Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India

by Cleo Odzer

  "BOMBOLAI!" yelled Richard, applying flame to the pipe. "BOM SHANKAR!" yelled someone else. I marvelled at their unconcerned attitude toward smoking hash in public. Anjuna was a Freak beach where the police never went, but this was a public place! Natives sat an arm's length away. I sneaked a look around and noticed no one seemed disturbed. Richard offered the pipe to two Indians across from us. With a nod and a smile, they accepted.

  India!

  When the chillum came to me, I declined and felt proud of myself for doing so.

  The boat docked in Panjim, a major city of Goa, and a few of us shared a taxi to Anjuna Beach. After asking around for a place to stay, I found room in a house on the north end. Unlike the south end, which had relatively few houses, the north end crowded one house next to another. Each had a walled-in plot of overgrown land. A lumpy, rock', dirt road, walled on both sides, divided the area into rectangles.

  A week later Michael, an American with dark hair and sparkling blue eyes, threw a party. Michael lived in a large room in the house of a Goan family. Having his own entrance, he'd built a fence of palm fronds around the area, creating a private compound.

  "Fatima is something else, man," Kadir told me as we sat outside on the sand.

  "Who?"

  "Michael's girlfriend. Over there with the platinum hair. She was arrested in Germany, man. She played crazy and got herself transferred to the psycho ward. Then she escaped and hitchhiked all the way back to India. Without a passport, man!"

  "I heard she once married a Kuchi chieftain in Afghanistan," Richard added. "James Michener based his novel Caravans on her."

  Wow, I thought. I just loved the Goa Freaks. How exhilarating to be part of them.

  And what a party! Dayid and Ashley turned up and secretly spiked the punch with LSD. I became suspicious when my limbs grew heavy and the reflections from candles spread out and touched. When coloured light hung from my eyelashes, I knew somebody had spiked something. I hadn't even known Dayid and Ashley were in Goa until they stopped by my spot near a wall of the compound, from which I hadn't been able to move since the acid hit. I barely managed to raise my head in salute.

  "You look like you're enjoying yourself," said Ashley. The train of her slinky, black dress trailed three feet behind her. I could only answer with a pleasurable noise. My body wouldn't move and my words wouldn't connect.

  "He'll leave you to your apparent jollification," said Dayid, and they moved on, grinning at the evidence of their good deed.

  Not till midmorning did I manage to break loose from spacing out on sand specks. Light blazed off the palms in the yard. I zigzagged across the sand into the house. An Oriental carpet filled the room.

  "Oh, boy," said a guy I recognized as the Neal who frequently dispensed liquid acid from a straw at parties. An American, he had shoulder length brown hair with long bangs that he shook continually out of his eyes. "You look like you could use some of this." His hand held a glass block with an engraved lion on the underside. CLICK, CLICK, SCRAPE, SQUEAK, SQUEAK went the razor blade on the glass as he divided white powder into lines. He passed me the block and a gold straw. Sniff. The efficient gold instrument shot the powder up my nose like a vacuum cleaner.

  "What was that?" I asked when the unfamiliar taste of it drained down my throat.

  "You thought it was coke?" he said, shaking his bangs and giggling. "It's smack."

  As the heroin seeped into, my bloodstream, my spaced-out body relaxed. Ooo, exactly what I needed. It eased the sharp edges of the acid aftermath. "That's wonderful," I said. I closed my eyes and sank deeper into a cushion. "Just right."

  "I thought it would help," answered Neal with a grin. He passed a finger through his beard and stashed me through his bangs. "Who are you?"

  "Cleo."

  "I've seen you around, but we've never met."

  "I had your acid one night."

  He giggled and embarked on a discourse about the purity of his acid; how there was little of it left because the C.I.A. had destroyed the formula, thinking it subverted America's youth; how the C.I.A. initiated the "bad trip" propaganda; how it was all a he, etc., etc.

  Neal loved to talk, and he babbled on into the afternoon. I listened, often with my head down and eyes closed. I felt so comfortable, and everything looked so acidy beautiful, I could have stayed like that for eternity.

