And what a god damn sleep it was. We ate a bunch of unnamed gypsy-candy in beige, brown and green flavors, and the only identifiable ingredient besides nuts was sugar. And the park benches didn’t help. But in the end what did us in were the curious ones who walked around uncomfortably close.
In the end, Chase felt that these people were putting his money-heavy camera in a precarious position, so we booked it from the park around 6 in the A.M.
We headed over to the mosque of interest. It doubled as the burial site for a person somebody more responsible with information would have remembered. But it was someone important. And that’s all that really counts. Later on, one of my more English savvy Moroccan friends would call it a basilica.
Mainly older women and children were lined up outside, and to set the scene before going any further, everything was sandy-colored.
Because of hearsay and hype, I saw the women’s feet covered in blood, but it turned out they were just henna-ed up for the occasion.
There were cops. Oh boy, were there cops. But they were gun-less and loosely uniformed. In fact, they looked pretty Rastafarian compared to the G-20 Po-lice. They had billy-clubs, but were mostly just eager to try out any English they knew on us. The main message was something we had already heard and something we would hear for the rest of the day: Don’t Wear Red, and Don’t Wear Black. That went for Chase’s big ol’ expensive black camera. But that’s neither here nor now.
So we waited for the craziness.
But it was slow to come. We had little sleep and no food but some milwi from the night before.
Standing in one spot for so long got old, so Soul Brother Matt and I set out around 7:30 to find oranges, water and bread which, incidentally, are the only things you need to sustain the life-force of your earthly bones.
Oranges was easy. Water too. But the bread was nowheres in plain sight so we started walking down the retainer wall holding back the graves in the cemetery.
There was no action then, but damned if there wasn’t anticipation. The wall was lined with people and as we rounded the curve we came to the apartments on the edge of the Medina. The roofs were decked out in folks. The trees were getting to be bleachers and the tombstones were filling out so there was standing room only.
Bread was still a concern, but flickering out as the drums and reeds screamed louder around the bend.
When we hit the toughest concentration of bodies, we found what we were looking for since before we left the big glass café the night before.
It wasn’t a shot of madness. First it was a wide smear of blood on the pavement. Then it was maniacal chanting with no visible origins. Then we saw them dancing. But visibility was bad, so we bumped up into a spot on the cemetery wall. It was packed, but some guys gave us a hand up. And that’s when me and Compadre Matt knew we found it. Rudimentary body-bob-based dancing and banging drums. They were all wearing white robes with bright yellow and green sashes: men and women: centrally located, breaking off occasionally to chase down any spectators too close and always ending the chase right before the catch.
The dancers weren’t anything too wild for the most part. They all bobbed with different levels of enthusiasm. Some looked like rather-be-sleeping-in candy throwers at a Labor Day parade, while some had eyes rolled back so just whites and g-nashing teeth were present.
After getting a-top the wall, a bored looking cop came over and shooed a pack of wild children out of a tree opposite our spot. Then he went down the line, and we thought, “what an opportunity, a spot up in a tree like that,” and jumped down and walked around, skirting the dancing white-robed crazies, to hit up our new vantage point.
Both world-class tree-climbers, we went up the tree, taking advantage of the highest sturdy limbs, looking down. On the way up, we took on more warnings concerning the color-code. No mutually understood language was talked, but the gist was that Brother Matt’s sweatpants were a navy-blue dark enough to look black in the unapologetic, simplifying noon-ish sunlight, and that the crazies might notice.
But, we thought, we’re in a tree and by all rights shouldn’t give a god damn, so we didn’t and became trend-setters for it. With the grumpy cop out of the picture, packs of kids swarmed back up the tree because, as tourist custom dictates, we were white=invincible, which by some kind of transitive property I never properly studied in algebra, makes everybody in the same tree=invincible too.
It got crowded quick, and gave Brother Matt a chance to put his Sophomore-Spanish to the test. At least one of the kids in the tree spoke Spanish, so he woulda beena translator had Matt actually spoken something recognizable. But he didn’t, so the would-be translator resigned to whipping out a dropper-tube of kif-snuff and passing it around the tree.
