Brion Gysin - The Process

Tanja, Nov. 6

No one here in Tanja has ever even heard of the Himmers. I have tried everywhere: consulates, banks, hotels and I’ve even asked some of the more reputable-looking guides. Tanja must be a very spiritual city because it simply swarms with guides but not all of us are ready for them. I feel safer inside the Café de Paris, where I am writing this, than I would on the terrace with all this money in my pocket. Money makes me nervous, anyway. I hate not to have money and yet I never know what to do with it when traveling. Americans abroad, I’ve noticed, always touch the talisman of AMERICAN EXPRESS once a day, at least, but I am going where travelers’ checks don’t travel. My spirit is already far away ahead of my body; already down in the desert, but Tanja persists in taking me still for a tourist. When I stride around Tanja with my eyes up to the lovely tumbling skies, beyond which I know rises the winter dome over the desert, swarms of shoeshine boys cluster around my feet, tripping me up: “Soo-sine? Soo-sine, buddy?” When I say: “No, go away, not today,” they answer: “Fuck-you, Jack! Fuck off!” I have been playing Pied Piper to all the guides, too, who sidle up according to hierarchy; each offering his wares until the right one finally gets through to me. “Englishman, wanna get fucked?” When I ask any one of the guides if they have ever heard of the Himmers, they all answer at once: “Sure, Johnny!” and lead me into yet another Arab bazaar.

Tanja, Nov. 7

Terrible hangover, today. I was still sitting in that Café de Paris at seven o’clock last night when a middle-aged American woman with big yellow teeth and stringy gray hair pulled back into an untidy but girlish psyche-knot at the back of her head, leaned over from the next table, gave me a rather revolting yellow smile, and she said: “Having the all-too-typical Tanja troubles?” It was a good enough gambit I guess. I ended up by paying for her coffee as well as my own and, then, she led me off to an American bar called the Exit, where everyone seemed to know her only too well. The very tall barman with a mustache and a pompadour leaned over her at her in an almost threatening way as he asked her:

“Well, what’ll it be tonight, Mag?”

She went all kittenish, rubbing herself up against me, gurgling: “I want you to meet everybody’s favorite barman, Billy Beachnut. Whad’ja say your name was, Mac?”

I think she must have taken me for a fellow-American, at first: “Olav Pesonius,” I replied.

“Latin, eh?” cracked Beachnut. “Well, Olav, this little lady’s got you in tow is Mrs. Mag Media, the newspaper-woman: She talks Latin, too.”

“Not Missus! Miss!” She twitched herself onto a barstool, letting her old gray coat fall back off her shoulders.

“A miss that’s still good for many a mile, eh, Mag? What’ll you folks be drinking, tonight?”

My head is splitting and there she is, singing in the bathroom, right now! Last night she drank me — a Finn! — under the table and, when she fished me out to pay for the outrageous bill at the Exit, I guess I must have felt I couldn’t afford to pay for a hotel room on top of all that so I ended up here and I feel simply awful.

Later

Things looking up slightly. Mag not only insists she knows the Himmers and how to get to them—“After all, I’m a newspaperwoman!”—but says she can get in touch with a girl in Casablanca whose brother, Amos Africanus, is general manager for the Himmers, down on Cape Noon. Ana Lyse Africanus will know how to get down to “Malamut.” Unfortunately, Ana Lyse seems not to be on the phone so Mag and I will have to go to Casa together in Mag’s old car to find her. I’ll pay for the gas.

Casablanca, Nov. 8

I knew it. We got here so late that Mag insisted on taking a double room with a bath in this expensive hotel. She’s in the bathroom right now, singing. We no sooner got settled in here last night than Ana Lyse herself phoned up saying she was coming right on over. I may be a dumb Finn but I did raise an eyebrow at that. “I sent her a telegram saying I’d be at this hotel. I’m surprised she’s coming over at this hour, though.” I thought the hotel might be surprised also but, no; they sent her right on up. You might just be able to get away with one woman in your hotel room in Helsinki but never with two in the middle of one night! Actually, we sat up all night plotting our trip south. Ana Lyse is petite but she’s the same sort of girl Ingating is; I felt it immediately. You just know she would know how to cook a good meal over an open fire. Poor thing, she has just heard that her brother, Amos Africanus, has been kidnaped down there in the desert and she doesn’t know where he is. She has tried everything including telepathy but she can’t get in touch with the Himmers, so she is as anxious as I am to get down there. The plan is to drive down as far as we can in Mag Media’s old car and then see what we can do from there on. Ana Lyse speaks Arabic and insists that it is useless to try anything official because officials will only stop us.

Tiznit, Nov. 9

This is the first place south that looks like the desert but the sun doesn’t shine much on this red-walled town because of the mile-high mist-bank formed by the Portuguese Current flowing south offshore a few miles away past this western end of the great beach of the Sahara. Seawater, swift and cold, condenses the hot air from the desert into fog. For all the sun there is this morning, one might as well be back in Finland. At the last minute this morning, I had to buy four new tires for Mag’s car before we headed south with Ana Lyse in the front seat beside Mag and me in the back with her huge Great Dane puppy called Karl Barx. I’ve been treated like a spare tire in the back seat, wrestling with the dog as we swung around all the loops and bends of a superb road hugging the coastline. Luckily, Karl Barx is friendly.

Tomorrow, we ought to get to Goulmimime or Goulimine or Goulmina or Ghoul Mime — anyway, for lunch. Then, on to Tam-tam if the road is in good enough repair after these early rains. It is strangely solacing to be back on the verge of baby country, again: in the Sahara, so many places and people have baby names. There is Ta-ta and Tan-tan and Tam-tam and Da-da and Ba-ba and so many more. At each stop, the hotel gets more primitive and the food worse since the French left this part of the world, except in some cases where a long-gone Madame’s former native “boy” still runs the place. Last night the food was so good I was convinced that some French Madame’s ghost was still out in the kitchen making the omelets.

Tam-tam, Nov. 10

When we got here, we were arrested, right off. The road here from Goulimine has, indeed, been washed out in many places where the water must come across like a wall when it rains. Luckily, it was the long flat “easy” stretches of the road surface which had been wrecked, while hairpin bends over ridges of rock are still in good shape. All this road is new, too, since the Spaniards withdrew further south. At last, we came over a pass to see Tam-tam set out like a tiny, crenellated white toy fort in the middle of a vast sandy plain over which ran a road as straight as an arrow. When we got to the end of it, we found that road barred by a gate out in the middle of nowhere outside of town. Two sentries stopped us at the point of a gun. One of them kept us covered while the other got in touch with the fort through his walkie-talkie. Then, we were ordered to drive straight on in and report. Karl Barx very nearly bit one of those men.

We are now living the sequel to an old Beau Geste movie in which the Arabs have won the fort and are running the show, dressed in classic khaki uniforms, looking more or less like soldiers anywhere these days. The second-in-command here met us out in the sandy street in which we stopped. He was unsmiling but perfectly polite as we showed him our papers. Mag Media was out front with her press card at which he looked dubiously because the photo was so much better than what he saw in front of him. Mag was already wiggling and ogling him; up to all of her tricks. The short surly captain came out to inspect us and then, rather than call us officiously into his office, he invited us into his own poured-concrete villa, which stood out like an eyesore in the landscape of pure white-washed cube-houses surrounded by sand. Inside, Mag pulled out her press card again and went into her act. The captain, who seemed not to understand her French, was completely cowed.