by Sam Kashner
One day after my poetry class, Allen asked me to buy groceries for Billy because he didn’t seem to have enough strength to walk through the aisles of the supermarket. You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that Billy needed a doctor.
His father finally agreed that we should visit the surgeon in Denver, the one they had made me call when I first arrived in Boulder. Trouble was, he was a psychic surgeon.
“He operates without cutting you open,” Burroughs explained in Allen’s apartment one afternoon. “They manipulate the body from the outside, they palpate and they remove without using the knife. It’s been known to be successful in a number of cases.” I told Allen that I thought Burroughs was dreaming, that Billy really looked sick. It was always a case of too little, too late where Burroughs and his son were concerned.
The next day, I carried a bag full of groceries up the steep walk to Billy’s apartment, which you could pick out from the street because the window was decorated half in an orange karmic flag from Naropa with a mythical, fire-breathing dragon on it, and half with an old pirate flag bearing a skull and crossbones.
Billy’s shopping list sounded like a condemned man’s idea of a great last meal: steak and ice cream, ingredients for a malted, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and A1 meat sauce. He also needed lots of milk and cans of tuna for the cats that wandered in and out of his apartment, like the cats in Hemingway’s house in Key West.
I later learned that Billy had come to Boulder because he needed to be somewhere safe. It was his father who had sent for him. He explained that Burroughs, whom he always called Bill, had done this before. When Billy had turned fourteen, Burroughs had decided he wanted his son back. At the time, Burroughs was living in Tangier and Billy was living in the lap of luxury with his grandparents, sleeping in a sleigh bed and having his clothes laid out by a servant. He hadn’t seen his father in at least two or three years when he was summoned to Tangier.
Billy told me that Burroughs was living there with two men at the time. He said it was a strange feeling to see this strange man in a business suit waiting for him at the airport. Once they arrived at Burroughs’s little villa, Bill Sr. had very little to say to his son. “He practically ignored me,” Billy said. “I was just a fourteen-year-old squirt, very American, and very un-hip.”
Billy had had to put up with a lot. The two Englishmen sharing the house with Burroughs kept coming into Billy’s room to try and have sex with him. Billy said that after his first night in Tangier, he found one of the men, Ian, sitting on his bed. Ian took Billy’s hand and tried to put it on his crotch. “I pulled my hand away from Ian’s lap,” Billy said. He told me this story while sitting up in bed smoking a joint.
After I brought the groceries into the apartment and put them away, some of Billy’s so-called friends arrived. They took out their long clay pipes and turned the tiny apartment into a kind of opium den, throwing the pillows and cushions from the couch onto the floor. Billy recalled how, when he was in Tangier, Burroughs had made one of the Englishmen take Billy down to the Casbah to pick out a pipe.
Billy’s apartment now looked like his description of the house in Tangier. It was a complete mess, with flickering lightbulbs and not an inch of unused floor space.
The long bowls came out and little vials of something that looked like tobacco were unscrewed and tenderly tapped out into the clay bowls. Billy asked me to share his pipe. He said that in Tangier he ate something called majoun, some kind of grass that you chew on and then swallow. Billy liked to say that it “will stone you into the middle of next week, possibly next month.” I refused, the hypochondriac in me rising up. Marion would have been proud.
Curiously, though Billy’s apartment was a mess, the little space where he wrote was a kind of pristine shrine. He said he had gotten that from his father. Burroughs had a sort of college or bunk bed in his bedroom in Boulder, which was very spare and clean. Billy said he only remembered a painting by Brion Gysin in his father’s room in Tangier, a haunting painting of the moon, which turned the room into a kind of permanent nighttime. Burroughs also had an orgone box in his Boulder apartment, in which he would sit “like Eichmann in his glass booth,” Billy said, and smoke majoun or pot—and after a few hours he would pounce on the Underwood and write.
