Brion Gysin - The Process

In Tanja, as I say, we went our own ways and, here in Tanja, Mya first tangled with Dr. Pio Labesse. Pio was what people used to call “a bad hat.” They told me Mya was singeing her wings but I knew she was only burning the pin-feathers off her pinions to grow her own eagle spread. I let her have her head, naturally, and she got a lot, eventually, from even Labesse. They had their ups and downs, of course. At one time, Mya claimed Pio was poisoning her with pills and he did have that sort of reputation but she found a way to poison him back so they made it up. She’s terribly clever at all that. Then, she decided to sue Strangleblood for divorce in Switzerland, in Basel where she’d first picked up her lawyer Rolf Ritterolf; he’s Swiss. She separated PP, legally, from so much of that loot that he began to feel a lot better right away, and left for Tibet. Mya, at loose ends and alone in Europe for a moment, absentmindedly married a prince. In First-Class on an airliner to Brussels, of all places, where she was going to pick up her new Lear jet, she was set upon by this dazzlingly handsome Himalayan, who was so persistent that Mya felt she owed it to herself to be swept away, just this once. Before she knew quite what was happening to her, she found herself marrying him in his embassy. In the air over Afghanistan, he explained the marriage customs of his country.

“Polyandry,” he told her.

Mya was only nineteen at the time. She said: “I’ve had my Salk.”

“No,” he explained, “you are now married also to all my brothers who are Khans like me — you can translate that as prince.”

She looked at the fuel gauge and she looked back at him. “How many brothers have you got?”

It turned out they were four and that wasn’t so bad but they all had other wives, too. When she was left alone for a minute with the women, they all flew at her like harpies, beat her and stripped her of her money and her clothes. When they poisoned her, she got hold of some of the stuff they were using and smuggled it out to be analyzed back in Basel. Mya will tell you herself about her deep and abiding interest in pharmaceutical folklore. It was quite an adventure but, all in all, it took Mya less than a week, flying both ways in her own jet, of course. Back in Basel, Rolf was still so hot from the Strangleblood case that he got her divorces from the four princes through — I was going to say; in a trice. Divorcing four princes in one swell foop was quite a feat, don’t you think? One permanent scar: Mya insists on being a princess ever since. With me, she’s a white-Ranee, if she wants to be, but she made Labesse, her fifth husband, build the base of an African empire for her and she wouldn’t marry him until he managed to have himself made a pontifical prince.

Poor Prince Pio, the day he got a crown he lost his head. He began acting like the caliph of Cairo soon after he rammed through the deal, with the Spaniards who claimed it in those days, for Mya to buy up two million bare acres of sand in the Sahara, including Cape Noon and the ruin of the Portuguese fort they found on it. Out of that pile of rubble, Mya made “Malamut,” which she built, as they say, in her own image and likeness and Mya thinks big. It was a draw, for a while; who could think bigger, she or Labesse. “Malamut” was meant to cost six million dollars but, so far, it’s cost nearly twenty times that and it’s not finished, yet. Can you imagine something between Mont Saint Michel and Gibraltar but set out on the blazing Atlantic coast of the Sahara right on the Tropic of Cancer, the one and only rock bigger than a pebble in thousands of miles of unmapped blue lagoons? Inland from “Malamut” is absolute desert, whose hard surface is stamped with giant moving dunes of amber-pink sand and each dune is carved by the wind into a perfect crescent with horns running due south. “Malamut” means megalomania to people like Pio and in that palace Prince Pio became a real prick.

