Brion Gysin - The Process

“Hello,” I said into the receiver, automatically imitating Hamid: “Yes, hello.”

Hamid was hopping up and down in front of me making mad monkey-faces; wild gestures apparently meant to intimate something about the caller, I couldn’t tell what.

“Yes! Hello, Hassan,” said the voice on the phone, so deep I thought for a flash it was a man’s: “You are very quick!”

“Glugh!” was all I could answer to that.

“Good, Hassan! Quite right! Now go back to your keef-pipe until twelve o’clock midnight but don’t overdo it. I just phoned to say that Thay won’t be able to make it, tonight, but our plan for the picnic still holds good. I’ll pick you up in my car in the Socco at twelve on the dot.”

“Picnic lady!” Hamid was hissing at me as she rang off. Hamid was kissing my shoulder, hugging my arm as he jumped up and down: “Picnic lady very good. Very big. Very rich!”

Being the sort of hotel it is, we all went back into my room to blow some more keef. Master Musicians smoke all the time: they’ve always got either a flute or a sebsi of keef in their mouths. We all beamed and embraced each other like brothers going through all the salaams and salutations like we hadn’t seen each other for a week of Moslem Fridays. Then, they all settled themselves comfortably on the floor while I climbed back into my sagging brass bed with Hamid hopping up alongside me holding a big bag of grass. A pair of pipes shuttled back and forth between us as we went through the ceremonies: I needed some time to get all my buttons done up and work on this plot. Now, that crazy white cat called Thay: him washing out like that right away! That was no good for openers: what did he mean: “ Rub out the word”? His tale was done, I could see that and I was glad I had it on tape. And that other voice: that was Milady Mya, was it? Well, that wasn’t the first time I’d heard that transatlantic tone. But: “What’s all this pack of pied pipers of yours doing down off their mountain?” I asked Hamid point-blank. At the same time, it ran through my head that this grimy group could well be my bodyguard; safety in numbers. And: “Hamid! How the hell do you hook up with the Himmers? Tell me that!”

One of the Master Musicians produced a special holiday pipe out of his wicker picnic hamper; a primitive clay waterpipe smoked, as a rule, only during the holy month of Ramadan and at night. Time out for distraction: this particular Master was thrown into paroxysms of gurgling delight at being able to fill his water-pipe from my tap. The mere idea of water leaking out of a wall like that instead of being caught spilling out of rocks or having to be drawn from a well tickled him all to hell. The Masters had all come tumbling down from their village to see me in town and, besides, the big city is full of thrilling adventure, as everyone knows. While Hamid was herding them through the Grand Socco market this afternoon, a lady stepped out of a very big car and hired them to play their Pan pipes at a picnic, tonight, in a cave up the coast. It seemed not at all far-fetched to them that this was a picnic being given for me. “Well, Hamid,” I said between pipes, “and what does she look like?”

Hamid rolled his eyes around in his head, making a globular gesture like: “Big!” High praise in Africa and, besides, Hamid’s not huge. A lady of leisure about Tanja was once heard to say that Hamid would have been a much taller man if so much of him hadn’t been turned up in cock — his famous big brush. Just as I was going to ask him if he’d ever heard of Imsak , he bounced off the bed and shot over to the window; having heard, as we all had, a roar like a riot in the Socco Chico below. As Hamid threw back the shutters, the breath of the beast in the crowd came in like a blast of hot air. My first thought was a lynching but I left that lay in Louisiana and, translating myself into Present Time, I said, getting up out of bed: “What is it, Hamid: the Whale?”

My window in the Duende Hotel was like a loge in an old Venetian theatre from which I could look straight down onto the paved stage of the Socco Chico, where absurd theatre has been going on in dozens of languages, right around the clock every day since forever, perhaps. Visible tale-ends of old-fashioned Arab plots torn alive out of the Thousand Nights and One Night shuttle back and forth under your eyes like bright threads running through a gloomy loom of out-of-work cats slapped into uniform Levis. More up-to-date, highly colored plastic plots tend to pass through after midnight and the bell was tolling, now. There was standing room only down there where a thick throng of extras was boiling about a gigantic old Rolls Royce touring-car which had beached center stage. The crescendo of circus-noise died away like the tide rolling boulders out to sea as a very large lady I took to be the Queen of the Tuareg got out of her car. She stood on the running-board in a hell of a hairdo of beads braided onto her head, clanking her barbaric jewelry and flapping her long desert-blue robes. My first guess was: She’s selling something like a magical embrocation of ostrich eggs, for example; so I turned away, saying: “Don’t look at it, Hamid; it’s on television. Some new kinda 3-D TV!”

Then, I squealed like a stuck Christian pig when Hamid suddenly made a dive past me and scuttled across the room to unplug my UHER from the wall: he is strictly forbidden ever to touch a machine of mine. He pulled out the jack to the charger, checked to see the tape was properly threaded before he packed the UHER expertly into its traveling case, me still protesting, and, slinging the holster-strap around my neck like a halter, dragged me out of the room, trailed by the Master Musicians. One of them threw my black burnous from the Sanara over my shoulders while we slid down the stairs. As we hit the Socco, a general yelp went up from the crowd when the lady flung up her arms melodramatically, and all the men fell back one sudden step, heels hard on each other’s toes. A child wailed out: “ Cinema! ” as Hamid, my handler, hurried me forward like a punchy old prize-fighter being hustled against his better judgment into the ring. I had the impression the lights went up full and, because it seemed to be expected of me, I kissed the lady’s hand to a round of applause from the mob. She got back into her car and gave it the gun. Dogs and children ran yapping as old graybeards with turbans waved the young riffraff out of our way when we followed her into the car and drove off to the cheers of fools who knew no more than we did what it was all about.

Now that I remember it, all that she said was “Get in!”

I suppose I didn’t dare look at her: anyway, my eyes were glued to her neat square bare blue feet planted on the pedals of the Rolls. As we were spinning so silently up steep Siaghine Street, I ventured to break into the ticking of the clock with some mumbled remark about the car. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a Rolls I picked up cheap out of an old novel by Lawrence Durrell.” What the hell kinda talk is that? I thought to myself and shut up. Our big leather seats were set apart like two thrones in the front of the car but I could smell that the lady had drenched herself in a bottle of Bint El Sudan before leaving her tent. I remarked that all the little knobs on the fittings of the car had fat little closed crowns on them over the letter F. She laughed and confessed that she had bought the old bus at the King Farouk sale in Cairo, years ago now. “It’s all solid gold,” she admitted, “and the biggest one Rolls ever built. Even the Nizam of Hyderabad … you know, the rich one in India … never had the horsepower or the head-room that I’ve got.”

We barely skinned through a narrow alley and swirled out around the Grand Socco, nearly taking a strolling policeman with us as we went. We chopped like a great golden hatchet through the secondhand-clothes market where they sort out the bundles of rags from America. My Master Musicians were bunched up in the back of the car like five live white teddy-bears in their rough woolen jellabas. I leaned around to snuff up their good country smell: lanolin from lambs’ wool, wood-smoke, spicy Moroccan cooking and keef. I saw Hamid had found a handy little folding “jump seat” in front of the built-in bar and was helping himself to a mixture of drinks. Knowing only too well how he can be with alcohol in him, I reached around to stop him but he batted back my paw, proudly pointing to the crown on his glass, as if that gave him royal permission to drink. Then, he unbuckled his prizewinning chuckle as he gave the back of my hand a wet kiss, saying fondly: “Who is whose guru? Fuck off!” It sounded more like: Hooz hooz gooroo foo koff! ”