PETER ORLOVSKY: Allen, Allen, the chicken is here, it’s out and it’s going to get cold.
GINSBERG: Let’s eat.
ORLOVSKY: What time do you want to eat, Bill?
GINSBERG: NOW!
BURROUGHS: Well, no … what! Let’s wait ten minutes. Have a drink … The Russians don’t make any bones about democracy. That’s why they’re always one up on us.
GINSBERG [drinking vodka and tonic]: Right, right. Now we had Iran in the palm of our hands, we got it in 1953 and we totally fucked it up, so then fucking them up means there’s some equivalent fuckup in our consciousness.
BURROUGHS: Russia doesn’t just sit around waiting for us to make a mess. Now one reason … you say for the goodness of democracy …
GINSBERG: I didn’t say give them democracy, I just said we fucked them up.
BURROUGHS: NOW [authoritatively] hold on a minute! One of the big reasons that democracy wouldn’t work there is because of the fucking mullahs. There are 183,000 mullahs, reactionary as priests in Ireland, sitting on the land and afraid that the land will be taken away from them and they will lose their power.
GINSBERG: Okay, so the difficulty was with land reform.
BURROUGHS: That’s one difficulty.
GINSBERG: Okay. But let me talk to that for a moment. Aside from the Mullah, the issue here is land and the Shah may or may not have tried to make some land reform.
BURROUGHS: He did.
GINSBERG: But, but the basic approach was so heavy in capital investment in industry—overindustrialization, including nuclear—that what actually happened was that the agricultural land diminished enormously between when he took over and when he was done; so that before, Iran used to provide its own food to a great extent, and by the time he was done, they were totally dependent on the outside world for food. Because he was investing all his money in military, atomic, and upper-class luxuries and not taking care of the agriculture. If he had been a fascist or a dictator and taken care of the agriculture it would be forgiveable and he could have outflanked the mullahs, but he didn’t do that, he did just the opposite, which is like a classic American thing of making an industrial monoculture with the oil and neglecting and fucking up everything else.
BURROUGHS: No, my whole point was that it’s not a simple matter to just produce democracy by saying Abracadabra.
GINSBERG: I would have settled this argument for a dictatorship that was agrarian.
BURROUGHS: … and then I would say again that one of the big stumbling blocks were the mullahs themselves. They are always going to be a source of trouble.
GINSBERG: Well, apparently he didn’t solve the problem, he only exacerbated it fifteen years ago by killing the Mullah’s father or something, remember?
BURROUGHS: I don’t know anything about this one, but there are 180,000 of these fuckers in Iran. It’s not just this one, it’s the whole system.
GINSBERG: Well, this policy, as he [the Shah] did it, only escalated domestic instability by destroying the local agriculture, totally offending the mullahs, and driving Iran into the arms of Russia.
BURROUGHS: Maybe they’re all undercover Communists! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they turned out to be super-Communists!
GINSBERG: The National Committee on Labor [now Fusion Party], the right-wing-left-wing-fake, the right-wing secret agent group, says that it’s a Rockefeller-Communist conspiracy, they mean it begins with Russia!
BOCKRIS: What is the overall effect of putting the hostages on trial?
GINSBERG: From an American point of view they’ve done us an enormous favor, I think, by making us confront what we actually did. It’s investigating what we did for twenty-five years, the unacknowledged, unrepented guilt: just as in the Vietnam War, which we evaded; [guilt] for the CIA which we evaded, for the FBI, which we evaded. And they say, you’re not going to evade it with Iran! You’ve been in here fucking around for twenty-five years, it’s time that you faced yourself. That’s at least the most sane statement of their position. Before November 1979, mass America did not know the Shah had his money in the Rockefeller banks, and didn’t realize how close Rockefeller and Kissinger …
BURROUGHS: This whole thing is also useful in that it serves an educational purpose. The man in the street now knows something about Iran, what absolutely fucked-up people they are. Khomeini never heard of Beethoven! “Islam is everything,” he says. Now, if the mullahs haven’t for generations been keeping people in poverty and abysimial ignorance to their own advantage …
BOCKRIS: Abysmal …
BURROUGHS: Abysmal.
GINSBERG: Abyssinian!
BURROUGHS: Abyssinian ignorance, yes, to their own advantage is exactly what’s been going on. They’re the most reactionary people in the country.
GINSBERG: You were saying the other night that you thought Rockefeller and Kissinger were not stupid, that I assumed that anybody who had different opinions from me was just stupid, which I think they are, but that they were not stupid, so that they knew when they maneuvered to get the Shah here that it would create a great crisis, and so the question was, what was their motive in doing it, what were their plans?
Burroughs in NO METRIC T-shirt and English country cap. The Gangster Look. Photo by Victor Bockris
BURROUGHS: I don’t know what their motive would be, but I think they must have had some idea, because the idea now is—we told you so. See, the experts, the old Iranian hands …
GINSBERG: First of all, the Rockefeller-Kissinger motive might have been to swing the clock back to patriotic-chauvinistic-hysterical-pro-CIA.
