Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Around midday he would take majoun—hash candy—and begin writing. Generally he would take a lot of majoun every other day, alternating with smoking a lot of pot on his days off. “That helped a great deal, there’s no doubt about it, it helps anybody, it stimulates the flow of images. And the whole associative process is very useful. I think it’s very useful for writing.”20 He wrote through until the evening drink and would sometimes take a little notebook with him to dinner and write down a few ideas, which he would type out after dinner. It was a period of a tremendous outpouring of material. “I am really writing Interzone now, not writing about it.”21 Routines clamored to be written down and were duly mailed off to Allen in San Francisco. In the afternoon he would take a break when Paco or Nimón would come over; he had several steady boys at this point.

  Dave Woolman, who lived next door, and Eric Gifford, who was on the other side, said they could hear his “strange wild laughter” through the doors. He would sit hunched over his typewriter, pounding the keys furiously, hair tousled, often cackling with laughter at his own routines, throwing the pages onto the floor as they came out of the carriage, where the sea breeze would sometimes blow them out into the garden through the open door. Paul Bowles described the scene: “The litter on his desk and under it, on the floor was chaotic, but it consisted only of pages of Naked Lunch at which he was constantly working. When he read aloud from it, at random (any sheet of paper he happened to grab would do) he laughed a good deal, as well he might, since it is very funny, but from reading he would suddenly (the paper still in hand) go into a bitter conversational attack upon whatever aspect of life had prompted the passage he had just read. The best thing about Bill Burroughs is that he always makes sense and he is always humorous, even at his most vitriolic.”22

  Now that he was clean, Bill found himself spending more and more time with Paul Bowles and getting on well with him. In October 1956 he told Allen, “[I] dig him like I never dig anyone that quick before. Our minds similar, telepathy flows like water. I mean there is something portentously familiar about him, like a revelation.”23 Unfortunately Bowles was just off to Ceylon again, not to return until February. Though Burroughs often found him icy cold and parsimonious, they had very many things in common. Bowles was only four years older than Bill, they were both expatriates, both somewhat disoriented individuals in voluntary exile in a potentially hostile environment. They were both escaping from an America where they could not live freely and about which they were both disparaging. They both became writers late in life, though they did not often discuss writing except to praise Conrad, whom both cited as their favorite author. Both had an interest in magic, and both took drugs. Not surprisingly they had much to talk about. They both used kif to unlock the doors to imagination: Bowles said of the final section of The Sheltering Sky that it was written “without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish.”24

  They both also shared an interest in boys, though Bowles was much more reticent about his homosexuality than Burroughs and may have been much less active in Tangier than in his youth. He and Burroughs were pragmatic about sex, both pretending that they had no emotional involvement with the boys they used, but both feeling emotional attachments, then angrily denying them.

  Bowles appears to have had the more promiscuous past. He complained to the composer Aaron Copland in the summer of 1933, “Where in this country can I have thirty-five or forty different people a week, and never risk seeing them again? Yet, in Algeria, it actually was the mean rate. […] I think it’s what I want, so it must be.”25 Another time he joked to Copland, “Did you tell me to or not to sleep with someone different every night? I have forgotten.”26 By the late forties, however, he had stopped having several boys a day, and when Bill met him he had fallen for Ahmed Yacoubi, the model for the young Arab boy, Amar, in Bowles’s The Spider’s House. They met in Fez in 1947. It was Yacoubi whom Burroughs referred to when he reported to Ginsberg on his initial lack of success in meeting Bowles: “Paul Bowles is here, but kept in seclusion by an Arab boy who is insanely jealous, and given to the practice of black magic.”27

