by Barry Miles
Back in civilization Burroughs reveled in the good food of Lima’s Chinatown and drank so much that one morning he couldn’t get out of bed. He found an American doctor who said, “You’ve been drinking pisco.” Bill said, “Yes.” The doctor told him, “You have pisco neuritis. Another week and you’d have been in hospital for six months.” He shot Bill with huge doses of vitamin B. He told Bill, “These people can drink it but you can’t.” Pisco is a raw sugarcane distillate that drains the vitamins right out of the system. He suggested that Bill switch to rum or Chilean brandy instead, so he drank that or plain aguardiente. Still, Bill liked Lima and its people very much, telling Allen, “The Peruvians are charming. These people down here are so much nicer than Americans.”29 It was in Lima, while recovering from his neuritis, that Bill wrote the Roosevelt After Inauguration routine that came to him in a dream. He enclosed it in a letter to Allen Ginsberg on May 23, 1953. Burroughs left for the high jungle on June 6.
The six-week trip to Pucallpa in the high Andes took him first to Tingo María, where he spent a couple of days at the Hotel Touriste, a well-run mountain resort hotel. From there he took a fourteen-hour car ride, squeezed in the back with two sisters who sprawled all over him. The road from Tingo María to Pucallpa had only been built nine years before, and was continually being repaired by bulldozers, pushing aside rocks from frequent landslides. If the road was left for a month it became impassable. Bill journeyed through some of the highest towns in the world, cold windswept places in the Puna, high above the tree line, where the houses were made of sod with just a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, and everyone dressed in animal skins and goat hats and ate a diet of chickpeas and cavies—guinea pigs. Bill thought they were the most depressing places he had ever seen.
Pucallpa, however, was “the pleasantest end of the road town I have seen in S.A.” Situated on the banks of the Río Ucayali, a major tributary of the Amazon, Pucallpa was still a small river town with just a couple of hotels and a shopping street, but even the smallest drugstores had penicillin, codeine, and a range of antibiotics and antimalarial drugs. The big news was “the Russians were here.” In 1927, the Russians had shipped a ton of yagé back to Moscow, the origin of all the stories in the Cold War pulp magazines.
The hotel put Burroughs in touch with the local curandero. Bill visited his hut in the early evening, taking with him Nembutal and codeine. He was a young man and there were two women there and another man; unlike in Colombia, women were allowed to participate. They sat around for hours, slowly sipping the potion. “It was a nice relaxed occasion. I was there for hours, hours and hours. It was great. Then I came back to him several times and then he gave me some that he’d fixed up, in a bottle, to take whenever I wanted. And I took it in my hotel room a couple of times, its really great. Great experience.”30 He was given the yagé in a large cup, and he sipped it very carefully. “Everything is blue, it’s a blue drug and you only take it at night. It’s a night drug and everything is just beautiful, sort of Easter island masks or something. Blue, colors, cities, vistas, very beautiful.”31 Burroughs was very impressed and told Allen, “It is the most powerful drug I have ever experienced. That is it produces the most complete derangement of the senses. You see everything from a special hallucinated view point.”32 He enclosed some notes on the yagé state:
The room took on the aspect of a near Eastern whore house with blue walls and red tasselled lamps. I feel myself change into a Negress complete with all the female facilities. Convulsions of lust accompanied by physical impotence. Now I am a Negro man fucking a Negress. My legs take on a well rounded Polynesian substance. Everything stirs with a peculiar furtive writhing life like a Van Gogh painting. Complete bisexuality is attained. You are a man or woman alternately or at will. […] There is a definite sense of space time travel that seems to shake the room.33
He added that it had occurred to him that the preliminary sickness of yagé was the motion sickness of transport to the yagé state, and referred to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which speaks of the indescribable vertigo of space-time travel. He found that he quickly developed tolerance and could have easily handled the dose given to him by the first brujo in Colombia.
