I Need Help

I took a night bus to Cadiz where a stain glass explorer named C. Colon sailed west dear Nina searching for gold, importing greed and converting heathen slaves with persecution and misery.

It was difficult raising funds from a skeptical king and queen intent on expanding their empire.

My inner child, poet and literary outlaw spent six days in the San Francisco Hotel establishing geographical bearings enjoying bistro tapas, meat, cheese, bread, fruit and veggies from the central market or Mercado. It was a 30-year flashback after the kissing the army goodbye when I passed through carrying a pack Jack.

I walked into the tourism office off De Dios Plaza. I got to the point with in and out dialogue.

“I need help.”

Three little English words said everything.

Patricia helped me make some calls. After settling in with a Romani family I visited her to say thanks. She said, “You know, we get a lot of people in our office, all nationalities looking for something and while most of them are nice some are really terrible.”

“I understand. Kind ones are a blessing. I’ve met some disconnected neurotic people on life’s road. Too many are rude and not sensitive to diverse cultures. Others fall into two distinct groups. The whiners and the complainers.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “that’s a good one. The reason I decided to help you was the way you just came in and said, ‘I need help.’ It was refreshing.”

“I’m fortunate,” I said, “seeing the challenges. My limited Spanish wouldn’t help me find a room. That’s why I came to see you.”

“It was the way you did it,” said Patricia.

“A three-year child taught me those three little words. I really appreciated your help. I’ll be back.”

My room with meals for thirty days was $500.

Amelia was an overweight diabetic who ate extremely fast, her husband Jesus resembled Ichabod Crane and son Janus, 20, was a mental case. He studied engineering in school and lay around the flat watching soccer on television with the volume at full blast or playing computer games.

His father hustled cheap scarves along chipped yellow walls outside the Mercado across from his local bar where Amelia nursed her daily wine.

Another resident was Dortmund, a gay German flight attendant for ABC airline working the South American circuit. He had a room for a month studying Spanish with a private teacher from 9-12.

“It’s great being here, no one knows where I am and I like it like that. Nothing to do but study.” He carried a cell phone. One day we met in an Internet cafe. “Hi Dortmund. How’s it going?”

“Great. I’m on-line with a guy in Germany. This is a great chat room. We’re talking about getting together when my studies are finished.”

Dortmund spent a lot of time chatting with guys on-line and looking at his mobile. The city was a relaxed place for his midnight encounters as bars and cafes spilled fictional people into romance novels. He was overjoyed. Spanish was a language of lust. Exotic perfume. Forbidden fruit hung heavy and ripe for the picking.

My Cadiz room was small, noisy and perfect for completing a sentence. My life sentence was a metaphor savoring my time on Earth. Living on the edge has the advantage of being sharper there.

There is no there there.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

A writer in Burma.

Tangiers to Cadiz

After doing my work at ground zero for two months in Morocco I leaped on a ferry from Tangiers to Algeciras, Spain.

An American woman from a lonely-hearts club tour group in Scottsdale, Arizona said hello.

“Hi, my name is Jean.”

“Hi, I’m Timothy Grasshopper. Nice to meet you.”

She opened a small book of quicksilver questions about life as a nomad, how it worked, how one survived. She gave me a multiple-choice exam to satisfy her curiosity.

“How does it work?”

“How does what work? The universe?”

“Moving around like this. Do you get scared?”

“No. I pay attention. I avoid choke points on the street. I trust my instincts. I see everyone before they see me. I am a ghost in exile. Invisible.”

“I was petrified in Tangiers. We were hustled by every child in the city.”

“They’re hungry. There’s huge poverty in Morocco. Fear of hunger and starvation and loneliness is a daily reality. One person supports thirteen. The majority makes less than $1.00 a day.”

“Yes I suppose so but I hope not. This is my first time away from the states. Some of my friends were afraid to leave after 9/11. They stayed in Arizona and Boston.”