But I’m running ahead of my own story because, all the time “Malamut” was a-building, I was down below the Socco Chico in Tanja, deeply involved with the Brotherhood of the Hamadchas, only coming up as far as the European Boulevard now and then for air. My encounter with the head-chopping Brotherhood was ordained by the fact that, from the first moment Mya and I drew breath in Tanja, we were under a spell. We were so sick of those poured-concrete shells they call hotels all over modern Africa that we asked for an old-fashioned place and they took us to the Hotel Africanus , hanging over the port on the edge of the old Arab quarter. Amos Africanus, whose grandfather built it around the turn of the century, said the old man had designed the hotel to accommodate the pig-sticking trade from Gibraltar. It seems that Her Majesty’s Lancers, lacking a good gallop on the Rock, used to sail over for long weekends in International Tanja to hunt wild boar from horseback with spears in the Diplomatic Forest. If you’ve ever been in the place, you’ve seen their ghosts still lingering in the long lawn curtains of the old mirrored dining room and the leather-lined bar. If you’ve ever stayed there you know how enchanted we were with our vast suites of rooms with every last Edwardian tassel still hanging, the big brass beds with their mosquito-net canopies and the long shuttered windows down to the floor.

But, when you open those windows, what strange sneaky smells come crawling up from the surrounding streets! And what noise! I almost fell off my various iron balconies, leaning out to see where such a din could be coming from and, let me tell you, we were used to the African drums. I tried ringing down to the desk to complain but, of course, no one answered the phone, so I ventured into the long stuccoed halls and down the marble staircase covered with dusty red carpeting into the Moorish lounge: no one about. I rapped on the ground glass of a mahogany cubicle and out stepped a very tanned man with prematurely white hair, who said: “I am the management. Can I help you?” That was my very first meeting with Amos and you heard what he said: “I am the management.” We have learned always to take people precisely at their word. Amos Africanus is a big help, you’ll see; he still manages things for us and he will, now, for you, Hassan, too.

When I asked him where all that weird racket of Arab music was coming from, he laughed: “Some American beatniks next door, as a matter of fact. They’ve settled into an Arab house and become Adepts of one of the local ecstatic brotherhoods.” I knew the sort of thing he meant because we have that in the Farout Islands where I was brought up. The servants all used to get psychic relief by chanting and dancing all night until they passed out. My amah, my nursemaid, took me to their secret services almost as soon as I could waddle and I became an initiate at a very early age. I introduced myself to Amos Africanus: “I’d like to contact the local mysteries,” I said, offering him at the same time a grip which I thought he might know and he did, apparently, for he refused it with another laugh, saying: “I’ll introduce you if you like, but I’ll not go inside with you.” I knew what he meant. The Sephardim are exceptionally careful, even coy, about the magic which surrounds them in North Africa although they have always been practically the only authorities open to us on the subject. Amos took me through the outer cubicle of his office into a vast old library built in ornate Moroccan style and filled with books on North Africa in six or seven languages. “This is the French section,” he said; “added by me. I would have taken my degree in anthropology under Levy-Levant at the Sorbonne if the war hadn’t interrupted all that.”

“How about a little fieldwork next door?” I suggested.

“On Lenny and Lorna? Or on the Hamadcha they’ve called in to dance in their house? I’m afraid the Levines are getting in a little over their depth with the Brotherhood, as a matter of fact. The Hamadcha think they’re just Americans and, what’s more, the Brotherhood wants to go on thinking the Levines are just Americans because of the money involved. Lenny plans to take a clutch of Hamadcha back to the States, to get people trance-dancing in the East Village basements before he takes over Madison Square Garden and the Fairgrounds and the West Coast, Gulf Coast and Canada; until he’s got the whole continent dancing. Mexico, Central America, Honolulu, Japan.… They tell me that kind of fantasy comes from shooting amphetamine in the mainline or do they call it: ‘mainlining amphetamine’? Well, anyway, Lorna comes here from time to time to confide to me that she’s afraid in the house because everybody seems to be trying to poison them. Their Moroccan maid, who is not a Hamadcha and disapproves of having the Brotherhood dancing in the house at all, told them that the only antidote was to eat a bat’s liver. So, they went out to the Caves of Hercules on the Atlantic beach about fifteen miles from here and paid a small boy to kill them two bats. They ate one of them fried.”