by Rucker, Rudy
To Allen Ginsberg
Tangiers, December 22, 1954
Dear Allen,
I been pounding my keys for a silo-fulla-queer-corn story this month...to the point where my typewriter seize up and croak. So I come at you direct through my quivering quill. Imagine a hack writer fixes with ink and he enters his personal Xanadu pleasure dream. But then the Great Publisher edit him outta Eden.
I’ve settled back into Tangier, they got everything I want. Each trip to the homeland drags me more. How did we ever let our cops get so out of hand?
If I ever started feeling sorry for my parents, I’d never stop. I’m a disappointment, but having gone thus far, I’d be a fool not to go further. My word hoard is compost to make lovely lilies bloom.
Too bad you and me didn’t contact personal, but I couldn’t make it to California with all them conditionals you were laying down. Why are you scared of mind-meld? Our buddy-buddy microscopic symbiotes do it alla time. Dysenteric amoeba Bil meets sexy-in-his-bristles paramecium Al, they rub pellicles—ah, the exquisite prickling, my dear—and schlup! My protoplasm is yours, old thing, the two of us conjugated into a snot-wad so cozy. I see me in a Mother Billie Hubbard ectoplasmic gown, tatting antimacassars to drape over that harrumph Golgi apparatus of yours.
“Just a routine,” says Clem, standing bare-ass on the milking stool while the gray mare kicks screaming through the barn wall. “Sorry, old girl, I meant to use lard, not liniment.”
The local worthies presented me with the key to the city—a nicely broken-in kief pipe stamped with arabesques. Ululating crowds of Spanish and Arab boys bore my pierced sedan chair though the streets. I’m installed in a Casbah seraglio, $23 per month, a clean plaster suite at Piet the Procurer’s, with an extra bedroom and a balcony affording microscopic views of the souq.
Brilliant clear Mediterranean skies. I’m a myrmecophilous arthropod in the African anthill—a parasite/symbiote whom the Insect Trust tolerates on account of my tasty secretions.
I leech the sparkle of the sun from the waves, the Japanese outlines from the pines, the exquisite curls of steam from my cup of mint tea. These stolen vital forces are channeled into making me a citizen. Vote Insect Trust or die.
Kiki seems genuinely glad to have me back. What relief, to have a boy who cares for me. I’ve already given him some of my new dry goods. The pith helmet. The feather-duster. I’m this staghorn beetle lurches in, legs furiously milling, the ants swarming over me like slow brown liquid, flensing off my waxy build-up, a peaceful click of chitin from my sun-stunned den.
Eukodal back in stock at the farmacia. But dollies, M tubes and codeineetas still in short supply. Brian Howard is like to have burned down the place this summer. “I just don’t feel right in the morning without I have my medication.” Brian’s gone home to the Riviera, buying a castle, my dear.
You gotta dig the Socco Chico when you and Jack come. The Little Market, the anything-goes interzone of Interzone. Maybe I write a magazine piece about it for Reader’s Digest, you be my agent, and we retain intergalactic telepathy rights.
By way of Socco Chico color, I run into a Cambridge type at the Café Central last night, he say he used to be math professor. I know this character from the summer when he briefly orbited Brian Howard, but yesterday I hardly recognize him...his face all dead and gray. Talks like a full-on Brit boffin, with stutters and pauses like Morse code, and he shrieks key words for emphasis. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, Burroughs!” Pathetically glad to talk to me, and I’m all ears, lonely Ruth amid the alien corn. He laughs inordinately at all my jokes.
After I stand him to a cognac and kief, he rush me outside to talk. This summer he called himself Zeno Metakides, but now he’s shedding his character armor and says he’s Alan Turing. As we walk, he’s darting glances down the side streets in fear of, he says, a large man-eating slug that he’s unleashed. And I’m digging the kicks, carrying a pipe and a bottle.
Turing say he’s learning to program the processes of biological growth. His face, just as a for instance, is a fake, a meat disk that he cultured in a pan six months ago, and it’s grown onto him like a lichen on a boulder. But it’s rotting. While he’s talking to me, he picks shreds of flesh off his cheeks,
Picking up on my visceral repulsion, the mad prof reassures me that his face-rot is akin to cancer and is therefore not a communicable disease. Says he’s concocted a cure with the help of an angelic youth name of Driss. The cure itself have however gone metastatic on him and is the aforementioned slug that roams the Tangier alleys in search of boys.
