by Barry Miles
Bill made his first visit to San Francisco in November 1974. For almost two decades the city had been associated with the Beats, and Burroughs with it in many people’s minds, but he had been abroad throughout that whole period and had not even met most of the people whom the public regarded as his old friends. He read at the University of California’s Wheeler Hall on November 7, and at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on the thirteenth with John Giorno as his opening act. The two readings were overwhelmingly well received. Bill, James, and John Giorno stayed for a week in the Berkeley cottage of Roger Steffens, who was away on his own poetry-reading tour. One night in the cottage the three of them took acid, a rare event for Burroughs, who generally avoided any strong hallucinogens. Bill and John stayed up all night talking about various methods of suicide, inspired by John’s “set,” which at that time included his poem “Suicide Sutra.” Billy Jr., then twenty-seven years old, now living in Santa Cruz, came up for a visit. They got on well and the whole trip was a great success.
New York began to agree with Bill. He began to socialize and entertain visitors at his loft. His old friend John Hopkins from Tangier reported dining there with him in December, along with John Paul Getty III—missing one ear—and Bill proudly showing off his fur-draped orgone accumulator. Getty brought with him as a gift an expensive Polaroid SX-70 camera that used self-developing film. There was no shortage of people wanting to be Bill’s friend; the whole Lower East Side poetry and literary scene welcomed him into their midst, led, very much, by Allen Ginsberg, who was delighted to have him back in New York. Several new generations of writers had appeared since Bill and Joan had headed off for Texas in 1946.
Another source of income was a regular column in Crawdaddy, a glossy rock ’n’ roll monthly. Early in 1975 Burroughs interviewed Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin. Their common interest was magic. In his article Burroughs explained what he meant by the word: “The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of ‘will’ as the primary moving force in this universe—the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self-evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the room is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy.”22 This was a deep-seated belief Burroughs first developed in Tangier in discussions with Paul Bowles and others, and confirmed by his experiments with Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel.
Teaching over, Burroughs began work on a new book. As usual he had no clear idea of how it would come out. While on the trip to the Greek island of Spetses with John Brady he had read James Jones’s A Touch of Danger about a private eye on vacation in the Greek islands who gets involved in drug smuggling. Bill used his own trip to the islands as the set for the section in Cities of the Red Night called “The Private Asshole.” He was also thinking about a pirate book. These were originally to be two separate books, but then he saw that they could come together. He was often affected by writer’s block, something he had not really encountered before. Sometimes he couldn’t work on the book for two or three months at a stretch and would concentrate on something else. He wrote a lot of essays during this period, including his regular “Time of the Assassins” column in Crawdaddy. The book jerked along, stopping and sometimes not progressing for months, It was a difficult project and took him six years to complete, with the book changing course many times.
He enlisted the help of a new friend named Steven Lowe to help him research pirates. Steve had been writing commercial pornography, including stories about gay and lesbian pirates, and he had some interesting ideas, though ultimately there was nothing that Burroughs could use. “At one point Steve Lowe and I were sort of collaborating on this pirate idea but it didn’t work out. […] He wasn’t coming up with anything that I could use so it wasn’t working as a collaboration. It seemed like it might work.”23 It didn’t. Conflict with Lowe came to a head in a phone call from New York when Bill and James were staying in a motel in Santa Cruz in the summer of 1976. Lowe had begun to think of himself as a collaborator on the Cities of the Red Night project and kept feeding Bill pages of text about gay pirates. Bill didn’t use any of it. The call ended with Steve shrieking at James, “Am I the cowriter or not?” and “I’m taking this very personally, you’re cutting me out.” It fell to James to inform him he was out. He and James didn’t speak for months.
That summer John Giorno went to India to see his guru, and as James and Richard’s lease was about to expire, he offered them his loft in the old YMCA at 222 Bowery for the month of August. When he returned, James and Richard pioneered “the Bunker,” the YMCA’s old locker room, where they lived until the following spring. They installed a long conference table and a set of orange Naugahyde chairs from Richard’s father’s law firm. These were to be the setting for numerous dinner parties when Burroughs later moved into 222 Bowery.
