Tangier Slight Return Part 2

Tangier: Slight Return (part 2)

Ten years ago I landed in Tangier in search of a dream. Now I was tracing those steps. Here’s an excerpt from my journal from that day back in 1999…

“I checked in at the hotel El Muniria, famed for being the place where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. If the days of the Interzone were long gone I thought, I could still try and catch his ghost. Peter, the quirky English owner received me, though he swore to me, unequivocally, that he never really was in Tangier anymore. Spent most of the year in the Old Country, he did. If I was talking to him right now, it was by pure chance. This moment was almost a statistical improbability. I grabbed my bags and followed this slow ascending improbability up a steep narrow magenta stairwell to the second floor where I was showed room 8. It was non-descript and ready but failed to excite my bleary eyes. On the other hand room 5 wasn’t ready but was the one Kerouac used to stay in when he visited Burroughs and company. The room immediately pulled you in. A giant palm tree stirred against one of the open windowpanes; behind it you could see the immaculate white minaret of the local mosque and further on the gritty arbor of Tangier with its deep blue scintillating sea. The light was bright, brighter than in Los Angeles. The other window overlooked the narrow Rue Magellan and the competing Hotel across the street with a maze of stairs and alcoves leading to a cozy roof top terrace café from which a couple of young hip-looking urban Moroccans, listening to blaring pop music and rolling what looked like a big fat joint, glanced at me with an air of complicity. A cool breeze came in, blowing the green velvet curtains and bringing with it the far away sounds of a schoolyard full of children.

“I’ll take it,” I immediately said. “If it’s not ready I can wait. All I really need is a shower.” An older Moroccan woman peeked her head inside the doorframe and frowned. She was the deaf mute maid of the hotel. The one really in charge, it seemed. She and Peter got into an argument filled with grunts and gestures mixed with Peter’s exasperated invocations of God’s Sake and a clean towel for our new guest. Burroughs was never so close, or so I thought.

A quick shower later, I left the room to go for a little roaming around Tangier hoping a bit of fresh air would put me to sleep later that afternoon. But Burroughs’s ghost didn’t let me get off that easy. The key to the room was twice as long as the door was thick and hundred times more difficult to manipulate than the French language. I imagined Kerouac coming back to his room, in the middle of the pitch dark night, high as a kite, trying to open this damn door, transferring to the moment a heavy rhymed spiritual test of epic proportions. There he was - key - door - the East - must open and take a piss. Here I was, fifty years later. People come and go but doors never change.”

I wanted to return to El Muniria, to that room number 5, where possibly Kerouac and I shared the same existential frustration with that fateful door. I had tried to call ahead of time but the connection was bad and probably wrong. So, I had left it to chance. The only place I hadn’t booked a place to stay was Tangier and since the Hotel – though famous in certain rarified literary circles – was a dive well outside the universe of everyday tourism. So, I wasn’t worried. I knew it was close by because I remember seeing the harbor from my now mystical room. I stepped into freedom and found a taxi. The driver was nice (they’re all nice until they scam you) started driving while telling me that he had no idea how to find Rue Magellan, where the Hotel was located. True, it was a small dead end street. But he seemed oddly lost. So, I told him to take me to Boulevard Mohammed 5. From there we can find it. He took me to Boulevard Mohammed 6! Ok. He was trying to scam me. I made him take me to the right Boulevard and I stepped out in a corner I seemed to recognize, where I could see the Bar Berlin. I walked in. It was a small bar/restaurant where they serve hard liquor in the basement and beer and Moroccan tapas on the main floor. Seven tables at the most. TV on. Everybody was waiting for the US/Brazil world soccer federation cup game.

The waiter – who had a dashing black moustache, straight out of casting central -shook his head and then turned to a group of three men sitting at table at the end of the restaurant. A big man with short hair and a voice hoarse from smoking too much signaled with a lazy gesture for me to come to him. I lifted my luggage and stepped through the door that had just opened.

The man, I will call Karim, was happily drunk. He had the swagger of a seasoned pro who knows exactly what he’s doing even if he’s shit faced. He reminded me of an old friend who had the same hard hybrid Mediterranean exterior but soft eyes that betrayed it.

El Muniria! He exclaimed loudly for all to hear. It doesn’t exist.
It does, I said.
He plucked a napkin, took a pen from one of his friends (more later on this motley crew in their 40’s and 50’s) and starting writing the names of hotels.
These are the hotels I know that are worth shit. After five I stopped him.
I’m looking for the El Muniria.
How do you spell it?
I spelled it for him, he wrote it down and with a knowing smile picked up his phone. I’m going to find out if this place exists or not.