  In the spring of 1953, Bowles had taken Yacoubi to Ceylon and India, then back to Italy, where they stayed with Peggy Guggenheim in Venice. This was followed immediately with a trip to the States, where they stayed with the singer Libby Holman in Connecticut. Montgomery Clift was another houseguest, and when he left, Holman transferred her affections to Yacoubi, who responded with enthusiasm. Bowles had derived satisfaction in seeing how an illiterate boy from the Medina in Fez reacted to India (he hated it), but was deeply upset when the experiment of seeing how he fared in American high society went badly wrong. Yacoubi had loved being with Holman; he enjoyed visiting the Stork Club, Cartier’s, the Blue Angel, and stayed on when Bowles returned to Tangier. Unfortunately, Yacoubi apparently felt up Holman’s seven-year-old adopted son, then pushed him in the pool and tried to choke him, clearly seeing him as a rival. Soon Yacoubi was on SS Constitution, first class, bound for Tangier. Astonishingly, Bowles made up with Yacoubi and next took him to Rome with Tennessee Williams, where Williams reported, “Ahmed is torturing Paul by not sleeping with him.”28 In December 1954, Paul took Yacoubi to Ceylon, then on to Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Japan.

  Bowles told Simon Bischoff, “All relationships I ever had, from the beginning, had to do with paying. I never had sexual relationships without pay, even when I was much younger. So I took that for granted. […] [With Yacoubi we] were friends, yes, naturally. But I never expected him to care one way or the other. He didn’t.”29

  Burroughs, however, played a different, more difficult game: he liked to get to know his boys, but not get emotionally involved. He reported to Allen, “I never been so horny in my life as right lately. Like yesterday I had two-hour set-to with Nimón, my latest heart-throb—that’s a way of putting it.”30 Bill used to alternate between an Arab and a Spanish boy, Nimón and Paco. Said Burroughs, “They were hot to go. Of course they want money, they don’t have any money. These old queens that object to paying, its really disgusting.”31 He described Paco to Allen: “My latest number is Spanish, 16, with a smile hit you right in the nuts. I mean, that pure, uncut boy stuff, that young male innocence.”32 He thought that one reason he received so many offers—he claimed ten “attractive” propositions a day—was that everyone knew how generous he had been with Kiki and so he was the “most eligible queer in Greater Tanger.” This much sexual activity began to take its toll. On a visit to his doctor, after finding his buttocks were a bright purple-red color, he was diagnosed with ringworm. “Then he looked at me over his glasses and smiled discreetly… ‘And there seems to be a certain amount of, uh, chafing.’ ”33 Mycota cured him at once.

  Paco was callow, guileless, he had no tact. When Alan Ansen visited, Paco used to tease him by taking off his clothes and sitting in provocative poses, hoping to disconcert him so that he would give him more money. Alan and Bill both had sex with him. In the end Bill succumbed and allowed Paco to move in. It didn’t work, and two months later, by Christmas 1956, Bill told Allen, “Paco, this Spanish kid wind up buggin’ me like I throw him out already.”34 In fact it probably upset Bill a lot to have to do so. Sadly Paco, like Kiki, came to a horrible end. In September 1967, he visited Lourdes, where he robbed and murdered a taxi driver. When the police arrived, he committed suicide. Ansen found it extraordinary that he was in Lourdes, but Paco was a poorly educated Spanish boy, almost certainly Catholic, and therefore racked with guilt and remorse for his “sins.” He went with men out of necessity not desire, which must have caused him enormous conflicts.

  Moroccan prostitutes felt less guilt, although they were also forced into homosexuality by poverty, rather than out of sexual preference. In Moroccan society, to be called a zamel—to take the passive homosexual role—was the worst possible insult. Many of the boys refused to do it. Despite t
he formal disapproval of religious authority and the strict segregation of men and women in Muslim societies, the strong emphasis on virility leads adolescents and unmarried young men to seek sexual outlets with males younger than themselves. It was not so much the action, “getting fucked,” that was disapproved of—this was often done from economic necessity—what was regarded as bad was enjoying it.

