Tangier

God, how I hate getting hustled.

Peering down at my map whilst screaming along the pot-holed highway, I decided Algeciras would be a better exit point than Gibraltar to cross over from Spain to Tangier, my next destination making up the great European adventure.

I made the decision based on the simple assumption that since Algeciras appeared to be a little closer to Africa on my microscopic map then the overall trip across the water would have to be shorter. The distance was 3/8" as opposed to 7/16". Obvious. However, in reality lurking in the shadows the decision actually made itself: I was in a hurry to get on a boat and get over to the other side. I wasn’t too keen on traveling across the sea anyway, not ever being on a boat in my entire life, but I wanted to try and the shortest possible route suited my needs.

So after several misguided turns along unmarked roads I made my way to the pier and parked and packed up my backpack all the while looking for a boat to take me across.

I didn’t have a clue about Morocco. Were shots required? A visa along with my passport? Sometimes the travel guides tell you that visas are not required in a particular place, and low and behold they actually are for an independent traveler and they rape you with the surcharges.

I just assumed (for whatever reason) a slew of boats transporting people to and from Spain would be running every hour and I could merely hop on one at my leisure. Sometimes the assumptions work out and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, the pull generated from all these unknowns concerning Africa was extremely strong. I’ve always considered it a rare and lucky thing when I actually feel a pull from something unknown.

The mere act of shutting off the engine of my car was where my troubles started. I had obviously parked where I shouldn’t have because I found I was accosted within seconds - the motor still winding down. And looking back, even after everything that was about to happen was behind me, I realized that I parked the rental less than 50 feet away from where the campaign began.

The panic and urgency from this guy - my new found foster parent who would also double as my guide and agent and all around savior was so contagious that even a cagey traveler like I tell myself that I am got caught up in the proposition that I would miss my boat any second.

I was, as they so aptly say, played like a cheap violin.

This chap, thirty-something, maybe forty-something; long haired, long bearded, overly helpful running along side my car, spoke exactly enough English to let me know the precariousness of my situation. As the car stopped, he spotted his opening. I no longer could ignore him shouting at me as I was moving. He would speak just intelligently enough to not confuse me and not lose me or my new-found panic in missing the last boat of the day, but not enough English to answer my specific questions concerning exactly when the boat would actually leave.

I somehow stupidly donated fifteen bucks for parking for a week which I found I had to repay at the gate at departure and another fifteen for his services to direct me through a myriad of obstacles in order to queue to buy the ticket.

"Come on, come on you’ll miss the boat!" he’d said, a little out of breath, "Where’s your ticket, where’s your ticket? Come on, do you even have a ticket?"

"I thought I’d get one at the dock," I said, slowing to about five miles an hour, not wanting to stop but smelling some sort of hustle. I’d had the window down taking advantage of the seaside Spanish air and having the wind blow inside the car which tended to negate that closed feeling I’d gotten all shut up inside with what was basically a load of dirty laundry and old food laying around that my lack of air conditioning could not quite overcome.

When the car finally stopped I find that he is light years ahead of the likes of me.

"You must hurry and park and I will take you across the street for the ticket, but you must hurry, the one boat today is leaving any minute."

Believe me, if you had heard that phrase ‘hurry’ enough times as I and had seen the panic in this man’s eyes all for the sake of performing that great deed of helping me catch the damned boat, you would have hurried to.

His hook is in deep.

Again, looking back I’m out $30 for what could have been accomplished for free with a little planning and a point of a finger from any street-side bystander if I would have been patient enough to ask. But that was the lesson, I got myself in a hurry in my own mind and it took very little for him to pick up on it. I was wearing my impatience on my shirtsleeve before I saw him. I remember looking back and seeing a security-type guard post right smack in the entryway of the dock area and thought I should have just asked one of the guards. At the time though I’m thinking that even though I knew this was a hustle, and a damned good one at that, it still represented a shortcut and that sometimes a shortcut is certainly worth thirty bucks. Or so I tell myself looking back to save my face.

He hurries me across the street to purchase the tickets, then quickly back again and we wind through an unmarked, undeterminable route to the Customs and passport check. I say goodbye, and actually watch his face frown when I don’t tip him further.

