When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  During my first summer at Naropa, Ginsberg had a lot of dinner parties at his apartment. Any visiting writer, any important decision that had to be made, any problem that arose was presented at one of his long, shambling, informal dinners. I went to most of them, sure of a chance to listen to Allen or Burroughs hold forth on whatever was obsessing them that week. For much of that summer, Burroughs was preoccupied with space travel and with unexplained voices that suddenly appeared on tape recordings. He was also enthralled with the literary collages that he and his collaborator, Brion Gysin, had created, called “cut-ups.” Burroughs’s conversation was in fact a kind of verbal cut-up, consisting of references to Shakespeare, the Bible, Rimbaud, Kohut, Freud, and Jack London. He referred to hustlers in Tangier and to the dying words of Dutch Schultz, to Goethe and the parables of Jesus Christ in the same tone of voice—and it was how he would order his dinners. Milk shakes with scotch. Egg creams and tequila. I loved to hear him talk.

  His cut-ups, he said, were a way to alter the meaning of words and ideas. Burroughs claimed he had been doing them for so long that sometimes his cut-ups actually anticipated future events.

  “I cut up an article written by John Paul Getty,” Burroughs explained at one of Allen’s dinners, “and the sentence that came up was, ‘It is a bad thing to sue your own father.’” Burroughs claimed that a year later one of Getty’s sons did sue him. Then Allen asked Burroughs to tell the story of the air-conditioner.

  I looked blankly at my hosts. They all knew what was coming.

  “In 1964 I made a cut-up and got what seemed at the time to be a totally inexplicable phrase: ‘And there is a horrid air-conditioner.’ Ten years later I moved into a loft with a broken air-conditioner, which was removed to put in a new unit. And there were three hundred pounds of broken air-conditioner on my floor—a behemoth—a horrid disposal nightmare, heavy and solid. It had all emerged from a cut-up I did ten years before.”

  I found out later that Allen, Anne, and Peter had heard Burroughs’s fairy tale about his air-conditioner at least a hundred times before. But they enjoyed hearing it, like children who ask to hear their favorite bedtime story and catch you every time you leave something out. It was a deeply weird pleasure to listen to that snarling, midwestern voice. The word “disposal” coming out of Burroughs’s mouth was a great pleasure. It was like listening to John Wayne say the word “pilgrim.” We all loved listening to Bill.

  It reminded me of a scene I had read, maybe it was in On the Road, when they stop at “Old Bull Lee’s” place. Old Bull Lee was Burroughs, at least that’s what we all thought. And Jack and his friends liked to visit Old Bull Lee and his wife, and just listen to Old Bull, sitting out on the porch with a shotgun laid across his lap, talk about what he’d just read in The Handbook of Psychic Discoveries.

  I noticed that Burroughs didn’t say anything for shock value. His life had absorbed too many body blows for that. His life had shock value. Like Kerouac’s Old Bull Lee, Burroughs was always an old man to them, and a kind of teacher. Even Allen felt that way. Although I never saw Allen Ginsberg afraid, the wrong look from Burroughs and Allen was like a little boy sent to stand in the corner and contemplate the peeling plaster. Burroughs was their oracle.

  I, however, wondered what kept him out of the mad house. He seemed to hear voices. There seemed to be no line between Burroughs’s daily life and his dreams. He seemed to walk through his dream life the way we walk through our daily lives. How does he do it? I wondered. How does he avoid getting killed crossing the street?

  Bill, as they called him, had brought dessert. Apple pie. “They say it makes you sterile,” Burroughs said, after Peter had asked whether or not the pie should be heated up. Burroughs’s son, Billy Jr., was to bring the ice cream. “It goes on top of the pie,” Burroughs explained, as if it were Dr. Heidegger’s experiment.

  Peter went into the kitchen to heat up the apple pie. The phone rang and Peter answered it. He called Burroughs to the phone. Burroughs listened for a moment, then put the phone down. “Heat the bathroom, company is coming,” was all he said.

  Later, I would figure out this code. I would learn what he wanted from the refrigerator, or when it was time for me to lay out the hypodermic needle, like some underage Dr. Watson preparing the needle for Sherlock Holmes after a particularly tough case. “Heat the bathroom, company is coming” was, apparently, an old Latvian custom. When expecting guests in Latvia, someone makes the trek into the bathroom and lights the stove. Burroughs was expecting his son to drop by.

