Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs said that Stuart Gordon, who was now living in Jim Wyllie’s house in the Kasbah, taught him two ways to make yourself invisible as practiced by a mafioso in Columbus, Ohio. The first was to give no one any reason to look at you, and the other was to see everybody before they saw you. Bill practiced getting from the Villa Muniria to the place de France without being seen. He walked down the street, his eyes swiveling, checking everybody out. He found the latter method to be a very effective exercise. Sometimes he could get through a whole line of guides without anyone seeing him, which in Tangier was a very good test. “You don’t give anyone any reason to see you. There are people whose job it is to see you. If you see everybody before they see you, they won’t see you!”42 He wrote in The Wild Boys, “Disguise is not a false beard dyed hair and plastic surgery. Disguise is clothes and bearing and behavior that leaves no questions unanswered… American tourist with a wife he calls ‘Mother’… old queen on the make… dirty beatnik… marginal film producer… Every article of my luggage and clothing is carefully planned to create a certain impression. Behind this impression I can operate without interference for a time. Just so long and long enough. So I walk down Boulevard Pasteur handing out money to guides and shoeshine boys […] Nobody gets through my cover I assure you. There is no better cover than a nuisance and a bore. When you see my cover you don’t look further. You look the other way fast.”43

  He told Paul Bowles that he had perfected a system of rays by which he could remain invisible. Said Bowles, “I said, ‘How, Bill, I don’t understand. I mean, you realize it sounds impossible.’ ‘I know it sounds impossible,’ he said, and then explained that he would put himself in such a state at a certain moment that he was literally invisible and no one could see him. Thanks to low-grade violet rays. He claimed he could go all the way to the place de France without being seen.” Bowles assumed it had similarities to Moroccan trance dancing where the dancers leave their body behind and have an out-of-body experience.44

  Bill’s invisibility did him little good in December, however, when three men followed him home and produced a twelve-inch shiv. Instead of swooning and giving in, Bill—no doubt drunkenly—hauled out his blade, “which opens with a series of ominous clicks and it got six inches.” Remembering his close reading of Commando Tactics, he advanced in a knife fighter’s crouch, left hand out to parry. The would-be robbers retreated, then they burst out laughing, “and one of them comes back to mooch a dime off me which I hand him at arm’s length.”45

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I figure it will require the orgones of ten thousand boys to finish my sexology. I assume the frightful responsibility of the creative artist.1

  1. More Orgones

  For some time, Bill had been asking Allen to come to Tangier to help him edit his book. When Allen suggested bringing Peter Orlovsky and Jack Kerouac along, Bill said “by all means” and assured him, “I will not be jealous. In fact jealousy is one of the emotions of which I am no longer capable. […] Self pity is also impossible for me.”2 Kerouac had wanted to accompany Allen and Peter but had seen reports of the independence riots and now had cold feet. That October Bill assured them, “Jack must not be afraid of Arabs. I am in the position to officially abolish fear. The chaos in Morocco is beautiful.”3

  Kerouac took a lot of persuading that he would be safe, and Bill had to write a number of times to reassure him. In January he was still dithering. Bill wrote, “I will say it again and say it slow: TANGER IS AS SAFE AS ANY TOWN I EVER LIVE IN. I feel a chill of fear and horror at thought of the random drunken violence stalking the streets and bars and parks and subways of America. […] ARABS ARE NOT VIOLENT. […] They do not attack people for kicks or fight for kicks like Americans.”4

  Now that Bill had enough space, in January 1957 he began to build an orgone accumulator. He had been deprived of the benefit since he stayed with Allen in New York. He kept it in the garden of the Muniria and would sit in it, doubled up, smoking kif for an hour a day. Said Paul Bowles, “He kept after me to go out and sit in it. ‘Just sit there and you’ll feel different when you come out,’ he said. It was a bitter cold winter night, and I did, and of course I did feel different when I came out—I was shivering. The box was like a dog kennel—I’ll never know why he believed in that. Some people believe in astrology too. It doesn’t seem compatible with what one knows about science.”5 Strange stories circulated around Tangier about Bill’s orgone accumulator. In the summer of 1954 he had made “an amazing discovery.” When he was high on kif and lying next to Kiki, his ideas came faster, and better than at other times. “It’s like he is some kind of orgone battery that tunes me in,” he told Allen. “I have tested this many times. The difference is palpable. Trouble is I don’t feel like, and it isn’t appropriate, to get up and write them down.”6 He did commit enough ideas to paper to be convinced of the theory. He reported that “he is sort of a medium through which I get ideas.”

