Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  In May 1973 Burroughs had received a letter from a nineteen-year-old fan from Coffeyville, Kansas, enclosing examples of his poetry and asking if he could interview him for an article about his early life. He also sent a snapshot of himself, a tall, slender, tight-jeaned teenage American boy, that did more to prompt a reply than the poems. Bill had said no to the idea of an article about his early life, but said to call him if he should ever find himself in London. James Grauerholz had sent a similar letter to his other hero, Allen Ginsberg. Allen responded by sending him his telephone number and inviting him to visit. James called him and it gave him an enormous thrill to finally talk to one of these legendary men. Not long afterward, along with two friends, James made the long cross-country trip to visit New York City. James met Allen at his place on East 10th Street. As Grauerholz later put it, “He made a well-intentioned but half-hearted and unsuccessful pass at me.” Allen referred James to Herbert Huncke, who introduced him to Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart. Brown showed an interest in James’s poetry and offered him a place to stay if he should ever move to the city.

  Nine months later, James, newly twenty-one, filled his red-and-white 1970 Volkswagen minibus with his library, his records, and his guitars, and set off for the big city, as in all the storybooks. A friend of his from Coffeyville, Bob Maness, had recently moved to Brooklyn Heights and offered him temporary housing at his place at 59 Pineapple Street. James had no idea that Burroughs was in New York, so when he called Allen Ginsberg he was astonished when Allen gave him a phone number for the loft in SoHo where Burroughs was staying and said, “I told him all about you. He’s expecting your call.”

  On February 8, James drove over to Manhattan, knocked on the big metal door, and met Burroughs for the first time. Bill had just turned sixty. James said, “My seven-year journey—from first exposure to Naked Lunch, to this portentous first meeting—had prepared me better than I could ever have expected. Improbably, I found myself quite at ease with William, despite my keen admiration for him; perhaps the steady stream of Scotch-and-sodas he proffered contributed to our bonhomie.” Bill was drinking Dewar’s and soda and smoking English Senior Service cigarettes. He showed James the latest issue of Rolling Stone with his interview with David Bowie in it and told him about teaching at City College. As they returned from a restaurant in nearby Little Italy, the freezing February wind blowing down Broadway provoked a quote from Bill: “the wind that blew between the worlds it cut him like a knife,”7 from Kipling’s “Tomlinson.” James recognized it. Back at the loft Bill asked him to stay the night, but James demurred. He told Bill, “I just moved to New York two days ago, and I just met you, and I have no objection in principle to what you’re talking about, but right now it’s just too much. I’m on sensory overload. I can’t do it.”8 However, a few days later he did, and Burroughs became the first man James had sex with, though he had been convinced in his head that he was gay ever since he was eight years old.

  James took a job at the Gotham Book Mart and saw Bill regularly. Bob Maness had only offered temporary accommodation in Brooklyn Heights, so, with Burroughs’s encouragement, James moved into the loft with him. The sex was awkward and strained. James was never physically attracted to Bill, he had no predilection for older men, but says he was not doing it against his will because he already felt love for Bill. For his part William had a real blockage against making it with James because he was repressed, too shy almost to make a move, and could only do it when he was drunk. This provoked a deep depression.

  James was from an old American family. The Paulks on his mother’s side came from England in 1665, and the Grauerholzes came from Germany in 1883. His parents were Alvin, an attorney and local politician, and Selda, an accomplished actress and singer. James was a precocious youth but seen as “a bit different” by his schoolmates. He was an only child, alienated and lacking friends. He became withdrawn, and despite his high IQ he had bad grades. When he was ten, they sent him for ten days at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka for evaluation. Their diagnosis was that he was very gifted but dissociated and was in danger of becoming suicidal. They recommended a special home to get him away from the family. In June 1964, at the age of eleven, he was taken to the Spofford Home, a “home for emotionally disturbed children” in Kansas City, where he saw a psychiatrist twice a week for two years. He returned to Coffeyville at the age of thirteen. The next year, one of his schoolmates gave him Naked Lunch to read, saying, “Grauerholz, you’re weird; you’ll like this. I don’t understand it.” James “came out” to himself in early adolescence, but though he had a number of sexual encounters with the boys at Spofford Home, he did not experience a complete sex act with a man until he met Burroughs.

  He gravitated toward the offbeat, the bohemian, and the antisocial, and experimented with alcohol, glue-sniffing, and marijuana, greatly inspired by his reading of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Fariña, Gregory Corso, and the other Beats. He graduated in only three years and went to the University of Kansas at Lawrence, where he majored in Eastern philosophy and wrote reams of poetry and fiction. He sought out slightly older “bohemian types,” and after seeing Jimi Hendrix play in Kansas City in 1968, began to develop his own musical talents, switching from piano to guitar and forming a rock band. His first sexual partners after puberty were teenage women, many of them minor-league “groupies” who attached themselves to the members of his band after the shows that they played throughout the region during James’s junior and senior years. He dropped acid twenty or thirty times and took synthetic mescaline.

