Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs was invited to teach a course at the University of the New World by Al de Gracia, brother of Ed de Gracia, the lawyer who defended Naked Lunch in the Boston trial. It was based in Haute Nendaz, a ski resort in Valais, Switzerland. However, by the time Bill got there in October 1971, Al de Gracia had already left the country, with the Swiss authorities accusing him of misleading advertising. The ads claimed there was a proper campus, whereas the actual University of the New World was a small shed. The students were housed in various rooms around town. Bill was put up at the Hotel Montcalme; the season had not yet started and he was the only guest. Bill approved of the idea, which was a modern version of the Black Mountain College, and taught a couple of classes. The university issued its own money, called “cows,” which the townspeople, sensibly, would not accept. Bill was paid in cows so he made nothing out of the trip, but he did have free board and travel for a month. The hotel had “the best coffee ever,” and he enjoyed the macrobiotic restaurant because it enabled him to avoid fondues, which, as he told Brion, “is a horrible Swiss thing.”24

  But he came down with a debilitating case of flu. He had a terrible headache and was almost delirious by the late afternoon. To his delight, codeine, under the name Codisan, was freely available in pharmacies. They were only two dollars for sixty, with one-twelfth grain in each pill. He bought a large batch and holed up in his hotel. He took twenty to thirty a day and after three weeks he had developed a habit. He would take ten in the morning and spend the day reading science fiction. It was here he read Dune by Frank Herbert. “I had kind of a nice time there.” Here Bill got to know one of the students, John de Chadenedes, whom he also saw later in London. John was good at sewing and made his own clothes and told Bill a lot about Buddhism.

  Burroughs used the opportunity to go and visit Timothy Leary, who was living in Carona, in the Ticino region of southern Switzerland, about seventy miles away. In September 1970 he had escaped from jail in America, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for two roaches of marijuana. He had gone first to Algeria, where he stayed with Eldridge Cleaver’s “government in exile,” but then Cleaver tried to hold Leary and his wife hostage. Bill thought he was lucky to escape with his life. In 1971 Leary arrived in Switzerland; the Nixon administration failed to extradite him, but managed to persuade the authorities to hold him in custody. They did so for a month, giving him a luxurious, comfortable room of his own and wine with his meals, then let him go. When Bill saw him he had broken up with his wife and was living in a motel with a variety of different women while the Swiss authorities decided what to do with him. Bill enjoyed the visit, all past animosities forgotten. “We had a nice talk and all that.”

  Burroughs’s fascination with Scientology continued, despite his misgivings about Hubbard’s attempts to run it as a religious cult, and in November 1971 he booked himself into an advanced course in Edinburgh. John Calder found him lodgings. He was looking for engrams in his past lives and told a friend, “I looked into my past, my God, I went back 77,000 years! [laughing] It was a funny feeling, time washing through me, whoosh, whoosh… I was experiencing something, that’s all I can say. Reincarnation? Whether it’s a past life, or something in your brain, what does it matter?”25 Back in London he began working with John McMaster, the first ever “Clear,” the man who set up the Church of Scientology with Hubbard and the inventor of much of the Scientology technology. McMaster was a soft-spoken, slim, gay, white-haired South African who presented himself as the victim of a power struggle with his former friend and told Burroughs that the Sea Org (Hubbard’s actual command post, based on a yacht off Casablanca) were out to get him. He claimed to have been thrown out of his bed by massive psychic forces entering his bedroom and showed Burroughs his bruises as proof. “If only I had been there with my karate!” Bill exclaimed. With McMaster as a teacher, Burroughs spent hundreds of hours self-auditing with his E-meter.

  It was now that he got hold of a copy of Excalibur. According to Hubbard four of the first fifteen people who read it went insane because the material was so powerful. After that Hubbard only sold copies to people who had reached the highest levels and could deal with this fast formula for clearing. Each copy was specially typed for the recipient, bound in gold with a lock, and signed by Hubbard. It sold at $1,500 a copy.26 Bill made a dozen photocopies and sent them out to people like Allen Ginsberg and the author of this book, who read it with no apparent ill effect. Burroughs finally began to feel skeptical about the Scientology techniques and beliefs during a dinner at the Cucaracha Mexican restaurant on Greek Street in Soho with McMaster. Toward the end of the meal Burroughs gave the guitarist a pound to sing the usually banned verse of “La Cucaracha” that is about marijuana smoking. Burroughs sang along in a cracked tenor. McMaster, who like Bill had drunk a considerable amount, leaned over and told Bill conspiratorially, “Bill, did I ever tell you that in a past incarnation I was Rudolph Valentino?”27 Burroughs pursed his lips and murmured, “Really, John? Most interesting.” Bill’s respect for McMaster began fading away. It was now that he finally gave up and turned against the organization. He was more than disillusioned, he was indignant: Hubbard was a gangster, it was a great racket, but Bill’s friends like Paul Bowles wondered, why didn’t he see that at the start?

  Burroughs used one of his new weapons in his retribution. Ever since the Chicago convention he had been interested in the idea of cut-ups as a way of altering consciousness and subverting the time-space continuum by recording situations on the street and taking photographs and then playing them back in situ, “tampering with actual reality” and leading, as he put it to “accidents, fires or removals.” He mounted an attack on Scientology’s London headquarters at 37 Fitzroy Street in Bloomsbury. Over a period of some weeks he haunted the premises, taking photographs and making tape recordings. Sure enough, after a couple of months, the Scientologists packed their bags and moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road (though it must be said that subsequent attempts failed to move them from their new quarters, which they still occupy at the time of writing).

  Encouraged by his success, Burroughs selected a new target, the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street in Soho, London’s first ever espresso bar, which had been opened by the actress Gina Lollobrigida in 1953. Here Bill had been the victim of “outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake.” Burroughs began the operation on August 3, 1972, making no secret of his activities. “They are seething in here,” he reported. “The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife and slack-jawed son, the snarling counterman. I have them and they know it.”28 Bill returned half a dozen times to play back the previous day’s recordings and take more photographs; their business began to fall off and they kept shorter and shorter hours. On October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. Later the premises reopened as the Queen’s Snack Bar—a name that gave Bill a certain degree of satisfaction. The incident appeared in The Place of Dead Roads, written over a decade later:

  And he closed down a Greek coffee shop that gave him some sass… camera and tape recording magic. […] So many good ones and so many bad ones. […] That’s what you get for trying.29

  Bill and Ian did a lot of street recordings and playbacks in the street, not necessarily directed at anyone in particular. Burroughs explained, “You get a lot of very strange coincidences like recording something about fire engines and there they are, right on cue.”30

  In April 1972, Burroughs made a trip to New York to see his publishers. At the suggestion of Elliot Stein, a great friend of Antony Balch’s, he stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at 24 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 8th Street, and enjoyed himself immensely. Stein lived in the hotel and introduced Burroughs to all the newly burgeoning pornographic bookstores, gay bars, and gay movie theaters showing hardcore sex. Burroughs wrote to Paul Bowles, “I have elected to visit the most exotic country of them all and have not been disappointed. New York has changed beyond recognition since I last saw it two years ago. Any sex act can now be shown on the public scree
n with beautiful actors and that’s a powerful sight. […] Anything described in The Wild Boys can now be seen in color and close up.” He expressed concern that no one would want to read about it anymore if they could see it on the screen. “It seems I wasn’t kidding when I said I was working to make myself obsolete.”31 He told Brion, “Antony didn’t see it. You didn’t see it. I saw it as soon as I walked into the Porter Mills gay blue movies on 43rd between Sixth and Seventh. Nothing you or Antony said had prepared me for seeing the trailers already some trailer that shoots its wad over the screen close up beautiful boys fucking rimming sucking coming.”32

  During this trip to New York he made an arrangement to pay $150 a month toward the rent on his friend David Prentice’s loft at 452 Broadway, number 3-F, in the Cast Iron District. His plan was to assemble his archives there and sell them. He told Brion, “My intention is to sell everything every file, scrap book, diary, all all all every fucking paper.”33 Many of his papers were already in New York, having been stored there from his sojourn in 1965, including a huge stack of sex routines based around hanging. This material was in a Chase Manhattan storage vault and had been edited down by a third to fit the box. “If your Picasso won’t fit into a packing case cut some of it off.”34

  He dipped into the New York social scene and quite enjoyed it. At the beginning of May he went to Jerome Hill’s off-to-Cannes dinner party at the Algonquin, where Andy Warhol, Burroughs, Terry Southern, and Larry Rivers sat in a row, “like some Mount Rushmore of Hip,”35 and Brigid Berlin burst into the room with a radio broadcasting news of Nixon’s massive bombing of Haiphong Harbor. Nonetheless, despite his dissatisfaction with his life in London, when he did finally sell the archives, he first of all considered buying an island off the coast of Scotland with the money. New York did not yet tempt him.

  At Christmas 1972, John de Chadenedes came to visit Burroughs at Duke Street Saint James’s, bringing with him another boy from the University of the New World named Freddy, described by Burroughs as “a nice little queer.” Ian Sommerville’s mother was cooking a Christmas turkey at Ian’s flat, so Bill took John and Freddy with him. Alan Watson was there, helping with the cooking. Mrs. Sommerville had found it difficult to accept Ian’s relationship with Burroughs. She was particularly concerned lest any compromising “man to man” letters should ever come to light or be published. Burroughs: “She’d also, at this point, had to take in her stride Alan Watson. This was a time when Ian and I weren’t making it, but Alan Watson had taken over completely and I had a period of great jealousy. So having swallowed the whale of Alan Watson she could hardly gag at the knot of my size. He’s a great screaming faggot but he gets himself along.”36 Alan Watson found her “a very difficult woman,” and the feeling was mutual.

  Ian left London to work as a computer programmer at a pork pie factory in the Roman town of Bath, in Avon in the west of England, where he shared rooms with John Michell, an expert in ley lines and geomancy, and author of The Flying Saucer Vision and City of Revelation. He and Bill continued to have an on-off sexual relationship, but Ian refused to ever live with Bill again. Burroughs visited for the June 21, 1972, summer solstice at nearby Glastonbury and climbed Glastonbury Tor, where Ian took photographs of him.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  There’s no such thing as a bad boy.

  —FATHER EDWARD FLANAGAN1

  1. John Brady

  In June 1972, Bill met a young Irish hustler, John Brady, in a pub near Piccadilly Circus and, after a while, invited him to move in. John was a street boy, a Dilly boy, who described himself as “black Irish” from County Kerry, then one of the most backward areas of Ireland; parts of Kerry were not connected to electricity or telephone until 1978. He had the black hair associated with the “Black Valley,” brushed forward low over his eyebrows in a Beatles cut. His father was a farmer and minor horse trader and he had a sister who sometimes visited him. He was short but powerfully built and very, very strong; all the other boys were scared of him. Apparently he had a bad temper, but Bill saw little evidence of it in the early days. John had always been a heavy drinker, favoring whiskey and beer. He was poorly educated; he could read a tabloid newspaper, but he was almost illiterate. When asked if he had read any of Bill’s books he replied, “Ah, I do intend to, but there’s a powerful lot of them.” Despite being from Ireland, with his uneducated rural belief in magic and unquestioning Catholicism, he more resembled a Mexican or Tangier boy than the usual Dilly boys. Bill enjoyed having him recount his experiences with “the little people.” “Well, it twas raining a little you see and I was walking down the lane and there he was, a-sitting on a leaf, sheltering himself from the raindrops, large as life.” Other times he saw them sunning themselves on the broad leaves of the hedgerow. John talked in his sleep—“I can’t quite make it, I can’t make it”—and Bill kept a whole scrapbook devoted to things he said in his sleep, some of which were quite extraordinary. Later Bill realized that he had been fooling himself, a case of an “elaborate pointless hoax. Trying to convince myself that John Brady is some supernatural dream boy come back to life. Even resorting to a sort of ventriloquism he is saying very meaningful things in his sleep. He was after all a natural sensitive and if you project an image with sufficient power it takes and becomes real… or as real as anything… as real as Real People.”2

  In the early days of their relationship, Bill would get John to display the various items he had stolen from his johns on the coffee table, an ever-changing selection of gold or platinum lighters, watches, and wallets that soon disappeared, to be replaced with a different selection. This was something Burroughs got from Genet. Bill gave John five pounds a day and tried to turn a blind eye to the girls who sometimes pushed past him to the bathroom in the mornings.

  After only a short time, things began to deteriorate. John became sulky and disagreeable. He began tapping his cigarette ashes on the rug and showing signs of hostility. “Johnny, what’s the matter with you?” Bill asked, but his replies made no sense: “They’re right after me! They won’t leave me alone!” Bill didn’t know what he meant by that, but it was evident that he was getting irrational, deeply disturbed, and dangerous. Bill told him, “Johnny, why don’t you just pack up and get out of here?” This made John very angry. He went to the kitchen and returned with a sharp meat cleaver. Bill was sitting at his typewriter with his hands on the desk. John brought the cleaver down, thunk! within an inch of Bill’s hand. “Now,” he said. “Light my cigarette!” Bill lit his cigarette with a steady hand, and John began to calm down. He smiled and laughed and said, “What about a cup of coffee?” Bill said, “Yeah.” Burroughs found out later that he had threatened his mother with an axe because he thought she hadn’t made enough effort to get him out of jail at some point in Ireland. Bill told Antony about the incident and he said, “Bill, you had better get rid of that boy just as quick as you can before he kills you.” Brion Gysin agreed.

  Instead, Bill took John to Tangier, where they had a complete reconciliation. They met up with Brion, who took them to Joujouka, where they saw Hamri and Brion’s ex-chef Targusti. They slept in one of the guest huts, listened to the music, smoked a lot of hash, and visited the ceremonial caves a mile or so out of the village. Burroughs said, “It was a very enjoyable occasion. I should say that was the highest point of the relationship when I felt that he was really learning something. He enjoyed it, he dug it, he had a lot of natural tact for getting along with people and everybody liked him.”3 Back in London, things ran smoothly once again.

  Burroughs included John in several books. In Port of Saints there was a direct journal entry dated October 15, 1972:

  On the way to the Angus Steak House, as we were passing through St. James’s Square, John B. found the cap of a gasoline tank still smelling of gasoline, reminding me of an unwritten section I had planned for The Wild Boys in which the Dead Child kills a CIA man by loosening the cap on his gas tank—brush fires by a bumpy road.4

  John also appears as a
member of a jack-off club: “There was John Brady, the policeman’s son, black Irish with curly black hair and a quick wide smile. Quick with his fists too.”5 Although he never read Burroughs’s books, John took an interest in his work with photographs and scrapbooks, but never ventured an opinion.

  JB: “I see you took some pictures did you Bill?”

  WSB: “I took some pictures, yes.”

  JB: “Who did you take ’em of?”

  WSB: “Nobody. I just took ’em of the apartment.”

  JB: “Oh, I see.”

  WSB: “Like, alright, I take a picture of the bed unmade and of the bed been made.”

  JB: “Yes.”

  WSB: “That’s when I cleaned up the bathroom. Here’s a picture of the bathroom like that, and cleaned up like that. It’s before and after. What was, what isn’t.”6