Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Typically, we are never told Kiki’s surname; he is just a boy. His father had been killed in Spain by the Fascists in the Civil War, and the persecution continued in Morocco: the Spanish occupied Tangier in World War II and shot all the Republican supporters they could find. Burroughs, normally the most apolitical of men, was always clear in his condemnation of Franco: “And America supports that lousy bastard who is no better than Hitler!”9 If his father had died then, Kiki must have been fifteen to eighteen years of age when he met Burroughs.

  One of the first people Burroughs met in Tangier was David Woolman, who lived in the room next to his at Tony Dutch’s brothel. He was an adopted boy from a well-off family in Indiana who had been an air force captain during the Korean War. He was tall, slim, muscular, with fair hair and a high-pitched, whiny voice, described by Alan Ansen as “very outer-directed, also liked small boys.” He appears in The Naked Lunch as Marv. He was effeminate and superficial, or at least pretended to be. He wrote two columns for the Casablanca-based weekly Moroccan Courier: “Socco Chico” about Tangier, and “Chips Off the Old Rock” about Gibraltar, and, as Barnaby Bliss, contributed a weekly gossip column, “The Spirit of St. Louis,” to the Tangier Gazette. He was to write the standard history of the Rif Wars, Rebels in the Rif: Abd el Krim and the Rif Rebellion.10 Bill found him fun to be with. To fill his columns Woolman was always out on the town, and Bill often accompanied him. Restaurants always gave them a 10 percent discount in the hope that Dave would mention them. Bill enjoyed Woolman’s company, but was always disturbed by his preference for very young boys. Bill told Allen, “No lower age limit on boys. An American I know keeps a 13 year old kid. ‘If they can walk I don’t want them.’ ”11

  Bill and Dave paid sixty cents to watch two Arab boys screw each other. The boys protested, saying, “Molo,” it’s bad, it’s bad to do this, then they began giggling. David said, “Sí, molo schmolo, todos molos,” all bad.12 Bill reported the incident at length to Allen Ginsberg: “We demanded semen too, no half-assed screwing. So I asked Marv: ‘Do you think they will do it?’ and he says: ‘I think so. They are hungry.’ They did it. Made me feel sorta like a dirty old man.”13 Bill used his report almost verbatim in the “Black Meat” section of The Naked Lunch.14 “We took the two boys back to Dave’s room and told them what we wanted. After some coy giggling they agreed, and took off their ragged clothes. Both of them had slender, beautiful boy bodies. Dave was M.C. he pointed to Boy 2 and said: ‘All right, you screw him first’ pointing to Boy 1. Boy 1 lay down on his stomach on the bed. Boy 2 rubbed spit on his prick and began screwing him. Dave said: ‘Leche we want leche.’ Leche means milk, Spanish for jissum—the boy contracted convulsively and his breath whistled through his teeth. He lay still for a moment on top of the other boy then shoved himself off with both hands. He showed us the jissum on his prick and asked for a towel. Dave threw him one and he carefully wiped his prick. Then he lay down on his stomach and Boy 1 took over. He was more passionate. He got mad because Boy 2 kept his ass contracted and pounded on his buttocks with his fist. Finally he got it in and began screwing violently. Boy 2 groaned in protest. Boy 1 came almost immediately, his buttocks quivering in spasms. He sighed then rolled free… I see both boys every day. They will do it anytime for forty cents, which is standard price.”15

  Bill described this in full to Ginsberg partly because he knew it would excite him, and partly because he knew Allen would have serious reservations because of the boys’ poverty. Bill used this in The Naked Lunch to purposely annoy his readers, a Swiftian gesture to reveal their prurience and to undermine their middle-class values. It was an illustration of the well-known Thomas Macaulay adage: “The Puritan hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” This is true of most of the erotic scenes in The Naked Lunch, which are based on the idea that sex is usually some kind of exploitation—the hanging scenes are both a critique of pornographic movies and the racist policies then pertaining in the southern states. Alan Ansen felt that Burroughs was a very moral writer and that the most important quality in his writing was in fact tenderness. “It is a great key to what makes his work so wonderful. It’s what I call the melody as opposed to the fugato. That enormous compassion is very very basic.”16

  2. Bar la Mar Chica

  After less than two months in Tangier, Bill was able to write to Allen, “Tanger is looking up. Meeting the local expatriates. Junkies, queers, drunks.”17 Bill’s kind of people. His social life now centered around the Parade, the Café Central, which was just around the corner from his room, and the Bar la Mar Chica, at 19 calle Bordj, a dim dockside Andalusian bar open twenty-four hours a day. At one end was a small rickety stage with a badly painted backdrop of a Spanish patio with an open window in the center and a window box filled with half-dead geraniums. There were two more or less permanent performers. One was Malaguena, a dumpy middle-aged flamenco singer who had often drunk so much brandy that she was unable to climb onstage and resorted instead to begging for money from the audience. She was nicknamed “Miss Pits” because she smelled so bad. The other was Louis, a slim, elegant gypsy dancer who performed to the clicking of castanets, a violin, and Spanish guitar. The proprietor was, according to Burroughs, “a man of great strength and exceedingly evil disposition. Beautiful Arab boy behind the bar. Languid animal grace, a bit sulky, charming smile. Every queer in Tanger has propositioned him, but he won’t play.” The bar was filled with young Spaniards and the occasional Arab dockworker. The American bullfighter known as El Rubio de Boston was a regular; though scarred by the horns of the bulls, he was admired for his courage reentering the ring. The British writer Rupert Croft-Cooke was there most nights, and the Honourable David Herbert took his guests there as an example of “local color.” Though he disapproved of Herbert’s slumming, Croft-Cooke reported one bon mot from Herbert:

