Cleo Odzer - Goa Freaks - My Hippie Years in India

Out every night from the age of fifteen, I became a regular on the disco scene. No club charged me admission; everybody knew me by the age on my phoney I.D. At seventeen I wrote a column in Downtown, a Greenwich Village newspaper. "Pop Sounds by Cleo," it was called. I got free concert passes to interview musicians backstage.

Despite the nocturnal pursuits, I did not drop out of school. In fact, achieved my highest grades while at my wildest. I'd always hated being told what to do—when Momsy said be home by eleven, I sneaked out again at midnight—and until my junior year in high school I'd been a terrible student. Three schools had expelled me, the French one and two others. But then I transferred to Quintanos School for Young Professionals. For models, actors, and rock musicians, this school catered to the weirdo. At Quintanos, students weren't required to learn at all. In this atmosphere I flourished. Rarely would I be graded less than an A. With no one forcing me to study, I did it because I liked it.

By my nineteenth birthday, my father had died, the money was gone, and my mother had to move to a smaller apartment with no room for me. Though it had been my idea to five alone, I'd wanted privacy, not excommunication, which was what the Break in standard of living brought me. With the cessation of my weekly allowance, I felt immediately excluded from my previous life. Our old kitchen had been so big it needed a sink at both ends; now all I had was a toaster oven on the bed stand of my rented room.

When I visited Momsy, she took me on a sad tour of the apartment she'd crammed herself into—five huge rooms on the sixteenth Floor of an elegant building on lower Fifth Avenue.

She wailed forlornly, "I don't know how I'll avoid claustrophobia here. And I can only afford the cleaning lady three days a week." The second bedroom had been converted to a library, and she gestured defeatedly, telling of the books she'd thrown out to accommodate the smaller shelf space.

"Momsy, I have a cavity and need a dentist," I told her.

"Baby, I wish I could help, but I just sent the sable to the furrier to be shortened and I haven't a cent left. With short skirts in style, I look retarded in a long coat, and I can't afford a new one."

With my mother barely able to maintain herself. I'd have to make my own way. There wasn't sufficient insurance money to support us both. But what was I supposed to do? I'd been raised to be a rich man's daughter. No one had geared me for the proletariat.

Bootlessly adrift, I felt homeless and even stateless. New York wasn't hospitable. There was nothing for me there. I tried modelling, but my measly five feet three inches disqualified me from the profession. What to do?

Eventually I decided to go away. My bank account totalled twelve hundred dollars, a life's worth of birthday presents from relatives. And so, after closing the account, I left the United States, bought an old car in Paris, and became a free-spirited traveller.

"Where are you going?" the European border guards would ask as I drove up in my colourful car. I'd painted a smiling face on the hood; on the roof, a cracked raw egg ran yellow and white into the bright colours of the car doors. A purple ghost on the trunk snarled at riders behind me who objected to my novice driving skills.

"I'm just going," I would answer.

"What happened to your front license plate?" they'd ask next, noticing its absence.

"It fell off. But the numbers are there—see them?" I'd painted the license number in the smiling mouth. It looked like teeth.

During the two and a half years I travelled around Europe and the Middle East, I modelled. In countries without blue-eyed blondes, I did well. In Greece you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing me with a tube of toothpaste or a can of deodorant, and I even performed minor parts in movies. In other countries, though, such as Holland with its lofty blondes, I was again too short to model. When winter made it too cold to sleep in the car, I lived on people's floors or in hippie hideaways in abandoned buildings. Poverty was okay if you were a traveller; then it made it a statement: I'm a rebel in search of a better world. I'm a flower child protesting capitalist values. I'm not part of your system.

"Hi, there. Remember me? Can I sleep on your floor again tonight? I'll be leaving soon for the Sinai in Israel. Heard there's a scene happening there in the desert."

Being "on the road" was a great way to meet people and have adventures. After a while, though, I tired of leaving places. I wanted a home, but I needed a place with people who had my kind of visions, people free from societal mores and the restraints of tradition. So far I hadn't found anything like that.

"Go to India," someone told me. "That's where the Freaks five."

I'd met a few Freaks here and there in my travels. From a variety of nationalities, they were people who'd given up their motherlands and their former lifestyles. They had a creative outlook on life and a collection of utopian ideals—plus an urge to have fun and avoid work.

"Really?" I asked. "Where in India?"

"Goa."

I BOUNCED INTO India on an overland bus I'd boarded in Athens. Specks of dirt and dost hovered in the air and covered everything by the time the other young passengers and I crossed from Pakistan via an unpaved road. The flies that’d joined us in Lahore were still with us, though their buzzing couldn't be heard over the blasting rock music. We'd been on the road six weeks, and as one of my feet scraped the floor, it gouged a path through a melange of dirt from Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A sample of this international sniff could also be found in my ears, in my nasal passages, under my nails, and now a chunk of the Indian variety was crusting in the corners of my eves. But this was India—INDIA!—and I was ready and eager to experience the East. Something special awaited me here—I could feel it. Maybe this was where I'd find a home.

In New Delhi, our first stop, some passengers got off and we picked up new ones. The new people had an indescribable quality about them. You could tell they'd been in the East a while. Their clothes hung looser, their mannerisms seemed freer, and they had a certain inner tranquillity. One American couple, Paul and Pam, both with waist-length, wavy brown hair, told us they'd been living in Goa four years. Paul, in white, flowing pants and a white top, stood in the front of the bus and helped with directions. I watched Pam to discover what gave her that "devour."

Whatever it was, I wanted it.

In Bombay, we parked overnight to sleep in the bus near the marble columned Taj Mahal Hotel where two German women and I took a refreshing sponge bath in the lathes' room of the lobby. On the way back, with washed underwear in our hands, we noticed what seemed like oblong bundles of garbage against the hotel's wall. I froze as a bundle moved, half expecting a rat to run out.

"What's the matter?" one of the Germans whispered.

The three of us remained still as we realized the oblong shapes lined both sides of the street.

"Look!" A bit of hair protruded from the far end of one; from the other, bare feet. I pointed to a baby arm sticking out from a tiny one. "They're people!"

" Baksheesh ," someone said, suddenly taking hold of my elbow. I turned to see a woman in a ripped sari holding a baby with an oily streak across its face. " Paisa ," she said holding her palm out and then gesturing toward her mouth. " Paisa ."

Another beggar appeared next to us, and two were detached from their rag bundles and headed in our direction. A child took hold of my ruffled dress and stuffed the edge of a ruffle in her mouth.

Was this where I wanted to five? "Let's get out of here," I said.