I get in the queue, overloaded with tension because he had repeatedly stressed the fact that this was the only boat for two days and that the boat left in thirty minutes sharp. Hurry, hurry he would say between every other word.

After waiting in line for over an hour I check my ticket and find I have an additional four hours to spare.

Four hours.

Four hours. For a split second, I cannot wait until my return to Spain and the price I’ll extract from my old friend, but alas, that too passes and I look forward to my journey, my first boat ride. I reluctantly admit to myself that I admire my seasoned hustler’s talents, congratulate him on his victory silently to myself and consider myself infinitely wiser, all for $30 American. Infinitely wiser – now what was the lesson I learned? Oh yeah, impatience sucks. I’ll remember that. Yeah, but I still just hate to get hustled. And I can’t wait to see him again.

Sunny but only partially clear from some distant haze, I can just barely see the great rock that divides Europe from Africa, the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, the modern from the ancient. Gibraltar is poised in the distance. I listen to stories and myths about today’s Simian inhabitants and burn a couple of photos, wasted over the great distance and foggy setting.

I look at the great rock and mentally step away from everything else going on around me for a moment. That rock took somewhere around six hundred million years to form. Jagged edges cut by the winds and rain and weather over countless and countless millenniums. The rains themselves hovering over the rock are molecules of water that have evaporated from the seas and filled the heavens only to rain down on the rock and start the process over again. And again. The water I’m looking at is as old as Gibraltar.

The fog is starting to lift in my mind, I look at the rock and the water and try and make rational sense of the tremendous numbers involved: 600 million years. Unimaginable, like the distance of the earth to the sun, some 93 million miles, another unimaginable number. So what’s going on?

There it is. The fog lifts, my mind clears a little for just an instant. Let’s see if I can spell this out. And I finally see the schooling my hustler has given me. The crux of the hustle was caused by a lack of respect for time.

Time. It’s no wonder that man is so out of sync with everything around him, it’s all 600 million years old. We live seventy, maybe eighty years - and that’s it, we’re gone. The earth is billions of years old. No wonder we rush around everywhere - we’re in such a hurry, we’ve got to accomplish things in a millionth of the time that those things all around us have. And it’s no wonder that I was a mark waiting to be taken, just by the look on my face this guy could tell I had a problem with time and with letting it flow around me naturally. My panic caused by my insatiable hurry would have saved maybe a minute or two, and as it turned out, I would have waited four hours and twenty-two minutes instead of four hours and twenty-four minutes.

Shit.

And I take this lesson of time and try to expand it to the represent a group, not just an individual. To a country. No wonder we’re always at war, shit, we’re always out of time, trying to hurry up and change somebody or something that normally takes tens of thousands of years to change - if it were to ever change at all.

So time is a key. All things being equal, time is one of the keys.

Lounging top deck on a big barge of indiscernible age and length and thinking about all this stuff I meet a fascinating couple; finally having married they tell me after being together for ten years. We swap exaggerated stories about ourselves for four hours soaking in the sun and the smooth salty air until we begin to draw into the harbor at Tangier. But bad news awaits us. Having missed the alleged public address announcement that all passengers without exception must show their passports and declarations to the purser below-deck before leaving, we unfortunately prepare to disembark without the required stamp.

As we clamor down around the narrow steel passageways now rusted with age and neglect, we wade through the people to get below to try to leave the boat and are abruptly stopped. We are taken below and forgotten for what must have been two hours and charged with what was apparently just short of treason. Maybe it was treason. We three lost souls try to explain our collective failure to hear the announcement and try to assure them that we are not entering the country in order to spy on the Republic of Morocco.

With a curt nod dripping with impatience and rudeness, we are finally let go - without even the previous non-negotiable stamp of approval on the missing Customs entry form.

Welcome to a world with rules of it’s own.

Knowing absolutely nothing about the country I happen to be standing in, I gladly accept the suggestion to tag along in their cab and follow my friends to their hotel, and still overloaded with stress and fatigued beyond comprehension, say goodnight.