  “Tell me,” said a young woman who was just learning about the sexual complications of Tangier. “Which is the one who has just come in? Jack or Jill?”

  “That? Oh that’s just the pail of water,” said David.18

  The Parade Bar, a single-story building on the rue de Fez, just off the boulevard, had a garden, offering a respite from the constant attention of passing beggars found in street cafés. This quiet courtyard was filled with shade trees, a large palm, and eight wobbly iron tables. There was a bitter orange tree from which Rupert Croft-Cooke made marmalade each year. The trio of owners were Jay Haselwood, from Kentucky, tall, handsome, and mustachioed; Bill Chase, a suave New Yorker who managed the kitchen, producing some of the best cuisine in Tangier; and Ira Belline, an older woman, a White Russian, unsmiling and wearing a turban, who was supposed to have been Stravinsky’s favorite niece and a designer for the Ballet Russe. All three had worked for the Red Cross in France during the Second World War. Their financial backer was Phyllis de la Faille. The bar was lit by gold reflecting balls, like old-fashioned gas lamps, and there were always fresh flowers. Later, in the sixties, the décor included three highly varnished oil paintings by Stuart Church of half-naked Nubian adolescents wearing feathers and rowing Venetian gondolas (“fruity gondolier murals,” as Burroughs put it).

  Among the regulars was Leslie Eggleston, from Philadelphia, who often appeared arm in arm with alcoholic women whom no one else could stand, glad to squire them for drinks and food. Bill would sometimes buy him drinks—“he was very very amusing, in a very strange horrible way. Not self-deprecation, no, just shameless mooching.”19 Sometimes Haselwood would order, “That one has been scrounging all evening, don’t buy him a drink!” Another regular was Bill Findlay, also from Philadelphia, who together with Eggleston moved in on the mother of Brian Power, another Parade regular, in Málaga, claiming to be Power’s friend. Findlay and Eggleston made indecent proposals to her servants, drank all the wine, brought back sailors, and refused to leave. Eventually a retired colonel of her acquaintance arrived and bodily threw them out. Bill loved these kinds of storie
s.

  All these people were observed by Burroughs and added to his cast of characters. One old reprobate was Gerald Hamilton, the original Mr. Norris from Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains. It was not until The Place of Dead Roads that he made an appearance, but then it was deadly: “An old-queen voice, querulous, petulant, cowardly, the evil old voice of Gerald Hamilton.”20

  The view from Tangier across the strait was sometimes so clear you could see the mountains of Spain and even the village houses. Sometimes it was lost in white glare. The levante, the ech cherqi, could blow for days, making the beautiful wide beach impossible to visit. Still, the summer lasted until November and it was rarely unbearably hot. The air had a particular luminosity that had delighted painters such as Matisse. In spring the breeze sang in the palm trees of the Villa de France. Tangier before independence was a smaller, quieter city. You could sit in the terrace of the Café de Paris and listen to the sounds of the cicadas in the eucalyptus trees before they were drowned out by the noise of traffic. The atmosphere had a particular smell, a mixture of burning charcoal, excrement, sweat, kif, and other fugitive elements that was unmistakably Oriental. Bill began to like the city.

  He lived just around the corner from the Socco Chico, which was then lined on both sides with cafés: the Café Fuentes, the Tingis, the España, Pilo’s, and the Café Central. Bill became an afternoon regular at the Café Central, which served beer and wine, as well as coffee and the ubiquitous glasses of sweet mint tea. It was open twenty-four hours. The stagelike architectural features of the nineteenth-century façades were perfect for the ongoing show, which was like a Brueghel come to life. Elderly Moors in white djellabahs and white beards, Jews in skull caps, peanut-sellers, bootblacks, money-changers, and beggars crowded the street. Young boys, eyes eaten by trachoma, were led by the hand by the eldest among them who tapped the way along the cluttered alleys with a long stick. Evidence of tuberculosis and syphilis was everywhere. Berber women carried enormous loads of charcoal on their backs, their noses frequently eaten away by disease possibly associated with their trade, followed by their menfolk riding donkeys. Trains of mules, laden with building materials or charcoal, pushed through the crowds. Bill’s new friend Brian Howard described Bill at the center of it all in a letter:

