On my flight home from Morocco, the long leg, Casablanca to Montreal, I had a bulkhead seat and 370 movies to choose from. Bridget Jones’s Baby, Alien, Batman Returns, Back to the Future II and III, A Bug’s Life, Forrest Gump, Glory, Million Dollar Baby, The Green Mile, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery; they were all there, just waiting for me to point and press.
It’s a seven-hour flight and I read my novel as long as I could stand it and then I scrolled the movies. Besides the movies, there were 650 “shows;” that’s over 1000 ways of piloting yourself through the airplane noise and stink, your sore butt and cramped legs, and the silent wrestling match with the person in the seat beside you over armrest justice. I’d smile and brace my elbow when I passed him his coffee or his chicken taco and he’d smirk back, pressing my arm for advantage while I was off balance.
The movie Casablanca was an option; it’s my favorite movie. My favorite scene takes place in Rick’s Café: Yvonne, a young French woman with her heart beating for Rick, proprietor and our American hero, waltzes into the scene and allows German Soldiers to buy her drinks to court his jealousy. A German soldier sits at the piano and bangs the keys while his fellow countrymen, led by Major Strasse (the perfect evilist), thump the piano with their clenched fists and sing Die Wacht am Rhein. In response, hero and idealist, Victor stands in front of the band and commands they play La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. The scene becomes a North Africa battlefront, the Germans in their synchronized male voices and well-cut uniforms arrayed in a tight battle group against the trombone, trumpet, drums and guitar, the many mouths open wide in shared song, the suits and long dresses, the white police uniforms, led by the idealist in his white tuxedo, overwhelm the Germans in beauty, numbers, volume and passion. As the tears run down Yvonne’s cheeks, they run down mine. Viva la France!
The problem with Casablanca is that it is a celebration of a war-besieged 1942 America and was shot when the outcome was unclear. The main character, Rick, outcast and rejected lover, damaged but tough, represents an America of ideals and courage in the midst of war, an America that stares into the future confident and unafraid. It’s an America that doesn’t exist anymore; we’ve become instead the fist-pounders belting out our nationalism, bullying the world, and using the tools of state to shut down resistance (the next scene in the movie). I wish we liberals were playing the part of Yvonne, that we were the resistance. But we’re not. We don’t have her tears. We don’t have her courage. We don’t have her passion. We don’t have her voice. We certainly don’t have her acting ability. Nor are we the tough idealist that is Rick, the courageous Nazi antagonist that is Victor (who can’t contain his outrage over even a bar song), or even the cynical yet patriotic French policeman, Captain Renault with his bemused smile and peccadillos.
Instead, I watched American Graffiti. The actors, the cars, the street scenes, the dialog, it’s the safe, confident, pretty America I grew up in; it’s who we used to be. The questions the movie wrestles with are the questions of of an idyllic youth; what should we do tonight, who’s dating who, whose car is faster, college or no, where do we get some booze; all with Wolfman Jack as our narrator and conscience over a playlist that includes Only You, Party Doll, Peppermint Twist, At the Hop, The book of Love, Do You Want to Dance, Why do Fools Fall In Love, Goodnight, Well It’s Time to Go, and all the rest. The fights and wrecked cars, the money stolen from the pinball machines, the teenage stunt that wrecked a police car resolve themselves quickly and neatly and don’t derail the narrative; they are instead absorbed as the unremarkable antics of youth. It’s a movie about ideals, confidence and identity; the answers to the existential questions are obvious and go without saying. In 1962, American young people believed in America. I watched it again when I got home.
I got out of the Army in March of 1978 and stayed in Europe. It was cold in Germany and I hitchhiked south. I met Clayton at a campground in San Sebastián in northern Spain. Tall, skinny, scuffed leather-soled wingtips with no socks and food-stained khaki shorts, Clay had been a shoe salesman in London. He had an Isles complexion, a perpetually startled expression, and drove a faded blue Renault station wagon with a dented-in passenger door. He was twenty-eight and on the run from his pregnant girlfriend.
In a campground in Madrid, we picked up Beau. He was a Kiwi who’d worked as a stevedore in Tauranga before coming abroad. He was 5’8” or so, thick legs, heavy shoulders, hard, short-fingered hands, untrimmed beard, bald head, and a round face that looked like back on the docks he might have taken some hard punches; thick, crooked lips, smashed-flat nose, cauliflowered ear, his left ear. The three of us jammed into the Renault with our backpacks and from Madrid, we traveled south through Cordoba and Sevilla to Algeciras.