  Homosexuality is forbidden in Islamic law: “For the unmarried, one hundred lashes and exile for a year, for the married, one hundred lashes and stoning to death” (Sura IV:15), but “And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls” (Sura LII:24), and “They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders” (Sura LXXVI:19). In any case, the Moroccans always had a more relaxed attitude toward homosexuality than most other Muslim countries (or Christian ones). Long before the arrival of sexual tourism by westerners, as far back as 1632, the Scottish traveler William Lithgow reported that in Fez there were twelve thousand allowed brothels and “three thousand common stewes of sodomitical boyes. Nay, I have seene at mitday, in the very market places, the Moores buggering these filthy carrions, and without shame or punishment go freely away.”35

  Their friends and neighbors understood why they did it: they were poor and their families were hungry. Tahar ben Jelloun in Leaving Tangier quotes the concierge, in what is obviously Paul Bowles’s building, observing the predatory sex tourists who came to Tangier: “This I know that poverty—our friend poverty—leads us to some very sad places. People have to make do with life, that’s how it is, and me, I see everything but I don’t say everything.”36 This was a Moroccan’s critical view of Paul and Jane Bowles. She continues, “They want everything, men and women from the common people, young ones, healthy, preferably from the countryside, who can’t read or write, serving them all day, then servicing them at night. A package deal, and between two pokes, tokes on a nicely packed pipe of kif to help the American write! Tell me your story, he says. I’ll make a novel out of it, you’ll even have your name on the cover: You won’t be able to read it but no matter, you’re a writer like me, except that you’re an illiterate writer, that’s exotic!” A tough critique, but in the decade they were together, there would have been plenty of time for Bowles to teach Yacoubi how to read and write.

  As Bowles didn’t drink, Bill would either visit him at his new apartment in the Edificio San Francisco, at plaza de Navarra, overlooking the Spanish consulate, or they would sometimes meet in a café such as Mme. Porte’s Salon de Thé, in the rue du Statut around the corner from the place de France, an establishment renowned for its pastries. In the morning men outnumbered women but in the afternoon it was the reverse. It was used as a headquarters by Abdelkhalek Torres, the popular Moroccan nationalist leader who appeared at 10:00 a.m. with his faithful acolytes, and many other local and foreign politicians and journalists gathered there. Bill would have observed many of the nationalist leaders here whom he parodied so mercilessly in The Naked Lunch. Sometimes, when asked a difficult question, Bill would quote Mme. Porte: “Je n’ai pas un opinion.” She was the model of discretion and Bill could be too.

  3. “The Jihad Jitters”

  It would have been impossible for Bill to overlook the struggle for independence going on all around him in Morocco, and though he was nominally in favor of it, inasmuch as he found the treatment of the Moroccans by the French utterly repellent, Bill disliked the puritanism and right-wing attitudes that went hand in hand with nationalism. Watching the politicians at work, however, was guaranteed to give rise to some routines. The “Ordinary Men and Women” section in The Naked Lunch came straight from the Socco Chico:

  Luncheon of Nationalist Party on balcony overlooking the Market. Cigars, scotch, polite belches… The Party Leader strides about in a jellaba smoking a cigar and drinking scotch. He wears expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular, hairy legs—overall effect of successful gangster in drag.

  P.L. (pointing dramatically): “Look out there. What do you see?”

  LIEUTENANT: “Huh? Why, I see the Market.”

  P.L.: “No you don’t. You see men and women. Ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks. Leading their ordinary lives. That’s what we need…”

  A street boy climbs over the balcony rail.

  LIEUTENANT: “No, we do not want to buy any used condoms! Cut!”

  P.L.: “Wait!… Come in, my boy. Sit down… Have a cigar… Have a drink.”

  He paces around the boy like an aroused tom cat.

  “What do you think about the French?”

  “Huh?”

  “The French. The Colonial bastards who is sucking your live corpuscles.”

  “Look mister. It cost two hundred francs to suck my corpuscule. Haven’t lowered my rates since the year of the rindpest when all the tourists died, even the Scandinavians.”

  P.L.: “You see? This is pure uncut boy in the street.”

  “You sure can pick ’em, boss.”

  “M.I. never misses.”

