A lantern light with the almost beautiful smell of kerosene. Not because it smells good, but more like nostalgia. I sent my thirteen year old friend out this evening to search for the fuel for my lamp which will power my evening until the flame burns out. A simple way of living. I’ve heard about things going on in this too huge world and have had to say goodbye to people with the unknowing, knowingness that a day will come when we will meet again. They’re not sinners and certainly not saints. The poorest people in the world. What a phrase that so often gets ascribed to farmers in West Africa or all of the developing world for that matter. What is poor? What does is mean to live a life and be able to know and describe someone else’s life as well? Writing hasn’t been very easy these past few months. Some stuff that has happened forced me to put up a mind-block to where the world was not something worth recognizing or documenting. Maybe I’ll get around to describing this terrible and untrue reality that occupied my mind for a long time.
The land of billboard sex and bacon. Back to the USA where leaves are changing colors and handheld objects filled with rare earth metals rule the world. I was sitting at a bar in Washington, DC and I don’t think I have ever seen someone with so many gadgets coming out of her purse. She had and iPhone, Iphone, IPhone, IPHONE, a blackberry, Itabletphonepadpodpopcicle, flip-phone, and some speakers with a cord that could connect them all together. She was connected, but had trouble having a conversation with those of us sitting at the same table. I called her Mary Poppins as she was pulling everything out of her purse and she looked at me like I was crazy and told me to F-off.
Togo is in the past these days and TXTing while driving is the new fun reality. The beer I spilled on my new flip-phone the other day makes those long texts messages really interesting because of the number of sticky clicks it takes and how I can do it without looking at my phone or having my hands on the steering wheel. I love America. There is really not much not to like, except 24-hour news and fear-mongering, but really we HAVE the best movies and food by far and your neighborhood pharmacy(s) sell painkillers, cough medicine, cigarettes, Halloween candy, Vienna sausages, and a whole meth lab’s worth of trinkets. If it’s close enough to walk to it’s certainly close enough to drive to. However, peeing on the side of the road is a big no no. Everyone is trying to make it somewhere and I can’t wait to meet everyone there. I’ll be in the corner giving the free foot massages.
I took the long way home from Togo and made a few different planned and unplanned stops along the way. I was at Hotel Gallion in Lome, Togo on the night of the 10th. For the past two years I’ve been staying at this hotel because of the cheap rooms and friendly service. The holes in the windows and rickety fans coming out of the ceilings are negligible. My flight leaving Togo wasn’t until 3:00am and I didn’t have any money so actually renting a room for the night was out of the question, so I figured I would wait until the band finished playing downstairs, settle my bill at the bar and say goodnight, then sneak up to the terrace and lay low for a bit until the waves crashing on the beach a block over became the only noise. Having money is cool, but most of the memorable and exciting times in my life have come at times when the funds have been extremely low or not there at all, which forces you to look at things with a whole different perspective, in my life at least. I didn’t have a place to stay and couldn’t afford one so the terrace at the hotel in Lome was my best option until the time came when I had to sneak down to the bottom floor without alerting the night guard and walk over to the dark beach road in the middle of the night with the dull hum of the crashing waves as the only noise and the putrid smell of dead fish and piss burning in my nostrils in order to flag down someone on a motorcycle to see if I could pay him to take me to the airport in the muggy, hot, dead African night.
The beach road is not somewhere you want to be at night, but I didn’t have any other choice and I was ready to get the hell out of Togo, so making the walk down to this sketchy road was just another thing I had to do before I could make my way home. I left my bags behind a bush at the hotel and wandered down this lonely road until I saw some headlights coming from the Ghana border and heard the rackety sound of a busted moto coming my way. I needed a ride to the airport and he was my only option so I ignored the fact that his moto was held together with some greegree and he was a large, fat man, which seemed to be giving the motorcycle trouble already. I tried not to think about my weight with the weight of my rucksack. Done, he agreed to take me for a very generous price on my part.
