Chapter Twenty-Two

We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

—CARSON MCCULLERS¹

1. Bill and the Boys

Tangier was very important. It was here that Burroughs really became a writer. Most of The Naked Lunch and Interzone was written here; the “Talking Asshole” routine, Dr. Benway, Marv and Clem, A.J. were all developed here. It was where Bill achieved happiness for the first time since the killing of Joan, but it was also where he was to endure his worst ever phase of drug addiction.

From Rome Bill had gone to Naples, then taken a boat to Algeciras from Sicily on January 4, 1954, docking en route at Syracuse, Malta, and Barcelona. It was a ten-day voyage, tourist class, and Bill had to share a cabin with four other people. It was awful. From Algeciras he took the ferry across the strait to Tangier. From the sea, Tangier looked like a collection of whitewashed blocks, like a box of sugar cubes scattered over a series of low hills; an animated Cézanne. At the port, he was met by the usual squabbling mob of “guides,” who soon directed him to a hotel. The population at that time was more or less segregated: the Moors, Tanjawis, in the Medina, and the Europeans, Tangerinos, living in the New Town, where the Moroccans rarely went. Bill opted for the Medina.

Tangier then was unique in the world: an international zone in a French colony, run collectively by eight nations and with local representation. It challenged the very notion of the nation-state; it also challenged the financial certainties that most countries, including the United States, operated under. In Tangier there was freedom from taxes, freedom to exchange the world’s currencies, there were no customs duties on goods in transit, and anyone could trade in gold or start a company and trade in secret. No visa was needed to enter and you could stay as long as you liked.

The International Zone was run by the Big Four Committee of French, British, Italian, and Spanish ministers. The committee had the final say on all issues, though the Zone was nominally controlled by the administrator, a puppet governor. By law he had to be Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, or Swedish, and held office for two years on a rotating basis. Each nation had its own judge: two French, two Spanish, one each from Belgium, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Morocco, and the United States. They were responsible for the administration of the law regarding disputes between foreigners and Moroccans, and foreigners with each other. The Americans, who were not part of the committee, had a unique system in which they alone tried and judged their own people (meaning that a Moroccan was bound to lose in a dispute with an American). As capital of the International Zone, Tangier had fifty-two banks, and the boulevard Pasteur was lined with the booths of money-changers.

Tangier had a population of 180,000, of which 100,000 were Moors. The city was surrounded by bidonvilles, shakily constructed from sheets of cardboard and petrol cans, with old rags to caulk the ramshackle walls. There was no drainage, water, heating, or light, and little protection from the incessant rains of winter or the icy nights. There was no income tax and therefore no money for social services. Fewer than one in ten children attended primary school. A laborer’s wage was capped at thirty pesetas a day, leaving no possibility for advancement. At the time of writing this book, more than 60 percent of the population is still illiterate.

Americans of Bill’s generation arrived in Tangier with a preconceived notion of Morocco, based in part upon popular fiction and Hollywood films: Robert Hichens’s Garden of Allah (1904), set in Algeria, and the classic 1936 version starring Marlene Dietrich; P. C. Wren’s French Foreign Legion adventure Beau Geste, filmed in 1926 with Ronald Colman and William Powell, and again in 1939 with Gary Cooper and Ray Milland; Edith Hull’s The Sheik (1919), which launched Rudolph Valentino’s career when filmed by Paramount in 1921; and many others, including Michael Curtiz’s film Casablanca (1942); Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much starring Peter Lorre (1934, remade by Hitchcock in 1956 with James Stewart and Doris Day); and a torrent of popular novels such as Edith Hull’s Sons of the Sheik (1925) and The Captive of the Sahara (1931).

Bill headed for the Socco Chico to look for boys. His hotel would not permit visitors to his room and there were no cheap hotels for the purpose; as soon as the proprietors saw what the deal was, they upped their prices, and the boys didn’t like hanging around in public. Burroughs told Ginsberg, “Ali is getting worried about his standing in the shoe-shine set. […] He thumps his little scrawny chest and says ‘I am a man.’ Oh God! Such shit I could hear in Clayton, Mo.” He was unable to score for opium, and the marijuana he bought was rough and burned his throat. He told Allen, “I like Tanger less all the time.”2 (Burroughs always used the official French spelling: Tanger.)

