Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Allen’s role as the receiver of the long, intimate letters from Central and Latin America, and now as his confidant, collaborator, and editor in New York, had quickly led to an affair. Allen had been a teenager when they both shared the apartment in New York with Joan and had regarded Burroughs as his mentor, if not his guru. He was only nineteen when Burroughs left New York. As the result of their conversations his respect for Bill had grown and he was prepared to do anything he wanted. “I thought he was my teacher, so I’d do what I could to amuse him. In bed, Bill is like an English governess, whinnying and giggling, almost hysteric. […] He liked to come while being screwed,” Ginsberg said. “Burroughs fell in love with me and we slept together and I saw a soft center where he felt isolated, alone in the world and he needed […] a feeling of affection, and since I did love him and did have that respect and affection, he responded. I kinda felt privileged.”13

  Ginsberg’s affection released a huge reservoir of pent-up feelings in Burroughs, to Allen’s great alarm and consternation. He said, “Bill became more and more demanding that there be some kind of mental schlupp. It had gone beyond the point of being humorous and playful. It seemed that Bill was demanding it for real. Bill wanted a relationship where there were no holds barred; to achieve an ultimate telepathic union of souls.”14 Ginsberg explained, “Schlupp for him was originally a very tender emotional direction, a desire to merge with a lover, and as such, pretty vulnerable, tenderhearted and open on Burroughs’ part.”15

  Burroughs’s concept of schlupping—the complete merging of soul mates into one entity—came from his close, and imaginative, reading of Wilhelm Reich, who saw that the point of the orgasm was to fuse the two orgone fields of the sex partners into one “orgonome”—to use Reich’s term—in an explosive, rejuvenating recharge of natural universal energy. Reich explained, “The sexual embrace, if abstracted and reduced to its basic form, represents superimposition and the bio-energetic fusion of two orgonotic systems. Superimposition follows orgonotic penetration. The pre-orgastic bodily movements and in particular the orgastic convulsions represent extreme attempts of the free orgone of both organisms to fuse with one another, to reach into one another.”16 It was not a question of one partner dominating the other; there was no invasion, no usurping the masculine status of the other person. The intention was schlupp, the complete fusion with the other person, “to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.”17 Burroughs didn’t want to become the other person, he wanted to fuse with the other person, the two of them making one. This is a common theme in Burroughs, particularly in the later writing where Mayan priests conduct various rituals to join two bodies. Of course complete schlupp was impossible, but a temporary flash of it was very desirable and partial occupation perhaps possible by cultural means. The flash of orgasm was when Bill was outside time and space. The orgasm flash where two orgone fields fuse into one is accomplished with no top and bottom, no domination or effeminacy, and Burroughs had always stressed that he saw his sex role as normal and male. “Like all normal citizens, I ejaculate when screwed without helping hand, produce a good crop of jissom, spurt it up to my chin and beyond. I have observed that small hard cocks come quicker slicker and spurtier.”18 This rather aggressive stridency suggests that Bill was not at all sure that “all normal citizens” did in fact come that way. There was also the matter of his small cock. “My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia.”19 Ginsberg thought that Bill’s small penis accounted for his obsession with guns,20 a subject that many academics have mulled over.

  Years later, Ginsberg revealed all the intimate details of Burroughs’s sex life in an interview in Gay Sunshine,21 saying, “His particular sexual thing is being screwed, because Burroughs can come when he is screwed; he is one of the few men that can.” Then, realizing that Bill might be embarrassed by it, he wrote to tell him what he’d done. Bill replied, “Yes I saw the interview in Gay Sunshine. No, I was not at all upset by the reference to my love life. I cannot understand why you think it at all remarkable to come when fucked. Lots of people do I find. Also people come from being beaten, kissed, etc. It’s all electric brain stimulation. As you may know you can now make someone come by pressing a button.”22

  Just as he had with Marker, Bill kept making up weird routines about the idea of parasitic symbiosis, like Bradley the Buyer in The Naked Lunch, who schlupps up the District Supervisor in some unspeakable manner. Bill was hoping to please and attract Allen with these routines, and in normal circumstances Allen would have found them highly amusing, but this was sending chills down his spine. Ginsberg said, “Burroughs will gross out in all sorts of situations that other people would think would be untouchable to begin with. He not only touches them, but he grosses out on them and turns them into comedy so that what is created is that attitude of everything is permitted, or at least as much is permitted in writing as is permitted by the mind in private.”23 Bill’s routines were turning Allen off. Ginsberg’s own sexual preference was for younger, straight young men who were “making an exception” for him; Bill was twelve years older and gay. It was Allen who was making the exception because of his love and respect for Bill. When Bill began talking seriously of taking Allen with him to Tangier, Allen blurted out, “But I don’t want your ugly old cock.” Bill froze.

