Timothy had invited us out to lunch. Although Bill had told me on the phone the previous day, “That’s very nice of him, but I don’t think I have time for lunch as well,” he now turned to me, in response to Timothy’s repeated invitation, and said, “Victor, what do you think? Shall we have a bite of lunch?” I, of course, agreed, and so we walked around the corner to a small Greek restaurant. We ordered some food and two bottles of retsina. William drank ice water. “This man is a priest. He will not touch alcohol,” Timothy explained to the waiter.
After lunch, we headed toward Books & Company. As we strode up Madison Avenue I asked Bill about a puzzling sexual dream I’d had a few nights before.
“Yes, this is well known,” he said. “This is a visit by the succubus. Of course, you know about it.”
“I don’t know anything at all about that. Please tell me.”
“What! You don’t know about the succubus and incubus? My dear, this is well-known endemic folklore—household words in medieval times, I fancy.”
“Yes, but what is it?”
“The Demon Lover, my dear! The one who descends upon you!” At that moment Timothy descended upon us and our conversation broke off. Before we got to the bookstore I had a chance to ask him one more question. “Does the person who comes have anything to do with sending themselves? Are they at all aware of it?”
“Not much solid evidence of this. People don’t like to talk about it, but it happens more frequently than one would suppose.”
“Has it happened to you?”
“Of course. Many times.”
He could give me no more information about it, nor leads. “The sources are scattered,” he said, “but I will give you one piece of advice: don’t let whoever is bothering you know about it, because they might feel they have some kind of power over you.”
BURROUGHS AT THE FACTORY
A week later, William and I arrived at Andy Warhol’s Studio, The Factory, at 6:00 P.M. A young man wearing a red shirt and blond mustache answered the door and we walked in. William immediately commented on how large the place was. A beautiful girl was slouching behind Ronnie’s desk. I crossed to the windows facing onto Union Square, took off my coat, and put my briefcase on the radiator. William followed, taking off his coat. I turned, took it from him, and placed it with his hat and cane on an art deco armchair in a grouping of art deco pieces. I walked into Vincent Fremont’s office and he was on the telephone. “I’m here with Mr. Burroughs,” I said.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Do I know you from somewhere?” I made a face and he said, “I’ll go and find Andy.”
“Could you turn the lights on in the conference room?”
“No, we’re cutting down on electricity.”
I motioned to Bill and he followed us into the conference room. “Ronnie’s got that music on loud again.”
“Ask him to turn it down,” I replied, thinking about my tape. Vincent went down the corridor. Bill and I looked through the bottles and he chose to stick with Smirnoff as opposed to trying Wyborowa, which I recommended. I ran back into the main office to get my tape recorder and came back as William was pouring some vodka into a glass. Andy entered. He was wearing an open-necked red, white, and yellow plaid shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, carrying a small Sony tape recorder, turned on, and a miniature 35 mm Minox with flash attachment.
WARHOL: Gee, you’re all alone.
BOCKRIS: Bill’s not alone. I’m with him.
WARHOL: Oh, you are. What do you think about people wearing earrings?
BURROUGHS: I don’t know. I guess it’s sort of their business, Andy. I don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other.
BOCKRIS: You never wore one yourself?
BURROUGHS: Oooohhh, good heavens no! It’s not my style.
BOCKRIS: You know, Bill never had long hair or a mustache or anything like that in his whole life.
BURROUGHS: I did try once to grow a mustache and it came out in all different colors and straggly; it didn’t work. It was all itchy. I hated it. I’ve got a barber down on Canal Street. They give me a straight cut like you see here. I don’t go in for McSweeney because there isn’t too much to be done with my hair anyway.
WARHOL: I have terrible spots, I … I … my skin …
BURROUGHS: Did you ever grow a beard?
WARHOL: No, my skin is so bad I have splotches all over it. I don’t know, nerves I guess.
BOCKRIS: We’re spreading this thing about all men should carry canes.
WARHOL: That’s a very good idea. I’m going to carry one. I used to carry a teargas gun. Taylor Mead gave me one, but you’re not allowed to carry it.
