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world.
    If anyone could sympathize with the surrealistic absurdity of Alan’s plight, Burroughs was the man. He’d seek out Burroughs, and something marvelous might result.
     
     

Chapter 3:Tangier Routines
    [These letters, and the ones reprinted in a later chapter, are said to have been written by the author William Burroughs. The letters in this chapter are variously addressed to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and to Burroughs’s father, Mortimer. The letters date from December 22, 1954 to December 25, 1954; the first two are hand-written, and the final three are typed. Note that Burroughs uses a variety of spellings for “Tangier.”]
     
    To Allen Ginsberg
    Tangiers, December 22, 1954
     
    Dear Allen,
     
    I been pounding my keys for a silo-fulla-queer-corn story this month...to the point where my typewriter seize up and croak. So I come at you direct through my quivering quill. Imagine a hack writer fixes with ink and he enters his personal Xanadu pleasure dream. But then the Great Publisher edit him outta Eden.
    I’ve settled back into Tangier, they got everything I want. Each trip to the homeland drags me more. How did we ever let our cops get so out of hand?
    If I ever started feeling sorry for my parents, I’d never stop. I’m a disappointment, but having gone thus far, I’d be a fool not to go further. My word hoard is compost to make lovely lilies bloom.
    Too bad you and me didn’t contact personal, but I couldn’t make it to California with all them conditionals you were laying down. Why are you scared of mind-meld? Our buddy-buddy microscopic symbiotes do it alla time. Dysenteric amoeba Bil meets sexy-in-his-bristles paramecium Al, they rub pellicles—ah, the exquisite prickling, my dear—and schlup ! My protoplasm is yours, old thing, the two of us conjugated into a snot-wad so cozy. I see me in a Mother Billie Hubbard ectoplasmic gown, tatting antimacassars to drape over that harrumph Golgi apparatus of yours.
    “Just a routine,” says Clem, standing bare-ass on the milking stool while the gray mare kicks screaming through the barn wall. “Sorry, old girl, I meant to use lard, not liniment.”
    The local worthies presented me with the key to the city—a nicely broken-in kief pipe stamped with arabesques. Ululating crowds of Spanish and Arab boys bore my pierced sedan chair though the streets. I’m installed in a Casbah seraglio, $23 per month, a clean plaster suite at Piet the Procurer’s, with an extra bedroom and a balcony affording microscopic views of the souq.
    Brilliant clear Mediterranean skies. I’m a myrmecophilous arthropod in the African anthill—a parasite/symbiote whom the Insect Trust tolerates on account of my tasty secretions.
    I leech the sparkle of the sun from the waves, the Japanese outlines from the pines, the exquisite curls of steam from my cup of mint tea. These stolen vital forces are channeled into making me a citizen. Vote Insect Trust or die.
    Kiki seems genuinely glad to have me back. What relief, to have a boy who cares for me. I’ve already given him some of my new dry goods. The pith helmet. The feather-duster. I’m this staghorn beetle lurches in, legs furiously milling, the ants swarming over me like slow brown liquid, flensing off my waxy build-up, a peaceful click of chitin from my sun-stunned den.
    Eukodal back in stock at the farmacia. But dollies, M tubes and codeineetas still in short supply. Brian Howard is like to have burned down the place this summer. “I just don’t feel right in the morning without I have my medication.” Brian’s gone home to the Riviera, buying a castle, my dear.
    You gotta dig the Socco Chico when you and Jack come. The Little Market, the anything-goes interzone of Interzone. Maybe I write a magazine piece about it for Reader’s Digest , you be my agent, and we retain intergalactic telepathy rights.
    By way of Socco Chico color, I run into a Cambridge type at the Café Central last night, he say he used to be math