Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  That same day, May 24, 1954, Bill sent Allen a “routine about purple-assed baboons, and Tangier miscellanea.” This was, of course, the celebrated Roosevelt After Inauguration that Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s English printers, Villiers Publications, found so disturbing that they insisted it be excised from The Yage Letters. (City Lights eventually published it as a separate text in 1979.) Bill had been delighted to find that there were purple-assed baboons in the mountains a few miles from town and that it was claimed that Paul Bowles was set upon by them and forced to flee for his life. The editor and poet Kenneth Rexroth was then a reader for New Directions so Ginsberg showed it to him at one of his San Francisco literary evenings, but Rexroth appears to have completely missed the point. Burroughs asked, “What does Rexroth mean by his remarks on the Roosevelt skit: ‘by one who had no touch with the higher ups’? It’s not supposed to be accurate. Does he think it has anything do with Roosevelt?”17

  More sections of The Naked Lunch emerged. In December, Bill claimed to have sat down to write a Best-Seller-of-the-Month piece on Tangier, but the first sentence that came out was, “The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif’s chauffeur, which is not an affectation on Keif’s part but a useful pretext to break off relations with anyone he doesn’t want to see: ‘You made a pass at Aracknid last night. I can’t have you in the house again.’ (People are always blacking out in the Zone whether they drink or not. No one knows for sure what he did last night.)

  “Aracknid is the worst driver in the Zone. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant women from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby on the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman.”18 This routine was used almost verbatim as the opening of the “Interzone” section of The Naked Lunch. Andrew Keif (Burroughs’s spelling of the drug) was of course Paul Bowles, and Aracknid his driver Mohammed Temsamany. Burroughs once claimed it was based on a true incident.

  Warming to his task, Bill told Allen, “Have written 1st chapter of a novel in which I will incorporate all my routines and scattered notes. Scene is Tanger, which I call Interzone. Did I write you anything about novel in progress? Starts with a deal to import and a sell ‘a load of K.Y. made of genuine whale drek in the South Atlantic…’ As you gather, in my most extreme line. I am going to attempt to complete work.”19 This opening text later appeared in the Marvie and Leif the Unlucky section of the “Interzone” chapter in The Naked Lunch (two characters based loosely on his neighbors Dave Woolman and Eric Gifford).20 However, in the same letter, Burroughs asked Ginsberg if there was any possibility of “publishing Naked Lunch I have some notes on cocaine that belong in it, but in the Junk section.” This was when the celebrated title was still being used for a three-part book comprised of three sections called “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage.”

  The “Tanger novel” dominated his work to the extent that he even wrote the jacket blurb, “getting a bit previous, I admit,” which immediately turned into a routine parody of jacket blurbs: “The book grabs you by the throat…”21 The first chapter, the section comprising part or the whole of the “Interzone” section, was sent to Ginsberg on December 30, 1954. When he was not inspired to write the novel, Bill wrote what was intended as a conventional travel article about Tangier that he hoped Ginsberg might sell to the New Yorker (eventually published as “International Zone” in Interzone).

  Bill now recognized the significant role that Tangier played in his writing, not just in providing characters, incidents, and the stage set for many of the scenes, but as inspiration for the whole book. It came to Burroughs in a flash while writing to Allen Ginsberg on January 6, 1955: “I have just conceived, at this second, the way to achieve my work, solving the contradictions raised by dissipation of energy in fragmentary, unconnected projects. I will simply transcribe Lee’s impressions. […] The fragmentary quality of my work is inherent in the method and will resolve itself so far as necessary. Tanger novel will be Lee’s impressions of Tanger, discarding novelist pretext of dealing directly with his characters and situations. I include the author in the novel.” In the same letter he enclosed further notes on the South American letters and a new introduction to Yage Quest—destined to become The Yage Letters.