BURROUGHS: To some extent …
GINSBERG: And also they abandoned any attempt that Mondale was framing to control the CIA the other day. They increased the budget to what?
ORLOVSKY: In 1981 it’s going to be 155 or 158 million and it was only 130 million last year. They’ve banned gay people from coming into the country …
BURROUGHS: Now wait a minute. This is not at all connected.
GINSBERG: I think it’s all related as a grand master plan by the Committee on Present Danger, headed by Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the whole thing, to roll back the sixties at the verge of the eighties!
BURROUGHS [patiently]: In the first place, nothing in the modern world succeeds like failure. In other words, the whole Iran thing is a great failure in America and now they’re saying it’s necessary to keep the CIA because they fucked things up so much. Look at Nasser. Every time he started a war and won it in record time, he was in that much more solid.
GINSBERG: Nasser was?
BURROUGHS [icily]: Yes.
GINSBERG [confused]: Every time he lost or won?
BURROUGHS [screaming]: Every time he lost! Did he ever win a war? [Testily]: What war did he ever win?
GINSBERG: No, you said every time he won a war he was more solid. I was just saying that …
BURROUGHS: LOST a war. By losing. It’s a sort of reversal of the fear of victory.
GINSBERG: Pyrrhic victory. [Burroughs sighs audibly.] I’m a very learned, bookish person.
BURROUGHS: Arrrggghhhh …
DINNER WITH GLENN O’BRIEN, ANDRE LEONTALLEY, ANDY WARHOL, AND ALLEN GINSBERG: NEW YORK 1980
BOCKRIS: Up at the Natural History Museum there is a woman studying the international roach population, spending nights with them, and doing very close-up portraits of them. She obviously knows what’s going on, whatever it is. These roaches are widespread and venomously effective.
BURROUGHS: Widespread they are, yes.
BOCKRIS: They’re brave and aggressive creatures, because what chance do they stand against you when they come out?
O’BRIEN: Some of them are smart, some of them learn to jump at the right time.
BURROUGHS: Some of them have wings.
BOCKRIS: You stated flatly that all waterbugs had wings.
BURROUGHS: As far as I know, although they may undergo various cycles.
O’BRIEN: They eat plastic.
&nb
sp; BURROUGHS: Yes. They eat glue, they eat the bindings out of your books.
BOCKRIS: We’re closer to roaches than almost anything else in New York and we don’t know anything about them, their habits.
BURROUGHS: I think you’re a bleeding heart do-gooder, you think we should get to know more about roaches. I doubt it, frankly.
BOCKRIS: It’s axiomatic where you’re fighting a war the more you know about your opponent the better chance you have of winning.
BURROUGHS: That I agree with entirely. But all you need to know about killing roaches can be learned in one afternoon. I went out with an old exterminator and I learned it all in one afternoon. They’re pretty easy to get rid of. The exterminator guarantees to get rid of them for thirty dollars and if the roaches come back he’ll come back for nothing. They’re much more efficient in controlling roaches now than they used to be when I was working as an exterminator.
LEON-TALLEY: Can you tell me the sex life of a roach?
BURROUGHS: I don’t know about that, but I do know how to get rid of them. I’d have to look around and analyze the case, see. They get under sinks; if there’s linoleum they’ll get under that, they’ll get in the kitchen cabinets and any kind of woodwork.
LEON-TALLEY: How do you keep them out of the kitchen cabinets where you have your best china and silverware and all that?
WARHOL: Well, they can be with the best china; it’s the best food you don’t want them to be with.
BURROUGHS: Take it out and spray it.
WARHOL: No, spray it and serve the people with the spray on it. That’s what you do.
BURROUGHS: You spy out where they are and then you spray there and they come running out, and you soon find out where they are. You have to have a feel for it.
LEON-TALLEY: But they’re so big and ugly.
BURROUGHS: Well, now you’re speaking about waterbugs.
WARHOL: But I used to come home and I used to be so glad to find a little roach there to talk to I just … it was so great to have … at least somebody was there to greet you at home, right? And then they just go away. They’re great. I couldn’t step on them. Do you step on them?
BURROUGHS: Oh no—God, man! I either have a sprayer … Well, occasionally I get a waterbug in my place. There’s something called Tat with a thin tube coming out from the nozzle and it makes this fine spray. If you see a waterbug you can just …
WARHOL: You don’t have any roaches in your new place?
BURROUGHS: Very rarely. I got rid of them all.
BOCKRIS: But didn’t you have a slight bedbug problem?
BURROUGHS: I got a bomb and put it under the mattress under where the springs are, that’s where they get to, and I got rid of them …
BOCKRIS: Much of your work has been extremely condemning of the planet as a whole. Are you feeling any differently about that?
BURROUGHS: As far as the whole cycle of overpopulation and pollution, there is such flagrant bad management, what’s being done about it is very inadequate, and that’s only one problem. Then there is proliferation of nuclear weapons, which is also a pollution problem; the problem of the whole economic system … It’s taking more and more to buy less and less. This is worldwide, it’s not confined to Western culture. Whether there’s any way of solving these problems, that’s another matter. Frankly, I doubt that much will be done. Pollution has been going on a long time, but there comes a point where you reach saturation. In terms of any possible hope or solution, I agree with Timothy Leary—the only possibilities are in space. In a recent talk he gave about space stations, he said, “When a place gets full to this extent, that is a sign that it’s been successful and it’s time to move.” He said, consider these space stations. We’ll have the longevity pill; you can live 500, 600, 700 years.