Morning, nine o’clock, time to set afoot. No map, no plans other than finding something Moroccan to eat for breakfast and again for lunch after some aimless hiking around. That really defines the plan: to aimlessly walk around Tangier. Something will come up.

As it turns out, I don’t even have to leave the hotel and something comes up. In the lobby of my hotel stands this dark, young Casanova-looking kid. I‘ll find out later my impression was anything but an exaggeration. He approaches me a little bit timid at first and asks if he can direct me around the maze of Tangier for the day as a guide. I tell him that I’m only interested in food at the moment, and thank him but I’m content to mosey around Tangier myself.

He is polite, energetic, honest, insistent. Finally I tell him he can come along if he wants and I’ll buy the food: all the beer and bread. It turns out to be the only good decision of the entire stay in Morocco. This young man was a true guide in every sense of the word. He understands immediately I have no interest whatsoever in visiting anything touristy, those things which I define as criminally Capitalistic - buy tastelessly generic junk low, sell tastelessly generic junk high. We avoided those many pitfalls and he commenced to lead me around for the entire day where I’m pretty sure no American had ever set foot before.

This young man first took me to the Kasbah, actually underneath the Kasbah where we proceeded to break in through a poorly locked dungeon door and eventually came up to the museum from below. My initial fears of following him into a blackened dead end and being set up for some later robbery had long since subsided. We climb certain sections in utter darkness before we happen upon a trap door to the museum above. The museum itself is so scant that it doesn’t really qualify to be called a museum, but the entire experience was exhilarating.

Afterwards, before I can even catch my breath, we visit his uncle with whom I sit entranced listening to him speak fluently in seven different languages. And if that’s not enough he changes from English to French to Portuguese to something else in one sentence.

He’s an old, old man; his gray-spiked hair is as unkempt as his pants laced with holes. His shirt patched and torn throughout, he was not much to look at and as we shook hands when we met I remember I almost inadvertently crushed his. He is very fond of his nephew, the apple of his eye, my tour guide and tutor in all Moroccan things and he gladly joins us. I’m very curious ands don’t know how either one of them earn their living but am afraid to even ask for fear of possibly insulting them.

The old man tells me wonderful, exaggerated stories of Morocco long ago, always drifting back to his dad and some horrible World War II experience he would stop just short of finishing or clarifying. And the young one would go on and on about his dreams to visit America and show off his knowledge of various cities from some travel book he had read. This kid had memorized all the downtown city streets of Chicago and San Francisco and would rattle them off describing his future trip overseas. His uncle has been to Spain and France and as far away as Norway in his lifetime, and was a virtual wonder of a storyteller. We drank butter tea to start which truly tasted like piss, and then some sort of far-off, strange form of alcohol, and I am soon overwhelmed and I find have to shut down my senses and just roll with the newness and the pleasures of this day.

I buy the old man an expensive three-dollar bottle of Whiskey, which we pass around until it’s exhausted and I find I’m treated like a dignitary for the rest of the night.

I get the subtle message that generosity has never been an American suit, certainly not in Tangier, but I seem to wear it well. We visit a nightclub where I buy the entire planet a round of beers for a total of about $5 American that further enhances my reputation. We proceed to follow his uncle into a hash house, which is extremely common place in Tangier as well as all Africa. We go in and sit down, and obviously with my skin coloring and different clothes, I am the new face on the block and also considerably more subdued than the incumbents.

Old men mostly, some very, very old sit around the floor circumscribing a central pipe, the room so smoke-filled I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to the number of participants. The long, plastic tube is passed around and although I reject my turn (I never inhaled!) with the concentration of the central burn combined with the exhalation in the room, it doesn’t matter.

Conversation in the small room was almost absent, but at some point my appearance was both publicly noticed and openly talked about. It must have gone rather well, probably the earlier gift of whiskey, and I had a couple of stoned men get up with great effort and lean over to shake my hand. I actually at that moment thought of myself as an ambassador to Morocco.