  Inevitably all the music-making, poetry, and drug taking interfered with his studies, and he left KU after four years, on “academic probation” and without a degree. He performed as a solo singer-songwriter around Lawrence and Coffeyville during the rest of 1973, and said that “a beautiful young woman named Lois taught me so much about lovemaking that I began to wonder if I really were queer, after all.”9 It was during this time that he wrote to both Burroughs and Ginsberg.

  James says that shortly after they met, Bill had upset him greatly by telling him, “I don’t know if I can still write fiction.” This was the result of a writer’s block caused by teaching. “In that period of four months I didn’t do a damn thing. […] I had a real writer’s block. I think it’s about the worst thing you can do is to teach creative writing.”10 Burroughs had brought an enormous mound of manuscript material with him from London, but found that he just could not make any headway.

  Bill’s move to New York was not just another new address, but a new start. He was the ultimate expatriate writer. Every one of his books had been written while living abroad. Americans seem to be particularly good at reinventing themselves and adapting to a new environment, perhaps because the United States is a settler nation. Burroughs had clearly decided to change his life. When he left London he got rid of his E-meter and disposed of his Scientology books. It was now too late for him to properly mend his relationship with Ian, or to reconnect with all the old friends whom Scientology had alienated. Once in New York he made little mention of Scientology and played down its importance in his life in conversations with friends and in interviews.

  In New York, after a faltering start, he took on the role of senior figure in the drug culture, the man who had been there, who had come back and written about it. He was the elder statesman, a celebrity of sorts. Previously he had always distanced himself from the Beat Generation, saying, “I don’t associate myself with it at all, and never have, either with their objectives or their literary style. I have some close personal friends among the Beat movement.”11 He said that “they are friends, but not doing the same thing. We don’t have the same subject matter or approach and less and less as time goes on.”12 He now claimed Kerouac as a friend, even though they had been estranged for the last decade of Kerouac’s life. He recognized Allen Ginsberg’s role in shaping his career and helped him to rehabilitate the Beat Generation and give it its rightful place—as Allen saw it—
in the pantheon of American letters.

  In Europe, he had been seen as an avant-garde experimenter in literature, as well as in film and audio with his cut-ups and performance pieces. He was also the revolutionary thinker of The Job who said, “I’m tired of sitting on my ass. I want to get out and stir up some trouble. I want to make trouble for everyone! For all the people in power.”13 He was seen as a mentor to the sixties youth movement whose thoughts were widely disseminated by the underground press: “There should be more riots and violence. Young people in the West have been lied to, sold out and betrayed. Best thing they can do is take the place apart before they are destroyed by a nuclear war.”14 He was in opposition to Allen Ginsberg’s pacifist approach, telling the underground, “The people in power will not disappear voluntarily; giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flowerpot from a high building.”15 But revolutionary techniques now belonged in the past along with Scientology. He wanted a new start and, hopefully, a new love.

  Burroughs’s tenure at City College ended in May, but he was offered $15,000 to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He talked to them when he gave a reading there in April. It was obviously a bad idea. Burroughs thought that Leslie Fiedler, the head of the English department, was little more than a loudmouth with nothing to say, and didn’t see how he could possibly work under him. In addition, he found Buffalo cold and depressing. “It’s an awful place, it’s an awful place!”16

  James was concerned that more teaching would destroy Burroughs’s own creative writing and suggested an easier, less time-consuming alternative: to go on the road. James knew a great deal about bookings and gigs, having toured with his own rock ’n’ roll band. He saw no difference between a band playing at a university or college and Bill doing a reading there; the logistics were the same. It was a new career, and a lucrative one. Allen Ginsberg had been touring the college circuit for years, but he was using the Rothschild Agency, whose other clients were all singers and rock ’n’ roll bands. By doing it themselves, Bill and James avoided having to give the booker a percentage, and James traveled everywhere with Bill, whereas Allen did all his traveling alone. But first Bill did a reading alongside John Giorno and Brion Gysin organized by Giorno at St. Mark’s Church in the Lower East Side.

  Burroughs was astonished by his reception. The audience loved him; they cheered and welcomed him back to New York like the prodigal son. Fans surrounded him for autographs. Unlike his students, these people really wanted to see him. Still reeling after the first few readings, he was asked by a friend how he was enjoying it and he replied, “One standing ovation is enough.”17 Burroughs had returned. For the next decade a considerable portion of his income came from readings. “Not only that, but I was getting out there and meeting the people who read my books. Extending it, considerably. It was just a whole, tremendous turning point which I owe to James, absolutely.”18 He was already experienced at public performance. In Britain he had been on panel discussions, been interviewed on television, performed with Gysin and Sommerville in multimedia events, acted in two plays as well as in several of Antony Balch’s films. However, he recognized the need for a professional approach to public performance. James coached him in microphone technique; he read his pieces aloud and timed them, marking them up for emphasis and pauses. He learned not to resume reading until the audience had stopped laughing. Bill still experienced stage fright and needed a few drinks and a hit of pot to give him a “breakthrough” feeling, and sometimes the quantities involved were injudicious.

