BURROUGHS: Presumably it gets more difficult as you get older, that seems to be what they tell me.
BOCKRIS: Actually, it’s easier for Bill to get more sex now than ever.
WARHOL: Yeah, because he’s good looking and adorable. He’s charming and he’s great!
MALANGA: What’s better than sex?
BURROUGHS: That’s the most difficult question of all. There are a lot of things involved. You see, we have been conditioned on this planet to think that sex is displeasure, or pleasure, or pain. Or that sex is the greatest pleasure. We know also that there are pleasures that undercut sex like junk which is antisexual. What would be your answer to that question?
MALANGA: You could always channel that sexual energy into your writing.
BURROUGHS: The answer might be what sex essentially is. And that’s something I don’t think anyone knows much about: What is sex? Why is it pleasurable? Do you have any answer to that?
MALANGA: Pleasure can cause pain in certain instances. Or pleasure can lead to pain.
BURROUGHS: The theory, of course, is that sex is simply a relief from tension.
MALANGA: Maybe people who tend to shy away from having sex are the ones who are most susceptible to disease, cancer or various ailments.
BURROUGHS: You know the works of Wilhelm Reich. He says that cancer is essentially a disease of sexual suppression. That all cancer patients are sexually repressed. A broad statement I think.
MALANGA: Have you ever had a strong relationship with a man that wasn’t sexual?
BURROUGHS: Yes, many. Depends on what you mean by strong. I’ve had all sorts of relationships. Business relationships to a wide extent. Intellectual relationships. I’ve had quite a relationship with Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, both of which were completely nonsexual and, of course, I’ve had long business relationships with publishers and agents which are also social relationships. Friendship relationships with people like Terry Southern, who is a very good friend of mine.
NEW YORK CITY 1979
Terry Southern arrived at my flat at about 7:00 P.M. carrying a shopping bag full of “drug samples,” given him, he said, by “a gregarious chemist—a social-climbing artist manqué, but a decent enough chap after his fashion.” He plopped the bag down on the table. “I’m afraid you’ll not find much of the old hard stuff amongst this lot, Vic,” he continued, momentarily assuming a la-di-da British accent he presumably thought matched my own, “I just brought them along for Bill—he enjoys rooting about in these drug samples.”
I reminded Terry that we were to call Bill about dinner, so he called and told Bill we’d be over in twenty minutes. I ran into the bathroom for a wash and brush-up, and almost at once, Terry was pummeling the door. “Bockris!” he yelled. “In God’s great name open up! I must pass water!” I was not able to vacate the premises at that particular moment and told him so—whereupon I heard a good deal of stumbling about, moaning and groaning from the room next door, followed by the clatter of dishes, and running water. “Ter!” I shouted, “what are you doing?”
“Just doing the dishes,” he replied.
I ran out of the bathroom a few minutes later. “It’s all yours,” I said, but Ter was sitting complacently on the couch, twisting up a bomber. “No, no, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m, uh, into something else now.”
“Damnation!” I cried, with a great show of annoyance, “You’ve pissed in the sink!”
“No, no,” Ter was quick to assure me, “passed water in the sink.”
“Damnation!” I repeated testily.
“The heavy surge of bodily fluid,” Ter went on in an expansive manner, “from my giant animal-like member, cleared the dishes quite handily. No need for your ranting Howie Hughes type fastidiousness.” And he lit the big funnel-shaped joint of Columbian gold.
So we did a bit of the bomber, stashed it for later, dropped in a bottle of whiskey, and headed downstairs.
A white Rolls-Royce was parked nearby and Terry tried to get in in the belief (or pretense of belief) that it was the High Times’ company limo, laid on for the occasion. I dragged him into a nearby cab.
DINNER WITH BOCKRIS-WYLIE AND JAMES GRAUERHOLZ 1974
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Are you jealous?
