by Barry Miles
Burroughs made no effort to feed Billy, who was used to regular meals at his grandmother’s table. People in the house ate at different times; very often they would go into town in the evening and eat at a restaurant. Billy would sometimes bring back food or go to the Parade for a burger for lunch. He recounts one time when he did bring back a roast chicken and an apple pie for his dinner but everyone in the house descended on him at the doorway and all he had left was a slice of pie; they were all hungry from smoking hash.9 Bill used the bones to make soup.
Ian took Billy to the Dancing Boy Café on the Medina wall overlooking the harbor where customers sat around on bentwood chairs smoking kif, drinking mint tea, watching the dancing boys on the small stage, and listening to traditional Moroccan music. The café closed at 3:00 a.m. and sometimes they would go on to someone’s house and the festivities would continue until dawn, in time to catch the baker’s boy, wheeling great rounds of bread to the shops. The bread was so hot Billy had to wrap it in his shirt. He would stop at a grocery store and buy fresh butter—made daily because of the heat—before returning home. It was in many ways idyllic, but as Billy wrote, “These were pleasant times but I couldn’t make it; I was too young and found it difficult to get involved.”10 Billy grew a little goatee and took to dressing in black like the hipsters at the Dancing Boy but never felt a part of the scene. He took to wandering the clifftops with a supply of grass and spent a lot of time by himself. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. One day Ian came to his room and observed that he was homesick. “You don’t want to live in a houseful of fags,” Ian told him. He was right. After six months in Tangier, Billy returned to Florida in January 1964, intent on getting his high school diploma. Nothing had been resolved between him and his father.
Throughout his stay relations between them had been stilted and difficult. Bill found himself talking with a stranger he didn’t know at all, and whose interests were entirely foreign to him. The photograph of father and son together taken in early November by Robert Freson for Esquire shows two strangers sitting together: Billy in black, trying to look older than he is, Burroughs, in a Moroccan skull cap, leaning just fractionally in his direction, looking blank.11 Billy clearly admired his father and desperately wanted his approval and friendship, but another side of him blamed him for the death of his mother, for separating him from his half sister, and, most of all, for neglecting him. He was too young to understand his own behavior, and Bill was too reticent and withdrawn to attempt to talk about it. Burroughs was repeating his family’s behavior. He never once heard his father and mother even raise their voices to each other. It was a family characteristic: to make a scene would have been unthinkable. It was just not done.
“We weren’t connecting. Just not connecting, sort of strained. I blame myself very much that I never really leveled with him and explained to him, as best I could, about Joan’s death and the whole circumstances. The feeling of possession and all that. Nothing. I never explained about it at all. He knew all about it, naturally. He was not exactly surly but sort of inaccessible and dead emotionally. When I talked to him it was like nothing was happening.”12 Sometimes Billy could behave in a typically difficult adolescent manner. He could be bored and moody, and Burroughs quickly noticed that any practical suggestion he made, Billy would resist. He told Billy to make sure he didn’t leave his kif and pipe on the table where anyone from the American consulate could walk in and see it. Naturally Billy left it there all the time and Bill would find it and put it away. “Of course I know it’s deliberate, but what can you do when someone has a deliberate flaunting mechanism? Of course he’s making me pay. I was trying to do something that would be constructive for him and it just wasn’t working at all, at all, all!”13
What Burroughs could not understand was Billy’s indifference to Tangier. Burroughs thought he was putting him in contact with another reality; he expected him to be overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place, to be astonished by the Socco Grande, which was then filled with Berbers in from the countryside with their stalls of vegetables and fruit, hot chestnuts, and small cakes beneath the giant ombú shade trees and the water sellers with their curious red hats and brass bells and ornaments and goatskins. But “he didn’t seem to give a shit”; he didn’t want to go anywhere or see anything. He had no enthusiasm or interest whatsoever. Burroughs felt that young people had no sense of wonder anymore, but he was not making enough allowance for Billy’s youth and naiveté. However, just before he left, Billy told Bill something that surprised him. He was just going back to an American high school but he told Bill, “I’m sure that this is where I’ll wind up.” Had he gone to Tangier two years later, things might have been different.
