Sometime in 1969, in a faraway land, I fell in love. The object of my desire was Turkish hashish, or esrar, as it was called by the natives. My drug love came on gradually, as addictions do, and even when it reached full throttle, I was never conscious that I was in over my head.
I was a senior at George C. Marshall Regional High School, in Ankara, Turkey, where my father worked for Michigan State University in a contract with the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The student body, about 350 of us, was comprised of American dependents of military, US State Department, USAID, and private business families, mostly in the Air Force. All American families lived right in Ankara, although about eighty high school kids, whose parents resided elsewhere in the Middle East, lived in dorms next to the high school at the American base. The base, located outside of Ankara near a village called Balgat, was held within high and secure fences and included a supermarket, snack bar, swimming pool, tennis courts, and the schools. Americans could enter through a traffic checkpoint to experience an oasis of Americana there on the vast Anatolian plateau.
But living in Ankara did not shield my classmates and me from the 60s cultural phenomena of the mother ship. We listened to the Doors, Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. We debated the vagaries of the Vietnam War and let our hair grow long. Some of us felt we were sent as emissaries from Woodstock Nation to explore and absorb life in Turkey. Many Americans in Ankara rejected the amazing opportunities to integrate into Turkish life and described it as a "hardship post." They would insulate themselves, as much as possible, and only venture out to the culturally familiar confines of the base.
But aside from attending school there, most of us spent little time out at the base. Some of us sought paths down side streets through modern downtown Kizilay or the cobblestoned alleyways of old Ulus with its carpet and copper shops and open air markets that held boiled sheep heads and mountains of watermelons and oranges for sale. Hundreds of peddlers had one specialized product for sale, either in tiny, dark shops or out on the sidewalk where they would bark out their bargains, all eager to barter. And rising above the markets of old Ulus stands the Citadel, the city's castle and prime lookout. The original foundations were built in Hittite times, about 3,000 years ago, and the outer walls were constructed by the Byzantine emperor, Michael II in the 800s. On a clear day, you can spot the Citadel from any point in Ankara, and my friends and I often climbed those winding cobblestone streets to stand with fists raised atop that ancient promontory. In 1969, we felt like the emperors of the Anatolian plateau, purveyors of all that stretched away within that magnificent view.
During my junior year, my itch for drugs started with trips to a local eczane, or drugstore. We could freely purchase Romilar, a cough suppressant that contained codeine. By downing a whole cannister of twenty pills on a Saturday night, we would submerge for hours into a numb and hallucinative quicksand. Or we would buy Gracidin, an appetitive suppressant made in Czechoslovakia. After dropping four tablets, we would stay up all night to argue with passion and fury the most vital of philosophical truths. The next day we plunged into near-suicidal depressive depths and vow to never again.
By the start of my senior year, I became fixated on smoking hashish. While getting drugs at the eczane was as easy as buying bread, Romilar and Gracidin were messy and took an ugly toll. But hashish took on a powerful appeal. Early on, my friends and I were at the mercy of hash-possessing American acquaintances who sometimes took pity on us and shared. This made getting high hit or miss. But through my friend, Joel, I met a contact at the Merhaba Palas named Ahmet. Ahmet was a friendly and outgoing young man who seemed to love my company. Each Friday evening, Joel and I would walk the mile over to Merhaba Palas from our neighborhood in Cankaya to meet up with Ahmet and his taxi driving friend, Mustafa, to score some dope.
During school on Friday, I would ask five or six of my friends if they wanted me to score for them, to chip in and divide the spoils later that night. With the accumulated 60 or 70 Turkish lira (about five dollars), I could buy a slab of hashish, infused with opium, that weighed about half an ounce.
Joel and I would arrive around dusk at the taxi stand near Merhaba Palas, and after Ahmet and Mustafa greeted us with kisses on both cheeks, Joel and I would take the back seat in Mustafa's cab, Ahmet riding shot gun, before the four us set out in that old model Chevy for a destination unknown. Ahmet delighted that I spoke some Turkish and while the car radio blared exotic Turkish tunes, I would answer his questions about life in the States and American movie stars. There was always talk of the revered JFK and Jerry Lewis movies.
We would soon leave Ankara's citified environs and wind through narrow, mud-walled streets in an endless series of poor villages. Large sections of the city's sprawl were referred to as gece kondu, or night villages, as thousands of migrants poured into the city from the country's destitute rural areas to claim a piece of ground and build makeshift shacks overnight and undetected, often on impossibly steep hillsides. If a person could claim squatting rights in the light of day, by law he could not be evicted. In this wild and haphazard geography, with gece condo climbing the hills all round, all sense of direction and the way home were lost.
We would finally slow to a stop a block from a dimly lit chay evi, or teahouse, where mustachioed men congregated to play cards or backgammon, drink tea, smoke tobacco, or calmly finger through a string of worry beads. Every old Turkish neighborhood had its gathering place for men, a custom reaching back centuries. You couldn't just waltz into some random tea house and inquire about esrar. You would be inviting serious trouble. It just happened that the dealer, this stranger that Ahmet knew, would be found in this one. Mustafa cut the headlights and Ahmet would reach back for the money I put in his hand. With a quick count, Ahmet flashed a knowing smile, and headed out into the shadows.