  P.L.: “Now look, kid, let’s put it this way. The French have dispossessed you of your birthright.”37

  The Sargasso was Bill’s name for the Café Central on the Petit Socco facing the Fuentes, a restaurant with a long narrow balcony above the café of the same name where people could eat and drink. Burroughs’s attitude was nonjudgmental, noncommittal, like that of Mme. Porte herself. The independence movement grew in size and by October 29, 1956, Bill was able to report to Allen, “This town really has the jihad jitters—jihad means the wholesale slaughter by every Moslem of every unbeliever. Yesterday I am sitting in the Socco and suddenly people start running and all the shop keepers are slamming down the steel shutters of their shops […] so at this point about thirty little children carrying the Moroccan flag troop through the Socco. […] I have a strange feeling here of being outside any social context. I have never known anyplace so relaxing. The possibility of an all-out riot is like a tonic, like ozone in the air: ‘here surely is a song for men like wind in an iron tree.’—Anabasis, more or less.”38

  Bill composed a long song called “The Jihad Jitters”: “The Istiqlal hates me / The guides all berates me / I’m nobody’s sweetheart now…”39

  He told Allen, “I have purchased a machete. If they stage a jihad I’m gonna wrap myself in a dirty sheet and rush out to do some jihading of my own like ‘I comma Luigi. I killa everybody.’ I say it’s nothing but a half-assed jihad that confines itself to unbelievers. […] Like there’s this awful queer guide here name of Charley who keeps insulting poor Dave on the street, saying: ‘Just wait. We’re going to take care of you fucking American queers.’ So come the jihad I will scream ‘Death to the queers!’ and rush out and cut Charley’s head off. And I will shit sure avail myself of the next jihad to take care of the nabor’s dog, the bastard is barking all night. […] I hereby declares the all-out massacre of everybody by everybody else. […] Perhaps come the Jihad I will have to yell ‘Death to the American queers!’ and cut off Dave W’s head.”40

  The Istiqlal Moroccan independence party was founded in 1944 but really became a significant force in April 1947 when Sultan Mohammed V made a historic speech in Tangier calling for freedom and independence from France. After a series of increasingly violent protests and demonstrations, the French reacted in 1952 by deporting Mohammed V and his son, Crown Prince Hassan, to Madagascar. For the first time in forty years there was a riot in Tangier; the police fired on demonstrators in the Grand Socco, killing nine people and injuring eighty or more. A Swiss teenager was beaten to death by a mob who mistook him for being French. In the summer of 1955, fifty-five Moroccans and eleven Europeans died in a riot in Casablanca. Police opened fire on the crowd in Fez and there was a riot in Tangier on August 20. The French could see that their protectorate would not hold, and in October 1955 Mohammed V was recalled to Paris and in November, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of his accessi
on as sultan, he made a triumphant return to Morocco. The anti-Western rhetoric of the independence movement made it obvious that the days of the free zone were numbered and banks began transferring their assets abroad. Tons of gold were flown out and more than 250 businesses closed, causing mass unemployment in what was still a small town. The former luxurious shops on the boulevard Pasteur stood empty, to be taken over in part by cheap tourist outfits. The British and Spanish post offices closed and all bars within a certain distance from mosques were closed: there were a lot of mosques in Tangier, so most bars were near one. Kif was made illegal, making criminals of half the population. Westerners left in droves, and the international banks closed their doors for good. Foreign imports of food and wine were now taxed, putting many foreign provision stores and luxury shops out of business. The days of the old Zone were now over forever, but officially at least the sultan wanted to maintain Tangier’s international community.

  Given that it was becoming increasingly difficult for Europeans in Tangier, it was a good thing that Burroughs had been cultivating his anonymity. He was famously known as el hombre invisible to the Spanish boys in Tangier; this came from a conscious effort on his part to blend in so well that people would not see him, as well as the fact that, in his junk phase, he was gray and spectral-looking. To the Moroccan writer Choukri Mohamed he was rather more sinister than invisible, and possibly to be avoided: “There was always something severe about his bearing. Anyone who saw him then would get the impression that he was a spy surreptitiously gathering information, the collar of his overcoat perpetually raised, his fedora tilted slightly downwards on his forehead, his gaze steady, one hand clutching the front of his coat, the other in his pocket, or both hands plunged deep in the pockets of his coat.”41 But invisibility was the intention.