BURROUGHS: I don’t feel dressed without my teargas gun. I usually just carry the teargas and a cane.
WARHOL: What kind of cane?
BURROUGHS [showing him]: You see, there’re all sorts of things you can do with a cane. I sent away for a book on cane fighting. I plan to start a cane store. It’s an art, like fencing.
WARHOL: Listen, I’m going to get one, I think it’s great!
BURROUGHS: This one only cost $10 and it’s nice to walk with, I like the feeling.
WARHOL: It’s a good shape too. It’s fat enough; it feels sexy.
BURROUGHS: I also use it to quell dogs. In Boulder I used to carry this against dogs and one day I went out without my cane and by God if a dog didn’t bite me. But I would prefer one made of metal with iron piping inside a wooden case.
WARHOL [as we walk through The Factory looking at paintings]: You’re looking so good. Do you really take care of yourself?
BURROUGHS: Oh yes, I do. I have some special abdominal exercises that I do for five or ten minutes every day and it’s very effective indeed.
BOCKRIS: One of the biggest problems for writers is that they sit all day.
BURROUGHS: Basically, they have to do a certain amount of sitting in order to get anything done. [He spots a stuffed lion John Reinhold sent from Africa for Andy’s birthday.] Look at this lion! I had a friend who was killed by a lion in a nightclub. The lion was asleep in a cage and Terry went into the cage and threw a flashlight in the lion’s face and it leapt on him. He was DOA at the Reynosa, Mexico, Red Cross. He had a crushed chest, a broken neck, and a fractured skull. It just jumped on him and killed him. Can you imagine anyone waking up a sleeping lion with a flashlight? The Mexican waiter went into the cage and tried to get it off him with a chair and he couldn’t. The lion dragged Terry into a corner. At this point the bartender came vaulting over the bar with a .45 and he went in and killed the lion, but Terry was dead. It’s a funny thing. About a month before Terry annoyed that lion we were in Corpus Christi and we built Terry up as Tiger Terry, this punch-drunk fighter, and Terry goes into a spit and shuffle act. Yeah, Tiger Terry …
ON POLITICS
DINNER WITH DEBBIE HARRY: 1980
BURROUGHS: Do you remember that great scene in The Day of the Jackal when De Gaulle got through because of a time fuckup? Machine-gun bullets have shattered the glass and he gets out of the car, brushing glass off himself, and says, “Encore une fois?” Really magnificent. “Once again.” He was a completely fearless man. The people who protected De Gaulle were professionals, they knew their business. And the people who were supposed to be protecting Kennedy didn’t know their business, obviously. A good bodyguard knows there’s something wrong before it happens.
HARRY: We’ve had bodyguards. They do go on instinct a lot.
BURROUGHS: And of course if the trouble is coming from real professionals with guns it’s serious. That was what De Gaulle was up against. He wasn’t up against nuts, he was up against professional soldiers who knew all about the use of weapons and had access to every kind of weapon, so his bodyguard had to handle real pros.
HARRY: They work with the police, too. That’s one of the things that Kennedy suffered from, because his own echelon was so separated from everyone else, it’s as if he went into enemy territory. There was no cooperation between his people and
the police.
BURROUGHS: Of course it has all the earmarks of a CIA and Mafia job combined. There are all these stories about Santo Trafficante. Santo Trafficante! What a character. Imagine anybody being called Saint Trafficker! Saint Pusher! The story goes that somebody said, “What are we gonna do if Kennedy gets elected?” So Trafficante said, “He isn’t gonna get elected he’s going to be hit.” So Kennedy had contracts out on him apparently from several sources. Nixon is a man who had the morals of a private detective. He had no basic integrity. Kennedy did. There were some things that he might actually balk at. But where would Nixon draw the line? [Dogs are heard barking out the window.] Oh, those howling dogs! I’m an antidog man, I love cats.
DINNER WITH SUSAN SONTAG: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: You were at medical school for a year in Vienna in 1937. Did you feel as if the whole place was going to blow?