Seeing Allen and Gregory was nothing new for Billy—he’d grown up with these men coming in and out of his life. He described how, in Tangier, the existentialist, expat hippies, who “looked as if they hadn’t seen daylight for years and were dressed entirely in black—dark hair, black circles under their eyes,” would hang around just to catch a glimpse of William Burroughs. They would watch him enter a club called the Casbah. Dressed in a suit, a long skinny tie, and a fedora, Burroughs would sit down with a glass of tea served to him on a tray. He sat motionless, in his right hand a cigarette burning down to his fingers, his lips parting to inhale the smoke. “Old Bill,” Billy called him. “My dad.” Then he’d laugh. He understood the absurdity of it. “I was still reading comic books and science fiction then,” Billy said.
Billy admitted that his father’s maternal instinct came out when he prepared a kind of chicken soup for his son, but even then he made it with so much pepper that Billy said it had tasted like whiskey.
In the middle of his disquisition on his father, Billy started nodding off, his words leaning over and falling against each other like drunken sailors on shore leave. I couldn’t quite understand him.
“He didn’t care what I did, or where I went,” Billy mumbled, half asleep. And then, rousing slightly, he continued, describing a time when he went around stoned in Tangier, perching himself precariously on a cliff covered with trees growing sideways out of the rock. “I’d sit there smoking grass and waiting. I thought maybe Old Bill would come looking for me, and we’d have a heart-to- heart talk.”
One night in Tangier, Billy explained, someone came into his room and told him that he was too young to know what he wanted, but what he really wanted was to go home. “Don’t live in a house with a bunch of fags,” one of the expat hippies told Billy.
“Does my father want me to stay?” Billy had asked him. When there was no answer, Billy repeated the question. As he recounted this tale, I saw beads of sweat on his brow, the clay pipe falling out of his hand. “Go to my father’s room and ask him,” Billy had told the hippie. “Ask him, does he or doesn’t he want me to stay.”
26. Burroughs and the Box
I thought I should tell Burroughs about how sick I thought Billy really was, how I didn’t think that going to a psychic healer was going to help him. I was thinking a lot about the movie Midnight Cowboy, how Ratso Rizzo, the Dustin Hoffman character, died on the bus on the way to Florida. He had needed real medical attention, just like Billy. That movie really stuck with me. I saw it on a first date, when my girlfriend and I went into New York, a glamorous thing to do back then. I remembered how she and I had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the suburbs to be part of the audience for Let’s Make a Deal, which was being broadcast from a Midtown television studio. I remembered how we were asked to leave the studio audience because we “looked too sad.” Out of step with the adults and with most of America, we couldn’t muster up the proper level of enthusiasm for the game show. On the way out, my sixteen-year-old girlfriend muttered “capitalist pigs!” under her breath. So I took her to the Baronet Theater on Second Avenue, across from Bloomingdale’s, where we saw Midnight Cowboy instead. That was closer to our mood and sensibility. Even better: sandwiched right between the Baronet and the Cornet theaters was Bookmasters, the great book and poster store where you could climb the shelves like Spider-Man and pick out the skinny little City Lights pocket poets. Series Number 14 was Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–1960 by Allen Ginsberg, a dollar fifty. And then there was Series Number 8, Gasoline/Vestal Lady by Gregory Corso, a buck.
I left Billy asleep with the other Westies in his opium den and gently pulled the long clay pipe out of his hand. I didn’t want to be responsible for Billy
burning the place down. I’d never graduate Naropa that way.
I went over to Burroughs’s apartment. I hated doing that. First, Jubal was often there and we’d never really hit it off. I hated the violent Westerns he was writing. He had read a few of them at one of the early readings, held in the basement of a private home where some of Rinpoche’s elderly followers were living.
Finally, I decided it didn’t matter what I thought of Jubal. I needed to speak with Bill about his son. When I arrived at Burroughs’s apartment, Jubal was there, of course, guarding the gate.
“Jubal, is Bill around? I need to talk to him.”
“He’s in the box,” Jubal said. “He may not be out for another two hours.” A few weeks earlier, I would’ve assumed that Jubal was telling me that Burroughs was in the bathroom for a spell. But I now knew what he meant, that Burroughs was sitting in his orgone box, something that he had been doing for years, maybe twenty years or longer. One of my first jobs at Naropa that summer had been to help build the box from an orgone kit, so that it would be ready when Burroughs arrived. It was lined with metal and a kind of insulation on the outside made from bark of some sort. It looked like a tree house that had been turned into a bomb shelter. Building Burroughs’s orgone box had not been easy.