  Billy Burroughs Jr. arrived, bringing coffee ice cream in a soiled backpack that looked as if it had been through a war, which, in fact, it had. He had bought it from an army-navy store in Denver; he said it had been to Korea on the back of an American soldier. It even had a bullet hole in it—of which Billy Burroughs was very proud. “Straight from the back of his heart to mine,” Billy said.

  There was nothing darling about this Billy. At least at first, at least to me. I had never been around a lot of alcohol. My parents still called it “schnapps.” Billy Burroughs was finishing out his twenties, and he looked just like Elisha Cook Jr., the character actor who played the gunsel Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon. Like Wilmer, Billy wore an overcoat frayed at the sleeves. It was made of camel hair, and it smelled of the unfiltered Camels he smoked. He looked like a dying youth who had come to say goodbye.

  Billy came over to his father and they shook hands. Billy looked at his father as if he were looking at Hemingway in a dream, with a bullet hole in his head talking about the Far Tortugas. He asked for a glass with ice in it. His mouth was dry. He kept his overcoat on, though it was hot in the apartment. The two didn’t seem to have a lot to say to each other.

  Billy Jr. was a good writer, I knew that much. He wrote a book called Kentucky Ham. It made me laugh. If the book was any indication, Billy lived to get stoned. His father, along with Anne Waldman, had thought it would be a good thing for Billy to come to Boulder. They hoped that he would fall under the influence of Rinpoche, maybe even start meditating. Give up cigarettes and drinking. Try some food.

  Allen made a place for him at the glass table, around which the usual suspects sat on wrought-iron chairs with wicker seats—Anne, Peter, Bill, Allen. Peter had made dinner for the whole crew, a vast, vegetarian lasagna sprinkled with oregano that looked like pot (halfway through the dinner, Peter announced that it really was pot). Billy sat hunched over in his overcoat, staring at his plate as though, if he looked at it long enough, his dinner would simply get up and leave. He had a few days’ worth of blond beard; his hair was dirty and fell into his eyes.

  Billy started talking about Rinpoche, whom he called “the professor,” or “the professor of nonexistence.” During a lecture, he’d asked Rinpoche whether or not “the far-away” really existed. “Is the future packed away in salt, somewhere? Is the body evidence of the spirit, Professor?” he asked, to the delight of his friends, a hard-core group of young, mostly Irish street kids, some with gold teeth, who were part of Billy’s all-white gang. Allen and Burroughs referred to them as “the Westies.” They revered Billy. One of them came by that night and whispered something in Billy’s ear, and then left. I think they spent a lot of their time scoring drugs and listening to music in the Naropa rooming house on Arapahoe Street.

  Burroughs asked me to hang Billy’s overcoat up in the closet. I did. I was happy to get away from their father-and-son reunion. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that there was a pistol in Billy’s coat pocket.

  I closed the door and went back to the table. Burroughs asked his son if he had been to see Dr. Shringwaym. “He was a CIA man at one time,” Burroughs said. “He worked in the pickle factory. So telephone with restraint, Bill. Watch what you say over the phone—remember, the cucumbers are listening in.”

  I got it. It was beginning to sink in, like a foreign language. If the CIA was “the pickle factory,” and pickles are made from cucumbers…

  I didn’t kno
w why Burroughs wanted Billy to call Dr. Shringwaym, or even who Dr. Shringwaym was. Allen then turned to me and asked if I would call the doctor for Billy.

  I said that I didn’t think the doctor would tell me anything about another patient.

  “He’s not that kind of doctor,” Burroughs said. “He performs psychic surgery.” It was the first time that night that Burroughs addressed me directly.

  “Go up and call now,” Anne said from the other side of the table, her silver bracelets tinkling as she flipped her long dark hair over her shoulder.

  “Obey Death. Blind Death,” Burroughs chanted as I went up the stairs to Allen’s telephone in the bedroom. My lungs felt like all the air had been pressed out of them. How dangerous will this phone call be? Was he really a CIA operative? Dangerous to whom?