Now he was on a mission.

The other men turned to me. One of the them, another one of those Moroccans that reminds me of my uncle Pato in Chile, tells me that he’s going to find out because he knows “people”. He’s a very high up customs security agent! I wait. They tell me to pull up a chair and sit down. Karim hollers to the waiter to get me a drink. I ask for a lemon soda. They ask me where I’m from. Chile, I said. The one that looks like my uncle, is name was Hassan begins to tell me that the two people he most admires is Che Guevara and Salvador Allende. I tell them I was in exile and they shake their heads in approval. Karim gets off the phone and with a resigned gesture nods that I was right. I should have told him that it sits above the Tangerine, a well known bar where left wing intellectuals used to drink and share their dashed hopes for social change in Morocco.

I drink there all the time, he exclaimed. You’re hungry? What do you want? My treat. And so began a two hour trip into what Karim described as “Moroccan Hospitality”. It became quickly clear that he was a sort of “godfather” who was paying for everyone at the table. There was an engineer, a lawyer and a businessman. Food starts arriving: fish, rice, meat, shrimp, olives, tomato salad, roasted turkey chunks, and beer, lots of beer for everyone. Except for me, I told them that I was not drinking. I had decided to be totally dry for the length of the trip. They ask me if I was Muslim. At this point I had to make a choice: I had not been practicing for a little while and was not sure how I would approach the subject while traveling through Morocco. After a flash in the pan – I told them that yes, I was.

You are a lucky man, said the Engineer.
Why?
Because I was born a Muslim. You had the chance to become one.
Karim interrupted and began an insane line of logic: so, do you hate Pinochet?
That was a tough one. I told them that I have been trying to avoid hating anybody.
So, you like him? Is you suitcase filled with the dirty money he stole from his people?
I laughed.
You are Mossad aren’t you? The Mossad woks with agents of Pinochet.
But he’s dead.
He’s dead, but not the agents.
I could not tell if he was serious or not because he was drunk. So, I told them the story of having once planted a nail smack in the middle of the photograph of Pinochet and how it really screwed me up. He didn’t buy it, but he finally moved on and asked me how long I was staying in Tangier. I told him that I was leaving for Fes in the morning.
Do you have a ticket?
No.
Alright. I’ll buy you one. I’ll get a taxi to go and get it for you and then the taxi will take you to the Hotel and you won’t pay a dime. That’s Moroccan hospitality! And when you go back to America you will tell everyone that we welcome everyone with open arms. Will people believe you?
Yes, I said. Thank you.
Have more food. Have a beer.
I paused and said, you know what, I used to have a sheikh that told me once never to refuse anything that is offered. So I said yes. He hollered for four more beers. They came, we drank them.
He looked at me. Sheikhs are full of shit he said, with their beards and their turbans. You know why I made you drink that beer? To break the connection between you and your Sheikh!
I shuddered. One of the hidden reasons I had come to Morocco was to figure out what I was going to do now that I didn’t have a Sufi Teacher anymore. But that was secret and this man had in his drunken haze had cut to the bone.
You are right, I said. I have lost that connection.
He scoffed. I’m sure your Sheikh liked to screw young girls.
I said nothing.
Have another beer, he ordered.
Alright.
When I come to the US, I come with 8,000 dollars in my pocket and I expect to have a good time. So, where do you live?
North Carolina.
Good. I’m going to go and visit you there and we’ll see how you receive me.
I’ll pick you from the airport.
No, I take a limo and stay at the best hotels but I expect that you will show me a good time.
Wow, I thought. What am I getting into? For a second I had a thriller vision. That’s when, in flash, I see the premise for a thriller movie in my head. Young visitor to small town is helped by the worst torturer of the secret police and he is slowly pulled into the fringes of that world.
If you come, I said. I will what I can.
We’ll see about that, he professed.

The taxi boy came, he had my first class ticket and he took me to the Hotel where I was lucky to get the last available room. Room Five was taken and I never got to see it. That’s all for the better. I’m starting to believe that if you go back to a place you have turned into a memory – then that memory will forever disappear and be replaced by a new one. It’s a gamble we should be careful to take.

Tomorrow Fes, “Spiritual Capital of Morocco”. I really hope no one offers me a beer again. Some truths go down better with something sweeter.