Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs arrived in New York on December 8, 1964, and was immediately pulled over for questioning. They had his name on a list. He spent three hours watching while agents pawed through the seven suitcases of manuscripts and clippings files that he had brought with him. The customs agents were joined by two narcotics agents who read through his diaries. In one diary there was something about feeling sick. “Does this refer to narcotics withdrawal?” he was asked. “No, no. It’s fiction,” he said. They found a boy magazine and waved it around saying, “Look at this! Look at this!” but they didn’t confiscate it. They debated whether or not to expose the film in his camera but decided instead to call it a day. They found nothing, not even a codeine tablet. Next they took him back to the boat and had him take his pants down in case he had narcotics up his ass. They said finally, “Well, we treated you like a gentleman, you may think that you’ve been mistreated but we treated you like a gentleman.” Outside, Brion Gysin was waiting for him. One of the customs inspectors approached him and asked, “Are you a friend of that man in there?” When Brion assented, the man said, “Well, he certainly writes some filthy stuff.” Bill booked into the Hotel Chelsea. Brion Gysin was staying with Leila Hadley on Fifth Avenue, trying to market the Dreamachine.

  Bill visited Allen on East 5th Street where he had lived since January 1964. Allen was busy making preparations for a long spell away from the city, putting things in storage and finishing up projects. He flew to Mexico City on January 15 on a trip that would take him first to Cuba, then Czechoslovakia, Poland, Moscow, London, Paris, and finally San Francisco, so he and Bill only overlapped by two weeks. Allen introduced him to a number of people at the Chelsea Hotel, including Harry Smith and George Kleinsinger, the composer of “Tubby the Tuba.” Bill was impressed by Harry Smith’s film animations, his photographic work, his work on Eskimo string figures and Seminole Indian patchwork, and his archive work with American folk songs. But he found Harry creepy and unpleasant to be around and hated the way he mooched off everyone. Arthur C. Clarke had one of the original top-floor apartments at the Chelsea and showed him his $3,000 telescope that could read a newspaper on the other side of Manhattan. George Kleinsinger had a huge double-height apartment with trees and birds flying free, shitting everywhere. There were huge aquarium tanks with turtles splashing around and a menagerie that included iguanas and pythons. In the center of the room was George’s grand piano and a group of chairs and sofas where everyone hung out and drank. Bill loved it.

  Bill’s French translators, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, were also living in the hotel, in one of the old apartments complete with wood-paneled walls and a fireplace. Claude worked standing up with his typewriter on the mantelpiece and Mary had a desk. They kept up a constant dialogue in a mixture of French and English, discussing the book they were working on. For the cut-up novels they had created an index card system with the original phrases in it that were subsequently cut up—as far as they could deduce them. That way they were able to use the same French phrases when they recurred. It was a very time-consuming approach, but they were working more for love than money. Both Claude and Mary produced their own cut-up books and Bill subsequently wrote introductions for them both.2 Bill very much enjoyed going to their rooms for proper European-style drinks before dinner.

  Burroughs made contact with poet Ted Berrigan, the bearded, overweight father figure of the Lower East Side poetry scene. He was the editor of C: A Journal of Poetry, and had published one of Bill’s experimental texts, “Giver of Winds Is My Name,” in the summer of 1964,3 the first of his texts to use Egyptian glyphs. Berrigan was enthusiastic about his work so Bill gave him another text, “Fits of Nerves with a Fix,” which he published that February.4 Berrigan arranged to publish Bill’s own thirty-two-page version of Time magazine,5 a three-column collaged text using the cover and title page of the November 30, 1962, issue of Time, which had contained the libelous review of Naked Lunch called “King of the YADS” (Young American Disaffiliates), in which it was claimed that Burroughs had cut off a finger joint to avoid the draft. By transforming this supreme organ of control Burroughs was aiming at the jugular. He told Bill Butler, “The Luce magazines [Time, Life, Fortune] are nothing but control mechanisms. They’re about as human as a computer. Henry Luce, himself, has no control over the thing now, it’s grown so large. Yet all it would take to bring it down is one technical sergeant fouling up the works, just one technical sergeant. That’s why the ‘Word falling, photo falling’ image. We’ve got to break down the police organization of words and images.” Time was published in a facsimile edition of the manuscript, with several different signed editions including one bound in Camargue cloth containing a manuscript page from Burroughs and a drawing by Gysin, who contributed four pages of drawings to the book itself.

