Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Many years ago my first contact with the Land of the Dead: It is in the backyard of 4664 Pershing Avenue. Darkness and patches of oil and smell of oil. In the house now, and I am bending over Mother from in front, eating her back, like a dinosaur. Now Mother comes screaming into the room: “I had a terrible dream that you were eating my back.” I have a long neck that reaches up and over her head. My face in the dream is wooden with horror. It is like a segment of film underexposed. Not enough light. The light is running out. Dinosaurs rise from the tar pits on La Brea Avenue. Oil and coal gas.

  Back through the sixties, slow letup in drug pressure . . . now back through the fifties . . . Anslinger in full swing. Morphine and Dilaudid scripts . . . Pantopon Rose . . . Old-time junkies at 103rd and Broadway . . . Back back clickety clack . . . Syrettes . . . World War II. . . The thirties . . . Heroin is $28 an ounce—back back . . . the Crash, the twenties . . . film stars on junk, Wally Read . . . Wilson Mizner . . . World War I. . . Keep the home fires burning though the hearts are yearning . . . back before the laws . . . another air . . . a different light. . . free lunch and beer at five cents a mug . . . back . . . no lines to the present. . . cut all lines . . . here come the lamplighters, ghostly private places . . . Westmoreland Place . . . Portland Place . . . empty houses, leaves blowing and drifting like shreds of time . . . radio silence on Portland Place . . . furtive seedy figures, rooming houses and chili parlors, hop joints, cathouses . . . July 27, 1991—after three weeks in the hospital in Topeka for triple bypass and fractured hip.

  Flying over African set in a rickety old tin plane. I am in a windowless cubicle, jiggling about; if it turns upside down I will know this is It. But we land on the edge of a lake or inlet, in a basin. Standing there on the shore, I can see fish swimming in the clear, yellow water, twenty or thirty feet deep, and deeper towards the middle. Lily pads three feet across, yellow-grey in color, some dry on top—others soaked through, stems reaching down into the clear, still water. In the distance an inlet, in clear, golden afternoon light.

  In that hospital there were interludes of blissful, painless tranquillity. (I start awake with a cry of fear.) Slipping, falling, deeper and deeper into easeful rest after the perilous journey, silent peace by the afternoon lake where the sun never sets and it is always late afternoon.

  How did we get here, somewhere in Africa? In a rickety old tin plane. He was in a metal-lined cubicle, sheet iron, like the inside of an orgone accumulator. There were no windows but it was light. He could feel the vibrations and he knew the plane was in danger of a crash, but it lands and he gets out.

  He is on the edge of a lake, sixty feet deep in the middle. About two hundred yards across. On the other side is a village. Black children trickling out along the shore of the lake, in little white suits and dresses. The water is a clear yellow, slanting steeply down to the center. There are large lily pads three feet across, and the stems reaching down to the bottom in a green-yellow haze where big, black fish swim around the stems. Fish range from one foot to three feet in length. The lake is in a basin. Away in the distance in a golden glow, I can see more water, a larger lake or river.

  I am standing on the near side of the basin with the pilot, who wears shorts and knee-length socks. He says something about the white stones that litter the slope, none larger than a Ping-Pong ball. I cannot see over the edge.

  Slowly a familiar odor fills my nostrils. Piss? Piss!!! The lake is piss. Years and years of strong yellow piss. And slowly the full desolate horror of that stagnant place hits him like a kick in the stomach.

  “Fishing, anyone?” The scales are encrusted with crystals of yellow piss, the flesh yellow and oily with piss. Where is the plane? No plane here. He tries to reach the top of the basin. Keeps sliding back on white stones, smooth and slippery. Where is the pilot? No pilot here. The sun is not moving. Just a steady glow in the golden distance, on the great brown-yellow river of shit and piss.

  The Duad! Out of the basin!? Beyond the basin? There is nothing beyond the basin!

  A deep slough of clear, yellow urine, seepage of centuries from the Duad, there in the western distance, bathed in the golden glow of a sun that never sets.

  Eternal vigilance and skill in the use of weapons that will never be needed here in this yellow stalemate where it is always late afternoon.