Life with Burroughs was too alien for this straight all-American boy. He never knew how to react. Billy was the object of attention from Jane Bowles, which embarrassed him though she was only being friendly and certainly not looking for sex. Other scenes were just too weird for him to know how to behave, such as when Alan Ansen came to Tangier for the summer and managed to obtain some opium. Bill, Ian, and Mikey, Guy Harloff and his girlfriend Ginette all gathered in Ansen’s room to take it. Bill went into one of his freezing acts with Ginette, not just indifference but a concentrated effort to will her out of the room. Ginette knew what he was doing and threw something at him. He later apologized, but as he was doing so, he was caressing Mikey’s thigh, to Ian’s obvious dismay.
Bill took Billy to the airport for his flight to the States and warned him, “Billy, for godsakes don’t try to take anything in with you.” Billy told him, “Bill, I don’t have anything.” But he had bought some majoun right there in the airport and as soon as he got to the States he was taken to one side and they found it right away. But the customs officers told him, “You’re too young to spend the night in jail. I don’t think this is going to amount to much.” However, from then on, they had his name on their books.
2. Living in the Marshan
Life on calle Larachi was described by Ian Sommerville as “gloomy.” Bill was in a curious frame of mind, doubtless caused by Billy’s presence, but he also had financial worries: the cost of the house was fifteen dollars a month, which was outrageous; a Moroccan would have paid half that. Ian Sommerville was dependent upon Bill financially, and Mikey was still sponging off him even though he was himself wealthy. On top of this was Billy: his food, his drugs and clothing, and, a much larger expense, his transport to and from the States. Alan Ansen tried, clumsily, to help by suggesting to Bill’s old friend James Le Baron Boyle, who was visiting Tangier, that he and Boyle buy Bill a stove so that he could eat in and save money. Boyle refused and there was embarrassment all around. Some of the gloom of the house was alleviated by Leslie Eggleston, who was oblivious to everyone’s problems and chattered away happily, his animated gossip helping to dispel sour moods. Stuart Gordon, with his tales of the Ohio Mafia, was also a frequent visitor that summer. Alan Ansen thought that Bill was in a very strange mood, particularly when Burroughs made him declare that he was a stronger personality than Ansen and asked him if he would commit murder for him. Ansen told him no, he wouldn’t.
This was also the summer when Antony Balch was around. He filmed the Tangier sequences for Towers Open Fire, with Ian and Mikey opening umbrellas. He and Bill cruised the bars. It was when Bill was living in the Marshan that Paul Bowles took Alfred Chester to meet Burroughs. Chester wanted Burroughs to write a blurb for his book, The Exquisite Corpse. Bill said, “Sure, I’ll write one,” and scribbled, “Alfred Chester writes like white lightning.” Many of Burroughs’s future blurbs were written in the same spirit, without reading the books. Bowles, who saw a lot of Burroughs that year, considered Burroughs to have an addictive personality. Bowles thought it was bad form to drink and smoke at the same time, but his image of Burroughs was that he always had a highball glass of whiskey, stirring it with his long finger in the glass, and a big cheroot of kif—Bowles never used the word “joint.” Bill would light a kif cig
arette and rest it on the mantelpiece; he would take a drink, spilling it on himself, pull out his kif, and roll himself another one, ignoring the one already burning down. He would get falling-down drunk, but claimed he knew how to fall so that he never hurt himself. Bowles made sure that he always had some kif of his own with him as Bill’s was unsmokable because it was full of seeds and stems.14
Just after Christmas, on December 28, Jane Bowles gave a dinner party. At first she was worried about whether to invite Bill, telling John Hopkins, “You know the way he drinks,” but in the event Bill behaved impeccably. He arrived wearing his black suit, a white shirt with a narrow black tie, and polished black shoes. Jane was relieved. There were oysters from Oualidia, poussin de bois (a code name for illegally caught partridge, sold under the counter at the market), and real French champagne.15 Bill enjoyed himself.
