BOCKRIS: When did you read Freud?
BURROUGHS: About thirty-five, forty years ago.
BOCKRIS: What was your reaction to it when you read it?
BURROUGHS: It’s obvious that the whole thing is riddled with errors and a lot of these errors are inseparable from the social configuration. For example, hysteria has almost ceased to exist as such. This is when someone faced with difficult circumstances, say like taking an examination, becomes quite genuinely sick. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he doesn’t realize that he’s doing it to himself; if he did he wouldn’t be able to do it. Hysterics produce quite genuine symptoms. This illness called hysteria was common in Freud’s day, whereas it’s rare at the present time, or confined to backward places like Ireland and Portugal. Take hysterical paralysis: people are paralyzed for long periods and it’s simply hysteria. You just have to say the right words or get them to say the right words and bingo they’re cured, like people cured of paralysis at Lourdes. They were suffering from hysterical paralysis so they get up out of their wheelchairs and walk, but they were never organically paralyzed to begin with.
BOCKRIS: Is this a scientific conference? What kind of people are they inviting?
BURROUGHS: Psychoanalysts. It’s a psychoanalysts convention, but I don’t think I will be the only nonpsychoanalyst there. There’ll be people from all over the place, mostly Europeans, and a lot of them, oddly enough, are Marxists.
BOCKRIS: That’s not so odd for Italy is it?
BURROUGHS: It’s not odd for Italy, but I don’t see any connection between psychoanalysis and Marxism.
BOCKRIS: Freud better look out for his rep!
BURROUGHS: Oh well, his reputation’s been bandied around a great deal and he is now being increasingly seen in more perspective as an innovator and a pioneer. He was a therapist. His patients were middle-class nineteenth-century Viennese. It’s hard for us to imagine the extent to which sexual subjects were taboo and unmentionable. This is back in the nineteenth century, and I think he had more women patients than men. Many of his female patients had symptoms that were obviously the result of sexual repression. I’m going to cite Julian Jaynes, Dunne’s Experiment with Time, and Korzybski’s General Semantics. I am skeptical of the whole concept of “mental illness.” Wherever there is “mental illness” there is physical illness. I had a cousin; at the age of thirty-eight he was a square citizen, started having these bizarre hallucinations—his leg was on fire, all kinds of things like that so the doctors gave him a neurological once-over, very sloppy as it turns out, and said there was no sign of organic illness, therefore he had a psychosis, right, schizophrenia. So they were analyzing him on the couch and in the course of this he died of a brain tumor. Well, that was sloppiness on their part. I would have said, if you don’t turn something up keep looking, because there’s something there. There’s no reason for a square stockbroker at the age of thirty-eight to suddenly exhibit these symptoms. And they were saying, “Why would he be thinking all this?” and looking for childhood traumas. He was vomiting and they said, “Oh, this is a psychosomatic symptom.” The next thing you know he was dead of a brain tumor.
BOCKRIS: Was there a particular point at which you turned away from this psychiatric approach?
BURROUGHS: It’s not a specific approach; there was just a particular point when more evidence turned up relating to precise brain areas. I think analysis is a very antiquated approach. In fact, I’ve seen people who’ve been in psychoanalysis for five years and weren’t getting any better, and I said this is a bunch of shit.
BILL’S 66th BIRTHDAY DINNER AT THE BUNKER, FEBRUARY 5, 1980
BURROUGHS: I just got back from Milan. The guy who organized it, Professor Verdiglione, is a lay analyst. Verdiglione is a practicing psychoanalyst; he has his own publishing company, with branches in France and Italy, and he’s written a number of books on language and the unconscious, a small fat man, but with great authority. This convention is the third one he’s organized. He’d gotten a big building around a courtyard called the Palace of the Orphans, which used to be an orphanage back in the Middle Ages and was now being used to house the participants. The rooms were reasonable, small but with a bath. He says to me in the afternoon, “Mr. Burroughs, so and so is giving a talk in ten minutes. You will be on the platform.” It’s not an invitation, it’s an order. I said, “Well, I have to go up to my room.” He said, “You are coming back.” Anyway, I gave my talk on Freud and the unconscious at nine o’clock in the morning the day after I arrived. They were trying to translate it into both French and Italian because a lot of people there were French, and at this rate it would have taken the rest of the day. So Verdiglione said, “Let Burroughs read it in English and then you give a summary.” They did. It was impossible to tell if anyone understood anything I said or not. Then I was drafted to be on the platform with this other guy, a Frenchman named Alain Fournier, whose talk had nothing to do with the unconscious; he was just going on about the rape of Cambodia, the invasion of Afghanistan, in other words the non-Communist left, Mary McCarthy’s camp. He was calling for a boycott on the Olympic Games. I was sitting there all this time and people were taking pictures. Then there was a big lead in the newspapers the following day: THE UNCONSCIOUS SAYS NO TO MOSCOW.