  The city is vaguely reminiscent of New York, with the Land of the Dead superimposed. Dark, dirty streets littered with trash and garbage, but trash from what usage? And garbage from what foods and what containers? The smell of death and rot is here, from decay of unfamiliar offal. Many of the buildings appear deserted or semi-deserted. Many have stained marble facades and steps. The streets are narrow. A park in front of the traveler is a twisted tangle of roots and vines and misshapen trees.

  I am leaving an old lover, who has taken a wife and has no further need of me. Looking at the tangled roots, the rotting fruit and phosphorescent excrement, I realize that I must face the nature of my own need.

  Why do I need to be needed, and why can I not face and eliminate this abject need? For inexplicable and therefore inordinate need is always abject and unsightly. A man who suffers, however intensely, from frustrated sexual needs is always an object of contempt. He has only himself to blame. But it may be very difficult for him to face the parts of himself he can blame.

  The pain of thinking about the lost lover and his new lover disporting themselves, with no thought of my pain and need, cuts like a salted wire whip.

  Cabin on the Lake

  Now I got no use for a big house, just two bedrooms, and one is my art studio . . . don’t really want a guest room, ‘cause I don’t really want guests, they can sleep on the sofa . . . and I got me this cabin out on the lake. Got it cheap since I was able to put up cash, which the owners needed to put down on another house they is buying out in the country. Could easy sell it now, but what for? A few thousand profit? Nowadays what can you do with that kinda money?

  My neighbor tells me right in front of my dock (I’ve got the access, and that is the thing matters here on the lake . . . a dock, see!), well, my neighbor tells me that right in front of my dock is the best catfish fishing in the lake, but I don’t want to catch a catfish. They squawk when you pull them out of the water and snap at you like an animal, and I don’t want to kill no animal. Besides which, they is a bitch to clean . . . have to skin them with a pair of pliers, and their guts is like animal guts. Course, I could turn the fish loose—unless he swallowed the hook, and then what I’d have to do is cut his head clean off with a machete and end his misery.

  I could cope with a bass, or better, some bluegills—half pound, as tasty a fish as a man can eat—fresh from the lake, and I got me an aluminum flat bottom boat, ten foot long, $270 . . . a real bargain. I likes to row out in the middle of the lake and just let the boat drift. I hear tell there’s been flying saucers sighted out here on the lake, and I’m hoping maybe one will pick me up. These aliens the government is trying to hush up, they got no stomachs, nourish themselves from photosynthesis—so you can see why the scum on top of us want to hack that up. The whole fucking planet is built on eating, and if a surgical intervention could remove all stomachs, the whole shithouse would come crashing down and then we could look at Bush and that tight-assed bitch Thatcher and Mohamad Mahathir, that Malaysian bastard hangs people for smoking pot . . . would be flopping around like displaced catfish, only I wouldn’t feel a thing for them, just stand there and watch them die. It would be my pleasure.

  So I rows out and lets the boat drift, looking at the hill beyond the lake and just hoping for a flying saucer and humming to myself, “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,” and take out my stomach so I don’t give a shit about no government. I can just set there from here on out. . . but nothing happens, leastwise nothing I can feel happening . . . but maybe it will happen when I go to sleep . . . but then I just wake up in my bed, to get up and feed my six cats. First thing would be to have their stomachs took out, so the
y would let up aggravating me.

  Now lying comes as natural as breathing to a politician, and just as necessary for his survival. I reckon that’s what happened with John F. Kennedy . . . he was on the edge of committing the criminal, unforgivable sin: he was about to tell the truth, and somebody called a special number in Washington.

  Yeah, it sure would pleasure me to see the whole lot of them—Bennett, Bush, Thatcher, Mohamad Mahathir, Sad-Ass Hussein—flopping around out of their medium and gasping out their last lies.

  One thing I hate more than other things is a liar. Maybe it’s because I am not capable of lying. Even a simple everyday lie, like claiming I am sick to avoid a trip or an appointment, rings so hollow, even over the phone, that nobody will buy it.

