SearchI push my way through the bead curtain and suddenly there I am! The Mecca of post-modernism, Dean’s Bar, Tangiers. It’s busier than I imagined it would be. I’m surrounded by expats, Americans, British and even a few burnoosed Moroccans, all working away at non-linear novels on typewriters that look like mechanical crabs. Every now and then one of the stereotypists leaps up and shouts ‘Breakthrough!!’ Naturally I’m wondering where I fit in. Then along come William and his mate Brion. They sit down at a table and start cutting up bits of paper. Having a good laugh they are too. “Ah there you are Simon.” Says William when he spots me.
“Simon? Who’s Simon? I’m Dick.”
“Sorry Dick. Pull up a chair Dick. Help yourself to a pair of scissors.”
How did I get here? I’ll tell you in a minute. William is his usual jovial self but Brion seems less friendly. I join them anyway. William explains to Brion how we met in Robert’s gallery. Then he shows me how to clip lines out of newsprint. I sit with them for a while but I don’t have much to contribute. They keep clipping away. I get a vision of the future, J.G.Ballard, David Cronenberg, Will Self …even Jake Arnott all feeding off this time and place like sucking jism through mugwump headtits. I’m not into that kind of thing myself. I find it all a bit too much.
You want non-linear? I’ll give you non-bloody-linear. When I met Samantha she did a lot of work for what we called underground magazines. She was a hippy I suppose but she didn’t sit around on the floor making candles. Oh no, not Sam. She was always interviewing somebody or other...Jagger, Donovan, Twiggy, Donovan, Leary, Donovan. There was TV shows, art openings, concerts, phone calls from Rolling Stone. It was hard to keep up with it all. She was no slouch. If anything I was the layabout in the house. Until Samantha’s mum decided I needed a job. Monty fixed me up with one later but at this point in time I’m still playing for the Gunners.
Everybody was doing their own thing in those days and we were just starting to hear words like Feminism. Sam met Germaine Greer about then and it was game over. I thought it was all a bit of a laugh at the time tell the truth. Good luck to the girls I said. Let them have a crack of the whip. Didn’t dawn on me till later they were serious. And don’t get me started on the bloody poofters.
Swinging London! Bollocks. All we did was drive around from one flat to another looking for drugs. Everybody sitting around being cool. Nobody was really interested in anybody except their bloody selves. Go to some of these places with Sam and nobody would speak. Just get stoned and sit there looking at each other. It made me want to fart out loud. One bloke I did get along with was Robert Fraser the art-dealer. I met him through Samantha. I could tell you a few tales about Robert too. Maybe another time. Robert had been to Eton but what I liked about him he was a wide-boy at heart. Bit flash maybe but not snotty like some of those upper crust cunts.
So anyway one day I’m wandering through the West End and I’m at the end of me rope. Sam’s kicked me out, I’ve lost track of time, Arsenal don’t want me no more, and I’m wondering where I fit into the scheme of things. Or even if I have an identity to call my own. You could say I was at a low point in my life. Then for no reason at all I find myself outside Robert’s gallery. I wander into the gallery and find him in the back wrapping up some paintings. Dubuffet? Magritte? Can’t remember now.
“What’s up Dick?” says Robert giving me a wave, “sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Funny. Right away he senses I’m not happy. “Just locking up here,” he says, “want to pop up for a cup of tea?”
Nice bloke. He only lives round the corner so I follow him down the street. Nicely cut suit. Always a natty dresser was Robert. He’s got a big flat and the main room looks like an extension of his art gallery. I notice a painting of soup cans next to one of big coloured flowers.
“That’s Warhol,” says Robert. “New York artist, and this is Dines, what do you think?”
It looks like somebody’s old shirt to me stuck on a bit of canvas. “Very nice,” I say, “I’ve got some stuff he can have...”
“And this is William,” says Robert. A bloke has come wandering out of the kitchen. He looks like a bloody corpse.
“Hallo William,” I say. “I’m Dick. I kick balls, what do you do?”
“Write books.” says William.
“Dick is depressed.” Robert says.
“Sorry to hear that.” says William, he looked it too, “What’s the problem?”
“Wife mainly.” I said.
“I’ve got a gun you can borrow.” says William.
I’ve never been much of a reader and I always felt a bit out of my depth with Samantha’s friends. Especially the literary types. They seem to be on a different wavelength from the rest of us. But there’s William sat there looking miserable and I felt like I had to say something. Eventually a question came to mind. “So what kind of books do you write William?” I asked.
“Fiction. That’s what they call it. Fictional accounts of alternate realities. Sex, drugs, control, destruction. Stuff like that. I’m an agent for the corporation trying to tell the truth using words. And time travel. Backwards and forwards and how it’s possible to move around in space and time without going out too much.”
“Very nice.” I said. Then it clicked. This was the great William Burroughs of Naked Lunch fame. I interviewed him a couple of times after that when I became Simon. Alternate realities? It was all new to me. To be honest I’ve never been a great reader. Samantha used to give me books to read but I couldn’t get far with them. Too poncy. They went on too long and there was never any pictures. I liked being illiterate anyway.
“Must be hard work. Writing.” I said.
“Can be,” says William, “Like being God. Let’s say you have someone called God OK? He’s like a movie director. He decides when we do what we do.”
“Are you God?”
“No you are. Excuse me a sec.”
