BURROUGHS IN COLORADO
ANNE WALDMAN: I fell in love with William last summer at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He’s such a good teacher. Meticulous. He said: “Remember, a writer has to write.” He also had this squirrel he befriended and fed. Everyone reacted very well to him and he handled the situation of being there perfectly.
Colorado has decriminalized marijuana. Open smoking there is quite pleasant. We stood out in the street in front of the Hotel Boulderado with the desk clerk and smoked a good joint yesterday afternoon. Bill told me that not only were there a number of very hip places in the States outside of New York, but the trend to go to New York was reversing and people from New York were moving to places like Boulder, Eugene, Oregon, etc. Little is lacking and life is much cheaper, safer, and, in some cases, more productive. Both Bill and James feel they are getting a lot more work done out in Colorado than they ever got done in New York. Though Bill points out that he has very carefully kept out of the New York social life because it is too distracting. “I see very few people and mostly people I know very well, but I probably know more people in Boulder than I know in New York.”
SATURDAY NIGHT, 6:00 P.M., BOULDERADO HOTEL: 1978
I meet Burroughs in the bar. He’s halfway through his first Bloody Mary. He’s wearing a rumpled turtleneck, a faded light blue check summer sports jacket and a pair of check trousers. A stack of his Retreat Diaries sits on the table on top of a manila envelope beside a copy of Arthur Koestler’s Roots of Coincidence and Burroughs’ perennial gray hat. Burroughs is shocked that Bellow won the Nobel. Burroughs is disgusted. “He just isn’t a major writer,” says Bill.
We decide to go upstairs to his flat in the hotel for dinner. Bill has made a delicious split pea stew which is bubbling in the pot. James is going to heat up some cutlets. There’s nothing much to drink, but Bill digs up a bottle of vermouth and splashes some into my half-full glass of vodka. “There’s your martini,” he says. I split it with him. Best martini I ever drank.
We sit down on the couch and talk about mugging and weapons. “Oh yes,” Bill says, “look to mother nature for weaponry … the porcupine quills …” He leafs through a book called Killers of the Sea. “Electric eels … a snail that shoots a poison dart … the ink screen of the squid … and so many poisons for the CIA to play about with. The poison contained in the spines of the stone fish causes intolerable agony like fire through the blood. Victims throw themselves around screaming. Morphine affords no relief. Often the victim dies of pain, quite literally tortured to death. Now if one had an immediate antidote, stone fish poison could be the perfect shortcut in interrogation.
“And consider the poison of the tiny blue ring octopus found in Australia and the South Seas. A nerve venom of unknown ingredients and unbelievable potency. Young soldier on a beach saw a small octopus two inches across of a bright blue color. He picked the creature up and it glowed an even brighter blue (the blue ring octopus lights up like neon when the creature becomes excited). A few minutes later, feeling dizzy and rightly suspecting a connection, he removed the octopus from his hand. Two tiny bruises could be seen in the skin. He collapses and is rushed to a hospital. Ninety minutes later he was dead.
“More of mother nature’s nonsense: Here is a tiny creature that must prey on even smaller fish and crustaceans …”
“But what use does he have for a poison that can kill a big beefy marine?” I interrupted. Bill waved an admonitory finger. “Overkill. She’s at it again, the old bitch …”
Burroughs with biographer Albert Goldman, after dinner at Bockris’s apartment, New York City, 1983. Photo: Victor Bockris
Reading this may save your life. If you are ever by chance in the South Seas area and you see a little blue octopus, don’t say, “Oh isn’t he cute” and snatch it right up or little bluie may show you just how cute he can be.