BURROUGHS: I can be, yes. I regard it as a flaw in myself. Jealousy is awful. It’s the most disgusting thing. But I will tell you how you deal with this. You do absolutely nothing, just let these feelings rush through you. The point is that most people cannot see that there’s anything wrong with themselves; I can. I can see that there are things terribly wrong with myself. And any sort of jealousy is certainly one of them.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Do you always consider yourself to blame when you’re jealous?
BURROUGHS: Absolutely.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: You don’t feel that being possessive is a really good thing?
BURROUGHS: Look, I feel that you should be in control of the situation. If you’re jealous, you’re not in control of the situation. That’s silly.
Bockris-Wylie, the interview team who used that name from 1973 to 1975, as they appeared when they first interviewed Burroughs in 1974. Publicity photo by Anton Perich
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Is the love you take equal to the love you make?
BURROUGHS: I’ll answer that I write my love objects.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Is it wish fulfillment or a record of fact?
BURROUGHS: It’s both. I say this: any writer who hasn’t jacked off with his characters, those characters will not come alive in a sexual context. I certainly jack off with my characters. I can write sexual situations, very hot sexual situations. I don’t get a hard-on, you understand. Bullfighters do get hard-ons in the course of a bullfight. So I have been told at least, and I do in part believe it.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: That’s very different, because that’s physical; with writing it’s just your fingers.
BURROUGHS: No, excuse me, there is no distinction. There’s an either/or concept, as if there’s some distinction between …
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: You can’t say that you attack your desk like a bull.
BURROUGHS: Didn’t say I attacked my desk.
JAMES GRAUERHOLZ: Bill does attack his desk, not like a bull, but the proverbial china-shop bull; he has an incredible talent for putting things in complete disarray from which he works and makes these great things.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Genet says jacking off is much better than making it with someone.
BURROUGHS: It is, but it’s also much more destructive.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: How?
BURROUGHS: Well, when you jack off you’re jacking off with imaginary sexual partners.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Why don’t you jack off thinking of someone you made it with?
BURROUGHS: There’s nothing wrong with that if there’s no one around. Okay if you’re alone, but if you’re not alone, what then? This is bad medicine. If you have any actual sexual outlet, to jack off is a betrayal of that sexual outlet. There’s nothing worse than making it with someone and thinking about someone else. It’s bad and will almost always be detected. Look, now all I’m saying is something very simple. You’re making it with someone, all your attention should be on them, you should not be thinking about someone else, or not jacking off to someone else, or not making it with someone else. There was a whole year or two in Tangier when I had plenty of boys. I never jacked off. Why in the hell should I?
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Maybe because, like Genet, you decide that jacking off is free of emotional dependence and love, so that it gives you more time to get your work done.
BURROUGHS: No. No no no no no no. That is all wrong. If you have actual sexual outlets, why in the hell should you jack off? I’ve seen extreme forms of this. There was for example a friend in Tangier who used to have boys in, take photos of them in the nude, then send the boys away and jack off with the photos. Ain’t that an image fix for ya!
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: What do you think about Genet saying that jacking off is better than making it with someone?
BURROUGH
S: After all how real is a real person, or an actual sexual outlet?
BURROUGHS IN LONDON
DINNER WITH ANDY WARHOL: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: The English are very odd sexually.
WARHOL: They’re really odd, but they’re so sophisticated, that’s why …
BURROUGHS: They like to be beaten with rulers and hairbrushes.
BOCKRIS: I think the English …
WARHOL: … are the sexiest people …
BOCKRIS: Did you ever have any really good sex in England?
WARHOL: Oh yeah, the best.
BURROUGHS: Yeeesss …
BOCKRIS: Didn’t you know guys in London who used to throw Ping-Pong balls at naked boys?
BURROUGHS: I’ve known boys who’ve told me about various practices. There was the egg man who had to be pelted with eggs for some reason. There was another man who made his boys get into a big cage. He had a big birdcage and he would throw some bread in there and say, “Eat it!”
BOCKRIS: Did he ejaculate at the sight?
