From the Pakistani side of the border, I took a taxi to Lahore. It’s about a half hour drive and it was hot and I was tired and after talking with the driver for a few minutes, I fell asleep. I was sitting in the front seat, with my olive green backpack between my legs. I chose the front seat so as not to play the Pasha, but it made no difference to the driver. After our short conversation, and after I fell asleep, he must have rummaged in the pocket of my backpack because later, after he had dropped me off at the bus station, I discovered that a cassette tape with many of the songs I had written in Delhi was gone. I remember having pushed it into one of the outer pockets of the backpack at the last minute, thinking that maybe I would be able to listen to it again in Europe. But it was gone, and all the songs were gone too. Me with my guitar, singing into the cassette recorder. I was sad and angry when I found out, but there was nothing to be done about it. And nothing else was missing, so I let it go. Of what use could it possibly be to him anyway? Maybe he could sell the cassette to somebody for a few rupees, and the new owner might even listen to it once before recording over the strange music he found on it. But its real value was next to nothing. I can’t even remember which songs were on it.
Two years later, in Gary, Indiana, I would have a quarter-inch tape with new songs I had recorded in a studio in Philadelphia taken from me along with my guitar and my backpack. In that case, I had been hitchhiking to Chicago from Cove Gap, West Virginia, and the last guy I got a ride with through Indiana left me at a level crossing after sunset where a train was supposed to stop on its way to Chicago. A train eventually did stop there but the conductor came down the steps and blocked my way onto the train and I ended up trying to hitchhike my way out of there, got picked up by four guys who packed me into the middle of the backseat of the car and then proceeded to rob me at gunpoint, leaving me to stand in front of the headlights of their car with my back to a garage door.
Before that, while we were riding toward the place where they would unload me, one of them kept saying: “Let’s kill him. Let’s kill him.” But the leader of the four — who was so small he could hardly see over the steering wheel of the car — looked into the back seat and said: “You won’t tell anybody, will you?” Automatically, I said: “No, I won’t.” And so they let me out after taking my pack and my guitar and I stood there in the glare of the headlights and out of the side of my eye I saw a wire fence about a foot high and scraggly bushes and somebody yelled: “Run!” and I dove to my left over the fence, rolled through and under the bushes and was suddenly running through a passageway between some apartment houses. I stumbled blindly along, panic shooting through my body along with the adrenaline of still being alive. It was a hot summer night and I saw that one door was open behind a screen door, a television on in the background. I knocked on the aluminum frame and said: “Please, can you call the police, I’ve just been robbed.” The man looked at me and shut the door in my face.
Later, after I finally convinced a couple of girls to call the police and the police came and picked me up, I remember how they stopped in an alley and asked me a series of questions about where I was from and whether I would come back to testify against the robbers if they were caught. I mentioned my mother of course and the Italian consulate and that I would come back at any time to testify and that must have convinced them that I was just an idiot who didn’t know anything about Gary, Indiana and not some drug dealer who had made a bad deal. So at the precinct where they went in to make their report, one of the cops gave me a dollar and I called my friend in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and he drove down to Gary with his brother and a German shepherd and picked me up. About seven months later a police report arrived at my mother’s house in Seattle and it said that there had been no solution to the crime committed against me and that the case had therefore been indefinitely suspended.
I believe the tape with my songs on it was just as useless to the guys who robbed me as the cassette tape was to the taxi driver in Pakistan. The guitar might have fetched a few bucks, but it certainly wasn’t precious, and the rest of my stuff, my clothes — mostly shirts, a pair of clean jeans and some underwear — might have served a purpose for somebody for a while, but all-in-all it hadn’t amounted to much of a catch for them. Not even the fifty-something dollars I handed over in cash could have made their night very interesting. And how many years of that life outside of jail and still alive did they have left after I was gone?
Lahore has not remained in my memory at all. I got on a bus for Peshawar and promptly fell asleep again. Pakistan was not beautiful, not a tourist paradise and the drive through run-down city neighborhoods and scruffy villages certainly did nothing to keep my interest. So I slept.
In Peshawar, I found a cheap hotel near the bus station, ate some flat bread dipped in vegetable curry and went to my room. It had a wooden chair and a bed without a mattress, a rope-spring bed. These types of beds were very common in India and Pakistan and, as I found out later, in Afghanistan as well. The hemp rope spring is tied starting at the left most hole at the head of the bed, then back and forth the length of the bed. At the right-most hole at the head of the bed, the end is carried under the rail and inside the post to the first hole in the side rail. The rope is woven over and under the rope going lengthwise. The rope spring is tightened with a straining wrench, repeatedly in the same order in which the rope was woven until the end is reached. At this point, the rope is wrapped around the wrench to secure it and tighten it and then tied with a secure slip knot as close to the outside of the rail as possible. Rope springs stretch with time so they need periodic tightening. But this rope spring was good and tight and I had a roughly woven grey wool blanket with me which I spread over the roped bed. I used my backpack as a pillow. After I propped the back of the wooden chair against the door handle, I fell asleep without any problem.