The road was dead and dark and the wind coming from the ocean reaffirmed its presence as the blackness of the night covered the ocean’s blue. My eyes were watering as he sped up and I could feel the wobbling vibrations of the moto under me as my hair was whipping around with the increasing headwind. Total trust in this dude I never met, but found because I had to on the sketchiest road in Togo in the middle of the night. Now I’m paying him to take me to the airport, to put me on a plane. Up the road we see three or four dark me standing in the middle, blocking the road and for a minute I can feel my new friend increase his grip on the throttle as if he is about to run through this, now obvious, military checkpoint. What can they be doing in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night?
Slowing down, one anxiety turns to another as my driver loosened his grip on the throttle and put his foot down on the break. The conversation we had with these armed guardians of the Togolese populace was about what it should have been with them seeing a white dude on this road and this time of night. They let us past and I left my stupid grin with them.
Palm trees race past us or us past the palm trees, if it wasn’t for the wind and gravity working against me and this machine you wouldn’t have been able to tell. A long, hard left turn takes us into the market where a breeze from another midnight rider blows trash and plastic bags scurrying across the street.
Music and lights and people, but they don’t look much like people, but staggering, screaming ghouls hanging outside this discotec that was still thumping music. Still holding on, still thinking that this could be the last ride and trying to forget about my life, telling myself I don’t exist because I was so scared and so afraid that the thought of my own life was too much. Thus, I continued on trusting this man in the early morning hours in Lome, Togo.
When arriving in new places it always takes time to get your bearings or at least any sense of direction. It is often the climate that gets you first evident in the fact that usually, when traveling long distances, taking off or putting on an article of clothing is the first thing you do when getting off the airplane. I was gripped by an urge of spontaneity and ambitious adventure arriving in Casablanca on a dry, hot Saturday afternoon. Plans were something that were made not to last. I shouldn’t have gotten on that train, but I did and ended up four hours and a train ride away from where I should have been and needed to be.
He was from Morroco and she was from Seattle.
“The world is about people helping people,” Hamid said. “I haven’t seen my mother or sister in three years and they don’t know that I’m coming home.” He looked at Sarah who was sitting cross-legged on the floor leaning against her backpack. She was gazing out of the window, starring at the passing dry, dusty plain and taking pictures with her camera as the train wizzed by. She would look up at Hamid from time to time and you could tell they were in love by their ideas and being. It was as if they both knew that other people existed in the world, but they really didn’t care. They were just two wandering hippies and she had followed him back to Morroco to live with a family she had never met. I was with them, sitting on the train bouncing around conversations in French, Arabic, and English.
“A.y., you can stay with us for a few days if you want in Merrakech, I could show you around,” Hamid said as he looked at Sarah who nodded in agreement.
“I mean, yeah, why not. I don’t really have any money and certainly do not have any plans, I am supposed to be four hours in the other direction, but I might as well keep going if you can help me figure out my problem tomorrow,” I replied and Hamid nodded, content and in agreement. “Yeah we will figure it out tomorrow.”
For the rest of the hot train ride we talked about reciprocity and about the good things that come to people who give without knowing. We arrived at my new friends mother’s apartment who didn’t know her son was finally returning from three years in the United States. She had not even talked to him in the three years he was gone and I was able to witness the beautiful reunion of mother and son. They took me in as their bum and for two days I slept in a room with Saiid, a very devote Muslim who never left the house and always warned us not to even though there was never any danger. Hamid’s sister cooked and made tea. Her couscous was incredible. Hamid’s mother waddled around in her burka, occasionally leaning from the window on the third floor overlooking the street below and would yell at neighbors or would just stare. We never got around to solving the problem I had, but it just ended up solving itself after a very stressful day sucking back tea, smoking cigs, pacing around, and worrying until my head was about to explode.
So was able to finally escape this sinkhole of Moroccan hospitality. I made a promise I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep to people who were genuinely willing to help me. I felt bad about it, but don’t feel bad about it.
Such is life sometimes I suppose.
Saiid wanted to take me to the desert he said.
Drinking milk and sitting crossed-legged on a rug.
We made plans.
Plans I couldn’t keep knowing he would pack his bags and knowing that he would expect me to call and I knowing that I wouldn’t call, couldn’t call