There’s not a lot in Tangier, not a lot of money or modern amenities or much of anything we Americans hold dear. Stuff - material possessions. I think that what all those old men in that smoke-filled room in the back streets of Tangier happened to be accomplishing was their own personal form of freedom. Freedom to think those wonderfully contaminated colorfully polluted thoughts and dreams. And who am I to judge them with my perception of accomplishment or of justice.

After about an hour, we go visit a friend of the old man whose house doubles as a diner and eat some bread and soup consisting of....consisting of....I just don’t know. The place to eat was downstairs of where the owners lived above. We walked in and a couple of young Moroccan toughs were enjoying some bread and soup. Hands were shook all around and I was introduced to another young, aggressive kid who would hound me mercifully in the following days after hearing that I had such a generous nature. Unfortunately for him, he found my dark side after repeatedly ignoring my attempts to scour the city privately.

Finally, the night is finished; it’s three o’clock in the morning, still only my first full day in Morocco. I stumble into my hotel, stumble into bed, stumble into a fitful sleep full of colorful, romantic dreams.

I open my eyes and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and I rouse myself up for my second day. Not much of it left. I walk down to the beach and see the poverty of Tangier and the quiet dignity of the people. I hop on a camel of all things just to say I did, and I tour the beach without seeing any tourists or even a single soul lounging around, only gangs of small children playing soccer.

A few days ago, a few hundred miles ago, a world ago and there was San Sebastian in all of its glory. And rightfully so, everything about the place was phenomenal. Here, the sand just as white, the sun just as bright, sadness.

I finally get to walk aimlessly about the central part of Tangier and find myself around the old town market place. Everywhere I turn there are countless numbers of trinkets, ninety-nine percent of it junk. I see some sketches of Moroccan landscape in a window of a shop and go in to bargain. I’m an old pro from my Tijuana days, and besides that, I just love the confrontation of a battle for a buck. The formalities to begin the session are extremely comical. Small talk, butter tea, more small talk.

Finally I’ve had enough and need to begin the process. Anyway, I hate tea - especially butter tea - which really does taste like piss-water. The sketches would draw from five to ten bucks American apiece, small simple things and I tell myself I’ll pay all the way up to $15 each, which even after the mark-up would be the price back home anyway.

I misplay. The store owner’s opening volley is just under a hundred bucks apiece and despite our attempts to give and take, he cannot lose face by selling them at such a tremendous reduction from his initial price, or for that matter, he decides he cannot sacrifice them at a fair price. He very grudgingly, salelessly lets me go. I honestly can’t believe he won’t take the money anyway, wounded pride or not.

As I leave I mention my interest in finding a nice Moroccan silk carpet. The day is saved for him. His eyes alight with the knowledge of an upcoming kickback. We get up and leave his shop and weave up several spiraling stone paths interesting in their own right, not wide enough even to walk side by side. Constantly looking back to make sure his fish hasn’t escaped; we finally arrive our destination. We enter a similar looking store as my junk dealer’s and climb up three floors to his cousin’s shop.

"My cousin is the most famous and trustworthy carpet dealer in all Morocco."

"Lucky me!", I said, cousin, bullshit. "What a coincidence!"

"No, I promise," he continues. " You will leave here with exactly what you want. He can even ship it to you with no tax and no customs duty if you prefer."

"I hope his sense of a fair price is opposite yours," I said, meaning it.

"I promise," and I don’t know what the Hell he meant by that.

If the painting dealer’s ritual was comical, his cousin the carpet dealer’s was vaudevillian. Not wanting to waste any more precious time with this family and anticipating another attempt at gouging a fat American, and not liking butter tea anyway I continue to try and short circuit the process. To no avail, there are procedures and protocols to observe before the great carpet sale gouge.

Finally, after three attempts at losing patience and threatening to leave, we begin the bargaining session. Again he starts high. The problem is, we’re almost $2000 American off right out of the starting gate. Several minutes go by, so I use the final volley: I must go, and out the door I head. I want a carpet, so I’ll look elsewhere tomorrow. I’m going to Marrakech where I read about a carpet wholesaler. See ya.

Match point, I get the carpet for my initial counter-offer. What I really want to find now is the imaginary carpet wholesaler in Marrakech whose prices scared the shit out of this guy.