BURROUGHS: They knew that Hitler was going to move in.
BOCKRIS: How did people react to Hitler as a media figure?
BURROUGHS: Lots of people in America were pro-Hitler; and not only the rich people. The whole Yorkville section of New York was pro-Hitler; whole sections of Chicago were pro-Hitler.
BOCKRIS: What did they find so attractive about him?
BURROUGHS: He was a leader whose hands weren’t tied. We are governed by people whose hands are tied. “Well, I’d like to do something about it … but my hands are tied.”
SONTAG: Do you have a feeling that people are afraid of war?
BURROUGHS: Excuse me, there’s such a difference that people can’t really realize what a nuclear war means.
SONTAG: I’ve heard people say it’s all right this time, I’m over age I won’t be drafted.
BURROUGHS: I could say that myself—about being drafted—but that don’t mean shit.
SONTAG: Because for America war means going over there. And casualties also have been small.
BURROUGHS: Americans are terribly naïve about what Edwin Arlington Robinson called “the merciless old verities.” In his poem “Cassandra.” You remember:
Are we to pay for what we have
With all we are
And will you never have eyes
To see the world the way it is?
We’ve never encountered them, we’ve never been invaded, we’ve never been occupied or even bombed. We’re speaking in the Atomic Age. In World War I people actually used to take a bomb and drop it out the plane by hand. The pilots used to shoot at each other with pistols from their planes. Now this just shows you what a splendid thing technology is. It took them five hundred years to get the idea that a cannonball could explode on contact. Once they got that idea it developed into the atom bomb in a very short time. The cartridge rifle didn’t appear in America until after the Civil War. We can orient ourselves by comparing technologies. This shows us where an artifact is, what is wrong with it, and how far it has to go. Take a bow. Nothing much wrong with it and it may well have reached the limit of effectiveness for a weapon using springs or elastic energy to propel a dart or other projectile. It can’t go much further. Now look at this artifact. A flintlock pistol. What is wrong with it? Just about everything: length of time needed to load, high incidence of misfire, wind and rain can render weapons useless, black powder is dangerous to transport and store. It has this far to go. Here is the most modern machine-gun pistol, and here are some special models like the Darlick. Never hit the open market, but we may be approaching the limit with arms and projectiles propelled by explosive charge. So you can see by useful comparison the technology that is not yet finished. And we can see the human organism as an artifact, ask what is wrong with it, and how far it has to go. I wonder if anyone at this table would be alive, say, if we were all living a hundred years ago. I’ve had appendicitis. I’ve had malaria, I’ve had several infections checked by penicillin that might well have been fatal. Malaria is an absolutely crippling disease.
BOCKRIS: I don’t understand how people can continue being involved in politics. It doesn’t really seem to make any difference who wins, they always do the same thing anyway.
BURROUGHS: It makes a hell of a lot of difference, my dear. Do you realize how narrowly a fascist takeover in this country was headed off by Watergate? They all said as much quite frankly in all their boring memoirs. It is extremely important to keep track of these things, and remember.
BOCKRIS: Having to keep track of what’s going on seems like a very tiresome thing to do.
SONTAG: But sometimes your life is at stake.
BURROUGHS: Your life is at stake, believe me. I knew people in that period. I remember the terrorism of the late sixties. People framed for pot. There was a time when Sinclair went to jail for ten years for one joint. It means your life to keep track of these things. Coming back to America from before Watergate and after Watergate is like coming back to Russia before and after Stalin. When I came back to this country in 1964 my luggage was pulled apart. Huncke was told at that time that the FBI had got a list of people they were out to get.
