This is a true story, and even the made-up parts deserve to be true.
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( At some stage , probably seeking relief from the frenetic London lifestyle, PETE STEEDMAN and JULIE REITER set out on an overland trip to Morocco with architect PETER BURLEIGH , who had drawn cartoons for
Broadside magazine back in
Melbourne. Burleigh, in the
Mother Country intent on becoming as famous as
Christopher Wren, who designed a church on just about every corner in
ye olde London , provided this tour de force account of that death-defying
Cook’s Tour . WARNING :
Maiden aunts, people of delicate disposition, those with
heart by-passes and
wowsers should
avert their eyes or prepare
to rant at
certain risqué , depraved and
wildly humorous passages .
Insomniacs who sit up watching endless reruns of the
golden years of Hollywood will be struck by the similarity with the
road movies of
Bing Crosby,
Bob Hope and
Dorothy Lamour, except they were wholesome,
G- rated fractured flickers. Astute
Little Darwin readers will notice a time discrepancy in this
golden prose and outstanding
Burleigh artwork , but then the travellers were
warped/
bent at the time , and
who cares what year it is when you are
having fun?)
*********************************************************
In 1969 or thenabouts, Morocco was a brand of instant coffee. Even though I had travelled to
London to make
my fortune, I came to accept the world might be
a bigger place than the
triangle formed by the
Holland Park pub, the supermarket in
Portobello Road and my
semi-basement flat. I needed to
broaden my horizons.
My first mistake was deciding to travel in
Continental Europe.
My second was to
seek advice from my
behaviourally-challenged advisor
on life matters,
Pete Steedman. Pete had
parachuted into London (about a year before ) and had disrupted
my middle-class yearning for
respectability. He worked for
Oz Magazine and the young
Time Out; both publications were
foul-mouthed,
deliberately outrageous and
politically subversive like
Pete himself.
My third mistake was deciding to
travel with him and his blond “
personal assistant”,
Julie Reiter.
I purchased a blue
Bedford Van for 200 pounds. It was old. “
She’ll last for years,” said the nice salesman,
wreathed in hashish smoke.
I trusted him immediately. The pop-up roof worked.
Two people would have to sleep in stretchers under this roof and one
lucky bugger (me, it was my van) would sleep on a bench seat down below. No matter that the
Bedford was the
worst van ever built by the
human race, I gave the salesman
my money and in turn he gave me the
ignition key and a rudimentary
road map cut from a
packet of breakfast cereal. It showed
most of Europe as
Empire Pink and while this seemed a
little out of date, how inaccurate could it be? He shrugged off a slight problem with the
starter motor; you had
to rock the van back and forth so
its teeth engaged and the thing would start.“
Don’t fret abaht it,” he grinned. “
It’ll prob’ly fix itself.”
Equipped with
basic items recommended in
Kerouac’s book
On The Road (wine, whiskey, selected aspirins and other drugs, plastic glasses,
a certain herbal substance and a bad attitude), we rocked the van,
engaged its teeth and drove to the
Channel ferry.
The crossing took five hours instead of the
customary two. The wind roared down the
Channel from the
North Sea. The weather the
Germans had hoped for on
D-Day had finally got here. Within 30 minutes of leaving
all the glasses fell out of the
on-board bars and smashed.
Bits of bottles rolled about, breaking down into
smaller pieces as they impacted on each other. The floor was
slick with vomit and spilled beer. Passengers lay as
good as dead on the floor,
seats and benches,
waxy-faced,
pale as toilet paper. The ferry staff disappeared; perhaps they
abandoned ship.
We drove southwards towards
Spain through France, which we ignored. At some point we decided to cross the
Mediterranean and go to Morocco. I don’t remember whose idea this was, but Steedman was known to be
attracted to subversion wherever it could be found, whereas I was known mainly for
making bad decisions.
Julie seemed sweetly innocent despite her use of
several four-letter words Pete had taught her.
She’d give it a go.
The cancer in the
starter motor got worse as we
ate and drank our way through
Barcelona,
Valencia,
Toledo,
Madrid,
Cordoba,
Seville,
Granada (but probably not in that order. Who knows?).
A fascist country which
could produce good beer, wine and food gave
Steedman pause. He started asking
awkward political questions in bars. Were there any ideas he could
use back in Australia?