He’s offering, it seems to me, the two most important things—immortality and space. He also points out that real space programs will be developed by private capital, which would be one of the best defenses of private capital, doing something really useful with their money. It seems to be a possibility within the range of modern technology. These would support rather small groups of people, and apparently one could select the setting, so there’d be worlds for bisexual vegetarians and Anita Bryant!
BOCKRIS: There seems to be a limited amount of money to spend on space.
BURROUGHS: We’re very near a certain point where money doesn’t mean anything anyway. They say: How much money is this going to cost? This is really a totally meaningless concept. Money determines less and less our reality. Money is not a constant factor, it’s simply a process dependent entirely on acceptance for its existence. We already see situations without money, and I think that we’re coming closer and closer to it.
As for Communism, it’s a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it’s less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there’s hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that’s been dead for over a hundred years.
And the present-day Communist clings to these outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn’t have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it’s changing all the time, and it’s changed immeasurably. Communists apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they’re following the same Marxist principles. We don’t have any principles. It’s an advantage.
BOCKRIS: From the perspective of your life and work through the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, are you surprised at the state America and Americans are in now?
BURROUGHS: I’d say it’s about as easy a place to live in as you can find, and it’s a hell of a lot better than I would have expected. It looked like it was going to develop into a repressive police state, but then that didn’t happen. One of the big turning points was unquestionably Watergate. What are Americans? We’ve got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicists here, and there’s certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There’s very little they have in common. In fact, Americans, should we say, have less in common than any other nationality. There are so many group and occupational differences.
BOCKRIS: Are you in favor of state, as opposed to national, government?
BURROUGHS: Nothing has come from the federal government except trouble and expense: Prohibition; this whole nonsense of trying to control drugs. The FDA is really crippling any kind of research. It’s going to take them five years to get this endorphin on the market because of the FDA, and they’re working hand in hand with the big drug companies. They’re really company cops for the big drug companies. So the less interference from federal bureaucracy the better. They’re always passing laws that affect states that have completely different problems from the eastern seaboard, these states should be allowed leeway to solve their own problems.
GINSBERG: Everywhere I go giving poetry readings I meet young people who picked up on Burroughs’ vibration, whether from the point of view of heavy-metal psyche, or police state paranoiac comedy, or terminal psychological withdrawal symptoms from civilization, or space-age back-to-the-wallism. Mainly, however, it’s his factual, shrewd, stoic, healthily cynical view of governments, bureaus, bureaucrats, politics, egotism, and … “chance operation.”
I think he played a major role in either catalyzing or expressing the change of consciousness that overcame the United States in the last two decades, which resulted in disillusionment on the part of the general public with self-mystifying government. That was the first theme I picked up from him back in the forties—his contempt for the trappings of authoritarianism and his humor in seeing through military-police uniforms to the hairy cancerous body-corpse inside. And that leads later on to his cynicism about the outward forms and trappings of ego itself.
BURROUGHS: If you ar
e asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I’d have to say he can’t do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
ON PSYCHIC SEX
If I had a talking picture of you
I’d play it everytime I felt blue
I’d give ten shows a day
And a midnite matinee
If I had a talking picture of you.
—A Song from the Twenties
During the period that I was seeing a great deal of William in New York, I began to have some extremely intense, what appeared to me to be sexual, hallucinations. I decided that he was the only person whom I could safely approach on this matter and told him what had happened to me on a recent morning.
BOCKRIS: I woke up around 5:00 A.M. and lay on my side looking out the window. I knew I was awake because I remember looking at my watch, thinking that I had woken up early. The next instant I was aware of a body, reclining on its side, descending upon me from approximately two feet above the bed. I immediately recognized and accepted the presence of a girl about whom I’d been having the most intense sexual fantasies morning and night for three months. Confused, I initially thought she’d come over to see me and wondered how she had gotten in. Then I realized that this “wasn’t really her,” but whatever it was, here she was and my strong sexual desire for her was being fulfilled. The creature’s presence was extremely delicate and I realized that I must move slowly and calmly, making no sudden lunges, or she would evaporate. Now what was that?
Bill first expressed surprise again at my ignorance about such a visitation, explaining that this was clearly “a visit by the demon lover, my dear!” He ran an exasperated hand through his thinning hair as he adjusted his spectacles in preparation for explaining the phenomenon to me. Bill always takes on an air of complete amazement when he comes upon the comparative ignorance of the majority of his companions. He has read omnivorously since he was a young child and attended all sorts of universities, and medical schools, doing graduate work in anthropology, and published papers in medical journals. The breadth and depth of his knowledge is remarkable, as is his ability to talk informatively about any subject ranging from the succubus to the sweet potato! “No,” said I, “I don’t know anything about this, Bill. What is a succubus?”
With William Burroughs Page 18