Ahab was my roommate back in the sixties.

Ahab wasn't his real name, but everybody called him "Ahab The Arab" after a pop
song.  He was known as the guy who never went to classes and lived off campus
and had a car.  The fact that he didn't know the name of the country from which
he came, or that he no idea of what money was worth or how much of it he had,
or that he had a hundred children, those things didn't attract so much
attention.

It was Fall in Schenectady.  It was the first evening cold enough to close the
windows and turn on the heat.  We lived in this old wooden firetrap of an
apartment building.  Four floors of dry, swaying, creaking wood, built around
this little atrium which had the only stairs.  Retrofitted down in the bottom
of the atrium was the furnace.  Right out in the open, with all the framing of
the building around the furnace room, newspapers on the floor, and a drunk
janitor.

So that was the reason that I jumped as soon as I smelled the smoke.  I ran in
to the atrium, but that was not where it was coming from.  This was before the
age of smoke detectors, and the only smoke detector that worked worth a hoot
was a nose.  Following my nose, I found smoke seeping out of the cracks of
Ahab's room.

Ahab was seldom home.  In five months I hadn't seen him for much more than a
few hours, spread out over maybe twenty times.  I had never been in his room.
I knocked on the door, but nothing happened.  I banged again, and was grabbing
the doorknob when it said, "Waayaa uurp?"

"Ahab!  Ahab!  Where's the fire?"

"Common in.  What's all the excitement?"

I opened the door, and a turbidity current of smoke rolled out the door and
down the hall.  The room was hot and full of smoke.  "Ahab!  Where is the
fire?!" I could just barely see him sitting on the floor in the middle of the
room.

"Ain't no fire nowhere."

"What's all the smoke?  It smells like a fire in a pile of horseshit."

"Yeah, shit.  Good shit."

"Ahab!  Where is the fire?!!"

"Good shit.  Have some." Ahab was sitting crosslegged on the floor, smoking a
hookah.  He had a plastic cigar mouthpiece on a rubber hose, and he put it in
my hand as I stood there.  I could see that sucking on this thing was what was
making the smoke, and I didn't want any of it.  There was no fire, but Ahab was
having more diffuculty than usual talking.

"Do you mind if I open the window?  The smoke is so thick that I thought that
the house was on fire."

"Good.  Good," he replied.  I opened the window and noted that the wind blew
out.

"Good shit.  Want some?" Ahab was incoherent, but he didn't seem to be in need
of medical attention.

"Holler if you need anything," I told him as I walked out.  The place still
smelled like smouldering horseshit, but at least the house wasn't on fire.

The next morning Ahab was in the kitchen eating breakfast when I got up.  This
was only the second time I had seen him eat breakfast here.  He was usually off
at his girlfriend's place.  "I'm sorry to have rung your fire alarm last
night.  You neededn't get so excited about a hookah."

"What were you smoking?  It smelled like you got horseshit instead of tobacco,"
I reminded him.  "Your room smelled like the time the horsebarns burned."

Ahab didn't say a thing, but got up and left the kitchen.  A minute later he as
back with a little box, about an inch cubed.  I had seen several like it in the
mail, covered with foreign stamps and Arabic writing.  He opened the box and
showed me what looked like a jellybean.  He dumped it onto my hand; it looked
more like half a jellybean, or even more like half a moose bean.  There was
something embossed on one end.

I sniffed it, held it up to the light, and tried to figure out what it was and
why Ahab had given it to me.  Held one way, the thing looked like it had a
woman's face on it.  She had glasses and long shit-brown hair.  "So what is
it?  Half a piece of mooseshit?" I asked.

I handed it back.  Ahab was dumbstruck.  When his English returned, he told me
what he had, "This is hash." He held the thing and looked at it like he was in
love.

"Hash?  Do you mean dried up hash from Sunday dinner?  It still looks like a
piece of shit." Ahab's English sometimes failed him.  He had never heard a word
of the language until he was fourteen and oil was discovered under his father's
camel pasture.  The drilling roughnecks thought that he was a neat kid, and
taught him English so that they could ask him about the camel races.  Five
years later he was enrolled in college trying to speak with the grammer of a
roughneck and the vocabulary of a stableboy.  Sometimes I never did convince
myself that I knew what he had just said for the third time.

"Hash.  Hashhish.  Cannabis indica.  Ganja.  Hemp.  What do you call it?  The
stuff you make ropes out of."

"Nylon," I said.  "My ropes are nylon, brand name: Goldline." I had rope that I
used for cave exploring, and I knew that nylon is made from petroleum.  "When
we first started tho, we used rope made of manila.  It is made from banana
leaves."