BOCKRIS: For the rest of the conference did you listen to everybody else’s talks?
BURROUGHS: There’s no point, I can’t understand it, it’s all in French and Italian.
BOCKRIS: What do you think his interest in you was?
BURROUGHS: PR obviously. He wants as many “name” people as possible at his conference. The more such people he gets, the more important the conference is. Anyway, in the afternoon I was supposed to take part in a roundtable discussion including questions and answers with the audience in all languages. This started at 2:30 and I had some appointments to do interviews about 4:00. At 4:30 I said, “Well, I’ve got to see these journalists,” so I left the platform. Meanwhile, the roundtable went on until seven.
BOCKRIS: Is Italy very tense politically?
BURROUGHS: I felt no tension.
BOCKRIS: Did you get much of an impression of Milan?
BURROUGHS: Nothing. Pretty blank. I saw the Cathedral and the famous Gallery. The weather was cold and rainy.
BOCKRIS: What did you do in the evenings?
BURROUGHS: The first evening I had dinner with Verdiglione, the second evening I had dinner with Sr. Pini, the third evening I sulked in my room. This was the evening after I missed my plane. I went down and got a sandwich at the bar and went back up to my room and read a mystery story. And the next day I just got up and said goodbye.
BOCKRIS: Did people come up to you and respond; did anyone say anything about it?
BURROUGHS: Some Englishman who understood it got up and said it was an interesting talk, but he had some questions he wanted to ask and I never understood his questions; he went on and on. People who get up and want to ask questions want to make a statement. You see it doesn’t matter at all. The thing is that Mr. Burroughs is there and they will probably publish something in the paper. The press was there and took a lot of pictures, that’s it. It wasn’t a question of anyone understanding what I was saying. This kind of conference is like nothing I’ve ever seen before because it’s not a conference. I thought a psychoanalytic conference would be actual psychoanalysts, most of them would be medical doctors, and fifty or sixty of them. Instead, I find most of them aren’t psychoanalysts at all, or aren’t there to talk about psychoanalysis, and there are three or four hundred people milling around, some of whom have paid to attend the lectures. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, but they have such things in America. Steven Lowe’s father belongs to the Order of the Flying Morticians and they have conferences, so there’s nothing phony about it, it’s just cultural analysis created out of nowhere, using psychoanalysis as a springboard …
NEW YORK CITY CLOSE-UPS
DINNER AT JOHN GIORNO’S: NEW YEARS EVE 1979–1980
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BOCKRIS: Which is your nearest supermarket?
