Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The book grabs you by the throat. […] It leaps in bed with you, and performs unmentionable acts. Then it thrusts a long cold needle deep in your spine and gives you an injection of ice water.1

  1. Looking for Ritchie

  Bill boarded the Saturnia, on the Italian Line, in Gibraltar, bound for New York, on September 7, 1954, and arrived on the sixteenth at 8:00 a.m. He planned to have his operation, then visit his family in Florida before continuing to San Francisco to see Allen. Kerouac had foolishly written to Bill telling him that Allen “secretly wants to be with you as before otherwise you see Bill he wouldn’t write and discuss and rehash so much,” something that Kerouac regarded as a “poor little kind white lie I told Bill—to make him feel good.” This now resulted in a wasted trip to the United States by Burroughs (who could have had his operation in London or Paris) and tremendous stress and anxiety on Ginsberg’s part, who was on the point of moving into an apartment on Nob Hill to live a straight life as an advertising executive with his girlfriend, Sheila Boucher. The thought of Burroughs arriving to demand his time and love and attention threw Allen’s life into chaos. He told Kerouac, “I will do everything I can for and to Bill, anything he wants, but the impossibilities of his demands are ultimately inescapable unless I let him carry me off forever to Asia or something to satisfy his conception of his despair and need.”

  The news that Allen had fallen in love with Sheila and wanted to live with her came as a huge shock to Bill. He told Kerouac, “Now Allen is talking about making it with a chick, and I am really upset and worried. If I get out to Frisco and he is making it with a chick I might as well turn around and start back. You know how U.S. chicks are. They want it all. It would be the end of my relationship with Allen. At this point I couldn’t stand to be around him all the time with no sex. It would be too much of a strain on me.”2 Allen pleaded with Kerouac to try and set Bill straight. “The situation with Sheila will be a madhouse. I don’t know how to manage it. Bill will enforce his idea so much he will make me reject it […] he still puts all his life in my hands. […] I can’t be his one sole and only contact forever, I can only be his nearest and best.” Although it pained him to do it, his fear of sharing a place with a frantic, jealous, and possessive Burroughs forced Allen to write him a stiff, formal letter explaining that he loved him but that he could not be his sexual partner. Allen reported to Kerouac, “Confusion reigns! After an exchange of shocking letters, Bill seems to have come off the distraction-intensity. […] My letter to him was perhaps too strong but subsequent correspondence has straightened out some of the bad feeling and left the whole situation a lot relieved.” Bill reported to Allen that Kerouac was angry at him for writing such a hurtful letter, but as Allen explained, “If I had not written so he would continue in state of tragic self-pity absorption perhaps. Even Bill knows at heart.”

  Burroughs ran into Alan Ansen, who was back in New York, arranging to rent his house to the novelist William Gaddis. Ansen was staying at the Hotel Saint George on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, and Bill joined him there. Bill was clearly very broke and kept asking Alan for money, about ten dollars at a time. Alan kept giving it to him. “Then I saw him consulting with a man with a moustache, who turned out to be Ritchie, the famous drug peddler, and after about four or five times the penny dropped, and I said ‘Oh, that’s what you want it for.’ ” Ansen recommended him to Dr. David Protetch, Stravinsky’s doctor, who was able to fix Bill up with something. Ansen: “I thought he was a kind of guru and it was a good work to give him money. He was always very very impressive. Not so much as a writer but a personality.”3

  Meanwhile, while all the letter-writing was going on, Bill had his operation with Dr. James Leake. Dr. Leake asked him how he was fixed for money and Bill explained that he had an income of about two hundred dollars a month. Leake said he would do it for $150, and when he heard that the hospital room would cost twenty dollars a day, he told Bill he thought he could get him out of there in two days. “Got rid of the problem forever.” Bill was upset that Kerouac did not visit or telephone the hospital.

