He said, “Well, what is writing all about?”
I still don’t have the answer on that one. Certainly not all the answers. So here is rock and roll. And rock and roll was one of the key factors in the cultural revolution which was and is concerned with confrontation.
The young English scientist spooned some of that runny brown sugar into his coffee.
“Is there a they in England?” I asked, “Or is it confused like America? Every mafia capo thinks he’s a they.”
He looked dreamily at a hideous stained glass mural. “Yes,” he said. “We are they.”
“Oh,” I said. “Just like that is it?”
He countered with a question. “How does it feel to know you are one of the last human beings?”
“I’m expecting another assignment,” I told him primly. So we get to talking like agents will and I told him I thought singing came before talking.
“Yes,” he purred “I’m sure it did.”
“So what these pop groups are doing is recreating the origins of human speech.”
“Oh quite.”
“The origin of language, in some cases, shall we say. Is a singer singing in the brains of his audience in such a way as to activate speech reflexes?”
“It had to come from somewhere. Someone had to program the machine.”
“Yes of course. I am thinking now of the actual process. I see it as an illness, a virus. The ape segment under study lost most of their body hair. There were alterations in the throat which made human speech possible. The Singing Sickness had a high mortality rate. And the enfeebled apes fell prey to predators. Or they died of hunger and thirst. Those who survived the SS had gained the potential for human speech. Alterations accomplished, the Biologic Engineer packs his tools. His face expresses the utter boredom of someone who has listened to the same bad joke for a million years.
“In a jungle clearing a survivor jumps up and begins to sing. Blood spurts out his mouth and nose. He is singing blood. But the show must go on. Now the others leap about in a frenzy screaming out the words blood and pus all over as they clean out their new vocal cords for a million-year talk marathon.”
“About the size of it.”
“So having piped people back to the origin of all this shit what happens now?”
“This had better be good.”
“It is. The Silent Sickness. The potential for silent communication is here. The Silencers will activate it.”
Singing out bloody vocal cords and now he is doing the impossible, he is singing in silence. And now that vast audience is singing with him, silent notes ringing through flesh and nerves and bones.
The Rolling Bones have two theme songs. They improvise, tossing the words and music back and forth:
When it gets too hot for comfort
And the music softly means
T’aint no sin to take off your skin
And dance around in your bones.
Stay all night and stay a little longer
Take off your coat and throw it in a corner
Don’t know why you don’t stay a little longer …
An estimated audience of ten million, racks of hammocks and bunks and tents to the sky. The Bones prance out in khakis with a suggestion of a uniform.
When it gets too hot for comfort
They are stripping off their clothes
And the music softly means …
They go into a hula dance. “T’aint no sin.” They throw clothes to the audience. “To take off your skin.” They peal off shimmering layers of flesh that float in the air and disintegrate in puffs of violet smoke and whiffs of musty ozone. “And dance.” A tornado of mad jig music.
“Take off your skin and throw it in a corner …”
“And dance around in your bo/
“Don’t see why you don’t sta/
There is a silver flash and silence falls like a thunderclap. Yes, an opportunity was missed.
AFTERMATH
During the next couple of weeks, Bill was visited by Joe Strummer, lead singer and guitar player for the Clash, and David Bowie. Although he was an hour and a half late, Strummer brought a bottle of whisky, a bottle of tequila, two six-packs of Heineken, and eight enormous joints. He was bubbling over with eagerness to meet Burroughs, with whom he had a very relaxed and pleasant conversation about English policemen. William hauled out his arsenal of blackjacks, Japanese throwing stars and knives, while Joe took a series of Polaroids of him thwacking cardboard boxes and alternately emitting an extremely wide, malevolent smile. Strummer left completely satisfied.
When David Bowie came by for a drink another evening, he was the model of gentlemanly courtesy and his entire demeanor conveyed respect. He asked Burroughs about his activities. They spoke about New York being the most exotic place in the world.
BURROUGHS: I gave David Bowie an issue of Knife magazine containing the Bowie knife Story. Colonel Bowie, Southern gentleman and soldier of fortune, is credited with the invention of the Bowie knife design. Experts point out there were knives of this design centuries before Bowie. In any case the Colonel did ably baptize his knife. On a lonely road three men waited with knives. They were not there just to look at him. A few seconds later all three were dead. With a powerful overhand slash the Colonel splits the skull of one assailant like a coconut. Bowie died in the Battle of the Alamo.
William Burroughs says good-bye to Mick Fagger after dinner at the Bunker, March 4, 1980. Photo: Victor Bockris
When we left to take a cab uptown (Bill and I were going to dinner at Debbie and Chris Harry-Stein’s), Bowie graciously took Burroughs by the arm and carefully escorted him across the wide streets.
OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
Bill finds the Bunker the most satisfactory living space he has ever inhabited, but he dreams of a country place: a fishpond, hunting and shooting, long walks. To this end he has purchased five acres in Florida near Tallahassee. His neighbors will be people like doctors, lawyers, professors. François Bucher has organized this project. All plots to be five acres and over. Positively no trailers.
BURROUGHS: My house in Florida presents itself as a shimmering mirage. It is on a wooded slope overlooking a long narrow fishpond which delineates the boundary of my land with a suggestion of the palace moat. The house is yellow cinder block. The front forms a wall with a heavy iron door and two barred windows. Doors open on the living room, dining room and kitchen area. To the right is the master bedroom behind a heavy adobe partition and a solid door. The bathroom is beyond the kitchen to simplify plumbing connections. Water supply comes from a cistern three feet off the ground just outside the bathroom. The cistern is filled from rain water draining off the roof. It goes through strainers of course but the one thing we have to watch out for, boys, is vultures, or any fucking bird for that matter, shitting on the roof. From the two back corners of the house runs a wall eight feet high with barbed wire on top back about fifty feet to form a courtyard with an iron door at the far end. The house faces inward onto this patio which contains lime and orange and peach trees, mimosa, gardenia and roses, and a fishpond with exotic goldfish, perhaps two of the large ones eighteen inches long. But I will eschew exotic pets who are, in the colorful lingo of Scientology, a “PTS: Potential Trouble Source.”
Oh dear, Shredni Vashtar, one’s pet ferret, has slipped out of his cage, he’s awfully good at that, and torn the throat out of an infant in its pram. I tried to explain that Shredni was only playing. He didn’t mean any harm. But mother became abusive. And Shredni made good his escape and has not been seen again. Then there was that terrible afternoon when Little Uttie disappeared.
Little Uttie, for Ruthie, was a horrible two-year-old that crawled around under tables biting people’s legs and ankles.
“Uttie? Have you seen UTTIE?” We open the toolshed and there is Quetzocoatl, my pet python, curled around his distended mid-sections. And you can see right away by the shape and size—that bulge he is curled around with its obscene suggestion of pregn
ancy clearly contains Little Uttie.
The reptile lifts its head and emits a somnolent belch as foul as the latrines of hell. Calmly and rationally I explained to the bereaved parent that an infant was, after all, logical prey for a python. “Little Mother.”
This epithet did not produce the soothing effect I had hoped for. Clearly beyond logic or psychological expertise, with a shocking lack of consideration for the other guests, she began screaming, “YOU FILTHY MURDERING COCKSUCKER!”
I signaled my driver to stand by to resist Furies. An awkward young deputy shot the plumed serpent in the courtyard while my driver did “Taps” on his bugle and I ordered the flag lowered to half mast. A gnawing uncertainty as to whether these funeral rites were directed towards Quetzocoatl or Little Uttie discombobulated the guests.
There is an awkward pause. Who is going to cut Little Uttie out of Quetzocoatl? Even as I formulated the question, nature yielded the hideous answer: With a rending farting sound accompanied by odors too foul for description, Quetzocoatl, in his death spasms, was voiding half digested pieces of Little Uttie per anus.
Or the time the Countess’s miniature Dalmatian … did I hear a little yelp? She calls it Hum.
“Hum!”
“HUM!”
The old toolshed again. A canine bulge was Hum. The Countess attacks poor Quetzocoatl with her umbrella and Quetzi grabs a big hunk of thigh with his uncurving needle teeth. We have to pry him out of her a tooth at a time while her Yugoslavian gigolo rushes around screaming “You arrant cads! You utter rotters! You foul reptiles!” And apes is no better. They turn vicious at puberty. When chimpy starts wanking off with girlie pictures in the loo, walk don’t run to the nearest phone and call a competent zoo.
Sand foxes? Stars splash the sky “like wilted gardenias,”—that’s a quote from Bill Faulkner, an early book about New Orleans. I have arranged a tasteful little oasis, a sand dune, a pool, a palm tree. I shush my guests as my sand fox slinks in like a shy ghost. They are in fact so shy that they die if you touch one—a wise old Arab told me this at a hotel in Biskra. They had two fennecs tethered in the patio and I approached one which rushed to the end of its tether in a blind stupid panic, and the old Arab said, “No touchy pas, Mister, ou il meurt.”
Clearly this could touch off some trouble. Of course I have signs up: Don’t touch the fennecs.
But I know sooner or later some joker is going to Touch my Fennecs.
“Happened.”
“Now Clem, you went and touched my sand fox last night and the critter’s deader’n a shit bug from the contact with you.”
“I meant no harm.”
“Just couldn’t help yourself, is that it? Couldn’t keep your ugly, stinking, murdering sex-perverted paws off my beautiful, immaculate, sensitive, delicate fennec, could you now? There must be a special place in hell for people like you sneaking around touching a decent man’s fennec!”
No other pets than a few choice cats. I favor delicate black Siamese and Ethiopian cats are so delightfully evil-looking. But absolutely no feral cats. Horrible experiences in New Mexico. This ocelot got up onto my lap, and every time I tried to shove it away it growled and dug its claws in. I eased my .380 Beretta out of an inside belt holster and told the host urgently, “Get it off me or I kill it!”
I provide a safe environment for my guests. I have considered keeping a few skunks in the patio since, in my opinion as a connoisseur of cuteness, the skunk is one of the cutest animals alive. Nor would I subject a cute skunk to the indignity of having his scent glands removed. If you are a Johnson my skunks won’t spray you. So everybody has to pass the skunk test. If my skunks spray you, you stink right there and you get the skunk rush. I have something I can clandestinely spray on the unwelcome guests. “Oh Lydia Anne, how nice to see you,” spray spray, a substance that irritates my skunks. “I’m sorry, Lydia Anne, but I simply can’t have a stinker in my house. It’s not fair to my other guests.”
So we declared a moratorium on pet welfare. It is just too deadly. I content myself with two Siamese cats that cry and scream the whole time.
Here in this remote garden I create an ambiance of great luxury. Outside a discreet medley of animal sounds drifts from mikes around the garden wall. “Isn’t that a wild turkey I hear?”
“It certainly is, Senator. I see you know your birds.” And I have an indoor shooting range for my guests and .22 pistols with BB cap loads. Hardly any noise. They can feed the goldfish. I have two of the very large variety, eighteen inches in length, worthless luxury beasts, created in Japan by an old Master of Goldfish Culture.
Here I entertain certain key people. Will you believe me when I say my house in Tallahassee cost less than $50,000? And we have actual as well as recorded wild turkeys and even a bear, yet this retreat is only twenty-five minutes from downtown Tallahassee.
When I went down to my pond this morning I found that my overnight trout line had snared a great catfish, all of twenty pounds, snapping viciously. I killed him with a .22 Magnum in the head and I thought, I will cook this noble fish for dinner tonight. Rather a special dinner: catfish, grits, turnip greens, and fried apple and persimmon pie for dessert.
The Judge is the first to arrive half sloshed as usual. The dinner is a big success. It’s important to get them into dinner before the fourth drink. So we are getting down to business after dinner and the Judge looks at me, the smeared purple veins on his nose and cheekbones glowing portentously, and his gray eyes slate cold. “Now I think that line of thought could prove productive, very productive indeed.”
I have also looked at property in New Mexico and Lawrence, Kansas, but for now my houses are like the glittering cities of the Odor Eaters in Tibetan mythology that dissolve in rain.
THE BEST DINNER PARTY I EVER GAVE, 1986
On Saturday, December 20, 1986 William Burroughs and James Grauerholz came to my apartment for dinner with Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Michael Basquait, owner of the Mudd Club Steve Mass, and Richard Hell. Richard had just returned from London where he had been investigating the Boy George heroin story. He said that many pop stars get addicted to heroin because their lives are boring and stressful and the whole mentality of a pop star is to push life to an extreme. I said that it was the most horrible lifestyle.
“Horrible?” cut in William. “It depends. It would be horrible for me.”
“It would be horrible for most people,” I replied.
“I wouldn’t say most people,” countered Bill, “I would never use such a vague, muddy concept as ‘most.’ But I would say if you go up to the man in the street they’d say they’d love to be a pop star, most of them.…”
Bill and James had come straight from the Factory where they had filmed a sequence for Andy Warhol’s TV with Chris Stein. James was worried because they had left a piece of wood with three bullets in it as a gift for Andy and he was wondering if it might be misinterpreted.
“I wrote a note explaining that this was a long-standing artistic tradition with William Burroughs and not a sign of random violence,” said Chris. “Andy takes it all in his stride.”
Back on Boy George William said, “All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we expose them the better. The whole concept of role models is frightful! You gotta make your own role.”
Chris told us that he and Debbie had been on the subway and nobody recognized them because “You’re cut off so heavily you have to go inside yourself so dramatically.” Bill said he had recently made “several subway voyages.” I mentioned that Jean Luc Goddard had invited William to play a small role in his film of King Lear. Debbie recalled that when she and Chris met Goddard to discuss remaking Alphaville he had pretended that he could not speak English and said through an interpreter, “Why do you want to do this movie? You’re crazy!”
“Didn’t he have a car accident a few years ago?” asked James. “It was a terrible wreck? He almost died?”
“Yeah,”
said Debbie, “I think he did. But it’s so hard to believe anything you read in the press. They just sensationalize everything. He could have gotten a broken finger and then ‘His finger lies in state’ or something.” Everybody laughed.
There was never a pause in the diverse conversation throughout the evening. We discussed the affair between Malcolm McLaren and Lauren Hutton, Florence Nightingale, the art scene, the casting couch, what to do when everything falls apart, the Iranscam and C.I.A. Directors Casey’s brain tumor.
“Holy bloody shit! An absolute mad man is running the agency!” cried William, whose uncle Ivy Lee (Hitler’s PR man in the States) died of a brain tumor. “The Russians might have got some kind of ray that tuned into his brain and bleeded all his secrets right out of him! Hell yes, that could have happened! He was the most sensitive man on the earth with a tumor the size of a golf ball. Who knew! Anyway, what was his angle?”
“He had the view of a police dog,” replied Steve.
Jean Michel spent much of the evening curled up on a love seat where he quietly drew in a small sketchbook that he intermittently handed to Bill. I was amazed to see William, who normally eschews the craft, deftly adding his own glyphlike images to the pages. “There was a rat in my house yesterday,” Jean piped up. “I have so many rats in my house, sometimes I think they’re not there, but they pop up.”
“I know they do! I know they do!” Bill chimed in. “I had to kill many rats in my house in Tangier with a stick! It’s awful! They shriek! Oh no man! Never again do I ever want to kill a rat with a stick!”
“I have a mouse in my house,” whispered Allen, but nobody seemed impressed.
“I hadn’t seen a rat for a long time and then I saw one and it was so horrible,” continued Jean. “He stuck his head in and ate a little donut, so I went out and got some more donuts and rolled the donuts in rat poison and put them under the sink.”
With William Burroughs Page 23