  I had never been upstairs before. I felt like the only one left on a deserted space station, the one non-astronaut, the scientist who goes up with the pilots to study plant life on Mars but who now has to steer the ship, alone.

  As I climbed the stairs, I listened in on the grown-ups—that’s how it felt to me—talking quietly downstairs. I could hear parts of their conversation drifting up the stairs. I heard Burroughs raise his voice: “Remember Dutch Schultz’s last words!”

  “What’s that?” I shouted through the walls of the space station, relieved that I was still connected to the mother ship. “What were his last words?”

  “I don’t want harmony. I want harmony.” I heard Anne Waldman’s laughter. It made me feel stupid. I had no idea what they were talking about.

  I dialed and a voice at the other end answered.

  “Dr. Shringwaym,” I said. “I’m calling for Billy Burroughs. I’m supposed to tell you—it’s time.”

  4. Billy the Kid

  William Burroughs was starting to remind me of Dr. Moreau—you know who I mean, the evil scientist who has his own island and conducts weird science on it, like the making of a half panther, half woman who wants to escape with the hero who finds himself stuck there. Like Dr. Moreau, Burroughs conducted weird experiments in his apartment. Dr. Moreau had a half man, half dog valet, and Burroughs had a young assistant who called himself Jubal. He was from a long line of Southern generals, going back to the Confederacy. Including one, Jubal told me, who shot his own men occasionally for slacking off. He was about twenty-five years old and wore expensive, tailor-made suits. He and his master wrote stories together, High Noon– type Westerns that climaxed in fantastic shoot-outs, with great carnage on both sides. When I was introduced to Burroughs he was obsessed with two things—extraterrestrial life and the shoot-out at the OK Corral. Westworld, which had opened that summer, was his favorite movie.

  Billy had to go see the surgeon. His Irish friends, the Westies, were going to pick Billy the Kid up and drive him into Denver for his date with Dr. Shringwaym. Billy’s surgeon gave him an evening appointment, which I thought was pretty strange. Like Freud, the doctor would see him in his “consulting room,” which was attached to his house in a suburban part of Denver.

  I made that appointment for him, I thought proudly to myself. Since I was terrified of taking drugs, serving the Beats was my “Henry” and my “Charly.” Burroughs taught me that: names for heroin and cocaine. At first I couldn’t keep the names straight, until I found a mnemonic method that seemed to work. I was a slow learner. But I was soaking up Beat knowledge like a sponge—a sponge off the coast of South America.

  I didn’t go into Denver very often. I wondered how much thought had gone into establishing the Jack Kerouac School just an hour or so away from Laramie Street and the once-upon-a-time hobo jungles of Denver, where Neal Cassady’s father drank and itinerantly practiced his barber trade. “A real Sweeney Todd,” is how Burroughs described Neal’s father. As it turned out, it was Trungpa, not the Beats, who had settled on Boulder, because the dark mountains reminded him not so much of Tibet but of Elsinore Castle and the mountains of Scotland, where he had gone to establish one of the first meditation retreats for practitioners of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

  It was while driving his sports car in Scotland that Rinpoche crashed into the window of a shop and nearly killed himself. He had crashed into a joke-and-magic shop. The accident paralyzed him on the left side. Whenever he entered a room (usually wearing a beautiful silk suit that shimmered like mermaid skin) Rinpoche carried his arm as if it were in an invisible sling, his palsied hand held in front of his solar plexus. Someone always helped him to get dressed. He loved jewelry and he always wore a Rolex watch. I could see it on his wrist, even from the back of the auditorium, when he gave his public talks. He had a lovely moon face with dark-rimmed glasses, and he spoke in a high whisper, which always made me think that somehow his vocal cords might have been damaged in the car crash. He always began by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen,” and he was always two or three hours late for his talks.

  Rinpoche’s talks always made people laugh. Like any prince, he loved his own jokes. My teachers—Anne, Allen, Burroughs—all adored Rinpoche. They said he was enlightened. They liked to tell stories about how drunk he would get on sake during dinner, before his lectures. There was always talk of his court, of the women he liked to have around him. In fact, I would soon discover that one problem with having a girlfriend who was a Buddhist at Naropa was that, if she was really attractive, Rinpoche might ask to see her and then, well…no self-respecting student of Rinpoche’s would turn him down. So don’t even bother asking her to choose. I would later come to know about this form of suffering.

