by Barry Miles
The first five days after a transplant are crucial, and there is always a relapse after ten days, due to tissue rejection. It all has to be managed very carefully, and at one point Dr. Starzl upbraided his nurses for not following his instructions to the letter. Sometimes Billy’s behavior was psychotic and he yelled at his nurses because the steroids he was on made him argumentative. They had been warned that steroids make people angry and self-righteous, and it was an expected symptom. Bill didn’t see too great a change in his personality, except that he had odd lapses of memory. Billy finally recovered but he was in hospital for five months. James and Richard Elovich drove Bill to Denver to visit Billy three or four times each week in a borrowed Jeep until they returned to New York at the end of November. Bill stayed on to be close to Billy, making occasional short trips to New York to take care of business.
In January 1977 Billy was discharged and Burroughs rented a room for him at the Boulderado Hotel in Boulder. He gave him a Royal manual typewriter and Billy wrote the two-hundred-page manuscript Prakriti Junction there, helped by Alan Davies, a young Canadian poet. Burroughs stayed on all winter to be near him, giving a winter course at Naropa to help pay the expenses. He sometimes had to leave town to make money, such as a European reading tour from September 19 until October 10, beginning in Berlin, otherwise he saw him every day. Billy should really have had full-time care or have been in sheltered accommodation. He had a breakdown; he threw as much of his furniture as he could out of his fifth-floor window at the Boulderado, including the chairs. The hotel ejected him.
It is a terrible thing for a parent to see his child gravely ill; the positions are expected to be in reverse. For Burroughs it was painful not just because of Billy’s illness, but for its underlying cause. All his life Billy had always wanted to be loved and respected by his father and his drinking and drug taking were all pathetic attempts to be cool, to show Bill that he was continuing the bohemian tradition. Billy’s illness forced Bill to confront the fact that he had been a lousy father and had badly neglected his son. The rift between them was now so great that it could not possibly be mended. Burroughs had not only killed Joan, depriving Billy of a mother throughout his childhood, but had denied him a father as well by leaving him in the hands of his grandparents and not visiting for years on end.
2. The Bunker
In December 1976, Bill finally moved into 222 Bowery, known as the Bunker, between Prince and Spring. It was built in 1884–85 to house the Young Men’s Institute, the first New York branch of the YMCA. In 1915 a rear three-story addition was built to provide a swimming pool, an enlarged gym, and a locker room.5 It was the locker room that William moved into, below the gym, which used to be Mark Rothko’s studio, and above the abandoned swimming pool. The first artist to live there was Fernand Léger in 1940–41 after he escaped the war in France. Next door was the Prince Hotel, a flophouse for Bowery bums, who were regularly found frozen to death on the doorstep in winter. The Bowery Mission and the Salvation Army were directly across the street. Wynn Chamberlain had a loft upstairs, where Burroughs had given a reading back in 1965, and importantly, John Giorno lived in the building in a loft overlooking the Bowery. It was to become a legendary address for Burroughs along with the Beat Hotel, but he only lived there continuously for three years, all of 1979 until 1981; the drug years.
The loft was one huge space with a concrete floor and windows that were inches from the opposite wall outside. These they painted over. When James and Richard lived there David Prentice had built stud-walling to divide the space into an office, a bedroom, and a large living space with an open-plan kitchen at one side. Everything was painted white. The concrete floor was scrubbed. The locker-room bathroom still contained a row of urinals, cubicles, and a choice of sinks. The space was very live; it echoed slightly and there was a hum caused by the fridge. In Bill’s bedroom six heating pipes and three drainage pipes ran floor to ceiling in the corner to the right of his bed and there was a sprinkler system on the ceiling. Andy Warhol described the Bunker in his diaries: “There’s no windows. It’s all white and neat and looks like sculpture all over, the way the pipes are. Bill sleeps in another room, on the floor.”6 Richard’s father’s conference table and chairs next to the kitchen became the focal point of the loft. Some of Brion’s paintings of the Sahara were hung, but the Bunker remained bare, functional, a place for work and the exchange of ideas.
Burroughs returned to Boulder in February 1977 in order to be near Billy, taking apartment 415 on the fourth floor of Varsity Manor, 1155 Marine. (Burroughs pronounced it “man-OR.”) There were breaks for readings such as the Chapel Hill Arts Festival held in North Carolina in March, where he appeared with Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. The most memorable reading from this period was in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery. Bill and James, Allen and Peter Orlovsky stayed with the Washington hostess Amy Huntington Block in Georgetown where they could look across the street at Henry Kissinger’s house. Amy pointed out all the boys walking around the street and explained that they serviced the foreign embassies. The boys were watched by the Secret Service but not interfered with as they waited to be invited indoors or for a limo to pick them up. At the Corcoran Burroughs read “When did I stop wanting to be President” to the cream of D.C. society; there was nervous laughter and a few walkouts. The dinner afterward was attended by Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, and his wife; his predecessor William Colby; James Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence; and other government bigwigs. James sat next to a Supreme Court Justice. Burroughs was delighted. “[Robert] McNamara7 was one of my fans. I was treated like royalty! I did have the feeling it was sort of like a small town atmosphere. […] She was a marvelous hostess.”8 Bill and James stayed with Mrs. Block several times when they were in Washington.
