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I feel I didnt explain that right, but it’s too late, the moving finger crossed the storm and that’s the storm.
I thereafter spent ten quiet days as that old freighter chugged and chugged across the calmest seas without seeming to get anywhere and I read a book on world history, wrote notes, and paced the deck at night. (How insouciantly they write about the sinking of the Spanish fleet in the storm off Ireland, ugh!) (Or even one little Galilean fisherman, drowned forever.) But even in so peaceful and simple an act as reading world history in a comfortable cabin on comfortable seas I felt that awful revulsion for everything—the insane things done in human history even before us, enough to make Apollo cry or Atlas drop his load, my God the massacres, purges, tithes stolen, thieves hanged, crooks imperatored, dubs praetorian’d, benches busted on people’s heads, wolves attacked nomad campfires, Genghiz Khans ruining—testes smashed in battle, women raped in smoke, children belted, animals slaughtered, knives raised, bones thrown—Clacking big slurry meatjuiced lips the dub Kings crapping on everybody thru silk—The beggars crapping thru burlap—The mistakes everywhere the mistakes! The smell of old settlements and their cookpots and dungheaps—The Cardinals like “Silk stockings full of mud,” the American congressmen who “shine and stink like rotten mackerel in the moonlight”—The scalpings from Dakota to Tamurlane—And the human eyes at Guillotine and burning stake at dawn, the glooms, bridges, mists, nets, raw hands and old dead vests of poor mankind in all these thousands of years of “history” (they call it) and all of it an awful mistake. Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led the Fall? Souls in Heaven said “We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it’s great!”—Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how.
How to live with glee and peace therefore? By roaming around with your baggage from state to state each one worse deeper into the darkness of the fearful heart? And the heart only a thumping tube all delicately murderable with snips of artery and vein, with chambers that shut, finally someone eats it with the knife and fork of malice, laughing. (Laughing for awhile anyway.)
Ah but as Julien would say “There’s nothing you can do about it, revel in it boy—Bottoms up in every way, Fernando.” I think of Fernando his puffed alcoholic eyes like mine looking out on bleak palmettos at dawn, shivering in his scarf: beyond the last Frisian Hill a big scythe is cutting down the daisies of his hope tho he’s urged to celebrate this each New Years Eve in Rio or in Bombay. In Hollywood they swiftly slide the old director in his crypt. Aldous Huxley half blind watches his house burn down, seventy years old and far from the happy walnut chair of Oxford. Nothing, nothing, nothing O but nothing could interest me any more for one god damned minute in anything in the world. But where else to go?
On the overdose of opium this was intensified to the point where I actually got up and packed to go back to America and find a home.
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At first the sea fear slept, I actually enjoyed the approach to Africa and of course I had a ball the first week in Africa.
It was sunny afternoon February 1957 when we first saw the pale motleys of yellow sand and green meadow which marked the vague little coast line of Africa far away. It grew bigger as the afternoon drowsed on till a white spot that had troubled me for hours turned out to be a gas tank in the hills. Then like seeing sudden slow files of Mohammedan women in white I saw the white roofs of the little port of Tangiers sitting right there in the elbow of the land, on the water. This dream of white robed Africa on the blue afternoon Sea, wow, who dreamed it? Rimbaud! Magellan! Delacroix! Napoleon! White sheets waving on the rooftop!
And suddenly a small Moroccan fishing boat with a motor but a high balconied poop in carved Lebanese wood, with cats in jalabas and pantaloons chattering on deck, came plopping by turning south down the Coast for the evening’s fishing beneath the star (now) of Stella Maris, Mary of the Sea who protects all fishermen by investing with grace of hope in the dangers of the sea her own Archangelic prayer of Safety. And some Mahomet Star of the Sea of their own to guide them. The wind ruffled on their clothes, their hair, “their real hair of real Africa” I said to myself amazed. (Why travel if not like a child?)
Now Tangiers grew, you saw sandy barrens of Spain on the left, the hump leading to Gibraltar around the Horn of Hesperid, the very amazing spot the entryway to the Mediterranean Atlantis of old flooded by the Ice Caps so celebrate in the Book of Noah. Here’s where Mister Hercules held the world up groaning as “rough rocks groaning vegetate” (Blake). Here the patch-eyed international gem smugglers sneaked up with blue .45’s to steal the Tangier harem. Here the crazy Scipios came to trounce the blue eyed Carthage. Somewhere in that sand beyond the Atlas Range I saw my blue eyed Gary Cooper winning the “Beau Geste.” And a night in Tangiers with Hubbard!
