Call Me Burroughs Quotes

“Bowles appears to have had the more promiscuous past. He complained to the composer Aaron Copland in the summer of 1933, “Where in this country can I have thirty-five or forty different people a week, and never risk seeing them again? Yet, in Algeria, it actually was the mean rate. [...] I think it’s what I want, so it must be.” Another time he joked to Copland, “Did you tell me to or not to sleep with someone different every night? I have forgotten.”

By the late forties, however, he had stopped having several boys a day, and when Bill met him he had fallen for Ahmed Yacoubi, the model for the young Arab boy, Amar, in Bowles’s The Spider’s House. They met in Fez in 1947. It was Yacoubi whom Burroughs referred to when he reported to Ginsberg on his initial lack of success in meeting Bowles: “Paul Bowles is here, but kept in seclusion by an Arab boy who is insanely jealous, and given to the practice of black magic.”
― Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life

“Bill and Dave paid sixty cents to watch two Arab boys screw each other. The boys protested, saying, “Malo,” it’s bad, it’s bad to do this, then they began giggling. David said, “Si, malo, todos malos,’” all bad. Bill reported the incident at length to Allen Ginsberg:

“We demanded semen too, no half-assed screwing. So I asked Marv: “Do you think they will do it?’ and he says: ‘I think so. They are hungry.’ They did it. Made me feel sorta like a dirty old man.” Bill used his report almost verbatim in the “Black Meat” section of The Naked Lunch.

“We took the two boys back to Dave’s room and told them what we wanted. After some coy giggling they agreed, and took off their ragged clothes. Both of them had slender, beautiful boy bodies. Dave was M.C. he pointed to Boy 2 and said: ‘All right, you screw him first’ pointing to Boy 1. Boy 1 lay down on his stomach on the bed. Boy 2 rubbed spit on his prick and began screwing him. Dave said: ‘Leche we want leche.’ Leche means milk, Spanish for jissum—the boy contracted convulsively and his breath whistled through his teeth. He lay still for a moment on top of the other boy then shoved himself off with both hands. He showed us the jissum on his prick and asked for a towel. Dave threw him one and he carefully wiped his prick. Then he lay down on his stomach and Boy 1 took over. He was more passionate. He got mad because Boy 2 kept his ass contracted and pounded on his buttocks with his fist. Finally he got it in and began screwing violently. Boy 2 groaned in protest. Boy 1 came almost immediately, his buttocks quivering in spasms. He sighed then rolled free...

I see both boys every day. They will do it anytime for forty cents, which is standard price.”
― Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life

“Ian began an affair with a deaf-mute albino Moroccan who apparently told him a lot about Arab beliefs and ideas; precisely because he was a deaf-mute he knew sign language. Ian was fascinated by the Arab way of life: he learned to speak a little Arabic and had a great respect for the culture, regarding it as superior to his own.

But the affair was filled with friction and difficulties and there was one unpleasant incident when Ian was forced to suck the cock of a boyfriend of the deaf-mute when he didn’t want to. The Arabs called him “the Mad Woman”; they thought he was insane. Ian took to wandering in the countryside around the city, getting fucked by anyone he met. He was clearly going through some sort of breakdown. Burroughs later used the incident in the “End of the Line” section of Exterminator!: “The Arabs called I.S. the ‘Mad Woman.’ He was jeered at in the streets and very near such a complete breakdown as westerners in contact with Arabs habitually undergo in the novels of Mr. P.”
― Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life

“In the afternoons he might walk in the garden and practice his knife throwing, before reading or flipping through magazines. He had piles of magazines in every room: Gun Tests, Gun World, Gun Digest, American Survival Guide, Knife, UFO Universe, Soldier of Fortune, subscription copies of National Geographic and the International Herald Tribune, which Bill always read in London and Paris, and the Weekly World News, a fictional news tabloid sold at the supermarket that Bill loved to read that specialized in alien abductions, mutants, “world’s fattest” stories, urban legends, Elvis sightings, and the revelation in 1994 that twelve U.S. senators were aliens from other planets.
(...)
His collection kept changing, but he normally had seven or eight handguns, two or three shotguns, and three or four rifles.
(...)
There was also the matter of his small cock. “My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia.”

Ginsberg thought that Bill’s small penis accounted for his obsession with guns, a subject that many academics have mulled over.”
― Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life

“Burroughs and Gysin had now extended cut-ups beyond tapes and collage and into the realm of personal relations. Burroughs now suspected that the entire fabric of reality was illusory and that someone, or something, was running the universe like a soundstage, with banks of tape recorders and film projectors. He was determined to find where the control words and images were coined. He was using cut-ups in an attempt to backtrack the word lines to find out where and when the conditioning had taken place, and more importantly, who was responsible. Suspicion fell on Time magazine’s enormous newspaper clipping morgue and the files of the FBI and the CIA. But they were more likely to be the source material for control, not the masters of it. However, with the aid of a great deal of majoun, Bill had finally determined that everybody was in fact an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy, though, as usual with Burroughs, it is hard to tell how literally he meant this. However, he was certainly convinced that everyone was an agent for control and that the only way to find out who they really were was to cut them up.”
― Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life