Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  In May, Burroughs rented a new loft at 77 Franklin Street. He went to London to close out his Duke Street flat and to say good-bye to Johnny Brady, who was still living there. Gysin came from Paris to see him, and Balch told them about Johnny’s late-night ruckuses in the building, and the neighbors’ complaints. Burroughs took this opportunity to sell the flat to one of those neighbors, and he shipped one last trunk of books and papers to New York before leaving. Johnny Brady disappeared.

  Back in New York, Burroughs began to receive more invitations for readings, and his travels in America exposed him to many new locales; for example, he first set foot in San Francisco in November 1974. Everywhere he went, there were enthusiastic audiences and a new generation of readers eager to meet “El Hombre Invisible.” He enjoyed a lively social schedule in New York, with a wide circle of old and new friends. But his oldest friend, Brion Gysin, was diagnosed with colon cancer, and underwent a colostomy in Paris that December. The surgery was a humiliating, painful ordeal for Gysin, which ended his sexual life as he had known it; while in hospital, he made a halfhearted suicide attempt.

  Burroughs spent the winter in New York, trying to work on his next novel, struggling with his writer’s block. In early 1975, walking past his old loft on Centre Street, he was approached by a young man, who introduced himself: Steven Lowe, a writer and artist from Florida. They became friends, and Lowe guided him to the homosexual-pirate research that gave Burroughs a new angle on his novel: Cities of the Red Night. The names of the six cities formed an ancient spell that Gysin had taught him, to gain power over fate. Burroughs resumed working on Cities between reading trips—for he was touring now, often with John Giorno, taking his act on the road, where his old carny-world, showbiz instincts stood him in good stead with his audiences.

  Allen Ginsberg had recently taken Buddhist refuge-vows with the émigré Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Trungpa established his Dharmadhatu Foundation in Boulder, Colorado, and founded the Naropa Institute there; he invited Ginsberg and Anne Waldman to set up the literature program, which they named “the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.” In May 1975, Burroughs met Ginsberg at Naropa to give a reading. Later that summer, they went to Chicago together for readings at the Art Institute. Burroughs also went to Geneva to join Gysin at the Colloque de Tanger in their honor, and to Trungpa’s Tail of the Tiger retreat center in upstate Vermont to spend two weeks in near-total solitude in a tiny shack. Burroughs’ notes from this period became The Retreat Diaries.

  On February 5, 1976, at Franklin Street, Burroughs received a telegram with the awful news that Ian Sommerville had died in a car wreck. It was Burroughs’ sixty-second birthday; he had known Sommerville for seventeen years. Ian’s significance for him was so deep that, even in his eighties, Burroughs dreamed of him often. But he had to return to his writing and his readings, and other new business: the two-year lease on Franklin Street was expiring. Burroughs had often visited John Giorno in his loft at 222 Bowery, a building which was built as a “Young Men’s Institute” at the turn of the century. Mark Rothko had used the old gymnasium space for a painting studio in the 1960s, and for several months I had been living in the locker-room area below the gym: an almost-windowless space with concrete floors, walls, and ceiling. I moved to Great Jones Street, and in early June 1976 Burroughs took over the locker room, which came to be known as “the Bunker.” He scarcely had time to unpack before it was time to go to Boulder for another Naropa summer session.

  Bill Burroughs Jr. was at Naropa in 1976, invited by Ginsberg for poetry readings and a father-and-son reunion. Billy had been drinking heavily for years; at twenty-nine, he was recently separated from his wife and had no visible means of support. But no one expected Billy to be as terribly ill as he was when he arrived in Boulder. He vomited a toiletful of blood at a party, and was rushed to the hospital. Billy’s liver was seriously cirrhotic, the doctors said; they tried a portocaval shunt (a liver bypass), but it failed. A liver transplant was performed by Dr. Tom Starzl and his team at Colorado General Hospital in Denver in late August 1976. At the time, very few liver transplants had been done, and the odds of surviving the operation were only fifty-fifty. Burroughs spent the night in the hospital waiting room with close friends and family.