“The media sells fear after 9/11. It’s a snake eating its tail if you know what I mean. What goes around comes around. Hello karma. Why did you leave?”

“My husband died a few years ago and I just sat around and then some friends got me interested in social activities. They told me about this tour, you know, stay in a Spanish coastal resort and see the sights with a day trip to Morocco. Then they stayed home after 9/11. Afraid to get on a plane.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your husband. Grief is part of the process. Letting go. Were you married long?”

“Twenty years. We were high school sweethearts.”

“Did you travel much?”

“Only around the states.”

“That’s a good beginning. I hitched around the states in high school and survived a year in Nam. Then I explored Europe, the Middle East, China, and Tibet. It’s evolving like a dream. One life, no plan, many adventures.”

“That’s really exciting. I wish I had the nerve to do something like that, just get up and go. This has been really good for me, it’s opened my eyes to a lot of things.”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks. We adapt, evolve and adjust. What have you learned?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Things like handling my luggage, realizing I brought way too much stuff. Stuff I don’t need, things I could have left behind. But of course I didn’t know any better. Seeing other people and their expectations, their attitudes being American. How many are loud and boring, childish really, like they’re in some foreign amusement park, how they give the impression of being rich, rude and stupid. The way some of them treated the Moroccans was just terrible. Everyone has their bias and prejudices.”

“Welcome to the freak show. I’ve observed kindness and stupidity. There are way too many idiotic crass tourists on the loose. No sensitivity or tolerance. Others are kind and polite. A day trip is only a fragment isn’t it?”

“I didn’t know any better. It’s part of the package. I’d love to come back on my own or with a friend someday.”

“Morocco is amazing. Hospitality. If you return I suggest you travel south into the Atlas Mountains and west to the coast. Get away from cities. Stay with people in villages.”

“Yes,” she said seeing a blue sea. “It’d be nice to go further.”

“Travel is the real education. Experiences are teachers. It’s essential to slow down and see with new eyes. We see through our eyes not with our eyes. Sit down in one place for a long time. Engage your senses.”

“Yes, I feel a little better now. Where are you going?”

“I left the states September 1st for six months. I’m going to Cadiz for a month, sit down, write and explore. Satisfy food, shelter and unconscious creative needs.”

“How exciting. What will you write about?”

“Experiences in Morocco and beyond. I was there on 9/11. Two months absorbing diverse realities. Using humor and satire with imagination and truth I will write about governments and media creating fear to advance their dystopian goals of social and psychological Control and greed ...

 ... I’ll write about illusions of fear and suffering as characters discuss how propaganda manipulates people. How humans face personal and collective desire, anger, ignorance, adventure and surprise on their quest for individuation. We are all connected on emotional and intellectual levels of awareness. Cadiz is the oldest city in Europe ...

 ... After a month I will live in an isolated mountain pueblo for the winter. My discipline is 1,000 words a day or two hours of revision. Polishing is the party. Next spring I’ll return to Tacoma, build a tree house, plant roses, caress thorns and write a book. I have a gonzo attitude. Be a master journalist with the eye of a photographer and the balls of an actor.”

“That must be exciting. They tell us every day where we’re going, what we’re going to see, where we’re going to eat, what time the bus leaves, where we will sleep, and who knows what. It’s a bit too much.”

“Hey, it’s your first time out. Think of it as a test run seeing how a tour package works. What you like and don’t like. You can use your experience to plan new independent adventures.”

“Yes, I like the idea and potential of being independent.”

“It’s a test with compensations. You are a free spirit in a free world.”

“Yes I am. I’ve always wanted to go to Greece.”

“Good for you. You’ll make it.”

“I’ll research it when I get home. You’ve been a big help. Nice meeting you.”

“Be well. Forget the words and cherish the ideas.”

She joined her group wearing nametags for a photograph with the sea sparkling blue and green foaming white.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Hokusai

"At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects.

"When I am 80 you will see real progress.

“At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mysteries of life itself.