BURROUGHS: The Pioneer. It’s sloppy and it’s dirty and there are all these old biddies with their baskets and their cigarettes all in the corner of their mouths jamming the aisles and hovering around, but it’s the only supermarket within twenty blocks. You meet all sorts of people there. I meet Mike Goldberg, John Giorno and various people from the neighborhood at the check-out desk. Once I saw this young man with a beard and our eyes met and I said, “Well, how do you do?” And he said, “I know you but you don’t know me,” and I said, “Well, happy New Year.” I know all the cashiers. If they’re feeling really good, if it’s a really jolly day, they might say thank you. But it’s a great day if you can elicit a thank you out of the clerks at the Pioneer. It’s just that they don’t care. To a customer in Boulder it’s unthinkable that a clerk wouldn’t say, “Hi there! Hi there! Hi there!” and then go on to “Thank you. Come again. Happy New Year! Have a good day!” But this doesn’t happen at the Pioneer in New York. It does happen, though, in the drugstore. I’m well known in the drugstore. I go in there and gab with the pharmacist, who’s a gabby old guy anyway. Buying vitamins and talking about his experience with vitamins. They’ve got their own special vitamin pill, which contains everything that you need. “If you take one like this,” he says, “it’s like a drop in the rain bucket every day, and it can head off an awful lot because there are all these things you need you’re not getting. Things like zinc.” Are you getting enough zinc? Horrible results of zinc deficiency. All your teeth fall out for starters. So, it’s on that basis. They always have anything I want. I wanted to buy a special kind of glue. You wouldn’t think you’d buy it in a drugstore, but they had it: Duco cement. They have a special kind of ball-point pen that only costs 59 cents, the only kind I use; they have stationery; it’s one of those drugstores that does everything. And his wife is very much of a theatrical Spanish Dolores type, fairly good looking, a middle-aged woman who’s had a lot of sorrow but has great dignity and a great presence. She says, “Oh, why didn’t you say the usual, Mr. Burroughs?” Her husband was much older than she was. He was the one who told me that vitamin E gave him diarrhea. He died shortly after that and I never saw him again. But then she, who I presume was his wife, was around with the armband for a while, and she also has either a daughter or sister who looks like her but is not young enough to be her child, sort of a heavy-set woman with a mustache. It’s a whole family. A new pharmacist appeared and what the relation between him and her is at this point I don’t know. He knows everyone in the neighborhood. For example he’ll advise someone: “You need glasses. You’re entitled to them on your social security.” He’s always instructing someone, telling them to do this or that. “I can give you this and charge you more for it, but I can give you the same product and charge you less.” It’s also a news exchange. There’d been a mugging and there was a report. Some woman got beaten up and she’s at the counter and they’re all commiserating and saying “two black boys.” And the Patrone, grandiose and sad in a Latin way, experienced woman said, “Yes, those are the ones, those are the ones …” She’s got quite a lot of style; she’s a real actress in the classical manner, still beautiful and still sort of trembling on the verge.… There’s a whole French novel right there on The Last Adventure: She gets taken by some Puerto Rican boy and the old pharmacist, mad with jealousy, comes in and kills them both. He’s an old character, that guy.
DINNER WITH PETER BEARD AND BOCKRIS-WYLIE: NEW YORK 1976
BEARD: If I were a cabdriver I’d have a weapon for sure.
BURROUGHS: Personally it would give me a great feeling if faced by muggers to pull out a gun on them.
BEARD: I’d like to blast them.
BURROUGHS: I don’t mean shoot them. I’d give them a chance. I’d say: “You better get out of here quick.”
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: I love that story you told about the guy on the Bowery who said he had a gun in his pocket …
BEARD: You never know how many guys are just around the corner backing him up.
BURROUGHS: He didn’t have fuckall backing him up, he was just all alone there trying to get smart.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Do you think you’d be good in a situation defending yourself?
BURROUGHS: I’ve always been good in those situations.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Has anyone ever tried to kill you?
BURROUGHS: People have attacked me. I beat the other person hands down. He’s causing me trouble, I said, “Don’t like ya and I don’t know ya and now my God I’m gonna show ya!” That’s from The Wild Party, written in 1922. On the few occasions in which I’ve been attacked physically I won hands down.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Do you think that’s because you want to stay alive more than the person who’s attacking you?
BURROUGHS: Exactly. It was like the original situation in the subway. This guy says, “Okay you guys, ya been in my pockets, we’re goin’ downtown.” And the Sailor hit him and he fell down, but he was still hanging on to the Sailor and the Sailor said, “Get this mooch offa me.” So I hit him once in the jaw and kicked him once in the ribs. The rib smashed. Because I hadda get outta that, man. I hadda get out of that situation.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: Have you ever been really scared that you would die in a situation where you were attacked?
BURROUGHS: I can’t say that I have. There was a situation in Tangier where I was talking to some boys out in front of the house and this nutty shoeshine boy comes up and says, “You fuckin’ queer.” I said something, and he hit me across the face with his shoeshine box. So I pulled the old elbow on him. There’s no strength needed in fighting, no strength needed at all. Just threw an elbow across his face and brought it back and he ran away to a big lot and hit me with a stone.
