by Barry Miles
In the second week of May, Bill tried to kick. He was shooting Eukodol every two hours. So he paid fifty dollars to an Englishman named Eric Gifford to bring him food and dole out Dolophine over ten days. Gifford took away Bill’s clothes to prevent him sneaking out to score. But Bill went into Dave Woolman’s room and stole his clothes, bought some Eukodol ampoules, and glutted himself. Gifford of course found out, confiscated the remaining ampoules, and insisted that Woolman lock his door in future. He also took Bill’s money away. Bill told Allen, “I am really stuck now. […] Gifford, he’s a hard man. No use trying to coax an extra ampoule out of him. ‘By God,’ he says, ‘I’m being paid to do this and I’m going to do it right.’ ”4
Gifford was a public-school boy5 first heard of during the war when his house in Tangier, the Villa Harris, was used as a billet for Spanish soldiers. He was arrested by a Spanish patrol, hanging around the building, “offering himself with lowered garments to a long queue of infantrymen who, deprived of womenfolk, were impatient to find relief.” Since the Spanish could not reveal the real nature of his offense he was charged with spying. However, as this could not be proved, he was set free. He worked for the British Council in Syria during the war. He was known to the Tangerines as “Calamity” Gifford because he attracted disaster. He had written a guidebook to Greece that didn’t sell, then went in with a friend in a scheme to make honey in Trinidad where no honey was produced. They soon found out why: a species of large moth that invaded the hives. The bees flew out and stung the moths to death, an action that caused their own demise, so that soon the hives were surrounded by mounds of dead bees and moths. He returned to Tangier and stopped by Dean’s Bar for a drink before returning to the Villa Harris. At the mention of Villa Harris, his friends went quiet and studied their drinks. When he got there he saw why. As it was apparently not being used, the locals had helped themselves to the roof tiles, the windows, the walls, until nothing was left but the foundations; even the floor and doorstep were gone. He then taught English until Tanjawi thieves broke into his new apartment and stole all of his possessions. This gave rise to his sobriquet “Calamity.” Even his social column for the Tangier Gazette came to an unfortunate end when he had a pointless argument with the editor. By the time Burroughs arrived, he was impecunious. He became a good friend of Burroughs’s, who saw a lot of him and used him as the model for Leif the Unlucky in The Naked Lunch.
Gifford’s best efforts to help Bill kick did not work, and by June 16 Bill was back shooting up every two hours. It was the worst habit he ever had. “A shot of Eukodol hits the head first with a rush of pleasure. Ten minutes later you want another shot. Between shots you are just killing time. I can’t control this stuff any more than I can control the use of coke. […] From taking so many shots I have an open sore where I can slide the needle right into a vein. The sore stays open like a red, festering mouth, swollen and obscene.”6 In an outtake from The Naked Lunch Burroughs wrote, “put leeches on my needle scars to suck out the poison,”7 which sounds like a report of actual experience. He scoured Tangier, looking for any remaining supplies of Eukodol. “I think I bought all the Eukodol in the place, then I had to shift to methadone in ampoules. I got all there was.”8
Bill had quickly found drugs, boys, and drinking companions in Tangier, so the severity of his addiction was not caused by loneliness or unfamiliarity with his new surroundings. But he was still heartbroken by Allen’s rejection and what appeared to be an attempt to ignore him completely by not replying to his many letters. When Bill left New York for Europe, Allen had gone south. He hitchhiked to Florida and spent Christmas with Bill’s parents in Palm Beach. From there he continued to Havana and reached Mexico in time for the New Year celebrations. His intention was to investigate Mayan culture, and he had made arrangements to stay free of charge in archaeological camps. He went first to Chichén Itzá. All this time he wrote regularly to his family and friends, including Bill, but unknown to him, the Mexican postal service had lost all but a few of his letters. In Tangier Bill grew desperate. He wrote to Jack, “Allen’s neglect will drive me to some extravagance of behavior. I don’t know what I will do, but it will be the terror of the earth. You must remonstrate with him. I didn’t expect him to act like this (not a line in four months) and I didn’t expect I would feel so deeply hurt if he did.”9 He asked Jack to write to Allen and tell him of the pain he was causing.
