by Barry Miles
Then on Monday, August 1, Manushi ran amok with a sharp butcher knife. He charged through the Medina, slashing at people, down past the American embassy, where they locked the door before he got there, and onto the beach. He killed five people and wounded four before the police shot him in the stomach and dragged him away. Bill missed him by ten minutes and wondered if he would have been one of his victims had he been there.37
Bill made another attempt to move from Tony Dutch’s establishment, this time to the Hotel Muniria on the calle Cook in the New Town. He took room 7, a top-floor apartment with a balcony and a view out over the harbor. David Woolman, reporting as Barnaby Bliss in the Tangier Gazette, wrote, “Twas the rain-riddled late afternoon of December 13, 1955, at the Villa Muniria Calle Cook. Author Bill Burroughs was writing a letter in his penthouse quarters. Suddenly a stream of men, some carrying guns, opened Burroughs’ door and looked in. The explanation is that the Villa Muniria is for sale and these were guides for the ‘Black Bernous,’ none other than the ex-Sultan of Morocco Mohammed ben Arafa. Burroughs, the most politically neutral man in Africa, said: ‘¿Ben Arafa, Quién es?’ ”
Burroughs demonstrated considerable sangfroid, as “¿Quién es?” were the last words of Billy the Kid before he was shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881. Burroughs of course knew who Ben Arafa was, but to admit it might provoke a line of questioning with unfortunate results, as he did not know who these men were or what line to take. Or he may have just wondered who was at the door.
Inevitably, Bill drifted back into addiction. By now Kiki realized that his situation with Bill was untenable. Bill was taking huge amounts of junk and had little money left over to give him. Kiki met a Cuban bandleader who came through Tangier, and as this looked like a better opportunity, he went with him first to Gibraltar, then to Madrid, where the bandleader was based. Bill didn’t blame him. “And Kiki went away. Like a cat, somebody gives him more food and one day he is gone. Through an invisible door. You can look anywhere. No good.”38 Kiki began playing drums in the band, which was made up mostly of women players. This was to be his undoing. The bandleader found him in bed with one of them in their hotel. At the beginning of September, 1957, Bill told Allen, “Poor Kiki was murdered last week in Madrid by that shit of a Cuban singer. Seems the frantic old fruit found Kiki in bed with a girl and stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. Then he attacked the girl, but the nabors rushed in and the Cuban took off, but was shortly afterwards detained by the Civil Guard.”39 The singer killed himself before the case reached court. Kiki remained in Bill’s thoughts for the rest of his life, transformed into one of his characters. We were never told Kiki’s real name. The only hint comes from a line in Nova Express, which suggests that his family name was Henrique, from which came his nickname Kiki, otherwise inexplicable among the macho Spanish boys as it is a girl’s name.
… met Paco by the soccer scores and he said: “Que tal Henrique?”
And I went to see my amigo who was taking medicina again and he had no money to give me and didn’t want to do anything but take more medicina […] so I said, “William no me hagas cas.” And met a Cuban that night in the Mar Chica who told me I could work with his band.40 […] and KiKi went away like a cat.”41
Chapter Twenty-Five
Was Weston glad to get rid of his evil and downright insolvent roomer. Never take a tenant with a monkey.1
1. Dr. Dent
Bill’s parents were dismayed to discover he was back on junk and insisted that this time he take a cure in England, but they prevaricated about sending the fare in case he used it to score. Bill was in a bad way again. At the end of February 1956 he told Allen, “Taking so much I keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my own other hand.”
Thirty years later he recalled those times: “I was on almost 50 grams a day living in the slimiest one room you could have found in the native quarter of Tangier. I hadn’t shaved or bathed or had a good meal in months. People would shy away from me in the streets—it must have been the body odour. I had some good friends, like writers Jane and Paul Bowles, but even they threw up their arms in disgust. Walking to the American Express office to pick up my monthly check from home […] I caught a reflection of myself in a shop window. It was not pretty. I could hardly recognise the person. To this day I cannot explain how I managed to pull myself together and get on that plane to London for a cure. I know I have my friends in Tangier to thank.”2 His father insisted on making the arrangements in London to ensure that Bill followed through, and finally, in the middle of April, Bill set out for England.
