Hotel Lamprey
When the detective double act of Hauser and O’Brien are sent to arrest William Lee, they’re given clear directions: “He’s in the Hotel Lamprey. 103 just off B’way [...] Room 606″ (175). The address seems typically to combine the fantastical with the familiar. “B’way” is of course Broadway, one of the main avenues of Manhattan. The Hotel Lamprey, we can only assume, is a joke name.
Lampreys crop up a few times elsewhere in Burroughs’ writing of this era. In “International Zone,” written in early 1955, around the time Burroughs began what would become “Hauser and O’Brien,” he describes one of Tangier’s predatory denizens looking for someone’s weak spot “on which he will fasten like a lamprey” (Interzone 51). And then in October that same year, Burroughs was thinking of eels when trying in one of his letters to arrive at the right title for his work-in-progress (revealing how close Naked Lunch came to being called something like Ticket to Sargasso), and he asked Ginsberg: “Do you know about lampreys? When they mate they tear each other with their suction cups so that they always die afterwards” (Letters 295). Burroughs actually reused lines from this letter near-verbatim for the final lines of “Hauser and O’Brien,” when Lee realises that he “had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso…” (181).
Finally, on top of the four brief references that occur in “WORD” (the major, largely unused, section of the Naked Lunch manuscript, later published in the Interzone collection), there’s one other appearance of lampreys in the text of Naked Lunch itself. This is in the “Algebra of Need” section, where “Fats” Terminal is endowed with “a lamprey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow black erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk…” (172) — a description that precisely echoes Willy the Disk, who hunts down Willy Lee in the opening pages of the book.
These points of reference should make us wonder why Burroughs has Lee living in the Hotel Lamprey. For the pun within the joke is ominously clear: lampreys are a kind of eel, and the word “eel” spells out “lee” backwards. And once we notice the pun here, perhaps we should think about “off B’way,” too. Because, just as there’s a play on words in this “routine pick-up” of a junkie that’s “not quite routine,” so too there is in the phrase “off Broadway,” which refers not only to an address near the Avenue but to the small alternative theatre circuit in Manhattan, the perfect venue indeed for one of Burroughs’ routines…
Hotel Lamprey? Front of Marseille at entrance on 103rd Street. (Photograph by Oliver Harris)
The puns and play on words, the mirror-reversing doubling of eel/Lee, take us in one direction, inward towards the complex and cryptic meanings of the “Hauser and O’Brien” narrative episode; but what if we travel in the opposite direction? Broadway is a real avenue, 103rd is a real street, and their point of intersection really exists. So, what’s there?
Travelling by way of Burroughs’ own writing, we already know from Junky that 103rd and Broadway “looks like any Broadway block” — “A cafeteria, a movie, stores” — but is in fact “junk territory.” And we also know that, because the “103rd Street boys were all oldtimers” — not the new generation of “hipster-bebop junkies” — by the late 1940s there were “no more junkies at 103rd and Broadway waiting for the connection” anymore (Junky 24–25). The trace of junk may indeed be long gone, but fifty years later this block on the Upper West Side still exists and it’s worth wondering, could the Hotel Lamprey still be there…
Burroughs tells us very little about Lee’s hotel: we know it has a self-service elevator and at least six floors (his room: 606). That’s all the information we’re given and it’s just enough to go on. On the east side of Broadway, the buildings on 103rd street are either too low to have a 6th floor or are too new to date from the period in which the “Hauser and O’Brien” scenario is set- which is anywhere from the mid-1940s to the late-50s. On the west side however, heading towards Riverside Park, there is a nine story building that stands right on the corner of the block, with an entrance at 230 West 103rd St. This is the Hotel Marseille, built in 1905 and designed by the architect Harry A. Jacobs. Nowadays, the Marseille is a senior citizen home, but you can see from the entrance that it must once have had a certain style.
Directly opposite is another building that might conceivably have been where Lee was living when the detectives burst in on him — or indeed where Burroughs himself stayed at some point in the 1940s, perhaps — but then again, the point is not to pin a literal building down so much as it is to see the Burroughsian world at work — which, with uncanny precision we assuredly do.
For a few steps up and across the street from the Marseille, at number 245, there is a stylish three-story brownstone, a building that gives this intersection of Broadway and 103rd Street its modern name (since 2006). And what could be more fitting as the site for what Burroughs called his “Chandler-style” story (Letters 262) than the place where the Hollywood actor synonymous with adaptations of classic American detective fiction grew up — the star of films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), and, intriguingly, the 1944 Michael Curtiz film Passage to Marseille: for Hauser and O’Brien were raiding what’s now called “Humphrey Bogart Place.”
Bogart lived on West 103rd from his birth in 1899 to 1923 (when his Broadway career was just starting), as the plaque outside number 245 now tells every passer-by. As for Hauser and O’Brien… “But they didn’t know. How could they? Just a routine pick-up. But not quite routine.”
(Text: Oliver Harris)