  As soon as he had recovered enough to travel, Bill visited his family in Florida. It was not a success. He could not stay with them at 202 Sanford Road in Palm Beach because they had converted the spare bedroom into a television room, so he had to make do with a mediocre hotel nearby at five dollars a day. His parents, faced with their strung-out son, whose child they were bringing up at their expense, kept asking him what made him return to the States in the first place. Even worse, his parents were not doing as well as they used to with their garden supply business and wanted to reduce his allowance by half. Bill was faced with the awful possibility, at forty years of age, of having to find a job. There was little in his résumé that would appeal to a future employer. In fact the only thing he could think of was dealing heroin with his old friend Ritchie. As usual, Bill looked for someone else to blame for his predicament. He told Allen, “Understand I forgive you the letter, but for the record, I still think there was a lot to forgive.”4 He wished Allen had changed his mind about their sharing an apartment before Bill had left Tangier, in which case he would still have been there and not trapped in Florida. “Well, maybe you have some suggestions as to what I should do now,” he told Allen, making it very clear. “Not to mince words, I did come back to U.S. to see you. Just wanted to be sure you knew that, and to put you in cognizance of my generally altered situation.” In the end he thought, “Maybe I can blackmail them into sending me back to Tangier.”5

  Marker was in Miami, looking for a job, and Bill went to visit him. They went to visit Betty Jones, his friend from the Bounty in Mexico City, who had separated from her husband, Glenn, and was living in Hollywood, Florida. But soon Bill was back in New York City and booked to sail for Gibraltar on November 20, 1954, having presumably extracted the fare from his long-suffering parents, who, perhaps relieved to see him go, had relented and kept his allowance at two hundred dollars a month. He wrote Allen, “They have a bad conscience about me. Besides they’ve been giving me money so long it’s a habit. They don’t have what it takes to kick the habit and me out on my ass which is what I would do in their place.”6

  2. The Socco Chico Set

  Back in Tangier Burroughs immediately resumed his life with Kiki at Tony’s brothel: “back in the Promised Land flowing with junk and boys.”7 Presumably no provision had been made for Kiki when he left, and as Burroughs had expected to live with Ginsberg in San Francisco, Kiki had not been expecting to see him again. However Bill and Kiki were soon spending fifteen to twenty hours every day in bed. He told Allen, “I didn’t realize what a drag the U.S. can be, until I hit a free country and get relief in every direction.” Unfortunately much of that relief came from Eukodol, which he began using again as soon as he hit town. Though convenient in many different ways, Tony Dutch’s had its disadvantages, one of which was the taunting by the street boys—“You like Beeeg one Meester?”—but the main one being the small room he occupied. By Christmas 1954, Kiki had moved in with Bill and they were looking for a bigger place so that Kiki could have a bed of his own and a place to store his things. Bill seemed to have now accepted that Tangier was his home. By the middle of January 1955, he had moved to a larger apartment in the Kasbah—four rooms for twenty-three dollars a month—owned by Jim Wyllie, the watercolorist and children’s author. Wyllie, a British expat who moved to Tangier in the 1920s to learn Arabic and then stayed for sixty years, could be seen each day pottering down to the Petit Socco in his tattered brown burnoose for mint tea. Wyllie rented out his house, Dar Zero on the place de la Kasbah, when he was away (it was here that Samuel Pepys wrote his Tangier Diaries in 1683 beneath an ancient fig tree in the courtyard). Wyllie also owned a nearby property built into the walls of the Kasbah, and it is unclear which house Burroughs rented.8 “I have my own house now,” he told Allen. “Can’t get up energy to clean it, and live here in slowly accumulating dirt and disorder.”9<
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  Paul Bowles had a house near the place Bab Amrah, which was rented by Burroughs’s friend David Lamont while Bowles was away in Ceylon. The houses in the Kasbah wall overlook the rue Amrah, and Burroughs was able to write to Allen and tell him he was so close to Paul Bowles that he could lean out the window and spit on his roof “if I was a long range spitter and I wanted to spit there”—a reworking of Hemingway’s lines “and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there”—one of Burroughs’s favorite lines and one he often reworked in conversation. This gave Burroughs access to Paul Bowles’s library, with unfortunate results. Bill borrowed a bound script copy of Tennessee Williams’s The Angel in the Alcove and in the course of reading it dripped blood on the pages while shooting up. Bowles was most displeased as it was the 1943 original.