The Lonely Planet Guide warned us that Morocco was dangerous, that travelers should be experienced. After several weeks sleeping on the beach in Spain, we declared ourselves experienced and got off the ferry, filled out customs forms, waited to be waved across the border and drove west along the cliffs toward Tangiers, the Mediterranean with its glassy waters far below becoming more intense and shockingly blue as the sea got deeper. As evening set in, we followed a tiny switchback track to the beach and set up camp under the trees fringing the sand, just like in Spain. Clay set up his tent, Beau and I threw our bags down on the sand, the canopy of trees with the stars of Orion glittering through as our tent. We built a fire and threw a frisbee.
The axe handle blow to my head made a deep, cracking noise that echoed through my skull and shattered my consciousness into small pieces, each piece part of a larger reality, a jigsaw puzzle dumped out. It was quick, the blow and its echoes, so quick that I didn’t feel it in the moment, but only remembered it afterwards. Putting the puzzle back together took time, and yet, all the while my mind was struggling, my body was twisting and writhing. And that’s when the pieces came together. We’d rolled out our sleeping bags at some distance from each other, I was closest to the car and took the hit. Trapped in my bag, I rolled toward the car and shoved my head underneath trying to protect it from the axe handle and the punches and the stomping feet.
Forever moments later, I heard Beau bellow, “Blawdy fuckin’ ‘ell!” as he charged into the mob standing over me. There were six or eight of them and they were focused on kicking the shit out of me and in the dark, he took them by surprise. As they turned on him, I got to my feet and together we fought, Beau and I, leaning back on each other, shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I remember hearing an animal howling and snarling that didn’t stop, that didn’t pause to breathe, that was a constant in our struggle. I wondered what it was as I shoved and kicked and punched at the shadow shapes in front of me before realizing the animal was me.
One of them had a flashlight, the beam slicing through the dark giving my memory of the event a black-and-white cinematic quality. As we struggled, I grabbed a rock from our firepit, perfectly formed to fit my hands and just heavy enough, an early man’s killing tool. I lifted it above my head and brought it down with the force of a hundred and eighty-five pounds of military fitness, adrenalin and terror just as the light flashed across a neck and bare shoulder and that’s where that rock hit, exactly in that confluence. He collapsed on the ground at my feet.
That was the end. They yelled and called to each other and ran into the dark, hauling with them the man whose neck I’d crushed. We called for Clay and got no answer. Frantic and terrified, we felt our way through the trees and underbrush where his tent had been searching for his body, certain that he was unconscious or dead. After many minutes, a faint “hello” and then another. We returned the call and Clay stumbled into the ruins of our camp clutching his hatchet. He’d heard the attack and had ran off down the beach and was unhurt.
We stuffed our wrecked and bloody gear into the car, drove up the switchbacks and spent the rest of the night in a thatched roof truck stop smoking hand rolled black tobacco cigarettes and telling tough-guy stories and bad jokes while the town doctor yawned and set my arm and sewed a dozen stitches into my head and six into my arm and another dozen or fifteen into Beau, all without the luxury of anesthesia.
The next morning when we should have been driving, we went to the police. That was inexperience. My French was horrible, my Arabic non-existent and Clay and Beau didn’t try. The cops were hostile and aggressive and at first I didn’t understand. I told our story over and over and at four o’clock in the afternoon, after sitting for three and a half hours perched on a wooden bench in a small room with concrete walls, no windows and a locked door, they determined I wasn’t a murderer and gave us back our passports.
We drove to the edge of town and stopped the car. The conversation, and I remember it well, was about whether or not to leave Morocco, whether or not to turn around and go back to the ferry, back to Spain. I argued, leaning against the Renault me with my arm in a blood-encrusted sling, against leaving a country we hadn’t seen. Beau agreed. Eventually, so did Clay.
* * * * *
We needed a place to sleep. As we talked, Taibi and Aref, carpenters working on a house across the road, came over and squatted down and brought out their kief and a pipe and passed it around and I told them our story. Taibi invited us to stay at his house. It wasn’t far. I translated his offer and Clay shook his head no, “Let’s try to get to Tangiers tonight.”
Beau said, “We won’t make it, mate. It’s getting dark, road’s shitty, we ain’t slept in two days. Probably thieves and bandits out there, besides.”
I said, “Let’s stay with Taibi.” Clay didn’t say anything.
Aref grinned and waved and shouldered his toolbelt and walked away down the road and the four of us climbed into the car and Taibi gave directions, pointing us down desert dirt roads until he told Clay to stop in front of a prickly pear cactus hedge. The hedge was ten or twelve feet tall, maybe four feet thick, neatly trimmed and dense so you couldn’t see through it. We grabbed our gear and he led us through a tiny wooden gate into a dirt courtyard with a small concrete house with a flat roof in the middle. The hedge completely surrounded his house.