We sat silently in those minutes while Ahmet was somewhere inside the tea house transacting the deal. Extreme danger filled the air. Turkish laws against drug use were extremely harsh and their prisons were notoriously primitive and cruel. Joel and I knew all this and yet, as raving mad as it seems now, the risk of arrest paled when compared to the prize just a block and moments away. My heart pounded as the thrill of the score was at hand.
Ahmet would return with hashish in his palm. He handed me ten or so fingers of the stuff and told me to stuff them down my sock. During one of these escapades, Ahmet ran back to the taxi, climbed in wild-eyed, and whispered, "Polis, polis, dikat!" Police! He ordered us to duck down on the floor behind the seats, and for a long and silent span the taxi meandered through those narrow lanes with the melodies of the radio turned to low while Mustafa's eyes scanned the rear view mirror. Ahmet at long last reached back and tapped my shoulder. All was clear.
You might think this near brush with jail would have been the wake-up call. It was easy to imagine the approach of Turkish cops as we sat there parked, of being yanked onto the ground, of being frisked, and cuffed, and thrown finally into a dungeon. But this American boy, there I was, so fixated by the intrigue and mesmerized by the smells and the sounds and the dim, unsure light. And I suppose, above all, I was doggedly true to my mission: I was the ring leader, the man in charge, and my American comrades depended on me. Together in fellowship, yes, undaunted, we would, by God, get high.
After all seemed safe and driving away, Ahmet asked to have bir tane, one of the hash fingers, to roll into a joint. I really liked Ahmet with his mischievous grin and quick laugh. For all he had just risked and accomplished, he asked us permission to share a piece of the spoils. It was a ritual Joel and I were happy to indulge. Ahmet would take apart two cigarettes to reassemble into a larger joint by spit-glueing the two papers together. And with the cigarette tobacco and an entire finger of crumbled esrar, he rolled a trumpet joint for the four of us to share.
Easing down a dark and vacant street, we took turns inhaling from the monstrous thing. During our earlier trips, Joel and I were eager to hit the joint right away, but as Ahmet instructed, "Yavash, yavash", slow down and let the red ash cool a minute before proceeding. Turks might take three hours to finish a formal meal, and Ahmet and Mustafa were in no hurry with this either. Let it cool and savor. Patience.
Mustafa then would drive us to remote areas of the city where, at high elevations, we could gaze out on the twinkling lights of the Turkish capital, the Citadel prominently spotlit, while squatting on our haunches on the side of a road to exchange drug-addled laughs. I would announce, "Ben Tarzan gibe!", I am like Tarzan!, and stand up and beat my chest like a gorilla. This would throw Ahmet into gut-splitting guffaws and beg me for an encore. No wonder Ahmet so jubilantly greeted us when we arrived every Friday. Getting high with Joel and me must have been the highlight of his week.
By the time we arrived back to the modern world of Merhaba Palas and walked the mile back to our meeting place in Kavaklidere, Joel and I still spun in an intense swirl. We may have only taken four hits each, but the amount of dope in that one joint equalled the amount I would smoke throughout a full day later on. Yes, each and every day, morning, noon, and night, together or alone, I smoked. Most weeks I would run out of my beloved allotment by Wednesday and had to rely on the kindnesses of friends before Friday night would roll around again.
My bedroom in our fourth floor apartment became a popular hangout for my American friends. With my door shut, we would crank up, say, Blind Faith or Quicksilver Messenger Service and sit in a circle of knees while passing around a homemade pipe made from aluminum foil. We simultaneously smoked cigarettes to help conceal the distinctively sweet smell of burning hashish. A goat skull hung from my ceiling, the bedroom mascot, that we christened, alas, "Yorick." One night in a fit of group creativity, six of us decided to illustrate my walls with florescent paint. My friend, Karl, painted above my bed a bright orange sentence that read, "If these walls could talk, they would cough."
My parents were amazingly oblivious to my wicked ways. I later learned that they were concerned about how secretive and isolated I had become, but at the time, never put two and two together. They were trusting and lenient. Ankara was a safe city (that is, if you weren't a lone female at night) and my friends and I took full advantage. We would get high, flag down a dolmush ("stuffed" station wagons that cruised the main drags picking up passengers) and head downtown or to Ulus or out to the base. My parents admired that I was immersing myself in Ankara life and believed I was an independent and popular son. I could navigate my way through public interactions better than they. They just had no idea about the extent of my immersion.
So it went, week in and week out, with Joel and I venturing out to the dangerous hinterlands on Friday nights. But one day in March, 1970, sitting in the school cafeteria, my friends and I heard a very serious rumor: the night before, Turkish police had busted into the apartment of a Turkish Cypriot, a rock band leader named Tezer ("Teddy" as he was nicknamed by American kids), and arrested him, two other Turks, an American airman and an American high school student. Teddy was a popular character among American teenagers who were drawn to his rock star charisma and generosity in altering their minds. American kids came and went from his Ankara flat, though I never had. The identify of the arrested student then became clear. It explained why he wasn't in school that day... Joel! He just happened to be at Teddy's the night before, infrequent visitor that he was, when the cops barged in. Joel! The unluckiest American in all of Turkey.
