The Last Renegade of Tangier : At 82, Paul Bowles still lives in Morocco, spins macabre tales and savors the bizarre. To enter his home is to take a step back in time to the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Shrunken with old age and hobbled by a painful nerve ailment in his hips and legs, Paul Bowles still manages a smile when he recalls the scorpion hunts years ago in thesub-Saharan countryside.

“Scorpions build holes in the roots of palmetto trees,” the American novelist and composer recounts fondly.

“My driver and I used to hunt them in October with sticks. We wet the ends of the sticks with saliva and stuck them in the holes. You could feel it when the scorpions took hold--like lobsters--and you had to pull them out quickly or you would lose them.” With a set of nail clippers, Bowles would snip the tiny barbed stinger off the scorpion’s soft, furled tail. His chauffeur and companion in scorpion “fishing,” a Moroccan named Temsamani, would then tuck the now-harmless arachnids in his coat.

After both men returned to the port city of Tangier, Temsamani would casually slither into a chair next to a friend in one of the big Spanish cafes in the old quarter.

“Here, I have something for you,” he would say, reaching into his pocket and encouraging the unsuspecting friend to hold forth his hands to receive the surprise: Voila! Several large, wriggling, frantically striking scorpions, deadly when armed.

Shrieks from the terrified recipient.

Tables overturned in horror and desperate retreat.

Howls and more shrieks from those at neighboring tables.

Ha Ha Ha.

Delivered in clinical detail, with the precise diction of a master linguist, the story seems positively chilling, although to Bowles it is clearly just good fun.

Catching the Saharan scorpions was only the beginning of the fun for Bowles, whose macabre repertoire of pranks also included secretly doping his friends’ food with cannabis jam and watching them freak out. Indeed, his is the kind of practical joking that Edgar Allen Poe or H. P. Lovecraft might have enjoyed.

But the author of “The Sheltering Sky” and other haunting stories of North Africa has long been renowned for his taste for the bizarre. And nearly half a century after he moved to Tangier, that taste is still intact. Meeting Bowles now, still elegant but often bedridden with sciatica, is much like entering a museum of American literature and music of the 1940s and ‘50s.

At 82, he has been the resident guru for several generations of American writers, ranging from Tennessee Williams to William Burroughs. With Bowles and his wife, the late novelist and playwright Jane Auer Bowles, as the beacons, Tangier became a regular port of call for expatriate artists fleeing the doldrums and persecution of the Eisenhower-McCarthy era back home.

Inspired by Bowles’ thematic fascination with native witchcraft and sexual violence, most of the tales that oozed out of the Tangier literary circle--including “The Sheltering Sky,” resurrected as a 1991 film by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci--had strange, twisted plots. Williams used the nearby coastal town of Asilah as the setting for “Suddenly Last Summer,” his play featuring ritualistic cannibalism. Burroughs’ hallucinogenic novel, “Naked Lunch,” was set in a Tangier male brothel.

Except for Bowles, however, literary Tangier is dead. Its labyrinthine alleys in the medina-- the old city where Burroughs and his friends, fellow writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, once cavorted--have been cleansed of their most overt vices by the Moroccan government. After a notorious incident in 1957, in which one of Bowles’ friends was jailed after being accused of seducing a 14-year-old German boy, the newly independent government began monitoring pederasty and other illegal sexual activities in the expatriate community.

For many years, Bowles, always careful not to mention Morocco by name in his books for fear of wearing out his welcome, found it increasingly difficult each time he went to the local police station to renew his annual carte de sejour.

“The police used to be very snotty to me,” he says now, his voice revealing a hint of pride--the pride of a man who never wanted to be accepted by authority. “I found it very difficult to get my annual permission to live here. Once it took 22 months. One policeman told me, ‘Monsieur Bowles, vous etes ici depuis trop longtemps’ (‘You have been here too long’).”

But in recent years, the pressure on Bowles to leave Tangier has eased.

Proof of his final acceptance as a cultural monument is that the latest slick coffee-table book on Tangier, distributed to visitors as a gift by the governor of the province, features a picture of the author, dapper in a necktie and tweed jacket, working at his typewriter at the American School of Tangier. Although he has not written stories for years, Bowles--an accomplished composer before he took up novels and travel writing--annually writes the score for the theatrical performance at the 270-student school.

Still, Bowles spends most of his time these days in the tiny bedroom of the fifth-floor apartment where he has lived for 40 years. Occasionally, he says, he still smokes kif, the Moroccan concoction made from the tender leaves near the flowers of the marijuana plant. Next to his bed is a round table stacked with a few books, letters, doctors’ prescriptions and bottles of medicine. The only window in the room is shrouded by a thick blue curtain that permits just a sliver of outside light.