Unfortunately his last five days in Pucallpa were a nightmare because he wanted to leave but was trapped by torrential rain and impassable roads. Everyone in the hotel had frayed tempers. The biggest blight on the landscape were the Protestant fundamentalist Christian missionaries from the so-called Linguistic Institute, based at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Unlike the Catholic fathers, who lived high on the hog, and on all other local foodstuffs, the missionaries lived on Spam and canned pineapples as they were afraid of the local food. They had no medical knowledge and had no medicines with them to help the local people. Burroughs met them all over Peru. There are thirty-five Indian languages in Peru, and they were learning them all, not for scientific research to analyze and preserve their culture, but in order to translate the Bible into all those languages. In Pucallpa one missionary told Burroughs, “I’d like to see a law against yagé with teeth in it because it comes from the Devil.” He believed this literally. They had six Indians with them and they were slowly working their way through the Bible, word by word, doing a literal translation. Burroughs hated them. “They were all horrible people, horrible.”34
On the bus ride back to Tingo María in the back of a converted truck Bill got so drunk he had to be helped to bed by the assistant truck driver. There was a two-day delay in Huànuco that he hated, “sad little parks with statues of generals and cupids, and Indians lolling about with a special South American abandon, chewing coca.”35 Bill tried it a couple of times, but coca leaves are only one percent cocaine and the absorption is so slow that there is little systemic reaction; all it did was freeze up his mouth.
The yagé experience freed Burroughs from the stasis of the previous year and introduced imagery that was to occur in all of his subsequent books. He had set out to change his life and had done so. “Yes Yagé is the final kick and you are not the same after you have taken it.”36
Yage is space time travel. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian and new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized, passes through your body. You make migrations, incredible journeys through jungles and deserts and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of your cock and vast Crustaceans hatch inside you and grow and break the shell of your body), across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City, Near Eastern, Mongol, South Pacific, South American where all Human Potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.37
Chapter Twenty-One
What the American male really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper and he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he’s drunk.
—W. H. AUDEN1
1. Reunion in New York
Burroughs flew to Panama, where he was reconciled with Garver—“After all, it was just a junky spat you know”2—then spent several weeks in Mexico City, looking for Marker. He had sent him ten letters but received no reply. Apparently Marker had left Mexico City by car for Guatemala, working as a guide to a major and his wife very shortly after Burroughs himself had left. Burroughs felt the pain ease a little. Then an acquaintance said he had seen Marker in the street about a month before. “A wave of misery and pain hit me like a main line shot, settling in the lungs and around the heart. Then I knew I was hung up on M just the same as ever.”3 He searched for Angelo and wrote in his journal, “Can visualize Angelo sharp and clear as overdue pusher. His eye brows. His smile. The way he would stop when he saw me with both hands in his pocket his green sweater. His young male gentleness. […] He was the best boy I ever had, and I didn’t know it. I used to give him $20. Now I would give him $100. I want to help him. No one else had the same young mal
e gentleness like an affectionate animal. Almost saintly in his freedom from viciousness, hostility, conflict.”4 But Bill had changed; he used to love Mexico, now he hated it. “It’s like I came back to Mexico City after being away 5 years instead of 5 months. Everybody. Gone.”5 But Mexico City hadn’t changed that much; people were always moving around when he lived there. It was Burroughs who had changed. He continued his journey.
In August he stopped briefly in Palm Beach to see his parents and young Billy. Although the purpose of publishing Junkie under a pseudonym was to prevent his parents from seeing it, he could not help but mention that he had published a book. He told them it was written under a pseudonym but said that he didn’t think they would be interested in reading it. While in Florida he located Marker, who had returned to his hometown of Jacksonville, where he had bought a house and divided it into apartments for sale. Bill still found him attractive but now knew he had to move on and control his feelings.