Mote had arranged through his local doctor, Dr. Murphy in Palm Beach, for Bill to contact Dr. MacClay in London—Bill marveled at the address: Queen’s Gate Place—but addiction was not his line at all. Bill was immediately referred to Dr. John Yerbury Dent, author of Anxiety and Its Treatment, because he had a good rate of success with addicts. Bill telephoned and went over to his house at 44 Addison Road, off Kensington High Street, a large comfortable house, separated from the road by a stuccoed stone wall, with a garden and a dog kennel for his Scottish terrier. Dr. Dent was known for his energy and his good humor. Over a cup of tea, Dr. Dent, a short-set, heavily built man with an untidy shock of white hair and mustache, asked, “Would you feel more comfortable so we can talk if you had an injection first?” Bill said, “Well, that would help.” Dent told Bill about the apomorphine treatment that obviated the need for morphine, but said that if he really needed morphine he could have it. Bill had been using methadone, but Dent said he’d rather he switched to morphine for two days because he would be using that in the treatment. “Magnificent man,” said Bill. Dr. Dent’s entire practice was drug addiction and alcoholism. He was the pioneer in the use of apomorphine, a metabolic regulator, to treat addiction, and soon convinced Bill of its efficacy.
Bill was sent to a nearby nursing home at 100 Cromwell Road, a four-story building where Bill had a room with rose wallpaper on the third floor. He had a day nurse and a night nurse and was given an injection of one-twentieth grain of apomorphine every two hours, day and night, reducing to every four hours. The withdrawal from opiates meant that he was unable to sleep for five days and nights as he went from thirty grains of morphine a day to zero in seven days. “You’ll sleep when you’re ready to sleep,” Dent told him. Bill told Allen, “The cure itself was awful. […] But I had a real croaker, interested in Yage, Mayan archaeology, every conceivable subject, and would often come to see me at 2AM and stay till 5 since he knew I couldn’t sleep.”3 Dent gave him three tubes of apomorphine tablets to use if the withdrawal pain became too intense. Bill enjoyed his company and had dinner with him at his house several times in the days following his cure. Dr. Dent shared the house with a civil servant and his wife, the Brenans, the brother of Gerald Brenan, the writer, whose books on Spain Bill knew. On release from the nursing home, Bill stayed on in a rooming house at 44 Egerton Gardens near the Victoria and Albert Museum. This address became one of Burroughs’s “sets,” appearing in Cities of the Red Night and in his dreams.4 Burroughs formed a long-standing friendship with Dent, whom he described as “the least paranoid of men, and he had the full warmth and goodwill, the best the English can offer.”5
Bill attempted to connect with writers in London. He tracked down poet George Barker in order to give him a copy of the manuscript of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” but Barker wasn’t interested. “Mutual disinterest,” Bill reported. “London is about the most God-awful place I was ever in. Barker is a bore. I never want to see England again,”6 he told Allen before moving on to Venice to stay with Alan Ansen at the beginning of June.
