Majoun is a candy you make with honey, spices and raw marijuana (kief)—Kief is actually mostly stems with fewer leaves of the plant chemically known as Muscarine—Bull rolled it all up into edible balls and we ate it, chewing for hours, picking it out of our teeth with toothpicks, drinking it down with hot plain tea—In two hours our eyes’ irises would get huge and black and off we’d go walking to the fields outside town—A tremendous high giving vent to many colored sensations like, “Notice the delicate white shade of those flowers under the tree.” We stood under the tree overlooking the Bay of Tangiers. “I get many visions at this spot,” says Bull, serious now, telling me about his book.
In fact I hung around his room several hours a day altho I now had a great room on the roof, but he wanted me to hang around about noon till two, then cocktails and dinner and most of the evening together (a very formal man) so I happened to be sitting on his bed reading when often, while typing out his story, he’d suddenly double up in laughter at what he done and sometimes roll on the floor. A strange compressed laugh came out of his stomach as he typed. But so wont no Truman Capote think he’s only a typewriter, sometimes he’d whip out his pen and start scribbling on typewriter pages which he threw over his shoulder when he was through with them, like Doctor Mabuse, till the floor was littered with the strange Etruscan script of his handwriting. Meanwhile as I say his hair was all askew, but as that was the gist of my worries about him he twice or thrice looked up from his writing and said to me with frank blue eyes “You know you’re the only person in the world who can sit in the room while I’m writing and I dont even know you’re there?” A great compliment, too. The way I did it was to concentrate on my own thoughts and just dream away, mustn’t disturb Bull. “All of a sudden I look up from this horrible pun and there you are reading a label on a bottle of Cognac.”
I’ll leave the book for the reader to see, Nude Supper, all about shirts turning blue at hangings, castration, and lime—Great horrific scenes with imaginary doctors of the future tending machine catatonics with negative drugs so they can wipe the world out of people but when that’s accomplished the Mad Doctor is alone with a self operated self tape recording he can change or edit at will, but no one left, not even Chico the Albino Masturbator in a Tree, to notice—Whole legions of shitters patched up like bandaged scorpions, something like that, you’ll have to read it yourself, but so horrible that when I undertook to start typing it neatly doublespace for his publishers the following week I had horrible nightmares in my roof room—like of pulling out endless bolognas from my mouth, from my very entrails, feet of it, pulling and pulling out all the horror of what Bull saw, and wrote.
You may talk to me about Sinclair Lewis the great American writer, or Wolfe, or Hemingway, or Faulkner, but none of them were as honest, unless you name … but it aint Thoreau either.
“Why are all these young boys in white shirts being hanged in limestone caves?”
“Dont ask me—I get these messages from other planets—I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I havent got my orders clearly decoded yet.”
“But why all the vile rheum—like r-h-e-u-m.”
“I’m shitting out my educated Middlewest background for once and for all. It’s a matter of catharsis where I say the most horrible thing I can think of—Realize that, the most horrible dirty slimy awful niggardliest posture possible—By the time I finish this book I’ll be as pure as an angel, my dear. These great existential anarchists and terrorists so-called never even their own drippy fly mentioneth, dear—They should poke sticks thru their shit and analyze that for social progress.”
“But where’ll all this shit get us?”
“Simply get us rid of shit, really Jack.” He whips out (it’s 4 P.M.) the afternoon’s apéritif cognac bottle. We both sigh to see it. Bull has suffered so much.
55
Four P.M. is about time John Banks drops in. John Banks is a handsome decadent chap from Birmingham England who used to be a gangster there (he says), later turned to smuggling and in his prime sailed dashingly into Tangiers Bay with a cargo of contrabands in a sloop. Maybe he just worked the coal boats, I dont know, like it aint too far from Newcastle to Birmingham. But he was a blue eyed spirited dashing dog from England with a limey accent and Hubbard just loved him. In fact every time I revisited Hubbard in New York or Mexico City or Newark or someplace he always had a favorite raconteur he’d found someplace to regale him with marvelous stories at cocktail time. Hubbard was really the most elegant Englishman in the world. In fact I have visions of him in London sitting before a club fire with celebrated doctors, brandy in hand, telling stories about the world and laughing “Hm hm hm” from the pit of his stomach bending, such an enormous Sherlock Holmes. In fact Irwin Garden that crazy Seer once said to me quite seriously “Do you realize Hubbard is somewhat like Sherlock Holmes’ older brother?”