In the foothills of the
wintry Sierra Moreno, mechanics in a bus workshop built parts for our starter motor by hand and wouldn’t
accept payment, which was just as well because it had a
serious relapse a couple of days later. From
Algeciras we took a car ferry to
Ceuta, a tiny
Spanish enclave in Morocco. To the ignorant romantic who owned the van this was
Casablanca territory and our first step onto the
African continent.
Neil Armstrong ate his heart out.
To celebrate our conquest of
Europe, we chose a bar near the border crossing
into Morocco. The
Spanish-speaking locals amused themselves by
buying drinks for us and by 11pm we were all seriously drunk. Pete, who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, was haranguing our new friends about
Australian politics. They were pouring what may have been
locally-made Port down our throats. Some of them were looking analytically at
Julie preparatory to making a financial offer.
The Port had shrunk
my brain, which was cringing in a
dark corner of my skull by the time Pete called me over to meet his
newest buddies. He was excited. These Spaniards, who were raving about
Austrians instead of
Australians, insisted on taking us
shooting in the hills the next morning. Even in its
crippled state my brain recognised this as a
fatally bad idea.
Around midnight I staggered outside to the Bedford van (it was parked on a garbage-strewn street near the bar),
put up the roof and inserted Julie into
her stretcher. She was unconscious the moment her head hit the pillow.
I went back for Pete. It took a long time to
find the bar again because I
had forgotten that a
straight line is the shortest distance.
He was laughing crazily, listing against an off-duty
Guardia Civil and insisting that the
cop’s patent-leather hat was akin to the
Australian Digger’s hat only
worn arse-about. As I knew
about rifles and hunting weapons he demanded that I clarify with
our hosts just what
armoury we could expect to use in the morning.
Pete’s secret hope for the morning’s shooting may have been to
take over Ceuta with a
swift coup; you never knew with him.
I had never seen him so pissed, and I never have since. He would
not stop drinking the
Port, although everyone else had.
I had one for the road. He had five.
Outside the
night was freezing. Getting Pete’s
raving, drunken body into the other stretcher was
a nightmare. Our
laughter made us more helpless.
A puppet with its strings cut, he too fell unconscious onto his sleeping bag. If he’d had
any awareness left he’d have been
satisfied with the shock and awe he’d created amongst the
Spaniards in the bar.
Drunk people snore but usually can be woken long enough to
get them to turn over or lie on their sides.
Steedman’s corpse was having none of this until, after a
sleepless couple of hours in which even
Julie was woken, we
pushed him outside the van and went to sleep. He was there a
few hours later, when I stumbled out of the
van to be sick. Somehow he’d got himself into his
sleeping bag. It was closed over his head.
Snoring came from inside. The whole
bag was shivering - not surprising because the
puddles on the street had frozen over and he was
lying on the road itself. He could have f
rozen to death,
been run over or
removed with the rest of the garbage.
As I alone retained some tenuous consciousness, I had to take the responsibility of getting us to
the border crossing and away from
any rendezvous with our
shooting comrades.
I rocked the Bedford without help.
I remember reversing into a wall at 20mph, but little else.
We got through the
Spanish formalities without
Steedman saying
something offensive about Franco’s personal habits, but at the
Moroccan side we were
refused entry by a plain-clothes official, the kind of
balding, puffy-faced, sweat-sheened villain we knew from
Midnight Express.
Julie and I wore respectful faces but the instant the man saw Pete
his hackles rose.
“
Come back tomorrow with hair cat,” he snarled. A U-turn took us away from there but I knew he
wouldn’t forget my friend, who has a
consistent talent for arousing hatred amongst bureaucrats.“
What the fuck is a hair cat?” Steedman scowls.“
He doesn’t like your pony tail.”“He can fuck my hat if I’ll cut it off.” says Steedman . “In fact he was
looking lustfully at your
hat. You could be next.”
The next day
Pete wore my polo neck sweater, his
ponytail tucked inside, hat pulled
down over it, coat with
collar pulled up, and
dark glasses.
His plan was to be inconspicuous but he stood out like a naked man in a nunnery.
“
You there!” It was the
same official. He took off
Pete’s hat,
put Pete’s shades in it, and with
infinite distaste used his
forefinger to flick the ponytail into the open air. “
Hair cat or you no go through.”He didn’t understood
Pete’s foul mutterings, but he
did recognise the huge flick knife which clicked open in front of him.
