PETER BEARD: How did you lose your finger?
BURROUGHS: Oh … er … explosion. Blew my whole hand off. See, I nearly lost the …
BEARD [looking closely at scars on Burroughs’ hand]: Oh … yes.
BURROUGHS: Whole hand, but I had a very good surgeon.
BEARD: And he saved the other fingers?
BURROUGHS: He saved them.
BOCKRIS: Was that a gun explosion?
BURROUGHS: No no no, it was, er … chemicals! Potassium chlorate and red phosphorus.
BEARD: What were you doing with it?
BURROUGHS: Chemicals! Boys! I was fourteen years old …
BEARD: Fabulous, just fabulous.
BURROUGHS: … and I was putting the top on …
BEARD: A Charles Addams character at large … playing.
BURROUGHS: Not at all, not at all. Everyone when I was a kid had these things known as chemistry sets and they had little wooden cases with very fresh hazardous chemicals in them and instructions for making powders and all sorts of things and they’d often blow up when you were putting the top on.
BOCKRIS: Did your finger actually come off right there?
BURROUGHS: Yes.
BOCKRIS: Did you feel any pain?
BURROUGHS: Oh yes I did. I felt pain about fifteen minutes later. The thing is numb for a while, but then it begins to really hurt. By the time I got to the hospital the doctors had to give me a morphine injection which they said was “almost an adult dose.”
BOCKRIS: Congratulations.
BURROUGHS: Yes, indeed. I’ve been addicted ever since.
BOCKRIS: How did you become addicted to heroin?
BURROUGHS: My first addiction was to morphine. Addiction is a disease of exposure. By and large people become addicts who are exposed to it—doctors and nurses, for instance. People I knew at the time were using it. I took a shot, liked it, and eventually became an addict.
BOCKRIS: Weren’t you aware of the dangers?
BURROUGHS: The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn’t believe them about addiction. I thought I could take it or leave it alone. They give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn’t. They claim that you can be addicted in one shot, and that’s another myth. They overestimate the physical bad effects. I just didn’t believe them about anything they said.
DINNER WITH TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: NEW YORK 1976
BURROUGHS: Paul Bowles had a first edition of your book The Angel in the Alcove. I borrowed his copy to read. I was on junk at the time and I dripped blood all over it, and Paul was furious. It should be quite a collector’s item—first edition, and with my blood all over it.
WILLIAMS: Do you ever take drugs at all anymore?
BURROUGHS: No, not that kind. I don’t have a habit or anything like that.
WILLIAMS: I’ve always wanted to go on opium. I did try it in Bangkok. I was traveling with a professor friend of mine, and he had been in the habit of occasionally dissolving a bit in his tea, and drinking it. Anyway, he was angry at me, or confused mentally, I don’t know which, and I called him one morning, as he’d gotten me this long black stick of opium, and I said, “Paul, what do I do with it?” And he said, “Just put it in the tea.” So I put the whole stick in the tea. I nearly died of an OD, of course. I was puking green as your jacket, you know? And sicker than ten dogs all that day. I called in a Siamese doctor. He said, “You should be dead.” I said, “I feel as though if I weren’t walking or stumbling about, I would be.” I’ve always said I wanted to write under the drug, you know, like Cocteau did—all of a sudden, my head seemed like a balloon and it seemed to go right up to the ceiling. Do you ever take goofballs?
BURROUGHS: I have, but I’m not an afficionado. De Quincey reports that Coleridge had to hire somebody to keep him out of drugstores, and then he fired him the next day when the man attempted to obey his instructions. He told him, “Do you know that men have been known to drop down dead for the timely want of opium?” Very funny indeed.
WILLIAMS: It’s all a big joke. Maybe a black joke, but it’s a big joke.
BURROUGHS: Have you ever written film scripts?