The problems at 4 calle Larachi did not manifest themselves badly until after Billy had left. That winter the kerosene heaters smoked and went out, filling the house with fumes; the villa guard from Arabian Nights over the road came to work for them, but continually demanded more money while stealing all their shirts and towels; the flat roof leaked and the walls of flaking plaster were alive with electricity. Bill would get a shock when he pushed pins into a wall-mounted map of Tangier to indicate the location of photographs on a photo layout. Snails crawled down the walls, leaving iridescent trails of slime, and green mold formed on their shoes and coat lapels.16
Problems were compounded by the antagonism of the local people, who expected them to employ staff. The children were sneering and hostile, always banging on the door to sell flowers or to ask for cigarettes or money. One beggar woman pounded on the door at seven in the morning. Rocks and even a spinning top crashed through their skylight window. Stones were thrown at the door every day, and every time they stepped outside they would be showered with insults and curses. Eventually Bill and Ian took to drawing lots to see who would run the gauntlet to go out and buy provisions. Thanks to Girodias, who had stolen the $5,000 advance sent to Burroughs by Grove Press, they had no money to move out.
One evening Burroughs walked out onto the balcony and there were about fifty Arab women gathered in the street, looking up at him. He raised his hands in a threatening gesture and they all scattered like rabbits. Burroughs later commented, “That gesture, it works or it don’t work. If it doesn’t work you’re in trouble, end up like Orpheus torn to pieces by mad women.”17 Ian felt the harassment more than Bill. He had originally liked the idea of sharing a house with Bill, but quickly became agitated and paranoid, leading to what must have been a full-scale paranoid episode. Bill was no longer attracted to Ian and was openly flirting with Mikey and other boys. Ian was still very attracted to Bill but was troubled by Bill’s lack of interest and worried about his future. He had no money and was entirely dependent upon Bill’s largesse. Ian’s insecurity and nervousness were greatly exacerbated by the behavior of the locals, but they had already been amplified by the arrival of Billy. Burroughs had always been to some degree a father figure to Ian, and so Billy was on one level a rival. However, seeing how badly Bill dealt with his real son could do nothing but fill him with dismay. Ian had a tough carapace, but Burroughs was so careless in his relationships that he often hurt the ones he loved.18
3. Cut-Ups, Columns, and Grids
Despite the chaos surrounding him, Burroughs worked assiduously on Nova Express and its associated cut-up experiments. He was now moving squares of text, usually a quarter page of typewriting, against the printed pages of other writers: Truman Capote, Evelyn Waugh, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Graham Greene’s The Man Within, as well as letters and newspaper clippings. One six-page document was titled “Cut-Ups with Jean Genet and Writing in His Style.” Early in 1964, he applied a new technique known as “grids” to a long series of cut-ups based on material from issue 2719 of LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima’s Floating Bear poetry newsletter and to the extensive Times Literary Supplement correspondence that resulted from an unfavorable review of Burroughs’s three Olympia books in the November 14, 1963, issue. The texts were typed out and cut up in the normal way. The resulting manuscript was then divided into a grid of anything between nine and thirty-six squares by thick colored lines, usually red or blue. He sometimes used wavy lines, one of the first suggestions that the formal appearance of the page was in itself important. A thirty-six-grid page would usually consist of four squares across by nine deep. Sometimes the top four would be numbered. Another series using the same source material was divided into one-inch squares by blue or red lines. These squares could then be visited in a random order and words or phrases taken from them and typed out on a fresh sheet of paper. It was yet another way of creating unexpected juxtapositions.
In Burroughs’s archives in the New York Public Library there is a folder labeled “Grids and Experiments” containing more than sixty pages of grids arranged in different sizes ranging from thirty-two or thirty-six squares to as many as 273, 117 of which were left blank. The number of squares varies enormously, from twenty-eight, thirty, forty, forty-five, and so on. Burroughs explored every permutation just in case it had something to offer. The grid is sometimes drawn in a blue wavy line, by red and blue lines, or by carefully ruled black lines. Orange, green, and black crayons are used as well as green and red ink, making the manuscripts very interesting visually. One text is divided into a geometric pattern of triangles and rectangles. Some squares are filled with calligraphy. One text is divided into ten columns by thin blue lines; another is typed in squares but lacks the grid squares. Sometimes the squares are ticked or numbered, presumably meaning their contents had been used in some way.