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
During the ride out of Boulder into the surrounding countryside Burroughs talked mostly about the mountains, with which he expressed an uncertain relationship. “The thing is there’s nowhere to walk around here. You need streams and trees and things. All this rock”—he waved a disconsolate hand—“what are these people gonna do?” He chuckled, pointing out small houses nestled among rocks with no view. “It gets awfully dark and oppressive in these mountains sometimes …” Spotting a No Hunting sign, I ask him what animals inhabit these hills. “There are a lot of deer and they’re pretty tame, they come right into Boulder sometimes. Lots of squirrels, raccoons and chipmunks.”
“How about bears?”
“They wouldn’t come in that close. The animals that come in close have accustomed themselves to suburban living.”
When we get back from the drive it’s 5:45 and we head straight for the bar. I learn that Bill is planning a trip to Guatemala where for ten dollars a day you can live in luxury and the fare is only three hundred dollars round trip. I also found out that Bill has never been particularly interested in the writings of Henry Miller and that he is intrigued by tycoons. J. Paul Getty, Jr., is a friend. “This story thing about Getty being the richest man in the world is completely wrong. The story is that while he was alive and the whole thing was running there was a lot of money, but the actual estate was not all that large. Getty was apparently a pretty decent guy. He liked to party and drank pretty heavily in his youth. In later years he was a teetotaler. He was considerate of his staff. If a man was an alcoholic or a drug addict, he would not fire him automatically but try and get him off the stuff. Hughes, on the other hand, had a reputation for being a bastard to work for. He would allow no one on his staff who drank or smoked. I’ve known people who’ve worked for rich people. There are some rich people who treat people so badly that they just can’t keep a servant for more than two months.” Burroughs finds this amusing. He seems pretty interested in Howard Hughes and returns to his comparison of Hughes with Beckett. Hughes was obviously afraid of people, he maintains. “He was quite a playboy up until the thirties and then this recluse thing seems to have come upon him very suddenly, where he just shut himself up and wouldn’t see anyone. I think he decided he was different than other people and he didn’t like other people at all. He thought they were going to come in and give him some terrible disease.”
The subject turns to inflation. “In the last thirty years I’ve seen the subway go from a nickel to sixty cents and of course everything else has gone up too,” Bill says. “In the late forties and early fifties I was living in London and Paris in relative comfort on an income of $200 a month, an allowance from my parents. Can you imagine that today? When the situation got bad in London I decided I was not going to pay for the sins of the English. All the bad kharma of the British Empire is dumping itself back onto London now. And I figured I hadn’t been given the advantages of living out in India with faithful native boys at my service so why’d I have to pay for it? I split. But this inflation has been going on for years now and nobody really understands it. Prices are slightly ahead of the wages and everybody is kept in constant need by that mechanism.”
We go upstairs to Bill’s room where James is preparing what will turn out to be a magnificent dinner of yams, meatloaf, oyster stew soup, and broccoli. There’s nothing to drink but a little of the vermouth left over from last night so I pour some for Bill and myself. “We’ll make martinis in our stomachs,” he says, referring to the three vodkas we’d already had in the bar. We sit back around the table while James cooks. William tells us that he had a private pilot’s license some years ago and enjoyed flying small planes. Just recently a friend, Robert Fulton, piloted down from Aspen in his Cessna 195 and Bill flew some of the way back. He says that while he passed the test he could never get a commercial license because his eyes weren’t good enough. He gesticulates during the detailed explanation. “The first thing you learn in flying is about stalling speeds. K.F.S., Keep Flying Speed, is the basic law of flying. You get to know what your stalling speed is so if you get close to it you
know you’re going to lose altitude quick. Then I had to do spins and difficult landings in small places. I was once forced to land in a cornfield. I just poured some gas into the plane and took off again,” he chuckles.