  Naturally Bill turned the whole thing into a routine: “One after the other his boys were drained of their orgones and cast aside, dragging themselves about like terminal hookworm-malaria-malnutrition cases.

  “I don’t know why, but I just feel sorta tired after I make it with that writing feller…”7

  Bill appears to have extended this theory—that boys have an abundance of orgones—and attempted to store them, at least temporarily, in his orgone accumulator. The evidence comes from Colonel Gerald Richardson, the British chief of police, who wrote, “One of them was known as Morphine Minnie. He was an educated American, a remittance man, like so many of them. It was sometimes said that he was putting up a fight against the habit. I suppose many of them did. […] Morphine Minnie certainly got up to some strange tricks. He had a large box specially made for him with holes punched in the sides: in appearance it was like a very long cabin trunk. On occasions he would induce a young boy to enter the box and lie down in it—fully clothed, I hasten to add—and he would put the lid back on. After he judged the boy had been in there long enough he would open up the box again, let the boy out and send him on his way. He would then get into the box himself, and lie down. When he later emerged, so far as I was able to understand it—and he was a strenuous advocate for the practice—he was supposed to be rejuvenated.”8 Clearly Richardson had not seen the device, as you sit in it, not lie down, but it helped confirm Bill’s reputation for eccentricity in the town.

  One of the revelations that came to Bill in his junk-free state was that he now found how emphatically he disapproved of stealing, or of any criminal activities, carefully distinguishing between criminal acts and illegal acts. He despised crimes against property and against the person of others. “And I used to admire gangsters. Good God,”9 he exclaimed to Allen. This was quite a profound change in position given his background in petty crime and association with Huncke, Phil the Sailor, Bob Brandinburg, and the rest.

  He was also tuning in to the all-pervasive spiritual atmosphere of Tangier, and made the surprising confession, “My religious conversion now complete. I am neither a Moslem nor a Christian, but I owe a great debt to Islam and could never have made my connection with God ANYWHERE BUT HERE. […] And I realize how much of Islam I have absorbed by Osmosis without spitting a word of their appalling language. I will get to that when I, ah, have a free moment. […] I have never even glimpsed peace of mind before I read the real meaning of ‘It is As Allah Wills.’ Relax, you make it or you don’t, and since realizing that, whatever I want comes to me. If I want a boy, he knocks on my door, etc.”10

  This appears to have been the high point of Burroughs’s writing career in terms of ease of writing. Never before had he been so possessed of the muse. “It is coming so fast I can’t hardly get it down, and shakes me like a great black wind through the bones,” he told Allen, and, “I live in a constant state of routine. I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all. […] There is something special about Tanger. It is the only place when I am there I don’t want to be anypl
ace else. No stasis horrors here. And the beauty of this town that consists in changing combinations.”11

  Not only that, but his sex life was also going strong. “Interzone 150 pages, all new, comes like dictation—I hardly get time out to eat and fuck. […] Tanger is the place in the World today where the dream breaks through. […] I had two boys that afternoon come to my room, and I am about throw them out they interrupt the Great Work […] So one says let’s make it—‘Let’s make it three ways.’ So Pepe fuck me, I fuck Pepe and Poco fuck me at the same time—it’s great in the middle, just relax and let the man behind shove you up the front ass hole. […] So that’s Africa, son. […] Many times I don’t have the slightest memory of what I wrote yesterday until I read it over, it is practically automatic writing.”12

  By mid-February 1957, Bill was writing “The Word,” a long prose poem of such majoun-inspired density that most people found it unreadable. He told Allen, “As you see I am running more and more to prose poems and no straight narrative in over a month.”13 Two weeks earlier he had revealed, “I have been hitting the majoun pretty heavy of late,”14 and it showed. He edited “The Word” down severely, but only a few pages of it finished up in The Naked Lunch, unlike most of the routines from Tangier, most of which entered the book more or less intact as written.

