The Yage Letters: Redux (Penguin Modern Classics) by Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs

Author:Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs [Ginsberg, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141903286
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

May 5

930 Jose Leal, Lima

Dear Allen:

This finds me in Lima which is enough like Mexico City to make me homesick. Mexico is home to me and I can’t go there. Got a letter from my lawyer — I am sentenced in absentia. I feel like a Roman exiled from Rome. Plan to hit Peru jungle for additional Yage material. Will spend a few weeks digging Lima.

Went through Ecuador fast as possible. What an awful place it is. Small country national inferiority complex in most advanced stage.

Ecuadorian Miscellanea: Esmeraldas hot and wet as a Turkish bath and vultures eating a dead pig in the main drag and everywhere you look there is a Nigra scratching his balls. The inevitable Turk who buys and sells everything. He tried to cheat me on every purchase and I spent an hour arguing with this bastard. The Greek shipping agent with his dirty silk shirt and no shoes and his dirty ship that left Esmeraldas seven hours late.

On the boat I talked to a man who knows the Ecuador jungle like his own prick. It seems jungle traders periodically raid the Auca (a tribe of hostile Indians. Shell lost about 20 employees to the Auca in two years) and carry off women they keep penned up for purposes of sex. Sounds interesting. Maybe I could capture an Auca boy.

I have precise instructions for Auca raiding. It’s quite simple. You cover both exits of Auca house and shoot everybody you don’t wanna fuck.

Arriving in Manta a shabby man in a sweater started opening my bags. I thought he was a brazen thief and gave him a shove. Turns out he was the customs inspector.

The boat gave out with a broken propeller at Las Playas half way between Manta and Guayaquil. I rode ashore on a balsa raft. Arrested on the beach suspect to have floated up from Peru on the Humboldt Current with a young boy and a tooth brush (I travel light, only the essentials) so we are hauled before an old dried up fuck, the withered face of cancerous control. The kid with me don’t have paper one. The cops keep saying plaintively:

‘But don’t you have any papers at all?’

I talked us both out in half an hour using the ‘We-got-like-two-types-publicity-favorable-and-unfavorable-which-do-you-want?’ routine. I am down as writer on tourist card.

Guayaquil. Every morning a swelling cry goes up from the kids who sell Luckies in the street —‘ A ver Luckies,’ ‘Look here Luckies’— will they still be saying ‘A ver Luckies’ a hundred years from now? Nightmare fear of stasis. Horror of being finally stuck in this place. This fear has followed me all over South America. A horrible sick feeling of final desolation.

‘La Asia,’ a Chinese restaurant in Guayaquil, looks like 1890 whorehouse opium den. Holes eaten by termites in the floor, dirty tasseled pink lamps. A rotting teak-wood balcony.

Ecuador is really on the skids. Let Peru take over and civilize the place so a man can score for the amenities. I never yet lay a boy in Ecuador and you can’t buy any form of junk.

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