Allen had told Bill to write him care of American Express in Mexico City, but his letter was returned unclaimed. “I don’t mind he doesn’t write if he wants to feel completely free for a while,” Bill told Jack, “but he could have spared me all this hurt—(which I am not playing up, which is worse than I describe in my letters to him)—by simply dropping me a line (as he apparently did to you) saying he would be out of touch for a while. […] P.S. No matter what Allen says I want to hear it understand? If he says something that you know would hurt me, please don’t keep it from me. I want to know. Nothing is worse than waiting like this day after day for a letter that doesn’t come… THIS IS SERIOUS JACK, DON’T let me down.”10
After visiting Uxmal, Allen had set off for the ruins at Palenque in Chiapas, where he met Karen Shields, a writer and actress. She invited him to stay on her coca finca, deep in the jungle, and he spent most of April and the beginning of May there writing poetry. Storms washed out the track from the finca to Salto de Agua, the nearest town, and made the rivers impassable so they could not get their mail. Allen had written to Neal Cassady on April 6, urgently requesting money, which Neal had sent at once, but the funds were returned from Salto de Agua as “unclaimed.” Bill asked his parents to cable Allen thirty dollars from his next month’s allowance, which they did, but the money disappeared en route. Bill wrote to Allen’s father, asking him to make inquiries at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, and asked Lucien to contact the Mexican branch of UPI. Bill told Jack, “I am afraid he may be in serious trouble, perhaps held incommunicado in jail. To stupid people he looks like a communist.”11 He concluded, “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to Allen. I guess you have seen the letters I wrote to him and have some idea of how much he means to me.” Neal Cassady was also concerned; three letters in a row had been returned. Allen, of course, was happily writing to his family, to Bill, Neal, Lucien, and Jack, from Salto de Agua, but the letters were all lost. Then one finally reached Bill and put his mind at rest.
Bill told Allen how worried he had been at his disappearance. On May 11 he wrote, “I will send along two more letters. You haven’t seen anything yet. There were even some letters I destroyed as too extreme.”12 The intensity of Bill’s feelings concerned Allen deeply. He wrote Neal, “He sure is lonely or imagines himself such and I guess it drives him off the road at times. […] This kind of need, with which I cannot but sympathize & try to do something real about […] will be a real problem. But of our friendship, so complicated now & in some ways difficult […] I hardly know what to do to straighten out and think probably the loco elements too deep to resolve and so must be put up with—too ingrained with the genius.”13 But Bill saw Allen as the key to dealing with his demons, and Burroughs could not shake loose from his obsession. In July he told him, “You’re one of the few people I would want around me if I was dying. […] That is a special compliment.”14 Burroughs certainly knew how to flatter people. A few days later he told Allen of a dream he had. “We were in the country somewhere like Texas, red clay, roads and farms. I wanted to be with you, but you kept saying like ‘today I’m spending with Jack, tomorrow with so and so’ and I said ‘What about me?’, feeling hurt and rejected. Finally I packed my suitcase and went away. […] Later started down Amazon alone in a canoe.”15 Further sad proof that Burroughs’s bluff that he never felt loneliness was untrue.
2. Kells in Morocco
In May, Kells Elvins came to visit from Rome, where he was living with his third wife, the Danish actress Mimi Heinrich. According to Burroughs, Kells “just hated Tangier. Thought it was insane, schizophrenic.”16
Kells wanted Bill to accompany him on a trip across Morocco but it didn’t work out. They got as far as Casablanca before parting ways. “Well, I didn’t have enough junk. I went back to Tangiers.” Kells disapproved of Bill’s addiction and decided that it was impossible to travel with him if he was continually seeking out Arab pharmacists to buy junk. Kells went exploring alone. On his return to Tangier, the hard-drinking Elvins soon found a tolerable roost in Dean’s Bar. Burroughs very rarely went there. “Dean and I just never hit it off.” Bill made an exception for Kells and described a visit to Allen: “We had just been in Dean’s Bar where I encountered a barrage of hostility. […] Dean wanted not to serve me, rolling his eyes in disapproval, but there was Kells, a good customer. (Dean has heard that I am a dope fiend. More than that, he instinctively feels me as a danger, far out, an ill omen.) So I sat there, loaded on tea, savoring their disapproval, rolling it on my tongue with a glass of good dry sherry.” Kells, as usual, was very supportive of Bill and clearly concerned about his drug addiction. Bill complained, “I don’t think I have much talent for writing,” but Kells told him, “You know what I think? I think you’re better than Paul Bowles and Peter Mayne, I think you’re better than all these people, you just don’t know it.” Bill was very sorry when Kells left for Madrid to join his wife in Copenhagen in the beginning of July.
