by Barry Miles
A whole beguiling new world was opened up for Burroughs when he read You Can’t Win by Jack Black, the autobiography of a former burglar, drug addict, and railroad hobo published in 1926.. He had not known that such a life existed and was immediately intrigued. It’had such a lasting impact upon him that he was able to quote passages verbatim fifty years later. It
was set in that forgotten era between the days of the Wild West and the development of the big metropolitan cities, between the death of Jesse James and the rise of Al Capone. “It fascinated me and I thought it would be great to be a burglar. I saw all these furtive seedy rooming houses....l got so much from that book, Salt Chunk Mary was one of his characters.
The whole idea of the Johnson Family comes from there. He read and reread it, indulging in an adolescent nostalgic de la boue. longing for this other world of cheap hotels, smoky bars, pool halls, whorehouses, and opium dens, of cat burglars and hobo jungles. He wanted to be one of the Johnson Family, the good bums and thieves with a code of honorable conduct in direct contrast to the venal, corrupt, hypocritical behavior of people like Uncle Ivy or the parents of most of his friends. He became fascinated by gangsters and romanticized them.
Bill continued to write stories, mostly lurid adventure tales of derring-do, gothic horror, or westerns that were read aloud in class. Sometimes he wrote more philosophical essays, such as his first published work, “Personal Magnetism,” which appeared in the February 1929 issue of the John Burroughs Review, about sending two dollars for instructions on “how to control others at a glance.” His interest in control systems appeared early on.
The 1927 St. Louis tornado made a big impression on him. On Sepember 29, the sky turned black and green and Bill was standing in the entrance to the boys’ locker room when he saw a bolt of lightning strike the cornice of the school, knocking off bricks. The children ran through the corridors, screaming hysterically. Then the phone calls from concerned parents began, but no one in the school was hurt. In St. Louis itself the scene was very different; seventy-nine people were killed and over 550 injured. The fronts were torn off whole rows of buildings, leaving their interiors exposed, cars were flipped over, trees uprooted, telephone poles became javelins as the tornado cut a swath through the West End.
It was left looking like a scene from a Great War battlefront, with houses reduced to rubble and tram lines twisted into bizarre sculptures. Tornadoes appear throughout Burroughs’s later Work, “usually with a frisson of sexual excitement.
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Bill, Joan, and the children moved to the Valley in April 1949 to sell Bill’s landholdings there. He and Kells had earlier combined their operation and Bill owned a share of the farm equipment as well as land. In May he sold his original fifty acres to Kells, but the family stayed on in Pharr until October, waiting to see how Bill’s trial was shaping up. Bill hated it there. “All the worst features of America have drained down to the Valley and concentrated there. In the whole area, there is not one good restaurant. The food situation could only be tolerated by people who do not taste
what they eat.” He felt that the Valley was plagued by DOR, Wilhelm Reich’s “Deadly Orgone Radiation,” a negative debilitating energy that brought on depression and lack of vitality. “Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is---orgones, life force-that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. The Valley is the place where the new anti-life force is breaking through. Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. [. . .] The dying cell gravitates to the Valley.”
The notion of orgones came from Wilhelm Reich’s recently published The Cancer Biopathy, in which he argues that cancer is caused by an inability to discharge sexual energy. Reich calls it orgone energy, natural energy, the life force, cosmic energy, what Henri Bergson called élan vital, which exists everywhere in the atmosphere and in all living and dead matter. It can be concentrated and used to help relieve a stasis of energy in the body, and Reich manufactured a simple device known as an orgone accumulator in which the patient sat and absorbed life energy. Burroughs thought that anything that energized the body would be good for the after-effects of
junk sickness. His approach to the orgone was essentially that of Bergson’s notion that "life is essentially a current sent through matter.” Reich’s ideas on the role of the orgasm in healthy functioning, an extension of Freud‘s theories, were seriously taken on board by New intellectuals (and elsewhere). Reich was a long standing member of the Freud seminar in Vienna, and his book Character Analysis on psychoanalytic technique was a standard work, so his ideas were carefully considered. Reich’s books were then extremely popular and people were hung orgone accumulators from Reich’s institute or building their own.Burroughs took exception to the amount of paperwork attached to renting an orgone accumulator, so in June he built his own in the yard behind Kell's house. The principle was very simple. Orgones are absorbed and retained by organic matter but pass freely through metal. A metal box with organic material on the outside will have a higher concentration of orgones inside than out because the layer of organic material will retard the escape of orgones from the box. The more layers of metal and organic material, the higher the concentration of orgones. Bill ordered sheet metal, wood, and a roll of rock wool. He told james Grauerholz, “Kells and I made it, and it was a sloppy job too. [. . .] We had some kind of jerry built but to start with and sloppily nailed sheet iron inside that. Then inside that we had another orgone box made out of an old icebox which you lowered down over yourself, and then we had a little accumulator made out of one of those jerry cans, we just covered that over in burlap and various stuff-we were getting three levels.” He felt it did him good: “My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal.” Kells and Bill’s accumulator was a popular new toy for the front porch set. Bill wrote Kerouac, “The gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he‘s a fucking genius.” From then on, whenever he was settled somewhere, Burroughs usually built himself an orgone accumulator. He had them in Tangier, London, New York, and Lawrence, Kansas.