  Burroughs also met up with the poet Ed Sanders, the editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, who had published a mimeograph edition of Roosevelt After Inauguration back in January 1964, after the English printer had refused to print it in the City Lights edition of The Yage Letters in late 1963. The cover was hand-drawn by Allen Ginsberg with a stylus straight onto the stencil. Like all Sanders’s productions, it was “printed, published and zapped at a secret location in the Lower East Side.” He also published a three-column layout called “Fluck You, Fluck You, Fluck” in his “God” issue of Fuck You in September 1964.6 Throughout his time in New York Burroughs continued to send material to Jeff Nuttall for My Own Mag.

  Bill went to book his train tickets at Grand Central Station:

  “I want to reserve a drawing-room for St. Louis.”

  “A drawing-room? Where have you been?”

  “I have been abroad.”

  “I can give you a bedroom or a roomette as in smaller.”

  “I will take the bedroom.”7

  Two weeks later, on December 23, 1964, Bill settled into his train bedroom, surrounded by his seven suitcases. His Oriental porter installed a table in his room so that he could set up his Facit portable and type as he looked out of the train’s picture window. His Zeiss Ikon was at his side, out of its cracked leather case, ready to snap the occasional picture. Bill lamented the old steam locomotives with their soot and noise, brass spittoons, smell of worn leather and stale cigar smoke.

  On his arrival in St. Louis, Carl Milles’s monumental brass nudes were still there to greet the visitor leaving the station. Bill made his way to the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, where, “like a good European,” he spent some time bouncing on the hotel beds and testing the hot-water taps to make sure all was in order. The hotel overlooked Forest Park and was a few minutes’ walk from where Burroughs grew up. He remembered the old Bixby place that the hotel replaced. The hotel was built in 1922, just as the Burroughs family were relocating to the suburbs. He went to the lobby newsstand to buy the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to look for items or pictures to paste in his scrapbooks and found plenty of points of intersection.

  The next day was mild and warm and Bill went for a walk around his old neighborhood, taking photographs, looking for anything that had survived from his childhood in the late teens and early twenties. His childhood house was still there. There was a Christmas family reunion at his aunt Kay’s house with all the cousins and relatives, and on December 27 he and his brother went for a drive around the city, stopping from time to time for Bill to take photographs: the Old Courthouse, the “Gateway to the West” arch, then still under construction. Clayton and the West End suburbs had been built up beyond recognition in the twenty years since Bill was there.

  Playboy had expected a return-of-the-prodigal-son type of story and were horrified by the three-column cut-up piece Burroughs turned in. They rejected it and paid him a three-hundred-dollar kill fee, but “St. Louis Return” was taken up by the Paris Review, which had already sent its interviewer, Conrad Knickerbocker, to the Chase Plaza to interview him on New Year’s Day. This interview, like all Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interviews, was o
n writing technique and is the best exposition there is of Burroughs’s methods outside his own technical books. It was widely reproduced. Knickerbocker gives us a good thumbnail sketch of Burroughs’s appearance at the age of fifty-one: he was wearing a lightweight Brooks Brothers suit with a waistcoat, a blue striped shirt from Gibraltar, cut in the English style, and a deep blue tie with small white polka dots. “He might have been a senior partner in a private bank. […] His face carries no excess flesh. His expression is taut, and his features are intense and chiseled.” Bill did not smile during the interview and laughed only once, but Knickerbocker felt that he was capable of much dry laughter in other circumstances. Burroughs’s voice was described as “sonorous, its tone reasonable and patient; his accent is mid-Atlantic, the kind of regionless inflection Americans acquire after many years abroad.”

