An anniversary excerpt

M Train Genet adventure on a Sonic birthday

Hello everyone,

Today Jesse and I are traveling through France working. ( yes back in Europe). We are both deeply thinking about her father, Fred Sonic Smith, on his birthday. I thought it would be nice to celebrate his memory by sharing one of our many adventures. A journey to French Guiana for our first anniversary. Below is an excerpt from my book M Train. Please give Fred a good thought on what would have been his 76th birthday. Below is also the video we made for a song we wrote together for the album Dream of Life. I wrote the lyrics for Fred on our 7th wedding anniversary. I send all good wishes to everyone and will report again from Nancy, France.

      

  In 1981 Fred and I were about to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. He said before we started a family together he would take me anywhere in the world. I chose Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a border town in northwest French Guiana, where stood the remains of the hub of the penal colony where transported French political prisoners and hard-core criminals awaited their fate. My wish was to gather some stones to one day offer Jean Genet. In Miracle of the Rose he had written of the inmates there, and the source of a deep and painful regret. He believed that the men, condemned to life or execution in the dreaded Penal Colony, had achieved a saintliness that he would never achieve. He felt them overlapping his own blooming soul and embracing their wretchedness, even their death. His blood, his transparent cells, seemed to flow within theirs. He mourned he would never get to French Guiana, but I would. I vowed to gather something of the abandoned prison for him - earth and stone. I was good friends with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg. Both knew Genet and I hoped they would deliver them to him.

Fred did not make light of my self-imposed task, we were well traveled and looked forward to exploring a place neither of us been, and we mapped our journey together. We found no direct flights and our best possible route was Detroit-Miami-Barbados-Granada-Haiti-Suriname, then a wooden boat like a large canoe across the Maroni River. We had to disembark at each stop while the hold was searched for smuggled goods. In Suriname a handful of young soldiers met us at dawn with automatic weapons and herded us wordlessly to a bus that directed us to a designated hotel. The first anniversary of a military coup that overthrew the Democratic government on February 25, 1980 was looming- an anniversary only a few days before our own. We were the only Americans around and did our best not to draw attention to ourselves.

Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, formally Dutch Guiana, was a necessary stopover to get to our destination. A guide inexplicably presented himself to us and Fred dubbed him hard-arms. We were grateful for his protection and the idiosyncratic places he took us. We approached deserted temples draped in fading prayer flags in the jungle forest.  We waded through high grasses into the sugar cane fields to find a half-finished Dutch housing complex. Detroit, Fred murmured, under his breath. “hard-arms” climbed to the top of a tall tree and shaved off a branch, heavy with large curling leaves- slightly furry, a bit like sage. Tea! he said. He took us to a hut of a friend who boiled water and steeped a handful of them. It was excellent tea that tasted of its own fragrance. After a few days bending in the heat of Para, we drove to Albino. The dawn sky was veined in lightning. A young boy agreed to take us across the Maroni River by pirogue. Fred and the guide said emotional farewells. Fred had a way with other men; they seemed to feel elevated in his presence. It began to rain as we pushed off and escalated into torrential by the middle of the river. The boy warned us not to trail our fingers in the water surrounding the low-slung wooden boat. I suddenly noticed the river was teaming with tiny black fish. Piranha he laughed.

We were dropped off at the foot of a muddy embankment at the heart of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. The boy dragged his pirogue on land and joined some workers taking cover beneath a length of black oilcloth stretched over four wooden posts. They seemed to be amused by our momentary plight and pointed us in the right direction. As we made our way to the road the sound of their laughter and soca music, wafting from a boom box, was all but drowned by the relentless rain. We tramped through the empty town and stopped at what seemed to be the only existing bar. The bartender served me coffee and Fred had a beer. Two men were drinking calvados. The afternoon slipped by as I consumed several cups of coffee as Fred engaged in a broken French-English conversation with a leathery fellow who presided over the turtle reserves. There seemed to be no one around and no telephones, yet everyone we needed appeared as the rains subsided. The owner of the main hotel introduced himself.  His son took our bags and we followed them along a muddied trail down a hill to our new lodgings.