WILLIAMS: Yes, I’ve written one called One Arm, which has been floating around, I don’t know where it is. I wrote it one summer while I was taking Dr. Max Jacobson’s shots. I did some of my best writing while taking these shots. I had incredible vitality under them. And I got way ahead of myself as a writer, into another dimension. I never enjoyed writing like that. You’ve never written on any kind of speed, have you, Bill?
BURROUGHS: Well no, I’m not a speed man at all.
WILLIAMS: I am a downer man.
BURROUGHS: I don’t like either one very much.
WILLIAMS: Speed was wonderful, while I was young enough to take it; but you don’t like either one now? You don’t need any kind of artificial stimulant?
BURROUGHS: Well, cannabis in any form is …
WILLIAMS: Cannabis has the opposite effect on me. I think Paul Bowles finds it very helpful. I have tried it: nothing. Just stonewalled me.
DINNER WITH JEFF GOLDBERG AND GLENN O’BRIEN: NEW YORK 1980
BURROUGHS: I’ve known lots of whores. The great majority of whores are addicts and they just fuck to get money for junk.
BOCKRIS: So many girls seem to need to take Quaaludes to have sex. Would heroin relax them in the same way?
BURROUGHS: It isn’t nearly as much of a knockout drug as Quaaludes. Addiction has always been endemic among whores. They’re one of the most heavily addicted segments of the population. And their pimps supply them with their junk.
GOLDBERG: It’s one of the most basic control situations.
BURROUGHS: Except in the nineteenth century it was very easy to score for junk anywhere before all this nonsense started. But the addicted whore is a very old syndrome: as early as the use of opiates was common. The use of opiates all through nineteenth-century England was terrific. On market days they’d have great jars of opium pills on drugstore counters and people could just go in there and buy them. It was cheaper than alcohol, and much better, so God knows how many thousands of addicts there were at that time. Nobody knew anything about it because it was legal. After it became illegal, and all through the twenties and thirties, it was restricted to the very high and the very low, to millionaires, movie stars, playboys, playgirls, and, on the other hand, criminals, whores, and thieves. You see it was cheap and easy to get. Heroin was $28 an ounce in the 1920s. Actually there was more morphine on the street rather than heroin. In the 1920s they brought in morphine. Then heroin came in in the late 1920s. Heroin is now about $9,000 an ounce, so imagine from $28 an ounce to $9,000 and junk turns out to be a model for inflation, being the most inflated item. A friend of mine, Phil White, who did time on Rikers Island in the thirties, told me the guards came in every morning with a shoebox full of heroin decks at fifty cents a deck. On one deck you could stay loaded all day and do the time standing on your head. With junk you are immune to boredom and discomfort.
GOLDBERG: Why was there this switch from the image of the habitué sipping laudanum to the dirty-needle junkie?
BURROUGHS: In the early forties, when Harry Anslinger took over, he forced the market up. As soon as the drug was illegal, naturally enforcement became a very important factor. Just as in Prohibition the fact that whiskey was illegal made it more expensive.
BOCKRIS: It seems that however much they put the price up, an addict will keep paying.
BURROUGHS: If the price gets too high they can’t pay, and the prices do come down.
BOCKRIS: You mean it really gets to the point where people say forget it?
BURROUGHS: It isn’t that they say forget, they just can’t pay. Now there’s good heroin on the street again and you can maintain a habit for $12 a day. So it does get to a point where people just cannot pay, then somebody else comes in, brings the prices down, and gets
the market. In the old days the price of heroin was manipulated like any other commodity price. Someone comes into Morocco, buys up all the sugar, puts it in the warehouse and takes it off the market. There are sugar riots in Tangier. When it comes back on the market it comes back at an increased price. And they’ve pulled the same thing with heroin here again and again and again. It’s known as a panic. Suddenly there’s no heroin anywhere that can be bought and the junkies are all walking around to doctors, trying to get stuff from them, and the doctors are saying, “Get out! Get out! Get out! You’re the tenth one who’s been in here today. I’m a professional man! I can’t service people like you!” But the panic never goes on long enough for people to really get off. It goes on for about a week and then the stuff comes back at double the price. You see, the sugar comes back at only a slightly increased price, and that’s known as manipulation of commodity prices. A lot of people have made huge fortunes out of the poorest people by monopolizing basic commodities and holding these commodities off the market, then reintroducing them and extracting as much as the people can possibly pay.