  As we eased into spring, people left Goa. The weather grew hot with the approach of the monsoon. Goa enjoyed clear, delightful warmth all year except for summer, when the temperature rose to unbearable heights, followed by incessant rain. That was when the Freak citizens of Goa left beach life to do business—drug business. The monsoon routine called for a quick scam to make a bundle of cash, then sojourning in another utopian spot, like Ibiza or Bali, until the next Goa season.

  One day, Kadir informed me that he and Dayid were putting their scam in motion and we were to move to Bombay.

  I flew up with Ashley, Dayid, Norwegian Monica, and other Goa Freaks we ran into at the airport. Though the flight itself took twenty minutes, the taxi ride to Diabolim Airport took three hours. The wait for the ferry I'd crossed with Tom and Julian's bus consumed most of the time. The steel structures extending into the water hadn't grown an inch since then.

  In Bombay we checked into the Astoria Hotel, and I shared a room with Norwegian Monica. Monica planned to run for Kadir and Dayid, carrying cases into Canada like I'd done. Depending on the amount of capital left at the season's end, the Goa Freaks either created their own scams or ran in someone else's.

  As Goa emptied, the Bombay Freak hotels filled, and we arrived in town to find a twenty-four-hour-a-day party scene. Friends occupied every room at the Astoria, and Neal checked in right across the hall.

  "Hi there, neighbour," he said, leaning against his open doorway, chopping powder on his glass block. CLICK, CLICK, SCRAPE, SQUEAK, AND SQUEAK. "Feel free to stop by for a toot whenever you want."

  "Oh, Monica. This is so great," I said to my roommate. "I don't know whose room to visit first."

  We stayed in Bombay a long time. Everyone, it seemed, got caught in Bombay Syndrome—scams and plans were delayed as parties carried on week after week. Dayid and Ashley had a suite where a horde of people always overran the bed, the chairs, and every inch of floor space. The coke flowed non-stop.

  "Anybody want victuals? I have room service on the phone," Dayid would announce periodically. "Ashley desires a piece of pericarp. Pericarp, a.k.a.—also known as—fruit. Fruit is the mature ovary of a flowering plant, did you know?"

  Monica and I made daily trips to smack up at Neal's. Heroin cures cocaine frazzle. After days of coke snorting, one's nerves tended to feel like yesterday's spaghetti stuck to the pot. A sniff of smack brought tranquillity to the fried brain. Often Neal provided us with a packet for morning too.

  After three weeks, I began to wake up with diarrhoea and cramps in my stomach. Sometimes Neal came by with a restorative spoonful of smack that made the ills go away. I wondered what I had. Monica was also sick, and we couldn't figure it out.

  "Hoo, boy! There goes my stomach again. What's wrong with me?"

  We made frequent trips to the "0" den for pipes of opium. It eased the symptoms. We didn't worry much over what ailed us, tiny trouble being a frequent companion to the traveller.

  After a six-week-long party. Kadir told me the cases were ready. "Did you get the new passport, man", he asked when he delivered them.

  "No. I decided to stop in Europe and get it there so no one in Canada will know I've been to the East," I answered. "How does this sound—PII report it stolen and then use the new passport for travelling in the West, while keeping the old passport for the East. Think it'll work?"

  "Yeah, man, sounds like a good idea."

  "I have to figure out how to work the visa stamps, though. Some countries don't stamp you in, and when they do, the stamps are never in chronological order anyway."

  I counted out two thousand Canadian dollars for Kadir. I was all set f
or my big number.

  I chose Belgium as my destination; it seemed an innocent little place. The morning of departure day, I woke up feeling dreadful. I had no energy, and my stomach was killing me again. "Oh, Monica, I can't move," I said.

  "Hoo, boy. I'm not hunky dory myself. Let's go to the "0" den."

  After a few pipes, we felt rejuvenated. I bought a ball of eating opium to take with me. Feeling great, I had my hair done and took care of last minute details. Just before I left for the airport, Neal handed me a good luck packet of smack. "Have a nice trip, cutie," he said. CLICK, CLICK, SCRAPE, SQUEAK, AND SQUEAK.