  Everything seemed to be going his way. The introduction of the Moroccan franc to replace the peseta as currency went in Bill’s favor. “The dollar is going up like a beeyutiful bird,” Bill reported. “I really love Tanger and never feel like this about any other place. Such beauty, but more than that, it’s like the dream, the other dimension, is always breaking through.”15 He appeared to be in good form to receive Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Alan Ansen, who were about to descend on him to knock Interzone—as The Naked Lunch was still known—into shape.

  2. Interzone

  In mid-February 1957, Jack Kerouac left New York Harbor on SS Slovenija, a Yugoslavian freighter, bound for Tangier. On arrival, his initial mood was elation as Bill showed him around the Kasbah and they sat smoking kif in outdoor cafés without fear of arrest. Bill arranged for Jack to have room number 8 on the roof with a terrace facing the bay for twenty dollars a month, and Jack unpacked his knapsack and settled in. He wrote excitedly to his editor Malcolm Cowley, “Together we take long walks over the green hills in back of the Casbah and watch the fantastic sunsets over Moroccan fields where little burros trot, men in robes, women in veils […] we brew tea and have long talks, go rowing in bay.”16 He developed a taste for Málaga wine at twenty-eight cents a liter that he designated “the most delicious wine in the world” and brewed coffee and boiled eggs in his room over an alcohol stove. He complained that the veiled Arab whores charged three dollars to come to his room when he was used to paying only fifty cents in Mexico City but told Cowley, “O they are passionate & sweet.” He wrote up his experiences, thinly disguised, in Desolation Angels. He described hanging around in Bill’s room while he wrote; “often, while typing out his story, he’d suddenly double up in laughter at what he’d done and sometimes roll on the floor.” Sometimes Bill would whip out his pen and start scribbling on the typewritten pages, annotating them with further ideas, which he then threw over his shoulder as he finished each one. The floor was littered with pages of manuscript, covered in his spidery handwriting. He told Kerouac, as reported in Desolation Angels and so maybe elaborated upon, “I’m shitting out my educated Midwest background for once and for all. It’s a matter of catharsis where I say the most horrible thing I can think of. […] By the time I finish this book I’ll be pure as an angel, my dear.”17 Jack was a fast, accurate typist and offered to help type up Bill’s manuscript but found himself strangely affected by Bill’s prose. “When I undertook to start typing it neatly double space for his publishers the following week I had horrible nightmares in my roof room—like of pulling out endless bolognas from my mouth, from my very entrails, feet of it, pulling and pulling out all the horror of what Bull [Burroughs] saw, and wrote.”18 Jack tried to get out of typing any more, but Bill persuaded him to keep at it, and as a reward for completing the first two sections bought him a small kerosene stove in the Medina because Jack’s room was cold at night.

  At 4:00 p.m., Bill would reach for the Fundador, a Spanish brandy from Jerez. His friends Paul Lund, Dave Woolman, and Eric Gifford would stop by, and the evening would begin. Over the years Paul Lund had become one of Bill’s best friends. Bill found his stories of Britain’s criminal underworld particularly amusing: “He had all his funny stories: ‘Don’t worry about ’im, we’ve put ’im down the marl hole.’ The English gangster scene is so hard and brutal, compared to the American.”19 Bill knew about marl holes because they were also found in the limestone country outside St. Louis. Kerouac called Lund “John Banks” in Desolation Angels. He said that Bill “just loved him” and recalled that Bill “always had a favorite raconteur he’d found someplace to regale him with marvelous stories at cocktail time.”20 After numerous drinks and tall stories from all involved, Jack and Bill would head off to dinner in a good French restaurant. Kerouac mentions eating at the Paname, a tiny basement restaurant run by Paul Toton, who had previously worked at La Pyramide in Vienne. He specialized in steak tartare and langouste. Burroughs commented that Paul Bowles thought it was “an outrageous extravagance going to the Paname and paying two dollars to get a magnificent partridge because he doesn’t eat, doesn’t care anything about food.” Bowles said, “He spends more money on food than most of us Tangerines, I’ve noticed; perhaps he has more to spend—I don’t know—but the fact remains that he insists on eating well.”21 Bowles, who was famously parsimonious, regularly dined at Tony Dutch’s café, where Burroughs also often ate, because there a meal only cost thirty cents. Other places Burroughs liked at the time included Michel Maslenikov’s Volga in the Rif Hotel on the bayside avenida de España, which specialized in borscht and chicken Kiev. There Bill liked the smoked fish and beef Stroganoff, and another favored French place was Grenouille on rue Rembrandt.

