The Adding Machine (3 page)

In 1955 I moved to the Villa Muniria at the corner of Cook Street and Magellanes. It was owned by a Belgian at the time and Paul Lund, a gangster from Birmingham, was also staying there. I saw quite a lot of him and used some of his stories in
Naked Lunch.
Later that year I moved into a house in the Casbah owned by Jim Wylie where there was no neighbor trouble since I sat around all day shooting junk and once dripped blood all over Paul Bowles’ first edition of
One Arm
by Tennessee Williams.

In 1956 I went to London and took the apomorphine cure with Doctor John Dent.
Naked Lunch
would never have been written without Doctor Dent’s treatment. The cure completed, I spent the summer with Alan Ansen in Venice. It was during this summer that A.J.’s Annual Party took shape and the gondola scene was written. Some of the Border City material was also written at this time and the concept of Freelandt evolved. Here too I disgraced myself by getting drunk at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo.

I left Venice in late August and went to Tripoli, arriving in time for the Suez Crisis and a general strike. The American Consulate wasn’t at all helpful and still less so in Algiers, where I got stuck on my way back to Tangier with all planes booked solid for three weeks and had to wire home for money and left by train without the necessary permits against advice of the Consulate. I was in Algiers for about a week during the war and used to eat lunch in a milk bar that was later bombed. There are a number of references to this incident in later writings.

Back in Tangier in September of 1956, I settled in a room on the garden at the Villa Muniria. For the first time in my life I began writing full-time and the material from which
Naked Lunch
was later abstracted and a good deal of the material that went into
The Soft Machine
and
The
Ticket that Exploded
was produced at this time. Often I would take a notebook to dinner with me and make notes while I ate. During this period I was making mahjoun every day.

Between 1956 and 1958 I saw a number of visitors in Tangier. Jack Kerouac was there in 1957, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in the same year. Alan Ansen made several trips to Tangier and helped me type the manuscript. In 1957 I made a trip to Scandinavia and wrote some of the Freelandt section for
Naked Lunch
in a cubicle room in Copenhagen.

In 1958 I moved to Paris and took up residence at no. 9, rue Git-le-coeur on the recommendation of Allen Ginsberg who was living there with Peter Orlovsky. I had a suitcase full of manuscripts with me, but Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press had rejected the first version of
Naked Lunch.
Other rejections from American publishers followed, and I was again losing interest in writing.

It was Allen Ginsberg who insisted that I send some short extracts to
The Chicago Review
which was then edited by Irving Rosenthal. The
Big Table
issue followed. One morning in room 15 at 9 rue Git-le-coeur I received a visit from Sinclair Beiles, whom I had known previously in Tangier. He was working for Girodias, who, after seeing the
Big Table
issue, now wanted to publish
Naked Lunch.
He wanted a complete manuscript in two weeks. With the help of Brion Gysin and Sinclair the manuscript was finished in two weeks and a month later the book was published,

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin showed me the use of cut-ups.
Minutes to Go
and
Exterminator!
followed Brion Gysin also demonstrated the use of cut-ups on the tape recorder and my subsequent experiments with tape recorders, carried out in Paris, London, Tangier, New York, all date from that summer.

In the fall of 1959 I moved to London and stayed in the Empress Hotel at 25 Lillie Road, which was to be my headquarters for the next year and a half. By the spring and summer of 1961, I was back in Tangier in my old garden room at the Villa Muniria, and it was here that I first started making photo-montages. This happened after a bad trip on DMT, which is described in
The Night Before Thinking
... the sensation of being in a white-hot safe. The following day, a sudden cool grey mist came in from the sea and covered the waterfront and I spread some photos out on the bed with a grey silk dressing-gown from Gibraltar along with several other objects and I photographed the ensemble. During that summer I made many of these montages in different ways and combinations. Ian Sommerville arrived during the summer and took over the technical aspect of the montages. Also present were: Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, Paul Bowles, Michael Portman and Gregory Corso... the psychedelic summer.

