Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25128
~!=~!!ii=!=ii!i~m~=:F~O;R~CENTURIES' ALTHOUGH EUROPEAN PAINTERS AND WRITERS HAD BEEN VISITING SINCE THE 19TH CENTURY, MOROCCO'S EXPATRIATE ARTIST COMMUNITY EXPLODED IN TANGIER AFTER WORLD WAR II. FOR THE ARTISTS AND LIBERAL-MINDED PEOPLE WHO WERE CHAFING UNDER THE CONSERVATIVE AND CLOSE-MINDED MORES OF POSTWAR AMERICA AND EUROPE, THE ALLURE OF THE AMORAL AND UNRESTRICTED LIFE OF MOROCCO WAS IRRESISTIBLE. GROUND ZERO OF THIS LIFE WAS IN TANGIER, IMMORTALIZED AS INTERZONE IN WILLIAM BURROUGHS' NAKED LUNCH AND WIDELY KNOWN DURING ITS HEYDAY AS SIN CITY. WITH ITS PROMISES OF CHEAP LIVING, FREELY AVAILABLE DRUGS AND A LIBERAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS HOMOSEXUALITY, LICENTIOUSNESS AND LAWLESSNESS, TANGIER DREW SUCH LUMINARIES AS TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, TRUMAN CAPOTE, WILLIAM BURROUGHS, ALAN GINSBERG, JACK KEROUAC, GORE VIDAL, BRION GYSIN, JANE BOWLES AND, OF COURSE, TANGIER'S MOST FAMOUS SON: PAUL BOWLES. "There was nothing to eat on the Sllip. There was no water to drink. It was so hot I couldn't stay below. My cabin, if you could call it that, was right opposite the bowels of the ship where the engine was going wha-whrumpa. There must have been ten thousand large cockroaches crawling around, clicking. Allover the walls, ceiling, floor. And then of course, the engine of the ship conked out halfway. I was trying to find someone to ask, 'When do we get into Sri Lanka, to Talaimannar?' And they said, 'Well, maybe tomorrow.' There was no food, nothing on this ship. Ah, ughl Permanent stench, wherever you went. Terrible." "And the rest of the trip?" I asked. "I enjoyed it," he said, "after the boat. " Once he got older Bowles wasn't as cavalier about dismissing the idea of home. At 82, he had become wistful. When I told him I was leaving Morocco he asked, "Where are you going? The States?" "It's my home," I answered. "Well, it's mine, too," he said. Then he hesitated and added softly, "It used to be." By then, he hadn't lived in New York for almost 30 years and had only visited five or six times, usually to fulfill a commission to write music. 'What is home?" I asked. "Yeah, what is home? Where you hang your hat.·' In his entrance hall. the suitcases sat mute for years, a sort of altar, a shrine to a lifestyle that slipped out from under him when he wasn't looking. He couldn't help that. he told me. "Because there were no porters. And you'd have to fly. No ships. So naturally I couldn't travel any more. That was the end of it. ,. The ocean liners are gone and Coca-Cola is everywhere. He shrugged. No regrets. Now Paul Bowles is dead. He died of a heart attack in a Tangier hospital. And the worlcl is worse for it. He once wrote a story about a Moroccan woman who escapes to Paris. Switzerland and Beverly Hills with her foreign lovers. She wants to come bacl, but her old neighborhood has been razed. "She was assailed afresh by the sensation ... of having gone too far for the possibil ity of return. " Read his words. He was, of course, writing only of himself . •