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“We were so drunk, Joan and I, we were driving these mountain roads. I was much too drunk to drive and so was she but she could at least steer. She had this polio-shriveled leg so that she couldn‘t work both the gas pedal and the brake, so I was lying on the floor of the front seat pushing down on the gas pedal and she had her one good leg on the brake and we would scream round the corners." They were drinking gin out of the bottle. Joan was yelling, “How fast can this heap go?” while in the backseat Allen cowered on the floor with Billy and Julie, absolutely terrified.
They came to a river where the bridge was washed out. It was night, but fortunately somebody had put a bush in the road; otherwise they would have driven into the water. They managed to find a Mexican to help them push the car back on the road. Lucien remembered, “Allen took his pants off and got out to push. And suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared a lot of Mexicans to help push, and as they were helping to push, they stole Allen’s pants, along with all his money and whatever he had in there. They eventually reached Guadalajara and Joan met her connection. On the way back they decided to visit Paricutin, the new volcano in Uruapan that had lowered the level of Lake Taluca by twelve feet. Paricutin came up in a farmer’s cornfield in 1943, and Within a week was eight hundred feet high and had buried the land and homes of fifteen thousand people in fire and ash and lava. By the time Joan and party were there only the tops of the church spires could be seen. Lucien and Joan fortified themselves with more gin and drove out onto the lava field at night. “I can remember the car falling into crevices, and having to get it out with the jack and Joan saying, ‘Go on! Go on! Let’s get to the volcano,’ Lucien remembered. Finally they got within a mile of the eruption, but molten lava and rocks landing all around them and hitting the car roof forced them to turn back.
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In March 1952. Bill told Allen that he had begun work on a new novel that could be seen as part two ot‘jimk or read complete in itself. He said Dennison was still the main character but he had shifted to third-person narrative. It was about his relationship with Marker, known in the book as AIlerton. He passed the time by writing and attending bullfights and cockfights. “I like my spectacles brutal, bloody and degrading.” In April, Allen Ginsberg finally persuaded Carl Solomon to publish Junk as an Ace paperback original for an eight-hundred-dollar advance; it was to be called Junkie, since the publishers thought Junk might be taken as a value judgment on the text. In 1977, Burroughs changed the spelling of the revised edition to Junky, which it has remained ever since. Now began months of prevarication and stalling on the part of Ace, who demanded to see the new material Burroughs was writing and to incorporate it into Junkie.
One complication came over Solomon’s suggestion that part two of the book be called Fag. Burroughs told Allen he did not mind being called queer: “T.E. Lawrence and all manner of right joes (boy can I turn a phrase) was queer. But I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a Fag. [. . .] That’s just what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us strong, manly, noble types and the leaping, jumping window dressing cocksucker. Furthechrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somewheres.”