The ship anchored in the sweet little harbor and spun slowly around giving me all kinds of views of city and headland from my porthole as I packed to leave the ship. On the headland around Tangiers Bay was a beacon turning in the blue dusk like St. Mary assuring me port is made and all’s all safe. The city turns on magical little lights, the hill of the Casbah hums, I wanta be out there in those narrow Medina alleys looking for hasheesh. The first Arab I see is too ridiculous to believe: a little bum boat puts out to our Jacob’s Ladder, the motor men ragged teenage Arabs in sweaters like the sweaters of Mexico, but in the mid boat stands a fat Arab in a grimy red fez, in a blue business suit, hands behind him, looking for to sell cigarettes or buy something or anything at all. Our handsome Yugo captain shouts them away from the bridge. At about seven we dock and I go ashore. Big Arabic Letterings are stamped on my fresh innocent passport by clerks in dusty fezzes and baggy pants. In fact it’s exactly like Mexico, the Fellaheen world, that is, the world that’s not making History in the present: making History, manufacturing it, shooting it up in H bombs and Rockets, reaching for the grand conceptual finale of Highest Achievement (in our times the Faustian “West” of America, Britain and Germany high and low).
I get a cab to Hubbard’s address on a narrow hilly street in the European quarter beneath the Medina twinkle hill.
Poor Bull has been on a health kick and is already asleep at 9:30 when I knock on his garden door. I’m amazed to see him strong and healthy, no longer skinny from drugs, all tanned and muscular and vigorous. He’s six foot one, blue eyes, glasses, sandy hair, 44, a scion of a great American industrial family but they’ve only a-scioned him a $200 a month trust fund and are soon to cut that down to $120, finally two years later rejecting him completely from their interior decorated livingrooms in retirement Florida because of the mad book he’s written and published in Paris (Nude Supper)—a book enough to make any mother turn pale (more anon). Bull grabs his hat and says “Come on, let’s go dig the Medina” (after we turn on) and vigorously striding like an insane German Philologist in Exile he leads me thru the garden and out the gate to the little magic street. “Tomorrow morning first thing after I’ve had my simple breakfast of tea and bread, we’ll go rowing in the Bay.”
This is a command. This is the first time I’ve seen “Old Bull” (actually a friend of the “Old Bull” in Mexico) since the days in New Orleans when he was living with his wife and kids near the Levee (in Algiers Louisiana)—He doesnt seem any older except he doesnt seem to comb his hair as carefully any more, which I realize the next day is only because he’s distraught and completely bemused in the midst of his writing, like a mad haired genius in a room. He’s wearing American Chino pants and pocketed shirts, a fisherman’s hat, and carries a huge clicking switchblade a foot long. “Yessir, without this switchblade I’d
be dead now. Bunch of Ay-rabs surrounded me in an alley one night. I just let this old thing click out and said ‘Come on ya buncha bastards’ and they cut out.”
“How do you like the Arabs?”
“Just push em aside like little pricks” and suddenly he walked right thru a bunch of Arabs on the sidewalk, making them split on both sides, muttering and swinging his arms with a vigorous unnatural pumping motion like an insane exaggerated Texas oil millionaire pushing his way thru the Swarms of Hong Kong.
“Come on Bull, you cant do that every day.”
“What?” he barked, almost squeaking. “Just brush em aside, son, dont take no shit from them little pricks.” But by next day I realized everybody was a little prick:—me, Irwin, himself, the Arabs, the women, the merchants, the President of the U.S.A. and Ali Baba himself; Ali Baba or whatever his name was, a child leading a flock of sheep in the field and carrying a baby lamb in his arms with a sweet expression like the expression of St. Joseph when he himself was a child:—“Little prick!” I realized it was just an expression, a sadness on Bull’s part that he would never regain the innocence of the Shepherd or in fact of the little prick.
Suddenly as we climbed the hill of white street steps I remembered an old sleeping dream where I climbed such steps and came to a Holy City of Love. “Do you mean to tell me that my life is going to change after all that?” I say to myself, (high), but suddenly to the right there was a big Kaplow! (hammer into steel) ca blam! and I looked into the black inky maw of a Tangiers garage and the white dream died right there, for good, right in the greasy arm of a big Arab mechanic crashing furiously at the fenders and hems of Fords in the oil rag gloom under one Mexican lightbulb. I kept on climbing the holy steps with weariness, to the next horrible disappointment. Bull kept yelling back “Come on, step on it, young man like you cant even keep up with old man like me?”
“You walk too fast!”
“Lard assed hipsters, aint no good for nothing!” says Bull.
We walk almost running down a steep hill of grass and boulders, with a path, to a magical little street with African tenements and again I’m hit in the eye by an old magic dream: “I was born here: This is the street where I was born.” I even look up at the exact tenement window to see if my crib’s still there. (Man, that hasheesh in Bull’s room—and it’s amazing how American potsmokers have gone around the world by now with the most exaggerated phantasmagoria of gooey details, hallucinations actually, by which their machine-ridden brains though are actually given a little juice of the ancient life of man, so God bless pot.) (“If you were born on this street you musta drowned a long time ago,” I add, thinking.)