He thanks me, assures me he cannot feed his family for at least a month from the money he has lost on this deal and wraps it. I use my plastic to pay, and leave. Walking out, I’m on my own since my original painting dealer has long since departed not anticipating much of a kick-back as he could sense the gouge not hooking. Immediately, I’m lost in scores of winding streets and only eventually find my way back to safe haven, my hotel.

I stumble back down the winding paths, losing any semblance of direction, every arch, every door, every child playing outside looking the same, knowing only that a decline in altitude will eventually get me towards the water and some sort of reference point.

There, I hit the market place again and run into a little section selling nothing but hundreds of different spices. I buy several aromatics and cooking spices, which will compliment the Moroccan cookbook, I picked up earlier in Algeciras.

My one American-related complaint whether walking in the market, or for that matter anywhere in Tangier was that every other man I make eye contact with troubled me to hire him as a guide and would not take no for an answer. Tangier is a hard place to visit. Americans enter the country with money to burn and the locals just want a little cut. It’s a difficult place.

Up ahead on the street a couple of blocks from my hotel I spot a seafood restaurant. I enter, sit down, put my bag-o-spices on the seat next to me, and I’m overwhelmed with an extraordinary meal. Veal, prawns, Heineken, antipasto, desert, all for just nineteen bucks American.

I go back to my room determined the following day to take the bus to visit Casablanca, and from there to Marrakech and Fez. I forget all about Spain, this one meal has won me over. Forget difficult. Morocco is fantastic.

Down at the station the next morning, it’s a little intimidating. Three different Americans have warned me off from traveling to Casablanca or anywhere inland in Morocco by bus because of a rash of bus hijackings and robberies. So I have a quandary, on one hand I’m right next door to these places and it will be years and probably thousands of dollars to get this close again. But the other hand says it doesn’t sound all that safe, so I make a spontaneous (and cautious) decision. I’ll return to Morocco in the future but I will fly straight into Marrakech, and I decide to cut short my Northern African experience to return to Spain and maybe add Lisbon to the list instead.

The queue for the return boat to Spain was unlike any line I’ve ever been in. Without a doubt, I was a part of a greater concentrated mass of humanity and that mystical compressive force that only over-packed impatient humans can create. More than even the stadium doors finally opening for the ‘Who’ when the kids have been left outside in the rain for several hours.

Apparently, due to some kind of Royalty visiting Tangier at some point during my visit all the exit borders had been shut down until the very morning of my decided departure. My six hundred-passenger flotilla that day would pack three thousand.

Oh, shit.

We stand, this mob of wet (of course it’s raining now) impatient motley mass of mortals and cram into the boat. I think back to the trip over to Tangier and how fantastic it was, outside in the sunshine, befriending that couple, both working in America now somewhere around Wall Street, both highly educated and highly entertaining individuals. The boat ride itself, my first, was pleasant enough. The unexplainable queasy stomach, but otherwise Ok. We talked, drank and blew four hours with the kind of anticipatory fun you have before you arrive at a brand new destination.

I find after spending hours in the line that my return ticket to Algeciras is not valid for the ferry ride today. I apparently had bought a round-trip ticket on the way over from the competition’s boat and I received a look of nothing short of contemptible scorn trying to pass the wrong colored ticket to the officer at the ramp heading into the boat.

I argue, in vain but I argue. I argue as I head down the ramp into and on the boat itself. The officer, slight in build could not forcibly move me as I was determined to set foot on the boat, get inside, thinking the battle was half won if I did. Finally help arrives for him and the battle continues and heats up.

However, I am not leaving.

"The boat is oversold and you must leave." A man of authority demands.

I don’t know if he’s a captain or what, but judging by the reaction of his subordinates and of everybody around him, it was plain he was running the show.

And the watchers were glued to the set.

"Listen to me," I screamed, " I bought this ticket and it includes a return and I can’t help it if you guys are oversold. Not everybody had this same boat originally." My argument has merit I’m thinking, but not here in this land and certainly not at this time.

"You will leave the boat immediately," he states very calmly as he puts my ticket back into my front coat pocket. He’s not used to getting his way without question, but again, I’m not moving.