  Ginsberg later said, “It wounded him terribly because it was like complete physical rejection in a way I didn’t mean. Like a heart blow that severed the trust, because I’d freaked out for that moment and regretted it ever since.”24 Bill began to actively plan his move to Europe. He told Alan Ansen that he wanted to move to Tangier or Rome and steep himself in vice. Ansen, who was gay and about to move to Rome, liked the sound of this and decided Bill would be a good traveling companion. In the end they traveled separately and agreed to meet in Rome.

  Relations with Kerouac, though amicable, were no longer as close as they once were. Allen had asked him for a blurb and for a quote to be used in a New York Times literary column to help publicize Junkie but Kerouac, despite living off Burroughs in Mexico, refused to help his friend, telling Ginsberg, “I do not want my name used in conjunction with habit forming drugs while a pseudonym conceals the real name of the author thus protecting him from prosecution but not myself. […] Especially I do not want to be misquoted as saying that ‘I dig the pseudonymous William Lee as one of the key figures of the Beat Generation.’ My remarks on the subject of either pseudonymous author or the generation are at your disposal through the proper channels, from my pen and through my agent.”25

  Burroughs’s relationship with Kerouac had always contained an element of suspicion and hostility, probably from as far back as his warning to Kerouac of becoming tied to his adored mother’s apron strings. Burroughs said, “It would be typical of him to use a name for me in a book that I didn’t like. He called me Old Bull Lee in On the Road. It was a peculiarity of Kerouac’s, this undercover, covert hostility that he had. I don’t think he thought of it as being hostile but it certainly was. […] Kerouac always liked to do things to annoy me. So someone who hated what I had written, he would be sure to bring that person around. He brought around some jerk who said that the prose in Junkie stinks. He did that quite deliberately. More so, this jerk was known for his violence, his physical attacks on people. […] I was just leaving for Europe the next day, going to Tangier. He did it a number of times, people who didn’t like my work, or didn’t like me, or were insulting and insufferable.”26

  Burroughs left for Rome on TS Nea Hellas on December 1, 1953. As usual, he found fault in the service. “In all my experience as a traveller I have never encountered such food and service and accommodations. Long greasy hairs in the scrambled eggs, no hot water, dirty state rooms, unwashed dishes. This is the crummiest line in the industry.”27 He was getting himself into shape, ready for Europe: “As for Rome. In all my experience as a traveller I never see a more miserable place.”28r />
  Ginsberg was left to close down the apartment. He intended to move to California, taking a scenic route through southern Mexico to visit the Mayan ruins at Chiapas. He sold the furniture, stored his books with his father, leaving the apartment empty except for the huge orgone accumulator that Bill had built in the bedroom, taking up much of the floor space. An unpublished Ginsberg poem despairs over it:

  And the great blue pool of bedspread running from my torso down the bed.

  And the inaudible stupid snout of the unbelievable homemade orgone accumulator sticking over the foot of the bed.

  Empty valises over the door on shelves—but not to be used.

  2. When in Rome

  It was winter and it was cold when Burroughs arrived in Rome on December 12, 1953, and he did not like it at all. He was unable to find a Roman equivalent of the San Remo and he was not permitted to have visitors in his hotel room. He told Allen, “A Roman ‘bar’ is a hole in the wall soda-and-ice-cream joint, no toilet and no place to sit down, with the door propped open or missing altogether where you can gulp a drink with a cold, blue hand.”29 He huddled in his room in his overcoat, reading The Invisible Man. Alan Ansen finally arrived, which cheered Bill up a little. Burroughs had not bothered to see any of the Roman sights, but Ansen managed to drag him out, telling Allen, “The fountains are wonderful (even old Cactus Boy melted at the sight of Trevi).”30 Burroughs was not convinced and booked passage to Tangier. Alan went on to Venice, where he lived for a number of years, making frequent trips to Tangier to visit Bill. Burroughs was about to make a fresh start in a country where he knew no one.