  Burroughs never cooked for himself, so he became very much a member of Tangier café society, soon getting to know all the restaurants, cafés, and bars. Most Arab cafés consisted of one room with a few tables and chairs with a raised dais at one end covered with mats and rugs where the patrons lounged about with their shoes off, smoking kif and playing ronda, a card game. A radio played Arab music loudly and at the counter was a huge copper or brass samovar for mint tea or coffee. Often, in the course of his walks around town, Bill sat in one of these cafés for a mint tea, to people watch or talk to the inevitable boys who would approach him. Mostly during the day he sat in the Socco Chico, watching the passing show. Cars were banned from the square from 8:00 a.m. until midnight and anyone not ordering between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. had to relinquish their seats in the cafés. A never-ending stream of beggars targeted anyone sitting outside, or even those seated at the bar: “Two girls paralyzed from the waist down, swing around on blocks. They bar the way, clutching at my pants leg.” Many people whiled away the entire day there waiting for job offers, selling or buying drugs, smoking their kif, looking at the boys, panhandling, and mooching for loans: “A nightmare feeling of stasis permeates the Socco, like nothing can happen, nothing can change.”10 It was out of this mix that The Naked Lunch was born.

  David Woolman dubbed its denizens “The Soco Foreign Legion”: Rupert Croft-Cooke, George Greaves, Dowell Jones, Paul Lund, and many other regulars. In his essay on Tangier, Burroughs gave the Café Central as “the official meeting place of the Socco Chico set.” Burroughs now found himself in an almost completely homosexual community. The prolific novelist and biographer Rupert Croft-Cooke had moved to Tangier with Joseph Susei Mari, his Indian “secretary,” after a stretch in prison in Britain on homosexuality charges. He was solidly built with black swept-back hair and freckles. He was pompous and smoked cigars. Croft-Cooke gives his impressions of Burroughs in The Caves of Hercules: “He was a pleasant enough fellow when I knew him […] in those days, when I first came to Tangier, he used to moon around the Socco Chico in suits which, he told me, he bought from supplies of used clothing sent from American charities for the poor Moroccans and sold by them to anyone who could pay for them. He was unnaturally gaunt, hollow-cheeked, meagre in body, and the Spaniards used to call him el hombre invisible. [He] was always asking to borrow my typewriter. He wandered down to the beach and sat, six foot two of palsied white flesh, nursing his knees and giving out wisdom to an artless young Canadian who encouraged him.”11 The Canadian was David Lamont, a painter who had moved to Tangier for the boys.

  Welshman Dowell Jones was the owner of the Passapoga, a gay bar in the arcade on the rue de Fez, a block from the Parade. He was a pedophile, already in his seventies in the late 1950s, who had arrived in Tangier one step ahead of Scotland Yard. His bar was the rival to Tony Dutch’s for very young boys, but though this trade was illegal, he survived for several years before being closed down by the police. He spent time in the Kasbah jail, but such was Tangier that he was permitted to order in gourmet food and other amenities and was soon set free to open once more for business.

  Bill found Paul Lund, one of the few straight members of Burroughs’s circle, to be particularly amusing. Lund was a professional criminal from Birmingham, though he appeared to have more of a London accent when imitated by Burroughs. He came from a wealthy shipping family, so a life of crime was a deliberate choice on his part. He came to Tangier because he was now liable to preventive detention, a law introduced in 1948 which meant that anything between five and fourteen years in jail could be given for any felony, however slight, as long as the accused was over thirty years old and had served three terms of imprisonment. When he was charged with conspiracy to defraud—selling cases of sawdust as stolen tobacco—he faced a ten-year stretch. He jumped bail and headed for Tangier.