Pete held his ponytail out and slashed it off his head with the knife.
Pete said, “
Here you are, you cunt”, or something
similarly sensitive. He handed it to the man. “
You need this fucking hair more than I do.”
Lucky not to be shot, we drove through
the shocked silence into Morocco .
He and Julie suffered vicious hangovers for the
next three days as I drove south through the dust. I couldn’t
focus very well and didn’t see much,
except the thousands of ragged children who came running whenever I stopped the van. They had
the impression that I had
boxes of free ballpoint pens,
sacks of coins and
air tickets to America to give away. If they’d
only known what awaited them should they get inside the van.
Pete’s new prejudices against Moroccans were approaching the genocidal.
To save money
in Tangiers we parked under
a street light for the night instead of a camping area. You’d do the
same thing in Australia and you’d be OK, so what was wrong with that?
In the
early hours came a
mighty thumping on the van.
Arabs. Would they rape the men and sell the women in the market? Julie lay in the stretcher above,
a beautiful naked blonde, probably the
target of evil slave traders. The bashing on the side of the van continued. They were shouting something.
Pete and I didn’t know what to do, but getting dressed before we did anything
was a good start. It sounded
like the Bedford was being
dismantled. The starter motor was no good,
so we concluded we had to get out and fight.
We slid the door open and a
tree branch whistled inside and
hit Pete on the forearm,
his back and chest. He took the
brunt of the attack – we couldn’t get out of the van.
Everyone was screaming. I remembered the
French word for “money” and shouted “
d’argent, d’argent”. They backed off
with the branch, but kept shouting. The street light wasn’t much
help with security. I crawled into the
front seat, got a
random sample of coins from
several countries in one hand and threw it out the window, turned
the key with the other - and the
motor started first time.
A bored night porter at a hotel told us where to
find a hospital.
Pete’s bloodied and chewed-up body was bandaged by an amateur nurse; to the hospital the incident was insignificant. “
That’s nothing,” said their attitude, “
wait’ll you see the horrific things people do to goats in this country.” But they did call
the Police Station. We had to go to them
or they would come looking for us. Driving around the
alien streets of Tangiers at 3am
tested our panic level, but finally there was the
police station – as grubby and rundown as any other building. We were made to wait in the lobby. There was no Muzak but there was the
sound of heavy blows and screams coming from a distant room.
There were spots of fresh blood on the lobby floor. A cop appeared wearing a
camel-hair coat over his shirt. He was smooth and neutral. He spoke English. He drove us back to the
street light in a police car. We pointed out
the branch and retrieved one of
Julie’s knee-length boots that I’d tried to
use as a weapon.
Now he knew what martyrdom was, Pete insisted that he’d saved my life twenty times over.
With
a shrug to put any
Frenchman to shame the cop told us there was nothing he could do and perhaps we would
like to contact the Australian Embassy?
That would be as productive as a Bandaid at a beheading - and there was a chance they’d
heard of Steedman which would
bring us even more trouble. Back at the Bedford
the cop smiled and without irony wished us a pleasant holiday in Morocco.
Marrakes/ch, although spectacular, proved to be a
pale imitation of this drama. Its huge marketplace
seethed with criminals and innocents of all kinds. In the whirling movement of people and music,
bowls of mysterious gruel were being eaten,
camel shit was sold in lieu of firewood,
orange peel dotted the walkways like confetti,
dates were slipped on instead of banana skins, and
local cops sold hash/kif to student travellers,
especially Americans,
then arrested them for a reward from the US Government. That was the
current paranoid belief in the medina, anyway. This combined with
our recently acquired anti-Arab prejudices meant we didn’t press on towards the
Atlas Mountains and Fez.
On our return journey we ignored
Morocco, Spain, Portugal and France. We crossed the channel like a Li-Lo crossing a warm bath, and enjoyed a full
Customs search on our return to
England. Something about Pete – perhaps his
contempt for their authority – intensified their search, which included
Julie’s knee-length boots, the roof lining and
door panels of the Bedford, and the inside of our spare tyre.
It took several years to work out that we’d had a good time, but we
never could agree on exactly what had happened.*** Succumbing to the dreaded influence of
Hollywood ,
Morocco recently removed this
unusual cultural link with the
Land Down Under.