He didn’t know anyone at all. He had gone to Tangier, attracted by reading Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down and The Sheltering Sky, but Bowles was away and Burroughs was unable to find the supposed writers’ colony. His immediate reaction was to blame Bowles: “What’s all this old Moslem culture shit? One thing I have learned. I know what Arabs do all day and all night. They sit around smoking cut weed and playing some silly card game. And don’t ever fall for this inscrutable oriental shit like Bowles puts down (that shameless faker). They are just a gabby, gossipy simple-minded, lazy crew of citizens.”³

Within a few days he met a Spanish boy who rented him a room in a small house in the cerrado de Medellin, a dead-end passage among the narrow alleyways and workshops of the medieval walled city. He lived there for about a month while he took his bearings. A week after arriving he attended an art opening of paintings by Brion Gysin at the Hotel Rembrandt on boulevard Pasteur but couldn’t connect with him. Burroughs: “He didn’t exactly snub me but he made it quite clear that he didn’t want anything to do with me. He later said it was because he was into Arabs and I was into Spanish, and that was a bad mix.”⁴ Bill had both Spanish and Moroccan boyfriends but after so much time in Mexico found it easier to speak Spanish than French, the colonial language of Morocco, and was more at home with Spanish culture.

By now Burroughs had found the right bars—Dean’s and the Parade—but had not yet adopted his chameleon role and adjusted to fit in. “The most loathsome types produced by the land of the free are represented in the American Colony of Tanger. There are like 2 American bars. No 1 I hit dead cold sober at 1 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Horrible vista of loud-mouthed, red-faced drunks, falling off bar stools, puking in corners, a Céline nightmare. Bar No 2 is stocked with the dreariest breed of piss elegant, cagy queens. […] Nowadays I spend my time smoking weed with shoeshine boys in Arab cafés. Their manners are better and their conversation quite as interesting.”⁵

However, things quickly improved: “I have a room in the best district for 50 cents a day,”⁶ a meal in the Medina was twenty cents, boys cost a dollar or less. Bill always protected himself with Aureomycin pro(phylactic), an antibiotic cream, which was expensive at three dollars “for adequate pro coverage fore and aft.” The room was in Anthony “Tony Dutch” Reithorst’s male brothel at 1 calle de los Arcos, now renamed rue Khayattine. It was on the corner with the rue des Chrétiens, now the rue des Almohades. Calle de los Arcos was a narrow alleyway beginning in an archway in the Socco Chico, then running behind the Café Central. Tony ran a string of Spanish boys but could get you anything you wanted. He was pale and portly, with a cherubic face, dressed neatly in a suit and tie, and was often seen sitting outside cafés in the Medina or walking his two poodles. He was sometimes accompanied by a beautiful woman, a friend of his who provided young women for other women. Tony rented two of his small colorless rooms to guests, lived in a third, and used the backroom kitchen-restaurant as the waiting room for the assignations he set up for English, American, and German tourists. There he offered lunch to all the madams from the Black Cat and the legal whorehouses. There was little that went on in the Tangier sex business that Tony didn’t know about or have a hand in, and it didn’t do to cross him. He had a heavy Dutch accent and spoke of the Arabs as the “Arabics.” Burroughs remembered Tony once told him a story that ended, “And in this house there was living also one dirty whore and she sleep with my poy. But the police come and take her to the prison and that’s what she get to sleep with my poy.”7 A month after he arrived Bill was able to report to Allen Ginsberg that he had been to bed with three Arabs since he arrived but was unable to tell them apart. In fact he wondered if it might have been the same boy. “Next time I’ll notch one of his ears.”⁸ By April 22 he was already with Kiki, a Spanish boy who was to feature in his dreams for the rest of his life.

Typically, we are never told Kiki’s surname; he is just a boy. His father had been killed in Spain by the Fascists in the Civil War, and the persecution continued in Morocco: the Spanish occupied Tangier in World War II and shot all the Republican supporters they could find. Burroughs, normally the most apolitical of men, was always clear in his condemnation of Franco: “And America supports that lousy bastard who is no better than Hitler!”⁹ If his father had died then, Kiki must have been fifteen to eighteen years of age when he met Burroughs.