In the fall of 1961 I spent a month in New York, where I started
Nova Express.
When I returned to England, my work with photo-montages and tape-recorders continued and in early 1962 I moved to an apartment sublet from Marion Boyars at 52 Lancaster Terrace in London, which I shared with Michael Portman. In a basement apartment I shared with Ian Sommerville I prepared a show with his assistance. I also wrote some poems for David Bud’s exhibition of sculpture in Paris.

In the summer of 1962, Ian and I went to Tangier where after some house-hunting we unwisely rented an Arab house at 4 calle Larachi. My son Billy arrived during the summer.
Esquire
took some photos of the house and of Billy and myself which were later used as an article.

We did not start to have real neighbor trouble until after the Kennedy assassination, but the trouble became acute after New Year’s of 1964. I had just returned from a television appearance in London with Alex Trocchi in which we were interviewed by Dan Farsons. Arriving in England for this show, I was stopped and searched by Customs. I think the word had been passed along by some snotty Vice-Consul in the American Consulate in Tangier. When I got back, we were under continual harrassment from the neighbors and I had no money to move. I started keeping a diary and decorating files with photos; later I started keeping scrapbooks.

Early in May my first substantial payment came through from Grove Press and I moved into 16 rue Delacroix, the Loteria Building. The work with scrapbooks continued and Antony Balch arrived during the summer to shoot some of the scenes from
Cut-Ups.
In December, I returned to America by boat and arriving at Customs got the ‘right-this-way’ treatment. Two narcs and three Customs agents spent three solid hours pawing through my books and papers and photos, reading them and commenting.

I stayed in New York from 1964 until September 1965, at the Hotel Chelsea and in a loft at 210 Centre Street There Brion and I assembled
The Third Mind.
Antony Balch came over from London to shoot more scenes for
Cut- Ups
and I did a lot of scrapbook work. Brion frequently remonstrated with me to leave these experiments and write some straight narrative.

Returning to England in September 1965, Brion and I were searched at the airport. After going through Customs and Immigration, an official walked out after us .. . and once again agents pawed through my papers. ‘What do you cart these about for?’ one said, holding up some Magic Markers/flash forward to being caught by a black subway guard, writing AH POOK IS HERE on the subway wall...
’
You a grown man, writing on the wall!’ New York City, April 30, 1972 .. .

We were limited to a stay in England of one month. Obviously, the American Narcotics Department had passed the word along. Lord Goodman, Michael Portman’s solicitor and Chairman of the Arts Council, straightened out this passport difficulty. I settled in at the Hotel Rushmore at 11 Trebovir Road, Earl’s Court. A number of tape-recorder experiments, described in
The Invisible Generation,
were carried out here with Ian Sommerville, who had a sound studio placed at his disposal by Paul McCartney.

By 1967, when I had moved into 8 Duke Street, Saint James’s, I had such an overrun on tape-recorders, cameras and scrapbooks that I couldn’t look at them, and started writing straight narrative and essays which later found their way into
The Wild Boys
and
The Job.
I made several trips to Tangier, to rework
The Ticket that Exploded,
and returned to Morocco and Marrakesh, where I started a first draft of
The Wild Boys.
In 1968, January through April, I was at Saint Hill in England, studying Scientology. In 1968, I covered the Democratic Convention in Chicago for
Esquire.

Brion Gysin, Stewart Gordon, and I were sitting in front of a little Spanish café in Tangier when this middle-aged Spaniard walked by, and we all gasped: ‘My God, that’s a harmless-looking person!’ I’d noticed him around town, and spotted him as a real M.O.B.ist: which is nothing special, just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people’s business.