Burroughs did teach again. He spent the summer of 1975 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, newly set up by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Chogyam Trungpa’s Buddhist center. Bill taught alongside John Giorno, Allen, and Anne. Boulder is a middle-class, almost exclusively white town overlooked by the Rockies. It was chosen by Trungpa not because it reminded him of Tibet, where he’d never been, but of Scotland where he set up his first monastery after leaving his birthplace in Kham in China. Burroughs wrote, “The town has an old-regime flavor, with red brick houses overgrown with ivy and great trees along the streams that run through the town. There is a mall downtown, quite Swiss—side-walk cafes, waiters in red uniforms.”24 He told Paul Bowles, “Boulder is bland and innocuous rather than exciting. It’s a middle class town with no minorities and no slums. […] Beautiful blond boys everywhere one looks but strictly decorative rather than functional.”25 It was anonymous in a way that suited his purpose for the time. The teaching was entirely different from CCNY because the students were there because they wanted to be. He gave talks on Hemingway and Maugham, Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, but he met the same blank looks of incomprehension. “I get up there and I’m talking about these things and they just don’t know what I’m talking about! They’re not getting what I’m saying.”26 Despite this, he found it very useful to clarify his ideas and to develop critical perspectives on writers whose work he admired.
Allen meanwhile had become an evangelical Tibetan Buddhist, approaching it with his customary zeal, memorizing lineages and Buddhist chants and acting in every way as a meditation teacher even though he had only started to study the system with Trungpa in 1971 and was in no way qualified to teach it. He was very keen to get Burroughs involved and discussed it with him at length. Burroughs was always open to trying new forms of self-improvement and took up the offer of a two-week solitary retreat at Trungpa’s center at Karmê Chöling (earlier known as Tail of the Tiger) in Vermont, beginning August 9, 1975. Burroughs asked about taking along a typewriter, but Trungpa specifically forbade it, saying it would defeat the whole purpose, comparing it to a carpenter taking along his tools. Burroughs asked what he should do if a useful idea came to him on retreat and wrote, “That he could make the carpenter comparison shows where the difference lies […] a carpenter can always be a carpenter, while a writer has to take it when it comes and a glimpse once lost may never come again. […] Writers don’t write, they read and transcribe. They are only allowed access to the books at certain arbitrary times.”27 He told Jim McMenamin, “A writer may only get one chance, so he shouldn’t ever put himself in a position where he can’t write something down if he wants to.”28 Burroughs said that he was more concerned with writing than any sort of enlightenment. He used meditation as a tool for writing. It was precisely the visions and fireworks that interes
ted him. “I sense an underlying dogma here to which I am not willing to submit.” He took along his red daybook and recorded his dreams and thoughts by hand. As he observed, “Show me a good Buddhist novelist.” Allen later objected to this criticism, sensing that it also meant, by extension, “Show me a good Buddhist poet.”
The solitude was productive: Burroughs developed a new episode for Cities of the Red Night and solved a problem of structure when a dream showed him how to feed in the pirate section of the book. He had always written down his dreams. In Vermont he did exercises in association: he would take a walk, then write down what he was thinking when a deer crossed his path. He also made efforts to make psychic contact with James and Billy Jr., with varied success. He wrote, “I am not looking for a master; I am looking for the books. In dreams I sometimes find the books where it is written and I may bring back a few phrases that unwind like a scroll. Then I write as fast as I can type, because I am reading, not writing.”29
There was a limit to how many of Allen’s schemes Burroughs was prepared to get involved with. That October he was invited to go on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour but declined, though he did attend the show on December 8 at Madison Square Garden. “I said, ‘Well, I’d be glad to come and do an interview for a certain sum of money,’ but I wasn’t just gonna go along as a groupie the way Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman did. They were given pocket money and put up at good hotels. I thought it was very undignified.”30
In direct contrast to his solitary retreat, Burroughs spent late September with Brion Gysin in Geneva at a conference designed to research and celebrate their work. The Colloque de Tanger ran from September 24 to 28, and was organized by Gérard-Georges Lemaire. It was a serious business, though enlivened by dance and music groups, and the proceedings were published in two volumes by Burroughs’s French publisher, Christian Bourgeois.