But Turing’s confident, and manful. He says that he’s still quite fit, he goes running on the beach three miles every morning, trailing his flag of stink. It’s a wonder the fellahs don’t tear him apart bare-handed and roast him like a goat.
Turing has a third problem besides his rotting face and the escaped slug, viz. he is unable to return to his rooms because of some unspecified dust-up with sinister unknown agents who have penetrate the Zone. They are persecute him because he know too much. And then the evening breaks into blotches and streaks with a soundtrack of hysterical laughter. I leave Turing passed-out in an alley.
And now...oh the horror, Allen, the horror...I hear this character’s voice in the street. Real-time message from the Burroughs memory unit: I offered to let the decaying math prof bunk in the spare room of this whorehouse suite where I hang my Writer shingle. He’s coming up the stairs, his gray pieface aimed unerringly my way like a lamprey’s toothed sucker disk.
Love,
Bill
***
To Jack Kerouac
Tangier, December 23, 1954
Dear Jack,
Jack, tell Maw Kerouac shut her crusty crack about me being a bad influence, of all the misguided abuse I ever stand still for. What you need is find you a decent woman, son. Marry the gash and tell your control-knob maw to wipe her own wrinkled ass alla time...
I’m practicing my winning sales pitch in case the writing game don’t pan out and I am reduce to sell cooking gear like Neal. Ideas flap in my belfry like hairy jungle bats. Ah, don’t turn away, my lad, I need you. Voice quavering from the darkness of Father Jack’s confessional booth. I got confidential doings that I gotta spill or else I wig already. I buggered my typing machine, your grace. Commence Scrivener’s Tale...
Against my better judgment, I am temporarily lodging a shameless mooch who used to call himself Zeno Metakides, only he a Brit math prof in disguise. He was a code breaker in the War, and he say the UK authorities are out to liquidate him on account of he’s queer. Or maybe it’s KGB, CIA, or the Knights of Templar. His legit handle is Alan Turing, but that don’t come from my primly pursed lips.
Turing is two years older than me, slim and fit, awkward and mechanical, with a robotic grating laugh I dig to provoke. Queer as a three-dollar bill. He has an endearingly bad attitude towards the powers that be. Dizzy with Wee Willy Lee’s majoun-tea and sympathy, he’s been pouring out his tormented heart. He’s quite impressed with my pedigree, says he’s had dealings with a giant artificial brain that use a magnetic memory unit from my grandpaw’s Burroughs Corporation.
Turing says he’s on the lam from England for some decryptional security breach. And now he’s evacuated his Tangier squat to sponge off me. It’s Strickly Platonic between Turing and me, at least for now, we’re two logico-analytic brains in jars. But now and then I catch his brain stem schlupping across the counter and vining up my leg. There is, one allows, a certain mutual attraction.
But all this is nothing compared to the real-life routine my prof-in-residence is laying down... and this is the tasty part. Turing is wearing an artificial face, a meat-skin flesh mask that he pancaked on while escaping the MI5 Heat.
Says he grew the face from a sample taken from the tip of his deceased Greek lover’s nose... that being the original Zeno Metakides. Seems the stumblebum Mystery Hit Squad poisoned Metakides instead of Turing. They used a pot of cyanide tea, how cozy. Whiz
that Turing is, he quick grew copies of his phiz and of Zeno’s dead pan, reassigned identities, and left the tarted corpse back home, escaping with the Metakides passport to...where else but old William Lee’s trap in Tangier. It’s like Allah sends him here special to be my gunjy muse.
Fed by Interzone’s miasmas, his face-rot have turn galloping necrotic over the last six months, and now he’s working on a cure. Yesterday all day he’s tinkering with colored goo and radio tubes while I write out a new routine in longhand, reading some of the choicer bits to the wacky prof.
Passable fun, but around sunset, Turing drop all dignity and begin mewling and holding his face. “Oh how it aches, Bill, can you give me something for the pain?” My reputation have precede me.