One of the first people Burroughs met in Tangier was David Woolman, who lived in the room next to his at Tony Dutch’s brothel. He was an adopted boy from a well-off family in Indiana who had been an air force captain during the Korean War. He was tall, slim, muscular, with fair hair and a high-pitched, whiny voice, described by Alan Ansen as “very outer-directed, also liked small boys.” He appears in The Naked Lunch as Marv. He was effeminate and superficial, or at least pretended to be. He wrote two columns for the Casablanca-based weekly Moroccan Courier: “Socco Chico” about Tangier, and “Chips Off the Old Rock” about Gibraltar, and, as Barnaby Bliss, contributed a weekly gossip column, “The Spirit of St. Louis,” to the Tangier Gazette. He was to write the standard history of the Rif Wars, Rebels in the Rif: Abd el Krim and the Rif Rebellion.10 Bill found him fun to be with. To fill his columns Woolman was always out on the town, and Bill often accompanied him. Restaurants always gave them a 10 percent discount in the hope that Dave would mention them. Bill enjoyed Woolman’s company, but was always disturbed by his preference for very young boys. Bill told Allen, “No lower age limit on boys. An American I know keeps a 13 year old kid. ‘If they can walk I don’t want them.’ ”¹¹

Bill and Dave paid sixty cents to watch two Arab boys screw each other. The boys protested, saying, “Molo,” it’s bad, it’s bad to do this, then they began giggling. David said, “Sí, molo schmolo, todos molos,” all bad.¹² Bill reported the incident at length to Allen Ginsberg: “We demanded semen too, no half-assed screwing. So I asked Marv: ‘Do you think they will do it?’ and he says: ‘I think so. They are hungry.’ They did it. Made me feel sorta like a dirty old man.”¹³ Bill used his report almost verbatim in the “Black Meat” section of The Naked Lunch.¹⁴ “We took the two boys back to Dave’s room and told them what we wanted. After some coy giggling they agreed, and took off their ragged clothes. Both of them had slender, beautiful boy bodies. Dave was M.C. he pointed to Boy 2 and said: ‘All right, you screw him first’ pointing to Boy 1. Boy 1 lay down on his stomach on the bed. Boy 2 rubbed spit on his prick and began screwing him. Dave said: ‘Leche we want leche.’ Leche means milk, Spanish for jissum—the boy contracted convulsively and his breath whistled through his teeth. He lay still for a moment on top of the other boy then shoved himself off with both hands. He showed us the jissum on his prick and asked for a towel. Dave threw him one and he carefully wiped his prick. Then he lay down on his stomach and Boy 1 took over. He was more passionate. He got mad because Boy 2 kept his ass contracted and pounded on his buttocks with his fist. Finally he got it in and began screwing violently. Boy 2 groaned in protest. Boy 1 came almost immediately, his buttocks quivering in spasms. He sighed then rolled free… I see both boys every day. They will do it anytime for forty cents, which is standard price.”¹⁵

Bill described this in full to Ginsberg partly because he knew it would excite him, and partly because he knew Allen would have serious reservations because of the boys’ poverty. Bill used this in The Naked Lunch to purposely annoy his readers, a Swiftian gesture to reveal their prurience and to undermine their middle-class values. It was an illustration of the well-known Thomas Macaulay adage: “The Puritan hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” This is true of most of the erotic scenes in The Naked Lunch, which are based on the idea that sex is usually some kind of exploitation—the hanging scenes are both a critique of pornographic movies and the racist policies then pertaining in the southern states. Alan Ansen felt that Burroughs was a very moral writer and that the most important quality in his writing was in fact tenderness. “It is a great key to what makes his work so wonderful. It’s what I call the melody as opposed to the fugato. That enormous compassion is very very basic.”16

