The Drifters (103 page)

Then I visualized that familiar other part, those millions of young people throughout the United States and all nations who had entered college on the same terms as these six but who had found it possible to accommodate themselves to traditional demands, and I knew that the future work of society—the factories, the hospitals, the art museums, the city councils—would be accomplished by those who were back home learning and working in the way most young people have done throughout history. The drop-outs of California and derelicts of Marrakech were spectacular; the stable young people working at their education were reassuring. It was inspiring to remember that Harvard and Michigan and Tulane were producing just as many well trained graduates as ever, and that by and large it would be these students who would ensure the continuance of our society. Young men who had to learn calculus were learning it; girls who required chemistry were mastering it.

But then I had the nagging suspicion that the spiritual leadership of the society—whose physical continuance was assured by the standard students who stayed on the job—would probably be provided by those more adventurous ones who had picked up a vital part of their education in such unlikely dormitories as the Casino Royale in Marrakech or the pads in Greenwich Village. I thought of St. Paul, who gave the Christian church its greatest impetus; he came not from the conservative yeshiva but from the sinks and alleys of his day. The singers who would best express the spirit of this age would come not from Harvard or Stanford or Tulane, but from less-structured centers of learning like Pamplona or Copenhagen or Conakry, for the true education of a probing mind occurs unexpectedly and in surroundings that could have been neither anticipated nor provided.

I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology to one part
poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.

Standing in this mud-floored cubicle, with the stench of the latrine filling my nostrils and six unconscious scholars at my feet, I judged that of the young people then occupying the Casino, a good ninety per cent were already ruined for creative work. Of these doomed ones, a handful would escalate to heroin and become totally incompetent. Others would be content to move lazily from one marijuana session to the next, never completely incapacitated but never fully in control of their capacities. Some would acquire sex habits which they could not accommodate, and I would see them a decade from now haunting the Torremolinos bars or living in Algarve with some rich widow from London. And there would be others among the lost ninety per cent who would be stained by a terrible disease from which there was no recovery—memory—and these would repeat endlessly to the irritation of their friends, ‘You should have been with us that year in Marrakech.’ They would recall it as the high-water mark of their lives.

That left a group of about ten per cent from which would rise the survivors, the one or two who would come to see the world whole, who would comprehend life as a terrifying reality, a combination of accomplishment and failure, and who might provide some degree of spiritual guidance to the world. The education of such leaders is never easy, nor is it cheap or safe. No man with a precious son would educate him in the baleful way that Saul was educated, on the dicey chance that as an adult he might mature into St. Paul; no logical planner would require a crocodile to hatch a hundred eggs a hundred yards from water in hopes that one newborn reptile might make it to the river before hyenas and storks devoured him as they had his ninety-nine brothers and sisters, but that is the way nature has ordained it. The system is prodigal and tragic, but it functions.

As I looked at the disheveled crowd saying farewell to Claire and her Tarot cards, I would not have wanted to gamble that even one of that unkempt mob would ever produce anything, for apparently they were among the doomed; but I also knew that if I were given the job of finding the charismatic leader who could speak to the
coming generation, I would stand a much better chance of finding him not in the antiseptic Mamounia where I slept, but here in the Casino Royale where they slept.

However, no sooner had I thought this than I realized that I was using the word
leader
in two senses. From the hard-working young people at home, who were completing their education in traditional fashion, would come constructive leaders like Aristotle, Pericles, Maimonides, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill, while from the Marrakech gang would rise meteoric figures like Saint Paul and Augustine, who had confessed to living in similar conditions, Byron and Dostoievsky, who had absorbed equivalent experiences, and Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, who had been nurtured on the same kind of confused political thinking. I suspected that for all centuries to come the world would continue to produce and follow this same kind of dualism in its leadership and that history would be the record of interaction between the two worlds of Michigan and Marrakech.

As I carried Claire’s malodorous bedroll out of the Casino, she clutched my arm and said, ‘Like wow, this place, you know, I can never forget it. Even the smell. The long discussions we had.’

But when we reached the Bordeaux we found excitement of a different kind, for everyone seemed to be crowding the balconies. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, and one of the Wellesley girls pointed to the third floor toward Monica’s room. I dropped Claire’s bedroll and started running up the stairs, but before I got very far, I saw Monica in her doorway, watching as Big Loomis and Cato carried an object from another room.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘That skinny kid from Mississippi,’ a girl whispered.

‘What about him?’

‘Stiff.’

Big Loomis and Cato had moved to the head of the stairs. As they carried their rigid bundle down, the balconies grew silent. Scores of young men and women watched the procession, and not until it had passed me in solemn quiet did the second Wellesley girl whisper, ‘We went into his room … to give him some food. He was real stoned. We shook him but he didn’t respond … not even in the unconscious way he usually did. We got scared and called Big Loomis and he came down. We said,
“Hadn’t we better call a doctor?” and he said, “Why?” Then we knew he was dead.’

There was now a commotion in the courtyard. It was Jemail rushing in to defend himself: ‘Not my fault, not my fault!’

‘Get out of here, you miserable son-of-a-bitch,’ Loomis growled. ‘You brought him heroin this morning. The girls saw you.’

‘He always buy cheapest stuff. Never pay for safe stuff. So he catch o-d. Not my fault.’

‘Why don’t you get the hell out of here?’ Cato asked, taking one hand from the corpse and pushing Jemail in the face.

The little Arab drew back and shouted venemously, ‘Goddamn nigger! Don’t touch me! Your girl up there, she not your girl much longer, goddamn nigger!’