I fix him with an ampule of Eukodal and I sit in my rocking chair watching the show. While Turing dreamy on the floor, this one particular centipede name of Akhmed crawl outta the crack by the toilet bowl to munch on his cheek. I break off a twitching bug-leg and smoke it in my tessellated pipe. And so we passed the night.
This morning Turing clarify that, the day before he moved in on me, the Interzone Heat have made him. He’s rather shy on this point, but I gather he has offed a secret agent by feeding him to a shapeshifting slug that was originally to have been a special unguent for his horrible condition. And this thing is now on the loose.
Turing brought a pound of his alien mollusk’s flesh in a cloth sack, and he set it out in a bowl on my counter. He call the thing a skug, he say it made of UDT or undifferentiated tissue, he talk to it like a pet. The UDT is subject to take root and grow anywhere. He very uneasy about using his skug before he’s done doctoring the pet with, like, goat bile and radio waves, he brought a whole mad-scientist lab along.
Meanwhile, every time I turn around, Turing want more medicine. His horrible condition is make him a junk hog in record time. And this afternoon while I step out to fetch my mail, the situation reach the inevitable crisis.
As fate wills it, I was detain from my rapid return on account of three fellahs are immolating some kind of mutant monster in the lane that leads into my naberhood.
“This clumsy thing brings us shame,” a boy explain, with weirdly fluid gestures of his arms—like maybe he a mollusk too.
Makes me feel so hot and nasty to see the flames lick across the rival mutant they’ve laid low, half-man/half-slug. The boys are goosing each other, laughing like hyenas, bending their faces into impossible grins.
When I finally sashay home, I find all my ampules gone, and my guest nodded out on the shitter floor. In a spasm of disgust I am compelled to remove his moribund facial tissues, using my scalpel-sharp shiv to sever the capillary-rich roots.
Liquidated Zeno’s face in the bidet, I did, doused it in nitric acid. Hideous pungent stench. An Arab gendarme come pounding on my door, I yell that I’m making a pork couscous, and can I borrow a pint of piss. And then Turing arises from the Land of Nod and runs out to the balcony screaming like lobster lost his shell, blending his voice with the muezzin in the minaret across the way.
The stub of Turing’s original face is red and raw like dysenteric buttocks. Taking pity, I squirt on some Vaseline and give him the last of my M tabs. He’s asleep on the couch now.
I’m having a pipe, watching the skug-thing twitch on the counter. Maybe if I dip a dab onto my spine I sprout a lemur tail.
As ever,
Bill
***
To Jack Kerouac
Tangers, December 24, 1954
Dear Jack,
Turing fixed my typewriter, so now it’s back to my novel, if it is a novel. Interzone. Maybe I just interleave the carbons of my letters with you-are-there descriptions of my innaresting daily routines. “I live my art,” says the Author, smoothing his eyebrow with buffed-nail pinkie. “Don’t you?” What I need is a television camera broadcasting me all day long. “You got an audience of like two, Boss. A hebephrenic and a blind leper.”
We find our protagonist in his louche Casbah suite...the plot as thick as the goat offal simmering on his alcohol stove. Cook it up and shoot it, amigo.
Continuity note: House-guest Alan Turing was hogging my junk to the point where I find my day’s box of Eukodal ampules empty before the Hour of Prayer. So I shave off the dying Zeno face that was paining him. Made a man of him, I did, only he look like lunch counter hamburger meat. He planning to patch himself with questionable slime that he call his pet skug. A larger version of his skug have eat a secret agent and was burned by Arabs in the street.
This afternoon, while Turing fiddle-fucks with his radio tubes and my broken typewriter, I watch a buzzard circling the fellahin sky. I am one with the bird, taking in the fragrant cedar of the souq braziers, the kief pipes’ glad exhalations, the drying jissom on pearly bellies, the slow rotting of the black meat, and the persistent pong of the parasitic Zeno Nu-Face that I charred with acid in my bidet. Flashback of me stirring clotted filaments with my double-jointed three-foot switch-blade.