The next day we rose early, and a worker dropped us off by the ruins of the prison. Our hours there were spent in an alchemical silence. Fred had an intense aversion for prison, rivaling my own intense romantic fascination. We moved about separately, careful not to disturb the spirits.I entered what had been the mass cell. There were still rusted chains embedded in the walls and graffiti everywhere. I quietly gathered five or six stones and placed them in an o resize Gitanes matchbox, careful to include a bit of earth.

 It was against the law to visit the turtle reserves at that time of the year, but the fellow from the bar found someone to take us to Cayenne. The driver had a beat-up Peugeot, and carried himself like a supporting actor in The Harder They Come, in aviator sunglasses, cocked cap and a leopard print shirt. He insisted our bags stay with him in the front seat, as chickens were normally transported in the trunk. Since we were traveling light it didn’t matter. We drove a little over two hundred kilometers along dirt roads through the continuing rains interrupted by furious sun. We listened to reggae songs on a station riddled with static. When the signal was lost we listened non-stop to a bootleg cassette of a band called Queen Cement. Every once in a while, I unwrapped the Gitanes box and peeked in.

Are the stones still there? Fred would say grinning.

I was happy; my goal for the journey had been accomplished. We wound through dense forests, passed short sturdy Amerindians with broad shoulders, balancing iguanas squarely on their heads. We traveled through towns like Tonate: three houses, one six-foot crucifix, and a population of nine. But as we approached Kourou we hit a checkpoint and were told to get out of the car. Our driver suddenly changed his demeanor. He’s going to bolt I thought.

Two officers went through the car finding a knife in the glove box. That can’t be so bad I thought, but as they knocked on the back of the trunk the atmosphere shifted. They asked for the keys and the driver attempted to run and he was taken down. They went through his pockets and found a wad of francs but no keys; the other searched the ground finding them beneath his side of the car. I side glanced Fred. He had a lot of trouble with the law as a young man and was wary of authority. He betrayed no emotion and I adopted his manner.

Drugs I was thinking as they approached the rear of the car, but we hadn’t seen or been offered anything but low-grade cognacs since we got here. They opened the trunk of the car and found no drugs but a man in his early thirties curled up like a slug in a conch shell. I was horrified to imagine him crammed in the womb of the trunk all that time in the heat without water. He looked terrified as they ordered him to get out and poked him with a rifle. We were all herded to the legion headquarters, put in separate rooms and interrogated in French. I understood enough to answer their questions but Fred, installed in another room, didn’t speak a word of French. Suddenly the Commander, who had been radioed, arrived sweating, harassed, dressed completely in khaki and looking right out of a totally different movie. He was barrel-chested with a weather-beaten but handsome face dominated by dark sad eyes and a thick mustache. Fred took stock of things, in this obscure annex of the foreign legion it was definitely a man’s world. I watched silently as the smuggled fellow who had been stripped and placed in chains was led away. Fred was ordered into the Commanders office. He looked at me. Stay calm was the message that shot from his pale blue eyes

I sat there for over an hour. Soon the dejected driver was also led out, but he did not look at me. An officer brought in our bags, and another with white gloves went through everything. I sat there with the little Gitane box wrapped in Fred’s handkerchief. I was relieved he did not ask me to surrender it. As an object it had already manifested a sacredness second only to my wedding ring. I just sat there alone with my thoughts. I sensed no danger but monitored myself against reactionary behavior. My interrogator brought me a black coffee on a small silver tray and entered the Commanders office. I could see Fred’s profile. After a time they all came out. They seemed in amiable spirits. The Commander gave Fred a manly embrace and we were placed in another car. Neither of us said a word until we were dropped off at the foot of a hill in Cayenne, the capital city situated on the banks of the estuary of the Cayenne River; the end of our journey.

Fred had the address of a hotel given to him by the Commander. We dragged our bags up the hill.

What did you two talk about?

I really couldn’t tell you, he only spoke French.

How did you communicate?

Cognac! He’s a lonely man. He just needed to talk.

Fred seemed deep in thought.

I know you are concerned about the fate of the prisoners, but it’s out of our hands. The driver placed us in real jeopardy and in the end my concern was for you.

Oh I wasn’t afraid. I said.

Yes, he laughed, that’s why I was concerned.