Venice could not have been more different. “Venice is perhaps the greatest place I ever see. Such a cornucopia of available ass. I mean, too much. Since the cure I been sexy as an eighteen-year-old and healthy as a rat.”7 He stayed at Ansen’s top-floor apartment on the calle delle Carrozze. They took a motorboat out but broke down in the middle of
the lagoon. Fit and well after the apomorphine cure, Bill learned to row Venetian fashion so you faced the direction you were going. He rowed around Venice for two or three hours each day, usually with Ansen on board, and also swam in the lagoon. Learning to row this way was difficult; thirty years later he still remembered the pain:
Remember when you first tried to row a gondola? The way you couldn’t possibly get it, and your muscles knotted up and you were just making spastic gestures with the oar and the feeling in your stomach and groin, that sort of packing dream tension almost sexual…? And then suddenly you could do it.8
He walked all over the city, exploring the little squares and canals. Ansen introduced him to a lot of people, including the gay American poet James Merrill. Bill met Mary McCarthy and her husband Bowden Broadwater. He found her “most pleasant” and they had a number of agreeable dinners together. Ansen introduced him to Harry’s Bar and they made the round of parties. At a cocktail party given by Peggy Guggenheim for the British consul, Bill was told that it was customary to greet Guggenheim by kissing her hand. Burroughs replied, “I will be glad to kiss her cunt if that is the custom.” Unfortunately this was overheard by her assistant, Bob Brady, who nearly swooned with excitement before running to report it. Burroughs and Guggenheim had gotten along well up until that point, but now Bill was banished forever from the premises. Guggenheim’s daughter Pegeen was there with her husband, Ralph Rumney. Bill was probably introduced to Rumney, who was a founding member of the Situationist International, but as Bill was very drunk at the time, it is unlikely that much in the way of political discussion occurred. Rumney was a friend of Ansen’s and sometimes put up his visitors, such as Allen Ginsberg, when Alan’s place was already full. Rumney, when later asked about Burroughs, simply said, “I liked Burroughs. But he lived in a different world from me. But he was a great man. Our attitudes were very different.”9
They established a regular routine and Bill spent a lot of time in his room writing. He hated Ansen playing solitaire, which he thought was very idle. To Ansen it was “a Puritan reaction to a harmless amusement—all right to take heroin but not to play solitaire.” They cooked curries and picked up a lot of boys together. Bill became dissatisfied with the sex scene in Venice: “As soon as I came off hard drugs I got randy as a fucking goat but there were slim pickings in Venice, slim pickings. There were lots of them willing to do almost nothing at an exorbitant price.” They did get involved with a couple of U.S. Army boys, but Bill surprised Ansen, saying, “We’re too old for them.” Ansen said, “A bit of friction at the end because we’d been more or less sharing boys but at the end there was one called Bruno that he wanted to keep for himself and I didn’t feel that was fair—there were no ultimatums but it was shortly after that that he decided to leave for Tangier.”10
According to Burroughs, “There were no quarrels over Bruno. Alan did feel that my presence there and my carryings on was imperilling his position. Two people is worse than one.” Ansen told Allen, “It was too bad he was leaving, he had been an ideal guest diffusing endless calm.” Ansen was trying to get permanent-residence status, but the Italian authorities refused because his neighbors had reported his behavior to the police. Then, some months after Burroughs left, there was a terrible scandal. Ansen brought two sailors home and they attacked him. He rushed into the street stark naked and ran to a bar at the corner, where he seized a chair to defend himself. This proved too much for the authorities, who threw him out of the country. He moved to Athens.
Bill left Venice for Naples on August 10, 1956, and from there took a boat to Tripoli. He didn’t like it, telling Allen, “Tripoli utter nowhere. Fraternizing between Arabs and Europeans is literally spat upon. I mean the Arabs spit on the sidewalk when you pass and yell: ‘Cock suck ’Mericans go home.’ ”11 The Suez Canal had been nationalized by Egypt in July, and there was an ongoing crisis that eventually led to war. In Tripoli there was a general strike and everything was closed. The American embassy was expecting trouble and all the vice consuls were walking around with pistols in their belts. They begrudgingly gave Bill a cup of coffee and told him to stay indoors. Bill’s hotel was just inside the Medina, and he soon found a black-market restaurant that was open. The local police were there eating steaks. Bill wandered around the Kasbah and the Medina with no trouble. He spent about a week in Tripoli before heading to Algiers, but there he was really stuck.
The Algerians had been fighting a war of independence for almost two years and there had been recent disturbances after an Arab had thrown a bomb into a crowded café in Oran and had been torn to pieces by an infuriated French crowd. All the flights were booked up for weeks in advance. Bill summed up the local feelings toward westerners:
Sample conversation between your reporter and a nameless Arab asshole:
A.A. “Hey, Johnny, feelthy pictures?”
Lee: “No.”
A.A.: “See me fuck sister? Me rimmy you?”
Lee: “No.”