Allen Ginsberg was living at apartment 16, 206 East 7th Street, a tenement building built in 1900 in the Lower East Side between Avenues B and C. He was working as a copyboy at the New York World-Telegram earning forty-five dollars a week writing up share prices. He had previously shared a flat with Dusty Moreland in one of his rare heterosexual relationships, and she had moved with him to his new apartment. Allen wanted her to get a job and contribute to the costs, but this led to a tempestuous breakup and she walked out leaving all her clothes and furniture behind. When Burroughs arrived in town in late August, her place had been taken, in part, by the young poet Gregory Corso, who was prepared to trade the occasional blow job from Allen for somewhere to sleep. Gregory had not been very responsive to Ginsberg’s advances and Allen had complained to Burroughs, who wrote to him from Lima saying, “Get rough with your little beast of a poet. They’re all alike, ingrates every one of them ingrates.”6 Now, with Burroughs sitting across the room giving him bloodcurdling looks as he slowly and methodically used his machete to shave the bark from the two suitcases’ worth of yagé vines he had brought back from Lima, Gregory found it prudent to seek accommodation elsewhere.
Bill and Allen had not seen each other for six years, the time Allen and Neal Cassady had visited Bill briefly in East Texas, but they had been in continuous correspondence and had worked closely on the editing and publication of Junkie with Ace Books. They were delighted to see each other. Ginsberg told Neal Cassady, “He is really exciting to talk to, more so for me than ever. His new loquaciousness is something I never had the advantage of. I’m older now and the emotional relationship and conflict of will and mutual digging are very intense, continuous, exhausting and fertile. He creates small usable literary symbolic psychic fantasies daily. One of the deepest people I ever saw. He is staying with me. I come home from work at 4:45 and we talk until one AM or later. I hardly get enuf sleep, cant think about work seriously, am all hung up in great psychic marriage with him for the month—amazing also his outwardness and confidence, he is very personal now, and gives the impression of suffering terribly and continuously. I am persuading him to write a really great sincere novel. He is going to Tangiers. […] The new impression of Bill that I get is that he is very great, greater than I ever realized, before even.”7
By the end of the forties, the bar scene had moved from the Minetta Tavern and Burroughs’s usual haunts to the San Remo Café at 189 Bleecker Street at MacDougal. The San Remo attracted the young, hip crowd who were more into experimenting with drugs than the straighter crowd that was just beginning to popularize the White Horse Tavern over on Hudson. According to Michael Harrington, “The Remo was a sort of Village United Nations. It was straight and gay; black, white, and interracial; socialist, communist, Trotskyist, liberal, and apolitical; literary, religious, pot smoking, pill popping, and even occasionally transvestite.”8 It was a classic old-time New York bar with a stamped-tin ceiling, black-and-white tile floors, a brass rail at the foot of the bar, booths, and salads for a dollar with all the bread and butter you could eat. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and their crowd hung out there, but the cool crowd rather disapproved of Kerouac because, according to Burroughs, “he was too frantic.” There were many comparisons made between the San Remo and the Café de Flore or La Coupole in Paris, and the analogy held: Village nightlife after the war took inspiration from the Left Bank, the liveliest quartier in Paris after the Liberation—the home of les caves existentialistes, as Boris Vian called them.9 The Village promised the same combination of alcohol, sex, jazz, open marriages, and highbrow conversation. John Cage, Miles Davis, Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz, James Agee, William Steig, Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, and the editors of Partisan Review, whose office was on Astor Place, were all regulars at the San Remo. The only crowd not well represented there was the painters, who preferred the Cedar Street Tavern.
