by Barry Miles
PO: “But now I’m a bonefide queer on the witness stand.”
AG: “Did I make that come true?”
PO: “Make it? You hypnotized it true.”
AG: “And now the dehypnotization is begun. I’m getting old and you’re realizing you’re no longer in my power…”
William Burroughs: “Yeah, man. It’s best for you to be away from him now. I mean now.” [Bill staggers drunkenly to his feet and knocks over his chair.]
AG: “Oh really Bill! Don’t whimper like that to me. I mean, I’m feeling something right now. Don’t you realize I have to sooner or later find a girl and get married so I got a junior?”
WSB: “Take a tip from me, kid, and steer clear of ’em. They got poison juices dripping all over ’em. Fishy smell too. Down right pornographic. Up a stretched asshole, that’s where they make ya look. Wise up Allen and picture yourself right for once in a while can’t you?”7
Peter had dysentery, a mild jaundice, and a head cold. He spent most of his time in bed, resting and brooding, then after a week in Tangier he announced that he had had enough and was heading on to Istanbul alone. His seven-year “marriage” to Allen was over, at least for now. Allen wrote to Ferlinghetti about Peter’s leaving: “We had big arguments about future of universe in Tangier. He wanted it to be sex-love, Burroughs wanted it to be unknown Artaud mutation out of bodies. I was undecided, confused. I still am except Burroughs seems to have killed ‘Hope’ in any known form. The Exterminator is serious. Peter wanted innocence and sex apocalypse. It got very serious. I was vomiting.”8 Peter left at the end of the month, running into Timothy Leary at the airport in Gibraltar. He told Leary he was sick of Burroughs and was off to the Far East to find wise men and drugs. “I’ll take drugs you’ve never heard of!” he yelled across the railings.
At the recommendation of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary had written to Burroughs in January 1961, asking if he would participate in an American Psychological Association symposium on psychedelic drugs and in a research project to evaluate psilocybin (magic mushroom) pills. Burroughs replied, telling him, “My work and understanding benefits from Hallucinogens MEASUREABLY. Wider use of these drugs would lead to better work conditions on all levels.”9 Leary sent him a supply of the pills, but Burroughs concluded that their effects closely resembled those of DMT. He advised Leary to have some apomorphine on hand in case psilocybin produced the same results.10
Allen had booked Leary into the Armor. Allen was out when he arrived, so Leary waited. Leary described his first meeting with Burroughs: “As I waited in the living room of the concierge, a thin, stooped man wearing glasses and a grey fedora walked in. Two handsome British boys about nineteen years old were with him.”11 Bill had come to find him. They left a message for Allen and retired to the outdoor garden of the Parade to discuss the upcoming drugs conference at Harvard over gin and tonics.
After dinner at the hotel with Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, and Gregory Corso they retired to Burroughs’s room. Leary wrote, “Dark cave. Big bed. Desk littered with papers. Hundreds of photographs pasted together and rephotographed. Cut up pictures. Boil out the essence of the pictures. And then shoot it. Three off-tuned radios blaring noise. Static is the essence of sound. Pot cutting-board. Allen’s pictures of Marrakech. We sat around the room, taking turns peering through the cardboard cylinder flicker machine. Burroughs wanted to take mushrooms. Allen Ginsberg said, ‘Well, everyone in Tangier has been waiting for you to arrive with the legendary mushrooms…’ Alan Ansen, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ian Sommerville and Mikey Portman… ‘All experienced hands at consciousness-expansion.’ ”12
The session began in Bill’s room, dim-lit, filled with cigarette smoke and with an unmade bed. It felt crowded, so all but Bill and the two boys went into the garden to look over the wall at the harbor below. It was the king’s birthday and there was a brilliantly lit fair next to the beach. The sounds of pipes and drums drifted up on the night air. Allen confided his troubles to Leary, explaining the breakup with Peter, telling him Burroughs was anti-love. As Bill seemed to want to be quiet, Allen suggested that they return to his hotel and watch the night from the patio in front of his room. Leary reported, “The floor beneath was a city carpeted with lights. Lights strung from the rigging of ships in the harbor and the King’s carnival rollicking along by the water’s edge. We were all in the highest and most loving of moods. Alan Ansen couldn’t believe it. He kept laughing and shaking his head. This can’t be true, so beautiful. Heaven!” All down the avenue d’España there were jugglers, folk dancers, tightrope walkers, dancing boys, and gnaoua musicians.
They decided to collect Bill and go down to the fair. Allen part climbed the wall next to the Muniria’s garden gate and called, “Bill BUH-rows! Bill BUH-rows!” After a wait, the door slowly creaked open and Bill stood, almost collapsed against the wall. As Leary described it, “His face was haggard and tense. […] He reached his left hand over his sweating face. […] His thin fingers clawing at the right cheek.”
“Bill, how are you doing?”