  It was not until he returned, emotionally shattered, from the United States that one of his most celebrated—at least by academics—routines emerged. Sent to Ginsberg on February 7, 1955, it was all part of his “latest attempt to write something saleable.” First of all he would busy himself with displacement activities: reading magazines, making hash fudge, cleaning his shotgun, washing the dishes, going to bed with Kiki, before he would finally sit down, smoke some pot, “and out it comes all in one piece like a gob of spit: The incredible obscene, thinly disguised references and situations that slip by in Grade B movies, the double entendres, perversion, sadism of popular songs, poltergeist knockings and mutterings of America’s putrefying unconscious, boils that swell until they burst with a fart noise as if the body had put out an auxiliary ass hole with a stupid, belligerent Bronx cheer. Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his ass hole to talk?”22 And he launched into the famous routine. The man’s asshole begins to take over; it would get drunk and have crying jags because nobody loved it. Eventually his mouth sealed over, leaving just the man’s eyes. “This is my saleable product,” Bill told Allen. “Do you dig what happens? It’s almost like automatic writing produced by a hostile, independent entity who is saying in effect ‘I will write what I please.’ ”

  This routine, addressed to Allen Ginsberg, who had rejected Burroughs’s asshole—Burroughs was a “bottom”—is literally the rejected orifice sending routines to the loved one, both in an attempt to amuse and please him and so to reclaim his affections, and also to register complaint. Burroughs’s asshole becomes quite strident in its objections to the way it has been treated. The Talking Asshole routine empowers the asshole, giving it the same active status as the penis, overcoming Bill’s problem with effeminacy. The routine was derived from Alberto Cavalcanti’s “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” story in the 1945 British portmanteau horror film Dead of Night. “Like when you have a ventriloquist’s dummy and suddenly the dummy starts talking for you.”23

  In the same letter he described a new routine that was to become the opening and closing sections of The Naked Lunch, framing the book: “I have started writing a Chandler-style straight action story about some super Heroin you can get a habit in one shot with it or something similar. […] But it starts out 2 detectives come to arrest me. […] To save myself I kill them both. That is where I am now. On the lam.”24 The Hauser and O’Brien section was a wildly exaggerated account of Burroughs’s bust for possession in New York in 1945. He didn’t remember their actual names, but the good cop was an Irishman and the bad cop, who came on heavy, was a Jew. The shootout was pure fantasy, Burroughs had nothing against them as people, and besides, it would have appalled him to do such a thing. “They were just cops.” Eight months later he tried to explain how the drifting, unsettled status of Tangier was affecting his book and told Allen and Jack, “Tanger is the prognostic pulse of the world, like a dream extending from past into future, a frontier between dream and reality—the ‘reality’ of both called into question.”25 This he extended to Interzone, the territory of his novel: “The meaning of Interzone, its space-time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world […] the very exaggeration of routines is intended to create this feeling. In Interzone dreams can kill—like Bangutot—and solid objects and persons can be unreal as dreams. […] For example Lee could be in Interzone, after killing the two detectives, and for various dream reasons, neither the law nor The Others could touch him directly” (just as the law couldn’t touch Americans in Tangier, as they had their own courts).26

  4. Remittance Men at La
rge

  In the middle of March 1955, Alan Ansen arrived for a two-week visit. Bill arranged for him to stay at Tony Dutch’s, which was convenient in every way. Ansen: “Tony was a good cook with lovely boys coming in.” Bill enjoyed Alan’s company enormously; together they did the rounds of the numerous good French restaurants in town. Bill cited a sample menu that included snails à la Bourgogne, chicken cooked in wine with lima beans, frozen chocolate mousse, camembert, and fruit, all for one dollar. One of the best and most expensive restaurants was Brion Gysin’s 1001 Nights, housed in a narrow wing of the Menebhi Palace in the Marshan. As Alan Ansen really did have a trust fund—six hundred dollars a month, unlike Burroughs’s parental allowance—they spent a number of evenings there sampling the black couscous, chicken tajine with dates stuffed with walnuts, lamb roasted over a wood fire, bisteeya pastilla, a cinnamon-flavored pigeon pie made with boiled eggs and sugar, all washed down with copious quantities of North African wines. Gysin had burned the menu onto a wooden tablet using a soldering iron. There were Moroccan lanterns of brass and colored glass that threw patterns on the walls and ceiling, and a huge fireplace burned most of the year round. A five-man Joujouka orchestra sat on a small corner dais, and there were adolescent dancing boys in gowns, slippers, and turbans from the Ahl Serif tribe in the Jibala Hills south of Tangier. There was usually a fire-eater or a sword-swallower. The performance ended with a dancing boy prancing around the room with a large brass tray set with ten glasses of tea and a lighted candle balanced on his head, never touching the tray or spilling a drop. At the end he would squirm and writhe until he was lying on the floor, then he would somehow turn completely over and slowly regain his feet as the music rose to a crescendo of flutes and drums, prompting large tips from the clientele. One evening Bill and Alan both got completely drunk and began throwing money at the dancing boys. This probably did little to improve Burroughs’s standing in Gysin’s imperious eyes.