  BOOK FOUR

  The Classic Stations of the Earth

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

  —CARSON MCCULLERS1

  1. Bill and the Boys

  Tangier was very important. It was here that Burroughs really became a writer. Most of The Naked Lunch and Interzone was written here; the “Talking Asshole” routine, Dr. Benway, Marv and Clem, A.J. were all developed here. It was where Bill achieved happiness for the first time since the killing of Joan, but it was also where he was to endure his worst ever phase of drug addiction.

  From Rome Bill had gone to Naples, then taken a boat to Algeciras from Sicily on January 4, 1954, docking en route at Syracuse, Malta, and Barcelona. It was a ten-day voyage, tourist class, and Bill had to share a cabin with four other people. It was awful. From Algeciras he took the ferry across the strait to Tangier. From the sea, Tangier looked like a collection of whitewashed blocks, like a box of sugar cubes scattered over a series of low hills; an animated Cézanne. At the port, he was met by the usual squabbling mob of “guides,” who soon directed him to a hotel. The population at that time was more or less segregated: the Moors, Tanjawis, in the Medina, and the Europeans, Tangerinos, living in the New Town, where the Moroccans rarely went. Bill opted for the Medina.

  Tangier then was unique in the world: an international zone in a French colony, run collectively by eight nations and with local representation. It challenged the very notion of the nation-state; it also challenged the financial certainties that most countries, including the United States, operated under. In Tangier there was freedom from taxes, freedom to exchange the world’s currencies, there were no customs duties on goods in transit, and anyone could trade in gold or start a company and trade in secret. No visa was needed to enter and you could stay as long as you liked.

  The International Zone was run by the Big Four Committee of French, British, Italian, and Spanish ministers. The committee had the final say on all issues, though the Zone was nominally controlled by the administrator, a puppet governor. By law he had to be Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, or Swedish, and held office for two years on a rotating basis. Each nation had its own judge: two French, two Spanish, one each from Belgium, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Morocco, and the United States. They were responsible for the administration of the law regarding disputes between foreigners and Moroccans, and foreigners with each other. The Americans, who were not part of the committee, had a unique system in which they alone tried and judged their own people (meaning that a Moroccan was bound to lose in a dispute with an American). As capital of the International Zone, Tangier had fifty-two banks, and the boulevard Pasteur was lined with the booths of money-changers.

  Tangier had a population of 180,000, of which 100,000 were Moors. The city was surrounded by bidonvilles, shakily constructed from sheets of cardboard and petrol cans, with old rags to caulk the ramshackle walls. There was no drainage, water, heating, or light, and little protection from the incessant rains of winter or the icy nights. There was no income tax and therefore no money for social services. Fewer than one in ten children attended primary school. A laborer’s wage was capped at thirty pesetas a day, leaving no possibility for advancement. At the time of writing this book, more than 60 percent of the population is still illiterate.

  Americans of Bill’s generation arrived in Tangier with a preconceived notion of Morocco, based in part upon popular fiction and Hollywood films: Robert Hichens’s Garden of Allah (1904), set in Algeria, and the classic 1936 version starring Marlene Dietrich; P. C. Wren’s French Foreign Legion adventure Beau Geste, filmed in 1926 with Ronald Colman and William Powell, and again in 1939 with Gary Cooper and Ray Milland; Edith Hull’s The Sheik (1919), which launched Rudolph Valentino’s career when filmed by Paramount in 1921; and many others, including Michael Curtiz’s film Casablanca (1942); Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much starring Peter Lorre (1934, remade by Hitchcock in 1956 with James Stewart and Doris Day); and a torrent of popular novels such as Edith Hull’s Sons of the Sheik (1925) and The Captive of the Sahara (1931).