3. Junky
The Junky project began in the spring of 1977 with a phone call from Joe Bianco, Jacques Stern’s lawyer, a dark, roly-poly child prodigy, always chuckling and smiling, who had made a fortune in commodities by the time he was twenty-three. He had helped Jacques crack several of his trust funds. Stern had seen the new edition of Junky, published in March, and wanted to make a movie out of it. Bill and James went to discuss it at his penthouse on 57th Street. The living room was dominated by a huge grand piano but there was very little furniture; Jacques needed the space to zoom around in his wheelchair. James said that Jacques was the only cripple he ever saw who could pace in a wheelchair: he paced and raved, watched over by two medical nurses who helped him in and out of his chair, administered his medicines, and listened passively as he cussed them out.
Jacques had a hospital syringe with 60ccs of liquid cocaine in it, the needle sticking in his wrist, the plunger half pressed as he raved to them that he would get Samuel Beckett to act in the film. He grabbed the phone and called France, the syringe still hanging from his wrist, and began talking as if he were connected to Beckett: “Hello, Beckett. You’ve read Junky by William Burroughs? Yes. Right. I want you to play Old Ike in the movie that we’re making. What? You don’t want to? Well fuck you, you old fraud!”
The project was their reunion with Terry Southern, whom, like Jacques, Bill had known at the Beat Hotel. Terry brought in his old friend Dennis Hopper to direct, and it quickly became obvious that they were there for the cocaine and the money and that the film meant little to them. Bill received $20,000 for the option on the book—a huge sum then—and Dennis and Terry each got the same. Bill and James, Terry and Dennis walked out of Joe Bianco’s condo at River House and went straight to the bank. Afterward they celebrated in an expensive French restaurant in Murray Hill. James took a year’s lease on an apartment on the twenty-sixth floor at 7 Park Avenue at 34th Street. He was trying to become a literary agent and wanted a Midtown address.
It was a period of dinners at One Fifth Avenue and visits to Terry Southern, who was ensconced at the Gramercy Park Hotel writing the script in a haze of cocaine. Typists ran in and out, taking things to be xeroxed, and there
were pages of script everywhere, typed on different-colored papers, the Hollywood method of distinguishing between rewrites. Terry kept writing scenes that weren’t in the book; a cocktail party with businessmen standing around saying, “My company recycles used condoms.” Terry and Dennis were both working on the script and getting expenses, most of which went up their noses. James thought the book should be treated as a period piece and shot as a costume drama of the forties. There were pointless meetings with Jacques Stern at the Stanhope Hotel. At one of these Bill, James, and Terry turned up but not Dennis. After forty-five minutes, Stern, furious and raging, wheeled himself down to the lobby. When Hopper finally arrived, in his leather-fringed suede coat and leather hat, he apologized: “Jacques, I’m sorry I’m late.” As guests milled around the lobby, trying to check in or out, Stern stabbed a finger at him and screamed, “You’re not late, you miserable ass, you’re fired! Get out! You’re through! Over!”9 Terry stayed close to the money, murmuring, “Jacques is a grand guy, really a grand guy!” But with Dennis gone there was no backing, despite Jacques Stern’s claim that he had a four-picture deal from the French Film Board, and the project folded, as expected.
Chapter Forty-Seven
What I am talking about is the magical theory of the universe, the magical history of the world. It’s the belief that nothing happens unless somebody wills it to happen. There are no accidents. If you see a condition of chaos it’s not because everyone’s blundering, it’s because some power intends to profit by it. Everything we see is deliberate, intended.1
1. Rocky Mountain Horror Show
Banned from the Boulderado Hotel, Billy moved into the Yeshe House, one of the Naropa Institute dormitories, only a block away from Bill at 1155 Marine. Bill saw him every day. Billy took most of his meals in the Yeshe House and for a while he was the cook there. Nonetheless, he complained to Bill (in a letter never sent) that he was living on raw potatoes while Bill was at home eating steak and sniffing cocaine. In fact the Yeshe House had enormous quantities of food; Bill had never seen such food stocks.
The Buddhists were extremely kind to Billy. They understood that the steroids made him behave in an unpredictable and sometimes crazy way and were able to deal with it. His fellow residents in the Yeshe House would often have to go to his room and try to calm him down, and sometimes people stayed over to make sure he was all right. He was constantly losing his pills and recruiting people to find them. Sometimes he raved and threatened suicide and they would impound his cutlery and any pills that looked dangerous. Once he took an overdose of Valium and had to be stomach-pumped in hospital. After that the hospital refused to prescribe any more to him. Billy’s condition made life difficult for Bill, who had to keep his guns, knives, and liquor hidden away in case Billy took them. Once Billy kept Bill up all night raging and threatening suicide. Bill sat and talked to him, keeping himself awake with tea and coffee. “Everything was my fault and it didn’t matter what happened. Tremendous ambivalence. Steroids make people extremely self-righteous, completely unrealistic, and blaming everybody else but themselves for everything that happens. It’s one of the effects of the drug, particularly when someone had a very strong tendency to do that anyway. I remember being impatient with him; I don’t remember ever losing control.”2
That summer Burroughs began teaching a screenwriting course. After a few weeks, one of his students, Cabell Hardy, built up enough vodka-fueled courage to go to the Varsity Manor at 10:00 p.m. and knock on Burroughs’s door. Bill invited him in. He poured Hardy a tumblerful of vodka, topped off with a little tonic, and slid it across the kitchen table. Hardy said he had come to show him his short stories about criminals and drug addicts that he had known. Bill flipped through the carefully typed pages, giving each page little more than a cursory glance so that he read through the entire portfolio of twenty stories in about two minutes. Hardy told the story in a 1999 interview:
“Is that it?” he asked. I just sat there, stunned, saying nothing.
