s, you know, good for is sending me my monthly check.’

After she finished her reading of Cato’s Tarot she announced that she had decided to move her gear from the Casino Royale to the Bordeaux, and her reasoning was interesting: ‘Like wow, on his floor Big Loomis attracts all the kooks in Marrakech, and if you lived up there you’d see the craziest, and you’d find the answers to everything.’ When Big Loomis came klop-klopping into the hotel, she asked him, ‘Like wow, could I move into one of your rooms? Like wow, it would be the greatest.’ He nodded benignly and klomped upstairs. ‘Besides,’ she added as she
prepared to leave for her gear, ‘like wow, he has the best supply of grass in Marrakech.’

The others were busy, so I walked with her through the alleys, which were now more familiar to her than the streets of Sacramento, and after many turns into tight little passageways and with many greetings to tradesmen who had come to know her blond hair, she brought me at last to a dead end, and I saw a sign scrawled on a once-white wall:
Casino Royale.
‘Home,’ she said.

The Casino, named by some hopeful Arab in the days of French occupation, was a one-story, mud-walled affair with a central courtyard around which were ranged sixteen of the smallest cubicles I had ever seen offered for rent. Not one had a window, so doors had to be left open, and as I stood in the court, almost overcome by the stench from the one inoperative latrine, I could look in upon any of the sixteen rooms, each of which contained up to six sleeping or dozing forms, not in beds—for the Casino Royale contained not one stick of furniture of any kind, neither bed, nor chair, nor table—but in sleeping bags or, in some cases, on wafer-thin blankets spread directly on the earth. This was Marrakech at its worst, a sleeping area renting at forty American cents a night, supervised by a miserable one-eyed Arab whose sole responsibility was to collect money, if he could, and keep the foul bathroom functioning, if he could. He performed his two tasks with equal incompetence.

Claire went directly to her cubicle, which she shared with four young men she had met in the Djemaá, and when they heard she was leaving they showed much apprehension, for like most American girls in Marrakech, she was supporting the men, since it was easier for a girl to get money from home than for a man. She told them not to worry, that she would look out for them for the rest of this month, after which they would probably be leaving anyway. ‘But we have nothing to eat,’ one of the boys complained, so she gave him half the money her father had sent her that morning. They thought that would enable them to get by. At this point she introduced them: Harold from Detroit; Cliff from New Mexico; Max from Portland, Maine; Bucky from Philadelphia. I spoke with the boys briefly and found that all had been to college for one or two years, had dropped out, might return at some future date. I didn’t ask, but I judged that none had had
a bath during the last three or four months, and the only luggage I could see was four sleeping bags. They probably had toothbrushes and passports, but I doubted that they had razors or soap. There was, of course, a communal bag of marijuana and a newspaper cornucopia of green cookies.

When word of Claire’s departure drifted through the other cubicles, their occupants streamed out to bid her goodbye, and there was a show of real affection for this good-spirited, convivial girl with the limited vocabulary, but I noticed that from the room next to hers no one appeared. I peeked in and saw six young people, boys and girls, lying on their sleeping bags completely unconscious, as if dead. For a moment I was frightened, thinking that some disaster had happened with poisoned heroin, but Claire, noting my apprehension, looked in the room, kicked one of the girls, got a groan in reply, and assured me, ‘Nothing wrong here. They’re in good shape.’ I must have betrayed surprise at this evaluation, for she added, ‘Well, last night they did want to see how strong the cookies, you know, were—and, you know, like wow, they each ate two and went all numb. But you can see for yourself that they’re all right now. Another ten hours and they’ll start to move.’

As Claire went about saying her farewells, I was left with the six immobile bodies and knelt to tap the shoulder of one of the girls. Slowly her eyelids opened, but only the whites were visible. She groaned, rolled over and returned to total unconsciousness. One of the boys—Claire told me later he was an honor student from the University of Michigan—seemed to be slowly working off the effects of his two cookies, but when he tried to raise himself on one arm, he collapsed and again fell into his deep sleep.

I thought, as I surveyed this filthy room with its extraordinary freight, that these busted students represented a significent portion of the new world that was evolving. They stood for that legion of lost young souls in Paris and London and Tokyo and Berlin who had rejected their societies. It was they who populated the communes in the hills above Taos, the colonies in Nepal and the caves of Crete. They were a new breed, most difficult to understand, and as I looked at this selection I thought of the homes from which they had come. They must have been little different from the home that I had left when young; their parents surely had the same hopes for them that
mine had had for me. Each of these sleeping six had probably gone to college and had busted out, forfeiting the tuition his parents had provided, and I wondered what those parents would have felt had they been able to stand where I was standing. This was the new part of the world, and the reverberations it was arousing would echo for many decades.