2. Ian’s Death
On Bill’s birthday, February 5, 1976, he received a telegram from Ian saying, “Happy Birthday. Lots of love. No realisation. Ian.” The last time they had spoken on the telephone, Ian was working on getting a job as a computer programmer in America. “No realisation” meant that no further progress had been made. A few hours later, Bill received a telegram from Antony Balch saying simply, “Ian dead.” Ian, who had only recently passed his driving test, had been driving back from the post office, having sent Bill his telegram, when an oncoming car signaled a left turn. (Britain drives on the left.) The car instead turned right, into Ian’s path. He died in the crash. His mother consented to the donation of his kidneys.
James arrived back at 77 Franklin to find Bill looking very solemn. He nodded to the yellow telegram lying on the kitchen table. “Ian dead.”
I looked up at Bill and into his eyes—they were reddish and moist—I was 22—my mouth opened and these words emerged from my shocked and saddened face:
“Ohhhhhh, Bill… I don’t know what to say…”
Bill looked at me, for a beat, and said:
“Then don’t say anything.”
And I sure didn’t.
Ian and Bill continued their relationship right up until Bill departed for New York in 1974, and would certainly have got back together again were it not for Bill’s obsession with Scientology. Ian sometimes talked wistfully about Bill, wishing that it had worked out differently, but mostly he was very guarded in his references to his personal life. He often seemed troubled and was often unhappy.
Bill gave some photographs of Ian to Dudjom Rinpoche, John Giorno’s guru, whose speciality was in contacting the dead. He looked at the pictures of Ian and said, “I’ve got bad news for you, he’s been reborn as an animal.” Bill wanted his photographs back because he didn’t have copies of them, but Dudjom said that he had destroyed them in a purification ceremony. Bill said, “I thought that was a bit thick,” but there was nothing he could do about it; his photographs of Ian were gone and Ian was an animal.
Five days later he gave a reading with Allen Ginsberg and R. Buckminster Fuller at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., with a big society party afterward at Mary Swift’s house in Georgetown, but his heart was not in it. Yet again there were “mistakes too monstrous for remorse.”31 Ian’s death precipitated a depression so deep that four months later James wrote anxiously to Brion Gysin:
I am afraid that William is losing his desire to live. True, he goes through cycles of depression and self-application, and even now, this week, is working very hard on the new book. […] But throughout the periods of exhilaration and dejection there run the continuous threads of alcoholism and flatly irrational behavior. William will very rarely end the night without having made himself drunk, and more often than not, dull and repetitive and obstinate as well. He will spend the whole afternoon reading and writing, and then at six o’clock he begins to drink. Often he gets too drunk on just those evenings when he should stay sober, that is, when someone he likes is coming to dinner. It is like a child’s over-excitement at the anticipation of a party, followed by premature tiredness and slurred, bull-headed, unhearing conversation. I realize that what I am writing here seems disrespectful or even shallow coming from a 23 year old kid from Kansas on the subject of a world-famous man of letters but I hope you will understand the frustration and broken-hearted helplessness I feel, to see this man whom I love and admire reducing himself nightly to travesty, to a pitiable avuncular figure they realize they must humor. There is no point in going on as master of ceremonies for a juggler who drops the pins.32
Brion replied, “It is an old story and a hopeless one. […] Ian and Antony who both had alcoholic fathers just couldn’t take it and dropped out. […] William however has disciplined himself in the past most remarkably and perhaps can again.”33
Chapter Forty-Six
They gave me hypnosis, Thorazine, Ritalin, imprisonment, kisses on my ass, and threats. They told me if I didn’t let them take care of my problem right away, I’d have difficulty with interpersonal relationships the rest of my life. They were right about that.