  It was a Thursday. For me, a portentous conjunction: I was born February 5, 1914, which was a Thursday. September 17 is also a special date for me. Arbitrary but significant, with potential for good or bad luck.

  It was eight A.M. when I left my house in Lawrence, with Michael Emerton driving his BMW. The rain is coming down in sheets, and there is a yellow-grey haze across the sky. We pass the toll booth and the quarry lake, going 65 mph. Then the rain comes down so heavy and visibility is limited to the hood of the BMW and I know and start to say, “For Christ’s sake, Michael, slow down and pull over,” when the car hydroplanes and slams into the guard-rail and skids across the highway and into the ditch. Stop!

  For a moment I can’t move, and I mutter, “I need an ambulance,” as if my need can conjure up such a contrivance. Then the door opens and a young man in a brown windbreaker says, “Can you walk?”

  I find that I can indeed walk, with my cane and his supporting arm.

  “Better move away,” he says; “the car might catch fire.” Another young man is helping Michael. They drive us ahead to the truckstop.

  “You guys are lucky you’re not dead.”

  Lawrence Journal-World, September 22,1992; Classified Ads

  * * *

  Card of Thanks

  To express our heartfelt thanks to the two young motorists who helped us out of a wrecked BMW 6 mi. E. of Lawrence on turn-pike on Thurs., Sept. 17,1992.

  William Burroughs & Michael Emerton

  * * *

  Michael B. Emerton shot himself November 4,1992.

  An experience most deeply felt is the most difficult to convey in words. Remembering brings the emptiness, the acutely painful awareness of irreparable loss.

  From my window, I can see the marble slab over Ruski’s grave . . . Ruski, my first and always special cat, a Russian Blue from the woods of East Kansas. Every time I see the grave, I get that empty feeling where something was, and isn’t anymore, and will never be again.

  epilogue

  by james grauerholz

  After he revised the final edit of My Education in late 1994, William Burroughs never worked on a novel again. He turned instead to studio performances; in early 1995, he recorded an abridged version of Naked Lunch for an audiobook. His first cat, Ruski, died that spring, which hurt him deeply. In the fall, he flew to New York to see Paul Bowles, who had made a rare trip to the U.S. for arterial surgery on his legs. Burroughs made no secret of his expectation that this would be their last meeting. In early 1996, Burroughs recorded an audiobook of Junky. When Timothy Leary was dying of cancer that spring, he spoke often with Burroughs by telephone, and on the last phone call they talked openly of Leary’s imminent death. The old junky priest was making his last rounds, taking confession and giving extreme unction.

  By summer 1996, Burroughs’ life had become a comfortably revolving schedule of dinners in his home with his close friends. The years had caught up with him, and he made allowance for the need to conserve his energy—despite the ever-growing demands of his celebrity. When the “Ports of Entry” museum exhibition, curated by Robert Sobieszek, was unveiled at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that July, the retrospective show demonstrated a visual-arts continuity in Burroughs’ life for the past thirty-five years, beginning with his collage-scrapbooks and The Third Mind. Burroughs returned home from Los Angeles recharged with energy from these encomia. He received Allen Ginsberg in his home for a two-week stay, and they talked about the worsening condition of Herbert Huncke, who died in October.

  Ginsberg returned again to Kansas in November when the “Ports of Entry” show moved to the Spencer Art Museum at the University of Kansas. At the end of the month, KU’s Lied Center for the Performance Arts hosted a “Nova Convention Revisited” performance night. The surviving veterans of the 1978 convention—Patti Smith (joined by Michael Stipe), John Giorno, Philip Glass, Ed Sanders, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Laurie Anderson—all performed in tribute to Burroughs’ life accomplishment. Watching in state from his opera box, Burroughs was pleased and grateful for the recognition, and for the outpouring of love and appreciation from his adopted community of Lawrence.