Richard Elovich comes in for dinner. The conversation goes from alligators to sharks. We agree that alligator kill must be very different than shark kill. And finally on to one of Bill’s favorite subjects—poisonous snakes. He knows a lot about them and gives a detailed account of which snakes are poisonous, how quickly they move, and the comparative time it takes to die. “Snakes are not as dangerous as people think because they don’t really move that fast,” he says. Talking about boa constrictors squeezing people to death and eating people, he says most of that is nonsense. “First of all they can’t swallow a whole person; biggest thing they could swallow would be a small pig.” He tells me about an incident where a man was half eaten by a crocodile and they found parts of his body in the crocodile’s stomach. “Last time this guy was seen was standing waist deep in water on a rock. A few minutes later he has disappeared. A crocodile had dragged him under. What they do is, they drown you first or kill you under water and drag you down to the bottom, where they eat part of you and leave the rest. It takes them two weeks to digest food like that. They found a whole foot and parts of a leg; these gruesome pictures are in Eyelids of Morning by Peter Beard.
Discussing writing again I suggest, “Intellectualism is useless in relation to writing.” James likes useless as a description. Bill agrees. “I always thought that Aldous Huxley’s work was crippled by that English intellectualism he was involved in,” he says. “If you actually looked at those novels they weren’t so much novels as treatises, and then if you stripped them down to consider the thought behind them it wasn’t particularly interesting or useful. Bloomsbury was a crippling organization, particularly for its younger members.” Bill knows Francis Huxley and thinks highly of his anthropological work but thinks that he too is somewhat crippled by that particular form of British intellectualism. I ask Bill about his reading habits and what he is reading, but he is vague. He is not interested in Roots of Coincidence by Koestler. Someone sent it to him. “One thing I will tell you though, is if you’re a black writer in this country you have got it over a white writer in the same way women writers have got it over men. There’s no doubt about that.” I asked Bill what he thought about the effect of worldwide news on the ability to write fiction, and he pointed out that this was not relevant because there were just as many incredible things going on and being reported in the last century and writers have always used information that comes through the news for fictionalization.
Around nine we get up to leave. James is off to his room for a short break. Bill is apparently going to read. They talk briefly about plans for the coming week. Bill has got some lectures to give. He prefers the students in Boulder to those he taught at CCNY in New York. In Boulder they’re paying for these courses. In New York they were just trying to get an easy credit. “I didn’t really like teaching there. This is much better, but even this I only want to do for a short time because I can’t write while I’m teaching. The preparation takes too long.” He is pulling material from the manuscript of his CCNY lectures. “Anything you say about writing is obviously open to complete revision three years later.” His novel Cities of the Red Night needs another six months’ work on it, he tells me, and he doesn’t know when he will get an uninterrupted period in which to work on it.
For three years, Burroughs taught at the Naropa Institute and made Boulder into a kind of Headquarters West. During this period, his son, William Burroughs, Jr., was going through a delicate liver transplant operation and subsequent long-term recovery. Since Billy has recovered, Burroughs has closed down the Colorado location.
BURROUGHS: I started residing in Boulder, Colorado, when Billy became ill and I stayed there most of that winter. After that I had an apartment there which I maintained for two years, through 1978 and 1979. It then became too much of an expense. Boulder was getting to be more and more of a boom town. Prices were rising drastically. In most university towns, there’s not enough housing for the students and then people are being overcharged.
William Burroughs Communications now has its headquarters in Lawrence, Kansas, where James Grauerholz, who worked closely with William in a secretarial capacity on a daily basis over the five years William spent writing Cities of the Red Night (which James spent the final three months editing in collaboration), has moved.
While holding the Bunker at all costs, William has since been looking for an alternative country location and considered two opportunities: to buy land in New Mexico near where some friends of his are living, or in Florida, where he was presented with a particularly intriguing opportunity which he investigated further.
BURROUGHS IN ITALY
DINNER WITH LEGS MCNEIL, JAMES GRAUERHOLZ, ANDY WARHOL, AND RICHARD HELL: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: I think Pasolini died happy.
BURROUGHS: I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that he died happy at all. The implication is that the boy was paid to kill him. He hit him over the head with a board with nails sticking out of it. Then when he was unconscious the kid backed the car over him. Now the boy himself, who’s still in jail, has never confessed to the fact that he was paid to do this because they said, “Okay, kid, we’ll take care of you; we’ll get you out if you keep your fucking mouth closed.” It was a political thing.