BOCKRIS-WYLIE: What’d you do then?
BURROUGHS: Nothing, because he could run faster than I could. I remember one CIA man in Tangier who got in an altercation with a shoeshine boy. He slapped the shoeshine boy, the shoeshine boy grabbed a piece of glass and the CIA man kicked him in the nuts and the boy ran off screaming. He was the ugliest American of them all …
NIGHT OF THE WHITE PILLS
I got to the Bunker around 6:30. Howard was there also. We had drinks and a light, pleasant dinner which Bill cooked and served. I was still feeling pretty ropy from being ill and Bill seemed a bit out of it himself. We drank a bit too much. I’ve noticed recently that Bill isn’t getting drunk very often. But this night we continued to drink more vodka after dinner. I was telling Bill that I didn’t know what to do and he said, “Do nothing.” He said, “Most of these problems are very simple. People think they’re very complicated but they’re not—just do nothing.” He said, “If one man refuses to believe in all this crap, that liberates everyone from it.”
Howard produced a handful of small white pills which he said were Swedish and very good, suggesting we all take some.
“What are they?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know. I have no idea,” Howard replied, “but this friend gave them to me and said they were great.”
“I ain’t takin’ nothing if I don’t know what it is,” Bill said. “Why don’t you take some and we’ll see what happens to you?”
Howard agreed, and took two of the pills. When they’d been in his system for an hour and a half he was able to report that he felt quite good—“drowsy eyelids—maybe some kind of synthetic opiate.” Bill swallowed two of the pills. Half an hour later I noticed that there was only one pill left, so I took it. I remember looking at my watch. It was 11:30 and I said to myself, “You really ought to go.” I was supposed to be at the Mudd Club at 10:00. The next thing I remember is looking at my watch and it was 6:30 A.M., I was sitting straight up in the same chair I’d been sitting in so I presumed I hadn’t moved. William was standing over by the sink washing a saucepan. “Bill wha … what’s happening?” I stuttered. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” he replied vaguely. “I’m just checking things out
, seeing what’s going on.”
I asked Bill if I could stay over because, even though at the time I felt all right, I basically knew something was wrong, so I stayed over on intuition. I went into the bathroom and washed up. Bill showed me where the blankets for the spare bed were kept, made sure I had everything I needed, and we both went to bed around 7:00 A.M. I heard Bill moving around about noon. After a while he came in to see how I was. I was sick and couldn’t get out of bed. I asked him if it would be all right if I stayed in bed for the day. He said, “Of course” and basically left me alone between noon and 6:00. He made one attempt to entertain me when he came in to show me the handful of pellets he’d dug out of the phone book in the orgone box in the cupboard. I couldn’t make out what he was talking about. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “I was firing the air pistol off last night. Look, I’ll show you …” and he led me into the cupboard, opened up the orgone box, and there was a heavily peppered telephone book.
Around 4:00 in the afternoon someone who was writing a dissertation on him came by. At 6:00 Bill came in. “What you need is the hair of the dog.”
“What do you mean?”
“A drink,” he said. Funnily enough I really felt like one, so, getting up slowly, I dressed and we met again at the conference table twenty four hours after we’d originally sat down to cocktails the previous evening. “Everything’s back to normal,” I said.
“Yes, everything’s back to normal.” Bill gave me a vodka and tonic and said, “I’ll make you some Jewish penicillin.” I ate my chicken soup and went home to bed.
ALLEN GINSBERG TEARGASSED BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS
Miles was visiting New York. I called William up and suggested the three of us get together. We arranged a date. We arrived at Bill’s place almost exactly on the dot of 6:00, taking a pint of vodka and some extra tonic water with us. William seemed in fine fettle as he met us to unlock the gate. We went upstairs. Soon John Giorno joined us. We talked about the White Gorilla of which William had seen pictures in National Geographic. He remarked that National Geographic provided the perfect CIA front: “Well, our man has been in the area for twenty years and he knows all about it. Anything you need, ask our man.”
With William Burroughs Page 15