  Back at the Hotel Chelsea, Bill wrote Ian, again inviting him to come over, and appears to have expected him to arrive in two weeks’ time, but Ian was unable to get an American visitor’s visa even though Burroughs sent him traveler’s checks for five hundred dollars to show the embassy that he had funds enough to visit. In any case, Ian remained ambivalent about going to the States and saw no point in the trip unless he could get a work permit. He had been turned off the idea of New York by meeting people like Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso, all of whom he regarded as uncouth, loud, and pushy. He asked Bill if he really needed him there. Had Bill insisted, a way could doubtless have been found to get Ian to New York and the course of their relationship might have been very different, but Bill let it go.

  Burroughs’s father, Mote, died on January 19 of a heart attack and Bill and Mort flew to Palm Beach for the funeral. Billy Jr. was unable to get there in time. Laura seemed to be coping, so after a few days Bill returned to New York. It was a time for reflection: his father had been a strange, somewhat remote man, whom Bill had always found it rather difficult to talk to. But he had always been there to bail him out when he got into trouble, it was his parents’ hard work that provided the monthly allowance that had permitted him to be a writer, and it was his parents who had brought up his son. He owed them so much, and was unable to really thank them for it.

  In New York, one of the main performance places for writers at this time was the 129-seat East End Theater at 85 East 4th Street, run by poets Diane di Prima and Alan Marlowe. Their patron, society hostess Panna Grady, invited Burroughs to perform on February 14 in what must have been his first reading in the United States. For the 4:00 p.m. performance he gave a pared-down version of the kind of show that he had been doing with Ian and Brion in Paris and London utilizing tapes of Joujouka drumming and flutes, cut-up pneumatic drills, radio static, and his own voice reading from newspapers but lacking the films and projections. He appeared through parted red curtains, removed his topcoat and fedora, which he carefully placed on the white chair provided. Wearing a three-piece suit, he made himself comfortable in a high-backed leather chair and opened his briefcase. He read aloud from Junky, Naked Lunch, and Nova Express before leaving the stage while a cut-up tape of Dutch Schultz’s last words, which he had recently discovered in James D. Horan’s The Desperate Years,8 intercut with news reports of plane crashes and stories containing the number 23, continued to play. The text of “The Valentine’s Day Reading” was mimeographed and sold as a program on the night. Two days later he wrote to Ian again, urging him to come to New York and bring over slides and films to enhance his performances.9 On March 3, Brion Gysin performed his “Permutations and Permutated Portraits” there, which did use projections.

  By 1964 there was a well-established poetry-reading scene in the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village and the poets were delighted to have Burroughs among them. He was invited out most nights. At a reading at Le Metro, the poetry café on Second Avenue, his fans clustered around him so tightly that he couldn’t see anything. This was where Herbert Huncke and Carl Solomon had read and was fast becoming known as a center for drug dealing as well as for poetry. Bill attended several readings there, including one by Brion Gysin, but did not read there himself. He attended the grand opening of Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, an ex–kosher meat market at 383 East 10th Street on February 24, which was also the publication day for the third anniversary issue of Sanders’s Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. The event also featured the world premiere of the Fugs, during which they performed “Swinburne Stomp,” “Coca Cola Douche,” “Jack Off Blues,” and a musical setting of the opening lines of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Sanders had invited the press and Burroughs asked him which one was from Time. Sanders pointed to a reporter named Chris. Bill stared at the man and replied, “I thought so.”10

  Antony Balch joined Bill and Brion in New York in March for a month and brought with him a print of his filming in Tangier, Paris, and London to date. Bill enthused to Ian about the looped sequences shot in the Socco Chico. At the Chelsea, Antony shot a lot of film of Dreamachines and of Brion painting a huge New York skyline, then rolling it up, a sequence Bill called “the Piper pulled down the sky.” At the Chelsea they also enacted a clinic scene, in which Dr. Burroughs carefully examined young Bruce Holbrook, one of his assistants. Holbrook had a camera and a Martel tape recorder, but as Bill told Ian, “Unfortunately he also has a wife.”11 Clearly she and Bill did not get on too well, as on the same day he told Antony Balch, “He has been most helpful despite handicap weight of the other half. (Who is about ready to stick a knife in me at this point).”12

  2. On Set

  In March Bill moved into a 1915 loft building at 210 Centre Street, a couple of blocks south of Canal Street in Chinatown. The fire escape was on the front of the building and he took a lot of photographs of the traffic and street activity from the iron landing on his floor. It was an austere space: no curtains or carpets, a refrigerator in the corner, shelves filled with scrapbooks and file folders in neat piles, a few comfortable chairs for guests, a work table with typewriter and tape recorder.

  The loss of a large fee from Playboy was made up for by the arrival of Conrad Rooks, who asked Bill to act in Chappaqua, a film he was directing. Two years earlier, flying to Paris after his Granada television appearance, Bill had run into Rooks on the plane, and they were now back on good terms again despite the problems Rooks had caused between Bill and Mikey’s mother.13 Now Bill, along with many others, finally succumbed to the lure of the Avon Cosmetics gold. Rooks wanted to make a film about his experiences as a recovering drug addict, taking a sleep cure in a Swiss sanatorium. The film came complete with flashbacks, and he managed to persuade Allen Ginsberg, Moondog, Swami Satchidananda, the Fugs, and other sixties celebrities to play cameo roles. His doctor in the Swiss rehab clinic was played by Jean-Louis Barrault, legendary for his role in Les enfants du paradis. Rooks hired Ornette Coleman to write the soundtrack, then replaced it with one cowritten by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass.

  The New York scenes with Ginsberg were shot in January, which Bill attended. His own scenes were not shot until the first week of April, but included one that Bill very much enjoyed involving hired 1930s black Cadillacs and Bill mowing Conrad down with a tommy gun loaded with blanks. “What an instrument great fun,” he wrote Ian.14 Filmmaker Robert Frank was the cinematographer but got into an argument with Rooks—which was not difficult as Rooks was a very bad manager of people—and Rooks fired him. That evening Rooks met someone at a bar who claimed to have been trained to use a cine-camera in the army and hired him in his stead. The next day they filmed a whole scene in a New York bar where Conrad Rooks got up and danced on the table, was shot, and collapsed into a garbage can. They trooped in to see the rushes, but there was nothing on the film; the kid had underexposed the whole thing. With $3,000 wasted, Rooks rehired Robert Frank the next day, presumably at a higher fee than before.

  Burroughs was also on set on March 18 when he was filmed by Ed Sanders at the opening of Charles Henri Ford’s Poem Posters show at Cordier & Ekstrom on Madison Avenue at 75th Street. Much of the
twenty-four-minute film, also called Poem Posters, was of Jayne Mansfield, but the footage also included Burroughs, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Ned Rorem, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. Burroughs was now a central figure on the New York art scene.15

  Pleased with the publication of Roosevelt After Inauguration, Bill gave Ed Sanders another manuscript to print: APO-33, a text on the apomorphine treatment. Unfortunately, Sanders had a volunteer, Elaine Solow, retype the manuscript onto mimeograph stencils instead of arranging to have an electronic transfer made from the original. This meant that he had to photostat all the many images in the three-column text, cut them out, and glue each one on, a very time-consuming procedure. He recruited Peter Orlovsky to help, who launched into the task with an amphetamine-driven alacrity not consistent with accuracy of placement. Some of the pictures obscured the text, and others fell out when the book was picked up. Ed had also failed to instruct Elaine to keep the columns exactly as Burroughs had composed them, and they got changed during her typing because she was using a different typewriter with a different face. Ed sent a couple of copies over to Burroughs, who at first thought they were some sort of markup or proof copies. When he realized that this was what the book was going to look like he quickly dispatched Brion Gysin to the cigar store on Times Square where Ed worked to inform him that Bill was displeased and was not prepared to let it go out that way. Ed disagreed; he thought it looked beautiful. His feelings were hurt but he kept his mouth shut: “Burroughs was Burroughs.” About fifteen or twenty copies were distributed and the remaining few were thrown away. It is now one of the most sought-after Burroughs items of all.