Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Dr. Schultes had given him an introduction to a German wine producer who knew Putumayo well and told Burroughs that there was a bug there like a big grasshopper that was a powerful aphrodisiac. “If it flies on you and you can’t get a woman right away you will die. I have seen them running around jacking off from contact with this animal. […] Another thing I have been trying to get information on [is] a vine you chew and all your teeth fall out.”

  “Just the thing for practical jokes on your friends,” Bill said, filing the story away.13 He left Pasto a couple of days later for Mocoa, the capital of Putumayo and the end of the road. From there transport was by mule or canoe.

  Burroughs arrived in Mocoa late at night. It was a small town of muddy cobbled streets and single-story buildings, surrounded by towering mountains part covered by low clouds and encroaching jungle of palms and canopy trees. Bill wrote Allen, “For some reason these end of road towns are always God awful. […] But in all my experience as a traveller—and I have seen some God awful places—no place ever brought me down like Mocoa. And I don’t know exactly why.”14 No one knew anything about the jungle or yagé, and he couldn’t even buy citronella to ward against bugs. Mocoa had four streets, which were constantly patrolled by a member of the Policía Nacional on a motorcycle that could be heard from any part of the town. The police also had a brass band that paraded around the town three or four times a day, starting early in the morning.

  Bill bounced about in the back of a truck thirty miles to Puerto Limón, near the meandering Rio Caqueta, where he found a helpful Indian and within ten minutes had a yagé vine. But the Indian refused to prepare it, insisting that was the monopoly of the brujo. Essentially a brujo is a black magician, combining witchcraft with Spanish Catholicism, whereas a curandero is the inheritor of the folk medicine techniques of the Mayans and deals in white magic. Bill’s brujo—“a drunken fraud”—was crooning over a man prostrate with malaria when Bill found him. Bill believed that the brujo drove the evil malaria spirit out of his patient and into the gringo, because he came down with malaria exactly two weeks later. The brujo explained that he had to be half drunk in order to work his witchcraft and cure people, so Bill bought him a pint of aguardiente, which is 25 percent alcohol. He agreed to prepare the yagé for another quart. He made a pint of cold-water infusion, but only after he misappropriated half the vine so that Bill got very little effect. One of the telepathic effects of yagé is supposed to be visions of a city. That night Bill had a vivid dream in color and saw a composite city, part New York, part Mexico City, and part Lima, which he had not yet seen. He told Allen, “I was standing on a corner by a wide street with cars going by and a vast open park down the street in the distance. I can not say whether these dreams had any connection with Yagé.”15

  He spent the next day with an Indian guide, exploring the jungle and looking for yoka, a vine the Indians used to prevent hunger and fatigue during long trips in the jungle. It took them four hours to reach the high ground where yoka grows. The Indian cut a vine and shaved off the inner bark with his machete. He soaked the bark in a little cold water then squeezed the water out and handed the infusion to Bill in a palm leaf cup. It was faintly bitter but not unpleasant, and in ten minutes Bill felt exhilarated, as if he had taken Benzedrine but “not so tight.” He walked the four hours back to Puerto Limón without stopping and said that he could have walked twice that far. The jungle views were spectacular. He told Allen, “The trees are tremendous, some of them 200 feet tall. Walking under these trees I felt a special silence, a vibrating soundless hum. We waded through clear streams of water.”16 He said that the Upper Amazon jungle had fewer disagreeable features than the midwestern Ozarks in the summer. Insect repellent discouraged the sand flies and jungle mosquitoes. Unfortunately he had run out of citronella. The whole time he was in the Putumayo he never got any ticks or chiggers.

