In 1968, Volkswagen had an amazing deal. A fully equipped VW van, which normally sold for $3,500, was offered to American students for $2,500— with two catches:
1- You had to pick it up at the factory in Wiesbaden
2- You had to export it from the Common Market
What a deal! I sold some hash and headed to Europe with the loot to buy my own traveling home. Martha and I took a train from Luxembourg to Heidelberg, to enjoy a few days of a student environment, and then north to Wiesbaden to pick up the van. We had to meet her parents, who were traveling around Europe and who hated me. And then we drove to Copenhagen, with her mother doing the classic backseat driver routine the entire way. Martha and I had been living together for a couple of years but her parents insisted she had to stay in the luxury hotel while I slept in the van parked down the street.
I’m sure I politely said goodbye to them the next day when Martha and I made a bee-line for Paris. We traveled around France, Spain and Portugal for 5-6 weeks and then took a ferry from Algeciras in southern Spain to Ceuta, a speck of a Spanish colony in northern Morocco, east of Tangier. I had this crazy idea about avoiding Tangier, which, over the years, became one of my favorite towns in Morocco. But on this first trip, we were headed south to Marrakech and Essaouira, where we hooked up with Jimi Hendrix, who I knew from New York before he was famous. Before driving to London, where Martha would fly back to the U.S. to finish school and I would… figure what to do with the rets of my life, we headed to the Rif Mountains southeast of Ceuta, where we had to catch the ferry back to Spain.
The Rif area was like the Wild West, a relatively lawless and very poor Berber area. The only reason westerners went there was to buy kif, the local version of hashish. I was rapidly running out of money so I figured— correctly— that I could buy a kilo of cheap kif and send it back to the States and make enough money to live on, modestly, for the next half year. By then we had started picking up hitchhikers to help us pay for gas.
We picked up two Jewish guys from New York and they proceeded to tell racist joke after racist joke, one after the other. Martha couldn’t tolerate it and growled at me to get rid of them. I came up with an idea for how to do it without just abandoning them in a dangerous area where something could happen to them. I told an anti-Semitic joke. They were startled and horrified, unable to imagine there was even such a thing… and asked to be let out. We drove on to Ketama, a small bandito town east of Chefchaouen. We bought some good kif and smuggled it back into Spain and then drove directly to the Isle of Wight. The last thing I remember is the two of us sharing a djellaba or blanket of some kind, standing in the drizzle and listening to Dylan sing “I Threw It All Away.” I couldn’t stop thinking that was exactly what I was doing. This is the actual footage:
The next day, Martha got on a plane and I went to stay with my friend Susie Marijuana in London. She had been a somewhat famous groupie in New York but moved to London. I used to let her hang out backstage at all the Stony Brook concerts and now she was putting me up in London. That's where I decided to drive to India. It’s funny, when I started writing today, I meant to write about living in Goa on the Arabian Sea... and I didn’t get anywhere near it. I’ll try to continue writing ’til I get there in the next couple of days. And here’s a photo of Martha and I at a Moroccan wedding that someone invited us to.