  Bill headed for the Socco Chico to look for boys. His hotel would not permit visitors to his room and there were no cheap hotels for the purpose; as soon as the proprietors saw what the deal was, they upped their prices, and the boys didn’t like hanging around in public. Burroughs told Ginsberg, “Ali is getting worried about his standing in the shoe-shine set. […] He thumps his little scrawny chest and says ‘I am a man.’ Oh God! Such shit I could hear in Clayton, Mo.” He was unable to score for opium, and the marijuana he bought was rough and burned his throat. He told Allen, “I like Tanger less all the time.”2 (Burroughs always used the official French spelling: Tanger.)

  He didn’t know anyone at all. He had gone to Tangier, attracted by reading Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down and The Sheltering Sky, but Bowles was away and Burroughs was unable to find the supposed writers’ colony. His immediate reaction was to blame Bowles: “What’s all this old Moslem culture shit? One thing I have learned. I know what Arabs do all day and all night. They sit around smoking cut weed and playing some silly card game. And don’t ever fall for this inscrutable oriental shit like Bowles puts down (that shameless faker). They are just a gabby, gossipy simple-minded, lazy crew of citizens.”3

  Within a few days he met a Spanish boy who rented him a room in a small house in the cerrado de Medellin, a dead-end passage among the narrow alleyways and workshops of the medieval walled city. He lived there for about a month while he took his bearings. A week after arriving he attended an art opening of paintings by Brion Gysin at the Hotel Rembrandt on boulevard Pasteur but couldn’t connect with him. Burroughs: “He didn’t exactly snub me but he made it quite clear that he didn’t want anything to do with me. He later said it was because he was into Arabs and I was into Spanish, and that was a bad mix.”4 Bill had both Spanish and Moroccan boyfriends but after so much time in Mexico found it easier to speak Spanish than French, the colonial language of Mo
rocco, and was more at home with Spanish culture.

  By now Burroughs had found the right bars—Dean’s and the Parade—but had not yet adopted his chameleon role and adjusted to fit in. “The most loathsome types produced by the land of the free are represented in the American Colony of Tanger. There are like 2 American bars. No 1 I hit dead cold sober at 1 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Horrible vista of loud-mouthed, red-faced drunks, falling off bar stools, puking in corners, a Céline nightmare. Bar No 2 is stocked with the dreariest breed of piss elegant, cagy queens. […] Nowadays I spend my time smoking weed with shoeshine boys in Arab cafés. Their manners are better and their conversation quite as interesting.”5

  However, things quickly improved: “I have a room in the best district for 50 cents a day,”6 a meal in the Medina was twenty cents, boys cost a dollar or less. Bill always protected himself with Aureomycin pro(phylactic), an antibiotic cream, which was expensive at three dollars “for adequate pro coverage fore and aft.” The room was in Anthony “Tony Dutch” Reithorst’s male brothel at 1 calle de los Arcos, now renamed rue Khayattine. It was on the corner with the rue des Chrétiens, now the rue des Almohades. Calle de los Arcos was a narrow alleyway beginning in an archway in the Socco Chico, then running behind the Café Central. Tony ran a string of Spanish boys but could get you anything you wanted. He was pale and portly, with a cherubic face, dressed neatly in a suit and tie, and was often seen sitting outside cafés in the Medina or walking his two poodles. He was sometimes accompanied by a beautiful woman, a friend of his who provided young women for other women. Tony rented two of his small colorless rooms to guests, lived in a third, and used the backroom kitchen-restaurant as the waiting room for the assignations he set up for English, American, and German tourists. There he offered lunch to all the madams from the Black Cat and the legal whorehouses. There was little that went on in the Tangier sex business that Tony didn’t know about or have a hand in, and it didn’t do to cross him. He had a heavy Dutch accent and spoke of the Arabs as the “Arabics.” Burroughs remembered Tony once told him a story that ended, “And in this house there was living also one dirty whore and she sleep with my poy. But the police come and take her to the prison and that’s what she get to sleep with my poy.”7 A month after he arrived Bill was able to report to Allen Ginsberg that he had been to bed with three Arabs since he arrived but was unable to tell them apart. In fact he wondered if it might have been the same boy. “Next time I’ll notch one of his ears.”8 By April 22 he was already with Kiki, a Spanish boy who was to feature in his dreams for the rest of his life.