Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

He recounted the story of his sound and image attack that closed down the Moka Bar in London and proposed the same for the deli. But they didn’t want to close the place down, only to try out the method until they saw if it worked or not. Bill suggested they restrict themselves to tape recorders, without taking photographs. Cabell and Poppy made an hour tape while sitting at the counter nearest the kitchen and made another the following day at lunchtime. That Sunday, Bill, Cabell, and Poppy went to the deli for breakfast at 10:00 a.m. They sat in the exact middle of the room and ordered coffee. Bill carried a cassette player in his inside jacket pocket and began to play back the tape at low volume. Over the next hour he increased the volume so that you could just about hear it, but no one appeared to notice. After forty-five minutes there was a huge crash, followed by a loud argument in Greek, and one of the waiters threw down his apron and stalked out, followed by the owner, arguing loudly. The owner returned and began to scream at the serving staff, sending two of the women running to the ladies’ room in tears. Then he calmed down and took charge of the cash register. A few minutes later another huge argument broke out, this time between the owner and a customer. Poppy stopped one of the waitresses and asked what was wrong, and all the girl could say was that the owner had suddenly gone crazy without the slightest warning. Cabell wrote, “Poppy and I looked over at Bill who was calmly smiling. He said, ‘I told you it would work! Now, aren’t you glad we didn’t take photos, too?’ ”8

  Bill and Cabell were constantly encouraging Billy to go somewhere to get straightened out. The hospital in Denver had a drug center where people could stay, and Billy went there for a few days but then wanted to get out. Burroughs didn’t want to confine him to a sanatorium. “It just didn’t seem right, he wasn’t dangerous. It was absolutely uncalled for. And of course he had periods in which he was better.”9 Cabell and Billy did not get along, but there was no real friction between them. Cabell was always complaining that Billy should be in a sanatorium, but it was never a real choice because Bill didn’t have the $3,000 or $4,000 a month it would have cost. Billy continued to believe that his situation was all Bill’s fault, not his, and Bill learned to live with it.

  Billy wanted Bill to witness the mess he was in; he was paying him back. He lost his pills, but as Burroughs noticed, he never lost his morphine. On one occasion he took his welfare check along with his passport to identify himself and started downtown to the bank. By the time he got there he had neither one. Fortunately they were found and returned by a concerned member of the public. James offered to accompany him to the bank to cash it but Billy was insulted. However, by the time he reached the bank, both were missing again. Burroughs commented, “Obviously he just threw them away somewhere but he had no memory of this. ‘You mean to say you think I threw them away?’ I said, ‘I think exactly that. You must have. What happened to them?’ So we went back over the route but we never found them.”10 His route would have taken him over the river, and Bill thought that Billy must have thrown them in. He went to the riverbank but couldn’t see anything. The current was fairly strong, the water deep.

  One of Billy’s many problems was a fistula, a part of the operation scar that had not healed properly. Because of this Dr. Starzl warned him to avoid sex. It was not a moral thing, just a grave danger of reopening the wound. Georgette had stuck with Billy when he was first in hospital and did as much for him as could be expected, but she was a practical, down-to-earth woman and had her own life to lead. It was obvious that Billy had a short life expectancy and would be an invalid for life. He was making no effort to improve the life he did have, so they separated. She moved back to Santa Cruz. In October 1977, Billy went to visit her on impulse, without making any medical planning, and found her living with a Mexican man. Although they were no longer together he found it very hard to deal with and began drinking, something the doctors had warned him to never ever do.

  James noticed Billy’s voice slurring, and had first noticed that the vodka in Bill’s apartment had been watered down in the summer of 1977, even before his Santa Cruz visit. Bill didn’t believe it at first because it was inconceivable to him that anyone with a liver transplant could be stupid enough to drink. But it was true. Dr. Starzl had left, and the hospital had cut his morphine down to practically nothing. Billy could have gone on the methadone program with no trouble at all, something Burroughs thought would have been better for him than morphine, but he chose not to. He knew the doctors at the hospital and got away with murder. Anytime he had been drinking too much or was feeling in bad shape, he checked into a hospital for a week as if it were a hotel. There was nothing Bill could really do to help him. He became impossible for the Buddhists to look after and he was asked to leave the Yeshe House. Allen Ginsberg took him in while he looked for a place, but he got fed up with Billy sitting around the living room all day drinking and never throwing his beer bottles out. Allen didn’t realize what a bad state Billy was in and kept encouraging him to look for a job, but Billy was too weak to stay out of the house more than an hour and in Boulder he needed a car to get around. He asked Bill for the five hundred dollars needed for a car but Bill refused, thinking that Billy would just give the money away.