Bull goes arm swinging and swaggering like a Nazi into the first queer bar, brushing Arabs aside and looking back at me with: “Hey what?” I cant see how he can have managed this except I learn later he’s spent a whole year in the little town sitting in his room on huge overdoses of morfina and other drugs staring at the tip of his shoe too scared to take one shuddering bath in eight months. So the local Arabs remember him as a shuddering skinny ghost who’s apparently recovered, and let him rant. Everybody seems to know him. Boys yell “Hi!” “Boorows!” “Hey!”
In the dim queer bar which is also the lunching spot of most of the queer Europeans and Americans of Tangiers with limited means, Hubbard introduces me to the big fat Dutch middleaged owner who threatens to return to Amsterdam if he dont find a good “poy” very soon, as I mentioned in an article elsewhere. He also complains about the declining peseta but I can surely see him moaning in his private bed at night for love or something in the sorry internationale of his night. Dozens of weird expatriates, coughing and lost on the cobbles of Moghreb—some of them sitting at the outdoor cafe tables with the glum look of foreigners reading zigzag newspapers over unwanted Vermouth. Ex-smugglers with skipper hats straggling by. No joyful Moroccan tambourine anywhere. Dust in the street. The same old fish heads everywhere.
Hubbard also introduces me to his lover, a boy of 20 with a sweet sad smile just the type poor Bull has always loved, from Chicago to Here. We have a few drinks and go back to his room.
“Tomorrow the Frenchwoman who runs this pension will probably rent you that excellent room on the roof with bath and patio, my dear. I prefer being down here in the garden so I can play with the cats and I’m growing some roses.” The cats, two, belong to the Chinese housekeeper who does the cleaning for the shady lady from Paris, who owns the apartment building on some old Roulette bet or some old rearview of the Bourse, or something—but later I find all the real work is done by the big Nubian Negress who lives in the cellar (I mean, if you wanted big romantic novels about Tangiers).
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But no time for that! Bull insists we go rowing. We pass whole cafes of sour Arab men on the waterfront, they’re all drinking green mint tea in glasses and chain smoking pipes of kief (marijuana)—They watch us pass with those strange redrimmed eyes, as tho they were half Moorish and half Carthaginian (half Berber)—“God those guys must hate us, for some reason.”
“No,” says Bull, “they’re just waiting for someone to run amok. D’jever see an amok trot? An amok occurs here periodically. He is a man who suddenly picks up a machete and starts trotting thru the market with a regular monotonous trot slashing people as he passes. He usually kills or maims about a dozen before these characters of the cafes get wind of it and get up and rush after him and tear him to bits. In between that they smoke their endless pipes of pot.”
“What they think of you trottin down to the waterfront every morning to rent a boat?”
“Somewhere among them is the guy that gets the profits—” Some boys are tending rowboats at the quai. Bull gives them money and we get in and Bull rows off vigorously, standing facing forward, like a Venetian oarsman. “When I was in Venice I noticed that this is the only real way to row a boat, standing up, boom and bam, like this,” rowing with forward motion. “Outside of that Venice is the dreariest town this side of Beeville Texas. Dont ever go to Beeville boy, or Venice either.” (Beeville a sheriff’d caught him making love to his wife June in the car, parked on the highway, for which he spent two days in jail with a sinister deputy in steel rimmed spectacles.) “Venice—my God, on a clear night you can hear the shrieks of the fairies on St. Marks Plaza a mile away. You can see successful young novelists being rowed away into the night. In the middle of the Canal they suddenly assault the poor Italian Gondoleer. They have palazzos with people straight out of Princeton amortifyin’ chauffeurs.” The funny thing is that when Bull was in Venice he was invited to an elegant party in a Palace, and when he appeared at the door, with his old Harvard friend Irwin Swenson the hostess held out her hand to be kissed—Irwin Swenson said: “You see in these circles you must kiss the hand of the hostess, customarily”—But as everybody stared at the pause in the door Bull yelled out “Aw gee, I’d rather kiss her cont!” And that was the end of that.
There he is rowing energetically as I sit on the poop digging Tangiers Bay. Suddenly a boatload of Arab boys rows up and they yell in Spanish to Bull: “Tu nuevo amigo Americano? Quieren muchachos?”
“No, quieren mucha-CHAS.”
“Por que?”
“Es macho por muchachas mucho!”
“Ah,” they all wave their hands and row away, looking for money from visiting queers, they’d asked Hubbard if I was queer. Bull rowed on but suddenly he was tired and had me row. We were nearing the end of the harbor wall. The water got choppy. “Ah shit, I’m tired.”
“Well for God’s sake make a little effort to get us back a ways.” Bull was already tired and wanted to go back to his room to make majoun and write his book.
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