  This time I was better prepared. I had enough rupees to pay the overweight charge, and I 'was early enough not to he tilled with anxiety during the inevitable complications of Indian bureaucracy. Am! No coke. Everything was OK as I boarded the flight to Brussels, a stash of dope and opium hidden in the hem of my dress.

  I had no problem leaving Bombay nor entering Brussels. After checking into a fancy hotel, I went to the American embassy to report my stolen passport. They said they'd have a new one for me the next day. Peachy.

  When the time came to leave for Canada, though, I was very nervous. I gobbled a pile of Neal's smack up my nose. This trip was the real thing, I thought, as I buckled into the Boeing 747. I wasn't going for someone else this time. This trip was mine. I would make twenty-five thousand dollars for myself. Could I pull it off? Was I really going to make that amount of money? Something had to go wrong. Never went this smoothly.

  I couldn't concentrate on the in-flight movie.

  As the plane banked its final approach to Montreal, I went to the bathroom and snorted more smack. I looked in the mirror. Oh, shit! Look at my eyes! They were so pinned! You could hardly see black in the middle at all. The Customs man would look at my eyes and know right away I had smack in my blood. Usually, I loved the way smack made my pupils so small. They showed that much more blue. But as I looked at reflection, my eyes seemed to announce to the whole world that I was smacked out.

  Well, too late to back out now.

  Upon landing, I shuffled with the other passengers to the Immigration area. What if they searched me and found the passport reported stolen? Did my eyes look like those in Children of the Damned?

  POOM! A man pounded an entry stamp in my passport and handed me the pass-through card.

  I made it! My own trip!

  I checked into the Sheraton to a green-and-white room that reminded me of spring. Full of glee, I called Esther. "I'm here!" I announced. I jabbed at the numbers on the push-button phone to create celebration music.

  She came over immediately. She loved the cases. "No one would ever suspect them," she stated. Then she asked, "How do you get the hash out?"

  I deflated. "Uh-oh. Good question. How do I get the hash out? Oh, shit." I'd forgotten to ask about that little detail. "Hmmm, I guess we need a scissor or something." We also needed a scale and Baggies. Esther left, to return shortly with supplies.

  Clueless about correct procedure, we set to work cutting the leather as best we could. With knives and razors, we stabbed, tore, and clawed. Scraps of leather fell to the floor as the hash came out in blocks. We divided it into onepound piles, which we packaged in Baggies. Within an hour, we'd parcelled seventeen and a half pounds. Esther took three and said she'd be back. I went to the lobby, bought ten dollars worth of candy, and retired to the room and the colour TV.

  A few hours later she returned with a friend.

  "This is Toad," Esther said. "He's going to help sell." Toad was another Canadian Goa person. She counted out forty-five hundred dollars in small denominations and gave it to me.

  I was ecstatic. "I'll have to hit every bank in Montreal to change these tens and twenties into large bills," I noted, amused at the problem. "Sorry. That's what they paid me."

  Esther and Toad took three pounds each and left. It was working. I was really doing it. An entrepreneurial drug smuggler! I felt like Genghis Khan conquering land. I snorted the last of my powder and chomped a Mars bar.

  When Esther returned, she cascaded Canadian dollars over the bed. We counted them giggling. She left again with more weighed-out Baggies, and then Toad appeared. I counted his money, and he too took more and left. I went to the lobby and crammed the cash into a safety deposit box, where it barely managed to squeeze in next to the money belt stuffed from the last trip.

  By night time, all the hash had been sold, and I was $26,250 richer! I couldn't believe it.

  "Wow. That went so fast!"

  "I told you it would," said Esther, surveying the traces of our day's labour. "What are you going to do with the suitcases?"

  I glanced at the slashed-up wrecks. They looked like they'd been attacked by Norman Bates from the movie Psycho. Oh, shit. What to do with the cases? Another little detail I hadn't asked about.

  "Oh, god!" I wailed. "I never thought about that what do I do with them?"

  She chuckled. "You could throw them out the window."

  We went and looked out the window, which faced an inner courtyard, fourteen floors down. We laughed.

  "Should I do it?" I asked, laughing at the thought. "Nobody would know where they came from."

  "Can you imagine the people in their rooms seeing the cases fall by?"

  We laughed louder and held the window sill to prevent ourselves from collapsing.