  It was Ansen who first met Charles Gallagher and introduced him to Burroughs. Gallagher was an intellectual who was thrown out of the CIA when a lie detector test showed he was homosexual. However, he continued to work for many organizations that were long seen as CIA covers, including regular reports on the situation in North Africa for the American Universities Field Staff in New York. He later wrote several books on Morocco, including The United States and North Africa: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia (1963). He was a linguist, speaking French, Spanish, Czechoslovakian, very good Arabic, and Japanese. He was in Japan during the war and had returned with a large collection of valuable Japanese art, enough to retire on.

  Burroughs said he looked just like a CIA man, an analyst not a field man, fat but powerful with “very cold gray eyes.” He was something of a gourmet, hated children and animals, and could be found at the Parade Bar most evenings. He was good friends with Paul and Jane Bowles. When he and Burroughs met he was writing a history of Morocco for the Ford Foundation, something that entailed spending a lot of time in the national archives in Rabat. He liked to drink and had a lot to say about local politics. He kept Burroughs up to date with all the latest political developments in Algeria, Tunisia, and events in the Sahara. He explained to Bill why the French should get out of Algeria, and why the independence movement in Morocco would eventually win. Burroughs found him very interesting to talk to and as a consequence was far more cognizant about local affairs than most critics have believed. Burroughs had also met Paul Bowles a few more times at parties and was getting to know him, and had met Peter Mayne, author of The Alleys of Marrakech. In addition he had become friendly with Christopher Wanklyn, a Canadian writer. He told Allen that there were now quite a few people of interest around.

  At the end of March Bill had to give up Jim Wyllie’s place because of the high utility bills. David Woolman had left Tony Dutch’s at the same time, and Bill now joined him in renting rooms on the Terrace Renschausen on the east side of the Medina overlooking the port. This arrangement did not last long, and the pair decided to return to the shelter of Tony Dutch’s establishment.

  In May Bill tried yet again to kick junk. He was treated by Dr. Apfel in a clinic in the Marshan. It was an unpleasant cure. Bill was knocked out for four days with huge doses of sedatives—thorazine, barbiturates, and chloral hydrate, used in rotation to keep him in a semiconscious state—followed by cold turkey. He lost thirty pounds. He told Allen he’d had “a substantial case of the horrors,” and days later he was still sick and sensitized to the point of hallucination. “Everything looks sharp and different like it was just washed. Sensations hit like tracer bullets. […] Junk is death. I don’t ever want to see it or touch it or commerce in it.”27 He almost fainted in the street and had to be helped by Dave Woolman. But he did not have enough self-control, and by the beginning of July he was using again: “After that awful cure it is really heartbreaking to find myself hooked again.” He recognized his problem: “I am so disgusted with my prevarication—always some excuse for one last box—I have been buying absolutely the last box of demerol ampules every day for the past 3 weeks. Such a dreary display of weakness.”28

  As usual, when exposed to a medical environment, Burroughs wrote medical routines. In his letter to Allen of July 3, Burroughs extrapolates on Eric Gifford’s bad luck, which included an operation without anesthetic, in what was to become a precursor of the Dr. Benway routine: “Or the old German Practitioner who removed his appendix with an old, rusty can opener and tin shears: ‘The germ theory is nonsense.’ Flushed with success, he then began snipping and cutting out everything in sight: ‘The human body is a most inefficient machine. Filled up vit unnecessitated parts. […] You can get by with von kidney—vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney. The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded. They need Lebensraum, like der Vaterland…’ This German cat practices something he calls technological medicine.”29

