I know that’s true, Margaret, and I’m very happy to make sacrifices—name one, I’ll make it. Meanwhile, I am not leaving my jeans behind.
MARGARET: Tom, do you know what sacrifices the others are making?
TOM: No, they haven’t told me. But I’m sure it’s all very difficult for them and I’d like to know so I have a better idea what I’m up against in not leaving my blue jeans behind.
A week later, at sea, Steve was infuriated to discover that Margaret had allowed at least one of the young women on the crew to bring aboard substantial bottles of hair care products, while some of the men had been cited over significantly lighter, smaller items.
In some cases, Margaret was indisputably right in her decisions, insisting for example that Ernst Fiby, he of the Viennese wit and shaved head, leave behind a pair of clunky, high rubber Wellingtons—for the sheer space they would command, as well as the weight. She was outraged to realize later that he had snuck them aboard, although he did finally toss them in the sea, where they may yet be doing thousand-mile circles in the currents of the mid-Atlantic.
EVERY EVENING at about seven o’clock, we’d slump out of the boatyard in the winter darkness, one of us pushing Angela in her wheelchair, up the mile-long hill outside the port walls to where the city proper began and we could organize our taxi-sharing for the long ride back across Agadir to the apartment. And from there on to a restaurant for a blessed hour of nourishment and relaxation. Restaurants are an adventure in Agadir, and our search for a decent tagine or couscous led us variably to little family bistros such as Daffy’s on the back side of the city’s tourist area and into the visceral horrors of the restaurant at the Riad Hotel, where, had the tagine I ordered been 50 percent better, I’d have suspected it of coming out of a can. At the same place, Tom’s much-anticipated sixteen-ounce “Entrecote USA”—“premier slice beefsteak, fired out on our uniquely charcoaling grille”—turned out to be a slab of unidentifiable zoological matter so thoroughly ridden with fat, bone, and gristle as to be entirely inedible (it would have been funny had some poor goat or donkey not died in the service of this reprehensible restaurant).
However, for the most part we ate in a breezy little outdoor barbecue in a non-tourist neighborhood near our apartment. We referred to this decidedly unregulated kitchen as “the meat place” because it served meat, bread, and pop only, the meat purchased by the customer on skewers at the fly-ridden butcher shop next door and carried a few feet to the restaurant, where it was thrown on the grill.
One night as Steve and I and a few others sat there in the company of sparrows and cats and one or two rib-thin mutts, a guy in his early twenties came along banging his palm on the metal table tops, demanding money. I reached into my pocket, realizing when I pulled my hand out that my only cash was a pair of 200-dirham notes, worth about forty bucks each, and some Canadian coins worth perhaps a dollar. So I gave him the coins and felt anguished five minutes later when he came raging up to the table and threw the money clattering down in front of me, accompanied by a blast of indecipherable scorn.
It had been stupid of me, no doubt—lazy both culturally and morally, in that I knew the coins were of limited or no value to him. But it served as a chastening, as one’s experiences on the road, particularly the embarrassments, tend to do. Happily, a couple of nights later I saw the same guy at the same place, and was able to give him a twenty-dirham note that he pushed into his pocket without a peep as he brushed past me.
THAT THESE PRECIOUS, nervous days in Agadir were winding down was impressed upon me on the 8th of January, when David did not show up at the boatyard until nearly noon—and eventually did so in tourist clothes, subdued, having taken Lali to the airport and seen her off to Tbilisi.
Late that afternoon, with our chores done, our spirits high (and about to get higher), Steve and I left the boatyard half an hour early to get our hair chopped short at Coiffure Paris, a tidy little barbering salon that we had passed numerous times within a few blocks of the apartment.
There was only one chair, and as Steve sat down, the barber, an amiable Arab of perhaps thirty-five, asked in rough, gentle English if we’d like a shot of “Moroccan whisky.” We would, and immediately he dispatched his young friend, who returned minutes later with a pair of juice tumblers full of a steamy amber-colored fluid.
It was not until I had drained this earthy potion and Steve and I were exchanging seats so that my own shearing could begin that Steve, wearing a broadening and relaxed grin—indeed, showing a state of relaxation that I had not seen in him since our arrival—wondered aloud if I realized we had been drinking marijuana tea, quite strong marijuana tea as it turned out. As a matter of fact I had not (there was a hint of peppermint to it, perhaps masking the main ingredient). But given the new tingling in my extremities and the fact that the modest barbershop, with its antique television and shelf of bright pomades, had just now begun to seem like the funniest entertainment on earth, I did not question the news.
Having been at first somewhat nervous about the threat of hepatitis, which can be contracted through a barber’s nick, I was soon sensitized to the point where I was enjoying with a kind of dreaminess the buzzing of the clippers over my skull, then the sound of the straight razor rasping down the skin of my neck and behind my ears, emitting what for me at that point was a quite euphonious pop with the snapping of each individual hair.
But the sense of well-being was short-lived. As we emerged from the barbershop into the crowded and noisy street, a kind of cloud descended around me, a sense of vulnerability, and I was reminded with considerable force that I was at that moment sixty-three years gone, an old man, without language, in the backstreets of a Muslim city, stoned on an illegal drug, as defenseless as a baby—beyond which, of course, I was facing a challenge in the weeks to come that would either kill me ingloriously or fortify me for life’s home stretch.
At the meat place, we ingested skewer after skewer of chicken and pepper sausage and steak. And floated home. To the whorehouse. Where that night I had a staggering dream, a kind of fin du monde, in which a bloody and beheaded man appeared at the door of the apartment asking for me, attempting to push his way in, determined that he should find me. As Nigel and the others forced him from the room, he hollered over their shoulders that he knew I was in there, knew my name, knew everything about me, said he would track me down, would not rest until he had found me. And then he was gone, and in the hallucinogenic logic of the dream world, I was left pondering who he was, whether he would be able to pursue me with no head, and perhaps most significantly in this twisted Jungian conundrum, why he had been wearing my shoes.
THE BIG MORNING arrived, and in a pilgrimage more spirited than our parade to the launch ramp at Shelter Island, we grouped up around the boat as a smallish tractor hauled it at an emperor’s pace out the boatyard’s wide front gates. Each of us had a job, mine being to carry a sheet of bendy galvanized steel that could be thrown down over a rough patch in the road to allow any of the four dollies beneath the hulls to pass smoothly overtop.
As we heaved through the potholed streets, the tires on the casters, frightful little things on stamped rims and hubs, began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, a crowd of chatty and inquisitive rubberneckers fell in around us—kids with soccer balls, men in work clothes or business suits, women in Muslim head coverings, yapping dogs, gulls, gannets, the lot of them making a carnival of it, the centerpiece of which, our space-age rowboat, was a clearly irresistible piper to those who were seeing her for the first time. Left and right we went, this way and that, eventually down to the port’s monstrous boat ramp. There, the broad concrete aprons were a dry-dock for trawlers and dories and tugboats, dozens of them, beyond which, in the inky waters off the docks, floated an armada of sardine trawlers and rusting freighters, some of which gave the impression of having been there for decades. It was all quite a contrast to Big Blue, which by the time she sledded into the shallows, to a modest cheer, had made dump waste of her dolly wheels, an appropriate symbol, I thought, of