Now, kif is about the mildest form of hashish I know. When smoked, the effects are: a feeling of being kicked in the throat with a boot, followed by a first-thing-in-the-morning-cigarette-on-an-empty-stomache buzz for about 5 minutes, followed by a caffeine-kinda high. Not too crazy, but these guys were around 13, and sucked that stuff up their nostrils like an insert generic movie coke fiend here.
They offered some over to us about the same time that the dancing crazies decided Brother Matt’s pants were close enough to black to be attackable.
The spectators that had been watching the dancers, leaning up against our stump split like they got hit by an opposing magnetic kick, and then an especially pale-faced woman was barking up our tree.
Some people grabbed her outstretched arms, pulled her back, and splashed some water on her face. Not able to claw the tree anymore, she turned her free hand on herself, clawing at her face and tearing at her eyes. And she wasn’t the last to charge. Then it was a lanky, darker-skinned man with incredible bug-eyes, and then a toothless Frank Zappa, gums working like his family’s food supply depended on it.
As Matt’s pants attracted more attention, the kif-snorting kids from the block started climbing upward to escape the crazies’ up-reaching hands. As the tree got filled to capacity, branches started to crack.
First it was twigs and flowers falling down onto the agitated folk below. Then the main veins started to give, and me and Matt were sinking. We fought our way down the trunk, keeping a safe distance from unfriendly hands. Then a fresh wave of donkeys came across the street with new dancers, drummers, and double reed-screamers. We swung out on a crunching limb, dropping to the ground behind this confusion and cycling back into the spectators.
Once we hit the ground we were out of the center of attention, and free to follow. The more we followed the weirder it got.
The women of the new and expanded tribe of crazies dropped to their knees and waved their arms down like they were praying to the East. But instead of Mecca, it was the toothless Zappa and a cript-keeper looking motherfucker sprinting at them in fake assault. They came a-swinging, and split off to the side at the last second, with their women hissing and growling at their feet.
There was air-fighting, and more of the tearing-of–the-eyes. Later I heard about them holding burning coles and smashing bottles on their heads, but I saw just the basic Fanatic 101 stuff here.
But one thing was for sure: as they danced closer to the “basilica,” they intensified.
They chased more. They lashed out more. Young people, to spite a decidedly phony custom, flashed their black and red shirts at the frenzied dancers. More and more Brother Matt and I found ourselves moving not so much voluntarily, but helplessly down a river of crowd, all shooting us “where the hell did your white ass come from?” looks.
Then a great spectacle of crowd dynamics twisted everything. It was like a rock hitting a pond: first water was sucked down towards the point where the rock hit the water. Then it was all pushed away in rippling waves.
The rock was a suspected fallen bystander. The water was an assuming crowd, rushing in to make sure the tactless victim, maybe a poor bastard wearing red or black, wouldn’t be killed by the crazies.
Then, Surprise! The crazies weren’t swarming a spectator, but a mutilated, half-a-goat carcass, now thirty feet up in the air, and the masses go from sucking in to rippling out, trying to escape the splash damage radius, me and Matt fighting to keep our heads above the crowd.
And then there’s a clash of realities:
1.) when your drowning, you grab hold of the tallest sturdy object above water
2.) Moroccans aren’t tall
So, as me and Matt made our way away from the soaring goat carcass, we found ourselves more and more encumbered in Moroccan girls and children.
They clung to our legs, our arms, and around our waists. And all the while yellow intestines were spouting.
I caught a spurt in the face before the full reality of the situation hit me.
The crypt-keeper looking motherfucker had the half-a-carcass by its two left legs before I realized the gravity of what was happening.
Then, again, the half-a-goat was far up in the air. That’s when the ripples froze to look up, and the fur and guts plummeted.
In the end, all were spared. The goat’s hips got caught on the creased edge of a roof-top, spine right angled, with minimum guts coming down on the innocent crowd.
The crazies continued, mad but goatless, and the day of elebration-cey continued too.
[The next part includes an urban flash flood and small children locked in cages. So read it if you want. Or be a heartless bastard.]
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