Although the room is stifling, a small propane gas heater, the kind used at construction sites, glows and hisses on the floor. Another fire, scented with pine branches, crackles in the grate of the small adjacent living room.

Bowles says he has found it very hard to stay warm in recent years, even in the temperate climate of North Africa. (According to biographer Michelle Green, who wrote the book “The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier,” Gertrude Stein once described Bowles as “delightful and sensible in summer, but neither delightful nor sensible in the winter.”)

It was Stein, still holding court at the time in her Paris Left Bank salon, who suggested Tangier to Bowles as a creative place to settle. He’d visited there before--in 1931, in the company of his musical mentor, Aaron Copland. Sixteen years later he and his wife, who died in a Spanish mental hospital in 1973, moved there, and the legend of Tangier’s postwar expats began.

As though preserved for decades in Morocco’s desert climate, Bowles’ recollections are spiced with first-name references to “Tennessee” and “Aaron” and “Truman”--as in Capote, who wrote some of the more vivid descriptions of life during the town’s literary heyday.

It is the memory of Capote that stirs Bowles’ own memory of the scorpion hunts. Bowles had never liked Capote and never forgiven him for describing expatriate American writers as being “among the planet’s most pathetic tribes, sadder than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long. . . .”

Mimicking Capote’s lisping, high-pitched voice, Bowles tells of a party that Capote and friends hosted in the Caves of Hercules, a natural grotto on the coast west of Tangier.

“It was a strange party,” he says disdainfully. “They only served champagne and hash(ish).” But Capote, he recalls, citing a terror of scorpions, refused to descend into the caves unless he were carried on a palanquin stretcher by Moroccans.

“A pah-lan-keeeen ! A pah-lan-keeen !” Bowles, slipping into Capote’s heavy Southern accent, remembers Capote squealing delightedly. “He was afraid of scorpions. It was a completely silly fear, of course. It was wintertime, and there were none around.”

His pale eyes suddenly animated, Bowles chuckles at the memory. But his laughter provokes a dry coughing fit that shakes his frail body violently and causes his young Arab housekeeper to peek into the room.

In the regional Moghrebi dialect, which Bowles mastered decades ago, the two discuss a confusing set of medical instructions from the doctor. A few minutes later the housekeeper brings in a tray heaped with steaming food--wild boar (shot by a friend on a recent hunt), chicken, spinach, toast, butter and cheese.

Bowles has no telephone, so one either writes him for permission to visit or, more often, simply shows up. Although he rarely rises from his low Moroccan bed, Bowles, wearing a bib, nibbles on the chicken breast and courteously answers questions from his uninvited guest. He ignores the steaming mound of wild boar. (“She doesn’t know how to prepare it. After all, it’s pork. If she knew what it was, she would be taking a bath right now, being a good Muslim girl.”)

Despite a bitter rejection of his homeland, years of experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs and frequent dangerous sorties into local witchcraft and mystic cults here, Bowles has never lost the gracious good manners of his middle-class upbringing on Long Island. By all accounts, he receives each of his visitors, even from the most sensational of the British tabloids, with equal hospitality.

Even before the Bertolucci film starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as Port and Kit Moresby--the ill-fated couple whose relationship closely matched that of the Bowleses--Paul Bowles’ apartment had long been a pilgrimage point for historians, documentary filmmakers and journalists seeking a glimpse of a literary dinosaur.

And extinction may be inevitable: The creative climate stirred up by the expats here probably will never be revived, predicts the American School’s headmaster, Joseph McPhillips III, a 56-year-old Princeton graduate from Alabama who settled in Tangier more than 30 years ago.

“When I arrived here in 1962,” says McPhillips, who looks in on Bowles nearly every day, “I met Paul and Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, (British-born writer-artist) Brion Gysin and Bill Burroughs. There is no one on the scene of that stature today.”

The main reason, according to McPhillips, is that over the years Tangier has become more middle-class and expensive. Sexual and creative taboos that once existed in the United States, causing artists to leave, have broken down there--while here, in the meantime, they have been tightening under the pressures of Islamic fundamentalism.

In a supremely ironic twist to the life of Paul Bowles, the last of the die-hard American expatriates, the United States today may be a more creative, free, dynamic milieu for art than is once-exotic Tangier.

“There is a Disneyland outside Paris,” says McPhillips. “A McDonald’s just opened in Casablanca. The world is being Americanized. So whatever you are looking for spiritually or sexually, you can probably find just as easily today on home ground.”