  Everyone within sight, from the tiny children to the elderly, fat waiters in tarbooshes, is for sale. And the hubbub is appalling. The lights are just coming on in Mangharan’s Celebrated Shirts opposite me and the smell of Kief cigarettes is asphyxiating. […] The other person at the table is a nice, if slightly long-winded, ex-Harvard creature of forty who is endeavouring to cure himself of morphinomania by taking this new medicine which the Germans invented during the war. There are several trade names for it. He uses two. Eukodol and Heptanal. Unfortunately the effects are so much stronger, and much more delicious than morphine itself that he now spends his whole time running from chemist to chemist buying it—and spends all his money on it, too.21

  Bill discovered Eukodol within days of arriving in Tangier and in less than two months he reported to Allen, “I am hooked. […] Some stuff called Eukodol which is best junk kick I ever had. Start Dolly cure in a few days now.”22 (Dollys were Dolophine, now known as methadone.) Eukodol was dihydroxycodeinone, a morphine substitute made by Merck in Darmstadt as a painkiller, but they found that it was euphoric, an unfortunate side effect that stopped them manufacturing it. It was made from codeine with its strength increased six times by dehydration. It was a short-acting drug, with the high only lasting three or four hours, which made it particularly addictive as the euphoria made the user want more. According to Bill, “it had a sort of a lift like a combination of cocaine and morphine. It was great.”23 By the beginning of April, Bill was shooting Eukodol every four hours. He told Allen, “God knows what kind of habit I am getting. When I kick this habit I expect fuses will blow out in my brain from overcharge and black sooty blood will run out eyes, ears and nose and staggering around the room acting out routines like Roman Emperor routine in a bloody sheet.”24

  Most people found Brian Howard impossible. He had no tolerance for alcohol and was thrown out of every bar and hotel in Tangier, including the Minzah, the Parade, the Mar Chica, Tony Dutch’s, and Dean’s Bar, where he called the proprietor a “pretentious West Indian nigger.” Eventually he and Sammy, his Cockney boyfriend, finished up at the Maybrook Hotel on the outskirts, which was the only place that would have him. Burroughs introduced Howard to Dolophine. “He was impossible when he was drinking so I said, ‘Why don’t you try a little junk instead?’ and that made a great improvement. Instead of drinking he got onto morphine and methadone and some kind of junk; it calmed him down and he was still fine.”25 However beneficent this was for Howard, it proved to be a big mistake for Bill. “He sweeps into drug stores, ‘chemist shops’ as he calls them, and says, ‘Give me four tubes of M tablets quickly.’ He has decided that M is after all more ‘amusing’ than Dolophine. ‘And you know, the strangest thing. I simply don’t feel right in the morning until I’ve had my medicine.’ ”26 Brian Howard burned the town down, and whereas before Burroughs could buy junk over the counter, scripts were now required.

  Burroughs found Howard very sweet when sober and enjoyed his literary connections. He was an old friend of Auden’s and Isherwood’s and was one of the characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Howard was quite a comfort to him in the absence of communication with Allen, extravagantly praising Bill’s writing. Bill told Kerouac, “Right now I am in urgent need of routine receivers. Whenever I encounter the impasse of unrequited affection my only recourse is routines. (Really meant for the loved one, to be sure, but in a pinch somebody else can be pressed into service.) And Brian really digs my routines. But he is leaving tomorrow.”27

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Looking down at my shiny, dirty trousers that haven’t been changed in months, the days gliding by, strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood, it is easy to forget sex and drink and all sharp pleasures of the body in this Limbo of pleasure, this thick cocoon of comfort.1

  1. Morphine Minnie

  Bill’s neighbor the gossip columnist David Woolman knew everyone, and in April he took Burroughs to meet Paul Bowles at the Hotel Marsillia in the Medina where he was living. Bill took along his contract from Ace Books, hoping to discuss it with a published author. Unfortunately Bowles was recovering from a dose of paratyphoid and was on his sickbed. He reclined in his dressing gown, smoking a cigarette in a holder. As Bill had already signed the contract, which was terrible, Bowles simply suggested that Bill get an agent for his next book.

  Bowles didn’t follow up on the contact and in July Bill grumbled to Allen that perhaps Bowles wished to avoid him because of his narcotic associations, “fearing possible hassles with customs inspection and authorities in general if he is known to be on familiar terms with me—guilt by association.”2 This assessment was probably partially correct, as Bowles had a terrible fear of being expelled from Tangier, but Bowles was also very passive and mostly responded to situations rather than creating them.

  Rumors soon spread that Bill was a drug addict. The newly appointed British police chief, Gerald Richardson, already referred to him as “Morphine Minnie.” All this upset his landlord. Bill told Kerouac, “So Tony, this old Dutch man who runs this whore house I live in, keeps casting me reproachful glances in the hall and saying: ‘Ach thirteen years and never before I haff such a thing in my house. And since two weeks are here in Tangiers two good English gentlemens I know since long times. With them I could make good business except my house is so watched at.’ However I am still his star boarder and he hesitates to evict me.”3 Bill had been in Tangier less than four months and the police were aware of him. Kiki’s mother had disapproved of their relationship and reported him, bursting into Tony Dutch’s with a policeman while Bill tried to push Kiki into Dave Woolman’s room like a bedroom farce.