“Sherlock Holmes’ older brother?”
“Havent you read all of Conan Doyle? Anytime Holmes was stuck to solve a crime he took a cab to the Soho and hit up on his older brother who was always an old drunk layin around with a bottle of wine in a cheap room, O delightful! Just like you in Frisco.”
“Then what?”
“Older Holmes would always tell Sherlock how to solve the case—It seems he knew everything goin on in London.”
“Didnt Sherlock Holmes’ brother ever put on a tie and go to the Club?”
“Only to knaow mother” says Irwin sluffin me off but now I see Bull is actually Sherlock Holmes’ older brother in London talking shop with the gangsters of Birmingham, to get the latest slang, as he’s also a linguist and philologist interested not only in the local dialects of Shitshire and the other shires but all the latest slang. In the midst of a tale about his experiences in Burma John Banks, over window-darkening cognacs and kief, lets out with the amazing phrase “There she is jugglin me sweetbreads with her tongue!”
“Sweetbreads?”
“Not pumpernickel, ducks.”
“Then what?” laughs Bull holding his belly and by now his eyes are shining sweet blue tho at the next moment he may aim a rifle over us and say:—“I always wanted to take this one to the Amazon, if it could only decimate piranha.”
“But I havent finished my story about Burma!” And it was always cognac, stories, and I’d step out to the garden now and then and marvel at that purple sunset bay. Then when John or the other raconteurs left Bull and I would stride to the very best restaurant in town for a supper, usually steak with pepper sauce à la Auvergne, or Pascal pollito à la Yay, or anything good, with a gibbering dipper of good French wine, Hubbard throwing chicken bones over his shoulder whether or not the basement of El Paname currently contained women or not.
“Hey Bull, there’s some long necked Parisiennes with pearls at the table behind you.”
“La belle gashe,” flup, chicken bone, “what?”
“But they’re all drinkin out of long stemmed glasses.”
“Ah dont bore me with your New England dreams” but he never did just throw the whole plate over his shoulder like Julien done in 1944, crash. Suavely he lights up however a long joint of marijuana.
“Can you light up marijuana in here?”
He orders Benedictine with dessert. By God he’s bored. “When will Irwin get here?” Irwin’s on his way with Simon in another Yugoslavian freighter but a freighter in April with no storms. Back at my room he whips out his binoculars and stares to sea. “When will he get here?” Suddenly he starts crying on my shoulder.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just don’t know”—he’s really crying and he really means it. He’s been in love with Irwin for years but if you ask me in the strangest way. Like the time I showed him a picture Irwin drew of two hearts being pierced by Cupid’s arrow but by mistake he’d drawn the arrow’s shaft only thru one heart and Hubbard’s yelling “That’s it! That’s what I mean!”
“What do you mean?”
“This autocratic person can only fall
in love with the image of himself.”
“What’s all this love business between grownup men.” This was on the occasion in 1954 when I was sitting home with my mother and all of a sudden the doorbell rings, Hubbard pushes the door in, asks for a dollar to complete the cab fare (which my mother actually pays) and then sits there with us distractedly writing a long letter. And my mother’d only just about then been saying “Stay away from Hubbard, he’ll destroy you.” I never saw a stranger scene. Suddenly Ma said:—
“Will you have a sandwich, Mister Hubbard?” but he only shook his head and went on writing and he was writing a big involved love letter to Irwin in California. The reason he’d come to my house, he admitted in Tangiers in his bored but suffering tones, was, “Because the only connection I had at that agonized time with Irwin was thru you, you’d been getting long letters from him about what he was doing in Frisco. Laborsome human prose but I had to have some connection with him, like you were this great bore getting big letters from my rare angel and I had to see you as secondbest to nothing.” But this didnt insult me because I knew what he meant having read Of Human Bondage and Shakespeare’s will, and Dmitri Karamazov too. We’d gone from Ma’s house (sheepishly) to a bar on the corner, where he went on writing while this secondbest ghost kept ordering drinks and watching in silence. I loved Hubbard so for just his big stupid soul. Not that Irwin wasnt worthy of him but how on earth could they consummate this great romantic love with Vaseline and K.Y.?