We all turned and looked up to the third floor, where Monica was standing. Realizing that Jemail was speaking of her, she put the back of her left hand to her lips and retreated into the shadows. Cato, aware that she had been hurt by what Jemail had cried, tried to strike the boy, but Jemail easily evaded him, shouting, ‘Stinkin’ nigger, you ain’t got white girl much longer. I know.’

The pallbearers edged the corpse out the door, for Big Loomis had learned from involvement in earlier heroin deaths that it was best to carry the dead to the police station, where paper work was easier to complete, and as the impromptu cortege disappeared, Claire, in a hushed voice, delivered the funeral oration: ‘Like wow, that one is stoned, you know, for keeps!’

After the funeral was over, the Bordeaux echoed to happier sounds, for Clive flew into town on one of his periodic tours, his purple carpetbag crammed with new releases. As in Pamplona, his most popular disk was one he had written, ‘Koutoubia,’ consisting of two contrasting parts, a verse built around an oriental wail and a driving chorus which pictured young people cavorting across the Djemaá:

The song captured the lyric quality of Marrakech, while at the same time, in its broken and naïve rhythms, depicting the darker side of the city:

Listening to the childish sentiment of the song, I doubted that the poetry of this generation was much better than the sickly-sweet junk of my youth. Once I heard Clive play five successive songs, each of which happened to feature the word
reality
, partly because it contained four crisp syllables and an easy rhyme, but mostly because its philosophical concept was a teasing one: ‘Our generation had found reality.’ The misty smoke-dreams so often alluded to in the new songs had little to do with reality; they referred specifically to marijuana and hashish, and this constant indoctrination explained in part why so many young people wanted to try the two experiences.

In spite of these lugubrious reflections I found that I liked Clive’s new song and I asked him to airmail a copy to Lieutenant Costa Silva at Vila Gonçalo, certain that he and Captain Teixeira would enjoy it. In fact, I was somewhat embarrassed to find that the heavy beat of Clive’s new records made me somewhat nostalgic for the ones I had grown to know in Torremolinos. These sounds were endemic to the age and appropriate to the young people who lived in it; so I lay back on Inger’s bed and allowed the heavy beat to reverberate against my stomach, thinking that if it had such an effect on me, how much more powerful its effect must be on young people. The tentative understanding I had glimpsed that evening in Brookline when
Gretchen first sang ballads for me was now enlarged many times, and I knew without doubt that the music was revolutionary; the lyrics, when comprehensible, were intended to destroy the old order of morality and family life; the hammering beat was a bugle call to rebellion against established norms.

Clive brought us sad news regarding one consequence of the rebellion. ‘Two of our finest record companies in London decided last month to quit issuing classical disks. No market for them. How pitiful! I’d have known nothing about music if I hadn’t been weaned on Mozart. What will the following generations do for understanding if they don’t have Beethoven?’

But when I asked if this demise had not been caused by the kind of music he wrote, he had a firm reply. ‘Each generation must defend its own values. If your group requires classical music and patriotism and the family, defend them. It’s your job to see that your values survive. Our job is to see that our type of music goes forward … our style of life.’

About midnight Joe and Gretchen walked in and Clive languidly moved toward her as if to resume their love affair, but with the mysterious power of communication that young people have, Joe interposed himself between them in such a way that Clive had to know that a change had occurred. To verify his interpretation, he tried twice more to sit with Gretchen, but Joe stayed in command and he retreated. Then, with the good grace that characterized all he did, he said, ‘Why don’t we hear some songs from Gretchen,’ and several of the gang went for their guitars and soon we had four singers who were able to join with Gretchen when she called out the Child numbers, but the surprise of the night, for me, was a song which did not come from Child. Gretchen announced it quietly between puffs on a passing cigarette: ‘Moorman and I are going to try something that ought to have two good voices. We haven’t practiced much and crave your indulgence.’ She struck a few chords, whereupon the honor student from the University of Michigan, whom I had last seen unconscious on the floor of the Casino Royale, cleared his throat and began strumming his guitar. ‘It’s called “Greenland Whale Fisheries,” ’ Gretchen said, and I wondered anew why the songs they liked best bore such strange titles. But when the pair began singing in a gently blended
duet, I as well as the others in the room were caught up in its beauty.

Then came a passage that might have been fashioned from leaping whale spume, or the shadows cast by a fleeting sun in northern latitudes, an authentic cry of women whose men followed the sea. When it ended we sat in silence:

When Gretchen repeated these words, she directed them to Clive, and he smiled. Then as a gesture of deference to her he suggested, ‘How about Child 173?’ and the others applauded, so after a few preliminary strummings on her guitar and a nodded invitation to the others to join her, either in the playing or the singing, she led with her delicate clear voice in the ballad of the four Marys, and when she came to the much-cherished verses in which the doomed serving lady reviews her tragic life, the two other girls joined in the words, and it seemed they were singing a lament for many of their generation, one verse in particular being especially appropriate for the audience in this city:

The singing continued for some time, after which the crowd was eager to hear Clive’s new records again, and this time when he played ‘Koutoubia’ they joined in the chorus, improvising the words they had not yet mastered. At one point Big Loomis filled the doorway, keeping time with his shaggy head, and later we could hear him plodding up the long flights of stairs. About four in the morning the singing ended, and Clive, who would sleep on the
floor at Inger’s, went to the door of the room and watched as Joe led Gretchen upstairs to their quarters and closed the door behind them. He then looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, and I thought how casually these young people handled their love affairs. On succeeding nights he played music for us, always insisting that Gretchen sing, and after a while he quietly drifted north to Tangier and from there to Torremolinos, where they were waiting for him at the Alamo.