  There was weary jubilation when Billy made it through the surgery, but in the light of day it was obvious that his new condition was still not very good. With Waldman, Ginsberg, and many others in Boulder supporting Billy, Burroughs put off his return to New York and moved into a suite at the Boulderado Hotel. For five months, he made the one-hour drive to Denver almost every day to visit Billy in hospital. Billy was in and out of Colorado General during the next few years; his first post-operative release was in January 1977. The Naropa family set Billy up at the Boulderado, and at first it seemed the worst of the crisis had passed.

  Burroughs returned to his New York “Bunker.” Jacques Stern, the renegade Rothschild, had reappeared on the scene, and he got everyone’s attention by spending tens of thousands of dollars on a movie project: Dennis Hopper would direct and star in a film of Junky, with a screenplay by Terry Southern. This foursome, plus various toadies, functionaries, and hangers-on, was good for a lot of wild, coke-fueled parties in New York during those months. These “story meetings” and unbridled goings-on lasted almost a year, but the film project came to nothing, which is probably just as well.

  Burroughs headed to Colorado in June 1977 for his third summer session at Naropa. He had been away only a few months, and his Boulder friends welcomed him back. After the Poetics session was over, Burroughs decided to stay on in Boulder; he rented a tiny apartment at the Varsity Manor complex, and kept the lease for three years. Steven Lowe was living in nearby Eldora, and Burroughs met Cabell Hardy and a number of other young people, mostly Beatitude-seekers left over from the Naropa summer sessions. Hardy lived with Burroughs, cooking for him and generally helping out, and keeping him company. Burroughs was writing the early drafts of The Place of Dead Roads, which he was referring to as “The Gay Gun,” or alternatively “The Johnson Family.” The novel’s emphasis on the Zen of shooting arose from Burroughs” frequent outings to nearby towns to practice his marksmanship, his lifelong favorite pastime.

  Two months after Billy was released from hospital in early 1977, he was readmitted for follow-up. His surgery wounds were messy and slow to heal; he underwent several more operations in an effort to close an abdominal cyst. In October Billy made an unplanned dash to Santa Cruz, California, in search of Georgette Larrouy, the girl who had lived with him there when his marriage fell apart. He arrived with no medicine and no money, and in the end he was poured onto a plane back to Denver. In January 1978, Naropa gave Billy a room at the Yeshe House commune, and Burroughs and Ginsberg persuaded Dr. Starzl to authorize a morphine-maintenance regime for Billy, on the theory it would stop or slow down his drinking, as Billy promised it would.

  An NYU film student, Howard Brookner, had embarked upon a documentary project on Burroughs. In October, Brookner arrived in Boulder with his soundman, Jim Jarmusch, to film Burroughs and his son together. It was an awkward situation; Billy felt threatened by the presence of Hardy and the two strangers, and the cameras and bright lights added an air of unreality to the gathering in Burroughs” tiny apartment. The film crew also visited Billy’s room, a windowed cave plastered with a riot of magazine-photo collages. Billy’s chaotic situation at Yeshe House eventually became untenable, and in November he moved to an apartment in Denver.

  John Giorno, the French philosophy professor Sylvère Lotringer, and I had been busy since midsummer planning the “Nova Convention”: a four-day series of performances and events at NYU and venues on the Lower East Side in early December 1978. Brookner decided to film the convention, which reunited Burroughs and Gysin and featured seminars with Burroughs” publishers and translators, and performances by Allen Ginsberg, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Anne Waldman, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, E
d Sanders, Frank Zappa, Patti Smith, Timothy Leary, and others. A text version of The Third Mind was published by Viking that same month, and Gysin, in from Paris for the event, exhibited new paintings at Books & Co. on Madison Avenue. An avalanche of press conveyed the consensus that the Nova Convention was a “summit meeting of the avant-garde”—as that term was defined in New York in the late 1970s. There was a tremendous letdown when all the visitors, speeches, and parties were over, and Burroughs hunkered down in the Bunker for the winter.