SONTAG: It was very easy to get into trouble in the fifties and early sixties. I remember the fifties as absolutely terrifying. People threw away books that were so innocent. I’m not talking about Marx, I’m talking about Ruth Benedict, John Dewey. People were hiding these most innocent liberal books because they’d be misconstrued. You can’t imagine! People would throw away Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the early fifties because they were afraid that they would be accused of reading Russian writers. This is a time, in the early fifties, when you could not write in red ink on a government form when you came into this country. You can write in purple ink, you can write in green ink or yellow ink, but you can’t write in red ink. This is a time when a team called the Cincinnati Reds had to change its name. That fear went on through the fifties and early sixties. Then something happened in the sixties which we still feel works. However, one wonders if even these things are now possibly revocable as opposed to irrevocable.
BOCKRIS: I imagine that everything is revocable.
BURROUGHS: Yes. Revocable and have been experimentally revoked or suspended.
SONTAG: Sure. It’s fifteen years for us, that’s a long time, it’s roughly the mid-sixties to now. It’s a very long time, so it seems like forever.
BURROUGHS: No, you see that’s just part of the sales talk—the price of your freedom here. You got it pretty easy, nobody’s busting into your apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don’t worry about what they’re doing in South Korea and places like that. It’s like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who’ve got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes. I think the CIA is precisely dedicated to getting a yes on both questions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Give up my standard of living!? NEVER!
DINNER WITH ALLEN GINSBERG: NEW YORK 1976
GINSBERG: The thing I remember most that changed my 1940’s mind and determined my own attitude was sitting around with Burroughs and his wife, Joan, listening to the radio as Harry Truman’s voice came over in his inaugural speech—and Joan sniffing down her nose and saying, “His tone of voice and his prose are like a haberdasher’s.” And: “What kind of president is that?” She was making fun of Truman’s prose style—a sort of catty putdown attitude.
It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone presume to criticize the president of the United States on account of his mind; in those days it wasn’t done. You assumed that everything was one big dumb mind in every direction, rather than that there might be isolated points of humorous perception. It never occurred to you that the whole nation might be comprised of democratic individuals with perceptions superior to the official perceptions of the government. I don’t think anybody can imagine what it was like in those days. It was a state of conditioned brainwash in which the emotion
al authority of the government was unquestioned. And I’m wondering: is this a hallucination on my part by hindsight? Maybe it wasn’t so; maybe it was just some cranky notion that we had. Because I suppose there were all sorts of right wingers saying, “Roosevelt and unions!”—including Kerouac’s father. What was surprising was that Burroughs was actually so much in agreement with conservative thought at the time. There was a vulgarity in the government that he objected to, and underneath that was some apprehension that vulgarity was somewhat sinister—that it might result in blowing up an atomic bomb. The main point is that the material the artists of the forties were dealing with was absolutely truthful and socially perceptive, and yet it seemed so off the wall compared to what was being printed, that the idea of material like this [Naked Lunch, On the Road] being in The New York Times or brought out by some respectable publisher seemed like some coup taking place in a teahead’s revery. Like—wouldn’t it be great if the Beatles got back together in the White House, or wouldn’t it be great if Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev got together naked in a stadium and fought out the cold war with socks full of shit!
DINNER AT THE BUNKER WITH ALLEN GINSBERG, PETER ORLOVSKY, AND JOHN GIORNO: NEW YORK 1979
GINSBERG [whispering]: Burroughs and I don’t talk anymore. We sit around and chide each other. I’m afraid to open my mouth. [Bill sits down at head of table. On his right, Allen looks up.] I might say something too radical. I had a thought about your opinion about the Shah.
BURROUGHS: What about it?
GINSBERG: It doesn’t make too much sense if Kissinger and Rockefeller provoked the Mullah to get better prices for oil—because Kissinger, besides being the oil representative, also has to have some sense of the sanity of the United States and not get us into a war, and this situation is really too dangerous. They might have done it to damage the relations between Iran and the United States, to make them worse.
BURROUGHS: You still haven’t sold me Khomeini.
GINSBERG: I’m not trying to sell you Khomeini, however, I do approve of the effect of the idea of Iran declaring its independence from U.S. tyranny and reacting emotionally, saying, what the hell has been going on for twenty years? Although the way they’ve chosen to dramatize it does break the skin of sane intellectual relations.
With William Burroughs Page 17