A.A.: “Fuck you son bitch. Go back to your own country.”
In short, to deal plainly, I am definitely anti the Arab Nationalists and pro-French as far as the Algerian setup goes. You can’t imagine what a pain in the ass these Nationalists are. Bastards, sons a bitches.12
The American consulate explained how Bill might get a permit to take a train to Morocco, and eventually he was able to find the right bureau and the right bureaucrat to stamp his papers. Despite the war, Bill was able to wander unharmed around the Medina. The worst experience came at night because his hotel was full of bedbugs. The train ride was long and uncomfortable and the sleeping soldier seated next to him kept slumping over onto his shoulder. At Oujda, a dreary border town, the French official stamped his passport with no problem. The train went to Casablanca and from there he had to take a bus to Tangier. The trip from Algiers to Tangier took twenty-four hours, nonstop. He was pleased to be back and told Allen, “There is no town like Tanger town. The place relaxes me so I am subject to dissolve. I can spend three hours looking at the bay with my mouth open like a Kentucky Mountain Boy. Man, I don’t need junk.”13
2. Villa Delirium
On September 16, 1956, Bill wrote to Allen to say, “So me and Dave […] have found us the original anything-goes joint. Run by two retired junky whores from Saigon.”14 The Hotel Muniria was at 1 rue Magellan, on the corner of calle Cook. Madame Aquarrone, the Frenchwoman who had just bought the hotel, used to run a brothel in Saigon and had brought her Vietnamese servant with her. “You can be free here, you understand?” she said, digging Bill in the ribs. Bill, Dave Woolman, and Eric Gifford took the three rooms on the ground floor. They opened onto the hotel garden and had their own private entrance onto calle Cook. Bill paid fifteen dollars a month for room 9, which contained a large comfortable bed, a dresser, and a washstand. He had a small oil stove on which he used to cook his own hashish candy, of which he was very proud. There were no maids to interrupt his work, but the Vietnamese servant used to bring him afternoon tea in a tea cozy, well made and very hot. He decorated the room by covering one wall with his snapshots taken in the South American jungle, all stuck together to make a giant collage. Another wall was pockmarked from target practice: shooting matchboxes off the shelf with his air gun. “I don’t see how anyone could be happier than I am right now,”15 Bill wrote.
It was an ideal situation: just a stone’s throw away from the main artery of Tangier, close to the Medina, and a stumble down the steep unpaved track to the beach. In those days the hillside was completely rural; there were a few goats and some gardens, many of them abandoned. The walled garden of the hotel was filled with sparrows twittering, the air thick with the scent of datura blossoms. Bill was so relaxed that he had a spontaneous orgasm while doing the special abdominal exercises that he received from a man named Hornibrook in London, who learned them from the Fijian islanders. “Now a spontaneous waking orgasm is a rare occurrence even in adolescence. Only one I ever experienced before was in the orgone accumulator I made
in Texas,”16 he told Allen. “And another thing. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It’s the new frisson, dearie […] women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old characters find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make the old switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at young cunts, little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. […] He stumbled out into the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say ‘Who do you think you’re kidding with the queer act? I know you baby.’ Well, it is as Allah wills.”17
Bill led a very healthy life. After his breakfast egg he would usually go rowing for an hour with a relaxed easy motion, Venetian style, in the deep blue water of Tangier Bay, looking straight ahead. He was soon very fit. The water was usually too cold for him to swim; there are cold Atlantic currents sweeping in through the strait, and you also have to wade out several hundred yards before it is deep enough. Sometimes he would stroll around the town, a flâneur, sitting in either the Café de Paris or the Normandie, the two grand cafés facing each other across the place de France. “These things give me pleasure,” he told Allen. “I think I must be very happy.”18 Now that he was no longer on junk he loved Tangier. He wrote, “Tanger extends in several dimensions. You keep finding places you never saw before. There is no line between ‘real’ world and ‘world of myth and symbol.’ Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination. Of course I see now with the child’s eyes, the Lazarus eyes of return from the gray limbo of junk. But what I see is there. Others see it too.”19
