The Guiding Hand of Jack
Dave Says:
I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a Jack Kerouac. Every since I first read On The Road at the impressionable age of fifteen I figured a nomad’s life of jazz, booze and beat-up old Underwood typewriters would be just the ticket for a suburban lad like myself. Jack is one the finest American writers but not exclusively for his quality or quantity and certainly not for his sales or his insight but because he embodied the confusion, contradiction and addiction of being on the move. 1950’s America was on the road and so was Jack, and, so am I. Some would say, my poor embattled mother for one, that I have always been on the move: crawling, walking, touring, emigrating, travelling; constant movement to Lord Knows Where. Jack did it better. I’ve always felt a bit of a fraud. Even when I was sleeping on the floors of the people who came to see our shows I hid behind suburban comfort, afraid of that uncertainty of undefined beds and redefined grime. However sometimes, not often, whenever he feels I need it the most, Jack looks over my shoulder. Today, as we pulled into Lord Knows Where, Morocco, Jack alighted from the bus with us, scratched his head from under his cap, squinted into the midday sun and suggested we get ourselves a drink before doing anything else.
We’re in El Jadida, Morocco, a few hundred kilometers from Tangier where, coincidentally, Jack and the boys had a substance induced multi-week bender in the late forties. Sometimes, Jack turns the pages in the guidebook and today he let it casually fall open to El Jadida. This place looked like a pretty good spot to spend a day or so to break the desert labored bus journey north. A good spot for St. Jack maybe, but for those not quite as carefree as our patron saint we would, in not so proper English, term it as somewhat of a shithole.
We got the best hotel in town, 160dh ($20) for a double. We have an en-suite bath-closet. It has a toilet but it leaks and smells. Our shower teases us with a red knob for hot water and a blue one for cold but I suspect it’s just for show. There’s no shower head which is a dead giveaway there’s not enough pressure to split the water molecules finer than the flaccid stream of bone chilling and slightly murky municipal supply that will attempt to rid my body of the filth from outside. It smells like rancid lemons, an odor the two cockroaches I disturbed seemed not to mind. We do have a balcony though so we’ll be able to enjoy our view (both ocular and aural) over the busy intersection of Ave Ibn Khaldouin and Ave Des Far from pre-dawn to post-dusk. We’re right over the liquor store, another example of Jack’s guiding hand. A double irony considering alcohol is widely frowned upon in Muslim Morocco yet today seems to be delivery day and they’ve been unloading and then dropping bottles all afternoon. Our room has a key but more for illusionary benefit than actual security. But what this room does have, what Jack made sure it had, was a gently decaying desk and chair from which I can set up my 21st century Underwood and type this/his message from the grave.
“El Jadida is where the Moroccans go on holiday.” That fact, that single, simple, straightforward, unambiguous sentence on page 268 of the 2001 edition of Lonely Planet’s succinctly titled publication “Morocco”, should have been enough to warn us of the madness that would ensue. We know better than to go where the locals go on holiday. There’s no hidden treasure to be had, just 50,000 not-so-wealthy locals living it up for the one week a year they claim off work. We’ve seen it all around the world and here is no different.
We walked past the beach today, its renowned and revered as a great beach by every Moroccan we spoke to. I think there’s sand there, I really couldn’t tell. The waves may crash upon naturally occurring towel, lapping around millions of years of dramatically eroding beach umbrella. Its hard to say. Its even hard to say if there was any water or just a sea of people.
The town boasts a cafe culture but it, like most cafe cultures here, is a culture of leaving the women at home while the men drink coffee together. Smoky, dodgy looking characters who don’t smile and don’t seem to do much more than sit and stare at us as we make repeated laps past them trying to find somewhere to eat.
Don’t get me wrong though, we’re happy to be here - sort of. Its not that we’re happy to be HERE its more like we’re happy to be anywhere. This is part of what we now do and in my case, how nostalgia and boyhood dreams of wanderlust adventure manifest themselves. Jack knows this and now so do you.
Postscript: I’m writing this on our first night here. I have been wrong about seemingly worthless towns in the past. If you see more text below this postscript then El Jadida has a redeeming quality or two, if not, then just tell ‘em Jack sent ya!