  By all accounts, a tsunami of smack hit New York in the winter of 1978–79, and within a few months not only Burroughs, but most of his closest friends as well, were addicted to heroin. He was preoccupied with a circle of much younger fellow users who could score for him on the Lower East Side’s burgeoning heroin scene. After five years, Burroughs was still working in fits and starts on Cities of the Red Night, but his heroin habit took up a great deal of his time and money. For the first time in many years, he was well and truly hooked. Ironically, some of the glassine bags of junk that he received were stamped with the “Dr. Nova” brand, inspired by his own literary persona.

  Meanwhile Blue Wind Press in Berkeley published Blade Runner: A Movie, Burroughs” short film treatment of an Alan E. Nourse novel, and John Calder’s New York office published Ah Pook Is Here, without the illustrations. In Paris, Gysin was struggling to make ends meet, and in London, in early 1980, Antony Balch was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer; he died that summer. Burroughs” last meeting with Balch had been at the Boulderado Hotel’s mezzanine bar, four years earlier; long before Balch’s diagnosis, Burroughs sensed that Balch was moribund. The two of them had often talked about “the dying feeling,” citing various examples of it from their lives.

  Burroughs traveled to Santa Fe for a D. H. Lawrence festival in July 1980, and in August he finished editing his Cities manuscript in Boulder and closed out the Varsity Manor apartment. In the final editing sessions, Burroughs decided to title each of the small chapters into which the book had been divided, and for most of these titles he used phrases that the Ukrainian para-psychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudivé had transcribed from “silent tape” recordings, spoken by “voices” just below the noise floor of the tape. Like Dutch Schultz’s last words, these phrases are evocative without any explicit meaning. Burroughs had been working on Cities of the Red Night for six years, longer than on any novel since Naked Lunch, and it was his first full-length book since The Wild Boys, published a decade earlier. By the time he finished Cities, Burroughs had already begun The Place of Dead Roads, and he set himself the task of writing a major trilogy of novels.

  In his Denver apartment, Billy Burroughs Jr. continued to deteriorate. The hospitality of the Buddhists in Boulder was not to his liking, and in any case he had abused it. He lived between the streets and deadbeat cafeterias in the neighborhood of Colorado General, where the receptionists and nurses were now his best friends. In November, a girlfriend from his Green Valley School days tracked him down. She wanted to see Billy again, and she sent him a ticket to Palm Beach at Christmastime. She was totally unprepared for Billy’s desperately ill appearance when he arrived; she found him an apartment and paid his rent there.

  In February, Billy decided he wanted to go up to Orlando to see his former headmaster, George von Hilsheimer, in nearby De Land, Florida. He and Hilsheimer quarreled, and Billy ran away into the rainy night. He was found unconscious in a drainage ditch, picked up by sheriff’s deputies, and admitted to West Volusia Memorial Hospital, near De Land. Upon his release, a kindly social worker found Billy an affordable motel room. Ten days later his caretaker called an ambulance to bring him back to West Volusia. Billy died at 6:35 A.M.on March 3, 1981. The coroner found no trace of prednisone in his bloodstream, which indicated that Billy had deliberately stopped taking his rejection-suppressing medications. His sketchy final writings reveal that he had been suicidal for some time.

  In the Bunker, Burroughs was devastated by the news. But Cities of the Red Night was to be published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston that spring, and Burroughs had planned two ambitious reading tours across the country with John Giorno to support the new novel. Eight months earlier, Burroughs had finally enrolled in a methadone maintenance program in New York; thereafter, he was able to travel without needing to contact the narcotics underworld in every city he visited. After two weeks of solitary grieving in the Bunker, once again Burroughs hit the road, playing to punk rock-club audiences across the Midwest. He visited Lawrence, Kansas, in July and spent the month in a borrowed studio room near the hilltop campus of the University of Kansas. There was a tornado in Lawrence that month, and from his balcony Burroughs had a good view of it. He put some of these impressions into The Place of Dead Roads, on which he was working full-time now.

