35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘A FLAME OF FAITH’
bills and caused no trouble. ‘Trouble’ entailed coming on to Goan
girls and hassling bona fide tourists. Goan men, on the other hand,
jockeyed to get a Western girlfriend. It was a status symbol: it meant
you were bound to get laid.
Yet many of the Goan men I came to meet with Feringhee
girlfriends seemed tragically out of their depth. Lost in
conversations, all too often they boasted about how much whiskey
they could drink, how much money they’d made, how fast their
motor scooters could go, which Bombay starlets they’d met when
film crews were shooting in Goa, and this obviously the ultimate –
how they’d be emigrating to Canada or the States soon. Few of
them could afford the bus ride to Bombay, let alone the airfare to
Toronto or New York. And they certainly weren’t used to a world in
which women called the shots.
The Westerners often made fun of them in ways they didn’t
understand. It was cruel, ungenerous, far from the ideals the Love
Generation professed to hold. But in Goa, as in Haight-Ashbury,
the dreams were corroding by the early seventies. ‘All You Need Is
Love’ had become ‘All You Need Is Dope,’ which was fast coming to
sound much like ‘All You Need Is Dough.’
‘Hey, man?’
I turned to find a young, bronzed girl wearing enough material
to make a shirt for a hummingbird held over her crotch by green
thread attached to a woven silver belt. Her black hair was cropped
like a Marine recruit’s, giving her a tough, elfin appearance.
I nodded, and David and Esther involuntarily stepped backward.
‘You a friend of Ray’s?’ she asked. The accent was southern:
Alabama, perhaps, or Tennessee.
‘Sort of . . .’
‘Can you tell him Velocity needs to see him?’
‘Velocity?’
‘That’s me. Can you tell him that?’
‘Why don’t you tell him?’
‘Listen, man,’ she tilted her hips and rested a fist on one in a
faintly hostile gesture, ‘you gonna tell him, or what?’
‘Sure.’
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