  Burroughs spent about a week in Puerto Limón before continuing by truck to Puerto Umbria and canoe to Puerto Asís. The canoes, the standard method of travel, were about thirty feet long and powered by outboard motor, but the motors were often out of commission because their owners took them apart and left out pieces they regarded as inessential. They also economized on oil so the motors often burned out. The Indians loaded them right down beyond the gunwale so they were almost at the water level. Puerto Asís consisted of a mud street along the riverbank, one cantina, one hotel, a few shops, and a Capuchin mission. Bill checked into the Putumayo Hotel. It was run by a middle-aged couple with seven daughters. “This giggling brood of daughters kept coming into my room (there was no door, only a thin curtain) to watch me dress and shave and brush my teeth. It was a bum kick,”17 he told Allen. The day after he arrived, the governor found an error in Bill’s tourist card. In Panama the Colombian consul had mistakenly put down “52” instead of “53” as the date. It was an obvious error, as Bill’s other papers, his passport, air tickets, and receipts, all showed clearly enough that 1953 was the correct date, but the man was obdurate. Bill was placed under town arrest pending a decision from Mocoa. A cop searched his luggage, missing the gun, but decided to impound all the medicine where the gun was hidden. Fortunately a father from the Capuchin mission interceded and he was not held in a cell. After the interrogation, Bill returned to the mission, where the fathers gave him good food, wine, and liquors; “they live the life of Riley, man, they lived good […] they snap their fingers and people jump around. But they’re always helpful.”18

  Bill was stuck in Puerto Asís with nothing to do but sit around and watch the wide flowing river and get drunk in the cantina in the evenings. One day he was sitting on an upturned worn-out canoe on the riverfront when a boy joined him there. That evening they walked into the jungle. Afterward Bill reported to Allen, “I beat him down to $10 bargaining under increasingly disadvantageous conditions. Somehow he managed to roll me for $20 and my underwear shorts (when he told me to take my underwear all the way off I thought, a passionate type, my dear, but it was only a maneuver to steal my skivvies).”19

  After eight days, word came that Burroughs had to be returned to Mocoa, so, accompanied by a cop as he was technically under arrest, he went back upriver. In Puerto Umbria he came down with chills and fever. Next day they arrived in Mocoa and the second-in-command threw Bill in a cell without even a bucket to piss in. They threw all his baggage, unsearched, in with him, including of course his gun. He took some Aralen and lay shivering all night. The next morning the commandante saw him, immediately recognized the error, and set him free. Bill returned to his hotel, called a doctor, and went straight to bed. He had chills, fever, and was aching all over. The doctor took his temperature, which was 105, said “Caramba!” and gave him an injection of quinine and liver extract to offset secondary anemia. Bill continued to take the Aralen and used codeine tablets to counteract the malaria headache. His temperature came down and he spent most of the next three days sleeping. The Aralen knocked the malaria right out of his spleen and bone marrow and Burroughs never had a recurrence.

  By February 28 he had reached Pasto and was back in the Hotel Niza. Two days later he was in the Hotel Nueva Regis in Bogotá. Dr. Schultes and the U.S. embassy helped him, and he was now armed with a paper signed and sealed by the minister and secretary of the Colombian Foreign Office. The trip was not a complete waste, however, because thanks to Dr. Schultes he was now a member of an expedition. This included Schultes, three Swedish photographers intent on capturing a live anaconda, two English broom rot specialists from the Cocoa Commission, two Colombian botanists, and their assistants. They were followed by a truckload of equipment including tents, rations, movie cameras, and weapons. They were to go to Putumayo in convoy, retracing Bill’s journey through Cali, Popayán, and Pasto to Mocoa. The expedition received regal treatment, with free boat and plane transport, free food served in the officers’ mess, and accommodation in the governor’s house. Officials were under the misapprehension that Bill was a representative of the Texas Oil Company traveli
ng incognito. He gave them no reason to doubt it. Bill got on extremely well with Schultes, and told Allen, “He likes to chew coke with the Indians, and is not above amorous dalliance with indigenous females.” Schultes later became world famous for his work protecting the Amazon jungle and its peoples, identifying more than three hundred new species of plants, and for isolating the active principle in curare, now used as a muscle relaxant in operations.

