Love, Interpol and Ecstasy
Chapter 14
Back in London Bob was impressed with the whole story and suggested that I turn the whole Delhi and Gulf jail dramas into a film script. We made a deal whereby he gave me £1800 to live on while I wrote the thing and then we’d go 50-50 on whatever I managed to sell the script for(I got the first draft done but shamefully never got it into good enough shape to present to a film studio. It’s on the shelf and I still mean to get back to it someday).
Feeling wealthy I flew back to Israel to pursue a woman called Maya, whom I’d met and loved during the Rainbow Gathering in the desert. Our emails had been tasty and I figured maybe the time had come to get stuck into a real relationship. When I arrived I went straight to her temporary lodgings in the spare room of her brother’s dental clinic. A month earlier we had made love to the sound of a drill boring into someone’s molar. It was all we could do to suppress our giggles and groans as patients waited outside with grim foreboding.
Within half an hour of arriving we were making love but she began to weep uncontrollably as passions waxed. I was lost for what to do. Should I stop? She didn’t know, couldn’t say. It seemed that the illusion of email romance had fooled her too and now that I was here she realized that she didn’t want me after all.
I went to stay with friends and she didn’t answer my calls as I tried to find out what was wrong. I knew she was having a rough time with sickness in her family and I hoped that there might still be a chance. The less there seemed the more I needed it. Only when I gave up and booked my flight out did we meet up and she let me cry on her shoulder for about four hours. The emotion was contagious and soon she was sobbing also.
There are few more lonely ways of life than traveling and few more solitary professions than writing. Wandering around the globe scribbling notes on the pages of my mind I had scattered myself far and wide. After years on the road you make more friendships than you could possibly maintain even if they were all in the same country. You spend half of your life saying sad farewells and the other half making awkward introductions. Paul Theroux called travel ‘the saddest pleasure’ and it doesn’t take long before you understand what he means.
I decided that the best cure for my malaise was to fly to Brazil and get laid. I heard that the women were warm and unreserved and that sounded like exactly what I needed to get over my broken heart. To hell with the old-fashioned wisdom that you can’t escape your problems by jumping on a plane.
The predictable result was that I whinged and moped my way around Brazil for a month before flying back to London. I hadn’t been able to get my head around Portuguese, I didn’t find work anywhere that seemed any fun, my money was running out too fast and Brazilians just seemed to watch TV all day. Needless to say I didn’t get laid.
I found myself back in Bob’s flat yet again and the threads of the Clive/Natasha story still wrapped around me. Clive had a half-brother in Ireland called Patrick who had managed to collect some of the money owed. Patrick spoke with a thick Irish accent though that made it impossible for the lawyer to understand a word he said. I didn’t have a bank account or an address so I arranged for Patrick to send the money to Rudi in Vienna, one of Clive’s friends who had come through for him. Rudi spoke very clear English and he could send the money on to the lawyer. It was like a tragic-comedy.
Bob had gone skiing in the US and I sat in his apartment trying to work out what to do next. Inspiration came in the form of an unexpected, almost mystical experience. I’d come back to the apartment on a rainy Friday evening and headed straight to the kitchen for some nourishment. If there’s one good thing about sofa surfing it’s helping yourself to the delicacies of other people’s cupboards. Especially in Bob’s house as he tended to have items that were beyond the budget of most. To begin I took a handful of pine nuts and a small glass of Bergundy wine. Then I opened the fridge and took a slice of Gorgonzola cheese and a few vitamin tablets to make sure that I didn’t come down with a cold after the rain. The I settled down to watch a video from his collection.
After about twenty minutes though the screen began to shake. This was a £2000 52 inch television – it wasn’t supposed to break. Then I realized it was actually the walls that were trembling and melting as I looked at them. Okay, this was it, I was going insane. All the lsd I’d ever taken was coming back to destroy my grip on reality and soon I would be in Syd Barrett land. If I could only get to the phone I could call some friends and get them to come and rescue me before I had any thoughts about being able to fly.
One last rational thought kicked in though. Just what had I done since coming into the apartment. I crawled over to the front door and began tracing my trail. Okay, so there were my shoes, still wet and then I must have gone to take a leak in the bathroom. I opened the door but all the white enamel blinded me and it took me a minute to regain my balance. Okay, the kitchen. I staggered through and saw the pine buts next to the wine bottle – but it had only been one small glass and the walls don’t shape-shift when you’re drunk. Okay, next. The fridge. I’d taken some cheese and a couple of vitamin tablets and wait-a-minute… what are vitamin tablets doing in the fridge?
I opened up the contained again and saw that there was also inside a small paper envelope. I opened it and found a few grams of cocaine. Ah. Then I looked more closely at the vitamins and realized that they looked like another kind of pill. It was entirely in Bob’s style to buy 100 ecstasy tablets in one time.