Me? William goes off to the bathroom. He’s in there for quite a while. When he comes back he seems more relaxed. I thought about what he said. About being God. Went right over my head at the time. Still does.
“Still depressed Dick?” William asked. I couldn’t help laughing. There’s this bloke who looks like a bloody undertaker in his black suit and a face like death warmed over asking me if I’m depressed. He seems genuinely concerned.
“Ever been to Morocco?” asks William. I hadn’t and he suggests I pop down there. “It’s a good place to get some perspective on things,” he says. “We’ve got a house there in the Interzone. Come on down. It’ll be a change for you.”
I leave Dean’s Bar and wander through the lanes of Tangiers. It seems safe enough if you don’t mind being dragged into shops selling carpets, water-pipes, camel skin cushions. I remember it from hitch-hiking to India with Arthur. They try to get you into the shop, serve you tea, put you under an obligation. And here’s the famous Socco Chico, basically an open area where several lanes meet. There’s a café with tables on the street where more writers will soon be sitting along with a motley collection of beatniks and nascent hippies, the next wave of druggies and drifters and ordinary tourists over from Gibraltar for the day looking for something different. William what have you done?
So William invited me to stay in his place in Morroco. He said it would be a nice change for me…
Bloody change all right. I get to Tangiers and what do I find? Bunch of bleedin’ poofters! Sticking needles in themselves too they were. Somebody offered to get me started on bloody heroine. I said no thanks to that. Mug’s game that is. Grass and beer alright but I’m not having none of them needles thank you very much.
Funny bunch they were in Tangiers, William’s mates. All they talked about was drugs and diddling Arab boys. Sometimes they’d sit around with scissors cutting up sheets of paper. Then they’d re-arrange the lines and have a good old chuckle. I got out of there smartish I tell you and went down to Marrakesh on a bus. Arrived in the middle of the night and thought I was in hell. Pipes wailing, drums beating, smoke everywhere. Sat in the central square there and watched Gnaoui drummers and snake-charmers and all kinds of Africans and hippy nutters. Some bloke took me to a ‘hotel’ on a street where they sold sheep’s heads and bits of intestine. Bloke in a djelabah gave me a padlock with a number on it and pointed past some donkeys to a row of doors in a wall. I went in one and there was a small room, no window just big enough for a straw mattress. I shooed a donkey out and tried to get some kip. Up all night scratching I was. I thought that’s it Dick, you’ve hit rock bottom.
But I still had a little way to go. This was before the days of credit cards. I wasn’t skint but it’s like I wanted to put myself through it. See how far down the shithole I could go like. I stayed in Marrakesh for a few days then me and some French blokes took another bus to Essaouira. I think that was the end of the road. I stayed at a place called the Hippie Hotel…old Arab hotel with rooms around a central courtyard. And a fountain in the middle that didn’t work. Spent all day stoned on hash or wandering around with my kief pipe.
Brion was interested in the Gnaoui drummers. So was William. Especially the little boy’s bottoms.
“Essaouira is a hybrid of styles, with a range of Portuguese, French and Berber military architecture that stands as a legacy to its chequered history. Since the seventh century BC it has housed Phoenicians, Romans, French, indigenous North Africans (Berbers) and Portuguese.
In 1765, the local ruler, Sultan Sidi Mohammed bin Abdallah, captured a French vessel and hired one of its passengers – French architect Théodore Cournut – to redesign the city. Then known as Mogador, the Sultan wanted the city to be suitable for foreign traders, while deterring marauders with the construction of walls and mounting of cannons between battlements. Mogador was renamed Essaouira, meaning "the little ramparts". http://travel.independent.co.uk/africa/northern/story.jsp?story=313138”
I would get stoned on kief and sit on the little ramparts and wonder what the fuck I was doing there. Dick Headley, promising young Arsenal striker, smashed out of his pod staring out across the Atlantic Ocean. I was young, I had money, passport, plane ticket, all that. And there I sat, fucking paralyzed. Sometimes I would walk on the beach, the long, long beach, with the crashing surf and the wind always the wind from the Atlantic, then it was back to the ramparts for more staring out to sea. I lost track of the weeks and months. Don’t know where the time went.
At one point I did look into the possibility of disappearing into the Sahara Desert. A bloke in Diabet who had some camels offered to take me part of the way. He said he could hand me over to some Tuaregs who would take me further. It sounded OK. Not a bad way to pass the time. Nice and pointless. I even thought of asking William to come along. He might get some ideas out of it for his books. But it was just an idea really.
Nowadays I suppose they’d make a TV show out of it. ‘Crossing the Sahara with Dick and William’. Here’s the scene where we sit around a camel-dung fire looking at the stars and pretend to ignore the microphone boom…
William: “Enjoying the immensity Dick?”
Dick: “Very much William. And the timelessness.”
William: “Certainly is immense Dick.”
Dick: “And timeless William. Immense and timeless.”
Could have been a good bit of reality TV. People like watching stuff like that. Maybe language really is a virus. Hard to say with all these font changes.
More information on mugwumps can be found in ‘Naked Lunch’ a book by William Burroughs originally published in 1959 by Olympia Press in Paris. The first printing in July 1959 consisted of 5,000 copies, and a second printing of 5,000 copies was done shortly thereafter. The first printing is distinguished by a green ornament border on the title page.
© Chuck Woww. All rights reserved by the author.
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