  Bill’s next experiment with yagé nearly killed him. The expedition had broken up, and Bill carried on with Dr. Schultes, the two Englishmen from the Cocoa Commission, and the two Colombian botanists. In Mocoa, Bill’s German connection made an appointment for him with a medicine man. At dusk they went to a thatched hut with a dirt floor in the jungle, about ten minutes out of Mocoa, to meet the brujo. The brujo, a smooth-faced old man of about seventy, first took a long drink from the quart of aguardiente that Bill brought with him, then squatted by a bowl set up on a tripod before a crude shrine. He sat in silence for a long time, then took another swig from the bottle and began crooning and shaking a little whisk over the bowl. Eventually he poured some of the black liquid into two dirty red plastic cups. The liquid was oily and phosphorescent. He handed one to Bill, who drank it right down, anticipating the bitter taste. The brujo downed his. The effect on Bill was instantaneous; within ten seconds the room began spinning. Blue flashes passed in front of his eyes, and he saw Easter Island heads carved in the support posts of the hut. He rushed for the door, banging his shoulder. He leaned against a tree and vomited violently. He was completely delirious for four hours, vomiting at ten-minute intervals, crouching on all fours by a rock, gasping, thrown by waves of nausea. It turned out that the brujo had given a similar dose to a man just a month before; the man ran into the jungle and they found him in convulsions. He died. The brujo had given Bill an overdose that, had he not puked it up within twenty seconds, could well have been fatal. Clearly the brujo had built up a large tolerance for yagé himself. Finally Bill was coordinated enough to find his Nembutal. It took him ten minutes to shake five tablets from the bottle, but he couldn’t swallow them because his mouth was so dry. He managed to crawl to a stream and gulp enough water to get them down. He recovered, but it was a horrible experience. He crawled into the hut and pulled a blanket over himself, blue flashes still igniting in front of his eyes. The next morning, feeling fine, he walked back to town.

  The expedition continued next day to Puerto Asís. Dr. Schultes had two assistants to carry his equipment and help collect specimens, one of whom was an Indian from the Vaupés region where they had a very different method of preparing yagé. In Putumayo the vines were crushed with a rock and boiled all day in a small amount of water together with a double handful of another plant to make a small amount of the beer. The Vaupés method consisted of scraping about three feet of bark to make a double handful of shavings. These were soaked in a liter of cold water for several hours and the liquid strained off. Nothing was added. The liquid was sipped over a period of an hour. The brujo in Mocoa told Bill that if a woman witnesses the preparation of yagé it spoils and will poison you. Bill resolved to try the Vaupés method. In the Putumayo Hotel there was no way to avoid the landlord’s seven daughters, who poked sticks into the mixture, breathing down Bill’s neck and giggling. The infusion was a light red color. He had blue flashes and a slight nausea but no hallucinations or vomiting. The effects were like marijuana.

  The next day they continued downriver to Puerto Espina, where the governor put them up, allowing them to sling their hammocks in an empty room on the top floor. There was supposed to be a Catalina flying boat service out of Puerto Espina, and Bill and Dr. Schultes were ready to return to Bogotá, but the agent had no radio, or any way of finding out when the next plane would arrive. Each day the river was getting higher and all the canoes in Puerto Espina were broken; desultory attempts to repair them could be heard all day as motors started up and failed.

  The Englishmen from the Cocoa Commission went up the San Miguel to collect specimens. Dr. Schultes continued downriver to Puerto Leguizamo hoping to catch a military plane. Bill decided to stay in Puerto Espina in the hope that the Catalina would arrive; if it didn’t he would go back with the Cocoa Commission. The Cocoa Commission returned and Bill joined their voyage downriver to Puerto Leguizamo, where the commandante put them up on a rusty gunboat anchored in the Putumayo River. Puerto Leguizamo was the inspiration for many of Burroughs’s descriptions of South American river towns: rusty abandoned machinery scattered here and there, unlighted streets deep in mud, the town’s five whores sitting out in front of blue-painted cantinas in the humid night beneath a naked electric bulb, waiting, the town’s young kids clustered around them, watching “with the immobile concentration of tom cats.”20

  After a week on the gunboat Bill was able to get a military plane to Villavicencio. Then he traveled to Bogotá by chauffeured car, provided by the U.S. Point Four scheme to assist underdeveloped countries; the driver rejected Bill’s advances. He arrived with a crate of yagé, but after the long journey it was no longer fresh. At the Botanical Institute Dr. Schultes helped Bill to extract the alkaloids in the lab, but it didn’t work, even though he followed the extraction directions carefully. Bill thought that some of the other ingredients usually added by the Indians might act as a catalyst to the drug. He only had fifty dollars to last two weeks because his monthly check had been stolen while he was away. To get drunk he stole pure alcohol from the university lab, went to a café, and poured it in a Pepsi-Cola. He moved into the cheapest possible flophouse accommodation. Burroughs was increasingly convinced by the Liberal cause, and even donated his gun—which he could have sold for $150—to a “pretty young Liberal.” He told Allen, “It is impossible to remain neutral, and I will help this boy no matter what. Always was a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face. Wouldn’t surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas.”21