  "How about the elevator?" I suggested. "I could wait till the middle of the night and put them in the elevator. Then send the elevator to the lobby."

  We could no longer hold an and fell to the floor in a giggling heap. "I still think you should throw them out the window," Esther advised when she could get enough air to talk.

  Amid the guffaws, though, I realized I had a problem. "I can't do that," I said. "These cases are a new scam. The narcs don't know about them yet. If I left them someplace, Narcotics would find out and know to look for that type of suitcase. The airports would be alerted. I'd ruin it for everybody; nobody could use them again." I groaned. "I MUST dispose of them where they won't be found."

  "So what will you do?"

  I hadn't the faintest idea. It seemed I wasn't yet the hot-shot professional. I said, "I'll ask Dayid. He should be arriving tomorrow. Oh, no! I can't let the maid in till I get rid of the cases. We really made a mess, didn't we?"

  The next day, Dayid and Ashley called, and we arranged to, meet for dinner that night. I spotted Ashley as soon as she floated through the lobby's revolving door. She wore a floor-length red fox coat, with a red fox hood framing her blonde hair and a red fox muff encasing her hands. I was feeling sick again.

  "I can't go to dinner with you," I told them. "I'm freezing and sweating. My legs hurt and I have no energy."

  They looked at each other and smiled. "Don't you know Ni hat your malady is?" Dayid asked.

  "No. Do you? What's wrong with me?"

  "You're withdrawing," said Ashley. "You have a habit."

  Addicted? Me? No. Not possible. "I can't be!" I said. "I haven't been doing that much smack."

  But I knew immediately they were right. How come Monica and I had never figured that out? Especially since we knew enough to go to Neal's for a little taste whenever we felt too bad.

  Dayid agreed to dispose of the cases for me, and I watched Ashley got out the door with him as I shambled back to the room. Goose pimples crawled over my body. I swallowed some over-the-counter Valiums I'd bought in India and took hot baths to ease the ache in my calves. After two days of that, I was fine.

  Planes full of Goa Freaks arrived, and Montreal soon turned into a continuation of the party begun in Bombay. After Monica landed safely, Ashley told us about an apartment building that rented by the month. The next day Monica and I moved into an apartment, with Dayid and Ashley taking another one down the hall.

  "Want a hit of smack?" Monica asked as we settled in. By this time, she too had figured out what had been making us sick. Sickness or not, though, the stuff was pure paradise, and I accepted. She winked as
she handed me her stash. "Souvenir from Neal."

  Every day brought another familiar face to Dayid and Ashley's apartment. The overflow filled our living room. Although no one mentioned the details of his or her business, I assumed we Goa Freaks were in Canada for the same purpose. I loved being part of these drug-smuggling outlaws, an underground community vibrant in the straight world of North America.

  Though the Goa Freaks didn't discuss business specifics, they recounted dose calls with gusto.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Canadian Jacques told stories in his French accent. "This time, they detained me in London," he said. "There I was, peacefully waiting in the transit lounge for the connecting flight."

  Goa Freaks crammed every corner of the room. Jacques scanned our attentive faces and tossed his waist-length hair over his shoulder. He fished a stash bottle from the sack hanging on his belt.

  ". . . and suddenly a man approached me," he continued as he snorted from an ivory spoon, "and asked me to follow him." Jacques scooped another spoonful and extended it to me. I leaned forward, and my nostril met it halfway.

  "Hoo, boy—what happened?" prompted Monica.

  Jacques went on with his story as he offered powder to the rest of his audience. "I knew they were going to search me," he said. "The man led me through a corridor and down a stairway." Despite the crowd, the room was quiet as the Goa Freaks listened. "The Customs official walked in front of me. I had a stash in this pouch tucked in my pants. I palmed the pouch, like this, and let him get ahead of me, then I threw it under the stairs where you couldn't see it. He took me to a room and had me undress." Jacques paused, and we waited expectantly. I was angry when he couldn't find anything."

  The Goa Freaks cheered.

  "My suitcases were there, and he searched everything. I was afraid he would give me a rectal exam or make me stay overnight. Sometimes they keep you to see if you shit anything out. But he didn't. He said I could go."