Brion Gysin - The Process

… frisking you, fucking you … biting you, butting you … taking you, leaving you. … Gone!

I clench my eyes tight for one pico-second, just the time for one all-knowing blink, and I open them again. They are … gone! Gone, leaving me speechless! What a relief to be back again at my own station in life. After all, I and only I; Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N. Y. — or whoever this is that I am — I am the sole captain of this super-stoned subway-system called Patience which burrows under the sands of the Sahara and — man! this subway sails only on keef. Borbor? What a bore! What a mothering bore! One thing I can tell you, I have come a long way but I’m back. I am not about to sign any more of that crew on again, ever! I learned my lesson with those characters. I have changed and, I think, progressed.

Could that be the clatter of my coffee cup crashing?

I am about thirty thousand feet high this morning so I have to parachute down from my crown to take a better look at those twin mountains I see down there, looking like loaves of brown bread cast in bronze. They are — if I can believe anything any more — my own feet. From between them, a dark brown oued is crawling across the Sahara paved with cement. Higher up, on the marble plateau of the table in front of me, the flash flood of coffee spreads slowly but inexorably across my still unfinished letter to the Fundamental Foundation, blotting it out. I crumple up the soiled page, not forgetting that I still have that other letter to write; my letter of application to the Independent School of Algut. I must remember to ask them if they want their new assistant headmaster to be both a pot-smoker and Black.

Out there in the heat on the Place de France, I can feel the tangle of midday traffic on the Boulevard thickening and tightening around me like a web. When I peer at the scene over the tops of my shades, Tanja appears a bit peaky but I have to admire that every last detail is bright, bright, bright! Dazzled by all the candy-colored little blobs of light frantically jazzing each other out there, I pull down my shades to take a reading on my watch. It is just a few minutes past noon and here I am back on the terrace of the Café de Paris up on the Boulevard, penniless on that very corner Hamid once called the Cape of Good Hope. Slightly shaken to find myself still shipwrecked here, I take out my last white handkerchief to wave it, unconsciously, around like a flag. Forgetting for a moment what I took it out for, I decide not to mop up the coffee with it and break into a lunatic laugh.

I laugh at the very idea of letters. How can mere words get me across half a lifetime in the Sahara and back again in a matter of minutes! The thought of it makes a shiver run through me like someone just walked on my grave. My scalp tingles and tightens like a drumhead over the open roof of my skull. My hairs uncurl stiffly, one by one; all frizzling out in an electronic halo that buzzes around my ears like an alarm. My ears swell and stand up in total erection like the ears of the jerboa when he hears the fennec hunting him down. Tin-tinnabulating choirs of lullilooing women ululate like a limitless pasture of bluebells, one bluebell to every square mile, ringing out over the Sahara after any short season of rain. A sudden squeal of brakes on the Boulevard in Tanja cuts through the heavy hum of the traffic on the Place de France like the jerboa’s dying scream. I nearly jump out of my skin.

I sat there feeling as if I had been turned into stone. Slowly, I swiveled my eyes around like a periscope until I caught the glint off the glass on a big old British car pulled up right in front of me. Trust any White Hunter to spot me as soon as I show the white flag! Slowly and stiffly, I brought the full power of my blackest Black Look to bear on the bold blank face of a white woman, obviously American, despite the desert drag she had on. The cheap blue cotton sari she had pulled over her head made her look dissolute rather than decent; like the defrocked mother superior of some lay order of barefoot working nuns. She hung one mottled-blue arm out of the side of the car nearest me like a slab of bad veal and put her other hand up to shade her eyes from the burning sun as she trailed her big tits back and forth over the steering wheel of her rented Rolls Royce, with its GBZ plates from Gibraltar. In a flash, I dug her essential indifference to all experience and association. That placid stupidity overlaid evident cunning: that soft firmness, her motherly look, was a cover for cruelty. Yet, there she sat projecting all this bundle like a challenge no man could afford to dismiss and, at the moment, she shone for no one but me. Instinctively, I jerked up, stripped naked, lathered myself all over with soap, waved my big cock at her, rinsed myself off, dressed and sat down like a good old boy; a real spade stud. She did not blink. The striped awning flapped over my head as a red-hot gust of the gaïla, the noon wind, grabbed at my breath and — who should bounce out of the back of that old British pile but Hamid; my Moroccan mock-guru himself!

I thought sure I had left Hamid safely tied down with his family and flocks on his Pan mountain but trust Hamid to come up with any eerie American couple rolling around Morocco, on the loose in a Rolls Royce. After all, the world is Hamid’s parish and all such, ah, “spiritual” chores of this caliber are part of his diocesan duties as a self-imposed “guide.” From the back of this rusty old Rolls, a youngish billiard-bald whitey with buck-teeth and bug-eyes, obviously the husband, bobbed his head and grinned out at me; giving me the greedies, too, if you please. I could see at a glance that Hamid had this one firmly fixed on his big hook. Somehow, from even fifteen good feet away, these people embarrassed me: they looked too eager and too shoddily disguised. My first guess was that Hamid had hustled them in a hurry through some “cheap bazaar belong to a friend,” where these buffoons come out the other end after great expense, masquerading as ersatz Arabs.

In fact, it turned out that Hamid had found them already dressed like this when he waved them down on the open road, on their way back from their first trip to the Sahara. Hamid was born to be a highwayman rustling Christian captives. All he has to do is to squirt them one look with his watermelon-pip eyes and promise to show them the Rope trick. They loop his lasso around their own necks. When they stumble after him into his Moroccan corral, he paints them in his own colors and rigs them as “Ringers” before he hawks them about in the world. I guessed that the woman took to Hamid’s high-handed treatment less well than the husband. She seemed a shade sullen and resentful; the white American look. Hamid bustled up to my table, cunning as a koala bear in his wooly jellaba, coming on strong to me like the spurious pusher of slaves. Hamid always has a bargain but, as they said of a man more after my own hue, Othello: “These Moors are changeable in their wills.” So, when you deal in this kinda merchandise on the hoof, you don’t shilly-shally around in the marketplace, do you? One single well-chosen word from Hamid, “ Food! ” and he had me on my feet. I was on! I rang down my last dirham on the marble-topped table and the two of us, arm in arm, à pas de loup , hungrily stalked our prey in their car.

“Him ’n’ Her,” as Hamid always called them, were dying to take us to lunch in their cool colonial villa out on the Old Mountain Road, overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, in the middle of a garden set out with one hundred and sixty varieties of flowering mimosa planted by the brother-in-law of an English lord over a hundred years ago, now, at the end of a delicious ten-minute drive. In Tanja, the past is that close to hand. I am getting all this load from Her, up in front. Back there with Hamid, there is not word one out of Him although I can feel Him practically panting like an Irish setter down the back of my neck. I thought, maybe the language difficulty made for the silence between Him and Hamid but I was wrong. When I got it from Her, as we sailed through “Suicide Village,” that they were missionaries from Champagne, Illinois, I felt like peeling right out of the car.