GOLDBERG: The poppy is basically like a Third World commodity, so they’re in a kind of chaotic situation.
BOCKRIS: What’s the connection between the chaos in Afghanistan and Iran and the heroin coming from those sources?
BURROUGHS: It’s just that most of the poppies are grown in those areas. But there is no reason for that. We have always imported our opium, we’ve never attempted to grow it here, but we could. Poppies can be grown anywhere. There are lots of places in America that are quite suitable for growing poppies, besides which they can grow in greenhouses. The poppy is a plant that adapts itself to dry, slightly mountainous climates. I’m sure they could be grown all through the Rockies, say from about May to September, and of course cocaine plants could easily be grown in many regions as well. Opium is made from the poppy. The extraction of morphine from opium is a very simple process, and heroin is a step beyond morphine. It’s a very simple chemical process, anybody can do it in a basement laboratory.
Andy Warhol tunes William Burroughs in, Chelsea Hotel, New York City, 1980. Photo: Victor Bockris
BOCKRIS: Who originally did this?
BURROUGHS: I don’t know, but he should go down in history.
GOLDBERG: It was named after heroisch, a German word meaning strong.
BURROUGHS: There must be some chemist who actually did it, but at any rate it’s a very simple formula. You order your heroin-conversion kit through High Times, it would look just like that [pointing to a psilocybin mushroom incubator], see, and you’d be tinkering around peering in to see how it was coming along, then first thing you know … hmmpfh hmmpfh hmmpfh …
GOLDBERG: When you were farming in Texas were you thinking about growing anything illegal?
BURROUGHS: Yes, I was growing marijuana down there.
BOCKRIS: I heard you were also growin’ heroin!
BURROUGHS: It springs up outa the earth what dya gonna do? Everyone got sick! Springs up outa the earth, in little packages on a Christmas tree.
BOCKRIS: If heroin was so easy to get, why would people want opium?
BURROUGHS: It has its advantages. If you don’t have a habit opium will last much longer; opium will last you hours and hours and hours. Some people like it better. There are lots of opium smokers who could have gotten heroin and didn’t want it.
BOCKRIS: I understand eating majoun has the effect of twenty joints hitting you at one time.
O’BRIEN: I’ve smoked twenty joints sitting at the typewriter.
BURROUGHS: I wrote the whole of Naked Lunch on majoun and I had some great experiences. It helps you to write.
BOCKRIS: I would think so, but I just wonder how far out you go. I love these potatoes.
BURROUGHS: They are good. These are excellent sweet potatoes.
BOCKRIS: What is the principle of this potato?
BURROUGHS: Principle! Well, it’s a sweet potato. It’s not a yam.
BOCKRIS: Is the sweet potato a cultured thing?
BURROUGHS: Why yes.
O’BRIEN: I think this is a native American potato.
BURROUGHS: They are not at all sure whether this potato was native to the New World or whether it possibly came drifting from the Indonesian Islands in the South Pacific where the yam culture is endemic. This is also known as a yam. There was an anthropological controversy which was known as the sweet potato controversy.
BOCKRIS: Why isn’t it more popular than it was then?
BURROUGHS [with considerable restraint]: Well, it’s quite popular. It’s very popular in the South since there are so many recipes, you know, like possum and sweet potato, fried chicken and sweet potatoes. Sweet potato pie is very popular I assure you in the southern part of the United States.
DINNER WITH SUSAN SONTAG, JEFF GOLDBERG, LOU REED, AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: NEW YORK 1978
BOCKRIS: You’re smoking again.
SONTAG: I smoke when I go out.
BOCKRIS: A closet smoker, eh.
BURROUGHS: I stopped smoking since I last saw you.
SONTAG: Was it very hard?