  In February 1997, Burroughs was eighty-three years old. He knew that his heart was going: it was his family heritage. Burroughs had already outlived his older brother by eleven years, and he now carried nitroglycerin tablets with him at all times. He was examined in March for a heart-valve problem, but the surgical options were of no further interest to him; he contemplated taking a dose of ketamine, for its promised preview of the near-death experience, but he concluded that the experiment might be fatal in itself. Burroughs had never approved of suicide, and especially not after experiencing the pain that Emerton’s death caused to everyone who loved him. Burroughs had been relieved when Leary’s announced plans for a public suicide, live on the Internet, came to nothing; he did not believe in any such display or intervention.

  At the beginning of April, Allen Ginsberg, whose health had been failing for a few years, informed Burroughs by phone that his doctors had discovered inoperable liver cancer, and that he had only a few months to live—“but probably much less.” How very much less became clear a few days later, when Ginsberg died, at home in New York, on April 5. Burroughs’ reaction was philosophical, and more and more he spread a sense of calm and acceptance among his circle of friends. Ginsberg had told him: “I thought I would be terrified—but I am exhilarated!” Burroughs confessed that this had given him new courage in the face of death.

  The spring and summer of 1997 were busy times, mostly with visitors. Burroughs continued writing every day in his private journals, by hand; his arthritis had made it impossible for him to use a typewriter. Even more friends than usual came through town, and some old comrades were welcomed back into the fold. Despite some people’s fanciful beliefs, Burroughs was never isolated in Lawrence; during his sixteen years of residence there, he made dozens of trips and received at least a thousand visitors in his home. Because of his fame and a published address, in his latter years Burroughs heard from many long-forgotten friends, from all the times and places of his life. The grandniece of his first wife, Ilse Klapper, sent a photograph of Use, and the news that she had died peacefully in the 1980s; this information put Burroughs’ mind to rest on a question that had long troubled him.

  Not long after July 4, Burroughs found his favorite cat, fat old Fletch, dead in the yard by a little pond, apparently from heart failure. For the past two years, his cats had been disappearing: Spooner, succumbing to feline leukemia; Senshu, swept away in a spring flood; Calico Jane, hit by a car. From his bedroom chair, where Burroughs read and wrote and took his afternoon cocktails, he could see all their graves around the pond. The death of Fletch was the worst, and Burroughs’ heartache was tangible. In his journals, he wrote of his desire to be reunited with his familiars.

  I spent all of the last day of July with Burroughs; the final round of visitors was gone, and although his energy had been subdued for weeks, he was very much our same old William. He had been target-shooting with friends that Tuesday, and due to his successful cataract surgery that spring, he was hitting the target better than ever. His arthritis troubled him, especially in his right hand, his writing hand; he was stoop
ed from a lifetime of reading and writing; and he was easily winded. But he was not crippled, nor incontinent, nor senile. William said good night to me that Thursday night, with a hug, as always, and I left him there with three of our friends.

  On the afternoon of Friday, August 1, when the painter George Condo called Burroughs to tell him that the paintings they’d made together would be shown in New York in December, Burroughs told him: “I am looking forward to some quiet time.” At about four o’clock, he suffered a severe heart attack. In the diary he was writing, after an entry for July 30 about “no final answer,” he wrote on the opposite page, in a struggling hand: “Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

  Our close friend Tom Peschio happened by the house just at that moment, and called me, and summoned an ambulance. Burroughs was quickly aided by paramedics, sedated, and hospitalized at Lawrence Memorial. Our snake-expert friend Dean Ripa was in Lawrence, and he and Tom and I kept a vigil at William’s bedside for twenty-four hours; William said nothing in all that time. He gave up breathing and died at 6:50 P.M. on August 2, 1997, very peacefully. We three were the only witnesses. I requested that his body lay untouched and undisturbed in the hospital for several hours, as the Buddhists recommend, and the hospital staff very kindly cooperated.

  The news spread quickly around the world; Burroughs had come to seem literally immortal, and many people were shocked that he had actually died. The funeral in Lawrence was somber and brief; there were over two hundred mourners. According to Burroughs’ express wishes, he was laid to rest in the Burroughs family plot at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, alongside his grandfather, the inventor; his uncle Horace, the drug addict; his father, Mote; and his mother, Laura.