"No.  That's manila hemp.  This is the real thing.  It makes better rope, and
smokes better too.  You Americans must grow it here.  Look, here's the seeds."
He was picking round brown seeds out of the jar of parakeet seed.  He held the
jar up to the light and said, "Milo, barley, German millet, hairy vetch, hemp.
There it is.  Hemp (sterilized).  We don't want you growing it over here."

I looked at the seeds and at the jar.  "Hemp.  Is that what we call reefer?
This tall weed that grows out in cowpastures.  It is something left over from
making rope during The Revolution."

Ahab quickly sketched on a paper napkin.  "Yeah, that's the weed on Donnie's
Grandmother's farm.  He calls it reefer.  What's that got to do with your hunk
of shit?"

"This is hash," he explained.  "It's like making whiskey from beer.  We take
all the good shit from a big pile of uh, reefrig, refry.  People walk in the
hemp fields back home and brush the plants with a camelskin dingquat.  The,
the, the goo is cooked almost like making whiskey, and all the good shit comes
out in the oil."

"That still doesn't explain what this is or why you showed it to me."

"No, you can't smoke the oil.  We soak the oil into, into, into a carrier.  I
mean we put the oil shit on shit so we can smoke it.  Best Yemeni hash is made
with camel shit.  My uncles make it and my sister sends me a turd every week.
See, look here.  Here's the stamp to get from our village to the port.  Every
Friday the camel train goes out to the coast.  This stamp gets it from the port
to the airport.  Here's the stamp to fly it over here.  It always takes at
least until Thursday to get here.  Your Post Office must use a donkey between
the airport and here."

The stamp looked like it had been cancelled a half dozen times.  There were
lines drawn in pen, and rubber stamps, and some I realized had to have been
made before the stamp was on the box.  "What's all this.  I looks like it was
cancelled a dozen times."

"Oh, every time there is another revolution, we run the old stamps through the
printer again.  See, it says Aden, and Oman, and North Yemen, and People's
Republic of Oman.  They have changed the name of my country five times since I
have been in America.  I don't know what to call home anymore.  And see, here's
the mark of the wayhouse, here's the Damn-quit portmaster, and this rubber
stamp is where it reached an international post office.  This one is London,
England, and this is the customs in New York City.  Here's my sister's name and
address in Arabic, mine, and mine in English.  And there is one side that she
didn't use."

"Five revolutions?  In three years?  How do you get anything else done?" I
wondered aloud.

Ahab went to his room and returned with an Atlas.  He showed me the map of
Saudi Arabia.  "Here, on the south edge.  It's about a third of the way from
the east end.  There is a mountain range just back from the coast.  My village
is on the other side of the mountains, in a valley.  The river just soaks into
the desert after the village, and my father owns the camel pasture from the
village limits to the Rab al Khali.  On the other side of the desert is Saud.
The oil company pays Father much dollars for his oil."

"So what's that got to do with this?" I still wasn't sure what he was telling
me.

"Uh, umm, you wanted to know what I was smoking last night.  Good shit.  See,
this is our brand.  See the woman's face, and here is her name." I saw the
face, but the name was in Arabic and it looked like a random squiggle.  "My
brand of hash is Mary, how do you say it?  John, how do you name a girl John?
Johna?  Johnnie?"

"Jean, Jane, Johanna," I suggested.

"Mary Jean Chef.  It's a, an, uhm.  Her name is Maryjohn Chef, we call hemp
Maryjohn when we mean to smoke it instead of making rope.  Don't you use the
Spanish name Marijuana here?  She is the maryjohn cook.  The picture is my
sister Hamadryad, carved into the marble of the pill press.  You can tell that
the stonecarver is in love with Hami." I couldn't but it was like looking at
the end of a worn jellybean.

"Oh, I'm late.  I'm supposed to be at Sylvia's before 7:30, and it is already
7:15," Ahab muttered as he stuffed the turd, a couple books, and a pair of
sandals into a paper bag.

"Who is Sylvia?" I asked.

"Sylvia will birth my baby this week."

"I thought that you girlfriend's name was Tabitha."

"Yes."

"Yes what.  Is her name Sylvia or Tabitha?"

"Yes.  Two Tabitha, and Sylvia, and more."

"Ahab, how many women do you have?" I never saw him bring a woman to our
apartment, tho I had seen at least two riding in his Volvo.

"Right now?  Uh, fifty seven."

"Did you say fifty seven women?  You don't mean that," I replied.

"Yes.  Fifty seven women, and ninety eight children born and thirty unborn,
unless Sylvia or Julianna has birthed last night.  I've gotta go." And with
that Ahab was gone.