If the Idiot had molested Ippolit, which he didnt, there’d have been no counterfeiter Uncle Edouard for sweet crazy Bernard to gnash on. But Hubbard wrote on and on this huge letter in the bar while the Chinese Laundryman watched him from across the street nodding. Irwin had just gotten himself a chick in Frisco and Hubbard says “I can just see this great Christian whore” though he neednt worry on that point, Irwin soon met Simon after that.
“What’s Simon like?” he says now crying on my shoulder in Tangiers. (O what would my mother have said to see Sherlock Holmes’ older brother crying on my shoulder in Tangiers?) I drew a picture of Simon in pencil to show him. The crazy eyes and face. He didnt really believe it. “Let’s go down to my room and kick the gong around.” This is Cab Calloway’s old expression for “smoking the opium pipe.” We’d just picked it up over desultory coffees in the Zoco Chico from a man in a red fez whom Hubbard confidentially accused (to me) of causing hepatitis throughout Tangerx (real spelling). With an old olive oil can, a hole in it, another hole for the mouth, we stuffed raw red opium in the well hole and got it lit and inhaled huge blue gobs of opium smoke. Meanwhile an American acquaintance of ours showed up and said he’d found the whores I’d been asking for. While Bull and John Banks smoked me and Jim found the girls striding in long jalabas under neon cigarette signs, took em to my room, took turns with the trick-turners, and went down again to smoke more Opium. (The amazing thing about the Arab prostitute is to see her remove her veil from over her nose and then the long Biblical robes, suddenly leaving nothing but a peachy wench with a lascivious leer and high heels and nothing else—yet on the street they look so mournfully holy, those eyes, those dark eyes alone in all that chastest cloth …)
Bull looked at me funnily later and said: “I dont feel this, do you?”
“No. We must be so saturated!”
“Let’s try eating it” and so we sprinkled pinches of raw O mud in hot cups of tea and drank up. In a minute we were stoned cold blue death. I went upstairs with a pinchful and sprinkled more into my tea, which I brewed on the little kerosene heater Bull had kindly bought me in exchange for typing up the first sections of his book. On my back for twenty-four hours thence I stared at the ceiling, as that Virgin Mary headlight turning across the Bay headland sent streamer after streamer of salvation light over the picaresque of my ceiling with all its talking mouths—Its Aztec faces—Its cracks thru which heaven you can see—My candlelight—Gone out on Holy Opium—Experiencing as I say that “Turning-about” which said: “Jack, this is the end of your world travel—Go home—Make a home in America—Tho this be that, and that be this, it’s not for you—The holy little old roof cats of silly old home town are crying for you, Ti Jean—These fellas dont understand you, and Arabs beat their mules—” (Earlier that day when I saw an Arab beat his mule I almost rushed up to grab the stick from his hand, and beat him with it, which would have precipitated riots on Radio Cairo or in Jaffa or anywhere where idiots beat their loving animals, or mules, or mortal suffering actors who are doomed to carry other people’s burdens)—The fact that the sweet little box bent back is only a fact for come. Come comes, and’s done. Print that in Pravda. But I lay there for twenty-four or maybe thirty-six hours staring at the ceiling, puking in the hall toilet, on that awful old opium mud whilst meanwhile a nextdoor apartment featured the creaks of pederast love which didnt bother me except at dawn the sweet smiling sad Latin boy went into my bathroom and laid a huge dung in the bidet, which I saw in the morning horrified, how could anybody but a Nubian Princessa stoop down to clean it? Mira?
Always Gaines had told me in Mexico City that the Chinese said that Opium was for sleep but for me it wasnt sleep but this horrible turning and turning in horror in bed (people who poison themselves moan), and realizing “Opium is for Horror—De Quincey O my—” and I realized my mother was waiting for me to take her home, my mother, my mother who smiled in her womb when she bore me—Though every time I sang “Why Was I Born?” (by the Gershwins) she snapped “Why are you singing that?”—I slurp up the final cup of O.