BURROUGHS: Well, I don’t know about that at all. He said, “A boy has to make a living …”
BOCKRIS: Andy, you had the best sex in England?
WARHOL: No, the best was when this guy bit off this guy’s nose. That was the best sex.
BURROUGHS: I heard about that.
WARHOL: Wasn’t that the best sex, Bill?
BURROUGHS: Ah yes, I imagine so.
WARHOL: The best.
DINNER WITH MILES: LONDON 1978
MILES: In 1964 I was working in London at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] and helped arrange an evening at which William himself showed up. It was a showing of Anthony Balch’s film Towers Open Fire. Brion Gysin painted to a cut-up tape of music, radio static, and William reading from newspaper clippings. Each one involved the number 23: there’d be 23 dead in an air crash, or 23 dead in a flood, or whatever. They didn’t have the movie on because it wasn’t quite finished, so William went on and sat on stage in that old brown raincoat with the velvet collar, and his hat on. There was a big tape recorder next to him and a blue light was shining on him. Above him stills from the movie were being projected. William just glared at the audience and everyone felt very uncomfortable.
BURROUGHS: In the early sixties London was a very cheap, relaxed, and pleasant place to be in. You could have a very good meal in a working class restaurant for about three shillings [approximately 50¢]. It was also a very cool place on drugs at that time. The whole set was more satisfactory.
MILES: I felt very distanced from Bill. It was extremely hard to know how to relate to him and Ian [Sommerville, Burroughs’ collaborator and companion at the time, since dead in a car crash on Bill’s sixty-second birthday] had played it up: “William’s feeling rather nervous this evening …” I suspect he was stoned, in some kind of cold blue silence on his own, quite apart from anything that was being projected on him. I don’t think he was on H or anything like that, but he’d probably had a few joints.
BURROUGHS: I was in and out of London in the sixties. I didn’t actually move there until 1966 after I’d spent 1965 in New York. The Empress Hotel, where I stayed during these early visits, was London’s equivalent of the Beat Hotel in Paris and we all stayed there. It was in Earl’s Court just off the Old Brompton Road. One pound [approximately $3 in 1964] a day with breakfast for a very good very comfortable room.
BOCKRIS: What prompted the move to London?
BURROUGHS: Nothing in particular. I knew people there. It had been a pleasant place. It deteriorated rather shortly after that. The more positive times I had in London were in the early sixties when I was in and out. The Empress Hotel no longer exists. Nor do those cheap restaurants. So-called “cheap” restaurants are fifteen shillings now, and you can’t eat it. Rents have quadrupled.
BOCKRIS: You have said, “A writer often travels intuitively to get images and scenes for something he may need thirty years later.” What are your ties with the different cities that you’ve lived in and how have they affected your work?
BURROUGHS: The different cities I’ve lived in … well, Mexico City is one. Tangier is another; London, Paris, and New York. These are the places that I’ve lived in for any length of time and the influence in my work I think is very clear. Whole sections of Naked Lunch certainly come from Tangier. There’s another section on Mexico. South America I never lived in but traveled there for about six months and that’s another area of influence. Another influence is Scandinavia. I was only there for about a month and a half or something like that. The whole concept of Freeland was born there. Copenhagen. Sweden. I was only in Sweden for about two days.
BOCKRIS: I know it’s difficult to say, inasmuch as writing is a magic process, but can you say anything about why going to a place suddenly has this kind of effect?
BURROUGHS: I’ve always noticed if you just hit a town that you’ve not been in before you see a lot more than the people who live there. Also, I’ve noticed that when you’ve been in a town for a while it becomes less and less stimulating and interesting. For example, my brief experience with Scandinavia, about a month and a half, most of it in Denmark, was very useful. But when I speak about locations I’m also speaking about a seemingly arbitrary decision like the pirate camp is here, then I later find out that indeed there was a pirate camp in that place. Or take my essay “Roosevelt After Inauguration” [which portrays Roosevelt as a Roman emperor]. I wrote that back in 1953. Allen Ginsberg later dug up a picture of Roosevelt at an actual toga party. That’s what I’m talking about. Not necessarily the actual location. Although there’s no doubt that Paris, Tangier, London, and New York are very important locations, as are Mexico and South America.