  Billy had to go to the Denver hospital three times a week to get his morphine and for checkups. Finally the commuting became too much of a burden and he moved to Denver to a rooming house on Colorado Boulevard full of bums and alcoholics but very close to the hospital. Billy was in an unenviable situation. The longest a transplant recipient had ever survived was seven years, so he knew he had a limited life span. The cocktail of drugs to prevent rejection puffed up his face, and the operation itself had left a hideous suppurating scar across his abdomen that meant he always smelled bad. He was ashamed of his appearance. He lived and looked like a street person, wearing dirty clothes. He rooted around in trash cans, carrying home salvaged items of food and rubbish. Bill’s old friends in Boulder kept their distance from him and most avoided him. No one realized how sick he was.

  To make life even more stressful, Cabell’s mother died while he and Bill were living together in Boulder. Cabell would tie up the phone with interminable conversations with his sister, who was an addict involved with some very destructive people. Then his sister died of an overdose and wasn’t found for a week.

  2. Horror Hospital

  Bill kept in close touch with Antony Balch, who came to visit him in Boulder. They had lunch at the Boulderado Hotel in the summer of 1977 and he and Bill caught up on all the gossip. James described them as “very animated together, very much bird-flapping hand, queeny.” On a trip to Paris in 1978, Bill arranged to have dinner with Antony, who, in addition to Dalmeny Court, had a modern luxury flat near the Arc de Triomphe. Antony was feeling too ill to go to Brion’s flat where Bill was staying, so they ate in a restaurant near Antony’s. Bill thought he was looking very pale and ill. Antony had a long history of ailments. He came down with a terrible depression after a bad attack of flu, diagnosed as a postviral depression, quite a common occurrence. He tried everything—alternative medicines, psychoanalysis, faith healing—but nothing worked. His business began to suffer as he went from doctor to doctor. Nothing gave him pleasure. Finally, after about a year, Burroughs read in the medical pages of Time that MAO inhibitors had often achieved remarkable cures of chronic recalcitrant depressive states. It was a dietary supplement rather than a drug, and this alleviated his condition. It came in huge bottles and Antony would take a spoonful several times a day.

  Shortly after Bill’s visit, Antony flew to Los Angeles on business, but when he got back to Heathrow, one of the stewardesses saw that he was practically collapsing. The airline arranged for a car to take him home. He went to a doctor, and two days later, after an exploratory operation, they made the diagnosis of inoperable cancer of the stomach. One of the symptoms of stomach cancer particularly is an acute anemia. The doctor thought the tumor had been there “five, maybe even ten years.” Antony was told he had a year to live. It was right almost
to the day. Bill thought that Antony’s depression had been precognition of the cancer, because he had already experienced several episodes of “the dying feeling.” He had an attack once at the Cannes Film Festival and the doctor told him, “No, you are not dying, this is the dying feeling. I’ve seen many people with it here, particularly at the film festival.”

  It was obvious that Antony’s position was hopeless, but he refused to accept it and embarked on a course of radiation treatment that gave him a lot of pain and did nothing to cure the condition. He had terrible headaches that morphine couldn’t alleviate. Then he was sent to an interferon clinic to take part in a new program. Interferon was then incredibly expensive, $2,000 a shot, but it seemed to help. In the summer of 1979 Bill was in Amsterdam for a literary festival, staying with Harry Hoogstraten, when Antony contacted him asking to see him. Bill changed his tickets and went to London to visit him in the clinic. Antony was always attempting to lose weight as he was a big eater and had been getting fat. Now he was a shrunken stick figure. He had painkillers in every pocket of his dressing gown and gave a couple to Bill, which Bill took, just to be companionable. Antony was on heavy medication and seemed quite cheerful. His mind was not affected; he was quite alert and realized the situation he was in. They had a good long talk. Antony died on April 6, 1980.