Happy priests who play basketball in the Catholic church behind, are up at dawn ringing the Benedict Bell, for me, as Stella the star of the Sea shines hopeless on waters of millions of drowned babies still smiling in the womb of the sea. Bong! I go out on the roof and glare gloomily at everybody, the priests are looking up at me. We just stare. All my olden friends are ringing bells in monasteries everywhere. There’s a conspiracy going on. What would Hubbard say? There’s no hope even in the cassocks of Sacristy. To never see the Bridge at Orleans again is not perfect safety. The best thing to do is be like a baby.
56
And I had really liked Tangiers, the fine Arabs who never even looked at me in the street but minded their eyes to themselves (unlike Mexico which is all eyes), the great roof room with tile patio looking down on the little dreamy Spanish Moroccan tenements with an empty lot hill that had a shackled goat grazing—The view over those roofs to the Magic Bay with its sweep to the Headland Ultimo, on clear days the distant shadow mump of Gibraltar far away—The sunny mornings I’d sit on the patio enjoying my books, my kief and the Catholic churchbells—Even the kids’ basketball games I could see by leaning far over and around and—or down straight I’d look to Bull’s garden, see his cats, himself mulling a minute in the sun—And on heavenly starlit nights just to lean on the roof rail (concrete) and look to sea till sometimes often I saw glittering boats putting in from Casablanca I felt the trip had been worthwhile. But now on the opium overdose I felt snarling dreary thoughts about all Africa, all Europe, the world—all I wanted somehow now was Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window in America, that is, I guess a vision of my childhood in America—Many Americans suddenly sick in foreign lands must get the same childlike yen, like Wolfe suddenly remembering the lonely milkman’s bottle clink at dawn in North Carolina as he lies there tormented in an Oxford room, or Hemingway suddenly seeing the autumn leaves of Ann Arbor in a Berlin brothel. Scott Fitz tears coming into his eyes in Spain to think of his father’s old shoes in the farmhouse door. Johnny Smith the Tourist wakes up drunk in a cracked Istanbul room crying for ice cream sodas of Sunday Afternoon in Richmond Hill Center.
So by the time Irwin and Simon finally arrived for their big triumphant reunion with us in Africa, it was too late. I was spending more and more time on my roof and now actually reading Van Wyck Brooks’ books (all about the lives of Whitman, Bret Harte, even Charles Nimrod of South Carolina) to get the feel of home, forgetting entirely how
bleak and grim it had been only a short while ago like in Roanoke Rapids the lost tears—But it has been ever since then that I’ve lost my yen for any further outside searching. Like Archbishop of Canterbury says “A constant detachment, a will to go apart and wait upon God in quiet and silence,” which more or less describes his own feeling (he being Dr. Ramsey the scholar) about retirement in this gadfly world. At the time I sincerely believed that the only decent activity in the world was to pray for everyone, in solitude. I had many mystic joys on my roof, even while Bull or Irwin were waiting for me downstairs, like the morning I felt the whole living world ripple joyfully and all the dead things rejoice. Sometimes when I saw the priests watching me from seminary windows, where they too leaned looking to sea, I thought they knew about me already (happy paranoia). I thought they rang the bells with special fervor. The best moment of the day was to slip in bed with bedlamp over book, and read facing the open patio windows, the stars and the sea. I could also hear it sighing out there.
57
Meanwhile the big lovely arrival was strange with Hubbard suddenly getting drunk and waving his machete at Irwin who told him to stop frightening everybody—Bull had waited so long, in such torment, and now he realized probably in an opium turningabout of his own that it was all nonsense anyway—Once when he’d mentioned a very pretty girl he met in London, daughter of a doctor, and I’d said “Why dont you marry a girl like that someday?” he said: “O dear I’m a bachelor, I want to live alone.” He didnt particularly want to live with anybody, ever. He spent hours staring in his room like Lazarus, like me. But now Irwin wanted to do everything right. Dinners, walks around the Medina, a proposed railroad trip to Fez, circuses, cafes, swims in the ocean, hikes, I could see Hubbard grabbing his head in dismay. All he went on doing were the same thing: his 4 P.M. apéritifs signalled the new excitement of the day. While John Banks and the other raconteurs swarmed around the room laughing with Bull, drinks in their hands, poor Irwin bent to the kerosene burner cooking big fishes he’d bought in the market that afternoon. Once in a while Bull bought us all dinner at the Paname but it was too expensive. I was waiting for my next advance installment from the publishers so I could start back for home via Paris and London.