  Australian George Greaves was described by Burroughs as “the most completely corrupt person you could possibly imagine.”12 He was generally thought to be a police spy and not to be trusted. He sprawled his huge bulk in a cane chair outside the Café Central and had a word of salacious gossip to pass on about everyone who passed by. He would invite people over for breakfast to his place on the rue Alexander; that was his meal of the day. Burroughs was there one morning while Greaves was importuning Paul Lund: “Listen, Paul, if you just give a little information about arms shipments, I think a lot of things could be forgotten.” Paul said, “How could I look at meself in the mirror if I did something like that?” And George said, “Well, Paul, you have to take a broad general view of things.” It was almost thirty years before George Greaves appeared in Burroughs’s prose. He is one of Kim Carsons’s dinner guests in The Place of Dead Roads:

  Well there’s old George Hargrave the Aussie, and a rottener man never drew breath. He takes a broad general view of things… nothing too low or too dirty for old George. […] Got his fat greasy fingers into all the pies and puddings.13

  3. The Talking Asshole

  Despite his initial dislike of Tangier, Burroughs had begun writing almost as soon as he arrived. His quick mind filled with routines, all of them directed toward Ginsberg, but Ginsberg was not replying, being stuck in the Mexican jungle. At first, only a month after arriving there, Bill contemplated setting down the most difficult story of all. He wrote Allen, “May yet attempt a story or some account of Joan’s death. I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it. I think I am afraid. Not exactly to discover unconscious intent, it’s more complex, more basic, more horrible, as if the brain drew the bullet toward it. Did I tell you Kells’ dream the night of Joan’s death? This was before he knew, of course. I was cooking something in a pot, and he asked what I was cooking and I said ‘Brains!’ and opened the pot showing what looked like ‘a lot of white worms.’ I forgot to ask how I looked, general atmosphere, etc. To summarize I pass along one of my specialized bits of wisdom like ‘always use poultry shears to cut off fingers’ ‘Never participate in active or passive role in any shooting things off of, or near one or knife throwing or anything similar, and, if a bystander, always try to stop it.’

  “I told you of a horrible nightmare and depression and anxiety I had that whole day so that I asked myself continually ‘What in God’s name is the matter with me?’ […] One more point. The idea of shooting a glass off her head had never entered my mind consciously, until out of the blue as far as I can recall (I was very drunk, of course) I said: ‘It’s about time for our William Tell act. Put a glass on your head, Joan.’ Note all those precautions, as though I had to do it like the original William Tell. Why, instead of being so careful, not give up the idea? Why indeed? In my present state of mind I am afraid to go too deep into the matter. […] I aimed carefully at six feet for the very top of the glass.”14 Many years would pass before Burroughs once again dared to address the issue.

  Writing poured out of him in an inexorable torrent. On April 7 he wrote, “Routines like habit. Without routines my life is chronic nightmare, gray horror of Midwest suburb. […] I have to have receiver for routine. If there is no-one there to receive it, routine turns back on me like a hom
eless curse and tears me apart, grows more and more insane (literal growth like cancer) and impossible, and fragmentary like berserk pin-ball machine and I am screaming: ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Trying to write novel. Attempt to organize material is more painful than anything I ever experienced.”15 By May 11 he was able to write to Allen enclosing the “beginning of novel,” and two weeks later he sent Kerouac a four-page text titled “Dream of the City by William Lee.” This was a routine based on a dream Kerouac had described about the huge overcrowded cities of the future, but it has some elements of the narrow winding alleys of the Medina where Bill was living and of the vision he had of a multileveled city looking at the clotheslines on pulleys and the fire escapes behind Allen’s building in the Lower East Side a few months before. It was also clearly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud’s cities in Illuminations:

  A strange design of bridges, some straight, some arched, others descending at oblique angles to the first. […] A few of these bridges are still covered with hovels, others support poles, signals, frail parapets.16

  Ginsberg later retitled the text “Iron Wrack Dream,” but it was not finally published until it was included in Interzone.