It all started at the end of the 1940s, after Burroughs had read a book by Wilhelm Reich called The Cancer Biopathy. Burroughs flipped for Reich. Burroughs always thought of himself as a lay analyst. Gregory in fact told me once that Bill had given Kerouac the best psychological advice of his life when he’d said, “Jack, you’re too attached to your mother, you’ve got to leave home and never come back.”
“He did it,” Gregory said, “and wrote a masterpiece, but then he moved back in with his mother and ruined it all.” He should’ve listened to the Ol’ Poisoner, as he called Burroughs.
Burroughs never thought much of most therapists, but he considered Reich a fucking genius. Reich built his first orgone box around 1940. Burroughs built his first orgone accumulator in the late 1940s; almost thirty years later we found ourselves standing around the orgone kit that Burroughs had sent on ahead of him to Boulder.
I asked Bill what the word “orgone” meant (it sounded to me like a cross between ozone and orgasm).
“You’re on the right beam, my wee boy”—Burroughs occasionally liked to fall into Treasure Island– speak, as if I were the boy in the Robert Louis Stevenson story, and he Long John Silver, the pirate with the wooden leg and the parrot perched on his shoulder.
“It comes from ‘orgasm’ and ‘organism,’” he explained; “it’s a conflation of those two words. It is a cure the government doesn’t want you to have. The bastards have too much money invested in the disease, so they aren’t interested in the cure. The cure ruins their plans. The funny thing is, the cancer is on the body politic; it has taken over.”
Burroughs told us that the FDA had investigated Reich and his orgone box “up the wazoo. It was the subject of more governmental investigation than the Hughes Spruce Goose, going back to 1946. They tried to bring down Reich, which they did. The orgone box is his cenotaph.”
I knocked on the entry door of the box. At first, no answer. I thought about tipping it over, but Jubal was watching my every move. I knocked again and yelled.
“Mr. Burroughs, it’s Sam. I want to talk to you about Billy. I think he’s sick and needs a real doctor!”
Burroughs opened the hatch to the box and leaned over to shake my hand. Suddenly I felt like the little girl who wrote Lincoln a letter telling him to grow a beard. Burroughs emerged from the orgone box looking like our Civil War president, someone who has just seen a lot of death and suffering. I told Burroughs I was sorry to interrupt his session but that I was concerned about Billy’s health, that he looked real bad.
“He doesn’t seem to have any energy,” I told Burroughs. “I know I’m something of a hypochondriac myself, and that sometime I can be a hypochondriac on behalf of others, but in this case I really think something’s wrong.”
“What do you think it is?” Burroughs asked me through the metal door of the orgone box.
“It could be something as simple as gallstones. He’s very sensitive down around his waist, and his back hurts. I read somewhere that’s a sign of gallstones. My cousin Sheldon had them when he was working in the diamond district; they had to carry him out of his booth on Forty-seventh Street, completely doubled over. He was gripping his diamond cutting tools so tightly they had to pry them out of his hand at the hospital.”
Burroughs seemed genuinely interested in what had happened to my cousin.
“If I should need some jewels appraised, I will go to see him,” Burroughs assured me. “They do come into my possession from time to time, gems and even the occasional necklace.”
The point of my visit was unraveling.
“What I want to know, sir,” I continued, “is if I can take him to the doctor here in Boulder.”
“Whatever happened to our glorious frontier heritage of minding one’s own business?” Burroughs growled, stepping out of the orgone box. “Billy should get in here now and this will help him. Bring him forward, laddie. Better yet, let him be for now. Orgones come in waves, and lately the waves have been at a very low ebb. We’ll go to the surgeon tomorrow; he comes highly recommended. It’s the sensible thing to do.”
Okay. It looked as if we were going to the psychic surgeon after all. I wondered what Billy thought about all this, if he had any say in it.