2. Bar la Mar Chica

After less than two months in Tangier, Bill was able to write to Allen, “Tanger is looking up. Meeting the local expatriates. Junkies, queers, drunks.”¹⁷ Bill’s kind of people. His social life now centered around the Parade, the Café Central, which was just around the corner from his room, and the Bar la Mar Chica, at 19 calle Bordj, a dim dockside Andalusian bar open twenty-four hours a day. At one end was a small rickety stage with a badly painted backdrop of a Spanish patio with an open window in the center and a window box filled with half-dead geraniums. There were two more or less permanent performers. One was Malaguena, a dumpy middle-aged flamenco singer who had often drunk so much brandy that she was unable to climb onstage and resorted instead to begging for money from the audience. She was nicknamed “Miss Pits” because she smelled so bad. The other was Louis, a slim, elegant gypsy dancer who performed to the clicking of castanets, a violin, and Spanish guitar. The proprietor was, according to Burroughs, “a man of great strength and exceedingly evil disposition. Beautiful Arab boy behind the bar. Languid animal grace, a bit sulky, charming smile. Every queer in Tanger has propositioned him, but he won’t play.” The bar was filled with young Spaniards and the occasional Arab dockworker. The American bullfighter known as El Rubio de Boston was a regular; though scarred by the horns of the bulls, he was admired for his courage reentering the ring. The British writer Rupert Croft-Cooke was there most nights, and the Honourable David Herbert took his guests there as an example of “local color.” Though he disapproved of Herbert’s slumming, Croft-Cooke reported one bon mot from Herbert:

“Tell me,” said a young woman who was just learning about the sexual complications of Tangier. “Which is the one who has just come in? Jack or Jill?”

“That? Oh that’s just the pail of water,” said David.¹⁸

The Parade Bar, a single-story building on the rue de Fez, just off the boulevard, had a garden, offering a respite from the constant attention of passing beggars found in street cafés. This quiet courtyard was filled with shade trees, a large palm, and eight wobbly iron tables. There was a bitter orange tree from which Rupert Croft-Cooke made marmalade each year. The trio of owners were Jay Haselwood, from Kentucky, tall, handsome, and mustachioed; Bill Chase, a suave New Yorker who managed the kitchen, producing some of the best cuisine in Tangier; and Ira Belline, an older woman, a White Russian, unsmiling and wearing a turban, who was supposed to have been Stravinsky’s favorite niece and a designer for the Ballet Russe. All three had worked for the Red Cross in France during the Second World War. Their financial backer was Phyllis de la Faille. The bar was lit by gold reflecting balls, like old-fashioned gas lamps, and there were always fresh flowers. Later, in the sixties, the décor included three highly varnished oil paintings by Stuart Church of half-naked Nubian adolescents wearing feathers and rowing Venetian gondolas (“fruity gondolier murals,” as Burroughs put it).

Among the regulars was Leslie Eggleston, from Philadelphia, who often appeared arm in arm with alcoholic women whom no one else could stand, glad to squire them for drinks and food. Bill would sometimes buy him drinks—“he was very very amusing, in a very strange horrible way. Not self-deprecation, no, just shameless mooching.”19 Sometimes Haselwood would order, “That one has been scrounging all evening, don’t buy him a drink!” Another regular was Bill Findlay, also from Philadelphia, who together with Eggleston moved in on the mother of Brian Power, another Parade regular, in Málaga, claiming to be Power’s friend. Findlay and Eggleston made indecent proposals to her servants, drank all the wine, brought back sailors, and refused to leave. Eventually a retired colonel of her acquaintance arrived and bodily threw them out. Bill loved these kinds of stories.

All these people were observed by Burroughs and added to his cast of characters. One old reprobate was Gerald Hamilton, the original Mr. Norris from Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains. It was not until The Place of Dead Roads that he made an appearance, but then it was deadly: “An old-queen voice, querulous, petulant, cowardly, the evil old voice of Gerald Hamilton.”²⁰

The view from Tangier across the strait was sometimes so clear you could see the mountains of Spain and even the village houses. Sometimes it was lost in white glare. The levante, the ech cherqi, could blow for days, making the beautiful wide beach impossible to visit. Still, the summer lasted until November and it was rarely unbearably hot. The air had a particular luminosity that had delighted painters such as Matisse. In spring the breeze sang in the palm trees of the Villa de France. Tangier before independence was a smaller, quieter city. You could sit in the terrace of the Café de Paris and listen to the sounds of the cicadas in the eucalyptus trees before they were drowned out by the noise of traffic. The atmosphere had a particular smell, a mixture of burning charcoal, excrement, sweat, kif, and other fugitive elements that was unmistakably Oriental. Bill began to like the city.