—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS JR.1
1. Billy Jr.
Bill’s lease ran out in June 1976 and he originally intended to move into the Bunker at 222 Bowery. All the cleaning and preparation had been done, partitions installed, and the concrete floor scrubbed, but Bill had asked Howard Brookner to paint the floor “Battleship Grey” and it had not yet dried so Bill spent several weeks with James and Richard in the floor-through loft at 43 Great Jones Street that they shared with their friends Richard and Jody Harris before taking the train to Boulder in mid-July, where he was to spend two weeks teaching at Naropa. Bill took an apartment at the Varsity Townhouse at 1555 Broadway, a group of three-story, balconied, mansarded red buildings with the Flatirons, the first low range of the Rockies, as backdrop. Richard and James took another apartment there. When the students returned in mid-August they all moved to the Boulderado Hotel, where Bill had one of the corner “tower” rooms on the fifth floor. They had all been looking forward to a quiet summer because Allen Ginsberg’s father was ill and they assumed he would be in Paterson, sitting at Louis’s bedside. But Louis had died, and as James told Bill’s friend and French translator Claude Pélieu, “now it’s all over and there he’ll be, knocking at the door every morning with a list of media people to see and events to attend—oh well, all I can charitably say is, he means well.”2
Allen used his background in market research and advertising to promote the causes and the people he admired or believed in. At Naropa he was shameless in advertising the involvement of members of the so-called Beat Generation (he even used Kerouac’s name for the department). Mostly Burroughs was prepared to meet people and give interviews, but Allen’s full-on proselytizing could be exhausting. Burroughs was only teaching in order to make money; he was not a Buddhist. In fact his attitude was summed up in The Soft Machine: “And not innarested to contact your tired old wisdom of the East disgust me to see it.”3
Nineteen seventy-six was the year of Billy�
�s illness. Billy Jr. was already in Boulder with his new girlfriend, Georgette Larrouy, when Bill, James, Richard, and Steven Lowe arrived for the July season. Bill took one look at him and knew that something was seriously wrong. Billy was coughing up blood in alarming quantities, but his doctor, a Seventh-Day Adventist, hadn’t made the obvious diagnosis; he thought it was “nerves.” Billy had another hemorrhage and James called his uncle Dr. Pat Barelli in Kansas City, who recommended Dr. Ewing. Dr Ewing immediately diagnosed cirrhosis and said it would be fatal unless he had a liver transplant. He could have a shunt bypass operation but that would only gain him about a year, at most. He drew diagrams and explained to Bill how the blood cannot pass through the damaged liver and backs up. Bill went to see Georgette and Billy’s wife, Karen, at the Yeshe House and started to explain it to them but broke down in tears. Georgette said, “Oh shit!” and put her arm around him to comfort him. Then Billy had a third hemorrhage and was transferred to Colorado General in Denver for an emergency portocaval shunt procedure. He had lost a lot of blood. The bypass was unsuccessful and Billy was taken into intensive care in a coma. It looked as if he would die. His only hope was a liver transplant.
Karen, Georgette, Bill, and James all stayed in Denver, waiting for a liver donor to appear. Even if a donor was found, it was a very risky operation, with a 30 percent mortality rate on the table. Then, with just twenty-four hours before they thought Billy would die, a liver became available. Bill had to sign a paper and so did Karen. Bill signed but Karen hesitated. She wanted to know who the donor was, but they couldn’t tell her because it was confidential information. Then she wanted to know about another clause. “It’s permission to use an experimental drug. We can’t operate without it,” they explained. Bill lost his temper with her: “For God’s sake sign the paper and shut up,” he yelled. She signed the paper. The operation was conducted by Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, who performed the first successful human liver transplant in 1967 and is known as “the father of modern transplantation.” They spent hours sitting in the waiting room until the staff told them to go home. “We’ll call you,” they said. The operation took eighteen hours. It appeared to be a success. Anne Waldman commented, “It was so painful at the hospital. You actually saw William Burroughs defeated, weeping, remorseful—very human things.”4