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Allen’s tenement window looked out over fire escapes and backyards with laundry lines strung from building to building, level upon level of metal stairs and wires all connected. Burroughs saw a woman reach out over the fire escape and start pulling in the laundry and conceived the futuristic city of Interzone, with its levels connected by a web of catwalks, boardwalks, and fire escapes, a great labyrinth of alleyways and passages, squares and tunnels, like a medina; a city so old that it had collapsed on itself and been rebuilt one building upon another, layer upon layer. Ashe described the idea to Ginsberg he gave the city a vibrating soundless hum, like insect wings and larval entities waiting to be born. The imagery of The Naked Lunch was being developed, in this case drawing heavily upon Arthur Rimbaud’s visions of cities in Illuminations, always one of Bill’s favorite books. Both Burroughs and Ginsberg later agreed that the “Interzone Meet Cafe” was the seed of The Naked Lunch. Allen’s role as the receiver of the long, intimate letters from Central and Latin America, and now as his confidant, collaborator, and editor in New York, had quickly led to an affair. Allen had been a teenager when they both shared the apartment in New York with Joan and had regarded Burroughs as his mentor, if not his guru. He was only nineteen when Burroughs left New York. As the result of their conversations his respect for Bill had grown and he was prepared to do anything he wanted. “I thought he was my teacher, so I’d do what I could to amuse him. In bed, Bill is like an English governess, whinnying and giggling, almost hysteric. [..] He liked to come while being screwed,” Ginsberg said. “Burroughs fell in love with me and we slept together and I saw a soft center where he felt isolated, alone in the world and he needed [. . .] a feeling of affection, and since I did love him and did have that respect and affection, he responded. I kinda felt privileged.” Ginsberg’s affection released a huge reservoir of pent-up feelings in Burroughs, to Allen’s great alarm and consternation. He said, “Bill became more and more demanding that there be some kind of mental schlupp. It had gone beyond the point of being humorous and playful. It seemed that Bill was demanding it for real. Bill wanted a relationship where there were no holds barred; to achieve an ultimate telepathic union of souls.”4 Ginsberg explained, “Schlupp for him was originally a very tender emotional direction, a desire to merge with a lover, and as such, pretty vulnerable, tenderhearted and open on Burroughs’ part.”
Burroughs’s concept of schlupping- the complete merging of soul mates into one entity-came from his close, and imaginative, reading of Wilhelm Reich, who saw that the point of the orgasm was to fuse the two orgone fields of the sex partners into one “orgonome”-to use Reich’s term-in an explosive, rejuvenating recharge of natural universal energy. Reich explained, “The sexual embrace, if abstracted and reduced to its basic form, represents superimposition and the bio-energetic fusion of two orgonotic systems. Superimposition follows orgonotic penetration. The pre-orgastic bodily movements and in particular the orgastic convulsions represent extreme attempts of the free orgone of both organisms to fuse with one another, to reach into one another.” It was not a question of one partner dominating the other; there was no invasion, no usurping the masculine status of the other person. The intention was schlupp, the complete fusion with the other person, “to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.” Burroughs didn’t want to become the other person, he wanted to fuse with the other person, the two of them making one. This is a common theme in Burroughs, particularly in the later writing where Mayan priests conduct various rituals to join two bodies. Of course complete schlupp was impossible, but a temporary flash of it was very desirable and partial occupation perhaps possible by cultural means. The flash of orgasm was when Bill was outside time and space. The orgasm flash where two orgone fields fuse into one is accomplished with no top and bottom, no domination or effeminacy, and Burroughs had always stressed that he saw his sex role as normal and male. “Like all normal citizens, I ejaculate when screwed without helping hand, produce a good crop of jissom, spurt it up to my chin and beyond. I have observed that small hard cocks come quicker slicker and spurtier.” This rather aggressive stridency suggests that Bill was not at all sure that “all normal citizens” did in fact come that way. There was also the matter of his small cock. “My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia.” Ginsberg thought that Bill’s small penis accounted for his obsession with guns, a
subject that many academics have mulled over. Years later, Ginsberg revealed all the intimate details of Burroughs‘s sex life.
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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.” (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 simpleminded, lazy crew of citizens.”
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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 Christ.mas 1956, Bill told Allen, “Paco, this Spanish kid wind up buggin’ me like I throw him out already.” 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 the 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 scene at midday, in the very market places, the Moores buggering these filthy carrions, and without shame or punishment go freely away.”
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’ 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.” 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 The, 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 has used as a headquarters by Abdelkhalek Torres, the popular Moroccan nationalist leader who appeared at 10:00 a.m. with his faithful acolytes,
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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.”
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.”
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
an amazing discovery." When he was high on kif and lying next to Klki his ideas came faster, and better than at other times. “It’s like he has some kind of orgone battery that tunes me in," he told Allen. “I have tried this many times. The difference is palpable. Trouble is I don’t feel W. and it isn‘t appropriate, to get up and write them down.” He did commit enough ideas to paper to be convinced of the theory. He reported glut “he is sort of a medium through which I get ideas.”
Naturally Bill turned the whole thing into a routine: “One after the all” 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. . .”
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.” 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,” 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.