  Their last collaboration had been Bill and Tony, a very different film from their previous collaborations. Shot in 1972 on a professional soundstage and lasting just five minutes fifteen seconds, it was designed to be privately projected onto the subjects themselves in live performance, not for public exhibition. It was in color and used a fixed camera to shoot studio close-ups of two talking heads: Burroughs and Balch. There are only four shots, which are repeated once with a different soundtrack. The soundtrack is each participant announcing, “I’m Bill,” and “I’m Tony,” sometimes lip-synching, sometimes actually speaking so that sometimes it is Tony’s voice issuing from Burroughs’s mouth and vice versa. Another synchronized line is from Tod Browning’s Freaks, in which a carnival barker invites the audience to inspect a “living, breathing, monstrosity” that “once was a beautiful woman.” Balch had originally intended to call the short Who’s Who.11

  Bill had been in Europe initially to attend a major Belgian literary festival in Brussels organized by Benn Posset at Raffinerie de Plan K, an old sugar-beet factory converted into an arts center. He and Brion Gysin read from The Third Mind and were well received by an audience of ten thousand. Also on the bill were Kathy Acker, Simon Vinkenoog, and members of Cabaret Voltaire and Joy Division. Benn had arranged for Burroughs to be treated as a government guest, and at Zaventem airport he was walked straight through the border controls to a waiting car. Bill was back on drugs so his first move was to find a pharmacy. Here his enormous knowledge of the pharmacopoeia enabled him to buy a selection of over-the-counter drugs that he was able to brew up back at the hotel into something to keep him going until he reached Amsterdam. At the reading Ian Curtis from Joy Division asked if he “had any spare,” but he didn’t. Early the next day, Gerard Pas drove him to Amsterdam, where he stayed at Harry Hoogstraten’s place in De Pijp.

  Pas scored for heroin on the Zeedijk. He cooked up a small dose, as Bill didn’t know the potency, and Bill asked him to inject him in the foot. Gerard wrote, “As I filled the syringe, Bill pulled off his sock, rolled up his pants and slapped his foot a bit to get the veins to stand up a bit more, making it easier for us to see. I placed the syringe on his foot on top of his vein, at a slight angle, and without waiting poked it into his vein. With those small veins, you want to make sure you don’t push the plunger too fast, as these veins can’t take the volume as easily as in the arm.”12 Ironically, one of the events in Amsterdam was a reading at a methadone clinic on the Dam across from the Nieuwe Kerk. As Bill was thought to be clean, Benn Posset had arranged for him to appear before a roomful of junkies as an example to them all. They circled around him like children at class waiting for story time. He read from Cities of the Red Night.

  Changes were afoot back at Burroughs headquarters. James had now devoted four years to Burroughs and was having second thoughts about making this his life’s work. He spent from May until August 1978 in San Francisco, attempting to revive his music career. But though he had found love with Neil Cadger, he did not find a record label and decided he would try and do both by relocating back in Kansas where his fellow musicians were. He decided that he could just as easily deal with publishers, agents, and arrange reading tours from his old university town, Lawrence, Kansas, so in March 1979, William Burroughs Communications relocated there. It was his long-term plan to get Burroughs to join him. But first came the Nova Convention.

  3. Nova Convention

  The year 1978 ended with a celebration of Burroughs’s work in New York. This was first proposed by Sylvère Lotringer, who first met Burroughs at the Schizo-Culture Conference that he organized at Columbia University on November 13–16, 1975, where Burroughs spoke on the same platform as Michel Foucault. His original intention had been to organize a largely academic event, bringing together theorists and artists who revered Burroughs’s work, similar to the Colloque de Tanger in Geneva in 1975. Lotringer said, “Burroughs was very reticent, and so was James. They didn’t believe that there would be enough interest in such a convention. I discussed it with James at the Bunker and it took a while before they took my suggestion seriously. […] I mobilized my own friends in the art world, like Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, etc. and the ball started rolling.”13 James brought in John Giorno because he had a lot of stage experience and knew so many people, and the three of them worked closely together. James suggested that film student Howard Brookner film and document the entire proceedings, the beginning of his feature-length documentary on Burroughs.