The American police authorities, the OSI, wanted to get to the bottom of which American kids were involved in drugs and who their ringleaders were. They used the Turkish bust as a springboard and interrogated some forty American high school students with an eye to which ones were involved in dealing drugs with Turks. The investigation went on for a few weeks, and when concluded, about five entire families were immediately deported back to the States. Others of us incurred milder consequences. I was allowed to stay until May 15 which enabled me time to earn enough credits to graduate before I would be sent back to the States.
American kids had time to prepare and they gave false statements to get their stories straight with their friends'. As a result, the OSI drew grossly erroneous conclusions. We learned through the grapevine that other kids had scapegoated three of my friends and I, and as such the OSI had dubbed us as "the fearsome foursome." With this advance knowledge, the four of us conspired to lie when we were called for questioning: we would admit to smoking hash, that we got our drugs from fellow high school kids, but would refuse to name names beyond the four of us. Had the OSI known that the now-imprisoned Joel and I every week for months had scored dope out in the wilds of Ankara, my family and I would have been booted within days of his arrest.
Before I was deported in May (two months after Joel's arrest), I twice tagged along with Joel's father and visited arkadashim, my friend, in prison. His dad and I took our places among a throng of desperate and impoverished families who waited in long lines for a turn at fifteen minutes with their loved ones. When I finally came face to face with him, through a small and filthy window, Joel burst into tears. This would have been unimaginable when he was free, stoic and emotionally hardened as was his norm.
The window was thick and we had to yell to be heard. Joel described how he shared a cell that held six cots with fifteen other inmates. It was still March so it was cold, especially sleeping on the floor, and there was little heat. He had to sleep on his back to keep other prisoners from sexually assaulting him from behind. The prisoners were segregated by class, so by comparison I suppose his accommodations were the Ritz. He craved news of our friends which caused him more tears when I shared the latest. When I went back a few weeks later, Joel was in good spirits. The weather had warmed, and he seemed hopeful about getting released. He had learned how to manage day to day, his fear seemed at bay, and he was playing volleyball. While his new world was harsh, dirty, and dangerous, he held his own. He was five foot six but built like a fire hydrant. He could be a tough customer in his own right and defended himself, surviving intact for eight long months.
In November, while Joel was being transferred to a prison in Istanbul, his father, as pre-planned, followed the transport van in his car. When the van pulled into a rest stop, Joel made a break for it, jumped into his dad's car, and lit out of there full tilt. During the following hours, as the two took to roads more off the grid, there was no apparent pursuit. The next night, Joel and his father made it across the Greek border in their car with no hard questions asked. My long-lost friend arrived in Ann Arbor a few days later. It turned out that Joel's father had stayed on in Turkey until he could seize the opportunity to spring his son, cross the border, and never return.
I stayed in contact with Joel over the years, hit or miss, especially during the several months he lived in Ann Arbor after his escape. We would party or go to rock concerts or just hang out. The last time I saw him was in the early 90s. He was driving a semi through northern Michigan and we rendezvoused at a bar in Houghton Lake. We both were clean and sober by then. He talked about the years he followed the Grateful Dead and life as a cross-country truck driver. I talked about settling in northern Michigan, being a father, and my work as a drug counselor.
We sat across from one another, Joel with his long scraggly beard and rainbow suspenders, me with my trimmed goatee and polo shirt. Far flung paths that originated from common ground. Mostly we talked about the friends we loved back in the day and the adventures and intrigues we shared in that spectacular and calamitous land. What was unspoken: he was a hero in my eyes. I may have been a hero in his.
Back then at eighteen years of age, we owned like sultans an expanse of experience where cultures melded -- Joel, Bobo, Karl, Bill, and I. Imagine that we may have just left my smokey bedroom where Jim Morrison presided in stereo, caught a dolmush to the old city, and wandered up alleyways where friendly carpet and copper shop owners invited us in for tea. We may have climbed on further, past the children selling souvenir evil eyes, and through the gates constructed by Seljuk and Byzantine conquerors more than a thousand years before. If we made it this far, we would always surmount the uppermost walls to stand atop Ankara's Citadel, its fortress for millennia, for a view across the ages.
Imagine us taking it all in: the modern, high-rising downtown with its great arteries of traffic, the dozens of minarets spiking the distant skylines, the gece kondu gripping like desperate fingers to those Anatolian mountain sides, and the fading highways north to the Black Sea, west to Istanbul, south the Mediterranean, and east to ancient Persia. American youth at the crossroads of time, and no time. As a boy, I fell in love with a drug and I couldn't have stopped it. Years later, I would need rescuing, like an imprisoned son waiting for his father's getaway car. But while it all started there, and I taunted the devil there, there is not a moment I would alter.