  Things got so bad with Bill’s addiction that he had to consider entering a clinic for a cure. The critical point came in the middle of September when he got hold of some ampoules each containing one-sixth grain of dolophine and one-hundredth grain of hyoscine. He shot six ampoules in the main line. He was found by Dave Woolman at 2:00 a.m., sitting in the hallway, stark naked on the toilet seat, which he had wrenched from its moorings, playing with a bucket of water and singing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” in his cracked voice. At the same time he complained to Woolman, “in clearly enunciated tones,” about the high cost of living: “It all goes on razor blades.” He tore up his sheets and threw bottles about his room looking for something and attempted to go out on the street but was restrained. “What a horrible nightmare if I had succeeded and came to myself wandering around the Native Quarter naked.”30 Dave Woolman and Tony Dutch were hugely relieved to find him fully dressed and in his right mind the next morning, as they had worried if this was a permanent state.

  Bill tried several doctors and every hospital and clinic in Tangier but no one would take on an addict. Help came from an unexpected source. Several times a week for about five months Bill had been giving Leslie Eggleston, the mooch at the Parade, a little money for food, but it was all worth it when Eggleston gave Bill a note of introduction to a woman in the Office of Social Assistance, an office Bill passed every day without noticing it. Within ten minutes she had found a doctor to treat him and booked him a room in the Benchimol Hospital, where he had his own room for two dollars a day and was permitted to use his new portable typewriter. Bill told Allen, “I am already paid back for the money I gave him and the meals and drinks I bought, by this introduction.”31

  Benchimol Hospital, known as “the Jewish Hospital,” was founded by Haim and Donna Benchimol in the New Town. Oliver Harris reports that one of its rooms was called Salle Salvador Hassan, surely the origin of “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” in The Naked Lunch. This was not the only idea that sprang from Benchimol. Dr. Apfel became another of Burroughs’s characters. Bill reported to Allen and Jack, “Just went to the head again. Still locked. Locked for
six solid hours. I think they are using it as an operating room,”32 which became the opening lines of the Dr. Benway routine. Other sections used in Benway appear in a letter of November 2: “I’m afraid she’s gone, doctor” and much of the “Black Meat” section of The Naked Lunch comes from this same letter.33 Pages of the book were piling up, almost all inspired by Tangier. This time the cure appeared to work, because Bill’s sex drive reasserted itself: “Figure to start at one end of Interzone and screw my way through to the other. I am tired of monogamy with Kiki,”34 he told Allen.

  In addition, Bill was beginning to appreciate more of his surroundings. He took a walk on the Old Mountain in the outskirts of the town, wandering through low hills covered with trees, tangled vines, and shrubs, overlooking red sandstone cliffs topped with pines. The beauty of the landscape astonished him and he told Allen he could write fifty pages just about that walk. He also took notice of the society he was living in, saying he was “beginning to dig Arab kicks. It takes time. You must let them seep into you.”35 This appreciation would grow and grow.

  In the summer of 1955 the political situation in Tangier began to heat up, as the independence movement grew in strength. “I simply must see some of this bloodshed,” Bill told Allen after a small riot in which there were four casualties, all Arabs. “All I saw was people running, shop shutters slamming down, and women jerking their babies inside off the street.”36 He went home and loaded his shotgun, but the riot had been promptly quelled.

  That summer Bill attracted the unwanted attentions of a local eccentric named Manushi, a member of a very puritanical Muslim sect. On his first approach, the man addressed him as his “Dear friend” and asked for fifty cents. Bill retorted, “with some asperity,” that he was not his friend and that no money was forthcoming. Next Manushi told both David Woolman and Bill, “I hear you like little boys, Allah doesn’t like that.” He began selling cakes and was abusive if people didn’t buy them. Over the weeks, Manushi’s communications became more cryptic. He was convinced that the U.S. embassy was the root of all evil and that Bill was a U.S. agent. He asked Bill, “Why does the American embassy have wires in my head?” Bill said he didn’t know. Bill always kept their conversations as short as possible, holding himself ready for any violence, but Manushi never made a hostile move.