  2. Into Peru

  His visa expired, so Burroughs had to leave Colombia. He flew to Quito and from there made his way south down the coast by sea. The ship broke its propeller at Las Playas, halfway down the coast between Manta and Guayaquil, and on April 29, Burroughs made one of his more celebrated landfalls, by riding ashore at Las Playas on a balsa raft accompanied by a beautiful boy.22 The Ecuadorian police arrested them as soon as they reached the beach, thinking they must be Peruvian spies or smuggling contraband, but only detained them for fifteen minutes. “I rode ashore on a balsa raft. Arrested on the beach suspect to have floated up from Peru on the Humboldt Current with a young boy and a tooth brush (I travel light, only the essentials) so we are hauled up before a dried up old fuck, the withered face of cancerous control. The kid with me don’t have paper one. The cops keep saying plaintively: ‘But don’t you have any papers at all?’ ”23

  Guayaquil, where he had stayed with Marker on his first South American trip, must have raised some memories. He was stuck there until May 4, when he flew to Lima. There was a letter waiting from Bernabé Jurado, informing him that Judge Eduardo Urzaíz Jiménez had found him guilty of homicide and sentenced him in absentia to two years in prison, less the thirteen days served, with no reparations to be paid. The sentence was suspended, but Burroughs doesn’t appear to have learned that until later; in the meantime he felt he was unable to visit Mexico. The formal sentence was not actually handed down until December 14, 1953, seven months later, by which time Burroughs was in New York.

  Lima was enough like Mexico City to make Bill feel homesick. Lima is famous for its flowers, and even roadworks were indicated by red carnations on a pole stuck in the road. A ceiling of cloud hung over the city, rarely breaking. He spent his first night in the Gran Hotel Bolívar before looking for cheap lodgings. He rented a little shop with a pull-down front shutter at 930 José Leal out near the public dump, in an area of empty lots and one- and two-story buildings. There was a long adobe wall where at all hours people were lined up shitting, vultures wheeling in the violet sky. Burroughs recalled
, “You walked out of there and there were vultures right on the sidewalk because there was the public dump and the vultures came there by the hundreds to eat fish-heads and stuff like that. And you’re walking down there and kick the vultures aside. They flap away. They’ll even snap their beaks at you. I’ve never seen a city with more vultures in it than Lima. They are all over the public buildings and Bolivar Square. And here’s a statue of Bolivar with vultures perched all over it.”24 The vultures were useful in a city with rudimentary sanitation; they ate all the garbage.

  In his little storefront apartment he could do anything he wanted. He wrote Allen, “Lima is the promised land for boys. I never saw anything like it since Vienna in ’36. […] in the bars around the Mercado Mayorista—Main Market—any boy is wise and available to the Yankee dollar. Last night I checked into a hotel with a beautiful Indian to the great amusement of the hotel clerk and his friends.”25 Making up for lost time, he told Allen that the older he got the less wisdom, maturity, and caution he had. He shadowboxed with a young boy in a louche Peruvian bistro—“Haven’t you any dignity at all? Obviously not”26—and made a pass at a thirteen-year-old Indian right in front of his family, dragging home two “ragged brats.” He told Allen, “All I remember is they were young. Woke up with the smell of youngsters on my hands and body.” The extreme poverty in Lima meant that sexual tourism was common, though it was not yet a fixture on the international pedophile route. Burroughs preferred to think it was cultural, describing Peruvian boys as “the least character armored people I have ever seen. They shit or piss anywhere they feel like it. They have no inhibitions in expressing affection. They climb all over each other and hold hands. If they do go to bed with another male, and they all will for money, they seem to enjoy it. Homosexuality is simply a human potential as is shown by almost unanimous incidents in prisons.”27 Lima and the Mercado Mayorista is used as a set for the “We are the language” section of Cities of the Red Night.28