Travel tips from Ayesha Pulaski

 

I moved into a small apartment on the second floor of a converted villa in a city in northern Morocco in the summer of 1984.  My landlords were an Italian/Jewish couple who owned most of the bars in town (Muslims don't drink, and can't own bars as a result).  My landlords also ran most or all of the prostitution in town. I'll tell you all about it some other time.

 

Around midsummer, an interesting gargoyle stuck her head through the hole in my window screen.  “I thought I heard somebody talkin' English in here!” she rasped in a cigarette voice.  “I'm Ayesha Pulaski.  I'm your neighbor.  You want a drink?  Bring ice cubes.”

 

Ayesha (not her real name) was a local girl, and had worked for a long time at one of the bars in town.  She'd married an American serviceman, Stan Pulaski (not his real name).  They lived in Maryland and had two kids.  (“Honey,” she griped, “I don't have to be here right now.  I could be home right now.  I could be crabbin'.”)  Her husband was on assignment in the Mediterranean, and the kids were at camp, and she'd decided to come back to visit her home town. 

 

“Honey,” she said to me one day, “write me a postcard.  I don't write so good.”  It was a girlie postcard.  "Okay. Write this: 'Dear Stan: Here's a pretty girl for you to look at.  Ha ha.  I need some more money.'  Okay?  Now sign it for me.”

 

Her mother came to stay with her.  Momma was a Berber woman, three feet tall, with blue tattoos on her cheeks.  I came out on the terrace one day and found Momma grinning up at me like a garden gnome, clutching a broom.  “GOOD MORNING!” she shrieked at me in Arabic, sweeping like a demon.

 

“Gonna take Momma back to the United States,” Ayesha confided to me that evening.  “I gotta get her a passport first, though.  Honey, can you imagine that little old lady on a plane?  She's gonna be runnin' up and down the aisle, screamin' her head off.  What am I gonna do?”

 

One last Ayesha story.  I'd just come back from Casablanca, she'd just come back from Spain.  She brought the Jack Daniels, I brought the ice cubes.

 

I told her: “My friends in Casablanca want to explore the desert.  They want to take the train into the Sahara.”

 

 

Ayesha looked disgusted.  She said: “Honey, you tell your friends they're crazy.  My boyfriend and I, we went to the desert.  Honey, there ain't nothin' there.  Ain't no grass, ain't no trees.  Ain't nothing but sand.  I seen this old Berber man, and I says, 'Gimme water,' and he says, 'Gimme money.'” 

 

 

She shook her head, grimacing, remembering that horrible trip, and took another sip of her drink.  “Honey,” she said finally, “my camera melted.”