“They gave me a large dose. I would like to sound a word of warning. I’m not feeling too well.” He said he was going to take some apomorphine and would join them later. “One of the nastiest cases ever processed by this department,” Leary quipped to Ginsberg.13
Bill and the boys joined them later. Bill wanted to go to a bar. Possibly he had been overconfident in his dosage, or possibly was even trying to impress Leary with his resilience. After a while Bill went home and the others stayed up all night talking on Allen’s patio.14
Leary was perplexed by the casual cruelty displayed by the Beats. One time they gathered at Paul Bowles’s flat, sitting on cushions and his hard sofa, the wood fire crackling, with the intense light from the glass-windowed patio filtered by an array of tall broadleaf plants. They all took majoun, washed down with mint tea. There was a hanger-on with them named Mark Grotrian, whom Mikey Portman ordered around and lorded it over. In High Priest, Leary recalled, “One of them got caught in bad visions. I could see why. He played the part of a miserable, bullied, self-despising English schoolboy homosexual. He had walked in on the session uninvited and had tagged along unwanted. […] I watched to see how the drug experts would handle the situation. For the most part he was ignored. […] Only Allen Ginsberg was tender, sitting next to him and talking softly, curandero style.”15 What Leary didn’t mention was that Bowles was purposely trying to give Grotrian a bad trip. Grotrian moaned, “Oh, I feel a terrible feeling of heat!” and Bowles responded, “God it’s hot in here, isn’t it! Open some windows,” making it worse. According to Ansen, it was Leary who tried to talk him down and get him out of his horrors. Ansen thought this was typical of the unpleasant side of Paul Bowles, who always enjoyed the discomfort of others. Burroughs had seen it several times before. He reported that Bowles gave Cyril Connolly and Robert Rauschenberg majoun. Rauschenberg did not know what was happening to him and became very fearful. Instead of reassuring him, Bowles made things worse, telling him, “Oh, well it sometimes has these terrible effects on people, and there have been suicides.” Rauschenberg hated him for the rest of his life.16 Ahmed Yacoubi told Burroughs that he and Bowles did this quite deliberately, giving majoun to people who had often never even smoked pot before, and enjoying their discomfort. Burroughs thought it very irresponsible.17
2. An American Interlude
Leary left Tangier for Copenhagen but arranged to reconvene with Burroughs three weeks later in London. Leary and Dick Alpert—the future Ram Dass—met him at the Empress Hotel. Bill had a small, dark room on the ground floor with an electricity meter on the wall into which he fed florins. To see if the mushrooms worked differently in London they all three took two pills—4 milligrams: “naught but a brush of the phoenix bird’s soft wing.” They went to a workingmen’s café. Bill told Leary that he regretted The Soft Machine, thinking that it wouldn’t be understood, that the cut-ups were too far out. He told him, “The Soft Machin
e is too difficult. I am now writing a science-fiction book that a twelve-year-old can understand. I write to create my own reality.” Together they walked the London streets, finishing up on the white benches at the entrance to a park. Bill still didn’t like the loss of control brought on by the mushrooms. “Burroughs talking brilliantly leather beaten face, turkey neck.” They had drinks at Leary’s hotel, followed by dinner. Bill was on form: “Now curare is an interesting drug. Muscle paralysis. No possibility of action. Just lie there absorbing all sensation. Medicine man crooning. Paralyzed. I was smothering and can’t say it. Can’t talk.”
Burroughs went to Leary’s house in Newton, Massachusetts, flying into Logan Airport on August 25, 1961. There he prepared his paper, “Points of Distinction Among Psychoactive Drugs,” for the 69th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, held in Manhattan between August 31 and September 6. Burroughs gave a talk and was on a panel with Timothy Leary, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, and Frank Barron, and the attendance was so great that members of the audience were crowded ten deep around the entrance hall, sat around the speakers’ table, and sprawled on the floor. Burroughs discussed the difference between a psychedelic and a narcotic drug, explaining how drugs with practically the opposite physiological effects had been lumped together as narcotics. He described junk as an antidote for cocaine, and how, if you have too much cocaine, junk will straighten you out, and explained that the psychedelics are not related to either one. He went through the different classes of drugs: narcotics, opiates, stimulants like cocaine and Benzedrine, and the sleeping drugs like barbiturates. He told how the psychedelics move in the direction of heightened awareness and how sedatives go in the other direction.
After the conference, Bill returned to Cambridge with Leary. But there was little connection between them and Bill spent most of his time alone in his third-floor room, making photo collages. In the evenings he would join the family around the kitchen table, throwing back gin and tonics, unsmiling, delivering monologues about Hassan-i-Sabbah and his other current interests. Leary described him as “increasingly bitter and paranoid, always brilliant.”18
He had arrived expecting to find scientific discipline, sensory deprivation and submersion tanks, devices to measure brain waves, the whole apparatus of a Harvard University lab devoted to research into psychoactive drugs. Instead he found Leary conducting what amounted to psychedelic encounter sessions, spouting theories of universal love and touting his psilocybin pills as the key to enlightenment for a sick society. Leary was working with prisoners in Concord Prison, giving them psilocybin and discussing game theory: how to get a new game, how to get out of the cops-and-robbers game. The psilocybin was supposed to enable them to see their game-playing and reorient themselves. Burroughs went to the prison several times and met some of the prisoners but didn’t witness the sessions. He thought it was all very hit-or-miss. The prisoners enjoyed it, though, because it was a chance to get high.
