The Grand Peace Mosque dominated the city that was created in the fifties and modeled after Western communities. All the houses had a driveway to the garage, a big front yard, and rambling, ranch-style homes with eight-foot high picture windows in front. Carefree, American TV sit-com families lived in neighborhoods and houses not unlike these built in the new Pakistani capital city. What made it so surreal was that instead of enclosing that big front yard with a picket fence or shrub border, the California-ranch-style homes were surrounded by high razor-wire fences. All the big picture windows were covered with massive anti-theft grills and the garages were boarded over and permanently closed.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the very progressive Prime Minister who was running things in Pakistan. Bhutto had graduated with honors from the University of California in 1950 and was admitted to Oxford. He embraced the American Federalist system and professed a dream of melding the five distinct tribal areas into one modern state. Many first-generation Pakistani leaders were heavily inluenced by having been educated in the U.S. of the 1950s. California ranch-style homes in safe neighborhoods were their vision. The razor-wire fences were the reality.
Prime Minister Bhutto made a fatal flaw in his political maneuvering. There was a great jockeying for what the official language of the new Pakistan would be. All these years after the creation of the country, the actual lingua franca of Pakistan was Urdu. Urdu was a coarse and profane multi-ethnic language that had developed out of the military in the nineteenth century. Bhutto preferred Sind. Sind was a beautiful old language that was still spoken in only one part of Pakistan by the intelligensia and wealthiest class. Choosing Sind to be the national language was a grave political miscalculation on Bhutto’s part. Bhutto went from being the darling of a military establishment that had fought India to a stalemate in the 1971 war, to facing trumped-up charges that sent him to the gallows.
The poetic Sind language brought to mind Pakistani art and culture and was spoken by the cinema community in Lahore. Urdu symbolized Islamabad’s garage doors nailed shut and dry swimming pools and was the metaphor for a backwards march toward religious fundamentalism.
Montreal Michael had been in Islamabad for six months and was slowly but surely assembling the components from the city’s scientific supply outlets necessary to distill pollen and create hash oil. It was a tedious and unpleasant task but he was undaunted and determined to see his hash oil dream factory built.
Michael met two other Canadians in Islamabad buying laboratory equipment at a scientific supply outlet for the same purpose. Cadillac and the Mad Professor were from British Columbia and, sharing the same nationality and the same purpose, they all became associates. We all went out for kabobs and info exchange.
We talked it through, always admiring the great, though somewhat bizarre, entrepreneurial skills of anyone who could come up with an idea like this. The Mad Professor, in a kindly manner, explained that Montreal Michael, while a genius, would never be able to build the elaborate factory that he was contemplating. He said that the seals that were needed to secure the lab pipe-works were not made well enough in Asia, and thus were dangerously unreliable. They would not be able to handle the engineering tasks that Michael was designing. The Mad Professor suggested a smaller, slower version that produced an ounce of hash oil a day, instead of a gallon an hour. The Cadillac offered to share the blueprints.
Seriously pondering their suggestions, I went back to Lahore to get Rebecca and return to Kabul. I was very glad to be rockin’ in my sweet baby’s arms again. Unfortunately the rockin’ didn’t last long because I was called back to Karachi, Pakistan, by an excited Dutch Bob.
Chapter Ten
“If you have a job without aggravation, you don’t have a job.”
MALCOLM FORBES
Dutch Bob made “arrangements” through some Dutch Embassy fringe employees to pay off Karachi customs officials. Every three or four months I would put the overland-out-of-Kabul-to-Karachi trip together. Dutch Bob took it airport-to-airport into Europe after that. Then I would break away from our idyllic life in Jangalak, put on the white linen suit and go to Amsterdam to collect. The demand for Tibetan carpets and primitive Nepali Tribe jewelry was taking off in Europe as well. Buddha statues were in demand.
Between meetings with Dutch Bob I found time to fly back to the States to visit my friend Bill Wassman. Bill had purchased the top floor of an old warehouse in New York City’s SoHo district. It was a 4400 sq. ft., well-lit skeleton. He had a double bed, a coffee pot and a refrigerator. I brought in a futon, blanket and pillow as a house warming present. An actor named Robert DeNiro bought the floor below to fix up for his mother, Bill said.
Bill and I went out to Max’s Kansas City club to hear Lou Reed with his new band, but we couldn’t get into the place. Outside in the crowd, also unsuccessful in gaining entrance, was a tall, good looking blond man about our age who was wearing a baseball cap from the same university we had attended. It was The Sizzler. We all ended up back at Bill’s l’artiste primitivo loft and got to know each other over some Durbin poison weed. The Sizzler knew a sailor. The sailor knew somebody who knew somebody on the docks in Brooklyn. Every few months Sizzler visited the sailor in New York City. The Sizzler then drove South African herb 1200 miles to Chicago.
I enlisted Sizz in the Afghan to Amsterdam operation, offering him the position of “cold-hard-cash courier.” All the money had to be brought into Afghanistan via money belt and money belt only.
While the money bazaar in Kabul was wide open and you could exchange currencies of any nation in the world for any other, checks of any sort were prohibited.
Anyone associated with an organization that does business based on finding loopholes in various nations’ laws generally takes the historical view of it all and the romantic characters involved with the herbe dangereuse, as the French call it, must be chivalrous and honorable and streetwise. The Sizzler was just such a guy. The $30,000 to $40,000 cash that would come back to Afghanistan from Amsterdam had to be carried securely on his person. Once he retraced the overland bus route through Iran. Iran was ruled by the ruthless Shah who employed vicious SAVAK underground torture squads. Other times the Sizzler would come directly into Kabul by plane. The Sizz could have, at any time, said that he lost the money by theft, corrupt customs or even legally confiscated. Every penny made it every time.
Also, on the U.S. transit, I reconnected with a couple of old friends from Haight-Ashbury – William VIII and Aggie. William VIII was an accomplished musician who played the bass. He had been the driving force behind organizing us into our failed attempt at a way-too-psychedelic rock and roll band. William VIII and Aggie were inspired to come to Afghanistan and showed up within a month.
Chapter Eleven
“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name It felt good to be out of the rain In the desert you can remember your name ‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.”
“HORSE WITH NO NAME,” AMERICA
When I returned to Afghanistan, German Ted, his wife Tory and their child, Guava, had come back there as well. Remembering his dog in Kathmandu, I immediately enlisted him into helping me search for a mastiff pup and so “Kachook” came into our lives. Kachook was just eight weeks old when I found him after Ted took me up to Bamiyan to locate one of the breed. Where Kachook was actually born is unknown. He was stolen, and had spent the previous two weeks tied to a caravan cart in a walk-for-your-life-or-death situation. The nomads that stole him had sold him to a local Wali the night before German Ted and I arrived. The local Wali had bought him to become a fighting dog, what the Afghans called sak-jungee. There were some histrionic Afghanstyle negotiations involved. German Ted, invoking local custom, insisted by making the point that it was very, very good luck for the Wali to make a profit so quickly.
When I brought Kachook back to our house, the staff was none too happy about his arrival, even