Another form of text presentation, begun in February 1964, was the “three-column” technique. Burroughs noticed that newspapers are printed almost as cut-ups, in long narrow columns, so that inevitably you unconsciously read across columns to some of the adjacent columns as you read down. Information from the two adjacent columns “leaked through,” subtly changing the meaning of the central text. He wrote Brion Gysin, “The newspapers and newsmagazines are cut ups. This is the secret of their power to mould thought feeling and subsequent events. We propose to apply the same format to non-statistical quality material. Art if you will. I mean by art a way out to space. The cut ups are being used now by the press to keep you locked in time and word.”20 He suggested setting up Rimbaud, Shakespeare, and Conrad in newspaper column format. He was to work with the three-column format for the next eighteen months. He wrote, “I extend the newspaper and magazine format to fictional material. When you read words in columns you are reading your future reading, that is, you are reading on a subliminal level other columns that you will later consciously experience you have already read. Also the presentation in columns enables the writer to present three or more streams of narrative running concurrently. This opens possibilities of contrast accompaniment and counterpoint. The same situation can be viewed from three different columns at the same time.”21 In other words, he finally found a way to present his material in the same way as he presented his photographic collages: in series, with small but significant variations between each.
4. Television with Dan Farson
On January 5, 1964, Burroughs went from Tangier to London to make his first appearance on television in a program with Dan Farson for Granada Television. The immigration authorities limited his visit to fourteen days with no reason given, crossing out the three months allowed on his visa. Bill was accompanied by Mikey, who could afford his own airfare. Ian stayed behind to guard the house. Burroughs was put up at the Devonshire Hotel at 7 Princes Square in Bayswater, an address that occurred in later books as the result of cut-ups and memory: “Back in England, find out my one contact has died six months ago. Check into anonymous Boardinghouse in Prince’s Square, Bayswater.”22 The program, a live talk show, was on the eighth. It consisted of Dan Farson, a celebrated alcoholic, talking to Alexand
er Trocchi, a celebrated junkie, and Burroughs, who was not on anything. Bill knew Farson from visiting his pub with Francis Bacon, so it was a convivial affair. During the intermission, there was a telephone call for Burroughs. It was someone named Al Feigerberg whom Bill knew from Mexico City. There had been a joke in Mexico City that “wherever you are in the world, Feigerberg always turns up.” He was now living in London and watching Bill on TV. Feigerberg was a tall, heavy Swede, a very aggressive, far-right racist, who borrowed money every chance he got. He held Mexicans in contempt, but it was blacks that aroused his greatest ire. “They breed like rabbits,” he said. “Jungle bunnies with their bongo knives down there, you wanna watch out.” Bill invited him to visit. He came to the hotel and gave Mikey Portman a bad scare. Mikey, who preferred the company of black people, sexually and in every other way, had reacted critically to Feigerberg’s outrageous rightist opinions. Bill had gone out to get some liquor and came back to find Mikey cowering in a chair with Feigerberg towering over him, saying, “One more word out of you, clunk, and I’m gonna slap the living shit out of you!”
Burroughs was pleased to see Trocchi again, and they spent some time together, during which Trocchi introduced him to his landlord, Michael de Freitas, who later became Michael X, and a self-proclaimed West Indian community leader. Years later, Burroughs was involved in a campaign to save Michael from the death penalty after he was convicted of the murder of Joe Skerritt in 1972. He was hanged in Trinidad on May 16, 1975. Burroughs never doubted his guilt, but was vehemently opposed to capital punishment. Trocchi also introduced him to the psychiatrist Ronald Laing, whose company Bill enjoyed, Laing being an enthusiastic drinker. But the most productive meeting during this trip to London was with Jeff Nuttall, the publisher of a mimeographed literary magazine called My Own Mag.