  Bill’s experience with the would-be muggers who had backed off laughing when he retaliated by pulling his own knife appears to have unsettled him. Possibly as a way of showing off to Kerouac, he behaved in such a belligerent way in public that Kerouac was alarmed. He would take out his switchblade in the street and click it open and shut and push his way rudely through groups of pedestrians. Kerouac wrote that “suddenly he walked right through a bunch of Arabs on the sidewalk, making them split on both sides, muttering and swinging his arms with a vigorous unnatural pumping motion. ‘Just push ’em aside, the little pricks,’ ”22 he told Jack. Fortunately his aggression was not reciprocated.

  Bill’s equanimity was disturbed by the imminent arrival of Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac describes how after dinner, standing on the roof terrace outside Jack’s room, Bill pulled out his binoculars and stared out to sea, asking, “When will he get here?”23 To Jack’s surprise, Bill began crying on his shoulder. “He’s really crying and he really means it,” Kerouac wrote.

  Bill questioned Jack about Peter Orlovsky, demanding to know what he looked like. Kerouac wrote that he drew a portrait in pencil, but Bill was not convinced and instead suggested, “Let’s go down to my room and kick the gong around.” According to Kerouac, they had earlier scored opium from a man in a red fez in the Socco Chico, which they smoked using an old olive oil can with a hole in it for the bowl and another for the mouth. In fact this was hashish. Burroughs explained that “there’s an old black guy that hung around the Socco Chico and he sold us some bad hash and several people either went nuts or became sick from smoking this shit. Now it looked gray, it was kind of metallic-looking, I didn’t like the looks of it. And Jack started smoking this stuff and he came down with a violent diarrhea with blood.”24 One person, Jim Monte, had a complete breakdown and had to be repatriated to New York. Kerouac wrote that he lay in bed for twenty-four or maybe thirty-six hours, staring at the ceiling and occasionally gettin
g up to vomit in the hall toilet. The experience reversed his opinion of Tangier completely. “And I had really liked Tangiers,” he wrote. But now he wrote, “On the opium overdose I had snarling dreary thoughts about all Africa, all Europe, the world—all I wanted somehow was Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen in America. […] So by the time Allen and Peter finally arrived for their big triumphant reunion with us in Africa it was too late.”25

  Burroughs had no memory of Jack’s initial positive reaction, only his post–hash overdose reaction. “Jack just hated Tangiers, it made him very paranoid. He wasn’t happy there, he just had an awful time. The guides bothered him, he was bothered by the whole thing, he didn’t like anything outside of America.”26

  Bill and Jack were waiting, waving, on the harbor wall in the sun on March 23, 1957, when Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky arrived. The excitement was too much for Bill, who quickly became very drunk. He began waving his machete about until Allen told him to stop because he was frightening everybody.

  Ginsberg was at the height of his powers. He was thirty, filled with energy, “Howl” had recently been published and was causing waves in literary circles. Allen wanted to do everything, see all the sights, explore the Medina and the Kasbah, visit the circus, swim in the harbor, explore the countryside, visit Fez. Bill’s orderly life of rowing and writing, drinks at 4:00 p.m. and then dinner was turned completely upside down. They washed balls of Bill’s majoun down with hot tea and stayed up half the night talking. Bill was very proud of his recipe for majoun: two pounds finely chopped kif, half pound unsalted butter, half pound ground wheat grain, quarter pound finely chopped dates, quarter pound finely chopped dried figs, quarter pound finely chopped walnuts, one ounce caraway seeds, one ounce aniseed, one pound honey, ground cinnamon, and half a ground nutmeg. (Two or three of these flavoring ingredients were usually left out.)27 Mix together and cook in a frying pan until it was a brown paste or became the “consistency of sticky shit,” as Ginsberg described it. Rolled in balls and popped into the mouth or spread on crackers, two spoonfuls would see you through the night.