The old hop-smoking rod-riding underworld had a name for it:’ a member of the Johnson family.’ Wouldn’t rush to the law if he smelled hop in the hall, doesn’t care what fags in the back room are doing, stands by his word. Good man to do business with. They are found in all walks of life. The cop who slipped me a joint in a New Orleans jail, for instance. Or when I was pushing junk in New York back in 1948, the hotel clerk who stopped me in the lobby: ‘I don’t know how to say this, but there is something wrong about the people who come to your room.’ (Something wrong is putting it softly: ratty junkies with no socks, dressed in three boosted suits puffing out, carrying radios torn from the living car, trailing wires like entrails. ‘This isn’t a hock shop!’ I scream. ‘Get this shit out of here!’ Regaining my composure I say severely, ‘You are lowering the entire tone of my establishment.’) ‘So I just wanted to warn you to be careful and tell those people to watch what they say over the phone ... if someone else had been at the switchboard...’

And a hotel clerk in Tunis; I handed him some money to put in the safe. He put the money away and looked at me: ‘You do not need a receipt Monsieur.’ I looked at him and saw that he was a Johnson, and knew that I didn’t need a receipt.

Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: ‘Some people are shits, darling.’ I was never able to forget it.

Mexican druggist throwing a script back at me: ‘We do not serve dope fiends.’ It’s like Mr. Anslinger said: ‘The laws must express society’s disapproval of the addict.’

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Now your virus is an
obligate cellular parasite,
and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be
right.
And right here we must make a distinction between a hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don’t cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone and are only dangerous when molested, like the Brown Recluse. Others cause minor trouble, like barroom fights and bank robberies. To put it country simple, Anslinger was an obligate shit; Dillinger, Jesse James and Billy the Kid were just sons of bitches.

This
right
virus has been around for a long time, and perhaps its most devoted ally has been the Christian Church: from the Inquisition to the Conquistadores, from the American Indian Wars to Hiroshima, they are RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT. If the Christian Church has given the virus a nice long home, it has also sustained a number of evictions in the past forty years.

When I was in high school in the 1920’s, anybody expressing doubts about our treatment of the Indians, capital punishment, the natural inferiority of blacks, the abomination of being a flit
^*
or a dope fiend, would have been shunned by his schoolmates as a dangerous radical or practitioner of the hideous vices he defended.

Yes, quite a change, and quite a few points gained for the M.O.B.ists: virtual abolition of censorship, decriminalization of pot, gay rights, and segregation issues at least out in the open and a lot better than they were forty years ago, and a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. This trend towards sanity has brought the last-ditch dedicated shits out into the open, screaming with rage. Victimless crime, the assumption that what a citizen does in the privacy of his own dwelling is nonetheless someone else’s business and therefore subject to denunciation and punishment, is the very lifeline of the
right
virus. Cutting off this air line would have the same action as interferon, which blocks the oxygen from certain virus strains.

M.O.B. opponents cling to the victimless-crime concept, equating drug-taking or private sexual behaviour with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one’s own business is recognized, the whole shit position is untenable, and Hell hath no more vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.

The Reverend Braswell, in the
Denver Post:
‘The United States shouldn’t be forced to accept perverted sexual practices under the guise of human rights. I refuse to say we are dealing with human rights, we are dealing with sexual perversion. Speak out against these filthy dreamers. The Civil Rights Act is national suicide. The God of this Universe, He doesn’t change. God’s attitude to wrong is the same since Adam. The Bible classifies homosexuality along with murder, stealing, inventions of evil ruthlessness and God hatred. Homosexuality is an abomination to God and should never be recognized as a legal human right any more than robbery or murder.’ And a letter to the Editor: ‘We should reform the marijuana laws by making them tougher. President Carter’s proposal to scrap Federal laws relating to marijuana is shocking.’

One is tempted to seek a total solution to the shit problem: Mass Assassination Day. M.A.D. Slaughter the shits of the world like cows with the aftosa. Then we’ll all feel a lot better. ‘It was like being cured of clap after twenty dripping years,’ a survivor reported... Perhaps we could accomplish the salubrious work with a virus designed to attack the already occupied RIGHT centers in the brain, inflaming and irritating these centers so that the target, muttering and finally screaming imprecations, dies in convulsions of Tightness. It was known as Righteous Fever; old men need it special.