The next morning, very early, I found a bus that would take me as far as the border crossing to Afghanistan, a place called Torkham.
Jamrud Fort, on the outskirts of Peshawar, was the official entrance to the Khyber Pass. Set high above the road, at a perfect military vantage point, with thick stone walls, the fort watched over the gateway entrance to one of the world’s oldest known mountain passes along an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia as well as being a strategic military location and an integral part of the ancient Silk Road. Darius, the Persian king, had been here, and Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan! And now here I was on a rickety bus, ready to make my way up one of the most famous roads in the world!
Of course I didn’t have a camera, because in those days I was determined to remember everything I saw and thus eliminate the need for a camera, which only rendered real one instant of a journey, anyway, and not the whole experience. Sometimes I think that maybe a couple of photos would have been interesting in terms of documentation, but then I also think that a camera would have been a liability because of its value as booty for thieves. Better to carry nothing of perceptible value. No gold or silver chains, no rings, no sunglasses, no shiny objects that might attract unwanted attention. And that included not dressing like a hippie. I wore blue jeans and a khaki military-style shirt of thin cotton, and custom-made boots of sturdy brown leather that had square toes but were otherwise like cowboy boots, with leather uppers that went halfway up my calves. Those boots were made for me by a cobbler in New Delhi and they served me excellently for years. They finally fell apart after being immersed in water and then dried in the California sun, years later after I returned to Los Angeles.
Going up the Khyber Pass in a rickety bus is not a wonderful experience. The view is awesome of course but death grins with every curve and at the approach of every bus and truck. After 20 curves and about 50 trucks you finally experience fright fatigue and fall without thinking much about it into ultimate Hinduism and say to yourself: “Life will be so much better next time!”
The bus stopped in Torkham and we all had to get off and find another bus that would take us the rest of the way, through Jalalabad to Kabul. The most frightening part of the bus ride was over. The road from here on out would be fairly straight and without steep drop-offs at the side of the road. But this little village was also the place where you could buy counterfeit weapons of every kind, from ancient British Enfield rifles to modern Kalashnikov knock-offs. I walked around the open marketplace where everybody, I mean everybody, had some type of weapon slung over their shoulder. I saw an astonishing variety of guns hanging from wires strung across under the cloth roofs of the stalls, the guns hanging like dried rabbits or geese or lambs stripped of skin in an outdoor meat market. It was weird to be among so many armed men and so many guns, and yet not for a moment did I feel threatened by anyone. The bearded men in their shalwar — loose pajama-like trousers — and kameez — a long shirt or tunic — most all of them with some type of headgear, a kufi, Peshawari cap, turban, sindhi cap or pakul, their traditional headgear, walked and talked with each other calmly, a few of them curiously looking at me, but not in an aggressive way. After all, I was the stranger here, the anomaly, with no beard, no weapon, no head-covering.
As I strolled past the stalls, the men inside smiled and waved at me to come in and have a look at their wares. I nodded and smiled back, the palm of my hand going to my heart, and kept moving. Then I came to a series of small wooden shacks, with open doorways, each with a smiling hat-less man standing in the doorway and waving at me to come on in. There were no weapons hanging, in fact nothing really to be seen, so I approached one of the huts and the smiling man walked in and I followed him. There on an unpolished wood table about a meter back from the doorway were five tallish stacks of rectangular slabs of hashish, each slab about 30 centimeters wide and 50 centimeters long and probably 2 centimeters thick. The slabs on the stacks were slightly different shades of black, with the slab on top of the darkest stack on the far right of the table sporting a large five-pointed gold star. Right next to that stack was a balance scale, a brass T with two round brass plates attached to the ends of the T with fine chains and a series of weights in a wooden holder next to it.
“Here. You try,” said the smiling man and proceeded to pick a slab up from the middle and light its corner from the sole burning candle in the room. Sweet hash smoke curled into my nostrils and I bobbed my head and smiled and quickly left the shack. Outside, the heat seemed slightly less intense and my perception of my surroundings became sharper. But I knew why, and I knew that it was imperative that I return to where the buses were gathered for the trip to Kabul. Sure, even that short sniff of hash smoke had its effect, but I knew there was no way I was going to survive this journey without being as connected to basic reality as possible.
The buses were ready to roll, and after handing over a handful of rupees, I got on the bus for Kabul.
*********
Reality Now is a song I wrote in 2013, which includes the scene about the robbery in Gary, Indiana.
Danny Antonelli 