“I hope the victim will be able to express his appreciation when it’s all over,” Billy said, in that sarcastic way he had of speaking, especially when speaking about his father and the other “unfortunate uncles,” as he called them, that he had grown up with—Allen, Peter, Gregory, Herbert Huncke, and I guess Kerouac, the saddest uncle of them all.
We piled into the car, the same arthritic town car that had carried all of us up the face of the mountain and whose trunk we had burdened with pot. Peter was at the wheel. I thought of John Clare’s poem “The Driving Boy”—although that was written about a boy at the plow—but that’s how Peter Orlovsky drove, like he was sitting in a car tied to oxen waiting for them to move.
Bill and Billy, father and son, sat together in the backseat, and Allen and I sat beside them. I stared out the window to keep my mind off such august company. Gregory had left Max and Lisa and Calliope behind so that he could come along for the ride. Peter didn’t seem to have control of the car. I thought we’d never get out of Boulder, at least not alive.
“I don’t know what it is,” Peter shouted at us over his shoulder. “The car seems possessed of some kind of spirit, it wants to be close to the flowers, it smells the flowers, Allen, the car smells the flowers!” We lurched closer to what in fact were flower beds and plants hanging out of windows on our way out of town.
“Bill”—Gregory turned around in his seat, looking like a gargoyle perched atop Notre Dame, with his wild untamed hair, no teeth, and hawklike nose, or a gryphon with bifocals chained to its face—“Do you think insane people have visions worth hearing?”
“Ah.” Burroughs thought for a moment, taking off his hat and looking inside as if the answer were written in the brim. “I don’t think so. It’s the insane who are so concerned with life, regular life, money and sex, food and its effect on their digestion. The insane are obsessed with the impression they make on others. The facts of life frighten the insane, and no man can detach himself, Gregory, from what he fears. As a consequence, the visions of the insane are unspeakably dreary.”
“My whole family’s insane, Bill,” our driver cried out, “and they are very interesting to me. Don’t you think my family is interesting, Allen?” Peter asked.
“Peter’s brother Julius thought he was the baby Jesus,” Allen said thoughtfully. “It made him very easy to be with—he was very mild.”
Billy didn’t say much. He asked how long the operation would take, if there would be any blood.
“I will get everyth
ing worked out,” his father said, reassuring him. “This will be like bagging a jaguar, you’ll bring the offending organism home in a sack.”
Somehow none of this was very reassuring to Billy. Billy lit up a cigarette and took out of his knapsack a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s that you can buy on airplanes. No one said anything. Gregory turned around as soon as Billy unscrewed the bottle and the smell of alcohol filled the car.
“Gimme some of that,” Gregory demanded. “You have to feed the first baby-sitter you ever had,” he told Billy. “Do you remember, Billy, when I took you out on the roof of that apartment building, with all the glass on the edge to keep out the burglars, and we threw the glass into the street and you said, ‘Diamonds, we made diamonds’? And I took you to the planetarium and stole that cardboard mobile of the planets for you, and I liked it so much I stole it back?”
Billy smiled. Allen laughed.
“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories,” Burroughs said. “There are things I wish I could forget.”
I, on the other hand, wanted to remember everything about being in the car with these men, though how strange we must have looked to the other motorists who glanced over suspiciously at us when the traffic slowed. They all looked like suburbanites going into the city to work or shop.
A family pulled up at a traffic light. A little boy in Oshkosh overalls smiled at us. His mother, who was at the wheel, pulled him away from the window. He looked like he would rather be with us. Burroughs looked the kid in the eye. “A timorous foe, a suspicious friend,” he said. Gregory winked at the mother and stuck out his tongue, like he wanted to kiss her. She looked disgusted and drove off.
It takes about an hour to drive into Denver. I wondered what they were thinking as we approached the city. It must have a lot of meaning for them. The hobo jungles of Denver—Neal Cassady’s Denver—were disappearing. There’s an expensive Japanese restaurant where Jack and Neal once fell down drunk and laughing in the street, knocking their brains out trying to impress a girl who left them both for a college kid in maroon slacks who later became a country club golf pro.