BURROUGHS: No, no, and it was the best thing I ever did.
SONTAG: Did you just say that’s it and you stopped?
BURROUGHS: Oh yes. This cutting down is nonsense. I read a book called How to Stop Smoking, followed the directions, and stopped.
GOLDBERG: Didn’t you get some sort of omen?
BURROUGHS: Oh yes, I put a pack of cigarettes down on the book of breathing and when I pulled it away it pulled out the whole lung of the person on the cover. I then said: this is an omen.
SONTAG: All sexual taboos have disappeared; all taboos about drugs except nicotine have disappeared. This is the only forbidden pleasure left.
BURROUGHS: If someone wants to draw smoke down into their lungs … I used to do it myself for fifteen years and when I got out of there it was like stepping out of a prison. After the third day I just felt so pure. Have you ever seen people who have stopped smoking? After about a week they get an almost luminescent radiant health, and when you have experienced that you won’t go back.
Lou Reed came in again and asked Bill a specific question about a scene in Junky where a character injects heroin with a safety pin. He couldn’t see how it was done.
BURROUGHS: A lot of old junkies used to do this. You make a hole with the pin and then you put the dropper over the hole and the stuff is supposed to run in.
WILLIAMS: I think it’s most remarkable that you avoided any commitment to drugs. Except cannabis. And you’re strong enough to control it. I’m strong enough to control anything I take …
BURROUGHS: Old Aleister Crowley, plagiarizing from Hassan i Sabbah, said: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the Law.”
WILLIAMS: Regarding drugs, you mean?
BURROUGHS: Regarding anything. And then Hassan i Sabbah’s last words were: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” If you see everything as illusion, then everything is permitted. The last words of Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, the Master of the Assassins. And this was given a slightly different twist, but it’s the same statement as Aleister Crowley’s, “Do what you want to do is the whole of the Law.”
WILLIAMS: Provided you want to do the right thing, yes.
BURROUGHS: Ah, but if you really want to do it, then it’s the right thing. That’s the point.
WILLIAMS: Isn’t that an amoralist point of view?
BURROUGHS: Completely … completely.
WILLIAMS: I don’t believe you’re an amoralist.
BURROUGHS: Oh yes.
WILLIAMS: You do believe it?
BURROUGHS: I do what I can …
WILLIAMS: I don’t think it’s true.
BURROUGHS: We were both brought up in the Bible Belt, but it’s obvious that what you want to do is, of course, eventually what you will do anyway. Sooner or later.
“If you can score for sex and drugs in a place, then you know you really ma
de contact with the place.”—Burroughs to Steve Mass, owner of The Mudd Club
* A codeine-based cough syrup sold over the counter a few years ago.
BURROUGHS IN HOLLYWOOD
DINNER WITH ANDY WARHOL: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: Andy, Bill is a great actor, he’s a natural. He could be a big star. Look at his face.
BURROUGHS: Yes I can play doctors, CIA men, and all kinds of things. I do war criminals very well.
BOCKRIS: War criminals?
WARHOL: I think you should be a dress designer.
BURROUGHS: A Nazi war criminal I could play very well.
WARHOL: I think you should be a dress designer. You gotta change your profession and become a dress designer.
BURROUGHS: Well … hmmm, that’s not my sort of thing.
WARHOL: Actually you’re the best-dressed person I’ve ever known.
BURROUGHS: Really?
WARHOL: Isn’t he the best? He’s always worn a tie since I’ve known him.
BURROUGHS: Actually I have had some acting experience. I played the Toff in A Night at the Inn by Dunsany. That’s an old old high school show. It was the principal part, my dear, I was the leeeaadd. That was at Los Alamos.
BOCKRIS: But how could you have a play if they only had twenty-six boys?
BURROUGHS: It doesn’t matter. How many people do you need for a play?
BOCKRIS: Quite a lot. Was it fun?
BURROUGHS: I was a big success.
BOCKRIS: Is that where you got bitten by the bug?
With William Burroughs Page 12