  Joan Burroughs, William’s wife, was a legend by the time I came to Boulder. She had been dead a long time. So long, in fact, that Burroughs had become one of the most famous and outspoken homosexuals of his time, his brief, heterosexual life long forgotten. But there was a time when William Burroughs had become a father, although he didn’t seem like one now. He and Joan had slept together, at least once, in a motel in Times Square, and Joan had become pregnant with Billy Jr.

  After I had worked for Allen for a couple of weeks, he trusted me enough to let me work not just on the verse that would go into his Collected Poems, but on the extensive, ongoing files he loved to keep. This man who hated the CIA and the FBI to the point of obsession kept files on everyone he knew. I saw his file for Billy—“William Burroughs III.” He was born on July 21, 1947. I read how Joan, in a very calm voice, had told her husband that it was probably time to go to a hospital and have her baby. They got into Burroughs’s jeep, driving off their farm in Texas to find the nearest hospital. It was not close by. Joan knew that she could never breast-feed the baby, as her breast milk was laced with amphetamines from the inhalers she refused to stop using during her pregnancy. Doing the dishes after dinner one night in Allen’s apartment, he told me about the “Birthday Ode” he had written to Billy, and how after he was born he hoped that Billy would be more of a brother to him than his own, rather straight-laced brother, Eugene, was. But it didn’t happen that way. Billy was too wretched, too sad, to make Allen feel any brighter about his own life. After Joan had given birth she would put the baby on the porch for her husband to hold while she would check herself for “worm-like filaments,” the first symptoms, as Burroughs had described for her, of postnuclear contamination.

  Billy Burroughs was born a drug addict, according to Allen’s file, and spent his “first days on earth in withdrawal.” The first time I met him I just saw a sad and quiet young man.

  After a week at Naropa, Allen asked me to keep an eye on Billy, who had been diagnosed with a cirrhotic liver, due to his heavy alcohol intake. It was one of my new tasks, to try to keep him away from the bottle, and to keep his Irish gang members from supplying him with booze.

  By then I had moved into a nicer apartment in a nearby complex where many University of Colorado students lived. It had a swimming pool, which I never used, but sometimes I sat by the pool dressed in long black pants and a black turtleneck sweater. I had never liked leisure clothes, but I preferred living
in the slightly more upscale Canyon Street apartments, as opposed to the student apartments on Broadway. And maybe I needed the added distance from Allen and Peter.

  One evening, Billy came by my new apartment and we sat and watched TV. He was drinking straight out of the bottle and smoking a lot of tobacco and marijuana. I knew it was part of my job as an apprentice to keep him from drinking, but I was too shy to say anything about it.

  Billy told me that in a couple of days he was going to go up into the mountains of Boulder where he and his father were growing marijuana in a hidden spot. He explained that Burroughs had told him, “Maryjane can grow in dry soil. The thing to do is cultivate a few other crops as a kind of beard.” Burroughs had turned his apartment into a chemistry lab, developing weed concentrates. (He was also developing tape-recording experiments to investigate life on other planets. “Not on the planets themselves,” Burroughs explained, “but between planets. In the space, the distance between planets, that’s where the life, though not as we know it, would be.”)

  “I’ll take you up there sometime,” Billy said between swigs of Bombay gin. “You can help me cultivate the crop, we’ll need help harvesting. We do it only at night, under a full moon. Harvest moon, like the Neil Young song.” He laughed, and then he started to fall asleep in front of the television set. Suddenly, Billy sat upright on the couch, in a mood to talk.

  “My father never said anything to me about his life,” Billy announced. “I learned it all from other people. He refuses to talk about anything real. He cultivates speaking to me in the clichés of parenthood. Things about being on the right track, and advice about how to drive around armadillos when it’s late at night on the highway to Denver. Practical advice. He would play Hungarian waltzes and watch me, unblinking, for hours. I would ask him what he was thinking and he would tell me that he was trying to imagine what was going through Lincoln’s brain when he was shot.”