"At 100 I shall be a marvelous artist.

“At 110 everything I create, a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before."

- Hokusai (1760-1849) The Great Wave

The Girl on the Train

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.

Her bare feet grip small pebbles as root structures dance with her toes.

Her grounded shadow prowls toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields as her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought.

She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats waiting for restless time to deliver them to the Red City.

Her history remembers potentates inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building adobe fortresses and writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur’an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where illusions of controlling time is their passion to be prompt and responsible citizens.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with wild brown hair tied back with straw or flower stems surrounding her with fragrances.

Inside rolling hills cut by wet canyons she is surrounded by orange blossom aroma in yellow and green fields. Her black eyes absorb ephemeral cloud thoughts in sky mind. Her open heart feels her breath ripple her long shadow.

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than an eagle soaring above the Atlas Mountains.

She smells the Berber fire heating tea for a festival. A shaman dances in a goatskin cape and skull below stars.

It is cold. Flaming shooting stars leap into her eyes. Her nomadic clan plays flutes and drums. She sways with the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving through soil, dancing through fields.

Red and yellow fire invites stars to her dance.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Tiznit

At dawn a sardine man yelling, “hout, hout,” pushed his bike with reed baskets holding dead fish along a dusty path. Cheap eats. Fried bones. His plaintive voice echoed between cinder block apartments. His song enticed Bedouin women sweeping and mopping red historical dust to buy protein.

Blood is no argument.

A solitary light bulb behind double metal doors at #187 dangled from the ceiling. The place was an aesthetic disaster. Chunks of cinder blocks hung from rebar.

A framed Qur’an quote and a dead clock decorated a wall. A green and brown speckled gecko crawled through the pantry looking for a high carb insect diet.

I loved these sweet imperfect places. Travel and adventure offered majestic habitats.

I bought sardines wrapped in greasy paper and got on a long distance bus for Tiznit seeking old Touareg silver and the wild sea at Sidi Ifni.

We traversed towns where armies of unemployed men slept in dark corners, on sidewalks or below green shuttered windows sheltered from a brutal sun by truck carcasses.

The bus accelerated though sand washed canyons passing isolated stone homes. Women on donkeys hauled water in jugs. The terrain reminded me of Southwestern mesas in Amnesia with red sandstone, bluffs, valleys, and gorgeous gorges by George.

Camel herds wandered in scrub as goats foraged high in Argan trees eating leaves. Argania spinosa was unique to this region of Morocco. Argan berry stones make traditional oil. It’s a labor-intensive extraction process. It requires sixty-six pounds of berries and eight hours of manual labor to produce 2.2 pints. Women do all the work.

They collect the fruit during the summer, dry it in the sun and store it. The flesh of the fruit is removed, used as animal feed and the stones are cracked open revealing an almond-like nut. This is roasted and ground by hand. The residue is a high-quality animal feed. The decanted oil is used for cooking and as a medicine for stomach and heart illness, poor blood circulation and fertility problems. It’s consumed in the West as expensive cosmetics.

In the middle of nowhere a skinny naked black man under a tangled mop of hair dragging a shawl in blazing sun walked along the road at a steady pace.

His eyes were on fire. Baraka.

In the Tiznit old market square Berbers in blue flowing robes meandered through a dream.

A hustler on his motorcycle materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes from here. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?”

“Great morning prices.”

Five hundred years ago he would have been on a camel wearing a burnoose tending his flock in the Sahara. He’d be planning Spanish invasions, married to a beautiful girl with dark seductive eyes, produced many kids and conquered Iberia in his spare time. Now he was on an imported European 50cc bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slicked black hair and grinning with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

I dreamed with my eyes open.

I am a hunter-gatherer of words and images. Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence - metis - a hybrid form.

Trap and shoot. ‘Snapshot’ was a British hunting word from the late 1800’s.

I make them. I didn’t take them being the qualitative difference. The best pictures are the ones in your heart-mind.