GRAUERHOLZ: He was murdered by the right?
BURROUGHS: Sure. I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. I talked to somebody who’s a friend of Felicity Mason’s, who is writing a book about this whole affair and interviewed the boy. It wasn’t his lover at all, it was a pickup. There’s no reason to believe there was anything pleasurable or masochistic about it. This boy hit him over the head. That was something he didn’t expect at all. The boy was a hit man. Pasolini had had experience with lots of boys like that. Pasolini was a black belt karate, he could have handled that kid with one hand, but he didn’t have a chance. The kid hit him over the head from behind. The kid claimed that he was horrified by the sexual demands of Pasolini. That is absolute rubbish. The boy’s story did not stand up. He got life. Indeed, he is still in jail. He’s been in there for some years. So this guy that I met was writing a book about it. He had inside information; he had interviewed the boy and the lawyers and everybody connected with the case.
RICHARD HELL: Pasolini was dangerous to the right wing?
BURROUGHS: I know nothing about Italian politics, but apparently there were people who had reason to believe that and wanted him killed.
BOCKRIS: Legs, do you enjoy having dinner with Bill?
LEGS MCNEIL: He’s a lot of fun at parties and a heck of a nice guy, but I like the dinners Bill gives inside the Bunker best. They always have a little quiet desperation about them.…
WARHOL: Who do you think has a good walk?
BURROUGHS: I’ve got a pretty good walk. One foot goes right straight after the other. They don’t turn out. Tomorrow I’m leaving to talk on the unconscious at an international conference of psychoanalysts in Milan. I’m saying there isn’t an unconscious. I’m going to talk about the fact that although Freud was one of the first to observe some of the psychological damage caused by the capitalist ethic and the whole industrial revolution, he never got beyond this ethic himself, being an academic. While he saw the importance of lateral thinking he never thought it could be used constructively. The unconscious was a hell of a lot more unconscious in his day than it is now. In the nineteenth century sex was unmentionable and in consequence it became unthinkable to many people. The unconscious, then, is not a fixed entity, but varies from person to person, culture to culture, and epoch to epoch. I will suggest that the unconscious may be physiologically located in the nondominant brain hemisphere and cite Julian Jaynes. Freud saw the unconscious as undesirable and formulated the aim of therapy: “Where Id was there shall Ego be.” Julian Jaynes stresses the im
portance of the nondominant brain hemisphere, which performs a number of useful—in fact essential—functions, among which are space perception. If the right brain hemisphere is damaged in an accident the simplest space problem becomes very difficult. So it isn’t a question of territorial war, but rather of trying to harmonize the two brain hemispheres. I’m announcing it at the conference as something called “hemispheric therapy.”
BOCKRIS: And what exactly is that?
BURROUGHS: Harmonizing the two brain hemispheres. Instead of being in conflict they are complementing each other. If you get rid of your unconscious, your whole right brain hemisphere, as happens sometimes in accidents, you’re terribly handicapped. There are all sorts of things you can’t do. For example [draws on a paper napkin a series of O’s and X’s] it would be very difficult to say which was the next one in sequence if your right brain was damaged. You wouldn’t know.
William Burroughs writing Cities of the Red Night, the Bunker, New York City, 1977. Photo: Gerard Malanga
BOCKRIS: Were you invited to speak about whatever you wanted to speak about?
BURROUGHS: No. The whole conference is on this subject, they wanted me to speak to it. They asked me: “Have you got something to say or read?” I answered yes. So they said, “Oh, but we thought you said you never read Freud.” “On the contrary,” I told them, “I have read practically everything that Freud ever wrote.” About twelve volumes. So I’m very well acquainted with this whole theory.
With William Burroughs Page 14