  Brion Gysin had arrived in New York on April 2 to visit Bill, to discuss the publication of The Third Mind with their editor Richard Seaver at Viking, and to show his new paintings to New York galleries. Brion and Bill spent a lot of time together and Brion accompanied Bill and James to Buffalo for his reading. On April 23, Brion had dinner with his old friends Nancy and Ted Morgan, whom he knew from Tangier. After the meal he sat on a sofa covered in pale blue linen to drink coffee. When he got up to go, there was a round bloodstain, the size of a saucer, soaked through the linen. Unable to afford medical treatment in America, he flew back to Paris two days later, where he was diagnosed with cancer of the colon. After months of painful and useless radiation treatment, he was referred to the cancer unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Bill wrote advising him to use an orgone accumulator, but it was too late for anything but surgery: his colon and his anus would have to be removed. Brion wrote Burroughs on December 21, 1974, that “the whole business fairly ironic on several levels since they are going to whip my asshole out from under me so all I can send you are the seasonal greetings of bottomless joy.” Brion returned to Paris from London in April 1975, devastated. Sex as he had known it was now impossible for him, his self-esteem badly damaged. He was deeply depressed and had made a feeble attempt at suicide in the hospital.

  Another visitor for Bill that April 1974 was Billy Burroughs Jr. He was then living in South Carolina with Karen, his wife since 1968, whom Bill was yet to meet. Billy came to New York and stayed with Bill for a week in his loft. Brion had taken one look at Billy and said later, “He’s a very disturbed adult.” Bill agreed. Billy was obviously trouble-prone and very upset and unhappy. “Like many disturbed persons, you don’t know what’s really the matter with them. You can’t tell and they don’t know. I couldn’t do very much. He wasn’t drinking at that point. He said very little, he didn’t want to talk about very much. It was after that that he began to drink very heavily.”19

  Meanwhile James fell in love with Richard Elovich, a man of his own age, the casual boyfriend of one of James’s coworkers at the Gotham Book Mart. James continued to live with Bill and unthinkingly brought Richard over to the loft for dinners with Bill, making Bill inordinately jealous. Bill wanted James to give up his job at the Gotham Book Mart and stay home and work for him. He had to accept the situation but asked James not to bring Richard around. There were some unpleasant outbursts and the situation provoked an anti-Semitic side to Burroughs that Grauerholz had not suspected because Bill was so close to Allen. James attributed it to his St. Louis background, encouraged by Gysin and Balch. James began to spend most nights with Richard at his apartment at 337 East 6th Street. This was the turning point in James and Bill’s relationship. James recalls, “He had issues, and the main issue was I wasn’t spending the night in his bed. I remember one night he was drunk and I said something to the effect ‘I just love you, you’re the greatest friend I’ve made in my life. I just can’t get enough time with you.’ I said words to the effect that ‘If you can conquer your sexual jealousy, you’ll find that I’m deeply loyal.’ That was the end of our meeting. The thing to do was to leave. I said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ and I left. So when I next saw him, everything had changed. He’d decided that he’d go for it.” The relationship continued until Burroughs’s death twenty-three years later; it was not unrequited, it just wasn’t sexual.

  In June 1974, committed now to living in New York, Burroughs took a two-year lease on a loft at 77 Franklin Street, a small four-story cast-iron warehouse building with a fire escape connecting the top three floors at the front. It was located between Broadway and Church Street, three blocks below Canal in Tribeca. “I like this area. There are lots of cops. The more cops in New York the better is what I always say.”20 A broken-down grand piano that someone had carried up the three steep flights to the apartment had been abandoned in the middle of the loft. Burroughs first of all worked on the essentials: wall shelving for his files, installing a new refrigerator, and building an orgone accumulator. Reich’s daughter Eva sent him plans and David Prentice built him one the size of an outhouse, draped in black rabbit fur, that Bill sat in for several hours each day.

  When Bill moved to the loft, James and Richard took an apartment together at 306 East 6th Street, where they lived for about a year. That Sep
tember James wrote to Allen, “I am also still with Richie. This is finally cool with Bill, and for the time being all is harmonious.”21 James gave up the bookshop job and began working full-time as Bill’s assistant. Richard was permitted to visit the Franklin Street loft, and sometimes took over the job of cooking William’s dinner. Allen, jealous that Bill had a secretary, hired Richard to work for him. Elovich was Allen’s secretary for about two years, 1974 to 1976.

  Bill knew many people from his nine months in New York in 1965 and also people he met on his subsequent brief trips, mostly in the early seventies, in particular David Prentice, David Budd, and John Giorno, who had been Brion Gysin’s boyfriend in Tangier. John was a Wall Street stockbroker who spent six hours sleeping in Andy Warhol’s first film, Sleep, made in January 1964. He began writing poetry in 1962. Bill and Brion first met him in the spring of 1965 at one of Panna Grady’s parties at the Dakota. He and Brion quickly developed a relationship, with Brion in the role of “great teacher.” John joined Brion in Tangier in March 1966 and stayed for six months. Brion was horrified when John published details of his penis size—along with those of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others—in his bitchy art world gossip column “Vitamin G” that ran in Culture Hero magazine.