Just as Kells left, Bill was stricken with a painful swelling of his ankle so that it was difficult even to walk around the room. His monthly check was unaccountably delayed so he was not only sick but broke as well. Kells’s departure left him in a deep depression, relieved only by visits from Kiki, who sat with him, stroking his head, feeding him on soup and tea, arranging his bedding. It was a week before Dr. Apfel came and diagnosed an acute attack of rheumatic fever, drew off the pus, and prescribed penicillin. “Just like me to contract an adolescent illness.”17 Bill was lucky that no damage to the heart ensued, as many people are invalided for life by such an attack. Even before he was sick, Bill had found himself growing fonder of Kiki, buying him nylon socks, underwear, a toothbrush, and a knife on his saint’s day, June 25, as a present. Now Bill told Allen, “(Remember I am broke now and have no money to give him.) Find me an American kid like that. Not that they are easy to come by any place, but Angelo in Mexico was very similar. What I feel with them is not the same as I feel with you, but it is definitely a relationship. That is, it involves real affection on both sides and some protoplasmic contact. […] Actually U.S. provides no counterpart to my relation with Kiki or Angelo.”18
What Burroughs was looking for in a sexual partner was a “boy” who was “straight”—that is to say who had sex with men for money but whose real preference was for women—and “Oriental.” In Queer he described Marker as “delicate and exotic and Oriental,”19 and while in Quito he had told Ginsberg, “The best people in S.A. are the Indians. Certainly the best-looking people. My boy is at least 70% Indian.”20 He described Kiki to Allen as looking like “a South American Indian”21 and Angelo as having a face that was “Oriental, Japanese-looking, except for his copper skin.”22 In Interzone he wrote that “both had very straight black hair, an Oriental look, and lean, slight bodies. Both exuded the same quality of sweet masculine innocence. Lee met the same people wherever he went.”23 By “Oriental” Burroughs meant people whose distant ancestors had arrived in the Americas from Asia. Thus to Burroughs, both American Indians and Mexicans were “Oriental.” In boys of Spanish or Indian ancestry he identified “real uncut boy stuff,” the essence of adolescent naturalism, fertility, and masculinity. Kiki fit the bill.
As Burroughs wrote in “Lee and the Boys,” “Lee was well pleased with Kiki.” Bill did not like the process of looking for boys; he was not compulsively promiscuous and did not lose interest in his boys. He had sex with Angelo in Mexico City twice a week for more than a year, and now that he had found Kiki, he was content to stay with him. It was in many ways a sybaritic life, but he found himself getting dangerously fond of Kiki, as he told Jack Kerouac: “I find myself getting jealous of Kiki—he is besieged by importunate queens. In fact, I am downright involved, up to my neck in Maya. He is a sweet kid, and it is so pleasant to loll about in the afternoon smoking tea, sleeping and having sex with no hurry, running leisurely hands over his lean, hard body, and finally we doze off, all wrapped around each other, into the delicious sleep of a hot afternoon in a cool darkened room, a sleep that is different from any other sleep, a twilight in which I savor, with a voluptuous floating sensation, the state of sleep, feeling the nearness of Kiki’s young body, the sweet, imperceptible, drawing together in sleep, leg inching over leg, arm encompassing body, hips hitching closer, stiffening organs reaching out to touch warm flesh.”24
He was so pleased with his description that he repeated much of it in a letter to Ginsberg the same day, adding, “Kiki would be quite at home in ‘sophisticated’ company. He simply wouldn’t try to compete. The only danger would be that he would be pampered and spoiled. Example of his health and simplicity: he had some sort of swelling or infection in his rectum, and I gave him four shots of penicillin. The other day he was sitting on the bed naked and I asked him if his ass was alright. ‘Yes’ he said with a boyish grin, and putting his hands on his knees rolled himself back showing me his ass. It was done without a trace of prissiness or exhibitionism, beyond a natural joy in his body that any young human male has.”25 Sometimes Bill and Kiki spent as much as sixteen hours together in bed, the room lit by flickering candlelight in a big brass holder, dozing, eating sweet grapes, smoking kif. Kiki said that Bill talked in his sleep and sometimes awoke with a cry.