I loved gathering raw material in Morocco and then Spain incorporating Omar's evidence and story-truth.

I practiced meditative patience, before the fact, the decisive moment, anticipating the vision manifesting itself. Before, during and after the emotional rush with detachment and reptilian behavior. Premonition is a beautiful thing. 

Photography was a beautiful fascinating magical alchemy since Nam traversing the planet becoming intuition, trusting instincts. Be the moment.

It was the essence of being and nothingness. A singularity of being, stalking and allowing life’s movie to roll as scenic action led to climatic instants. I isolated elements clean and simple.

I tweaked reality.

I stopped time.

The emotion preceding the action was my intention.

It was the KISS philosophy of straight shooting.

A shooting star flashed across the sky shedding tears of light.

I settled into the rhythm of a place. Ephemeral realities evolved through time and space. Space folded.

I sat down, did my work, packed up essentials and hit the road. I found my comfort zone inside a visual zonal theory. Spectrums decrypted language, attitudes, perceptions and theoretical interpretations.

As a mystic and guardian of the visible world, light was my prayer wheel.

A decisive moment divided time in two. It was a pure thought with pure action. Wu-Wei. A way of life passed through a gate-less gate.

“Infinite diversity through infinite combinations,” said a laughing Zen monk walking on the curvature of the earth. It was a walking meditation or kin-kin in Japanese.

It was all the same - comforting addicts in a group, with Tran in Da Nang, offering Cambodian amputee rice and chicken or buying grapes from a malnourished boy offering sweet green life. Everyone needs love and compassion.

Millions graduated from the University of the Street with a degree in Hustling 101. It was all about survival. How the world works.

Meditating on the process of my death shaped my intention. Karma.

“The nature of my mind is the empty sky,” I said to the hustler.

Sky mind, cloud thoughts.

“Get on,” said the biker.

I shouldered curiosity and got on. We roared out of the market, down narrow twisting passages zooming along high gingerbread adobe walls slashed by blue sky, in and out of blinding sun, blasted into cool shadows and arrived at an empty shop. Full stop.

A young boy in the silver shop took over the sales pitch plying me with sweet tea and sugar words.

He tried sympathy and pity. He cajoled, he sighed wearing his saddest face. He tried to convince me to buy something. “Morning sale means good luck.”

“Every morning you wake up is good luck. A gift.”

The boy used well-established emotional appeals playing me for a sucker. His assumed every tourist was rich and relatively speaking this was true. He gave me a wooden bowl.

“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”

I accepted the wooden bowl. I looked at inlaid boxes, daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.

In another incarnation I carried my begging bowl through dirt streets on Earth. It felt cool and smooth in my hands. Fingers caressed a worn oval surface. The begging bowl had a consciousness.

Recalibrating my existence I thumbed open a ragged existential dictionary. It was filled with stories, legends, myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas, and vibratos.

It contained journey notes, broken hearts, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests, rose thorns, rainbow threads, the game of life and empty wooden bowls.

The Tiznit boy wanted me to fill it up. He wanted me to be greedy. He wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. He had great expectations based on my desire. I wanted to hit the bricks. I found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.

I became a Touareg Berber. “I’ll give you 100.”

“Mister, please, the price is 350,” said the boy fresh out of tears being too tired to cry and the man in front of him being Berber and patient with Sahara nature existing inside silence did not buy self-pity and stayed with his final price.

I was a hustling poetic mercenary 24/7 and it wasn’t my fate or karma to rescue sellers trapped in their expectations.

“Take it or leave it,” I said in Tamasheq, a Touareg language. The boy was shocked hearing his cultural identity.

Culture eats strategy.

We were on common territory. Negotiation is hard work. Extra talk. It didn’t require extraordinary skills, only patience the great teacher, with determination and instinct. Always be closing. ABC.

I received one piece of silver and dissolved into a broiling sun, experiencing a metamorphosis as ego dissolved.

The bowl reflected emptiness.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir