Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  All dreams in male subjects except nightmares are accompanied by erection. No one has proffered an explanation. It is interesting to note that a male chimpanzee who did finger and dab paintings, and was quite good too, went into a sexual frenzy during his creative acts.

  Cold-blooded animals do not dream. All warm-blooded creatures including birds do dream.

  John Dunne discovered that dreams contain references to future time as experienced by the dreamer. He published his findings An Experiment With Time in 1924. Dream references, he points out, relate not to the event itself but to the time when the subject learns of the event. The dream refers to the future of the dreamer. He says that anybody who will write his dreams down over a period of time will turn up precognitive references. Dreams involve time travel. Does it follow then that time travel is a necessity?

  I quote from an article summarizing the discoveries of Professor Michel Jouvet. Jouvet, using rapid eye movement techniques, has been able to detect dreaming in animals in the womb, even in developing birds in the egg. He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream a lot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth.

  He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had enough practice in dreams. This indicates that the function of dreams is to train the being for future conditions. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically designed for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as training f or space conditions. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die.

  Art serves the same function as dreams. Plato’s Republic is a blueprint for a death camp. An alien invader, or a domestic elite, bent on conquest and extermination, could rapidly immobolize the earth by cutting dream lines, just the way we took care of the Indians. I quote from Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt (Pocket Books):

  “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered like a ring of smoke. There is no center any more. The sacred tree is dead and all its birds are gone.”

  from THE JOHNSON FAMILY

  I first heard this expression in a book called You Can’t Win by Jack Black, the life story of a burglar. The book was published in 1927 and I read it as a boy fascinated by this dark furtive purposeful world. I managed to get a copy and re-read the book with poignant nostalgia. Between the reader in 1927 and the reader in 1980 falls the shadow of August 6, 1945, one of the most portentous dates of history.

  Train whistles across a distant sky. This is a peep show back to the world of rod-riding yeggs and pete men and cat burglars, bindle stiffs, gay cats and hobo jungles and Salt Chunk Mary the fence in her two-story red brick house down by the tracks somewhere in Idaho. She keeps a blue porcelain coffee pot and an iron pot of pork and beans always on the fire. You eat first and talk business later the watches and rings slopped out on the kitchen table by the chipped coffee mugs. She named a price and she didn’t name another. Mary could say no quicker than any woman I ever knew and none of them ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar but nobody thought about that. Her cold grey eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by or a citizen comes up with a load of 00 buck shot into your soft and tenders.

  In this world of shabby rooming houses, furtive grey figures in dark suits, hop joints and chili parlors, the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He’s a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble-making person.

  You get to know a Johnson when you see one and you get to know those of another persuasion. I remember in the Merchant Marine training center at Sheep shead Bay when the war ended. Most of the trainees quit right then and there was a long line to turn in equipment which had to be checked out item by item; some of us had only been there a few days and we had no equipment to turn in. So we hoped to avoid standing for hours, days perhaps in line for no purpose. I remember this spade cat said, “Well, we’re going to meet a nice guy or we’re going to meet a prick.” We met a prick but we managed to find a Johnson.

  Yes you get to know a Johnson when you see one. The cop who gave me a joint to smoke in the wagon. The hotel clerk who tipped me off I was hot. And sometimes you don’t see the Johnson. I remember a friend of mine asked someone to send him a cake of hash from France. Well the asshole put it into a cheap envelope with no wrapping and it cut through the envelope. But some Johnson had put it back in and sealed the envelope with tape.

  Years ago I was stranded in the wilds of East Texas and Bill Gains was sending me a little pantopon through the mail and he invented this clever code and telegrams are flying back and forth.

  “Urgently need pants.”

  “Panic among dealers. No pants available.”

  This was during the war in a town of two hundred people. By rights we should have had the FBI swarming all over us. I remember the telegraph operator in his office in the railroad station. He had a kind, unhappy face. I suspect he was having trouble with his wife. Never a question or comment. He just didn’t care what pants stood for. He was a Johnson.

  A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn’t stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car. Kells Elvins, a friend of mine, was doing ninety in his Town and Country Chrysler on the way from Pharr, Texas, to Laredo. He comes up over a rise and there is a fucking cow right in the middle of the road on the bridge. He slams on the brakes and hits the cow doing sixty. The car flips over and he is pinned under it with a broken collar bone covered from head to foot with blood and guts and cowshit. So along comes a car with some salesmen in it. They get out cautiously. He tells them just how to jack the car up and get it off him but when they see that blood they don’t want to know. They don’t want to get mixed up with anything like that. They get back in their car and drive away. Then a truck driver comes along. He doesn’t need to be told exactly what to do, gets the car off Kells and takes him to a hospital. The truck driver was a Johnson. The salesmen were shits like most salesmen. Selling shit and they are shit.

  The Johnson family formulates a Manichean position where good and evil are in conflict and the outcome is at this point uncertain. It is not an eternal conflict since one or the other must win a final victory.

  Which side are you on?

  I recollect Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and your reporter were drinking an espresso on the terrace of a little café on the Calle de Vigne in Tangier . . . after lunch a dead empty space. . . . Then this Spaniard walks by. He is about fifty or older, shabby, obviously very poor carrying something wrapped in brown paper. And our mouths fell open as we exclaimed in unison.

  “My God that’s a harmless looking person!”

  He passed and I never saw him again, his passing portentous as a comet reminding us how rare it is to see a harmless looking person, a man who minds his own business and gets along as best he can in a world largely populated by people of a very different persuasion, kept alive by the hope of harming someone, on their way to the Comisario to denounce a neighbor or a business rival leaving squiggles and mutterings of malevolence in their wake like ugly little spirits.

  QUEER UTOPIA

  queer Utopia

  by james grauerholz

  After his year in New York, Burroughs returned to London in January 1966, taking up residence at the Hotel Rushmore with Ian Sommerville. But while Burroughs was away, Sommerville had begun dating a younger man named Alan Watson, from his own hometown of Darlington, England. Sommerville had also developed his engineering skills, and he was operating a home studio provided by Paul McCartney, and surreptitiously living there with Watson. Many of Burroughs’ experimental tape works were recorded by Ian in this studio.

  Burroughs worked through the spring on the
U.S. edition of The Soft Machine, and he was pleased when—after a four-year legal battle—the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in July that Naked Lunch was indeed not obscene, and could be sold in bookstores. He moved to a flat at No. 8, Duke Street, St. James’s, the building where Antony Balch was already living. It was not long before Sommerville and Watson asked to join Burroughs at the Duke Street flat—the Beatles’ management had evicted them from their recording studio. This new ménage turned out to be more harmonious and domestic than Burroughs expected.

  Then Bill Jr.’s troubles in Florida began to call Burroughs home again: Billy had been sent to the experimental Green Valley School in Orange City, Florida, but he ran away in September 1966 to New York, where he was arrested for possession of methamphetamine, and jailed. Burroughs stalled for as long as he could, then went to Florida for Christmas with his widowed mother and his nineteen-year-old son, who was now out on probation. Laura was in bad shape; intermittently disoriented, she fell and hurt herself while Burroughs was staying there that winter. He accompanied Billy to his court hearing in Palm Beach, advising him on the rules of cool to avoid worsening the legal situation. In February 1967, Burroughs took his son to Lexington, Kentucky, for a drug cure—Burroughs’ first return since his own admission to that clinic, when Billy was not yet a year old. The guard at the gate had to ask which one of them was being admitted.

  Burroughs went back to London in March, feeling helpless about Billy’s and Laura’s problems. In May he went to Marrakech and Tangier to visit friends, but the Tangier scene was finished. Sommerville was still living at Duke Street with Watson, but Burroughs was beyond jealousy; he was preoccupied by his struggle with unwanted feelings from his childhood, his mother’s deterioration, and his son’s delinquency. Billy was granted probation and sent back to Green Valley School, but he was soon in trouble again. In September, Mort and Miggy moved Laura to Chastains, a nursing home near St. Louis.

  Burroughs’ freedom to pursue his life as an artist was threatened by the strong pull of these old family ties. He searched for a way forward. Brion Gysin, in Paris in 1959, had introduced him to L. Ron Hubbard’s book Dianetics, which Burroughs commended to Ginsberg in letters from that time. By 1967, Burroughs began writing a column called “The Burroughs Academy Bulletin” for Mayfair magazine in London, and his editor introduced him to the psychics John McMasters, a close associate of Hubbard’s who founded the Church of Scientology. Burroughs became interested in Scientology’s techniques of directed recall, and he signed up for two months of “auditing” at Saint Hill, Hubbard’s compound in East Grinstead, England—where he would become “clear,” if not an “Operating Thetan.”

  As Burroughs “ran” his feelings obsessively over and over on the E-Meter, using Hubbard’s patented processing routines, he was trying to de-emotionalize himself; so news of Neal Cassady’s death, in February 1968 in northern Mexico—after a life of inspiration to others, but small profit to himself—may have had little impact on the new Clear at Saint Hill. In June, Burroughs took an advanced “clearing course” in Edinburg, Scotland—the scene of his literary apotheosis just six years earlier—but before long, he was fed up with Hubbard’s megalomania. He returned to his Duke Street flat in July; Watson had left town. Burroughs remained obsessed with “auditing” his closest associates on the E-Meter, causing Sommerville—now twenty-five—to absent himself from Burroughs, for the last time.

  In August 1968 the United States’ Democratic Party convention was held in Chicago. All the revolutionary currents of the sixties now came to a head, framed by the Vietnam War. The yippies, headed by Abbie Hoffman and the rest of the “Chicago Seven,” planned to disrupt the convention with demonstrations in Chicago’s lakeside Grant Park. Esquire editor John Berendt invited Burroughs, Jean Genet (with Richard Seaver interpreting), and Terry Southern to cover the convention for the magazine. Burroughs brought along his new weapon, a portable tape recorder, and he busied himself tape-recording and playing back the police/riot sounds at unpredictable intervals. His friendship with Terry Southern since the late 1950s in Paris was an important literary association; the two writers mined similar veins of wild satire. And his admiration for Genet’s work was very high; so to be treated as an equal by the French writer must have meant that he had “arrived.”

  On his way home in September, Burroughs stopped in New York to write his article for Esquire, “The Coming of the Purple Better One.” He and Genet were staying at the Delmonico Hotel. Jack Kerouac had been invited to appear on William F. Buckley’s television program, “Firing Line,” and he came down from Lowell, Massachusetts, with three of his hometown friends. When Kerouac came to visit him that day at the Delmonico, Burroughs was shocked by Kerouac’s condition: drinking hard liquor during all his waking hours, Kerouac had become bloated and semi-incoherent. Burroughs advised him to cancel the studio taping with Buckley, but Kerouac decided to keep the appointment. It was Burroughs’ last encounter with his old friend.

  In October 1968, Gysin was in Tangier, and Burroughs was at Duke Street. Antony Balch had a flat in the same building, a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus, and Balch was acquainted with the “working boys” in the neighborhood. Through Balch, Burroughs met a young hustler who became his domestic partner for the next year and a half. It was a good time for Burroughs’ work, with his “duly boy” (when not too drunk or careless) making a tranquil home for his fifty-four-year-old lover. Burroughs was finishing the first edit of his 1968 interviews with Daniel Odier, which were published in January 1969 in Paris by Pierre Belfond as Entretiens avec William Burroughs.

  Since the mid-1960s, Burroughs had been working on a new novel that he called The Wild Boys, which would present his vision of a postapocalyptic future where feral teenaged boys live tribally in the desert, apart from all adult authority—and from all women. He finished the manuscript in London on August 17, 1969. Only two months earlier, as if to confirm that Burroughs had his finger on the pulse of gay futurity, the Stonewall Riots occurred in Greenwich Village. When the Stonewall Bar was raided by New York police, queers and drag queens fought back for the first time in America, and there were street fires and riots for three nights.

  In October, sad news reached Burroughs in London: Jack Kerouac was dead at forty-seven, of a cirrhotic liver and esophageal hemorrhage. Although he had known his old friend was slowly drinking himself to death in St. Petersburg, Florida, for the last few years, Burroughs was unexpectedly moved by this loss. At this point, however, he was preoccupied with adding his own texts to the Odier interview book; retitled as The Job, the new book was published by Grove in May 1970. The Dutch Schultz film project, meanwhile, was not yet dead; Burroughs’ painter friend David Budd had found new backers, and he invited Burroughs to New York for movie meetings. Burroughs had tired of his “dilly boy,” and he evicted him from the Duke Street flat before going to New York. During his stay, Burroughs spent time with Budd and the painter David Prentice, and he found the city very livable. The third revision of the Dutch Schultz screenplay was published by Viking in June 1970, while Burroughs was in New York, as The Last Words of Dutch Schultz; when the movie deal stalled again in August, he returned to London.

  Two months later, Burroughs received a telegram from his brother Mort: “MOTHER DEAD.” He later described his delayed reaction as “a kick in the stomach.” Laura had asked him to promise, while he was still a boy, to take care of her and to come see her, no matter where she was; but Burroughs had not visited her once in the three years she was at Chastains. And now, he did not travel home for the funeral. Burroughs’ shame and regret for this failure reappear throughout the rest of his work. “There are mistakes,” as he would often quote E. A. Robinson, “too monstrous for remorse / To tamper or to dally with.” Burroughs knew that his life was filled with such mistakes.

  In May 1971 there was a flurry of activity around a Naked Lunch movie project, spearheaded by Balch and Gysin. Brion had written a screenplay, and Balch created extensive storyboar
ds in preparation for the production. Talks with Mick Jagger added excitement to the project, but nothing came of these meetings. Meanwhile, Burroughs’ visit to New York in 1970 had opened his eyes to a new medium: gay pornographic films, which—with the erosion of censorship—could now be viewed in public theaters. He corresponded with the porno director Fred Halsted (L.A. Plays Itself) about an explicitly erotic movie version of The Wild Boys. But of course, it was not commercially feasible.

  Grove Press published The Wild Boys m October 1971. The book is a marked departure from the tone and content of the cut-up novels; much of it is written in a more straightforward-seeming narrative style, and as critic Jennie Skerl noted in her 1985 monograph, William S. Burroughs (Twayne, Boston), his thematic emphasis had shifted from the “Dystopia” of his satirical depictions of a corrupt, inhospitable world to the “Utopia” of an all-homosexual future—a new liberation of the Present, by means of a “magickal” rewriting of history. But although the boys in his new work were all queer, they were literarily derived from the boy’s-adventure pulp fiction of Burroughs’ childhood, and his fantasies of revenge against the oppression of parents and heterosexual society. It is not the unchained sexuality of the Wild Boys that is most distinctive, but their animal freedom.

  William Burroughs Jr., with guidance from his godfather, Allen Ginsberg, had followed in his father’s footsteps as a writer. Speed, a first-person account of his ill-fated flight to New York City in 1966, was published by The Olympia Press in Paris four years later. Speed demonstrated Billy’s literary talent, but also showed his irresistible self-destructive urges. In 1971 Billy was living in Savannah with his wife of three years, Karen Perry, and working on Kentucky Ham, an autobiographical sequal to Speed that describes his frustrating half year with his father in Tangier and his adventures at the Green Valley School and on the school’s teaching vessel in the Pacific Ocean near Alaska.