Taibi set up a tarp on poles in the courtyard and we laid out our sleeping bags. His wife brought us dinner, tangine chicken. We sat cross legged and ate with our fingers, copying our host. When we were finished, Taibi wanted to talk. Sitting side-by-side on the ground, we talked world politics, carpentry, fishing, scuba diving and I don’t remember what else. We talked in French and when Beau and Clay couldn’t follow the conversation, they went to sleep. That went on, him talking to me in French and me nodding until it was 3:00 in the morning. Finally, I gave up and told him that that I needed sleep and he nodded and shouted a command in Arabic.
A young woman, his daughter, stepped around the corner of our tarp as though she’d been waiting and stood silent in front of us. She was fifteen, maybe, and teenage-skinny. Her hair, in the flickering yellow light, was a thick, wavy auburn-black that she wore pulled back over her shoulders. Her complexion was smooth, clear, the gold color of the North African desert but darker, more complex. She was wearing a white kaftan with gold embroidery that hung straight from her shoulders, touching her body only lightly at her breasts and hips. She was barefoot.
At first, I thought her eyes were black but as I looked at her and she stared back at me and her father talked, I realized that in fact her eyes were the same unfathomably deep blue as the Mediterranean viewed from the cliffs above. A soft smell of citrus, tangerines or maybe mandarins, surrounded her, the scent just detectable over the stink of kerosene. She stood, her lips tense and pinched, her feet together, her arms stiff at her side, her eyes never moving from mine while her father proposed our marriage. It took a while for me to understand.
Tangiers, Rabat, Casablanca, Fez, we spent a month in Morocco, camping in campgrounds patrolled by uniformed, no-nonsense guards with rifles. Our days we spent walking the narrow, thousand-year-old cobblestone streets, drinking mint tea in the markets under cobalt skies, canvas tarps shading us from the desert sun, and in the evening, smoking joints rolled from a mix of hashish and black tobacco.
Beau and I became quite close. Clay became increasingly bitter and distant. The Renault was his, he was our driver, and so we were forced into an uneasy truce when we were in the car and when not, we separated, Beau and me, our tents side by side in the sandy campgrounds, and at some distance, Clay’s tent, the nylon sagging around the aluminum poles bent in the struggle. We never talked about it, but the attack had ruined us.
We left Morocco the way we came, on the ferry from Ceuta to Algeciras. Clay dropped Beau and me at a train station. I took the train to Nuremburg then to Rhein-Main Air Base, got on a C-130 and started college that fall.
In the Army, I was a reconnaissance specialist assigned to the 1/1 Cavalry Squadron at O’Brien Barracks in Schwabach, West Germany. We spent several months of the year in the field and I needed a knife, a heavy, general purpose knife for all the cutting, prying, slicing, scraping, tasks living in the field and sleeping on the ground and in jeeps and tracks and eating out of a mess kit required. I bought one at the PX, probably in 1976.
From the PX at O’Brien Barracks
I got out of the Army in Europe and hitchhiked south; I used that knife to slice cheese and bread in small towns in France and shuck oysters on a dock in Spain (of course I cut myself, have you ever tried to shuck oysters?).
It was on my belt when I was attacked on a beach in Morocco (I used a rock from our fire pit to crush a man’s shoulder, it didn’t occur to me to reach for the knife). Later I used it to slice and crumble hashish as I wandered through the markets of Tangier, Fez, Rabat and Casablanca with stitches and a broken arm.
I used it to scrape the head gasket off my brother’s Triumph Bonneville in a campground in San Luis Obispo, cut choke cable housings to make a throttle cable for a Moto Guzzi Eldorado in Daytona Beach.
It was in my luggage when I moved to Tokyo and on my hip every day for 13 months as I rode a Honda XL250 through 21 countries across three continents; a sailors tool on a rented sailboat in Thailand, a camping tool in Australia, a backpacking tool in Nepal, a tool for cleaning chickens bought live in Zaire markets.
It was there when Eli (my son) and I rode to Prudhoe Bay and when Coco (my daughter) and I camped at the Grand Canyon and when Jane (my wife ) and I stared in amazement at the VLA (Very Large Array, a radio telescope in New Mexico). It opens freeze-dried packets and baked beans in a can with equal facility.
It’s here with me now, an odd and fitting talisman for my wondering, wandering life. And it’s sharp.