  As is usual in these things, there was a lot of jockeying for position, many large egos were involved, and in the end it became a celebration of Burroughs as a celebrity, with little academic or critical analysis of his work. There was, however, an interesting panel discussion between Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Brion Gysin, and Les Levine on the subject of time and space. A number of musical events and readings were arranged in Burroughs’s honor (or in some cases to increase the participants’ own fame by association). One of the most important figures responsible for Burroughs’s reputation was not there to assert his position and consequently was completely overlooked at the planning stage. Brion Gysin wrote bitterly from Paris to Burroughs, “I am sorry that I will not be able to make the Nova Number in NY but besides the fact that nobody asked me there remains the fact that neither Seaver-Viking nor anybody else can come up with the bread for a fare over there although I am glad to hear that there are tickets for Lemaire, Mikriammos and any French feminist who is willing to go over there and heckle you.”14

  It was doubly important for Gysin to be present, because Viking was finally publishing The Third Mind. This key text was certainly from an earlier period in Burroughs’s life but he still wanted it published, as did Gysin, who was enormously proud of his long collaboration with Burroughs and wanted people to know about it. Burroughs said, “I wrote [The Third Mind] in collaboration with my friend Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. It is the end result of two minds put together with a third and superior mind. It consists of quotes which Brion and I picked up from 1959 to 1965. The style used is that of cut-ups and permutations. Language is treated in the same way a collage would be by a painter. Since language is a part of matter, it can be manipulated in a manner as to make it superior.”15

  This obvious planning oversight was eventually remedied and Gysin was provided with a ticket and a place on the list of performers. Brion had not seen John Giorno’s loft or Bill’s Bunker at 222 Bowery. According to Rachel Wolff, “He took one look at Giorno’s space, cluttered with Oriental rugs and piles of poems, and remarked, in his particular British-Canadian cadence, ‘You all live like bohemians!’ Which they did.”16 They proceede
d down to the Bunker, where Giorno cooked a meal for them all of bacon-wrapped chicken—Bill’s favorite—and Brion was seated in one of the orange chairs surrounding the oval conference table. Brion stayed until 10:00 p.m. when, after Bill had demonstrated his latest blowgun, it was time for bed. Every evening members of Bill’s circle came by to pay their respects to Brion: Allen Ginsberg, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat bringing expensive pot and listening to the great raconteur, who loved every minute.

  The Nova Convention ran from November 30 until December 2, 1978, with most of the three days of events being held at the Entermedia Theatre on Second Avenue at 12th Street. After a reception at La Maison Française at New York University, there was a book signing by Brion Gysin and Burroughs at Books & Co. to launch The Third Mind, followed by film screenings at NYU and a reading by Kathy Acker. On Friday there was a panel discussion with Maurice Girodias, John Calder, Richard Seaver, and others at NYU and evening performances by Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward. Merce Cunningham and John Cage performed “A Dialogue,” and Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky gave readings. There was a midnight concert at the Mudd Club with the B-52s, Suicide, and the Stimulators. Saturday opened with a panel discussion between Burroughs, Gysin, Timothy Leary, Les Levine, and Robert Anton Wilson.

  The final Saturday night program at the theater opened with a solo organ piece by Philip Glass, who was heckled by kids who wanted to see Keith Richards. They had presumably not seen the items in the press saying Richards had canceled and no one made a stage announcement to tell them. Richards was about to appear before the court in Toronto on a heroin charge and his management felt that association with a well-known junkie like Burroughs would not help his case. James Grauerholz had managed to get Frank Zappa to appear in his place, so the kids had someone famous to gape at. Patti Smith threw a temper tantrum about following Zappa onstage and James had to soothe her by explaining that he wasn’t doing it to show her up, in fact it was not about her at all. Zappa had come in at the last minute as a favor to William to fill the star gap. Frank read the “Talking Asshole” section from Naked Lunch and got a rousing reception. Patti Smith came on in a huge fur coat and finally explained to the audience why Keith Richards wasn’t there. She said that if anyone wanted their money back they could have it and waved a handful of bills, but there were no takers. Robert Palmer, reviewing her performance in the New York Times, said, “Smith played clarinet and electric guitar with virtually no technique in the conventional sense but with a certain understanding of the kind of effects that were within her grasp.”17 Palmer singled out John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, and Brion Gysin for praise but didn’t stay on to see the midnight set, which included Blondie and Robert Fripp. He particularly liked Bill’s reading: “Of the other performers, Mr. Burroughs himself was the most appealing, and this had less to do with what he was reading than with how he read it. Although he has created some enduring characters, he is his own most interesting character, and he was in rare form, sitting at a desk in a business suit and bright green hat, shuffling papers and reading in his dry Midwestern accent.”18