Once I understood that I’d dosed myself with two hits of rather good E I fell on the floor and laughed for a full ten minutes. I spent the night smoking weed and giggling, seeing the past few months for the comedy it had been. I even handled a call from Rudi at 1am and gave him some advice on handling the lawyer without losing my mood. For a few hours I was untouchable.
Past traumas could be exorcised by an inadvertent ecstasy high but the current realities were far less willing to pull a Houdini act. Over the next fortnight it felt like the international telephone wires were wrapping tighter and tighter around me, pulling me towards a looming abyss. Somehow by virtue of being trustworthy and half-together the whole Clive Aid program had come to rely upon my coordination and planning. Another fie mess you’ve got yourself into, Stanley. Somehow my daily life was coming to resemble a Quentin Tarrantino movie.
Rudi emailed me saying that he hadn’t heard from Patrick in Ireland for two weeks now and was waiting for the rest of the money to pay the lawyer. Dr Al Khalif was threatening to quit unless he received his next installment.
Patrick had been nothing sort of useless from the beginning. I doubt if he had ever left Ireland in his life and wasn’t even capable of setting up an email account so that we could communicate. He couldn’t speak his own language clearly enough to communicate with foreigners and worse yet, he didn’t realize himself incapable he was.
On the other hand he didn’t ask to be drawn into a story like this. He couldn’t have placed his finger within 1000km of the Gulf on a map and didn’t want to know where it was. All this international intrigue and logistics must have been a nightmare for a guy like him. This is what was so fucked up about this whole story, that it spilled over and upset the lives of those who had nothing to do with it. None of us were making any money from smuggling drugs.
True to form, when I needed to get in touch with him, Patrick had disappeared. His cell phone was permanently on the answering service and I left three messages a day: ‘Hi, Patrick –it’s Tom. Listen, you need to get your act together. Your brother’s rotting away in jail and we need to get the money to the lawyer, yeah? Okay, please call me on _____________, cheers.’ Finally, I leafed through Clive’s phone book and found a name with the word ‘cousin’ next to it in brackets.
Phoning up an unknown Irish family in the middle of their dinner to inform them that their cousin in jail counts as one of the more surreal things I’ve done. They were fairly deadpan about it and I guessed they were fairly used to these kinds of stories. Or else they didn’t care too much. Either way they were loyal enough to go and search all of Dublin for Patrick. I finally got to speak to him on a new cell phone at midnight.. He was frantic.
“Hi Tom? Ah, you don’t believe what I’ve been through. The cops picked me up on charges of money laundering – They threw me in jail for ten days! I couldn’t explain where Clive’s drug money had come from. I told them it was for some internet publicity work I’d done but I had no receipts to back my story up. It’s fucking edgy, Tom, I could face ten years for this. You didn’t leave any messages on my phone, did you? They confiscated it from me and they’re probably checking it.
I think they might be listening in to this phone too. I’m pulled over on the side of the road and I’m feeling fucking paranoid, I can tell you. What am I going to do, Tom? Hey, do you know how I can get hold of any faked Bank of Ireland papers? Like, where did Clive get those false passports – can you sort that out, Tom?”
I suddenly regretted having made this call from a friend’s house rather than from a callbox. It had been cold and rainy outside.
“No, Patrick. I don’t know anything about that. I’m completely straight. I don’t have anything to do with that kind of thing. Look, I’ll call you on Monday, okay? Bye.”
The next day I received an email from Rudi in Vienna saying that Interpol had been taking pictures of him in the street. He wasn’t too worried as he had a normal life with a job and nothing to hide.
I, on the other hand, had everything pointing towards me. My passport was full of stamps from the world over. In the past year I had traveled through Delhi, Katmandu, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, the Gulf, Rio de Janeiro and London where I’d stayed with a professional gambler. I had no bank account and no apparent profession except for my book which I could hold up like a shield against the interrogator’s spotlight.
In addition I had been over to see Clive in jail and my name was written in the visitor’s book. If Interpol were serious about cracking the rest of the ‘international smuggling ring’ then any half-intelligent officer would want to have a chat with me. The address books alone that I carried would have made for interesting investigation. They would probably assume that I was a courier myself or even the architect of the whole situation.
Clive was due to phone up Bob’s apartment the following weekend and as Bob was out of town I’d arranged to take the call. I was getting more and more nervous about taking another step in this whole story and I elected to consult the I Ching. For once it wasn’t too ambiguous:
The Abyss. Extreme danger. Do not move.
I read somewhere that when you’re going the wrong way the gods give you first a Wink, then a Hint and finally a Nudge. Apparently it could take years to recover from a Nudge and so I decided to take the Hint. How had all this ever happened? Little by little I’d drifted into this until I’d completely lost my way. Just two months before I’d been writing songs on a guitar with hippies in the desert.
I thought of the old cowboy movies when the heat begins to kick in. The lead characters exchange grim looks and head for the hills. I used half my remaining cash to book a flight to the Himalayas.