Though Bill felt profoundly out of place, he sometimes encountered a like mind. Leary reported that one evening Dr. Jefferson Monroe, the black psychiatrist of Concord Prison where Leary was conducting some of his psilocybin trials, came to visit and he and Burroughs ran routines against each other.
Bill snarled in his low nasal mutter, “Anyone who wouldn’t enjoy fucking a twelve-year-old Arab boy is either insane or lying.”
Monroe screamed in high falsetto, flicking his wrists in mock disdain, “You’re so middle-class, my dear. Have you ever fucked a…”
“We Harvardites listened to this with jaws gaping. We were simply too square, too straight. Burroughs was too far out for us,”19 wrote Leary.
From the moment he saw Leary’s setup, Burroughs had been suspicious of psychedelic drugs and their use, predicting, correctly, that they could be used as a method of mind control. As Leary sadly reported, “He never concealed his distaste for the drug we hoped he would research.”20 Although Burroughs thought that drugs could play a useful role in expanding consciousness, he did not see them as a universal panacea and always insisted that “anything that can be done chemically can be done other ways.” But his biggest concern was that Leary and his fellow workers, including Allen, were being duped by the establishment and that psychedelics were more likely to be used by the government and the military than as a means of self-enlightenment. His pessimistic view was later borne out when the extent of CIA involvement in the early spread of LSD was revealed.21
Leary was mortified. He wrote, “Bill Burroughs came to visit, a dignified, sage complex genius-shaman-poet-guide from a different, but sympathetic tribe. Our obtuse game-playing paid disrespect to him and his clan. And when I heard the poet scold me, I turned towards him, covered with such shame that even now it circles in my memory.”22 Leary later said, “He thought we were a bunch of dumb bozos running around and trying to save the world with these drugs and he was very uh, rightfully cynical about what we were doing. He’s a very scientific person. The only psychedelic he likes is marijuana. He never really liked other psychedelic drugs.”23 Paul Bowles commented, “When Bill went to visit Leary at Harvard, he was back here within five weeks saying ‘Leary is the most unscientific man I’ve ever met.’ ” Burroughs felt he should issue a warning against these easy routes to expanded consciousness and began working on it as soon as he got to New York:
Open letter to my constituents and co-workers if any remain for the end of it.
“Don’t listen to Hassan i Sabbah,” they will tell you. “He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?”
At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this:
“Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden Of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—Learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.24
3. New York
By September 28, 1961, Burroughs was in New York City and remained there for about two months reworking the manuscript of The Soft Machine and working on his new book, then called Novia Express. Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset had already had ten thousand copies of Naked Lunch printed and bound up, but they were sitting in a warehouse, waiting until the trials and lawsuits surrounding Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had cleared. He had been obliged to guarantee that he would pay the legal defense fees of any wholesaler or retailer arrested for selling the book, otherwise no one would distribute or sell it, and he was fighting lawsuits all over the country. He wanted to clear them away before he would risk publishing another book that would attract lawsuits, and so Naked Lunch was not published until March 21, 1962. Burroughs had s
ent the manuscript of The Soft Machine to Grove from London and Bill’s editor, Dick Seaver, was concerned that it was too dense and difficult for readers to understand. He wanted more straight narrative and Burroughs was endeavoring to make it suitable for the American audience.
He rented a small apartment on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn and about three weeks later moved into a better apartment in a basement on Congress Street, near Brooklyn Heights, just over the bridge, that better suited his purpose. It was near a union hiring hall for seamen and he could hear their calls as jobs were shouted out. It was a studio apartment: bedroom, kitchenette, and bathroom, fully furnished with a table and work bureau. But it had the worst cockroach infestation Burroughs had ever seen and he quickly ingratiated himself with the landlord by killing not only all the cockroaches in the apartment but in the landlord’s apartment and the corridors as well, using bags of pyrethrum powder. It reminded him of his days as an exterminator back in Chicago and he enjoyed it enormously. Burroughs worked on his book, seeing no one. He made no effort to contact Lucien Carr or Kerouac or any of his old friends. Occasionally he would go into the city for lunch with Barney Rosset or to see Dick Seaver—he never dealt with Rosset on editorial matters, only with Seaver—otherwise he would go a local bar, eat in local restaurants, and work. He handed in a text that was acceptable to Seaver and returned to London. It was years before Grove released it. When Naked Lunch was finally published it sold so well in hardback that the American edition of The Soft Machine was delayed until March 21, 1966, when Naked Lunch finally came out in paperback. By this time, Burroughs had long since moved on.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Now,” he said, “I’ll by God show them how ugly the Ugly American can be.” 1
