In Search Of Burroughs
by Carol Neuman, seemagazine.com
April 21st 2011
It’s our last meal in Africa and the service is as predictably slow, silent and
surly as anywhere in Morocco.
Cottony light from beaded art deco lamps softens the edges of the long wait
between visits from our server. We examine the heavy silverware, admire the
gleaming cedar staircases, and moan about the unmistakable aroma of Galouises
from a nearby table of fellow tourists.
No worries. We weren’t there to indulge in the decadent menu of freshly caught
fish, scandalously good martinis, or fresh in-season vegetables.
We were there to drink in the aura of authentic fakery. After all, this is
Rick’s Cafe — the tourist trap to end all tourist traps.
If the restaurant is a celluloid dream come to life, it flirts with Groundhog
Day almost as much as Casablanca. Downstairs from our table, the Bogey and
Bergman classic plays silently on endless repeat, the centerpiece of a
perfect-replica dance floor with the almost-same piano where Sam played it
again.
Here, the movie lives on in perpetuity, acted out in the unchanging rhythms of
the cafe’s costumed servers and era-appropriate background music.
The restaurant is an island of eerie comfort in a sea of regional tension and
urban disaffection. In the crowded streets of Casablanca, where tourists are
few and far between, the city is remaking itself. The colonial Parisian
grandeur of Bogey’s supposed stomping grounds is now covered with a patina of
soot. Construction workers are carving deep incisions for coming light-rail
transit lines.
Even if it doesn’t reflect contemporary Morocco, at least Rick’s Cafe is
located in its borders. Casablanca, by contrast, was shot entirely on a
Hollywood soundstage. Yet almost 70 years on, it’s still a gateway drug for
grasping the country’s intoxicatingly complex, storied, and contested history.
Pop culture travel isn’t simple pilgrimage or re-enactment. It’s about
traveling to a feeling, a memory that you dreamed you had. Or better still, a
memory of someone else’s life. It’s a post-modern mix of legend, fact and sheer
marketing magic.
Take Essaouira, a beach town on Morocco’s southwestern coast. It boasts Hendrix
as its dead rockstar laureate. The myth? That he was inspired to pen ‘Castles
Made of Sand’ by a sandbar off the Essaouira beach. The truth? He wrote the
song seven years before his trip across the Atlantic to Morocco. The marketing
magic? His face, along with fellow hazy music man Bob Marley, adorn the illicit
head shops and backpacker bars. It’s a bit disappointing not to hear Hendrix
cranked through the loudspeakers between calls to prayer, but his touch is
unmistakable: you don’t even need to ask to have heroin, cocaine, hash, pot,
ecstasy and kif offered up as readily as thuya wood souvenirs.
Still, it’s a far easier pill to swallow than the dizzying labyrinth of
Tangier, a few hours to the north. Some landmarks have changed since William S.
Burroughs immortalized the seedy city in the pages of Naked Lunch, but step
inside the medina walls and the unshakeable unease grips you quicker than a
tout with a con game.
Night is falling and we’re retracing Burroughs, who himself was following
fellow writer Paul Bowles. Few non-locals dare to come to the medina after
dark, when the smell of donkey dung and a flickering garland of bare bulbs are
the only navigational signposts. Women have retreated home, bored young men
fill the cafes and any remaining tourists become unwitting game in the sport of
distraction.
We’ve been on our quest for over an hour when we finally slap down a few
dirhams for gum.
“The Petit Socco?” we ask the shopkeeper. “Around the corner. Left, then two
rights, then left,” he says. Skeptical but desperate after both Google and our
earnest map-scanning fail us, we follow his advice and slink through narrow
alleys to our purported destination. It’s a dead end. Half-lit neon signs buzz
above our heads, luring us into one of the sketchy rooming houses Burroughs
himself might have holed up in.
We do our best to reverse course, and emerge into another mini-square, this
time with new landmarks and new faces. Without asking and despite our
increasingly short-tempered rejections, we’re given advice on where to find our
mysterious socco.
“Keep going straight!” says one smirking tout.
“You’ll need to take a taxi; follow me to my brother’s cab,” offers an
enterprising other.
Claustrophobia has set in. We’re feeling as Burroughs might: paranoid and
punchy. But we’re determined to give it one last try.
A final scan of the barely-readable map suggests we should head uphill. We
trudge up a gentle incline toward the smell of Sanka and sizzling lamb skewers.
A café. And not just a café but a big one. The café. Café Centrale. The Petit
Socco sprawls out before us.
Weren’t we here an hour ago? Didn’t we pass by that hostel twice before? No
matter.
We’re awash in the relief of arrival. All the exposition of Burrough’s
Interzone emerges, like a puzzle solved: The house he shot up in. The balcony
he fought from. The corners he hustled on.
It’s a leap through the wormhole that partitions the grind of independent
travel from the fantasy of pop culture. Finally, the distance between the two
worlds collapses, and so do we, happy to sip some bad coffee and ponder our own
would-be Tangerine memories.
Original Page:
http://www.seemagazine.com/article/city-life/lifestyle/in-search-of-burroughs-5511/
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