Inevitably Bill fell in love with him. The realization came toward the end of August when Kiki came in late one night and described in great detail the designs that he proposed to have tattooed on his chest, shoulders, and arms. Bill had hysterics, cried, and begged him not to do it. He had to give him his sports coat, a combat jacket, and ten dollars to promise not to do it. Bill reported to Allen, “I was shocked into an awareness that in a way I love him. Now I know I should not allow myself to be emotionally involved. He doesn’t understand and looks at me in bewilderment when I embraced him with special intensity. It is exasperating. I can’t really get near him. I feel all-out attempt would be disastrous for me. I know I should let matters rest in status of liaison, fond of him in an off-hand way, but it’s so dull like that. I notice that sex is much more enjoyable since I feel some variety of love for him.”26
In a matter of hours after writing those lines to Allen, Bill was brought down to earth about the reality of the situation. In a postcript he wrote, “Kiki was here and hurt me so I am quivering all over. Oh, he’ll come around all right because of the $. It hurts me to know that is the reason, at the same time glad that I have that advantage. A complete shambles of feeling. […] I simply can’t take these details lightly: if I do, it’s no more than masturbation; if I don’t, I get hurt like this.”27 Kiki could be very sulky at times and sometimes shocked Bill with tirades of abuse. Bill told Allen, “I always have a fear with anyone I love that they really hate me and I will suddenly be confronted with their hate,”28 which was of course what had happened in his sexual relationship with Allen.
All around him he could see Europeans and Americans falling in love with their boys in untenable situations. His friend David Lamont, a Canadian writer, used to weep on Bill’s shoulder because he couldn’t find his boy, “who was a real little horror, actually.” Dave Woolman experienced pangs of jealousy at the thought of his boy going off with another European or American (Arabs were okay). Bill hardened his heart.
Decades later, Burroughs revised his memory of those years, saying, “I didn’t really get too much attached to any boyfriend. I preferred it that way, just a perfectly simple relationship. All these people that I saw making fools of themselves over some Arab boy, with their boys, with all this emotional nonsense. Obviously this is a confusion of levels; the boys aren’t thinking in these terms at all. They are thinking in ver
y simple terms of advantage, of bettering themselves, and why shouldn’t they?”29 He recognized that the boys were just doing it for money, and that if a better opportunity came along they would take it. There were also certain rules to be followed, as Harold Norse explained to Winston Leyland. “They often put a restriction on the amount and kind of sex they have with you: three orgasms a week, no kissing, and you can’t fuck them.”30
That summer Bill attempted another cure, at Kiki’s urging, perhaps because junk had made Bill’s sex drive almost completely disappear and Kiki felt his services would no longer be required. Kiki confiscated all his clothes, and they began a reduction cure, using new substitute preparations prescribed for him by Dr. Apfel. Rumor had it that Dr. Apfel was in fact a concentration camp doctor who only pretended to be a German Jewish refugee. Bill didn’t care which; he was a good doctor, the best in Tangier.
He was rather looking forward to noon prayers for Friday, August 20, the anniversary of the day the French had exiled the old, much-loved sultan. He happily reported to Allen that in 1952 there had been a riot, with twelve Arabs killed by French police and a Swiss tourist mistaken for French and torn to pieces by the mob. In readiness, Bill had purchased a meat cleaver and a razor-sharp knife; he also had two weapons of his own invention: a Flit gun filled with ammonia, and a piece of lead on the end of a leather thong. “And me caught short without a pistol the one time in my life I really need one!”31 There was no riot, but Bill demonstrated his weapons when a plague of black rats suddenly infested Tony Dutch’s rooms. As Tony screamed and carried on, Bill killed one with his cane. Tony’s Chinese orderly killed another in the toilet bowl with a Coca-Cola bottle. Eric Gifford believed they came up out of the sewers. Bill said he felt very “manly.”
At this point Bill had not yet become friends with Paul Bowles, and though he spent a lot of time with Dave Woolman, Dave Lamont, and various other members of the Socco Chico set, he still felt that he hadn’t properly connected with what was really happening in Tangier. He was also badly strung out on Eukodol, he was depressed, and he yearned for Allen Ginsberg’s company. In addition, he was plagued by rectal warts, which, considering he was a “bottom” in sexual relations, meant that this was a particularly troublesome inconvenience. He determined to have them operated on in New York, and from there visit Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco. If circumstances seemed propitious, they would share an apartment.