Clickity-clack. Happy keys on my typewriter. I dance the alphabet while my flayed-face professor putters at my kitchen counter, less jolly than before. He plan to change his looks yet again, and then to obtain a fresh passport—not easy just now as the heat have close down the Interzone paperhangers on account of a rogue con-man have pass himself off as the Norwegian consul and infect half of Embassy Row with coal-gas addiction which result in they metamorphose into scaly manila folders that smell of lutefisk.
“I am my papers.”
Turing’s company wears thin. In reaction, I’m compulsively pitching comedy routines at him, just to hear him laugh—a sound like a starter-motor on a cold morn.
I can’t ascertain if he has hard feelings over my emergency surgery on him, his raw-meat phiz being somewhat hard to read. He still poking at his skug of undifferentiated tissue. He say he eventually need to let it grow all over his head for making a new face. But first he want to make it smarter.
Meanwhile he giving me the horrors with his boffin etiquette. “I say, Burroughs, could you possibly procure a pint of ammonia?”
He’s sent me out to the farmacia twice today for like streptococcal infusion and bovine growth hormone, the latter come in glass icicle tubes that Turing crack open to drip yellow glow-juice into his little reagent vat...formerly my cooking-pan and now destined, I shouldn’t wonder, for the Royal British Museum of the History of Bio-Computational Science.
Drip, stir, measure, mix, low mutter, squeak of pencil on paper...last night Turing sneak out and steal two car batteries he use to power a mad-scientist all-fluid self-generating magic-lantern show...he not care about making me felony burglary accessory after the fact.
The batteries connect to colored juice between two sheets of glass he cut out of my window. Seems like he’s hand-crafted some kind of optical display, it’s hooked into his radio tubes to make a show for his skug thing that sits on a cushion like a hairless cat—watching. Horribly the skug have grown a fuzz of snail-antennae, with a tiny black eyeball atop each wobbly stalk.
I fix M and settle in with the skug to watch Turing’s show this morning for a few hours...jaguar yage visions, subdimensional towers, sea cucumbers of the hollow earth, branching tentacles of the Crooked Beetle, and then Joan’s annulled face transitioning through the days and months of decomposition. Turing has the skug mirroring these mind movies on its own skin. He has probes all over it, he at his controls, watching me from the corner of his eye, his own raw face unreadable.
Despite all recent reverses, Turing remain manfully eager to emigrate to Amerika and set to work building morphogenetic slime processors for the Fatherland.
One thing Turing say this afternoon is very disturb me: “Tomorrow for Christmas, I want to be you.” He say this with his voice flat and wistful like a prairie orphan, his teeth very prominent in his ruined face.
At this point, I’d gladly throw my boy Kiki off the sled and into Turing’s slavering jaws, but Kiki don’t come around no more. My lodger the Ma
thematical Brain is give everyone the creeps.
“Sorry to be a bother, Burroughs, but could you pop out for some turmeric and cayenne pepper? My display needs more hues.”
Like I owe him endless favors. Just because I carved off his nasty rotting face. Classic mooch psychology.
I’m scared of him, Brother Jack.
As ever,
Bill
***
To Allen Ginsberg, Letter A
Tanger, December 25, 1954
Letter A
My original plan today: take a break from junk so’s I can get my sex up...hit the Socco Chico and gift myself a Christmas boy...or eat majoun and be a centipede that wriggle along the endless maze of Tanger sewer pipes inspecting cheeks.
But I got this like house guest Alan Turing who spring a surprise routine of his own. He was working all night, and when I wake up this morn, there’s no gay, bright presents...instead I see Turing’s become a human-sized slug of undifferentiated tissue. What I’d call a skugger. The prof’s gone viral on my ass.
He slime up onto the wall and across the ceiling, he move very fast for a mollusk, like a speeded up movie, schluppp, he drop down and assimilate me right in my bed. Now I’m a skugger too. Our skins quilt themselves together...all is one... everything is merged inside. We’re filled with white light ecstasy, our four tranced eyes stare up like shiny puddles. Thinking fast.
Sexy the way our livers slide across each other, tasty how our bones bump the grind. With the orgone pleasure rush comes a nausea like I never feel it before, my trillions of cells in revolt against Turing’s violation of the immune system code...