  Burroughs returned from the second leg of the Red Night tour that fall to find that the Bunker’s status was in jeopardy: the 222 Bowery building was in the throes of a rent strike. Burroughs didn’t want to see it through, and decided to move to Kansas before the new year. His last public event in New York was his widest exposure yet: he appeared on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, reading from “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”—the routine he wrote with Kells Elvins in 1938. On November 7, as millions of viewers watched, Burroughs looked up from his pages and straight into the camera, and began to speak: “S.S. America . . . off Jersey Coast. . . there is no cause for alarm . . . there is a minor problem in the boiler room, but everything is now under—[sound effects of a nuclear blast].”

  The winter of 1981-82 was unusually cold and snowy in northeastern Kansas. Burroughs was established in “the Stone House,” a rented nineteenth-century two-story limestone dwelling four miles south of Lawrence, and had resumed his work on The Place of Dead Roads. His friend Dean Ripa, a writer and venomous-snake collector, visited Burroughs in Lawrence, bringing deadly pillowcases full of diamondback rattlesnakes, Gaboon vipers, and kraits. Burroughs was happy with the somewhat primitive conditions of the Stone House; it was ideal for the Old Western novel he was writing, with a panoramic view for miles across the Wakarusa Valley and north to the campus buildings on thousand-foot-high Mount Oread.

  Spring came to Douglas County, and with it came the cats: the big white tom; the ginger-colored longhaired female; the Russian Blue male, with his silky grey coat and plaintive cry. Burroughs began to feed these strays, and he found his heart opening to them: they each had distinct personalities, and they reminded him of people from his past. At age sixty-eight, Burroughs began to review his life, and his diaries confess his frequent weeping spells. It was his practice to write the next day’s date on a journal entry, a typewriter page, or an index card, so that he could jot down his dreams when he woke up in the night—as he did often, being a light sleeper. A year later, Burroughs went back to these notes to write The Cat Inside.

  The Stone House had a limestone barn nearby, and Burroughs took to shooting his pistols at targets propped up against a “backstop” of stacked firewood. After years of living in cities where handguns were forbidden, or at least not for sale, he enjoyed spending time in the gun shops of Lawrence, picking out new additions to the firearms collection he had begun in the late 1970s, when he lived in Colorado. For his targets, Burroughs picked up old pieces of scrap plywood that lay around the barn. One day he fired a 20-gauge shotgun at one of these, and then, his shoulder bruised by the big gun’s recoil, named the plywood panel “Sore Shoulder.” The date was February 28, 1982, an unseasonably warm day. Burroughs made about two dozen more “shotgun paintings” that spring, adding house paint, oil colors, and India ink and collaging photographs and magazine images to the plywood, which was often so old and dried out that it resembled phyllo dough in its structure. Burroughs spent hours gazing into the patterns of torn wood grain exposed by his shotgun blasts.

  That summer, Burroughs traveled by car to Naropa for the Jack Kerouac Conference, where he saw many old friends, including Kerouac’s first wife, Edie. October 1982 found Burroug
hs visiting London to participate with Gysin and a long slate of poets and musicians in “the Final Academy,” a five-day event honoring and reuniting Gysin and Burroughs.

  Work on Dead Roads was nearly finished now. Burroughs sets up his story with a “Shoot-Out in Boulder,” which pits Kim Carson against his old nemesis, Mike Chase, in a duel; then Burroughs introduces his narrator’s character: William Seward Hall, writer of Old Western stories. Hall is the first elderly, self-referential protagonist in all of Burroughs” work; in Cities, the characters are all adolescents or middle-aged. By the end of Dead Roads, Burroughs has taken “Kim” and his band of “Wild Fruits” through numerous lifetimes and incarnations. Their attempts to rewrite history become more fantastic and frantic, with a Grand Guignol closing sequence that perhaps outdoes the end of Cities. But the final scene is the pistol duel in the Boulder Cemetery, and on the last page, Burroughs throws a curveball: someone unseen and unnamed shoots both Kim and Chase. As Kim dies, his last words are: “What the FU—!?!” Kim’s death, and the birth of Hall, are Burroughs” turning point into old age as an artist.