Burroughs dropped right into Ginsberg’s social scene. During his four months in New York he consolidated his friendship with Allen, got to know Gregory Corso, and met Alan Ansen, who was to become one of his lifelong friends. When Burroughs arrived in New York Ansen was one of the first people Allen told him about. Burroughs wanted to meet him and so Ginsberg dialed Ansen’s number and put Bill on the line. “Come on in, man,” Bill said. “Take a cab. We’ll pay at this end.” Ansen thought that was a delightful gesture. Ginsberg first met Ansen at one of Bill Cannastra’s notoriously wild parties. At one of them, Ansen gave Cannastra’s dog, a boxer, a blow job. The other guests responded with ennui. “Oh, that again!” It took a lot to astonish the guests at Cannastra’s parties. Ansen also met Lucien Carr at Cannastra’s, so he was closely involved with the Beat Generation at an early date. Ginsberg was interested in Ansen because he was W. H. Auden’s secretary. Ansen’s father was a jeweler and had left him a trust fund income of six hundred dollars a month, a lot of money in those days. Burroughs described him. “He is a very strange, very brilliant person. He was very Jewish-looking with a big nose, typically Semitic features, fat, and a semi-spastic, he didn’t have any strength in his arms. I remember in Venice he couldn’t pull himself up into a boat from the water. He would get in a panic.” Ansen was a San Remo regular and several times invited Bill and Allen, and sometimes a crowd of people, out to his house in Woodmere, Long Island. Ansen introduced Burroughs to the work of Jean Genet. In 1948, Bernard Frechtman, an American living in Paris, had translated Our Lady of the Flowers into English for a limited edition of five hundred copies illustrated by Jean Cocteau. When Frechtman began living with Annette Michelson, a friend of Ansen’s, she gave him a copy and Ansen lent it to Burroughs. Burroughs was astonished and came to regard Genet as one of the two twentieth-century writers whose work would stand the test of time (the other was Samuel Beckett).10
Kerouac was also around, living with his mother out in Richmond Hill, New York, but frequently coming into the city to see Allen and Bill. Ginsberg had recently bought a Kodak Retina camera, and many of his most famous early photographs date from this period: Burroughs on the roof of 206 East 7th; Burroughs lecturing a puzzled-looking Kerouac or engaging him in a mock fight; and the portrait of Burroughs behind a row of books, taken from the fire escape outside the window that was used on the front flap of the first edition of The Naked Lunch. Burroughs was thirty-nine, still young. There is a picture of him standing outside the San Remo with Alan Ansen, both smoking, Burroughs immaculately dressed in a double-breasted, off-white suit with wide lapels and shoulder pads, dark shirt and light tie, with his dark hair greased back, looking a bit like an Italian film director.
Bill had originally intended to spend a month in New York, before moving on to Rome or Tangier, but he found the company so congenial, and was getting such a lot of writing done, that four months passed. He and Allen typed up his long letters to Allen from Peru and Ecuador and rearranged them to make a continuous narrative, taking parts of one letter and adding it to another. The dates in the book are not necessarily the date the letter was written. These became an
epistolary novel then called Yage, filled with his ruminations on the effects of the drug and its significance, as well as hilarious descriptions of his trials and tribulations in search of it. They also retyped Queer, adding in new material. Clean manuscript copies were then typed by Allen’s friend Alene Lee, who later featured as Mardou Fox in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, a novel based upon his short affair with her.
Burroughs’s life from 1944 until 1953, with the obvious omission of his marriage to Joan, was now written. “Everything happened as it is […] they are as autobiographical as I could make them from memory, Junkie, Queer, and The Yage Letters […] those are all just precisely as it happened.”11 The Yage Letters was the most accurate, because it was based on contemporary documents. He was pleased to have it all on paper, but still did not see himself as a writer, and could not conceive of the two final books ever being published. Yage was later modified to incorporate letters from Allen Ginsberg, who also visited Pucallpa and experienced yagé. It was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as The Yage Letters in 1963. Queer was not published until 1985.
Allen’s tenement window looked out over fire escapes and backyards with laundry lines strung from building to building, level upon level of metal stairs and wires all connected. Burroughs saw a woman reach out over the fire escape and start pulling in the laundry and conceived the futuristic city of Interzone, with its levels connected by a web of catwalks, boardwalks, and fire escapes, a great labyrinth of alleyways and passages, squares and tunnels, like a medina; a city so old that it had collapsed on itself and been rebuilt one building upon another, layer upon layer. As he described the idea to Ginsberg he gave the city a vibrating soundless hum, like insect wings and larval entities waiting to be born. The imagery of The Naked Lunch was being developed, in this case drawing heavily upon Arthur Rimbaud’s visions of cities in Illuminations, always one of Bill’s favorite books. Both Burroughs and Ginsberg later agreed that the “Interzone Meet Café” was the seed of The Naked Lunch.12