"I’m going to tell you this one more fucking time, I’m on this boat, I showed my purple ticket to the man at the window, again at Passport and finally at Customs, all three which were officers positioned at places where the lines changed directions. Nobody mentioned that it was the wrong ticket until now after I’ve waited in the line for hours." The brilliance of the logic of my argument amazed even me.

To no avail. With a wave of his hand he motions for help. It’s going to get ugly now.

A final tact. "Look, I’ll buy another ticket, I’ll pay you for a first-class ticket, I don’t care what it costs but I’ve got a plane to catch which I’ve already missed once because of this delay in your country and I’ve got to get on this boat." I’m on a roll now trying to appease him with a ploy to have him pity me.

No other words are exchanged. He takes me by the arm and walks me himself over to some sort of one-window administration office and where another ticket is purchased. I’m out an extra twenty bucks and I’m the asshole, but I’m on the boat.

Now, returning, spent, no longer having fun, just wanting to get back, no longer considering the return trip exciting, but sadly an encumbrance.

And of course it’s raining.

I’m somehow at the rear of another line and all the seating inside fills immediately and completely. I didn’t get my first class ticket and I’m just lucky to be on board. It can’t be that bad so I go top deck and carve a slice about three feet by three feet, consider it my home and sit myself down for the duration.

And I sit, not moving, merely swaying. I sit some more, not moving for four more hours. I stay put because I have food in my backpack, I have valuables in my backpack and I don’t want to lose my precious three-foot square space that is actually partially out of the rain. I sit because I don’t want to leave my home.

We finally leave dock, and the waves are nothing short of surfable. I try and tell myself there isn’t any danger and that seasickness is merely a perception of reality and not reality itself and can be overcome by logic.

We’re not really going to sink I tell myself, and that discombobulation threatening the base of my skull is some ugly mystical non-truth with no solid foundation that has no business with me.

And in less than 30 minutes my inner ear tells me to shove my philosophy up my ass and I leave my treasured area, because my reasoning and philosophy have failed, and I head straight for my true sanctuary.

Left behind in my backpack is an eight hundred dollar (down from $2600!) Arabic carpet and a wonderfully colorful king-sized satin bedspread carefully re-wrapped inside a five-dollar wool throw rug and wrapped further in brown paper.

My thinking was as follows: when the Customs Gestapo guys tear the brown paper they will see the cheap wool rug and wonder what the idiot paid since it was wrapped so neatly. Well, at the moment I’m thinking, whoever wants it can have it. I want to die.

I go below deck, open up the communal latrine doors, and learn what misery really is.

The men’s latrine, which could probably hold up to thirty people if truly needed, has over one hundred kneeling, bent, fallen individuals strewn across the floor. That sight is distressing enough by itself, but there are five inches of vomit rolling back and forth along with the ship, crashing into small children and washing into and over those laying, unable to rise.

But I have no pity for them, pity me I’m thinking, so once again down here as above I carve out my space and find a wall to lean my hands against and join this miserable fraternity.

Six times I retch until my mind and my stomach clear and I finally can walk again. I go back above deck, find my backpack untouched and sit motionless (except for the evil presence of the sea) for another five hours. My four-hour boat ride is in its eleventh hour. My mind drifts away and I begin to imagine what it must have been like on the slave ships departing here a few hundred years ago.

But there is a God. At nine o’clock p.m. we disembark. Immediately my senses regain control just by setting foot on stationary ground and I labor to get to my car, pay for parking again (that’s right, Damn him) and pull out a map. I’ve survived something I know, and the accompanying shot of adrenaline is pulling me to make some sort of getaway.

I want to see Lisbon and I draw a path on the map through Seville. I leave Algeciras, drive twenty or thirty minutes and see the futility of traveling any further. My adrenaline rush has vanished, left is pure unadulterated fatigue. I find a back street and pull my rental car behind an old truck not even wanting or able to bother locating a hotel or even sleeping in a hotel bed.

And lacking those colorful romantic dreams, take off my dirty, sweaty shirt and pants and tilt the seat back and crash.