MILES: In 1966, Paul McCartney, myself, Marianne Faithful and John Dunbar had the idea that we should bring out a monthly magazine in record form. There’d be somebody at all the good poetry readings, we’d have a few snatches of groups rehearsing, and I would be going out doing interviews for International Times and we could do bits of those on tape. As you can imagine, we smoked an enormous amount of dope and thought this was the greatest idea in the world. So we needed someone to operate the tape recorders and nobody knew anyone who could do this except me. Ian Sommerville knew a lot about tape recorders. We also needed a studio and Ringo had this old flat that he wasn’t using in Montagu Square, a ridiculous pad with green silk wallpaper, and he said we could have that. Ian actually moved in there. I don’t think he was supposed to, it was supposed to be the studio. Bill never moved in, to my knowledge, although when you went to see Ian there, Bill was usually mucking about, but he kept out of the way because he definitely had the impression that this thing was somehow to do with the Beatles and he wasn’t supposed to be there.
BURROUGHS: It was kind of uneasy there.… This was when the Beatles were just getting into the possibilities of overlaying, running backwards, the full technical possibilities of the tape recorder. And Ian was a brilliant technician along those lines.
Ian met Paul McCartney and Paul put up the money for this flat which was at 34 Montagu Square. There were people like bodyguards and managers who didn’t like this at all and they were always threatening to come around and take the equipment away. I saw Paul several times. The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his “Eleanor Rigby.” Ian recorded his rehearsals. I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see that he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and very prepossessing. Nice-looking young man, hardworking.
MILES: I recall one day when Peter Asher, Ian, and I were there. Bill was there but sort of distant and not spending much time in the room, always doing things in other rooms. Paul arrived with the acetates for “Rubber Soul.” That was the first time anybody’d ever heard those; they’d just finished mixing them. We were talking about what direction rock music was going to go in, no doubt toward electronic music, but no one knew what that really meant. In those d
ays digital technology didn’t really exist. We all knew that somehow there was going to be a combination of electronics and rock that would be really exciting and that music had gone beyond the barriers of just a bunch of guys playing instruments. Bill and Paul were talking about this.
I remember another time there was a big scene at a party in which a famous English poet beat up his wife’s lover. It got kind of rowdy and the police were called. They were at the door and said, “What’s happening? We had a call.” It was a big fancy place so they took their helmets off. Panna O’Grady, the hostess, was flustered and William was standing behind her saying, “Nothing’s happening, nothing at all.” He was reassuring. In fact the fight was going on upstairs. He was barring the stairway, standing at the bottom of it holding on to the banister. Fresh-faced public schoolboys who’d just arrived at the party were approaching but William was two or three stairs up and obviously wasn’t going to let go. “We would like to go upstairs,” they pleaded, and he would reply, “There’s nothing upstairs. Nothing at all,” and stare at them. But all the time you could hear the sound of ferocious fighting going on upstairs, and the sound of things being broken.
Mick Jagger arrived at that party and Allen Ginsberg asked me to introduce him, which I did. Jagger and Allen went and sat on the balcony and talked about music and chanting and breathing for a long time; I then made Allen introduce Jagger to Burroughs.
BURROUGHS: Mick gave off the impression of great energy and intelligence and a sort of special cool of knowing where his connections are going. I had admired his work, what I’d heard of it, and also I admired him because of the pressure he was under. There’s someone who is idolized and yet receives shockingly rude treatment. Six cabdrivers refused to have him in the cab when he and Marianne Faithful arrived at the airport. There’s something about Mick that arouses great antagonism in a certain kind of person, the cabdriver-hardhat-redneck strata throughout the world, and to be able to stand up to that and be able to maintain his equilibrium and cool, as he certainly has, is quite something.
With William Burroughs Page 8