“Very nice,” he said, and I could tell he thought no such thing. I supposed they seemed terribly amateurish, and I was completely humiliated. I was already thinking about the best way to get out of there politely when he said, “Let’s go out on the porch.”
He stepped out onto the small, railed porch through the glass door and looked over into the Varsity Apartments courtyard. In spite of the hour, most of the apartments were active and the courtyard was brightly lit. Across the way, we watched a young boy, perhaps fifteen, naked but for a swimsuit, climbing up and around the trellises that covered the inner walls of the courtyard. […] I had to admit the boy was beautiful, and said so. Bill smiled at me […] and said, “Young boys do need it special!” He laughed and put a large, heavy hand on my shoulder, and suddenly I knew everything was going to be alright.3
According to Burroughs, Cabell didn’t talk until he was six years old. He told Bill, “I couldn’t be bothered to talk.” When Cabell was in his teens, aged sixteen or seventeen, in Richmond, Virginia, he used to dress up in drag and sell himself as a transvestite hustler in order to buy heroin. He told Burroughs gravely, “This is very degrading.” His father, a lieutenant commander in the navy, got to hear about it and drove around looking for him. Cabell saw the car coming and, thinking he was a customer, seductively lifted his slit dress. Out jumped his father and took him home. Herbert Huncke told a similar story: he was picked up by the police for hustling and when his father arrived at the station house there was Huncke in a dress. His father threw him out. Huncke and Cabell had a lot in common. Cabell got busted for pushing dope and did about eight months in jail. There he put himself under the protection of the most powerful inmate he could find, which of course meant that he owned Cabell sexually.
Cabell told Bill that he only attended the course in order to meet him. He said that it was destiny. He reminded Bill of John Brady, both in character and appearance. Both were “short, dark, good-looking in sort of an awful way.”4 James likened him to a miniature Huncke. He had shifty downcast eyes and plucked his eyebrows; he had a low voice and spoke like a street hipster, so cool that it was exaggerated and sounded forced: “Everything is taken care of…” He was a very histrionic character, prone to burst into tears or a sudden rage. He loved to argue and bicker, something Burroughs couldn’t stand. He had a beautiful girlfriend, Poppy, who was working as Gregory Corso’s babysitter. She claimed to be a “confirmed” lesbian, but left her girlfriend for Cabell and saw him two or three times a week They had terrible fights, screaming and throwing dishes at each other, which Cabell enjoyed very much.
Burroughs said, “James hated him from the first moment, and he said, ‘He’s bad news. I just hate to be around him. I don’t want to be near him.’ He’s an individual.”5 Bill admitted, “Cabell was a weird and in many ways quite disagreeable character. He had his redeeming features, but the more you saw of him, the less apparent were his redeeming features. He became less and less helpful and I finally didn’t want any more to do with him.”6 The problem was, of course, sex. “We were making it for a while. Whenever it comes to sex, good judgment goes out of the window.”7 The sex may not have been all that satisfactory, as both Bill and Cabell were bottoms; however, by the end of the summer, Burroughs had invited him to move in.
Burroughs’s newfound fame brought with it many advantages. People gave him presents. One admirer presented him with a pair of Civil War–era cap-and-ball revolvers. Bill and Cabell tried them out on the man’s property outside Boulder. Another Burroughs fan, a major drug dealer whom Bill had never met before, made him a present of a half-pound chunk of raw black Thai opium as a mark of respect to the “godfather.” Bill treated this magnanimity very casually. He kept the opium in the back of his freezer and would chip off a one-gram chunk and let it thaw out until it was sticky enough to roll into a ball. He would smear the ball in vegetable oil and swallow it down, followed by a cup of Earl Grey, which warmed the drug and helped to activate it. It took about a quarter hour for them to g
et high. They sensibly kept the existence of this huge amount of opium a secret known only to a small group of friends, and it lasted them for many months. It did, however, precipitate a rerun of Burroughs’s famous “Playback” scenario.
Two or three times a week, Cabell and Poppy would meet at the deli in the Boulder Mall and start their day with a couple of opium pills. The owner’s attention was soon drawn to these customers who only ever ordered tea, then nodded off to sleep. One day he turned them away, saying they could come back, but next time no drugs. Cabell thought this was reasonable, but Poppy didn’t, and over drinks that evening she complained bitterly to Bill about it. Surprisingly, he agreed with her that “something should be done.”