He lived just around the corner from the Socco Chico, which was then lined on both sides with cafés: the Café Fuentes, the Tingis, the España, Pilo’s, and the Café Central. Bill became an afternoon regular at the Café Central, which served beer and wine, as well as coffee and the ubiquitous glasses of sweet mint tea. It was open twenty-four hours. The stagelike architectural features of the nineteenth-century façades were perfect for the ongoing show, which was like a Brueghel come to life. Elderly Moors in white djellabahs and white beards, Jews in skull caps, peanut-sellers, bootblacks, money-changers, and beggars crowded the street. Young boys, eyes eaten by trachoma, were led by the hand by the eldest among them who tapped the way along the cluttered alleys with a long stick. Evidence of tuberculosis and syphilis was everywhere. Berber women carried enormous loads of charcoal on their backs, their noses frequently eaten away by disease possibly associated with their trade, followed by their menfolk riding donkeys. Trains of mules, laden with building materials or charcoal, pushed through the crowds. Bill’s new friend Brian Howard described Bill at the center of it all in a letter:

Everyone within sight, from the tiny children to the elderly, fat waiters in tarbooshes, is for sale. And the hubbub is appalling. The lights are just coming on in Mangharan’s Celebrated Shirts opposite me and the smell of Kief cigarettes is asphyxiating. […] The other person at the table is a nice, if slightly long-winded, ex-Harvard creature of forty who is endeavouring to cure himself of morphinomania by taking this new medicine which the Germans invented during the war. There are several trade names for it. He uses two. Eukodol and Heptanal. Unfortunately the effects are so much stronger, and much more delicious than morphine itself that he now spends his whole time running from chemist to chemist buying it—and spends all his money on it, too.21

Bill discovered Eukodol within days of arriving in Tangier and in less than two months he reported to Allen, “I am hooked. […] Some stuff called Eukodol which is best junk kick I ever had. Start Dolly cure in a few days now.”²² (Dollys were Dolophine, now known as methadone.) Eukodol was dihydroxycodeinone, a morphine substitute made by Merck in Darmstadt as a painkiller, but they found that it was euphoric, an unfortunate side effect that stopped them manufacturing it. It was made from codeine with its strength increased six times by dehydration. It was a short-acting drug, with the high only lasting three or four hours, which made it particularly addictive as the euphoria made the user want more. According to Bill, “it had a sort of a lift like a combination of cocaine and morphine. It was great.”23 By the beginning of April, Bill was shooting Eukodol every four hours. He told Allen, “God knows what kind of habit I am getting. When I kick this habit I expect fuses will blow out in my brain from overcharge and black sooty blood will run out eyes, ears and nose and staggering around the room acting out routines like Roman Emperor routine in a bloody sheet.”²⁴

Most people found Brian Howard impossible. He had no tolerance for alcohol and was thrown out of every bar and hotel in Tangier, including the Minzah, the Parade, the Mar Chica, Tony Dutch’s, and Dean’s Bar, where he called the proprietor a “pretentious West Indian nigger.” Eventually he and Sammy, his Cockney boyfriend, finished up at the Maybrook Hotel on the outskirts, which was the only place that would have him. Burroughs introduced Howard to Dolophine. “He was impossible when he was drinking so I said, ‘Why don’t you try a little junk instead?’ and that made a great improvement. Instead of drinking he got onto morphine and methadone and some kind of junk; it calmed him down and he was still fine.”²⁵ However beneficent this was for Howard, it proved to be a big mistake for Bill. “He sweeps into drug stores, ‘chemist shops’ as he calls them, and says, ‘Give me four tubes of M tablets quickly.’ He has decided that M is after all more ‘amusing’ than Dolophine. ‘And you know, the strangest thing. I simply don’t feel right in the morning until I’ve had my medicine.’ ”²⁶ Brian Howard burned the town down, and whereas before Burroughs could buy junk over the counter, scripts were now required.

Burroughs found Howard very sweet when sober and enjoyed his literary connections. He was an old friend of Auden’s and Isherwood’s and was one of the characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Howard was quite a comfort to him in the absence of communication with Allen, extravagantly praising Bill’s writing. Bill told Kerouac, “Right now I am in urgent need of routine receivers. Whenever I encounter the impasse of unrequited affection my only recourse is routines. (Really meant for the loved one, to be sure, but in a pinch somebody else can be pressed into service.) And Brian really digs my routines. But he is leaving tomorrow.”²⁷