Out to the Interzone by Will Nett
Will Nett goes to Tangiers, following in the footsteps of William S. Burroughs...
Tangiers isn’t a squalid place anymore, as such, but you can still find that sort of thing if you want it – just not in the abundance that writers like William S. Burroughs did when he arrived here in the 1950s.
It’s ‘…one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don’t proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behaviour, you can do exactly what you want,’ he said. If nothing else it sounds like a great place for degenerate authors called ‘William’.
Burroughs availed himself of all the above anyway, ingesting donkey-stopping amounts of drugs, badly managing a hellish Eukodol addiction – it’s called Oxycontin, now… check it out, it’s a great way to meet pharmacists in your area – that required him to dose it every fifteen minutes and still managed to churn out Naked Lunch (1959), one of the seminal works of the Beat period that he reluctantly godfathered after the death at forty-seven of the totemic Jack Kerouac.
By the time the completed manuscript had been scraped together by friends and collaborators, namely Alan Ansen and fellow Beat alumni Allen Ginsberg, from the sheafs of hashish and heroin-smeared pages trampled into the carpet of Burroughs’ rooms at El Muniria, the first wave of Beat Generation literature that included Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Ginsberg’s earlier Howl (1956) had dissipated on the shores of Merkala below my current accommodation inside the brilliant white stone walls of the Medina.
Burroughs’ influence outlasted perhaps all of his contemporaries, and merged into something like notoriety after a disastrous game of ‘William Tell’ in Mexico during which he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in the face but even that couldn’t dilute the counterculture curiosity that earned him acknowledgment from cyberpunk doyen William Gibson, saw him hanging out with Lou Reed, and appearing in a U2 video in what turned out to be his final recorded public appearance.
I started coming to Tangiers – ooh, about thirty-six hours ago, now – but my previous visits to Morocco have concentrated on the west coast and the chaos of inner Marrakesh, so much so that the latter forms a crucial part of my work-in-progress debut novel, The Upright Man that I’ve come here to finish. If it’s good enough for another ex-pat US literary colossus, Paul Bowles - whose encounter with Paul Theroux in Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules (1995) and Theroux’s wider trip around the edge of the Mediterranean shoreline so inspired my own travels – then it’s good enough for me.
My fuel is somewhat milder than Burroughs’ diet of multi-form narcotics and yoghurt that sustained him as he descended into his katabasis. I’m surrounded by dates, figs, olives, grapes and chocolate that I hope will be sufficient to power me through to whatever time my long-delayed ferry finally sets sail for Tarifa. Nothing happens down here travel-wise without the approval of the Mediterranean crosswind – the Levanter – that for centuries has scuppered Roman legions, Barbary pirates, oil tankers and hydrofoils. At the ticket office the ferry clerk tells me he can’t confirm any planned departure times until he gets the nod from ‘the man’.
Like Burroughs himself, acolytes like the Velvet Underground, and roadgoing travellers like me dependant on strangers for transit, we’re all just ‘waiting for the man’.
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